When John wakes in the dark, for a delirious moment, that’s where he believes he is: in the guts of the black cabin. His skin feels hot. His breath comes in gusting pants. He isn’t sure whether he’s lying on his side or hanging upside down. He tries to move, but his limbs won’t respond, whether because he’s been poisoned or because he’s been bound tightly, he can’t tell. His mouth has been duct-taped shut, and his throat and nose burn with bile.
And then he sees the modem blinking and hears the furnace breathing and the hot-water heater burbling and realizes he is in the basement. Bound to the same chair where he found Dan Swanson several months ago. He made a choice then—the choice to return fully to his family, to reclaim his place in it—and now the choice has consumed and infected him. He hears floorboards creaking as someone approaches. Then the overhead light buzzes on. Maybe, in a moment, he will walk in. John himself. And he will wrap his own body in black plastic and weight it with chains and plunge it into a toxic lake. Because he has done this to himself.
But the person who steps hesitantly in front of him is Stacie. She’s not in uniform. She wears a pink wool hat with a yarn ball at the top, a down winter jacket, and boots that still carry snow in their laces. “Oh, dear,” she says and cringes when she stands before him. She leans in and picks and peels the duct tape from his lips.
He spits out the vomit clumping his mouth, and she says, “Oh, dear,” again. “You don’t look so good.”
He heaves and splatters the floor with a fresh surge. He coughs as he speaks: “I don’t feel so good.”
She works at the knots binding his wrists, then gives up and searches the nearby tool bench and returns with a box cutter and slits him free.
“How did you . . .” It’s difficult to find his words. His brain feels like it’s hazing back and forth between dreams and reality. He tries to get up and then realizes his legs are still bound. He has no idea if he’s been here for hours or days, but his joints feel ossified and his muscles larded. “How are you even here?”
“The nurse let me in. Your father’s nurse. She said she hadn’t seen you, but I spotted your Bronco in the shed, so I figured you were either dead or restrained somewhere in the house. And thankfully, here you are!”
“I’m so confused.”
“I’m sorry to say that, while you were out, all heck has broken loose.”
He slumps back and she kneels before him and keeps her gaze steady as she tells him everything that’s happened. Yesno is in the hospital, being treated for shock and several vertebral fractures. Talia is dead and so is Mickey Golden, both killed in a bomb blast at the Lumberjack Steakhouse.
“The Lumberjack?” His voice suddenly sharp with panic. “What about Jenna? Was she —”
“She’s fine. So’s everyone else other than a few people who got cut up by broken glass and flying debris. Everyone except for Walter Eaton, that is.”
“How’s that?”
“A steak knife magically flew across the street and into his parked SUV and hit him right in the heart. Weirdest thing, right? But nobody’s worried too much about it because he appears to have been the one who set off the device.”
His head feels loose on its hinges. “I’m sorry. This is a lot to take in,” he says and she nods understandingly.
“Would you like some candy?”
“What?”
She pulls some Starbursts out of her coat pocket. “You look like you could use something sweet.”
“No. Thanks.”
She takes a square for herself. “It’s going to be up to you now, John. Everybody else is gone. You can make this right.”
Pull the business out of the Boundary Waters. Cut off the contract with the Department of Defense. Take responsibility for the company while taking care of the Northwoods. The two things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
After a long time, he says, “Not yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Got some unfinished business that needs dealing with first.”
Stacie has been smiling encouragingly at him, but now the smile fades. “My father says I can’t trust you, but I said I believed in you. You’re not going to let me down—are you, John?”
John closes his eyes and massages the bridge of his nose so tightly that he sees a pulse of red. “I know I haven’t even said thank you yet, but I’m going to have to ask you for help.”
* * *
Victoria is eating again. Big breakfasts of turkey sausage and scrambled eggs and wheat toast smeared with marmalade, a short glass of orange juice with her coffee, a cranberry muffin on the way out the door. Wade whistles in the kitchen as he pops open cabinets, shakes salt, adjusts the burners on the stovetop. He wears an apron that says I Cook As Good As I Look.
In the mornings, he is all about speed and efficiency, but in the evenings he takes his time. He brings Victoria a glass of chardonnay and a small dish of Spanish olives and she reads a novel while he grills salmon on cedar planks or fries bacon in an iron skillet with brussels sprouts or massages a spicy dry rub into a beef roast. Then he turns down the lights and brings a flaming match to two candles and plays some jazz and uncorks another bottle of wine and they gather at the table for a long, luxurious meal. There is always dessert. Triple chocolate cake he tops with raspberries. Crème brûlée he crisps golden with a butane torch.
“This is nice,” she says one night. “Thank you.”
