In Bay 3, Zed looks over to a cabinet beside the empty bed, a utilitarian work of metal and plastic. A glass vase sits on top, cut from crystal of the finest quality. It once held flowers: prize roses, exotic orchids, Casablanca lilies, peonies. Symbols of life. Celebrators of death.
Nobody invited the ravens to his wife’s funeral, just as no one had invited him. They came of their own volition. Natural history blew them in, an inexorable surge of events propelled them forward. Just like him. He stood back from the graveside gathering and listened to their cawing. They were the only attendees he recognized, with one exception.
He saw just enough of himself in his son to be sure. The pale eyes, the prominent jaw, the slight widow’s peak, even at twenty-five. A young woman stood at his side and grasped his arm. The warm air of spring settled snugly about them as they stared at the casket draped with flowers. Prize roses, exotic orchids, Casablanca lilies, peonies.
His son suddenly looked up, looked right at him. His heart gave a solitary thump. Did the boy know? Zed quickly broke off eye contact, and when he looked up, his son was once again staring at the casket.
The ravens chose that moment to depart. Big black wings beating through a sky of cloudless blue.
Zed scans the darkened screens of the monitoring equipment. They once danced with the imagery and numeric symbols of life in progress. Pulses, beats, pressures, electrical waves. Now they stand like silent scriveners, waiting to once again take note and bear witness. Just as they had in that hospital room over fifty years ago, when his only child lay dying.
He had entered the room only after hesitating out in the hall to gather his composure. The bleak light of late winter imposed itself from outside, and the instruments around the bed displayed all the signs of imminent decline brought on by lymphoma. Weak pulse, vacillating blood pressure, falling oxygenation. Seventy years of life circling for a final stand. His son lay motionless with his head propped on the pillow, his cheeks sunken and his color gone.
Zed pulled up a chair and sat down. His son did nothing to acknowledge his presence. His only offspring stared out into a space known only to those on the final precipice. Zed took a deep breath and moved into his son’s field of vision.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t there for you. It was a terrible mistake, the biggest of my life.”
His son stared back at him blankly. Not a hint of motion in the pale blue eyes, their common legacy. No response anywhere on the dying face.
Zed looked away and out into the grim winter. No resolution, no forgiveness, no reconciliation. His son’s final silence would fester within him always, an open sore prone to spontaneous eruption.
“Is it cold?” Zed asks Arjun as he wheels himself out of Bay 3 and back into the corridor. “It seems cold to me.”
“Yes, it might be a little chilly,” Arjun agrees. “I’ll check on it.” They kept the temperature down here at almost 80 degrees to accommodate the old man. Any higher and you would break a sweat just by walking. But Zed’s comfort comes first. Always.
Arjun grasps the handles of the wheelchair and they start down the corridor at a brisk pace. “I think you may be humoring me,” Zed comments. “But we’ll deal with that later. Now let’s review the facts.”
Arjun reviews the possible repercussions of Anslow’s escape. The scientist’s handheld turned out to be a cheap bootleg from Borneo. All the data from phone calls and video resided exclusively on the memory card, which was missing and presumably with Anslow. Zed’s generosity with the current administration had bought them deep access with the National Security Agency and others of its ilk, so it might be possible to trace any calls, but it would definitely take time. And that still left the possibility that video shot inside the van was on the card.
“Just remember Yogi Berra,” Zed says.
Arjun stares down at the old man’s bald skull as he wheels him along. A brown spray of age spots cover the pallid dome. “Who’s Yogi Berra?”
“It’s not over until it’s over,” Zed responds, with no further explanation.
They reach an unmarked door at the far end, beyond all the numbered bays. They knew from the outset that this additional space would be necessary. It holds a fully equipped examining room that doubles as a morgue, with the most advanced autopsy tools and diagnostic instruments. Arjun does a lobe scan to let them in, and they face three portable tables, with the body lying face up on the center one.
