Tina was in awe of — and disquieted by — the stately forest that crowded them as they drove north on the narrowing county road. Even if she had not known that these deep woodlands harbored secrets about Danny and the deaths of the other scouts, she would have found them mysterious and unnervingly primeval.
She and Elliot had turned off Interstate 80 a quarter of an hour ago, following the route Danny had marked, circling the edge of the wilderness. On paper they were still moving along the border of the map, with a large expanse of blues and greens on their left. Shortly they would turn off the two-lane blacktop onto another road, which the map specified as “unpaved, nondirt,” whatever that was.
After leaving Billy Sandstone’s house in his Explorer, Tina and Elliot had not returned to the hotel. They shared a premonition that someone decidedly unfriendly was waiting in their room.
First they had visited a sporting-goods store, purchasing two Gore-Tex/Thermolite stormsuits, boots, snowshoes, compact tins of backpacker’s rations, cans of Sterno, and other survival gear. If the rescue attempt went smoothly, as Tina’s dream seemed to predict, they wouldn’t have any need for much of what they bought. But if the Explorer broke down in the mountains, or if another hitch developed, they wanted to be prepared for the unexpected.
Elliot also bought a hundred rounds of hollow-point ammunition for the pistol. This wasn’t insurance against the unforeseen; this was simply prudent planning for the trouble they could foresee all too well.
From the sporting-goods store they had driven out of town, west toward the mountains. At a roadside restaurant, they changed clothes in the restrooms. His insulated suit was green with white stripes; hers was white with green and black stripes. They looked like a couple of skiers on their way to the slopes.
Entering the formidable mountains, they had become aware of how soon darkness would settle over the sheltered valleys and ravines, and they had discussed the wisdom of proceeding. Perhaps they would have been smarter to turn around, go back to Reno, find another hotel room, and get a fresh start in the morning. But neither wanted to delay. Perhaps the lateness of the hour and the fading light would work against them, but approaching in the night might actually be to their advantage. The thing was — they had momentum. They both felt as if they were on a good roll, and they didn’t want to tempt fate by postponing their journey.
Now they were on a narrow county road, moving steadily higher as the valley sloped toward its northern end. Plows had kept the blacktop clean, except for scattered patches of hard-packed snow that filled the potholes, and snow was piled five or six feet high on both sides.
“Soon now,” Tina said, glancing at the map that was open on her knees.
“Lonely part of the world, isn’t it?”
“You get the feeling that civilization could be destroyed while you’re out here, and you’d never be aware of it.”
They hadn’t seen a house or other structure for two miles. They hadn’t passed another car in three miles.
Twilight descended into the winter forest, and Elliot switched on the headlights.
Ahead, on the left, a break appeared in the bank of snow that had been heaped up by the plows. When the Explorer reached this gap, Elliot swung into the turnoff and stopped. A narrow and forbidding track led into the woods, recently plowed but still treacherous. It was little more than one lane wide, and the trees formed a tunnel around it, so that after fifty or sixty feet, it disappeared into premature night. It was unpaved, but a solid bed had been built over the years by the generous and repeated application of oil and gravel.
“According to the map, we’re looking for an ‘unpaved, nondirt’ road,” Tina told him.
“I guess this is it.”
“Some sort of logging trail?”
“Looks more like the road they always take in those old movies when they’re on their way to Dracula’s castle.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“And it doesn’t help that you’re right. It does look like the road to Dracula’s castle.”
They drove onto the track, under the roof of heavy evergreen boughs, into the heart of the forest.
Chapter Thirty-Three
In the rectangular room, three stories underground, computers hummed and murmured.
Dr. Carlton Dombey, who had come on duty twenty minutes ago, sat at one of the tables against the north wall. He was studying a set of electroencephalograms and digitally enhanced sonograms and X-rays.
After a while he said, “Did you see the pictures they took of the kid’s brain this morning?”
Dr. Aaron Zachariah turned from the bank of video displays. “I didn’t know there were any.”
“Yeah. A whole new series.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Yes,” Dombey said. “The spot that showed up on the boy’s parietal lobe about six weeks ago.”
“What about it?”
“Darker, larger.”
“Then it’s definitely a malignant tumor?”
“That still isn’t clear.”
“Benign?”
“Can’t say for sure either way. The spot doesn’t have all the spectrographic characteristics of a tumor.”
“Could it be scar tissue?”
“Not exactly that.”
“Blood clot?”
“Definitely not.”
“Have we learned anything useful?”
“Maybe,” Dombey said. “I’m not sure if it’s useful or not.” He frowned. “It’s sure strange, though.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” Zachariah said, moving over to the table to examine the tests.
Dombey said, “According to the computer-assigned analysis, the growth is consistent with the nature of normal brain tissue.”
Zachariah stared at him. “Come again?”
“It could be a new lump of brain tissue,” Dombey told him.
“But that doesn’t make sense.”
“I know.”
“The brain doesn’t all of a sudden start growing new little nodes that nobody’s ever seen before.”
“I know.”
“Someone better run a maintenance scan on the computer. It has to be screwed up.”
“They did that this afternoon,” Dombey said, tapping a pile of printouts that lay on the table. “Everything’s supposed to be functioning perfectly.”
“Just like the heating system in that isolation chamber is functioning properly,” Zachariah said.
Still poring through the test results, stroking his mustache with one hand, Dombey said, “Listen to this… the growth rate of the parietal spot is directly proportional to the number of injections the boy’s been given. It appeared after his first series of shots six weeks ago. The more frequently the kid is reinfected, the faster the parietal spot grows.”
“Then it must be a tumor,” Zachariah said.
“Probably. They’re going to do an exploratory in the morning.”
“Surgery?”
“Yeah. Get a tissue sample for a biopsy.”
Zachariah glanced toward the observation window of the isolation chamber. “Damn, there it goes again!”
Dombey saw that the glass was beginning to cloud again.
Zachariah hurried to the window.
Dombey stared thoughtfully at the spreading frost. He said, “You know something? That problem with the window… if I’m not mistaken, it started at the same time the parietal spot first showed up on the X-rays.”
Zachariah turned to him. “So?”
“Doesn’t that strike you as coincidental?”
“That’s exactly how it strikes me. Coincidence. I fail to see any association.”