"You've been fucked up for years," Woody said.
Frank didn't laugh. "I mean it. You think about this thing too much, and it gets really weird and scary, Woody. So do what you told me—accept what's good about it and forget the rest. Leave it alone. Really. Just leave it the hell alone."
~*~
He tried. He tried to let it drift away, to lose himself in the alternate reality in which he now irretrievably lived, tried to adjust himself to a world in which things were different. His personal life could not have been better. The children were wonderful, bright, and loving, and Tracy was the wife and friend he had hoped, when he was young, that she would be.
So Woody immersed himself in his family and his music, trying to accept through indifference a world in which Walter Mondale had become president in 1984, only to be defeated in '88 by George Bush, who thus became the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutively. Such things, Woody told himself, did not affect him in major ways, and he wrote music that was different, but still his, planned his next album, readied himself for his approaching Japanese and European tours, tried to fill his mind with all these things so that Keith Aarons would find no room there.
And while Woody attempted to banish his dead friend from his mind, that friend, alive, healthy, and universally dangerous, drove into the east Texas town of Bone, looking for death on the wind, seeking the end of humanity, and the salvation of the earth.
Chapter 13
Keith Aarons's car, a 1976 Chevy, was as dusty and weathered and authentic-looking as his new, false identity. Creating identities and backgrounds was, along with assassination, demolition, and unauthorized computer entry, one of Keith's most well-honed skills. Since 1970 he had concocted over fifty of them. Today he was, and would be for several months to come, Peter Francis Sullivan, a man with a past so disturbed and brilliant that he trusted he would be irresistible to those who ran the lab.
Bone, Texas, did not look like the kind of place that housed the lab. In fact, Keith thought, it didn't even look like a place named Bone. Bone should have been situated on a barren strip of desert, with steer skulls next to the single dirt road in and out. But instead it nestled on the southeast edge of Davy Crockett National Forest like a patch of moss among stands of pine trees, actually green there under the summer Texas sun. Keith hadn't known there was anything green in Texas. But Bone was more reminiscent of the woods of his own western Pennsylvania than of the other times Keith had been in Texas.
The first had been in 1979, when he had flown into Corpus Christi to sabotage the Tarbick Oil Refinery after one of their tankers spilled 800,000 barrels of crude off the coast of South Carolina. The little he had seen of the land around the city had been sparse and hellish, and the other Texas cities he had done his work in had been little better, so Bone came as a pleasant surprise. The houses were clean and simple, the streets swept clear of debris. It appeared to be simply a well cared for company town. Funny, he thought, how deceptive appearances could be.
Was this little town the place, he wondered, from which the plague could spring, from which the microbes could come charging across the planet slaying all in their path, the microscopic army of Gaia, the earth, with him as commander?
He smiled at his delusions of grandeur. But perhaps they weren't delusions after all. Perhaps his fondest dream could be very real, and Bone, Texas had precisely what he sought.
He parked his car in the town square, bought a copy of The Bone Courier from a machine, and walked into Red's Tavern, where he sat at the bar and ordered a bottle of Lone Star. At that time of day there were only a few patrons, so the place was quiet except for a country song coming from the tinny speaker of the radio above the bar. Keith scanned the want ads of the eight page weekly, and stopped when he noticed the ad for the very tavern in which he sat.
He looked from the paper to the dour, paunchy man behind the bar. The man's doughy cheeks were peppered with freckles, and his hair, though nearly pure white, was still crowned with sandy patches. "You the owner?" Keith asked, a perfect east Texas twang falling softly in the dark room.
"Yep," said the man, pouring himself a shot of Old Grandad and downing it in one jerky motion.
"Still need a cook?"
"Uh-huh."
"What's the hours?"
"Five pee-yem to eleven, ev'ry night but Sunday. Pays fifty cents an hour over the minimum. You cook?"
"Short-order. 'Swhat you need, right?"
