Relentless Page 15

  I backed the Mountaineer into the rain—then drove into the garage once more, put down the window, and said, “We meant to take Lassie.”

  Vivian looked at the dog cradled in her arms. “Mercy me.” After she put Lassie in the backseat with Milo, she took advantage of this unexpected opportunity to say, “Maybe for a while, Cubby, not so blithe. Be an optimist but not a flaming optimist. For a while, expect the worst and make yourself mean enough to deal with it.”

  I nodded, put up the window, and reversed into the rain once more.

  In the garage, Vivian waved at us until I shifted into drive and sped away.

  By the time we returned to St. Gaetano’s, vespers must have concluded more than an hour earlier.

  I worried that even as early as seven-thirty, the church might be locked. The benign days when houses of worship could be open around the clock without being vandalized were as far in the past as bell-bottom blue jeans, tie-dyed shirts, and psychedelic hats.

  I dropped Penny near the front entrance. The rain suddenly intensified as she climbed the steps and tried the door. Unlocked.

  As she went inside, I drove to the serviceway behind the church, parked but left the engine running. I got out, raised the tailgate.

  The sacristy door opened. Penny braced it with a suitcase.

  I went inside, and she said, “Somebody’s in the choir storage room off the narthex. The door was open. I think it was Father Tom.”

  My note was where I had left it. Together, Penny and I quickly moved our belongings from the sacristy closet to the Mountaineer.

  If I could avoid Father Tom, so much the better. Because I did not want to endanger him and also did not want to spend half an hour explaining the glimpse of Hell that our day had been, whatever story I told him would have to be at least incomplete if not a string of lies. I loathed having to lie to a priest, considering that by my calculation, I already was scheduled for 704 years in Purgatory.

  When all the luggage was loaded in the SUV, I decided against testing our luck by blotting the rainwater from the sacristy floor, as I had done previously. I pulled the door shut, and we drove away.

  Our destination was Boom World, as we called Grimbald and Clotilda’s property, and our route from the church took us past Beddlington Promenade, the dark and deteriorating shopping center where earlier we abandoned our Explorer.

  As we drove by, we had no difficulty seeing the SUV under the skeletal branches of the dead trees. It was illuminated by the headlights of the black Cadillac Escalade parked in front of it.

  Penny said, “Didn’t you tell me Waxx drove a black—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t draw attention. Don’t slow down.”

  “I’m not slowing down.”

  “Don’t speed up.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t hit anything.”

  “What about that red Honda?”

  “What red Honda?”

  “In the next lane.”

  “What about it?”

  “Can I hit that?”

  “Don’t make me nuts, Cubby.”

  “It’s harder to avoid being blithe than I thought it would be.”

  “Do you think he saw us?” she worried.

  “No chance. He doesn’t know what we’re driving. And the rain. And there’s a lot of traffic. We’re just another fish in the school.”

  My personal cell phone rang, not the disposable.

  Thinking John Clitherow, driving one-handed, risking a collision involving so many cars that it would set a world record, I fumbled the phone out of a raincoat pocket and took the call.

  Shearman Waxx said, “Hack.”

  I heard myself saying, “Hoity-toity snob.”

  Disconcerted, he said, “Who is this?”

  “Who do you think it is, you enema?”

  “You think you’re very cute.”

  “Actually, I have ugly feet.”

  “Already I found your SUV. Soon I will find you.”

  “Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow.”

  “And I will cut out your boy’s beating heart.”

  I didn’t have a snappy comeback for that one.

  “I will feed his heart, dripping, to your wife.”

  “Lousy syntax,” I said lamely.

  “Then I will, while you watch, cut out her heart.”

  Again, a perfect bon mot eluded me.

  “And I will feed it to you.”

  He terminated the call.

  I returned the phone to my pocket. I drove carefully with both hands, glad to have something to grip that would prevent them from trembling uncontrollably. After a moment, I glanced at Penny.

