The Last Child

by John Hart

  THE

  LAST CHILD

  ALSO BY JOHN HART

  The King of Lies

  Down River

  THE

  LAST

  CHILD

  JOHN HART

  MINOTAUR BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  THE LAST CHILD. Copyright © 2009 by John Hart. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35932-4

  ISBN-10: 0-312-35932-2

  First Edition: May 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is for Nancy and Bill Stanback, Annie and John Hart,

  and Kay and Norde Wilson.

  Parents, friends, trusted advisors.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A lot of people committed to making this book a success. For all that they’ve done—setting the tone, directing resources, and making such a strong commitment—I would like to thank Sally Richardson, Matthew Shear, Andrew Martin, and Thomas Dunne. For his genius at marketing the book, thanks to Matt Baldacci and to the wonderful people that work with him: Tara Cibelli, Kim Ludlam, and Nancy Trypuc. The jacket is beautiful and captures so much of the book’s spirit, and for that I thank David Rotstein and Ervin Serrona. In Production, my thanks go to Kenneth J. Silver, Cathy Turiano, and Nina Frieman; and to Jonathan Bennett in Design. As always, a special shout-out to the hardworking pros on the St. Martin’s sales team—you’re the best. Few books could succeed without strong publicity; so to my publicity team, Hector DeJean and Tammy Richards-LeSure, my gratitude. I am lucky enough to have the best editors in the business—Pete Wolverton and Katie Gilligan—who know how much I appreciate their hard work. Nevertheless, I’ll say it here: “Thanks, you two. You’re fabulous.” Thanks, as always, to my agent, Mickey Choate. To my early readers, Clint Robins, Mark Witte, James Randolph, and Debbie Bernhardt—you guys continue to play a vital role in the process, so thanks for that. Special thanks to Clyde Hunt and John Yoakum, who gave their names knowing full well that I might abuse them. Thanks to Mark Stanback and Bill Stanback, who spoke to me of eagles. And finally, most important, thanks to my wife, Katie, who remains my best friend and the love of my life, and to my daughters, Saylor and Sophie, the wide-eyed masters of daylong joy and innocent enthusiasms.

  THE

  LAST CHILD

  PROLOGUE

  Asphalt cut the country like a scar, a long, hot burn of razor-black. Heat had not yet twisted the air, but the driver knew it was coming, the scorching glare, the shimmer at the far place where blue hammered down. He adjusted his sunglasses and threw a glance at the big mirror above the windshield. It showed him the length of the bus and every passenger on it. In thirty years he’d watched all kinds of people in that mirror: the pretty girls and the broken men, the drunks and the crazies, the heavy-breasted women with red, wrinkled babies. The driver could spot trouble a mile away; he could tell who was fine and who was running.

  The driver looked at the boy.

  The boy looked like a runner.

  Skin peeled from his nose, but beneath the tan he carried the sallow kind of pale that came from sleeplessness or malnutrition or both. His cheekbones made sharp blades beneath skin stretched tight. He was young and small, ten maybe, with wild hair that rose black on his head. The cut was jagged and uneven, like something he’d done himself. Frayed cloth hung from the collar of his shirt and from the knees of his jeans. The shoes were just about worn through. On his lap, he clutched a blue backpack; and whatever it held, there wasn’t much of it.

  He was a good-looking kid, but what struck the driver most were the boy’s eyes. Large and dark, they moved constantly, as if the boy was overly aware of the people around him, the hot press of humanity typical of a broken-down bus on a sun-blasted morning in the North Carolina sand hills: a half-dozen itinerant workers, a few busted-up brawlers that looked ex-military, a family or two, some old folks, a couple of tattooed punks that huddled in the back.

  The boy’s eyes most often found the man across the aisle, a slick-haired sales type in a wrinkled suit and sprung loafers. There was also a black man with a creased Bible and a soda bottle tucked between his legs; he seemed to catch the kid’s eye, too. In the seat behind the boy sat an old lady in a parchment dress. When she leaned forward to ask a question, the boy shook his head in a small way and answered with care.

