The vehicle Pike had chosen for the run was one of the hardened transports — not military surplus exactly, the category of vehicle that existed in the post-Shroud world which was civilian equipment that had been reinforced by people who understood that civilian equipment was no longer sufficient for civilian conditions. Plated doors. Reinforced glass. The kind of thing that would not stop a River Brute but would stop a Runner and would stop two Runners and would give you time to address the third.
Pike drove. Dylan was in the passenger seat with his jacket zipped and his guitar case in the rear because Dylan did not go anywhere without the guitar case and Pike had stopped arguing with this the same way he had stopped arguing with other fixed facts about Dylan, which was to acknowledge them and proceed. Steve was in the rear left with the rifle Pike had given him and the focused quality of a man who had been given a task and understood the task and was going to do it. Three others filled the remaining rear positions — capable, armed, not requiring introduction.
The road out from the mine was clear. It was always clearest in the morning, Pike had found — the roaming packs moving differently in daylight, less coordinated without the dark to work with, the individuals more visible and more addressable. He kept the speed steady and his eyes on the tree lines on both sides and his hands on the wheel with the easy grip of someone who had been driving difficult roads long enough that difficult roads did not require the grip to be tight. "Genesee Abbey first," Pike said. Dylan was looking out the window at the landscape going past — the Genesee Valley in the early morning light, the particular quality of it, the way the ridgelines caught it, the creek visible through the tree breaks running cold and clear the way it always ran. "You know the monks had the best garden in the county," Dylan said. "Before all this. You could buy honey there. And bread." He paused. "The bread was something else." Pike said nothing. He was watching the road.
The Genesee Abbey came into view through the tree line with the quality of a place that had been built to be permanent — the stone of it, the careful proportions, the particular stillness that old religious buildings carried regardless of what was happening around them. Pike stopped the vehicle at the front approach and looked at it for a moment before getting out. The grounds were quiet. Not the quiet of early morning. The other kind. He got out. The crew got out. Dylan got out without being asked and stood beside the vehicle looking at the building with his hands in his jacket pockets. They went in.
The main hall first. The light came through the windows in the way light came through abbey windows — angled, deliberate, the architecture having been designed to do something with the light and continuing to do it regardless of current circumstances. On the floor: habits, robes, the dark cloth of the brothers' daily dress, pooled on the stone in the shapes of people who had been standing and then were not, the fabric settling into the gravity of the absence the way fabric settled when the thing wearing it ceased to be present. One near the window — a breviary open on the ledge beside it, the page turned to the office of lauds, the morning prayer, the ribbon marker still in place, the robe directly below the breviary, a pair of sandals beside it, a simple wooden rosary. One near the long table in the center of the hall — a coffee cup still faintly warm beside it, the robe under the chair, a watch on the table, a folded handkerchief. Others throughout the space, each one where a person had been, each one the complete absence of that person — not just the outer garment but everything, the underthings, the personal items carried in pockets, the small worn things that people kept on their bodies because they kept them on their bodies and had done so long enough that the keeping had stopped being a decision.
Dylan stood in the middle of the hall and looked at it. He was quiet for a long moment. "Brother Thomas used to come into the shop looking for strings," he said. Not to anyone specifically — to the room. "They had a few guitar players in there, the younger brothers. He was a quiet guy. Deliberate. Like everything he did he'd already thought about it twice." He looked at the robe near the window. At the open breviary. At the rosary beside it. "He was one of the good ones." He stopped. There was not more to say than that and Dylan understood when there was not more to say. "All right," Pike said. He looked at the hall one more time. "Back in the vehicle." Dylan looked at the robe near the window for another moment. Then he turned and walked back out without looking at it again.
Mooner's Jump was a quarter mile up the road on the north side — the bridge visible from the approach, the creek below it running cold and dark in the morning shadow of the ridgeline. The pool under the north side of the bridge was the kind of pool that bodies of water became when the geography was right — deep, still at the edges, the quality of a swimming hole that generations of people had found and used and told other people about in the way of places that belonged to everyone who knew about them. Pike slowed as they crossed the bridge. Dylan looked down at the pool from the passenger window. "Used to be college kids out here on summer nights," Dylan said. "Townies too. You'd drive by and half the time there'd be somebody up on the railing." He smiled slightly at the memory. "You'd get mooned. That was basically the tradition. You drove by Mooner's Jump after dark you were accepting the possibility." "I'm aware," Pike said. "Right, you grew up here." "Yes," Pike said.
Dylan looked at the pool below. "That's what it looks like," he said. "In the mine. At the Abbey." He paused, finding the words. "Like somebody just — took everything off and jumped in. Outerwear, underwear, jewelry, the hat they'd been wearing all winter. Everything that was on the person. All of it right there." He shook his head. "Just not the person." Pike watched the road. "People don't go skinny dipping in robes," he said. "No," Dylan said. "They don't. That's not what this is." He looked out the back window at the bridge receding behind them. "But that's the picture I keep coming back to. Everything that was on them. Right there. Like they went in and kept going somewhere the clothes couldn't follow." The vehicle moved on up the road.
