Shortly after their midday break for lunch, the buildings drew away and they found themselves facing a grid of enormous stones, twice the height of a man, set up like menhirs, all dissimilar, with between them gravel and nothing more. They stretched as far as the eye could see to either side and looked to extend as far ahead. At the sight of them, Hanson immediately turned and began walking east.
“Hold it right there,” Delgardo snapped. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I told you. Never go through anything, under anything, inside anything, or between anything. If you want to survive. Sir.”
Delgardo looked scornful. “Have you ever heard of gongshi, Hanson? No, of course you haven’t. Chinese scholar’s stones. Rocks that were selected for their aesthetic value and used as objects of meditation. Look at these things, what do you see? No two of them are alike. Different kinds, different shapes. What we’ve got here is somebody’s rock collection. Probably the owner liked to wander through it, thinking profound thoughts. None of us are afraid of a rock garden, am I right?” Lowering his voice so he couldn’t be overheard, Delgardo added, “And I’ll put three rounds through your skull if you don’t lead us straight across. Maybe you’d survive that. But I don’t think you’d enjoy the experience much.”
So, having no choice, Hanson led the troop into the rocks.
It was eerily quiet among the great stones. Not a bird or insect was anywhere to be seen or heard. The only sound was the crunch of gravel underfoot. Nobody spoke a word. Somehow, this near-silence translated, in the inner reaches of his brain, into a sensation of profoundest peace. After a few minutes, Hanson found his thoughts wandering back to his youth, to the days when his wife, Becky, was still alive and he was in possession of his full force of strength and vigor. Those were good times, though they had seemed hard enough then. He’d put in his ten hours at the factory, shoveling coal, and sometimes have a watery beer with friends in somebody’s basement speakeasy before returning home to his wife and dinner. There was never enough money to keep lots of lights burning, so in his memories, Becky’s face had a warm orange glow, all the rest of the world falling away from her into darkness. For the first few years, they two were so very, very happy.
He didn’t like to think about what came after.
Better to cast his thoughts further back, to his childhood, when he had been the protector of his little sister from schoolyard bullies. He’d always been larger than the other kids in his class, so at recess the little bastards would sometimes deftly arrange, by lies and rumors, for him to fight an upperclassman. Sometimes he’d win and sometimes not. But the image of him as a bruiser, with blood on his knuckles and a glower on his face, lingered and he rarely had to do more than growl a word or two of warning to keep the bullies away from her. She’d died young, his sister had, but while she lived, she adored him, had little—
Little—
Why couldn’t he remember her name?
Hanson stumbled and drew himself to a stop. Head swimming, he put out a hand to keep from falling, and felt himself lurch against one of the standing stones. Delgardo, who had been following in his wake, brushed past as if he weren’t there. The others, too, he saw, were plodding along steadily, eyes half closed, heads bowed, like so many sleepwalkers. They passed him by without a glance, and he had to dance backward to avoid being stepped on by the Stumper, which, had it been a foot or two wider would have been scraping against the rocks to either side of it.
“Everybody! Everybody!” Hanson shouted. “Wake up!” He grabbed hold of the kid who was leading the Stumper by a rope and shook his shoulders. The soldier snorted and his eyes fluttered open. Then he ran forward to shake—Phillips, was it?—and then Barker, and then he and Barker were running up and down the line, shouting and shaking, until everyone was awake again.
With puzzled expressions, the men listened to Hanson as he tried to explain: that the rocks were somehow mesmerizing them all, putting them into a half-sleep for whatever purpose he couldn’t say, it was possible the rocks were making them forget things, maybe they ate memories, he couldn’t say, but… “Listen to me!” Sergeant Barker said. “The first one of you falls asleep, I will kick your ass halfway to the moon. Understand?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” the men said, as one.
“A’right. Now. Double time! March!”
They were moving again, fast this time. The sergeant danced up and down the line, shouting and punching, keeping everyone going. And it worked. In less than an hour they were out of the rock garden.
When Delgardo had called a halt, Hanson drew him aside. “Listen. Sir. There’s something you need to know.”
“I was trying to remember…” Delgardo said in such an unguarded, puzzled way as to seem, for the briefest and most fleeting of moments, almost human. “A girl I knew. She…” He shook his head. Then, registering how Hanson was looking at him, “What is it?”
“There were a dozen of us when we started out, right?”
Delgardo squinted at him, as if he were something unexpected and not particularly pleasant. “Yeah. So?”
“I only count eleven now. But… I can’t quite remember who we’ve lost.”
Delgardo was still for a long moment, clearly running over the roster in his mind and failing to come up with a name. At last he said, “Well, whoever he is, he’s not coming back. Don’t say anything about this to the men. That’s an order, Hanson.”
“Yes, sir.” Hanson didn’t like being polite to the bastard. But Delgardo looked like he would make Hanson sorry if he wasn’t.
“Fifteen minutes!” Delgardo said at the top of his voice. “Then we get going again.”
They were following an open space between enormous cylinders that Hanson did his best not to look at, because they were covered with what appeared to be beetles the size of his hand and in constant motion, when Hanson saw that ahead of them was a narrow silver arch. It was three times as tall as a man and, because it touched the cylinders to either side, impossible to walk around. Reflexively, without even thinking, Hanson turned away.
“Halt!” Delgardo commanded. Then, “Why are you going out of your way here? You know something about this hoop?”
“Never go through anything,” Hanson mumbled. “Never go underneath anything. Never put your hand inside anything. It might be safe, it might not. Best way is to never find out.”
“But you don’t know anything specific about this thing? You haven’t seen its like before?”
“No,” Hanson said, “sir.”
Delgardo pulled up a handful of grass, bringing up a clod of dirt with it. He threw the thing through the hoop and it fell to the ground with a soft plop. Then he unsnapped his holster and with meaningful intensity, said, “Looks fine to me. Walk on through.”
Everybody stood motionless, staring at Hanson. They were none of them his friends and they all carried weapons with a confidence that said they knew how to use them. He swiftly added up all his options and, as usual, came up with zero. Then he took a deep breath and obeyed.
He walked through the hoop.
Nothing happened.
“You see?” Delgardo said and, jauntily stepping through the hoop himself, waved for the soldiers to follow him.
Hanson was looking forward and so did not see what happened next, for which he would be forever grateful. However, what he heard as the first of the soldiers passed through the hoop was a strangely liquid sound which made him spin around in his tracks. Just in time to see a tangle of what looked to be internal organs slump to the ground. Blood poured freely from it.