Unassigned Territory (40 page)

He wound up making several trips back and forth between the hole and the car while Harlan tried to figure out what was wrong with it. He had Obadiah doing various experiments with the lights and the battery. The trouble was that neither of them knew much about cars, Harlan only slightly more than Obadiah, and in the end they gave it up.

Obadiah closed the doors and went back to the hole. He started out trying to walk but his ankle was feeling like it might explode and he wound up crawling back on all fours. As he crawled he thought that Neil Davis would probably have been able to figure out what was wrong with the car. It was, he thought, a stupid thing to think about but there it was and he thought about it anyway. When he reached the hole he sat down in the dirt. His throat was raw from thirst. He had been thankful for the car. Useless as the fucker had proven to be, it had kept his mind occupied. At the edge of the hole he thought about Delandra. He thought about how righteously fucked up it all really was. Delandra was gone. Harlan was in a hole. Jack and Lyle and their ladyfriend had been divided into parts. Sarge Hummer was dead. Ceton Verity was dead. And it was damned hard to say why. Because there was a part missing on the Electro-Magnetron. Because Bill Richards was afraid the thing might work. Because Judy Verity wanted her daddy’s land back. You could more or less take your pick. Possibilities had been made manifest. What was clear was that the car wouldn’t start and that Obadiah himself had led them here—an architect of dumb death. “It’s useless,” he said. He had till now not had the heart to put it into words.

At rest upon his platform Harlan heard the news about the car. A single piece of shoring near the edge of the hole was lit now by the moonlight. The rest of it was wrapped in blackness, so that the hole he was in might have been without sides, might not have been a hole at all—the illusion was such that at times he felt himself to be adrift in space. He focused upon the bit of shining wood. It was not clear to him why Obadiah had left the camp. Or why he could not go back now, for help.

Obadiah told him about finding the gun.

“And the gun belonged to one of these people who were killed.” Harlan wanted to keep it straight. His mind seemed to be working against him. He was alternately cold and hot. At times his teeth chattered against one another with such force, it was necessary to stop talking, to massage the hinges of his jaw with his good hand.

“I think so,” Obadiah said. In fact he had begun to question his conclusions once again. What if he was wrong? The camp was a good deal closer than the highway. Could he find it again? Throw himself on the mercy of Bill Richards? But then what if he had been right? He tried to envision that scene—he and Richards driving back out here, alone.

“So it hangs,” Harlan said, “on whether or not that gun is the one you think it is.” It occurred to him there was a lot riding on the gun.

Obadiah rested his head in his hands. “It was the same kind of gun,” he said, “and the thing had this lousy little hand carved on it. All I could think of was, who would do something like that, and the only guy I could imagine doing it was Lyle. And that seemed to fit with the rest of it—Richards thinking how great it was that the Table Mountain People had been busted, Judy wanting that land...” He let it trail away. The question now was, did it fit well enough? It was coming down to a hard choice. Harlan’s next question was not, however, the one he anticipated.

“What did this hand look like?” Harlan asked.

Obadiah had his legs out in front of him, his elbows on his thighs and his chin in his hands. In part he was hunkered so in protection from the cold. In part he felt he had been bent into this position by the weight of choice. Harlan’s question surprised him. “It was small,” he said. “It was poorly done, carved with a penknife or something. It had six fingers.”

The silence in the hole lasted a long time—so that for a moment Obadiah believed the man had lost consciousness. At last, however, Harlan said something. He said, “Forget the camp, brother. You’ll have to try for the road.”

Obadiah wanted to be certain he had heard correctly. The voice was not without authority. It was as if the choice was being removed. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Listen to me,” Harlan said. He wanted to say several things at once and was not sure where to begin. The moonlight was gone. He drifted. The darkness changed colors before his eyes—a kind of aurora borealis, a magnetic disturbance. “What you don’t understand,” Harlan said, “is that the road to these mines was built by Nazis.” And he began to talk about the hand.

