Blind Lake

Right now he was scowling, butting heads with the Security chief. Chris couldn’t hear the conversation but he zoomed in his pocket recorder and archived a few seconds of video. Just a few, though. He was saving the bulk of the memory for the apparently inevitable collision of the robotic truck with the gate.

The truck had crept to within a hundred yards of the guardhouse. It looked unstoppably massive.

Elaine shaded her eyes and stared intently along the line of the fence. The setting sun had come under a rack of cloud and spilled a raking light across the prairie. She put her mouth against Chris’s ear: “Am I seeing things, or are there pocket drones out there?”

Startled, Chris followed her line of sight.

Bob Krafft, a contractor who had come into Blind Lake with a team of engineers to survey the high ground east of the Alley for the construction of new housing, had spotted the truck shortly after noon, when it was still a pea-sized dot on the wide southern horizon.

He had done some time in the Turkish wars and he recognized it as the kind of driverless resupply vehicle more commonly found in a combat zone. But the truck didn’t alarm him. Quite the opposite. Incongruous as it might be, the truck was still inbound traffic. Which meant the south gate would have to swing open to admit it. And that was a golden opportunity. He knew immediately what he had to do.

He found his wife Courtney among the cots set up in the Blind Lake gymnasium where they had languished for most of a week. He told her to wait right here but be ready to travel. She looked at him nervously — Courtney was nervous at the best of times — but kept her mouth shut and gave him a terse nod.

Bob walked two blocks (quickly, but not quickly enough to attract attention) to his car in the visitors’ lot under Hubble Plaza. He got in, double-checked the charge gauge, sparked the motor, and drove at a deliberate speed back to the rec center. His pulse was up but his palms were dry. Courtney, wandering through the big front doors even though he had told her stay put, spotted him and climbed into the passenger seat. “Are we going somewheres?” she asked.

He had always hated this about her, her Missouri trailer-park grammar. There were days when he loved Courtney more than anything in the world, but there were also days when he wondered what had possessed him to marry a woman with no more culture than the raccoons who used to raid her trash. “I don’t think we have a choice, Court.”

“Well, I don’t see what the hurry is.”

With any luck she never would. Bob was quarter-owner of a respectably successful landscaping and foundation business operating out of Constance. Thursday morning — tomorrow morning — he was supposed to meet Ella Raeburn, a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who worked in reception, and drive her to the Women’s Clinic in Bixby for a D C. Although it was not Bob’s fault that the vacuous Ella had neglected to use any form of birth-control or morning-after pill — unless you considered his predilection for brick-stupid women a fault — he did have to own up to responsibility for the condition she was in. So Thursday morning he would drive her to Bixby, buy her a few days in a motel to recuperate, write her a check for five thousand dollars, and that would be the end of it.

If he refused — or if this government-inspired Blind Lake fuck-up kept him confined here another day — Ella Raeburn would FedEx a certain video recording to Bob’s wife Courtney. He doubted Courtney would divorce him over it — the marriage wasn’t a bad deal for her, all in all — but she would hold it over his head for the rest of his life, the fact that she’d been treated to the sight of her own husband with his face buried between Ella Raeburn’s generous young thighs. The video had been his own half-baked idea. He hadn’t realized Ella would burn a copy for herself.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by half. If Bob failed to arrange for an abortion, Ella would be forced to throw herself on the mercy of her father. Her father was Toby Raeburn, a hardware salesman, a deacon at the Lutheran church, and a part-time basketball coach. His nickname was “Teeth,” because he had once knocked out the left bicuspid of a would-be car thief and then had the souvenir embedded in Lucite so he could carry it around as a good-luck charm. Toby “Teeth” Raeburn might be willing to extend Christian forgiveness to his daughter, but surely not to a middle-aged contractor who (as Ella would mention) had introduced her to the barbiturates that always put her in a cooperative mood.

He didn’t bear Ella Raeburn any particular grudge over the matter. He was more than willing to pay for her D C. She was dumb as a bag of hammers, but she knew how to look out for herself. He kind of admired that.

Courtney had been one of those before he married her. She had dulled down into a perpetual sullen snit, though, and that wasn’t the same.

“Did they call off the siege or something?” Courtney asked.

“Not exactly.” He headed toward the south gate, reminding himself to maintain an inconspicuous speed. Certainly the black transport was in no hurry. It hadn’t crept more than a quarter of a mile since he’d first spotted it, judging by the view from the rise past the Plaza.

“Well, what, then? We can’t just leave.”

“Technically, no, but—”

“Technically?”

“You want to let me finish a thought? They shut down places like this for security reasons, Court. They don’t want the bad guys getting in. People aren’t allowed to just come and go because that would make it hard to enforce. But basically they don’t care about us. All we want to do is go home, right? If we break the rules we get, what, a lecture?” More likely a fine, and probably an expensive one, but he couldn’t tell Courtney why it was worth taking that risk. “They don’t care about us,” he repeated.

“The gate’s locked, dummy.”

“Won’t be in a little while.”

“Who says?”

“I say.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m psychic. I have psychic powers of prediction.”

There was already a crowd gathering. Bob drove off the road onto the trimmed grass of the verge and parked as close as possible to the right side of the gate. He turned the motor off. Suddenly he could hear the wind whistling through gaps in the bodywork. The wind was getting colder — winter cold — and Courtney shivered pointedly. She hadn’t brought winter clothes to Blind Lake. Bob had, and he was punished for that foresight: he had to lend his jacket to whining Courtney and sit behind the wheel in a short-sleeve cotton shirt. The sun dropped down below a big raft of turbulent gray clouds, casting a sickly light over everything. A couple of months and all this prairie would be balls-deep in snow. It was melancholy weather. This kind of weather always made him feel sad and somehow bereft, as if something he loved had been carried away by the wind.

“Are we just going to sit here?”

“Till the gate opens,” he said.

“What makes you think they’ll let us through?”

“You’ll see.”

“See what?”

“You’ll see.”

“Huh,” Courtney said.

She had dozed off — warm, he guessed, with her arms lost in his oversized leather jacket and her chin tucked down into the collar — when the immense black truck paused in its crawl not more than ten yard from the gate. It was past dusk now, and the truck’s headlights pivoted to sweep the ground ahead of it in restless arcs.

The crowd had grown considerably. Just before Courtney fell asleep a couple of on-campus Security vehicles had come from town with their sirens howling. Now guys in what looked like rent-a-cop uniforms were waving the crowd back. Courtney was motionless and Bob hunkered down in the driver’s seat, and in all the commotion and darkness the car passed for an empty vehicle someone had parked and left. Within moments, Bob was delighted to see, the bulk of the crowd was actually behind him.