“This is just a taste,” he says, “of what retirement could be like.”
“I think I’d pop,” she says, scooping into a coconut sorbet and letting the spoon linger in her mouth.
The color has returned to her cheeks. Her hair has shine, a lustrous silver. The hollows in her body have smoothed out with fat. Her fingernails are no longer brittle from a lack of calcium. And her throat stops hurting, no longer singed with acid. Five pounds, ten pounds, twenty. It comes on fast, and she needs it. The weight makes her feel more substantial, stronger, whereas before, she felt so frail she was in danger of snapping. She still leaves for work every morning, but without the septic dread she once felt. Wade waves at her from the window when she backs out of the driveway, and she toots the horn and blows him a kiss.
She still spends ten hours a day in the subterranean lab in building 3, but now she is testing Hawkin for another reason. For herself. For him. They need to know what he is capable of if they are going to successfully manage his escape. The boy no longer refuses his meals or lingers tiredly on his bed but jumps up immediately upon her arrival, eager to get started. “How much longer will it be?” he always asks in a whisper, and she can only say, “Soon, my dear.”
She and Wade keep their packed luggage ready by the front door. They talk at length about what-ifs and might-bes, excited about their uncertain future. He fusses over her diet and rubs her feet and back with lotion and draws up lavender-scented baths for them to soak in.
Maybe a year had passed since they made love, but now they make up for lost time. She reaches for him in the dark, shuts off the television, nuzzles his neck on the couch. She surprises him with a negligee she hasn’t worn in over a decade. Afterward, when they lie spent and panting with their arms around each other, he thanks her. “I missed you,” she says and bites his ear.
In Northfall, most people shop for groceries at the Pamida or the Walmart Supercenter, but Wade is fussy about his food and insists on the Wellness Co-Op, where the air smells like spicy soaps and crumbly cheeses. Victoria joins him as he sniffs a cantaloupe, squeezes a tomato, burrows through a messy pile of cilantro. Then they hear a throat being cleared and turn to find a man standing close behind them.
Victoria would not have recognized John except for his birthmark. His eyes are black hollows and his cheeks are unshaven and he wears a hat pulled low. “Tomorrow” is all he says before walking away.
35
* * *
Thaddeus is out of town when it happens. A U.S. warship was attacked and sank in the Sea of Japan only a hundred miles off
the Korean coast. Though at first a torpedo was suspected, some of the sailors claim the gash in the hull came from something else. Something massive they saw rise out of the deep.
Gunn is on a carrier studying sonar readings when a petty officer brings him a satellite phone. He says, “Yes?” and listens for a long time and does not speak. Finally he says, “This is going to take a moment to process. Stand by.” He sets down the phone. His breath whistles from his nose. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes and puts them back on. He brushes some lint off his sleeve. He picks up the phone again and the voice on the other end says, “Please advise. What’s the plan?”
His mouth opens, but for a few seconds he can’t find the words. “I’m going,” he finally says, “to kill that bitch.”
* * *
The walls of the motel room are pine-paneled, and the overhead lamp is dirty with dead flies. A painting of the woods in winter hangs crookedly. The television is on and plays the Cartoon Network on mute. The bedspread and the carpet are similar shades of orange, both spotted black with cigarette ash.
Hawkin sits cross-legged on the bed, a fat stack of comic books in front of him. They are brand-new but already rumpled and wrinkled from him reading them over and over. All around him, he has carefully arranged candy in concentric circles. Milk Duds and Skittles and Kit Kats and M&M’s and Dots and Junior Mints and Sour Patch Kids. More than thirty packages altogether. He sprinkles them experimentally into a half-melted carton of strawberry ice cream, then spoons it up. “I have concluded the experiment,” he says, speaking with a full mouth, “and science has decided that the best flavor in the world is yellow Skittles and strawberry ice cream.”
The bathroom door is open and the water is running. Victoria calls out, “I respect your diligent lab work but respectfully disagree with your findings.”
“Try it.”
“No way.”
“Seriously, it’s so good.”
“Dark chocolate and red wine is about as crazy as I get.”
He scoots over to the night table. Four open cans of Dr Pepper sit there, and he picks each of them up until he finds the one with a few sips left in it.
Victoria comes out of the bathroom. Her hair is cut short around her ears. Instead of silver, it’s now a furniture-polish brown. “Well?” she says and runs her fingers through it. “How do I look?”
He tips back the can and shakes out the final drops. Then he squints at her. “No offense, but kind of like an old boy?”
At this they both laugh, an unfamiliar sound between them.
