“We’re on our way to East Meadow,” said Jayden, “just making sure the area’s safe before we make camp. How many you got in there?”
The voice laughed hoarsely. “That’s a mighty dumb piece of intel for me to give you, not knowing your intentions. What if you’re Voices?”
“We’re from the Defense Grid,” said Jayden. “I told you already.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time someone lied to me.”
Kira heard a noise in the trees—a rustle of leaves, a snap that could have been a twig or a cocking gun. She sank lower to the ground, hoping it was one of their own people.
“There’s ten of us,” said Jayden. “The Voice is a lot more subtle than that … like maybe one old man hiding out in a ruined house.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point there,” said the man. “Doesn’t seem likely we’re going to trust each other either way.” The voice paused, silent. Rain beat down through the leaves. After a moment the voice returned. “The name’s Owen Tovar. I’m on my way to East Meadow myself, though, as it happens, and I could use the good word with the border guard. If you don’t mind sharing the place with Dolly and me, you’re welcome to come on in.” Kira heard nothing, then the sound of a door swinging open. Jayden hesitated, just a heartbeat, then lowered his rifle to his hip.
“Thanks for the offer.”
CHAPTER SIX
Owen Tovar turned out to be a tall man, thin and weathered, waiting just inside the door with a black plastic shotgun propped up on his shoulder. He smiled at Kira and Gianna.
“If that moron had told me you had women with you, I’d have let you in a lot sooner.”
Marcus stepped in front of Kira protectively, but Tovar chuckled and clapped him on the arm. “Nothing unseemly, son, just good manners. Soldiers I can take or leave, but I’m afraid my mama trained me a little too well to leave a lady outside in a storm like this.” He shut the door behind the last soldier and pushed his way through the group toward the dark interior of the house. “I gotta say, whichever one of you found me in here is a better tracker than most. You’re wasting your talents in the Grid.” He opened another door to reveal a brightly lit room—an old living room, maybe, with no exterior windows and a cheery orange fire in a stonework fireplace. The room was tightly packed with old couches and blankets, and a small wooden cart sat against a set of closed double doors on the far side. Kira turned to the right as she walked in, sizing up the area, and jumped back in surprise when she found herself nose to nose with a camel.
“Say hello, Dolly.”
The camel groaned, and Tovar chuckled. “Don’t be rude, folks, answer back.”
Marcus smiled and bowed to the camel. “Pleased to meet you, Dolly. Mr. Tovar failed to mention how lovely his companion was.”
“I don’t know if every camel’s as ornery as she is,” said Tovar, “but we get along more or less. I figure she must have escaped from a zoo or something; I found her a few years back, just wanderin’ around.” He ushered the group through the doorway and closed it behind them. “I went through a lot of trouble to keep this fire invisible from outside,” he explained. “Chimney still works, too, so with a storm like this to hide the smoke, you can’t even tell I’m here.”
“We followed the tracks,” said Marcus, pulling off his coat.
“The tracks don’t lead here,” said Tovar. “At least not directly.”
“I heard you,” said Jayden, a small smile creeping through the corner of his mouth. “Dolly needs a few lessons in stealth.”
Tovar shook his head. “She wanted more sugar. Figures you folks’d be passin’ by for the two seconds she decides to argue the point. Most folks—meanin’ those folks nosy enough to be lookin’—never find this place at all. They just follow my tracks down around the next house, back through the woods, and then give up when they hit the creek. Turns out the bridge is fallen down, if you’ll believe it, and the planks I use to get across are pretty well hidden on the wrong side.”
“You’re a drifter,” said Jayden.
“I’m a salesman. That makes me a target for all kinds of unsavories, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a target of opportunity.” He moved a pile of blankets from the couch nearest the fire. “Best seats to the ladies, naturally. This place is pretty cozy with just me in it, but we’re going to get downright neighborly with this many people trying to sleep.”
Kira watched the man as he sorted out the blankets, squeezing between the dusty couches to arrange sleeping space for ten people and a donkey. Is he a part of the Voice? There was no way to tell, not unless he tried to blow them up.
