by Lis Wiehl
“The school is gone,” Reese replied. “Who’s on the boat with you?”
“Who’s what?” Tommy asked.
“Behind you.”
Tommy turned to see Adolf Ghieri holding Dani by the throat.
45.
December 24
8:47 p.m. EST
The fiend was decaying from the inside out, his spiritual corruption eating away at him like a cancer. He looked older, sicker, paler, but Tommy knew the demon still possessed a power superior to his own. The rain dripped off his bald skull. He was dressed in what had been formal wear, his bow tie unknotted at his neck. He’d been attending the gala at St. Adrian’s, Tommy realized. The fund-raiser. Ghieri had been inside the main building when the water came, and now … he was here.
The monster held Dani toward the rear of the boat, her hands pulling at his arm but unable to move it.
“Let her go,” Tommy said.
“Or what? You’re not in charge here,” Ghieri said.
“So you’d rather fight girls than me?” Tommy said. “I was going to ask you if it made you feel like a big man, but I keep forgetting—you’re not human. That would constitute a major upgrade.”
Ghieri tightened his grip around Dani’s throat. “You feeling strong, little man?” he said. “Would you like to know what true power really is? Invite me in. This body is no longer useful to me. I need a new one. Invite me in, or this woman you cherish dies in my hands. Invite me in and I’ll let her go.”
“Don’t do it!” Dani said before Ghieri tightened his grip to silence her.
With no one at the helm, the boat drifted in the current, spinning like a leaf in a stream. Tommy grabbed the console to steady himself, his hand only a foot away from the emergency flare pistol attached to the console by a plastic bracket.
“Come on—what’s the matter? You afraid of me?” Tommy said. His only thought was to get Ghieri to attack him, not Dani. Perhaps she would have a chance to escape.
“You challenge me?” Ghieri said. “Are you as mentally defective as all the other humans I’ve known?”
“Do you own a television?” Tommy asked.
“Do I what?”
“Do you own a television?” he repeated. “Because I’m guessing you must have seen me play football. Maybe I can’t defeat you, but you know I can hurt you.”
“Like the boy you killed on the field?” Ghieri said.
Tommy tried not to react. Tried … and failed.
“Dwight Sikes,” Ghieri said. “Remember how you felt when you cracked his skull open? You exalted in it. You raised your arms to the sky and danced. Remember? You belong with me. Invite me in. I’m giving you the chance to join the winning side.”
“How is it that you’ve lived a thousand times longer than I have, but I’m so much smarter than you?” Tommy said. “You were thrown out of heaven because Satan thought he was smarter than God, and now you’re so stupid, something that should be obvious escapes you completely.”
He moved his hand closer to the flare pistol.
“You have absolutely no idea what I can do,” Ghieri said.
“And you have no idea what God can do,” Tommy said. “That’s what you don’t get. Dani and I aren’t afraid to die. It just means we’ll meet Jesus a little sooner than we expected. You don’t get to meet him at all. You blew that one a long time ago.”
“Your faith is pathetic.”
“My faith is intact.”
“You want to test it?” Ghieri said. “I’ve been breaking men more pious than you for a thousand years.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said, “but did they have one of these?”
He grabbed the flare pistol and fired it at Ghieri from fifteen feet away.
Ghieri caught the burning missile in his left hand, snatching the potassium nitrate and magnesium projectile in midair. He examined it for a moment, then popped it into his mouth as casually as if he were eating a grape and swallowed.
The demon took a step toward Tommy.
“All righty then,” Tommy said. “So much for Plan D.”
Ghieri snarled and threw Dani aside. “This is where the villain tells the victim to say his prayers,” he said. “And you’ll see just how much good they’ll do you.”
He stepped closer, reached out, and put a finger to Tommy’s chest, pressing hard against Tommy’s sternum.
Tommy had no illusions about Ghieri’s strength. He knew that if the fiend wanted to, he could tear a hole in his chest and pull his heart directly out of him.
“It’s rude to point,” Tommy said.
“Are you supposing your angel friends will step in to help you?” Ghieri said. “Last I checked, they were busy holding back the floodwaters.”
The demon pressed harder against Tommy’s chest. Tommy wanted to cry out from the pain, but he held his tongue, and his ground, defiant. He would not give the demon what he wanted.
“Do you know how your friend Abigail Gardener died?” Ghieri asked. “We sucked the life out of her. She was crushed, like a submarine at the bottom of the sea. But maybe you’re one of those humans who responds well to pressure.”
He laid a finger on Tommy’s lips, and suddenly Tommy felt himself unable to breathe. He felt like an elephant was sitting on his chest, squeezed from all directions; his head felt like it might implode, his eyes like they might burst from his head.
There was a sudden crack, and the finger lifted from his lips. Ghieri was wobbling on his feet.
Tommy saw Dani standing behind him, holding the fire extinguisher she’d used to smack the demon on the side of his head.
“Leave him alone!” she shouted.
“I forgot,” Ghieri said, sneering. “You love each other. That’s going to make this even more pleasurable.”
The demon got to his feet, and once more his finger pushed on Tommy’s chest. This time Tommy screamed and almost fell to his knees.
