Then he spun, went back into the house, retrieved his radio, and emerged again onto the porch, all thoughts of nausea or discombobulation forgotten. He lifted the radio to his mouth… and then paused. In the distance, he saw the flat shapes of four huddled forms hustling across the no-man’s land of the common ground. They were barely detectable; he wouldn’t have seen them, in fact, if not for their traversal in front of the white walls of the Solexx Greenhouses. They disappeared from view shortly after.
Clay keyed the radio and said, “AJ. Where the fuck are you?”
He began counting off seconds, but the radio squawked before he could reach the number two. A thin, staticky voice said, “Here, Clay!”
“Get everyone loaded up in the diesels and get the fuck back up here right fucking now!”
“Way ahead of you! We heard the shooting all the way out here; we’re on our way up right now!”
Clay lowered the radio and pulled a long, hitching breath. “How long?” he asked.
“We’re coming up the pass right now. I make it thirty seconds. A minute at most.”
Good news, thank God.
“Fuckin’ step on it, AJ.”
“What are we coming into?”
“No fuckin’ clue, except to say Pap’s gone on to sing with the fucking choir and the rest of this shit seems to be carrying on without me.”
There was a pregnant interval of silence, then, “Sit tight. We’re coming.”
Clay set the radio on the porch rail. “Music to my fucking ears…”
AJ looked at Rollins and shouted, “Pin that gas pedal!” Rollins nodded, did as he was told, and the Chevy’s rear axle broke loose as they accelerated out of the turn. Rollins corrected beautifully, bringing the truck nearly sideways before lining it back up, and they surged forward up the trail.
Once he was sure they weren’t going into the dry gulch, AJ jumped back on the radio and said, “Hey! You boys back there copy?”
“Yeah!” a voice responded.
“Let us get out ahead a bit, okay? We don’t know what we’re driving into, so we’ll go in fast and surprise the hell out of ’em. Let ’em think that we’re it, then you guys roll up like cavalry, okay?”
“Roger!” said the voice, and AJ immediately noted the headlights of the other trucks begin to dim in the side mirror as they fell behind.
AJ dumped the radio into the footwell, took up his rifle, and said, “You kill them lights before we hit the valley, okay?”
“Okay, but… I’m as likely to kill us if I do…” Rollins warned.
“Gotta risk it, man. They’ll see our headlights coming for miles. I’m betting they don’t hear the engine; all that shooting going on.”
Rollins blew air through his nostrils and choked down on the wheel. Looking into the back, AJ said, “You fellas ready to party?” He was met by three serious faces, all of which nodded slowly. He looked past them to the truck bed, noting the six additional men in the back squatting three to a side. They gripped the sides of the truck like they rode a runaway bull; as AJ supposed, they might be.
He faced front, chamber-checked his rifle, and sighed.
“Okay…” he muttered.
Alan perched halfway up the wall of the valley’s entrance, surrounded by a thickness of ponderosas that had grown tall and fat through their long, silent stewardship of the valley. For some one hundred and fifty years they had stood and, with little thought for the creature now hunkered at their feet, for another hundred and fifty they would remain. And Alan thought as little of them as they did of him. The trees thinned out ahead, offering a clear-ish line of sight to the obscured trail some forty yards below. The ground appeared farther away than it actually was; the whole valley floor was an indefinite blob, transitioning between expanses of mottled gray and total void.
He listened to the shooting back at the cabins and ground his teeth. He stared at the ground ahead, not willing to look toward home, not willing to think of his brother or his brother’s child.
He wondered about Rose and hoped she’d gotten away with the others to safety.
He heard the truck first; the engine announced its coming like a descending stampede. Alan craned his neck to the right, hoping to see it coming up the trail. More pines stood in his way, making the darkness appear closer in places and further in others, and he began to wonder if he was even looking in the right direction. The engine sounded far off, yet.
He rubbed the balls of his thumbs over the exposed wires held in each hand. They felt slightly frayed, and he knew it was he who’d frayed them, rubbing them incessantly. He pinched and twisted them in his fingers, rolling the ends into a tight spiral. As he did this, the truck blasted into view at the trail’s first bend; a thing of odd shapes and hitching, indeterminate motion. The winding sound of its engine grew to prominence at its eruption, as if some god had jammed the volume of the world to its maximum level, and the chameleonic shapelessness of its mass bore up the trail like a loping animal.
Alan’s wind seized in his chest; he’d not expected the thing to appear so quickly, its sound had been so distant. He jammed the ends of the wires onto the battery terminals, wincing as he did for anticipation of the coming hell storm. When the truck blew by the cleft into the valley, he stared after it gape-mouthed. Horrified, he looked down at the battery in disbelief and muttered, “Oh my fuck…”
He yanked his knife from its belt sheath, laid the base of the blade against one terminal and, pinching the handle carefully in his fingertips, dropped the tip against the other. He let go of the knife at the last instant and was rewarded with a violent spark as the blade shorted the terminals together.
“Well, what the fu…?”
Puzzle pieces began to fall into place. He grabbed the wires, tugged the ends toward his chest until he found the point where they joined together, and then yanked. The length slid toward him easily.
“…ohmygod…” he moaned. He began to yank entire loops into his lap, pulling hand over hand, and before long he held the opposing end up to his eyes and squinted. They were frayed wildly, like the ends of Rebecca’s hair on the dampest of mornings, and Alan understood that it must have come exposed on the trail. That the passage of vehicles over its length must have severed it.
He heard the far-off rumble of more engines approaching. He looked into the valley toward the homes; saw the tail lights of the retreating truck (they’d turned on their headlights, apparently unable to maintain the trail without them) and then, in the further distance, he saw and heard the insistent, continuous thunder of machinegun fire.
Alan hefted the battery and plunged down the slope. It became clear that a run would result in a headlong tumble after his first step, but he knew there wasn’t enough time for him to pick out the cautious path. The oncoming vehicles sounded far off, but then so did the first as well, right before it rounded the bend and fell upon him. He clutched the battery to his chest like a baby, pelted down the mountainside and when he sensed balance beginning to fail him, threw his legs out ahead, took the fall on his hip, and spent the rest of his descent either in stuttering triple-steps or just surfing whole spans on his side.
He hit the bottom in a pile of limbs and heavy lead battery, a near-perfect reenactment of Fred’s earlier tumble though he couldn’t know it, and in his struggle to keep the battery in hand his head bounced against the hard earth. He lay stunned, momentarily unaware of the world around him.