Sole Survivor

by Dean Koontz

  The boy enjoyed the killing. Joe supposed it was even possible that his handlers had never instructed him to destroy everyone aboard Nationwide Flight 353, that he had done it as an act of rebellion and because he enjoyed it.

  Make them stop 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.

  Recalling those words from the transcript, Joe sensed that the boy had not been referring merely to the passengers on the doomed airliner. By then he had already made the decision to kill them all. He was speaking of some act more apocalyptic than three hundred and thirty murders.

  What could he accomplish if provided with photographs and the geographical coordinates of not merely a missile-tracking facility but a complex of nuclear-missile launch silos?

  “Jesus,” Joe whispered.

  Somewhere in the night, Nina waited. In the hands of a friend of Rose’s, but inadequately protected. Vulnerable.

  Rose seemed to be taking a long time.

  Rapping on the rest room door, Joe called her name, but she did not respond. He hesitated, knocked again, and when she weakly called “Joe,” he pushed the door open.

  She was perched on the edge of the toilet seat. She had taken off her navy blazer and her white blouse; the latter lay blood-soaked on the sink.

  He hadn’t realized she’d been bleeding. Darkness and the blazer had hidden the blood from him.

  As he stepped into the rest room, he saw that she had shaped a compress of sorts from a wad of wet paper towels. She was pressing it to her left pectoral muscle, above her breast.

  “That one shot on the beach,” he said numbly. “You were hit.”

  “The bullet passed through,” she said. “There’s an exit wound in back. Nice and clean. I haven’t even bled all that much, and the pain is tolerable…. So why am I getting weaker?”

  “Internal bleeding,” he suggested, wincing as he looked at the exit wound in her back.

  “I know anatomy,” she said. “I took the hit in just the right spot. Couldn’t have picked it better. Shouldn’t be any damage to major vessels.”

  “The round might have hit a bone and fragmented. The fragment maybe didn’t come out, took a different track.”

  “I was so thirsty. Tried to drink some water from the faucet. Almost passed out when I bent over.”

  “This settles it,” he said. His heart was racing. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  “Get me to Nina.”

  “Rose, damn it—”

  “Nina can heal me,” she said, and as she spoke, she looked guiltily away from him.

  Astonished, he said, “Heal you?”

  “Trust me. Nina can do what no doctor can, what no one else on earth can do.”

  At that moment, on some level, he knew at least one of Rose Tucker’s remaining secrets, but he could not allow himself to take out that dark pearl of knowledge and examine it.

  “Help me get my blouse and blazer on, and let’s go. Get me into Nina’s hands. Her healing hands.”

  Though half sick with worry, he did as she wanted. As he dressed her, he remembered how larger than life she had seemed in the cemetery Saturday morning. Now she was so small.

  Through a hot clawing wind that mimicked the songs of wolves, she leaned on him all the way back to the car.

  When he got her settled in the passenger’s seat, she asked if he would get her something to drink.

  From a vending machine in front of the station, he purchased a can of Pepsi and one of Orange Crush. She preferred the Crush, and he opened it for her.

  Before she accepted the drink, she gave him two things: the Polaroid photograph of his family’s graves and the folded dollar bill on which the serial number, minus the fourth digit, provided the phone number at which Mark of Infiniface could be reached in an emergency. “And before you start driving, I want to tell you how to find the cabin in Big Bear—in case I can’t hold on until we get there.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’ll make it.”

  “Listen,” she said, and again she projected the charisma that commanded attention.

  He listened as she told him the way.

  “And as for Infiniface,” she said, “I trust them, and they are my natural allies—and Nina’s—as Mark said. But I’m afraid they can be too easily infiltrated. That’s why I wouldn’t let them come with us tonight. But if we’re not followed, then this car is clean, and maybe their security is good enough. If worse comes to worst and you don’t know where to turn…they may be your best hope.”

  His chest tightened and his throat thickened as she spoke, and finally he said, “I don’t want to hear any more of this. I’ll get you to Nina in time.”

  Rose’s right hand trembled now, and Joe was not certain that she could hold the Orange Crush. But she managed it, drinking thirstily.

  As he drove back onto the San Bernardino Freeway, heading east, she said, “I’ve never meant to hurt you, Joe.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “I’ve done a terrible thing, though.”

  He glanced at her. He didn’t dare ask what she had done. He kept that shiny black pearl of knowledge tucked deep in the purse of his mind.

  “Don’t hate me too much.”

  “I don’t hate you at all.”

  “My motives were good. They haven’t always been. Certainly weren’t spotless when I went to work at Project 99. But my motives were good this time, Joe.”

  Driving out of the lightstorm of Los Angeles and its suburbs, toward the mountain darkness where Nina dwelled, Joe waited for Rose to tell him why he should hate her.

