Possibly the dog had split shortly after I’d left him. He might have become convinced we’d followed the wrong trail. Maybe he had caught a fresh scent of Jimmy; weighing the risks of disregarding my instructions against the need to locate the missing child as quickly as possible, perhaps he had left the warehouse and returned to the hunt. He might be with the boy now, ready to confront the kidnapper when the creep showed up to collect his captive.
For a two-bit philosopher full of smug homilies about the danger of investing too much emotional capital in mere hope, I was laboring mightily to build another of those gossamer bridges.
I drew a deep breath, but before I could shout again, Orson barked twice.
At least I assumed it was Orson. For all I knew, it could have been the Hound of the Baskervilles. I wasn’t able to determine the direction from which the sound had come.
I called to him once more.
No response.
“Patience,” I counseled myself.
I waited. Sometimes there is nothing to be done but wait. Most times, in fact. We like to think we operate the loom that weaves the future, but the only foot on that treadle is the foot of fate.
In the distance, the dog barked again, ferociously this time.
I got a fix on the sound and ran toward it, from serviceway to serviceway, from shadow to shadow, among abandoned warehouses that loomed as massive and black and cold as temples to the cruel gods of lost religions, then into a broad paved area that might have been a parking lot or a staging area for trucks delivering freight.
I had run a considerable distance, leaving the pavement and plunging through knee-high grass lush from the recent rains, when the moon rolled over in its bed. By the light that came through the disarranged covers, I saw ranks of low structures less than half a mile away. These were the small houses once occupied by the married military personnel and their families who preferred on-base living.
Although the barking had stopped, I kept moving, certain that Orson — and perhaps Jimmy — could be found ahead. The grass ended at a cracked sidewalk. I leaped across a gutter choked with dead leaves, scraps of paper, and other debris, into a street lined on both sides with enormous old Indian laurels. Half the trees were flourishing, and the moonlit pavement under them was dappled with leaf shadows, but an equal number were dead, clawing at the sky with gnarled black branches.
The barking rose once more, closer but still not near enough to be precisely located. This time it was punctuated by yawps, yelps — and then a squeal of pain.
My heart knocked against my ribs harder than it had when I’d been dodging the two-by-four, and I was gasping for breath.
The avenue I followed led among the dreary rows of decaying, single-story houses. Branching from it was a large but orderly grid of other streets.
More barking, another squeal, then silence.
I stopped in the middle of the street, turning my head left and right, listening intently, trying to control my labored wheezing. I waited for more battle sounds.
The living trees were as still as those that were leafless and rotting.
The breath I’d outrun caught up with me quickly. But as I grew quiet, the night grew even quieter.
In its current condition, Fort Wyvern is most comprehensible to me if I think of it as a theme park, a twisted Disneyland created by Walt Disney’s evil twin. Here the guiding themes are not magic and wonder but weirdness and menace, a celebration not of life but of death.
As Disneyland is divided into territories — Main Street USA, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Fantasyland — Wyvern is composed of many attractions. These three thousand small houses and associated buildings, among which I now stood, constitute the “land” that I call Dead Town. If ghosts walked in any neighborhood of Fort Wyvern, this would be the place where they would choose to do their haunting.
No sound was louder than the moon pulling the clouds around itself once more.
5
As though I had crossed into the land of the dead without having the good manners to die first, I slowly drifted spirit-silent along the starlit street, seeking some sign of Orson. So profoundly hushed and lonely was the night, so preternaturally still, I could easily believe that mine was the only heart beating within a thousand miles.
Washed by the faint radiance of far nebulae, Dead Town appears to be merely sleeping, an ordinary suburb dreaming its way toward breakfast. The single-story cottages, bungalows, and duplexes are revealed in no detail, and the bare geometry of walls and roofs presents a deceptive image of solidity, order, and purpose.
Nothing more than the pale light of a full moon, however, is required to expose the ghost-town reality. Indeed, on some streets, a half-moon is sufficient. Rain gutters droop from rusted fasteners. Clapboard walls, once pristine white and maintained with military discipline, are piebald and peeling. Many of the windows are broken, yawning like hungry mouths, and the lunar light licks the jagged edges of the glass teeth.
Because the landscape sprinkler systems no longer function, the only trees surviving are those with taproots that have found some deep store of water that sustains them through California’s long rainless summer and autumn. The shrubbery is withered beyond recovery, reduced to wicker webs and stubble. The grass grows green only during the wet winter, and by June it is as golden and crisp as wheat waiting for the thresher.
The Department of Defense doesn’t have sufficient funds either to raze these buildings or to keep them in good repair against the possibility of future need, and no buyers exist for Wyvern. Of the numerous military bases closed following the collapse of the Soviet Union, some were sold off to civilian interests, transformed into tracts of houses and shopping centers. But here along California’s central coast, vast reaches of open land, some farmed and some not, remain in the event that Los Angeles, like a creeping fungus, should eventually cast spoors this far north or the suburban circuitry of Silicon Valley should encroach on us from the opposite direction. Currently, Wyvern has more value to mice, lizards, and coyotes than to people.
Besides, if a would-be developer had placed an offer for these 134,456 acres, he would most likely have been rebuffed. There is reason to believe that Wyvern was never entirely vacated, that secret facilities, far beneath its increasingly weathered surface, continue to be manned and to carry out clandestine projects worthy of such fictional lunatics as Doctors Moreau and Jekyll. No press release was ever issued expressing compassionate concern for the unemployed mad scientists of Wyvern or announcing a retraining program, and since many of them resided on-base and had little community involvement, no locals wondered where they had gone. Abandonment, here, is but a refinement of the sophisticated camouflage under which this work has long been performed.
I reached an intersection, where I stopped to listen. When the restless moon rolled out of its covers yet again, I turned in a full circle, studying the ranks of houses, the lunar-resistant darkness between them, and the compartmentalized gloom beyond their windows.
Sometimes, prowling Wyvern, I become convinced that I am being watched — not necessarily stalked in a predatory way, but shadowed by someone with a keen interest in my every move. I’ve learned to trust my intuition. This time I felt that I was alone, unobserved.
I returned the Glock to my holster. The pattern of the grip was impressed into my damp palm.
I consulted my wristwatch. Nine minutes past one o’clock.
Moving out of the street to a leafy Indian laurel, I unclipped the phone from my belt and switched it on. I squatted with my back against the tree.
Bobby Halloway, my best friend for more than seventeen years, has several phone numbers. He has given the most private of these to no more than five friends, and he answers that line at any hour. I keyed in the number and pressed
Bobby picked up on the third ring: “This better be important.”
Although I believed that I was alone in this part of Dead Town, I spoke softly: “Were you sleeping?”
“Eating kibby.”
Kibby is Mediterranean cuisine: ground beef, onion, pine nuts, and herbs wrapped in a moist ball of bulgur and quickly deep-fried.
