Thirty-nine
The blast rocked the ground, the building under me shuddered, and I nearly bit my tongue as my teeth clacked together. The flash left my eyes less adapted to the dark than they had been an instant earlier. Louder than any crack of thunder that I’d ever heard, the detonation rolled away through the orchard, but in the aftermath a solemn tolling continued in my ears, as if I were not atop a two-story building but were inside the bell tower of a cathedral.
A sudden downpour clattered onto the roof. Not rain. Debris. Splinters of wood. Slabs of wood as long as my arm. Dirt and gravel. Scraps of metal, twisted and hot and smoking. I closed my eyes and averted my face and covered my head with both arms until the stuff stopped peppering me.
Torn and burning, the massive edifice, the almond-processing plant, groaned as if it were a living leviathan, groaned and torqued out of true. At the sight of that structural torment, a woman below let out a wild rebel yell of exaltation, her voice shrill with glee. Another cultist answered her. A second. A third. A fourth. The curved metal roof of the tortured structure bulged and buckled, rivets popping like corn, welded joints shrieking as they separated, widths of sheet metal peeling up to claw like robot hands at the night sky, where the low clouds reflected the sudden rush of fire.
Two hundred feet away, at the farther end of the same building, a second explosion equaled the first. Because it was more distant, the flash seemed less bright. The bang split the night with cleaver-sharp sound. Although the stucco building quaked less violently under me than before, the effect on the processing plant was greater than that of the first explosion. Lit by fire, the immense structure rippled from the farther end to the nearer, as if I were not looking at it directly but were seeing its reflection in the surface of a breeze-ruffled lake. Wood rafters and joists and studs cracked like the whips of the gods, structural metal squealed as it was deformed by the initial shock wave, and what window glass had not shattered in the first blast shattered now.
The behavior of the cultists, when they shot the Explorer to pieces and when they opened fire on me in the almond orchard, had been reckless, but this was insanity. They had not come here with the intention of blowing up that building; they had come here only because they were chasing me. The doors were locked, the windows high. I couldn’t be hiding inside the place. The destruction of the processing plant seemed to be a pointless crime of opportunity. Worse, it seemed to have been done on a whim. They probably thought that I had gotten away clean, and they were frustrated, disappointed, badly in need of a mood boost. Nothing could elevate your spirits more than blowing the crap out of a large building, a point of view that half the lunatics in the world would enthusiastically endorse—if, when you asked their opinion, they weren’t busy beheading people.
I figured we could be certain now that the ton of C-4 hadn’t been hijacked by some other group of maniacs, that these apostles of the demon Meridian were indeed the culprits. The amount detonated in this instance was at most a few pounds, which left them with more than enough to break the Malo Suerte Dam if that happened to be their intention. Maybe C-4 was the least of it.
But if they did intend some epic act of evil, destruction on a scale so enormous that it would assure this night a place in the history books, wasn’t it stupid to waste their time and risk compromising their main objective by blowing up a nut-processing plant in an almond orchard? Just because I’d given them the slip and they were miffed? They were probably fist-pumping when they let out those rebel yells, maybe doing an end-zone dance of triumph. They appeared to be spiraling out of control. The discipline that had marked their scheming in the past seemed to be dissolving.
Great tongues of flame seethed from the roof of the stricken building, licked through every crack in its walls, spewed out of the small high windows. Huddled against the parapet, I was at most eighty or ninety feet from the blaze. The heat began to wring more sweat from me than had the long run through the cottonwoods and the almond grove. Smoke, thus far churning into the night sky, suddenly rushed in thick gray masses from the side of the structure and plumed toward me as a portion of the wall collapsed.
I couldn’t stay on the roof. If smoke inhalation didn’t kill me, it would cause fits of coughing, which would locate me for the cultists. If they didn’t want to brave the climb and come after me, they could just wait for me to suffocate. Or they could blow this place up, with me atop it. In fact, maybe they had already placed more packages of C-4. Maybe they were going to destroy every building at the orchard.
I rose, turned to the ladder, and looked down, pretty sure that I would see a grinning face and a gun muzzle. No one waited below. Although some shadows danced here and there, the graveled ground between this building and the other two was largely well revealed by throbbing reflections of firelight. I hoped that the cultists were either gathered elsewhere to watch the fiery spectacle or had gone away altogether.
Holstering the Glock, I swung onto the ladder and started down just as a tide of smoke washed across the roof. Even though I was under the worst of the fumes for the moment, the air smelled wicked, a bath of toxic chemicals. At the bottom of the ladder, I drew the pistol, surveyed my surroundings, saw no one.
Holding my breath, I ran toward the last two buildings, toward the space between them. No one would hear footsteps in gravel above the roar of the flames and the thousand sounds of distress issuing from the doomed building.
As big as silver dollars, ashes like enormous gray snowflakes spiraled to the ground around me. A storm of burning embers rained down, too, carried by thermal currents from the ferocious blaze, dropping out as the currents weakened with distance. Each ember was a potential new fire if by chance it fell upon fuel. I winced as one of them glanced off my face, shook another off my jacket sleeve, and brushed yet another out of my hair, blistering my left thumb in the process.
