The lodge was made of the same dusty concrete as the other buildings. Five concrete steps led up to a shallow concrete porch, where a single closed door gave access to the windowless lodge. Lucia looked at the door and trembled. He took her hand, but she gave no sign of noticing it.
Ruppert gazed along the unlined black road. From the security map, he knew the school bristled with cameras, not all of them visible. They would have a video record of him, which would undoubtedly find its way to Terror, though he hoped bureaucratic inefficiency and territorialism might delay that a day or two. It was a slender hope.
The main concern, of course, was whether anyone was monitoring the cameras right now and might notice that Ruppert wasn’t actually a school employee, or that Lucia wasn’t in any sense a male. They’d had plenty of luck so far. Lucia’s carnovirus must have done its job on Liam O’Shea’s home office, as well as the Child and Family server.
He’d half-expected a pack of Terror agents lying in wait when they arrived. Or maybe they were here, still waiting for the order to ambush. Ruppert glanced at the dark alleys between the cinderblock buildings, but they were pitch black. If men in dark coats or uniforms hid there, he would not be able to see them.
“Are you ready?” he whispered to Lucia, who continued staring at the door.
After a moment, she nodded.
They proceeded up the steps, Lucia’s hand still shivering in Ruppert’s. Ruppert waved the school officer’s identity card at the keypad beside the door, and its single light turned from red to green. They entered the lodge.
Inside, they stood in a sour-smelling, wood-floored anteroom. To their right, a rectangular window looked into a room that served as a station for a guard or supervisor, but fortunately was not occupied at the moment. It contained a flat table with a data console, its cluster of pinpoint lights burning blue in the darkened room. There was an office chair behind the table and three smaller, plain chairs facing it.
Ruppert stepped to the office door and waved the identicard to unlock it. He held it open for Lucia, who tossed aside the fire blanket and walked to the tall microphone next to the data console. She unscrewed the mesh bulb at the top of the microphone, and then she withdrew from her pocket a circuit board, once a part of her remote control, and wired it into the microphone. She depressed the last of a row of buttons at the microphone’s base, labeled with a strip of masking tape: GENERAL/OUTDOOR. Then she pushed the power button to activate the microphone.
They took care to make no sound as they left the room, and closed the door very cautiously. She gave him a thumbs-up sign and an attempt at a smile.
They continued from the anteroom into the hallway running down the center of the lodge. They passed a dreary rec room hung with dusty, unpainted drywall and furnished with a few badly wounded sofas facing a chunky, outdated video screen. A dusty ping-pong table occupied a back corner of the room.
There seemed to be no interior doors in the dorm area, not even for the bathroom, where a row of toilets faced a row of showerheads. The boys were clearly meant to live with zero privacy of any kind. Ruppert wondered if they were instructed to watch each other for misbehavior, like the pastors encouraged at Golden Tabernacle.
They crept into the long dorm room, where twenty boys between the ages of ten and twelve slept on twenty bunk beds. Everything was gray-the walls, the sheets, the t-shirts and pajamas of the boys. The only splashes of color were large posters warning against the evils of foreigners and masturbation.
Lucia stalked from one to the next, looking for her son. Ruppert struggled to remember the picture of the boy he’d seen in Liam’s office. He could feel the seconds ticking past, each one bringing him closer to the moment when a boy would waken and notice them, or a guard would come to investigate why a school official had returned to work late on a Friday night.
Lucia grabbed his sleeve, motioned excitedly towards one of the lower bunks. They edged toward the bed, and Lucia reached out her hand. The boy slept like a tin soldier in a box-flat on his back, arms and legs perfectly straight. The sole sign of childishness was a spit bubble swelling on his lips.
Lucia nodded, and they closed in on him. She covered her son’s mouth with her right hand, and then pinned down both his arms with her left arm. At the same time, Ruppert seized Nando’s feet to prevent him from kicking out against the bunk bed frame to make noise and alert the others.
Nando’s eyes snapped open and he immediately tried to swing his arms, then his feet. Ruppert struggled to keep his feet pinned. The boy was incredibly strong for his small size.
Nando grunted and tried to speak, but Lucia kept him muffled. His eyes rolled to her and grew wide, and he bucked his entire body several times, trying to break loose. He reminded Ruppert of a spooked horse.
“Sh,” Lucia whispered. “It’s okay, Nando.”
Nando continued struggling until he looked at Ruppert. His gaze dashed over Ruppert’s hat and jacket, and then the boy fell limp and quiet. It took Ruppert a moment to realize the boy was automatically obedient to any adult wearing the school uniform.
“Stay quiet,” Ruppert whispered. “Come with us right now.”
Nando nodded, and they released him. He stood, saluted Ruppert, then strode towards the foot locker at the end of his bunk bed. Lucia took him by the arm, shook her head. Nando looked to Ruppert, who shook his head and pointed towards the hall.
Nando walked towards the empty doorframe on the balls of his bare feet, making no sound on the warped floorboards. Ruppert did not have as much luck-one of the boards groaned under his shoe.
A boy in a top bunk sat up suddenly, like Frankenstein’s monster jolting to life. His eyes locked onto Lucia and scanned down her body: long hair, breasts, curving hips. From the horrified expression on his face, she might have been a slimy, tentacled alien. He reacted in probably the only way he knew how. He opened his mouth and screamed:
“ Foreigner!”
The other boys snapped up to a sitting position as if each one were a spring-loaded bar on a mousetrap. The call repeated itself from bunk to bunk. Boys jumped to their feet and hurried towards them, falling into a tight semicircle formation around Ruppert, Lucia, and Nando.
“Stop!” Ruppert yelled, and they froze, straightened up their backs, and saluted him. He noticed puzzled looks on some of their faces-he’d probably used the wrong terminology. He sifted his memory for war movie dialogue.
“Atten-tion!” he said. Twenty boys, including Nando, lay the flats of their hands parallel to their sides and lifted their chins, their faces stoic. Ruppert struggled to think of something to say next. As he looked among them, it occurred to him that it might be best to say nothing at all.
He tapped Nando’s shoulder. “Come along…” Happily, the school’s name for the boy popped into his mind. “Liberty.”
“Yes, sir.”
The three of them moved on into the hall and towards the front door. Ruppert’s nerves were on a hair trigger, urging him to run, but he fought them down.
He opened the front door, looked out into the road. It seemed clear. They left the lodge, down the steps, and towards the Goblin Valley truck, and then a pair of high beams swung out from a corner down the road and rushed towards them.
“Get going!” Ruppert shouted, and they hurried to the truck, Lucia half-dragging Nando, then boosting him up through the passenger door. She climbed in after him.
Ruppert was running around to the driver’s side, unfortunately located in the direction of the approaching headlights, when the lights swerved and a Goblin Valley truck parked slantwise in front of him. A second truck pulled in behind it.
A uniformed, pimpled young man with very bloodshot eyes leaned out the driver’s side of the nearest truck.