Rise the Dark (32 page)

“She wouldn't have wanted it,” Mark said again.

“I'm sure I would've loved your wife. But I don't think I would've agreed with her on some of the finer points.” Larry studied Garland Webb's corpse. “There may come a day, I suppose, when we'll know. If there's a God, Markus, I'll be curious what he thinks of this one.”

Mark watched Garland Webb bleed out and half of him wished he'd fired the shot and another half wished it hadn't been fired at all. When he turned from the corpse and looked away from the circle of light, he was aware of the vastness of the night as if it were a new player in the scene. A cold wind was blowing out of the north, rustling the pines below them. Far off down the mountain, the blackness was broken by flashers.

Police en route.

“They're coming,” Mark said.

“Yes.”

Mark knelt and untied Garland Webb's hands, then slid the AR-15 over with his foot until the rifle and the body rested together. Larry watched in silence, understanding.

“Hell of a defensive shot I made,” Larry said.

“You saved me with it,” Mark said. “There's no lie in that.”

Mark lingered with Webb's corpse for a moment, looking into those eyes. Then he turned away.

“Where is Mom?”

“She has the view.” Larry pointed up the slope, to the high rocks above the plateau. It couldn't have been an easy climb.

“I'm sorry,” Mark said. “I forced things in that direction, just by coming here.”

Larry shook his head. “I'd rather have her there than here. That's the truth. And I don't think she was leaving this place on her own.”

They walked away together, through the high fence and down the rocky slope toward the distant flashing lights below.

T
he radio had been silent for the last five minutes of the drive, but when Janell pulled onto the narrow lane that ran parallel to the railroad tracks and the power lines she saw a truck parked off the road, in the trees, and knew that it had to be him.

The relief she felt then made her eyes sting, and she blinked back the approaching tears. He had no use for tears, and after so long a wait, she didn't want to disappoint him when she finally arrived.

A train whistle shrilled to the east, and she realized, with a delirious joy, that she would be with him for the moment. When it all began, when the darkness rose, they would be together.

Just as it had always been planned and promised, in a place years and an ocean away from this spot in the mountains.

She drove as far as she could on the road and then left it, following the tracks in the grass that led to the truck, bouncing over the uneven terrain. The headlights captured a glint above the train tracks, and she braked hard and stared.

The cables were in place. Novak hadn't disrupted anything.

She slammed the gearshift into park, opened the door, and took off running toward the truck. Her eyes were focused on the truck and the tracks, and she never saw the thing that tripped her. One minute she was running, the next she was down, landing hard, a jarring impact that stole her breath. She rolled over and looked back to see what had caught her feet.

It took her a few seconds to understand that the twisted, blackened thing in the grass had once been human.

“No,” she said, her voice clear and reasonable. It was not him. It absolutely could not be him. It was the climber, Jay, the last recruit, the one who'd be blamed for so much in short order, the man whose name the world would learn. The trusted worker who'd killed his wife and then turned on his country.

“Eli?” She sat up and looked into the darkness as she called for him. When he answered, all would be well.

It was silent until the mournful train whistle sounded again. The approaching train made the ground tremble.

She knew she should look at the terrible corpse again, look closely, but she couldn't bring herself to turn.

Not him. No, no, no, it is not him.

The voice came from the outer dark north of the train tracks.

“He took my wife.”

She looked in the direction of the sound, but she couldn't see the man. He spoke again.

“He thought I couldn't do anything about it. He was wrong.”

The lights of the oncoming train appeared, and in the increasing glow she could finally see the man. He was climbing down the tower.

She forced herself to look back at the body. At Eli.

The tears started then. Silently. She had not wept since she was a little girl.

Approach from the south,
he'd said.
You'll see me. We'll watch the train go through, and then we'll leave.…Together.

The climber reached the base of the tower and came on, walking awkwardly, stiff as a spaceman in his strange suit. He took clumsy, stumbling steps toward the tracks. It was impossible that a man such as this could have killed Eli.

The climber said, “If you want to run, I'd start now. I'm coming over to cut those cables down, and I've got a gun.”

The vibrations in the earth were stronger, the light from the train harsher. The moment almost at hand.

She got to her feet, stepped carefully around Eli's body, and ran to the stolen Yukon. Opened the tailgate and pulled out the shotgun and racked a shell into the chamber. Then she walked back toward the train tracks, the shotgun braced against her body.

When the man who'd come off the tower stopped on the north side of the tracks, she knew that he'd been lying. He had no gun.

“If you want to run,” she said, “I'd start now.”

He hesitated. She saw him turn and look to the north, to the place where distance and darkness would hide him if he ran.

Then he said, “It's been too long of a day for that,” and started forward again.

She fired from the waist. The first blast of double-aught rattled into the gravel and sparked off the metal rails and he tripped and wavered but did not drop, stumbling on over the tracks as she levered another shell into the chamber and fired again.

This time he fell. His heavy boots caught the lip of the second rail and he didn't even get his hands out in front of him. He fell onto the embankment and slid down it, one gloved hand outstretched toward the grove of fir trees on the other side of the tracks. The cold wind rose with the sound of the train whistle, and the trees shifted gently and the earth shuddered beneath Janell's feet.

She wanted to go to him. Wanted to feel his pulse. She had the thought, brief and bold as a flash of lightning, that he would have a very strong pulse and that she would need that in days to come.

There was no time, though. The train was too close and there were more important tasks for her. The one thing she could not grant them was Eli's body.

It was crucial that they wonder and rush for explanations. Rush right past the truth.

J
ay could taste blood in his mouth and he thought that there should be pain, but he couldn't feel it. Could feel nothing but the tremble of the earth, constant now, like a drumroll of the gods. He felt that and waited for the pain and when he could not find it he thought,
Of course, the Faraday suit.