Warsaw was forty minutes out. Pike raised the Warsaw mine on the radio twice before they reached it and got nothing both times — not static, not interference, simply no response, the channel open and empty in the way a channel was empty when there was no one at the other end of it to respond. The mine at Warsaw was different from Retsof in the ways that mines were different from each other — different scale, different age, different character, the personality of an underground operation shaped by its geology and its history and the people who had run it. Angie had run the office. Pike knew Angie the way people in the same industry in a specific geographic area knew each other — professionally, reliably, with the accumulated mutual respect of people who had both spent years doing difficult work correctly. Angie always answered the radio.
The approach to Warsaw was clear. Pike stopped the vehicle at the entrance and they got out and he looked at it the way he had looked at the Abbey — reading the quality of the quiet before committing to what the quiet meant. The gate was open. Not forced — open the way a gate was open when the person who last went through it had simply not closed it, had expected to come back and close it or had expected someone else to come through behind them and the expectation had not been fulfilled. They went in.
The office first. Angie's desk had the organized quality of a person who ran an operation correctly — the logbooks open to the current page, the radio equipment on and receiving, the coffee mug with a skin of cold coffee on the surface that told Pike it had been poured that morning and left that morning. Her jacket was on the back of her chair. Her reading glasses were on the open logbook. Her shoes were under the desk. Just the shoes. Pike looked at the shoes under the desk for a moment. Then he looked at the logbook. The last entry was in Angie's handwriting — the population count as of yesterday morning, neat and precise, 637 confirmed, all secure, no external contact. He looked at the count. He looked at the shoes. "Office is the same," he said. "Fan out. Check every section."
They fanned out. The mine proper told the same story the office had told — clothes and personal effects distributed through the tunnels and the main gathering space and the sleeping areas in the pattern of things left behind by people who had not left in any direction that a tunnel or an exit provided. The pattern Pike now recognized because he had read it for three days in his own mine and had walked every tunnel and checked every exit and arrived at the same conclusion each time. No one had gone out. The count was wrong though. He could see that within twenty minutes of walking the mine — the scale of the absence was not the scale of 637. He walked the occupied areas, the sleeping spaces, the communal sections, and he counted what remained and what remained was not nothing.
He came back to the main space. "Roughly eighty," Steve said, coming in from the eastern section. "Maybe a few more in the deeper tunnels. But they're not here." "Where," Pike said. "Tracks," Steve said. "Outside. Leading out the main entrance. North up the slope. Looks like they left on foot — some running from the gate pattern, some walking. Mixed." He paused. "Maybe eighty sets. Went out sometime last night or early this morning." Pike went back outside and read the tracks himself. Not running from something — running from the absence of something, the panicked exodus of people who had woken up in a mine where hundreds of people had disappeared and had made the decision that staying inside that mine was no longer a thing they could do. He followed the line of them with his eyes up the slope to the north where the road curved toward the ridge. He looked at Dylan. Dylan was looking at the ridge. "Bowling alley's up there," Dylan said. Pike looked at the ridge. "Yes," he said.
The bowling alley sat on the hill with the stubborn presence of a building that had been built to last and had lasted — the kind of commercial construction from a specific era that overdid the structural requirements because overdoing them was simply what you did, and the result was a building still standing in conditions that had taken down things built with more ambition and less concrete. The parking lot had vehicles in it. That was the first sign. The second was the light coming from inside — not electrical but lanterns, the warm glow of people who had figured out how to have light in a space and were using it.
Pike stopped the vehicle and looked at the building. "Armed?" Steve said. "Assume yes," Pike said. He got out slowly, kept his hands visible, moved toward the entrance with the deliberate pace of someone announcing themselves as not a threat while maintaining the awareness of someone who understood that not a threat was a position you held until the situation confirmed it. The door opened before he reached it. A man in his fifties with a hunting rifle held across his body — not raised but held, the position of someone who was prepared and was not yet committed to prepared meaning anything specific. He looked at Pike. At the vehicle. At Dylan, who had gotten out and was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets with the unthreatening quality that Dylan carried everywhere without effort. "Harlan Pike," the man said. "From Retsof." "Yes," Pike said. "I'm not here to cause you any trouble. I'm here because you've got people who need to be somewhere safer than a bowling alley." The man looked at him for a long moment. Then he stepped back and held the door.
Inside, roughly eighty people were distributed through the lanes and the seating and the counter area with the quality of people who had not slept and had been in a confined space with a shared catastrophe long enough that the catastrophe had settled into something they were living inside rather than reacting to. The light was lanterns on the scoring tables and along the counter. Someone had found the bar's remaining stock and it was present in the room in the way that alcohol was present in rooms where people were managing something they did not know how to manage. Not a party. Not celebration. The desperate warmth of people using what was available to hold themselves together.
