Waking Lazarus

by T. L. Hines

  37

  REAPING

  Rachel looked at the giant octopus that was her best friend. Nicole, who constantly took care of Nathan when Rachel needed a break, or dropped by the shop with a latte to surprise her, or made the lemon bars Rachel loved so much, was now an octopus of metal and plastic. Tubes and wires intertwined, connecting her body to machines and outlets. Worst of all, her head had swollen, her features ballooning into an oversized mask.

  The ICU was for family only—they had passed a sign that told them as much on the way in—and Rachel realized Nicole was her only family here, in a way. The sister she’d never had. But Rachel herself felt more like a wicked stepsister. She thought a moment, trying to recall how many times she’d dropped by Nicole’s home, or just called to say hi. Not many. Not many at all.

  She bit her lip and listened, hoping for God’s voice inside to proclaim something warm and comforting. A baritone You are forgiven, my child, perhaps. But the voice remained quiet.

  She tasted something salty and only now realized she was crying. Tears traced a thin line down her cheeks and found their way to her mouth, right where she always bit her lip. She wiped at her cheeks with the heel of her hand as she moved next to Nicole. She took Nicole’s hand, squeezed, hoping for a squeeze in return. Nothing.

  Rachel felt something brush her shoulder, and she jumped, catching her breath in her throat.

  ‘‘Sorry,’’ Jude mumbled.

  At first, she thought he looked pale, as if the blood in his veins had been replaced with a few quarts of milk. But his eyes, ah, his eyes seemed to be overfilled with color, maybe even a different color than normal. She tried to recall if she’d ever noticed their color. Blue? Green? Hazel? Even now, she couldn’t say for sure—it was almost as if the color were subtly shifting, like one of those mood rings from the 1970s.

  ‘‘How’s your dad?’’ she asked.

  He shrugged, locked eyes with her. ‘‘Hard to say. But I’m better.’’

  Yes, she had to agree, something about him seemed more . . . alive. So much, he had hidden so much. It was amazing he hadn’t become more paranoid, amazing he hadn’t actually just folded in on himself at some point, hiding a secret like that. And she wondered— for the first time since she’d become a believer, she realized—what it was like to die. What really was on the other side? Was the white light everyone talked about really there?

  She cleared her mind, swept all those thoughts away. Her son was missing, and she didn’t want to think about dying. She didn’t want to think about anything else but finding him. She could feel sorry for herself later, feel sorry for Nicole, feel sorry for Jude and anyone else who might come to mind. But now, right now, she had to close off feelings of self-pity. She had to be cold, hard, iron.

  ‘‘So do you—’’ Rachel started before a nurse bolted through the door and stopped her in mid-sentence. It was the same nurse who had closed Nicole’s door in her face a few minutes ago. The look on the nurse’s face said she was annoyed to see Nicole the Octopus had visitors.

  The nurse’s eyes narrowed. ‘‘You family? ICU’s for—’’

  ‘‘She’s my sister,’’ Rachel said firmly, staring at the nurse.

  The nurse nodded and set to work. ‘‘Seems to be more stable now. I just need to check some vitals,’’ she said. She waded into the tangle of tubes and wires, leaving Rachel and Jude to stand by awkwardly.

  Rachel looked at Nicole’s eyes, noted how puffy they were. Even if she were conscious and awake, she probably couldn’t open them. Rachel felt her own eyes starting to blur again.

  ‘‘Has she . . . been able to say anything?’’ Rachel asked. She was sure Nicole hadn’t, but she wanted to ask something. She had to break the awkward human silence in the room; various machines buzzed, pumped and beeped, but those sounds were somehow more sinister than dead silence. Rachel also needed to speak to remove the emotion from her eyes. If she had to speak, she wouldn’t cry.

  The nurse looked up from her work, shook her head softly. ‘‘Still in her own world.’’

  Rachel thought about what Nicole must have been through. Had she seen the kidnapper? Maybe. Was she shot trying to save them? Probably. Most definitely; Nicole would have fought the kidnapper, whoever he is.

  ‘‘I wouldn’t want to wake up,’’ Rachel said. At first she was sure she had simply thought this, but when she noticed both the nurse and Jude staring, she realized she’d spoken the thought aloud. Still, neither of them made a comment. Maybe they agreed with her.

