If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  42

  Blue.

  Not I. Not J. Yes, K. One flick.

  Tara is exhausted, but Shannon is pressing, and Tara won’t quit on her. She’s answered every question Shannon has thrown at her so far, and she’s surprised at how the task is sharpening her memory, bringing images back with clarity and vividness. The growing paranoia she’d felt with Oltamu has more precision now, and she remembers a specific question he’d asked, about whether everyone took the same route from dinner to the auditorium. She’d thought he was worried about being on time, but a man worried about his destination didn’t keep looking over his shoulder. He was worried about what was behind him, which meant that the place he’d come from might matter, and she remembers this name and is trying to spell it out, quite literally, for Shannon.

  Red? No. Two flicks.

  “Yellow?” Shannon asks, and then interrupts herself, a feat only Shannon could achieve. “Hang on, we don’t need to waste your time. It’s E, isn’t it? It’s Black Lake?”

  Tara gives one relieved upward flick of the eyes. You win Double Jeopardy! Tara thinks, and she wants to laugh hysterically. She’s never been so tired in her life. All she’s doing is moving her eyes, and yet it drains her more than any marathon ever has.

  “He came from Black Lake,” Shannon repeats, and now she has her phone out, tapping into it, probably searching for the town. “Black Lake, New York? Or there’s…a ghost town in Idaho. I hope he didn’t come from there. Was it New York?”

  Tara doesn’t know, so she doesn’t move her eyes. Shannon waits, then says, “Do you even know where it was?”

  Two fatigued flicks.

  “Okay.” Shannon lowers the phone. “Did he take any other pictures?”

  One flick.

  “Of you?”

  Two flicks.

  “Someone else.”

  Tara hesitates, then looks upward.

  “We’re going to have to spell, aren’t we?”

  One flick.

  And so they spell.

  Yellow—H. Green—O. Red—B.

  “Hobbs?” Shannon guesses.

  Two flicks, more angry than exhausted now; just let her finish.

  “Red?”

  No. Finally, they get there. Green—O.

  “Hobo?” Shannon says, voice heavy with disbelief. “He took pictures of a hobo?”

  She looks at Tara as if she’s crazy, as if this is the first clear misfiring of memory, and Tara wants nothing more than the power to reach out and strangle her. Her thumb twitches against her palm, but Shannon doesn’t notice, because Shannon is watching only her eyes. This is the only window out. For now. Tara has to stay calm, stay patient, and keep working at it. It’s 1804 London Street all over again—Tara trapped inside, Shannon waiting to rescue her from the outside, and the two of them working to widen the gap in the steel doors that separate them.

  “A hobo,” Shannon says, taking a breath. “Can you explain more than that?”

  One flick.

  “Spell it. Red line?”

  One flick.

  “A?”

  Thank goodness, yes, it’s finally the first column and first letter. A is a common letter, isn’t it? How in the hell is Tara never drawing an A in this thing? She’s got two of them in her own damned name!

  “Red line?” Shannon asks, and again, this is a yes, but Tara has to go all the way to the end of the row now to get to end of word, and halfway through she realizes that she didn’t need the stupid A anyhow—stick to nouns and verbs, damn it!

  So over they begin, but good news—it’s red again! Not A, not B, not C, but D, D for Damn it, I want my voice back.

  Green—O. Yellow—G. Thankfully, Shannon doesn’t make her indicate end of word again, but guesses. “A dog? That’s not what you mean. Tell me that’s not what you mean?”

  If I could kick you, Tara thinks, you’d have bruises for weeks. What in the hell am I supposed to do with that phrasing? “A dog? That’s not what you mean. Tell me that’s not what you mean?” How do you answer that with a yes or a no?

  So she doesn’t answer. She waits. She’s swell at waiting. She’s becoming the best there ever was in the game of waiting, a natural, a pure talent.

  Shannon gathers herself, finally understanding that her typical flurry of speech is not the way to go about this, and says, “Did Oltamu really take pictures of a dog named Hobo?”

