What’s the matter with you, Markus? It’s an empty pole barn, nothing more. What in the hell is the matter with you?
He’d felt this way before; that was the problem. His body had trapped the memory of the house in Cassadaga and was throwing it back at his mind.
But why? The house in Cassadaga was straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. This is an empty barn in wide-open country. There’s no similarity.
Still, the feeling was there.
Where’s that strange boy when I need him? Or, better yet, Walter, the dead man who apparently took a shine to me. I could use his advice right now. Tell me, Walt, what’s the issue up ahead?
Mark forced a smile as the fenced-in barn came back into sight, looking as if it had been abandoned for months. Beyond the fence was sun-and-wind-blasted soil with a few thatches of brush clinging to whatever groundwater there was to be found.
“I’ll drive right up to the gate and we’ll climb again,” Larry said. “Ain’t no point in jacking with that security box.”
The box he’d referenced was a curved metal pole with a keypad. High-tech for an isolated barn. A deep ditch ran between the road and the fence, ready to drain runoff and snowmelt out of the mountains, and you had to cross a massive cattle-guard grate to get across that and onto the last thirty feet of dusty drive. Larry was scanning the property, searching for watchers, and Mark knew he should be doing the same, but for some reason he was fixated on that cattle guard. It looked new, the stainless-steel gleaming in the sun, high angled pieces that rose on each side, allowing for heavy equipment to lower the grating into place easily. Cattle guards were common in this part of the world, so why this one held Mark’s eye made no sense, and yet he couldn’t look away from it, and the echoing, popping noise in his head was back and louder, closer to the surface.
You’ve seen it before.
Of course he had. He’d seen a million of them, old and rusted and dusty, while this one was new.
It shouldn’t be new, nothing else here is new-
There was nothing strange about it, nothing threatening; it was a straightforward device for livestock and drainage and-
You’ve seen it before!
The voice in Mark’s head didn’t seem to be his own, and the light reflecting off that polished, clean steel pierced his brain like an ice pick through the eye and he was just about to look away when a memory finally broke the surface like a drowning man fighting a riptide.
The basement in Cassadaga. The trap on the table. It was a model. It was a scale model and that means this one, at full size, is-
“Uncle, hang on,” Mark said, and Larry glanced at him but kept driving. As the front wheels bounced off the gravel road and onto the cattle guard, Mark grabbed his uncle by the back of his neck and jerked him down, away from the windshield and the window, pressing their faces together and slamming their heads against the gearshift. For one blissful instant, a tenth of a second, he thought, I was wrong, and I am going to look like a fool.
Then the truck rocked like it had taken a direct hit from a howitzer, and glass exploded all around them.
Just like the tiny one. That was a model for this. Turning a standard bit of equipment into a bear trap. That is what they were working on.
Larry was struggling against him, swearing and fumbling for his gun. Mark held him down for a few seconds, but there were no more impacts, so he released him and they both rose shakily to look at the damage.
The windshield was spiderwebbed with fractures, and all of the windows had blown out. Larry’s cheeks and arms were laced with small cuts, and Mark’s showed the same damage. As they looked at each other and then the truck, Larry whispered, “Mother of God, what is that?”
He was looking at the doors. Pieces of metal each as big as a man’s fist but filed down into shark’s teeth had punctured the doors, slamming shut on the truck with such incredible force that they’d bitten clean through. The doors themselves had buckled inward, and on a newer vehicle, a smaller one with less solid metal in the frame, the damage would have been even worse. A compact car would have been crushed. In another car, the airbags would have deployed, but Blue had come off the line long before airbags. Mark twisted in his seat and opened the latch on the bedcover window.
“We gotta get out.”
He wormed through the narrow opening and fell into the corrugated bed, landing hard, bits of glass biting into his hands, and again he thought of Cassadaga, of his crawl out of the basement while the house had burned around him.
He climbed across the truck bed, noticing for the first time that Larry had a trio of long guns-two rifles and a shotgun-hidden under a roll of old carpet, and he found the latch to the tailgate and opened that and pushed out, stumbling into the dusty road, shedding pebbled glass and drops of blood. He turned back and saw Larry following suit, swinging down to the road.
“You okay?” Mark asked.
“Fine. Thanks to you, that is. If you hadn’t pulled me in like that, that fucking thing would have taken my head off. Damn sure it would have broken my arms and ribs, probably my leg. How in the hell did you see that coming?”
“Walter,” Mark murmured.
“Who?”
“Nothing. I saw a version of it in Florida, and I nearly lost my hand to that one. It was so small I didn’t understand what it was a model of. I finally recognized the shape. Almost too late.”
“Just in time, that’s for sure.” Larry stepped away, looking at his beloved truck from the side. The hood and the cab were demolished, smashed and ravaged by those massive steel teeth that had been welded onto the angled side of the cattle guard. The design could not have been simpler-it was an old-school trap, springs responding to pressure, but Lord, they were powerful springs.
Why use springs, though? Mark wondered. An explosive and a pressure sensor could have incinerated the truck and killed them both in the time it took to blink. The technique employed here was far more labor-intensive, resulting in far less damage. It was a step backward in the art of war.
It fits Pate’s preaching, Mark realized. Pate needed to sell the idea of the dangerous world of modern technology. He would, therefore, go to war with old weapons, or at least old theories.
“Look what they did to Blue,” Larry said. The look on his face made any expression he had shown at Sal Cantu’s seem positively kind. “Do you have any idea how many miles I’ve covered behind the wheel of that-”
The gunfire that interrupted him was a sustained burst of shots, rapid and fired from a semiautomatic. The bullets lit up the truck, taking out what was left of the windshield and pocking the hood like hail. The shooter wasn’t armed with a large magazine, apparently, because he ran out of ammo almost as soon as Mark and Larry managed to react, and they were pressed against the back bumper, guns drawn, during the brief respite where one magazine was dropped and another inserted. Then a second burst fired. More glass and metal flew, but the bullets weren’t penetrating, and many of them were sparking off the steel cattle guard.
Mark dropped to the gravel and rolled sideways as Larry hissed, “Markus, don’t go out there!”
Mark had his gun raised but wasn’t about to return fire with the.38. That was like bringing sparklers to a fireworks show. He just wanted to see where the shooter was.
He wasn’t hard to locate-there was a pedestrian door on the east-facing side of the building, toward the front gate, and a man stood in front of it with a rifle, probably an AR-15, at his shoulder, spraying bullets at the truck.