By the time the sun made its appearance, the buses were pulling into the large Visitors Center of the area’s most celebrated tourist attraction. The night guard stepped out from his shack to greet the buses. To him the situation was obvious; some overeager tourists must have gotten it into their heads that this was a twenty-four-hour attraction. Not so. The Visitors Center was closed, and the first tours didn’t begin for three more hours. He felt sure he’d be able to convince them all to come back later, and if he couldn’t, the iron security gate would.
He approached the dark-tinted windows of the first bus, and the door opened to admit him.
Turns out he had misdiagnosed the entire situation.
Ten minutes later, the night guard emerged from the lead bus, bewildered and rubbing his chest. Although he had never told his employer, he was, in fact, a dying man . . . but the redheaded kid who led this group had changed that. Now the cancer that had been devouring his right lung was leaving him. He could almost feel the malignant cells collapsing in upon themselves, the genetic mutation corrected—his body fixed from the inside out. He didn’t know what all this meant, but he did know that, even though it broke the rules, he was going to open the gate, and allow these buses to pass.
What was the kid’s name? Darren? Devin?
The buses rolled through, and he closed the gate behind them, wishing he could be in there with those people—because he knew that this had been the most important moment of his life.
Dillon! Yes, that was it.
Whoever he was, the guard sensed that Dillon was not coming here as a tourist, and he realized that his own sense of loyalty was no longer with the department of Parks and Recreation. Now he worked for the boy.
He marveled as he watched the buses wind their way inland, amazed by the way they moved in perfect, orderly formation, spaced precisely one bus-length apart, as they drove east down the lone road, and toward the solitary castle in the distance, which stood silhouetted against the rising sun.
7. Eclipsed
Michael awoke with an overwhelming urge to jump off the back of the boat. That’s how he knew they had gone too far. He climbed out of the cabin to find Lourdes at the controls. They were a few hundred yards from shores and while the flat stream of water still stretched out ahead of them, Michael knew it would only lead them to a place Dillon had been, not the place he was now. The sky, which had been a sunny blue just a moment ago, was already weaving with clouds.
“I took over for Drew at around midnight,” she told him with a smile.
“We’ve passed him, Lourdes,” Michael said. “We passed him sometime during the night.”
“Or he passed us,” Lourdes said calmly.
“Then why are we still headed up the coast?”
“I was waiting for you,” she said. “So we could decide together what to do.” She turned off the engine and the boat quickly slowed and began to drift.
“You could have woken me!” he said.
Lourdes smiled again. “Maybe I just wanted to let you sleep.” She gently brushed his hair out of his eyes. “You looked too peaceful to wake up. . . . I knew when you woke up you would be worried. So I let you sleep.”
There was warmth and concern in her words, but Michael couldn’t echo back her warmth. All he could do was stare at her emptily. Lourdes leaned just an inch or two closer.
“No kissing in front of the children,” said Drew. Their shipmate sat in the corner of the deck, as unobtrusive as a barnacle on the hull.
While kissing hadn’t been on Michael’s mind, apparently Lourdes had been considering it, because she backed off the moment Drew spoke, leaving Michael to take control of the boat. He brought them around to a southerly heading, while Drew, under the glaring eyes of Lourdes, inhaled Chee-tos.
“Drew,” said Lourdes, “if you keep on eating like that, you’re going to get fat. Believe me, I know.”
Drew shoved another Chee-to in his mouth. “I’m a growing slug,” he said.
Michael had to admit that Drew was playing his third-wheel role to a tee—but the fact was, Drew and Lourdes had more in common than they cared to admit. To Michael, it seemed both of them were far too content for their own good.
“Can’t you just close your eyes, and figure out exactly where Dillon is?” asked Drew.
Lourdes laughed at the thought, and shook her head. “Better yet, why don’t we just teleport ourselves there?”
“Yeah,” said Drew. “Why don’t you?”
“Just because we can do some things, that doesn’t mean we can do all things,” Michael told him. “As far as finding Dillon, it’s not like we’ve got navigational computers in our brains. It’s more like playing hot-and-cold. All I know, is that we were getting hotter last night . . . and now we’ve gotten colder.”
Now only about a hundred yards from shore, Michael kept them hugging the coastline as he tried to pick up a sense of Dillon’s position . . . and all the while Lourdes watched him—Michael could practically feel her eyes boring into him. She was waiting for a tender gesture, he knew, and when she didn’t get it, she came to him, and put her arms around him. He knew he should have been flattered by her attentions, but instead felt caged. So he shrugged himself out of the grasp of her comforting, protective arms.
“Let’s just think about solving the problem.”
Lourdes gaped at him as if he had hurled mud in her face. Her cheeks flushed with humiliation—but she soon recovered, finding some of her old stoicism to cool her eyes and cheeks. Then she surrendered.
“San Simeon,” she said.
“What?”
“I looked at a map, and there’s not much between here and Morro Bay—just San Simeon. Dillon could be there.”
Michael nodded. “San Simeon it is.” He kicked up the engine, and turned his eyes forward. He could tell Lourdes was waiting for more from him—a hug, a grin . . . anything—and when Michael didn’t deliver, she stormed down to the cabin.
“Who wants to find Dillon Cole anyway?” She pulled the cabin curtain shut behind her. Closest she could come to slamming a door, Michael supposed.
So, if this trip wasn’t about finding Dillon, then what was it about? Michael wondered. But he already knew the answer. It was about the old times. It was about being so alone that they needed each other more than they needed their next breath. But it wasn’t like that anymore for Michael—and although he still needed many things, he wasn’t sure Lourdes was one of them.
None of this was lost on Drew. He remained a silent observer as Michael cold-shouldered Lourdes down into the cabin, all the while crunching Chee-tos as he watched, like popcorn at the movies.
Now Drew spoke up as the last trace of sun fell behind cloud cover. “Hey Michael!” he said. “You’ll screw up my tan—why don’t you do that trick with the sky!”
“Not in the mood,” Michael told him. For months he had mined his own depths, and forced a happy face onto the world around him—but now that they were headed toward Dillon, there wasn’t a single vein of good cheer left to mine.
Drew, on the other hand, seemed as comfortable as could be. The world could end, and Drew would wisecrack his way into oblivion.
Michael was as envious as he was irritated. “Drew, this is serious shit here. I felt Dillon scream—and when Dillon screams, it doesn’t mean he stubbed his toe. Something major is going down, and I don’t know what the hell it is yet.”
“Hey, I have faith in you, man,” said Drew. “You can do no wrong.”
Michael had to smile. Drew’s trust was a powerful thing; something absurdly stable in the madness they were sailing into. But as far as doing no wrong, Drew was sorely mistaken. “You didn’t know me back east,” answered Michael.