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But come on, it had been how long?
“You ready,” he said as he glanced over his shoulder.
Gus St. Claire didn’t look all that ready. The guy had on a black parka from the stock the guards used, and it was okay in the shoulders, too short in the arms. His boots were likewise on the lend from the supply closet, and as he stepped out onto the back terrace, he lifted them up funny, like a dog with booties strapped on its paws.
“Yeah, of course.” Gus zipped the puffy jacket up his chest to his chin. “I was born ready.”
The way his eyes bounced around the back forty suggested he was in an internal debate with himself to the contrary, but it was hard to know whether he was worried about being out in the open or if it was more what they were about to do.
Maybe it was that he was counting down to a departure from this fortress of relative safety—and was uneasy about it.
Leaving was a dumb idea, of course. But hey, stones and glass houses and all that: Daniel wasn’t exactly a poster boy for being sensible. Otherwise he wouldn’t be out here in the cold with his lungs, would he.
“Come on, Doc,” he said as he started off. “We’ll take it slow.”
Not that there was an option to go fast-wheeling. Both of them were dragging, and though Daniel wouldn’t have wished so much as a hangnail on Gus, it was nice to not feel like he had to apologize for his own snail’s pace.
After they crossed the flagstone terrace, they hit the dead lawn and rounded the winterized swimming pool. On the far side, they started into the meadow. The thing had been mowed one last time before the frosts had started, so short of watching out for gopher holes, the going wasn’t so bad.
Overhead, the sky was a dull gray, and the gathering light of day wasn’t making much of a difference when it came to illuminating the landscape.Daniel didn’t mind the relative darkness at all. He preferred the shadows, and instinctively, he searched the pines in the distance, and the open field, and the house behind. He’d made it clear to the guards that they were going out together, and explained what they were going to do. The uniformed types hadn’t liked it.Hedidn’t like it.
But there wasn’t a gun range inside the house or the lab, and Gus was determined to go home—and maybe this little tiptoe into the world of firearms would prove to the guy exactly how foolhardy it was for him to leave right now. Did the doctor really think he could come out here, shoot at a couple of tree trunks, and be qualified when it came to self-defense? No fucking way. Hopefully how hard it was going to be would make Gus change his mind.
And as for security, there were cameras everywhere, guards on standby—and outposts in the forest that were manned. They would be safe…
Fine, safe-ish. And if this kept Gus on-site? The roll of the dice was worth it.
“So this is where you came out to smoke?” Gus asked as they continued tromping through the short field grass.
“Ah…” Daniel glanced over, and as he flushed, he thought it was amazing how you could be a full-ass grown man and still feel sheepish when you got caught doing dumb shit. “How’d you know.”
“Lydia told me about it.” The doctor noddedto the forest line that was still a ways off. “I figure out here is the only place you’d get any privacy—plus you seem to know exactly where we’re going.”
“It was stupid.”
“Quality of life, not quantity.”
Daniel laughed in a hard burst. “I coughed the whole time, so it was neither of those.”
“Old habits die hard. You don’t need to apologize to me.”
“Even though I gave myself lung cancer?”
“I don’t judge.” The man shook his head, his dark eyes shifting over. “Your DNA let you down against an environmental toxin that, yes, is avoidable, but plenty of people get cancer without engaging in risk factors, and plenty of people engage in risk factors and live to be ninety-five. It’s just the luck of the draw. Like everything.”
“You’re a wise man, Doc.”
The grunt that came back at him could have meant a lot of things: pain from walking, stress from everything, modest agreement that he was a Mensa candidate.
When they reached the trees, Daniel entered the way he had before, through a natural gap between a stand of birches and two oaks. The going got easier because the underbrush was kept in strict control during the growth season so that the monitoring of the property was more effective.
The navigational props he’d set for himself wereintact, the sticks that were crossed or laid at specific angles on the ground, the branches that were hung in the V’s of trunks, the rock that was set in the cradle of a root, all precisely where he’d left them last. He tracked the directional cues on a parallel process, part of his mind making sure he didn’t trip and fall with his unreliable feet, the other half ticking off the progression of markers.
Gus was talking the whole time, his chatter a release of nerves, and who could blame him. Fortunately, the conversation—about the weather, and the college football playoffs that were approaching in a month, and what he liked with his Thanksgiving turkey—was not the kind of thing that required robust responses.
Meanwhile, Daniel was looking for signs of disturbance. Footprints. A pattern of broken branches. His makeshift trinket map fucked up because the points of orientation had been so subtle that they wouldn’t have been noticed and avoided.
There was none of that.