Keith wasn't lying. He had learned to be an excellent short order cook as soon as he had realized that there was a shortage of them in nearly every town in the country.
"Wanna start tonight?"
So that easily Keith had a job. He gave Red Bates his false name and false social security number, both of which would, and would have to, stand up to far closer scrutiny than that given them by an aging, alcoholic bar owner.
Within the next hour Keith also had a home. Though Red recommended a boarding house two blocks away, Keith found an apartment for rent on the other side of town. There were too many people in a boarding house, and Keith required privacy.
That evening Keith began work at Red's Tavern. Red's refrigerator and kitchen were well stocked, and business was slow the first few hours, so by seven o'clock Keith had a large kettle of chili bubbling on the stove. Then the crowd hit. Keith fried burgers, made sandwiches, threw french fries into the deep fat fryer, then slid the plates through the opening where Mae and Sally, the two waitresses, grabbed them and whisked them away to the tables. The chili moved slowly at first, but as people tried a taste of their friends' bowls, more and more bowls went out, and by eleven, when the kitchen closed, the pot was empty.
It took Keith a half hour to clean up the kitchen, and at 11:30 he took off his apron, went out, and sat at the bar. A grinning Red set a Lone Star in front of him. "Nice job," the man said. "You're fast. And that chili was damn good."
A few murmurs of agreement came from the bar and the booths, and a blond young man sitting with two other men held up his beer bottle. "You bet it was," he said, "and when you finish that Lone Star, Cookie, I wanta buy you another one!"
Keith nodded agreeably, and raised his own bottle to acknowledge the offer. In five minutes he was sitting next to the young man, whose name was Bob Hastings. His two friends, Al Freeman and Ted Horst, had graying hair and wore rumpled white shirts and ties loosened at the neck. Keith noticed the bulge of pocket calculators in both men's shirt pockets. These older men were neither as friendly nor loquacious as Bob. Horst drank his beer seriously, while Freeman did so guiltily, looking around as if to apologize for every sip. He smiled more often than Horst, but Keith thought it looked as though it made his face hurt.
Bob Hastings made up for their sobriety. He grinned and joked and went on and on about the chili Keith had made. "Damn," he said, "these guys are good cooks, but they never made nothin' to touch your chili."
Keith raised an eyebrow. "You guys cook?"
Freeman cleared his throat. "Just in a manner of speaking. We, uh, work at Goncourt Labs."
"Don't know it," Keith said. “Just new in town."
"Yeah, we all work there," said Bob. “Just got off our tours. A whole week of lazin' around now."
"Tours?"
Freeman spoke again. "We work for two weeks at a time, live there and everything, then have a week off."
"That's pretty weird," Keith said.
"It . . . aids in concentration. So," Freeman went on, abruptly changing the subject, "where are you from, Pete?" He used the name Keith had given them.
Keith told them he hailed from Galveston, but hadn't lived there for many years. When Bob Hastings asked where he'd been recently, he merely responded, "Up north," and smiled bitterly.
"Finally figured out back down here's where I belong.”
“Didn't like it, huh?" Bob asked.
"Didn't like seeing other people eatin' my lunch is the truth of the matter." He waved a hand. Don't rush it, he thought. Don't
look too anxious. You have time. "No point talkin' about what's done," he said. "Don't wanta sour you fellas' time off. So tell me," he went on, "what's the high school football team here like?"
~*~
That night in his apartment, on a mattress that smelled of stale beer, Keith Aarons lay awake in the darkness, writing in the book of his mind.
It was a book that he had started over twenty years before, after he had dedicated his life and begun his work. He knew, then and now, that he could not yet put anything down on paper. But perhaps someday, when people came to their senses, when the earth was pure again, and there was no need for his work, he could write it all down, tell his story, make them all understand, even the parents and the children of the innocents. He could show them how no one had died in vain.