  “So…let me tell you,” she said, “about the project’s only true success….”

  Ascend, now, in the elevator from the little glimpse of Hell at the bottom of those six subterranean levels, leaving the boy in his containment vessel, and come all the way up to the security room where the descent began. Farther still, to the southeast corner of the ground floor, where CCY-21-21 resides.

  She was conceived without passion one year after 89-58, though she was the project not of Doctors Blom and Ramlock but of Rose Tucker. She is a lovely child, delicate, fair of face, with golden hair and amethyst eyes. Although the majority of the orphans living here are of average intelligence, CCY-21-21 has an unusually high IQ, even higher perhaps than that of 89-58, and she loves to learn. She is a quiet girl, with much grace and natural charm, but for the first three years of her life, she exhibits no paranormal abilities.

  Then, on a sunny May afternoon, when she is participating in a session of supervised play with other children on the orphanage lawn, she finds a sparrow with a broken wing and one torn eye. It lies in the grass beneath a tree, flopping weakly, and when she gathers it into her small hands, it becomes fearfully still. Crying, the girl hurries with the bird to the nearest handler, asking what can be done. The sparrow is now so weak and so paralyzed by fear that it can only feebly work its beak—and produces no sound whatsoever. The bird is dying, the handler sees nothing to be done, but the girl will not accept the sparrow’s pending death. She sits on the ground, grips the bird gently in her left hand, and carefully strokes it with her right, singing softly to it a song about Robin Red Breast—and in but a minute the sparrow is restored. The fractures in the wing knit firm again, and the torn eye heals into a bright, clear orb. The bird sings—and flies.

  CCY-21-21 becomes the center of a happy whirlwind of attention. Rose Tucker, who has been driven to the contemplation of suicide by the nightmare of Project 99, is as reborn as the bird, stepping back from the abyss into which she has been peering. For the next fifteen months, 21-21’s healing power is explored. At first it is an unreliable talent, which she cannot exercise at will, but month by wondrous month she learns to summon and control her gift, until she can apply it whenever asked to do so. Those on Project 99 with medical problems are brought to a level of health they never expected to enjoy again. A select few politicians and mili
tary figures—and members of their families—suffering from life-threatening illnesses are brought secretly to the child to be healed. There are those in Project 99 who believe that 21-21 is their greatest asset—although others find 89-58, in spite of the considerable control problems that he poses, to be the most interesting and valuable property in the long run.

  Now look here, come forward in time to one rainy day in August, fifteen months after the restoration of the injured sparrow. A staff geneticist named Amos has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease. While healing Amos with only a soft and lingering touch, the girl detects an illness in addition to the malignancy, this one not of a physical nature but nonetheless debilitating. Perhaps because of what he has seen at Project 99, perhaps for numerous other reasons that have accumulated throughout his fifty years, Amos has decided that life is without purpose or meaning, that we have no destiny but the void, that we are only dust in the wind. This darkness in him is blacker than the cancer, and the girl heals this as well, by the simple expedient of showing Amos the light of God and the strange dimensional lattices of realms beyond our own.

  Once shown these things, Amos is so overcome with joy and awe that he cycles between laughter and weeping, and to the eyes of the others in the room—a researcher named Janice, another named Vincent—he seems to be seized by an alarming hysteria. When Amos urges the girl to bring Janice into the same light that she has shown to him, she gives the gift again.

  Janice, however, reacts differently from Amos. Humbled and frightened, she collapses in remorse. She claws at herself in regret for the way she has lived her life and in grief for those she has betrayed and harmed, and her anguish is frightening.

  Tumult.

  Rose is summoned. Janice and Amos are isolated for observation and evaluation. What has the girl done? What Amos tells them seems like the happy babbling of a harmlessly deranged man, but babbling nonetheless, and from one who was but a few minutes ago a scientist of serious—if not brooding—disposition.

  Baffled and concerned by the strikingly different reactions of Amos and Janice, the girl withdraws and becomes uncommunicative. Rose works in private with 21-21 for more than two hours before she finally begins to pry the astounding explanation from her. The child cannot understand why the revelation that she’s brought to Amos and Janice would overwhelm them so completely or why Janice’s reaction is a mix of euphoria and self-flagellation. Having been born with a full awareness of her place and purpose in the universe, with an understanding of the ladder of destinies that she will climb through infinity, with the certain knowledge of life everlasting carried in her genes, she cannot grasp the shattering power of this revelation when she brings it to those who have spent their lives in the mud of doubt and the dust of despair.