Saved again. The suit had kept the current at bay. Not at bay, exactly, that wasn't right. The suit had energized him. He had become the current, safe within it.

But it wasn't electricity. It was a gun.

Maybe. It seemed there had been a gun. Still, the suit made sense to him. You had to trust it, that was the first lesson. Because if you had no faith that you were protected, if you could not believe that there was a shield between you and the ground, you would make a mistake. Your last moment was promised then.

The earth trembled and rolled. He thought that he had forgotten something, failed to achieve something, but for the life of him he could not recall what it was. He'd been going somewhere, reaching out, a plan in mind, a goal. He was not supposed to be down on the ground.

Sabrina.

For a horrified moment, he was overwhelmed by the fear that Sabrina was not safe. But then voices whispered, hers blended with another's, a man's voice.

She is safe and well.

Yes, she was. Jay knew this. It was all that had mattered, up there on the steel.

I climbed,
he wanted to tell her,
in the end I climbed,
and he knew that couldn't be the truth because in the end he'd found himself here on the ground, but it was hard to remember how that had come to pass, and the climb was vivid; the climb was victory.

He thought it strange to end in darkness. He had been sure that it would end with light, had always understood that, and for six long months he had even seen it—this life would end with a flash. Seen and gone, spectacular for the last moment.

He had known this and yet somehow he was down here on the ground and in the dark and in his own blood.

Then out of the trembling earth came a light. Brightening rapidly, like a dimmer switch being dialed all the way up, the thrum of the earth intensifying in proportion to the light. The sound was just like an oncoming train, but his mind called up a memory to make sense of what he could no longer parse in his pain-addled mind, a memory drawn from so many nights in so many storms, a knowledge of exactly what that combination of power and light meant: the system was back online.

The job was done.

The spectacular flash, when it came, was all that he had known it would be.

M
ark was in custody when he learned the transmission lines had gone down. A tower carrying a half a million volts that fed the West was pulled down by a train that had then derailed and wiped out a second tower, and a third.

The first interrogations took place in a dimly lit police station. They were running on backup generators, and the overhead fluorescents were more than the generators could handle.

The detectives who asked the first questions about Eli Pate asked them from out of the shadows.

The investigators lost interest in Garland Webb's death quickly. Garland Webb they understood—or thought they understood. What they cared about was Wardenclyffe. How it had come to exist, who had been there, and who might still be alive. Garland Webb was not in that mix.

Neither was Jay Baldwin.

They'd found his body in the train wreckage. When they told Mark that, all he could see was Baldwin's anguished face in the darkness outside of his home, imploring Mark for one chance, for just a little more time.

And if you had the chance to go back and save her? If you could have made a deal to keep from losing her? What would you have been willing to do?

Mark had been answering questions for hours by then, and the detectives seemed to accept his exhaustion when he lowered his forehead to the tabletop and closed his eyes.

T
he body count was high, but it did not include Eli Pate.

In official statements, law enforcement suggested that his corpse had been destroyed in the carnage of the train derailment. That was not the news a terrified American public wanted to hear. They wanted the body.

They wanted proof.

Nearly a million people in the West were without power. What Pate had succeeded in—wiping out a transmission line that fed areas from Montana all the way to the Pacific and taking down another 107 poles once the lines were dead—was an unprecedented act of domestic terrorism, and the only good news was that the law enforcement agencies who wanted to talk to Mark were not the kind who cared about a stolen pickup truck or an assault on a thug like Salvador Cantu.

Or even the bullet in Garland Webb's forehead.

They wore assorted badges—FBI, Secret Service, military intelligence—and their questions often overlapped, but the focus was the same: How had Pate achieved it, and who from his group remained?

Mark couldn't help much, and neither could his uncle, but the questions kept coming, and the new faces kept appearing. The only information Mark gleaned from the process was a sense of why his mother had mattered so much to Pate. She was a recruiter, assembling the followers who bought into Pate's philosophy that the world needed a wake-up call.

This was the story the investigators understood and the story that meshed with what Mark had seen and heard firsthand.

It did not mesh with the public narrative. Already reports were coming in saying the attack had been engineered by a right-wing militia based out of Texas, though on social media, ISIS proudly and repeatedly claimed credit and promised that it was just the first strike.

“It's tense out there,” one of the FBI agents admitted to Mark. “We've got to prove this shit fast, and the explanation needs to be ironclad.”

Mark had been through two full days of interviews—a generous word; the more accurate one was
interrogations
—before he was given the chance to meet with Sabrina Baldwin. Even then the environment was bad, a conference room in the courthouse in Billings, and one that he was certain was bugged.

She didn't get many words out before the tears came. Mark held her hand, a hand that felt too hot, her heartbeat a steady throb against his palm, and he watched her cry and he thought:
This is the other road.

Anything,
he had told Jay, had told Jeff, had told whoever dared to ask and many who did not. That was what he would have done to keep Lauren from Cassadaga if he'd had the chance. Absolutely anything, including trading places with her. Of course he would have done that.

Now he watched Sabrina cry and felt her pulse beat against his hand and thought of the anger that could overtake him so often, a survivor's anger, the loneliness of the lost, and he said, “Jay was not selfish.”

She lifted her head and stared at him with shimmering but outraged eyes.

“What are you talking about?” she said. “Not selfish? Of course he wasn't. It's not as if he had a choice.”

Mark could see him again in the shadowed yard in Red Lodge. Could hear him begging for the choice. He wondered how it had gone for Jay up there on the tower with the train coming on, what other choices he'd made and why he'd made them. But he only nodded, because that was the right thing to do.

“He was a hero,” Sabrina Baldwin said. “That's the only word.”

“Yes,” Mark said. He touched Lauren's dive permit briefly. “Yes, he was. And yes, it is.”