Sole Survivor

by Dean Koontz

  But her little face was as white and shiny as candle wax. Heavy-eyed and not really with us. Half in a sort of trance. I worried about her, but Rachel said she was okay, and Rachel was a doctor, after all, so then I didn’t worry about it that much. The little doll slept in the car all the way to Pueblo.”

  Mercy rolled a ball of dough between her palms. She put the pale sphere on a baking sheet and flattened it slightly with the gentle pressure of her thumb.

  “Rachel had been to Colorado Springs to visit family for the weekend, and she’d taken Nina with her because Nina’s dad and mom were on an anniversary cruise. At least that’s how I understood it.” Mercy began to fill a brown paper lunch bag with the cooled cookies that were stacked on the platter.

  “Not the usual thing—I mean, a black doctor and a white doctor in practice together in these parts, and not usual, either, to see a black woman with a white child around here. But I take all that to mean the world’s getting to be a better place at last, more tolerant, more loving.”

  She folded the top of the bag twice and handed it to Barbara.

  “Thank you, Mercy.”

  To Joe, Mercy Ealing said, “I’m sure sorry I couldn’t be more help to you.”

  “You’ve been a lot of help,” he assured her. He smiled. “And there’s cookies.”

  She looked toward the kitchen window that was on the side of the house rather than on the back of it. One of the stables was visible through the pall of rain.

  She said, “A good cookie does lift the spirit, doesn’t it? But I sure wish I could do more than make cookies for Jeff today. He dearly loves that mare.”

  Glancing at the calendar with the religious theme, Joe said, “How do you hold on to your faith, Mercy? How in a world with so much death, planes falling out of the sky and favorite mares being taken for no reason?”

  She didn’t seem surprised or offended by the question. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard, isn’t it? I used to be so angry that we couldn’t have kids. I was working at some record for miscarriages, and then I just gave up. You want to scream at the sky sometimes. And there’s nights you lie awake. But then I think…well, this life has its joys too. And, anyway, it’s nothing but a place we have to pass through on our way to somewhere better. If we live forever, it doesn’t matter so much what happens to us here.”

  Joe had been hoping for a more interesting answer. Insightful. Penetrating. Homespun wisdom. Something he could believe.

  He said, “The mare will matter to Jeff. And it matters to you because it matters so much to him.”

  Picking up another lump of dough, rolling it into a pale moon, a tiny planet, she smiled and said, “Oh, if I understood it, Joe, then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be God. And that’s a job I sure wouldn’t want.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s got to be even sadder than our end of things, don’t you think? He knows our potential but has to watch us forever falling short, all the cruel things we do to one another, the hatred and the lies, the envy and greed and the endless coveting. We see only the ugliness people do to those around us, but He sees it all. The seat He’s in has a sadder view than ours.”

  She put the ball of dough on the cookie sheet and impressed upon it the mark of her thumb: a moment of pleasure waiting to be baked, to be eaten, to lift the spirit.

  The veterinarian’s Jeep station wagon was still in the driveway, parked in front of the Explorer. A Weimaraner was lying in the back of the vehicle. As Joe and Barbara climbed into the Ford and slammed the doors, the dog raised its noble silver-gray head and stared at them through the rear window of the Jeep.

  By the time that Barbara slipped the key into the ignition and started the Explorer, the humid air was filled with the aromas of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies and damp denim. The windshield quickly clouded with the condensation of their breath.

  “If it’s Nina, your Nina,” Barbara said, waiting for the air conditioner to clear the glass, “then where has she been for this whole year?”

  “With Rose Tucker somewhere.”

  “And why would Rose keep your daughter from you? Why such awful cruelty?”

  “It’s not cruelty. You hit on the answer yourself, out there on the back porch.”

  “Why do I suspect the only time you listen to me is when I’m full of shit?”

  Joe said, “Somehow, since Nina survived with Rose, survived because of Rose, now Rose’s enemies will want Nina too. If Nina had been sent home to me, she’d have been a target. Rose is just keeping her safe.”

