Notes: My apologies for the delay in posting. The advent of Summer A classes, coupled with a rather nasty computer problem, kept me from even thinking about this fic. And then when I did think about it, it starting fighting me. So obviously the stars are aligned against me this week. But! I did get quite a lot done in my "Measurement and Assessment in Education" class.
Somehow, rattling along in the back of the ancient pickup truck, buffetted by chill winds, Rachel managed to fall asleep. She woke up abruptly, though, when the truck's engine made a loud noise like a miniature nuclear explosion and the vehicle came to a shuddering halt. Along with everything else in the crowded bed of the truck, Rachel went tumbling. Most of the other stuff came to rest on top of her.
Albert Jethro coughed and called, "You okay back there, Miss Rachel?"
"Fine," she managed, pushing a bale of rusting chicken wire off of her chest and sitting up again. Dust and sand had coated every inch of her, and she brushed at it hopelessly. "Are you okay?"
He coughed again; the door squealed opened with a jingle of keys. "Been through worse."
Rachel hauled herself over the side of the truck and went to stand beside Albert Jethro, who was looking at the smoke wafting from beneath the hood of the engine with a kind of grim resignation. "Is it broken?" she asked, made tentative by disappointment.
"Just overheated," he said, sighing and ending it with a cough. "We'll have ta wait a spell 'fore we can get going."
The cold of the night seemed to press down on her with icy fingers, trying to clutch at her bones. They were still miles from being in the middle of nowhere, the road was framed by looming cliffs, and the only light in the sky that wasn't star-based was a distant, faint glow barely arching above the cliffs. She expected ghosts to drift across the road at any moment. "How long?"
He shrugged, ran a hand over his almost hairless pate. "Long enough for the hood to cool off so I can open it, let the engine get some air. Then a good while after that."
Thor, evidently no stranger to these breakdowns, casually stretched his way out of the cab of the truck and began idly investigating the side of the road.
"Come ta think of it, though," Albert Jethro said, nodding and starting in the general direction of the rear of the vehicle, "I may have something in the back I can use." He moved that way, adding, "Mind keepin' an eye on Thor, there, Miss Rachel? He wanders."
"No, no problem," she said, wrapping her arms around herself again. There was nothing she would have liked less than watching out for the hound dog, and judging from the low, smug "whuff" aimed in her direction, she suspected Thor knew it. She wondered if maybe she'd been attacked by dogs or something, once.
Out of sight, Albert Jethro began noisely shifting the contents around, and Rachel reluctantly turned her attention to the dog. Thor was indeed wandering - slowly strolling with his nose down in the narrow stretch of dirt between the road and the cliffs. She trailed behind him at a cautious distance, gradually moving further away from the dim starlit outline of the truck.
She had dreamed when she was asleep. Pieces of it floated back across her consciousness now as her mind wandered with the dog. She'd dreamed of people, familiar people, but she could only remember one of them. A young man with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, wavy blond hair. Tall, handsome and square-jawed. He had blue eyes, she thought, even though she couldn't see his face clearly; it was just a vague idea of a face, although she knew she knew the features by heart. She couldn't remember his name either.
It frustrated her all over again, deeply, to the point of helpless anger, and she shoved the young man out of her mind. Instead she turned over the mystery of why she was not the slightest bit worried about being alone in the desert with a stranger and his dog. Probably because neither Albert Jethro nor Thor were dangerous... but how did she know that?
"Thor?" she tried, cautiously, when the truck was barely more than a streak of pale against the black road. He growled. "Thor, I think we need to get back to Albert Jethro."
Nose to the ground, the hound whuffed again, then let out a short, surprisingly fierce bark and took off running.
"Thor?! Hey, stop!" Rachel cried out, and ran after him. The dog was making a beeline for a dark line in the cliffs that resolved itself into a crumbled trail. She called out to Thor again, but he was already charging up the skinny switchback trail and showed no signs of slowing down. With a glance back at the truck, she followed.
The cliffs here dipped down, lower than their fellows, so she had to climb for less than a minute before the trail flattened out into a broad, windswept plateau. The dog had come to a quivering, hair-bristling stop in the middle of the path in front of her, fixed on a point in the distance. He was growling low in his throat.
"Thor!" she exclaimed, a bit out of breath and more than a little exasperated. "What are you doing?"
Then she saw what he was looking at. Far away but closer than the horizon, tucked inside a deep canyon, sprawled a man-made facility. She couldn't see all of it, but given the glow of light hanging over it, it had to be huge. Bunkers, buried half in the earth. Vehicles of all kinds swarming around. A generator station. Something that looked like a water-treatment plant. There was a forest of antennas and satellite dishes sprouting from one low-slung bunker, but only a single road connected it to the outside world; she followed the road back with her eyes and realized it must hook up with the highway she'd been traveling on.
"Wow," she murmured, awestruck. The sight stirred a memory within her. It danced just beyond the edge of her recollection, and while she stood there trying to retrieve it, the night and its unexpected wonders faded out of her awareness...
"Miss Rachel!" Alberto Jethro's voice called, breathless and wheezing from what must have been a mad dash. He didn't look like he was in shape for that, and, brought back to herself, she felt a twinge of remorse. "What's going on up there?"
Rachel bent and grabbed Thor's collar, fear be darned, and tugged him roughly around. The dog offered no resistance and trotted cheerfully down the same path he'd charged up hellbent just a minute before, greeting his master's huffing arrival with a slurpy lick to the hand. "Nothing," she said.
Albert Jethro narrowed his kind eyes but said only, "Well. Looks like the truck is ready to go."
"Actually," she blurted, surprising herself again so badly that she had to stop and feel out what she was going to say. Slowly, she went on, "Actually, I think... I think I'm going to stay here."
Thor whuffed. His master made a noncommittal noise in his throat that sounded about the same. After a moment, Albert Jethro clicked his tongue. "All right. Mind yourself, though, honey," he added, pointing with his wrinkled chin in the direction of the bunkers. "The desert'll kill you, but so will they. And they won't be as gentle about it."
And he should know; he'd come ashore at Normandy in World War II and fought all the way to the heart of Germany.
It popped into her mind the way her name had: without any bidding or any question of the veracity of the information. A trailing afterthought - she reminded him of the figures he'd seen wearily trudging out of places with names like "Dachau" and "Birkenau."
But she didn't know any of those names or places. She wasn't sure she even knew what "World War II" was. It sounded sort of familiar. "World War III" rang a stronger bell.
"I will," she told him, giving him a smile. Albert Jethro nodded farewell, turned with Thor at his heels, and shortly disappeared down the path. Belatedly, she called out, "Thank you for the ride!"
He called back something that might have been "God bless", but she wasn't sure.
Rachel turned back to the facility and squared her shoulders with a deep breath. Her heart was racing in her chest, her blood humming. It was crazy, her mind was saying. It was crazy to intentionally strand herself out here, on the fringe of an unknown lair, when she had a ride to safety waiting. But she had to be here. It was right that she had discovered the facility. It was no accident. Something about the place tugged at her, like a dream halfway glimpsed, or a memory on the tip of her tongue.
Or a strong arm around her neck.
She had the faintest prick of alarm at the back of her skull, and then, before she could turn, a leather-clad arm shot out of the darkness and caught her across the throat. Another arm grabbed at hers with inhuman strength, restraining her as neatly and effortlessly as Rachel had grabbed Thor's collar. Only her legs and feet were free, but she had no leverage to use them.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?" her attacker hissed angrily, and Rachel realized, startled beyond all words, that the person choking her was a teenage girl.