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Declan reentered the building. His flunkies followed. The door swung shut.

  Laura turned. “Your friend just drove off in the Hummer.”

  “Who?”

  “Hutch!”

  “In the Hummer?”

  Laura sighed. She dropped into an overstuffed chair.These rooms above the town’s florist and art gallery had been set up for use as a hotel, though they caught only the overflow from the two bed-andbreakfasts. The owner lived in an apartment behind the florist. Most likely he was now among the town’s captive masses.

  “You sure it was him?”Terry asked.

  “Yes.” She did not know whether to be elated or depressed.

  “Was Dillon with him?”

  “That’s just it, I don’t know. I didn’t see him, but Hutch ran around from the passenger side, as if he’d helped someone in. That’s why I didn’t see him at first.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Up the street. I think he turned on Shatu’ T’ine Way.”

  Terry kicked his blankets off and used the bed to push himself up. “Was anyone after him?”

  “Declan watched him leave.”

  Terry’s face skewed. “Like waving good-bye?”

  “Like he didn’t know he was leaving until he did, and by that time it was too late for Declan to do anything about it.”

  Terry looked out the window. “Whose are those other cars?” he said. “Looks like a Jeep Cherokee and an old Bronco.”

  Laura lowered her head into her hands. “They belong to some people in town, but I think Declan’s using them.”

  Terry sat on the arm of the chair. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Hutch would never, ever leave Dillon. I know that about him. He would die first. So we have to assume they’re together.”

  She looked up at him. Nothing but resolve on his face. He believed what he’d said.

  “So now what?” he said.

  She tried to make sense of the chaos in her head. “Hutch might try to make it to Fond-du-Lac or Black Lake, but Dillon knows that’s slow going this time of year.”

  “But still, another town.”

  Laura shook her head. “I don’t mean slow like a traffic jam. I mean slow like you can walk faster. And that’s assuming you don’t break an axle or completely slide or rattle right off the road.”

  “How do you get supplies?”

  “Everyone stocks up in the winter. Winter roads are smooth as concrete. Supply trucks drive right across the river. Floatplanes bring campers and fishermen once a week in the summer, twice a month this time of year, if that.”

  “What if somebody gets injured or sick?”

  “Dr. Jeffrey—”

  “But he can’t do everything. He doesn’t have all the things a hospital emergency room would have.”

  “He’s better equipped than most small-town docs because of the isolation. Besides, Black Lake has a hospital.”

  “That’s Black Lake.You just said it may as well be the moon.”

  She stood up. “Let’s go get your friend and my son.”

  “But where? If Dillon talks Hutch out of heading to one of the neighboring towns, where will they end up?”

  “Dillon, Tom, and I—we have a cabin. It was my father’s. Dillon will try to convince Hutch to take him there.”

  “I don’t know if Hutch . . .”

  Laura smiled. “Dillon can be very persuasive.”

  32

  “We need to head north.” Dillon was standing on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He swayed like a drunken sailor as the Hummer bumped over deep potholes and boulders, invisible in the darkness. Hutch was starting to think they’d make better time pushing the vehicle.

  The heater howled with hot breath, but it was losing its battle with the chilly wind that came through the glassless window in the door behind Dillon.

  Bracing himself, Dillon leaned over the wide center console. He looked Hutch square in the face. “We need to turn.”

  “What we need to do,” Hutch said, trying to avoid Dillon’s big, pleading eyes, quivering bottom lip, and about-to-cry whine, “is get help, and that means getting to another town.”

  “My dad says you can’t get to Black Lake now. In a month or two the mud will freeze over, and then you can.”

  “With all respect to your dad, Dillon, we don’t really have a couple of months.”

  Dillon’s face dropped. He sat in the passenger seat, which just about swallowed him.

  Hutch glanced over. “I’m trying to help us,” he explained.

  “My dad’s dead,” Dillon said.

  “I’m sorry.When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  Hutch braked to a stop, which wasn’t much slower than they’d been moving anyway. He put the transmission in park and turned in his seat to face Dillon. “What?” he said.

  Dillon stared down into the footwell. “Two days ago. Those men killed him. There was like . . . thunder . . . an explosion.”

  Hutch felt as though someone had punched him in the gut, again and again. He ached. The revelations of grief and pain just never stopped. He had thought it was really something that Dillon’s mother had survived the explosion outside the back door of the rec center, and he had thought it was really something that he and Dillon had escaped the heart of Declan’s lair. But Dillon had already suffered a catastrophic tragedy. It wasn’t that those other things didn’t count now, but it was like feeling elated at rescuing a man lost at sea, only to find that his legs had been bitten off by sharks.

  “Dillon.” He reached over and touched his hair. “I am so sorry. I am not going to let those people hurt you anymore.You or your mom. If I can, I’ll see that they pay for what they did to your dad.” He wondered what he would have done if he had had this information when he had his arrow pointed at Pruitt and then at Bad. He thought it would be a different world now, without Pruitt, without Bad, without Declan—or without him and without Dillon.

  Hutch peered through the windshield.They had been driving with the headlamps off in an effort to keep Declan’s eye in the sky from spotting the Hummer.