“Let go of him!” he heard Dani shout.
“Stay back,” Tommy said through gritted teeth. “Leave him—”
He looked up just in time to see Dani grab Ghieri by the shoulder and spin him around to face her.
“I told you to let go of him,” she said. She pulled her hand out from behind her back.
“What’s that?” Ghieri asked. “A pocketknife?”
“It’s more than a pocketknife,” Dani said. “It’s a Swiss Army knife.”
Tommy had seen a knife very similar to the one she was holding once before—in Charlie’s hands.
“That’s a special knife,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“Someone must have given it to me without telling me,” Dani said. “I found it in my coat pocket.”
“What’s so special about it?” Ghieri scoffed.
“Well,” Dani said. “It has attachments.” She gave the knife a squeeze.
Nothing happened.
Ghieri took another step toward her.
“I said, it has attachments,” she repeated, louder now.
“Say please,” Tommy suggested.
“Please.”
Suddenly the knife became a blade of pure fire, though the flames did not scorch her hand. Ghieri stepped back, but too late. Dani jumped toward him, raised the fiery sword high above her head with both hands, and speared the demon clean through the heart.
The demon’s face registered his shock as he fell backward, grasping the flames with both hands. Dani twisted the sword, put one foot on Ghieri’s chest, and pushed him over the gunwale and into the water.
And then, just as suddenly, all she held was a Swiss Army knife.
Tommy had slumped to the deck. She ran to his side and held him close, kissing him, grateful to find him safe and whole.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I will be,” Tommy said, sitting up and rubbing his chest. “It’s like getting the wind knocked out of you, except a thousand times worse.”
“Just rest for a second,” she told him.
“Can I see that? The
knife?” he asked her. Dani handed it to him. It seemed quite ordinary now.
“We’re going to need that back.”
He turned to see Ben and Charlie standing by the cockpit.
“You sure?” Tommy asked, smiling. “I’d take good care of it.”
“I’m sure you would,” Charlie said, “but this was just a loan.”
“We know how much you like gadgets,” Ben said.
The angel held his hands out to form a basket.
Tommy sighed. “Oh well.” He tossed the knife to Charlie.
“Wait—Ghieri said—” Dani began, but the angels were gone before she could ask them a question.
Tommy took her in his arms and kissed her. When they broke the embrace, though, she wasn’t smiling.
“What’s wrong?” Tommy asked. “We won. Ghieri’s gone. He’s not coming back.”
Dani shook her head.
“We didn’t win,” she said.
46.
December 24
9:39 p.m. EST
Dani said she needed to think. Tommy wanted to help her, but without knowing exactly what was bothering her, he didn’t know what to do. He focused on practical matters, on the boat, and on getting them back on solid ground.
The city lights of Stamford glowing in the sky downstream told him they were approaching the ocean and open water. The floodwaters had joined with the Georgetown River, causing it to overflow its banks, where the people and the businesses were accustomed to periodic flooding and were prepared for it. There was too much debris in the water, and it was still too dark to safely turn the boat around and head upstream, so he went with the strong current, riding the high water as they passed beneath Interstate 95, which paralleled the shoreline.
He dialed the radio to the local NPR station, which reported that the only structures seriously damaged by the floods had been the school and the research campus for Linz Pharmazeutika, where the building closest to the river, Building C, was completely destroyed. He called Ruth to check in. She didn’t have good news. She hadn’t heard a word from either Quinn or Cassandra.
Tommy managed to raise Frank DeGidio on a police frequency to make sure he was okay.
“Any casualties?”
“They’re still trying to count. There were a number of people at St. Adrian’s for some sort of celebration. That place was wiped out.”
“How about in town?”
“None in East Salem,” DeGidio said. “They’re calling it a miracle. The whole lake spills down the valley and nobody gets hurt. We thought we had one but turns out we were wrong—you remember that kid who killed that girl?”
“Amos Kasden?”
“Yeah,” DeGidio said. “Apparently the floodwaters disinterred his grave, because we found his body washed up near the school. Anyway, looks like East Salem got lucky.”
“Looks like,” Tommy said. Amos Kasden had been cremated, but no matter.
“You’ll never guess what they found at the bottom of Lake Atticus after all the water drained out,” DeGidio said. “Some guys went up there to survey the damage.”
“A Harley Fat Boy and a Night Rod,” Tommy said. “And the 2004 Honda CRV George Gardener drove into the water when he disappeared.”
“How’d you know?”
“Just a guess.”
“Okay, wise guy—guess what else? Guess what was clogging the floodgates at the bottom of the dam?”
“What?”
“A 1968 Mustang Boss. Wasn’t that the car you sank in the lake when you were racing Gerry Roebling on the ice in high school?”
“Do you really think I’d do something that lame?” Tommy said. It had been a stupid prank in high school, a dare that made him drive his car out onto the ice and then fall through, but it had been part of God’s plan, even then. If his car hadn’t blocked the sluice, the rain might not have overwhelmed the dam. He’d been playing his part, even in high school, when he had no idea of what was to come. The wonder of it all astonished him.
