“All of that area can’t also be under the gymnasium,” he said.
“No. It’s beneath a few feet of earth and the teachers’ parking lot. Essentially, we’re in a soundproof bunker.”
“Have we replaced the teachers?”
She shook her head. “The janitorial crew, the school nurse, and the culinary staff are with us. Tonight and tomorrow night, we’ll take the teachers in their homes.”
“Thursday will be a good day,” Chief Jarmillo said.
Principal Raines said, “The final phase—children’s day. Will you come to watch them be killed and processed?”
“We’ll be killing them all over town,” he said. “I’ll want to see as much of it as I can.”
chapter 29
Having answered the bishop and been well answered in turn, Arnie analyzed the game board, considering his next move, while his sister and brother-in-law struggled to cope with the unwanted message they had received from the tattooed chess master.
Carson, Michael, and Deucalion were present when Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, perished. Carson was certain that the circumstances of his horrific death allowed no possibility that he could have been revived. He had been simultaneously electrocuted, suffocated, and crushed.
Furthermore, when Victor died, the creatures of his making who were present fell dead as well, except for Deucalion. In his altered body, Victor had contained power cells that converted electricity to another life-sustaining energy of his invention. When he died, those batteries were tapped to relay a signal by satellite to every member of the New Race that he had created while in New Orleans, a lethal signal that at once terminated them. If he couldn’t be their immortal god, he would not permit them to outlive him by even one hour.
Pacing the study, Carson said, “The very fact that we saw them fall down dead is proof that no life remained in Victor.”
Still cradling Scout, Deucalion said, “Perhaps it proves just what you say. But he was a genius, even if a demented one. And I know as surely as I know anything that he had a contingency plan, a means by which to survive the death of his body, to survive not as a spirit deep in Hell, but in the flesh and in this world.”
“You say you know,” Carson countered, “but in fact you only feel that he’s still out there. You don’t know what the contingency plan could have been or where he is, or what he’s doing. How can we turn our lives upside down, go chasing off after a phantom, based only on a feeling?”
The lingering glow of his birth lightning pulsed through Deucalion’s eyes as he said, “Considering what you know of me, perhaps you might agree that a feeling such as this is more than a sensation, more than an emotion, that it may be a truth perceived by intuition, far more than a hunch. Far more. A revelation.”
Carson turned to Michael, but Michael shook his head and looked toward a window as if to say, If you want to debate a two-hundred-year-old sage with mysterious powers, have at him, but you don’t need my help to make a fool of yourself.
In the embrace of the self-described monster, Scout plucked at the lapel of his coat, as if eager for his greater attention. The smile with which the baby regarded his damaged face was only a few watts short of rapturous, as if she felt as safe in his arms as she would have been in the care of Saint Michael the archangel, celestial warrior.
“But even if he’s alive somehow,” Carson said, “and even if you could find him, what could Michael and I do that you can’t do better yourself? With your powers. With your … strength.”
“You can move more openly in the world than I can with my face and my occasionally illuminated eyes. Whatever the situation may be, I can’t fight and destroy him alone. As before, I need allies. And I know the two of you have the wit and courage to face down dragons. I don’t know that of anybody else.”
For the moment, Arnie was distracted from the game board. “You know you’ll do it, Carson. Michael knows, and you know it, too. You were born to kick butt and set things right.”
She said, “This isn’t a video game, Arnie.”
“No. It isn’t. It’s all that’s been wrong with the world for thousands of years, all that’s wrong now coming to a head here in our time. Maybe Armageddon is more than the name of an old Bruce Willis movie. Maybe you’re not Joan of Arc, but you’re more than you think you are.”
In the two years since Deucalion cured Arnie of severe autism, seemingly by a touch, Carson had sometimes thought that he had not only taken away that affliction but had also given the boy something. A quiet wisdom greater than his years. But not only wisdom. Another quality, perhaps not of mind or body but of character, an ineffable quality of which she was aware, though she could not name it.
To Deucalion, she said, “Even if we wanted to help, even if we should, what are we to do? If Victor is alive somehow, we don’t know where he is. We don’t know what madness he’s up to, if he’s up to anything at all.”
“He’s up to what he’s always been up to,” said Deucalion. “He wants to murder the idea of human exceptionalism, debase all life until it has no value whatsoever, acquire ultimate power at any cost, and by the accomplishment of those goals, thereby destroy the soul of the world. As for where he is … one way or another, we’ll soon know the place.”
One of Carson’s two cell phones rang. The tone was that of the line given solely to Francine Donatello, their office manager, who used it only on exceptional occasions, usually regarding a crisis related to one of their current cases. Grateful for the distraction, Carson answered the phone.
Francine said, “I got this call from a woman, she claimed it’s a matter of life and death, and she was pretty convincing. She left a phone number.”
“What woman?” Carson asked.
“She said to tell you that she was aware of your work in New Orleans and kept track of you when you left the NOPD.”
“Did she leave a name with that number?”
