heard the tires screaming as they grabbed onto the rocky ground. The truck squealed to a stop as the canyon walls closed in around it.
Ruppert turned off the truck and removed his shaking hands from the steering wheel. Lucia caught her breath, then reached out and scrolled the map a few degrees. “Oh, maybe we should have come down the other side,” she said. “It’s not as steep.”
Ruppert removed his seatbelt, which would soon be tattooed into his skin in the form of a chain of purple bruises, and opened the truck door. He half-climbed, half-fell from the cab, stumbled across the smooth rock floor, and sat down.
“This is good, though.” Lucia sat beside him and looked up. The canyon walls reached more than a hundred feet above them, but were so close to each other they almost touched in places. “Hard for them to look down in here.”
They shrouded the truck under the desert-camouflage tarp, and then sat upon a heap of boulders to study the laminated maps printed from Liam O’Shea’s computer. They shared a paper sleeve of salt crackers and a large bottle of water.
“The database said Nando lives in Lodge 10, with twenty boys his age,” Lucia said. “The nearest gate is the staff entrance, here in the west wall. We should use that.”
“We can’t just ram it down with the truck,” Ruppert said. “They’ll have a security system. Armed guards, I bet.”
“Guards, and machine gun nests, and lots of boys with military training.”
“They’re just kids.”
“Best time to train them,” Lucia said. “Goblin Valley keeps boys up to the age of sixteen, then enlists them. So there will be older boys too-boys trained as soldiers and snipers, trained to torture and interrogate. I'm sure they run school-defense drills. That would be good training for protecting foreign bases. So we could be facing a few thousand defenders.”
“Then we have to keep quiet. I don’t suppose we can use your magic remote?”
She shook her head. “It's just a toy against their systems. They have an evolving propriety code.”
“Then what do we do, extraction expert?”
“We’ll need human intelligence. A person on the inside.”
“Which we don’t have,” Ruppert pointed out.
“And we’ll have to get one. I’m not sure how. Let’s assume we’re inside and go from there.”
“Okay. So we’re inside the school, surrounded by a bunch of armed Children of the Corn-and your son,” Ruppert hurried to add, in response to Lucia’s scowl. “We have to get inside his dormitory without drawing the attention of guards or other kids. We have to wake him without disturbing any of the others. I assume they’re not in private apartments or anything?”
Lucia glanced at the map, shook her head. “Looks like they all sleep in one room.”
“Won’t he automatically try to alert the others?”
“He won’t, if he recognizes me.”
“Do you think he will?” Ruppert regretted the question even before he asked it, but it had to be said. He worried Lucia was being a little unrealistic in her expectations-the boy was ten years old and hadn’t seen his mother since the age of five. Ruppert himself couldn’t remember anything before the age of six or so, though that was thirty years ago now.
Lucia’s mouth trembled, and she looked away from him without answering.
“I’m just saying,” Ruppert continued, “That he could make a lot of noise and trouble before he realizes who you are.”
“Then what can we do?” she whispered.
“All I can think is to use a tranquilizer. Maybe they have ether.” He pointed to the square building near the center of the school compound. It was marked “Clinic/Dispensary.”
“Then we’d have to break into a second building, right in the middle of the place,” Lucia said. “Probably extra secure because of the drugs. Too complicated.”
“Fernando kicking and screaming would complicate things, too.”
“We would trigger security alerts at the clinic,” Lucia said. “We’d never get to Nando.”
“All right. So, by some miracle, we get into the school, we grab Fernando without getting ambushed by a mob of killer ten-year-olds. We still have to get out again. And we have to plan for them to be pursuing us at that point. Worst-case scenario.”
“At last, you are thinking clearly.” Lucia traced her fingertip along the route from the west gate to Fernando’s barracks. They would have to make several turns. She tapped a series of low sheds, shielded from the road by a wall. They were marked ORDINANCE.
“We cover our escape with fireworks,” she said. “If we time it right, there will be burning debris falling into the road behind us. Maybe even rubble. Block off the way out as we leave.”
“There are other gates they can use.”
“It will buy us a little time. And a lot of confusion. Once you assume they are following us, time will be short no matter what we do.”
“Okay, you’re right, it’s the best we can do. And then we all go north, right?”
“Yes. There is a safehouse. We can get across the border from there.”
“I thought you didn’t know about those things,” Ruppert said.
“I only know about this one. I’m not supposed to know about it, either.”
“Then it’s a lifetime of ice fishing and beaver trapping.”
“God willing.”
“God willing,” he agreed.
Goblin Valley was a low, rocky place between the Fishlake Mountains to the west and a dry tundra of badlands stretching away to the east, where the wind had carved the stone into elaborate fortresses, as if a forgotten race of giants had once lived and fought there. The valley itself teemed with thousands of enormous stone mushrooms, or “goblins,” the size of suburban homes. The school compound was barricaded inside concrete walls at the western cliffs of the valley, where the oddly shaped rocks created a landscape resembling vast human faces and skulls. The valley was without water and clearly never meant for human habitation.
Ruppert and Lucia drove through the open desert, far east of the valley, and also explored the mesas and canyons in the San Rafael Swell to the west. In the evening, they passed through the nearest town, Hanksville, whose main attraction seemed to be the Hollow Mountain gas station, carved into the side of a rock.
Hanksville provided much support to the Goblin Valley facility, judging by the numerous vans and trucks with “Goblin Valley School for Males” stamped on their doors. Ruppert noted six such trucks parked outside “Berna’s Lounge,” a cinderblock building with a sheet-metal roof, the town’s only apparent drinking establishment, located just outside the official town limits. He noticed a few more of them at a five-story brick apartment building at the center of town, and others parked in the driveways of small houses.
Their plan took shape as they studied the situation. At night, they hid in the shadows among southern Utah’s endless slot canyons and narrow, rocky valleys. They slept in the back of the truck on the forest-camouflage tarp, all their clothes piled around them for warmth, each one sleeping half the night and keeping guard the other half, watching for bandits, police, or Terror.
On their fourth night in Utah, a Friday, Lucia parked the Brontosaur in the parking lot at Berna’s Lounge, positioning it so that the driver’s-side door faced the bar, while the passenger side looked out to the empty desert. Ruppert was slouched down deep in his seat, out of sight. It was a few minutes before eleven.
“Wish me luck,” Lucia said. She’d dressed in a long cotton skirt and a skimpy top that left most of her belly and chest exposed. Dressing that way could get you arrested for public immorality in Ruppert’s old neighborhood, but such attire on a young woman was always welcome wherever men gathered to drink.
“Luck,” Ruppert said. He took her hand, which was decorated with chunky, glittery fake jewelry she’d purchased in a flea market three towns away. “This is your last chance to turn back. Are you sure?”
Lucia shook her head. “No second thoughts.”
“No second thoughts,” he agreed.
“Are you ready?”
“As much as possible.”
