Clay's Ark p-5 Page 2

  Blake hugged Rane. "Watch yourself," he said, trying to sound steadier than he felt. "Be more careful than you usually are -at least until we find out what's going on."

  Blake watched Ingraham follow Rane through the muddy downpour, watched her get into the red Mercedes. Ingraham said a few words to the woman, Meda, then exchanged places with her.

  When that was done, Eli relaxed. He thrust his gun into his jacket, walked around the Wagoneer as casually as an old

  friend, and got in. It never occurred to Blake to try anything. Part of himself had walked away with Rane. His stomach churned with anger, frustration, and worry.

  After a moment of spinning its wheels, the Mercedes leaped forward, shot all the way across the highway, and onto another dirt road. The Wagoneer followed easily. Eli patted its dashboard as though it were alive. "Sweet-running car,"

  he said. "Big. You don't find them this size any more. Too bad."

  "Too bad?"

  "Strongest-looking car we saw parked along the highway. We didn't want some piece of junk that would stall or get stuck on us. One tank full and the other nearly full of ethanol. Damn good. We make ethanol."

  "You mean it was my car you wanted?"

  "We wanted a decent car with two or three healthy, fairly young people in it." He glanced back at Keira. "You can't win

  'em all." "But why?"

  "Doc, what's the kid's name?" He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Keira. Blake stared at him.

  "Tell her she can get up. She's been awake since Ingraham took your wallet."

  Blake turned sharply, found himself looking into Keira's large, frightened eyes. He tried to calm himself for her sake. "Do you feel all right?" he asked.

  She nodded, probably lying.

  "Sit up," he said. "Do you know what's happened?"

  Another nod. If Rane talked too much, Keira didn't talk enough. Even before her illness became apparent, she had been a timid girl, easily frightened, easily intimidated, apparently slow. Patience and observation revealed her intelligence, but most people wasted neither on her.

  She sat up slowly, staring at Eli. His coloring was as bad as her own. She could not have helped noticing that, but she said nothing.

  "You get an earful?" Eli asked her.

  She drew as far away from him as she could get and did not answer.

  "You know your sister's in that car up ahead with some friends of mine. You think about that." "She's no danger to you," Blake said angrily.

  "Have her give you whatever she's got in her left hand."

  Blake frowned, looked toward Keira's left hand. She was wearing a long, multicolored, cotton caftan-a full, flowing garment with long, voluminous sleeves. It was intended to conceal her painfully thin body. At the moment, it also concealed her left hand.

  Keira's expression froze into something ugly and determined.

  "Kerry," Blake whispered.

  She blinked, glanced at him, finally brought her left hand out of the folds of her dress and handed him the large manual screwdriver she had been concealing. Blake could remember misplacing the old screwdriver and not having time to look for it. It looked too large for Keira's thin fingers. Blake doubted that she had the strength to do any harm with it.

  With a smaller, sharper instrument, however, she might have been dangerous. Anyone who could look the way she did

  now could be dangerous, sick or well.

  Blake took the screwdriver from her hand and held on to the hand for a moment. He wanted to reassure her, calm her, but he thought of Rane alone in the car ahead, and no words would come. There was no way everything was going to be all right. And he had always found it difficult to lie to his children.

  After a moment, Keira seemed to relax-or at least to give up. She leaned back bonelessly, let her gaze Hicker from Eli to the car ahead. Only her eyes seemed alive.

  "What do you want with us?" she whispered. "Why are you doing this?" Blake did not think Eli had heard her over the buffeting of the wind and the hissing patter of the rain. Eli obviously had all he could do to keep the car on the dirt road

  and the Mercedes in sight. He ignored completely the long, potentially deadly screwdriver Blake gripped briefly, then

  dropped. He was a young man, Blake realized-in his early thirties, perhaps. He looked older-or had looked older before Blake got a close look at him. His face was thin and prematurely lined beneath its coating of dust. His air of weary resignation suggested an older man. He looked older, Blake thought, in much the same way Keira looked older. Her disease had aged her, as apparently his had aged him-whatever his was.

  Eli glanced at Keira through the rearview mirror. "Girl," he said, "you won't believe me, but I wish to hell I could let you go."

  "Why can't you?" she asked.

  "Same reason you can't get rid of your leukemia just by wishing."

  Blake frowned. That answer couldn't have made any more sense to Keira than it did to him, but she responded to it. She gave Eli a long thoughtful look and moved slowly toward the middle of the seat away from her place of retreat behind

  Blake.

  "Do you hurt?" she asked.

  He turned to look back at her-actually slowed down and lost sight of the Mercedes for a moment. Then he was occupied with catching up and there was only the sound of the rain as it was whipped against the car.

