Fire Will Fall (10 page)

The rest of this info was mind-boggling, and I let it roll through my head like water over a dry sponge. A potential terror attack nearby ... not across some ocean. I felt guilty feeling so happy about that. But then, if the dudes were going to make trouble, it ought to be near to me, where maybe I could get my foot into it somehow. I forced away thoughts of the Kid and sat there rocking contentedly and chuckling, ignoring my sore throat and feeling all the luck I'd experienced in life come rushing back to even the score a little.

I glanced down the hall at Cora's darkroom door, hearing Henry's voice and realizing some of the challenges here. I fumbled in my pocket for the pile of tissues I always carried around lately, balled them up, and stuck them hard into the little hole in the speaking tube. It barely showed in the dark, and I hoped it would keep other people from hearing anything. They didn't need to hear USIC-anything, not while Cora was so busy trying to ignore all of that, trying so hard to be normal.

Jeezus. I couldn't even remember what normal was...

CORA HOLMAN
SATURDAY, May 4, 2002
11:45
A.M.
THE POND

I
FELT ALEESE DRIFTING THROUGH ME
during my darkroom lesson. After forty-five minutes of feeling like her ghost was laughing at my meager talents in the blackness, I was more than glad to head back upstairs. Fortunately, in my darkroom class at school, I had been a sponge, and Henry offered more praise and encouragement than instruction.

He and I walked around the grounds, and he also gave me some great pointers on how to frame a shot. We took priceless pictures of a goat with a bell around its neck—a perfect subject. He wanted to
baa
at us more than move around. Henry mentioned there being two of them, and I hoped to see the other as we walked down a trail that ended at the pretty pond. Seeing the water, I raised my camera to my face.

"You can always block the shot better in the darkroom, but try to block it as well as you can from the start ... from now," he said.

His camera was digital, whereas I still loved film. We took the same shot of the pond, and he was able to show me his in the viewfinder. His was far better, I gathered, as he had focused with the pond in the middle, whereas in mine it had been at the bottom of the frame.

"Stand there..." He moved ahead of me, turned, and took a shot of me holding my camera with one hand, a stray branch in the other. He showed it to me.

"See? And if you're shooting people, you want their eyes as much in the center as possible."

I blushed, looking at the image. For all intents and purposes, it was a really great shot. A puffy white cloud had dimmed the sky moments ago, which made the light in the surroundings slightly foreboding. I looked wide-eyed and yet focused, as someone walking through an enchanted forest might. My dark eyes were at the very center of the frame and would pull an onlooker's eyes to them. I would say the picture spoke volumes about my being slightly anxious and slightly shy.

"You're a good subject," he said, nudging me playfully. "Come on. You want to shoot some water? Water always involves catching the light correctly."

I looked up at the numerous cotton puffs above us, thinking we would get a variety of lighting opportunities at the pond just by showing up. I halted when we got to the break in the trees.

Rain was sitting Indian-style on a large flat rock that hung over the water's edge, with her back to us. She was leaning off to the side, her head on one hand. Then I saw the tissue in her grip and figured she might be crying.

"Maybe I should leave you for now," Henry said, probably sensing my mood shift.

I waved in thanks and went slowly toward Rain, feeling my insides sway. I had not gotten Henry's phone number or made any further plans with him. I could get Mrs. Starn to put me in contact later.

I sat down slowly beside her while she blew her nose in a tissue she'd obviously used far too many times. I reached in my pocket for the stash Scott replenished daily in our jackets as part of his staying-busy routine. I handed her another.

"Thanks. I'm trying to keep my crying out of everyone's earshot. I know it's getting on all your nerves."

"Not mine," I lied, putting an arm around her shoulder. I had been very sympathetic to her crying at first, but into the second week of it, even I had felt drained. I didn't expect to have much to offer her in the way of comfort. "What's wrong?"

"Owen has another HH." Headache from Hell.

"Already?" I flinched. He'd never had one two days in a row. The rest of us could go as many as five days.