  Expecting nothing more than that she is going to experience the psychic equivalent of a magic-lantern show, a tour of a child’s sweet fantasy of God, Rose asks to be shown. And is shown. And is forever changed. Because at the touch of the child’s hand, she is opened to the fullness of existence. What she experiences is beyond her powers to describe, and even as torrents of joy surge through her and wash away all the countless griefs and miseries of her life heretofore, she is flooded, as well, with terror, for she is aware not only of the promise of a bright eternity but of expectations that she must strive to fulfill in all the days of life ahead of her in this world and in the worlds to come, expectations that frighten her because she is unsure that she can ever meet them. Like Janice, she is acutely aware of every mean act and unkindness and lie and betrayal of which she has ever been guilty, and she recognizes that she still has the capacity for selfishness, pettiness, and cruelty; she yearns to transcend her past even as she quakes at the fortitude required to do so.

  When the vision passes and she finds herself in the girl’s room as before, she harbors no doubt that what she saw was real, truth in its purest form, and not merely the child’s delusion transmitted through psychic power. For almost half an hour she cannot speak but sits shaking, her face buried in her hands.

  Gradually, she begins to realize the implications of what has happened here. There are basically two. First: If this revelation can be brought to the world—even to as many as the girl can touch—all that is now will pass away. Once one has seen—not taken on faith but seen—that there is life beyond, even if the nature of it remains profoundly mysterious and as fearsome as it is glorious, then all that was once important seems insignificant. Avenues of wondrous possibilities abound where once there was a single alley through the darkness. The world as we know it ends. Second: There are those who will not welcome the end of the old order, who have taught themselves to thrive on power and on the pain and humiliation of others. Indeed, the world is full of them, and they will not want to receive the girl’s gift. They will fear the girl and everything that she promises. And they will either sedate and isolate her in a containment vessel—or they will kill her.

  She is as gifted as any messiah—but she is human. She can heal the wing of a broken bird and bring sight to its blinded eye. She can banish cancer from a disease-riddled man. But she is not an angel with a cloak of invulnerability. She is flesh and bone. Her precious power resides in the delicate tissues of her singular brain. If the magazine of a pistol is emptied into the back of her head, she will die like any other child; dead, she cannot heal herself. Although her soul will proceed into other realms, she will be lost to this troubled place that needs her. The world will not be changed, peace will not replace turmoil, and there will be no end to loneliness and despair.

  Rose quickly becomes convinced that the project’s directors will opt for termination. The moment that they understand what this little girl is, they will kill her.

  Before nightfall, they will kill her.

  Certainly before midnight, they will kill her.

  They will not be willing to risk consigning her to a containment vessel. The boy possesses only the power of destruction, but 21-21 possesses the power of enlightenment, which is immeasurably the more dangerous of the two.

  They will shoot her down, soak her corpse with gasoline, set her remains afire, and later scatter her charred bones.

  Rose must act—and quickly. The girl must be spirited out of the orphanage and hidden before they can destroy her.

  “Joe?”

  Against a field of stars, as though at this moment erupting from the crust of the earth, the black mountains shouldered darkly across the horizon.

  “Joe, I’m sorry.” Her voice was frail. “I’m so sorry.”

  They were speeding north on State Highway 30, east of the city of San Bernardino, fifty miles from Big Bear.

  “Joe, are you okay?”

  He could not answer.

  Traffic was light. The road ascended into forests. Cottonwoods and pines shook, shook, shook in the wind.

  He could not answer. He could only drive.

  “When you insisted on believing the little girl with me was your own Nina, I let you go on believing it.”

  For whatever purpose, she was still deceiving him. He could not understand why she continued to hide the truth.

  She said, “After they found us at the restaurant, I needed your help. Especially after I was shot, I needed you. But you hadn’t opened your heart and mind to the photograph when I gave it to you. You were so…fragile. I was afraid if you knew it really wasn’t your Nina, you’d just…stop. Fall apart. God forgive me, Joe, but I needed you. And now the girl needs you.”

  Nina needed him. Not some girl born in a lab, with the power to transmit her curious fantasies to others and cloud the minds of the gullible. Nina needed him. Nina.

  If he could not trust Rose Tucker, was there anyone he could trust?

  He managed to shake two words from himself: “Go on.”

  Rose again. In 21-21’s room. Feverishly considering the problem of how to spirit the girl through a security system equal to that of any prison.

  The answer, when
it comes, is obvious and elegant.

  There are three exits from the ground floor of the orphanage. Rose and the girl walk hand in hand to the door that connects the main building to the adjoining two-story parking structure.

  An armed guard views their approach with more puzzlement than suspicion. The orphans are not permitted into the garage even under supervision.

  When 21-21 holds out her tiny hand and says Shake, the guard smiles and obliges—and receives the gift. Suddenly filled with cyclonic wonder, he sits shaking uncontrollably, weeping with joy but also with hard remorse, just as Rose had trembled and wept in the girl’s room.

