The Rising(76)
“Alex…”
“No, don’t bother. I’m okay, Sam. Really I am.”
She shrugged, leaving things there.
“What are you thinking about?” Alex asked, when Sam’s gaze strayed out the BART car’s window again.
“You told Reverend Billy I was your girlfriend.”
“So?”
She turned back his way. “So what would Cara think of that?”
“What’s the difference?”
“No difference. I just…” Sam started to turn back to the window, then stopped. “I want to tell you something I promised not to tell.”
“That Cara’s breaking up with me.”
“She told you?” Sam asked, squaring her shoulders with her gaze now.
“No, you just did. Well, not really—I already knew it was coming, was just stringing her along. I mean, did you really think I wouldn’t find out about that college guy she’s been seeing?”
“So why lead her on?”
“Because she led me on first. And it was the brother of one of the other cheerleaders who told me and I promised to let her spill first. It was kind of fun.”
“Leading her on?”
“And seeing her for what she really was. It’s like, what was I thinking? How did I not see through her before?”
“You really want me to answer that?”
“I asked.” Alex shrugged.
“She was an accessory, like the souped-up wheels on your car or your new leather jacket.”
“I don’t have souped-up wheels or a leather jacket.”
“Figure of speech.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, “ironic, isn’t it? And Cara wasn’t always an accessory. I really liked her for a while.”
“You didn’t say ‘loved.’”
“For a reason.”
Sam shook her head, frowning. “Someday you need to explain all this high school stuff to me.”
“You mean, like be your tutor? Be careful, I’m expensive.”
“What happened to ‘All Free Tomorrow’?”
“Then we’d face the same problem in twenty-four hours. And right now we’ve got something more important to do.”
“Find Laboratory Z,” Sam finished.
77
BISHOP RANCH
“WHERE DO YOU THINK it was?” Sam asked Alex, as they walked along the outer perimeter of the sprawling Bishop Ranch Business Park, which seemed to stretch on forever.
“Only wish I remembered,” Alex said dryly, sweeping his eyes about. “Maybe I’m a different kind of human, but even my kind doesn’t seem to retain much of what happened as an infant.”
He tried to keep his gaze indifferent, purposeful, avoiding thoughts of the fire from which his mother had saved him. It didn’t work. A coldness gripped him, spreading from the inside out, the chill as bad as any winter could muster. The somewhat cross-shaped spread of interconnected buildings was bracketed at each arm by parking lots that formed endless, glistening seas of steel. But Alex saw only flames and noxious white smoke, more like vapor, overspreading the area like a vast wave. The stench of it was something corrosive and sweet at the same time, and Alex fully believed had he been closer to the buildings themselves he would’ve glimpsed a tiny but brave Chinese woman lugging a baby from the death trap of flames that burned white hot.
Bishop Ranch had either risen from the resulting refuse or been part of the same complex all those years ago, only to be spared the brunt of the blast that had leveled Laboratory Z. “Ranch” was the word he’d overheard his parents use. Never any mention of the livestock Alex’s imagination had filled in. An Chin had said nothing of Bishop Ranch in the flash drive tucked inside Meng Po, which Alex took for a clear sign she never wanted him to come here. Or an even clearer sign there was nothing left to return to.
A waste of time. A fool’s errand.
Still, all he had right now.
“Alex?” Sam prodded.
“Huh?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What’d you ask me?”
“What are we supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t got a clue.”
Then his eyes fastened on a lone figure in a sun-drenched clearing shrouded by a thick umbrella of trees.
“Maybe we should ask him,” Alex said to Sam.
*
The man was seated on a cream-colored blanket splattered with grass stains beneath a frayed and flimsy pop-up tent. He had long flowing white hair, gnarled and matted into ringlets in places, blue eyes the color of the sky, and a bushy beard that looked like cotton candy. The grounds he occupied alone had a park-like feel to them, likely still the civic property of San Ramon, which would explain why the man was allowed to stake his claim here unmolested. He held an unlit pipe in his mouth and a small pot hung from a swivel at his side beneath a sign that read, DEPOSIT A DOLLAR AND ASK THE PROFESSOR A QUESTION.
But it was a series of larger signs staked in a semicircle around the bearded man’s blanket that grabbed Alex’s attention first, among them: THEY WALK AMONG US, TRUST NO ONE, THE WAR IS COMING, and ALIENS GO HOME!
With the exclamation point formed into something that looked like a ray gun aimed downward.