  To the best of my recollection, I never before saw the whites of her eyes exposed all the way around her dazzling blue irises.

  She said, “Hoity-toity snob? That was him?”

  “It pretty much sounded like him.”

  “He saw us. He knows what we’re driving now.”

  “No. The timing was coincidental.”

  “Then why did he call?”

  “The usual ragging you get from a psychopathic killer.”

  “Ragging?”

  “You know—all the gross stuff he’s going to do to us.”

  After a hesitation, she said, “What gross stuff?”

  Rolling my eyes to indicate Milo in the backseat, I said, “Dumbo, Despereaux, Pistachio.”

  Milo said, “Good grief.”

  “All right, all right. He says he’ll cut out your heart and feed it to your mother. Are you both happy to know that? Mmmmm?”

  “Don’t worry, Milo,” Penny said. “I absolutely won’t eat it.”

  “What else did he say?” Milo asked.

  “Then he’ll cut out your mother’s heart and feed it to me.”

  “This guy,” Milo judged, “is a major sicko.”

  Lassie growled agreement.

  We traveled several blocks in silence.

  Some of the intersections featured pavement swales that were overflowing with swift-moving water. Passing through those rushing streams, the cars ahead of us sprouted white wings and seemed for a moment about to fly up into the storm.

  Finally Penny said, “Not everything is a joke, Cubby.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re in serious trouble.”

  “I know.”

  “But I have to say …”

  I waited, then asked, “What?”

  She laughed softly. “Hoity-toity snob.”

  “Well, he called me a hack again.”

  “He’s not only a psychotic killer—he’s also rude.”

  “He is very rude,” I agreed. “I’d like to meet his mother.”

  “What would you say to his mother?”

  “I would severely chastise her for poor parenting.”

  “Our Milo is never rude,” Penny said.

  “Because he’s been properly raised.”

  “There was that one experiment that exploded,” she said.

  “Well, that’s just the Boom side of him coming out. It’s in his genes.”

  Behind us, Milo said, “This is so better.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “You guys—the way you are now.”

  “How are we now?”

  “Not scared silent anymore. I like it this way.”

  I liked it better that way, too, and when I smiled at Penny, she smiled at me.

  We would not have been smiling if we had known that eventually one of the three of us would be shot dead and that life would never be the same.

  At the eastern end of Orange County, many of the canyons are still home to more coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and deer than people. Carved into the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, some are mere ravines, others less narrow, all thick with trees and brush, a refuge for the contemplative, for those who dislike urban and suburban life, and for various eccentrics.

  The serpentine, undulatory tossed-ribbon of a road unraveled as if it were the
last feeble construction of the declining civilization that had built it. Huge California live oaks overhung the pavement, trunks and limbs char-black in our headlights.

  The houses were well separated even at the civilized end of the road. They grew farther apart the deeper we penetrated the canyon, the name of which I will not provide, for reasons soon obvious.

  With isolation came a different mood. Geological details seemed more dramatic, slopes steeper and rock formations more suggestive of violence. The woods thrust at us and the brush bristled aggressively, as though we had passed through a membrane, leaving benign Nature, entering a preternatural place in which a malevolent consciousness lived in the darkness, was the darkness, watched, and waited.

  When I saw lamplit windows back among the trees, they no longer appeared warm and welcoming, but eerie and forbidding, as though the unseen structures were not houses but abattoirs, temples of torture, and fiery forges in which were cast images of strange gods.

  The two-lane blacktop continued, but we turned onto a narrower gravel road that looped a few miles before rejoining the paved route. This one-lane track, which climbed the lower slopes of the canyon wall, was used largely by agents of the state forestry department.

  Wet weeds swished against the sides of the Mountaineer, and some semitropical plant, with pale leaves as large as hands, slid its many palms across the passenger-side windows.

