As sweet as the blood of the children.
Part Three
The Closing
Chapter One
TO THE OTHERS sitting in the departure lounge, Helman was nondescript and appeared somehow removed from his immediate physical surroundings. Daydreaming perhaps, even though it was near midnight; maybe just one of those people who was apprehensive of flying. But within himself, Helman raged.
The redeye flight to Vancouver was due to receive its passengers within minutes. There was still no sign of Adrienne.
Pearson International Airport, January 18
They had split up outside a small church in Toronto’s east end where one of Adrienne’s sanctuaries had been. It was the one in which she had cached two flight bags and a small hard-sided suitcase. She said they contained her notes and the results of some of the work Dr. Leung had begun. Helman had checked the suitcase through to Vancouver on the all-night flight in his own name. He carried both of the flight bags. It was important that she not have any luggage, but she would not tell him why. She had told him, that, as a matter of course, whether or not Mr. Rice had believed Helman’s story about finding her impaled clothes, he would have an yber standing by any port of exit from the city. So Helman had gone ahead of her, purchased the tickets—hers left behind to be picked up at the customer service desk—and taken care of the luggage. She had said that she would come aboard at the last minute. The less time she stayed in one place in the airport, the less chance that another yber would sense her and be able to stop her. Apparently she was not concerned if they sensed her and discovered which flight she was on. She was only worried that they might do something to try to stop her from boarding.
A flight attendant began calling out row numbers to begin the boarding procedure. People began milling about the exit of the departure lounge leading to the embarking tunnel. Still no sign of Adrienne.
Helman’s section was called. He stayed seated, trying to control the anxiety he felt. If they got Adrienne, his sister would be next. And the children. He wondered if Weston had gotten his agents to them in time. He wondered if they would do any good even if they arrived in time. Adrienne had to make it.
The last of the passengers were leaving the lounge. A flight attendant walked up to him.
“Excuse me, sir, are you—”
There was the sound of running in the corridor. Helman wheeled around in his chair. It was Adrienne, moving rapidly. He looked past her. His hand moved uselessly to where his shoulder holster would normally be. He had not had any way to bring his weapons past the metal detectors and the x-ray machine of the security checkpoints. Adrienne was running and he was defenceless.
She stopped in front of the check-in desk, holding Her ticket before her. Helman watched the people beyond her in the corridor carefully. No one appeared to be following her.
“Excuse me, sir,” the flight attendant began again. “If you’re going to Vancouver, all passengers must board now.” She saw Helman was watching the running woman check in. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Were you waiting for her?”
Helman shook his head. “No. Don’t know her. Must have been falling asleep I guess.” He yawned convincingly, got up and went through the lounge exit. He could hear Adrienne walking behind him. He slowed his pace to allow her to catch up in the tunnel. For a few moments they were alone in it; the flight attendants were checking paperwork back in the lounge.
“Did they pick you up?” he asked her in an urgent whisper.
“No,” she said. After all the running, she was not out of breath. But she looked worried. “I didn’t pick them up, either. It was as if they didn’t have anyone watching the airport.”
“If my story were believed, couldn’t the watchers have been called off?”
They rounded the corner of the tunnel. Two flight attendants waited by the plane’s hatchway.
“I don’t think that’s likely,” she said in a pleasant, conversational tone.
“Why not?” he asked, equally jovial.
She gave him a quick glance, and smiled at the flight attendants as she showed her boarding pass to them.
They walked down one of the narrow aisles of the plane. Helman’s seat was behind hers by several rows. She had said it was very important they not be connected to one another in anyone’s eyes. Again she had refused to say why. Helman stopped behind another passenger who had opened the compartment above a seat and was filling it with flight bags and coats.
Adrienne moved closely behind Helman. He heard her whisper.
“The only reason they wouldn’t be looking for me, for us, at the airport, is because they already know where we’re going to be.”
“Is that possible?” he whispered back.
“There aren’t many options,” she said.
The other passenger had sat down. Other people waited behind Helman. He moved on to his seat, confused and apprehensive.
What would be waiting for them in Vancouver?
Chapter Two
THE CHILDREN WERE sleeping.
New Hampshire, West Heparton, January 18
Miriam sat up in her bedroom. A half-read book lay open on the night table. Granger’s Remington lay beside her on the bed. For the past two days she had seen watchers in the woods behind her farmhouse and across the road. She had not let Steven and Campbell go to school. But Granger would be home soon and everything would be back to normal.
At least, she thought, the farmhouse is so rickety, no one could move through it without making the floorboards and the stairs creak up a storm.
The house was silent.
She watched in horror as her bedroom door swung open without a squeak of protest. It has to be a dream, she thought. And then they were on her so quickly she didn’t even have a chance to scream.
The children did not sleep for long.
