Gone to Ground (26 page)

“There’s something else you need to know, though.”

A small jolt of adrenaline shot into her blood stream. “Why is it whenever you tell me there’s something else I need to know, it’s never a good thing?”

“Not always.”

“Yes, always. Do you want me to list them?”

“No, I get it. I guess this might fall into that category, too. Did I ever mention to you that they were implanting all the residents of the APZs with microchips.”

“Microchips? You mean like the identification chips they put in dogs so that they don’t get lost, or rather so that they get found when they do get lost?”

“Yes, that kind, only with more information on them than the chips they implant into the dogs. These chips have your name, an identification number, your medical information, that type of thing.” His voice had taken on a flat tone that caused more adrenaline to course into Maggie’s blood stream. “The authorities said it was so they could track who was getting what, and making sure that no one was taking more than his share, you know, of food and clothing and things like that.”

“It makes sense, I guess. With all the shortages of goods until they’re able to get the food production reestablished and factories up and running, the government is going to need to be sure than no one is hoarding. I don’t really like the idea of being implanted like a dog or a cat, but it would work, I suppose.”

“Yes, it works. The thing they don’t tell the residents is that each chip contains a GPS tracer, so that a satellite can track anyone, anywhere on the planet.”

“I’m already not liking where this is going,” Maggie said with an appalled expression. “I know you better than to think you brought the children here with those chips still in them. What is it you’re trying to say?”

“I don’t know how the children made it to Wikieup without being picked up. I know the techies were having problems with the tracking software before I left. The sudden demands on the system following the concentration overwhelmed it. I hope that I got the chips out before anyone got a fix on them, but there are no guarantees.”

“See, I told you. Never a good thing. Next time you tell me there’s something I ought to know, can’t it be something like ‘dinner’s ready’ or ‘I’ve left you a million dollars in my will.’”

“I’ll see what I can come up with,” O’Reilly said with a unfamiliar note in his voice. “I’m sure there’ll be something.”

“So,” Maggie continued, suppressing an internal quiver of fear, “What’s the upshot? How much has this increased our danger?”

“I took the chips out of their arms soon after I met them. Then we destroyed the chips, so the furthest they can be traced is to Wikieup. Closer than I’d like, but no closer than the annihilation teams will be when they destroy the town. The rains would have washed out our tracks by now, so as far as they know the children could have headed in any direction from there.”

O’Reilly turned his arm over in his lap, rubbing his finger lightly along the small white scar on his wrist.

“What concerns me more is that a captain in the Enforcers, Seth Rickards, connected me with Christina. He was questioning her about where I might be before she escaped. If they’re able to track her to Wikieup, then he’ll suspect that I’m nearby.”

“What kind of guy is Rickards?”

“If you’re on the force, he’s someone you want at your back. If you’re doing something you’re not supposed to do, he’s the guy you don’t want tracking you down. He’ll have seen my escape as a betrayal to the Enforcers and to the country. He’ll know that I have information that could hurt the government, and he won’t stop at anything to get me back.”

“Okay, not great, but not terrible either.”

“I wasn’t sure what to do when I found the children, and if you say so, I’ll take them and we’ll leave. We’ll go far away from here, maybe drop some clues so that Rickards doesn’t look in this direction. I couldn’t just disappear, though, and leave you wondering what happened to me.”

“Yeah, that would have been a lousy thing to do. Not to mention the fact that we still don’t have adequate skills to make a living out here.” Maggie was quiet for a moment then suddenly said, “There’s something
you
ought to know.”

A snort of laughter escaped O’Reilly, and he turned to look at her, a grin stretching his tanned face white teeth flashing in the gloom. “Does this fall into the ‘dinner’s ready’ variety, or the ‘boogey man’s hiding in the closet’ variety?”

“Definitely the boogey man variety.” Maggie answered with conviction. “A big, bad boogey man with slimy green skin, bulging bloodshot eyes and severe halitosis.”

“Let’s have it. Boogey men with bad breath are my speciality.”

“While you were gone Emily had her calf.”

“Yeah, I know. I saw them out in the pasture. I would have thought that information only ranked at the level of a two-inch tall boogey man with hiccups, if that.”