  He didn’t know what kind of technology was involved, whether whatever was up there had night-vision optics or infrared; all he could do were the things that made sense to him given his admittedly limited knowledge of what they were up against. As much as it seemed that Declan’s resources made him omniscient and omnipotent, that really wasn’t the case. If it were, he and Dillon would not be alive.Terry and Laura would not have survived Declan’s last blast.

  Hutch had escaped from them in the woods and again when David was murdered, thanks only to Terry’s relatively insignificant pistol.True to what Hutch knew about life, Declan’s powers seemed wildly inconsistent. Here was a man who could take over a town and imprison more than two hundred people, but in the course of pursuing four men, he’d succeeded in getting only one of them. One was enough, but it said something about the limits of his power.

  Beside him, Dillon sniffed, and he realized the boy was crying. He had lost his father, which meant another success to Declan. He was sure there were others he didn’t know about. He could not help but believe there was something about Phil,Terry, and himself that somehow neutralized Declan’s power.

  What was it? What had they done differently from David and Dillon’s father? He had been there when David died. Had almost died himself. To find a common denominator, he needed to know more about how Dillon’s dad had died. Regardless of how potentially crucial the details could be, he would never ask them of Dillon. He needed to find Laura. He could not return to town, and he had no way of knowing where she might be. She was with Terry and, he hoped, Phil, but now, after this much time, he didn’t know where any of them were. Then it dawned on him.

  “Dillon?”

  The boy barely glanced at him. His eyes were red and leaking. He did not seem ashamed, as though his grief supplanted every other feeling in the spectrum of human emotion.

  “Dillon, why do you want us to head north?”
>
  In a small voice Dillon said, “There’s a cabin.”

  “A cabin? What about it?”

  “Mom said to go there.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll go.”

  Dillon looked at him, really looked at him.

  “If that’s what you want, Dillon, that’s what we’ll do.Your mom is a smart lady, setting up something like that way before she could have known that you would ever need it.You want to go there?”

  Dillon nodded.

  “Do you know how to get to this cabin?”

  Dillon nodded.

  “Without . . . wait a minute . . . I have a map.” Hutch retrieved the vinyl topo map from his inside pocket. “Will this help?”

  Dillon shook his head. “Don’t need it. It’s by the fire.”

  “The fire?”

  “Last year’s fire. It burned miles of forest, but Dad and I went back to the cabin and it wasn’t burned.The fire came really close, but it turned away. Dad said that proved the cabin was special.”

  Hutch remembered flying over the burned land. How many miles from the campsite had their pilot said it was? He couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t too terribly far. Fiddler Falls and Black Lake had been evacuated, the pilot had said.

  “Is it walking distance from your house?”

  Dillon shook his head. “Dad takes a Jeep.”

  “How long a drive is it?”

  Dillon shrugged. “Couple hours.”

  “Are the trails really bad? Like this one?” Hutch didn’t want to go to a cabin to meet Laura if it would have been just as easy to get to Black Lake. But at the rate they were going, Black Lake was considerably farther than a couple of hours.Ten, twelve maybe.

  Dillon raised his eyebrows. “Not this bad.”

  Hutch used his thumb to wipe a tear from Dillon’s face. An intimate gesture he hoped Dillon would recognize as a sign of caring. He wanted the boy to trust him and to know he wasn’t alone. He said, “I can’t get there without you.You need to be my navigator. Can you do that?”

  Dillon smiled and nodded.

  Hutch held out his hand. “Partners?”

  Dillon took it in his own. His grip was surprisingly firm.They shook.

  Hutch looked out the windshield. In the dark, the road did not appear nearly as rugged as it was. “So where to, Mr. Navigator?”

  “There’s a trail a little ways back. It leads into the hills above town. We go that way.”

  “How far back?” In an effort to throw pursuers off their tail, he had started toward Fond-du-Lac to the west before circling back to head for Black Lake, due east. He could not be sure the trick had worked or that Declan hadn’t spotted them after they’d changed course. He dreaded the possibility of running headlong into them.

  “Just there!” He turned in his seat and pointed.

  Hutch saluted. He popped the vehicle into reverse and backed off the road. He threw it in drive and pulled onto the road, heading back the way they’d come. He prayed he was making the right decision.

  33

  Julian appeared in the doorway of the office Declan had appropriated for his headquarters and bedroom. Hunched over a briefcase full of electronic equipment, Declan glanced up briefly, then again to hold on Julian. The boy held the arrow he had found in the field in one hand, tapping it against his leg. He had brushed his long dark hair down over his forehead, as was his style.The bruise and gash were not evident. Still, he looked as miserable as a death-row prisoner after his last meal.

  “What?” Declan asked impatiently.

  Julian shuffled in. “Dec . . .” He paused, searching for words. “I don’t know about this.”

  “What’s this?”

  “All of this, everything we’re doing up here.”

  Declan straightened. “What’s the problem, Julie?”

  The boy shrugged, seemed to study the tile floor. “Pru’s video . . . I mean, who kills people and puts the footage in a video game? Isn’t that like saying, ‘Look what we did’?”

