It was the middle section they had to worry about, and Gary was very impressed by how quickly everyone found a hiding place. They all turned their cell phones on, making sure to hide the lights, which at night would be very visible, and then they practiced. Several times. Gary walked back and forth along the entire length of the memorial path, clapping his hands at random locations to indicate that an Outsider had accosted him. Each time, someone was there to back him up immediately, and seconds later a horde of people were running up the walkway from both directions to rescue him. It seemed an eminently workable, nearly foolproof plan, and after ten tries, they quit, satisfied.
Gary wanted someone on watch, and Ed took the first shift. He would walk casually back and forth between the parking lot and the physical plant, keeping his eyes open for anyone resembling the description of an Outsider with which he’d been provided. An hour later, Brian would take over, and someone would keep up the patrol until dark, at which time all of them would take their places.
Thanking everyone profusely, Gary left, taking Reyn and Stacy with him to his dorm room to retrieve a few items.
He thought about Joan. He recalled what it had felt like at Burning Man when he had started to go under, and he tried to remember the last words he’d spoken to her before her abduction. But he couldn’t think of what they might have been. In his mind he saw very vividly the temporary structures surrounding their makeshift camp, the Joe Strummer cube and the buildings made of recycled trash. He recalled the hallucination that had not seemed like a hallucination, the rag doll Joan, his slaughtered friends, and the two banshee shapes that had picked up the rag doll and carried it off as, in the foggy background, the Burning Man walked. But he couldn’t remember what he’d said to Joan.
He had never felt farther away from her than he did at this moment.
“Do you really think this will work?” Stacy asked.
He looked over at her and hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “I think so,” he said. “I hope so.”
Sixteen
Gary walked alone down the tree-lined memorial path, and though he knew Reyn, Brian, Stacy and the others were nearby, watching, waiting, ready to leap out should any of the Outsiders put in an appearance, he still felt nervous.
It was the second night he’d been doing this, and already he was inclined to give it up, to drive nonstop back to the ranch outside Larraine and torture that limping bitch until she told him where Joan was being held or gave him the name of someone who could. He felt helpless, powerless, and everything he did brought home to him the fact that Joan was being held captive. When he slept last night on Reyn’s floor in his sleeping bag in front of the television, he saw Joan lying alone on some concrete floor in the darkness of an abandoned building. When he ate breakfast and lunch, he imagined her gnawing on a hard crust of moldy bread. Even when he went to the bathroom, he pictured her squatting over some filthy, smelly bucket.
He thought about his own time in the ranch house, drugged and shackled to the floor, and knew that she was putting up with far worse.
And had been doing so for more than a week.
The very idea made him frustrated, furious, committed to doing anything it took to get her back.
A cold breeze brushed his cheek.
Yet he was still frightened.
There was a bone-crackle rattling off to his left, and his heart lurched in his chest, though he forced himself to keep walking and pretend he hadn’t heard. Nothing sprang out at him, and he hazarded a casual glance in that direction, seeing nothing in the darkness until the sound came again and he saw, by the diffused illumination of a far-off streetlight, a sparrow hopping through a small pile of dead leaves.
Maybe it would have been better if he’d assigned someone else to do this. Brian, perhaps. He himself had been through too much recently, and his nerves were fried. He’d never been a nervous person, but he was now, and he could not be entirely sure that when crunch time came he wouldn’t panic.
But, no. As scared as he might be, he had to see this through. Joan was his girlfriend, this was his responsibility, and deep down he not only needed to do this; he wanted to do it.
Gary kept walking.
He’d finally gone to the police station this morning to talk to Williams. Despite his skepticism, he’d wanted, he’d hoped, that the detective might have turned up something. But the police still hadn’t looked in on Joan’s parents’ house, and no effort had been made to pressure Sheriff Watt about the ranch where Gary had been held. Williams assured him that they had some “good leads” concerning Kara’s disappearance, but he didn’t believe that, and he’d left the police station feeling more discouraged than he had when he’d walked in.
Gary reached the slow curve in the center of the path where he knew Reyn and Stacy were hidden behind a copse of bushes. For the millionth time, he went over the plan in his mind, looking for loopholes, but once again he couldn’t find any. The plan was a good one. Unfortunately, it only encompassed capturing the Outsiders. He and his friends had not thought much beyond that point, and though he intended to question the person or persons they caught, he did not know what they would do after that. Turn their captives over to the police? Let them go? Neither of those options seemed right, but Gary refused to think about what that meant.
From the parking lot ahead, he heard the sound of a car starting. He still couldn’t see the parking lot, but the volume and clarity of the sound meant that he was close, and he turned around to start his trek back.
And there they were.
There were two of them, and Gary’s heart was pounding so hard it actually hurt. One of them was holding something in his hand. From this distance, it looked like a length of cloth, and Gary immediately recalled the terrible dirt-root taste of the gag that had been used to drug him.
Ape arms.
The other man had extremely long arms, disturbingly long arms—and Gary knew that these were the two who had come to his room looking for him. He had a sudden flashback to the photo of Joan’s mom with her too-long legs and her oddly formed bones.
The men moved toward him.
Why weren’t they stopped before they got this far? he wondered. Why didn’t anyone give the signal to alert the others?
His first terrifying thought was that his sentries had been killed, that Outsiders had murdered one or more of the film society students—
or Reyn or Stacy or Brian
—but as soon as he called out, “Here!” the darkness was filled with the shouts and cries of his cohorts. The noise was intended to confuse and frighten, and it seemed to do its job. The two Outsiders remained unmoving, not advancing, not retreating, but staying in place and looking frantically around as though certain they were about to be attacked but unsure from which direction the attack would come.
Dror arrived first, and not only was he big and fast, but he carried a weapon, a baseball bat that he swung with abandon. Most of the students who came whooping down the path and from behind the trees were carrying makeshift weapons of some sort, nearly all of them bats or knives, and within moments they had surrounded the two Outsiders, who looked lost and frightened.