Gone to Ground (24 page)

He grabbed the paint’s reins, bringing him under control and found himself face to face with Christina, the girl he’d left in the APZ. The girl he thought he’d never see again.

“Sorry, that was stupid,” Christina said, chest heaving. “I lost control. I can’t believe we found you. This is amazing.” The paint horse continued to toss its head and fidget in place.

O’Reilly looked back over Christina’s shoulder as the other three riders and their pack horses approached. The lead rider was a girl about Christina’s age with heavy black hair pulled back into a braid and dark rose brown skin. Behind her were two boys, twins by the look of them.

They must be Christina’s brothers,
thought O’Reilly. He studied their faces. Christina had spoken of her brothers several times. They looked to be about Mark’s age or a bit younger, but he could see the resemblance to their sister.

God, Mark
...
and Maggie and Lindy.
He closed his eyes momentarily as his mind tried to wrap around the disaster that was looming over their heads. Were they all about to be tracked down and captured because these kids had escaped from the APZ and followed him out here? It would be on his head if it happened. That thought was beyond bearing.

“O’Reilly. O’Reilly? Is there something wrong?” He opened his eyes and looked down at Christina who was staring into his face with a worried expression. “What’s going on?”

“I’m just surprised to see you. I thought you were safe and sound in Laughlin, not running around the country side.”

“That’s not it.” Christina shook her head frowning then looked back at the other three children who were waiting a short distance away. “You don’t have that ‘gee, I’m surprised to see you’ look on your face. You have an ‘oh, shit’ look on your face.”

“Let me see your right arm.”

“What?” Christina looked down at her right hand and arm in confusion. “What do you want to see my arm for?”

“Just let me see your right arm.”

Christina transferred her reins to her left hand and  held out her right hand and arm, palm down. O’Reilly took hold of her hand and turned it over, palm facing upward and ran his thumb over the upper edge of her wrist. There it was, the small bump made by the microchip.

Why hadn’t they been picked up already? Was Rickards hoping that the children would lead him to O’Reilly? Was he really so desperate that he’d let a group of kids wander around in lion infested mountains just to catch a deserter?

Christina was watching O’Reilly with growing concern.

“What’s wrong? That’s where they put our identification chips. It lets us get food and stuff. I don’t suppose we need it out here, but it hasn’t caused any problems or gotten infected or anything. We all have them. Tagging us like dogs and cats.” Christina frowned, apparently at the thought that they’d been treated like animals.

O’Reilly met Christina’s worried eyes with an equally serious expression. “Christina, I’m going to need all of you to trust me. Our ability to stay free will depend on it. The chips need to be removed.

Fear blossomed in Christina’s deep blue eyes, mirrored by the other girl’s expression. The two boys drew closer to each other.

Taking a deep breath, O’Reilly tried smiling to reassure the four children. “It’s going to be okay. We just need to get those chips out of your arms and destroy them before we go any further. Once they’re gone, we can head to the canyon.”

Damn
, he thought suddenly.
What the heck was Maggie going to say when he showed up with four more children
. Deciding he wasn’t brave enough to contemplate his future in that regard, he resolutely turned his mind away from Hideaway, and to the task at hand.

28

The you
ng brown-haired girl stood in the hallway in front of Rickards. He could see the pleading look in her green eyes as she raised her arms to him, asking him to save her. Rickards stepped forward, reaching out his hand to take hers and pull her to safety. He could see the long dimly lighted hall behind her and knew, just knew, that some terrible danger lay beyond one of the many doors that populated the walls.

He reached further toward the girl, expecting to feel her warm hand in his, her weight against his arm, but nothing was there. Looking up, he saw her, ten feet away from him, still reaching toward him, fear flickering in her face.

A rumble told him that the train was approaching, which didn’t make sense. There shouldn’t have been a train here, in a hotel hallway. He looked to the right toward where the rumble seemed emanate and was surprised to see that what he’d thought was a hallway was actually a wide open platform, a train waiting on the far side. The area was crowded with people, all ages and genders, all lining up to enter the train. What surprised him even more was that no one seemed to want to go. The platform lacked the typical babble and noise that would be expected on a typical journey. Instead, all the people were quiet, shuffling heads down toward the doors.

Looking around again, he searched for the girl, but she was nowhere in sight. A feeling of dread washed over him and he began running down the hallway, now miraculously a train station platform, hunting through the crowds of people.

Nothing. No sight of her anywhere.

Then... There! There she was, in a line at the end of the platform, getting ready to board the train. She looked back over her shoulder at him as she put her hand on the rail and began to step onto the railway car.

“Stop! Wait!” Rickards shouted. He ran toward the doors desperately trying to reach them before the girl was completely on board.

Too late. The girl stepped onto the train and turned to face him as the doors of the car slid shut with a woosh, but instead of regular folding train doors, these doors were made of bars, reminding him of cages in a zoo.