  The pearly condensation retreated toward the edges of the windshield.

  Barbara switched on the wipers.

  From the rear window of the Jeep Cherokee, the Weimaraner still watched them without getting to its feet. Its eyes were luminous amber.

  “Rose is keeping her safe,” he repeated. “That’s why I’ve got to learn everything I can about Flight 353 and stay alive long enough to find a way to break the story wide open. When it’s exposed, when the bastards behind all of this are ruined and on their way to prison or the gas chamber, then Rose will be safe and Nina can…she can come back to me.”

  “If this Nina is your Nina,” she reminded him.

  “If she is, yes.”

  Under the somber yellow gaze of the dog, they swung past the Cherokee and circled the oval bed of blue and purple delphiniums around which the terminus of the driveway turned.

  “You think we should have asked Mercy to help us find the house in Pueblo where she dropped Rose and the girl that night?” Barbara wondered.

  “No point. Nothing there for us. They never went inside that house. As soon as Mercy drove out of sight, they moved on. Rose was just using Mercy to reach the nearest sizable town, where she could get transportation, maybe call a trusted friend in Los Angeles or somewhere. How large is Pueblo?”

  “About a hundred thousand people.”

  “That’s large enough. Plenty of ways in and out of a city that size. Bus, maybe train, rental car, even by air.”

  As they headed down the gravel driveway toward the paved road, Joe saw three men in hooded rain slickers exiting a stable stall beyond an exercise yard. Jeff Ealing, Ned, and the veterinarian.

  They left both the lower and the upper halves of the Dutch door standing open. No horse followed them.

  Huddled against the downpour, heads bowed as if they were a procession of monks, they moved toward the house. No clairvoyance was required to know that their shoulders were slumped not only under the weight of the storm but under the weight of defeat.

  Now a call to the knackery. A beloved mare to be transported and rendered. Another summer afternoon on the Loose Change Ranch—never to be forgotten.

  Joe hoped that the years, the toil, and the miscarriages had not caused any distance to open between Jeff and Mercy Ealing. He hoped that in the night they still held each other.

  The gray storm light was so dim that Barbara switched on the headlights. In those twin beams, as they reached the paved highway, the silvery rain glittered like flensing knives.

  In Colorado Springs, a network of shallow lakes had formed on the grammar-school playground next to which Joe had parked his rental car. In the gray-rinsed light, rising from the rain-dimpled water, the jungle gyms and the seesaws and the elaborate swing sets appeared strange to Joe, not at all like what they were, but like a steel-pipe Stonehenge more mysterious even than the ancient rock megaliths and trilithons on England’s Salisbury Plain.

  Everywhere he turned his eyes now, this world was different from the one that he had inhabited all his life. The change had begun the previous day, when he’d gone to the cemetery. Ever since, a shift seemed to be progressing with gathering power and speed, as though the world of Einsteinian laws had intersected with a universe where the rules of energy and matter were so different as to baffle the wisest mathematicians and the proudest physicists.

  This new reality was both more piercingly beautiful and more fearsome than the one that it replaced. He
knew the change was subjective and would never reverse itself. Nothing this side of death would ever again seem simple to him; the smoothest surface hid unknowable depths and complexities.

  Barbara stopped in the street beside his rental car, two blocks from her house. “Well. I guess this is as far as we go.”

  “Thank you, Barbara. You’ve taken such risks—”

  “I don’t want you to worry about that. You hear me? It was my decision.”

  “If not for your kindness and your courage, I’d never have had a hope of getting to the bottom of this. Today you’ve opened a door for me.”

  “But a door to what?” she worried.

  “Maybe to Nina.”

  Barbara looked weary and frightened and sad. She wiped one hand across her face, and then she looked only frightened and sad.

  “Joe, you keep my voice in your head. Wherever you go from here, you remember to listen for me at the back of your mind. I’ll be an old nag, telling you that even if two people somehow came out of that crash alive, it’s damn unlikely that one of them is your Nina. Don’t swing the sword on yourself, don’t you be the one to cut yourself off at the knees.”

