“Del, you’ve got to go back in.”
Lew’s body didn’t respond.
“You’ve done this before. The pool, Del. You saved yourself before. You have to go back in.”
How?
“I don’t know how,” Lew’s voice said.
“Dammit, you got out, you can get back in.” She got to her feet.
“You can’t stay—” She made a slashing gesture, aimed at Lew’s chest.
“In there. In someone else. Get back in your body, Del.”
My body.
A rumble of big engines. The rumble grew louder, then was joined by a rising whine. The helicopter lifted over the treetops in a ring of lights. It turned on its axis, tilted toward the lake, and zoomed away. In Lew’s vision, where the vehicle had disappeared was an absence, a dot of deeper black. The mouth of the well opened, edges fitfully expanding, eating the sky. The twisting shaft like a gullet, dropping, or rising, until it exploded into an infinity of tributaries that divided and divided again: black fireworks.
The well tugged at me, but less forcefully than it had under the water. I could resist it, or I could fall into it. All that was required was that I be willing to die, again.
Somehow O’Connell got us to the hospital in Louise’s ’92 Taurus station wagon, the only car big enough for all of us. Bertram rode with O’Connell up front. I lay diagonally in the back, covered with blankets. Lew rode in the middle seat, leaning against the window, Louise next to him holding towels to his nose. The muscles of Lew’s triceps were torn, and he couldn’t lift his arms. I was conscious, my eyes open. I could hear everything that was said, but couldn’t make myself move or talk. Just as well.
The hospital was an underfunded, fifties-era county institution forty-five minutes from Harmonia Lake. When I arrived in the ER my core temperature was 83 degrees, my heart rate somewhere near twenty beats per minute. I was breathing slowly but regularly, which surprised them. At that temperature, my central nervous system should have shut down like a carnival in winter. The staff was small, but they knew hypothermia; plenty of drunk fishermen falling out of their boats. They fastened a mask over me that hissed hot, humidified oxygen into my lungs, and set up an IV of warmed saline.
They didn’t know what to make of Lew’s injuries, though. O’Connell told them that he’d dived in to rescue me from drowning, but he looked as if he’d been in a car accident. He’d burst dozens of arteries in his nose and cheeks, creating a full-faucet nosebleed that was surprisingly hard to stop. His face had swelled with blood, turning his eyes into piggy slits. As well as the torn triceps, several muscles in his back were pulled. His right kneecap had popped loose from the tendons, floating under the skin, and would require orthopedic surgery. Worse, blood tests showed that he’d suffered a heart attack. Only the massive amounts of adrenaline in his system had kept him from dying on the spot.
My shiver reaction came back online after thirty minutes of oxygen and IVs, and my core temp started to rise. This seemed to make the ER doctor very relieved. By morning I was breathing without the mask, and the rectal thermometer pegged me at a toasty 94.2. My first visitor was Bertram. He wouldn’t stop apologizing. “I swear to God, Del, that was never part of the plan! It’s—it’s—completely against the League philosophy! We use only humane, nonlethal weapons.”
“Humane? Have you ever been shot by a Taser?”
“But we’d never hurt you. ‘The use of force is a black crime.’ It’s one of our core beliefs. Killing you was never in the plan.”
“Bertram, you weren’t in on the plan, you were part of the plan.”
He was crushed, and for a moment I felt sorry for him. A moment. I got him out of the room by telling him I was tired. If you’re in a hospital bed, you’re entitled to a range of efficient social tactics. Later in the morning O’Connell appeared in my doorway looking like Super Exorcist. She was back in her voluminous black cassock, which served as a matte backdrop to the gigantic hunk of silver that hung from her neck on industrial-gauge chain. The crucifix was a nine-inch-long naturalist rendition of Jesus in maximum agony mode. It looked like it weighed five pounds.
I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. It was too late to pretend to be sleeping.
“Hi,” I said.
“How are you feeling?” she said. This was probably a required question for clerical visits. The forms must apply even to dubiously ordained priests of schismatic sects.
“Not bad,” I lied. My mouth felt cottony, and I cleared my throat.
“Warmer.” They’d put some kind of hot-water tube vest around my chest, and now that my temperature was above the danger zone, they let me heat up my extremities too. The nurses had piled four or five blankets onto me, covered them with a sheet, and tucked the edges tight, creating a perfectly smooth mound that hid any suggestion of legs or arms. I hadn’t moved enough to disturb their handiwork.
“Your doctor’s amazed at your progress.”
“This morning I impressed my nurses by sipping chicken broth. Very exciting.” I smiled, but I didn’t have the energy to sell it. I changed the subject. “Have you seen Lew?”
“I stopped in just now. He’s fairly medicated at the moment, not in any pain.” She walked to the end of the bed. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. “He doesn’t remember rescuing you. That’s standard.”
Standard for possession, she meant.
I tried to change the subject again. “That’s good in a way,” I said.
“The less he knows, the less he’ll get sucked into the investigation.”
“What investigation would that be?” O’Connell’s face was set into
an expression of mild curiosity. There was no one else in the room, but she was performing just the same.
I didn’t know what to say. Commander Stoltz and at least three of his men were dead, killed by the Shug. The rest of the Human League, all except Bertram, had fled in the helicopter. True, they’d come to kill me, so they weren’t about to go to the police. But there were still four dead men. You couldn’t have people die in your town and just pretend it didn’t happen. You had to at least look into it, didn’t you?
But no. If they called in the cops, what could they do? Arrest Toby, kill him? And then the Shug would just move on to the next host. This couldn’t have been the first time people had disappeared at the lake. It wouldn’t be the last.
O’Connell watched my face, saw me get it.
“It’s Harmonia Lake, Del,” she said.
Holy shit.
“You’ll still have to answer some questions, though,” she said. She paced to the window, leaned against it. “Lew wants to know what happened to him. He wasn’t happy with my answers.”
“What’d you tell him?” I said.
“Exactly what I saw,” she said. The morning light was behind her, and I couldn’t make out her face. “I saw him snap handcuffs like chopsticks, shrug off a Taser, disable two armed men. I saw him save his brother from drowning.” She paused. “That’s what I saw. Now why don’t you tell me what happened.”
“I was at the bottom of the lake, remember? I was unconscious until—”
“Don’t lie, not to me,” she said quietly.
It was too hard to look into the sunlight. I stared down at the mound of bedclothes covering me from chest to toes like a white casket.
“How’d you do it, Del?”