The locomotive rumbled to life, preparing to leave the station. Rickards skidded to a stop outside the cage doors and looked at the girl as she looked back at him. The pain in her emerald eyes jolted through him, and a tear began to slide down her face as she reached through the bars. Starting forward he reached out to her again, but their fingers barely brushed as the train began to pull away.

“Captain Rickards,” she said, her voice barely audible over the rumble of the train. “Please, Captain Rickards. Captain Rickards!” The voice was louder, more demanding.

“No, stop. What’s going on? Where are you going?” Rickards yelled to be heard over the train. The terror he felt exploded in his chest and he began running along the platform, trying to catch the boxcar.

“Captain Rickards. Seth Rickards. Seth,” the voice pleaded as the rumble became an explosion of sound, jolting him out of his nightmare and back to the real world. The rumble resolved itself into a cataclysmic thunderstorm, and the voice emanated not from a young brown-haired girl, but from the young, raven-haired deputy standing in the doorway of his room, looking at him with an expression of concern bordering on fear.

Rickards struggled to a sitting position, heart pounding as though it would explode out of his chest and fly away at any moment. He looked around his room, trying to reorient himself.  He was laying on his bed. The dim light outside the window told him it was either late afternoon or early evening, with a thunderstorm raging outside. Taking a deep breath, his heartbeat beginning to return to normal, he looked back at the deputy standing just inside the door.

“What are you doing here, Deputy Kail?” he snapped at the young woman standing in front of him. “Haven’t you heard of knocking? You have no business entering my rooms uninvited.”

“Uh... sir... Well, sir I... um... I’m sorry sir, I... uh... I did knock sir, but you didn’t answer, and I heard you yelling inside.” Deputy Kail stumbled and stammered, then finished in a rush. “I thought you might be injured, sir, so I came in. You were in the middle of a nightmare; thrashing and yelling. I was worried.” The deputy blushed, lowering her gaze away from Rickards’ bare chest emerging above the thin, tangled blanket.

“Fine,” Rickards growled, noticing for the first time his state of undress. He’d returned, exhausted, to his rooms early that afternoon after nearly forty-eight hours on duty. The last thing he remembered was undressing and falling into bed. Apparently he hadn’t been asleep more than four or five hours, and now here he was, being disturbed again.

“I asked you before, what are you doing here? I’m sure you didn’t just come all the way up here to see how I was.”

Deputy Kail continued to look flustered but had started to regain some measure of self control. “We couldn’t reach you on the radio, sir.”

Rickards glanced at the radio on his bedside table. Sure enough, it was either off or the battery had died. He tried briefly to remember the last time he’d charged it, then gave up. It didn’t really matter anyway.

“Why did you need to reach me?”

“The techs got the monitoring system working. They got a fix on the missing children, or at least a temporary fix. They seem to have lost the signal again, and...”

“They got a fix? On the missing children?” Rickards started to struggle out of the tangled blanket, then subsided after he realized that he hadn’t taken the time to put on any form of sleeping garment before he’d fallen into oblivion.

“If you don’t mind stepping outside, deputy, I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Deputy Kail blushed again and turned to step outside the bedroom door. As soon as her back was turned, Rickards finished untangling himself and reached for the dresser which held clean underwear.

Pulling a clean uniform from his closet, he called out over his shoulder, “Where did they get the fix? Are they still in the city? Have you dispatched a patrol to pick them up?”

“No sir, they’re not in the city and we wanted to find out how you wanted to handle this. It seems the signal came from near a small town on Highway 93 in Arizona of all places. A place called Wikieup? We were only able to zero in on the signal for about fifteen minutes, then one at a time they blinked off, but the techs are sure it’s them.”

“What do you mean, they ‘blinked off’?” Rickards questioned. He pulled on a fresh khaki uniform shirt over a clean t-shirt, hurriedly tucked it in, then began looking for where he’d kicked his boots earlier that afternoon.

“Well, sir, I don’t completely understand, but they said that all four were there, then there were only three, then two, then one, then none. The techs said they didn’t think it was a software malfunction again. Maybe the kids went into a cave or something that blocked the signal, but it hasn’t come on again. Of course it’s raining and there’s a lot of lightning, but the computer gurus said that if there was a problem with the storm they should have lost everyone all together. So, it’s much more likely that they simply went into some type of structure that’s blocking the signal.”

Or they’ve met up with someone who knows about the chips and who is removing and destroying them,
Rickards thought grimly.

“Do we have a team in that area that we can send?”

“No, sir. The annihilation teams are working north and west of here, and there are no exorcism teams out at the moment. We tried to call the Phoenix APZ, but apparently the storms have disrupted communication and we can’t get through to see if they have anyone out in that direction.”

“What teams do we have available here?” Rickards asked, heading for the door with Deputy Kail trailing in his wake like the tail of a comet.

