Fear (Gone 5)

Then back to Cigar.

“What was that?”

“The little boy.” Cigar giggled and placed his hand over his mouth like he’d said a dirty word. Then in a low whisper, “The little boy.”

Astrid’s throat was tight. The flesh on her arms rose into goose bumps. “What little boy, Cigar?”

“He knows you,” Cigar said, very confidential, like he was telling a secret. “Screaming yellow hair. Stabby blue eyes. He knows you, he told me.”

Astrid tried to speak and couldn’t. Couldn’t ask the question. Couldn’t accept what the answer might be. But at last, strangled words came from her mouth.

“The little boy. Is his name Pete?”

Cigar reached to touch his own eye, but stopped. He looked for a moment as if he were listening to something, though there was nothing but the sounds of gentle breeze and grating grasshoppers. Then he nodded eagerly and said, “Little boy says: ‘Hello, sister.’”

OUTSIDE

SERGEANT DARIUS ASHTON was very good with a truck engine. This did not mean he was necessarily good with an air compressor. But his lieutenant said a mechanic was needed at a site around the far side of the dome.

“That’s the air base, Lieutenant,” Darius protested. “They don’t have an HVAC mechanic over there?”

“Not one with your security clearance,” the lieutenant said.

“A security clearance for an air conditioner?”

The lieutenant wasn’t a bad guy, young but not arrogant. He said, “Sergeant, I would have thought by now, with your long experience in uniform, you’d know better than to expect everything to make sense.”

Darius couldn’t argue with that. He saluted and turned on his heel. A cheerful female driver, a corporal who knew the drive well, was waiting behind the wheel of a Humvee. Darius loaded his tools in the back. How was he supposed to know what to bring if he didn’t even know what he was supposed to be fixing?

The corporal had done a tour in Kabul, something she and Darius had in common, so they talked about that on the long, circuitous drive. And they talked about this supposedly great new Cuban pitcher who had reached the United States on a raft. The Angels were going to sign him.

The drive went up the highway, then onto a series of gravel side roads. There was another way to reach the Evanston Air National Guard base, but it would mean going all the way to I-5, then back south. This path was bumpy and dusty but it was quicker.

Much of the drive was within sight of the bowl. Darius had gotten used to it. Ten miles high, twenty miles across. It looked like someone had dropped a small, smoothly polished moon down on the Southern California coastline.

But there was no crater, no fracture lines. It hadn’t landed; it hadn’t exploded; it had just suddenly existed. A gigantic terrarium.

“Been here long?” Darius asked, nodding at the dome.

“Just transferred in last month,” the corporal said. “I saw it on TV, like everyone else. But it’s something in person.”

“It is that.”

“Weird thinking there are kids in there.”

They pulled up at a facility that had obviously been recently built. It had all the usual obsessive military neatness and order. A dozen buildings in ruler-straight rows. A barracks, an officers’ quarters, a number of command trailers, a communications building bristling with dishes and antennae.

The base was a hive of activity. Men and women bustling back and forth with very busy expressions on their faces. No one was lounging or grabbing a smoke or chatting on the phone. There was a self-conscious sense of Very Important Stuff Happening.

The facility was ringed with chain link topped with extremely serious-looking razor wire. The gate was guarded by unsmiling military police. IDs were checked against a manifest showing that yes, they were both expected.

One of the MPs accompanied them to one of the trailers. The corporal peeled off and Darius stepped into a blast of air-conditioning.

A sergeant asked him again for his ID. Then he handed Darius a paper to sign. The paper required him to reveal nothing of the purpose of his visit, of the existence of the facility, of the work there, of any of the personnel assigned there.

There was a great deal of official-ese and some decidedly threatening language.

“You understand, Sergeant, that you are governed by this security protocol?”