“Look, lemme lay it out for you. If you told him what he wanted to know, he’s never coming back, so it won’t matter if you tell me. If you didn’t give him what he wanted, he will come back, and you’ll need me to protect you. Us to protect you.” She gave him a moment to absorb that “us.”
“So, what did you say to him? Exact words?”
He studied her face.
“For a fuckin’ pizza?” he said.
“You’re out of your league, Barry. Way the hell out of your league.
Think about how big he was. How much stronger he was than you, and that’s when you had arms. Now think about other parts of your body, Barry. Soft parts.”
He blinked at that, licked his lips, and then sighed.
“Site R,” he said.
“He wanted to know where Lynn and the guys went camping. All I knew was Site R. That’s what I heard Rip say. They were going to ‘break into’ Site R. I don’t know what that means. I told him that.
And I still don’t fuckin’ know, okay?”
She looked at him.
“Okay. And has it ever occurred to you that if you’d told someone this a lot sooner, maybe we’d have found them?”
He looked away. Janet got up and left.
Just before sundown, Browne McGarand watched the reaction on the last copper sponge fizzle out. The light coming through the four skylights of
the control room was turning sunset red. He shut off the acid drip and was beginning the purge sequence when he heard two distinctive taps on the metal door, followed by two more taps. Jared was back. Browne turned out the single work light, got his flashlight, and went to the control room door. He tapped the door once.
“It’s Jared,” Jared replied from the other side. They had arranged a duress code when the project began. If Jared ever said, “It’s me,” Browne would know that Jared was not alone and that he should get out of there through the vehicle bays. Browne opened the door and Jared came through.
His grandson was a hefty-shouldered man with a large paunch and a heavy black beard. His job with the local telephone company had him spending days by himself checking the more remote lines in the county, where he tended to roadside tree falls, so-called backhoe interrupts, when customers or the other utilities unwittingly dug through a phone line, and feeder-box problems in the isolated cabins and trailers off the main county roads. His clothes always smelled faintly of pine needles and tobacco. Jared was perpetually suspicious, and he had a habit of squinting his eyes at people and things as if he expected them to lunge at him. Browne closed and locked the door and turned the work light back on.
“The security people stop anywhere?”
“Nope. Drove around like always. You could hear their damn radio goin’ a block away—some damn rock and roll crap. Windows rolled up with the AC goin’.” He sniffed.
“Some security.”
“Be thankful they’re not real professionals,” Browne said.
“I’ve always wondered when they might start random building checks.”
“Not that pair,” Jared said, easing his heavy frame into one of the console chairs.
“But we may have us another problem.”
Browne finished the purge and began to set up the retort for cleaning.
“What kind of problem?”
“You know how sometimes you see something’ outta the corner of your eye? You wonder if you really seen it or you just imaginin’ things?”
Browne eyed his grandson.
“Things?”
“I was watchin’ that there security truck from the rail sidin’ control tower. I’d a sworn I saw a man crossin’ that little ravine, joins the creek just below that big logjam? You know where I’m talkin’ about? You can just see that stretch from the sidin’ tower. But something’ was off about it, what I saw, I mean.” He shook his head.
“Like he was wearin’ a hood or something’. That’s it—wasn’t no face. I don’t know. I think I saw it. But maybe not.”
Browne rubbed his jaw.
“A man, though? Not a deer or other animal?”
Jared nodded thoughtfully.
“That tall grass out there along the creeks?
Looked like he’d been down in that there grass, but had to stand up to jump that brook, comes through there. Then he was gone.”
“What did you do?”
“When the security truck went out to the back bunker area, I went down there, to the north side of the creek. Hid out in the tree line.
Waited for a coupla hours, see if he came out of the woods or showed himself somehow. But nothin’. And it didn’t feel like there was someone there. Not like when you know there’s deer movin’ around in there, you know? Birds wasn’t yellin’. No bushes were movin’, no other noises.” He rubbed the back of his leg.
“Got into some damn chiggers, I think. Hell, I don’t know. Prob’ly nothin’.”
“A single individual,” Browne said as he closed the retort back up.
“Those traps still set?”
“Yep.”
“Well, maybe we’ll skip taking the girl her food tonight. Maybe we’ll go out there and see what happens. If she ate those apples I fixed for her, she’ll still be out of it anyway.”
“You want me to go check on her?” Jared asked, a little too casually.
Browne wasn’t fooled.
“No, I don’t think so, Jared,” he said.
“Besides, we shouldn’t go near the nitro building, especially if there’s someone here.
He might be here because of those kids going missing. Wouldn’t want to just lead him to her, would we, now?”
Jared nodded but said nothing. He continued to rub the back of his leg while Browne closed off all the valves to the truck in the next bay.
“We’ve got pressure showing on the truck tank,” Browne announced, trying to distract Jared from thoughts of the captive girl. Jared didn’t need to be messing with that girl.
“From now on, we’re building power. But I’m almost out of copper.”
“Got me some back in the central office yard,” Jared said.
“Pallet of cracked switch plates. They’re flat. We can grind ‘em, or just put ‘em in there and use more acid.”
Browne nodded. Acid they had, in vast quantities. No government agency would be putting a pattern together on missing copper. He thought about the pressure. Maybe another thirty batches, if they
could keep the process going. Pretty soon, they’d have to switch to the big pump. He finished up securing the hydrogen generator.
“All right. Let’s go down there and look around,” he said.
“Maybe it was just a late-season turkey hunter sneaking around; those guys cammo up pretty good.”
Edwin Kreiss made his move forty-five minutes after the sun went down behind the ridges to the west of the arsenal. He felt refreshed, having slept for a couple of hours in his hiding place. He had crept out to the tree line just before sundown and again memorized the features in the pile that were closest to the cap. Once darkness just about obscured the opposite tree line, he crept down on his belly through the tall grass, moving directly toward the creek. Mindful of that copperhead, he probed ahead with the rod, parting the grass carefully and probing the spongy earth on either side before slithering forward. The ground was not wet, but it was very soft, with occasional round rocks embedded here and there. It took him ten careful minutes to get down to within six feet of the creek bank,