The drifter handed a blanket to Brown, who stared at him suspiciously before yanking it gruffly from his hands. Tovar smiled and stepped back.
“This is going to be an awful long night if we keep not trusting each other. You really think I’m a Voice?”
Brown said nothing, and Tovar turned to Gianna. “How about you?” He turned again, stopping in front of Jayden and opening his arms. “What about you, do you think I’m a Voice? Is risking my own life and sharing my dry blankets all part of some larger plan to destroy the last human civilization?”
“I think you’re ex-military,” said Kira, inching closer to the fire.
Tovar cocked his head to the side. “What makes you say that?”
“Some of the words you use,” said Kira, “like ‘intel’ and ‘target of opportunity.’ The way you stowed your gun when we came in. The way you and Jayden are standing with absolutely identical postures right now.”
Jayden and Tovar looked at each other, then at themselves: feet shoulder-width apart, back straight, arms folded loosely behind them. They moved away from each other awkwardly, shifting their weight and shaking out their wrists.
“Being ex-military doesn’t mean he’s not in the Voice,” said Brown. “A lot of them are soldiers, too.”
“If being a soldier is proof of guilt,” said Tovar, “seven out of ten people in this room are looking awfully guilty.”
“So tell us about yourself,” said Marcus, settling into a couch. “If I’m going to spend the whole night waiting for you guys to stop flirting and shoot each other, I want to at least be entertained.”
“Owen Tovar,” he repeated with a bow, “born and raised in Macon, Georgia. I played varsity football for two years, graduated, joined the marines, and blew off four of my toes in the war—this would be the Iranian war, not the Isolation War, the one with the Chinese that you kids are probably thinking of, the one we sent the Partials to fight for us. Though I suppose most of you are what, late teens? Two or three years old when that war ended, five or six when the whole world ended a few years later? No, when I say ‘war,’ you’re probably thinking of the Partial War, things bein’ what they are, but I hate to break it to you that that wasn’t no kind of war at all, just some fightin’ and some dyin’ and some ‘that’s all she wrote.’ War, see, is when two sides fight, maybe not evenly, but at least they both get a few swings in. What we call the Partial War was mankind gettin’ mugged in an alley.”
“I remember the Isolation War,” said Gianna. “We’re not all plague babies here.”
“Not my place to speculate on a lady’s age,” said Tovar, sitting down by the fire. He looked relaxed, but Kira noticed that he was still in quick, easy reach of his shotgun. Jayden sat across from him, but most of the soldiers stayed standing. Kira sat by Marcus, pulling his arm over her shoulders. He was warm and reassuring.
“Doesn’t matter which war it was, I guess,” said Tovar. “I lost four toes, left the marines on medical leave, and went home to Georgia to play hockey.”
“They couldn’t have played hockey in Georgia,” said Sparks. “That was one of the southern ones, right? Georgia? Hockey was an ice sport.”
“Hockey was ice-skating,” said Jayden, nodding, “and there’s no way you could do that in Georgia. Especially with no toes.”
Tovar smiled. “This is where you plague babies start to show your ignorance.
” He turned to Gianna. “You remember ice rinks?”
A small grin crept into her face. “I do.”
“An ice rink,” said Tovar, “was a giant room, like a whole basketball court, inside of a refrigerator. Just imagine—a whole building so cold the ice stays frozen. And then you fill it up with people, hundreds of people sometimes—we were only the minor leagues—and they’d all start cheering and yelling and getting worked up, and that room would heat up like this one is now, all those bodies packed in there like logs in a fire, and that giant refrigerator would keep chugging away and cooling it down and that ice would stay so frozen that all they had to do was spray it with water between periods, and a few minutes later it was as smooth and as flat as a Tiger Sharks cheerleader.” He grinned maliciously. “I beg your pardon. Old rivalries.”
“That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Sparks. “You could power a whole city for a year with the kind of electricity you’re talking about.”
