“Do you have your phone with you, Seth?” When he produced it from a pocket of his uniform jacket, she said, “Is it turned on? No? Then please turn it on now. Okay. Good. Leave the phone on and wait here, Seth. I’ll call you before too long.”
“All right.”
Her knees felt loose, her muscles slack, but they carried her at a run to the garage.
26
* * *
Jane at the head of the procession, Luther at the back, their pistols drawn. The children two-by-two between them. Nothing to be done but brazen it through on foot. They could only hope that Cora Gundersun had given them all they would need, that what had worked thus far would work for a few minutes longer.
She used a remote control that had been clipped to the visor of the Cadillac Escalade. The segmented garage door clattered upward in its tracks.
A thirty-foot length of pavement led to the southeast corner of the big house and connected to the circular drive in front. In those thirty feet stood fifteen to twenty people, all facing the garage, silent here if not in the whispering room they shared. Low pathway lamps splayed arcs of pale light across the feet of this tense assemblage, but they were otherwise darksome figures and ghastly in their watchful stillness, like inhabitants of Pandemonium ascended from subterranean streets of burning tar, waiting for the commanding note of some infernal horn before seizing a quota of innocent souls to be borne down into the final abyss.
When Jane led the children out of the garage, the hive members moved toward her, and she raised her voice to halt them. “Play Manchurian with me.”
She feared they would be immune to this manipulation, but they responded with the unanimity of a congregation during a litany—“All right”—and halted in anticipation of her next words.
“Move aside,” she said, “and let us pass.”
Most obeyed at once, though a few briefly hesitated before complying.
“Let us pass and wait as you are.”
As Jane led the children and counted on Luther to have her back, she came close to some of those over whom she had asserted control. Their faces clarified slightly out of the shadows, like the visages haunting a séance mirror in the murky candle-lit parlor of a medium, eyes colorless and darkly glistening and as whiteless as the eyes of insects, for the most part conveying less emotion than death masks. Here and there, a twitch or a squint, or the baring of clenched teeth, suggested inner conflict, perhaps because they had answered a call to arms only to be disarmed with a few words, but even these remained obedient to the game master who asked them to play Manchurian.
Turning the corner of the house, Jane almost faltered at the sight of at least fifty people gathered on the driveway, under the portico, and on the lawn, blocking exit. On first sight of the children, they moved forward in silence, with unmistakable intent.
Jane raised her voice and issued the invitation to the game as a command, and it seemed that she was answered submissively by all. However, one among the stilled swarm continued to approach slowly, solemnly. The woman might have been in her late thirties, blond hair ashy-silver in the poor light, one hand raised to her breast as though to quiet a pounding heart.
No evil individuals stood sentinel here. These people lived constricted lives, unaware of their enslavement, believing they were free. Perhaps they could be made to do cruel things with no memory of having done them, but Jane wanted to avoid stopping them with bullets if words would suffice. Nevertheless, when she commanded the approaching blonde to halt and was not obeyed, she raised her pistol in a two-hand grip and warned the children, “Kids, look away. Look down now.”
The blonde halted about two feet from the muzzle of the pistol that centered on her pretty but eerily blank face. She opened her mouth and shaped words, though no sound at first issued from her. On her second try, she said, “All right,” acknowledging her powerless condition. However, her eyes fixed on Jane’s, and clearly she wanted to say something more. The hand pressed to her breast drifted away from her as if it must be suddenly weightless, less in the woman’s control than freed from gravity and floating under the influence of what few electrons and protons of solar wind might be present even in the night.
Before the woman dared to reach for the pistol, Jane said, “Move aside now. Move aside and let us pass.”
The seemingly ungoverned hand drifted slowly back to the woman’s breast and then lowered to her side. She stepped out of their way.
One of the two children immediately behind Jane, the boy named Harley, spoke then, his voice trembling—“Mom? Mom? Mommy?”—and the blonde turned her eyes to him.
27
* * *
Seeing his mother come out of the night, out of the crowd, Harley thought that everything might not be lost, that their lives could be put right again. This was the first time he’d seen her since the day, ten months earlier, when she and his father brought him to this so-called school. Maybe life could be like a sci-fi movie after all, and maybe this FBI agent and this sheriff would have the power to undo even the work of evil ETs or whatever other power had changed people. His resentment and sorrow lifted from him, and he spoke to her.
She looked down at him, and he saw that she knew him. Her eyes were shadowed and her face without expression at first, but he felt that somewhere deep inside her, she remained who she’d always been, still his mother, good and kind and gentle and loving.
Again he spoke to her, and she reached out to him, her hand upturned that he might place his in it, in this hand that had once tousled his hair and felt his forehead for fever and straightened his necktie when he wore his Sunday best. He heard himself say he loved her, which he did and always would.
