He’s stalling.
“The Plagues are ticking time bombs, and only my restraint will keep them from exploding. Leave us alone.”
“TWENTY.”
“We recovered enough from the lab to restart the research.”
“It will be too late. I’m hanging up now, before the trace. I truly am sorry about your son.”
“TWENTY-FIVE.”
Jenkins’ tone changed then, chill and vicious. “You son of a bitch, I’ll hunt you down for Andy’s sake, I swear to God I will –”
Daniel hung up. Took the battery out. Handed it to Elise. “Throw this away, will you?” He massaged his throbbing temples. He had no doubt Jenkins would try to do as he said.
***
A little while after they crossed into West Virginia they made a last stop for gas and food, then turned northward onto a nondescript two-lane that looked like it had last been repaved in the Eisenhower administration. It wended its way up into the central Appalachians, through towns with names like Cornstalk and Trout and Cold Knob, where bony women in faded pioneer dresses or worn jeans and tee shirts put their hands with cigarettes on their hips and stared suspiciously at them; where hard-eyed men in John Deere and Caterpillar caps spat tobacco juice from their rocking chairs on their front porches or out of their pickup truck windows; where every rickety house had an American flag on an angled pole nailed to the front post, and every store, no matter what kind, added “Bait and Tackle” and “Guns and Ammunition” and “Beer and Cigarettes” to its signage.
West Virginia was the only state to actually secede from the Confederacy to the Union, and they took their patriotism seriously. So did every one of their band, though Daniel was sure they all had their own ideas about how to apply it. He studied each of the men in turn.
This Appalachian backwater was a far cry from the thin splash of freeway suburbia along the interstate, where smiling cashiers fat with fast food asked, “Would you like fries with that?” in deliberately flattened accents. They almost expected the sound of banjos to come wafting through their opened windows.
Driving at mountain road speeds, twenty to forty, they turned off on an unmarked gravel track, still more or less northwards by the angle of the chill sunlight.
They passed by beautiful, rugged woodland with patches of snow lingering in the shady spots. They were glad of their high clearances and four wheel drives when they had to cross a shallow but swift stream of snowmelt that cut the road. Larry had to be shown how to engage his 4WD on the Escalade. To Daniel it didn’t look like he’d ever used it in urban Atlanta.
After another hour and progressively worsening terrain, they climbed a short way up a steep mountainside on what looked like a logging trail until they abruptly broke out onto a very wide, well-graded gravel highway. Turning sharply left, they climbed a couple of hundred yards more onto – into – an otherworldly landscape, a different world.
The road had leveled out and they drove through an unnaturally flattened plateau, with odd-shaped, artificial-looking hills scattered around. It appeared that a giant boy had played with his toy earthmovers, making arbitrary excavations and dumping dirt into cone-shaped sand-castle mounds, all sharp angles and straight sides. The whole thing was about a mile across, overgrown with a thin veneer of scrubby grass and thistle, and the gravel road they were on turned black. It put Daniel in the mind of a fantasy book he’d read as a boy, where the hero would shift through the thin shadowy layers between strange worlds with his mind, past an evil black road.
“Mountaintop removal mining,” Zeke remarked. “Blast off the top of the peak, scoop up the material and process it for coal or whatever other ore is in it. Repeat as necessary. Not very pretty, but efficient. And our salvation.”
He led the way in the Land Rover, turning off the black road that crossed the plateau toward the only remaining natural feature, a rising piece of the mountain that had not been removed. It loomed more than a thousand feet above, showing a covering of thick, undamaged natural forest. It was as if the miners had excavated up to the perimeter of this peak and decided to stop. Or maybe something convinced them to stop?
Zeke pulled the Land Rover to a halt, still well within the dug-out mining zone.
The rest of them pulled up in a line, getting out and stretching after the long drive. The men moved away from the lone woman in the group to pee behind the last SUV. Like so often happened, the lady was going to have to wait or squat behind a bush.
Daniel looked at Elise and smiled, shrugged sympathetically.
She had lifted her eyes to the sky, sneezed, then seemed to notice his gaze. A smile broke out warm on her face. “I hope wherever we’re going, we’re close,” she said, stepping over to him, and he embraced her.
Everything smelled of mountains. Clean. The afternoon sun felt warm but the air was biting with the chill of late winter. An eagle screamed high above, making lazy circles among the turkey buzzards riding a thermal over the warmer, exposed ground. Daniel held her closer.
“We are really beyond hicksville,” Larry remarked. It broke the mood as Daniel realized they had an audience, polite and benevolent, but even so…they pulled apart.
Daniel guessed Larry must be feeling invincible after coming back from those injuries. He knew better. No plague in the world would bring you back from a bullet to the brain, or one that tore through the heart. It wasn’t magic.
Opening up the back of the Jeep, Daniel reaching into an ice chest he’d packed full of food, and slapped together a sandwich, popping open a soda can. He left the chow out for other hungry people, making a gesture of invitation. Then he went over to see what Zeke was doing.
He watched as Zeke opened up a case and laid a topographical map on the hood of the Land Rover. Zeke took a lensatic compass out of his pocket and started doing a resection. Daniel realized that he was trying to locate something specific, old-school, without the GPSs they had dumped for fear of being traced.
Zeke took sightings on known points, in this case mountaintops, plotted the azimuths back from those points on the map, and found their exact position at the intersection of the plots. Once he had done that, he used a thin clear plastic military protractor to draw a line between their position and a point already marked on his map, measuring the angle. He then lifted the compass to his eye and sighted along it, turning until he was looking exactly along that bearing. He stared at something there for about fifteen seconds, fixing it in his mind. Then he turned back to the group, which by this time had formed a rough semicircle around him, watching. He rolled up the dummy cord attached to the compass, putting it in his pocket.
“Let me tell you a story,” Zeke began dramatically. “One day about ten years ago I got a funny call at my desk in the Pentagon. I was doing my hated staff tour and I really don’t know how the call got routed to me, but a lot of weird calls come to the Pentagon from concerned citizens about everything from UFOs to unexploded ordnance. This one was from a manager at a mining company who had run across some kind of old underground government installation in the course of their operations.” He pointed with an outstretched arm at where he had been looking just a moment ago. “Right there.”
“What is it?” Elise queried.
With the air of a showman, he responded, “I was hoping you would ask. I’ll show you. Follow along, kiddies, and don’t wander off.”
Zeke climbed back behind the wheel of the Land Rover, and the rest of them piled back into the other trucks. He led the way directly across the plateau, powering over head-high thistles and through brambles, the only things that would take root in the mine tailings and basalt, a thin layer of green. After about three hundred yards they approached the untouched mass of older-growth forest. Majestic evergreens, ash and oaks rose abruptly at the dividing line, with lots of snow patches on the ground where the sun touched only weakly.