She sank, drifting deeper, exhaustion claiming her body. Looking up, she saw with strange detachment the shimmer of moonlight above, and felt the darkness pull her down into its embrace. She no longer felt the cold; she felt only a weary sense of inevitability.
Noah.
In the shimmering circle of light above, she imagined she saw his face, as he was when he was a child. Calling to her, reaching for her with needy arms. The circle of light seemed to fracture into fragments of silver.
Noah. Think of Noah.
Though she had no strength left, she reached up toward that phantom hand. It dissolved like liquid in her grasp. You are too far away. I can’t reach you.
She felt herself sliding downward again, dragged into the murk. Noah’s arms receded, but his voice continued to call to her. She reached up to him again, and saw the circle of light grow brighter, a halo of silver just within reach. If I can touch it, she thought, I will reach heaven. I will reach my baby.
She struggled toward it, limbs thrashing against the pull of darkness, every muscle straining toward the light.
Her arm broke through the surface, shattering it to ripples, her head bursting through for one gasp of air. She caught a glimpse of the moon, so beautiful and brilliant it hurt her eyes, and she felt herself sink for the last time, her arm still outstretched toward heaven.
A hand grasped hers. A real hand, its grip solid around her wrist. Noah, she thought. I’ve found my son.
Now the hand dragged her upward, out of the murk. She stared in wonder as the light blossomed brighter, and then her head surfaced and she saw the face staring down at her. Not Noah’s face, but a girl’s. A girl with long hair, bright as silver in the moonlight.
Mitchell Groome poured half a can of gasoline over Max Tutwiler’s body. Not that destroying the corpse really mattered. This cave had lain untouched all these millennia; Max’s remains would not be found anytime soon. Still, as long as he was destroying the worm colony, he might as well dispose of a dead body as well.
Wearing a mask against the fumes and a headlamp to light the dim cave, he took his time emptying the contents of the three gasoline cans. He had no reason to rush; the doctor’s submerged vehicle would not be found until daylight, and even if it was found before then, no one would link Groome to her death. If anyone were to draw suspicion, it would be Max, whose sudden disappearance would only solidify those suspicions. Groome didn’t like being forced to improvise; he had not planned this move, had not planned to kill anyone. But then, he hadn’t counted on Doreen Kelly stealing his car, either.
One murder sometimes necessitates another.
He finished splashing the walls and tossed the last empty container into the shallow pool of gasoline at the center of the cavern. It was right beneath the thickest colony of worms. Already they seemed to sense impending disaster, for they were wriggling frantically in the rising fumes. The bats had long since fled, abandoning their invertebrate companions to the flames. Groome took one last look around the cavern, assuring himself he’d forgotten no detail. The last box of specimens, as well as Max’s scientific log books, were in the trunk of his car, parked at the trailhead. With the strike of a match, everything in this cave would go up in flames.
It would be instant extinction of the species, except for the surviving specimens now being nurtured in the labs at Anson Biologicals. The hormone these worms secreted was worth a fortune in Defense Department contracts, but only if it stayed out of the hands of Anson’s competitors.
With the destruction of this cave, only Anson would possess the species. To the rest of the world, the reason for this epidemic of violence, and for all the epidemics that came before it, would remain a mystery.
He crawled up the passageway leading to the exit, dribbling a fine line of accelerant as he backed toward the opening. Crouching in the entrance chamber, he lit a match and touched the flame to the ground. A line of fire licked all the way down the tunnel, and then there was a whoosh as the cavern below exploded in flames. Groome felt the inrush of air as oxygen was sucked in to feed the conflagration. He turned off his headlamp and watched the fire burn for a moment, imagining the worms turning black, their charred carcasses dropping from the ceiling. And he thought of Max’s corpse, reduced to unidentifiable bone and ash.
He backed out of the cave, his feet dropping into the icy stream, and pulled the branches over the opening. Beyond these thick woods, the glow of the fire in the cavern would be invisible. He waded to the streambank and stumbled onto land. His eyes were still dazzled by the fire, and he had not yet readjusted to the darkness. He turned on his headlamp, to light his way back to the car.
Only then, as his beam flared on, did he see the policemen standing among the trees, weapons drawn.
Expecting him.
Warren Emerson opened his eyes and thought: At last I have died. But why am I in heaven? It was a discovery that greatly surprised him, because he had always assumed that if there was existence after death, he would find himself in some dark and terrible place. An afterlife that was merely an extension of his despairing existence on earth.
Here there were flowers. Vases and vases of them.
He saw blood-red roses. Orchid blossoms like white butterflies fluttering on stalks across the window. And lilies, their fragrance sweeter than any perfume he had ever inhaled. He stared in wonder, for he had never seen anything so beautiful.
Then he heard a chair creak beside his bed, and he turned to see a woman smiling at him. A woman he had not seen in years.
Her hair was more silver than black, and age had left its deep engraving in the lines on her face. But he saw none of this. Looking into her eyes, what he saw instead was a laughing girl of fourteen. The girl he had always loved.
“Hello, Warren,” whispered Iris Keating. She reached out to take his hand in hers.
“I’m alive,” he said.
