One Door Away From Heaven (34 page)

Chapter 40

AVOIDING THE LONG LENGTHS of open grassy aisles across which the ranks of vehicles face one another, the dog leads the boy between a motor home and a pickup with a camper shell, runs
across
an aisle, between two other motor homes, kicking up plumes of dust and bits of dead dry grass, thus in and around the wheel of campsites, through the area of brightly colored tents, eventually back among mechanized campers, dodging grownups and kids and a barbecue and a sunbathing woman in a lounger and a terrified Lhasa apso that squeals away from them. When Curtis at last glances back, he sees that their pursuers, if ever there were any, have given up, proving that he’s better at adventuring than he is at socializing.

He remains mortified and shaken.

For a while at least, he doesn’t want to leave the commotion and cover of the crowd at this contact vigil. Tonight or tomorrow, maybe he can hitch a ride with someone headed for a more populous area that will provide even better concealment, but right now this is as good as it gets, better than the lonely country road. As long as he avoids another encounter with Mr. Neary, he should be able to hang out in the meadow safely enough—assuming that Clara the smart cow doesn’t suddenly drop out of the sky and crush him to death.

Old Yeller whimpers, sits next to a huge Fleetwood motor home, and tilts her head up in the posture of a dog howling at the moon, although no moon rides the sky this afternoon. She’s not howling, either, but searching the heavens for a plummeting cow.

Curtis crouches beside her, scratches her ears, and explains as best he can that there’s no danger of a Holstein flattening them, whereupon she grins and leans her head into his ministering hands.

“Curtis?”

The boy looks up to discover that an astonishingly glamorous woman looms over him.

Her toenails are painted azure-blue, so it seems as though they are mirrored to reflect the sky. Indeed, she’s such a magical-looking person and the color on her toenails has such lustrous depth that Curtis can easily imagine he is looking at ten mystical entry points to the sky of another world. He is half convinced that if he drops a tiny pebble on one of her toenails, it will not bounce off, but will disappear into the blue, falling through into that other sky.

He can see her perfectly formed toes, for she wears minimalist white sandals. These have high heels made of clear acrylic, so she appears to be standing effortlessly on point, her feet as unsupported as those of a ballerina.

In tight white toreador pants, her legs look impossibly long. Curtis is sure that this must be an illusion fostered by the woman’s dramatic appearance and by the severe angle from which he gazes up at her. When he rises from beside the dog, however, he discovers that no trick of perspective is involved. If H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, on his mysterious island, had been a success at his genetic experiments, he couldn’t have produced a human-gazelle hybrid with more elegant legs than these.

The low-rider pants expose her tanned tummy, which serves as the taut setting for an oval-shaped, bezel-faceted opal the exact same shade of blue as the toenail polish. This gemstone is held securely in her navel by either glue or a cleverly concealed tension device of unimaginable design, or by sorcery.

Her bosoms are of the size that cameras linger on in the movies, brimming the cups of a white halter top. This top is made from such thin and pliant fabric, and supported by such fine-gauge spaghetti straps—capellini straps, actually—that as a wonder of the man-made world, it rivals the Golden Gate Bridge. Scores of engineers and architects might require weeks to study and adequately analyze the design of this astonishingly supportive garment.

Honey-gold hair frames a centerfold face with eyes that match the color of the opal. Her mouth, the ripe centerpiece of a lipstick advertisement, is a frosted red like the petals of the last rose on a November bush.

If the boy had been Curtis Hammond for more than two days, say for two weeks or two months, he might have been so completely adapted to the human biological condition that he would have felt the stir of male interest that apparently had begun to tease the original Curtis into adding Britney Spears to the big posters of movie monsters that papered his bedroom. Nevertheless, although he’s largely still a work in progress, he undeniably feels
something,
a dryness of the mouth that has nothing to do with thirst, a peculiar tingle along the nerves of his limbs, and a tremble short of weakness in his knees.

