The Turning

by Davis Bunn

  The silence was eerie. All Trent heard was the sound of rain striking his helmet. Trent undid the clasp and lifted off his helmet. And froze.

  They were surrounded.

  He had no idea how many there were. Twenty. Forty. More. All of them riding nondescript old bikes, all dressed the same way, in slickers and helmets and boots. He tried to see if they were armed. But their hands not holding the controls remained hidden. Which he took as a very bad sign.

  Della shouted at the circled men, “Get out of here.”

  “Now, see, that’s kind of funny coming from you.” The biker nearest them lifted his visor. He was grey-bearded and narrow-faced, and his gaze was hard as flint. “You’re the ones that don’t belong.”

  “Move off, or we’ll take you down,” Della snarled.

  “You can try,” the man replied almost casually. “See, my buddies and me, we’ve been out there in real combat.” He scanned the clutch of silent bikes. “We know what it means to face a real enemy.”

  “You’re about to find out just how real we can be.” Della lifted the edge of her jacket and started to unholster her gun.

  “No,” Trent said.

  But Della was not made for following orders. She pulled the weapon free and cocked it.

  The sound galvanized their opponents. All of them, whoever they were, moved forward as one. Menacing in their silent intent.

  “Della, put the gun away!”

  “I didn’t come here to be chased off!”

  “No shooting! No deaths! We can’t—”

  “Can’t what?”

  Trent could not shape the words, we can’t win. Shooting even one of them would turn this into a melee. He could see that, even when he couldn’t make out any face except for the man directly before them. Della’s gun meant nothing to them. “You can’t shoot them all.”

  The van began to move slowly forward, surrounded on all sides by helmeted allies. These bikes rumbled softly as they rolled, the noise muted, an unspoken warning as they passed.

  Della glared fiercely at the frightened faces inside the van as it drove by. Rain dripped unnoticed from her hair. “So we’re just going to turn and run?”

  Trent was saved from having to reply by the biker behind them. “We’re outnumbered,” the man muttered.

  The closest biker hit his kick-start. “I’m outta here.”

  Their bikers thundered into life. The watchers made no move. They simply sat it out as Trent and the others turned around and slowly twisted their way back down the lane. Trent held his helmet in one hand so he could see study the blank visors they passed, trying to catch a glimpse of his unknown enemies. But all he saw was rain-streaked Plexiglas, reflecting the night back at him. Then they were past and rattling across the cattle guard. He jammed on his helmet as Della made the turn and hit the throttle.

  Gayle had been right after all. He should not have come.

  32

  “Let your work appear to your servants …”

  WESTCHESTER COUNTY

  Dexter’s friend from the VFW parked his bike and stood between  John and the caretaker, watching the last of the would-be attackers rumble away. John was glad his voice remained steady. “I can’t thank you enough for coming.”

  “We weren’t going to,” the man confessed. “What with the rain and all, we figured there wasn’t no need to make the trip. But some of us, well …”

  “Good to know your danger sense still works,” Dexter said.

  Alisha stood to John’s other side, shivering in the rain. “I was so scared it’s embarrassing.”

  “Ain’t no shame in fear,” Dexter replied.

  “Me, I was quaking in my boots,” the vet agreed.

  They heard the sound of approaching engines and stepped off the lane. The six bikes that had escorted the van rumbled past. John shouted a thanks, but the bikers gave no sign they had even heard, joining all but three of the others as they rumbled off into the night.

  The grey-bearded vet said to Dexter, “Good thing your other buddies showed up when they did.”

  John and Dexter exchanged perplexed glances. Dexter said, “What’re you going on about now?”

  “The posse you dragged in for back up.”

  “Friend, the only people I spoke to were there in the hall with you.”

  The grey-bearded biker looked from one face to the other. “This a joke?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  John said, “You’re telling me you didn’t know some of those who came to help?”

  “I’m saying the only friends I could get to follow me out are the three you see right over there.”

  Alisha’s voice trembled from far more than the cold. “Then who …?”

  They stood in silence, studying the darkness through the rain. Finally the biker climbed back on his machine, cranked the starter, and drove away.

  Celeste’s voice carried the soft lilt of slumber. “Alisha? What time is it?”

  “A little after eleven. I woke you, didn’t I?”

  “No, no, Terry and I just lay down. It’s been a long day. Wait just a minute.” There was the rustling sound followed by a door closing. “All right. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Not a single solitary thing.” Alisha sat in the padded chair she had drawn over to her cottage’s open window. She clutched the blanket tightly around her shoulders. “Except for how I can’t stop shaking.”

  “Girl, are you sick?”

  “No. But I should be. I’ve been standing in the rain for an hour. But I took a long hot shower, and I made some tea. I’m good.”

  “Why were you out there in the rain?”

  “Because.”

  The pastor’s wife huffed softly. “Now you sound like one of my children. The word ‘because’ don’t make a reason. It just starts one. Now tell me what happened.”

  “I think I just saw …”

  “What?”

  She finally breathed the word she had been thinking for a while now. “A real live miracle.”

  “Lord, have mercy.”

