“Sometimes lately, I’ve felt like one. Nick didn’t know what he was doing. Or maybe he knew and couldn’t stop himself, which makes me sick.” She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. “Suicides of successful, happy people have soared for two years, people with no history of depression, with every reason to live. Sometimes they take other people with them.” She opened her eyes. “You must have seen the story about the woman in Minnesota, Teacher of the Year, not only killed herself but also the governor and forty-some others. I know for a fact she was controlled by these people, as Nick was.”
“You have proof of all this?”
“Yeah. So who do I trust with it? The FBI isn’t entirely corrupt, but some people in it are part of this conspiracy. Same with the NSA, Homeland Security. They’re salted everywhere.”
“Go to the press?”
“I tried. Thought I had a trustworthy journalist. He wasn’t. I have evidence, a lot of it. But if I give it to the wrong person and he destroys it, everything I’ve endured has been for nothing. And there’s even worse than the Hamlet list. Much worse. Not everyone they inject is programmed for suicide.”
“Then what?”
“Some people under their control seem to have free will, but they don’t. They’re used ruthlessly. As programmed assassins. Others are flat-out enslaved and used as cheap labor.”
She hated death, the thief that had robbed her of her mother and her husband, but when she looked at the corpse between her and the mortician, the cold, wax-pale face suggested an enduring peace that might be envied by those who lived with a nanoweb woven across and through their brains.
“I’ve seen men guarding an estate of one of the Arcadians—as they call themselves—a pack of men in slacks and sport coats, normal at first glance, but like trained dogs, living in conditions as crowded as kennels. Their personalities and memories wiped away. No internal lives. Programmed to carry guns and provide security, to track down and kill intruders. They’re like…machines of flesh.”
If she had any doubt that he believed her, it was resolved when he made the sign of the cross.
“Machines of flesh,” she repeated. “There are high-end brothels for wealthy, powerful people who fund this conspiracy. I managed to get into one—and out alive. The girls are beautiful beyond words. But they have no memories. No awareness of who they once were or of a world beyond the brothel. No hopes. No dreams. No interests except staying fit, desirable. Programmed to provide any sexual pleasure. Totally submissive. Never disobedient. No desire is so extreme they won’t satisfy it. They’re soft-spoken, sweet, apparently happy, but it’s all programmed. They’re incapable of expressing anger, sadness. Somewhere deep inside…what if there is something left in one of them, some palest shadow of real human feeling and awareness, some thread of self-respect, some fragile hope? Then her body is a prison. A life of unrelieved loneliness in a solitary hell. I’ve dreamed of being one of them. I wake up shaking as if with malaria. I’m not ashamed to say I’m terrified of ending like that, stripped of all free will. Because once the control mechanism assembles in the brain, there’s no removing it, no way out except death.”
18
A dragon’s-egg moon emerged from a nest of shredding clouds harried southeast by a high wind that had no presence here at ground level. The oaks were widely separated now, each the majesty of its domain, black-limbed and cragged and crooked, like the scorched but stalwart survivors of a cataclysm, or oracles warning of some dire event impending. The land grew less hospitable to grass, and the last upslope was patterned with faint tree-cast moonshadows on a carpet of wet pebbles and scraggly clumps of flattened sedge.
In spite of the inexplicable danger in which Tanuja and her brother found themselves, she could not help but see the story potential in this bizarre situation. Even as she hurried toward the crest of the last hill, a novel was germinating, a contemporary take on “Hansel and Gretel,” a brother and sister transported from the primeval woods of Germany to the semidesert wildlands of Southern California, their adversary not a witch who lived in a house made of bread and cake, but instead some fearsome sect or wicked fellowship. What she had always liked most about Hansel and Gretel was that they kicked ass; after Gretel shoved the witch into the oven and bolted it shut, she and Hansel filled their pockets with the vicious hag’s fortune of pearls and jewels.
Gasping for breath, she and Sanjay reached the crest, where the source of the red, blue, and yellow auras that drew them through the darkness now flared bright below them. The sole structure in sight, a commercial building made to resemble a log house, advertised itself with a double row of neon tubes around the roofline; and in the enormous sign at the front, the words COOGAN’S CROSSROADS blazed within the glowing outline of a giant cowboy hat.
At least twenty vehicles were parked in front of and beside the establishment. Faint country music found its way into the night from a barroom jukebox.
Tanuja followed Sanjay down a slippery slope of rain-sodden half-collapsed masses of foot-snaring Aureola grass and onto the east-west two-lane that made a crossroads with a north-south route.
As they entered Coogan’s parking lot, a few bars of “Macarena” by Los Del Río issued from a pocket of Sanjay’s jeans, bringing him to a halt. As the ringtone repeated, he fished out the smartphone that belonged to one of the men who had invaded their house.
“Don’t answer it,” Tanuja warned.
“I won’t,” Sanjay said. “I took this so we’d eventually be able to get a lead on who they are.”
“Who’s calling? What’s their number?”
“No ID,” Sanjay said.
Although he did not accept the call, a connection was somehow effected. A long chain of binary code, like a centipede racing along a switchback path, flowed down the screen from top to bottom. The code vanished, the blue background blinked to white, and two black lines, labeled with route numbers, portrayed the crossroads at which they had arrived. A blinking red indicator could have represented nothing else but the position of the smartphone.
“Shit!” Sanjay said. “They just located us.”
“How’s that possible?”
“I don’t know.”
Tanuja looked toward the north-south route, dark at the moment and untraveled. “They’ll be coming.”
The building featured a plank porch elevated on two-foot log piers. Sanjay ran to it and threw the phone between two plants in a decorative fringe of cushion spurge, into the dark space far back under the porch.
Engine noise arose and swiftly grew louder. Out of the south, from the direction of the ruins of Honeydale Stables, a wash of light, undulating with the contours of the road, swelled behind a windbreak of eucalyptuses.
Tanuja and Sanjay, of the same mind without the need to speak, ran to one of the parked vehicles—a truck with a thirty-foot bed, tall slat-wood sides, and an arched canvas canopy fitted to a metal frame. They scaled the tailgate and swung into the dark cargo area, where just enough light entered to suggest that they were aboard a landscaper’s truck more than half full of large ferns and Rhapis palms growing in soil-filled ten-gallon plastic nursery buckets. They crouched four feet from the tailgate, beyond where the neon radiance might reflect off their faces, the fronds of the young Australian tree ferns cascading over and around them.
A moment later, the engine noise peaked. Headlights swept the parking area, one pair and then another. First past the landscaper’s tailgate was a sheriff’s department cruiser, employing neither its sirens nor its lightbar, braking to a stop at the steps to the plank porch, where the yellow-striped pavement warned against parking.
Close behind the squad car came the Chevy crew-cab on jacked tires, the front passenger door caved and incompletely closed and rattling, held shut by the man riding shotgun. The pickup pulled into an empty slot between two SUVs. The driver killed the engine and got out with two other men. Evidently the injured man had been left back at the bridge to fend for himself. The driver went around the north side of Coogan’s Crossroads, the other two around the south side, evidently intending to rendezvous at the back of the tavern, where there were a kitchen entrance and an emergency exit.