Fear Nothing (7 page)

I reached the backyard. The manicured lawn looked broader and more open than I remembered it.

The full moon was no brighter than it had been minutes earlier, but every hard surface that had previously absorbed this languid light now reflected and amplified it. An eerie silver radiance suffused the night, denying me concealment.

I dared not attempt to cross the broad brick patio. In fact I decided to stay well clear of the house and the driveway. Leaving via the same route by which I had arrived would be too risky.

I raced across the lawn to the acre of rose gardens at the back of the property. Before me lay descending terraces with extensive rows of trellises standing at angles to one another, numerous tunnel-like arbors, and a maze of meandering pathways.

Spring along our mellow coast doesn’t delay its debut to match the date celebrating it on the calendar, and already the roses were blooming. The red and other darkly colored flowers appeared to be black in the moonlight, roses for a sinister altar, but there were enormous white blooms, too, as big as babies’ heads, nodding to the lullaby of the breeze.

Men’s voices arose behind me. They were worn thin and tattered by the worrying wind.

Crouching behind a tall trellis, I looked back through the open squares between the white lattice crossings. Gingerly I pushed aside looping trailers with wicked thorns.

Near the garage, two flashlight beams chased shadows out of shrubbery, sent phantoms leaping up through tree limbs, dazzled across windows.

Sandy Kirk was behind one of the flashlights and was no doubt toting the handgun that I had glimpsed. Jesse Pinn might also have a weapon.

There was once a time when morticians and their assistants didn’t pack heat. Until this evening I had assumed I was still living in that era.

I was startled to see a third flashlight beam appear at the far corner of the house. Then a fourth. Then a fifth.

A sixth.

I had no clue as to who these new searchers might be or where they could have come from so quickly. They spread out to form a line and advanced purposefully across the yard, across the patio, past the swimming pool, toward the rose garden, probing with the flashlights, menacing figures as featureless as demons in a dream.

7

The faceless pursuers and the thwarting mazes that trouble us in sleep were now reality.

The gardens stepped in five broad terraces down a hillside. In spite of these plateaus and the gentleness of the slopes between them, I was gathering too much speed as I descended, and I was afraid that I would stumble, fall, and break a leg.

Rising on all sides, the arbors and fanciful trellises began to resemble gutted ruins. In the lower levels, they were overgrown with thorny trailers that clawed the lattice and seemed to writhe with animal life as I fled past them.

The night had fallen into a waking nightmare.

My heart pounded so fiercely that the stars reeled.

I felt as though the vault of the sky were sliding toward me, gaining momentum like an avalanche.

Plunging to the end of the gardens, I sensed as much as saw the looming wrought-iron fence: seven feet high, its glossy black paint glimmering with moonlight. I dug my heels into the soft earth and braked, jarring against the sturdy pickets but not hard enough to hurt myself.

I hadn’t made much noise, either. The spear-point verticals were solidly welded to the horizontal rails; instead of clattering from my impact, the fence briefly thrummed.

I sagged against the ironwork.

A bitter taste plagued me. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t spit.

My right temple stung. I raised a hand to my face. Three thorns prickled my skin. I plucked them out.

During my flight downhill, I must have been lashed by a trailing rose brier, although I didn’t recall encountering it.

Maybe because I was breathing harder and faster, the sweet fragrance of roses became too sweet, sharpened into a half-rotten stench. I could smell my sunscreen again, too, almost as strongly as when it had been freshly applied—but with a sour taint now—because my perspiration had revitalized the scent of the lotion.

I was overcome by the absurd yet unshakable conviction that the six searchers could sniff me out, as though they were hounds. I was safe for the moment only because I was downwind of them.

Clutching the fence, out of which the thrumming had passed into my hands and bones, I glanced uphill. The search party was moving from the highest terrace to the second.

Six scythes of light slashed through the roses. Portions of the lattice structures, when briefly backlit and distorted by those bright sweeping swords, loomed like the bones of slain dragons.

The gardens presented the searchers with more possible hiding places to probe than did the open lawn above. Yet they were moving faster than before.