  She says it in the tone of voice in which you might ask someone to tell you the details of her alien abduction. Tara gives her one flick of the eyes, a flick with attitude.

  Yes, it was a dog named Hobo, and kiss my sweet ass if you think I’m crazy.

  Shannon sets the alphabet board down flat on her lap and stares at Tara as if she can’t decide what to ask next. Tara wants to hold her arms up in a giant V for victory. She has achieved the impossible—not in coming back from a coma, not even in proving she’s awake despite being paralyzed. This is a truly heroic feat: she has rendered Shannon Beckley speechless.

  “You’re serious. Do you think the dog matters, or am I going on a wild…” She stops herself, holds a hand up, and walks her words back. Communication with Tara favors the short-winded, which doesn’t play to Shannon’s strengths.

  “Do you think it matters that he took pictures of a dog?”

  Tara doesn’t know, so she doesn’t answer.

  “You’re not sure?” Shannon says, beginning to understand what a blank stare means.

  One flick.

  “Did he take any other pictures after the dog?”

  Two flicks.

  “Did he tell you anything about the phone?”

  Tara wishes she could think of a way to communicate the odd camera and its unique grid, but she can’t. Or she doesn’t think she can, at least, but then Shannon does what only a sister could possibly do: she seems to slip inside Tara’s mind.

  “Was it a real phone?”

  Two flicks.

  Dr. Pine enters almost soundlessly.

  “Can’t you knock?” Shannon snaps, startled.

  He takes a step forward, brow furrowed, hands clasped behind his back, as if he would have been content to remain a spectator.

  “Pictures of a dog?” he says.

  “That’s none of your business,” Shannon says. Still not trusting him. Tara understands this but she disagrees with it. Shannon hasn’t trusted many people in her life, having been burned too many times, but for all of Shannon’s force of personality and will, she doesn’t have the most intuitive reads on people. Extroverts are too busy projecting their opinions and personalities to intuit anything submerged about anyone in their audience, in Tara’s opinion. Tara, the introvert—and has there ever been a more undeniable introvert than the current model of Tara Beckley? She’s the literal embodiment of the concept now. She does not see herself as superior to her sister in most ways, but she is more intuitive. Tara doesn’t distrust Dr. Pine. The very tics that make Shannon nervous are the reasons Tara trusts him. He’s genuinely concerned about her, and he’s genuinely concerned about his ethical dilemma in this situation.

  “Where’s your investigator?” Shannon asks.

  “En route. I couldn’t speak to her, but she e-mailed from the plane. She’ll be landing soon and coming directly here.” He pauses. “Would you like to wait until she is here before you tell me what you’ve been asking Tara?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fair enough.” He paces, hands still behind his back. Outside the window, lightning strobes in dark clouds, and the wind throws raindrops at the glass like handfuls of pebbles.

  “Your parents have gone to the hotel to take a short rest,” he says. “I didn’t object. If you wish to bring them back, though…”

  “No,” Shannon says, firm, and Dr. Pine seems unsurprised. He looks at Tara, and this time she answers without needing to hear the question voiced. Two flicks: no, he does not need to summon her parents. Mom is an exhausted mess, and Rick will battle with Shannon. Tara needs to save her energy
for the Department of Energy—ha! Why can’t anyone hear these jokes?—and whatever information this mysterious investigator will have. Tara wants to hear answers, and that will mean providing answers, a task that she now knows is utterly exhausting.

  “You could call the local police,” Dr. Pine suggests. “But you haven’t done that yet. Why not?”

  Shannon looks like she doesn’t want to answer, but she says, “I’m not sure. I guess because I haven’t had time to figure out what I would even tell them. And I’ve been instructed…I’ve been warned about trusting the wrong people.”

  “Warned by whom?” Pine asks gently.

  Shannon shakes her head and gives a little laugh. Dr. Pine seems to read it as frustration, but it’s more than that—Shannon is unsure of herself. Tara knows. Tara is just as curious as Dr. Pine, though. Where is Shannon’s information coming from?

  “Who have you told about the Department of Energy investigator?” Shannon asks Dr. Pine.

