She said, "What are you talking about?"
"It's normal not to remember," the doctor said. "But according to your friends out there, you arrested and one of them resuscitated you. Said it took four or five minutes."
"You mean I was dead?"
"Would have been, if you hadn't gotten CPR."
"Peterresuscitated me?" It had to be Peter, she thought.
"I don't know which one." Now he was tapping her elbows with the hammer. "But you're a very lucky young woman. Around here, we get three, four deaths a year from strikes. And sometimes very serious burns. You're just fine."
"Was it the young guy?" she said. "Peter Evans? Him?"
The doctor shrugged. He said, "When was your last tetanus?"
"I don't understand," Evans said. "On the news report it said they were hunters. A hunting accident or an argument of some kind."
"That's right," Kenner said.
"But you're telling me you guys shot them?" Evans looked from Kenner to Sanjong.
"They shot first," Kenner said.
"Jesus," Evans said. "Three deaths?" He bit his lip.
But in truth, he was feeling a contradictory reaction. He would have expected his native caution to take over--a series of killings, possibly murders, he was an accomplice or at the very least a material witness, he could be tied up in court, disgraced, disbarred.... That was the path his mind usually followed. That was what his legal training had emphasized.
But at this moment he felt no anxiety at all. Extremists had been discovered and they had been killed. He was neither surprised nor disturbed by the news. On the contrary, he felt quite satisfied to hear it.
He realized then that his experience in the crevasse had changed him--and changed him permanently. Someone had tried to kill him. He could never have imagined such a thing growing up in suburban Cleveland, or in college, or law school. He could never have imagined such a thing while living his daily life, going to work at his firm in Los Angeles.
And so he could not have predicted the way that he felt changed by it now. He felt as if he had been physically moved--as if someone had picked him up and shifted him ten feet to one side. He was no longer standing in the same place. But he had also been changed internally. He felt a kind of solid impassivity he had not known before. There were unpleasant realities in the world, and previously he had averted his eyes from them, or changed the subject, or made excuses for what had occurred. He had imagined that this was an acceptable strategy in life--in fact, that it was a more humane strategy. He no longer believed that.
If someone tried to kill you, you did not have the option of averting your eyes or changing the subject. You were forced to deal with that person's behavior. The experience was, in the end, a loss of certain illusions.
The world was not how you wanted it to be.
The world was how it was.
There were bad people in the world. They had to be stopped.
"That's right," Kenner was saying, nodding slowly. "Three deaths. Isn't that right, Sanjong?"
"That's right," Sanjong said.
"Screw 'em," Evans said.
Sanjong nodded.
Kenner said nothing.
The jet flew back to Los Angeles at six o'clock. Sarah sat in the front, staring out the window. She listened to the men in the back. Kenner was talking about what would happen next. The dead men were being ID'd. Their guns and trucks and clothes were being traced. And the television film crew had already been found: it was a truck from KBBD, a cable station in Sedona. They'd gotten an anonymous call saying that the highway patrol had been derelict and had allowed a picnic to proceed despite flash flood warnings, and disaster was probable. That was why they had gone to the park.
Apparently it never occurred to anyone to question why they'd got an anonymous call half an hour before a flash flood warning had been issued from the NEXRAD center. The call had been traced, however. It had been placed from a pay phone in Calgary, Canada.
"That's organization," Kenner said. "They knew the phone number of the station in Arizona before they ever started this thing."
"Why Calgary?" Evans said. "Why from there?"
"That seems to be one primary location for this group," Kenner said.
Sarah looked at the clouds. The jet was above the weather. The sun was setting, a golden band in the west. The view was serene. The events of the day seemed to have occurred months before, years before.
She looked down at her chest and saw the faint brownish markings from the lightning. She'd taken an aspirin, but it was still beginning to hurt slightly, to burn. She felt marked. A marked woman.
She no longer listened to what the men were saying, only to the sound of their voices. She noticed that Evans's voice had lost its boyish hesitancy. He was no longer protesting everything Kenner said. He sounded older somehow, more mature, more solid.
After a while, he came up to sit with her. "You mind company?"
"No." She gestured to a seat.
He dropped into it, wincing slightly. He said, "You feel okay?"