Obadiah tried to follow it. It seemed there was a road. Somewhere. Which led to some mines. Which had been built by Nazis. Harlan seemed to think he was on it. Later he remembered the road was in Africa and corrected himself. Richards’s father, however, was a Nazi. There was a golden medallion in the Desert Museum. Perhaps Obadiah had seen it. There was a sign at the side of the freeway in Los Angeles. The Temple of the Sons of Elijah. And there was a tricky little thing there with that text. One verse added. One omitted. If you believed Leonard Maxwell. And yet Harlan had found certain evidence...

Obadiah followed it as far as he could, until it had become clear to him the man had begun to rave, that the discourse on hands had gone the way of the sermon which had earlier preceded it. And yet there was something different about the two as well. The discourse had a dark side which had been missing from the sermon. It had something to do with the fact that whatever it was Harlan was talking about, it was something which frightened him.

It was this hand. What Harlan seemed to believe was that there was something out there of which this hand was the symbol. It had something to do with Nazis, mines, Indians, the Table Mountain People, Africa, and, quite possibly, the Thing itself. Whatever it was, it was worth being scared of, however, and without knowing anything more about it than that, Obadiah found that he was.

And then he knew why. It was because he knew more about it than he thought he did. He knew, for instance, about the Indian—the one who had been interested in the Thing from the very beginning, the third man at the camp. And when he understood that, he understood what was wrong with his original assumption—that there had been a deal between Richards and the Indian. What was wrong with that was the Indian himself. If he was all that Delandra had said he was, what would he need with Bill Richards? But if they were both part of the same thing... Then it would work. The Indian would have known what was going down all along—he’d just let Richards lure them into the desert was all, except that Richards was having some trouble with his end. He’d only gotten one of them into the desert. And somehow he had wound up with the wrong Thing—enough, Obadiah supposed, to make any man sweat, the way he had seen Richards sweat in the trailer, particularly when your partner favored ax handles and swift justice. And now the jeep was gone and the blackhearted bastard was out there somewhere. Maybe he was even what was behind the deaths of Sarge and Verity. Maybe he had orchestrated everything, from the beginning—if anyone could do that. And yet if the Indian was a part of this thing that Harlan was afraid of... It was a hell of a conclusion to arrive at, alone, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night. Nor was that the end of it. There was the part about the Indian having pulled out, Delandra having turned up missing. The part about the noise that might have been gunfire. And what would the man do if he had her? Would he circle back? To find the car? Would he find the hole with Harlan in it?

Obadiah began to look for a weapon. He set out on all fours. The night was alive with the black shapes of things. His heart beat against his ribs like a caged animal. The moon slunk like a beaten stray along the black spine of the ridge. He found a stick with a pair of good-sized nails sticking out of one end and he returned with it to guard the hole. He would meet this Indian in the valley of shadow. He stared hard into the night—until his eyes burned as badly as his throat. He gripped the foolish thing until his arms ached. The camp was out of the question. The road was too far. And there was no way he would leave Harlan alone. The man was here because of him. A man like Harlan gone down for a simple asshole like himself. The least he could do was guard the hole. And then he remembered something he had seen in the car and it struck him that there was something else he could do, after all. He leaned toward the inky blackness of the hole and called Harlan’s name. The man had been silent for some time now and Obadiah had no idea if he was conscious or not. But he wanted him to know. “Listen to me,” he said. He pushed his voice down into the shaft. “I have an idea,” he said. “I’m going to try something.”

Harlan was conscious. Something had happened to him during the course of his discourse. It had begun with a sense of elation at his newfound ability to, under the circumstances, articulate complex issues so clearly. This elation, however, was soon followed by the discovery that he could not stop talking. He kept thinking of things to say. One sentence followed another. He spoke faster. He became panicky. The sweats came once more. And at the same time that his voice speeded up, his mind did something else. It became clear to him, in a terrible moment of lucidity, that he was making no sense, that this in fact was the “little talk” for which he had pursued his young charge across the Mojave Desert. The insight was a crushing one, eventually it snuffed out the discourse altogether, leaving him with only a bone-deep weariness against which he now fought in an effort to come up with at least one or two meaningful sentences. His mind felt like a bowl of hot mush. He became aware that the boy was saying something to him.