“Yeah. She said you met her sister, but you never met her. She said her last name now is Swedenborg, but her maiden name was Erika Five. I never heard a name that was a number before.”
chapter 30
Bryce Walker sat in his hospital bed, staring at the window, watching gray clouds, like a spooring fungus, gradually creep across the sky.
The sheets were clean, the carafe contained ice water, but the capsule in the pill cup was different from the medication he received the previous evening.
According to the information on his chart, in the plastic sleeve hanging from the footrail of the bed, his prescription had not been changed. The nurse must have given him the wrong capsule by mistake.
That was one explanation, anyway. A second possibility might be that she had intentionally switched medications, hoping that he would not notice the difference in size and color from the capsule that he had been given twelve hours before, following his MRI.
Dr. Rathburn’s uncharacteristic impatience and his humorless demeanor. The silence and forced smiles of the nurses. The glimpse Bryce had gotten of hatred in the eyes of one of them, her face tight with contempt …
If he’d had a paperback Western to read, perhaps he would have told himself that everyone was entitled to be a screwup or a crank now and then, and he might have lost himself in a good yarn as he waited to see if lunch would be served on time. But then—the voices in the air shaft. Even the best book by his favorite author wouldn’t have taken his mind off those cries for help and mercy.
If the nurse gave him the incorrect medication on purpose, Bryce could imagine only one reason. The capsule in the paper cup must be a sedative. She was annoyed at him because of his dissatisfaction with his treatment, and she wanted him to be either more compliant or fast asleep.
No professional nurse of his experience would have done such a thing. Rainbow Falls Memorial didn’t rate as a five-star facility in anyone’s book, but neither was it a third-world hospital. When his wife, Rennie, had been ill, everyone on the staff proved efficient, friendly, and emotionally supportive.
Instead of swallowing the capsule, he put it in the pocket of his pajama shirt.
The room darkened as increasingly malignant-looking clouds metastasized across the sun.
Bryce vacillated between apprehension and denial.
Perhaps what truly troubled him, what affected him more profoundly than he realized, was the memory of the chest pains that had brought him here. An old man acutely aware of his mortality, terrified of death but too macho to admit his fear, might distract himself from his failure of courage by imagining mysterious enemies, conspiracies. The ordinary hisses and whistles of air moving through grilles and ductwork might inspire auditory hallucinations in a man left already shaken by a brush with death.
And that was as big a load as an elephant ever dropped.
Bryce had no abnormal fear of dying. In fact, he hardly feared it at all. Death was just a door he needed to go through to be with Rennie again.
He was trying to talk himself out of pursuing answers to the staff’s peculiar behavior and to the voices in the ductwork. Bryce was uncomfortably aware that since Rennie’s passing, he had been reactive instead of proactive in all things. He had not given up on life, but he’d given in to a tendency toward passivity that he would never tolerate in one of the heroic marshals or determined ranchers who were the protagonists in the novels that he wrote.
Not exactly disgusted with himself but more than merely annoyed, Bryce threw back the covers, got out of bed, and stepped into his slippers. From his closet, he withdrew the thin bathrobe provided by the hospital and pulled it on over his pajamas.
In the main second-floor corridor, Doris Makepeace, the shift supervisor, sat alone at the nurses’ station. Bryce remembered her well and fondly from Rennie’s last hospitalization.
Nurse Makepeace seemed to be lost in thought, staring at the wall clock across the hallway from her post.
Bryce could not remember an occasion when a shift supervisor or any other nurse had not been busy at the central station, from which they tended to all of the patients on this floor. Nurses always had more work than they could easily complete.
Doris in particular had always been industrious—bustling and lively and engaged and diligent. Now she appeared detached and even bored. Either she hoped to make the hands of the clock move faster by watching them or her thoughts had traveled so far beyond the hospital that she didn’t even see the clock.
As before, he might be making something out of nothing. Everyone needed to zone out for a few minutes now and then, during a busy day.
When Bryce passed in front of her, Doris Makepeace stirred from her trance to say, “Going somewhere?”
“Just getting a little exercise, maybe visit a couple of the other patients.”
“Stay close. Stay where we can find you. We might be taking you downstairs for tests.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be right around here,” he promised, and he found himself shuffling instead of walking, not because he needed to shuffle, which he did not, but because he thought it might be wise to appear somewhat feeble.
“Don’t tax yourself. The sooner you’re back in bed and resting, the better.”
Nurse Makepeace’s voice had neither its characteristic lilt nor its customary warmth. In fact, Bryce heard a cold, authoritarian note close to contempt.
He paused at a couple of rooms to glance at the patients. He saw no one he knew.
Step by step, he felt the weight of the nurse’s stare against his back. He probably should not go directly to a stairway with her watching.
In Room 218, no one occupied the bed nearer the door, and in the farther bed sat a boy of about nine. He paged through a comic book as if nothing in it could hold his attention.
Entering the room, Bryce said, “A lot of years ago, I wrote some comic books. Of course, they were all about cowboys and horses, not aliens and spaceships and superheroes, so they’d probably only put you to sleep. What’s your name, son?”
The boy seemed wary but was most likely merely shy. “Travis.”
