"So this place is a commune," Stella said, turning to face Dr. Keogh. His mind seemed a million miles away, and he looked at her for a long moment before he seemed to gather himself. He felt it too, the same sense of belonging that washed everything else away. Only her mistrust had spared her.
When he focused on her, however, his gaze was as penetrating as before. "We strive to create a sense of community here, Ms. Orozco, a society with its collective eye on the goal of surviving. By taking responsibility for every aspect of their survival, from maintenance to growing their own food, they come to renew their appreciation for life itself."
Great. Every hospital could save a bundle if they could convince their patients that they'd mend faster by cleaning out their own bedpans. "But your policy doesn't extend to medical staff? You have trained medical people here?"
Keogh laughed. "Of course, aside from myself, we have five other doctors, ten nurses, an anesthesiologist, an oncologist and a radiologist. All of them are also patients. Well, here we are."
The cart pulled into a cart-sized space in front of the medical center. Stella noticed an RV and an ambulance beside the door—the same one they'd picked up Stephen in. A bulky cable ran from the wall of the medical center to a port on the side of the van. "I think you'll be impressed with our facilities, Ms. Orozco. Our emergency room is especially noteworthy." He held open the door for her and followed her in. A gust of refrigerated air blew past her as she stepped in. Over her shoulder, Dr. Keogh said, "Pressurized, you understand, to minimize airborne infection. Now, as a medical professional yourself, what do you think of this?"
She stepped into the room, and all doubts about the integrity of Radiant Dawn crumbled away. Whatever they were, they weren't just peddling snakeoil.
The emergency room boasted three trauma stations and an on-site radiology station. Peering in the window of what she thought was an odd closet, she saw a baby MRI apparatus. She'd never seen a model half that small before. There were a dozen beds, lining the L-shaped room. All empty.
At the crook of the bent room, a middle-aged woman in a track suit sat at the nurses' station. Four computer workstations alternated patient charts and video feeds from different parts of the building. A massive wall monitor behind her displayed a schematic of the hospice community, with red dots moving across it. One by one, the nurse highlighted a different dot and clicked on it. A health chart that appeared to be monitoring in real time sprang up. Satisfied, she closed it and moved on to the next.
"Our patients regain the world by getting out of their beds, but they receive more attentive care than any health enterprise in the world could provide relative to our costs."
"How do you track—I mean, how do you monitor them?"
"A computer chip in their ID bracelets monitors their functions and location for us." He looked at her and saw her next question gathering, cut it off. "Stephen had the misfortune to have misplaced his."
She watched the board as he talked. She counted eighty-five residents on it. "Not a lot of people for such a big place," she said, trying not to sound like she was angling. What was she angling for?
"The residents we have take up all our time. We do much more than merely care for them. We do quite a bit of research, as well. That's what occupies the upper floors. We're looking for a cure, but in the meantime, we try to teach our residents to live with their cancer."
"So nothing like what happened to Stephen has ever happened before," she said, more sharply than she intended.
"Oh, no. Stephen had other issues which contributed to what happened. We deeply regret it, but there's nothing one can do for another who has simply renounced the life force."
"Is his body going to be sent on to his relatives?"
"He had none, I'm afraid. We're going to bury him here in Radiant Dawn. The state recently granted us license to inter remains here. It may seem paradoxical, but we find it helps to maintain the network of mutual support we've built here, to allow the dead to continue to provide comfort for those still engaged in the struggle."
After talking to Dr. Keogh last night, she'd reviewed the morgue records, and by computer, those of Lone Pine and Independence. In the thirteen months they'd been in operation, they'd had twelve deaths, all of cancer. The bodies were delivered to the hospital in Lone Pine, which was a smaller facility and took a more parochial view of autopsies and such. Which explained why she'd never heard of them. But now they were burying them here. Why now?
The moon ladder
Stella suddenly felt that same wind she'd felt before at her back, and she turned to see Dr. Keogh was holding the door open for her. "Well, I hope you've learned all you hoped to learn from us. I've got to return to visiting with my residents, so, if you don't mind…"
She hurried through the door and retrieved her notebook from the cart. Dr. Keogh approached her. Plunged back into the blasting high desert heat, she was breathless, her lungs seared, and her mind bleached clean of lies.
