The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (39 page)

“My God! What has he done?” Rachel asks as she recovers her balance.

Lane doesn’t know the particulars but gets the general idea. The Bird just blew up the gate in a horrific explosion, and used the mountain as a shield for his troops assembled here on the far side.

Before he can voice his theory, the Bird comes bounding out onto the porch and yells to the men assembled in the yard. “Let’s go!” He turns to Lane. “Okay, General. Lead the way.”

“You better stay here,” Lane tells Rachel.

“I think you’re right,” she says. “I’m a talker, not a fighter.”

Pale clouds of swirling, agitated smoke blow across Division Street as Lane and company approach Sixtieth Avenue. Their SUV’s headlights push twin tunnels of illumination through the haze, and Lane wonders if they’ll be able to reach their objective, the gate up on Salmon Street.

Three Bad Boys along for the ride say nothing, but Lane sees the fear creep across their faces. They’ve lived lives of petty violence, but never faced slaughter and destruction on a truly
massive scale. The Bird gave them strict orders to stick with Lane and provide security if he found his Johnny, so they are committed whether they like it or not. Nobody crosses the Bird.

“Turn right,” Lanes commands as they reach Sixtieth.

The thick smoke comes and goes as the SUV cautiously moves up the street, running over downed power lines and splintered debris from demolished houses. Only the foundations remain intact. Great pillars of fire from blazing trees cast a flickering golden light over the scorched remnants. Lane feels the heat blister the exterior of the vehicle.

And so it goes for block after block. Nothing moves. Nothing lives.

“Shit!” one of the Bad Boys mutters as his stoic persona wobbles. They continue until they reach the heart of the blast area, where the gate into Mount Tabor once stood, with its massive bunkers and gun turrets. Now only pulverized concrete rubble marks the spot. They can barely find a clearing big enough to drive through. Beyond, all the structures in the military facility are sheared off at ground level. Several pools of phosphorus from demolished armaments burn a brilliant white and create wildly flickering shadows.

They drive on and up the hillside, where they enter a cathedral of flaming fir trees with their crowns all ablaze. Showers of embers float down and twist in little currents on the pavement.

“Step on it,” Lane says.

The driver accelerates. Their vehicle creates eddies of dancing sparks as they hurry through. They reach a clear space, and Lane recognizes the empty reservoir with its old building of crenelated stone hanging on the side, the only structure he’s seen that survived the blast. “Hang a hard left and head up,” he orders the driver. Once they’ve rounded the curve, the road follows a graded rise that affords them a view of the city below. Hundreds of individual fires form bright beacons in the smoky haze stretching west twenty blocks or more. The city teeters on the edge of a firestorm, where little blazes merge into a greedy monster that creates howling winds of fresh oxygen to perpetuate itself.

Had the Bird’s rage trumped his political sensibilities? Did he have any idea of the awful catastrophe that his vanity and pursuit of vengeance would visit upon the people of this city?

They climb up the grade and curve into an area thickly populated by a mix of deciduous and fir trees. The fires have yet to reach this elevation, although they’re most surely on their way. Thin wisps of smoke already drift across the road. The security lights from darkened buildings come and go, but Lane ignores them. He knows from Rachel’s trip precisely where he’s going.

And there it is, a hulking mass of buttressed concrete protruding from the hillside on the right. Next to its massive service door, a smaller entrance stands open and spills fluorescent light into the parking lot. “Pull in here.”

As he does so, a man appears in the door, a smallish man slightly bent with age. He
smokes a cigarette with one hand and pockets the other in his loose slacks. One of the Bad Boys cocks his weapon. “Stow it,” Lane orders. “No trouble.” He opens the door and climbs out. “Wait here.”

“Good evening, Mr. Anslow,” the man says as Lane approaches.

***

The limo is late, and Thomas Zed knows why. It’s the gunfire.

He stands in the deserted turnaround at the Pinecrest air hop terminal and looks out over the pond to the lights of the houses beyond. Large, comfortable houses economically gestating in a costly womb of carefully engineered security. Until now, anyway.

Behind him, the thin whine of the chopper’s idling engine. To his right, the random pop of small weapons fire. Pinecrest’s main gate is under attack.

