Sole Survivor

Moved almost as deeply as she had been when she was first given the knowledge of the afterlife, in the room at the orphanage, Rose withdraws her hand from the photo of Nina Carpenter and sits silently for a while, humbled. Then she takes her own Nina into her arms and holds the girl tightly and rocks her, neither capable of speaking nor in need of words.

Now that this special girl’s power is being reborn, Rose knows what they must do, where they must start their work. She does not want to risk going to Lisa Peccatone again. She doesn’t believe that her old friend knowingly betrayed her, but she suspects that through Lisa’s link to the Post — and through the Post to Horton Nellor — the people at Project 99 learned of her presence on Flight 353. While Rose and Nina are believed dead, they need to take advantage of their ghostly status to operate as long as possible without drawing the attention of their enemies. First, Rose asks the girl to give the great gift of eternal truth to each of the friends who has sheltered them during these eleven months in their emotional wilderness. Then they will contact the husbands and wives and parents and children of those who perished on Flight 353, bringing them both the received knowledge of immortality and visions of their loved ones at the blue interface. With luck, they will spread their message so widely by the time they are discovered that it cannot be contained.

Rose intends to start with Joe Carpenter, but she can’t locate him. His co-workers at the Post have lost track of him. He has sold the house in Studio City. He has no listed phone. They say he is a broken man. He has gone away to die.

She must begin the work elsewhere.

Because the Post published photographs of only a fraction of the Southern California victims and because she has no easy way to gather photos of the many others, Rose decides not to use portraits, after all. Instead, she tracks down their burial places through published funeral-service notices, and she takes snapshots of their graves. It seems fitting that the imbued image should be of a headstone, that these grim memorials of bronze and granite should become doorways through which the recipients of the pictures will learn that Death is not mighty and dreadful, that beyond this bitter phase, Death himself dies.

High in the wind-churned mountains, with waves of moon-silvered conifers casting sprays of needles onto the roadway, still more than twenty miles from Big Bear Lake, Rose Tucker spoke so softly that she could barely be heard over the racing engine and the hum of the tyres: ‘Joe, will you hold my hand?’

He could not look at her, would not look at her, dared not even glance at her for a second, because he was overcome by the childish superstition that she would be all right, perfectly fine, as long as he didn’t visually confirm the terrible truth that he heard in her voice. But he looked. She was so small, slumped in her seat, leaning against the door, the back of her head against the window, as small to his eyes as 21-21 must have appeared to her when she had fled Virginia with the girl at her side. Even in the faint glow from the instrument panel, her huge and expressive eyes were again as compelling as they had been when he’d first met her in the graveyard, full of compassion and kindness — and a strange glimmering joy that scared him.

His voice was shakier than hers. ‘It’s not far now.’

‘Too far,’ she whispered. ‘Just hold my hand.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘It’s all right, Joe.’

The shoulder of the highway widened to a scenic rest area. He stopped the car before a vista of darkness: the hard night sky, the icy disc of a moon that seemed to shed cold instead of light, and a vast blackness of trees and rocks and canyons descending.

He released his seat belt, leaned across the console, and took her hand. Her grip was weak.

‘She needs you, Joe.’

‘I’m nobody’s hero, Rose. I’m nothing.’

‘You need to hide her… hide her away…‘

‘Rose—’

‘Give her time . . . for her power to grow.’

‘I can’t save anyone.’

‘I shouldn’t have started the work so soon. The day will come when… when she won’t be so vulnerable. Hide her away… let her power grow. She’ll know… when the time has come.’

She began to lose her grip on him.

He covered her hand with both of his, held it fast, would not let it slip from his grasp.

Voice ravelling away, she seemed to be receding from him though she did not move: ‘Open. . . open your heart to her, Joe.’

Her eyelids fluttered.

‘Rose, please don’t.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Please. Don’t.’

‘See you later, Joe.’

‘Please.’

‘See you.’

Then he was alone in the night. He held her small hand alone in the night while the wind played a hollow threnody. When at last he was able to do so, he kissed her brow.

The directions Rose had given him were easy to follow. The cabin was neither in the town of Big Bear Lake nor elsewhere along the lake front, but higher on the northern slopes and nestled deep in pines and birches. The cracked and potholed blacktop led to a dirt driveway, at the end of which was a small white clapboard house with a shake-shingle roof.

