“I’m not sure they need any of that,” Reyn said, flipping quickly through the rest of the photos. “Look how many people are here. Front, back, sides. Someone’s bound to notice us.”
“It’s harvest time,” Gary said. “We might get lucky; they might be in the fields.”
“That’s a possibility,” Reyn conceded.
“How do we get in?” Stacy said again.
Gary had taken the photos from Reyn and was looking through them. The front of the Home did not resemble a home at all, but a generic industrial building. A meatpacking plant, perhaps. Or a warehouse. Both the surrounding farm and the Texas setting would seem to make a Western look more appropriate, but there was no wood, only stucco, no portico, only a flat door in the wall. As Stacy said, it was essentially a fortress, and the disparity between function and appearance was disconcerting.
Inside, the decor was just odd: irregularly shaped rooms; looms, spinning wheels and other items from a preindustrial era; a restaurant-sized kitchen with a wood-burning stove; primitive, spartan living quarters, and those ever-present framed photos of a white-bearded old man. Father. The people were even odder, and like the two they had captured back in California, many of the residents appeared to have some sort of physical deformity or mental handicap.
Like Joan’s mother.
He stared at a man with an overlarge head and stumpy extremities, and it suddenly occurred to him that Joan’s mother would fit right in with these people. He thought of the prayer scroll they’d found in Joan’s room.
The Outsiders.
Realization suddenly dawned on him. Joan had belonged to the Homesteaders. She had come from here. And Outsiders were anyone else, anyone who was not part of the cult. Joan and her parents had escaped somehow, and the Homesteaders had tracked her down, brought her back. Her parents…
Gary thought of the dead dog in the empty house.
The spot of red blood on the white linoleum floor.
His thoughts must have shown on his face because Stacy said worriedly, “What is it? What’s wrong? Did you see something in that picture?” She took it out of his hands to examine it.
He didn’t want to say. They were here to help him, and it was wrong to keep information from them, but he rationalized it by telling himself that it was not information, just conjecture. The truth was that he was embarrassed, as stupid and superficial as that might be, and he didn’t want them to know that Joan had ever been involved in any way with these lunatics.
Gary looked at the next photo, a picture of the farm. Rows of crops stretched across a long field bordered at the far end by tall, leafy trees. In the photo, one man was riding an antiquated tractor, while a dozen or so others worked with hoes along the rows. If the tractor had been taken out of the picture, the scene could have been one from two hundred years ago.
“They’re not as primitive as they make themselves out to be,” Brian reminded him, looking over his shoulder. “They erased your electronic footprint. And Joan’s. Someone in there is sophisticated enough to hack into the DMV, UCLA, banks, credit agencies… . They’re not just simple God-worshipping farmers.”
“No, they’re not,” Gary said grimly. “And they’re not just here in Texas. They have allies all over, like those people in New Mexico—”
“Like that sheriff,” Brian emphasized.
“They’re not just growing potatoes on that farm, either. Whatever they drugged me with tasted like dirt, like some sort of root. I’ll bet they grow that shit right there.”
“Duly warned,” Reyn said. “We have to be careful.”
They spent the next twenty minutes or so looking through the photos on the computer, trying to figure out the best way in. The compound itself was surrounded on all sides by large tracts of open land, so whichever approach they took, they would be easily spotted. Before they even tried to get inside the buildings, they had to reach them, and they went back and forth on how best to do that.
Finally, they heard new voices from the front of the sheriff’s office, and Gary glanced up at the window to see that it was fully light outside. They should have gone under cover of darkness, he thought. That would have been the best way to reach the Home undetected. But Stewart had dissuaded them from that, and now it was too late.
The sheriff walked back into the room. “Morning shift’s here,” he said. “We’re ready for action.”
“Did you contact your guys who are out there?” Gary asked.
“Quiet night. Nothing unusual. All clear.”
“Then we should get going,” Reyn said.
They thanked the sheriff, double-checked the phone numbers they had to make sure they were correct, grabbed some fresh doughnuts and coffee from the break room, then went outside. The air was cool and smelled of smoke—someone in town was using a fireplace—but it was obvious that the day was going to be warm. An old man atop a muddy tractor drove slowly down the center of the street.
Gary, Reyn, Stacy and Brian got into the rented Nissan. Reyn drove, with Brian as navigator, and Gary sat in back with Stacy. They pulled around the tractor, still slowly making its way through town, then turned onto a side street just past a feed and grain supply store. The street sloped down a gradual incline past a few blocks of small run-down houses, then turned into a dirt road and began winding through copses of trees and boulder-strewn hillsides, following the lay of the land. They passed a single farm with a walnut tree orchard, and then there was only wilderness.
And then there was the Home.
They could see it from afar, a collection of interconnected buildings on a slight rise of open land. It looked bigger than it had in the photographs and, despite its generic appearance, more intimidating. Along the side of the narrow dirt road, conforming to the boundaries of the property, was a wrought-iron fence eight to ten feet high, in the center of which was the arched gateway topped by a cross that they’d seen in the pictures.
Reyn stopped the car several yards away from the open gateway, parking next to an overgrown bush that hid the vehicle from the buildings. They all opened their doors and got out. “All right,” Gary said. “Let’s go.”
Brian faced him. “And do what exactly?”
“Try to sneak in.”
No one moved. Reyn looked at Stacy. Brian looked at Reyn.
“What is it?” Gary asked. “What’s going on?”
“You can’t come with us,” Reyn said.
“What?”
“They know you. They sent people all the way to California to get you. You think they don’t know what you look like? They probably have Wanted posters with your mug plastered all over that damn place.”
“They know all of us,” Gary pointed out. “We were all drugged at the same time at Burning Man, and whoever did that kidnapped Joan and brought her back here. He—or they—will recognize us instantly.”
“Hence the sheriff’s break-in strategy,” Brian said drily.
“We’ll disguise ourselves as penitents,” Gary suggested. “They might not recognize us if we’re dressed like them.”
“Two problems,” Brian pointed out. “We don’t have any of their peasant clothes to put on, and we don’t know shit about their religion. One short conversation with anyone and we’d be spotted as fakers in three seconds flat.”
“I told you we should have come up with a plan before we got here,” Stacy said.
Brian held his hand out toward Reyn. “Give me the key.”
Reyn tossed him the key, and Brian used it to open the trunk. He rummaged through the backpack he’d brought and pulled out a knife. Some sort of camping knife, it had a green handle with a built-in compass, and a heavily serrated blade that glinted in the early-morning sun.