As he raised his attention from her hand, he saw her blank face forming an expression, though not one that he’d ever seen on her before, not one suitable to a mother-and-child reunion. It was a needful look, but a fierce twisted need, and though she smiled, the smile was one of triumph rather than affection, as if whatever used her now couldn’t avoid expressing its feelings through her as it shaped her features to deceive.
Their fingers touched, and her reaching hand became a claw that seized him. He tore loose and shrank from her, and the FBI lady told her to step back. His mother—not his mother, but a mother thing—did as ordered, her face again without expression.
Harley heard himself make a terrible sound, and he told himself not to make another like it. Nothing had been lost here. He had told himself for many months that there could be no going back, that all this strangeness washed away any chance of a return to normalcy. But if nothing had been taken from him this night, he nevertheless felt as though he had lost his mother all over again, and he regretted allowing himself to hope.
The FBI lady said, “Harley, sweetheart, you’ll be okay. You hear me? I promise you’ll be okay. Take Jenny’s hand.” She wasn’t smiling exactly, but there was kindness in her face that he had hoped to see in his mother’s. “Jenny, you take Harley’s hand. Help each other.”
He and Jenny Boone were paired immediately behind the agent. Jenny offered her hand, and Harley was grateful for it.
They began to move again, with all the people watching as if waiting to pounce. Harley did not glance at his mother, and neither did he search the crowd for his father, who was surely there. He didn’t know where he and the other kids were going or how long it would take to get there, and he didn’t know what waited for them at the end of the journey, but it didn’t matter because there was nothing for them in Iron Furnace anymore.
28
* * *
Like mannequins invoked to life and summoned here from retail tableaus to herald the abolition of humanity, these flesh-and-blood drones still posed a threat, as far as Jane was concerned. Nanotech brain implants were the work of science, though for all intents and purposes, these individuals were bespelled. The oldest stories that people told one another, before there were books, had been stories of spells cast—and spells broken.
As she led the ki
ds through the throng to the open front gate and off the property, she glanced back repeatedly and saw Luther at all times scanning the crowd.
Vehicles were parked haphazardly along the shoulders of the two-lane blacktop. No headlights approached, suggesting that not all six hundred of Iron Furnace’s citizens were thought necessary to answer the alarm that had been sent through the whispering room.
Her Ford and Luther’s rented Chevy were parked a hundred yards west of the estate. They loaded four kids into each vehicle, and then the two of them conferenced at the back of Luther’s rental.
“That was hairy,” she said.
“Still is.”
“We have to get them across the state line, just in case some legitimate Kentucky authority gets involved.”
“Agreed. Quickest is down to Tennessee. Then where?”
“Texas. If you’re game for that.”
As they talked, they watched the exit from the estate, wondering if there might be a limit to how long these programmed people would remain open to being commanded after they had responded to the access line—Play Manchurian with me.
“What’s in Texas for them?” Luther asked.
“A place I know about. I’ll tell you later.”
“I’ve got to call Rebecca.”
“You do, for sure. And you and I have to talk about that. But let’s close this out and get across the state line first.”
She’d taken a disposable cellphone from the console box in the Ford. Now she used it to call Seth Donner’s smartphone, though she was half convinced that the big man would no longer be sitting patiently in the armchair in his room.
“Hello,” he said.
“It’s me. Do you remember?”
“Yeah. You said you’d call.”
“There are three things you have to do.”
“All right.”
“As soon as I hang up, go to the whispering room. Send a message to everyone in Iron Furnace. Can you do that?”
“Yeah. What message?”
“You will say, ‘Play Manchurian with me.’ ”
“All right.”
“And they will all respond as you just did. After they respond, you’ll tell them to forget the alarm that George sent out. Tell them to forget they were ever called to the school. Tell them to forget everything and everyone they saw at the school. Do you understand, Seth?”
“Yeah.” He repeated what she had told him.
“Good. Very good.” Remembering the pages of Cora Gundersun’s repetitious writing that Luther had shown her, Jane said, “There is a phrase in German that puts an end to each Manchurian game. You know it, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll repeat it in the whispering room after you’ve told them to forget.”
“I will.”
“Next, is there a security-video recorder at the school, a place where video from all the cameras is stored?”
“Yeah. It’s in the pantry. There’s a disc.”
“Yes, it will be stored on a disc and probably a backup disc. Take the discs out of the machine, Seth, and put them in a bucket with a few ounces of gasoline and take them out to the patio and set them on fire. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“When the fire burns out, throw whatever remains of the discs in the lake. Will you do that?”
“I will. You said I should.”
“Yes, I did. One more thing. After you’ve thrown the remains of the disc in the lake, go back to your room and lie down.”
“All right.”
“Lie down and go to sleep and forget everything that’s happened tonight. Sleep and forget me and the guy who was with me. While you sleep, forget what happened to the children, and while you sleep, forget everything I’ve just told you to do.”
He was silent.
“Seth?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you do all of that?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Better get started now, Seth.”
“I will.”