“Now that’s a fine old name, always a hero’s name, and perfect for a Western novel.” Indicating the day beyond the nearby window, he added, “Think we might have an early snow, Travis?”
Dropping the comic book on the bed, the boy said, “Did they take away your BlackBerry?”
“I don’t have a BlackBerry, and I never will. I prefer to talk to people instead of type at them, but then I’m older than the Great Wall of China and just as solidly set in my ways.”
“They took mine this morning.” Travis glanced toward the hallway door, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. “They said text messaging interferes with some hospital machines.”
“I suppose it might. I’m pretty much ignorant about machines,” Bryce admitted. “The only thing I could fix on a car is a flat tire. But I can do a bunch of rope tricks and sharpshoot, for what that’s worth.”
“I had it the first two days here, and nobody cared. Then this morning they just suddenly make a big deal about it.”
Picking up the comic book to have a closer look at the superhero on the cover, Bryce said, “You seemed bored with this. That made my heart feel good. But then it’s probably just because you’ve read it twenty times before.”
Travis glanced at the door, at the window, at the door again, and then met Bryce’s eyes. “What’s wrong with them?”
“In my opinion, a lot of things. No damn superhero is ever really in jeopardy, not even when someone locks him in a lead box with a chunk of kryptonite as big as a cabbage and drops him in the ocean.”
“I mean them,” Travis said, lowering his voice and gesturing toward the hallway door. “The nurses, doctors, all of them.”
They were both silent for a moment, eye to eye, and then Bryce said, “What do you mean, son?”
The boy chewed his lower lip and seemed to search for words. Then he said, “You’re real.”
“I’ve always thought I am.”
“They’re not,” said Travis.
Sitting on the edge of the bed to make a quieter conversation possible, the doorway clear in his peripheral vision, Bryce said, “Sounds like it’s not just them taking the BlackBerry that’s gotten under your skin.”
“Not just the BlackBerry,” Travis agreed.
“Want to tell me about it?”
The boy’s voice fell to a whisper. “Something wakes me in the night. Don’t know what it is. Some sound. It scares me. Don’t know why. I lay here listening for it again—ten minutes, twenty. The room is dark. Only the moonlight in the window. Then the hall door opens and two of them come to my bed.”
“Who?”
“Nurses. I can’t see much of their faces. I pretend I’m asleep, but my eyes are open a little. I watch them watching me.”
“Watching you?”
“They don’t have medicine to give me. Don’t feel my forehead for a fever. They just watch me in the dark, and then they leave.”
“They say anything to you, to each other?”
“No.”
“How long?” Bryce asked.
“Two minutes, three. A long time to be watching someone in the dark, don’t you think?” The boy looked at the window, where a graying sky would mask the moon in the night to come. “And the whole time they were watching me … I could feel it.”
“Feel what?” Bryce asked.
Travis met his eyes again. “How much they hated me.”
chapter 31
Nummy kept his cash money in a OneZip plastic bag, in a box of saltines, in a kitchen cabinet. At the moment the bag contained three five-dollar bills and ten one-dollar bills, plus ten more ones, plus three more ones.
Mr. Leland Reese, Grandmama’s attorney, only gave him fives and ones because Nummy wasn’t good with numbers. He could count to ten as well as anyone, but after that he got confused. Nummy couldn’t read, but he could see the difference between a five and a one.
The most stuff he needed to shop for was food and things to clean house with,
like soap and paper towels. He always bought those things at Heggenhagel’s Market because Mr. Heggenhagel helped him and didn’t want money. Each month Mr. Heggenhagel sent a list of what Nummy bought to Mr. Leland Reese, and Mr. Reese paid Mr. Heggenhagel.
As he carefully lined up the ones and the fives on a kitchen counter, Nummy explained all this to Mr. Conway Lyss. He also told him how Mr. Heggenhagel always brought Nummy home with the stuff that he bought and helped him to put away what needed the freezer and what needed only the refrigerator. He talked about some favorite foods, like corn dogs with bottled cheese sauce, and cold cheese sandwiches with hot mustard, and thin-sliced roast beef from Mr. Heggenhagel’s deli.
As Mr. Lyss picked up the money, he said, “Fascinating. If they ever made a TV show about your life, it would be a colossal hit, so riveting, so glamorous.”
“I won’t be on no TV,” Nummy said. “I like to watch, but being on would be too noisy. Most stuff on TV is noisy, I turn it quieter.”
“Well, if you won’t be on, that’s the viewing public’s loss. A tragedy for the medium. So I owe you thirty-eight dollars.”
“No, sir, that’s not right. You owe me three fives, ten ones, ten more ones, and then three ones.”
Mr. Lyss shook a long ugly finger at Nummy. “You’re sharper than you pretend to be, you rascal. You’re exactly right. No one can pull the wool over your eyes.”
“I don’t like wool,” Nummy said. “It itches.”
Mr. Lyss looked Nummy up and down and up again. “There’s not going to be anything in your closet that fits me. Pants will be too short by six inches, the waist half again bigger than I need. I’ll look even more like a clown than I do in orange.”