"Dr. Keogh, I think you should know the real reason that I came to see you," she stammered. "I'm a fully trained, registered nurse with five years' experience in trauma medicine. I also have cancer—of the liver. The doctors have said it's inoperable and I have a year, maybe less, to live. I saw how advanced Stephen's cancer was, and how strong his body was even in the cancer's metastasized state. I'd like to come here. I don't want to die."
Dr. Keogh gently took her in her arms, stopping her from pulling out her resume or her charts from the hospital in Fresno. He held her for a long time, waiting for she knew not what. And then she was sobbing, and she knew this was it. She hadn't cried in front of anyone for as long as she could remember, perhaps not since her mother died. And now here she was with her puffy-eyed face buried in the shoulder of a strange doctor, bawling her heart out for a life lost before she even knew what to do with it. He held her and let her cry, drew the pain out of her like venom, and let her cry some more, until she felt nothing but the peace Radiant Dawn had given her when she'd first seen it. Dr. Keogh let her go and looked into her eyes, and she could almost see her sorrow swimming around behind them. "I'm sorry, my dear, but it's quite impossible right now."
Slapping her would've elicited less shock. "What? You won't…take me?" She sniffled and choked up in the middle of talking, hated herself for her weakness. The cleansed, open space he'd made inside her filled with hurt and red, red anger.
"We can't admit anyone once the residents have embarked upon their journey into the life force. There's no catching up, Stella. These people have transcended their illness, made themselves as one with it."
Her tears came again, but this time they were hot, stinging. Her hands ached to slap and scratch them. She made them hold each other back and scratch each other as she yelled at him. "How the fuck can you say that to me? How can you tell me I can't have what they have? What kind of heartless chingalo are you, to tell me I have to die, when these people can go on raking your leaves and making your beds? We Mexicans can pick a mean head of lettuce, you gringo bastard—"
His implacable calm wasn't even dented. "Please understand, Ms. Orozco, that we regret this more than you can understand right now. We wish it could be otherwise, but this process can't be revised. We all serve the life force, in our way."
"But as far as you're concerned, the brown people of the world can serve as fertilizer, eh?" An undercurrent of livid self-hatred rolled back on her as she slipped deeper into race-baiting. Never shamed of her heritage, she'd never invoked it for anything. Stella Orozco was a race of one, and it made her sick to hear her own voice using her Hispanic blood as a weapon.
"No, Stella, no. Listen to me," he said and he was closer to her than she would have allowed, just now, if she'd noticed him coming. His hands were on her arms again, but not restraining. She felt comforted, and she fought it. She lost. "Where there is life, there is change. Where life fights change, it breaks through…as cancer. But if your will to live is strong, you'll see the next Radiant Dawn. This is only the fir
st such hospice. There will be others. And you will go among them. We will teach you to live with your illness, which is the life force. We will help you to become one with it, and live."
He let her go again, and steered her toward the cart. As the driver backed it out, Dr. Keogh waved to her once and went inside. As oblivious to the driver now as he apparently was to her, Stella cried some more.
She was still crying when they topped the ridge beside her car and she made out the shapes of residents at work on the dusty field. They were digging irrigation ditches, laying the groundwork for turning the desert into a farm. She wiped her eyes and climbed into the car. She stopped and stood up again and craned her neck, looking at one of the fieldworkers. His ginger hair and lanky build. She'd never seen him upright, but that same perverse voice that'd urged her to flee told her she was looking at Stephen. Standing on his two legs in a field. Holding a shovel in his two hands. He was talking to someone with their back turned. She shielded her eyes against the glare and the airborne dust and strove to see just a bit more clearly, but the dust was caking her face, miring in her tears. Then the man he was talking to turned and faced her and he seemed to see her very clearly indeed. It was Dr. Keogh. He waved once more to her and watched her as she dove back into the car, started the engine and sped away.