  After some distance—for reasons soon obvious, I will not say how far—we came to a lay-by, where I could park alongside the track. When I switched off the engine and headlights, the darkness was as absolute as if we were in a windowless building. Only the drumming of the rain proved we remained outdoors.

  The Boom house faced the paved road that we had departed. But we were not entering by the front door.

  “We’ll be eaten alive, going in this way,” Milo predicted.

  “No mountain lion will attack a group of people,” Penny assured him. “They stalk what’s smaller than they are—and what’s alone.”

  “Lassie and me are smaller,” Milo said, and the dog whined.

  “But neither of you is alone,” I said.

  Milo was not a fan of wilderness. He embraced civilization and all its charms, regardless of its humongous carbon footprint.

  Hoods up, with two flashlights, we got out into the rain, and I locked the Mountaineer.

  Moving away from the gravel track, we waded through weeds and between trees until we came to a small low rock formation from which, in daylight, you could look down a gentle slope, through woods to the canyon floor, although not quite as far as the paved road.

  Scattered nearby on the loamy floor of the forest, among ferns, were several stones, each a unique shape, but each weighing precisely 4.4 pounds. Any one of them was a functioning key.

  I carried a stone to the rock formation and placed it precisely where Penny indicated with her flashlight.

  We stepped back, off the lock slab, which would not move if either too little or too much weight was applied. After a moment, a five-by-six-foot horizontal portion of the formation pivoted along what seemed to be natural fissure lines, cast aside the 4.4-pound lock key, and stood on end: a trapdoor.

  Although it appeared natural, the rock formation was man-made. Thirty-eight years previously, Grimbald, his intriguing father, his unique mother, his unusual brother Lenny, his irregular brother Lanny, his curious brother Lonny, his remarkable sister Lola, and his wondrous strange Uncle Bashir had joined with Clotilda and seven members of her uncommon and baffling family—all sixteen of them committed survivalists—to construct a combination home and end-of-the-world retreat prior to Grimbald and Clotilda’s marriage, as a wedding gift.

  You can think of this project as like an Amish barn-raising for newlyweds, except that none of these people was Amish, no barn was involved, they used power tools, they cussed sometimes, most of the construction was done in secret without building-department permits—and, if what we believe we know about the Amish is true, Grimbald and Clotilda began their married life with a great many more guns than did the couple for whom the barn was raised.

  Although both Grimbald’s and Clotilda’s families are no more forthcoming than the great stone heads on Easter Island, although they have a high regard for subterfuge and hugger-mugger, they have hinted that they have come together to build similar retreats for one another in Northern California, Oregon, Nevada, and Montana.

  Under the pivoting-rock trapdoor, our flashlights revealed a long narrow flight of concrete stairs and a stainless-steel handrail. Penny led, Milo followed with Lassie, and I brought up the rear, descending as if into a storm cellar.

  Halfway down the stairs, we came to a one-foot-wide, eighteen-inch-high recess in the left-hand wall. A steel rod with a rubber handgrip protruded from a slot in this recess. It was in the down position.

  As Penny pushed the rod up, it made a ratcheting noise. I heard gears clicking somewhere.

  Overhead, the rock trapdoor pivoted shut with a gasket-muffled thump. Without the inflowing air, the stairwell smelled of lime and wet dog.

  After the end of the world, reliable electrical service will most likely not be available from the power company—nor, I might venture, will you be able to buy those delicious little chocolate-covered doughnuts that are currently to be found in any supermarket. Consequently, the three secret entrances to Boom World are opened and closed by a system of weights and counterweights riding on cables, controlled by hand-operated levers and wheels, a system so mechanically complex that I would rather die horribly in Armageddon than try to learn how to operate and maintain it.

  At the bottom of the stairs was your standard impenetrable steel door. It looked not much different from the one protecting access to the panic room in Marty and Celine’s peninsula house. The door had no keyhole; the lock-release levers were concealed in the floor drain.

