Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (12 page)

His mind sometimes made a picture of her, the way she might look now. He imagined her standing here under the sequoias, staring up with her eyes wide, feeling six inches tall.

He’d learned years before not to let those kinds of thoughts last. He’d learned how to let them fade—how to let everything fade, really. How to go through the day in logical steps: sleeping, breathing, buying groceries, taking the trash to the curb. Life as a mechanical process. As limbo. As inertia.

That it could all change—that there was anything for it to change
to
—had not crossed his mind in years. Not until today.

He looked into the cabin again. Rachel had eased onto her back. For a minute or two he watched her sleep. Then he faced the woods again and watched the dark come down.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Long after night had claimed the valley, after the moon had risen through low clouds, sending wraiths of pale light playing over the forest floor, Rachel began to murmur in her sleep. Dryden entered the cabin, moving carefully so as not to wake her. His adjusted eyes found the audio device, and he pressed
RECORD.

For the first minute or two, her sounds were indecipherable, even from a foot away.

Then her body stiffened. Her right arm jerked. Dryden knelt beside her, ready to take hold of her if it looked like she could injure herself.

Her arm spasmed again. The other did the same. Both started to move away from her sides but stopped after traveling less than two inches, held fast as if by invisible straps. She tried to sit up, but her shoulders also met unseen resistance. With a chill, Dryden understood. After two months of sleeping in restraints, Rachel’s body had become conditioned to the limits. Dryden took a moment to reflect with satisfaction upon the revenge she’d dealt the blond man, even if she hadn’t meant it as such.

Her murmurs fell silent for thirty seconds, and then she said, “It’s so pretty from this window at night.”

Her eyes were still closed. The cabin had no windows, regardless. Rachel was describing something in her dream.

“From up here,” she whispered, “all the lights…”

She trailed off.

Dryden sat down on the plank floor beside her. He steadied himself. This would either work or it wouldn’t. All he could do was try.

Making his voice as soft as he could, he said, “Hello, Rachel.”

She didn’t quite startle. The reaction was more reserved than that. A twitch of her eyebrows in the faint light. Tension in her features that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier.

“Hello,” she said. Her tone was devoid of emotion.

“Can I ask you some questions?”

Rachel exhaled slowly. When she spoke, she sounded like she was reading from a note card.

“Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”

Dryden took in the words. Took in their meaning, at least in the abstract—the rough implication of where Rachel had come from. Of what she was.

But more than the words themselves, what struck him was the way she’d said them, and the way her jaw clamped shut when she was finished. The mix of determined and scared shitless that etched itself across her face.

It was a look Dryden had seen on other faces. Many others.

As carefully as he’d first spoken, he said, “Do you recognize my voice?”

She appeared to think about it. Her eyes, already shut, tightened as if narrowing.

Then the scared resolve fell back over her like a shadow, and she replied in the same flat tone as before.

“Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”

An old, familiar phrase surfaced in Dryden’s mind. One that was known to soldiers the world over.

Name, rank, and serial number
.

Rachel’s stock reply was the equivalent. She held it in front of herself like a shield, because in her head she was back in that little room in El Sedero. Whatever pretty dream she’d been having a minute ago, the very act of questioning her had changed it, and now her mind was stuck in the phantom restraints as surely as her arms were.

Dryden rubbed his eyes. Christ, how to explain it to her—that he wasn’t one of those people? How to explain it without telling her too much and waking her up?

Rachel’s head turned a few degrees toward him, though her eyes remained shut.

“Waking who up?” she asked.

Dryden stared at her. Because he’d been with her all day, because he’d gotten used to having her respond to things before he actually said them, he almost missed what’d just happened—that she’d heard his thoughts, even from inside the dream.

“Inside what dream?” she asked.

Shit.
Shit
.

Dryden felt it all getting away from him. Like a stack of dinner plates atop his hand, unbalancing, pitching outward—

He made his voice as stern and cold as he could manage, and said the words as quickly as they formed in his head: “The thing everyone’s scared of—tell us about it again. Right now. You’ve already given us that much, there’s no harm in repeating it.”

For a moment Rachel seemed to continue looking at him through her closed eyelids, as if still hung up on the question of who was dreaming. Then the strained resolve settled back into place.