  She told Celeste what had happened. Or rather, what she thought had just gone down. “And the whole way back to my cottage, I kept thinking one thing. How I had to call my sister Celeste, tell her what I’ve witnessed.”

  “Now look what you’ve done. I’m crying. I never cry.”

  “I believe I’ve sung that same song myself a time or two lately.”

  “What do you want us to do here, sister?”

  “Pray,” Alisha replied. “Pray just as hard as you know how. This is not over yet.”

  The rain ended while John and Heather prepared for bed. He opened the rear window of the cottage and slipped in beside his wife. Drops cascaded from the roof and pattered upon leaves. It sounded to John like living cymbals. Heather sighed as she nestled in close. John said, “I need to tell you something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “But I don’t know if I can.”

  “Start with one word. See where it takes you.”

  John described the confrontation with the bikers. By the time he finished, Heather was sitting up, supported by all the pillows except one. She asked, “Where did they all go?”

  “They followed the others back out the exit.”

  “Did anyone think to invite them back to dry off? Or at least thank them for what they did?”

  “I tried to thank them. But I don’t know …” John tried to recall if anyone had spoken the words, but could not. “Tell the truth, I’m not sure of much of anything except they kept us safe.”

  Heather did not object or argue that he was seeing things. Instead she merely asked, “What are you going to do now?”

  John smiled at the unseen ceiling. “Whatever God asks.”

  She moved closer still. “That’s my good man.”

  33

  “What then shall we say …”

  MANHATTAN

  By the time the taxi deposited Trent in Manhattan, he was numb  with
exhaustion and cold and fear. Della had dumped him off at the Yonkers bus depot and ridden off without a word or backward glance. On the taxi ride into the city he had booked a room at the Millennium Times Square. He checked into the hotel, refused the bellhop’s offer of assistance with his backpack, and took the elevator to his room. He dumped his sodden clothes in the trash, hung his rumpled suit in the closet, and ordered a room service meal while he waited for the bath to fill. He groaned his way into the steaming water. But he found no peace. Behind his closed eyelids flashed one rain-swept image after another. How could they have known he was coming? Dermott had assured him the Barrett compound was lightly guarded. Where did they find an army on such short notice?

  He dried and dressed in the hotel robe and ate a sumptuous meal, but all he could taste was defeat. They had beaten him.

  He wheeled the dinner table outside his door and climbed into bed. His sleep was tormented by the same images and emotions that had chased him into the city.

  It was 2:15 a.m. on the bedside clock when he rose from the bed and went over to the window to look out from the thirty-ninth floor. The only sign of the departing rain was windswept clouds turned a coppery hue by the city’s lights. The air was washed clean, and the surrounding buildings looked etched in wet crystal. The horns sounded softly from far below his post. Trent pounded the glass, wanting it all with a hunger that gnawed at him.

  Soon after he returned to bed, the dream rose up and captured him. He was back in his childhood home on the outskirts of Tulsa. The scene was familiar enough, for he often dreamed of being trapped there, never finding a way out or up. In his dream he stood in the center of the kitchen and breathed the same dry acrid air that dominated Oklahoma summers. Only tonight there was a unique difference. Instead of chafing at his prison, Trent felt surrounded by something … love?

  His mother stood at the battered counter, drying the dinner plates and singing some long-forgotten tune from church. She had done her best to make a home for her only boy, smiling and praying her way through the long empty absences while her trucker husband was out on the road. Church was something Trent had rebelled against at an early age, only in this dream, everything was different. He did not rage against her quiet acceptance. He did not despise their hardscrabble life. Instead, he knotted his tie and he walked with his mother, down the street he remembered so well, and entered the sanctuary at the end of their road. He knelt with her and he sang with her and he prayed. And he felt flooded with the contentment and the joy that he had spent a lifetime declaring was a lie.

  The dream sped up then, sweeping him along in a life that had never existed. The church put together a series of donations to cover the cost of his final surgeries, adopted him as a member of almost every family in the congregation. He excelled at university, and he served there with a student ministry. He met a wonderful girl doing pre-law, and they married. He supported her through law school, then she did the same while he completed his doctorate in finance. They moved to Washington. He worked for an investment bank, then a think-tank, then a university. She took time off to raise their three children, then accepted a job with the government. They remained deeply involved in student ministry. They were happy. They loved each other, their children, and God …

  When Trent finally was released from the dream, he discovered he was sobbing so hard he could hardly draw breath.

  Trent fought the sheets for another hour, then dressed in the suit he had last worn on the private jet. He left the hotel and wandered the empty streets. Times Square never looked so tawdry and forlorn than at quarter to five in the morning. He had breakfast at the Broadway Diner, just another bleak face amid the strange predawn company. Trent studied them with idle curiosity, the red-eyed gamblers; the all-night partiers; the corporate types with hard empty gazes; even a pair of weary chorus girls with sparkle across their cheeks. Not a winner among them. The only thing they had in common was brittle desperation, the urge to reach for what they could no longer name. The chase had been so hard for most they had forgotten what they strived for. They just kept running from night to night. Trent finished his breakfast around the bitter knot in his gut.