  The nurse finished her work, looked back and forth between Jude and Rachel, then left the room quietly.

  For a moment neither of them said anything. Then—

  ‘‘So do I what?’’ Jude asked.

  ‘‘Hmmm?’’

  ‘‘You were asking me a question when the nurse walked in. You said ‘So do you—’ and the nurse walked in.’’

  Right. Rachel couldn’t find her thought. What had she been asking? It had to be about Nathan. And Bradley, of course. Nathan and Bradley. They had wasted so many hours coming to the hospital in Billings. The bungee cord wrapped around her waist was overstretched, and beginning to fray. Something had to give, because she needed to get back to Red Lodge and find her son. He was there, she could feel it. But to do that, they needed some answers from Nicole.

  ‘‘So what happens now?’’ Rachel asked Jude.

  He moved next to the bed, and she could tell something was wrong.

  ‘‘What is it?’’ she asked, feeling breathless. The voice of God, I need the voice of God.

  ‘‘Well, it’s nothing. That’s just it. Nothing. I . . . remember when I told you about the guy who got hit in the street? The copper thing?’’

  She nodded.

  ‘‘I’ve had . . .’’ He paused, and she could see he was uncomfortable, maybe a bit embarrassed. ‘‘Whenever I’ve had a vision, I’ve always had the coppermouth first. But right now, nothing. Nothing at all.’’

  ‘‘We have to try,’’ she said.

  He nodded, already putting his hands on Nicole’s arm. Rachel watched as he closed his eyes, closed them tight as if getting ready to dive into deep water. Soon, he opened them again and moved his hands. He touched Nicole on the forehead. Rachel noticed his hands trembling—he’s not used to touching people, she thought—and then he closed his eyes once more. After a few moments his eyes opened again, and now Rachel saw a glint of desperation igniting and glowing steadily in them.

  Suddenly a single word came to her. Obvious and penetrating. Comforting. At a time when she wasn’t expecting to hear that voice— indeed, when her mind had been totally preoccupied with other thoughts—God reached to her through one simple word:

  Pray.

  Of course. That was what she had to do, what she should have been doing the whole time. She should have been on her knees the moment they entered the room, praying for Nathan, Bradley, Nicole. Jude. Herself.

  She bowed her head, closed her eyes (not as tightly as Jude seemed to close his eyes, to be sure, but tight nonetheless). It was a simple prayer, really, a plea to God to make things right. In the growing darkness that spread across Nicole Whittaker’s hospital room, Rachel asked God to work a miracle.

  She opened her eyes and was a bit shocked to see Jude staring at her. She hadn’t said the prayer aloud, but he seemed to know she’d been praying. Just as he’d done at the dinner table (a night that seemed to have happened five centuries ago), he once again uttered a word she’d never pictured coming from his lips: amen.

  He smiled, a faint smile that said thanks, before his face contorted into a grimace. He wiped at his mouth with the back of a hand. An unconscious move, but one a person might make when tasting something unpleasant.

  Jude touched Nicole’s arm one more time. Immediately Rachel felt an electrical shock course through her own body, a shock that jolted . . .

  No, no, she hadn’t felt the shock herself. Jude had. But it seemed so real, and it was so surprising and unexpe
cted that she felt she had shared the sensation.

  She watched as the various muscles on Jude’s body tensed and released, as his eyes raced behind closed lids, as a bit of spittle formed at the corner of his mouth and started to wind its way down his chin. It was like those electric paddles hospitals use to kick someone’s heart back into the right rhythm: the body stayed tense and taut until the shock had finished. Only it didn’t relent. The muscles in his neck and jaw quivered.

  Then, just as Rachel started to worry Jude was being shocked, perhaps by a loose wire from those cables connected to Nicole, his eyes opened and the quakes in his body calmed. He removed his hand from Nicole’s arm, and Rachel looked at the spot where they had been touching. She half expected to see blistered burn marks on Jude’s hands or Nicole’s arm, but nothing was there. Nothing.

