The Walls Have Eyes (3 page)

“It's chilly in the mornings. I could really use that sweatshirt. It's not that far, and we could take a shortcut through the fields back to the packet line.”

Chip crouched down and tucked his tail between his legs.

“Don't be silly!” Martin scolded. “Hertz can't get you anymore. He's nothing but a big wad of silver Jell-O. The reset chip is keeping him that way, and it's not like he can do anything about it.”

Martin headed to the high hill that marked the old camp, with his unhappy dog slinking along behind him. But when they got to the camp, Martin's backpack wasn't there. Neither was Hertz. They could plainly see the broken weeds where the big bot had flailed in agony, but his oblong of silver gel was gone.

Martin ran from the spot. When he couldn't run anymore, he trotted. Then he ran again, as far and as fast as he could, sure that the killer bot was on his trail. Not until the next morning dawned, clear and tranquil, did he begin to feel safe again.

“We're never going back there, Chip,” he said. “Never! Hertz can keep that whole place for himself.” And the thought of the strong, rugged bot striding alone through the empty hills sent a shiver down Martin's spine.

By noon on the third day, Martin spotted the steel dome of HM1 by noon on the third day, a bright gleam of light on the top of a far off hill. As the afternoon wore on, it grew larger, and its dazzling glare intensified, until Martin couldn't look straight at it anymore. When the sun sank, its light struck up a ruddy glow from the steel structure, as if Martin's former home were on fire. And in the fading colors after sunset, Martin reached the cinder-block fence that surrounded the suburb's dome.

“It's so weird, Chip,” he said. “It's all in there. Families, playgrounds, the store, the bowling alley, all stuck inside this big bubble. It's like a package of army men or something, like a kit with a bunch of parts.”

The German shepherd didn't appear to be paying attention to Martin. He kept looking back and swiveling his tall ears to take in the sounds of the coming night.

“Okay,” Martin said. “Dad's gone home. The main thing is to check the loading bay for one of those transmitter things. If there isn't one, we know an inspection isn't going on, and that means nobody's looking at us through all those little glass eyes. We'll keep quiet in case they're listening, though, and we'll
head to the factory. Bug hid out there, and nobody heard him for two whole years, so we'll be fine for tonight.”

Chip licked Martin's hand, glanced over his shoulder, and gave a breathy little whine.

“Would you quit worrying?” Martin said. “We'll be back outside with Mom by this time tomorrow. Now, let's get in fast before that security bot finds us here. I don't want him setting off some alarm.”

Chip transformed into a rolling dog and carried Martin in on the packet rails. Obeying Martin's instruction, he picked up quite a bit of speed. It was all Martin could do to hang on.

They whizzed through the long tunnel and through the dark washing room. The sprinklers exploded in a downpour behind them, but the big steel doors were already swinging open, and only a shower of drops caught them as they sped into the loading bay.

The big banks of fluorescent tubes were off for the night. Four small emergency lamps shed a golden glow at the edges of the gloomy space. The shadows of the freight bots were enormous as the bots rolled forward to greet them.

“No transmitter,” Martin whispered, pointing up into the gloom. “Chip, get these guys to back off, and let's get out of here.”

They made their way to the hall with the raveled red rug and the door marked AUTHORIZED ENTRANCE ONLY. Then the German shepherd covered the keypad with his paw and broke its code. Martin pushed the door open, and they stepped into the nighttime world beneath the suburb, the unlit access space
that held the tanks and conduits linked to the houses on the level above.

Chip lit his eyes, and their twin beams shone out into the massive basement, flickering across its concrete columns and cement floor. Booming, hissing industrial noises surrounded them as they walked. A tiny flame at the ceiling attracted their attention. A tool bot clung there, welding a metal pipe.

Fifteen minutes later, they reached the factory and hurried through its well-lit passages to the managers' break room. The big television still blared, and Bug's little colored disks still lay on the brown tabletop. The custodial bots appeared to be dusting around them.

“Poor Bug,” Martin said at the sight of the crazy man's solitaire game. “He wasn't hurting anybody with his jokes and wild ideas. Do you think he's still alive?”

