Sole Survivor (39 page)

His voice was shakier than hers. “It’s not far now.”

“Too far,” she whispered. “Just hold my hand.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It’s all right, Joe.”

The shoulder of the highway widened to a scenic rest area. He stopped the car before a vista of darkness: the hard night sky, the icy disk of a moon that seemed to shed cold instead of light, and a vast blackness of trees and rocks and canyons descending.

He released his seat belt, leaned across the console, and took her hand. Her grip was weak.

“She needs you, Joe.”

“I’m nobody’s hero, Rose. I’m nothing.”

“You need to hide her…hide her away…”

“Rose—”

“Give her time…for her power to grow.”

“I can’t save anyone.”

“I shouldn’t have started the work so soon. The day will come when…when she won’t be so vulnerable. Hide her away…let her power grow. She’ll know…when the time has come.”

She began to lose her grip on him.

He covered her hand with both of his, held it fast, would not let it slip from his grasp.

Voice raveling away, she seemed to be receding from him though she did not move: “Open…open your heart to her, Joe.”

Her eyelids fluttered.

“Rose, please don’t.”

“It’s all right.”

“Please. Don’t.”

“See you later, Joe.”

“Please.”

“See you.”

Then he was alone in the night. He held her small hand alone in the night while the wind played a hollow threnody. When at last he was able to do so, he kissed her brow.

The directions Rose had given him were easy to follow. The cabin was neither in the town of Big Bear Lake nor elsewhere along the lakefront, but higher on the northern slopes and nestled deep in pines and birches. The cracked and potholed blacktop led to a dirt driveway, at the end of which was a small white clapboard house with a shake-shingle roof.

A green Jeep Wagoneer stood beside the cabin. Joe parked behind the Jeep.

The cabin boasted a deep, elevated porch, on which three cane-backed rocking chairs were arranged side by side. A handsome black man, tall and athletically built, stood at the railing, his ebony skin highlighted with a brass tint cast by two bare yellow lightbulbs in the porch ceiling.

The girl waited at the head of the flight of four steps that led up from the driveway to the porch. She was blond and about six years old.

From under the driver’s seat, Joe retrieved the gun that he had taken from the white-haired storyteller after the scuffle on the beach. Getting out of the car, he tucked the weapon under the waistband of his jeans.

The wind shrieked and hissed through the needled teeth of the pines.

He walked to the foot of the steps.

The child had descended two of the four treads. She stared past Joe, at the Ford. She knew what had happened.

On the porch, the black man began to cry.

The girl spoke for the first time in over a year, since the moment outside the Ealings’ ranch house when she had told Rose that she wanted to be called Nina. Gazing at the car, she said only one word, in a voice soft and small: “Mother.”

Her hair was the same shade as Nina’s hair. She was as fine-boned as Nina. But her eyes were not gray like Nina’s eyes, and no matter how hard Joe tried to see Nina’s face before him, he could not deceive himself into believing that this was his daughter.

Yet again, he had been engaged in searching behavior, seeking what was lost forever.

The moon above was a thief, its glow not a radiance of its own but a weak reflection of the sun. And like the moon, this girl was a thief—not Nina but only a reflection of Nina, shining not with Nina’s brilliant light but with a pale fire.

Regardless of whether she was only a lab-born mutant with strange mental powers or really the hope of the world, Joe hated her at that moment, and hated himself for hating her—but hated her nonetheless.

17

Hot wind huffed at the windows, and the cabin smelled of pine, dust, and the black char from last winter’s cozy blazes, which coated the brick walls of the big fireplace.

The incoming electrical lines had sufficient slack to swing in the wind. From time to time they slapped against the house, causing the lights to throb and flicker. Each tremulous brownout reminded Joe of the pulsing lights at the Delmann house, and his skin prickled with dread.

The owner was the tall black man who had broken into tears on the porch. He was Louis Tucker, Mahalia’s brother, who had divorced Rose eighteen years ago, when she proved unable to have children. She had turned to him in her darkest hour. And after all this time, though he had a wife and children whom he loved, Louis clearly still loved Rose too.

