The Falling Away (2 page)

“Those were legal prescriptions.” The current governor of Montana had made a big splash by arranging bus trips for seniors to Canada, where they could fill prescriptions for a fraction of their U.S. price. That had been during his first major campaign for office, when he was running to be a senator.

He'd lost that race.

Webb drained his mug, tilted it toward Dylan. “Hey, look. Pullet surprise cup is totally empty. You should be happy now.”

Dylan ignored him and kept his eyes forward. This, too, was a lot like his time in Iraq. Always looking. Always patrolling. Always hoping to find . . . something. Something that would alert you to danger.

Trouble was, you never spotted any such thing. You knew it was there, some ever-present monster lurking just beyond your view, but you never really saw it. You only felt it. Even spinning numbers and geometric patterns inside your head—counting lighted windows and subtracting them from the number of unlit windows, then changing your equations whenever another light flickered on during night watch—didn't settle you. The monster was always there. Always waiting.

In the distance, lights flashed in the white haze. Once. Twice. Like the lights in the shattered brick buildings on the streets of Baghdad.

“You see that?” Dylan asked.

Webb turned, looked out the windshield. The lights flashed twice again. “Yeah.”

Dylan pulled a lever on the dash, flashing his own headlights twice in return.

“Seriously? They're in a white pickup?” Dylan said, not really expecting an answer.

“Harder to spot,” Webb responded. “Aren't you at least happy about that? Keep the big bad DEA and border patrol on their toes. Bet the thousands of secret cameras they got here in eastern Montana won't even pick it up. Those Canucks are crafty.”

Dylan ignored Webb, shifted in his seat, zipped his parka, pulled on his nylon gloves.

“Those the warmest gloves you could find?” Webb asked, displaying his own padded mittens. They fit the rest of Webb's marshmallow getup.

“I'm good,” Dylan said. He put his hands in his pockets, not bothering to explain that he wore thin gloves so he could move his fingers easily. So he could use the .357 Mag revolver tucked into the right pocket of his parka if he had to. Loaded with 158-grain soft points. No need for Webb to know about such a thing; he'd just laugh, chalking it up to paranoid delusions on Dylan's part.

Dylan wasn't paranoid, didn't hear voices out to get him or anything like that.

There was Joni's voice, of course.

And the numbers and patterns thing.

And the kill box inside his mind, where he sent unwanted thoughts.

And . . .

Okay. Maybe he was paranoid. Or schizophrenic. Or mentally unbalanced. A bit of that posttraumatic stress disorder, as the therapist at the VA hospital was fond of telling him.

After all, Joni wasn't out to get him. And the mental kill box and the strange manipulation of numbers and shapes were just . . . mental exercises. Ways of controlling his environment. Perfectly healthy ways of coping with stress—another nugget of wisdom imparted by the VA therapist.

You didn't tell your therapist about me
. Joni's voice.

No. If I did, we'd probably still be in the hospital
.

Dylan and Webb sat in silence for a few moments, studying the area ahead of them.

Dylan cleared his throat, waiting patiently. His eyes still itched, almost as much as his leg. It was always worse in the cold like this, his leg. He knew it would start to roar with pain even more when he stepped into the frosty air outside.

“There they are,” Webb said.

“Yeah.” Dylan watched as two figures slowly materialized, moving slowly. Like mules on a long, hard trail.

And that's what they were. Drug mules. What he himself was about to become. A limping mule.

I can think of another word for mule that might be more fitting
, Joni's voice said in his mind.

Hilarious, that Joni.

“Let's go,” Webb said, popping open his door. The lights in the cab of the old Ford Ranger sputtered to life.

Dylan, shaking his head, opened his own door and struggled into the biting cold. He closed it behind him, leaned on the pickup's fender as he made his way to the front. At the front of the pickup he returned his right hand to his coat pocket, loosely cradled the revolver's grip.

Outside, even though he stood on the vast, flat plains of northeast Montana, it felt as if he were in a tunnel. The wind was part of that; it lapped at any exposed skin, whispered hollow echoes in his eardrums, swirled dirty snow around him in a cloud. He could even taste the wind on his tongue as he breathed: it should taste fresh and clear, he thought, but instead it was loamy, like soil.

