He winds his way through the cars and semis, some abandoned, most ruined. He guns it to seventy, eighty, ninety, bombing through Multnomah, through Hillsdale, to the Terwilliger curves, a six-lane section of freeway that has long been the most dangerous in the state. He skids along its perilous corners, foot off the brake, leaning into the turns, feeling all the blood in his body pulled in the opposite direction. Two of the cars catch up with him and bash him until he knocks against the safety railing, which carves into the Ram and throws up showers of sparks. He jerks the steering hard enough to run over the hood of a BMW Roadster. The truck’s tires lift on the left side, and just when he wonders if he will tip, gravity brings him crashing down again. When he regains control and checks the mirrors, he sees the BMW upended and skidding on its side, the broken axle spearing from its undercarriage.
Up ahead, a logging truck has overturned and spilled its trailer, and the road is dirty with bark and messed with twenty-foot sections of pine that scatter in every direction. One of the cars meets its end here, striking a fat log with such force that it burrows beneath its tonnage, half-flattened as if by a rolling pin. Another bursts a tire when it runs over a shorn logging chain. It tries to continue on for a hundred yards or so, the tire flapping like an old black sock, the rim throwing up intermittent fans of sparks, before giving up.
Near downtown, the traffic gathers thickly, and he barely makes it onto the Ross Island Bridge, headed for another data center in Milwaukie. One of the cars loses traction on the exit ramp and hits a concrete stanchion with a punch of flame. Then there is only one left—a ghost-white Mercedes—as he rumbles across the bridge, over the Willamette River. The water is chevroned with whitecaps. A lit-up apartment building on the farther shore looks like a stack of digital bytes. The Mercedes appears in one mirror, then the other, a phantom. It tries to nose past him, but he blocks it each time with a nudge of the wheel.
At the last moment, he sees the abandoned motorcycle. He cuts right and slams the brakes and skids at a violent diagonal. The tires wail as they burn away their rubber. The Mercedes uses this opportunity to zip past him, unaware of the bike until it is too late. They collide with a screech. The motorcycle goes pinwheeling in one direction, the Mercedes in the other, striking the guardrail, spiraling off the bridge, plummeting through the air and into the river below.
?
Crows gather on top of Big Pink, the U.S. Bancorp building. Dozens of them, flapping their wings and spiraling in the air. A man stands among them, the axis around which they spin. Lump is dressed in clothes as black and ragged as their wings. They land delicately on his shoulders, and he whispers to them before hoisting an arm to send them fluttering off in every direction.
He knows that Josh is dead. He knows that without help Juniper will soon join him. Crows take to the air, cawing while down below headlights flash on and engines rumble to life and inject themselves into the streets to pursue the black Ram.
One crow and then another and then another—and then still more—come bombing out of the night, striking windshields hard enough to crack the glass, clogging up the grilles, and slicking the tires with their guts and feathers. They are joined by rats and possums and then a doe and even a black bear. They clamber out of storm drains and from beneath porches and Dumpsters. They pour out of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and the Reed College campus and Westmoreland Park and Eastmoreland Golf Course. Some of the cars try to dodge the animals, but this spins them off the road, so the rest plow through and their windshields fissure and their tires pop. Owls and bats and swallows. Raccoons and squirrels, cats and dogs, a herd of thirty deer, their eyes candled by the headlights and taillights, charging toward the brigade of vehicles.
Sensors go wild. Airbags go off. Emergency brakes scream. Tires pop. One car careens into a McDonald’s, and another smashes into a parked van. A street sign bends and clangs and skids the undercarriage of one car, and another sideswipes a fire hydrant that geysers a white stream. And through all of this—the pursuant current of cars and animals—Juniper passes unmolested. He doesn’t know whether the plan will work, but he remembers too well the last words he spoke to Sarin, “Or die trying.”
Chapter 28
HOURS AGO, they all gathered around Hannah’s body. Her skin was crisped to ash. Her eyes had boiled in their sockets. Wisps of smoke rose from her mouth. Lela scooped the girl into her lap and rocked back and forth and made a high, keening sound. No one spoke. Hemingway whined and Josh closed his eyes and Derek covered his mouth and Juniper clenched his fists so tightly his arms shook. The basement air was cold. A pipe clanked. The computers fizzled and oozed white where Derek had blasted them with a fire extinguisher.
“There are ways,” Juniper said, though he hardly sounded convinced. “There are ways of coming back.”
“Shut up,” Lela told him.
She said this in a dead voice. All of the abstract emotions—grief, guilt, anger—hadn’t had a chance to take form. Lela was owned by the purely physical. She had her arms around her niece, and it felt as though they were falling together, through the concrete floor, the brick tunnels beneath, the tangle of sewer pipes and power cables, the black dirt, the clay as red as wine, farther and farther still, beyond the miles of bedrock, all the way to the molten core of the earth, where they would burn up and Lela would feel grateful because then she wouldn’t have to feel or think anything more.
She wouldn’t have to remember Hannah—earlier, at the shelter, when Lela promised to take care of her—saying, “If we’re all going to die, I hope I die first, because then I won’t have to miss you.”
“Don’t say that,” Lela had said. “I’m here for you. You’re here for me. And we’re going to look after each other for a long, long time.”
It felt true when she said it. It felt true even now. As if she could will her niece back to life.
A chime sounded in Lela’s pocket. A text alert. One, then another, then another, then another, like a tolling. She would have ignored it except the sound kept on. She pulled out the phone with the intent of hurling it against the floor. But the lighted screen paused her hand, and she read aloud what she saw there. “I’m still here,” Lela said, her voice unbelieving. “And I know how to stop it.” Followed by a string of characters Derek told her must be an IP address. “XO Hannah.”
?
Her body was still in the basement, but Hannah was elsewhere.