“If you really believe she’s not dead, that she’s only moved on,” Joe said coldly, “why cry for her?”

“I’m crying for me,” said Louis. “Because she’s gone from here and I’ll have to wait through a lot of days to see her again.”

Two suitcases stood in the front room, just inside the door. They contained the belongings of the child.

She was at a window, staring out at the Ford, with sorrow pulled around her like sackcloth.

“I’m scared,” Louis said. “Rose was going to stay up here with Nina, but I don’t think it’s safe now. I don’t want to believe it could be true—but they might’ve found me before I got out of the last place with Nina. Couple times, way back, I thought the same car was behind us. Then it didn’t keep up.”

“They don’t have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.”

“And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out onto the porch ’cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind—does that make sense?”

“You better get her out of here,” Joe agreed.

As the wind slapped the electrical lines against the house, Louis paced to the fireplace and back, a hand pressed to his forehead as he tried to put the loss of Rose out of his mind long enough to think what to do. “I figured you and Rose…well, I thought the two of you were taking her. And if they’re onto me, then won’t she be safer with you?”

“If they’re onto you,” Joe said, “then none of us is safe here, now, anymore. There’s no way out.”

The lines slapped the house, slapped the house, and the lights pulsed, and Louis walked to the fireplace and picked up a battery-powered, long-necked butane match from the hearth.

The girl turned from the window, eyes wide, and said,
“No.”

Louis Tucker flicked the switch on the butane match, and blue flame spurted from the nozzle. Laughing, he set his own hair on fire and then his shirt.

“Nina!” Joe cried.

The girl ran to his side.

The stink of burning hair spread through the room.

Ablaze, Louis moved to block the front door.

From the waistband of his jeans, Joe drew the pistol, aimed—but couldn’t pull the trigger. This man confronting him was not really Louis Tucker now; it was the boy-thing, reaching out three thousand miles from Virginia. And there was no chance that Louis would regain control of his body and live through this night. Yet Joe hesitated to squeeze off a shot, because the moment that Louis was dead, the boy would remote someone else.

The girl was probably untouchable, able to protect herself with her own paranormal power. So the boy would use Joe—and the gun in Joe’s hand—to shoot the girl point-blank in the head.

“This is
fun,
” the boy said in Louis’s voice, as flames seethed off his hair, as his ears charred and crackled, as his forehead and cheeks blistered.
“Fun,”
he said, enjoying his ride inside Louis Tucker but still blocking the exit to the porch.

Maybe, at the instant of greatest jeopardy, Nina could send herself into that safe bright blueness as she had done just before the 747 plowed into the meadow. Maybe the bullets fired at her would merely pass through the empty air where she had been. But there was a chance that she was still not fully recovered, that she wasn’t yet able to perform such a taxing feat, or even that she could perform it but would be mortally drained by it this time.

“Out the back!” Joe shouted. “Go, go!”

Nina raced to the door between the front room and the kitchen at the rear of the cabin.

Joe backed after her, keeping the pistol trained on the burning man, even though he didn’t intend to use it.

Their only hope was that the boy’s love of “fun” would give them the chance to get out of the cabin, into the open, where his ability to conduct remote viewing and to engage in mind control would be, according to Rose, severely diminished. If he gave up the toy that was Louis Tucker, he would be into Joe’s head in an instant.

Tossing aside the butane match, with flames spreading along the sleeves of his shirt and down his pants, the boy-thing said, “Oh, yeah, oh, wow,” and came after them.

Joe recalled too clearly the feeling of the ice-cold needle that had seemed to pierce the summit of his spine as he had barely escaped the Delmann house the previous night. That invading energy scared him more than the prospect of being embraced by the fiery arms of this shambling specter.

Frantically he retreated into the kitchen, slamming the door as he went, which was pointless because no door—no wall, no steel vault—could delay the boy if he abandoned Louis’s body and went incorporeal.