“Curtis?” she asks again.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and realizes as he speaks that he hasn’t told anyone his name since he chatted with Donella in the restaurant at the truck stop the previous evening.

Warily she surveys their surroundings, as if to be certain they are not observed or overheard. A few men in the vicinity, staring at her while she’s focused on Curtis, look away when she turns toward them. Perhaps she notices this suspicious behavior, for she leans closer to the boy and whispers: “Curtis
Hammond
?”

Except for Donella and poor dumb Burt Hooper, the waffle-eating trucker, and the man in the
DRIVING MACHINE
cap, no one but Curtis’s enemies could know his name.

As defenseless as any mere mortal standing before a shining angel of death, Curtis is paralyzed in expectation of being gutted, beheaded, shredded, broken, blasted, burned, and worse, though never did he imagine that Death would arrive in dangling silver earrings,
two
silver-and-turquoise necklaces, three diamond rings, a silver-and-turquoise bracelet on each wrist, and navel decoration.

He could deny that he is either the original or the current Curtis Hammond, but if this is one of the hunters that wiped out his family and Curtis’s family in Colorado two nights ago, he has already been identified by his singular energy signature. In that case, every attempt at deception will prove useless.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s me,” he says, polite to the end, and steels himself to be slaughtered, perhaps to the delight of Mr. Neary and others whom he has offended with no intention of doing so.

Her whisper grows yet softer. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Resistance is as pointless as deception, for if she is one of the worse scalawags, she has the strength of ten men and the speed of a Ferrari Testarossa, so Curtis is road kill waiting to happen.

Trembling, he says, “Dead. Yes, ma’am. I guess I am.”

“You poor child,” she says with none of the sarcasm you might expect from a killer intending to decapitate you, but with concern.

Surprised by her sympathy, he seizes upon this uncharacteristic suggestion of a potential for mercy, which her kind supposedly does not possess: “Ma’am, I’ll freely admit that my dog here knows too much, considering that we’ve bonded. I won’t pretend otherwise. But she can’t talk, so she can’t tell anyone what she knows. Whether my bones ought to be stripped out of this body and crushed like glass is something we’re sure to disagree about, but I sincerely believe there’s no good reason for her to be killed, too.”

The expression that overcomes the woman is one that Curtis has learned to recognize on faces as diverse as the round physiognomy of smiling Donella and the grizzled visage of grumpy Gabby. He supposes that it implies befuddlement, even bewilderment, though not complete mystification.

“Sweetie,” she whispers, “why do I get the feeling that some awesomely bad people must be looking for you?”

Old Yeller has not assumed a submissive posture, but has risen to her feet. She grins at the woman in white, tail wagging with the wide sweep of expectancy, pleased to make this new acquaintance.

“We better get you out of sight,” whispers the angel, who now seems less likely to be assigned to the Death Division. “Safer to sort this out in privacy. Come with me, okay?”

“Okay,” Curtis agrees, because the woman has been given the Old Yeller seal of approval.

She leads them to the door of the nearby Fleetwood American Heritage. Forty-five feet long, twelve feet high, eight to nine feet wide, the motor home is so immense and so solid in appearance that—except for its cheerful white, silver, and red paint job—it might be an armored military-command vehicle.

In her acrylic heels, with her golden hair, the woman reminds Curtis of Cinderella, though these are sandals rather than slippers. Cinderella most likely wouldn’t have worn toreador pants, either, at least not a pair that so clearly defined the buttocks. Likewise, if Cinderella’s bosoms had been as large as these, she wouldn’t have displayed them so prominently, because she had lived in a more modest age than this. But if your fairy godmother is going to turn a pumpkin into stylish equipage to transport you to the royal ball, you want her to dispense with the mice-into-horses bit and use her magic wand to whack the pumpkin into a new Fleetwood American Heritage, which is cooler than any coach drawn by enchanted vermin.

The instant the door is opened, the dog leaps up the steps and into the motor home, as though she has always belonged here. At the suggestion of his hostess, Curtis follows Old Yeller.