  Declan laughed. “You gotta trust me, kid. First, everything we do up here’s going to get scrubbed clean. You don’t think Dad would leave us exposed, do you?”

  “I don’t think he—”

  “Whatever happens here, Julian. He’ll take care of it, okay? He always does. Besides, Kyrill’s going to tweak the images, change the look of the people, the town, the landscape.We might run it all through a filter to make it look computer generated. The important thing is, we’ll get the physics right—the explosions, the crashes, the facial expressions. It’s going to take gaming to the next level, wait and see.”

  Julian nodded, the movement seeming to take all his strength. He turned to leave.

  “Julie.” Declan approached him. “You’ve got to get over this, dude.” He wrapped an arm around Julian’s neck. “If every bump and bruise puts you out of the game, you might as well not play at all.”

  “I didn’t ask to come.”

  “You like hanging with me. Dad wanted you to.”

  “I didn’t know . . . never mind.”

  “I won’t. But you gotta grow a spine, okay?”

  “The doctor said I got a concussion, Dec.”

  “He gave you meds, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, and I don’t know if the way I feel is from the knock on the head or all the pills. I’m sick and dizzy. I feel like I’m moving underwater.”

  Declan slapped Julian’s forehead, hard.

  The boy cried out and tried to jerk away, but Declan’s arm held him firm. He waited until Julian stopped struggling, then said flatly, “Get over it.” He released him, went to the case on the cot, shut the lid, and latched it. “Bring this out to the Jeep,” he said.

  Julian was touching his forehead and examining his fingers. Declan saw the blood. The kid really did have to toughen up. Reared in a world of chauffeured cars, tutored education, and nannies to towel you off after every shower, it was easy to be soft.

  Poverty and rough streets often drove people like their father to inhuman levels of work and determination, innovation and manipulation. So it was more than ironic and sad that the children of self-made men were pampered to the point of weakness and dependency. If these kids accepted only the comforts and did not go out of their way to find the challenges that would make them strong, they would be nothing more than possessions to be placed where they looked pretty, displayed as evidence of their parents’ humanity.

  Declan and Julian’s father had sired five children, each from a different wife. Declan’s slightly younger sister was institutionalized somewhere in Europe. A younger brother, older than Julian, had killed himself five years ago.Then there was the baby, two-year-old Clarissa, from Dad’s current wife, who was three years younger than Declan. So two Page siblings were already lost, either dead or as good as. Declan was determined to avoid their fate.

  He had offered to help Julian as well, but his little brother didn’t seem interested in being his own man. Money bought lots of things—freedom to live and travel in opulence, to experience the entire ban-quet of life’s possibilities; power and control over people. But it did not make you strong. Only struggle did that. Adversity. Poets said it: “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars”—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Buddhist philosophers believed it: “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey”—Kenji Miyazawa. The Christian Bible confirmed it: “See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.”

  So what were people born into wealth to do? How were you supposed to grow strong when there was no weight, no friction to challenge your muscles, your mind, your will? Unless you were satisfied being nothing more than a consumer, a spender of inherited fortune, you needed to create the challenge, the struggle, the friction. You needed to cut a tree down and catch it.To set your house on fire and leap through the flames.To kill and not be caught, or be caught and beat the rap.

  Grudgingly, Julie snatched up the case. He stopped at the door. He said, “I wa
nt to go home.”

  “I know.” Declan thought a moment. “Come here.”

  Julian didn’t move.

  “Come here,” Declan repeated.

  Julian turned and walked back.

  Declan untied a bracelet from his right wrist. Gestured for Julian to lift his arm.

  “I don’t want that,” the boy said.

  “Yes, you do. It’s peyote root from the Apaches. It’ll make you brave.”

  Julian shifted the arrow to the hand that also held the case. He raised his wrist.

  Declan indicated the arrow. “What’s that for?”

  Julian shrugged. “I like it. It’s cool.”

  Declan tied the bracelet to him. “There,” he said.“Your first amulet. Wait’ll you see what that does.”

  Julian looked at it. He rotated his wrist.

  “Yeah?” Declan said.

  Julian nodded. He shuffled out.

  Declan called, “Cort! Cortland!”

  She breezed in, considerably perkier than Julian.

  “I want you to stay here,” he said.

  “Dec—” she started.

  “Keep your eye on the place. Lock the doors after we leave. Don’t unchain the auditorium doors. Where’s your gun?”

  She lowered her head.

  “Cort?”

  “I think it got destroyed in the explosion out back.”

  “Or those guys out there got it?” he said, realizing but not caring that his tone was like kicking the already shaky scaffolding of her selfconfidence.

  While the doctor was tending to Bad and Julian, he, Kyrill, and Pruitt had gone out to examine the destruction. Shockingly, there had been no bodies, no body parts. He did not know how that last strike had missed. At least two—and he had thought four—people were in the kill zone when he fired.

  Too many glitches in the system. He supposed weeding them out was in part what he was there for in the first place. He only hoped that the deficiencies lay in one of the other divisions’ workmanship and not in the control pad Declan’s own company had designed.This was an ideal opportunity to show his father that video gaming was no longer about distraction and entertainment, but touched all aspects of life, especially when it came to the industry of war.