At the forty-nine-mile mark, Ash started scanning the left side of the road in case Chloe’s mileage estimate had been wrong, but it hadn’t been. The road was right where she said it would be. It had the forgotten look of having been abandoned to the elements long ago, as if its construction had been well intended, but its promise never fulfilled. Given the fact that it was literally in the middle of nowhere, Ash wondered why it had been built at all.
Even if Olivia had not cautioned them that the road would be watched, Ash would have still kept driving by just like he was doing. She had told them their only chance was if they hiked in. He didn’t like the idea of following her instructions precisely, but there didn’t seem to be much of a choice.
He drove on for another half mile, then pulled the car to the side of the road. In the wide open landscape, there was really no place to hide the vehicle.
As he turned off the engine, he looked at Chloe. “Stay with the car.”
“No way.”
“I want to make sure it’s still here when I get back with my kids.”
She looked outside, scanning both ways down the road. There were no other headlights in sight. “Where would it go?”
“Just stay here.”
He got out and circled around to the trunk. From the weapons case, he removed another gun, filled its mag, then set it on the floor of the trunk. He grabbed his spare mags and the container of little bangs, and distributed them between his jeans and his jacket. Picking up the spare pistol, he shut the trunk, then walked around and knocked on the passenger window.
Chloe stared at him for a moment, then lowered it.
“Here,” he said, handing the SIG to her. “Just in case.”
She pulled back as if it might bite her, but then reluctantly took it.
“You know how to fire that?” he asked.
“I’ll figure it out.”
He nodded, then said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Her only response was to roll the window back up.
He checked both ways before he crossed the empty highway, then angled into the desert on the other side, paralleling the access road that was supposedly being watched. Olivia said NB7 was about a mile and a half in, on the side of the road Ash was currently on.
His eyes quickly adjusted to the moonless night as he made his way through the scrub-covered land. At one point he thought he heard something in the brush. He paused, listening, but the sound didn’t return. He decided it was rabbit, perhaps, or whatever other types of animals might choose to live in this nothingness.
As he passed the mile mark, his jaw tensed. Mike had warned him to be careful about believing anything Olivia said. Maybe this was just a lie. Maybe he was the only thing out here. Maybe Josie and Brandon were hundreds of miles away, and would die because he had chosen to follow the directions of an obviously deranged woman locked up in a secret prison.
If that turned out to be the case, he would go back to the Bluff and kill her.
He slowed his pace. If NB7 was here, he had to be close. Better to sneak up on it than to stumble.
Again, he heard something in the brush. It came from behind him, maybe thirty yards. He crouched down, then looked back the way he’d come, letting his eyes focus on nothing in particular.
There. Just off to the right of the line he’d been following, a shadow hovering above the brush and moving in his direction.
A lookout,he thought.If he’s already seen me, I’m done.
If that was the case, half a dozen others were probably closing in on him from different directions, and he was going to get taken down before he even got to NB7.
Should he run? Stay where he was? Or what?
He looked at the shadow again. It had moved to about forty feet away, then stopped. Carefully, he turned, scanning around, looking for others, but the only thing he could see was more brush. If there was anyone else out there, they had to be lying on the ground.
If he’d had time to play games, he would have kept moving to see if the shadow was really following him. But time was something he didn’t have.
He pulled out his gun, and made a beeline straight for the shadow. Before he’d even gone halfway, it disappeared. Not moved to the right or the left, or any other direction, just disappeared. But he didn’t slow until he was within a few feet of where it had been.
He was sure whoever it was had dropped to the ground, blending in with the brush, but there was no one there. He swung his gun around, angling it toward the ground, knowing the person had to be close.
“I could have killed you if I wanted to.”
He whipped around. Standing directly behind him, her gun at her side, was Chloe.
“I told you to stay with the car,” he whispered.
“And I never said I would. You need me,” she whispered back.
“I don’t need you. I can do this myself. Now just go back.”
He turned and started walking in the direction he’d been headed. After only a couple of seconds, he could hear her following him.
“Chloe, it’s not safe,” he said, turning back.
“And going into the psych hospital earlier was?”
“That was different. You were the one who knew the layout. I had no choice. But you don’t know this place. I’m not going to put you in a position where you might get hurt.”
“Not your decision,” she said. “I’m here, and I’m coming with you. Now let’s go, unless you want to stand here all night arguing.”
Short of carrying her back to the car and locking her in the trunk, he saw there was nothing he could do to stop her.
“Okay,” he said. “But you do everything I say.”
He took her silence for assent, though deep down, he knew it wasn’t.
For the next five minutes, his concerns that Olivia had been lying continued to grow. There was nothing but dirt and brush. No buildings at all.
“What’s that?” Chloe whispered a couple minutes later.
She was still behind him, so he had to look back to see what she was talking about. She pointed twenty degrees to their right. It took him a moment, but then he saw it, too.
Just ahead, the terrain dipped into a shallow wash, then rose on the other side, perhaps not high enough to be called a hill, but definitely higher than this side of the wash. At the very top was a post or, maybe, the trunk of a small tree. It appeared to be less than a half-foot in diameter, and stood two feet above the brush.
“There’s another one,” Chloe said. “About twenty feet to the left.”
She was right. After that, it was easy to pick out others. They spotted seven in all, stretching in what looked like a line blocking their path.
“A fence?” she suggested.
“Seems kind of low.”
They walked through the wash, then up the embankment, finally stopping ten feet short of the first post Chloe had seen. Though it was hard to judge color in the darkness, Ash got the sense the pole had been painted to blend in with its surroundings. Why? There didn’t appear to be anything attached to it, or anything sitting on the flat top. It was just…a post.
Chloe pulled out her flashlight and flicked it on.
“Turn that off. Someone will see it,” he whispered.
“Anyone who can see this probably watched us walk up the hill,” she told him, then pointed the light at the post.
Instead of wood, it appeared to be fabricated out of a plastic-like material. Near the top, a thin slot ran all the way around the post with what looked like curved, tinted glass covering it.
“Any idea what this is?” he asked.
“Motion sensor?”
“Could be,” he said. “Let’s see how far it goes.”
They went approximately seventy-five feet to the right before the row of posts took a sharp left turn. As they followed the new section, the hill fell away and they were on level ground again. Three hundred feet this time, then another turn to the left.
They’d gone twenty feet down this third part when Chloe touched Ash’s arm.