A green Jeep Wagoneer stood beside the cabin. Joe parked behind the Jeep.

The cabin boasted a deep, elevated porch, on which three cane backed rocking chairs were arranged side by side. A handsome black man, tall and athletically built, stood at the railing, his ebony skin highlighted with a brass tint cast by two bare, yellow light bulbs in the porch ceiling.

The girl waited at the head of the flight of four steps that led up from the driveway to the porch. She was blond and about six years old.

From under the driver’s seat, Joe retrieved the gun that he had taken from the white-haired storyteller after the scuffle on the beach. Getting out of the car, he tucked the weapon under the waistband of his jeans.

The wind shrieked and hissed through the needled teeth of the pines.

He walked to the foot of the steps.

The child had descended two of the four treads. She stared past Joe, at the Ford. She knew what had happened.

On the porch, the black man began to cry.

The girl spoke for the first time in over a year, since the moment outside the Ealings’ ranch house when she had told Rose that she wanted to be called Nina. Gazing at the car, she said only one word in a voice soft and small: ‘Mother.’

Her hair was the same shade as Nina’s hair. She was as fine-boned as Nina. But her eyes were not grey like Nina’s eyes, and no matter how hard Joe tried to see Nina’s face before him, he could not deceive himself into believing that this was his daughter.

Yet again, he had been engaged in searching behaviour, seeking what was lost forever.

The moon above was a thief, its glow not a radiance of its own but a weak reflection of the sun. And like the moon, this girl was a thief — not Nina but only a reflection of Nina, shining not with Nina’s brilliant light but with a pale fire.

Regardless of whether she was only a lab-born mutant with strange mental powers or really the hope of the world, Joe hated her at that moment, and hated himself for hating her — but hated her nonetheless.

5

Hot wind huffed at the windows, and the cabin smelled of pine, dust, and the black char from last winter’s cosy blazes, which coated the brick walls of the big fireplace.

The incoming electrical lines had sufficient slack to swing in the wind. From time to time they slapped against the house, causing the lights to throb and flicker. Each tremulous brown-out reminded Joe of the pulsing lights at the Delmann house, and his skin prickled with dread.

The owner was the tall black man who had broken into tears on the porch. He was Louis Tucker, Mahalia’s brother, who had divorced Rose eighteen years ago, when she proved unable to have children. She had turned to him in her darkest hour. And after all this time, though he had a wife and children whom he loved, Louis clearly still loved Rose too.

‘If you really believe she’s not dead, that she’s only moved on,’ Joe said coldly, ‘why cry for her?’

‘I’m crying for me,’ said Louis. ‘Because she’s gone from here and I’ll have to wait through a lot of days to see her again.’

Two suitcases stood in the front room, just inside the door. They contained the belongings of the child.

She was at a window, staring out at the Ford, with sorrow pulled around her like sackcloth.

‘I’m scared,’ Louis said. ‘Rose was going to stay up here with Nina, but I don’t think it’s safe now. I don’t want to believe it could be true — but they might’ve found me before I got out of the last place with Nina. Couple times, way back, I thought the same car was behind us. Then it didn’t keep up.’

‘They don’t have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.’

‘And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out on to the porch ‘cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind — does that make sense?’

‘You better get her out of here,’ Joe agreed.

As the wind slapped the electrical lines against the house, Louis paced to the fireplace and back, a hand pressed to his forehead as he tried to put the loss of Rose out of his mind long enough to think what to do. ‘I figured you and Rose… well, I thought the two of you were taking her. And if they’re on to me, then won’t she be safer with you?’

‘If they’re on to you,’ Joe said, ‘then none of us is safe here, now, any more. There’s no way out.’

The lines slapped the house, slapped the house, and the lights pulsed, and Louis walked to the fireplace and picked up a battery-powered, long-necked, butane match from the hearth.

The girl turned from the window, eyes wide, and said, ‘No.’

Louis Tucker flicked the switch on the butane match, and blue flame spurted from the nozzle. Laughing, he set his own hair on fire and then his shirt.

‘Nina!’ Joe cried.

The girl ran to his side.

The stink of burning hair spread through the room.

Ablaze, Louis moved to block the front door.