Behind the last two buildings, at the east end of the complex, the gravel gave way to bare earth. Here, the night lay in deeper darkness than the territory that I’d just left, although still somewhat revealed by firelight. I could see just well enough to discern a series of large troughs, maybe twelve feet long, six feet wide, four deep, elevated on concrete pads, each with a swan-neck spout and a spigot at one end. I couldn’t imagine a purpose for them, but they looked as if they were public baths for a race of giants.
Beyond the troughs and the board-and-wire fence lay twenty feet of bare ground and then, to the east, a shadowy vista of chaparral. On a warm evening like this, it was the kind of land that teemed with nightlife, though not the kind that required a dance band and adult beverages. Tarantulas as big as my fist. Lizards and rabbits that wouldn’t hurt you, rattlesnakes that would. Coyotes. A bobcat or three.
I needed to get back to the fairgrounds. I still believed that the cultists had some intention there, other than to use the Sombra Brothers carnival as their cover and headquarters for this operation.
As something inside the burning building exploded and shrapnel banged and thudded off all manner of surfaces in the conflagration, I headed south, using the line of troughs for cover until there were no more of them. Low and bent-backed. Hurrying but not running. I hastened into a secondary orchard much smaller than the first.
The heat of the fire and the flurries of ashes and smoke were far behind me. In the distance I heard sirens once more, sirens combined with stentorian horn blasts that identified the vehicles as fire engines.
As before, I stayed close to one row of trees, pausing at the sixth, the twelfth, the eighteenth, to scope the orchard ahead and to keep my breathing as slow and quiet as possible. I was too far from the burning building for the racket of its piecemeal collapse to provide much cover now.
I resisted the temptation to glance back at the blaze. My eyes were not yet fully dark-adapted again, and I needed them to adjust to the gloom as quickly as possible.
Although lacking headstones and monuments, the orchard at night reminded me of a graveyard, perhaps because of the regimented rows, perhaps because I believed that black-clad figures, as faceless as Death, would at any moment step out of cover and loom before me.
At the twenty-fourth tree, six from the end of the orchard, I stood with my back to the trunk, held my breath, listened. I thought I heard a voice. Two voices. I drew a breath or two, listened again, but heard nothing except a tree rat or a raccoon scratching its way along a branch overhead. Then the voices again. They were speaking low, but they weren’t as quiet as they should have been if they were cultists on the lookout for me.
I needed to locate them. In as low a crouch as I could get without proceeding in a duck-walk, I moved from the twenty-fourth tree to the twenty-fifth, leaning to the left, to the right, trying to tune in to their conversation.
They fell silent. Back pressed to the almond tree, I waited, hoping that they hadn’t gone quiet because they’d seen or heard me.
My eyes were well adjusted to the dark again, which meant only that now I was merely half blind. If money could buy anything, I would have called Mrs. Fischer and asked her to buy off the cloud cover and bring back the moon.
Judging by the tone of their voices, when they spoke again, the unseen men were irritated.
I eased forward to the twenty-sixth tree, to the twenty-seventh.
Halfway to the twenty-eighth, I saw them. On the right. Two figures dressed in black. Ahead of me, at the end of the alley between this row and the next. So close.
They evidently were supposed to be scanning the ten feet of open ground that separated the almond trees from the fence that marked the southern perimeter of Maravilla Valley Orchards. They didn’t seem to be deeply committed to the task.
I kept moving, afraid one of them would look toward me at any moment. I put my back to the twenty-eighth tree, two from the end, and found that I was now close enough to hear what they said.
“Damn it, Emory, that freak never come this way.”
“Yeah,” Emory said, “but this is where they want us.”
“You’d break your own neck tryin’ to kiss your own ass if one of the inner circle said so.”
“I’m not afraid of the inner circle.”
“Hell you ain’t. Come on. I wanna be where the action is.”
“Me, too, Carl. Who doesn’t?”
“Well,” Carl said, “it ain’t here.”
Emory didn’t respond.
“Five or six minutes till maybe they blow that church.”
“They’ll blow whatever they find.”
“If it’s the church, I gotta see it.”
“You don’t care about the church.”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t care about.”
Emory said, “It’s the farmhouse that has you hot.”
“You, too. You seen the pictures—them two girls, their mother.”
“They aren’t for us, anyway.”
“But we can watch it bein’ done.”
“I’ve already seen it done. Lots of times.”
“This is bullshit, man.”
“We don’t want to get in trouble.”
“All we do want is trouble.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, you’re a chickenshit.”
Emory didn’t reply.
Frustrated, Carl said, “Ain’t we anarchyists?”
“It’s pronounced an-are-kists. And no, we aren’t.”
“I thought we was.”
“We rule through chaos. That’s different.”
Carl sounded like a pouting child. “We need to be doin’ some anarchyism.”
Intellectual arguments between satanists were less witty than I had expected.
“You hear them sirens?” Carl asked.
“Of course I hear them. Fire trucks.”
“And cops close behind.”
“Shouldn’t be here for the cops,” Emory said.
“Finally you said a smart thing.”
“It’s maybe ten minutes before the farmhouse.”
“So let’s go, let’s get in the action.”
“All right. You’re right.”
“Bet your ass I’m right.”
I heard footsteps, the rustle of clothing. Looking past the tree behind which I sheltered, I saw them moving away, toward the fence.
Prudence suggested that I should let them go. There were two of them, and they were heavily armed. The element of surprise might not be sufficient to get me into a confrontation and out the other side alive.
This was the night of nights, however, and too much prudence might result in the forfeiture of the game.