Yeah, he was in a tunnel. A long, dark tunnel to nowhere, and coming down that tunnel were two guys carrying drugs.

Webb stepped away from the front of the pickup, clutching a dusty blue rucksack of his own in his left hand as he raised his right hand in a greeting. Webb was what you'd call a people person; he loved bull sessions, loved telling and hearing jokes, loved slapping shoulders and shaking hands and exchanging high fives. It energized him.

Dylan wasn't a people person.

Webb hailed the two men, a greeting of some sort Dylan didn't quite catch; Webb was turned away from him, and the wind was carrying his voice to points unknown. But Dylan knew Webb was grinning expansively as he spoke. He always did.

The two Canadians stopped a few feet away from Webb, their breath misting as the wind carried it away from their mouths, as if they were exhaling smoke. The two exchanged a quick glance, and the taller man spoke. “Nah, let's just get this over with.”

Dylan could at least make out what he was saying, since he was shouting to be heard over the wind. Even though they'd only walked a short distance from their pickup, crossing the U.S. border in the process, ice crystals had formed on the taller man's beard, longer and fuller than Webb's. He wasn't a good beard guy, though, not like Webb. Webb looked like the guy on the Brawny paper towels packaging. This guy's beard made him look more like a wannabe biker.

The other Canadian was thin, almost anorexic. Oily hair pooled over his shoulders from beneath a knitted cap as he shuffled in place. What'd the Canadians call those stocking caps?

Tuques
, Joni's voice answered helpfully.

Dylan didn't like this at all. These guys seemed too edgy, even if they were the type to partake of the cargo they were carrying (and he had no doubt they'd done a little skimming from their backpack).

Oh, so now you don't like it
.

Never wanted in this deep, Joni. You know that
.

Webb said something else, turned and flashed a grin at Dylan. Dylan decided he should move closer so he could catch whatever Webb was saying.

Both the Canadians looked at Dylan as he stepped forward, evidently taking this movement as a signal he had something to say. Instead he kept his head down, hunching his shoulders and keeping his hands in his parka pockets, avoiding eye contact. His finger found the trigger guard on the revolver.

Just in case.

2

Quinn pushed away her cup of coffee, convinced it had been brewed roughly around the time she was born twenty-seven years ago. She glanced at the scowling face of Greg, who was sitting by himself at a booth in the corner, and waited. Greg wasn't talking to anyone else, which was good. If he were, that might mean Quinn would have to do something drastic, figure out a way to shoot him in a crowd.

But Greg was eating his breakfast alone, lost in his own world. Probably still getting his bearings after leaving the safety of the HIVE.

HIVE was well known to just about everyone in Montana. It was something like a cross between an Amish community and an old hippie commune. The letters stood for Hope Is Via Earth, but most people just called HIVE members drones.

Drones like Greg here, finishing his breakfast, his eyes dark and cloudy for reasons he probably didn't even understand. Understanding wasn't the job of the drones; the drones existed to spread their disease, while Li, the leader of HIVE, built his power and influence.

Li, an enigmatic, bald figure, had started the community in the early nineties; together with a band of a few dozen followers he purchased several hundred acres of central Montana farmland and established the New-Agey commune. He had attracted a growing base of followers since then, adding mobile homes in a crude phalanx while the HIVE population expanded, and eventually building permanent accommodations to create his self-sustaining community in the proverbial Middle of Nowhere.

As it grew, HIVE branched into different sections of agriculture: dairy, eggs, wheat. Soon stores across Montana and adjoining states began stocking their wares; people drawn to the whole Earth-is-our-loving-mother spiel bought their organic products.

In the early twenty-first century, Li had obviously seen ahead of the curve and tapped into the growing green movement by signing a contract with an energy company to build dozens of giant wind turbines on HIVE property. That was what identified HIVE to the rest of Montana: more than a hundred giant turbines stood as silent sentinels over the mysterious compound.