“Why do you need to hear it again?” she asked. “I told you.”

“Just do it,” Dryden said. “Tell us what it is.”

“I told you
where
it is. Go see it for yourself if you want to know about it. You can walk right up to it. No one’s going to stop you.”

Before Dryden could respond to that, Rachel’s forehead furrowed, and she turned her head toward the cabin’s nearest wall.

“Who’s in the next room?” she asked.

Dryden ignored the question—that she was referring to someone in her dream was obvious, but to dwell on that for even a second would only further break the spell.

“Alright then,” Dryden said. “Tell us again
where
this thing is.”

Rachel stared at the wall a moment longer, her face still full of concern.

“Stop stalling, Rachel. Tell us.”

“Elias Dry Lake, in Utah.” She gave up on the wall and sank back onto the fabric of her sleeping bag. “It’s right there. You can’t miss it.”

“Keep talking,” Dryden said. “Tell us what’s there.”

A strange little smile turned up the corners of her mouth. If anything, it made her look more scared.

“What’s the point of threatening me now?” she whispered. “I already know what Gaul’s going to do to me. So do you guys.”

Dryden could see tremors running through her body. It was all he could do to keep from putting a hand on her shoulder.

“It must burn him up, though, right?” Rachel said. “He gets something as useful as me in his hands, and he doesn’t get to keep me? Someone else builds a new toy for themselves, and Gaul has to kill me because…” Rachel laughed; the sound of it crept under Dryden’s skin. How many times had he heard a prisoner laugh that same way, in the deep end of despair, holding on to bravado as if it were a punctured raft? “Because any time now they’re going to stop test driving that new toy and really give it the gas … and if I’m still alive when that happens … talk about a wrench in the gears—”

She cut herself off. All at once she looked confused. For a second Dryden expected her to open her eyes.

Then she said, “Who are you? Wait … Sam?”

Dryden spoke softly again. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Who’s with you? Who’s in the next room?”

“There is no other room, Rachel.”

She started to reply, then stopped herself. She looked thoughtful. “I’m dreaming, right?”

“You’re dreaming,” Dryden said. No point trying to fool her now. “You’re dreaming there’s someone in the next room.”

Rachel shook her head. “I can hear a man thinking, but he’s not in my dream. He’s there with you. He’s right on the other side of that wall.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In the fraction of a second it took Dryden to understand, everything changed.

Outside the cabin, feet scraped the dry ground as the intruder reacted to what Rachel had said, and then footsteps sprinted hard along the exterior wall. Sprinted toward the front of the structure, and its still-wide-open door.

Dryden came up from his sitting position beside Rachel, threw his body at the shelf next to the door, and had the SIG SAUER in his hand an instant later. He braced a palm on the door frame and shoved himself backward, dropping to a shooter’s stance in the middle of the floor.

In the next second a man appeared in the doorway.

A big man, silhouetted against the moonlit forest.

Holding a shotgun.

Dryden fired.

Three shots in rapid succession, into the figure’s chest from less than ten feet away.

Rachel woke, screaming.

The intruder dropped the shotgun and staggered backward. One foot went off the edge of the porch platform, and he fell on his back in the dirt.

Rachel called out Dryden’s name, groping around in the darkness, disoriented. Keeping the SIG and most of his attention on the fallen man outside, Dryden found Rachel’s flailing hand and held it.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m right here.”

He could hear her hyperventilating, trying to get control of herself. Waking up to gunshots was a hell of an alarm clock for anyone; he couldn’t imagine how it felt to a kid.

In his peripheral vision he saw Rachel sit up and look out through the doorway. The man was just visible outside. Dryden gave her hand a squeeze and then let go. He moved toward the dying man, ready to put another few shots into him at the first sign of movement. When he reached the door and got a full view past the lip of the rough platform, the SIG immediately felt heavier in his grip.

The man on the ground was a uniformed cop.

*   *   *

Implications flared in Dryden’s mind like muzzle flashes. Dots and connections, stitching together in rapid fire. He heard Rachel take a sharp breath in the dark behind him, picking up on what he’d seen.