“What?” he said. He was stalling for time.

“I’m going to send up a flare.”

“What kind of flare?” asked Harlan. It was the best he could do.

Obadiah found the matches in the car. He used his shirt for the wick—got some gas on it out of the carburetor, then stuffed the thing into the tank. He lit it and ran for the hole. He was carrying Delandra’s guitar. The blast knocked him to his stomach and filled the sky with light.

Harlan felt the blast. It began with a deep rumbling which seemed to issue out of the darkness beneath him. The sky went yellow and then orange and for a moment the light reached into the hole so that he saw it for the first time—the dirt walls, the wooden shoring, the wooden ladder with only a few rungs gone near the top, nearly within arm’s reach. The fireball passed. The light above him shifted toward red. The walls disappeared once more. The rumbling continued, however, deep, distant. It might, he thought, have been the first stirrings of ancient stone hearts, locked for millennia in the secret places of the earth—that, or some rash act on the part of his boy. Suspended in the twilight of Obadiah’s flare, he groped for the ladder as the platform shuddered beneath him.

L
ooking for a stick at the Table Mountain Mines, Delandra ran into the same two rednecks whose ride she had refused on the road out of Trona. Her first thought was to distance herself from the hole, to hope that she had seen them before they saw her, and she had made for the nearest standing shack. But it was no use. She could hear the men whooping as the jeep came bucking down on her across the rocky ground.

Her second thought had been to start shooting. But then she remembered the scatter-gun she’d seen between the seats when she’d argued with the men over the ride. She also knew that her chances of actually hitting anything at any kind of range with Sarge’s cannon were next to none. The thing swung like an anchor at the bottom of her purse. She felt it bang against her hip as she ran. In the end, winded, scared, pissed beyond belief, she had appealed to the men’s sense of fair play. “Listen to me,” she said. She spoke before either of them could say anything to her. She was standing in the still settling dust of their arrival at the edge of the shack. “I don’t have time for games. A friend of mine is trapped in a shaft. I need help.”

One of the men, a white-faced guy with yellowish hair and eyes which seemed to rest on the sides of his face, had shaken his head. “That’s too bad,” he said.

“But it’s a good story,” the second man said. The second man wore a small leather cap and mirrored shades.

Delandra could see herself in the shades. She looked like someone who had gone looking for mercy and come up short. When the man with the leather cap started out of the jeep she tried for the shack. The driver cut her off and the guy with the mirrors got her by the arm. His strength took her by surprise. She felt herself twisted and fairly flipped into the space back of the seats. The driver then took them over the ridge and down to another group of shacks. The ride was much too rough and fast for her to do anything except hang on. She was on her back with her legs up in the air, her boots against the roll bar in an effort to steady herself. The men seemed to find this amusing. There was more whooping. Her head banged against the metal floor. Her boots kept slipping from the bar. At last she managed to hook an ankle between the bar and one of the braces which supported it. She could feel the ankle twisting against the grain in her boot in a kind of slow sprain. But it steadied her long enough to get a hand into her purse. What she had going for her at the time was that neither man had been smart enough to search her—that, together with the fact that the ride was too rough for either of them to keep a good eye on her. They were too busy hanging on themselves, looking for rocks in what was left of the light, and whooping like assholes in heat. By the time the driver brodied to a stop in front of the shacks she had a little something for them. She had Sarge’s forty-one in both hands, her finger on the trigger and her thumbs on the hammer.

She kept them in the front seat. She’d been on her knees by then, in the back, waving the gun back and forth between them. She’d come close to wasting them both. She could have. Point-blank range in the base of the skull to the guy on the passenger side, at which point the driver would have turned and she could have blown his face off. She’d decided instead to try to get them into the shack. For a minute she had believed it was going to work. The gun was big enough to make someone who knew anything about it nervous and she could see that they were, that they didn’t like the way that big barrel kept swinging around between them or the crazy-woman eyes behind it.