But on paper? No. Words on paper were a confession, and if he one day made a mistake, if his deeds were less than flawlessly planned, if he were anything less than perfect, they would search and find and condemn. His words would burn him. And though he did not fear death itself, for he had seen too many die to think it terrible, he feared that death would claim him before he had completed his work, and that thought was unbearable.
He was not unlike other men. He needed to talk, to communicate, to tell what he had done, what he thought. Above all, he needed to rationalize his actions. So he wrote in his mind, saw his hand write the words, etched them into the convolutions of his brain, remembered all, and would someday write everything down on paper so that the world would not only know what work it had been, but also what pain it had cost him.
A double fire had burned inside him all these years. He had tried to quench the flames of guilt, while at the same time he strove to keep the coals of purpose burning red. It was hard. It had been hard from the very first. And he knew it would be harder still. But he worked on. And wrote on:
May 31, 1993:
They work for the lab. It's remarkable that Bob should have called me over, made it so easy for me. I'll be inside the place within two months. After I fill them in on the background, all I need is an incident.
It took me a long time to find them, but this has to be the place. Goncourt Laboratories. God, how many company files did I have to hack into, how many records until I finally found them, with their incoming shipments and their outgoing products not quite meshing, a little more coming in than going out. A cover, but not a cover for controlled substances.
Not the usual controlled substances, at any rate, but very, very controlled substances. Controlled. Until it's time to release them.
And then they become uncontrollable.
Like influenzas, viruses, AIDS.
It's unlikely, but maybe if I could trace them back far enough, they'd be responsible for the bubonic plague. Probably wanted it to just kill the Jews, and it got out of hand.
Well.
If things got out of hand once, they can get out of hand again.
Chapter 14
Woody Robinson continued to do what Frank McDonald had suggested. He put the instrument of death named Pan out of his mind, and concentrated on life.
The plans for the Japanese tour took much of his time, particularly since Michael Lester, his bass player, had been hit with a new strain of summer flu that the doctors claimed needed three weeks to run its course. The Japanese tour began, inconsiderately, in two. So Woody and the others spent much of their time auditioning bassists, finally selecting Ivan Redburn, who was twenty years younger than the rest of the band, but brilliant nonetheless. The plan was for Ivan to stay with them for the entire two weeks in Japan, giving Michael plenty of time to rest up for their late July invasion of Europe.
They rehearsed heavily the last week of June so that Ivan could lock in to the twenty-odd numbers in the repertoire. During a break, Woody flipped through a month-old copy of Newsweek in the studio's waiting area. When he read of Pan's killing of Mrs. Naomi Weeks in L.A., he felt a nauseating tingle in his throat. He finished the article, closed the magazine, looked at his watch, and went to one of the pay phones in the hall. He dialed directory assistance for the 412 area, got the number for Iselin University, called it, and asked for the Alumni Office.
"I'm trying to find the address of an old classmate of mine," he said when a woman came on the line. "His last name is Aarons, first name Keith. Class of '70."
"One moment, please," the woman said officiously, and put Woody on hold. A minute later, she spoke again. "I'm sorry, but the only student by that name is listed as deceased."
"Deceased?" Woody tried to sound surprised. "My God. Does it say when?"
The woman sighed in exasperation. Woody heard the click of fingers on keyboard, and the woman's next words were the date that Woody had etched in his heart, the date that in some other life had seen the death of the girl he loved.
"Thank you," he said, and hung up.
All right then. Keith Aarons was dead, and he had proof of it, not just some warped memories of people who were there in one lifetime or another. It was on paper in this lifetime, here and now. Keith was dead. And if Keith was dead, he couldn't be Pan. And if he wasn't Pan, Woody was not responsible.
When Woody heard the door to the studio creak open, he gasped.
"What's the matter?" Jim Columbo said. "I scare you?"
He made himself laugh. "No . . . the door . . ." He was about to say, It reminded me of another door, a door opening and closing, but he didn't.
"You ready?" Jim said. "You wanted to get through those other two numbers today."
