Hellworld by Tom Leveen

Author:Tom Leveen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

20

Then

* * *

“Sure this is right?”I asked Charlie.

“Pretty sure,”he said, consulting his iPhone. A second later, he frowned, shoved it in his back pocket, and began opening cabinets. “Signal’s already shot. Is there a map around?”

“Charlie, there is nothing out here,”I said, watching the Sonoran Desert tumble by outside the window. Severe saguaro and prickly paddle-shaped cacti dominated the gravel floor. Mountains loomed in the distance, purple and blue, their peaks reminding me of shark teeth. Shorter, rounded hills surrounded us, punctuating the otherwise flat desert.

Perhaps not the best possible introduction to driving into the middle of nowhere to meet a stranger.

“There it is,”Alex said a minute later as we drove around a hill.

A simple wood-framed house sat in the middle of a sort of valley. I found myself surprised to see there were no horses anywhere, just mesquite trees, more saguaro, and a huge satellite dish planted into the ground.

“This place has an address?”I said.

“There were the mailboxes,”Charlie said. “We’re not that far off the main highway. It just feels like it.”

“If you say so. Where are the other houses?”

“Beats me. They could be anywhere in these hills, I guess. I doubt they’re very close together.”Then he added, as if just reaching this realization: “You don’t move out here to be near people.”

The professor’s house didn’t seem much bigger than mine, and mine wasn’t very big. It looked sort of diminutive, sitting there alone in the middle of all that nothing. Just a dark green splotch against a backdrop of browns and tans. The house sat in the middle of a sort of valley, with hills surrounding most of it, starting at maybe two hundred yards away. No fence marked off the property, and I wondered how much of it Dr. Riley owned. As far as the eye could see? Farther?

Alex stopped the RV in front of the porch, which ran the width of the house, Southern-style. A picture window took up much of the wall, with the front door implanted a few feet to the right of the window. Thick drapes were drawn across the window, blocking any attempt at looking inside.

Selby’s first order of business upon exiting the RV was to light a cigarette. Alex, after grabbing the video equipment bag, fell in beside Charlie, who climbed carefully up a short flight of wooden steps to the porch. The lumber warped mildly, as if warning that one more year out here was apt to result in all planks springing free of their nails. All of us seemed to be scanning the area as if expecting snipers to open fire, except for Selby, who paced back and forth in front of the RV with her smoke.

Charlie knocked on the door. We waited. He knocked again.

The curtains in the window fluttered.

“Dr. Riley?”Charlie called.

The front door opened, revealing an older man with a few weeks’ worth of gray beard growth, deep crow’s feet around his eyes, and dry, parched skin.

“Christ,”the old man said, like he’d stepped in dog shit. “What do you want?”

Charlie reared back at the snarl in the old man’s voice.

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