He opened the door set in the middle of the window panelling, and disappeared into the rain. I stepped out after him, but stayed at the wall. By now I was increasingly sure that Nina had been right: perhaps this guy Wang had speeded things up, but the evacuation had started right from the moment I had beaten up Chip. I'd fucked up, in other words. Given them warning, and time to get away. I hadn't expected this would be their response. They were bunkered in. They were rich and powerful; this was their land. Why run? But I'd still screwed it up. We hadn't discussed the matter, but I suspected Zandt felt I had, too. There was an increasingly wild look to the man's eyes.
As I listened to the sound of him poking about out there in the darkness, I noticed a long line of wire that lay along the bottom of the wall. It appeared from round the corner, and seemed to be buried in the beds by the wall. Cable, or something. Maybe the much-vaunted ADSL Net access. I was about to take
a closer look at it when Zandt made a sudden coughing sound.
I hurried out into the yard. He was standing right in the middle, bolt upright. 'What?'
He didn't say anything. Just pointed. .
At first I couldn't make out what he meant, but then I saw that a patch of ground just to the right
seemed a little rounded.
I walked over and looked down at it. Licked my lips. 'Tell me that's a pet or something under there.'
Zandt just shook his head, and I realized that he hadn't let his arm drop yet. Instead he was pointing
at another spot. At another mound. 'Oh Christ,' I said, my voice catching in my throat. 'Look at this.' Now I was looking for them, I could see that there were other mounds. Three short lines of them. Twelve in total.
Zandt dropped to one knee, pulled at the earth over the nearest mound. The grass slipped out of his fingers, but he got a clump out. Underneath was heavy, wet soil.
I dropped to help him, and we yanked and pulled at the ground. The going was hard and it took a couple of minutes to get down to where suddenly we had something other than soil in our hands and the
smell became awful. I started back, but Zandt pulled out two more handfuls before abruptly giving up.
'We need a shovel,' I said.
Zandt shook his head. 'Anything in these holes is dead. Sarah may still be alive somewhere.'
'Come on, man — she's going to be in one of these graves.'
Zandt was already striding back to the house. I followed him, trying to avoid the mounds but realizing
I must have stepped on at least one on the way out. Back inside Zandt strode straight through into the first reception room. 'We're going to have to look
again,' he said. 'We missed something.'
'I don't know where,' I said.
'So let's start here.'
We split to opposite sides of the room, overturning bookshelves, pulling furniture out of place. I was
quickly convinced that there was nothing there to be found, but Zandt wouldn't be budged from searching every inch.
'This is going to take hours,' I said. 'I don't
I stopped. Zandt glanced up. 'What?'
I wasn't looking at anything in the room, but staring straight out through the main bank of windows to the front of the house. Zandt stepped over to where I was standing.
'You see that?'
I pointed down to the split in the path, about twenty yards away. There, lying where it forked into the routes to all the different houses, something lay on the ground. It wasn't very large, and at this distance it was impossible to tell what it might be. A small pile of sticks, perhaps.
'I see it,' Zandt said.
'That wasn't there when we came in.'
I flicked my safety off again and we went back out through the front door. I walked slowly down the
path; Zandt holding a position back by the door, watching the other houses.
It did look like a pile of sticks. Short curved sticks, very white. Very clean. But I suspected what they were from a couple of yards away. I squatted down beside them, picked one up. Turned to indicate Zandt over.
As he approached, I took over the job of being ready to fire at anyone who might appear. Because
someone was here, without question. Someone who knew we were here, too.
After a brief inspection, Zandt said: 'Those are ribs.'
'That's what I figured. Human?'
'Yes.'
'So who put them there?'
'Ward, look.' About five yards up the path was another stick.
I walked forward, bent down to pick it up. 'Girl or boy?'
Zandt took the femur from me. Like the ribs, the leg bone was clean and white, as if some process had recently been used to bring it to museum condition. 'Can't be sure. But somebody not very old. A teenager.'
We stood together, watching either side of the path.
'Someone's leading us somewhere,' I said.
'The question is whether we follow.'
'I don't see we have any choice.'
'But we've already found the house with bodies.'
'A house. The first we looked in. Either that's a cute coincidence — or there's more than one.'
At the next junction there was another bone, just to the left of the path, as if indicating the way to the house on that side. We checked it quickly. This time the graves were spread around the side of the house, and better — or more proudly — concealed. It was only when Zandt realized that the small squares of stone set into the grass would not have formed a useful path, that we realized they were markers.