  The grid bars in the drain grate formed approximately half-inch square holes, except in each of the four corners, which featured a trio of larger openings. If you knew into which two corners to insert your fingers, you could lift the grate out of the way, exposing the drain and the hidden lock-release levers.

  In the event that you inserted your fingers into the wrong holes, the grate would not release but would amputate your digits.

  By the time my courtship of Penny matured to the inevitability of marriage, I had gotten to know her family, and I had on one occasion half-seriously wondered if, to protect their daughter from sexual predators, they had designed for her a wardrobe of cleverly booby-trapped clothing that would sever my hands at the wrists if I put them anywhere they had not been invited.

  Taking every measure that might thwart Shearman Waxx, we had not called ahead to let Grimbald and Clotilda know we were coming. Therefore, even if we lifted the drain grate properly and correctly used the hidden levers to unlock the blast-resistant door, we would be at great risk crossing the threshold. The Booms were in lockdown mode, which meant additional lethal devices had been engaged in the hallway beyond this antechamber.

  Beside the door, a capped pipe protruded from the wall. In the center of the two-inch-diameter cap was a pull-ring that connected to a taut, small-link chain inside the pipe. The pipe—and the chain—led into the main room of the shelter. When the near end of the chain was pulled, the far end swung a miniature brass hammer against a brass bell, producing a single loud, clear note.

  With a series of pulls on the chain, Penny rang out her personal passcode. She waited ten seconds and rang the code again.

  I could hear the notes echoing faintly through the pipe from a distant room of Boom World.

  Half a minute later, mechanically triggered clockwork gears began to turn inside the steel barrier, retracting a series of bolts from the jamb. The door opened.

  Penny confidently led the way across the threshold into the Hall of a Thousand Deaths.

  Grimbald and Clotilda actually called it the Hall of a Thousand Deaths, but they were exaggerating. In the walls of
the seven-foot-high, fourteen-foot-long passageway were dark holes like the muzzles of pistols, spaced irregularly and at various heights. In each hole waited a spring-loaded steel rod, blunt on one end and as sharp as a pencil on the other. There were 180 of these lethal projectiles, not a thousand.

  Mechanically rather than electrically controlled, the entire arsenal could be released in a single volley or in clusters of ten. The arming springs were so tightly wound and the rods so sharply pointed that Kevlar body armor would not protect a hostile intruder.

  Electric bulbs brightened the hallway, but if the power failed, backup batteries would take over. The batteries could be recharged by Grimbald or Clotilda riding a stationary bike adapted as a generator.

  To some people, survivalism is a hobby, to others a prudent philosophy. To my in-laws, survivalism was a religion.

  At the farther end of the Hall of a Thousand Deaths stood a steel door, different from the first in that it had a porthole of bulletproof glass. This circle framed Grimbald’s grinning face.

  When he opened his door, he filled the doorway side to side, top to bottom. Six feet six, 250 pounds, barrel-chested, with a head larger than any haberdasher allowed for when producing a line of hats, with a jolly face as flexible as Silly Putty, Grimbald was an embodiment of many myths: a bit of Paul Bunyan, a little Santa Claus, a trace of Zeus, a measure of Mars, a pinch of Odin….

  His bass voice lent an operatic quality to Grim’s greeting: “Children! What a delightful surprise. Welcome to our stronghold.”

  As usual, he wore a vibrant Hawaiian shirt, khaki pants, and sneakers. The shirt presented an acre of lush palm trees silhouetted against a sunset; and one of his shoes could have carried the baby Moses down the river more safely than an ark of bulrushes.

  Milo claimed to be afraid that Grandpa Grimbald—aka Grimpa— would step on him one day and not notice until, hours later, he realized that the icky stuff stuck to his shoe was squashed boy.

  The name Grimbald comes from the Old High German word for “fierce” and from the Old English word for “bold.” I had never seen him fierce, though certainly bold; I had no doubt that were you to attack him, he would have the ferocity to wring your neck till your head popped off.