  He nodded.

  “Promise me,” she said.

  “Promise.”

  “She’s gone, Joe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Armor your heart.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Better go,” she said.

  He opened the door and got out into the rain.

  “Good luck,” Barbara said.

  “Thanks.”

  He slammed the door, and she drove away.

  As he unlocked his rental car, Joe heard the Explorer’s brakes bark less than half a block away. When he looked up, the Ford was reversing toward him, its red taillights shimmering on the slick blacktop.

  She got out of the Explorer, came to him, put her arms around him, and held him tight. “You’re a dear man, Joe Carpenter.”

  He embraced her too, but no words came to him. He remembered how badly he had wanted to strike her when she had pressed him to forsake the idea that Nina might be alive. He was ashamed by the hatred that he had felt for her then, ashamed and confused—but he was also touched by her friendship, which meant more to him now than he could have imagined when he first rang her doorbell.

  “How can I have known you only a few short hours,” she wondered, “and feel as if you’re my son?”

  She left him for the second time.

  He got into his car as she drove away.

  He watched the dwindling Explorer in the rearview mirror until it turned left into Barbara’s driveway, two blocks behind him, and disappeared into her garage.

  Across the street, the white trunks of the paper birches glowed like painted doorjambs, the deep moody shadows between like open doors to futures best left unvisited.

  Soaked, he drove back to Denver with no regard for the speed limit, alternately using the heater and the air conditioner, trying to dry out his clothes.

  He was electrified by the prospect of finding Nina.

  In spite of what he had said to Barbara, in spite of what he had promised her, he knew that Nina was alive. One thing in this eerily altered world seemed absolutely right again at last: Nina alive, Nina out there somewhere. She was a warm light upon his skin, a spectrum of light beyond the ability of his eyes to detect, as were infrared and ultraviolet, but though he could not see her, he could feel her shining in the world.

  This wasn’t at all similar to the portentous feeling that had so often sent him spiraling into searching behavior, chasing after ghosts. This hope was rock under his hand, not mist.

  He was as close to happiness as he had been in more than a year, but each time that his heart swelled too full with excitement, his mood was dampened by a pang of guilt. Even if he found Nina—when he found Nina—he would not also regain Michelle and Chrissie. They were gone forever, and it seemed callous of him to be too happy about reclaiming only one of three.

  Nevertheless, the desire to learn the truth, which had motivated him to come to Colorado, was the tiniest fraction as powerful as the wrenching need to find his younger daughter, which now raged in him to a degree beyond the measurements used to define mere compulsion or obsession.

  At Denver International Airport, he returned the car to the agency, paid the bill in cash, and retrieved his signed credit-card form. He was in the terminal again fifty minutes before his flight was scheduled to depart.

  He was starving. But for two cookies in Mercy’s kitchen, he had eaten nothing since the two cheeseburgers the previous evening on his way to the Vadance house and later a chocolate bar.

  He found the nearest restaurant in the terminal. He ordered a club sandwich with french fries and a bottle of Heineken.

  Bacon had never tasted half as good as it did now. He licked mayonnaise from his fingertips. The fries had a satisfying crunch, and the crisp dill pickle snapped with a spray of sour juice. For the first time since another August, he not only consumed his food but relished it.

  On his way to the boarding gate, with twenty minutes to spare, he suddenly took a detour to the men’s room. He thought he was going to be sick.

  By the time he got into a stall and latched the door, his nausea passed. Instead of throwing up, he leaned his back against the door and wept.

  He hadn’t cried in many months, and he didn’t know why he was crying now. Maybe because he was on the trembling edge of happiness with the thought of seeing Nina again. Or maybe because he was scared of never finding her or of losing her a second time. Maybe he was grieving anew for Michelle and Chrissie. Maybe he had learned too many dreadful details about what had happened to Flight 353 and to the people on it.

  Maybe it was all those things.