She heard the question in his voice, and with a smile she nodded. “Yes. You most certainly are alive.”
He looked down at her hand, grasping his. Remembered how their fingers once had entwined all those years ago, when they had both been young, and they had sat together by the lake. So many changes in our hands, he thought. Mine are now scarred and leathery; hers are knobby with arthritis. But here we are, holding hands again, and she is still my Iris.
Through his tears, he looked at her. And decided he was not ready to die after all.
Lincoln knew where he would find her, and there she was, sitting in a chair at her son’s bedside. Sometime in the night, Claire had climbed out of her own hospital bed, had shuffled down the long hallway in her robe and slippers, and found her way to Noah’s room. Now she sat hugging a blanket to her shoulders, looking very tired and pale in the afternoon sunlight. God help the soul who dares to come between a mother bear and her cub, thought Lincoln.
He sat down in the chair across from her, and their gazes met over Noah’s sleeping figure. It hurt him to see that she was still wary, still untrusting of him, but he understood the reason for it. Only a day ago, he had threatened to take from her the one thing in the world she loved most. Now she was watching him with an expression that was both fierce and, at the same time, afraid.
“My son didn’t do it,” she said. “He told me, this morning. He swore it to me, and I know he’s telling the truth.”
He nodded. “I spoke to Amelia Reid. They were together that night until after ten. And then he drove her home.”
By which time, Doreen was already dead.
Claire released a breath, tension melting from her body. She sank back in the chair and placed her hand protectively on Noah’s head. At the touch of her fingers stroking his hair, his eyes flickered open, and he focused on Claire. Neither mother nor son spoke; their quiet smiles conveyed everything that needed to be said.
I could have spared them both this ordeal, thought Lincoln. If only he had known the truth. If only Noah had come right out and confessed he’d spent the evening with Amelia. But he had bee
n protecting the girl from her stepfather’s wrath. Lincoln knew of Jack Reid’s temper, and he understood why Amelia would be afraid of him.
Afraid or not, the girl had been ready to share the truth with Claire. Last night, just before J.D.’s rage had exploded in murder, Amelia had slipped out of her house and walked through the clear, cold night, toward Claire’s house. Her route had taken her along Toddy Point Road.
Right past the boat ramp.
The girl’s fortunate journey had saved Claire’s life. And in the process, Amelia had saved her own.
Noah had once again fallen asleep.
Claire looked at Lincoln. “Is Amelia’s word going to be enough? Will anyone believe a fourteen-year-old girl?”
“I believe her.”
“Yesterday you said you had physical evidence. The blood—”
“We also found blood in the trunk of Mitchell Groome’s car.”
She paused as the significance of that fact sank in. “Doreen’s?” she said softly.
He nodded. “I think Groome meant to implicate you, not Noah, when he smeared the blood on your pickup. He didn’t know which car you’d been driving that night.”
They were both quiet for a moment, and he wondered if this was how it would end between them, with silence on her part, and longing on his. There was so much he still had to tell her about Mitchell Groome. There’d been the items they’d found in Groome’s trunk: the jars of specimens and Max’s handwritten log books. Both Anson Biologicals and Sloan-Routhier had denied any connection to the two men, and now Groome, angered by that disavowal, was threatening to drag the pharmaceutical giant down with him. Lincoln had come to tell Claire all this and more, but instead he remained silent, his unhappiness weighing down on him so heavily it seemed a burden just to take a deep breath.
He said, hopefully, “Claire?”
She raised her eyes to his, and this time she did not look away.
“I can’t turn back the clock,” he said. “I can’t erase the hurt I caused you. I can only say that I’m sorry. I wish there was some way we could go back to …” He shook his head. “The way we were.”
“I’m not sure what that means, Lincoln. The way we were.”
He thought about it. “Well, for one thing,” he said, “we were friends.”
“Yes, that’s true,” she admitted.
“Good friends. Weren’t we?”
A faint smile touched her lips. “Good enough to sleep together, anyway.”
He felt himself flush. “That’s not what I’m talking about! It’s not just the sleeping together. It’s—” He gazed at her with painful honesty. “It’s knowing there’s a possibility for us. A possibility that I’ll be seeing you every morning when I wake up. I can wait, Claire. I can live with the uncertainty. It’s not easy, but I can stand it, as long as there’s a chance we’ll be together. That’s all I’m really asking for.”
Something sparkled in her eyes. Tears of forgiveness? he wondered. She reached out and stroked his face. It was the gentle caress of a lover. Even better than that, it was the touch of a friend.
“Anything’s possible, Lincoln,” she said softly. And she smiled.
He was actually whistling when he walked out of the hospital. And why shouldn’t he? The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and the ice-encrusted branches of willow trees clacked and glittered like hanging crystals. In two weeks would come the longest night of the year. Then the days would open up again, the earth cycling back toward light and warmth. Toward hope.
Anything’s possible.
Lincoln Kelly was a patient man, and he could wait.
POCKET BOOKS
PROUDLY PRESENTS
Gravity
Tess Gerritsen
Coming soon in hardcover from
Pocket Books
The following is a preview of
Gravity . . .
