False Memory (56 page)

They waited a few minutes, apparently discussing their options, and then the blushing man got out of the truck, stretched, and went into Green Acres, leaving Skeet alone.

Perhaps they suspected that Jennifer had come here to meet the doctor himself, for a romantic tête-à-tête over bowls of bran mash and platters of steamed squash.

Ahriman considered walking over to the pickup, opening Skeet’s door, and trying to access him with
Dr. Yen Lo.
If it worked, he might be able to bring Skeet back to the El Camino and drive away with him before the other man returned.

Skeet’s program didn’t always function properly, however, due to the unfortunate custard consistency of his drug-addled brain, and if the encounter
didn’t
go smoothly, then the pie-faced partner might catch the doctor in the act.

He couldn’t just walk over to the truck and shoot Skeet, either, because with twilight, multitudes of the terminally taste-challenged were driving into the restaurant lot. Witnesses were witnesses, after all, regardless of whether they were gourmets or gourmands.

The blushing man came out of the restaurant and returned to the pickup truck, and after only two minutes, both he and Skeet went into Green Acres. Evidently they were going to conduct surveillance of Jennifer while shoveling down some swill of their own.

The doctor’s mood was ever rising, because he expected to have a clear shot at both men, in a suitably private setting, before the night was out, and then a dinner fit for a predator. He intended to use all ten shots in the magazine, whether he needed them or not, just for the fun of it.

The threatened rain had never fallen, and now the clouds were breaking apart in the twilight, revealing stars. This pleased the doctor, too. He liked stars. He’d once wanted to be an astronaut.

He was halfway through his third cookie when he saw something that threatened to spoil his wonderful mood. One row away and east in the parking lot stood a beautiful white Rolls-Royce with tinted windows, traditional hood ornament, and polished titanium hubcaps. He was shocked that anyone wealthy enough to own a Rolls and refined enough to choose to drive such a motorcar would come to Green Acres for dinner other than at gunpoint.

This truly was a dying culture. Rampant capitalism had spread wealth so widely that even root-chewing, grass-grazing vulgarians could drive in royal equipage to dine at the vegetarian equivalent of a Wienerschnitzel franchise.

The sight of this vehicle here, of all places, was enough to make the doctor want to consign his vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud to the nearest hydraulic automobile crusher. He looked away from the white beauty and vowed not to look again. To put the depressing sight out of his mind, he started the El Camino, popped a classic-radio tape of old Spike Jones programs into the cassette deck, and concentrated on his cookie.

On three sides, the ghost village. In centuries past, watch-fires and tallows burning, mica-lens lanterns holding back the night. Now, no resistance to the frigid dark. Populated by wraiths, perhaps all of them merely figures of snow, perhaps some spirits.

To the south, behind Martie, half seen in the murk, stood broken and weathered adobe walls, two stories in places, a few feet high in others, with deep-set window openings. Doorless doorways led to rooms more often than not roofless and filled with debris, inhabited in warm weather by tarantulas and scorpions.

In the east, better revealed by the car headlights but still resistant to full revelation, tall fractured chimneys of stone rose from round stone formations: perhaps ancient ovens or fireplaces.

North lay the low curving walls of a structure largely blocked from view by the BMW.

Surprisingly, looming throughout the crescent of ruins were tall cottonwoods. In addition to the deep well that Zachary had mentioned, there must be water near the surface, within reach of roots.

Kevin could be circling Martie, moving from one crumbling structure to the next, from tree to tree. She had to get out of the open, but she dreaded the thought of stalking him—and being stalked—through this strange and ancient place.

In a crouch, she hurried to the car and huddled against the rear tire on the driver’s side.

The back door was open. Pale light from the ceiling fixture.

She dropped flat and risked a quick look under the car. Kevin wasn’t there.

In the backwash of headlights, the thin mantle of snow on the far side of the BMW was aglow. From this ground-level perspective, the otherwise pristine whiteness appeared in one place to have been disturbed by someone heading away from the car.

Rising into a crouch again, she leaned into the light that came from within the BMW, and she examined the machine pistol to make sure that nothing about it would surprise her if and when she was forced to use it. The extended magazine scared her. From the high ammo capacity, she inferred that the pistol was fully automatic, not just semi, and she didn’t have much confidence in her ability to control such a powerful weapon.

Her hands were cold, too. Fingers growing numb.

She closed the rear door and leaned with her back against it, studying Zachary. He remained motionless, facedown on the ground. If he was faking unconsciousness, waiting for her to lower her guard, he was supernaturally patient.

Before she could concentrate on Kevin, she had to know whether this man was still a threat.

After consideration, she approached him boldly rather than with caution, moving in fast and poking the muzzle of the machine pistol against the nape of his neck.

He didn’t move.

She pulled back the collar of his quilted ski jacket and pressed her cold fingers against his throat, searching for a carotid-artery pulse. Nothing.

His head was turned to one side. She thumbed back his eyelid. Even in the poor light, his fixed stare was unmistakable.

Guilt sutured her heart and mind together, so that the thought of what she had done caused stitches of pain to pull in her breast. She would never be the same person again, for she had taken a life. Although circumstances had given her no option but to kill or be killed, and though this man had chosen to serve evil and to serve it well, the gravity of Martie’s action weighed on her nonetheless, and she felt diminished in more ways than she could count. Gone was a certain innocence that she would never be able to regain.