Entry is directly into the cockpit. As he steps between the well-separated passenger’s and driver’s seats, into a lounge with flanking sofas, he hears the door shut behind him.

Suddenly this fairy tale becomes a horror story. Looking across the lounge, into the open kitchen, Curtis sees at the sink the last person that he might expect to find there. Cinderella.

He turns in shock, looking behind him, and Cinderella is
there,
as well, standing between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, smiling and even more dramatic-looking in this confined space than she had been out in the sun.

The Cinderella at the sink is identical to the first Cinderella, from the silky honey-gold hair to the opal-blue eyes, to the opal in the navel, to the long legs in low-rider white toreador pants, to the sandals with acrylic heels, to the azure toenails.

Clones.

Oh, Lord,
clones.

Clones are usually trouble, and there’s no prejudice in this opinion, because most clones are born to be bad.

“Clones,” Curtis mutters.

The first Cinderella smiles. “What’d you say, sweetie?”

The second Cinderella turns away from the sink and takes a step toward Curtis. She’s also smiling. And she’s holding a large knife.

Chapter 41

SITTING IN THE fluorescent-flooded brick-and-mortar library but also outbound through cyberspace with its infinite avenues of radiant circuitry and light pipes, traveling the world on the swift wheels of electric current and microwaves, exploring virtual libraries that are always open, ever bright, poring through paperless books of glowing data, Micky found the primitive self-interest and darkest materialism of humanity everywhere in these palaces of technological genius.

Bioethicists reject the existence of objective truths. Preston Maddoc had written, “There is no right or wrong, no moral or immoral conduct. Bioethics is about efficiency, about establishing a set of rules that will do the most good for the most people.”

For one thing, this efficiency means assisting suicide in every case where a suffering person considers it, not merely assisting the suicides of the terminally ill, not just of the chronically ill, but assisting even those who could be cured but are at times depressed.

In fact, Preston and many others considered depressed people as candidates not only for suicide assistance but also for “positive suicide counseling” to ensure they self-destructed. After all, a depressed person has an inadequate quality of life, and even if his depression can be alleviated with drugs, he isn’t “normal” when on mood-altering medication and therefore is incapable of leading a life of quality.

An increase in the suicide rate is, they believe, a benefit to society, for in a well-managed medical system, the organs of assisted suicides should be harvested for transplantation. Micky read many bioethicists who were gleeful at the prospect of alleviating organ shortages through managed-care suicide programs; in their enthusiasm, it was clear they would work aggressively to
increase
the number of suicides if given all the laws for which they relentlessly pressed.

If we are all just meat, having no soul, then why shouldn’t some of us join together to butcher others for our benefit? There will be an immediate gain and no long-term consequences.

Micky snatched her right hand away from the mouse, her left hand off the keyboard. To save electricity, the library was almost as warm as the day outside, but a chill slithered into her from the Internet, as though someone at a computer in Dr. Frankenstein’s castle had crossed paths with her in cyberspace, reaching out of the ether to trace her spine with a virtual finger colder than ice.

She looked around at the other library patrons, wondering how many of them would be as shocked as she was by what she’d read, how many would be indifferent—and how many would agree with Preston Maddoc and his colleagues. She had often brooded about the fragility of life, but for the first time, she realized with sobering acuity that civilization itself was as fragile as any human being. Any of the many hells that humankind had created throughout history, in one corner of the world or another, could be recreated here—or a new hell could be built, more efficient and more thoroughly reasoned.

Back to the mouse, the keys, the World Wide Web, and back to Preston Maddoc, the spider, out there spinning….

The organs of the suicidal and the disabled were coveted, but Maddoc and others in the bioethics community expressed great sympathy for the harvesting of organs from the healthy and the happy, as well.

In
The Elimination of Morality,
by Anne Maclean, Micky read of a program proposed by John Harris, a British bioethicist, in which everyone would be given a lottery number. Then “whenever doctors have two or more dying patients who could be saved by transplants, and no suitable organs have come to hand through ‘natural deaths,’ they can ask a central computer to supply a suitable donor. The computer will then pick the number of a suitable donor at random and he will be killed so that the lives of two or more others may be saved.”

