Silence.
I scrambled off the deck, keeping low, crabbing down the stairs and into the ferns. I zigzagged toward the tree line. Behind me the house was like a boat anchored in a cove rimmed by forest. The trees, under a full moon, were bright as if in a photographic negative, a silver and black world, inside out.
Nothing.
“Orrin!”
I’d reached the trees and, shielded by a fat hundred-year-old pine, heard myself breathing, smelled sap, heard an owl… ooooh.
“Orrin, the cops won’t be here for twenty minutes! Here’s your chance to finish it! You screwed up in Washington!”
I moved left, to a different tree, an oak, judging from the thick, ridged bark at my back. He was close, he was somewhere close. He was fucking close and he was waiting. A Beretta Brigadier carries fifteen rounds, and is accurate up to fifty yards. Clouds scudded above and silver light disappeared and reappeared and slid left to right. In the glint I saw battered-down ferns, a fresh place between trees. Either Orrin had passed this way or an animal had. Several areas showed flattened ferns. Which ferns had been flattened by Orrin?
“Hey, Orrin! You got Harlan killed! If you had taken me out in D.C., he would still be alive!”
I avoided a moonbeam and kept to deep shadow. I stepped as quietly as possible over rotting trunks and foot-deep holes. He was not behind the freestanding granite boulder, deposited here by a glacier a hundred thousand years ago. He wasn’t coming out from behind the birch trees or maples. Something small skittered away through the brush. I almost shot it. Possum maybe. Or raccoon. Pet cat maybe. Fisher.
Every step I took carried me farther from Chris and Aya. If I wanted to protect them, I needed to stay close. But I also needed to finish things with Orrin. And maybe I needed to finish things with myself.
“You’re a loser, Orrin.”
I was making too much noise, even when I was trying to be quiet. I wondered if he had night vision goggles, if his world was a clear, underwater green. The moonlight made some spots bright as day. I smelled rancid musk, bear. East Coast bears are small and harmless. Well, they’re not harmless if you get between a mom and cub. This time of year was when moms and cubs moved around near my house.
I only realized I’d stepped into a stream when I felt the shock of cold water on my ankles.
“Orrin! You had me in the car! You should have finished it! I don’t know how Harlan ever trusted a jerk like—”
He ran into me from the right side, smashing me back against a tree. Either he was out of bullets or, maddened, he wanted to finish it by hand. The Brigadier was gone. He was howling like an animal, not in words, just with a high, crazed rage. I lashed out even before striking the ground but missed his face. I must have struck a root because my lower spine exploded with pain. There was no finesse to his attack, just brute vengeance. We were rolling, going for eyes, nose, soft spots, death spots. At the bottom of the slope we rammed into a boulder, and the breath went out of me.
I saw his eyes in moonlight, but the lower face, the screaming, was all shadow. As if the earth itself or the night created the sound. It was not human. It seemed to come out of time. The ferns were in my face and mouth. He gripped my wrist and slammed it into the moss-slick boulder. I parried an elbow launched toward my face. He was on top of me.
Warriors scream to ratchet up energy, but the scream is energy, concentrated adrenaline, and his waste of it was a mistake. As he pulled in more air, I felt the smallest opening, the briefest weakening. I twisted my wrist and pulled free as my other hand jabbed into the shadow area below his eyes. I struck something soft and pliable. He reared up and jerked back.
Orrin Sykes’s hands stopped clawing at me, and started clawing at his own face. Pushing him off was easy. He was gagging. My own ragged breathing was hard but regular. Orrin’s was begging, a plea for oxygen, but one which could never get enough of it through a trachea that had been half crushed. He was up on his knees. He kept clawing at his collar.
It was over.
Orrin Sykes was still alive as I stood over him. A hollow gurgling came from his throat. The eyes were blinking and I smelled a gut wound, too, a mix of blood, rot, and viscera. Maybe I’d shot him before or he’d injured himself in the forest. Orrin Sykes was dying.
He had lied and crawled and snuck his way across a nation. He’d come to finish what Harlan had told him to do. Maybe it was out of vengeance. Maybe like Harlan Maas, he was sick, if that psychologist who’d visited me was right. Maybe he’d come because I had robbed him of membership in something, and cast him back into loneliness. I’d never know.
Things take a long time to build up. Sometimes they end in a few seconds.
He might have realized that I looked down at him. From the way his eyes moved, he saw something, that was sure, but what it was may have been beyond my ability to comprehend. He was trying to talk. I leaned over to listen.
“I’m not… the last… one,” he said.
And he died.
When I got back to the house — ten minutes later — Chris and Aya were on the deck, waiting. I was angry at them for leaving the protected interior of the building—what if I’d been killed, and Orrin was the one coming back—but no one was listening to anyone else tonight. The relief on their faces was so profound that I bit off my retort and didn’t mention Orrin’s last words. I surrendered to exhaustion. It had been a while since I’d felt anyone’s arms around me. The two of them hugged me. The sensation felt strange.
That Orrin had come alone was certain. I had no doubt of that. If he’d come with help, the fight might have ended differently. But what had he meant, I’m not the last one? Had he lied? Had it been a useless threat? Or were there really more cult members out there? And someday would another show up?
Thirty minutes later we heard the thin wail of a siren. A glow of light appeared above the treetops, two hundred yards away, and then red lights were pulsating, and the first headlights turned into my driveway, throwing up gravel the way a dog digs at dirt with its hind legs. Within the hour would come more headlights. And then local reporters. And then a chopper, hovering.
What I remember most about that night now, six months later, is the way Aya’s face changed, that last vestige of kid disappearing as she stared down at Orrin’s body, before the cops came. Aya pushing away her mom, just looking and not crying, perfectly alone. Aya had lost innocence. We can’t protect the people we love. We can only try. When we can’t approximate trying anymore, we let them go away.
Karen had taught me that.
That Orrin Sykes had chosen that night to show up was no coincidence. That he had come when Chris and Aya were there was part of the great game I played. I’d told Reverend Nadine that I believed myself to be in a macabre tug-of-war with God, or some force approximating God — fate, humor, coincidence, you name it — and the notion that for whatever reason, it kept coming back.
Joe Rush, superstitious fool.
I let them stay the night, of course. In the morning they were brought to the state police barracks to be questioned by detectives, and FBI, and days later, allowed to leave and continue Aya’s alleged college tour, as if nothing, no outbreak, no deaths, no bacteria, none of it had happened. Out beyond my town four hundred million people were trying to do the same thing: get back on commuter trains, shop at Costco for apples and wines, go to the beach, repair houses, go to church.
Chris and Aya stopped in to say good-bye. I kept it quick. I told Aya we could e-mail each other. I shook hands with Chris, felt the small fingers, and her grip, and the coolness of the departing touch. Then their car backed out of my driveway and the last pebbles sprayed out and settled and the world was still. It wasn’t just people leaving. It wasn’t just love. It wasn’t even God leaving. To me, it was different. It was more. And it was right.