The Return

by Joseph Helmreich

  And now that enhanced superman lay motionless on the side of the road, not far from where the remains of the kamikaze drone and the Honda Civic lay burning and smoking. Shawn crept out from the woods and walked up the hill to the highway. It was dark now, but the fire made everything visible enough, and the exploded drone was an incredible sight; its body and blades merged with the remains of the Honda Civic into an indistinguishable heap of twisted metal. Shawn didn’t get too close in case there were residual explosions still to come. He knelt down beside the unconscious Leland, who had apparently been ejected by the force of the collision, the explosion, or both. His body, on the surface, looked remarkably intact; though his skin was covered in soot, it didn’t appear to be burned, and the cuts on his face, though bleeding, looked superficial. Shawn felt for a pulse. Leland was alive.

  Just then, he saw headlights coming up the road. Shit, he thought, here they come. They were actually later than he might have expected, he realized. If the drone knew where they were, then Ambius itself obviously knew, as well.

  He quickly scanned the ground nearby, and sure enough, thanks to the fire, he was able to make out the shape he was looking for several feet away on the asphalt, about halfway between Leland and the wreckage: Leland’s pistol. He walked over, scooped it up, and shoved it into the inner pocket of his spring jacket. Then he stood still and waited for the car to arrive.

  He wasn’t going to run. Not this time.

  As the vehicle got closer, though, he could see that it was a large, silver SUV. Would Ambius agents be arriving in a mom car? The SUV screeched to a stop, and the shocked driver who stepped out was actually no mom at all, but a plump, middle-aged man with spiky red hair, a goatee, and a faded Styx T-shirt.

  The goateed man stared at the wreckage in disbelief. “Holy fuck,” he mouthed. Then he became aware of Shawn at the side of the road, and Leland, lying on the ground beside him. “Jesus!” he yelled and rushed over to them. “Dude, you call an ambulance already? What the hell happened here?”

  Shawn surprised himself by reaching into his jacket pocket and retrieving the gun, which he aimed at the man’s chest.

  “I’m going to need your car.”

  * * *

  Sometime later, when he had enough distance and enough time had passed for him to be reasonably confident Ambius wasn’t hot on his tail, Shawn pulled over to the side of the road and activated his tablet. Though it had been rewired to be virtually untraceable, he and Leland had both deemed it good sense to keep electronic devices off as much as possible, just in case. The screen lit up now, and instead of using the GPS, which was part of what had made the tablet traceable in the first place, he checked the Internet to determine the distance between where he was now—north of Sierra Vista—and where he intended to go.

  Taking Leland there would be risky. Ambius surely knew about it, even if it was unlikely that it figured too high on their radar screen. But nowhere was actually safe, and in the end, the way Shawn saw it, if there was anywhere in the country where Leland might be able to get some adequate medical assistance without creating a nationwide frenzy that would spell his imminent doom, this was going to be the place.

  CHAPTER 24

  The crowd in the old church house quieted, but not enough, as Hal Townsend took the stage. He waited a few moments, obviously irritated, but some geezers in the back pews still continued yammering until Carl Smith, sitting in the second-to-last row, turned around and shushed them. Several people laughed. Carl had only been voted general secretary days prior, and this just might have been his first official act in that capacity.

  “All right now,” Hal began. “First off, I’d like to thank all y’all so much for coming out tonight. The children have prepared long and hard for this event, so I know the last thing anyone wants is to see them all held up by introductory remarks. All the same, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I had all y’all assembled before me and I didn’t remind you about the annual dinner coming up next week. I know we aren’t the richest town, and we aren’t the richest congregation, so let me just say that every li’l penny does count. Unless, of course, you’re Walt Butler, in which case we’ll just throw those pennies right back at you and ask for some bills, thank you kindly.”

  The crowd laughed. Butler, a solid, white-bearded man sitting near the front, smiled with good cheer. He’d been enduring these awful “richest man in Annabella” jokes with that same grace for decades.

  “Now, on a more serious note,” Hal continued, “I want to point out that the dinner, despite our lack of advertisement, will likely draw out some, shall we say, vermin. They’ll most likely be milling around out front, if we succeed in keeping ’em from sneaking in. Now I won’t name names, but someone did some chatting with one of these vermin just last week, and so we had a nice little write-up in the Central Valley Gazette about what a lovely little bunch of loonies we all are.”

  Several people lacking in tact looked to Tobias Wheeler, whose face had already begun to turn red.

  “Now, I ain’t saying we should care what vermin think, but—”

  “Hey now,” a voice interrupted.

  Hal tried to ignore it and continued, “—we do have to keep in mind that some of the people who read this—”

  “Hey now!” the voice repeated. It was Tobias Wheeler, and Hal sighed and let him speak.

  “That is not fair,” Tobias said, rising from his seat. “That man didn’t tell me he was from any Central Valley Gazette. We’re in Morgan’s, I’m having a cup of coffee, and some gentleman starts asking questions about our fair town. I don’t know I’m on the record—should I be unfriendly? Would that have been more to your liking, a story about what unfriendly boobs we all are?”

  “Tobias, I’m not blaming anyone, and I never used anyone’s name.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t give me that horseshit.”

