“I think the Yeti’s expecting us.”
He put both hands against the heavy steel and pushed. It took some effort because of its weight, but the gate was beautifully balanced, and once in motion it swung inexorably open until Peter curled his fingers around the edge and fought it to a stop. Now he could see the structure of the thing, thick reinforced steel hanging on giant pintles, the latch bolts concealed within a broad armature, the whole thing simple and strong and designed to last for generations in the dry air with no more maintenance than some kind of grease for the hinges. There was another solar panel mounted on the back, with another storage battery. It looked like it powered some kind of remote-controlled electromagnet for the latch bolts.
The Yeti didn’t fuck around.
Peter followed June back to the truck and drove through the gate, the gearshift solid in his hand. “We’re not closing that gate behind us,” she said with a grim look.
“You’re the boss,” he said.
“You’re goddamned right.” She put her hand on his arm.
“Tell me how you see this going from here,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a plan past right now.”
“Well, hell,” he said, patting her hand. “Why should you be any different?”
48
The landscape opened up before them and they drove into a beautiful little teardrop-shaped valley, maybe three miles long and a mile and a half wide at its bottom, with steep granite ridges like parapet walls, hemlocks and cedars on their lower slopes. The river wandered wide and slow down the middle from a high waterfall at the valley’s top.
Peter overlaid the view with the map in his head, trying to find the features June had drawn at lunch the day before. He found the rocky outcrop on the far left, jutting out above a series of mature orchards. You could see the whole valley from there. The rows of gnarled fruit trees were punctuated by frame structures and a few open meadows. On the other side of the river was the flattest part of the valley where the river had flooded over the centuries and left rich bottomland dirt. Neat fields lay fallow and muddy, waiting for the tractor. Up the road was a cluster of funky-looking greenhouses that June hadn’t put on the map, and a few big structures he couldn’t quite make out. Dark dots smaller than people moved at the margins, maybe calves or newly shorn sheep, grazing.
If you ignored the giant steel gate, it looked just like a nice little agricultural operation.
No checkpoints, no machine-gun towers. No black Ford Explorers, no steely-eyed troops with automatic weapons. No security at all that Peter could see.
No evidence that anything was other than it seemed.
Except for the road. After the steel bridge, Peter had thought the road would revert to dirt. But it turned to concrete and became flat and arrow-straight, a single lane that ran almost the full length of the valley. The concrete alone would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not to mention the labor, the surveying and bulldozer work, two hundred dump trucks full of gravel. A million-dollar road, at a minimum.
“Where does the money come from?” asked Peter.
“I don’t know,” said June. “When I lived here, everything in the valley was old and beat-up and held together with duct tape. He always lived like every nickel was his last. But this road is sure new. And straight. It looks like a runway, don’t you think?”
Peter nodded. That thought had already occurred to him.
It was late morning, after eleven o’clock.
He stepped on the gas and headed up the road. Toward the Yeti’s house and laboratory.
A few figures moved in the orchard, maybe suckering branches or fertilizing. They paused in their work to watch the truck pass. Farther on he saw the partially framed skeleton of a house rising above the tops of the apple trees. The whine of a circular saw and the irregular pop-pop-pop of nail guns sounded faintly through the open windows. A few more low buildings were tucked into the trees, white-painted and steep-roofed like old farmhouses, links in a wide-spaced irregular chain leading toward the head of the valley.
Halfway to the waterfall, they came to the group of greenhouses. They were simple A-frames covered with sheet plastic to collect and retain the heat of the sun. Inexpensive to build, they would shed any snow that might fall. The shorn sheep turned out to be goats of all sizes and colors, nibbling at weeds growing in the margins. A slender young man turned a compost heap with a pitchfork, revealing rich black soil at the bottom. He looked up as the truck approached.
Outside the largest greenhouse, someone had parked a rusty red cargo tricycle, the two wide-set front wheels holding a platform between them. The platform carried assorted five-gallon buckets and gardening tools. “Stop the car, stop right here,” said June, and Peter hit the brakes.