Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (11 page)

You can’t get away from me. It’s not even worth trying.

“Please,” Owen said.

You know what I want. You know what I’ll do to you if I don’t get it. I can still make it worse. I can keep you in the soup as long as I want to. Take a few minutes to think about it. Our friend isn’t going anywhere.

The voice went silent.

There was no sound but the low rumble of the quad’s engine and the ringing of blood in Owen’s ears.

When he breathed in, he could still taste the air inside the coffin. Like the smell when a rat died in a wall somewhere in the house, and there was no way to find it to get rid of it. He looked at his hands. They were clean and dry, but he could still feel the thick liquid coating them, dripping through the gaps between his fingers.

He slid off the quad and sank to the ground next to it. He crossed his arms and gripped his own shoulders and began rocking forward and back at the waist. He hadn’t done that since he was very young—kids at school had teased him to death for it—but here it was, back again. He didn’t fight it.

*   *   *

When he rolled the quad back up to the convertible and cut the engine, the kid didn’t say anything. He only stared at Owen, his eyes wary.

Owen went around to the passenger door. The claw hammer was there in front of the seat. He leaned down and got it, and when the kid saw it, a kind of nervous hope seemed to fill his face. Like Owen had found a tool to help him with after all. Then the kid met his eyes and saw what was there, and he drew away like a chained-up animal. He made sounds that weren’t quite words—or if they were words, they might have been
please
and
no.
His bound-together feet slipped out from under him and he thrashed his body around.

Owen stood above him with the hammer down at his side.

“I don’t mean it,” he said.

*   *   *

He rode back up to the spot two days later, when Grandpa went into town for brake pads. The convertible was gone, and where the young man had bled, there was only a scoured patch of ground. A good bit of the desert topsoil had been raked up and taken away.

Three months had passed since then. Every night at bedtime, the Gravel Man visited and made the girls in Owen’s memory come to life. It was always good—there was no denying that—but whenever the nice feelings faded and he was alone again, the same thoughts always came to him. They circled like ghosts in the dark of his bedroom.

Where was all this going?

What was it for?

To those questions, the Gravel Man never offered any answers.

PART TWO

BETA

This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,

And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.

—GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was raining when Holly Ferrel arrived at Amarillo Children’s Medical Center. The car pulled under the overhang at the entrance, and two of the three men with her—the two seated on the passenger side, front and back—got out fast. From her position in back, Holly couldn’t see their heads, but she knew they were sweeping their gazes over the geography surrounding the hospital’s entry. She could see their hands ready to go under their suit coats for the sidearms holstered there. She could see their posture, tense and wired, the embodiment of her own anxiety.

One of them gave the roof a double pat with his fingertips; only then did the driver put the car in park.

“Clear,” the driver said to her. He said it the way a ticket taker at a movie theater might say “Enjoy the show.” Every step in the process was routine—to him and to her. It’d been going on for weeks.

One of the others came around and opened the door for her. The two of them followed her as far as the entrance, then took up positions outside as she went in. She liked to tell herself the fear stayed outside with them. That it was like an overcoat she could hang up at the door and not think about again until it was time to go home. Some days it almost worked.

Sixty seconds later, and five stories up, Holly passed through another door. An engraved steel sign beside it read
ONCOLOGY
.

She didn’t go straight to her office. She nodded hello to the nurses on duty at the station, crossed to the north-wing hallway, and went to the third doorway on the right. The door was wide open. Even before reaching it, she saw the dim room inside strobing with familiar light. She came to it, leaned in, and knocked on the frame.

Ten feet away, Laney Miller looked up from the video game on her laptop. Her eyes brightened.

“Hi, Holly.”

Laney’s voice, soft and raspy, reminded Holly of a teenaged girl who’d just spent a week singing lead in the high school musical. For a second the awful math swam into Holly’s thoughts: the odds against Laney ever doing that. The odds against her becoming a teenager at all. Holly buried the notion before her face could register it.

