“Late and unlamented,” Doc Tanner added.
“Best keep moving,” Ryan said.
J.B. hugged the wheel of the big Kenworth truck, gunning the motor, pedal to the metal, twin lights blazing a path along the old blacktop. About ten miles out of town they picked up the bedraggled figure of Jak Lauren.
For the rest of the night, the seven drove on, away from Ginnsburg Falls, following the northward trail, tugged on by the radio message.
With its mysterious words of hope.
Of hope?
Chapter Twelve
IN THE PALE LIGHT of dawn, they passed a bullet-riddled sign, leaning drunkenly to one side, telling them they were on State Highway 62.
J.B. had found a creased and taped map of the district in the glove compartment of the big truck. He opened it carefully, knowing from previous experience how delicate very old documents could be. The light in the crowded cab was a faint, flickering, uncovered light bulb, and he angled the map beneath it, trying to hold it steady against the lurching of the big vehicle.
“Watch the damned bumps,” he snarled at Finnegan, who was at the wheel.
“What the fucking bumps yourself!” The Kenworth hadn’t taken kindly to being pushed along at a speed beyond what its age could handle. In the first hour a couple of the forward gears had stopped functioning, and the shift was becoming uncomfortably hot to touch.
“See where we’re heading, J.B.?” Ryan Cawdor asked, blinking his good eye at the hills that towered up on either side of the blacktop. “There’s a big mountain, called Mazama. Old volcano, with a round lake in its crater.”
“Crater Lake,” Doc Tanner said, yawning, trying to stretch himself awake and finding that there wasn’t enough room for his spindly legs with Lori asleep in his arms.
“Know anything about that?” Ryan asked, hoping that the old man’s precarious memory might be triggered off to give them some useful information.
“Some.”
“Yeah? Go on.”
Doc shook his head, his stringy hair dangling across his shoulders. “Cerberus and the other projects were intensely secret. But there were others. I was not privy to many of them.”
Everyone in the party, except the albino boy, was awake. Krysty was puzzled. “What does ‘privy’ mean, Doc?”
“At one time, dear lady, it had the meaning of a place for one’s bowel movements and bladder evacuations.”
“What is that?” Lori asked, opening her eyes.
“Means where you piss and shit,” Ryan said. “Don’t it?”
The old man nodded, the pearly light from the east illuminating his oddly perfect teeth. “But in this case, my dear Ryan, it means there were doors closed to me. I was allowed certain knowledge on a need-to-know basis. I do recall that Crater Lake was what was it?”
Finn applied the brakes and cursed his way down through the gears, fighting the truck to a slowing halt. “Road’s blocked,” he said, pulling the hand brake on with a hiss of compressed air.
Ryan ignored him, concentrating on clinging to Doc’s elusive memory. “Crater Lake was what?”
“In truth it was. A man might trudge along, noting every passing phenomenon” He hesitated, savoring the word, rolling it around his mouth as if he were trying to identify an exotic herb on his tongue. “Phenomenon. Truly said, my boy. It was that and more.”
It was too late.
The frail highways that linked brain and memory had fallen asunder again. Gradually, Ryan thought, Doctor Theophilus Tanner was returning to some kind of normal.
“Is someone going to get off their ass and move that fucking pile of wood?” Finn said, winding down the window of the truck and spitting out into the freezing morning. Though the engine was beat-up, at least the heater worked. Outside, the temperature was way down past freezing. Ryan almost expected to hear Finnegan’s spittle turn to ice in the air and tinkle on the road.
Ryan peered through the windshield. Ahead he could see the blacktop rolling higher between the banks of dark conifers. Above them, to the left, there’d been an earth-slide, bringing down a jumble of debris, including the snapped branches and fallen trunks of pines. By the look of it, the blockage had been there for a while, confirming their suspicion that the good folk of Ginnsburg Falls didn’t travel north very often.