  No, ma’am.

  His words rose like smoke, and the lady settled back, blue-veined fingers on the chain that held her spectacles. She looked through the window and her lenses flashed, then went dark as the road sliced into a stand of pine with shadows that pooled green beneath the limbs. The same light filled the bus, and the driver studied the man in the wrinkled suit. He had pale skin and a hangover sweat, unusually small eyes and an edginess that scraped the driver’s nerves. Every minute or two, the man shifted in his seat. He crossed his legs and uncrossed them, leaned forward, then back. His fingers drummed one knee of the ill-fitting suit and he swallowed often as his gaze drifted to the boy, then flicked away, drifted again and lingered.

  The driver was a jaded man, but he ran things clean on his bus. He refused to tolerate drunkenness or debauchery or loud voices. His momma raised him that way fifty years ago and he’d found no reason to change. So he kept an eye on the boy, and on the drawn, shiny man with eager eyes. He watched him watch the boy, saw him push back against the greasy seat when the knife came out.

  The boy was casual about it. He pulled it from a pocket and folded the blade out with a single thumb. He held it for a moment, visible, then took an apple from his bag and sliced it in a sharp, clean motion. The smell of it rose above the travel-stained seats and the dirt-smeared floors. Even above the diesel stink, the driver caught the sharp, sweet tang of it. The boy looked once at the man’s wide eyes and slick, washed-out face, then folded the knife and put it back in his pocket.

  The driver relaxed and watched the road, uninterrupted, for a few long minutes. He thought that the boy seemed familiar, but the feeling passed. Thirty years. He settled his heavy frame deeper into the seat.

  He’d seen so many boys.

  So many runners.

  —

  Every time the driver looked at him, the boy felt it. It was a gift he had, a skill. Even with the dark shades on the driver’s eyes and the big curve in the face of the mirror, the boy could tell. This was his third trip on the bus in as many weeks. He sat in different seats and wore different clothes, but guessed that sooner or later somebody would ask him what he was doing on a cross-state bus at seven o’clock on a school day. He figured the question would come from the driver.

  But it hadn’t happened yet.

  The boy turned to the window and angled his shoulders so that no one else would try to speak to him. He watched reflections in the glass, the movements and the faces. He thought of skyscraper trees and brown feathers tipped with snow.

  The knife made a lump in his pocket.

  —

  Forty minutes later, the bus rocked to a stop at a one-room gas station depot lost in the great swath of pine and scrub and hot, sandy earth. The boy made his way down the narrow aisle and dropped off the bottom step before the driver could me
ntion that nothing but the tow truck sat in the lot, or that no grown-up was there to take possession of him, a thirteen-year-old boy who could barely pass for ten. He kept his head turned so that the sun seared his neck. He rocked the pack onto his back, and the diesel cloud rose; then the bus jerked and was rolling south.

  The gas station had two pumps, a long bench, and a skinny old man in blue clothes stained with grease. He nodded from behind smudged glass but did not come out into the heat. The drink machine in the shade of the building was so old it only asked for fifty cents. The boy dug into a pocket, fingered out five thin dimes and purchased a grape soda that came out of the chute in a cold glass bottle. He popped the top, turned in the direction from which the bus had come, and started walking down the black snake of dusty road.

  Three miles and two turns later, the road diminished, asphalt gone to gravel, gravel gone thin. The sign had not changed since the last time he’d seen it. It was old and abused, feathers of paint lifting to show the wood beneath: ALLIGATOR RIVER RAPTOR PRESERVE. Above the letters, a stylized eagle soared, and on its wings, the paint feathers rose.

  The boy spit chewing gum into his hand and slapped it on the sign as he passed.