“No that’s not what you needed to know, though I will say that if you’re gone the next time a cow needs a midwife, you better not come back, extra children or not!”

Maggie paused, considering her words. “The problem is that Emily had some difficulties, and I sent Mark to see if there was any information on delivering calves in any of the books we found here. He couldn’t find anything, but I’d left my computer out on the table and he thought he’d log onto the Internet and find information that way.”

The smile that had been resting on O’Reilly’s face disappeared as he realized what was coming.

“He couldn’t log on. The web required an authentication code. He thought it was my security code, since that’s the computer I always used for work, and he came out to ask me the password. I shut down the computer as soon as I realized what happened. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes and it was nearly four days ago, but there it is. Christina may have led the Enforcers to Wikieup, but I may have led them directly to the canyon.”

Both grew silent as O’Reilly apparently processed the information. Finally, after a few minutes so quiet that Maggie began to squirm, O’Reilly let out a huge sigh and said, “You’re right. A big boogey man with halitosis and probably lethal levels of flatulence as well.

“It’s possible that the computer wasn’t able to be accurately traced in that amount of time.” O’Reilly seemed to consider the options. “But in a worse case scenario, they now know you’re out here somewhere, and Rickards isn’t fool enough to believe that the kids heading this direction, as well as an unauthorized computer from the middle of nowhere are unrelated.”

“Do we need to run?”

“You say it’s been four days since the computer?”

Maggie nodded.

“And it’s been three days since I met up with the kids in Wikieup. I’m afraid that if they’re coming, they’ll be close by now. If we’re out moving across the empty lands - a group of eight -  there’s no way we’ll go undiscovered.

“No, I think the only option right now is to make sure the caves are provisioned and get ready to hide. If they’re coming I don’t think we have much time.”

All the warmth seemed to have been sucked out of the evening air, and Maggie shivered.

O’Reilly started to push himself to his feet. “It’s getting late Maggie. We’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow. I’m off to bed. I only hope my new roomies don’t snore.”

He put a hand on her shoulder, then suddenly leaned forward and brushed her cheek with his lips. “Don’t worry. We’ll get it all worked out. But I think we might wait a day or two before beginning your addition.” Finishing getting to his feet, O’Reilly went into the house and closed the door quietly behind him.

Left alone in front of the house, Maggie hugged her legs to her chest and rested her chin on top of her knees; wishing she weren’t alone, that O’Reilly had stayed out with her. She was scared. She wasn’t ashamed to admit it. After everything she’d been through in the last year, she couldn’t ever remember being so scared.

It was going to happen, then. They were going to have to fight to survive. Not just the elements, but people, too. She remembered back to the night O’Reilly told her about what was happening in the APZ; when he’d made her promise that if they came for him, she’d take Mark and Lindy and hide in the caves, and let him be taken. That they wouldn’t let her live. That Lindy might be the only one that would come out of a direct confrontation alive because of her young age. Now there were four others that would die with them. Four others depending on them for safety.

She put hand to her cheek, where O’Reilly had kissed her. She felt a well of conflicting emotions  bubbling up inside her, threatening to overwhelm and incapacitate her in the flood; fear, confusion, annoyance (plenty of that), frustration (even more of that, damn O’Reilly), mixed in with an unexpected amount of happiness and even love. It was an unpalatable mixture and it churned her inside like a blender.

Heaving in a huge sigh that caused Jack, who was laying nearby, to leap to his feet on the alert for what ever danger had crept up on him unawares, Maggie pushed herself to her feet and turned to head inside and to bed.

I hope all three of them
do
snore. Loudly.

30

Where the hell are they?

Rickards stood in the middle of Highway 93 near the front of his jeep, looking around at the empty buildings of Wikieup. Other than a few furtive dogs, sliding in and out between the buildings, as well as an impressive variety of bird life, there was no indication that Wikieup was anything but a ghost town.

“Captain, there’s no sign
of the children or of O’Reilly,” Harlan approached from the south, where he and a group of other Enforcers had been conducting a door to door search of the town. “The team is continuing to look, but I feel fairly certain that there is no one in the town at this time. There are signs, however, that someone recently broke into many of the stores and cleared out the shelves of dry goods. It’s impossible to tell if it’s the people we’re after or another band of ghosts, but I have trouble believing in coincidences.”

