“This is far enough,” Lucia said, blinking away sleep. “We need a place to hide.”
“We still have another hour to Goblin Valley.”
“And we don’t want to get any closer. I’m the extractions expert, remember?” She zoomed to a closer view of their location on the digital dashboard map. They were near a region marked Capitol Reef National Park. “Utah. We should find a slot canyon.”
For the first time, Ruppert enjoyed the fact that the Party had gutted the parks and conservation budget long ago. There would be hardly any rangers to find them. Not much risk of tourists, either. The wilderness teemed with the insane, the murderous, and the criminal, or so Ruppert had frequently reported. The Dominionists preached against visiting the wild, insisted it was home to demons, emphasized that time in the wilderness had made even Jesus vulnerable to the devil’s temptations. The only real sanctuary was the church and the company of fellow believers.
“Turn off here,” Lucia said. They turned down a narrow rut of a path littered with boulders and rocks. Ruppert eased the truck around, and sometimes over, the rocks. The truck seemed like it could handle the terrain, but he worried about the tires.
She directed him through a series of sharp, steep turns. His headlights shone on irregular rock surfaces pitted with long, deep shadows, like Rorschach blots, and his tired brain could hardly interpret any meaning from what his eyes told him.
“Okay, slow down,” she said. She leaned until her nose almost touched the screen, scrutinizing the old satellite image of the park. “You want to slow down…and turn to the left…right…here.”
Ruppert gingerly turned the wheel to the left, unable to understand the strange rock patterns around him, and drove them over a cliff. His fingernails bit into the steering wheel as the front tires reached out into empty space, and then the whole front end of the truck dropped like the heavy end of seesaw. They slammed into a hard, steep slope, rattling everything inside the cab and shoving Ruppert and Lucia upward against their seatbelts, which dug deep into their thighs and abdomens. He thought he felt his brain splosh against the dome of his skull.
The truck charged forward at an extreme downhill angle, out of his control, fishtailing down a washed-out gully.
“Gas!” Lucia screamed. “Give it gas!”
“What?” he asked, but his foot, which had been searching for the brakes, took her advice instead and stomped the accelerator. They roared down the slope. In the headlights, a high, solid ridge appeared in the distance and rapidly swelled to consume his field of vision.
“Turn!” Lucia yelled, but his hands were already moving. Ruppert’s instinct was to wrench the wheel as hard as possible, but his numbed shock at the situation saved him, and he only turned it a little. The truck spun to the right, and they skittered down the remainder of the slope and then skipped across an uneven surface of eroded rock.
The canyon narrowed quickly around them-ahead, Ruppert could see where the smooth boulders of the opposing canyon walls nearly touched each other. A man on foot would have to climb his way through.
He eased down the brake, then stomped it. Again the seatbelt lashed diagonally across him, and now he heard the tires screaming as they grabbed onto the rocky ground. The truck squealed to a stop as the canyon walls closed in around it.
Ruppert turned off the truck and removed his shaking hands from the steering wheel. Lucia caught her breath, then reached out and scrolled the map a few degrees. “Oh, maybe we should have come down the other side,” she said. “It’s not as steep.”
Ruppert removed his seatbelt, which would soon be tattooed into his skin in the form of a chain of purple bruises, and opened the truck door. He half-climbed, half-fell from the cab, stumbled across the smooth rock floor, and sat down.
“This is good, though.” Lucia sat beside him and looked up. The canyon walls reached more than a hundred feet above them, but were so close to each other they almost touched in places. “Hard for them to look down in here.”
They shrouded the truck under the desert-camouflage tarp, and then sat upon a heap of boulders to study the laminated maps printed from Liam O’Shea’s computer. They shared a paper sleeve of salt crackers and a large bottle of water.
“The database said Nando lives in Lodge 10, with twenty boys his age,” Lucia said. “The nearest gate is the staff entrance, here in the west wall. We should use that.”
“We can’t just ram it down with the truck,” Ruppert said. “They’ll have a security system. Armed guards, I bet.”
“Guards, and machine gun nests, and lots of boys with military training.”
“They’re just kids.”
“Best time to train them,” Lucia said. “Goblin Valley keeps boys up to the age of sixteen, then enlists them. So there will be older boys too-boys trained as soldiers and snipers, trained to torture and interrogate. I'm sure they run school-defense drills. That would be good training for protecting foreign bases. So we could be facing a few thousand defenders.”
“Then we have to keep quiet. I don’t suppose we can use your magic remote?”
She shook her head. “It's just a toy against their systems. They have an evolving propriety code.”
“Then what do we do, extraction expert?”
“We’ll need human intelligence. A person on the inside.”
“Which we don’t have,” Ruppert pointed out.
“And we’ll have to get one. I’m not sure how. Let’s assume we’re inside and go from there.”
“Okay. So we’re inside the school, surrounded by a bunch of armed Children of the Corn-and your son,” Ruppert hurried to add, in response to Lucia’s scowl. “We have to get inside his dormitory without drawing the attention of guards or other kids. We have to wake him without disturbing any of the others. I assume they’re not in private apartments or anything?”
Lucia glanced at the map, shook her head. “Looks like they all sleep in one room.”
“Won’t he automatically try to alert the others?”
“He won’t, if he recognizes me.”
“Do you think he will?” Ruppert regretted the question even before he asked it, but it had to be said. He worried Lucia was being a little unrealistic in her expectations-the boy was ten years old and hadn’t seen his mother since the age of five. Ruppert himself couldn’t remember anything before the age of six or so, though that was thirty years ago now.
Lucia’s mouth trembled, and she looked away from him without answering.
“I’m just saying,” Ruppert continued, “That he could make a lot of noise and trouble before he realizes who you are.”
“Then what can we do?” she whispered.
“All I can think is to use a tranquilizer. Maybe they have ether.” He pointed to the square building near the center of the school compound. It was marked “Clinic/Dispensary.”
“Then we’d have to break into a second building, right in the middle of the place,” Lucia said. “Probably extra secure because of the drugs. Too complicated.”
“Fernando kicking and screaming would complicate things, too.”
“We would trigger security alerts at the clinic,” Lucia said. “We’d never get to Nando.”
“All right. So, by some miracle, we get into the school, we grab Fernando without getting ambushed by a mob of killer ten-year-olds. We still have to get out again. And we have to plan for them to be pursuing us at that point. Worst-case scenario.”
“At last, you are thinking clearly.” Lucia traced her fingertip along the route from the west gate to Fernando’s barracks. They would have to make several turns. She tapped a series of low sheds, shielded from the road by a wall. They were marked ORDINANCE.
“We cover our escape with fireworks,” she said. “If we time it right, there will be burning debris falling into the road behind us. Maybe even rubble. Block off the way out as we leave.”