the Institute guys don’t find me, I’ll die in these woods.
But because going back wasn’t an option (he couldn’t have retraced his steps even if he wanted to), Luke kept walking, hands waving in front of him for branches that might try to wound him in new places. His ear throbbed.
He quit counting his steps, but he must have been around five thousand—well over two miles—when he saw a faint yellowy-orange gleam through the trees. Luke first mistook it for either a hallucination or one of the dots, soon to be joined by swarms of them. Another dozen steps put paid to those worries. The yellow-orange light was clearer, and had been joined by two more, much dimmer. Those had to be electric lights. He thought the brighter one was an arc-sodium, the kind they had in big parking lots. Rolf’s father had told them one night when he had taken Luke and Rolf to a movie at the AMC Southdale, that those kinds of lights were supposed to stop muggings and car break-ins.
Luke felt an urge to simply bolt forward and restrained it. The last thing he wanted to do was trip over another downed tree or step in a hole and break his leg. There were more lights now, but he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the first one. The Big Dipper hadn’t lasted long, but here was a new guiding star, a better one. Ten minutes after first spotting it, Luke came to the edge of the trees. Across fifty yards or so of open ground, there was another chainlink fence. This one was topped with barbed wire, and there were light-posts along it at roughly thirty-foot intervals. Motion-activated, Maureen had told Avery. Tell Luke to stay well back. That was advice he hardly needed.
Beyond the fence were little houses. Very little. Not enough room to swing a cat in, Luke’s own father might have said. They could contain three rooms at most, and probably just two. They were all the same. Avery said Maureen called this the village, but to Luke it looked like an Army barracks. The houses were arranged in blocks of four, with a patch of grass in the center of each block. There were lights shining in a few of the houses, probably the kind people left on in the bathroom so they wouldn’t trip over something if they had to get up and use the toilet.
There was a single street, which ended at a larger building. To either side of this building was a small parking lot filled with cars and pickup trucks parked hip to hip. Thirty or forty in all, Luke estimated. He remembered wondering where the Institute staff kept their vehicles. Now he knew, although how food was supplied was still a mystery. The arc-sodium was on a pole in front of this larger building, and it shone down on two gas pumps. Luke thought the place almost had to be some kind of store, the Institute’s version of a PX.
So now he understood a little more. Staff got time off—Maureen had had a week to go back to Vermont—but mostly they stayed right here, and when they were off-shift, they lived in those ticky-tacky little houses. Work schedules might be staggered so they could share accommodations. When in need of recreation, they hopped in their personal vehicles and drove to the nearest town, which happened to be Dennison River Bend.
The locals would certainly be curious about what these men and women were up to out there in the woods, they’d ask questions, and there had to be some sort of cover story to handle them. Luke didn’t have any idea what it might be (and at this moment couldn’t care less), but it must be pretty decent to have held up for so many years.
Go right along the fence. Look for a scarf.
Luke got moving, the fence and the village to his left, the edge of the woods to his right. Again he had to fight the urge to speed along, especially now that he could see a little better. Their time with Maureen had necessarily been short, partly because if their palaver went on too long it might raise suspicion, and partly because Luke was afraid too much of Avery’s ostentatious nose-grabbing might give the game away. As a result, he had no idea where this scarf might be, and he was afraid of missing it.