The operatory fixtures pour a merciless light down upon the subject. No detail hides in shadow. The subject is young. The subject is old. Take your pick. The jaw strong and firm. The neck wrinkled and withered. The forehead clean and smooth. The earlobes swollen and hairy. The arms thick and muscled. The hands knotted with arthritis. The calves strong. The thighs withered. The haunches firm. The belly a puddle of white flab.
The subject holds no shock for Zed and Arjun. The 101-year-old male was one of the first. They’re intimately acquainted with his bizarre farrago of biological triumph and tragedy. They know that CT and MRI imaging shows even more chaos inside him. The robust heart, the wheezing lungs. The vigorous liver, the shriveled colon.
“Have we determined when he died?” Zed asks.
“It was in the early morning, somewhere out on the road in the van with Anslow.”
“Are you going to cremate him?”
“Not yet. First, we want to fully understand the nature of his death.”
“Yes, of course. Well, no matter what, he gave himself for a good cause.”
“Yes, he did,” Arjun says. A good cause! What did that come from? Madness? Genius? It was hard to tell. And getting harder all the time.
Chapter 8
National Pancake Warehouse
“Nice piece,” the security guard says as he examines Lane’s pistol, one of the new 10 mm weapons with an auto-correcting laser system.
“Goes with the job,” Lane mumbles. They stand at the screening gate for Store Land, a commercial zone on the old highway just east of Hillsboro, the county seat. The lobe scan informed the security people that he was cleared to carry it, but routine procedure demands a check of any weapon that comes through the gate.
The guard hands the pistol back to Lane, who tucks it in his shoulder holster and walks toward the big building directly ahead. A large, electrified sign on the roof explains the enterprise below: NATIONAL PANCAKE WAREHOUSE. Even though it is mid-afternoon, people are streaming toward the big entrance, seeking a nutritional bargain that lets them fuel up on fats, sugar, and carbohydrates at a minimum cost. Most have the soft yet inflated look of the chronically overweight. A few carry the extraordinary bulk of the hopelessly obese.
Lane enters through the sliding glass doors and waits patiently in the ticket line. The interior is a big, industrial cavern lit by a grid of fluorescent lights installed in the metal framework overhead. They pour their cold illumination onto a cement floor covered with a multitude of folding tables and chairs. Off to the right are the big gas-fired griddles and the prep tables where batter is mixed, bacon arranged, butter whipped, and syrup bottles refilled. In front of the griddles is a long counter built from folding tables, where the patrons file by with plastic trays and paper plates to pick up their fare.
Lane avoids this orgy of cholesterol and goes to the end of the line, where he pours himself a cup of coffee from a ten-gallon container. He surveys the sea of tables and spots Bellows at the far end, right where he said he would be, underneath the giant screen for the Feed. As Lane weaves through the tables, people look up at him suspiciously before diving back into their heaping plates. He shouldn’t be here. He’s too hard, too lean. He can only mean trouble.
Bellows doesn’t bother to rise as Lane approaches the table. He merely nods and takes a sip of his coffee. Not a good start. Bellows is the number two guy in the Washington County coroner’s department. The plane disaster has him on edge. The department has gone from maybe a half dozen bodies a month to more than one hundred all at once. All burned beyon
d recognition by a hellish blaze of jet fuel.
“Sorry,” Bellows says, without any formalities. “I can’t tell you anything about your brother.”
“I didn’t think you could,” Lane says.
“So what do you want to know, Mr. Anslow? As you might suspect, I’m a busy man.”
“I want to know if you’ll ever know anything about my brother.”
Bellows sighs. “You got me there. You got me good. It’s a real mess, I’ll tell you that. Our lab can’t handle it, that’s for sure. Sooner or later, we’ll send everything off to the state. Maybe we’ll get something back, maybe we won’t. It’s not like it used to be.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” Lane says. “Anyway, thanks for your time. Keep in touch, all right?”
Bellows stands and lightens a little. “Sure. And I’m sorry about your brother, okay?”
“Okay.” Lane watches Bellows walk off through the crowded tables. He and Bellows are informally connected as members of the law enforcement fraternity. He’d asked for a favor and got one. Sort of.