Woody nodded and followed his percussionist back into the studio. Yes, Keith was dead. Everybody said so.
But why had he heard the goddamned door? And why did he hear it still?
Chapter 15
When the ROTC building exploded in the fall of 1969, Keith Aarons's first reaction was one of horror, not because the building blew up, but because of the person he knew was inside the building. As pieces of rubble fell all around him like charred, smoking snow, he struggled to keep from vomiting in terror. Then he turned and ran toward where he had parked his car, anxious to get in and drive away, far away from Iselin, somewhere where they would never find him.
But just as he was about to open the door, he stopped, made himself think. If he ran now, revealing that he was still alive, the charges brought against him would put him in jail for more years than he cared to think about. And then he realized that with any luck the remains in the rubble might be thought to be his own.
And he could be a dead man.
The thought aroused him like a young man's glimpse of his naked lover. A dead man. A man with no identity. A man who could be anyone, go anywhere, a man who could never be a fugitive because no one even knew he was alive. Oh Jesus, a dead man.
There was far more to it than his romantic imaginings, but he did not pause to consider the consequences. He opened the door, put the keys in the ignition, slammed it shut, and ran into the night, as he would run into so many other nights.
Now, he thought as he ran down tree lined streets, clinging to the shadows, ran away from where the sirens were starting to scream, now he must be a ghost, unseen, must live as a spirit, with no friends to help him, no one who would know he still lived.
The first night was the worst night, the first week the worst week, the first year the worst year. He learned quickly that it was not as much fun being Zorro as he had thought it would be. In fact, there was no fun in it at all. The only joy he felt in those first few weeks on the run was reading in a discarded newspaper that Keith Aarons was thought to have been killed while causing the destruction of a campus building. When he read that, he somehow felt that everything else would fall into place.
But that first night Keith slept in the woods near the reservoir. It was cold on the ground, and he awoke before dawn and took inventory of what he carried. In his pockets were a Swiss army knife, a comb, and a handful of change. In his wallet were twenty-three dollars and a number of identification cards, including his social security card, a
ll of which he tore into small pieces and buried beneath a layer of dirt and dead leaves.
There was also a photograph of his mother and father, taken at a picnic table his father had built in the back yard. He thought he could have been no more than five when the shot was taken. His father's hair was dark, his physique full, as yet unravaged by black lung disease. His mother was slim and pretty. They smiled out at him in black and white, and he realized with a grief that choked him that they were now as dead to him as he must be to them.
That moment was the closest he ever came to changing his mind, to going back and turning himself in. He cried for a long time, looking at the picture through a haze of tears, knowing that he could not keep it, that he could keep nothing that would in any way connect him to his past.
He could have no parents now. He must be Adam, sans past, sans navel, born of rage and fire and whatever else his God was, and he cried as he tore the photograph into fragments, placed the bits beneath the heel of his boot, and ground them into the dirt. Then he walked south, through the woods, knowing that he would eventually come out on Route 22, twenty miles away from Iselin, where he could hitch a ride into Pittsburgh. He didn't know what he would do when he got there, but it was the nearest city, and you could be anonymous in a city.
There were so many things he would have to do. He knew what they were, but didn't know how to go about doing them. If he wanted to live he would have to work, and he could not work without identification—a new name, a new history, a new social security card. But how were these things done? He remembered reading a book about a spy or assassin or someone getting a name from a tombstone, but then what? He would either have to find out or figure it out on his own.
As he hiked through the woods, the understanding of what he would have to endure became crushing, and he found himself nearly hysterical over the utter hopelessness of his situation. He giggled when he thought that he did not even have a change of underwear, and, when his bowels started to roil, walked for several more miles before defecating, gingerly used maple leaves for toilet paper, and felt uncomfortably unclean as he walked on. It was not romantic or exciting. It was unpleasant, tiring, difficult, and sordid, and it was the life he had chosen.
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