to carry across the intervening desert, but few faint cries are chilling enough to plate his spine with ice. Gunfire, familiar to this territory for a century and a half, is answered by battle sounds never heard before in the Old West or the New: an ominous tolling that shivers the air and shudders the earth, a high-pitched oscillating whistle, a pulsing bleat, a tortured metallic groan.
As Gabby wrenches open a man-size door next to the larger doors of the barn, a hard flat crump draws Curtis’s attention to the town just in time to see one of the larger structures — perhaps the saloon and gambling hall — implode upon itself, as if collapsing into a black hole. The reverse-pressure wave pulls eddies of salt from the dry bed of the ancient ocean, sucking them toward the town, and Curtis rocks on the balls of his feet.
A second crump, following close after the first, is accompanied by a whirlpool of fiery orange light where the saloon had stood. In that churning blaze, the imploded structure seems to disgorge itself: Planks and shingles, posts and balcony railings, doors, cocked window frames — plus two flights of stairs like a portion of a brontosaurus spine — erupt from the darkness that had swallowed them, spinning in midair, in tornado like suspension, silhouetted by the flames. As a pressure wave casts back the eddies of salt and chases them with showers of sand, nearly rocking Curtis off his feet once more, it’s possible to believe that the whirling rubble of the saloon will magically reassemble into a historic structure once more.
Gabby has no time for the spectacle, and Curtis should have none, either. He follows the caretaker and the dog into the barn.
The door isn’t as rickety as he expects. Rough wood on the exterior but steel on the inside, heavy, solid, it swings smoothly shut behind him on well-oiled hinges.
Inside lies a short shadowy corridor with light beyond an open doorway at the end. Not the light of an oil lamp, but a constant fluorescent glow.
The air contains neither the faint cindery scent of the desert nor the alkali breath of the salt flats. And it’s cool.
Pine trees, pine trees, close to the floor, pine on the floor. Pine-scented wax on the vinyl tiles. Cinnamon and sugar, crumbs of a cookie, butter and sugar and cinnamon and flour. Good, good.
The fluorescent light arises in a windowless office with two desks and filing cabinets. And a refrigerator. Chilled air floods out of a ventilation duct near the ceiling.
Barely detectable vibrations in the floor suggest a subterranean vault containing a gasoline-powered generator. This is a barn worthy of DisneyLand: entirely new, but crafted to resemble the battered remains of a homesteader’s farm. The building provides office and work space for the support staff that oversees maintenance of the ghost town, without introducing either contemporary structures or visible utilities that would detract from the otherwise meticulously maintained period ambience.
On the nearest of the desks stands a cup of coffee and a large thermos bottle. Beside the cup lies a paperback romance novel by Nora Roberts. Unless the official night-shift support staff includes a ghost or two, the coffee and the book belong to Gabby.
Although they are on the run, with the prospect of heavily armed searchers bursting into this building behind them at any second, the caretaker pauses to sweep the paperback off the desk. He shoves it under a sheaf of papers in one of the drawers.
He glances sheepishly at Curtis. His deeply tanned face acquires a rubescent-bronze tint.
The dilapidated barn isn’t at all what it appears to be from outside, and Gabby isn’t entirely what he appears to be, either. The not-entirely-what-he-or-she-or-it-appears-to-be club has an enormous membership.
“Judas jump to hellfire, boy, we’re in dangerous territory here! Don’t just stand there till you’re growed over with clockface an’ cow’s-tongue! Let’s go, let’s go!”
Curtis stopped at the desk only because Gabby stopped there first, and he realizes that the caretaker is shouting at him merely to distract his attention from the incident with the romance novel.
As he follows Gabby across the room to another door, however, Curtis wonders what sort of plants clockface and cow’s-tongue might be and whether in this territory they really grow so fast that you could be completely overtaken by them if you stand too still even for a few seconds. He wonders, too, whether these are carnivorous plants that not only cocoon you, but then also feed on you while you’re still alive.
The sooner he gets out of Utah, the better.
Beyond the first office lies a second and larger office. The four doors leading from this space suggest additional rooms beyond.
Gimping like a dog with two short legs on the left side, Gabby leads Old Yeller and Curtis to the farthest door, snares a set of keys off a pegboard, and proceeds into a garage with bays for four vehicles. Three spaces are empty, and an SUV waits in the fourth, facing toward the roll-up door: a white Mercury Mountaineer.
As Curtis hurries around to the passenger’s side, Gabby pulls open the driver’s door and says, “That dog, she broke?”
“She fixed, sir.”
“Say what?”
“Say fixed, sir,” says Curtis as he frantically jerks open the front door on the passenger’s side.
Levering himself in behind the steering wheel, Gabby shouts at him, “Tarnation, I ain’t havin’ no biscuit-eater pissin’ in my new Mercury!”
“All we had was frankfurters, sir, and then some orange juice,” Curtis replies reassuringly as, not without difficulty, he clambers into the passenger’s seat with the dog in his arms.
“Spinnin’ syphilitic sheep! What for you bringin’ her in the front seat, boy?”
“What for shouldn’t I, sir?”
As he pushes a button on a remote-control unit to put up the garage door, and starts the engine, the caretaker says, “Iffen God made little fishes, then passengers what has a tail ought to load up through the tailgate!”
Pulling shut the passenger’s door, Curtis says, “God made little fishes, sure enough, sir, but I don’t see what one has to do with the other.”
“You got about as much common sense as a bucket. Better hold tight to your mongrel ‘less you want she should wind up bug-spattered on the wrong side of the windshield.”
Old Yeller perches in Curtis’s lap, facing front, and he locks his arms around the dog to hold her in place.
“We gonna burn the wind haulin’ ass outta here!” Gabby loudly declares as he shifts the Mountaineer out of park.
Curtis takes this to be a warning against the likelihood that they’re going to experience flatulence, but he can’t imagine why that will happen.
Gabby tramps on the accelerator, and the Mountaineer shoots out of the garage, under the still-rising door.
First pinned back in his seat, then jammed against the door when the caretaker turns west-southwest almost sharply enough to roll the SUV Curtis remembers the applicable law and raises his voice over the racing engine: “Law says we have to wear seat belts, sir!”
Even in the weak light from the instrument panel, the boy can see Gabby’s face darken as though someone from the gov’ment were throttling him at this very moment, and the old man proves that he can rant and drive at the same time. “Whole passel of politicians between ‘em ain’t got a brain worth bug dust! No scaly-assed, wart- necked, fly-eatin’, toad-brained politician an’ no twelve-toed, fat-assed, pointy-headed bureaucrat ain’t goin’ to tell me iffen I got to wear a seat belt nor iffen I don’t got to wear one, as far as that goes! Iffen I want to stand on these brakes an’ bust through the windshield with my face, damn if I won’t, an’ no one can tell me I ain’t got the right! Next thing them power-crazy bastards be tellin’ us the law says wear a jockstrap when you drive!”
While the caretaker continues in this vein, Curtis turns in his seat as best he can, still holding on to Old Yeller, and looks back, to the east and north, toward the embattled ghost town. It’s a light show back there, violent enough to make even Wyatt Earp hide in the church. When the shootout ends, whatever historical society oversees this site is going to be hard-pressed to restore the town from the splinters, bent nails, and ashes that will be left.
He remains amazed that the FBI is aware of him and of the forces pursuing him, that they have intervened in this matter, and that they actually think they have a chance of locating him and taking him into protective custody before his enemies can find and destroy him. They must know how outgunned they are, but they’ve plunged in nonetheless. He can’t help but admire their kick-butt attitude and their courage, even though they would eventually