Kill a thousand to save three thousand. Kill a million to save three million. Kill the weak to save the stronger. Kill the disabled to provide a higher quality of life to the firm of limb. Kill those with lower IQs to provide more resources to those judged smarter.

Great universities like Harvard and Yale, like Princeton, once citadels of knowledge where truth might be pursued, had become well-oiled machines of death, instructing medical students that killing should be viewed as a form of healing, that only selected people who meet a series of criteria have a right to exist, that there is no right or wrong, that death is life. We are all Darwinians now, are we not? The strong survive longer, the weak die sooner, and since this is the plan of Nature, shouldn’t we help the old green gal in her work? Accept your expensive diploma, toss your mortarboard in the air to celebrate, and then go kill a weakling for Mother Nature.

Somewhere Hitler smiles. They say that he killed the disabled and the sick (not to mention the Jews) for all the wrong reasons, but if in fact there is no wrong or right, no objective truth, then all that really matters is that he
did
kill them, which by the standards of contemporary ethics, makes him a visionary.

Photographs of Preston Maddoc, as they appeared on the screen, revealed a good-looking if not handsome man with longish brown hair, a mustache, and an appealing smile. Contrary to Micky’s expectations, he didn’t sport a Universal Product Code on his forehead with the numerals 666 rendered in bar code.

His short-form bio revealed a man on whom Lady Luck smiled. He was the sole heir to a considerable fortune. He didn’t need to work in order to travel in style from one end of the country to the other in search of extraterrestrials who might have a healing gift.

Micky could find no story in the media exploring Maddoc’s belief that UFOs were real and that ETs walked among us. If it was a genuine long-held belief, he had never spoken publicly about it.

Four and a half years ago, he resigned his university position to “devote more time to bioethic philosophy, rather than teaching,” and to unspecified personal interests.

He was known to have assisted in eight suicides.

Leilani claimed he had killed eleven people. Evidently she knew of three who were not part of the public record.

A few elderly women, a thirty-year-old mother with cancer, a seventeen-year-old high-school football star who suffered a spinal injury…In Micky’s mind, as she read of Maddoc’s kills, she heard Leilani’s voice reciting the same list.

Twice Maddoc had been prosecuted for murder, in two different cases and jurisdictions. Both times, juries had acquitted him because they felt that his intentions had been noble and that his compassion had been admirable, unimpeachable.

The husband of the thirty-year-old cancer victim, though present during the assisted suicide, subsequently filed a civil suit seeking damages from Maddoc when an autopsy discovered that his wife had been misdiagnosed, that she didn’t have cancer, and that her condition had been curable. The jurors sided with Maddoc, nevertheless, because of his good intentions and because they felt the true fault resided with the doctor who had delivered the wrong diagnosis.

A year after the death of her son, the mother of the six-year-old wheelchair-bound boy filed suit, too, claiming that Maddoc, in conspiracy with her husband, subjected her to “relentless mental and emotional intimidation using techniques of psychological warfare and brainwashing,” until in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, she agreed to terminate her son’s life, for which she was remorseful. She dropped all legal action prior to trial, maybe because she didn’t have the heart for the media circus that began to pitch its tents or because Maddoc reached an undisclosed settlement with her.

Luck undeniably favored Preston Maddoc, but you couldn’t lightly regard the importance of the powerhouse legal-defense team that his fortune provided or the effect of the twenty-thousand-dollar-per-month public-relations firm that for years worked tirelessly to polish his image.

He kept a lower profile these days. Indeed, since he had become Sinsemilla’s devoted husband and deep-pocket pharmacy, he’d steadily moved farther off the public stage, allowing other true believers to man the barricades on behalf of their vision of a brave new world of greater happiness through useful killing.

Curiously, Micky could find no reference to Maddoc’s marriage. According to every thumbnail biography to be found on the Internet, he was single.