She couldn't stop crying until she got home. After a long bath, she realized that despite what Keogh'd told her, despite what she'd thought she'd seen, she was beginning to hope, and that nothing else mattered.
7
Storch drove out to the place where he knew they hid. The place that immediately leapt to mind when Hansen had told him she'd been missing nine years. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of it before.
The skin traders.
A year before, they'd come into his store. They smelled like organized crime. Three men, two bodyguards flanking an out-of-work Greek lounge emcee in a powder-blue Dacron suit that seemed to squirt sweat from strategic gutters when he walked or waved his arms. Which he did constantly, as if he were freezing to death in the hundred and three degree heat. His shopping list reinforced Storch's suspicion that they were penny-ante crooks on the lam—sleeping bags, lanterns, shotgun shells, and such—but a few unusual items, like bolts of canvas, camcorder batteries, pepper spray and handcuffs led him to believe they were going into the rough-trade porn business. They had four moving vans that came and went at odd hours from a mining hut two miles north of Thermopylae.
Storch minded his own business and took their money, until about four months ago. The emcee was trying to hustle Hansen into procuring Thiopental for them in industrial volumes, and Hansen must have complained to the Field Marshal, who chased them out of town. Storch visualized the two or three underage girls he'd spotted in the van that tore out of his parking lot inches ahead of the Field Marshal's half-track. They'd never stopped in town again, but the vans kept coming and going.
The mysterious combatants whose secret war had trampled his life whirled about in his mind. He couldn't figure out which side was which. The feds—if they were feds—had raided the weapons cache that Harley was sitting on for someone involved in a race war, but had shown little or no interest in him. If he were under surveillance, they'd surely have stopped him by now. They'd have Hiram, and they'd have the girl. The girl…
What did the body of a girl kept alive for nine years, then unceremoniously dumped into the San Andreas Fault, have to do with a militia group? The skin traders were strictly business, however depraved. Why did the militia want so desperately for him to dig up a body and hide it? Why not call the police, or the media? People far less clever than Storch had concocted less far-fetched schemes to frame someone for murder. It had to be something they wanted him to see, to provoke him to take action. Harley's last words swam into his thoughts, that incomplete sentence that at the time had told him only that he wasn't alone in his room, and probably not holding his own gun to his temple.
Zane, some people will try to contact you soon. Don't…
Don't what? Don't believe them? Don't lead the feds, real or fake, to them? Don't do anything? DON'T—
Don't mess with Texas
Thinking made what he was about to do seem more absurd by the moment, and it was like throwing burning sticks into the cave of the Headache. For all that he had already lost, for all that he believed in, Storch stopped thinking.
He drove up a service road that paralleled the gravel track to the mining hut. A quick glance told him the hut was a losing proposition: two sentries in desert camo milled around out front. Storch counted eight ATVs and two pickups out front. All the real action was downstairs, anyway. He drove another half-mile up the service road before he found what he was looking for. A ventilation shaft, ten feet in diameter, bored into the sandstone beside the road. Chain link fencing stretched across the mouth of the vertical shaft, a rusted sign warning that the shaft was CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY. He looked around again. The road was rutted with knobby ATV tracks; they patrolled up here regularly.
He'd seen men in combat who sought their own deaths in action, and seen in them a cowardice that other idiots mistook for fearlessness. Had he already snapped?
He climbed back into his truck, drove it back out and two miles up the highway, pulling over at the beginning of a nature trail. He climbed out, filled a knapsack with his MP5, four extra clips, a modified Beretta, a hooded flashlight, a compass and a canteen, and began jogging. The awesome heat fired his blood like clay, burning all flexibility out of him. Any outcome short of victory or death would shatter him.
Twelve minutes later, he belly-crawled across the road and up the rampart of tailings around the shaft. With a tool off his belt, he snipped out a semicircle of fence and lowered himself into the hole. He shined a light down below. Sand and rocks and soda cans, fifty feet below his feet. He dropped a fist-sized rock, waited. It hit the bottom with a raspy thud, but the ground around it rippled, an oily motion, like waves in taut fabric.