“So do I, Deputy Harlan. But, if they’re not here, then, where are they?” Rickards suppressed a tremor of annoyance at the man’s officious tone.

“I’d pin my bet on the computer signal from northeast of here. That’s wide open country, very rough, covered with canyons and washes, but there are a few ranches and camps scattered about. From what I’ve heard about O’Reilly, I’d guess that he chose one of them as his headquarters. Probably the most out of the way one he could find. It’s too bad that we couldn’t get here sooner and catch them before they went to ground.”

“Yes, too bad indeed,” Rickards growled, anger and frustration over the delay clouding his features as surely as the monsoon storms obscured the nearby mountains.

In spite of Rickards’ intention of heading to Wikieup the afternoon they picked up the children’s signal, things hadn’t moved quite so quickly. Their primary problem had been transportation.

All of the vehicles assigned to the Enforcers, the fire department, and the medical department were kept in the same lot to streamline and carefully monitor supplies of gasoline, diesel and oil. When Rickards had radioed to the transportation yard, he was told that a shipment of gasoline had been diverted by a band of ghosts on I-40 outside of the Albuquerque APZ. Until a replacement shipment arrived, the entire Laughlin APZ would be running on fumes and under no circumstances was the transportation director about to let Rickards take a bunch of gas guzzling vehicles off into the backwoods of Arizona on a wild goose chase. Or words to that effect.

Rickards demanded. He threatened. He yelled. He even tried to cajole, something with which he had no skill, and which was frightening to watch, but to no avail. He found that Loveless, the grumpy fifty-something mechanic in charge of the motor pool lived up to his name and adamantly refused to hand over the keys. Rickards considered holding him at gun point. However, he realized that any vehicles released in such a manner still would have no fuel, and that such behavior would almost certainly mean his immediate removal from the Enforcers, followed by long term incarceration. Since neither would further his aim, he stopped short of such an action.

Ultimately it took two days before the replacement shipment of fuel arrived at the APZ and his team was able to secure enough vehicles to head after the children. During this enforced down time, the team researched the area to which they were heading, and tiptoed around Rickards.

Now they were in Wikieup, the small and only bump on Highway 93. Reference books identified 93 as what used to be Arizona’s deadliest road. Now, after extensive renovations, it was simply a long road through the middle of some very rough country covered with brush and boulders. Regardless of all the information the books held, the one thing they didn’t say was where the quarry was. All Rickards knew was that they were no where in sight.

“Have the techies back in Laughlin been able to pin down where the computer signal was coming from any closer than when we left?”

“No, sir,” answered Harlan. “They’d need the computer to try and log back on to do that, and unfortunately that hasn’t happened. Attempts to initiate a reverse log on have been unsuccessful as well. However, based on the coordinates that they gave us before leaving the APZ, we’re looking at this area here.” Using a red marker, Harlan indicated a large square northeast of their present location, somewhere in the box between Highways 93 and 89 and south of I-40. “I suggest we send out the seekers to these coordinates and see what we get. We can monitor the signal on the mobile station here, then if they pick up something, we’ll know where to head.”

“Sounds like a good plan, Harlan,” Rickards said, nodding. “Get them in the air right away.

Harlan nodded and turned starting back toward the truck carrying four long range seekers. Stopping suddenly, he turned back to Rickards.

“Sir, there’s another thing we’re going to have to consider, even if we do find them.”

“What’s that, Harlan?”

“This time of year the roads in this area can be pretty bad. It’s very possible that we won’t be able to move the vehicles in, even with four-wheel drive, until the rains let up a bit. I’ve seen some of these remote ranches and camps socked in for several days or more during a wet summer or winter. It doesn’t take long for the roads to dry if we hit a few days where the monsoon holds off, but going in when it’s wet could be a disaster.”

“Just find them, Harlan. We’ll worry about the roads when we know where we’re going.” Rickards looked stormier than the skies. “I want those seekers up in the air within a half hour. The good news is that if we can’t get in, they can’t get out, so right now we just need them found.”

“Yes, sir.” Harlan hurried to the truck to relay his orders.

Rickards stood looking around the deserted town, as the thunder rumbled and the first large drops of rain began to fall.

Where the hell are they?