He was almost to the end of the pool when the full importance of what had happened abruptly settled upon him, and his heart began to pound. He had intervened in a violent assault and shot a man—a thing, something like a golem but not made of mud, a golem without a soul that had once been a man with a soul. He had shot him to death. Yet somehow he’d remained calm throughout the confrontation. He had not been afraid, only concerned about doing what needed to be done.
Now his heart knocked hard, though not because he was worried about the consequences of what he’d done, which he wasn’t. These events—the insane attack, the shooting, the failure of the 911 system—had something to do with Jane and her boy. She’d said her enemies would be here in force and seal off the valley as best they could. But suddenly it seemed they hadn’t just sealed it off. They had also transported the valley out of the world as Bernie had always known it, out of the real world into the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone where anything could happen but nothing good could be expected.
As Bernie approached a large Winnebago, one of the other motor homes currently in the park, a deeply tanned barrel-chested man in sandals and khaki shorts stepped out of it. He gestured toward the farther side of the pool. “What’s going on? What the hell happened over there?”
“Crazy man,” Bernie replied. He kept moving. “Big fight. Somebody shot somebody.”
“Oh shit.”
Before boarding the Tiffin, Bernie disconnected it from the park’s power supply. By the time he took the .45 from his waistband and put it on the console box and got behind the wheel and started the engine, the Winnebago was roaring past on its way out of the park. A minute later a Thor Motor Coach decamped, and behind it a Fleetwood.
Shivering in the outflow of air-conditioning, which wasn’t very cold, Bernie picked up the burner phone and stared at it, hoping.
5
PASSENGER AS ALWAYS, Carter Jergen is being driven through the quivering thermals that rise from the sun-scorched blacktop, the wasteland flat and sere and daunting to all sides, like a dreamscape in which emaciated horses bearing dead riders will appear in a long, ghastly procession, as they do sometimes in his sleep.
The four-door six-wheel VelociRaptor is a big vehicle, but it’s a subcompact compared to the Valleywide Waste Management übertruck, which could demolish it in the equivalent of a head-butting contest. The V-Raptor is the very essence of cool, yes, but driving cool wheels when you go off a cliff won’t buy you a soft landing.
Having conceived of his mortality while touring the scene of slaughter in the kitchen of the Corrigan house, Carter Jergen is hour by hour becoming more obsessed with the prospect of his death, which previously had seemed no more likely than going to bed here in California and waking up on the moon.
He doesn’t want to find the dumpster-lifting truck and endure the demolition derby that might ensue. He doesn’t want to come face-to-face with Arlen Hosteen, because Hosteen has gone through the forbidden door and fallen down the forbidden stairs and is just an older version of Ramsey Corrigan, the teenage mutant death machine. After having been enthusiastically in the hunt for Jane Hawk, Jergen does not any longer want to find her, either. Now that he’s able to conceive of his death, he’s increasingly concerned that Jane Hawk will deliver it to him. He’s surprised by the transformation he’s undergoing, but he’s pretty close to embracing a live-and-let-live attitude, and it doesn’t feel half bad.
“Maybe we need to step back and rethink,” he says.
“Step back from what?” Dubose asks.
“The brink.”
“What brink?”
“Jane Hawk.”
“She’s a brink? She’s not a brink. She’s a dumb bitch who’s been damn lucky.”
“She could be a brink,” Jergen insists. “We’ve been racing after her full tilt for so long, we could suddenly find ourselves airborne with a long drop and nothing below but rocks.”
Radley Dubose doesn’t bother to reduce speed when he looks away from the road and pulls his sunglasses down his nose with one finger and peers at Jergen over the frames. “You’re too young to be going through a midlife crisis, Cubby.”
“I have a bad feeling.”
“Well, I have a good feeling.”
“I’ve never had a bad feeling like this before.”
Dubose repositions his sunglasses and looks at the road again and says, “Maybe you need testosterone shots.”
This is when Dubose receives a call from the Desert Flora Study Group. The Valleywide Waste Management truck—and probably Arlen Hosteen with it—has been spotted by the Airbus crew conducting low-altitude surveillance. The truck plowed into a house approximately one and a half miles from the VelociRaptor’s current position. FBI agents—Arcadians, of course—are already on the scene.
6
TRAVIS HAD BEEN HUDDLED on the floor behind the driver’s seat, below window level. At his mother’s instruction, he now sat on the seat long enough to thrust his legs into a roomy gray duffel bag she provided, pulled it up to his shoulders as if it were a sleeping bag, and then returned to the floor, where he curled in the fetal position. Head toward the front of the vehicle, back to the port-side door, he faced the transmission hump that separated his half of the backseat from Cornell’s. He was small enough to fit nicely in that footwell.
Jane leaned through the open door and kissed his cheek. She pulled the duffel bag over his head and partly closed the drawcords at the top, leaving a large enough opening for air to enter.
“Are you okay, sweetie?”
“I’m good.”
The gray bag was emblazoned with a red cross in a white circle.
“Now, you’re just bandages, honey, lots of bandages and medical supplies. If we’re stopped, you don’t move.”
From within the duffel, he said, “Not a finger.”
“You’re a brave boy.”
“I’m an FBI kid.”
When Jane looked up from the Red Cross bag, she met Cornell Jasperson’s stare. His eyes glistened with torment.
He whispered too softly for Travis to hear, “I won’t let him die, won’t let him, won’t let him.”
The white plastic zip-ties around his wrists and ankles had been cut and mended with white tape. They looked secure, but they could be pulled apart with ease.
“Just play it like I explained,” she whispered, “and we’ll all make it.”
When she closed the door, she realized that, in the imploded house, still alive in the cab of the truck, the driver continued to pump the accelerator with demonic insistence. The engine roared and an underlying shrill grinding noise might have been the front axle spinning relentlessly against the joists that had not yet given way. If he was one of the adjusted people, something had gone so wrong with his nanoweb control mechanism that he was now perhaps as much of a machine as was the truck he had once commanded, stuck in gear and unable to shift himself into neutral.
She hurried around to the front passenger seat, where Luther had propped the fully automatic 12-gauge shotgun on its butt plate, barrel against the dashboard. She stood it between her legs, keeping it upright by pincering it with her knees, and pulled the door shut.
As they drove past the destroyed residence, the mounded wreckage abruptly cratered as apparently the joists succumbed. The basement swallowed the truck along with a few tons of debris, and the ruins disgorged a thick gray plume. The only portion of the structure remaining upright was a six-foot-wide section of stuccoed wall with a glassless centered window offering a view of churning dust, like a cenotaph standing as a memorial to a lost civilization.
In the backseat, Cornell said, “Good-bye, little blue house.”
Twenty yards north of the ruins, a Lexus SUV was parked aslant the shoulder of the road, its back end on the pavement, the driver’s door standing open. There appeared to be a dead man slumped in the front passenger seat.
“What’s this?” Luther wondered.
Jane figured that the man who had broken down the front door, before the arrival of the garbage truck, had driven the Lexus. Is you whisper sex me, sex me, kill me, kill you … whisper inside head?
To Luther, she said, “I’ll explain later. If I can. Just get us the hell out of here.”
They headed north on the leg of County Highway S3 that was called Borrego Springs Road.
7