Chapter Three
HELMAN SAW THE whole, impossible thing, but denied it when the RCMP officers questioned the passengers on the plane. The officers were simply the security force for Vancouver International Airport. They had no knowledge of what had recently happened to their more highly placed colleagues in Toronto. They had no reason not to believe Helman’s story. He was free to go with the other passengers an hour after the plane had landed. From the corridor windows he watched as the searchlights played across the tarmac, looking for the body. No one had believed the one passenger who had seen the woman run away. Helman had a hard time believing it himself. But he knew it had to be true.
Vancouver, January 19
The plane had been descending. Seatbelts were fastened and all the passengers, frightened or not, had been holding the seat arms just a little more tightly than usual as they waited for the first impact of the tires on the runway. All the passengers except one.
Adrienne St. Clair had gotten up from her seat moments before landing. She had held on to both her head and her stomach, as if sick and confused, and staggered down the aisle. Helman had heard the attendants shouting to her to return to her seat. Adrienne had continued.
Helman had slipped off his seatbelt and raised himself off his seat enough to turn his head and see what was going on. The senior flight attendant had unbuckled herself and gone after Adrienne. By this time, Adrienne was right were she wanted to be. The plane hit the runway with a jolt. Adrienne lashed out her arm and caught the unbalanced attendant across her midsection. The attendant went flying backward into the galley. Adrienne spun around to the emergency escape door and pulled and twisted on the large yellow handle. More attendants shouted.
Then the door popped open and Adrienne jumped out and hit the runway at one hundred and forty miles an hour.
She was safe.
Helman was impressed. Whatever was waiting for them in Vancouver had just been avoided by Adrienne. There did not appear to be anyone interested in him. Perhaps the yber watchers, if there had been any, had heard about the crazy woman on the Toronto flight who had committed suicide, realised what had happened, and were now scouring
the areas beyond the runways.
Helman had not known what was going to happen. He continued on the way that they had planned. She had found him before in his Toronto hotel room. He had no doubt she would find him again.
The Ford LTD he had reserved from Toronto was waiting for him and he drove into the wet Vancouver night. Adrienne waved him down two miles from the airport. Before they drove on, she had him take the suitcase from the trunk of the car so she could put on new clothes. The ones she had worn in her jump from the plane were almost completely torn away by the force of the impact. Helman saw several dark ripples running along the pale skin that showed as she changed in the car. He asked her about them.
“That’s the healing process,” she explained. “Small wounds close up in seconds. If you can watch carefully, you may be able to see a thin dark line, almost as if a hair had been laid across the skin. More major wounds take a few minutes longer. Some can take hours, depending on the extent of the damage. The dark colour is a type of antibody reaction we haven’t been able to analyse yet.”
Helman considered what Adrienne had said. Perhaps she would have an answer to his question.
“How can yber be so impervious to bullets and so fatally vulnerable to arrows or wooden stakes?”
Adrienne smiled. “Jeffery and I spent a considerable amount of time on that one, Granger. Essentially, despite the fact that there are so few outward manifestations of the changes from human to yber, inside the changes are extensive. What it comes down to is that yber, six months or so after Communion, experience a fusing of their internal organs. Instead of the dozens of specialised organs that humans have, each one prone to its own disorders, many capable of destroying the entire organism because of their own malfunction, yber possess a generalised organ. That’s really about the only way I can think to describe it.”
“One organ to do the work of all the others?”
“Essentially. It’s like the brain. Certain areas of the brain, while they have no observable structural difference, serve as control centres for specialised functions. There’s the speech centre, sight centre, tactile response, all of them with a more or less specific control point in the brain. But if one of those centres is damaged or destroyed, providing it’s not one of the important ones that governs heartbeat or breathing, the organism is not destroyed. Almost every part of the brain has the capability of taking over control from any other part of the brain. Burn out the sight centre of a chimpanzee. Leave the optical nerve structure intact so that the signals still can enter the brain, and within a few months you’ll have a sighted chimpanzee back. It’s the same way that, stroke victims can recover. The brain tissue can’t grow back, but as long as the signals can get to some area of the brain, there’s a good chance that some form of recovery will take place as new areas take over.”
“So if a bullet goes through the part of this generalised organ that is the centre for, let’s say the pancreas, some other part of the organ will begin the production of insulin?”
Adrienne nodded. “Other than the factt that yber don’t produce and don’t need insulin, that’s the idea. And unlike the brain of a stroke victim, our generalised organ, which fills the chest and abdominal cavities, can regenerate itself. Incredibly rapidly. Just like these.” She held out one arm and rolled back the sleeve of her sweater. The dark ripples Helman had seen when she changed were little more than a light discoloration.
“So if that system makes you impervious to bullets, why doesn’t it work on arrows and stakes?”
Adrienne rolled down her sleeve.