Many people in Montana had a vague uneasiness about the community. HIVE members had a good story to tell, and various media ate it up; after all, HIVE members always wore impossibly wide smiles, always talked about sustainable living and saving the earth. Great sound bites. But most Montanans who came into contact with HIVE members would tell you the smiles and the chatter felt too . . . rehearsed. Maybe too robotic. Which was another reason why the “drone” moniker fit so well.

These drones, the ones who ventured from the HIVE into the surrounding communities, were the only members most people saw. What Quinn thought of as the light drones.

The dark drones were another matter. Most people never saw them. No, that wasn't right; most people who saw dark drones never realized they had any connection with HIVE at all, because dark drones didn't have bright smiles and canned stories about loving the earth. They said nothing about their connection to HIVE.

Dark drones weren't sent out to recruit; they were sent out to infect.

Released from the HIVE, dark drones such as Greg invariably found their way either here to Great Falls or south to Billings and then on to points unknown. If they weren't stopped before they boarded a plane or a bus, well, there really was no way you'd catch them except by chance. It was a big country, a big world, and they could hide underground almost anywhere. Infecting people all around them. Spreading the disease.

But for right now, at least, Greg seemed more interested in his burned toast than in casual conversation with anyone around him. Which meant he wasn't actively trying to infect anyone. Yet.

Quinn found herself thinking of Dylan Runs Ahead, wishing she'd been able to follow him instead. Her overall goal was keeping him out of the HIVE, of course, and she knew HIVE would be quite interested in welcoming him into their fold.

He was, after all, a chosen.

But Dylan was hundreds of miles away from the HIVE right now, far away from their influence, so her priority had been Greg. Dark drones, when released from the HIVE, always took priority; if they made it to their destinations they could go underground, infect hundreds, even thousands. Dylan, though important, was just one person.

Quinn sighed, traced the faint outline of her new staple with a light finger, then pressed it, reassured by the pain.

She was an embedder. Self-embedding disorder was the precise diagnostic term, describing the compulsion to embed objects—usually metal items such as needles, staples, and nails—into various parts of the body. Quinn had read all about it on the Internet; it even had its own Wikipedia entry. SED, the entry said, was a form of self-mutilation (otherwise known as self-injury or SI), related to cutting and trichotillomania, the odd name for the compulsion to pull out your own hair.

Self-mutilation. Well, who didn't mutilate themselves in some form or another?

Her mother had done it, when Quinn was a young girl. After her father left without explanation, her mother had self-mutilated by sinking into the depths of her depression and dementia. They'd spent two years together on the streets of Portland, a wandering, aimless existence; then, after her mother had mysteriously disappeared, Quinn spent another two years on her own. Before Paul. Before the Falling Away.

She understood that her need for cutting, and her subsequent need for embedding, were tied to issues with her mother. And her father, she supposed. But mostly her mother. She had seen the pressure building inside her mother, and wanted so much to be able to relieve that pressure. After her mother's disappearance, when she felt her own pressure building inside her, she'd discovered the perfect way to release it.

She didn't resent the embedding, didn't wallow in self-hatred for her self-injury. She understood it was a necessary part of what she did, really; those who didn't have a release valve for the poison they pulled out of others felt the pressure build inside until it forced them to explode. So in an odd way, the compulsion was what had led Quinn to become part of the Falling Away.

God worked in mysterious ways, indeed.

Stop.

This was no time to think about the embedding; right now, she needed to concentrate on Greg, concentrate on removing him before he could escape and infect others. Quinn uttered a silent prayer, asking for strength, asking for focus, and felt better.

An informant had called the previous afternoon, told Quinn someone from the HIVE was scheduled to check in at the O'Haire Motor Inn. Quinn had driven over from Judith Gap, had watched through field glasses as Greg checked in late that evening before slipping into the attached Sip-N-Dip Lounge.

In hindsight, Quinn should have followed him back to his room, done the job while he was sleeping. It would have been easier. But HIVE usually sent two or three dark drones out together, and Quinn had been sure others would meet Greg at the bar. That's part of why neutralizing dark drones always took precedence over other activities.