“Is that what you want to do?” “No.”

“Neither do I.”

A hundred and fifty yards farther, they reached another sharp turn. The road descended into a gully, swung hard to the left this time, and then headed up again.

Twenty yards beyond the bend, the way was barred by a steel gate. On each side of the gate, a nine-foot-high fence, angled outward at the top and strung with wickedly sharp coils of razor wire, stretched out of sight into the forest. The top of the gate was also wrapped with razor wire.

A large sign stood to the right of the roadway, supported on two redwood posts:

PRIVATE PROPERTY

ADMISSION BY KEY CARD ONLY

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

“They make it sound like someone’s hunting lodge,” Tina said.

“Intentionally, I’m sure. Now what? You don’t happen to have a key card, do you?” “Danny will help,” she said. “That’s what the dream was all about.”

“How long do we wait here?”

“Not long,” she said as the gate swung inward. “I’ll be damned,”

The heated road stretched out of sight in the darkness. “We’re coming, Danny,” Tina said quietly.

“What if someone else opened the gate?” Elliot asked. “What if Danny didn’t have anything to do with it? They might just be letting us in so they can trap us inside.”

“It was Danny.” “You’re so sure.” “Yes.”

He sighed and drove through the gate, which swung shut behind the Explorer.

The road began to climb in earnest, hugging the slopes. It was overhung by huge rock formations and by wind-sculpted cowls of snow. The single lane widened to two lanes in places and switchbacked up the ridges, through more densely packed strands of larger trees. The Explorer labored ever higher into the mountains.

The second gate was one and a half miles past the first, on a short length of straightaway, just over the brow of a hill. It was not merely a gate, but a checkpoint. A guard shack stood to the right of the road, from which the gate was controlled.

Elliot picked up the gun as he brought the Explorer to a full stop at the barrier.

They were no more than six or eight feet from the lighted shack, close enough to see the guard’s face as he scowled at them through the large window.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“He’s trying to figure out who the devil we are,” Elliot said. “He’s never seen us or the Explorer, and this isn’t the sort of place where there’s a lot of new or unexpected traffic.” Inside the hut, the guard plucked a telephone handset from the wall.

“Damn!” Elliot said. “I’ll have to go for him.”

As Elliot started to open his door, Tina saw something that made her grab his arm. “Wait! The phone doesn’t work.”

The guard slammed the receiver down. He got to his feet, took a coat from the back of his chair, slipped into it, zippered up, and came out of the shack. He was carrying a submachine gun.

From elsewhere in the night, Danny opened the gate.

The guard stopped halfway to the Explorer and turned toward the gate when he saw it moving, unable to believe his eyes.

Elliot rammed his foot down hard on the accelerator, and the Explorer shot forward. The guard swung the submachine gun into firing position as they swept past him.

Tina raised her hands in an involuntary and totally useless attempt to ward off the bullets. But there were no bullets.

No torn metal. No shattered glass. No blood or pain. They didn’t even hear gunfire.

The Explorer roared across the straightaway and careened up the slope beyond, through the tendrils of steam that rose from the black pavement.

Still no gunfire.

As they swung into another curve, Elliot wrestled with the wheel, and Tina was acutely aware that a great dark void lay beyond the shoulder of the road. Elliot  held the vehicle on the pavement as they rounded the bend, and then they were out of the guard’s line of fire. For two hundred yards ahead, until the road curved once more, nothing threatening was in sight.

The Explorer dropped back to a safer speed. Elliot said, “Did Danny do all of that?”

“He must have.”

“He jinxed the guard’s phone, opened the gate, and jammed the submachine gun. What is this kid of yours?”

As they ascended into the night, snow began to fall hard and fast in sheets of fine, dry flakes.

After a minute of thought Tina said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what he is anymore. I don’t know what’s happened to him, and I don’t understand what he’s become.”

This was an unsettling thought. She began to wonder exactly what sort of little boy they were going to find at the top of the mountain.

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