She crossed to the bed, leaned down, and kissed Laney’s forehead beneath the pink knit cap that kept her scalp warm.

“How do you feel today?” Holly asked.

Laney managed half a smile. “Same.”

So many things going on in that face, in that tone.
I don’t want to lie to you, but I also don’t want to make you feel bad. I know you’re doing everything you can.

Holly returned the smile. “Same is better than worse, right?”

One of her professors at NYU had told her doctors weren’t supposed to get attached. Not
very
attached, anyway. That was better left to nurses. Her attending physician during her residency at Anne Arundel, in Annapolis, had said something similar. In the decade since, Holly had never taken the advice.

Laney was playing the video game again. Its name slipped Holly’s mind, but she was familiar with how it worked: The player existed in a 3-D world made up of small, discrete cubes—cubes of grassy earth, exposed dirt, sand, and rock. You could dig shafts deep into the ground or into the sides of cliffs, and use the freed material—also in the form of cubes—to build things with. For three days now, Laney had been creating a replica of Egypt’s Giza Plateau in the game. The three largest pyramids and the Sphinx. It was absorbing work. Which qualified it as a godsend.

“I found a new Neil deGrasse Tyson video on YouTube,” Laney said. “He was talking about Europa—that’s one of Jupiter’s moons. He said the whole thing is covered with ice, but under the ice there’s an ocean of liquid water, and there might be life down there.”

Before her time here, Laney had been about as serious an astronomer as a sixth grader could be. She had shown Holly pictures from her blog, of herself and her little sister at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Once Laney had even been to the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona. What she’d liked most of all, though, was just lying on the rooftop deck of her home, in farm country north of Tulsa.
It’s a long way from city lights,
she had told Holly.
It’s dark enough that you can see satellites going over, if you watch long enough. They don’t blink or anything. They look just like stars, except they move. They slide right across the sky in a minute or so
.

Holly’s phone beeped with a text message. She took it out and looked at it.

Karen Simonyi: Lab just sent the new numbers for Laney. Not what we hoped for
.

Holly kept her expression blank. From Laney’s point of view, it might’ve been a text about dinner plans. Still, when Holly met the girl’s eyes, it was possible to imagine she knew otherwise—to imagine Laney could tell what she was thinking.

Holly almost shivered at that idea.

That all too familiar idea.

Laney looked puzzled. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry, just spacing out.”

The girl offered another smile, this one a little closer to full. “Doctors aren’t allowed to space out. Too many responsibilities.”

“That’s
why
we space out.”

Holly kissed her forehead again and left the room.

Two minutes later she was standing at her office window, looking out over the Texas flatlands in the rain. The numbers for Laney were on her computer screen. She’d looked them over twice. She leaned her head against the windowpane. Far below, one of her bodyguards walked out under the entry overhang. He turned and surveyed the road in both directions, then headed back to the door. He did this several times per hour.

Holly went to her desk chair and sank into it. She shut her eyes. In the silence were all the memories that always came to her. Like old acquaintances. These days, just about anything could trigger them. Could send her back to when everything had gone wrong—to when it could’ve gone right if she’d done things differently. If she’d been stronger.

She squeezed her eyes more tightly shut. Felt the pressure against her eyeballs. Saw little pops and flashes of light in the black. She’d found long ago that this helped her deal with the other feeling—the sense that regret could be a physical thing. That it could stand behind you with its hand on your back, and that sometimes it could reach inside you and clutch your heart in its grip.

“Rachel,” she whispered. She braced her elbows on the desk and put her face into her palms, and the name echoed in her thoughts as if she’d spoken it in a catacomb.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Evening came to the forest and brought with it a change of soundtrack, from chaotic birdsong to the sedate rhythm of a billion insects. Dryden sat on the small porch of the cabin and watched the shadows deepen among the sequoias. Through the open door he could hear Rachel breathing softly in her sleep. If she began speaking, it would take only seconds to step inside and switch on the audio recorder next to her.