Bellows was bought and paid for. Lane is sure of it. The DNA would never come back from the state. The fate of his brother’s body would remain permanently unresolved. Sorry, Mr. Anslow; it’s the best we can do.
Lane gets up and heads out through the seductive smell of grilled bacon. The meeting was a success. He’d sent a signal that he thought his brother was dead. Just in case someone was watching.
The interior of Johnny’s lab is stereotypical, at least from Lane’s point of view. Counters full of chemistry, cubicles full of computers, hulking machines dedicated to purposes unknown.
The place is empty and quiet. Just the drone of the cooling fans in their endless thermodynamic battle against the march of the electrons. Lane finds Johnny’s cubicle at the end of the row, a double-wide befitting the leader of the pack. Arcane papers and notes litter his desk, full of graphs, math expressions, and chemical equations of the sort that have mystified Lane ever since high school. The spot obviously reserved for Johnny’s laptop sits empty. End of story. Peoples’ lives reside on their laptops, and without it, Lane has little to go on.
He sits in Johnny’s chair and looks up to the burlap-like surface of the cubicle wall. A blue pushpin secures a photo to its surface, a snapshot of him and Johnny with the water, the firs, and the wooden pilings encrusted with barnacles that mark the annual extent of the tide.
Fuller Bay.
They were in their late teens then, and their swimming trunks hung loosely from their spare frames. An idle summer afternoon stretched out before them.
“Let’s check out Old Man Simmons’s boat.” Johnny sprang up off the porch steps as he said it, powered by an effortless muscularity.
“We’ve still got work to do,” Lane protested. A rotary power mower sat idle down on the wild grass. Little waves of heat still rose off its finned cylinder head. “We’ve got to finish the lawn.”
“We can do that later.” Johnny started to pace between Lane and the end of the porch. His head kept thrusting forward in an avian fashion, as if to an invisible rhythm. He’d been doing more of this kind of thing lately, and it bothered Lane. The more he paced, the more he thrust, the more determined he became. “Let’s have some fun, man. This is it. You know that, don’t you? We’re not coming back. It’s gonna be gone.”
Lane did know that, and it pained him. Someone would buy the place for sure. Some couple would think it was the pinnacle of rustic charm, and that would be the end of it. And his dad kept dropping the price, just to make sure.
“Okay, but let’s be quick,” Lane said. They walked across the partially mown lawn to a buffer of tall grass that marked the edge of the Simmons property.
They followed a narrow path that cut through to the far side, and stopped to take in the house, a Cape Cod bungalow with white siding and powder-blue trim. Simmons was ex-Navy and ran a tight ship. His grizzled flattop looked just like its nautical namesake. He seldom spoke and never smiled. A permanent scowl creased his mouth, and his pale eyes assessed you with merciless calm whenever you encountered him. But on this day, Simmons was absent. Only the brown oil spot in the empty driveway remained.
“Okay, let’s go,” Johnny said, and they moved quickly across the lawn and down some stairs to a wooden boathouse. Halfway down its side was a door, and on this particular day it was secured with a big padlock.
Lane felt a flood of relief. Johnny’s ill-advised expedition was now over. Old man Simmons’s boat dwelled safely out of reach. And what a boat it was. A classic speedboat, sporting a fifteen-foot white hull of plywood reinforced with fiberglass. The mahogany topside held fore and aft seating spaces, with a big curved windshield and a car-size steering wheel. When Simmons took the boat out, you could hear the snarl of the big engine all over the bay. It threw off a mighty wake, with twin ridges of foaming white cutting a big, violent V into the water astern.
But today, the craft floated in silent repose inside the boathouse. And the padlock barred their entry to admire it. “It’s all locked up,” Lane observed. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t think so,” Johnny said, and started for the door. A large paper clip extended from his thumb and forefinger. Big trouble. Lane knew it instantly. Johnny was a mechanical wizard. Machines became nearly transparent in his presence. In no time at all, the lock was sprung, the door was open, and Johnny was inside.
“Come on, chickenshit,” he called out to Lane. “Check it out.”
