Sole Survivor (36 page)

The lighting was as bright as that on a movie set, and though Joe and Rose were not being sought by the type of police agency that would distribute their photographs to local television news programs, Joe preferred to stay out of the glare. He parked along the side of the building, near the rest rooms, where huddled shadows survived.

Joe was in emotional turmoil, felt slashed across the heart, because now he knew the exact cause of the catastrophic crash, knew the murderer’s identity and the twisted details. The knowledge was like a scalpel that pared off what thin scabs had formed over his pain. His grief felt fresh, the loss more recent than it really was.

He switched off the engine and sat speechless.

“I don’t understand how the hell they found out I was on that flight,” Rose said. “I’d taken such precautions…. But I knew when he remote-viewed the passenger cabin, looking for us, because there was an odd dimming of lights, a problem with my wristwatch, a vague sense of a
presence
—signs I’d learned to read.”

“I’ve met a National Transportation Safety Board investigator who’s heard the tape from the cockpit voice recorder, before it was destroyed in a convenient sound-lab fire. This boy was inside the captain’s head, Rose. I don’t understand…Why didn’t he take out just
you?
”

“He had to get us both, that was his assignment, me and the girl—and while he could’ve nailed me without any problem, it wouldn’t have been easy with her.”

Utterly baffled, Joe said, “Nina? Why would they have been interested in her then? She was just another passenger, wasn’t she? I thought they were after her later because… well, because she survived with you.”

Rose would not meet his eyes. “Get me the key to the women’s rest room, Joe. Will you, please? Let me have a minute here. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way to Big Bear.”

He went into the sales room and got the key from the cashier. By the time he returned to the Ford, Rose had gotten out. She was leaning against a front fender, back turned and shoulders hunched to the whistling Santa Ana wind. Her left arm was curled against her breast, and her hand was still shaking. With her right hand, she pulled the lapels of her blazer together, as though the warm August wind felt cold to her.

“Would you unlock the door for me?” she asked.

He went to the women’s room. By the time he unlocked the door and switched on the light, Rose had arrived at his side.

“I’ll be quick,” she promised, and slipped past him.

He had a glimpse of her face in that brightness, just before the door fell shut. She didn’t look good.

Instead of returning to the car, Joe leaned against the wall of the building, beside the lavatory door, to wait for her.

According to nurses in asylums and psychiatric wards, a greater number of their most disturbed patients responded to the Santa Ana winds than ever reacted to the sight of a full moon beyond a barred window. It wasn’t simply the baleful sound, like the cries of an unearthly hunter and the unearthly beasts that it pursued; it was also the subliminal alkaline scent of the desert and a queer electrical charge, different from those that other—less dry—winds imparted to the air.

Joe could understand why Rose might have pulled her blazer shut and huddled into it. This night had both the moon and the Santa Ana wind to spark a voodoo current in the spine—and a parentless boy without a name, who lived in a coffin of steel and moved invisible through a world of potential victims oblivious to him.

Are we recording?

The boy had known about the cockpit voice recorder—and he’d left a cry for help on it.

One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom. One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock. They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.

Whatever else he was—sociopathic, psychotic, homicidal—he was also a child. A beast, an abomination, a terror, but also a child. He had not asked to be born, and if he was evil, they had made him so by failing to teach him any human values, by treating him as mere ordnance, by rewarding him for murder. Beast he was, but a pitiable beast, lost and alone, wandering in a maze of misery.

Pitiable but formidable. And still out there. Waiting to be told where he could find Rose Tucker. And Nina.

This is fun.

The boy enjoyed the killing. Joe supposed it was even possible that his handlers had never instructed him to destroy everyone aboard Nationwide Flight 353, that he had done it as an act of rebellion and because he enjoyed it.

Make them stop or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

Recalling those words from the transcript, Joe sensed that the boy had not been referring merely to the passengers on the doomed airliner. By then he had already made the decision to kill them all. He was speaking of some act more apocalyptic than three hundred and thirty murders.

What could he accomplish if provided with photographs and the geographical coordinates of not merely a missile-tracking facility but a complex of nuclear-missile launch silos?

“Jesus,” Joe whispered.

Somewhere in the night, Nina waited. In the hands of a friend of Rose’s, but inadequately protected. Vulnerable.

Rose seemed to be taking a long time.

Rapping on the rest room door, Joe called her name, but she did not respond. He hesitated, knocked again, and when she weakly called “Joe,” he pushed the door open.

She was perched on the edge of the toilet seat. She had taken off her navy blazer and her white blouse; the latter lay blood-soaked on the sink.

He hadn’t realized she’d been bleeding. Darkness and the blazer had hidden the blood from him.

As he stepped into the rest room, he saw that she had shaped a compress of sorts from a wad of wet paper towels. She was pressing it to her left pectoral muscle, above her breast.

“That one shot on the beach,” he said numbly. “You were hit.”

“The bullet passed through,” she said. “There’s an exit wound in back. Nice and clean. I haven’t even bled all that much, and the pain is tolerable…. So why am I getting weaker?”

“Internal bleeding,” he suggested, wincing as he looked at the exit wound in her back.

“I know anatomy,” she said. “I took the hit in just the right spot. Couldn’t have picked it better. Shouldn’t be any damage to major vessels.”

“The round might have hit a bone and fragmented. The fragment maybe didn’t come out, took a different track.”

“I was so thirsty. Tried to drink some water from the faucet. Almost passed out when I bent over.”

“This settles it,” he said. His heart was racing. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

“Get me to Nina.”

“Rose, damn it—”

“Nina can heal me,” she said, and as she spoke, she looked guiltily away from him.