Nina slipped out the back door of the cabin, and a wolf pack of wind, chuffing and puling, rushed past her and inside.

As Joe followed her into the night, he heard the living room door crash into the kitchen.

Behind the cabin was a small yard of dirt and natural bunch-grass. The air was full of wind-torn leaves, pine needles, grit. Beyond a redwood picnic table and four redwood chairs, the forest rose again.

Nina was already running for the trees, short legs pumping, sneakers slapping on the hard-packed earth. She thrashed through tall weeds at the perimeter of the woods and vanished in the gloom among the pines and birches.

Nearly as terrified of losing the girl in the wilds as he was frightened of the boy in the burning man, Joe sprinted between the trees, shouting the girl’s name, one arm raised to ward off any pine boughs that might be drooping low enough to lash his eyes.

From the night behind him came Louis Tucker’s voice, slurred by the damage that the spreading flames had already done to his lips but nevertheless recognizable, the chanted words of a childish challenge: “Here I come, here I come, here I come, ready or not, here I come, ready or not!”

A narrow break in the trees admitted a cascade of moonbeams, and Joe spotted the girl’s cap of wind-whipped blond hair glowing with pale fire, the reflection of reflected light, to his right and only six or eight yards ahead. He stumbled over a rotting log, slipped on something slimy, kept his balance, flailed through prickly waist-high brush, and discovered that Nina had found the beaten-clear path of a deer trail.

As he caught up with the girl, the darkness around them abruptly brightened. Salamanders of orange light slithered up the trunks of the trees and whipped their tails across the glossy boughs of pines and spruces.

Joe turned and saw the possessed hulk of Louis Tucker thirty feet away, ablaze from head to foot but still standing, hitching and jerking through the woods, caroming from tree to tree, twenty feet away, barely alive, setting fire to the carpet of dry pine needles over which he shambled and to the bristling weeds and to the trees as he passed them. Now fifteen feet away. The stench of burning flesh on the wind. The boy-thing shouted gleefully, but the words were garbled and unintelligible.

Even in a two-hand grip, the pistol shook, but Joe squeezed off one, two, four, six rounds, and at least four of them hit the seething specter. It pitched backward and fell and didn’t move, didn’t even twitch, dead from fire and gunfire.

Louis Tucker was not a person now but a burning corpse. The body no longer harbored a mind that the boy could saddle and ride and torment.

Where?

Joe turned to Nina—and felt a familiar icy pressure at the back of his neck, an insistent probing, not as sharp as it had been when he was almost caught on the threshold of the Delmann house, perhaps blunted now because the boy’s power was indeed diminishing here in the open. But the psychic syringe was not yet blunt enough to be ineffective. It still stung. It pierced.

Joe screamed.

The girl seized his hand.

The iciness tore out its fangs and
flew
from him, as though it were a bat taking wing.

Reeling, Joe clamped a hand to the nape of his neck, certain that he would find his flesh ripped and bleeding, but he was not wounded. And his mind had not been violated, either.

Nina’s touch had saved him from possession.

With a banshee shriek, a hawk exploded out of the high branches of a tree and dive-bombed the girl, striking at her head, pecking at her scalp, wings flapping, beak click-click-clicking. She screamed and covered her face with her hands, and Joe batted at the assailant with one arm. The crazed bird swooped up and away, but it wasn’t an ordinary bird, of course, and it wasn’t merely crazed by the wind and the churning fire that swelled rapidly through the woods behind them.

Here it came again, with a fierce
skreeeek,
the latest host for the visitant from Virginia, arrowing down through the moonlight, its rapier beak as deadly as a stiletto, too fast to be a target for the gun.

Joe let go of the pistol and dropped to his knees on the deer trail and pulled the girl protectively against him. Pressed her face against his chest. The bird would want to get at her eyes. Peck at her eyes. Jab-jab-jab through the vulnerable sockets at the precious brain beyond. Damage the brain, and her power cannot save her. Tear her specialness right out of her gray matter and leave her in spasms on the ground.