They know, Zed thinks. The street has already told them, even this far out on the urban fringe. Mount Tabor is going down, the biggest, strongest gate of all. So what about all the other gates? Some outlier gang has already been inspired to mount a ragtag attack on Pinecrest. It’s probably happening all over the city. Amateur hour. Most of the insurrection will be cut to pieces by contract military people. Still, the survivors will tell the tale over and over again for the rest of their miserable lives.

Zed gives up on the limo, which the security people were supposed to provide. He walks over to the access panel on the side of the building and orders up a shuttle vehicle. He returns to the curb and waits. Crickets chirp. Frogs croak. Their nocturnal musing weaves its way into the chatter of discharging weapons out on the community’s secured perimeter. He’s always marveled at how, during great civil upheavals, tranquility and mayhem can coexist in such close proximity.

Autumn should be ready by now. All they have to do is get back here with her stuff and take off. The rest will take care of itself. He’s certain of that.

The momentary solitude of the empty street starts to eat at him. Something is wrong, something deep inside. He has a vision of life redeemed, of life relived, but his soul suddenly refuses to follow. A sinkhole of fatigue is pulling him down. He’s felt it before, many times as he’s aged. But now it should be a distant artifact, a biological relic from a time past, a time of decrepitude, dissolution, and disrepair.

We all have a time, Autumn had said
.
And our time has come and gone
.

What if she’s right?

Zed climbs out of the shuttle from the air hop. Autumn’s house is dark, the front door
open. No light comes from within.

His heart quickens as he strides up the steps and enters. Has she fled and deserted him?

“Autumn?” He tastes the fear in his voice and moves from room to room, finding nothing. His master plan, so carefully engineered and constructed, spools out into the dim solitude.

He finds her in the garden, in a rocking chair, lit by the glow of reflected light from a neighboring house. A small wrought-iron table stands next to her chair. A framed photo sits on it, the picture taken in front of the theater in Nebraska, so many years ago.

Her eyes are closed, her lips at peace, her skin cool, her life gone.

He can’t bear to touch her. He picks up the photo. She smiles out at him, full of life, ready for the promise of the future, a time that has come and gone.

Tears stream down his renovated cheeks. Was she dead from her own hand, or the hand of time itself? It no longer matters. She’d told him that they were an experiment, and here is its sad conclusion.

If Zed ever cried like this before, it resides somewhere in a past no longer remembered, in the smoke from the embers of fires long forgotten.

“You know me, which means you also know Johnny,” Lane says to Arjun as they cross the floor to the older man’s office. “So where is he?”

“Johnny’s gone,” Arjun says, sinking wearily into the chair behind his desk.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

Arjun smiles with a curious mix of irony and bitterness. “Let me show you the truth.” He brings up a CT scan on a display. “See all those little white spots? They’re cancerous tumors. And they’ve reached a point where nothing will stop them.”

“You’re saying Johnny has cancer?”

“No. Just that I’m dying. I’m almost gone.”

“Sorry, but where does that leave Johnny?”

“It leaves him on a big yacht called the
Eternal Heart
. It’s owned by the man that owns all that you see here. His name is Thomas Zed.”

“And why are you telling me all this?”

“Because if you kill Thomas Zed, I can depart this world knowing justice has been done.” Arjun looks away with a sad smile. “I was next in line for the treatment, but that’s not how it worked out. It looked like he would sail on forever while I wasted away.”

“We can’t always get what we want,” the Bird interrupts. Lane turns to see him standing in the doorway wearing a lambskin leather jacket and tweed slacks.

“Well, I got what I want,” Lane says and starts for the door.

“Stay in touch,” the Bird says, “or I’ll start to worry about you.”

“I’m sure you will,” Lane says.

The first flicks of fire creep through the crowns of the fir trees opposite the parking lot, where a noisy parade of vehicles filled with Bad Boys streams on past. Lane hears a shout from higher up the hill behind him. “Hey, there’s a fuckin’ mansion up here!” Weapons pop. Glass shatters.