I scaled the fence and swung over the top, wary of snaring my jacket or a leg of my jeans on the spear-point pickets. Beyond lay open land: shadowed vales, steadily rising ranks of moonlit hills, widely scattered and barely discernible black oaks.

The wild grass, lush from the recent winter rains, was knee-high when I dropped into it from the fence. I could smell the green juice bursting from the blades crushed beneath my shoes.

Certain that Sandy and his associates would survey the entire perimeter of the property, I bounded downhill, away from the funeral home. I was eager to get beyond the reach of their flashlights before they arrived at the fence.

I was heading farther from town, which wasn’t good. I wouldn’t find help in the wilderness. Every step eastward was a step into isolation, and in isolation I was as vulnerable as anyone, more vulnerable than most.

Some luck was with me because of the season. If the searing heat of summer had already been upon us, the high grass would have been as golden as wheat and as dry as paper. My progress would have been marked by a swath of trampled stalks.

I was hopeful that the still-verdant meadow would be resilient enough to spring shut behind me, for the most part concealing the fact that I had passed this way. Nevertheless, an observant searcher would most likely be able to track me.

Approximately two hundred feet beyond the fence, at the bottom of the slope, the meadow gave way to denser brush. A barrier of tough, five-foot-high prairie cordgrass was mixed with what might have been goatsbeard and massive clumps of aureola.

I hurriedly pushed through this growth into a ten-foot-wide natural drainage swale. Little grew here because an epoch of storm runoff had exposed a spine of bedrock under the hills. With no rain in over two weeks, this rocky course was dry.

I paused to catch my breath. Leaning back into the brush, I parted the tall cordgrass to see how far down into the rose gardens the searchers had descended.

Four of them were already climbing the fence. Their flashlight beams slashed at the sky, stuttered across the pickets, and stabbed randomly at the ground as they clambered up and over the iron.

They were unnervingly quick and agile.

Were all of them, like Sandy Kirk, carrying weapons?

Considering their animal-keen instinct, speed, and persistence, perhaps they wouldn’t need weapons. If they caught me, maybe they would tear me apart with their hands.

I wondered if they would take my eyes.

The drainage channel—and the wider declivity in which it lay—ran uphill to the northeast and downhill to the southwest. As I was already at the extreme northeast end of town, I could find no help if I went uphill.

I headed southwest, following the brush-flanked swale, intending to return to well-populated territory as quickly as possible.

In the shallowly cupped channel ahead of me, the moon-burnished bedrock glowed softly like the milky ice on a winter pond, dwindling into obscurity. The embracing curtains of high, silvery cordgrass appeared to be stiff with frost.

Suppressing all fear of falling on loose stones or of snapping an ankle in a natural borehole, I gave myself to the night, allowing the darkness to push me as wind pushes a sailing ship. I sprinted down the gradual slope with no sensation of feet striking ground, as though I actually were
skating
across the frozen rock.

Within two hundred yards, I came to a place where hills folded into one another, resulting in a branching of the hollow. With barely any decrease in speed, I chose the right-hand course because it would lead more directly back into Moonlight Bay.

I had gone only a short distance past that intersection when I saw lights approaching. A hundred yards ahead, the hollow turned out of sight to the left, around a sweeping curve of grassy hillside. The source of the questing beams lay beyond that bend, but I could see that they must be flashlights.

None of the men from the funeral home could have gotten out of the rose gardens and ahead of me so quickly. These were additional searchers.

They were attempting to trap me in a pincer maneuver. I felt as though I were being pursued by an army, by platoons that had sprung sorcerously from the ground itself.

I came to a complete halt.

I considered stepping off the bare rock, into concealment behind the man-high prairie grass and other dense brush that still bracketed the drainage swale. No matter how little I disturbed this vegetation, however, I was nearly certain to leave signs of my passage that would be obvious to these trackers. They would burst through the brush and capture me or gun me down as I scrambled up the open hillside.

At the bend ahead, the flashlight beams swelled brighter. Sprays of tall prairie grass flared like beautifully chased forms on a sterling platter.