When a figure as controversial as Preston Maddoc took a wife, the wedding should be news. Whether he’d drawn a marriage license in busy Manhattan or in a sleepy backwater in Kansas, the media would have learned of the event and would have reported it widely, even if the ceremony had been conducted and the bride had been kissed before journalists could fly to the scene with cameras. Yet…not a word.

Leilani had called it an amazing wedding, though it lacked a carved-ice swan. By now, Micky believed that no matter how outrageous the girl’s stories seemed, Leilani never lied. Somewhere, a wedding had been held, without either the carved-ice swan or the breathless attention of the media.

Understandably, when your bride was a woman like Sinsemilla, you might not want your publicist to seek a three-page spread in
People
or to arrange for the two of you to do a TV interview with Larry King in celebration of your nuptials.

Most likely, however, the reason for this singular degree of discretion had been the groom’s intention to kill his stepson and stepdaughter if his expectation of extraterrestrial healers wasn’t fulfilled. Fewer questions will be asked about your missing children if no one knows they existed in the first place.

Micky remembered Leilani saying that Maddoc didn’t use his own name at campgrounds when they traveled in their motor home and that he affected a different appearance these days. Judging by copyright dates, the most recent photos of him were at least four years old.

Staring at Dr. Doom’s blithe face on the computer, she suspected that his murderous intent toward Lukipela and Leilani wasn’t the only reason he kept his marriage secret. A mystery awaited revelation.

She logged off. The resources on the Internet were exhaustive, but Micky could learn nothing more of use from them. The real world always trumped the virtual, and it always would. The next step was to meet Preston Maddoc face-to-face and take his measure.

Leaving the library, she was no longer self-conscious about her too-short, too-tight skirt. If she hadn’t canceled, she could have gone to the job interview with confidence.

In the past couple hours, she’d changed in some fundamental way. She felt this difference profoundly, but she couldn’t yet define it.

Brooding about bioethics, Micky arrived at her Camaro without quite realizing that she’d crossed the parking lot, as though she had teleported from the library to the car in an instant.

Behind the wheel, she didn’t switch on the radio. She
always
drove by radio. Silences made her edgy, and music was a caulking that filled every jagged chink. But not today.

The real world trumped the virtual….

Bioethicists were dangerous because they devised their rules and schemes not for the real world but for a virtual reality in which human beings have no heart, no capacity to love, and where everyone is as convinced of the meaninglessness of life as are the ethicists themselves, where everyone believes that humanity is just meat.

On her way home, the highways were as clogged as an aging sumo wrestler’s arteries. Usually she chafed at the stop-and-go traffic. But not today.

Maddoc and his fellow bioethicists ceased to be merely dangerous and became bloody tyrants when they obtained the power to try to make the world conform to their abstract model of it, a model that was in conflict with human nature and no more representative of reality than an idiot savant’s math tricks are representative of true genius.

Stop, go. Stop, go.

She remembered reading that California had halted freeway construction for eight years in the 1970s and ’80s. The governor back then believed automobiles would no longer be in wide use by 1995. Public transit would take over. Alternate technology. Miracles.

In all the years that she’d railed at bumper-to-bumper traffic, during so many frustrating two-hour drives that should have taken thirty minutes, she had never before connected that idiotic public policy to the current mess. Suddenly she felt that by her own choice she’d been living entirely in the current moment, in a bubble that separated her from the past and the future, from cause and effect.

Stop, go. Stop, go.

How many millions of gallons of gasoline were wasted in traffic like this, how much unnecessary pollution generated by the unintended consequence of that moratorium on highway construction? And yet the current governor had announced his own ban on freeway construction.

If she let Leilani die, how could she live with herself other than by embracing the we’re-just-meat philosophy of Maddoc’s crowd? In her own way, she’d been living by that empty faith for years—and look where it had gotten her.

One new thought led to another. Stop, go. Stop, go.

Micky felt as if she were waking from a twenty-eight-year dream.