Pike looked at the room. At the faces. He saw what Dylan's pattern looked like from the outside — not the absence but the presence, the ones who remained, the quality of people still carrying something, still in the argument, the loss written on them not just as grief but as the particular grief of people who had been left and did not understand why and were turning that question inward with the cruelty that unanswerable questions produced when they had nowhere else to go. A woman near the far lane was sitting with her hands around a bottle she wasn't drinking from and looking at the floor with the expression of someone trying to understand a math problem that did not resolve. "My husband is gone," she said. Not to Pike specifically — to the room. "My kids are gone. Both of them. Seven and four." She looked up. "I'm still here." Nobody answered her. A man two tables over: "My wife. My wife and my mother. Both of them." He shook his head. "I don't understand it." "My brother," someone else said. "But not me." The accumulation of it in the room — each person carrying their version of the same thing, the ones present and the ones gone and the impossible arithmetic of why this one and not that one, why the children especially, why the youngest ones most of all.
Pike listened to it for a moment. He let it be present. Then he spoke. "I don't have an answer for why," he said. His voice carried in the space the way practical voices carried — without effort, without performance, present at the volume required. "I don't know why some people went and some people didn't and I'm not going to stand here and tell you I do." He looked at the room. At all of them. "What I know is that you're here. And outside this building there are still roaming packs of mutants that do not care about your grief or mine." He paused. "The people who are gone — wherever they went — they are not in danger right now. You are." He looked around the room. "I need you to get up. I need you to come with me back to the Warsaw mine where there is food and water and walls and people who are going to help you figure out the next part." He stopped. "You are allowed to grieve. You are allowed to not understand it. You can do both of those things inside the mine where you are not going to get bitten." He looked at the woman with the bottle. "Your kids went somewhere. That's real. I can't tell you where. But they didn't suffer and they weren't afraid and you being dead in a parking lot doesn't get you any closer to them."
The room was quiet — the quality of quiet that arrived when something true and hard had been said in the right way. The woman looked at him. She set the bottle down. She stood up. One by one the others moved — the gradual motion of people who had been in one position for a long time and had just been given sufficient reason to change it. Not enthusiastically. Not with relief. With the tired compliance of people who understood that the practical man was right and that being right did not make the situation smaller but did make it navigable. Steve and the others moved through the room quietly — helping people up, gathering what needed gathering, the functional kindness of people doing a job that happened to also be a human thing.
Dylan stood near the entrance and watched them come toward the door. He looked at the room as it emptied — at the lanterns on the scoring tables, at the bottles on the counter, at the evidence of eighty people spending a night inside the question of why they were still here. He said nothing. He held the door.
The convoy back to the Warsaw mine moved slowly — the hardened transport leading, the people following on foot and in the vehicles they had driven up the hill, the careful pace of a group moving through territory that required attention. No contact on the way back. The approach was clear. The mine received them the way mines received people — simply, without ceremony, the walls and the dark and the mineral cold of it already doing what underground spaces did for people who needed to be inside something solid.
Pike got them settled. It took the better part of an hour — the practical work of integrating eighty people into a space that had not been configured for them, finding sleeping areas, finding food, finding the small immediate logistics of people who needed to stop moving and start being somewhere. When it was done he went to the radio room. He picked up the handset. He opened the channel to Sanctuary. "Ben," he said. "I need Saul." The line crackled. "Go ahead Pike," Ben said. "He's here."
Pike looked at his notes. At the Warsaw count. At the Abbey. At Mooner's Jump in his mind — the pool under the bridge, the image of everything a person had been wearing settling into a pile where the person had been, the clothes and the boots and the personal items left the way they were left when the thing that gave them meaning simply ceased to be present. He delivered it. All of it. The Abbey empty, the robes on the stone floor, the breviary open to lauds, the Warsaw mine at 637 down to roughly eighty, the rest gone the same way, the tracks to the bowling alley, the people there, the quality of who remained and who did not.
He delivered Dylan's read. He delivered it the same way he had delivered it the first time — as information from a source he could not formally validate and would not formally dismiss, because Dylan had looked at that room full of eighty people who had been left behind and the thing those eighty people had in common, the argument they were still in, the thing they were still carrying, was sitting in that bowling alley as plainly as the lanterns on the scoring tables. When he finished the line was quiet. "Copy," Saul said. "We're building the full picture here. Keep counting. Keep the channel open." "Copy," Pike said. He set down the handset.
He sat in the radio room with his hands flat on the table in front of him and looked at the wall of the Warsaw mine and thought about Angie's shoes under the desk and the open logbook and the cold coffee and the neat handwriting of a woman who had been doing her job correctly until the moment she was no longer there to do it. He thought about Brother Thomas and the open breviary and the morning prayer. He thought about the pool at Mooner's Jump. He sat for a while. Then he stood up and went back out to the main space where eighty people were beginning the difficult work of being alive in a world that had just become considerably harder to understand. There was still work to do. There was always still work to do. He went and did it.