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The Burning Road

Page 36

by Ann Benson


  “So you didn’t get the impression that they were being discarded, then.”

  “No. Not at all. In fact, it looked to me like they were accounting for every one of them.” She looked directly into Janie’s eyes. “I remember this weird, creepy feeling I had for the rest of the day. And something else—there were two men there, watching the whole thing. They looked ludicrously out of place. They were wearing suits. It was July, and well over ninety degrees.”

  “Any idea who they were?”

  “None whatsoever. But everyone at camp wore those blue T-shirts. As it happened, I wore one too that day.”

  “So you blended in, then. I don’t suppose you did that on purpose, did you?”

  Linda made a little smile. “I had a bunch of those T-shirts. They were always giving them away.” She shrugged. “That color looks good on me.”

  Janie stayed quiet as she mulled over Linda’s revelations. There didn’t seem to be much more to ask. It was so thoroughly pleasant in the house that she didn’t want to leave. But it was time to move on.

  “I was wondering,” she said, hoping it would seem like an afterthought, “during the Outbreaks, how did you manage …”

  “To stay alive?” Linda Horn smiled. “I hid.”

  As nonjudgmentally as possible, Janie said, “Ah … I see.”

  “Here,” Linda added. “The place wasn’t quite finished, but that didn’t matter to us.”

  “So you and your husband had this place … to hide.”

  A little bittersweet smile of recollection came onto Linda’s face. “We brought the entire town of Burning Road with us.”

  Janie stared at her. “The whole town?”

  “It was a small town.”

  “Still,” Janie said with uncertainty, looking around,“this house isn’t all that big.”

  “We set up a campsite. The townspeople had some experience in that, after all. If you bother to look at the records, you’ll see that the Outbreak death rate in Burning Road was zero for local residents. There were some squatters and out-of-towners who died—”

  “But no one from the town?”

  “No one. We all went back, a year later.”

  “I wasn’t expecting a happy ending to that story.”

  “No one ever does.”

  “The people of the town were very lucky to have you. Well, here’s hoping they won’t be needing you in that capacity again.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Janie stayed quiet for a moment, then sat back down again. “I think you might mean something by that remark, but I don’t quite get it.”

  “I do. I was wondering if you had heard anything, that’s all. About DR SAM coming back again. I’ve been reading things, hearing things.”

  It cannot come back, Janie thought. It just can’t. “I read a small article in the paper a few days ago—in fact it was on the front page—but it wasn’t being described as a comeback.”

  “Then they are keeping it quiet.”

  “When did you hear this … and where—”

  “People in our movement—we behave like one big family, really, and when there’s any kind of DR SAM news, it travels really fast. We’re all starting to get a little nervous. There have been a couple of pop-ups on the West Coast in the last week or so.”

  “Dear God.”

  “And what’s most troubling: we heard it was all over Mexico, and they aren’t saying anything down there. Or doing a blasted thing to stop it.”

  “Well, they didn’t before.”

  “And that’s how the whole thing got out of hand.”

  “Okay, here she is again.”

  The sound of a car starting came through the speakers, then the crunch of gravel under the tires, and shortly after that, there was music. And then painful shrieking, as Janie tried, in her own unique way, to sing along to a recording of Maria Callas.

  The listeners all winced. The volume was turned down. “She obviously just left it in the car when she went inside.”

  “I’d like to know why. Kristina, what do you think?”

  The young woman looked around at the gathered group, whose eyes had all come to rest heavily on her. “I don’t know,” she said. “She’s been very good about taking it with her. And she brought it along, she just didn’t bring it into the house when she went inside.”

  “Curious. I wonder … do you think she suspects?”

  Call me, the e-mail from the travel agent said. I have some information for you.

  “I can change your return flight,” the agent told her when they spoke a few minutes later, “but the outgoing flight is fixed. You have to enter on a certain date. That way they don’t get too much of a pileup in immigration. Iceland’s a small country—until the year before the first Outbreak the President’s phone number was still listed in the directory.”

  “No kidding. Don’t suppose I could get it now, and ask if she’d help me change my incoming flight?”

  “Probably not,” the woman said. “The problem is that they can’t just call up a few immigration agents to come in for a little overtime. They don’t have the manpower. So they try to pace the entries.”

  “Going out, though, I can pretty much get on whatever plane I want to.”

  “Yes. Whichever plane has room for you.”

  Then she read the rest of her mail. The next incoming message was another unfriendly one, much like the one she’d received just a few days earlier, which said that she ought to back off, though what she was supposed to avoid doing wasn’t made clear.

  I don’t think so, she’d replied bravely.

  Janie assumed it was from the same source. But this time it was a little more jarring than the first.

  She didn’t reply. She deleted the malevolent little blip from the mailbox as soon as she finished reading it.

  Janie needed advice and company, so she was very grateful when Tom said yes to her last-minute offer of dinner.

  “Ten minutes’ notice and I’m here,” he said when he met her at the restaurant. “Pretty pathetic, don’t you think?”