The hawk struck, sank one set of talons into the sleeve of Joe’s coat, through the corduroy, piercing the skin of his forearm, planting the other set of talons in Nina’s blond hair, wings drumming as it pecked her scalp, pecked, angry because her face was concealed. Pecking now at Joe’s hand as he tried to knock it away, holding fast to sleeve and hair, determined not to be dislodged. Pecking, pecking at
his
face now, going for his eyes, Jesus, a flash of pain as it tore open his cheek. Seize it. Stop it. Crush it quickly. Peck, the darting head, the bloody beak, peck, and it got his brow this time, above his right eye, sure to blind him with the next thrust. He clenched his hand around it, and its talons tore at the cuff of his coat sleeve now, tore at his wrist, wings beating against his face, and it bobbed its head, the wicked beak darting at him, but he held it off, the hooked yellow point snapping an inch short of a blinding wound, the beady eyes glaring fiercely and blood-red with reflections of fire. Squeeze it, squeeze the life out of it, with its racing heart stuttering against his relentless palm. Its bones were thin and hollow, which made it light enough to fly with grace—but which also made it easier to break. Joe felt its breast crumple, and he threw it away from the girl, watched it tumble along the deer trail, disabled but still alive, wings flapping weakly but unable to lift into the night.

Joe pushed Nina’s tangled hair away from her face. She was all right. Her eyes had not been hit. In fact, she was unmarked, and he was overcome by a rush of pride that he had prevented the hawk from getting at her.

Blood oozed from his slashed brow, around the curve of the socket, and into the corner of his eye, blurring his vision. Blood streamed from the wound in his cheek, dripped from his pecked and stinging hand, from his gouged wrist.

He retrieved the pistol, engaged the safety, and jammed the weapon under his waistband again.

From out of the surrounding woods issued a bleat of animal terror, which abruptly cut off, and then across the mountainside, over the howling of the wind, a sharp shriek sliced through the night. Something was coming.

Maybe the boy had gained more control of his talent during the year that Rose had been on the run, and maybe now he was more capable of remoting someone in the outdoors. Or perhaps the coalesced power of his psychogeist was radiating away like the heat from a rock, as Rose had explained, but just wasn’t dispersing fast enough to bring a quick end to this assault.

Because of the blustery wind and the express-train roar of the wildfire, Joe couldn’t be certain from which direction the cry had arisen, and now the boy, clothed in the flesh of his host, was coming silently.

Joe scooped the girl off the deer trail, cradling her in his arms. They needed to keep moving, and until his energy faded, he could move faster through the woods if he carried her than if he led her by the hand.

She was so small. He was scared by how small she was, nearly as breakable as the avian bones of the hawk.

She clung to him, and he tried to smile at her. In the hellish leaping light, his flaring eyes and strained grin were probably more frightening than reassuring.

The mad boy in his new incarnation was not the only threat they faced. The explosive Santa Ana wind threw bright rags, threw sheets, threw great billowing
sails
of fire across the flank of the mountain. The pines were dry from the hot rainless summer, their bark rich with turpentine, and they burst into flame as though they were made of gasoline-soaked rags.

Ramparts of fire at least three hundred feet across blocked the way back to the cabin. They could not get around the blaze and behind it, because it was spreading laterally faster than they could hike through the underbrush and across the rugged terrain.

At the same time, the fire was coming toward them. Fast.

Joe stood with Nina in his arms, riveted and dismayed by the sight of the towering wall of fire, and he realized that they had no choice but to abandon the car. They would have to make the trip out of the mountains entirely on foot.

With a hot
whoosh,
roiling gouts of wind-harried flames spewed through the treetops immediately overhead, like a deadly blast from a futuristic plasma weapon. The pine boughs exploded, and burning masses of needles and cones tumbled down through lower branches, igniting everything as they descended, and suddenly Joe and Nina were in a tunnel of fire.