After a cautionary glance up at the house and driveway, Lane stepped into the structure’s dim recesses. The craft floated pointing toward the shore, and Johnny was already in the stern, reaching out over the motor. Lane heard sliding wood as the front doors opened to a great blast of marine light. “Now, that’s a little better, isn’t it?” Johnny said.
And indeed it was. The polished varnish on the mahogany topside caught the gleam of summer sky and dazzled Lane’s young eyes.
Johnny climbed forward, plunked himself down in the driver’s seat, and looked up at Lane with a febrile smile.
“So let’s take her out.”
“What?”
“I said, let’s take her out.”
“Are you fucking crazy?”
“Don’t think so, bro.” Johnny leaned over to examine the little panel on the dash where the ignition key went.
“I’m outta here,” Lane declared.
“Okay then, you’re outta here.” Johnny had already pulled a few wires down from under the panel.
“You’re on your own, dickhead. You’re very seriously on your own,” Lane said, and spun and stalked out the door. He made his way to the stairs leading up to the yard.
Just then, he heard the big outboard motor fire up.
The boat came into view, with Johnny standing at the wheel. He maneuvered the craft over to the dock’s edge, where he looked up at Lane with supreme confidence and conviction.
“Just a quick spin. That’s all. Then we can say we did it.” He paused. “Or maybe you just want to remember how you sweated over the lawn mower, like a good little boy.”
It wasn’t the taunt that tore at Lane. It wasn’t the transparent manipulation. It was the thought of abandoning his brother in this moment of supreme recklessness. He simply couldn’t do it. From the dock, he stepped down into the rear compartment and worked his way up to the passenger seat.
Johnny said nothing. The engine murmured in a low hum and burble as he rotated it to point the boat toward the center of the bay. He stood with one hand on the rim of the windshield and the other on the wheel, and looked straight ahead. His head once again fell into that birdlike thrust to a rhythm of some unknown internal origin.
Soon they were entering the bay’s mouth, where the water turned from green to blue and the waves went from modest ripples to the whitecaps of the open waters of Puget Sound.
“Hang on,” Johnny commanded from where he stood. He took his hand off the windshield and shoved the throttle all the way for
ward. The motor spun up to an angry howl.
Lane felt the surge as the bow lifted and the acceleration shoved him back into the seat. The waterline disappeared and only sky remained.
“Yes!” Johnny shouted as he held the windshield’s rim to steady himself.
The boat picked up speed at an alarming rate. The bow settled back down to reveal the choppy water, all blue and gray and white with waves.
Bam! The hull smacked a wave crest and shuddered as it sailed high in the water.
“Yes!” Johnny screamed. The wind tossed his hair back.
Bam! The hull smacked another wave crest. Spray flew. Lane felt the mist on his face.
“Yes!” Johnny screamed. He made no attempt to ease the throttle back. The motor roared like a cornered beast.
Bam! The hull smacked yet another crest. This time, they nearly went airborne. Lane knew he had to act. Sooner or later, they were going to lose it. He shot his hand out to pull the throttle lever back.
Johnny caught Lane’s move out of the corner of his eye. “No!” he yelled and reached down to stop Lane’s hand.
At that moment, he took his eyes off their forward motion and unintentionally pulled the wheel to the left.
Bam! The hull caught the white cap just as the boat veered to the port side.
Lane instinctively held on to the lip of the topside to secure himself against the violent twisting and rocking. The boat nearly flipped and came down hard. Lane reached out, grabbed the throttle lever and pulled it all the way back. The engine descended to a low growl and the craft quickly lost headway.
But Johnny was gone. Only the empty seat and gently oscillating steering wheel remained.
Lane looked up and fought panic as he took his bearings. The boat pointed toward the shore north of the sand spit. He turned and scanned the water to his left rear, toward the mouth of the bay.
And there he was. Just a dot on the rolling waves, a pitifully small dot in an ocean of trouble. “Stay right there! I’m coming!” Lane screamed. He crossed to the driver’s side, spun the wheel to port, and thought about the cold as he closed the distance. The stunning, numbing, paralyzing cold of the waters of Puget Sound. Johnny might already be slipping into shock.
The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller Page 9