  She laughed. “I’m imagining that you canceled a date with the clone of Marilyn Monroe to meet me.”

  “I wish. But you are one of my most important clients. So if I did happen to have a date like that, I probably would have canceled it.” He grinned.

  “Now, that’s pathetic.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” He cleared his throat with a nervous little cough. “So, when are you leaving? Soon, I imagine.”

  “Tomorrow, actually.”

  Tom looked away briefly, then said, “Well, I know you’ll have a good time. But like I said yesterday, I’ll miss you.”

  A silence followed as thoughts went unspoken on both sides of the table.

  “So how long are you going to be gone?”

  “I don’t know yet. I have to arrive tomorrow, there’s no choice on that. Apparently they schedule their entries pretty rigidly. But I can go back out again anytime there’s room on a plane as long as I stay within the date limits of my visa.”

  “Which is how long?”

  “I could stay for up to a month if I wanted to.”

  His face seemed to fall, just long enough for Janie to recognize the expression for what it was, though he seemed to be trying to hide it.

  “I won’t be staying that long, Tom. I don’t think I’ll be gone more than a few days. I’m way too involved in this other stuff right now. I don’t really want to leave it at all. I feel pretty confused about it—and other things.”

  They stopped speaking and smiled mechanically when the waiter presented himself, and remained silent while he recited the specials. They ordered soup and salad for simplicity’s sake. And as soon as the waiter was out of hearing range, Tom said, “This isn’t just something mildly interesting to you anymore, is it, or a way to get relicensed?”

  “No. I’m hardly even thinking about my license at this point. It’s become much more than that.”

  “I get the fe
eling that you’re actually enjoying it.”

  His understanding felt like a blessing. She leaned forward with a gleam in her eye and let the excitement come through in her voice. “Yes. I am. I can’t tell you how much, and how everything else just seems very small and unimportant all of a sudden. I wish it was … cleaner, though. Things seem to be getting much more complicated in the last couple of days.”

  She told him about the second threatening message, and watched him as he considered what she’d told him. She couldn’t avoid the thought that he was trying very hard not to show any reaction.

  “I wonder if I should have someone look after my house while I’m gone.”

  “That might be a good idea. Do you know anyone who could do it?”

  “I was thinking of asking this girl Kristina who’s been—uh—for lack of a better word, running me.”

  “Interesting way to put it.”

  “Well, that’s sort of what it feels like. I don’t know what else to call it. It’s like she’s my spymaster.”

  “Bond has his M, you have your Kristina.”

  “There you go.” She reached down and patted the briefcase that contained V.M. “And my fancy technological gizmo. I don’t think I ought to be taking him to Iceland.”

  “You could just give it back to her and she could take it home with her.”

  “I suppose I could.” Then she paused for a moment. “You know, I don’t have the faintest idea where she lives.”

  He looked surprised. “You’re kidding.”

  “I never had any reason to ask her. I’ve always reached her electronically. V.M. has a mail module with a preset route to her, but I don’t have any way of unembedding the address. I’ve never called her on the telephone, even. But I assume she lives somewhere close by because she shows up on pretty short notice when I contact her.”

  “Maybe she’s really some bizarre alien being and only corporates when she’s with you. Maybe she reverts to a gaseous state the rest of the time, and hovers in the air, awaiting your summons,” Tom said.

  “Wouldn’t that be a neat explanation? In the case of this particular girl, it doesn’t sound all that far-fetched. She has some—oddities. And there was something I’ve been noticing in the last few days. Something really unusual in a young person.”

  “Which is?”

  “She seems to have some difficulty with her memory.”

  “Really? That is unusual, I guess. What kind of difficulty?”

  Janie noticed an unusual edge to Tom, a sudden stiffness that wasn’t generally present in him. She wondered why. “Well,” she said, “I would tell her something one minute, but the next, it was as if she hadn’t heard me.”

  “Maybe she was distracted.”

  “I thought of that. She’s quite distractable. But it’s happened more than once. And I know she hears well enough.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Tom. What did I do before the Outbreaks?”

  “Oh. Right. Neurology.”

  “She shows all the classic signs of short-term memory problems. Long term, I don’t see anything unusual. She calls up knowledge in impressive depth. But moment to moment she seems to be skipping a few beats. Twice yesterday there were funny little incidents, lapses almost.”

  “Maybe you should examine her. See what’s going on.”

  “Maybe. But not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want her distracted.”

  “You don’t want her distracted? From everything we’ve discussed, I got the impression that it’s this Kristina handling you, not the other way around.”

  “Well, that’s true, in terms of this project, or whatever you’d call it. This mission, maybe. But that’s not what I’m talking about. She needs a different kind of handling, I think. She seems awfully lost sometimes, like she could use a little parenting.”

  After a reflective pause, he said, “Something I know very little about.”

  “Which I, for one, have always thought to be one of the Cosmic Troll’s worst decrees. You would have been a great father.”

  Tom smiled down sadly at his plate, and Janie asked him, “Do you ever regret not having had children?”