“A little place like East Meadow, sure,” said Tovar, “you could power that town on a good-size corporate air conditioner. For the old cities, and the old ways, even a tiny little place like Macon could swallow East Meadow whole, and with all those hundreds of thousands of people driving cars and watching movies and surfing the Internet eighty-seven hours a day, we still had enough juice left over to run an ice rink in the state of Georgia—one of the hot ones, like you said, where we didn’t have no business freezing anything at all.”
“I still don’t believe it,” muttered Sparks.
“We’re talking about minor league hockey in Macon, Georgia,” said Tovar. “I didn’t rightly believe it myself. You know what we called the team? If you’re not believing anything else, you’re sure not gonna believe me on this one: We called our team the Macon Whoopee.” He cackled with laughter. “That sounds like the biggest lie yet, but it’s true, the Macon Whoopee.” He slapped his knee; several of the soldiers were laughing, and even Kira couldn’t help but chuckle. “We were a minor league team that didn’t feed into any majors, in a town that loved just about every sport but ours. We were going nowhere and we knew it, so why not have fun? In the forties, when I was playing, we were officially the most violent team in the country, and that means probably the whole world, and by the way, that’s why I could skate with no toes. A figure skater, a speed skater, an NHL forward, sure, you need your toes for control, but all that finesse takes a backseat when all you’re trying to do is slam somebody into a wall and break all his teeth.”
“Hockey,” mused Marcus. “The sport of kings.”
Tovar paused, his eyes focused on a distant memory. “Sometimes I think that’s what I miss most about the old days. The old times. We had so much of just about everything, we could waste it all on stupid junk that nobody needed. ‘The Golden Age of Man.’” His smile returned, wry and sour. “Pride cometh, as they say, before the fall.”
Jayden nodded, smiling faintly. “I can’t say as that story makes me trust you any more than I did, but it does make me like you.”
Tovar nodded back. “Very kind of you, under the circumstances.” He pulled a flask from his back pocket, took a drink, and offered it to Jayden. The soldier took a swig and passed it back.
“I must admit,” said Marcus, “that as a medic I am still waiting to get to the good part of this story.”
Tovar looked surprised. “Excuse me?”
Marcus grinned. “The toes, man, bring out the toes!”
The soldiers cheered, and Tovar smirked. “You asked for it.” He leaned down and started to unlace his boot. “Every biotech in North America offered gene treatments to regrow them for me, wounded veteran and all, but I figured a war wound was a war wound, and I had no business pretending I didn’t have one. Now: The proprietor of this freak show recommends that all women and children avert their eyes before the coming horror, but as that includes pretty much all of you, I imagine he’s going to be disappointed.” He wiggled out of his boot, peeled back his sock from his pale, hairy leg, and whipped it away from his toe with a flourish. “Behold!”
The whole room gasped, half in shock and half in laughter, and Kira found herself smiling and grimacing at the same time. Tovar’s foot was a lump of scar tissue and calluses, the four smaller toes burned or blown away and the big toe, the last one remaining, curled awkwardly to the side. The toenail was gone, and the whole foot was stark white.
“That is disgusting,” said Kira, forcing each word through bursts of laughter. “How did you say you did that again?”
“I was a specialist in the Marine Corps,” said Tovar, wiggling his deformed toe. “Demolitions.”
The feeling in the room changed so suddenly Kira swore she could feel it: an icy chill in the air, a spray of cold water droplets as the soldiers swung their guns into place in a furious blur. Even sitting down, Tovar lost his balance and staggered back, fumbling with his sock and nearly falling off the couch as he pressed himself away from the guns.
“What the—what’d I do?”
“You have ten seconds to tell us where you’ve been in the last forty-eight hours,” said Jayden, sighting down his rifle, “or we start shooting you just in case.”
“What are you talking about?” screamed Tovar.
“Nine,” said Jayden fiercely. “Eight.”
“Hold on,” said Kira, holding out her hands to try to calm everybody down. “Give him time to think.”
“Seven,” said Jayden.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” said Tovar.