  There was audible shock from the crowd at Tobias’s language in the church and when there were children present, no less.

  “You’re out of line, Tobias!”

  Tobias glared at Hal, but sat back down.

  “As I was saying before that little interruption,” Hal continued, “please remember, at the dinner, not to engage with those who are only looking to mock what they don’t understand.” He smiled. “And now, for some short words of grace and science to introduce the youngsters, let’s have a hand for Reverend Daniels.”

  The crowd applauded, and Reverend Will Daniels, a man of about fifty with graying curly blond hair, stepped onto the stage and smiled warmly at the assembly.

  “Evenin’, everyone,” he said.

  “Evenin’, Reverend!” the crowd called back.

  “First off, I’d just like to say that, Toby, I think you’re quite right in what you say. You didn’t know who you were talking to, and you were being friendly. I, myself, in the first years after our big switch, voluntarily spoke to the press a few times. I tried to explain our point of view, that we represented a serious and sincere faith and that we weren’t no Waco or Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate. What I learned soon enough, folks, is that the press is a lot like the house in a gambling casino. You can say what you want, present things as carefully and accurately as possible, but they will always win. So the only way to not lose is to not play.

  “Now, Hal promised you words of grace and science, but far be it from me to delay the proceedings any further. I’ll just note that the first song our Choir of Celestial Light will be performing tonight might sound familiar. It’s a hymn we used to sing in our less enlightened, pre-Event days. The lyrics have been changed only a little, and if the words don’t move you, well, the voices of the little ones most certainly will. My brothers and sisters, may I present the Choir of Celestial Light!”

  The reverend left the stage, and about twenty-five middle-school-aged boys and girls appeared. As an organist began to play, they launched into a high and beautiful updated version of the seventh-century Presbyterian hymn, “Creator of the Stars of Night.” They sang
:

  Descender from the stars of night

  Thy people’s everlasting light

  A winter solstice gently shown

  All things celestial bring you home

  Our Andrew grieving ancient curse

  Should doom to death a universe

  Hath found the medicine, full of grace

  To save and heal the human race

  Reverend Daniels, gently swaying to the music beside his wife, Anne, felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Marjory, the church’s longtime secretary, holding a cell phone.

  “It’s Dr. Rogers from the clinic,” she said in a whisper louder than the average person’s speaking voice.

  Alarmed, Reverend Daniels took the phone and brought it to the back of the room.

  “Evenin’, Eddie,” he said into the phone.

  “Evenin’, Reverend,” came the reply. Eddie’s voice sounded just slightly off.

  “I’m at the children’s performance. Everything okay?”

  “Reverend, are you sitting down?”

  * * *

  Annabella’s clinic had been operating for about thirty years. It had originally included just a doctor’s office and examination room, but over the past decade or so, a pharmacy had been added and then eventually several sickrooms and even a limited ER. About fifteen minutes after his phone call with Dr. Rogers, Reverend Daniels’s station wagon pulled into the parking lot. When he got out, Nurse Ellen was waiting for him by the entrance. She brought him in and whisked him down the hall to the room where the doctor was.

  Reverend Daniels went inside and stopped in his tracks. An unconscious male patient lay on a gurney, hooked up to various tubing and machinery. The reverend just stared at him, scarcely able to believe his eyes, as Dr. Rogers, removing a blood pressure cuff from the man’s arm, smiled.

  “You believe me now?” Dr. Rogers asked.

  The reverend walked all the way into the room and got closer to the patient. He leaned over him, held his hand over the man’s face, but restrained from actually touching him.

  “How … how’s he doing?” he asked, a slight but audible tremor in his voice.

  “Well, his heart rate is 105 beats a minute, fairly high, and he’s breathing independently, but he’s definitely comatose. Blood pressure’s at 130 over 90, also high. Usually, we’d want to do a whole battery of blood tests, but that doesn’t seem possible at the moment.”

  “Why not?”

  Dr. Rogers put the blood pressure monitor back into a drawer and closed it, then turned back to the reverend.

  “Because our needles can’t puncture his skin.”

  Reverend Daniels opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. He looked back at the unconscious Andrew Leland, lying there on the gurney, then turned back to Dr. Rogers.

  “Eddie, I don’t want anyone to know about this, you hear me? This has got to be kept strictly confidential. The repercussions would extend far beyond Annabella, you can be sure of that.”

  Dr. Rogers nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ve already sworn my secrecy to the young man.”

  “The kid you said brought him here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is he now? I should speak to him right away.”

  “Him? Oh, he’s gone.”

  “Gone? Well, where did he go?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” the doctor said with a shrug. “He brought him in here, said something about there having been an accident, and then just took right off into the night.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Leland had said Shawn wouldn’t last more than two hours on his own. It had now been more than two days, nearly all of that time spent driving, and he hadn’t so much been stopped by a state trooper, let alone mowed down by a hit squad or blown to bits by a drone. Now, though, the risk factor was about to jump exponentially. He was heading straight back into the fire.

  Leland was right about what he’d said just moments before they were attacked. Shawn had no credibility, and the world at large would never take him seriously. So he had decided to come now to the one person who might.

