He dug a pit next. He was drenched with sweat by the time he finished.
He tossed Dale’s body in, along with his clothes and the bloody boards. He doused them with gasoline from the tank, waited for the sun to slip past the horizon, and tossed a match in.
The smell of burning human flesh sickened him, reminded him of the elementary school where he had stayed with all those people burned by the bushfire. He thought of Charlotte as he walked away from the blaze, then he thought of Agnes, and finally Orville. The man had been mean as a snake. A hard man. But he was all the family Desmond had. Now he was gone.
With the fire burning in the pit a few feet away, Desmond took out the envelope and read Orville’s letter.
Desmond,
Take the money. Don’t be careless with it. Respect it, invest it, and take care of it, and it will take care of you. I’ve been saving it my whole life. After you came to live with me, I got a little more serious about not spending every last cent I earned. The rest is the proceeds from your family’s ranch in Australia, which I have preserved in its entirety.
I hope you leave and go far away from this place. There’s nothing here for a mind like yours.
People often say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That’s bullshit. Some events a person just can’t recover from. They don’t make you stronger, they make you weaker, no matter how hard you try to cover it up or how strong you try to act. That happened to me when I was 25. It doesn’t matter what it was. Don’t go trying to find out. It’s water under the bridge. When you came to live with me, I was well on my way to drinking myself to death. Probably would have been in the grave within a few years if the rigs didn’t get me first. I told the woman on the phone that I was in no shape to care for you. I figured it was more dangerous here than wherever they would take you. But she wouldn’t listen. She sent you on anyway. I’m glad she did. For my sake. Caring for you saved me. Changed me. After what happened to you, I thought you would do what I did, shrivel up and die inside. But you didn’t. There’s a fight inside you that’s stronger than anyone I’ve ever met. Not on a rig, or in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia, or on the streets of London when the bombs were falling.
This world broke me. I found my peace at the bottom of a bottle. Drinking was my crutch. Don’t let it be yours. Don’t take the road I took. Drinking and drugs only make you forget for a while, dig you deeper in the hole. Don’t depend on them, Desmond. Get yourself clean. Leave the drinking behind. Quit the rigs for good. I don’t know where in this world you belong, but it’s not here. Live a life that makes you proud. As the years pass, it will be the wind in your sails. Regrets will sink you.
Orville
Desmond folded up the letter and watched the fire burn down until the flames receded into the pit. Sitting in that field in Oklahoma, he made a promise to himself: he would stop drinking for good. And he would do as Orville had suggested: he would leave this place and never come back. He knew where he had to go.
He took the shovel from the truck, tamped out the last glowing embers, scooped up the fire’s remains, and deposited them in two five-gallon buckets. He filled the hole back in, drove the truck another half mile to the banks of the Canadian River, and slipped his waders on. He washed the blood off the tarp in the river, then cut it into small pieces and scattered them, along with the ashes from the buckets. For half an hour he dropped the remains in the river, watching them flow out of sight. Then he washed the truck bed out with bleach and cleaned his hands.
At a grocery store in Noble, he loaded up on supplies.
He camped in another field that night, though he didn’t light a fire.
First thing in the morning, he visited a lawyer. He brought his uncle’s will and the deed to the house. The man was a professional, fair on his fees, and amenable to what Desmond suggested, though he said it was highly irregular.
Two hours later, Desmond signed a series of documents, which the receptionist notarized. The three of them walked to the courthouse for a brief meeting, which went as expected.
Desmond drove out of town that afternoon, heading for a place he’d never been but which would change his life forever: Silicon Valley.
Chapter 53
Peyton opened her eyes. Slowly, the room came into focus: metal walls, a narrow bed, and a glass partition. Her head throbbed. She felt hung over. She sat up, and a wave of nausea greeted her. After it passed, she still felt a slight motion, almost like a vibration. She recognized the feeling: she was on a ship.
A man with a badly scarred face and long blond hair was sitting in a metal chair beyond the glass partition, reading a tablet.
“Good morning,” he said, an insincere cheeriness in his Australian accent.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Conner McClain.”
Petyon studied him a moment. “What do you want?”
“Information.”
Peyton wanted information too. She sensed that this man had it. “You started the outbreak in Kenya, didn’t you?”
“We merely accelerated the inevitable.”
“Pandemics aren’t inevitable.”
“You know they are, Peyton. You’ve said so yourself.”
“I’ve said that pandemics have been inevitable—throughout human history. Not anymore. They can be a thing of the past. I’ve dedicated my life to that work. And you’re destroying it.”
Conner stared at her, a mildly amused expression on his face. “There’s one person in this room who’s going to make the human race safe from pandemics. And it isn’t you. Your life’s work is a drop in the bucket compared to our plan. We’re implementing a real solution—one final pandemic to end all others.”
One pandemic. “They’re related, aren’t they? The flu pandemic and the hemorrhagic fever in Kenya.”
“You’re smart enough to know the answer to that.”
“Why?”