Chip made a circuit of the room, sniffing. Then he laid his ears back and leaned into Martin, who stroked his ruff.

“Yeah, I know. You can't tell. I bet Bug was right. I bet they put him on the game shows. You know, it's a pretty creepy government that kills you just for having a big mouth.”

Chew your way to health!
babbled the television.
It's a vitamin and a gum.

Martin found the remote and changed the channel.

The break room cooker offered him the choice of hot pastrami on rye with a pickle on the side, pepperoni pizza and carrot sticks, or a jumbo Caesar salad. The fridge held nothing but low-calorie soda.

“I can't believe Bug was stuck eating this stuff for two years,” Martin said. “And no candy, either. I don't know how he stood it.”

Martin ordered up several pizza slices and flipped channels on the television. There was nothing on. He wandered around the factory, looking for a good place to sleep, but jaunty music played over the speakers, and a bot in the corridor startled him by turning on its vacuum. Martin returned to the break room.

At ten o'clock, the television picture winked out with an indefinable crackle that Martin had always associated with dying. He spread out his bedroll in the corner and tried to turn off the break room light. It didn't have a switch. None of the factory lights did. A custodial bot rolled in, wadded up his empty pizza trays, and began wiping down the counters.

“Mom and Dad are in bed now,” Martin said, grabbing his knapsack and stuffing the bedroll into it. “And we're not getting any sleep down here till the cleaning brigade is done. I need to charge my game cartridges if I'm gonna take them with me this time. Now's a perfect time to go grab them.”

They left through the factory lobby with its polished granite tiles, climbed the wide marble steps to the suburb level, and crept out into the park. Street lamps shone down on the asphalt path, but the rest of the park was in shadow. The empty space stretched away from them, devoid of sound or movement. Not a cricket chirped in the darkness.

Martin looked up. The night felt close, and the air seemed stale. The steel dome above him blocked out the stars. Nighttime in the suburb. He hated it here.

“Mom's gonna love it outside,” he whispered to Chip. “I wish I could talk David and Matt into coming too, but I don't wanna make their parents mad. Besides, Matt would try to bring his
whole collection of celebrity batting helmets with him. We'd need a rolling dumpster just to haul them around.”

Orange streetlights illuminated the curving row of houses before him. Not forty feet from Martin stood his own house and his own front door. It looked so ordinary, it took his breath away.

Chip opened that door, and they sneaked into the front hall. A tiny night-light was on, and everything was quiet. Foraging by the light of the open fridge, Martin grabbed a strawberry-kiwi soda and a bag of barbecue puffs. Then he tiptoed down the hall to his room.

Mom had been in here, putting things away. Martin's bed was made, and he could see the surface of his desk. But his faithful beanbag chair was still in a heap by the rug, and his box of game cartridges lay within easy reach. Martin shut the door and flipped on his plasma lamp.

The purple-and-green paisley shapes of the plasma lamp swirled around the darkened room, fat and slow on the walls, thin and hurried in the corners. They looked like clouds, he realized. They weren't quite as good as clouds, but they were something that changed, anyway.

Martin rummaged through the box of cartridges as quietly as he could. “Okay, which to take? Speed Addiction, that's a good one, with all the scooter crashes.” He set it in the charger. “And which one's this? The label's gone.” He flipped the power switch.

An eerie sight flickered into view on the cartridge screen. It was a ruined house bathed in twilight shades of velvet blue and charcoal gray. Martin felt the hair prickle on his arms.

“House-to-House Six,” he murmured. “That looks like the places we saw in the old suburb outside.” More tumbledown houses floated across the screen, stark black against a lurid sky. Red eyes blinked from the gap of a doorway. Martin hit the fire button.

“See, this isn't the future, when we're all mutants,” he whispered in excitement. “This is how it is right now! I bet these things are the stuff that's haunting those abandoned suburbs, all those people the President killed when he built the domes. The guys who made this game must have been out there and seen them.”