  It is a simple matter to push the button on the guard’s console to throw the electronic lock on the door and pass through.

  Another guard waits on the garage side of the connecting door. He is startled by the sight of this child. She reaches for him, and his surprise at seeing her is nothing compared to the surprise that follows.

  A third guard is stationed at the gated exit from the garage. Alarmed by the sight of 21-21 in Rose’s car, he leans in the open window to demand an explanation—and the girl touches his face.

  Two more armed men staff the gate at the highway. All barriers fall, and Virginia lies ahead.

  Escape will never be as easy again. If they are apprehended, the girl’s offer of a handshake will be greeted by gunfire.

  The trick now is to get out of the area quickly, before project security realizes what has happened to five of its men. They will mount a pursuit, perhaps with the assistance of local, state, and federal authorities. Rose drives madly, recklessly, with a skill—born of desperation—that she has never known before.

  Barely big enough to see out of the side window, 21-21 studies the passing countryside with fascination and, at last, says, Wow, it sure is big out here.

  Rose laughs and says, Honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

  She realizes that she must get the word out as quickly as possible: use the media to display 21-21’s healing powers and then to demonstrate the greater gift that the girl can bestow. Only the forces of ignorance and darkness benefit from secrecy. Rose believes that 21-21 will never be safe until the world knows of her, embraces her, and refuses to allow her to be taken into custody.

  Her ex-bosses will expect her to go public quickly and in a big way. Their influence within the media is widespread—yet as subtle as a web of cloud shadows on the skin of a pond, which makes it all the more effective. They will try to find her as soon as possible after she surfaces and before she can bring 21-21 to the world.

  She knows a reporter whom she would trust not to betray her: Lisa Peccatone, an old college friend who works at the Post in Los Angeles.

  Rose and the girl will have to fly to Southern California—and the sooner the better. Project 99 is a joint venture of private industry, elements of the defense establishment, and other powerful forces in the government. Easier to halt an avalanche with a feather than to resist their combined might, and they will shortly begin to use every asset in their arsenal to locate Rose and the girl.

  Trying to fly out of Dulles or National Airport in Washington is too dangerous. She considers Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. She chooses New York.

  She reasons that the more county and state lines she crosses, the safer she becomes, so she drives to Hagerstown, Maryland, and from there to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, without incident. Yet mile by mile, she is increasingly concerned that her pursuers will have put out an APB on her car and that she will be captured regardless of the distance she puts between herself and Manassas. In Harrisburg, she abandons the car, and she and the girl continue to New York City by bus.

  By the time they are in the air aboard Nationwide Flight 353, Rose feels safe. Immediately on landing at LAX, she will be met by Lisa and the crew that Lisa has assembled—and the series of media eruptions will begin.

  For the airline passenger manifest, Rose implied that she was married to a white man, and she identified 21-21 as her stepdaughter, choosing the name “Mary Tucker” on the spur of the moment. With the media, she intends initially to use CCY-21-21’s project name because its similarity to concentration-camp inmates’ names will do more than anything else to characterize Project 99 in the public mind and generate instant sympathy for the child. She realizes that eventually she will have to consult with 21-21 to pick a permanent name—which, considering the singular historical importance of this child’s life, should be a name that resonates.

  They are seated across the aisle from a mother and her two daughters, who are returning home to Los Angeles. Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina Carpenter.

  Nina, who is approximately 21-21’s age and size, is playing with a hand-held electronic game called Pigs and Princes, designed for preschoolers. From across the aisle, 21-21 becomes fascinated by the sounds and the images on the small screen. Seeing this, Nina asks “Mary” to move with her to a nearby pair of empty seats, where they can play the game together. Rose is hesitant to allow this—but she knows that 21-21 is intelligent far beyond her years and is aware of the need for discretion, so she relents. This is the first unstructured play time in 21-21’s life, the first genuine play she has ever known. Nina is a child of enormous charm, sweet and gregarious. Although 21-21 is a genius with the reading skills of a college freshman, a healer with miraculous powers, and literally the hope of the world, she is soon enraptured by Nina, wants to be Nina, as totally cool as Nina, and unconsciously she begins imitating Nina’s gestures and manner of speaking.

  Theirs is a late flight out of New York, and after a couple of hours, Nina is fading. She hugs 21-21, and with the permission of Michelle, she gives Pigs and Princes to her new friend before returning to sit with her mother and sister, where she falls asleep.

  Transported by delight, 21-21 returns to her seat beside Rose, hugging the small electronic game to her breast as though it is a treasure beyond value. Now she won’t even play with it because she is afraid that she might break it, and