  ‘‘I saw it,’’ Jude rasped. His throat sounded strained, which wasn’t much of a surprise after the trauma she’d just seen his body go through. He seemed scared, very scared, and Rachel did something without thinking about it: she took his hand between her own hands and held it, as if he had frostbite and she needed to warm the fingers. If she had thought about it, she would have been scared to touch him—scared of being shocked the way she’d just seen him shocked— but something inside her told her to simply hold his hand.

  ‘‘You saw . . .’’ A rotten, putrid lump stuck in her throat suddenly, and she had to clear it out. ‘‘You saw Nathan and Bradley?’’ She was at once hopeful and terrified of the answer.

  He nodded. ‘‘They’re okay, Rachel. But . . . we need to get to them. Soon.’’

  ‘‘Okay.’’

  ‘‘They’re still in Red Lodge.’’

  She knew this, she knew it only too well when they left Red Lodge. She did not need to drive all the way to a hospital in Billings to confirm this. As a mother, she knew.

  Jude turned to the door and started to leave. Of course they should get back to Red Lodge as soon as possible; she could still feel the bungee cord trying to pull her back. Except.

  Except the same authority, the same assurance she’d heard before now urged her to say something to Nicole. Rachel needed to pull Nicole from her puffy dreamland for Bradley. And yes, for herself.

  She took Nicole’s hand, cradling it between both of her hands as she had done with Jude’s.

  ‘‘Nicole, he’s okay. And we’ll bring him back. Just hang on to that.’’ She let go of Nicole’s hand and gently placed it back on the bed, then looked to Nicole’s face one more time.

  Nicole’s eyes opened. The eyes were vacant and glossy, and Rachel thought she could almost see clouds of gray swirling inside the pupils.

  But they were open.

  Jude asked if he could drive, and Rachel let him. He didn’t think she would; it wasn’t as if he borrowed her car all the time, or as if they drove together a lot. They hadn’t . . . ever, really.

  He wanted to drive because it gave his body something to do. He was juiced on adrenaline-charged energy, and he had hoped driving would calm him. It was calming him, in a way. But he probably wasn’t in the best shape to be driving, either. Already fifteen or twenty miles had passed, and Jude couldn’t remember a single one of them. How could he think of the road, with all the new images cluttering his mind? Jude feared they were images he would never be able to let go. Like rust getting into a car’s body, he knew these thoughts would stay lodged in his brain and slowly grow, taking over every other thought slowly and painfully.

  Rachel hadn’t asked questions yet. She had asked if Nathan was okay, of course (he was, at least for now), but she hadn’t pressed him for details. That time was coming, though. He could tell. She was shifting in her seat frequently, staring his direction. She was searching for the right words to break the silence.

  Another mile marker ticked by, and Jude recognized this stretch of highway: the section flanked by grain fields. He smelled the pungent aroma of grain, stronger than it had been before. He looked out his window and saw a harvester moving through the field, its giant mouth sucking in stalks of grain and spitting the heads into a waiting truck. A cloud of dust swirled around the harvester in the evening twilight.

  Time to reap what you’ve sown. The thought floated naturally into his head. Yes, it was that time. He had been given a chance to save Nathan—along with Bradley and Nicole—before any of this happened. In fact, now that he looked back on the last few weeks, it was quite obvious everything had been leading up to that: he was meant to save his own son, but he had refused. Time to reap what you’ve sown. Indeed.

  ‘‘Are you . . . okay?’’ Rachel asked. Obviously she’d given up on waiting for details. He couldn’t blame her; in fact, she had been remarkably calm.

  ‘‘Scared.’’

  ‘‘Me too.’’

  Jude knew she was waiting for him now. Waiting for him to tell her, but the images seemed too cluttered. He couldn’t get his mind around the violent, shrieking images of the vision. He just wanted to concentrate on something else. It was almost too terrifying to talk about just yet.

  Still, he needed to tell Rachel. He owed her that much.

  She spoke suddenly, as if reading his mind. ‘‘We’ve been to Billings. You did your . . . whatever. And I’m trying to be patient. But I have to tell you: I’m starting to fall apart here.’’ He saw small wells of tears forming at the corners of her eyes. There it was: her Ace of Spades, face up on the table at last. He’d have to return to those rust-tinged thoughts. He should have done it before; she had waited a long time, stepped out in faith with him, as it were.

