Blind Lake

“I won’t,” he promised. Whatever that meant.

He walked the hallway from end to end, opening doors. Apart from the room where Adam Sandoval lay motionless in his coma there were only empty storage spaces, locked pharmaceutical closets, vacant boardrooms, and darkened offices.

His server buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and talked to Elaine, who told him the night nurse had called Security and that the staff on duty were begi

Chris looked at the server in his hand: if his was working, why not Marguerite’s or Tessa’s?

If Marguerite and Tess were both missing, did that mean they were together? And if they weren’t in the building, where had they gone?

He made his way back to the lobby, to the heavy glass doors. If Marguerite had left the clinic she would have taken the car. There was no other way to travel in this weather. If the car was gone, maybe he could borrow a vehicle and follow it.

But Marguerite’s conservative little runabout was parked where Chris had left it, wheels on the curb, under a fresh layer of snow. He opened the door and snow came into the lobby on a fugitive wind, small flakes turning to watery diamonds on the tiled floor.

Elaine stood behind Chris and put a hand on his shoulder. “This is freaky, but you need to calm down.”

“You think Ray has something to do with this?”

“I thought of that. Ari said he’d been on the phone to Shulgin, who talked to Charlie Grogan. Ray’s out at the Eye somewhere.”

Chris held the door open a crack, letting frigid air play over his face. “She was right here, Elaine. Playing with that fucking wooden truck. People don’t just disappear.”

But they do, he thought. They slip through your fingers like water.

“Mr. Carmody?” This was Rosalie Bleiler, the duty nurse. “Could you close that door, please? Elmo — Elmore Fisk, he’s our night guard — would like to see you at the back entrance.”

“Did he find Tess?”

Rosalie flinched from his voice. “No, sir, but he found some child-sized footprints in the snow out there.”

Tess wasn’t dressed to be outdoors. “Did he follow the footprints?”

She nodded. “About fifty yards out past the visitor’s lot. But that’s the problem. He says the footprints don’t go anywhere. They just sort of stop.”

Thirty

To date there had been seven serious attempts to break out of Blind Lake. Three of them had resulted in the deaths by pocket drone of those who breached the fence and entered the no-go zone. Four more had been interrupted in the attempt by Security forces within the Lake. The most recent case had been an agoraphobic caterer who had elected to scale the fence solo but had lost his nerve halfway up. By the time Security found him and talked him down he had suffered frostbite to the fingers of both hands.

Herb Du

Except this week. This week he was on what the Security force called Dawn Patrol, nobody’s favorite duty. The idea of Dawn Patrol was to send out a guy in an all-weather vehicle to ride the circuit of the fence, presumably to rescue miscreants from their own misguided escape attempts. Dawn Patrol had yet to encounter even a single miscreant, but Herb supposed it had a certain deterrent effect. Today, given the shit-awful storm that had blown through the Lake overnight, Shulgin had told him his route was cut short: just a drive out to the main gate and back. But that was bad enough.

The snow had begun to taper off when he left the garage, but a fierce wind out of the northwest was still complicating matters. These Security vehicles were decent machines, smart-drive Hondas with mutable-tread tires, but a snowmobile would have been more efficient, Herb thought.

The main road from the Plaza at the center of town had been plowed during the night, but only as far south as the staff housing tracts. From there to the fence it was all blown and drifting snow, not quite deep enough to conceal the road but slow going even for the Honda. Herb took some consolation from the fact that there was absolutely nothing urgent or even necessary about this run. It made the delays easier to endure. He settled back in the steamy warmth of the cab and tried to picture his current favorite actress in a state of radical undress. (Back home, he had videoserver apps that did this trick for him.)

By the time he approached the main gate dawn had come and gone. There was enough light now to mark the limits of vision, a bubble of windblown snow around the cab of the Honda and a glimpse of ponderous clouds in a sky like a muddy river.

He reached the turnaround point at the main gate — no daring escape attempts in progress — and stopped, idling the vehicle’s motor. He was tempted to close his eyes and make up for some of the sleep he’d lost, sitting up after midnight watching old downloads, up at 3:30 to get ready for this pointless expedition. But if he was caught sleeping he’d be on Dawn Patrol for the rest of his natural life. Anyway, his breakfast coffee had worked its way through him and he had an urge to write his name in the snow.

He was climbing out of the cab into the frigid morning when the low clouds lifted and he saw something moving beyond the main gate. Something out there in no-man’s-land. Something big. He supposed at first it was one of those robotic delivery trucks carrying food and supplies, but when the wind shifted again he saw more of these uncertain shapes. Huge machines, just outside the fence.

He goose-stepped a few feet closer through the snow. Just to see, he told himself. He was as near the main gate as he meant to get when without warning it began to swing open. There was another lull in the wind, a moment of almost supernatural calm, and he recognized the vehicles out there as Powell tanks and armored perso

He turned and took a few awkward steps back toward the Honda, but before he reached it he was surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers in camouflage-white protective suits and aerosol masks. Soldiers wearing enhanced-vision goggles and carrying sonic-pulse rifles.

Herb Du

He put up his hands and tried to look harmless.

“I only work here,” he said.