  —

  It took two hours to find a nest, two hours of sweat and sticker bushes and mosquitoes that turned his skin a bright, splotchy red. He found the massive tangle of limbs in the high branches of a longleaf pine that grew straight and tall from the damp soil on the bank of the river. He circled the tree twice, but found no feathers on the ground. Sunlight pierced the forest, and the sky was so bright and blue that it hurt his eyes. The nest was a speck.

  He shrugged off the pack and started climbing, bark rough and raw on his sunburned skin. Wary and afraid, he looked for the eagle as he climbed. A stuffed one sat on a pedestal at the museum in Raleigh, and he remembered the fierceness of it. Its eyes were glass, but its wings spanned five feet from tip to tip, its talons as long as the boy’s middle finger. The beak alone could take the ears off a grown man.

  All he wanted was a feather. He’d love a clean, white tail feather, or one of the giant brown feathers from the wing; but in the end, it could be the smallest feather from the softest patch, a pin feather, maybe, or one from that downy soft place beneath the shoulder of the wing.

  It didn’t really matter.

  Magic was magic.

  The higher he climbed, the more the branches bent. Wind moved the tree and the boy with it. When it gusted, he pushed his face into the bark, heart thumping and fingers squeezed white. The pine was a king of trees, so tall that even the river shrank beneath it.

  He neared the top. This close, the nest was as broad as a dining room table and probably weighed two hundred pounds. It was decades old, stinking of rot and shit and rabbit parts. The boy opened himself to the smell, to the power of it. He shifted a hand, planted one foot on a limb that was weathered gray and skinned of bark. Beneath him, pine forest marched off to distant hills. The river twisted, black and dark and shining like coal. He lifted himself above the nest and saw the chicks, two of them, pale and mottled, in the bowl of the nest. They opened splinters of beaks, begging for food, and the boy heard a sound like sheets on the line when the wind got up. He risked a glance, and the eagle dropped from a perfect sky. For an instant, the boy saw only feathers, then the wings beat down and the talons rose.

  The bird screamed.

  The boy threw up his arms as talons sank into him; then he fell, and the bird—eyes yellow bright, talons hooked in his skin and in his shirt—the bird fell with him.

  —

  At three forty-seven, a bus rolled into the parking lot of the same one-room gas station depot. Pointing north this time, it was a different bus, different driver. The door clattered open and a handful of rheumatic people shuffled out. The driver was a thin, Hispanic man, twenty-five and tired-looking. He barely looked at the scrawny boy who rose from the bench and limped to the door of the bus. He didn’t notice the torn clothes or the near despair on the boy’s face. And if that was blood on the hand that passed the ticket over, it seemed clear that it was not the driver’s business to remark upon it.

  The boy let go of the ticket. He pulled himself up the stairs and tried to hold the pieces of his shirt together. The pack he carried was heavy, stuffed near to bursting, and something red stained the seams at the bottom. There was a smell about the boy, one of mud and river and something raw; but that, too, was not the driver’s business. The boy pushed deeper into the gloom of the bus. He fell once against a seat back, then moved all the way to the rear, where he sat alone in the corner. He clutched the bag to his chest and pulled his feet onto the seat. Deep holes punctured his flesh and his neck was gashed; but no one looked at him, no one cared. He clutched the bag tighter, felt the heat that remained, the broken body, like a sack of shattered twigs. He pictured the small and downy chicks, alone in the nest. Alone in the nest and starving.

  The boy rocked in the dark.

  He rocked in the dark and wept hot, bitter tears.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Johnny learned early. If somebody asked him why he was so different, why he held himself so still and why his eyes seemed to swallow light, that’s what he’d tell them. He learned early that there was no safe place, not the backyard or the playground, not the front porch or the quiet road that grazed the edge of town. No safe place, and no one to protect you.

  Childhood was illusion.

