Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

by Patrick Lee

  She crossed to the bed, leaned down, and kissed Laney’s forehead beneath the pink knit cap that kept her scalp warm.

  “How do you feel today?” Holly asked.

  Laney managed half a smile. “Same.”

  So many things going on in that face, in that tone. I don’t want to lie to you, but I also don’t want to make you feel bad. I know you’re doing everything you can.

  Holly returned the smile. “Same is better than worse, right?”

  One of her professors at NYU had told her doctors weren’t supposed to get attached. Not very attached, anyway. That was better left to nurses. Her attending physician during her residency at Anne Arundel, in Annapolis, had said something similar. In the decade since, Holly had never taken the advice.

  Laney was playing the video game again. Its name slipped Holly’s mind, but she was familiar with how it worked: The player existed in a 3-D world made up of small, discrete cubes—cubes of grassy earth, exposed dirt, sand, and rock. You could dig shafts deep into the ground or into the sides of cliffs, and use the freed material—also in the form of cubes—to build things with. For three days now, Laney had been creating a replica of Egypt’s Giza Plateau in the game. The three largest pyramids and the Sphinx. It was absorbing work. Which qualified it as a godsend.

  “I found a new Neil deGrasse Tyson video on YouTube,” Laney said. “He was talking about Europa—that’s one of Jupiter’s moons. He said the whole thing is covered with ice, but under the ice there’s an ocean of liquid water, and there might be life down there.”

  Before her time here, Laney had been about as serious an astronomer as a sixth grader could be. She had shown Holly pictures from her blog, of herself and her little sister at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Once Laney had even been to the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona. What she’d liked most of all, though, was just lying on the rooftop deck of her home, in farm country north of Tulsa. It’s a long way from city lights, she had told Holly. It’s dark enough that you can see satellites going over, if you watch long enough. They don’t blink or anything. They look just like stars, except they move. They slide right across the sky in a minute or so.

  Holly’s phone beeped with a text message. She took it out and looked at it.

  Karen Simonyi: Lab just sent the new numbers for Laney. Not what we hoped for.

  Holly kept her expression blank. From Laney’s point of view, it might’ve been a text about dinner plans. Still, when Holly met the girl’s eyes, it was possible to imagine she knew otherwise—to imagine Laney could tell what she was thinking.

  Holly almost shivered at that idea.

  That all too familiar idea.

  Laney looked puzzled. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, just spacing out.”

  The girl offered another smile, this one a little closer to full. “Doctors aren’t allowed to space out. Too many responsibilities.”

  “That’s why we space out.”

  Holly kissed her forehead again and left the room.

  Two minutes later she was standing at her office window, looking out over the Texas flatlands in the rain. The numbers for Laney were on her computer screen. She’d looked them over twice. She leaned her head against the windowpane. Far below, one of her bodyguards walked out under the entry overhang. He turned and surveyed the road in both directions, then headed back to the door. He did this several times per hour.

  Holly went to her desk chair and sank into it. She shut her eyes. In the silence were all the memories that always came to her. Like old acquaintances. These days, just about anything could trigger them. Could send her back to when everything had gone wrong—to when it could’ve gone right if she’d done things differently. If she’d been stronger.

  She squeezed her eyes more tightly shut. Felt the pressure against her eyeballs. Saw little pops and flashes of light in the black. She’d found long ago that this helped her deal with the other feeling—the sense that regret could be a physical thing. That it could stand behind you with its hand on your back, and that sometimes it could reach inside you and clutch your heart in its grip.

  “Rachel,” she whispered. She braced her elbows on the desk and put her face into her palms, and the name echoed in her thoughts as if she’d spoken it in a catacomb.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Evening came to the forest and brought with it a change of soundtrack, from chaotic birdsong to the sedate rhythm of a billion insects. Dryden sat on the small porch of the cabin and watched the shadows deepen among the sequoias. Through the open door he could hear Rachel breathing softly in her sleep. If she began speaking, it would take only seconds to step inside and switch on the audio recorder next to her.

  The cabin, a simple one-room structure, was an old Fish and Game Department outpost Dryden had found while backpacking, years earlier. Department field workers probably stayed in it a few nights a year; the rest of the time it was left unlocked for the use of any backcountry hiker that happened by. No harm in that—there was nothing of value kept inside. Dryden sat with his back against the exterior wall, waiting for answers to emerge from Rachel’s dreams.

  For the first hour that she’d slept, Dryden had sat on the floor next to her sleeping bag, though for reasons that had little to do with listening in on her. He was concerned with keeping her from hurting herself: The drug they’d used on her worked by inhibiting something called REM atonia, a kind of natural sleep paralysis—the body’s own countermeasure against sleepwalking. Under the drug, that paralysis was blocked. Subjects would act out their dreams: moving their limbs, which wasn’t helpful for interrogators, and moving their lips, which was.