  He was on a runaway rocket of emotion, and he needed to regain control of himself. He wasn’t going to be effective in his search for Rose and Nina if he swung wildly between euphoria and despair.

  Red-eyed but recovered, he boarded the plane for Los Angeles as they issued the final call.

  As the 737 took off, to Joe’s surprise his heart made a hollow racket in his ears, like running footsteps descending stairs. He clutched the arms of his seat as though he might tumble forward and fall headlong.

  He hadn’t been afraid on the flight to Denver, but now he was in the lap of terror. Coming eastward, he would have welcomed death, for the wrongness of outliving his family had been heavy on his mind—but now, westward bound, he had a reason to live.

  Even when they had reached cruising altitude and leveled off, he remained edgy. He could too easily imagine one of the pilots turning to the other and saying, Are we recording?

  Since Joe could not get Captain Delroy Blane out of his mind anyway, he withdrew the three folded pages of the transcript from an inner jacket pocket. Reviewing it, he might see something that he had missed before—and he needed to keep his mind occupied, even if with this.

  The flight wasn’t heavily booked, a third of the seats empty. He had a window seat with no immediate neighbor, so he was afforded the privacy he needed.

  In response to his request, a flight attendant brought a pen and note pad.

  As he read through the transcript, he extracted Blane’s dialogue and printed it on the note pad. Standing apart from First Officer Victor Santorelli’s increasingly frantic statements and shorn of Barbara’s descriptions of sounds and pauses, the captain’s words might allow for the discovery of nuances otherwise not easy to spot.

  When he was done, Joe folded the transcript and returned it to his coat pocket. Then he read from the note pad:

  One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom.

  One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock.

  They’re doing bad things to me.

  They’re mean to me.

  Make them stop.

  Are we recording?

  Make them stop hurting me.

  Are we recording?

  Are we recording?

  Make them s
top or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

  This is fun.

  Whoooaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

  Whoooaaa. Are we recording?

  Are we recording?

  Oh, wow.

  Oh, yeah.

  Oh, yeah.

  Now. Look.

  Cool.

  Joe didn’t see anything new in the material, but something he had noticed before was more obvious when Blane’s dialogue was read in this extracted format. Although the captain was speaking in the voice of an adult, some of the things he was saying had a distinct childlike quality.

  They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.

  This was neither the phrasing nor the word choice most adults would use to accuse tormentors or to ask for help.

  His longest speech, a threat to kill everybody and like it, was petulant and childish as well—especially when immediately followed by the observation This is fun.

  Whoooaaa. Here we go…Whoooaaa. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.

  Blane’s reaction to the roll and plunge of the 747 was like that of a boy thrilling to the arrival of a roller coaster at the crown of the first hill on the track and, then, to the first stomach-rolling drop. According to Barbara, the captain had sounded unafraid; and there was no more terror in his words than in his tone of voice.

  Now. Look.

  Those words were spoken three and a half seconds before impact, as Blane watched the nightscape bloom like a black rose beyond the windscreen. He seemed gripped not by fear but by a sense of wonder.

  Cool.

  Joe stared at that final word for a long time, until the shiver it caused had passed, until he could consider all the implications of it with a measure of detachment.

  Cool.

  To the end, Blane reacted like a boy on an amusement-park ride. He had exhibited no more concern for his passengers and crew than a thoughtless and arrogant child might exhibit for the insects that he tortured with matches.

  Cool.

  Even a thoughtless child, as selfish as only the very young and the incurably immature can be, would nonetheless have shown some fear for himself. Even a determinedly suicidal man, having leaped off a high ledge, would cry out in mortal fear if not regret as he hurtled toward the pavement. Yet this captain, in whatever altered state he occupied, watched oblivion approach with no apparent concern, even with delight, as though he recognized no physical threat to himself.

  Cool.

  Delroy Blane. Family man. Faithful husband. Devout Mormon. Stable, loving, kind, compassionate. Successful, happy, healthy. Everything to live for. Cleared