The Lonely Dead

'You think so?' Tom shouted. He pushed himself to his feet. He swiped his sleeve under his nose, viciously, not caring how much it hurt. 'You really think I walked from it?'

'You're alive, they're dead,' Henrickson said. 'You do the math.'

Tom started to move, but the man knew about the thought before he did. A quick movement, and the barrel of his handgun was planted squarely in the middle of Patrice's forehead.

'I'll make you kill her and then when we're done I'll set you free,' Henrickson said. 'You couldn't kill yourself last time. I doubt you'll be able to again. I'll let you flail for a year or two, and then I'll come find you and put you out of your misery. Maybe. Or we can find this thing and we will photograph it and then it will escape, so far as anyone else knows. Everything will be good. You will attain the distinction and purpose you now know can't be found in a young woman's pants. Sarah might even take you back.'

'How do you know all this?'

'Because he's not human,' the old woman said, quietly.

Henrickson laughed shortly. 'Tom — are you going to tie her fucking hands, or what?'

Tom looked at Patrice. One side of her face was red, but her eyes were clear and locked on his.

'Don't,' she said. 'Not for me. For them.'

But he looked away, and when the bundle of rope hit his chest this time, he caught it.

24

'Ward, be still, for God's sake.'

'It hurts.'

'Well, just, be cool.'

'Screw that. Cool is for teenagers. I'm old enough to admit it hurts like a motherfuck.'

I was sitting on the passenger seat with my feet outside. Nina was crouched outside the car dabbing at my shoulder with a cloth soaked in disinfectant. I had no idea where we were except that we were in the parking lot of a gas station just outside a small town whose name we didn't know.

'It's clean,' she said. 'I think.'

I glanced across at my shoulder and saw a ragged tear across the deltoid muscle. It was bleeding still, but less than it had been for most of the fifty miles from Fresno. It hurt a lot, even though I'd eaten a fistful of the strongest pain pills we could find in the market where we'd bought the cloth and disinfectant. It hurt like I was eight years old and a bully was repeatedly smacking a fist into my shoulder, so hard and so fast that the impacts blurred into one long, keening ache.

Nina was looking up at me. She looked young and worried and as if she hoped she had done something well enough; also as if she hoped I wasn't going to keep whining for much longer. I realized the dent in my shoulder was nothing compared to the hit she'd taken up at The Halls. I also knew I should just be thankful the bullet hadn't landed about nine inches to the right.

'Thank you,' I said. 'It does feel better.'

'Liar,' she said. She stood and looked over the roof of the car at the station, where a man with a beard was standing in the window. 'We're being watched.'

'It's just the till monkey. Wondering if we're going to buy gas or what. It's okay. Not everyone is out to get us.'

'Attractive theory,' she said. 'You got any proof?'

'Not really.'

'What are we going to do?'

'You're going to have to call someone,' I said. 'Tell them about Monroe.'

'They'll know already,' she said, glumly. 'He'll have had ID on him.'

'I don't mean the fact,' I said. 'I mean what happened. And what it means.'

'We don't know,' she said. 'Not for sure.'

'Yeah we do.'

'I didn't see the man who came out of The Knights and killed the cop. I'm just going on the witness statements.'

'I know. But he sure sounded a lot like the man who just tried to kill us. Down to the clothes.'

'It's a very general description. The wage slave in there probably doesn't look so different.'

'I don't mean just physically similar. I also mean the kind of man who will walk into a restaurant and keep shooting — in front of witnesses — even when three people are shooting back. Don't split the atom. I don't think we need to look for two people here.'

'So who is he? You've got something on your mind again and I really wish you'd just tell me what it is.'

'We need to keep driving,' I said. 'Not just because we need to get ourselves as far from that disaster as possible. Also because there's a woman we have to see tonight and it's a long way.'

'Where?'

'North. Get my bag for me. I've got the address.'

— «» — «» — «»—

Mrs Campbell wasn't home.

This time I called ahead, long before we approached San Francisco. There was no answer, and no machine. It's funny how quickly you get used to the idea that houses have a memory, and liaise with strangers, and will pass on a message for you. This house wasn't there to help. So we just drove up there instead. Nina meanwhile continued to refuse to call the FBI in LA. They would either know about Monroe, or would do soon. She didn't feel inclined to trust them either way. I thought this was wrong, that declaring our position and innocence as early as possible made sense. There might be one strange person wandering the halls of justice: it didn't mean the whole organization was riddled. I couldn't convince her. In the end we stopped discussing it. The more time I spent with Nina, the more I got the sense that there were inner defences — a whole castle, with a moat and a keep and probably boiling oil in reserve too — that it would be hard or impossible to bust through.

The ache in my shoulder was manageable so long as I kept gobbling painkillers. More of a problem was that it started to tighten up. By the time we were at the outskirts of San Francisco it felt like it had been sewn on by someone who hadn't bothered learning how it was supposed to work inside the cloth. This kept me on map-reading duty, which was probably a good division of labour. Nina drove well. Her sense of direction wasn't so hot; the inconveniences of three-dimensional space seemed to irritate her. I wouldn't want to see her in a Humvee. I suspect she'd just drive straight through anything in the way.

'Why now?' she said, eventually. 'Why wait three months before pouring it on? Okay, you were AWOL and hard to find. But they could have clipped me and John right away.'

'Assume regrouping time, I guess, after The Halls got blown up.'

'But that can't have been all of them up there. If they're as powerful as we think, there must be more. Do we really think the guy I saw with Monroe was one of them?'

'I do,' I said. 'And that scares me.'

'Me too. But it makes it even harder to believe that they couldn't have had us killed.'

'They sure as hell tried, tonight.'

'Yes. But why not sooner?'

'You work for the FBI. If you turn up in a dumpster, questions are going be asked. Questions that wouldn't go away. I could see Monroe turning it into a crusade.'

'For the good of the department, of course. But I'm still dead.'

'These people take a long view. The cabin we found near Yakima says they've been at this kind of thing a long time. They were going to let us sweat on the grounds we were no real danger, and clear us up when the opportunity arose. Then everything went wide immediately after John capped this Ferillo person. He must have got hold of some huge great stick and pushed it right into their nest. They obviously had someone surveilling him after his daughter disappeared, taped him coming out of DeLong's house. Evidently they decided to let it go, maybe DeLong was overdue for retirement anyhow, but now John's done something big enough for them to dust it off. John's the key to this.'