  “Just you.”

  “Really?” Those dubious Doberman eyes fixed on him.

  “Really.”

  Shannon takes a breath and leans back. “All this for a phone,” she says softly. “What in the hell was on that phone?”

  Even if they were using the alphabet board, Tara would have no answer for this one.

  Outside, lightning strobes again, but it is dimmer, distant. The storm is clearing. Tara hopes she can take some confidence from the symbol, but she doesn’t believe that. There are too many things she doesn’t know, and most of them are happening outside of these walls.

  43

  Abby fumbled for her harness. She’d been knocked out, but her helmet was still on, and she was upright, trapped in the seat. That meant she needed to release the harness, but where was the pit crew? She needed them. Needed help.

  Something wrong with her arm too. Broken, probably, and it felt like her hands were smashed together. Why couldn’t she separate them?

  She opened her eyes and stared at her hands as if they were unfamiliar, and only when a lightning flash lit the yellow cord that bound her wrists together did she remember where she was and that there was nobody in the pit coming for her.

  But she was too upright, just like if she’d been harnessed into the seat. Why was that?

  A cord was around her neck, too, that was why. She was bound against the headrest, the cord just slack enough to let her breathe but not to let her slump sideways or forward. The kid had positioned her well. He’d also put his black baseball cap on Abby’s head, pulled low, shading her face. That was what Abby had confused for the helmet. To any passerby who glanced in the car, she was just a woman in a baseball cap, dozing in the dark.

  Dax Blackwell looked over. “Morning, Abby.”

  When Abby turned, the cord chiseled across her throat. She winced, then refocused.

  It was the first time she’d ever seen the kid without the baseball cap, and even in the dark, his hair was a startlingly bright blond. It was cropped close to his skull, moon-white and luminescent in the glow from the dash lights.

  “Nice touch with the hat,” Abby said. Her voice came out in a dry croak.

  “I thought it would help. You had a little blood in your hair. Sorry about that.”

  The road rolled beneath them, the lights of Boston up ahead. They were still on I-95, cruising by the northern suburbs. The hospital wasn’t far away.

  “You’re lucky you’re necessary,” the kid said. “I’d have very much enjoyed killing you back there, but…priorities. Nice trick with the phone too. I almost missed it.”

  He took one hand off the wheel and held the phone up.

  Abby tried not to show her defeat. It had been the only win, the only thing she could take from the evil prick.

  “Interesting developments in Tara’s room,” the kid said. “Investigator en route, it seems. Department of Energy, no less. Do you understand that?”

  “No.” Speaking made Abby’s skull ache. She closed her eyes and waited out the pain.

  “You’ve done some research on our friend Amandi Oltamu,” the kid said. “Where is Black Lake? Seemed to confuse Shannon, and I don’t know anything about it either.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tara thinks Oltamu came from Black Lake, but my information said he came from Ohio. There’s no Black Lake in—”

  “Yes, there is.” Abby’s eyes opened. Suddenly she understood Oltamu. Something about him, at least. And why the Department of Energy would be interested in him.

  “Siri disagrees with you,” Dax said. “Surely you don’t mean to tell me Siri is confused? She’s a voice of reason in a mad world.”

  “Black Lake is not a town. Or even a lake.”

  The kid looked at her, interested now. “What is it?”

  Abby stared straight ahead, watching taillights pull away. Dax was keeping the Challenger pinned at the speed limit, refusing to tempt police.

  “It’s the nickname for a place where they run cars through performance and safety tests,” she said. “It’s fifty acres of blacktop, and from the sky it looks like dark water—that’s where the nickname comes from. You can ask a car to do anything in that space. A high-end car, tuned right, can be a lot of fun out there.”

  It could also be instructional, of course. The Black Lake was all about pushing limits. Sometimes you exceeded them. That was the nature of testing limits, of playing games on the edge of the deep end of the pool. Sooner or later, you slipped into it.

