“How cold do you bet the water is?” Lucia asked.
“Freezing,” Ruppert told her. “Don’t even think about it.”
She kicked off her shoe, dipped a toe in the edge of the lake. “It’s not so bad. I haven’t had a real bath since California. Neither have you.” She pinched her nose, keeping her face solemn.
“This isn’t a real bath, either. Besides, Nando-”
“We can watch him from here.” The boy was walking up along a flat vein of rock toward the dark bluffs, arms wide as if he were navigating a tightrope, though the ridge was wide and low. The gorgeous colors of the morning sky glowed around him.
Lucia peeled off her skirt and tossed it into the grass, then weighed it down with rocks against the cool morning breeze. She waded out into the lake wearing the black panties and the short top she'd purchased to seduce the staff sergeant. She turned back to face Ruppert, smiling and waving, and then dived into the deeper water toward the center of the lake.
Ruppert glanced back towards Nando, who now lay on his back on the stone ridge, looking up at a stream of low, fluffy red and yellow clouds streaming across the sky just above them, nearly close enough to touch.
Ruppert took off his own shoes and jeans, then followed her into the water. It was so cold that it seemed to grab both his legs.
“Better if you just dive in,” Lucia told him. She treaded water several yards from the shore.
“I know that.” Ruppert plunged into the clear depths, dunking his head under the frigid surface to soak his hair. The water was painfully cold, until his skin grew numb.
“That feels so good, doesn’t it?” Lucia said.
“Sure. Ready to get out?”
Lucia swam up to him, her head submerged up to the eyes like an alligator. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pushed her body up against him.
“Thank you for all of this,” she said. “I could not have rescued him without you.”
She gave him a long kiss. For some reason, he could only think of how easily she’d tricked the man from Goblin Valley.
“You don’t have to do this,” he whispered.
She pushed back from him and lay floating on her back, sunlight glittering on her damp skin, eyes closed. “This is the perfect moment,” she said. “Don’t ruin it.”
Ruppert swam for a couple of minutes, occasionally glancing up the slope to see that Nando was still close. He thought about all the copies of his interview with Hollis Westerly now beginning to circulate out in the world. Lucia and Nando were minor figures to Terror, nonexistent in terms of public perception. Daniel Ruppert, though, had been a recognizable media presence, at least in southern California, before turning guerilla journalist (or “terror propagandist,” as the charge would surely read at his closed-door tribunal). Terror would want his blood, and would never cease hunting him.
If he settled in the same place as Lucia and Nando after they crossed into Canada, he would only become an unnecessary threat to their safety. As if the mountain water had cleared his mind, he now saw that he would have to help the two of them across the border, but then part ways with them forever. Over time, they could build new identities, and the world itself might change for the better, but Ruppert would have powerful enemies hunting him as long as he lived.
He returned to the shore, shivering hard, and replaced his jeans and shoes. He glanced up to check on Nando, and saw the boy hurtling down the meadow towards him, arms wide. Nando opened his mouth and began screaming, his voice redounding off the mountains around them, but Ruppert couldn’t make out his words.
“What is it, Nando?” Ruppert asked. The boy rushed towards him with great, leaping steps down the slope. He jumped up and down, jabbering words too fast for Ruppert to follow, and pointed across the lake.
Ruppert and Lucia, who had just reached the shore, turned back to look across the lake. On the meadow sloping up and away from the far side of the lake, where most of the fog had now burned away, a herd of elk nibbled among the thick grasses. A few of the cows sipped cold water from the shallows on the far side, while their calves nuzzled them for milk.
The massive, dark animals paid no attention to the jumping, yelling boy across the lake.
“What are they?” Nando asked.
“Those are elk,” Ruppert told him. “Mountain animals.”
“They’re so big,” Nando breathed, gazing at them. “I didn’t know animals got that big. What do they eat?”
“Whatever they can find, I guess,” Ruppert said.
“Do they eat people?” Nando’s eyes were very large, looking up at him.
“Nope, just plants. You want to stay back and give them plenty of room, though.”
“Do they care if I watch them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Can you ride one?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Can you teach them tricks?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“I wonder if they have names. Anything that big should have a name.”
“They probably won’t mind if you name them.”
“Really?” Nando seemed captivated by the idea. “I’ll name that one Washington…Lincoln…Roosevelt…Eisenhower…” He walked along the shore, pointing at each of the grazing elk.
Ruppert and Lucia changed into dry clothes, and Lucia spread out the forest-colored tarp near the lake. The three of them ate lunch on the meadow, and Lucia pointed out images in the clouds to Nando. Nando entertained them with a detailed plan of how he could invade, occupy and defend the valley with a force of fifty soldiers.
?
They remained in the valley for the rest of the day, Lucia and Ruppert taking turns between sleeping and keeping watch on Nando. As the sun began to set, they climbed back into the Bronto, and Ruppert drove them northward.
They passed into open, flat country in Montana, under a sprawling blue sky that made Ruppert feel dangerously exposed, as he had in the desert. Terror controlled the skies, and there was a lot of open sky out here. The safehouse that Lucia knew about was out in prairie country, an hour or more east of the comforting shadows of the Rocky Mountains.
They traveled in a relaxed quiet and let the stereo play songs at random from its memory. Archer had stored an unfortunately wide array of old Broadway musical numbers on his truck's hard drive, which Lucia flipped past impatiently.
It was another night of driving, and they arrived before dawn at a cluster of wooden buildings that appeared to be an actual working ranch, with a herd of a thousand or more cattle, lowing to each other in the early light. These animals impressed Nando as much as the elk.
A few men approached on horseback as Ruppert parked alongside a row of trucks. They wore cowboy hats and appeared to be in their late thirties or early forties, with deep lines worn into their faces by years of wind and sun. One of them rode up alongside Ruppert’s window.
“Help you?” he asked. Ruppert turned to Lucia.
“We’re looking for Violet Jakobsen,” Lucia told him.
“She expecting you?”
“No,” Lucia said, “But you can tell her we’re arriving under a flag of distress.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. He instructed the other two to keep watch on the unexpected visitors, then dismounted and walked up into the rambling, uneven main house, which looked as if it had grown one misfit room at a time over the years-some stone, some brick, some wooden. A collection of miniature windmills spun in the front yard.
“Is that an elk?” Nando pointed to a white and brown spotted horse. The man atop it shook his head.
“Appaloosa. Horse.”
“A horse.” Nando spoke the word in awe.
“Must come from someplace awful strange,” the other man said. “Not to know what a horse is.”
“I know what they are!” Nando sounded defensive, which amused Ruppert a little. “Alexander the Great’s horse was Bucephalus, and he conquered Afghanistan, like George Bush the Second. Soldiers used to ride them a long time ago.”
“Not all that long ago,” the man on the Appaloosa said, and his companion smiled.