Astonished, he said, “Heal you?”

“Trust me. Nina can do what no doctor can, what no one else on earth can do.”

At that moment, on some level, he knew at least one of Rose Tucker’s remaining secrets, but he could not allow himself to take out that dark pearl of knowledge and examine it.

“Help me get my blouse and blazer on, and let’s go. Get me into Nina’s hands. Her healing hands.”

Though half sick with worry, he did as she wanted. As he dressed her, he remembered how larger than life she had seemed in the cemetery Saturday morning. Now she was so small.

Through a hot clawing wind that mimicked the songs of wolves, she leaned on him all the way back to the car.

When he got her settled in the passenger’s seat, she asked if he would get her something to drink.

From a vending machine in front of the station, he purchased a can of Pepsi and one of Orange Crush. She preferred the Crush, and he opened it for her.

Before she accepted the drink, she gave him two things: the Polaroid photograph of his family’s graves and the folded dollar bill on which the serial number, minus the fourth digit, provided the phone number at which Mark of Infiniface could be reached in an emergency. “And before you start driving, I want to tell you how to find the cabin in Big Bear—in case I can’t hold on until we get there.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll make it.”

“Listen,”
she said, and again she projected the charisma that commanded attention.

He listened as she told him the way.

“And as for Infiniface,” she said, “I trust them, and they
are
my natural allies—and Nina’s—as Mark said. But I’m afraid they can be too easily infiltrated. That’s why I wouldn’t let them come with us tonight. But if we’re not followed, then this car is clean, and maybe their security is good enough. If worse comes to worst and you don’t know where to turn…they may be your best hope.”

His chest tightened and his throat thickened as she spoke, and finally he said, “I don’t want to hear any more of this. I’ll get you to Nina in time.”

Rose’s right hand trembled now, and Joe was not certain that she could hold the Orange Crush. But she managed it, drinking thirstily.

As he drove back onto the San Bernardino Freeway, heading east, she said, “I’ve never meant to hurt you, Joe.”

“You haven’t.”

“I’ve done a terrible thing, though.”

He glanced at her. He didn’t dare ask what she had done. He kept that shiny black pearl of knowledge tucked deep in the purse of his mind.

“Don’t hate me too much.”

“I don’t hate you at all.”

“My motives were good. They haven’t always been. Certainly weren’t spotless when I went to work at Project 99. But my motives were good this time, Joe.”

Driving out of the lightstorm of Los Angeles and its suburbs, toward the mountain darkness where Nina dwelled, Joe waited for Rose to tell him why he should hate her.

“So…let me tell you,” she said, “about the project’s only true success….”

Ascend, now, in the elevator from the little glimpse of Hell at the bottom of those six subterranean levels, leaving the boy in his containment vessel, and come all the way up to the security room where the descent began. Farther still, to the southeast corner of the ground floor, where CCY-21-21 resides.

She was conceived without passion one year after 89-58, though she was the project not of Doctors Blom and Ramlock but of Rose Tucker. She is a lovely child, delicate, fair of face, with golden hair and amethyst eyes. Although the majority of the orphans living here are of average intelligence, CCY-21-21 has an unusually high IQ, even higher perhaps than that of 89-58, and she loves to learn. She is a quiet girl, with much grace and natural charm, but for the first three years of her life, she exhibits no paranormal abilities.

Then, on a sunny May afternoon, when she is participating in a session of supervised play with other children on the orphanage lawn, she finds a sparrow with a broken wing and one torn eye. It lies in the grass beneath a tree, flopping weakly, and when she gathers it into her small hands, it becomes fearfully still. Crying, the girl hurries with the bird to the nearest handler, asking what can be done. The sparrow is now so weak and so paralyzed by fear that it can only feebly work its beak—and produces no sound whatsoever. The bird is dying, the handler sees nothing to be done, but the girl will not accept the sparrow’s pending death. She sits on the ground, grips the bird gently in her left hand, and carefully strokes it with her right, singing softly to it a song about Robin Red Breast—and in but a minute the sparrow is restored. The fractures in the wing knit firm again, and the torn eye heals into a bright, clear orb. The bird sings—and flies.

CCY-21-21 becomes the center of a happy whirlwind of attention. Rose Tucker, who has been driven to the contemplation of suicide by the nightmare of Project 99, is as reborn as the bird, stepping back from the abyss into which she has been peering. For the next fifteen months, 21-21’s healing power is explored. At first it is an unreliable talent, which she cannot exercise at will, but month by wondrous month she learns to summon and control her gift, until she can apply it whenever asked to do so. Those on Project 99 with medical problems are brought to a level of health they never expected to enjoy again. A select few politicians and military figures—and members of their families—suffering from life-threatening illnesses are brought secretly to the child to be healed. There are those in Project 99 who believe that 21-21 is their greatest asset—although others find 89-58, in spite of the considerable control problems that he poses, to be the most interesting and valuable property in the long run.

Now look here, come forward in time to one rainy day in August, fifteen months after the restoration of the injured sparrow. A staff geneticist named Amos has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease. While healing Amos with only a soft and lingering touch, the girl detects an illness in addition to the malignancy, this one not of a physical nature but nonetheless debilitating. Perhaps because of what he has seen at Project 99, perhaps for numerous other reasons that have accumulated throughout his fifty years, Amos has decided that life is without purpose or meaning, that we have no destiny but the void, that we are only dust in the wind. This darkness in him is blacker than the cancer, and the girl heals this as well, by the simple expedient of showing Amos the light of God and the strange dimensional lattices of realms beyond our own.