Page 139 of Almost Midnight

“Okay,” he said. “Your friend paid us, and you’re helping us a lot to sustain our dig out here, so I’m not feeling inclined to argue. But I really think you would be better off going when it’s light out. In the morning, preferably.”

“Sorry,” Nick said only, and at that, the other man seemed to give up.

“We’ve got all the maps set to Nice,” he said next, his voice business-only. “If you want to refine that to the specificareaof Nice, it programs in just like regular GPS.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

Anand walked away, but Nick couldn’t help noticing the man’s brow never stopped furrowing, and he never stopped looking like he was trying to think up better arguments to persuade him not to go now, but to wait until the next day.

Nick liked the man, but he felt even more certain that they needed to go now.

Something was pushing on him.

He didn’t know what it was, but he trusted the feeling.

It was strange even being back in this part of the world, after all of Nick’s insanely vivid dreams. Even with how completely transformed it was, how totally unrecognizable the land and sky, it was odd to be back where he’d lived the longest, and the happiest.

Dalejem was buried here somewhere.

The thought was more strange now than even sad.

He climbed into the driver’s seat of the dinosaur-like vehicle.

He buckled himself in, and glanced back over his shoulder while one of the engineers instructed the rest of their group to do the same. They warned that this road would be much bumpier than the one they drove to the science dome, and that the belts and cushioned seats would be needed. They buckled Jordan into one of the bucket seats as well, and only cuffed him to the metal poles around his seat once he was completely strapped in, and “couldn’t fly up and slam into the ceiling,” as the man jokingly put it.

Jordan looked a little more awake now.

He stared at the man who buckled him into his seat, almost like he was thinking about biting him.

He didn’t, though. Thank God.

Before they left, Nick handed Damon two bags of synthetic blood out of the cooler they’d given him, just in case. He brought a third bag up to the front seat for himself, figuring it wouldn’t hurt him to feed a bit more, either.

Once everyone had their harnesses on, and knew where their armored suits were located, and once they all understood the different emergency protocols for various problems that might arise, Nick hit the large blue button that started up the armored truck’s engine.

The thing spat and growled and rumbled at him, and when he glanced at Walker, and got a curt nod, Nick threw the massive, ground-chewing thing into gear.

* * *

The dashboard clockran on a nonstop timer. You couldn’t turn it off, even if you wanted to.

The journey felt slow, although Anand told him it was only about sixteen miles from the driveway of their garage to the water’s edge, which was basically in the center of what had been Nice’s Old Town. It hadn’t been called that in years, of course.

Anyway, where they were going would be a little further.

They had to travel around the cliffs and hills that used to loom over the water, until they reached what had been a small boat harbor.

The grotte was located on the other side of that.

According to the GPS Nick consulted, it was another four miles to there, as compared to just heading straight for the sea.

The first ten miles had been choppy, but mostly flat.

Nick kept expecting to see buildings, to glimpse the hollowed-out husks of landmarks he had known in he and Dalejem’s later years, when Nice first started to resemble the place Nick had visited in his thirties on his home world.

He never saw any buildings, though.

It wasn’t until the three-dimensional map showed him the edge of the sea in the distance that Nick realized that they weren’t going to see any buildings at all.

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