"Maybe we should go back to the loggers' road and angle right or left," Slaughter suggested.
"And maybe lose our way as you just said? I wish I knew." "Well, let's keep going then. If this gets much worse, we'll have to change direction."
So they pushed up through the pine trees, and the clearing wasn't fifteen steps away, the trees so dense they didn't see it until they stepped free from the forest.
There were stumps that stretched off through young forest, all the growth here up to Slaughter's chest so that he looked out past the new tips of the pine trees toward the compound over there. Slaughter was reminded of a camping trip years ago. He'd gone with his father to a small lake in northern Michigan. They'd pitched their tent and eaten, so exhausted that they soon had gone to sleep. Rain pelting onto the canvas had wakened them, and they had talked and dozed and wakened again as the storm got worse, and in the morning when the storm was finished, they had crawled out from the tent to stare across the lake. A billowing mist hung over it, but they were camped up high enough that they were just above the mist, the pine trees visible along the other bank, and Slaughter now remembered how he'd thought about what he couldn't see below the mist-the fish that would be rising, and the ducks and frogs and other things. It wasn't real. That thought again. Like now. That sense of life around him but unseen. Except the compound was deserted.
They started through the new growth toward the compound. Dunlap took a photograph. "Hope the camera works." They continued walking.
"Sure," Dunlap said. "They used the timber here to build the barracks." He thought that Rettig had been accurate. With the difference that the walls were like log cabins, Dunlap was reminded of a deserted Army camp. Lanes and squares, a parade ground, everything was here. No, not exactly everything. He didn't see a flagpole. Hell, this kind of culture, they'd have called it a Maypole.
The compound loomed as they approached it, wide, the buildings all one story and with slanted roofs. At least the hippies knew enough to compensate for deep snow on the roofs in winter, Slaughter thought. And then he paused as Dunlap took another picture.
"Watch these branches on the ground here," Slaughter told him. "We don't want another accident."
Dunlap nodded, staring toward the compound as they walked around the branches, coming toward the nearest buildings. There were weeds and bushes, young trees growing in the lanes, and vines enmeshed around the shutters. There were broken windows, doors half off their hinges. And the slogans on the walls, the symbols, Day-Gloed green and red and blue, now faded, flowers, flags with rifles for the stripes and bullets for the stars, a skull and crossbones and a down with nixon, the down with slashed out, then to hell with scrawled above it, that too slashed, a simple fuck above it. vietnam will claim our children. Skeletons across a pentagon.
"Sure. They took the time to do all that, but they didn't even think to treat the logs for insects," Slaughter said and pointed. There were tiny holes in all the logs, and down below the holes, thick piles of what seemed sawdust, dirty, flecked with dead leaves from the vines.
Dunlap took more photographs. As they reached the buildings, Slaughter had the odd sensation that he'd been here before. "Is anybody around?" And then he knew what he was thinking of. Sure. Bodine's ranch when yesterday he'd gone there and he'd heard the kettle.
"You look in this building. I'll check the others," Dunlap said, and Slaughter stopped him.
"No, we'd better stay together."
"What's the matter?" Dunlap asked.
"Let's just say I've got a bad feeling. Anybody here?" he called again.
He waited, but no answer.
"No one's been here for quite a while," Dunlap said.
They stepped inside one building. There were bunk beds, wooden slats instead of springs, no mattresses, but many spiders, cobwebs, leaves piled in one corner as a nest for something. The floor-decaying planks-looked unsafe.
"Let's try a little farther on," Slaughter said.
But almost every building was the same. Slaughter glanced around to notice how the compound had been situated in a canyon, cliffs beyond the trees on three sides, and the slope behind them descending toward the loggers' road. A wind came from below there, rustling trees and cooling him. He took his hat off. Then his back felt unprotected, and he looked behind him. "Well, they picked a good spot anyhow. Except they would have needed water, and I don't know where they got it."
"Higher up. Those cliffs might have some streams."
"Could be. But I don't have time to look."
That made his point, Slaughter hoped. He didn't have time. He hadn't thought it would take this long getting up here. While he felt more sympathetic toward Dunlap, all the same he had his job to do, and he was anxious to get out of here.
Because you're thinking of Bodine? he asked himself. That feeling you had yesterday? You're scared. You might as well admit it.
No. Because I have to get back if there's trouble. Sure. And now he followed Dunlap past some bushes toward a larger building. Its door had toppled. The steps were rotted. They looked past the spider webs at what must once have been the dining room. Rettig had been accurate again. Logs made into trestles, tables that went down the whole length of the room. A bird sat in a glassless window, staring at them. Slaughter blinked, the bird flew away, and Slaughter felt that spot between his shoulder blades again. He turned, but there was no one out there.
"Are they hiding?"
"Little children laughing?" Dunlap asked. "What the hell is that?" "It's from a poem. T.S. Eliot."
"I know who he is. That's not what I meant." And Slaughter started running toward the small low building in front of the parade ground. "I saw something moving."
He ran harder, glancing at the buildings on each side, staring toward the trees beyond them, and he had his gun out, lunging past the listing door, finding just a table, spider webs and dirt, more pine needles.
But there wasn't any back door, and he didn't understand what he'd seen moving. Then he did. The wind blew toward him, and he saw the thick, rotted curtain moving. A blanket really. Torn in half and hung up on a branch before a broken window. He was nauseated by the smell that he'd been registering all along: must and crumbling wood, the fetid, sick-sweet smell of buildings left to ruin. Then he saw the hornet's nest in the far right corner. Something moved inside its portal, and he stepped out into the open.
Dunlap. Where was Dunlap? "Over here!"
Now he reads my mind, Slaughter thought as he ran toward the muffled voice inside another building. The emotion in Dunlap's voice worried him.
This building didn't have planks for a floor. Only dirt. There weren't any windows. Two big doors hung open. Dunlap stood in a shadowy corner, staring at dark stains on the ground.
"That's blood?" Slaughter asked.
Dunlap only shook his head.
"Well, what then? Christ, you scared me."
"Did I? Well, I didn't mean to. No." Dunlap picked up the dirt and sniffed it.
Slaughter suddenly was angry. "Tell me what that stuff is."
"Even after all these years, you can still smell the oil. This is where the Corvette would have been."
"Except it isn't."
"Where then?" Dunlap wondered.
"Look, there's no one up here. Quiller drove out years ago. He maybe let the others walk, but he kept the car in case he needed it to leave."