Kira leaned forward desperately. “Just calm down,” she said firmly. “He doesn’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t do anything stupid, Kira.”
Kira turned to Tovar. “It’s because you said you were in demolitions. We’ve had kind of a bad day, explosively speaking, and all they want to know is if you have been—”
“Not another word, Kira, or he’ll know exactly what to deny.”
Kira kept her eyes locked on Tovar’s. “Just tell us where else you’ve been.”
“I was in Smithtown yesterday,” said Tovar. “Came straight here from there. They’ve got a farm there on an old golf course. I was selling them guns.”
“Guns?”
“What, do you think I sell puppies? I’m a marine, I sell what I know, and out here without your Long Island Defense Grid to watch over them, people need guns. Most of these old houses have a gun safe in the basement, so I … blast them open and sell the guns.”
“You’re not sounding any less guilty right now,” said Jayden.
Tovar’s voice was thick and desperate. “As hard as it is to believe with ten-odd guns pointed at me, not everyone on the island has one. Not everyone on the island has a Defense Grid patrol ready to leap into action every time somebody looks suspicious. Out here, people know there’s a war coming, between East Meadow and the Voice, and people need to be able to help themselves. I just make sure they have the tools to do it.”
“He’s lying,” said a soldier.
“You don’t know that,” said Kira. “You can’t shoot someone on a hunch.”
“Did somebody try to blow you guys up?” asked Tovar.
“See?” cried the soldier, stepping forward. “He knows!”
“Stand down,” said Jayden. “Do not shoot without my order.”
Kira swallowed. “It doesn’t take a genius to look at the last few minutes of this conversation and guess that someone tried to blow us up. If he knew about the bomb, he wouldn’t have told us he was a demolitionist in the first place, would he?” She turned to Tovar. “Have you ever been to Asharoken?”
He shook his head. “That can’t possibly be the name of a real place.”
“You say you sell guns and ammunition,” said Jayden. “Do you sell explosives, too?”
“I’d be an idiot if I did,” said Tovar. “Anyone who’d buy them would either be after the same stuff I am, or planning something worse—like whatever happened to you guys. I
keep all my explosives secret.”
“Where?” demanded Jayden.
“Some in the cart, some in little caches around the island.”
Gianna leaped away from the cart. “I’ve been leaning on a bomb?”
“It’s stable,” said Tovar, standing up. The soldiers retrained their guns on him, but he held up his hands in a show of innocence. “They’re perfectly stable, okay?” He shuffled to the cart, limping in one heavy boot and one bare foot. “It’s a water gel—it’s completely inert until you activate it, and even then it needs a detonator.”
“Where do you find explosives out here?” asked Jayden, still following him with his rifle. “I thought the military gathered up all that kind of stuff years ago.”
“They got the weaponized stuff, yeah,” said Tovar, “but this is used commercially all the time.” He pulled back the heavy canvas tarp on his wagon and pointed to a white plastic package, like a ration bag of water. “I got this at a construction site; the activation powder’s on the other side of the cart. And I swear I haven’t sold any of it to anyone.”
Kira looked back at Jayden. “If this is a lie,” she said, “it’s the most convoluted, well-acted lie in the history of the world. We’re all headed back to East Meadow anyway, so let’s just put down the guns and let them deal with it. If they decide he’s guilty, then they can put him in jail, but I won’t let you kill him here.”
“That is the second worst idea I’ve ever heard,” said Tovar, “but since the first worst is you shooting me in the face, I’m all for it.”
Jayden stared at Kira, his eyes burning into hers like smoking coals. After an eternity of waiting, he lowered his gun. “Fine. But if he tries anything between now and then, I don’t wait for your approval: He’s a Voice, and he dies.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kira slept fitfully, listening to Marcus and the others as they shifted and snored and muttered in the darkness. The camel made odd, semihuman moans all through the night, and the house creaked in the rain. Even the mice, ubiquitous in every home she could remember, seemed louder and more bothersome than usual as they skittered through the floor and walls. Rats, maybe, or something bigger.