  “Oltamu wasn’t in the car business,” Dax said, and Abby didn’t argue, but she believed Oltamu might very well have been in the car business. He was the battery man—and every automaker on the planet was working on electric vehicles now. But if Tara was right, and Oltamu had just come from Black Lake in East Liberty, Ohio, then he’d been watching performance tests. You didn’t go to the Black Lake to test a battery-charging station. You went to the Black Lake to push a car to its performance limits—or beyond.

  Dax shifted lanes. Despite the late hour and the storm, traffic was thick. Welcome to Boston. Traffic was always thick.

  “We’ve had to reroute, and I’ve been tempted to drive faster, but if I got pulled over, I’d have a hard time explaining you, wouldn’t I?” He laughed, a sound of boyish delight. “It’s a waste of the car, though.”

  He put on the turn signal and then shifted again, gliding left to right in a move that would attract no attention, and yet Abby could feel that he was still learning the throttle of the Hellcat, the bracing amount of torque that even a light touch on the accelerator brought. It was a waste of the car with him behind the wheel. He had no idea how to handle it, how far it could be pushed. Or how quickly control could be lost.

  I made that gap in the guardrail, Abby thought dully. That was one hell of a move. Splitting traffic with the angle and acceleration perfect, then the hard brake and turn without misjudging the tires and rolling, putting it through a gap most people couldn’t hit at forty, let alone ninety, and doing it all on wet pavement…dumb, yes, and a product of panic, but…not easy to do.

  Strange and sad, how that still pleased her. It was nothing to be proud of—she’d been melting down, her nerves no longer merely fraying but collapsing like downed power lines, sparking flashes of failure.

  But it was also the first time she’d taken anything remotely resembling a test of the old instinct, the old muscle memory.

  The old Abby.

  For a moment, the woman she’d been had surfaced again. For a moment, she’d seen nothing but that narrow target, had anticipated the speed of the cars crowding in, felt the tires exploring the pavement in a way that was as intimate as skin on skin. She’d executed the intended maneuver perfectly and in circumstances where inches and fractions of seconds mattered.

  There weren’t many people alive who could have pulled that off without causing a deadly pileup, and she’d landed without even scratching the paint.

  And now you’re riding shotgun with a killer, tied to the seat, a
nd you didn’t even succeed in taking his phone from him. Some victory, Abby.

  Victories, though, like phobias, weren’t always rational. Sometimes they were very internal, invisible to the outside world. Matters of willpower or control were still wins. The short-term impact didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you’d held on in the face of adversity. A win was a win, as they said. No matter how small, no matter how private.

  She watched the traffic thicken as Dax rolled southeast, and she wondered how she’d feel with the wheel in her hands again. The same old panic? Or would it be diminished by the knowledge that when things went to hell, she’d maintained enough of her old brain and body to execute the escape maneuver? Tough to call it an escape maneuver when there’d been no real external threat, nothing except the irrational dread that soaked her brain like chloroform, but the brain didn’t operate strictly on facts; its fuel was emotion.

  This much, Abby understood very well.

  The exit for the hospital was fast approaching, maybe five miles away. She wondered what the kid’s plan was and if he had any concern, any fear. He projected nothing but confidence. He was to killing what Abby had once been to driving—a natural pairing, in total harmony with his craft.

  But killing Tara Beckley wasn’t his goal. Not tonight, at least. He had to get Oltamu’s phone to her, and she would need to be alive for that. How he intended to walk through a hospital and achieve this without attracting attention, Abby couldn’t imagine.

  She figured she’d be a part of it, though. There was a reason she was still alive, and it wasn’t his compassion.

  Dax shifted right again, decelerated, and exited. Abby didn’t follow this choice; if time was now an issue, then he shouldn’t abandon the interstate this far north. Then they were moving into a residential stretch, high-dollar homes on tree-lined streets. Driving farther from the hospital.

  The kid pulled into a parking space on the street, tucking in behind a behemoth Lincoln Navigator, and studied the road. His eyes were on the houses, not the cars, but then he paused and checked the mirrors as well. Satisfied by whatever he saw or didn’t see, he killed the engine.