“Andrews’ team is in, sir, but some of them were injured on the last mission. They cornered a well armed group of ghosts and...”

“I know, I know. Lister and Smith caught fire. Serious injuries, but recovering. How’s the rest of the team doing?”

“Fine, as far as I know, sir. There’s also Larson’s team. They were pulled off ghosts and have been working with the fire squads, removing houses outside the APZ perimeter.”

Rickards headed for the stairwell, walking quickly, not bothering to look back to see if the deputy was following. “Radio ahead, Kail, and tell dispatch to put a call in for Larson’s team. We’ve got to get someone out to Arizona and pick up those kids before they disappear again.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kail, already reaching for her radio to make the call.

It took less than ten minutes for Rickards and Kail to reach headquarters, and most of that time was spent in silence as Rickards pondered the implications of the children’s signal coming from a remote area in Arizona, as well as the implications of the signal’s disappearance shortly after it was intercepted. It was impossible that the children would have removed the chips themselves. If they’d known the true nature of the chips, they would have removed them before ever leaving the APZ, certainly before heading east into Arizona.

Could they have met up with someone who knew about the chips? The most likely person on that list would be O’Reilly. That would mean that he’d headed north to throw searchers off track, removed his chip, then headed east. They’d already suspected something of the sort. What didn’t make sense was that the children would meet up with him out in the middle of nowhere.

Knowing O’Reilly as he did, and the sense of honor that he possessed which caused him to throw away his career, Rickards was fairly certain that O’Reilly wouldn’t have left the children to escape on their own. If he had planned on them escaping at all, he would have made sure that he was there to protect them, and he would have removed the chips immediately, rather than wait until they were nearly a sixty miles away into the Arizona wilderness.

Of course, it was possible that they were perpetrating yet another subterfuge, and O’Reilly was planning on taking the children in a completely different direction. Maybe he’d even stolen a vehicle, driven the chips down to this little town, then destroyed them, planning on backtracking. But how could he be sure that it would take them this long to get a fix on the chips? No, that couldn’t be the answer.

In the midst of this stygian swamp of conjecture and confusion, the memory of the nightmare constantly intruded. He’d never been one to attribute meaning to dreams, but his wife had been a firm believer. A lesson in a high school social studies class floated, unbidden, into his mind. The one where they talked about the Jews being loaded onto trains to be sent to the concentration camps. It suddenly struck him that the looks on the faces of the people in the videos were the same as the expression he’d seen on that dream-world train platform. The connection was obvious, but Rickards couldn’t figure for the life of him, why his subconscious would have pulled that visual image out of thirty year old memories.

Another memory rose to the surface. The ghettos in Europe, as well as the Japanese internment camps in the United States. People being forced to leave their homes and relocate to a governmentally approved location. Just as they were being forced to move now. The situations were eerily the same... or were they? Rickards shook his head, trying to banish this unwanted train of thought.

Rickards’ mind was beginning to spin and he felt the onset of a headache by the time he and Kail finally walked through the door of the enforcer’s headquarters. Walking into the large room used by the deputies he looked around, noting that the room was nearly empty on this stormy afternoon. As he paused in the large entryway, a young, sharp-featured deputy - 
damn, why can’t I remember his name?
-  rushed over to him.

“Sir, dispatch has paged Larson and he will be here within a half hour. He’s calling his team. He didn’t seem too happy about having to switch assignments again so soon, and head back out.”

“Well, deputy...,” Rickards paused expectantly.

“Harlan, sir. New transfer from the Albuquerque APZ.”

“Well, Deputy Harlan, Larson’s just going to have to suck it up. We need to get those kids back here immediately and find out what’s going on.”

Rickards made as if to walk past Harlan, heading for his office when the deputy cleared his throat again.

“Well, what is it?”

“Sir, there’s been another development over in the same direction as the runaways. An unregistered computer attempted to log on to the net yesterday morning. Not exactly in the same small town, but not more than fifty miles away to the northeast, either. What’s even stranger is that it’s out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Why didn’t I hear of this before?” Rickards snapped.

“It was a short lived signal; only a few minutes of access. Tech thought it must either be a bug or glitch in the new tracking software. There’s no power out there, so it didn’t make sense that a computer was trying to log on, though the techies did admit it could be a small satellite enabled handheld. It was noted on the day log, but since it couldn’t be confirmed, and the connection couldn’t be backtracked, they didn’t think much of it. After all, that area of Arizona is a lot of nothing. I mean, empty, rough land with nothing but a few ranches and a lot of cows, rocks and cacti.”

“What made them change their minds, then?” Rickards snapped, impatient with the entire conversation.

“They didn’t, sir. It’s just that... well, I know that land, sir. I grew up just west of Flagstaff, Arizona. If the children are in that area, and there’s someone with computer access that close, well, I think it’s more than a coincidence. If we don’t find the children at Wikieup, then we need to consider sending seekers out into the ranch land and see what we can find.”