“I’m a media whore!” she cried, giggling hysterically as the echo of her voice rebounded through the swamp.
But her exultation evaporated almost instantly. The rivulet of blood had come from her wound, not the pen barrel. The plastic tube was still clotted shut.
“No,” she whispered, fighting the urge to drive the barrel deeper into her suffocating heart. “No, no, no.” Her back and chest felt as though someone had been pounding them with a mallet. “Please, God,” she moaned, remembering the blessed relief after the first jets of blood had drained enough smothering fluid for her heart to find its rhythm again.
Staring down at the clogged tube, she began to sob quietly. I’m going to die because I don’t have a six-inch needle and a syringe. “For want of a nail,” she whispered. “One motherfucking nail.”
She probably had only minutes to live. Tom lying motionless on the ground made her future all too plain. A wail of desolation forced its way up through her constricted throat, but the strangled squawk that emerged probably traveled less than fifty feet. Her vision flickered, faded to black. Panicked again, she shook her head and shifted position; the world returned.
Magic, she thought. But soon the light would vanish forever.
A soft hiss sounded in her ears. Then little splashes threw water droplets off the surface of the swamp like glass beads over a black floor. Only a few dozen at first . . . then hundreds, thousands . . . millions. As Caitlin stared, each impacting raindrop registered in her brain as a separate event. Time had slowed, or dilated somehow, every second stretching to many times its usual duration. The chilling drops fell indifferently on Tom’s gray face, and he did not move.
Somewhere above the canopy of branches, she knew, beyond the leaden clouds, glorious sunlight streamed over the horizon onto this part of the world. A few miles to the west, the Mississippi River rolled over the land as it had for millions of years. And somewhere to the north, Penn had probably heard from Terry Foreman by now. He might be racing toward Athens Point even now. But long before he found Caitlin, she would have vanished from the world.
Her baby, too.
The thought of a new life growing inside her did not drive Caitlin to fight harder. The last thin filament that held her to the world—an umbilical as fine as a strand of spiderweb—had stretched to the point of breaking. The old part of her, the super-competent control freak, was finally laying down her weapons and giving in to the ebb and flow of eternity. She recalled how safe she’d felt inside the ancient tree behind her, the sacred chamber, a centuries-old repository of bones. Why not use her last reserve of strength to get out of the rain? Even dying animals had the sense to find a warm, dry place to lie down for the last time.
She tried to scoot to her left, but she couldn’t manage it. She could no longer even shift her own body weight. She would die here, and before long, animals would crawl up out of the water and devour what remained of her.
Circle of fucking life, she thought. So it goes.
The rain fell cold upon her face, but she didn’t care. Now that she’d accepted the inevitable, her thoughts drifted to Penn, and to Annie. She wished she could say something to them, explain that she’d had no intention of abandoning them when she came on this crazy quest.
She picked up her Treo and checked the screen again, praying for a miracle. One bar could be considered divine intervention at this point. But there were none.
She pressed 911 anyway.
Nothing happened.
Staring at the silver device, Caitlin realized that she had one last way to speak to Penn and Annie, or at least to leave them a message. After gathering her thoughts as best she could, she activated the Voice Memo program and began talking softly. She had to pause every few words to take replenishing breaths, but this effort brought her a feeling of peace that nothing else had. She tried not to cry, but tears came anyway. She felt like a mountaineer trapped on a storm-shrouded peak, leaving a final message for her family. As she ran out of words, she realized with a jolt that she was losing consciousness.
Is this how it ends? she thought dully.
She still had enough neurons firing to know that if she could clear the clot from the pen and drive it back into her pericardium, she might be able to save herself. As she lowered her gaze, the world began to shrink again, tunneling down to the small plastic tube. Then a new train of thoughts flashed through her mind, not images from her past, but from the future: She lay on a hospital bed, a pink baby swaddled in her arms. Tom stood beside the bed, grinning through his white beard. He had somehow delivered the baby, even though his arthritic hands made that all but impossible. Peggy stood on the other side of the bed, Annie smiling beside her. The scene was pure Norman Rockwell. Yet as corny as it was, Caitlin wanted it more than anything else the world had to offer.
But where was Penn? He wasn’t in the picture. He wasn’t even in the room. But Caitlin could hear him. He was shouting at her, seemingly from far away. What was he saying? He wanted her to do something. But what?
Pull it out! he cried. You have to do it now. Pull it out and clear that clot. . . .
“Do it now,” she echoed, her voice slurred.
Caitlin raised her right hand to the two inches of plastic protruding from her chest. Her fingers, slick with blood, could barely grip the pen barrel. She tried to squeeze harder, but her fingers lost their purchase. The hexagonal tube stayed in her chest. With her last pulse of energy, she seized the tube, yanked it from her body, stuck it in her mouth, and blew with all the force left in her.
“GOT IT!” CARL SHOUTS, as Danny holds the hover with perfect steadiness.
“If it is her,” Danny says worriedly. “It could be one of the search teams.”