The cabin, a simple one-room structure, was an old Fish and Game Department outpost Dryden had found while backpacking, years earlier. Department field workers probably stayed in it a few nights a year; the rest of the time it was left unlocked for the use of any backcountry hiker that happened by. No harm in that—there was nothing of value kept inside. Dryden sat with his back against the exterior wall, waiting for answers to emerge from Rachel’s dreams.

For the first hour that she’d slept, Dryden had sat on the floor next to her sleeping bag, though for reasons that had little to do with listening in on her. He was concerned with keeping her from hurting herself: The drug they’d used on her worked by inhibiting something called REM atonia, a kind of natural sleep paralysis—the body’s own countermeasure against sleepwalking. Under the drug, that paralysis was blocked. Subjects would act out their dreams: moving their limbs, which wasn’t helpful for interrogators, and moving their lips, which was.

Sleep interrogation wasn’t especially new. Dryden had heard firsthand accounts of the practice going back forty years or more, with older and less sophisticated narcotics. The principle had always been the same, though: Get the subject dreaming, get him talking, and then interact with him. Try to influence the dream by suggestion. Dryden had seen interrogators sit at bedsides and whisper in Farsi or Arabic, pretending to be a subject’s brother or father or son. Subtlety was everything. Dreams were fragile, evanescent things; the surest way to end one was to let the subject
realize
he was dreaming.

Rachel had less than the normal dose of the drug in her system right now, but there was no question she still had some of it left in her. It took forever for the kidneys to filter the stuff out of the blood. The subjects Dryden had seen during his years with Ferret had always been tied to their beds for at least one more night after their last interrogation session. In almost all cases they moved and talked that extra night, if only a little. Sometimes the interrogator would try to get a bit more out of them on those occasions; why not?

Dryden turned and looked in on Rachel. She lay on one side with the sleeping bag pulled up around her chin.

So many questions. Who was she, really? Where had she come from, before her time in that building in El Sedero? Did she have a family somewhere? Did she have anyone? Rachel herself had rattled these questions off before lying down, and then she’d surprised Dryden.

Don’t ask me any of those things in my sleep. Like you said, if this works at all, it’ll be just barely. You might only have time for a question or two. I can wait a week to find out who I am. Just ask about the other stuff
.

When she’d said it, the fear beneath her expression had been palpable. Above the edge of her sleeping bag, her face was relaxed now. Soft features, untroubled. The face of a child, at last. Part of Dryden hoped she’d just sleep through the night. She sure as hell deserved to.

Less than a hundred yards from the cabin, a jay scolded and flew from a low branch. Dryden turned fast and studied the place it had flown from. He watched for movement, more out of instinct than any real fear that Gaul could have tracked them here. Dryden’s precautions had been a few degrees beyond paranoid, even under these circumstances.

For starters, there was nothing to link him to this location. His hiking trips had always been personal outings, never related to his military service—wilderness training or anything else on record. Of all the documents in Dryden’s past for Gaul to dig up, there could be nothing to indicate he’d ever been to Sequoia National Park, much less to this nameless little structure more than a mile from any marked trail. There was simply no way anyone could know he and Rachel were here.

Yet Dryden kept his eyes on the spot from which the jay had fled.

A fern swayed.

It wasn’t the wind; the weeds around it were still.

The pistol, a SIG SAUER P-226, was two feet from Dryden’s hand, on a shelf inside the door.

The fern shook harder, and then a fox kit sprang from it, tackled a second later by its sibling. They wrestled in the clear patch for a few seconds, then tumbled into brush on the far side.

Dryden let his nerves rest. It felt nice, if only for a minute, to see the forest the way he might have seen it as a kid. Or as a father. Erin would have been six years old this month, maybe a little young to come out here backpacking overnight, but not by much.