“What?” Rebekah said, startled awake. “What’s happening?”
Charlie dropped hold of the bony wrist and wrestled with the wheel. The tires skidded on a thin coat of ice.
Bathsheba was sitting bolt upright, muttering “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”
The car banged the rails again, the hatchback springing open and the alarm bell dinging.
An oncoming truck pumped its horn, switching its headlight beams to bright and sweeping the interior of the van.
“What’s going on?” Bathsheba said. Icy cold air was flooding the car from the open hatch.
“And the Lord said to the Israelites, ‘I will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses …’ ”
“Watch it!” Rebekah shouted, as he barely managed to get control before they veered into the other lane.
In the rearview mirror, the dead man was gone, as if extinguished by the gush of light and air. All Charlie saw was Bathsheba, and through the gaping hatch the empty roadway disappearing behind him.
The truck rattled by, its driver thrusting his middle finger out the window at Charlie.
“Did you fall asleep?” Rebekah accused him. The cross, free of its rag, was lying on the floor of the van.
“Ew,” Bathsheba said, squirming in her seat.
“And the angel of death spared them, as the Lord had promised.”
“Double ew,” Bathsheba said again. “It stinks back here.”
“What are you talking about?” Rebekah snapped, turning around. “And close that hatch before we lose half the gear!”
The van eased off the other end of the Heron River Bridge, and Charlie, steering it onto the shoulder, took his first full breath in what felt like forever. His hands were shaking, and he was still too scared even to turn in his seat.
“And it’s all wet back here,” Bathsheba complained, settling back into her own seat after securing the hatch.
Rebekah took a look around the rear, and said, “You should have stomped the snow off your boots before you got back in the van.”
“I did,” Bathsheba insisted.
“Then what did you step in?” she said, rolling down her window. “It does smell like something died back there.”
“Forget about the smell,” Charlie muttered to Rebekah. Gesturing at the cross on the floor, he said, “Pick that up.”
She did, wrapping it back in the rag.
“Put it in the glove compartment.”
She stuck it in the compartment and slammed the little door shut. “And you,” she said, glaring at him, “watch your damn driving from now on.”
“ ‘And it came to pass that the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt …’ ”
Charlie flicked off the CD and punched the radio dial to a country-western station.
“I was listening to that,” Rebekah complained.
“You were sleeping,” he said, as Garth Brooks came on, mournfully wailing about lightning strikes and rolling thunder. “Listen to this instead.”
With his eyes fastened on the road, his hands clenching the wheel, and his heartbeat gradually returning to normal, he steered the van out into the darkness of the surrounding land—darkness that could be felt—and pondered the cross they had looted from a Russian grave.
Was the apparition he had just seen in the backseat its rightful owner?
A wolf—a big dark one—was momentarily caught in the headlights, loping along the side of the road, as if keeping pace with the van. But then, with a turn of its head and a silver flash of its eyes, it vanished into the night.
Chapter 30
By the time Slater had reached the bottom of the stone steps leading to the beach, he could hardly believe it.
It had been hard enough coming down them, in the light of day, but to think that Old Man Richter had managed to climb up them after being shipwrecked was almost beyond comprehension.
“That guy we found in the church must have been one tough old bird,” Rudy, the Coast Guard ensign, said.
“The toughest there ever was.”
In some places, the steps were no more than a few inches wide, and they zigged and zagged down the cliff face from the colony grounds high above them. Up top, Slater could hear the sounds of Sergeant Groves’s work crew preparing for the exhumations—buzz saws cutting a clear path to the cemetery, jackhammers loosening soil, hammers clanging on metal stanchions as the lighting poles and lab tents were erected. Even now, at high noon, the sun was struggling to make itself felt through the low-hanging clouds, and a hundred yards offshore the bracelet of mist that clung to St. Peter’s Island obscured the Bering Strait beyond.
“Just in case,” Rudy was saying as he walked a few yards down the rocky beach, “this RHI is going to be left right here.”