  Since Dellwood College hadn’t existed in over ten years, the main entryway to the campus, a winding woodland road, had long ago been chained off. Shawn had therefore left the SUV in a small forested area just off the highway and then walked up the hill to where that blocked road began. Earlier, he had considered entering via the woods, parallel to the road, but since his intention was to make his presence known as soon as he arrived, there was no point, and he figured the sneakier he went about things, the more likely it was he’d be shot before he had a chance to talk. Dying he could deal with, but talking was the whole reason he’d come back.

  Night had fallen, and as he made his way along the road, surrounded by tall oak, black ash, and maple trees and guided by the moonlight, every sound, every creak of a branch or rustling of an animal, seemed sinister. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he was basically a walking dead man, anyway, so what good was fear? Even if Ambius believed him, even if they accepted his claims about the dangers of deactivating the cosmic shield, and even if they listened to him and heeded his warnings, they’d surely also kill him. As long as he wasn’t any use to them, he was a threat. He’d learned that the hard way, and just being back on that road, so close to the campus, brought back the sickening feeling of Rachel’s betrayal.

  When he reached the main campus, he saw that everything was dark. While it was normal for the lights in the main buildings to be off, at least some of the lights in the physics buildings, the student center, and the dorms should have been on at this time. Shawn walked up to the entrance of the old physics building and tried the door. It was locked. Though months of being on the lam had greatly enhanced Shawn’s lock-picking skills, this particular door utilized a Medeco dead bolt, which made it impervious to any of the standard methods. Fortunately, as he circled around the building, he spotted a window that wasn’t completely closed. He grabbed the bottom with his fingers and pulled up hard, managing, with all his might, to pry it open. He then hoisted himself up and climbed through. Once he was all the way inside, he got to his feet in the dark and turned on his flashlight, illuminating what turned out to be a classroom. Keeping the flashlight shining forward, he moved out of the room and into the hallway, then down the stairs to the basement level, where Laboratory B was located.

  Stepping into the old lab, he first tried the lights, but they were dead. He then swept the room’s perimeter with his flashlight and could see no indication that the lab had been recently used. No scattered papers, no empty Styrofoam cups. The air seemed dustier than he’d remembered, if not in the same league as the school library’s. The equation on the whiteboard was actually one he recalled having worked on with Rachel shortly before his last night at the campus. That was particularly strange. It was as if the entire Dellwood operation had existed solely for him.

  He left the physics building, crawling out the way he’d come in, then moved on to the old dormitory, which, unlike the physics building, wasn’t locked. But if the physics lab had appeared abandoned, the dorms unquestionably were abandoned. Moving through the empty rooms on the second floor, flashlight in tow, Shawn couldn’t find a trace of anyone’s belongings or any other signs of life. The place had apparently been entirely cleared out, though there was still one room left to check.

  Rachel’s dorm room had always been a source of great mystery to Shawn. But his feelings for her aside, Rachel’s room was unique in and of itself. Situated on a separate wing of the floor once designated for the dorm preceptor, no one was ever invited inside, and when Rachel locked herself in for long periods at a time, no one, or certainly not Shawn, had any idea what she was doing in there. Ravi once joked that the room probably contained a spa and a private Starbucks, the latter a reference to the unconventional hours she kept.

  When he tried to open the door, it was locked, but he removed a small pick and torque wrench from his pocket and went to work. After about a minute or so of f
iddling, the lock clicked open, and Shawn entered the room and turned on a lamp on the night table beside the door; unlike the lights in the physics buildings, the lamps in the dorm rooms still worked. The room didn’t look much different from his own. A simple-looking full bed. Industrial ceiling fan overhead. Night table and dresser. The main differences seemed to be a tall mahogany bookcase, far nicer than any of the furnishings in the other rooms, and a walk-in closet. Or rather, what Shawn presumed to be a walk-in closet; it was covered by a wide curtain with a tacky, purple geometric pattern.

  Shawn walked over and yanked the curtain to the side. Sure enough, it had been covering a walk-in closet, but not just that. At the far end of the closet were two large silver panels. Shawn walked into the closet and approached the panels, which he realized were actually double sliding doors. On the upper part of the right door, there was a tiny little hole about the size of a nickel.

  There could be no doubt: he was looking at an elevator.

  “Welcome back,” a soft, childlike voice said somewhere behind him.

  He spun around to see the bald man from earlier, his bulbous head glowing eerily in the lamplight, smiling at him and aiming a handgun. Though Shawn still had Leland’s pistol in his jacket pocket, it was too late to draw it now. “I need to speak to Rachel,” he said.

  “No problem,” the man answered. “She’s expecting you.”

  And then the man reached out his gun and swung it straight into Shawn’s right temple. Shawn dropped to the ground, clutching his head with both hands. The pain was seismic. He heard ringing and thought he felt something moist seeping from his hair through his fingers, though identifying it as blood would have required far more focus than he could muster. Already down on the floor, he felt a hard kick to the stomach that knocked the wind right out of him. As he lay there gasping, the man reached into his own pocket, removed a syringe, and inserted it into Shawn’s arm, bringing on a profound sense of déjà vu.