  He’d been up for an hour, waiting for the night sounds to fade, for the sun to slide close enough to call it morning. It was Monday, still dark, but Johnny rarely slept. He woke to patrol dark windows. He rattled the locks twice a night, watched the empty road and the dirt drive that looked like chalk when the moon rose. He checked on his mom, except when Ken was at the house. Ken had a temper and wore a large gold ring that made perfect oval bruises.

  That was another lesson.

  Johnny pulled on a T-shirt and frayed jeans, then walked to the bedroom door and cracked it. Light spilled down the narrow hall, and the air felt used up. He smelled cigarettes and spilled liquor that was probably bourbon. For an instant, Johnny recalled the way mornings used to smell, eggs and coffee and the sharp tang of his father’s aftershave. It was a good memory, so he drove it down, crushed it. It only made things harder.

  In the hall, shag carpet rose stiff under his toes. The door to his mother’s room hung loose in its frame. It was hollow core and unpainted, a mismatch. The original door lay splintered in the backyard, kicked off its hinges a month back when Ken and Johnny’s mother got into it after hours. She never said what the argument was about, but Johnny guessed it had something to do with him. A year ago, Ken could never have gotten close to a woman like her, and Johnny never let him forget it; but that was a year ago. A lifetime.

  They’d known Ken for years, or thought they had. Johnny’s dad was a contractor, and Ken built whole neighborhoods. They worked well together because Johnny’s dad was fast and competent, and because Ken was smart enough to respect him. Because of that, Ken had always been pleasant and mindful, even after the kidnapping, right up until Johnny’s dad decided that grief and guilt were too much to bear. But after his dad left, the respect disappeared, and Ken started coming around a lot. Now he ran things. He kept Johnny’s mother dependent and alone, kept her medicated or drunk. He told her what to do and she did it. Cook a steak. Go to the bedroom. Lock the door.

  Johnny took it in with those black eyes, and often found himself in the kitchen, at night, three fingers on the big knife in its wooden block, picturing the soft place above Ken’s chest, thinking about it.

  The man was a predator, pure and simple; and Johnny’s mother had faded down to nothing. She weighed less than a hundred pounds and was as drawn as a shut-in, but Johnny saw the way men looked at her, the way Ken got possessive when she made it out of the house. Her skin, though pale, was flawless, her eyes large and deep and wounded. She was thirty-three, and looked like an angel would look if there was such a thing,
dark-haired and fragile and unearthly. Men stopped what they were doing when she walked into a room. They stared as if a glow came off her skin, as if she might rise from the ground at any moment.

  She could not care less. Even before her daughter vanished, she’d paid little attention to the way she’d looked. Blue jeans and T-shirts. Ponytails and occasional makeup. Her world had been a small, perfect place where she’d loved her husband and her children, where she’d tended a garden, volunteered at church, and sang to herself on rainy days; but no more. Now there was silence and emptiness and pain, a flicker of the person she’d been; but the beauty lingered. Johnny saw it every day, and every day he cursed the perfection that graced her so completely. If she were ugly, Ken would have no use for her. If she’d had ugly children, his sister would still sleep in the room next to his. But she was like a doll or something not quite real, like she should be in a cabinet with a lock on it. She was the most beautiful person Johnny had ever known, and he hated that about her.

  Hated it.

  That’s how much his life had changed.

  Johnny studied the door to his mother’s room. Maybe Ken was in there, maybe not. His ear pressed against the wood, and breath caught in his throat. Normally, he could tell, but sleep had dodged him for days, and when he finally crashed, he crashed hard. Black and still. Deep. When he did wake, it was with a start, like he’d heard glass break. That was at three o’clock.

  He stepped back from the door, uncertain, then crept down the hall, and the bathroom light hummed when he flicked the switch. The medicine cabinet stood open and he saw the pills: Xanax, Prozac, some blue ones, some yellows. He picked up a bottle and read the label. Vicodin. That was new. The Xanax bottle was open, pills on the counter, and Johnny felt the anger fill him up. The Xanax helped Ken come down after a night with the good stuff.