He starts off on foot toward the far side of the mountain; the side spared the explosion and fire. He can walk down these leeward slopes with impunity. Zed’s surviving security people were busy melting into the surrounding neighborhoods below. Lane leaves the chaos of the road, the shouting, the shooting, and the vehicles, and begins his descent through the fir trees. His route through the forest is well defined; the holocaust on the far side of the mountain has put up a brilliant glow.

“So you’re sick, huh?” the Bird inquires, sliding into a chair across the desk from Arjun.

“Yes, I am.”

The Bird gives a nod of faux compassion. “After everything you’ve done here, that’s pretty ironic, isn’t it?” He turns and looks out the window, down the row of bays. “It would be an even bigger tragedy if you let it all go to waste. I mean, it’s your legacy. Right?”

“Correct.” Arjun looks at his watch while answering.

The Bird assumes a thoughtful pose. “You know, even at this late date, you have choices. You could help me package all this up in a way that others could share it. And then, when you really hit the skids, we could do all that was medically possible to keep you comfortable.”

“Or?”

“You could keep all this to yourself and deny the world the benefit of what you’ve accomplished. And then we could do everything possible to make sure you spent your final days in maximum pain and agony.”

“I see.” Arjun checks his watch again. “Let’s consider a third choice.”

Lane feels the detonation as a muffled thud of monstrous proportion. He has no doubt of its origin, and continues down the hill.

The blast serves as a punctuation mark of sorts. All the shouting and gunfire abruptly stop. In its place, an ugly cloud of rumination settles in. Lane had vastly underestimated what the Bird was willing to do to reclaim his teenage balls—a horrible mistake on his part. All in the service of Johnny, all in Lane’s quest to prove who was really the biggest brother of all. On the other side of the equation, Lane knows that a mistake and an act of deliberate malice are two
distinctly different things. But his heart claims otherwise.

He looks up and sees that he’s reached the bottom of the mountain, and walks out onto Seventy-second Avenue, now completely devoid of power. The sky’s glow has surpassed the wattage of a full moon, and casts the street, the sidewalks, and the houses in a spectral frost of delicate peach.

He passes a yard where three kids dart among the shadows and giggle in delight at the novelty of no lights. Up ahead, Rachel sits on the porch steps of the commandeered home. She rises at his approach. “You’re all right. Thank God.”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” They meet in a spontaneous embrace and both realize that they’ve crossed some threshold as yet undefined, but bright in its possibilities.

“What about Johnny?” Rachel asks.

“I know where he is. I got what I wanted.”

“Harlan?”

Lane shrugs. “You know, his name never came up. Like maybe he isn’t around anymore. Want to guess why?”

“Don’t have to.”

Behind them, a great conflagration rages and shakes its fiery fist at the black void.

A pyre to life everlasting.

Lane parks his rental car where the street ends near the shore of Puget Sound in the one-block village of Quamish just to the south of Fuller Bay. He brings out his binoculars and trains them on the distant vessel moored just outside the bay. He can’t quite make out the name, but he doesn’t have to. A ship as big as the
Eternal Heart
requires substantial support, so it wasn’t hard to trace.

Two weeks have passed since Mount Tabor went up in smoke. Thousands died in the nearby neighborhoods. Hundreds of homes and businesses succumbed to fire. The Feed buzzed with speculation over the cause. The pundits flapped their jaws. The consultants opined. The commentators commented. No one got even close to the truth.

He stows his binoculars, gets out, and smells his childhood drifting by on the breeze. A timeless composite of life and death churning beneath the cold green waters and washing up on the graveled beaches.

He looks over at the single row of old wooden buildings that house a tavern, a café, and the ghost of some enterprise long expired. Two young men clad in khaki shorts and navy-blue T-shirts emerge from the tavern, one tall, the other shorter and muscular. They stop on the steps and light up cigarettes. The door remains open and loud music spills out, a recent genre called Bantu slipstream. Lane knows it by name only. Its origins and nuances escape him entirely. But the name stenciled in white block letters on the young men’s T-shirts does not.
THE ETERNAL HEART
. They must be crew members. Through the door, he can make out maybe two dozen others wearing the same garb at the bar and in the booths. Lane casually approaches the young men and engages them smoothly in classic street cop style.