I retreated to the Y in the hollow and took the left-hand branch that I’d forgone a minute earlier. Within six or seven hundred feet, I came to another Y, wanted to go to the right—toward town—was afraid I’d be playing into their assumptions, and took the left-hand branch instead, although it would lead me deeper into the unpopulated hills.

From somewhere above and off to the west arose the grumble of an engine, distant at first but then suddenly nearer. The engine noise was so powerful that I thought it came from an aircraft making a low pass. This wasn’t the stuttering clatter of a helicopter, but more like the roar of a fixed-wing plane.

Then a dazzling light swept the hilltops to the left and right of me, passing directly across the hollow, sixty to eighty feet over my head. The beam was so bright, so intense, that it seemed to have weight and texture, like a white-hot gush of some molten substance.

A high-powered searchlight. It arced away and reflected off distant ridges to the east and north.

Where did they get this sophisticated ordnance on such short notice?

Was Sandy Kirk the grand kleagle of an antigovernment militia headquartered in secret bunkers jammed with weapons and ammo, deep under the funeral home? No, that didn’t ring true. Such things were merely the stuff of real life these days, the current events of a society in freefall—while this felt
uncanny.
This was territory through which the wild rushing river of the evening news had not yet swept.

I had to know what was happening up there on higher ground. If I didn’t reconnoiter, I would be no better than a dumb rat in a laboratory maze.

I thrashed through the brush to the right of the swale, crossed the sloping floor of the hollow, and then climbed the long hillside, because the searchlight seemed to have originated in that direction. As I ascended, the beam seared the land above again—indeed, blazing in from the northwest as I’d thought—and then scorched past a third time, brightly illuminating the brow of the hill toward which I was making my way.

After crawling the penultimate ten yards on my hands and knees, I wriggled the final ten on my belly. At the crest, I coiled into an outcropping of weather-scored rocks that provided a measure of cover, and I cautiously raised my head.

A black Hummer—or maybe a Humvee, the original military version of the vehicle before it had been gentrified for sale to civilians—stood one hilltop away from mine, immediately leeward of a giant oak. Even poorly revealed by the backwash of its own lights, the Hummer presented an unmistakable profile: a boxy, hulking, four-wheel-drive wagon perched on giant tires, capable of crossing virtually any terrain.

I now saw two searchlights: Both were hand-held, one by the driver and one by his front-seat passenger, and each had a lens the size of a salad plate. Considering their candlepower, they could have been operated only off the Hummer engine.

The driver extinguished his light and put the Hummer in gear. The big wagon sped out from under the spreading limbs of the oak and shot across the high meadow as though it were cruising a freeway, putting its tailgate toward me. It vanished over the far edge, soon reappeared out of a hollow, and rapidly ascended a more distant slope, effortlessly conquering these coastal hills.

The men on foot, with flashlights and perhaps handguns, were keeping to the hollows. In an attempt to prevent me from using the high ground, to force me down where the searchers might find me, the Hummer was patrolling the hilltops.

“Who
are
you people?” I muttered.

Searchlights slashed out from the Hummer, raking farther hills, illuminating a sea of grass in an indecisive breeze that ebbed and flowed. Wave after wave broke across the rising land and lapped against the trunks of the island oaks.

Then the big wagon was on the move again, rollicking over less hospitable terrain. Headlights bobbling, one searchlight swinging wildly, along a crest, into a hollow and out again, it motored east and south to another vantage point.

I wondered how visible this activity might be from the streets of Moonlight Bay on the lower hills and the flatlands, closer to the ocean. Possibly only a few townspeople happened to be outside and looking up at an angle that revealed enough commotion to engage their curiosity.

Those who glimpsed the searchlights might assume that teenagers or college boys in an ordinary four-by-four were spotting coastal elk or deer: an illegal but bloodless sport of which most people are tolerant.

Soon the Hummer would arc back toward me. Judging by the pattern of its search, it might arrive on this very hill in two more moves.

I retreated down the slope, into the hollow from which I had climbed: exactly where they wanted me. I had no better choice.

Heretofore, I had been confident that I would escape. Now my confidence was ebbing.