“Yes, you would,” Frank said. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For saving my life back there,” DeGidio said. “I’m gonna make sure people know what you did for the town.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t,” Tommy said. “I’ve really had it with the whole fame thing. Right now, the less attention I get, the better.”
“Okay. I gotcha. Merry Christmas, Tommy,” Frank said.
“You too. Merry Christmas,” Tommy said, and hung up.
“Maybe not so merry,” Dani said.
“Dani—talk to me. Tell me what’s bothering you.”
“We failed,” she said, turning to face him. “Look.”
She held up a small plastic case. It was Quinn’s case, containing the water samples taken from Tommy’s pond and from Lake Atticus, as well as the reagents Quinn had devised to test for the presence of the endocrine disrupting agent. The Doomsday Molecule. That name felt right to Dani now. It was a simple test. Take a water sample, add the EDA reagent, and if the water turned red, it meant the water was contaminated.
“Watch.” She took a water sample from the bottom of the boat, Lake Atticus water, and added the reagent. It turned red.
“We were too late,” she said. “Ed Stanley was right. It’s already happened. It’s already spreading.”
“We did the right thing,” Tommy said. “We just have to figure out what to do next.”
“What would that be?” she said. “We can’t clean up all the water in the world. After all this. After everything we did …”
“Dani—”
“After Charlie and Ben … I don’t understand. We couldn’t let them kill all those boys. How could we fail? How? How could we fail?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I don’t have an answer.”
“No Plan E?”
“No Plan E,” Tommy said.
The rain had stopped. Tommy gazed toward the sea and realized they’d drifted into Bowden Harbor. To his left he saw a single star in the sky. He recalled the stories of the star of Bethlehem, but the star of Bethlehem had risen in the east. It was the North Star he saw, unless the axis of the earth had changed.
He dumped the water sample Dani had given him overboard, then leaned down to rinse out the test tube. He raised the test tube up to look at the city lights through it. The water was clear. Just curious, he poured some of the EDA reagent into it. The water remained clear. He dumped the contents overboard.
“At least the water here isn’t contaminated,” he said.
“Well, this is saltwater,” Dani said. She could hear the despair in her own voice, and she didn’t like the sound of it. She sighed. “Nobody drinks saltwater.”
Then, in an instant, she had an epiphany.
“What did you say?” she asked Tommy.
“I said the water here isn’t contaminated.”
“And what did I say?”
“You said it’s saltwater, and nobody drinks saltwater.”
“Banerjee thought Carl must have drowned in saltwater, but he didn’t,” Dani said. “I remember that when he was eating, he used way too much salt. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t good for him.”
She reached into the plastic case for a fresh test tube and handed one to Tommy.
“Fill this with saltwater,” she told him.
She filled the second test tube from the water in the bottom of the boat and added the EDA reagent. It turned red. She added saltwater to it. It turned clear again. She repeated the experiment and got the same results. She started to laugh.
“Tommy,” she exclaimed, “I could be crazy, but—it’s too obvious. It’s so obvious they wouldn’t even think about it.”
“What is?”
“Salt,” she said. “The antidote is salt.” She laughed in full now, no reason to hold back. “They tested the drug in fresh water. They wouldn’t test it in saltwater, because nobody drinks saltwater.”
“Still not following you,” he said.
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“Quinn said they had to modify the drug right before the release because the side effects were so extreme that nobody would keep taking it. He said it takes a few months to build up in the body before it has any effect. All drinking water recycles through the oceans. Even if you put the drug in fresh water, eventually the salt in the oceans would nullify it. We didn’t fail. I mean, we did, but God didn’t.”
“What about the red version they developed at DARPA?” Tommy said.
“The blue version recombines with molecular metabolites already in the water to feed the virus,” Dani said. “The red version is just the concentrated virus. It’s the same thing once you dilute it in a large reservoir.”
She turned to see the stars shining on the Atlantic. She took Tommy’s hand.
“‘God was moving over the face of the waters,’” Dani said. “Isn’t that how Genesis starts?”
“It sure is.”
“There’s a lot of salt in the ocean,” Dani said. “God took care of it. A long time ago.”
“I have a better one,” Tommy said. “‘Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.’ Mark chapter 9, if I recall.”
He saw a place to bring the boat in and steered for it. As he did, he started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Dani asked him.
“I was just thinking of how hard we tried to stop the dam from breaking,” he said. “If we’d been successful, the school would still be there. We failed. But God wanted us to fail. It’s just …”
“What?”
“The word is overused, but all I can think is, it’s just awesome.”
47.
December 25
2:14 a.m. EST / 8:14 a.m. CET
On the island of Sardinia, at a place called Porto Palmas just up the coast from the village of Argentera, a young shepherd boy was moving his flock along the dirt road that hugged the shoreline. His mother had asked him to bring the sheep out for the day and then hurry home because she had a special Christmas breakfast waiting for him, and presents under the tree as well. It was quite early in the morning, and so he was surprised when he saw a woman—a beautiful woman, at that—emerging from the sea. This was not a time of day when people usually went swimming, nor was this a part of the island commonly visited by tourists. On top of which, it was Christmas morning.