  Sleep interrogation wasn’t especially new. Dryden had heard firsthand accounts of the practice going back forty years or more, with older and less sophisticated narcotics. The principle had always been the same, though: Get the subject dreaming, get him talking, and then interact with him. Try to influence the dream by suggestion. Dryden had seen interrogators sit at bedsides and whisper in Farsi or Arabic, pretending to be a subject’s brother or father or son. Subtlety was everything. Dreams were fragile, evanescent things; the surest way to end one was to let the subject realize he was dreaming.

  Rachel had less than the normal dose of the drug in her system right now, but there was no question she still had some of it left in her. It took forever for the kidneys to filter the stuff out of the blood. The subjects Dryden had seen during his years with Ferret had always been tied to their beds for at least one more night after their last interrogation session. In almost all cases they moved and talked that extra night, if only a little. Sometimes the interrogator would try to get a bit more out of them on those occasions; why not?

  Dryden turned and looked in on Rachel. She lay on one side with the sleeping bag pulled up around her chin.

  So many questions. Who was she, really? Where had she come from, before her time in that building in El Sedero? Did she have a family somewhere? Did she have anyone? Rachel herself had rattled these questions off before lying down, and then she’d surprised Dryden.

  Don’t ask me any of those things in my sleep. Like you said, if this works at all, it’ll be just barely. You might only have time for a question or two. I can wait a week to find out who I am. Just ask about the other stuff.

  When she’d said it, the fear beneath her expression had been palpable. Above the edge of her sleeping bag, her face was relaxed now. Soft features, untroubled. The face of a child, at last. Part of Dryden hoped she’d just sleep through the night. She sure as hell deserved to.

  Less than a hundred yards from the cabin, a jay scolded and flew from a low branch. Dryden turned fast and studied the place it had flown from. He watched for movement, more out of instinct than any real fear that Gaul could have tracked them here. Dryden’s precautions had been a few degrees beyond paranoid, even under these circumstances.

  For starters, there was nothing to link him to this location. His hiking trips had always been personal outings, never
related to his military service—wilderness training or anything else on record. Of all the documents in Dryden’s past for Gaul to dig up, there could be nothing to indicate he’d ever been to Sequoia National Park, much less to this nameless little structure more than a mile from any marked trail. There was simply no way anyone could know he and Rachel were here.

  Yet Dryden kept his eyes on the spot from which the jay had fled.

  A fern swayed.

  It wasn’t the wind; the weeds around it were still.

  The pistol, a SIG SAUER P-226, was two feet from Dryden’s hand, on a shelf inside the door.

  The fern shook harder, and then a fox kit sprang from it, tackled a second later by its sibling. They wrestled in the clear patch for a few seconds, then tumbled into brush on the far side.

  Dryden let his nerves rest. It felt nice, if only for a minute, to see the forest the way he might have seen it as a kid. Or as a father. Erin would have been six years old this month, maybe a little young to come out here backpacking overnight, but not by much.

  His mind sometimes made a picture of her, the way she might look now. He imagined her standing here under the sequoias, staring up with her eyes wide, feeling six inches tall.

  He’d learned years before not to let those kinds of thoughts last. He’d learned how to let them fade—how to let everything fade, really. How to go through the day in logical steps: sleeping, breathing, buying groceries, taking the trash to the curb. Life as a mechanical process. As limbo. As inertia.

  That it could all change—that there was anything for it to change to—had not crossed his mind in years. Not until today.

  He looked into the cabin again. Rachel had eased onto her back. For a minute or two he watched her sleep. Then he faced the woods again and watched the dark come down.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Long after night had claimed the valley, after the moon had risen through low clouds, sending wraiths of pale light playing over the forest floor, Rachel began to murmur in her sleep. Dryden entered the cabin, moving carefully so as not to wake her. His adjusted eyes found the audio device, and he pressed RECORD.

  For the first minute or two, her sounds were indecipherable, even from a foot away.

  Then her body stiffened. Her right arm jerked. Dryden knelt beside her, ready to take hold of her if it looked like she could injure herself.

  Her arm spasmed again. The other did the same. Both started to move away from her sides but stopped after traveling less than two inches, held fast as if by invisible straps. She tried to sit up, but her shoulders also met unseen resistance. With a chill, Dryden understood. After two months of sleeping in restraints, Rachel’s body had become conditioned to the limits. Dryden took a moment to reflect with satisfaction upon the revenge she’d dealt the blond man, even if she hadn’t meant it as such.

  Her murmurs fell silent for thirty seconds, and then she said, “It’s so pretty from this window at night.”

  Her eyes were still closed. The cabin had no windows, regardless. Rachel was describing something in her dream.

  “From up here,” she whispered, “all the lights…”

  She trailed off.

  Dryden sat down on the plank floor beside her. He steadied himself. This would either work or it wouldn’t. All he could do was try.

  Making his voice as soft as he could, he said, “Hello, Rachel.”

  She didn’t quite startle. The reaction was more reserved than that. A twitch of her eyebrows in the faint light. Tension in her features that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier.

  “Hello,” she said. Her tone was devoid of emotion.

  “Can I ask you some questions?”

  Rachel exhaled slowly. When she spoke, she sounded like she was reading from a note card.

  “Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”

  Dryden took in the words. Took in their meaning, at least in the abstract—the rough implication of where Rachel had come from. Of what she was.

