“They’re not going to hurt her, are they?” asked Alicia. She was fighting back tears, fighting to keep control, Frank saw.
“From what your husband has told me they have no reason to. That is not a guarantee, but it offers reason to hope.”
“This is what you meant about this Evil allying itself with Chaos, right?” Frank wanted to accelerate, to pull around and use the motor home’s greater weight to run the ominous cruiser and its occupants off the road. Wanted to see the car roll over and over among the weeds and Joshua trees until it exploded in a ball of flame. Instead he followed meekly. “They were waiting for us.”
“You told me they were not expecting you.”
He sat a little straighter. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. That’s what the sergeant said.”
“Then we are still an anomaly to them. We must break away before they learn who I am.”
“Who are they?” Alicia asked. “What is this place?”
“An outpost of Evil. That much is certain. What kind of Evil we do not yet know.”
They fell silent, following. Other vehicles passed them regularly now. Frank tried not to look in their direction, hoped Alicia did not. Steven remained in the back, absorbed in his comic books, for which Frank was grateful.
Each car featured the same blank-faced driver, gray robots immune to everything but their driving. Chauffeurs on a concrete Styx. Like the cars and trucks, the passengers they were convoying came in all sizes, colors, and shapes.
Frank watched as an open-topped Jeep went bouncing past, towing two middle-aged men behind it. Both were naked and obviously had been dragged a considerable distance. Their bodies were raw and bloody and yet they acted lively enough. Probably more alive than they wanted to be. A big blue Lincoln cruised by smoothly. An attractive woman of middle age hung out the rear back window. She was screaming and waving both arms frantically. He had a quick glimpse of her companions in the back seat. They were ugly and alien enough to stop a sensitive man’s heart.
The Jeep and the Lincoln were exceptions. The majority of vehicles that roared past had all their windows rolled up. Their human occupants were visible only as jerking, gesticulating silhouettes, tormented shadows riding in the back of Chevrolets and Mercedes and VWs. Frank wondered if there was a formal relationship between the class of vehicle and its passengers, as well as the kind of tortures they were undergoing.
Only the motor home drove in the slow lane. We’re normal, he thought. Maybe that’s why these cops find us abnormal. A check of the speedometer showed they were doing fifty. Their captors were driving cautiously.
The landscape commenced a radical metamorphosis. This time it wasn’t a matter of a few stunted, distorted plants. The sky had turned a pale greenish hue, sickly and unhealthy-looking. Pools and ponds of molten sulfur and other unidentifiable acrid fluids pockmarked the terrain on both sides of the highway. He turned the air-conditioning up all the way. They might freeze, but at least they could breathe. The air outside stank of rotten eggs and burning flesh. The distant mountains were now obscured by steam and mist rising from pools of boiling mud.
Once Frank thought he glimpsed a line of at least fifty men, women, and children yoked to an enormous four-wheeled wooden cart. The cart had barred sides through which twisting, contorting bodies tried to squeeze. Blood and excrement formed a noisome trail behind the great wheels.
Squatting atop the front of the cart, wielding long metal whips, were a pair of nightmare faces with bulging eyes and long fangs. They had no legs and bounced up and down on a pair of muscular arms. All in a nightmarish glimpse as the motor home cruised past, its air-conditioning humming efficiently. After that he ignored the terrain on both sides of the highway and concentrated on the road ahead.
Whatever else might happen, he did not want to break down in this country. Alicia rested a hand on his leg. Even going fifty with the air conditioner running on high he could still hear occasional pitiful screams from the passing cars. The shrieks of the damned filled the air beyond the barbed-wire fences that delineated the limits of the highway.
Only the cacti had done well here. They had ballooned to enormous sizes, with spines like swords. Prickly pear and jumping cactus, cholla and devil’s tail covered the ground. Everyone he’d seen beyond the fence had been naked and barefoot.
It took him a moment to recognize a different humming sound. A glance in the rearview showed Mouse cuddling a frightened Steven. Apparently he’d forsaken his comics for a look outside and had been traumatized by what he’d seen. Now she was doing her best to reassure and comfort him.
“It’s all right,” she was telling the boy over and over. “Everything will be all right.”
“But I want to go home.” Steven’s voice was barely audible. “I don’t like this place. I want to go home.”
“In good time we shall all return home.”
Alicia raised no objections to Mouse’s maternal exertions, realizing that their visitor was doing a better job of calming her son than she could herself. She had enough trouble fighting down her own hysteria. All she could do was concentrate hard on the taillights of the police car in front of them, concentrate and not think.
