Obedience

They all turned. He was standing in the trees, halfway down, holding himself in position by a sapling. Coming toward them.

The bartender.

“What’s going on?” De

The man didn’t say anything. He turned and began to claw up the hill. Fast, faster-grabbing trees as he went, turning up the fallen leaves with his boot heels as he tried to find his footing on the loose dirt.

“There’s a car up there,” Brian said.

There was. They could see the top of it from where they stood, parked in front of the empty house they’d just been to on St. Louis Street.

My God, Mary thought. He’s coming for us.

Before she could say anything, Brian was pulling her and they were ru

“There he is!” Brian shouted. Mary turned to see it: the car was pulling off St. Louis and speeding toward them. There were two men in the front seat.

“Oh Christ, oh Christ,” De

The ridge dropped away on either side of the car, and at some points along the road there was no guardrail. Mary looked to her right and saw the tops of the trees. It was the same thing on the other side. Behind the Lexus, the car was gaining on them quickly but De

“Faster, De

“I’m going as fast as I can!” De

The car was a silver, rusted Mazda RX7. It was right on their bumper now. Mary could see the two men’s faces. The bartender was driving, and the man in the passenger’s seat was the man from the trailer. Marco. Their stares were placid. Businesslike. As she stared at them, Marco raised a video camera to his eye. She could see its pulsing red light. My God, she thought, they’re filming us. The camera struck an awful fear in Mary, and she turned around and put her face in her hands.

“The interstate,” De

She looked up in time to see it whizzing by her on the right-hand side: the sign for I-64. Straight ahead.

De

“There!” De

Mary looked ahead of them. She could only see the distant clover of the freeway ramps rising out of the woods in the middle distance. “What?” she asked him.

“There! Right there!” he shouted again.

And then she saw it: a parking lot just before the on ramp. Maybe if De

“Pull in there,” Brian said, breathless now, leaning up into the front seat.

The Mazda swung out to the left, into the other lane. De

They didn’t. The car came to a stop, its struts popping and gravel dropping from the underside of the chassis in little metallic clicks.

They sat in silence for a moment as the dust rolled up over the car. When it had settled, De

Mary got out of the car. Her knees were weak, and she had to lean against the Lexus to steady herself. The blowing dust began to choke her, and she coughed violently, spitting on the ground. Soon the urge to vomit was uncontrollable. She fell to her knees and looked at the gravel, felt pebbles digging into her legs, but she could not release it. Instead, she cried. She sobbed into her hands and tried to find a point of release, some window out there where she could throw it all away, all of what was inside her, all the pain and frustration, all the knowledge, just throw it out and be rid of it, lose it on the wind.

“Here.” It was Brian. He was behind her with his hand on her shoulder. Then he was helping her up. Then they were standing by the car again, trying to decide where to go next. It was all operatic to her now, a scripted thing, and she was acting not on her own volition, but of some other accord. She was acting for the good of Professor Williams’s script.

“We could have died,” Brian said.

“Look,” De

They followed his finger to the sign that rose high over the freeway.

TRIP’SU-STOR-IT.

Immediately Mary knew what it meant. “Pig’s motorcycle,” she whispered.

They were standing, of course, on almost the exact spot where Professor Williams had taken that last photograph of the storage facility, the one that showed them where Polly could be found.

39

They walked up and down the aisles, checking the many storage garages for markings or anything that would suggest that one had something of interest inside it. They all knew they had been sent here. There was no question about it. Everything that had happened in the last two days had led them here. But now that they were here, the question became where to look. There were perhaps five hundred garages in the facility-too many to check one by one.

De

“That one there,” De

“Which one?”

“The one in the middle. Center of the shot. It has to be that one. He was trying to point us there.”

They walked in a straight line, trying to keep their eye on the door of the garage De

Nothing. The garage was locked.

Mary leaned on the garage door, her back against it. She felt so tired, so zapped, that she could have lain down on the gravel and gone to sleep for a hundred years. There was so much weight on her, so much awful tension.

Brian was walking down the bank of garages, which contained about a hundred in all, pulling on every lever. “Brian,” Mary whispered. But he was intent. She could hear him grunting with every failed pull from where she stood, the sound of it guttural, animalistic.

De

“It has to be here, doesn’t it?” De

“Why else would he show us those photographs? Why else-”