  "In a way," Eli answered finally. "Sometimes. How about you?" Keira hesitated, nodded.

  Blake started to speak, then stopped himself. He did not like the understanding that seemed to be growing between his

  daughter and this man, but Eli, in his dispute with Ingraham, had already demonstrated his value. "Keira," Eli muttered. "Where did you ever get a name like that?"

  "Mom didn't want us to have names that sounded like everybody's." "She saw to that. Your mother living?"

  ". . .no."

  Eli gave Blake a surprisingly sympathetic look. "Didn't think so." There was another long pause. "How old are you?"

  "Sixteen."

  "That all? Are you the oldest or the youngest?" "Rane and I are twins."

  A startled glance. "Well, I guess you're not lying about it, but the two of you barely look like members of the same family -let alone twins."

  "I know."

  "You got a nickname?" "Kerry."

  "Oh yeah. That's better. Listen, Kerry, nobody at the ranch is going to hurt you; I promise you that. Anybody bothers you, you call me. Okay?"

  "What about my father and sister?"

  Eli shook his head. "I can't work no miracles, girl."

  Blake stared at him, but for once, Eli refused to notice. He kept his eyes on the road.

  PAST 3

  In a high valley surrounded by stark, naked granite weathered round and deceptively smooth-looking, he found a finished house of wood on a stone foundation and the skeletal beginnings of two other houses. There was also a well with a huge, upended metal tank. There were pigs in wood-fenced pens, chickens in coops, rabbits in hutches, a large fenced garden, and a solar still. The still and electricity produced by photovoltaic intensifiers appeared to be the only concessions to modernity the owners of the little homestead had made.

  He went to the well, turned the faucet handle of the storage tank, caught the cold, sweet, clear water in his hands, and drank. He had not tasted such water in years. It restored thought, cleared the fog from his mind. Now the senses that had been totally focused on survival were freed to notice other things.

  The women, for instance.

  He had scented at least one man in the house, but there were several women. Their scents attracted him powerfully. Yet the moment he caught himself moving toward the house in response to that attraction, he began to resist.

  For several minutes he stood frozen outside the window of one of the women. He was so close to her he could hear her soft, even breathing. She was asleep, but turning restlessly now and then. He literally could not move. His body

  demanded that he go to the woman. He understood the d
emand, the drive, but he refused to be just an animal governed by instinct. The woman was as near to being in heat as a female human could be. She had reached the most fertile

  period of her monthly cycle. It was no wonder she was sleeping so badly. And no wonder he could not move except to

  go to her.

  He stood where he was, perspiring heavily in the cold night air and struggling to remember that he had resolved to be human plus, not human minus. He was not an animal, not a rapist, not a murderer. Yet he knew that if he let himself be drawn to the woman, he would rape her. If he raped her, if he touched her at all, she might die. He had watched it happen before, and it had driven him to want to die, to try to die himself. He had tried, but he could not deliberately kill himself. He had an unconscious will to survive that transcended any conscious desire, any guilt, any duty to those who had once been his fellow humans.

  He tried furiously to convince himself that a break-in and rape would be stupidly self-destructive, but his body was locked into another reality, focused on a more fundamental form of survival. He did not move until the war within had exhausted him, until he had no strength left to take the woman.

  Finally, triumphant, he dragged himself back to the well and drank again. The electric pump beside the well switched on suddenly, noisily, and in the distance, dogs began to bark. He looked around, knowing from the sound that the dogs were coming toward him. He had already discovered that dogs disliked him, and, rightly enough, feared him. Now,

  however, he had been weakened by days of hunger and thirst and by his own internal conflict. Two or three large dogs

  might be able to bring him down and tear him apart.

  The dogs came bounding up-two big mongrels, barking and growling. They were put off by his strange scent at first, and they kept back out of his reach while putting on a show of ferocity. He thought by the time they found the courage to attack, he might be ready for at least one of them.

  PRESENT 4

  Eventually, the Mercedes and the Jeep emerged from the storm into vast, flat, dry desert, still following their arrow- straight dirt road. They approached, then passed between ancient black and red volcanic mountains. Later, they turned sharply from their dirt road onto something that was little more than a poorly marked trail. This led to a range of earth and granite mountains. The two cars headed into the mountains and began winding their way upward.

  By then they had been driving for nearly an hour. At first, Blake had seen a few signs of humanity. A small airport, a lonely ranch here and there, many steel towers carrying high voltage lines from the Hidalgo and Joshua Tree Solar Power Plants. (The water shortage had hurt desert settlement even as the desert sun began to be used to combat the fuel shortage. Over much of the desert, communities were dead or dying.) But for some time now, Blake had seen no sign at all that there were other people in the world. It was as though they had left 2021 and gone back in time to primordial desert. The Indians must have seen the land this way.