Once she’d made the mistake of looking to her right, at the land beyond the highway. She’d seen half a dozen creatures, each no taller than four feet, stockily built and clad in black pants striped with yellow. They surrounded two women, a mother and daughter. Each time the women would try to run through the circle, two or three of the imps, or devils, or whatever the creatures were, would grab the naked figures and throw them back into a pile of bed-shaped cacti. Both women were thick with imbedded spines, and blood trickled endlessly down their bodies. Beyond them two young men fought to escape a similar circle. It struck her then that the men were trying to reach the women, and the women the men. Shuddering, she turned away from the ghastly sight, praying that the four were not related.
The smooth unbroken concrete roadbed was a white slash of normality in the midst of nightmare. That, and the police cruiser ahead that held her daughter.
“Frank, what’s going to happen to us?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to us.” He said it because he didn’t know what else to say, and because he strongly suspected that to give in to pessimism in this would be to give in to madness. “We’ll get out of this all right. Wendy, too. It’s just a mistake on somebody’s part. Like the patrolman told us.”
“He’s not a patrolman.”
“I know that!” Immediately he apologized for snapping at her, conscious how close he was to the breaking point. He lowered his voice. “I just don’t know what else to call him.”
She was sobbing now. Softly, not hysterically but steadily. “What’s going to happen to us, Frank? What is this place? Where are we?”
“I think you know where we are, Alicia. I think we’ve both known for several miles. It can only be one place, and it isn’t Baker.”
6
AN OFF RAMP LOOMED just ahead. Frank wasn’t surprised when the police cruiser’s turn signal began flashing.
There were two lanes. The right one was backed up onto the highway with cars and trucks. The left was empty until the patrol car started up it. As they followed close behind, Frank saw that the land surrounding the highway was still barren but full of red buildings. The plethora of architectural styles was astonishing. There was no rhyme or reason to the town that he could see. Victoriana slumped next to early medieval, Islamic alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, Balinese beside early Russian.
There was a stop sign at the top of the off ramp. A crossroad ran right, through part of the town, and left via an overpass to the other side of the highway. Directly ahead lay an on ramp. Part of him desperately wanted to take it, to chance pursuit by the patrol car, which had already turned right onto the crossroad. They’d have a slight head start and the down ramp would let him build up speed quickly.
But not without his daughter. Not without Wendy. She might be something of a rebellious airhead, but no more so than many teenage girls her age. He loved her even when he yelled at her. No way was he leaving her in this place.
There was a big parking lot off to the left, fronting a squat, single-story building. Feathery antennas protruded from the roof, giving the edifice the appearance of a bloated caterpillar hugging the ground.
Frank had no trouble turning across the road since there was no oncoming traffic. It was all one way. The lot was full of police cruisers and vans, all the same color as the one carrying Wendy. Above the main entrance a sign unsurprisingly proclaimed:
HADES JUNCTION POLICE
The cruiser they’d been following parked. Its driver turned off the spinning red lights and exited. A moment later Wendy emerged in the firm grasp of the sergeant. Her headphones hung from her neck. Fear and confusion vied for dominance on her face.
The older officer held onto her as he beckoned toward the motor home.
Frank rose, unlatching his seatbelt. “You stay here.”
“Not a chance, Frank. I’m coming, too.”
“I think we’d all best go.” They both looked at Mouse. She indicated the waiting police. “Their company offers official protection, at least until they find out more about us. I’d rather not stay out here alone.”
Frank hesitated, then nodded. “All right. I’m taking your advice because I don’t know what else to do. Steven comes, too?”
“Especially Steven.” She put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. Alicia noted the gesture but said nothing.
After checking to make sure the doors and windows were locked, Frank followed them outside. He paused atop the steps, his attention caught by the long line of vehicles backed up in the lane they’d just exited. They crawled slowly toward an imposing gate a couple of hundred yards down the road, inland from the highway off ramp.
He couldn’t read the symbols atop the gate, but he had no trouble with the big steel sign just down the road from the police station parking lot. It was painted cherry red and only confirmed what he’d already guessed. The three words were a contradiction in terms.
WELCOME TO HELL
He hurried after Alicia and Mouse and Steven, not wanting to be left behind outside. As he hurried, he wiped sweat from his cheeks and forehead. It had been hot by the side of the road, but not this hot. The paved parking lot was a frying pan, Death Valley’s Furnace Creek in high summer. He fancied he could hear his sweat evaporating into the air.