  ‘‘The important question is,’’ he said, ‘‘are you ready to hear it?’’

  She was.

  38

  MEETING

  The moonless sky of early twilight was a smear of violet above as Jude parked Rachel’s car at Wild Bill Lake. Wild Bill was a small manmade lake—no more than a couple of acres, if that. It sat at the very edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Five miles east sat Red Lodge; five miles west, nothing but rugged backcountry dotted by pines and boulders.

  Jude turned off the ignition, and they sat listening to the darkness creep in for a few seconds. Even though it was autumn, crickets and cicadas still rattled in the breeze around them.

  ‘‘You’re sure about this? You’re absolutely sure?’’ Rachel asked. Her voice had a new smokiness to it, as if she’d aged years during the drive from Billings. And perhaps she had; Jude felt a pang of guilt tweak his stomach, knowing he’d brought all of this on her.

  ‘‘Yeah, I’m sure,’’ he answered.

  She was nervous, edgy. She wanted to finish all this before—Jude stopped his thoughts there; he didn’t want to think about what would come for Nathan and Bradley if his plan didn’t work.

  ‘‘You sure he’s still there, this time of night and all?’’ Rachel asked.

  ‘‘With this case? No way he’d be knocking off early tonight. He’ll still be there.’’

  ‘‘Ready to make that call?’’ she said.

  ‘‘Don’t think I’ll ever be ready. But let’s do it.’’

  Rachel rummaged through her purse, then brought out a cell phone and handed it to Jude. Jude remembered the number to the Red Lodge Police Department and dialed it. A man’s voice answered.

  ‘‘Chief Odum, please.’’

  ‘‘Who’s calling?’’

  ‘‘Jude—er, Ron Gress.’’ Jude gave a quick glance at Rachel, who returned a slight smile. These days it seemed more and more difficult to be two people. He listened to silence while he waited on hold.

  Eventually Odum’s voice came on the line. ‘‘Mr. Gress?’’

  ‘‘Yeah, it’s me.’’

  ‘‘Calling in for the latest?’’

  ‘‘Yeah. Well, not really. Actually, I suppose I’m calling to update you.’’

  ‘‘Update me?’’

  ‘‘I . . . well, I know where the boys are.’’

  Odum held on to a long pause.

  ‘
‘Are you trying to offer a confession here, Mr. Gress?’’

  Jude rolled his eyes. ‘‘I’m trying to tell you I know where the boys are. I know who took them, and it wasn’t Sohler.’’

  Silence on the other end. ‘‘And how might you know such a thing?’’

  Jude looked at Rachel, who had her eyes closed. Maybe she was praying again. ‘‘I can take you there, if you meet me.’’

  ‘‘Where, Mr. Gress?’’

  ‘‘Wild Bill Lake.’’

  ‘‘And where did you get this information, if I may ask?’’

  ‘‘You can ask, but I don’t think you’ll believe me.’’

  ‘‘Probably not, but humor me.’’

  ‘‘Well, it was kind of a vision.’’

  Jude could hear Odum’s smile on the other end of the line. ‘‘Ah, so now you’re one of those psychics who wants to work with the local police department. Is that it, Mr. Gress?’’

  ‘‘No, that’s not it, Chief Odum. But now’s probably not the time to debate it.’’

  Odum sighed. ‘‘I suppose not. But I have to tell you, I don’t buy into any of this psychic mumbo jumbo, Mr. Gress. I’m not gonna waste the time of my people until I know you have something.’’

  ‘‘Understood.’’

  ‘‘Care to tell me who we’re talking about here?’’

  ‘‘His name’s Frank Moran. He’s a janitor I work with.’’

  Jude heard another smile creep into Chief Odum’s voice. ‘‘Okay, then, Mr. Gress. I’m in.’’

  When Odum hung up the phone, he had a solid mass of doubt tumbling in the depths of his stomach. Something about this whole situation wasn’t right. Wasn’t right at all. And the biggest thing that wasn’t right was Ron Gress himself. Or Kevin Burkhart. He’d checked that name, found a few records, but hadn’t chased that lead any farther. More pressing things at hand.

  Now that more kids had disappeared . . . Gress knew something more about them, Odum could tell. And whatever Gress knew, he needed to know as well.