  Blake wondered whether he and his daughters would die in this empty place. It occurred to him that his abductors might be more likely to feel they needed him if they thought of him as their doctor. They might even give him enough of an opening to take his daughters and escape.

  "Look," he said to Eli, "you're obviously not well. Neither is your friend Ingraham. I have my bag with me. Maybe I

  can help."

  "You can't help, Doc," Eli said. "You don't know that."

  "Assume that I do." Eli squeezed the car around another of a series of boulders that seemed to have been scattered deliberately along the narrow mountain road. "Assume that I'm at least as complex a man as you are."

  Blake stared at him, noting with interest that Eli had dropped the easy, old-fashioned street rhythms that made his speech seem familiar and made him seem no more than another semieducated product of city sewers. If he wished,

  then, he could speak flat, standard, correct American English. "What's the matter with you, then?" Blake asked. "Will you tell us?"

  "Not yet."

  "Why?"

  Eli took his time answering. He smiled finally-a smile full of teeth and utterly without humor. "It was a group decision," he said. "We got together and decided that for your sake and ours, people in your position should be protected from too much truth too soon. I was a minority of one, voting for honesty. I could have been a majority of one, but I've played that role long enough. The others thought people like you wouldn't believe the truth, that it would scare you more than necessary and you'd try harder to escape."

  To the surprise of both men, Keira laughed. Blake looked back at her, and she fell silent, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," she whispered, "but not knowing is worse. Do they really think we wouldn't do just about anything to get away now?" "Nothing to be sorry for, girl," Eli said. The accent was back. "I agree with you."

  "Who are the others who disagreed?" Keira asked.

  "People. Just people like you and your father. Meda's family owned the land we live on. Ingraham . . . well, he was with a gang of bikers that came calling one day and tried to rape Meda- among other things. And we have a private hauler and a music student from L.A., a couple of people from Victorville, one from Twentynine Palms, and a few others."

  "Ingraham tried to rape someone, and you let him stay?" Blake demanded. He was suddenly glad Ingraham was driving the car ahead. At least he would not have time to try anything until they got where they were going-but what then?

  "That was another life," Eli said. "We don't care what he did before. He's one of us now." Blake thought of Ingraham's gun against Rane's head.

  Eli seemed to read his thoughts. "Hey," he said, "I know how it looked, but Ingraham wouldn't have shot her. I was afraid you or she might make a dumb move and cause an accident, but there's no way he would have shot her."

  "Was the gun empty?" Keira asked.

  "Hell no," Eli said, surprised. He hesitated. "Listen, I'll be this straight with you. The safest person of the three of you is Rane. She's young, she's female, and she's healthy. If only one of you makes it, chances are it will be her." He slowed, looked at Blake, then at Keira. "What I'm trying to do is build a fire under you two. I want you to use your minds and your plain damn stubbornness to make a liar of me. I want you all to survive." He stopped the car. "We're here."

  "Here" was a small high valley-a little space between the ancient rocks that formed the mountains. There was a large old house of wood and stone and three other wooden houses, less well built. A fifth house was under construction. Two men worked on it with hand tools, hammering and sawing as almost no one did these days.

  "Population explosion," Eli said. "We've been lucky lately."

  "You mean people have been surviving whatever it is you do to them here?" Blake asked. "That's what I mean," Eli admitted. "We're learning to help them."

  "Are you some kind of ... well, some kind of religious group?" Keira asked. "I don't mean any offence, but I've heard there were . . . groups in the mountains."

  "Cultists?" Eli said, smiling a real smile. "No, we didn't come up here to worship anybody, girl. There were some religious people up here once, though. Not cultists, just . . . What do you call them? People who never saw sweet reason around the turn of the century, and who decided to make a decent, moral, Godfearing place of their own to raise their kids and wait for the Second Coming."

  "Leftovers," Blake said. "At least that's what we called such people when I was younger. But this place looks as though it hasn't been touched by this century or the last one. Looks more like a holdover from the nineteenth."

  "Yeah," Eli said, and smiled again. "Get out. Doc. Let's see if I can talk Meda into cooking you folks a meal." He took the keys, then waited until Blake and Keira got out. Then he locked their doors and got out himself.

  Blake looked around and decided that almost everything he saw reminded him of descriptions he'd read of subsistence farming more than a century before. Chickens running around loose, pecking at the sand, other
s in coops and in a large

  chicken house and yard. Hogs poking their snouts between the wooden planks of their pens, rabbits in wood-and-wire