  Memory of the dream still gnawed at him as he returned to the hotel and checked out. He tried to tell himself it was just a typical move for his subconscious to attack him when he was down. But the image of that other Trent Cooper, that happy man and his joy-filled life, chased him from the hotel. As though every decision he had ever made was wrong. As though he had convicted and sentenced himself to a lifetime of angry and futile battle.

  Trent arrived at the Mundrose Headquaters at a quarter past six. There was nothing to be gained by waiting. He pushed through the side entrance, greeted the bored guard, and took the elevator upstairs. The knot at the center of his being tightened and swelled at the sight of his suitcase standing beside his temporary desk. He told himself it was only because Gayle had no idea where he had spent the night, so had no alternative but to leave it here. Yet all he could think was that he was one step from taking his final ride down the executive elevator, walking through the power door, and being deposited permanently on the street.

  Trent went through the motions for an hour and a half. He answered a few emails, he cleared out his desk drawers, he returned a couple of calls. His voice sounded flat, emotionless. As though the nighttime assault had drained him of the ability to feel anything, even defeat. He found himself thinking about the faces he had seen in the diner. And knowing that was exactly how he looked.

  The call came at a quarter past seven. Dermott McAllister spoke in that strangely toneless manner, “Ah, Mr. Cooper. How good to find you available.”

  Trent searched for some response, but all he could think to say was, “I’m glad it’s you.”

  The little man seemed caught off balance. “Excuse me?”

  “That you’re the one to wield the knife. No polite emptiness or words neither of us believes.”

  “You think I’m calling to fire you?”

  “Of course. I failed.”

  “And you’re glad ?”

  “Not that it’s happening. That it’s you. And yes. I am. A clean savage cut. Over and done.”

  There was a moment’s silence, then, “Actually, Mr. Cooper, I am the one who must apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “I’d assured you the Barrett complex held no guards. I was misinformed. I understand from Della that the opposition was quite substantial.”

  “They had an army on wheels.” Trent shivered at the memory, how they seemed to be drawn from the rain, so many he couldn’t count. “We were surrounded.”

  “And yet all Della saw was the fact that they were unarmed.”

  “They didn’t reveal their weapons. That’s not the same thing.”

  “Precisely what I told her. It was your cool head that saved us from a potential calamity.”

  Now it was Trent’s turn to hesitate. A second tremor coursed through him. For the first time, he was willing to accept what he was hearing. “But—we failed.”

  “You retreated intact. You saved us from a calamity that would have turned public attention against us. You responded wisely to the unexpected.” The man gave Trent a chance to respond, then went on, “I confess I thought you were foolish to want to participate personally. A thrill-seeker gone bad, as it were. Now I see I was wrong.”

  “That’s not why I went,” Trent said. The shivers assaulted his words, and he didn’t care. His entire being resonated to the realization that he had a tomorrow. “I wanted to show Mundrose Group that I understood the words, whatever it takes. Understood, agreed, and I would do exactly that.”

  “The message has been received,” Dermott replied.

  He knew he should just hang up. Accept the news was good. He had another day to prove himself. But the confusion would not let go. Not yet. “But Barry Mundrose is all about results. And I’ve been thwarted by them. Again.”

  “On one level, that is correct. But on another
, you have created an enormous success.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I will allow our superiors to explain. Good-bye, Mr. Cooper. I look forward to working with you again very soon.”

  A half-hour later, Trent was still seated in a motionless daze when others began arriving for work. His mind, however, spun with brilliant speed. Beneath the stunned immobility burned a slowly mounting fury. The dream continued to whisper at him, only now his response was clear. He raged at how he had been assaulted at his weakest moment. He hated how the concepts made a mockery of his ambition and his hunger. He felt the tendrils of invitation and choice become consumed by the fire at the center of his gut. Until finally the whispers and the memories left him alone. But not even that was enough. He wanted revenge. He sat in his shell of rampant isolation. And he planned.

  Barry Mundrose’s outer office gradually filled with executives seeking passage to the inner sanctum. Trent found himself studying the faces. Their expressions mirrored the hunger and the frustrated rage he felt within himself.

  Trent forced himself to focus on the coming meeting with Barry Mundrose. He keyed in his project website and watched the latest advert put together by Colin Tomlin and his team. The stars from the television show and the film and the music videos danced with the ghouls beneath the flaming words, Hope Is Dead.

  Trent had designed the message as simply a means to an end. He had created the slogan to help him reach his goals. But now he lifted his gaze to the executives clustered at the room’s other end. And he knew the logo was in fact branded upon his empty soul. And not just his. He could see it in the frantic aggressiveness shining from every face. Hope was indeed dead. The religious world revolved around a myth. All he’d done was clear away the dross and speak what most people already knew.

  Gayle was the last to arrive. She did not look his way, or speak to him. Trent missed her and the closeness they had known in Los Angeles. But he did not know how to breach her carefully erected barriers. She waited until Barry’s senior aide was called into the boardroom. Then she drifted over and said, “I didn’t know what to do with your suitcase. So I brought it here.”