From the waistband of his jeans, Joe drew the pistol, aimed —but couldn’t pull the trigger. This man confronting him was not really Louis Tucker now; it was the boy-thing, reaching out three thousand miles from Virginia. And there was no chance that Louis would regain control of his body and live through this night. Yet Joe hesitated to squeeze off a shot, because the moment that Louis was dead, the boy would remote someone else.

The girl was probably untouchable, able to protect herself with her own paranormal power. So the boy would use Joe — and the gun in Joe’s hand — to shoot the girl point-blank in the head.

‘This is fun,’ the boy said in Louis’s voice, as flames seethed off his hair, as his ears charred and crackled, as his forehead and cheeks blistered. ‘Fun,’ he said, enjoying his ride inside Louis Tucker but still blocking the exit to the porch.

Maybe, at the instant of greatest jeopardy, Nina could send herself into that safe bright blueness as she had done just before the 747 ploughed into the meadow. Maybe the bullets fired at her would merely pass through the empty air where she had been. But there was a chance that she was still not fully recovered, that she wasn’t yet able to perform such a taxing feat, or even that she could perform it but would be mortally drained by it this time.

‘Out the back!’ Joe shouted. ‘Go, go!’

Nina raced to the door between the front room and the kitchen at the rear of the cabin.

Joe backed after her, keeping the pistol trained on the burning man, even though he didn’t intend to use it.

Their only hope was that the boy’s love of ‘fun’ would give them the chance to get out of the cabin, into the open, where his ability to conduct remote viewing and to engage in mind control would be, according to Rose, severely diminished. If he gave up the toy that was Louis Tucker, he would be into Joe’s head in an instant.

Tossing aside the butane match, with flames spreading along the sleeves of his shirt and down his pants, the boy-thing said, ‘Oh, yeah, oh, wow,’ and came after them.

Joe recalled too clearly the feeling of the ice-cold needle that had seemed to pierce the summit of his spine as he had barely escaped the Delmann house the previous night. That invading energy scared him more than the prospect of being embraced by the fiery arms of this shambling spectre.

Frantically he retreated into the kitchen, slamming the door as he went, which was pointless because no door no wall, no steel vault could delay the boy if he abandoned Louis’s body and went incorporeal.

Nina slipped out the back door of the cabin, and a wolf pack of wind, chuffing and puling, rushed past her and inside.

As Joe followed her into the night, he heard the living room door crash into the kitchen.

Behind the cabin was a small yard of dirt and natural bunch-grass. The air was full of wind-torn leaves, pine needles, grit. Beyond a redwood picnic table and four redwood chairs, the forest rose again.

Nina was already running for the trees, short legs pumping, sneakers slapping on the hard-packed earth. She thrashed through tall weeds at the perimeter of the woods and vanished in the gloom among the pines and birches.

Nearly as terrified of losing the girl in the wilds as he was frightened of the boy in the burning man, Joe sprinted between the trees, shouting the girl’s name, one arm raised to ward off any pine boughs that might be drooping low enough to lash his eyes.

From the night behind him came Louis Tucker’s voice, slurred by the damage that the spreading flames had already done to his lips but nevertheless recognizable, the chanted words of a childish challenge: ‘Here I come, here I come, here I come, ready or not, here I come, ready or not!’

A narrow break in the trees admitted a cascade of moonbeams, and Joe spotted the girl’s cap of wind-whipped blond hair glowing with pale fire, the reflection of reflected light, to his right and only six or eight yards ahead. He stumbled over a rotting log, slipped on something slimy, kept his balance, flailed through prickly waist-high brush, and discovered that Nina had found the beaten-clear path of a deer trail.

As he caught up with the girl, the darkness around them abruptly brightened. Salamanders of orange light slithered up the trunks of the trees and whipped their tails across the glossy bows of pines and spruces.

Joe turned and saw the possessed hulk of Louis Tucker thirty feet away, ablaze from head to foot but still standing, hitching and jerking through the woods, caroming from tree to tree, twenty feet away, barely alive, setting fire to the carpet of dry pine needles over which he shambled and to the bristling weeds and to the trees as he passed them. Now fifteen feet away. The stench of burning flesh on the wind. The boy-thing shouted gleefully, but the words were garbled and unintelligible.