“Auf Wiedersehen.”
She terminated the call and switched off the disposable cell, which she could not risk using again. She would toss it out of the car on the way to Tennessee.
Before she and Luther had set out from the garage with the children, she’d given him a one-minute condensation regarding what she had learned about the whispering room. Although he’d heard only her side of this call to Seth Donner, he knew enough to understand the general shape of what she had just done.
For a moment he regarded her as sternly as if perhaps she might be the criminal mastermind that the media claimed. “When the hell did you figure that out and put together what to do?”
“On the fly.”
“I guess it had to be.”
“We can swing through Mourning Dove and get your luggage at the motel and still be in Tennessee in ninety minutes. Maybe seventy-five, depending.”
“Don’t drive so fast you lose me.”
“I thought you hick sheriffs knew how to run a tail.”
“Damn it,” Luther said, “I’m scared shitless about what we’re up against. Don’t you go making me laugh.”
29
* * *
At a truck stop in Tennessee, they fueled the cars and bought sodas for everyone, but they delayed a bathroom break until they got to a roadside rest stop at 10:40 P.M., where there wasn’t an audience to see—and wonder about—the children in their stocking feet.
To discourage thieves and worse from preying on motorists who used these facilities, the comfort station and its wooded grounds were so brightly lit that the scene was as unreal as a highly stylized stage setting. The black shadows and white light, geometric forms in stark conflict, seemed to symbolize something profound, as if an avant garde play of singular tedium was about to be performed.
The cameras didn’t worry Luther. In such installations, the video equipment was out of service half the time. The lenses were rarely cleaned. Some cameras would be unfunctioning shells, a cheap way to dissuade predators and provide false comfort to the prey.
At a distance from the restrooms stood two concrete picnic tables with benches under the limbs of basswoods that were neither winter stark nor in fullest leaf. Luther sat on a bench to use his disposable cell to call the like phone he had left with Rebecca.
She answered at once, and he said, “You know I love you more than life itself.”
“You’re scaring me,” she said.
“I don’t want to, but I will. Something bigger than I ever imagined is going on.”
After a silence, she said, “That’s all you’re gonna tell me?”
“It’s all I have time for. It’s big, and I don’t know what it’s going to do to us, the family, our future. Until we know how things are shaping up, we’ve got to plan for the worst.”
He told her what she needed to do. It was a testament to Rebecca’s trust in him, her quickness of mind, and her well-honed survival instinct that she didn’t balk and didn’t ask why, because she intuited why in every instance.
When he terminated the call, he sat for a moment in the night shade of the basswoods, in the fragrance of honeysuckle, listening to tree frogs and crickets calling to their kind; and the made world had never seemed more precious to him. As he gazed out from nature’s comfort at the blacktop parking lot so barren in the cold fall of hard light, he asked for courage and for mercy, and if that should be too much to ask, then for courage alone.
1
* * *
Harley Higgins murmured deep in dreams, slumped in the safety harness of the front passenger seat. Sally and Nora slept in the backseat, while Jenny Boone nestled among the suitcases in the luggage area forward of the tailgate.
Out of Nashville to Memphis, to Little Rock, and into western Arkansas, under a sky from which clouds withered and into which grew a moon and stars, Jane was the only one awake in the Ford Escape, owl-eyed on caffeine tablets and energy drinks, her heart given wings by
the successful extraction of the eight children from that village of the damned. For grueling weeks, her days had been shaped more by iron determination than by hope, because hope too ardently embraced could lead to disappointment, and disappointment to a sense of failure. But based on this triumph, small as it might be in the scheme of things, a large dose of hope healed the most recent wounds to her spirit.
Luther knew the route they were taking and their destination. They had nonetheless arranged a few rendezvous points along the way at which they could reconnect if they became separated. They both had burner phones to stay in touch as required.
They needed to get him and the kids out of the rental car to which his name was tied and replace it with wheels that didn’t come with a GPS. She was loath to drive all the way across northern Texas to Nogales, Arizona, to visit Enrique de Soto, from whom she had purchased her Ford.
A possible alternative existed here in Arkansas, though she was taking a risk by arriving unannounced. Besides, it wasn’t a property on which children were certain to be safe—although the number of places in this world where children were inarguably safe diminished day by day.
2
* * *
In the first light of that cold Wednesday morning, Deputy Rob Stassen pulled the ’61 Buick station wagon out of the barn that served as a garage for his and Melanie’s vehicles. He had a Ford crew-cab pickup he loved not as much as he loved his wife but more than he loved their cat, and Melanie had a Honda, and the Buick was used by both of them, though not often. Rob had long meant to bring the Buick up to showroom condition, but he’d attended only to its mechanicals. The car ran smooth, but some of the sleek contoured body needed work—dings to repair, small areas of rust to cut out—and instead of a cool paint job, it sported gray primer. He was embarrassed to get out of it and hand the keys to Rebecca Tillman.