"I broke my ass making up some story about looking up dirty Internet purchases, which made him laugh and all. He was doing great. Then ... he got up very suddenly and left. He's in his room with the curtains drawn and the lights off. We know what that means." She wiped tears around on her face, not bothering with the soggy tissue. "I'm just starting to wonder if we've been given false hopes."

"By whom?"

"By the doctors and nurses at St. Ann's. They were always so cheerful. And what with the cards, and telegrams from royals, and calls from Hollywood, yadda yadda. It was a big, old mess, but sometimes I could feel..."

"Euphoric?"

"Yeah, with all that attention. Who wouldn't?"

"I loved the flowers," I said. The whole lobby at St. Ann's had been wall-to-wall flowers for several weeks.

"But we're down to maybe six cards a day. Dr. Godfrey is only coming up here twice a week, and those happy nurses are gone. They've been replaced by a nurse who's cheerful enough, but she's a hospice specialist. She's got death on the brain."

"What do you mean?"

"I had to listen to her speech early this morning about how we should fully understand things. Like if something goes wrong here—somebody spirals, has a terrible fall, catches something deadly, and starts to crash and bleed out—there will be no more exploratory diagnostics for a while. It would only give info that they couldn't do anything about. They're not doing any invasive surgeries until we improve. We would hemorrhage."

I didn't know what to say. I rubbed her back a little as the wind blew up a gust. "Well, don't panic about Owen" was all I could think of. "We all learned back at St. Ann's not to panic. It's a lesson I'd like to carry through life."

The wind rose through the trees and hissed a little. The leaves were still budding. She stayed silent, so I tried a change of subject.

"What dirty Internet purchases?"

Her smile spread a little finally, then she turned and bobbed me lightly on the nose with one knuckle. "You don't want to know."

All three of them assumed they had to hush their trash talk when I came into a room. Often, I entered to find any combination of them, and the talk would suddenly cease. It bothered me. I didn't mind hearing
anything.
It's just that when it came my turn to contribute, I couldn't think of a thing to say.

"You're still wigging out over Miss Haley," I guessed.

"You're not?"

I crinkled my nose, trying to remember how Dr. Hollis had taught me to tell the truth. Children of drug addicts are notoriously bad at truth telling. He'd told me to inhale slowly and release the truth on the exhale.

"I just ... put it on the back burner. It's no tragic loss. My last conquest? I think dinosaurs were still roaming around Trinity Falls."

"Who?" she asked, suddenly interested.

Three
breaths, and on the exhale: "Danny Daggett. Seventh grade closet game."

"Oh ... damn!" Her horror echoed through the trees as it rightfully should have. I giggled. "How'd you get stuck with him?"

"Luck of the draw."

"Ole rooster legs. He
still
looks like he's nine—"

"To answer your question, I'm not troubled by my losses. But would you mind, please, not sharing that with the boys?"

"Why? They don't care."

I
cared. I was growing more comfortable with them every day, and sometimes I could even forget the canyons that had separated them from me in high school. But most of that was because I always tried to pass myself off as mysterious rather than naive. What I just told Rain would truly blow my cover, I decided.

Rain continued to gripe. "And I would love to know how Scott goes around acting so cool, when his past is so much about being Joe Romance. Did you know that in December of freshman year, he was the girls' pinup in the Slut of the Month Club?"

My eyes flew to her. "What's that?"

"Slut of the Month Club. It was some gag going on inside Sarah Shoemaker's softball locker, but anyone on the team could vote on the guy. And there's some truth in all jokes. Someone had scrawled across his chest in the picture, 'Beware of Mr. Bag 'n' Bolt.'"

I covered my smile with my hand.

She kept laughing, throwing in a cough now and again, but it was good to hear. I had missed hearing her laugh as much lately. And yet, it was becoming plain that most of our laughter had to do with the past, while our future was a dark and very serious matter.

"Do you think we've seen the end of terror attacks?" she asked uneasily. I sensed her quandary. Surely, we wouldn't want anyone else to be in our shoes, but we hated feeling so freakishly alone.

I just went with the truth. "Only some of those men were arrested. There's more of them out there. But maybe they'll lie dormant for years."

