THERE WAS the distant hum of a powerful generator with forty or so clusters of lights placed around the perimeter of the base. There were fewer guards, but Jim had counted at least five of them patrolling at a steady walk close to the lamp towers.
He was surprised that it was so relatively sparsely protected, assuming it was as important as he supposed it was.
Jim was walking slowly and carefully in the lead, his daughter tracking his steps a couple of paces behind, just as he’d told her.
“Stop, Dad!”
“Shit! You made—”
“Don’t move forward.”
“What the—I nearly decorated my underwear, Heather.”
Her voice was a sibilant whisper. “Something ahead… Saw the moonlight off it. A wire.”
Now Jim Hilton could see it, as well—a narrow strip of cable, around midthigh, with two thicker lengths beneath it. Farther along, to the left, almost hidden by a fallen jumper, was an upright post with three white discs on it.
“Electric,” he breathed. “Better go back, Heather. Well spotted. Best warn the others in case…”
“We haven’t found anything out.”
“We already saw with the glasses by the truck that it was hydroponics. Could even read the sign by the main gates. All we’re going to…”
Away to their right there was a sudden, startling flash of magnesium light and an audible hissing crack, like the lash of a giant whip.
Jim turned and ran toward it. After a few minutes he heard a sound, followed by Kyle’s voice.
“It’s me and Carrie. You heard the noise, Jim?”
“And saw the flash. There’re high-voltage cables strung around the base, hidden in the brush. Heather saw it in time.”
“We never saw that. Think it was…”
The question hung in the cool of the November evening as they stared at each other with fear.
Then from the guarded establishment a quarter mile off, they became aware of a siren, rising and falling like a wounded dinosaur in the last throes of agony.
“This place will be swarming with sentries in a few minutes,” said Jim. “Carrie, you take Heather back to the pickup. Get it packed. All our gear. Be ready to move out at ten seconds’ notice. Shoot anyone who isn’t us.”
They didn’t argue, running away, feet crackling through the dried, dead branches.
Jim was leading Kyle toward where he’d seen the dazzling flash, when they bumped into the lumbering, puzzled figure of Sly Romero.
“What is it, son?”
“Where’s Steve?” added Kyle, at Jim’s heels. “Where’s your dad, Sly?”
“Me worried, Jim. Me worried, Kyle.”
“Where is he?” said Jim, managing with a great effort of self-control to take Sly very gently by the arm.
“Sleep.”
“Asleep! He can’t… Oh, no.”
“Me was behind Dad, and Dad fell on a rope and me saw big light and bangbangbang. It was the highdrypomix. Dad sleeping and me couldn’t make him wake. Shook him, Jim. Me shook Dad. But he stayed sleep.”
“Come on, Sly,” said Kyle. “Let’s go join Heather and Carrie. Your Dad’ll be along a bit later.”
Jim walked on, steeling himself for what he knew he was going to find.
Chapter Eighteen
“Blessed Lord Jesus!”
“May his angels, seraphim and cherubim and all the celestial hosts gather in their brazen armor to protect us.”
Nanci’s breathing was fast and shallow. Twice in the early hours of darkness she’d slithered away into unconsciousness. But her honed combat reflexes saved her, waking her within scant seconds to staunch the flow of blood from the deep knife wound in her femoral artery.
Now she blinked into the velvet blackness around her, straining to see where the bizarre voices were coming from.
“I believe it is a poor wayfarer, sister, cast away on the drift rock of life.”
“Indeed, brother, I concede that you are correct in your assumption.”
“Perhaps we should seek to put the traveler away from all suffering, into that bourn from which no man returneth.”
Nanci Simms sat up, trying to moisten her cracked lips with a tongue that had swollen and blackened in the desert heat. She gripped the 9 mm automatic in her right hand.
And waited.
THIRTY MILES AWAY, Jefferson Lee Thomas was in better shape.