His player stumbled, and the screen lit up with vomit green streaks. Three zombies in ragged jeans were attacking him with knives. He turned and fired just in time, then ran past their wriggling limbs.

“I didn't recognize it because I was there in the daytime, and these pictures don't show the bushes and stuff. Besides, I bet these things hide when it's light outside. We were lucky we got out before night.”

A green skeleton glided into view. Martin fired, but it kept coming. “Grenade!” he said, hitting buttons, and the skeleton burst into a shower of fragments. “I bet the government ordered up these games to train commandos. I better study up on these things!”

The door clicked as it opened. Chip scrambled to his feet and barked. Mom and Dad stood in the doorway, mouths open and eyes wide.

The plasma lamp's purple and green clouds drifted across his parents' stunned faces. Martin dropped the cartridge with a clatter. He thought Mom and Dad looked just like zombies.

Then Mom wrapped her arms around him in a hug so tight it hurt.

Dad's face was a collage of different emotions. “How— What—”

“Don't ask, Walt,” Mom warned. “The walls have ears.” Then she hugged Martin again.

Martin looked away from Dad's face.

“I'm hungry, Mom,” he said. “Got any good cereal in the house?”

A few minutes later, he was sitting at his old spot at the kitchen table. In the middle of the table was a doily, and on it Mom's lazy Susan, which she'd made in plate-painting class:
THE KITCHEN TABLE IS THE HEART OF THE HOME
.

Mom took his chin in her hands and tilted his face toward the light. “Martin, your face,” she said softly. “What happened to you out there?”

“Sun,” Martin said, reaching for the milk and pouring it onto the cereal. “It burns you, but you peel and get a whole new set of skin. Browner, too. See?” He exhibited his arms.

“And you're so dirty! How did you manage to get so dirty?”

“There's a whole lot of dirt out there, Mom.”

Martin scooped up the jewel-colored nuggets in eight bites
and dumped in another round. His parents sat down to watch him eat. He hadn't seen them look at him like that since the day he'd beaten up Principal Thomasson's boy.

“Son,” Dad said, “you've done a terrible thing. You've endangered your whole family.”

“My whole family's not here,” Martin said. “I had to make sure Cassie was all right. And she is, Mom. She's doing great.”

His parents' faces blanched with shock again. Dad went back to talking in monosyllables. “How—Where—Did—” Martin was getting a little tired of it.

“I went to Cassie's school, Mom,” he said. “I took her her bunny. I told her you hoped she was doing math, and she was, too. She told me this crazy stuff about quadratic thingies and tesla somethings; I didn't get much out of it. But their school isn't all that safe. In fact, I better not talk about it. You know, because of the walls.”

Mom dropped her face into her hands and started to cry. Dad looked confused and gloomy, and maybe a little guilty. Yeah, that's right, Martin thought with satisfaction. You think about what you did. You think about how you sent your daughter away to die.

“Martin,” Dad said sternly, “your mother's been through a lot. She doesn't need you to break her heart with playground stories. We need you to tell us the truth.”

“Okay, now, the truth,” Martin said. “You know, it's funny you bring up the truth, because I know a guy who turned the truth into a trick. He was a scientist who lived in the laboratory where the Wonder Babies were made and that's why he knew so much about them. He made
some
people think he
was working for the recall, and then he took all the Wonder Babies away to his school before the recall people could get them.”

Dad looked away and fell silent.

Martin left Dad sitting at the table and followed his mom down the hall. She pulled pajamas out of the drawer and laid them on his bed for him as if he were four years old, straightening the sleeves and smoothing out the wrinkles with trembling hands. Martin scooped up the pajamas before she could turn them into a still life.

“You'd better take a shower,” she said. “All that dirt!” And she stared at him with wonder in her eyes. Martin closed the bathroom door on her before she could arrange his towels for him and make him feel even stranger than he already did.

Out in the hall again after the shower, he heard his parents in Cassie's room. He waved for Chip to wait for him and tiptoed to Cassie's door. Why? He didn't know. Years of habit. Long years of sitting in the hall night after night and listening to his parents' conversation.