He crossed the porch, stepped to the ground, and knelt over the officer. The man was still breathing, but Dryden could tell from the sound that his lungs were shredded. They were filling with blood. The guy had a minute at most.

There was a 9 mm on the cop’s hip. Dryden popped the holster strap, pulled the gun out, and slid it far from the man’s reach. As he did, he saw the guy’s head move. Dryden met his eyes just as they opened and fixed on him.

He thought to ask the man if he was alone, then decided it was a waste of fading seconds; if there was another cop within a hundred yards, there’d be bullets coming out of the woods already.

The officer struggled to take a breath. When he let it out, his body was racked with a violent coughing fit. Blood came out of his mouth; it looked black in the moonlight.

“How did you find us?” Dryden asked.

“Hiker saw your car … trailhead. You stupid fuck.”

“How would a hiker know to look for it?”

The cop’s voice grew fainter on each word. “Whole world’s looking for it. You were on TV all day.”

Dryden sat back on his knees, as if pushed by the force of the strange information.

“On TV for what?”

“You know for what,” the cop said. Another coughing fit seized him, worse than the first. When it ended, his breathing went fast and shallow. Then it stopped. The man convulsed once and went still. Gone.

Dryden stood and turned toward the cabin. Rachel was standing in the doorway, shaking; she couldn’t take her eyes off the body.

“Rachel—”

Dryden stopped himself.

He turned and listened.

The sound was right at the edge of his hearing. Rising and falling against the night wind. Then it solidified, and there was no doubting it.

Rotors. Far away but coming in. The drumming reverberated off the mountains on both sides of the valley, masking its direction and even its distance. It didn’t matter. It was already too close. Dryden went to Rachel and turned her face away from the dead man. He spoke softly but urgently.

“They’re coming,” he said. “We need to go.”

She nodded, still looking dazed. Dryden stepped past her into the cabin, put the SIG in its holster, and clipped it around his waist. Then he picked up the duffel bag containing the two emergency items from Visalia. The last thing he took was the audio recorder; he put it in his front pocket and left the sleeping bags and other gear behind.

Rachel, already following his lead and putting on her shoes, indicated the duffel bag in his hand. “Shouldn’t we get those out now?”

“Not yet,” Dryden said. He went to the doorway and listened to the drumbeat of the incoming chopper, so much louder already. “Not just yet.”

Rachel finished tying her shoes, and they left the cabin at a run.

*   *   *

Gaul was ready to put a chair through a window. He went so far as to pick one up, then slammed it back down, his hands gripping the armrests hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

He was in the computer lab again. The window, spared for the moment, looked out on the same L.A. nightscape as his private balcony upstairs.

Lowry and the others were at their stations. They sat transfixed by what the Mirandas were showing from four separate angles. Dryden and the girl were sprinting through trackless backcountry in Sequoia National Park while the body of the officer cooled in the dirt far behind them.

Gaul’s people had been explicit in their instructions to local authorities, from the moment the hiker’s tip had come in: They were not to interfere. Apparently this one hadn’t been able to resist getting his name on Fox News. Well, mission accomplished.

The element of surprise was gone. Granted, it wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway; Dryden still would have heard the chopper coming. But he wouldn’t have known it was hostile and would have lost precious minutes weighing the choice of whether to run for it. In truth, though, none of that mattered. There was no possible exit for Dryden and the girl this time.

There were only seven roads within a twenty-mile radius of the cabin they’d been holed up in. All of those roads were now blocked by local and federal authorities whom Gaul had control of, in a roundabout way, but those personnel were a redundancy; Dryden had no chance of reaching even the nearest road. The helicopter, a Black Hawk, carried ten specialists who answered directly to Gaul. They were his new sword point, promoted to fill the vacuum left by Curren’s group. The Black Hawk’s pilot had been instructed not to risk getting close to Dryden; there was no telling what sort of weaponry he was packing right now, having been free and unaccounted for all day. Instead, the pilot would circle Dryden and the girl at a distance of half a mile, guided by the techs watching the Miranda feeds, and deploy the ten-man specialist team into the forest at different points along the circle. They would form a mile-wide ring around the prey. Then it was just a matter of tightening in on them.