There was little chance McKay or anyone else would have recognized him as the quiet, blue-blazered agent of the White House detail he’d been a few weeks ago. He was ragged and indescribably filthy-making it more of a wonder that the folks at Angels Rest had let him through the gate-and the clothes he’d gleaned from the luggage of downed planes were stained, mismatched and torn. He kept his beard clipped short but it started high, just under his cheekbones, and above it his eyes were red-rimmed, hollow with fatigue. It was as if all the disguise he’d worn for years in the service, all the neatness and presentability that made him invisible, had worn away, leaving. .
What?
Exhaustion had ground him down to the point of feeling very little, either of revulsion or pity-only weariness, and the growing dread he felt every time he thought of McKay, of the man he should have been protecting but wasn’t.
He’ll think I’m dead, Shango thought. Or worse, that I’ve given up, leaving him, and by now there’s no one else he can send.
And his mind turned backward on itself, conjuring images of despair and ruin until he forced it to stop, forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand. If she was on a plane, if her stuff was on a plane, it’ll be out here somewhere.
One chance, out of how many?
Shut up and search, he told himself. Shut up and do your job. If it’s here, I’ll find it. There was nothing else but that.
The first body he found, at the edge of a burn scar in the thin woods a few miles from Angels Rest, had a boarding pass in what had been her jeans pocket. It was hard to read- blood and fluids from three weeks of decay had badly discolored the card, and animals had mauled the body-but he made out the flight information.
United 1046 from Houston.
Shango closed his eyes and thought, Shit. He sat down on the ground, shocked that he’d actually found the flight. That it had, in fact, come down here, instead of clear the hell on the other side of the Appalachians. For a moment he felt disoriented, like a dog who’d chased a Cadillac and then actually caught it.
Then, hearing his mother’s admonishing voice in his mind, he added, Thank you, God.
And opening his eyes again, he viewed the scene of the wreck.
Coming down without instruments, the big 747 had caught wind shear off the Allegheny Plateau, had veered over on its side, caught its wing and bounced. At least that’s what Shango guessed from what little he knew about flight dynamics, coupled with Mrs. Close’s description. The thing must have been burning after the first bounce. Bodies, seats, luggage, debris would be scattered all over the back half of Albermarle County. Shango could see twisted hunks of metal on the ground among the charred trees, a couple of corkscrewed seats, a smashed and gutted suitcase, a shattered stroller. Close by, the stink of decay and a humming column of flies marked another body.
He gritted his teeth and walked to the second body, scanning the ground as he went.
For two days, he searched.
He found about a hundred and fifty suitcases, most of which had been torn open or burst on impact: suits, dresses, belts, scarves, cosmetics exploding among the light ferns and creepers. A Bally loafer had survived by falling into a puddle. A woman’s mauve-and-pale-green scarf incorporated into a squirrel’s nest. An old man’s cane embedded in an elm tree as if it had been fired from a gun.
Some of the bodies had fared the same, torn to pieces on impact. This wasn’t the first wreck Shango had checked out, nor the first time he’d moved aside a bush expecting to see a body at the end of a protruding leg that turned out not to have one. He didn’t know whether the matter-of-factness he felt was because of exhaustion or because, after three weeks of heat and flies and animals, what he found didn’t look particularly human anymore. It was just meat.
What he didn’t feel by day, he felt in his nightmares at night-but in his nightmares, the bodies all had faces: his mother, his brother, his father. Mrs. Close. The guy in the tower with the sling on his arm. Czernas. McKay. And he’d wake sweating in the dark, in whatever burrow he’d found for himself, hearing the foxes fighting over a severed hand.
The second day he found the tail section, eighteen people still more or less seat-belted into the twisted wreckage. There was a beverage service cart and most of a flight attendant nearby.
Earphones half-crushed, gray worms in the fast-growing new creepers underfoot. Somebody’s portable CD player with a Gregorian chant disc still in it. A slightly waterlogged copy of The Velveteen Rabbit: after a long time, if you love enough and are loved, you lose all your soft plush and your stitching gets a little loose and you get a little faded and a little saggy and you become Real.
And Real is the best that you can be.
Voices rang behind him in the woods.
Shango shoved the book into his backpack and slithered into the nearest cover, a thicket of sugarberry brambles near the broken impact crater of a seat section, keeping his head down and balling his body small. He heard the soft whuffle of horses and the creak of leather, not too near but near enough they’d have seen him; a man’s voice said, “-live off the country till we get that first crop in. Then we’ll be able to increase their rations. Till then they’re lucky they’re getting anything. Bastards couldn’t be bothered to lay up provisions, who the hell’d they think was going to feed them?”
Shango waited till the noises faded utterly, then crept from the thicket. It was late afternoon, and he had two hours or so of daylight left. But instead of returning at once to his search, he made his way back to a stream cut he’d marked earlier in the day as a place to hole up for the night. Spring runs had undercut the bank and wild honeysuckle grew down over it, leaving a hidey hole behind. Shango dipped up water in one hand, the other hand ready on his knife, listening, always listening, to the birdsong and the soft rustlings of beasts in the woods.
The last body he’d found had been a boy of six or seven, burned, dismembered by foxes. Why that child’s body affected him he didn’t know. Maybe because a section of seat had covered the face, so that when he’d tipped it clear to look for flight bags or purses, the flesh had still been in place, recognizable to those who’d loved this boy.
But they were probably dead, too.
And he thought, Those who kept the Source in existence-those who organized it, funded it, lied about it to McKay- are the people who’re going to end up with the food and the water and the protection that everyone else is dying without.
Whoever they are, they, too, knew what it meant when the lights went out.
Anger flamed within him. Anger beyond anything he’d thought himself capable of feeling, a volcano, a cataclysm: hatred for the men who had killed that child.
Hatred followed by an exhaustion so intense that it made him dizzy and sick.
He crawled behind the honeysuckle, sat with the damp cool clay of the bank against his back.
McKay was a part of it, he thought. YOU were a part of it. All this time, being a cog in their wheel, being good at your job and proud to be good at your job. And your job was to protect the men who secretly, quietly, were working on this.
He remembered how good it had felt, to hear Cox or McKay say, He’s good at his job. He’s the best. How good it had felt to have a scorepad that said, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred rounds in the target zone”; to spot some questionable yo-yo in a crowd and remove him, or to establish a perimeter or make a transfer from door to car without slip-ups. That sense of accomplishment. Something apart from, beyond, the chaos in which he’d grown up, the chaos of watching his father and mother giving their time and money and attention to a thousand things besides their children: buying one too many rounds of beers for friends, being gone with the church ladies one too many nights. No time, gotta go. . Not this week, honey, next week. .