  “There are way too many things I regret.” He looked up at her. “I would’ve needed a partner, and that just never seemed to work out. But the flip side is that I never had to go through losing a child. I watched a lot of people crumble a few years back. I don’t know how well I would’ve done with that.”

  “I don’t think that’s something you can predict ahead of time.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Imagine how the parents of these camp boys must feel now. Their sons all made it through the Outbreaks. They probably thought they were home free.”

  “Are you ever home free when you have kids?”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Janie sat on the edge of her bed between the two items that were going to occupy the remainder of her night. Though both required her attention, she was simply sitting and thinking, ignoring her obligations.

  “Sorry, guys,” she said, as if her empty suitcase or Virtual Memorial could hear, or would understand. “I don’t mean to neglect either of you, but he’s a tough act to follow.”

  She finally heaved herself off the bed and went to her closet to begin the onerous task of figuring out what was just enough, and what would be too much to take to a country where the temperature was hard to predict from one day to the next. The travel agent had given her a book with guidelines and suggestions, which seemed too complicated to follow.

  Fuck it, she thought, I’ll just pack everything I own. Let someone at the airport decide what I should leave home. Once upon a time she could have taken what she wanted, for a price. But everything now had limits.

  She came back to the bed with an armful of clothing, and set it down. Then she went to V.M. and typed in a few more additions to the growing list of what she wanted to search for in Big Dattie when she returned from Iceland. The list was growing longer at an alarming rate. But she had only thirty minutes to do the work and record what she’d done.

  “Okay, that’s all the attention I can give you tonight,” she said to V.M. “But I promise to be better when I return. I’m going to give you back to your other parent while I’m gone.”

  One last thing to do. She needed to tell that other parent that she planned to take an excursion into Big Dattie, and she needed to try to get the mysterious “agency” to fund it.

  She e-mailed Kristina. Bring the leash, she wrote, after everything else was conveyed. It’s your turn to walk the dog.

  21

  Karle waited until they were safely ensconced in their small chamber to read the letter Alejandro had tossed from his barred window. He unwrapped the parchment from around the piece of wood as Kate looked anxiously over his shoulder.

  I am healthy and well fed, though I grow wearier every minute of my captivity. I am constantly guarded and cannot see any means of escape from this house. The chamber in which I am kept is small but properly appointed, though in comparison to the hovels we have known this is luxury. But I will not allow myself to enjoy it while we are still apart.

  De Chauliac has become my shadow; he rarely lets me out of his sight, follows my every step, if not in physical movement then with his eyes, and his constant vigilance seems more a prison to me than my bodily captivity in this house. But I am thinking of ways to get myself out of here. I have begun a friendly flirtation with Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, who is the wife of Prince Lionel …

  “Dear God!” Kate gasped. ” Lionel is my half-brother!”

  … with the cooperation of her page, a lad named Geoffrey Chaucer, who has brought me a gift from her and carried my message of thanks back with him. He is a spirited lad and fond of amusement; I believe I can entice him into a conspiracy for the sheer love of the intrigue. If I can arrange it, I will have him come to you with a message—I will
have to conjure some way to convince him that it is part of my dalliance with the countess.

  Parchment seems dear in this house, and de Chauliac grows suspicious when I request it, so if you can, toss back a message with one side blank—I will leave the window open, so you need only get it past the bars. Come late at night so we will not be discovered.

  Kate, my beloved child, stay well and take care of yourself. I long to hold you in my arms again and to smother your sweet cheeks with kisses. Karle, take care to guard her. I am counting on you.

  Kate held the letter to her face and cried. “Oh, Père … we must write back immediately.”

  “This drawing signifies the fire from heaven that breathes the spark of life into man and all beasts,” Flamel said, “and this”—he pointed to a trilobed icon —“invokes the presence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They are shown here as the red stone, the white stone, and the elixir vitae.” His traced a finger along the drawing. “See how these rings join them together in divine union?”

  “But how does this apply to the work of transmutation?” de Chauliac asked. “If it is just a recombination of the elements, why is all this necessary?”

  “Ah,” Flamel said, “it is not mere recombination, it is an act of creation. These first steps are perhaps the most important steps of all, for without heavenly sanction no man can do what falls naturally into God’s realm. Anytime man attempts to engage in such an activity, he must first seek the approval of the Divine One Himself so as not to offend. Otherwise the process cannot be successful.”

  De Chauliac was fascinated. “And how does one know if such approval is granted?”

  “God sends a sign, of course.”

  “Which is?”

  “There is no way to predict—it is different every time. Each practitioner of the art of knowing must pray deliberately and continuously in order to discover what God wants of him, and when he comes to that sweet knowledge he will recognize the sign. A flash of fire, a change in the wind, the rising of the waters, the upheaval of the earth. These four elements have always been under God’s control, and He can make them do His will. And so He will use them to make man understand his own power, and the work can begin. He can learn, through the guidance of God, how to catch the wind, claim the earth, light the fire, and harness the water. Then all things are possible.”

 

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