And yet, cohabiting with the guilt was a sense of gratification, a cold and keenly felt satisfaction that she had acquitted herself so well thus far, that her and Dusty’s odds of survival had improved, and that she had shattered the gunmen’s smug assumptions of superior power. A thrill of righteousness filled her, and she found it simultaneously heartening and terrifying.

To the car once more, to the front door on the driver’s side, slowly rising until she could see through the window. The door open on the passenger’s side. Kevin gone. Blood on the seat.

Crouching below the window again, she thought about what she had seen. At least one of the four rounds she had fired through the seat must have struck him. There hadn’t been a lot of blood, but any at all meant that he was hurting and at a disadvantage.

The keys were in the car ignition. Switch off the engine, open the trunk, free Dusty? Then it would be two against one.

No. Kevin might be waiting for her to go after the keys, might have a clear line of sight on the interior of the car, through the open passenger’s door. Even if she obtained the keys without being shot, she would be an easy target when she stood at the back of the car, fumbling at the lock and opening the trunk lid.

Although she loathed the idea, the safest thing seemed to be to retreat across this clearing into the ruins to the south. Use the cover of the crumbling structures and the cottonwoods to circle east, then north. Get around to the other side of the car, where Kevin had gone. If she made a wide enough loop, she might come in behind the northern position from which he was covering the BMW.

Of course, maybe he wasn’t hunkered down and watching the car from a fixed position. He might be on the move, too, doing the same thing that she was doing, just in reverse. Using the long-abandoned village and the trees to travel east, then south. Circling in search of her.

If she had to stalk him through the adobe-and-cottonwood maze, while he, too, was on the prowl, her chances of being the one to come out alive were dismal. She no longer had the advantage of surprise. And though he was wounded, he was the pro, skilled at this, and she was the amateur. Luck didn’t favor amateurs.

Luck didn’t favor the hesitant, either. Action.

Action would be Kevin’s motto, as well, drummed into him by whatever military or paramilitary specialists had trained him, and probably also by hard experience. She suddenly
knew
that he would be on the move, and that the last thing he might be expecting from a video-game designer and a housepainter’s wife would be for her to follow him boldly, seeking him out by as direct a route as she could possibly take.

Maybe this was true. Maybe it wasn’t. She convinced herself, nevertheless, that she should neither circle behind him nor lie in wait for him to appear, but aggressively pursue, tracking him by whatever spoor he had left in the fresh snow.

She didn’t dare cross through the headlights. Might as well just shoot herself and save him the ammunition.

Instead, she retreated in a crouch along the side of the car, away from the headlights. Against the rear fender, she hesitated, but then she moved around to the back of the BMW.

The red taillights were far dimmer than the blaze of headlamps, but the falling snowflakes turned to blood when they passed through the glow. The billowing exhaust was a sanguinary mist.

The plumes of vapor gave Martie cover but also blinded her, a crimson immersion, a fearful baptismal passage. Then she was out of the churning cloud, exposed and vulnerable on the north side of the car.

Action that seemed bold in the planning now seemed reckless in the execution. Staying low, but still a choice target, she angled at a run to the tracks leading from the open front door of the BMW.

Footsteps and drops of blood, half covered by the falling snow, revealed that Kevin had gone toward the round adobe structure, forty feet away.

She hadn’t been able to see this building clearly from the other side of the car. Now that she had a better view, she found the place more rather than less mysterious. A six-foot-high wall curving away into the darkness. The suggestion of a low domed roof. Hard to judge the diameter of the structure from this one aspect, but surely thirty or forty feet. Stairs, flanked by decorative stepped walls, led to the roof, where the entrance appeared to be located, and the logical deduction was that most of the building lay underground.

Kiva.

The word came to her from a documentary that she had once seen. Kiva, a subterranean ceremonial chamber, the spiritual center of the village.

As Martie hurried farther from the car, the shadows grew deeper, and by the second, torrents of snow obscured the spoor. The trail remained clear enough, however, because the footprints deteriorated into broad shuffle marks, and the spots of blood were replaced by more liberal spatters.

Her heart a tom-tom, her eardrums vibrating with a sympathetic beat, she followed him to the steps, dreading the possibility that he had climbed to the roof, had then gone down into the kiva, and was waiting there in the smooth round darkness. At the steps, however, he had hesitated, losing more blood, and then he had continued along the curving wall.

Martie moved with her back against the adobe, sidling around the kiva into ever deeper darkness, beyond the last reflection of the BMW headlights, holding the machine pistol with both hands, finger tense upon the trigger. The deep pitchy shadows were relieved only by the faintly luminous cassock of snow spread across the ground and by the phosphorescent falling flakes.

Muffled by the intervening structure and by skeins of snow, the idling car engine faded until it was barely louder than an imagined sound, and something near to silence settled around her. She listened for her quarry, for the scrape of footsteps or ragged breathing, but she heard nothing.

Even in this gloom, she was able to follow Kevin, though hardly at all by the marks that his shuffling feet had left. Now only the blood was clear enough to lead her, a drizzle of blackness across the virgin snow, laid down in looping script, as though he were writing the same number over and over again, and she thanked God that there was so much of it.

Instantly, Martie cringed at having expressed gratitude for the blood of another human being, and yet she could not repress a flush of pride at her effectiveness. This pride, she warned herself, might yet earn her a few bullets of her own.

Inching, inching, inching sideways, she remembered now and then to glance back the way she’d come, in case he’d circled the building and stolen in behind her. While looking back, she knocked her left foot against an object on the ground, and turning her head, she saw a dark shape more geometric than the patterns of blood. The clatter had been distinctive.