“No, you wouldn’t, would you.” Charley turned, looking halfway back toward the place where they had left the van. Mujer, who had been up the street ahead of them, came galloping back and halted, panting, at Charley’s side.
“That was Nicholas,” Mujer said. “Calling for help.”
“Yeah. God damn.”
Charley swung around, and Mujer, and then the others, too, running past Tom, heading back in the direction of the van. Stidge went sprinting by, his eyes wild, his spike in his hand. Tom felt his skin prickling. Trouble coming, no doubt of it. He trotted behind them back toward the parking place. Nicholas was shouting now, again and again. Tom looked ahead and saw two strange men in worn jeans and loose white shirts on the far side of the van, running away, firing bolts of red heat as they ran. Rupe’s blocky body lay sprawled in the street, face down. Nicholas was crouched behind the van, firing. By the time Tom reached the van it was all over, the strange men out of sight, the weapons put away. Charley was scowling and pounding his fists together in fury.
“You get a good look at them?” he said to Nicholas.
“No doubt of it. The two farm kids, the ones who got away from us when Stidge killed the father and the mother.”
“Shit,” Charley said. “Our quiet visit to San Francisco. Shit. Shit. Rupe’s dead?”
“Dead, yeah,” Mujer said. “Burn clear through the belly.”
“Shit,” Charley said. “All right. We got to go after them. Stidge, you got us into this, you track them down, wherever. We don’t find them, they’ll haunt us, pick us off easy. Move your ass, man. You got to go get them.” Charley shook his head. “Go. Go.” He looked to-ward Tom. “You see what I mean about killing? Once you begin you got to finish.” He touched the laser bracelet on his right wrist. “You stay here with the van,” he said. ” Inside the van, don’t open it for nobody. Try to keep your wits about you, you hear me, Tom? We’ll be right back. God damn,” Charley said. “And everything moving along so nice, too.”
Four
1
For Elszabet it was a quiet evening. She had a simple dinner about 1900 hours in the staff mess hall at the east end of the GHQ building: salad, grilled fish of some kind, small carafe of tangy white wine from one of the little wineries nearby. She shared her table with Lew Arcidiacono, who did most of the mechanical and electronic maintenance work at the Center, and his girlfriend Rhona, who was Dante Corelli’s assistant in the physical therapy department, and Mug Watson, the head groundskeeper. None of them seemed to have much in the way of dinner conversation that night, which was fine with Elszabet. Afterward she went over to the staff recreation center and listened to Bach harpsichord concertos with holovisual accompaniment for an hour or so, and by 2130 she was making her way down the path to her cabin far over on the other side of the Center. A quiet evening, yes.
In the evenings things were always quiet for Elszabet. Generally her last sessions with patients took place about 1700—end-of-day counselling, periodic progress reviews, crisis intervention if any crises had popped up, stuff like that. Then she liked to meet briefly with individual staff members to check out special problems, theirs or their patients’. By 1830, usually, the workday was over, and the social part of the day, such as it was, was beginning. For Elszabet that part was never anything much. First an early dinner—she had no regular dinner companions, just sat at any table that happened to have a free space—followed by an hour or two in the staff rec center for a movie or a cube or a nighttime splash in the pool, and then back to her cabin. Alone, of course. Always alone, by choice. She might read for a while, or listen to music, but her lights invariably were out well before midnight.
Sometimes she wondered what they all thought of her, an attractive woman keeping to herself like that so much. Did they think she was peculiar and aloof? Well, they were right. Did they think she was antisocial or snobbish or asexual? An uppity bitch? Well, they were wrong. She kept to herself because keeping to herself was what she wanted to do these days. Was what she needed to do. The ones who knew her best understood that. Dan Robinson, say. She wasn’t trying to snub anyone. Only to pull inward, to rest, to give her weary and eroded spirit time to heal. In a way she was as much of a patient here as Father Christie was, or Nick Double Rainbow, or April Cranshaw. Whether or not anyone else was aware of that, Elszabet was. She was living on the edge, had been for years, had taken the post at Nepenthe Center as much for the sake of healing herself as anything else. The difference was that instead of giving herself over to the mindpick every day so that the jarring dissonances could be scraped from her soul and a healthy new personality could form in the blank new places, she was trying to do it on her own, living cautiously, marshalling her weakened inner resources, letting her strength come gradually flowing back. This place was a sanctuary for her. Life outside the Center had worn her down the way it wore everyone down: the uncertainties, the tensions, the fears, the knowledge that the world that had been handed everyone was a badly broken one in danger of coming apart entirely. That, she had decided, was what Gelbard’s syndrome was all about, really, the awareness that life nowadays was lived at the brink of the abyss. The Dust War had done that to people. For a hundred years everyone worries about the horrors of atomic war, the flash of terrible light and the shattered cities and the melted flesh, and then the atomic war comes, not with bombs but very quietly, with its lethal radioactive dust, far less spectacular but a lot more insidious, great chunks of land made permanently unlivable overnight while life goes on in an ostensibly normal way outside the dusted places. Nations fall apart when bands of hot dust are spread through their midsections. There are migrations. There are upheavals of the body politic. There are ruptures of communication and of transportation and of ordinary civility. Societies fall apart. People fall apart. These were apocalyptic times. Something bad had happened, and everyone believed that something worse probably would happen, but no one knew what. These weird dreams, were they the harbingers? Who knew? Were they cause or effect? Was everybody going to go crazy? Was everybody already crazy? Elszabet thought she was in better shape than most, which was why she was here as one of the healers instead of as one of the patients. But she didn’t kid herself. She was at risk in this maimed and broken world. She could fall into the pit just as Father Christie had, or April, or Nick. There but for the grace of God went she, and she didn’t know how much longer God’s grace would hold out. So nowadays she moved through her life with care, like someone crossing a field mined with explosive eggshells. The last thing she needed now was emotional turbulence of any kind, or emotional adventure. Let other people have the stormy love affairs, she thought. Let them have the winning and the losing. Not that she didn’t miss it. Sometimes she missed it terribly. She missed that wonderful warm embrace, hands on her breasts, belly against her belly, eyes looking into her eyes, the sudden hard thrust, the warm flood of fulfillment, his, hers, theirs. She hadn’t forgotten what any of that felt like. Or just the presence of the other, leaving sex out of it, just the comforting knowledge that there was someone else there, that you weren’t minding the store all by yourself. She had had that once, or thought she had; maybe she would have it again someday. But not now, not here, not while the edge lay so close. The thing she feared more than anything else was having it again and losing it again. Better not to try for it. Not until she felt stronger inside. Sometimes she wondered: If not now, when? And had no answer.