He brought the phone close to his face to see if he’d hit the right key, but it still looked as though he was peering through an ice cube. He moved the phone back a few inches, then side to side. Nothing helped.
I’ll remember, he told himself. I’ve done so many of these. My fingers will remember.
Which was true. He was a much bigger texter than caller. He knew people who hated texting but loved calling. (The same people, he had discovered through the years, generally didn’t care much for emailing, either.) He had sculpted a theory that callers had more aggressive personalities by nature, whereas texters (and emailers) were the more passive. He definitely put himself in the latter category, and for more reasons than just his communication preferences. He and Sarah spoke on the phone maybe twice a day, but they probably texted two or three dozen times. And he preferred to keep in touch with all his friends this way, too. So much more efficient than blabbing on the phone. A phone call more easily afforded the luxury of wasting time, whereas texting more or less forced you to get right to the point.
He moved the phone back into place and got the thumb moving again.
help me im at
A seizure grabbed him like a giant hand, twisting him into a fetal position while all four limbs quaked. A disorganized mass of facial muscles quivered and shuddered as if governed by a computer that had gone haywire. Emilio’s eyes blinked rapidly and his hands — broken and whole — flailed about like flags in a hurricane. As his chest tightened and his breath was choked off, his lips took on a bluish, corpselike hue. His teeth clamped together and raggedly sliced off a bit of his protruding tongue. Blood began to pour from the wound, running down his chin, creating the appearance of a carnivore in the full and lustful throes of the kill.
The episode lasted less than thirty seconds, and when it subsided Emilio was, miraculously, still clinging to consciousness. His breathing came now in staccato hitches, like a child settling down after a crying jag. His brain was so overloaded that it was barely receiving the pain signals from his shattered left arm. As his vision cleared, he perceived something beyond amazing — the phone, lying just inches away and still glowing.
A beacon of hope.
A gateway.
Back to Sarah.
Back to life.
He forced his body to move, determined not to give in to agony or fate or the outrageous circumstances that had put him here.
Grabbing the phone, he needed every fragment of willpower he had left to finish his message, type the first few letters of his wife’s name into the recipient box — knowing the trusty iPhone would fill in the rest — and hit SEND.
Emilio smiled. He had won.
Then the darkness took him once more, and all was quiet.
28
They were flying low enough so that Sarah could almost feel the brush of the treetops on the helicopter’s underbelly. The man in the pilot’s seat, whose identity was obscured by his protective suit and mask, had not spoken a word telling her to strap in. She had seen the town after dark a thousand times, but never like this. The crazy aerial perspective was bizarre enough, but the emptiness, the stillness, the deadness of it…
The pilot switched on the searchlight as soon as they lifted off, directing the beam with a little joystick on the control panel. Sarah followed the bright circle with both intensity and a macabre fascination. There are no signs of life down there. Silver Lake is a ghost town.
The streetlights had come on, in accordance with their programming. The pallid sodium glow seemed particularly eerie tonight, shining on empty streets. There were no cars rolling along, carrying people returning from a long day’s work or a pleasant dinner, no cyclists or walkers with their dogs getting their evening exercise, no herds of noisy teenagers strutting about like they owned the world. The houses were all dark, their windows as blank as the eyes of the dead.
There’s nothing down there. Nothing at all.
“We are almost to Prince Park,” the pilot said. In spite of the continuing rain spatter and the steady thrum of the chopper’s blades, she could hear him clearly through the headset. “According to the information I have, it’s just over that rise.” He pointed straight ahead.
She nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Ten-four.” He eased the stick forward and accelerated, causing the craft to tilt down slightly.
Sarah didn’t know Kate Soames well, categorized her more as an acquaintance than a friend. She’d believed, however, they could become closer if they spent a little more time together; the potential for that seemed to be there. Sarah had only met Kate’s husband a few times, but he seemed all right to her, possessed of a roughly equal supply of qualities she liked and those she didn’t. Kate’s older son, Mark, seemed a typical adolescent — rough on the surface, but with more underneath. The younger boy, Cary, with whom she had a playful rapport, was a doe-eyed darling.
What do I say to her if I find her husband and oldest son dead? How could she — how could anyone — possibly be comforted in such a situation? What are the right words?
The pilot came through the phones again—“Just so you know, ma’am, I have received word that the evacuation of the rest of the town is nearly complete.”
Sarah glanced at her watch.
“Right on schedule per General Conover,” she said. “Impressive, I have to admit.”
“He’s a very smart man. I believe you and he have had some exchanges, but he really does know what he’s doing.”
Sarah nodded. “I’m more aware of that than you might think. Anyway, what about the plant? The nuclear facility where all of this started?”
“It was one of the last locations on the planned route. We have two evac units there now.”
They rose above a tract of hardwood forest, then soared over a brief stretch of open grassland which was bordered by a road. The pilot worked the joystick and the searchlight followed the road as it curved through the landscape. Sarah leaned forward until her forehead was almost touching the slanted window. Every sense was operating at full capacity.
The searchlight struck something metallic and threw back a bright flash.
“There!” Sarah just about shouted this. “Did you see it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll bet that’s Peter Soames’s car.”
“Okay, let’s check it out.” The ’copter tilted downward and swooped toward the intersection.
Closer observation eliminated any doubt — the color and shape of the roof was that of a Prius, exactly where Kate said it would be. As they hovered, wrinkles in the water spread away from it in jittery, concentric circles.
“Move the light around,” Sarah ordered. “They’ve got to be here somewhere.”
Visibility was limited by the ongoing rainfall, which was as heavy as ever, and blown about by winds of indiscriminate direction. The searchlight moved off the Prius’s roof and started eastward, down Juniper, which flooding had turned into a broad river, erasing the line where the pavement ended and the grass began.
“No no,” Sarah said, pointing west. “They’ll be over there if they’re anywhere. If the car is here, then Peter went that way. That’s where the field is. He came to look for his son and his son’s friend.”
The pilot grunted in agreement and sent the beam of light in the other direction, scanning the parking lot, a jungle gym put up in 2008, a swing set that was at least twenty years older, two Porta-Johns, a pay phone—one of only two left in town, Sarah thought — and a little utility building. To the right of all this was a towering line of conifers, which had been planted back in the 1960s, and beyond those, the woods ran wild to the horizon.