“Size is what it comes down to. Yber bodies are less dense than humans’. The tensile strength of the skin is less. Bullets, even the kind designed to mushroom on contact, don’t meet much resistance when they pass through us. It’s like throwing a stone through water. A stake or an arrow doesn’t pass through the body as readily and instead of causing less than a cubic inch of internal displacement as a bullet does, it creates a permanent tunnel into the yber body that can’t be instantly healed. The heart is one part of the yber body that is not absorbed into the generalised organ. There’s only one. If a shaft of some sort impales it, stops its beating, our blood stops circulating, and our rapid metabolism almost instantly depletes our muscles of strength. We die. Same thing would happen if a powerful enough explosion hit us in the chest or if an enormous burst of bullets tore into our heart faster than the body could heal itself. Other than that, and barring massive destruction of the brain, yber are almost indestructible.”
“Makes it handy when you have to leave a plane in a hurry,” he said.
They drove south on 99. With the change in time zones, there were still several hours of night remaining. They planned to be outside of Seattle by sunrise. At the very worst, if no sanctuary were available, Adrienne would be protected in the trunk of whatever car they stole to drive across the border. Helman could continue to drive through the day. If sanctuary were found, Helman could make arrangements for them to ‘fly from Seattle to San Luis Obispo in California the next night. The Father’s estate would be less than an hour’s drive away.
Helman had many more questions, but for now he had to concentrate on a plan for getting them into the United States without delay. He would not like to be sitting in a small, American customs interview room when the sun came up.
He drove toward the border.
The couple in White Rock, walking out of the restaurant into the parking lot, was perfect. They were middle-aged, obviously married, and moving as though they had had just a bit too much to drink. They were completely stunned when Adrienne stepped in front of them and told them that the man standing behind them had a gun. If they tried to run or scream, they were dead.
Helman closed in behind them. He held his hand menacingly in an empty coat pocket. He linked his arm with the woman’s. Adrienne took the man’s.
Helman smiled as he walked. “Just look straight ahead and keep walking to the blue LTD over there. Nothing bad is going to happen. We won’t hurt you. Won’t take any jewels or cash. Just need your car. Keep walking.”
The man had rehearsed a hundred times what he would do if his wife and he were threatened in just this way, and all his plans evaporated. The shock of actually being in that situation made him incapable of doing anything except following the reasonable suggestions made by the reassuring voice of the man with the gun. Maybe it won’t be so bad he kept telling himself.
Helman could tell what was going through the man’s mind. He didn’t tell the man how many people had gone quietly to their deaths thinking just those thoughts. He was just pleased that the man hadn’t tried anything to cause a scene. It would have been unpleasant for everyone.
Helman got into the back seat of the LTD with the wife; Adrienne in the front with the husband. If the husband should try anything now, Adrienne could drop him instantly. Helman, however, was sure he would stay calm because of the threatening position his wife was apparently in. For people not used to it, violence was rarely necessary. The implied threat of violence, usually more vicious in their imagination than in reality, was generally all that was needed to keep those people in line. The type of people Helman hated dealing with were the type who thought they understood violence. By thinking they understood it, they somehow couldn’t believe it could actually happen to them. That idea had given several people the incentive to attack Helman in similar situations. Helman was an expert. He had taught some painful lessons.
But this couple was co-operating. Both Helman and Adrienne were relieved.
Constantly reassured, the couple handed over their identification, car registration, insurance forms, keys, and even offered their cash. Helman turned it down. He still had more than $3000 left from the cash Rice had given him in Toronto. It could be easily exchanged for American cash in Seattle. And he still had the charge cards of his Osgood identity.
The LTD was angled away from the parking lot lights and not visible from any of the restaurant’s windows. Helman slipped out
of the back seat and opened the trunk of the car. He asked the man to follow him. Helman assisted him into the trunk. Then Adrienne brought the woman.
“Stay close because it’s cold,” Helman said. “And don’t bother screaming because the lot is almost deserted and no one can hear you. When we get to Vancouver,” he lied, “well call the police and they’ll come and get you. Well take good care of your car and leave it in a parking lot where they’ll be sure to find it. All right?”
The man nodded. Fear was in his eyes and Helman knew what he must feel like being crammed in a trunk with his wife, completely out of control. Helman reached down to the edge of the trunk and ripped out the two wires leading to the trunk courtesy light switch. He twisted the bare ends together.
“The light will stay on when I shut the lid.” He looked into the man’s eyes. “Sir, I have a gun and I was ready to use it. You did exactly what you should have done. If you had done anything else, you both would be dead. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Do you understand?”
The man nodded.
Helman lowered the trunk lid.
“Stay close. The police will be here within an hour.”
The trunk clicked shut. Adrienne and Helman walked quickly to the car the man had pointed out as being his; a white Buick Riviera from the days before downsizing. It started on the second try and they were at the border within twenty minutes. Within thirty minutes they were at an American service stop calling the White Rock police about a couple locked in the trunk of a car. Helman knew that by the time the police had gotten the story out of the couple and the Vancouver police had decided that the Riviera wasn’t going to be found and perhaps the Washington State Police should be notified, two days of bureaucracy would have passed and the car would be long abandoned.
By the time the sun rose, they had checked into a small hotel north of Seattle and Adrienne was being protected from the light in a well-sealed, windowless bathroom.
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