  But more than the words themselves, what struck him was the way she’d said them, and the way her jaw clamped shut when she was finished. The mix of determined and scared shitless that etched itself across her face.

  It was a look Dryden had seen on other faces. Many others.

  As carefully as he’d first spoken, he said, “Do you recognize my voice?”

  She appeared to think about it. Her eyes, already shut, tightened as if narrowing.

  Then the scared resolve fell back over her like a shadow, and she replied in the same flat tone as before.

  “Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”

  An old, familiar phrase surfaced in Dryden’s mind. One that was known to soldiers the world over.

  Name, rank, and serial number.

  Rachel’s stock reply was the equivalent. She held it in front of herself like a shield, because in her head she was back in that little room in El Sedero. Whatever pretty dream she’d been having a minute ago, the very act of questioning her had changed it, and now her mind was stuck in the phantom restraints as surely as her arms were.

  Dryden rubbed his eyes. Christ, how to explain it to her—that he wasn’t one of those people? How to explain it without telling her too much and waking her up?

  Rachel’s head turned a few degrees toward him, though her eyes remained shut.

  “Waking who up?” she asked.

  Dryden stared at her. Because he’d been with her all day, because he’d gotten used to having her respond to things before he actually said them, he almost missed what’d just happened—that she’d heard his thoughts, even from inside the dream.

  “Inside what dream?” she asked.

  Shit. Shit.

  Dryden felt it all getting away from him. Like a stack of dinner plates atop his hand, unbalancing, pitching outward—

  He made his voice as stern and cold as he could manage, and said the words as quickly as they formed in his head: “The thing everyone’s scared of—tell us about it again. Right now. You’ve already given us that much, there’s no harm in repeating it.”

  For a moment Rachel seemed to continue looking at him through her closed eyelids, as if still hung up on the question of who was dreaming. Then the strained resolve settled back into place.

  “Why do you need to hear it again?” she asked. “I told you.”

  “Just do it,” Dryden said. “Tell us what it is.”

  “I told you where it is. Go see it for yourself if you want to know about it. You can walk right up to it. No one’s going to stop you.”

  Before Dryden could respond to that, Rachel’s forehead furrowed, and she turned her head toward the cabin’s nearest wall.

  “Who’s in the next room?” she asked.

  Dryden ignored the question—that she was referring to someone in her dream was obvious, but to dwell on that for even a second would only further break the spell.

  “Alright then,” Dryden said. “Tell us again where this thing is.”

  Rachel stared at the wall a moment longer, her face still full of concern.

  “Stop stalling, Rachel. Tell us.”

  “Elias Dry Lake, in Utah.” She gave up on the wall and sank back onto the fabric of her sleeping bag. “It’s right there. You can’t miss it.”

  “Keep talking,” Dryden said. “Tell us what’s there.”

  A strange little smile turned up the corners of her mouth. If anything, it made her look more scared.

  “What’s the point of threatening me now?” she whispered. “I already know what Gaul’s going to do to me. So do you guys.”

  Dryden could see tremors running through her body. It was all he could do to keep from putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “It must burn him up, though, right?” Rachel said. “He gets something as useful as me in his hands, and he doesn’t get to keep me? Someone else builds a new toy for themselves
, and Gaul has to kill me because…” Rachel laughed; the sound of it crept under Dryden’s skin. How many times had he heard a prisoner laugh that same way, in the deep end of despair, holding on to bravado as if it were a punctured raft? “Because any time now they’re going to stop test driving that new toy and really give it the gas … and if I’m still alive when that happens … talk about a wrench in the gears—”

  She cut herself off. All at once she looked confused. For a second Dryden expected her to open her eyes.

  Then she said, “Who are you? Wait … Sam?”

  Dryden spoke softly again. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Who’s with you? Who’s in the next room?”

  “There is no other room, Rachel.”

  She started to reply, then stopped herself. She looked thoughtful. “I’m dreaming, right?”

  “You’re dreaming,” Dryden said. No point trying to fool her now. “You’re dreaming there’s someone in the next room.”

  Rachel shook her head. “I can hear a man thinking, but he’s not in my dream. He’s there with you. He’s right on the other side of that wall.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the fraction of a second it took Dryden to understand, everything changed.

  Outside the cabin, feet scraped the dry ground as the intruder reacted to what Rachel had said, and then footsteps sprinted hard along the exterior wall. Sprinted toward the front of the structure, and its still-wide-open door.

  Dryden came up from his sitting position beside Rachel, threw his body at the shelf next to the door, and had the SIG SAUER in his hand an instant later. He braced a palm on the door frame and shoved himself backward, dropping to a shooter’s stance in the middle of the floor.

  In the next second a man appeared in the doorway.

  A big man, silhouetted against the moonlit forest.

  Holding a shotgun.

  Dryden fired.

  Three shots in rapid succession, into the figure’s chest from less than ten feet away.

  Rachel woke, screaming.

  The intruder dropped the shotgun and staggered backward. One foot went off the edge of the porch platform, and he fell on his back in the dirt.