Tears came to his eyes, and he couldn’t stop them. It’s all right, he told himself. You can cry for them. No one else will.
But he was crying now for himself, as well. He was crying for what he had turned himself into. He understood better than anyone what too much of something could do to you. He had witnessed it firsthand not that many years ago. He had not believed it possible before then. He thought that once you understood the difference between right and wrong, it was ingrained in you. He thought your moral values were developed early and stayed with you.
As with so many things, Michael had taught him otherwise. It was a lesson he would never forget.
He drove on through the morning, the sun an indistinct splash of brightness above the thick screen of clouds, its light diffused into a dull wash as it filtered down through the mist that shrouded the lower levels of the peaks. The temperature was changing slightly, but the air was still warm and oddly dry, even in the haze. If there was such a thing as dry damp, this was it.
He remembered an expression he had once heard—sunny showers—which was used to describe bright sun shining down through a rain. He wondered what that would be like.
It was barren and empty in the mountains, more so than on the plains, which was disconcerting. To keep himself from dwelling on it, he sang “Amazing Grace” a few times, repeating the phrases he liked the best, letting the melody take him away. He was feeling better today, after his night with the Preacher and his flock of old people, and he wanted to keep that feeling wrapped about him for as long as he could. The horror of the compound had begun to dissipate, as such horrors always did, even when he feared they wouldn’t.
The human spirit was remarkably resilient. Were it not, he supposed he would have gone mad a long time ago.
The road tunneled between the cliffs, and he went with it, steering the AV through clusters of boulders and over small slides. If he had been driving anything else, he might not have been able to go on, but the Lightning’s huge tires and high-set chassis allowed passage over almost anything. The mountains loomed all about him now, huge monoliths that jutted skyward until they disappeared in clouds and mist. Everything was taking on a hazy look, giving the world about him an indistinct quality that suggested it was fading away. He wondered how much farther he would have to climb in order to reach the crest of the pass.
He got his answer almost as soon as he finished asking the question. The road rounded a curve and simply disappeared. Tons of rock had collapsed in a slide that had brought down an entire cliff face. He drove right up to it, stopped, and got out. The slide was fifty feet high if it was an inch. It angled down across the road from what remained of the cliff and tumbled over a drop.
There was no way around or over unless he proceeded on foot. The slide had formed a wall he could not get past.
He would have to find another way.
There is no other way!
The familiar voice screamed at him in the silence of his mind, the words cutting at him like a razor and triggering a memory he knew he would never escape. He felt the world drop away beneath his feet as the memory surfaced in a swarm of harsh, angry images.
And suddenly, he was reliving the final moments of his last night with Michael Poole.
Chapter EIGHTEEN
. HE CROUCHES WITH the others in the concealing shadows of a skeletal forest and peers through the hazy darkness of the moonless night at the Midline Slave Camp. The Midline sits squarely on the border of what used to be the states of Indiana and Illinois, just bebw Lake Michigan. A hundred yards of open ground surrounds the camp, land cleared by the once-men as a precaution against what is about to happen. Watch fires burn in pits along the barbed-wire fences surrounding the camp, and torches flicker at its heavy gates. It is a slave camp like all other slave camps, and yet it is something more. It is the one slave camp that Michael Poole has steadfastly avoided attacking, the one camp he has said it would take an army to break into.
Nevertheless, here they are, preparing to do what he has sworn they would not.
There is no reason for them to do this. There are other, easier compounds against which they could mount an assault. The Midline is formidable.
Three buildings that were once steel mills form the compound— huge, cavernous structures built of corrugated steel sheets and surrounded by double rows of mesh steel fencing strung with concertina wire. Ditches deep enough to swallow Michael’s Lightning S-150 pockmark the open ground outside the fences in all directions. The buildings are tightly sealed, their doors and windows barred and shuttered. The slaves of the once-men who come here are taken inside and do not come out again until they are carried out. The work that is done here is infamous. It is widely regarded as the most impenetrable of the slave camps.