decrease speed, I chose the right-hand course because it would lead
more directly back into Moonlight Bay.
I had gone only a short distance past that when I saw lights
approaching. A hundred yards ahead, the hollow turned out of sight to
the left, around a sweeping curve of grassy hillside.
The source of the questing beams lay beyond that bend, but I could see
that they must be flashlights.
None of the men from the funeral home could have gotten out of the rose
gardens and ahead of me so quickly. These were additional searchers.
They were attempting to trap me in a pincer maneuver. I felt as though
I were being pursued by an army, by platoons that had sprung
sorcerously from the ground itself.
I came to a complete halt.
I considered stepping off the bare rock, into concealment behind the
man-high prairie grass and other dense brush that still bracketed the
drainage swale. No matter how little I disturbed this vegetation,
however, I was nearly certain to leave signs of my passage that would
be obvious to these trackers. They would burst through the brush and
capture me or gun me down as I scrambled up the open hillside.
At the bend ahead, the flashlight beams swelled brighter.
Sprays of tall prairie grass flared like beautifully chased forms on a
sterling platter.
I retreated to the Y in the hollow and took the left-hand branch that
I’d forgone a minute earlier. Within six or seven hundred feet, I came
to another Y, wanted to go to the right-toward town-was afraid I’d be
playing into their assumptions, and took the left-hand branch instead,
although it would lead me deeper into the unpopulated hills.
From somewhere above and off to the west arose the grumble of an
engine, distant at first but then suddenly nearer. The engine noise
was so powerful that I thought it came from an aircraft making a low
pass. This wasn’t the stuttering clatter of a helicopter, but more
like the roar of a fixed-wing plane.
Then a dazzling light swept the hilltops to the left and right of me,
passing directly across the hollow, sixty to eighty feet over my
head.
The beam was so bright, so intense, that it seemed to have weight and
texture, like a white-hot gush of some molten substance.
A high-powered searchlight. It arced away and reflected off distant
ridges to the east and north.
Where did they get this sophisticated ordnance on such short notice?
Was Sandy Kirk the grand kleagle of an antigovernment militia
headquartered in secret bunkers jammed with weapons and ammo, deep
under the funeral home? No, that didn’t ring true. Such things were
merely the stuff of real life these days, the current events of a
society in freefall-while this felt uncanny. This was territory
through which the wild rushing river of the evening news had not yet
swept.
I had to know what was happening up there on higher ground.
If I didn’t reconnoiter, I would be no better than a dumb rat in a
laboratory maze.
I thrashed through the brush to the right of the swale, crossed the
sloping floor of the hollow, and then climbed the long hillside,
because the searchlight seemed to have originated in that direction.
As I ascended, the beam scared the land above again-indeed, blazing in
from the northwest as I’d thought-and then scorched past a third time,
brightly illuminating the brow of the hill toward which I was making my
way.
After crawling the penultimate ten yards on my hands and knees, I
wriggled the final ten on my belly. At the crest, I coiled into an
outcropping of weather-scored rocks that provided a measure of cover,
and I cautiously raised my head.
A black Hummer-or maybe a Humvee, the original military version of the
vehicle before it had been gentrified for sale to civilians-stood one
hilltop away from mine, immediately leeward of a giant oak. Even
poorly revealed by the backwash of its own lights, n unmistakable
profile: a boxy, hulking, the Hummer presented a four-wheel-drive wagon
perched on giant tires, capable of crossing virtually any terrain.
I now saw two searchlights: Both were hand-held, one by the driver and