"I wish I'd been attacked by a serial killer instead of those guys." She folded her hands in her lap, restlessly letting her left fingers bend back her right, and then the opposite. "That way, I would have had a chance at scratching someone's eyes out."

I understood her feeling. Nonetheless..."You wouldn't want to wake up and see a terrorist at your bedside," I said.

She watched me, her fingers relaxing. The only people to bring up my having been attacked in the ICU by a ShadowStrike assassin were Dr. Hollis and Mr. Steckerman. And it was a vague, brief mention each time. I was supposed to bring up "whatever I remembered and wanted to discuss," as Dr. Hollis had put it.

I went on, "They're more like demons. Oma always used to say she suspected that the devil personified would be very well spoken and wear an expensive suit."

"You ... thought you were finally meeting your dad," she stumbled.

"Please. Don't tell Scott I remember this," I begged her.

She nodded, shifting around uncomfortably. "It would be cool if he knew you remembered him saving your life."

"I wouldn't forget that. He almost killed himself trying. I just haven't said anything because ... it gets him all hyped up to talk your dad into a USIC job so he could go find those guys. I don't want..." I trailed off, feeling selfish, but Rain finished my sentence.

"What? You don't want to wake up to find one beside your bed again, if he comes looking for Scott and gets lost in the dark?"

I laughed uncomfortably. It definitely sounded stupid.

"I don't think that's so dumb. I mean, if he's helping USIC, that makes him a target. Though the part about waking up to see another one, that's a lot of what-ifs all strung together," Rain said.

"Still, I'm paranoid."

"You have reason to be." She rubbed my knee and assured me flatly, "Scott will never get a USIC job. USIC policies are etched in blood. Intelligence will take some clerks at eighteen, but he's in bad health. They simply won't have it ... unless he recovers, and then we won't be living with him, and you've got nothing to worry about. Maybe Marg will give Scott medical things to do. Maybe he can draw our blood and do the chart thing..."

She was done crying, it seemed, but I felt uneasy over all this speak about Scott becoming a target. I don't know which bothered me more—him becoming a potential target or me having been one for reasons never made clear. I supposed I had been the easiest hit; I'd been in a coma, utterly helpless.

I suggested we go back to the house, as it had been a while since we'd taken any pills, and we were sure to be due for something. But that was the small reason covering what could become a big compulsion if I let it. I was finding my peaceful spot on the property, and it happened to be wherever Scott Eberman was. It had been like that at St. Ann's, too. He'd go down to help out in the phone station in the ER, and our ward became an anxious place. He'd come back to the ward, and I would relax.

I was not relaxed now. I found myself drawn back to the house—back to where he was. As I stood up and glanced across the pond, I was met with a pair of eyes. They peered between a six-inch space in the bramble of vines and leaves between three trees. I froze, watching, trying to be reasonable, wondering if I were hallucinating again. But I decided I definitely was swapping gazes with someone ... or something...

"Rain?"

When I sensed her looking up at me, I could neither move nor explain. She peered across the water, too.

"What do you see?" she asked.

My hand rose to my throat, but the scream wouldn't come. I waited for the person to blink. I told myself that if it didn't blink, it was surely a hallucination.

"What is it?" she demanded, nudging my leg hard. It spun my gaze, and when I found the small hole in the bramble again, no one was there.

I pointed and said, "Someone was back there—staring at us."

She stood up slowly. "It's probably one of those damn photographers."

We'd been warned about straggling journalists at St. Ann's. They'd been told not to come here, not to photograph us. I'd rather it be a snooping photographer than a hallucination ... or someone in ShadowStrike.

Rain moved forward, squinting slightly. "I didn't see anything, but I believe you. I'm gonna kick some butt."

"No, you're not..." I grabbed her arm.

But she actually stood on the rock and shouted. "Hey, pervert! I got an STD from a WMD! Why don't you come over here and catch it?"

"Don't," I whispered, my hair standing. "It could be some local drunk who got lost walking home last night."

She jumped down off the rock and followed the sandy beach around toward the other side of the pond, and I followed. Where it ended, we picked up the trail that led around to the other side.