Storch took out a compressor gun and fitted a piton into the barrel. The walls of the shaft were conglomerate, a peanut brittle of well-worn igneous rocks suspended in adobe and sand. Granite boulders littered the tailings below the shaft, in plain sight from the road. He drove the piton into one of these, hoping that the meth-crazed mob soldier who pulled patrol duty would be too busy trying to run over jackrabbits to notice the cable dangling from the rock into the shaft.
He lowered himself into the shaft, rappelling off the walls, sending showers of pebbles and larger rocks ahead of him. His feet scraped the bottom, dimpling matte black canvas. He shifted his weight to hang head down on the rope and drew his knife, listening. He heard water spraying from sprinklers. Beneath the dust of the shaft, he smelled a palpable musk of mold, sweat, shit and sinsemilla. He slashed the canvas and paid out another foot of rope through his clenched fist. An evil purple glow bled through the hole.
Storch descended into a Martian jungle. Hydroponic troughs lined the floor; ten-foot marijuana plants filled the tunnel as far as the eye could see in either direction. Each was laden with clumps of livid ultraviolet buds the size of coconuts. Their pungent funk curdled his brainwaves, so strong it became a noise, a fuzzed-out sub-bass under lilting sitars. He inserted his nose plugs, slipped on a surgical mask.
The stifling air was pregnant with mist, a sea of quicksilver mirrors in which Storch could almost see pointillist reflections of himself, stalking himself amidst black and violet phantoms. He rubbed gobs of resinous sleep from his eyes. Mist-irrigation hoses snaked along the canvas-lined tunnel walls, and fluorescent grow-lamps and space heaters made the mine a subterranean sauna. Storch dropped to the ground on a narrow path that divided the crops in half, listening. Beneath the white hiss of the sprayers, he could hear, no, feel, music, a throbbing bass pulse that shook motes of dust from the tunnel walls. His compass verified that it was coming from the direction of the hut. There was a junction of three shafts about five hundred yards ahead, where the generat
ors were located. Storch hugged the right-side wall, wading through the pot plants. The music continued to wax louder, covering the sound of his passage. He moved as quickly as he could while scanning for tripwires, mines or cameras. He saw none. Apparently, the sweaty emcee trusted his remote location and perimeter security to deter intruders.
He sidled through two bushes and ran into a barricade of translucent heavy plastic, stretched taut across the mouth of the shaft. Storch dropped back and knelt between the five-gallon plastic tubs in which the plants grew and peered out. At the intersection of four or five shafts, the slavers had erected a little studio, complete with a glassed-in dubbing booth, three tripod-mounted camcorders and a satin-sheeted bed large enough to have its own zip code. They were indeed in the porn business, but not the kind Storch, or any sane, healthy human being, could watch for pleasure.
Chains and leather straps dangled from a wrought-iron cage that enclosed the bedroom set, and from them hung a girl, limp, hooded. There was no one else in sight. Storch sliced the plastic with his combat knife and stepped into the studio. The air was cold and gelid with air conditioning. He could already feel the migraine building in his head.
A rack beside the cage was stocked with whips, riding crops, cattle-prods, a soldering iron, an acetylene torch, and something Storch had seen once in the museum of torture inside the Medieval Times theme restaurant in Anaheim. It was called the Pear, and it was designed for extracting confessions from wanton women. It looked like a lemon juicer made of steel, with a handgrip and an artichoke-shaped knob sticking out of it. When the inquisitor squeezed the grip, the knob opened up like a cruel flower, its edges honed to wicked sharpness. Storch couldn't eat his microwaved Medeival banquet meal for thinking that some member of the same species as him could conceive of such a thing for the express purpose of mutilating wombs.
Storch crossed the studio and took the girl's pulse. She was alive, but drugged into a stupor. He yanked off her hood. She was pretty, and probably not even fifteen. A rubber ballgag was stuffed in her mouth. Gingerly, he pried it loose, squeezed her earlobe to wake her and whispered in her other ear.
Radiant Dawn Page 8