“Collision course!” yelled Griggs over space-to-space radio. “Discovery, you are on a collision course!”
There was no response.
“Discovery! Reverse course!”
Emma watched in horror as disaster hurtled toward them. Through the space station's cupola window, she saw the orbiter simultaneously pitch up and roll to starboard. She saw Discovery’s delta wing slicing toward them with enough momentum to ram it through the station’s aluminum hull. She saw, in the imminent collision, the approach of her own death.
The plumes of firing rockets suddenly spewed out from the forward RCS thruster in the orbiter’s nose. Discovery began to pitch downward, reversing momentum. Simultaneously the starboard delta wing rolled upward, but not quickly enough to clear the space station’s main solar truss. She felt her heartbeat freeze. Heard Luther whisper, “Lord Jesus.”
“CRV!” Griggs shouted in panic. “Everyone to the evac vehicle!”
Arms and legs churned in midair, feet flying in every direction as the crew scrambled to evacuate the node. Nicolai and Luther were first through the hatch, into the Hab. Emma had just grabbed the hatch handhold when her ears filled with the squeal of rending metal, the groan of aluminum being twisted and deformed by the collision of two massive objects.
The space station shuddered, and in the ensuing quake, she caught a disorienting glimpse of the node walls tilting away, of Griggs’s Thinkpad spinning in midair and Diana’s terrified face, slick with sweat.
The lights flickered and went out. In the darkness, a red warning light flashed on and off, on and off.
A siren shrieked.
Shuttle Flight Director Randy Carpenter was watching death on the front screen.
At the instant of the orbiter's impact, he felt the blow as surely as if a fist had been rammed into his own sternum, and he actually lifted his hand and pressed it to his chest.
For a few seconds, the Flight Control Room went absolutely silent. Stunned faces stared at the front wall. On the center screen was the world map with the shuttle trajectory trace. To the right was the frozen RPOP display, Discovery and ISS represented by wire-frame diagrams. The orbiter was now melded like a crumpled toy to the silhouette of ISS. Carpenter felt his lungs suddenly expand, realized that, in his horror, he had forgotten to breathe.
The FCR erupted in chaos.
“Flight, we have no voice downlink,” he heard Capcom say. “Discovery is not responding.”
“Flight, we’re still getting data stream from TCS—”
“Flight, no drop in orbiter cabin pressure. No indication of oxygen leak—”
“What about ISS?” Carpenter snapped. “Do we have downlink from them?”
“SVO’s trying to hail them. The station pressure is dropping—”
“How low?”
“It’s down to seven hundred ten . . . six hundred ninety. Shit, they’re decompressing fast!”
Breach in the station’s hull! thought Carpenter. But that wasn’t his problem to fix; it belonged to Special Vehicle Operations, down the hall.
The propulsion systems engineer suddenly broke into the comm loop. “Flight, I’m reading RCS ignition, F2U, F3U, and F1U. Someone’s working the orbiter controls.”
Carpenter’s head snapped to attention. The RPOP display was still locked and frozen, with no new images appearing. But Propulsion’s report told him that Discovery’s steering rockets had just fired. It had to be more than just a random discharge; the crew was trying to move the orbiter away from ISS. But until they had radio downlink, they could not confirm the orbiter crew’s status. They could not confirm they were alive.
It was the most terrible scenario of all, the one he feared most. A dead crew on an orbiting shuttle. Though Houston could control most of the orbiter’s maneuvers by ground command, they could not bring it home without crew help. A functioning human being was necessary to flip the arming switches for the OMS deorbit burn. It took a human hand to deploy the air-data probes and to lower the landing gear for touchdown. Without someone at the controls to perform these functions, Discovery would remain in orbit, a ghost ship circling
silently around the earth until its orbit decayed months from now, and it fell to earth in a streak of fire. It was this nightmare that passed through Carpenter’s head as the seconds ticked by, as panic slowly gathered force around him in the FCR. He could not afford to think about the space station, whose crew even now might be in the agonal throes of a decompressive death. His focus had to remain on Discovery. On his crew, whose survival seemed less and less likely with every second of silence that passed.
Then, suddenly, they heard the voice. Faint, halting.
“Control, this is Discovery. Houston. Houston . . . ”
“It’s Hewitt!” said Capcom. “Go ahead, Discovery!”
“. . . major anomaly . . . could not avoid collision. Structural damage to orbiter appears minimal . . . ”
“Discovery, we need visual on ISS.”
“Can’t deploy Ku antenna—closed circuit gone—”
“Do you know the extent of their damage?”
“Impact tore off their solar truss. I think we punched a hole in their hull . . . ”
Carpenter felt sick. They still had heard no word from the ISS crew. No confirmation they had survived.
“What is your crew’s status?” asked Capcom.
“Kittredge is barely responding. Hit his head on the aft control panel. And the crew on middeck—I don’t know about them—”
“What’s your status, Hewitt?”
“Trying to . . . oh God, my head . . .” There was a soft sob. Then she said, “It’s alive.”
“Did not copy.”
“The stuff floating around—the spill from the body bag. It’s moving all around me. It’s inside me. I can see it moving under my skin, and it’s alive.”