* * *
Twenty-seven hours later, Thaddeus is back on the ground in Northfall, studying the damage to the labs and reviewing surveillance footage and interviewing the staff, trying to piece together a narrative.
A concrete-walled hallway is so spider-webbed with cracks that it powders to the touch. A staircase has collapsed on itself like a broken accordion. A steel door—five inches thick, with nine security cylinders locking it in place—has been torn from its frame. Lights have shattered and the floors crunch with glass. A pipe broke and filled the ventilation ducts with water. A gas line ruptured and three offices caught fire and burned black.
One guard has a broken leg. One guard has a lacerated liver. One guard had to have over a hundred pieces of glass tweezered out of his face into a metal bowl. One guard has such a severe concussion that he has to keep his eyes shut because everything appears scrambled—arms coming out of ears, words spilling off pages and crawling away.
Gunn sits at a desk before a bank of screens. He fiddles with the time signatures of the recordings. Rewinds and pauses, fast-forwards and pauses. Zooms in and out. Here is Victoria spending the better part of the morning emptying clips of ammunition into Hawkin. At one point he pulls the clip on a grenade and curls his body over it, swallowing up the detonation. He is charged up with so much energy that his chest glows a constant blue, as if a new star were being born.
Here is Victoria exiting her lab and asking the guard stationed at the door a question and then Tasering him in the neck before he can respond. She and Hawkin don’t make it farther than the next hallway before the alarm sounds and the building goes into lockdown. Up to this point, she has sheltered the boy, half hugging him with an arm as they hurry along. But now he motions for her to stand aside.
He approaches a door and throws forward an arm. When the video is played at a normal speed, the door appears as insubstantial as paper torn by a hard breeze as it’s ripped off its hinges. Then Thaddeus slows down the clip and goes frame by frame. The instant the boy’s fist strikes the door, a kinetic blast blooms from his knuckles—the flowering, rippling blue of someone plunging into a sunlit pond. The force warps metal and shatters concrete. Victoria covers her ears and staggers back. The boy stands there a moment, looking at his fist uncertainly. But they don’t have time to marvel because more guards are approaching now, their weapons drawn, ordering the boy to stand down, stand down, stand down.
Hawkin doesn’t listen. He marches toward them steadily, ignoring the bullets that swarm the air and pock the walls and strike his body and fall uselessly to the ground. He comes to a place where two hallways intersect and pauses at the juncture. He is surrounded. He waits until the guards empty their pistols and then drops into a squat and punches the floor between his feet. The slow-motion playback reveals a translucent blue dome swelling briefly around him—and then bursting outward. The video here is disrupted as the ceiling collapses and the walls shrug down. Minutes later, when the dust finally clears, Hawkin is kneeling at the bottom of a shallow crater. Victoria picks her way through the rubble and takes his hand and they hurry along once more.
There is one image Thaddeus keeps coming back to. It’s right as Victoria and the boy exit the building. He zooms in on and sharpens the image. Victoria’s face turns up to stare at the camera stationed above the door. It is difficult to tell, with the grainy quality of the feed, but it appears she is smiling.
* * *
In the motel room, Victoria sits on the bed, propped up by pillows, her head reclined against the backboard. The boy is tucked up against her waist and she combs her fingers absently through his hair. The television plays a black-and-white movie about an alien invasion. Saucers hover over cities. Ray guns blast. People scream and race through the streets.
“Maybe we should take a break from the TV?” she says. “You’ve been watching an awful lot of it.”
“Nah.”
“I brought some books. We could read them. Together.” On the night table there is a short tower of books she ordered online. At its top, her copy of Hatchet. The ripped pages and torn spine are repaired with masking tape.
“Maybe later. You could read one of my comic books if you want.” He reaches for the stack and holds up a copy of X-Men.
“No, thank you.”
“You sure? They’re good.”
“Quite sure.”
“Well, maybe we can read Hatchet later. But I haven’t watched TV in a hundred million years. So I got a lot of catching up to do.”
“I guess you’re right,” she says.
He shifts in her arms and gives several tiny grunts and she can tell he’s trying to find a way to say something. His voice is shy when he finally says, “Dr. Lennon?”
“You know you can call me Victoria.”
“That seems weird, but Dr. Lennon seems right.”
“Just try it.”
“Victoria?” The word comes slowly.
“Yes?”
“Do you think I killed any of those men?”
“I think you hurt them. But no. You didn’t kill anyone,” she says quickly.
“How do you know?”
She doesn’t but says, “I just do. Don’t you worry about that. Not for one more second. Okay?”
“Okay.” He twists his body so that he can look at her. “When am I going to see my mom?”
She tries to control her expression, to show him a smile instead of the frown she fee
ls. “We’re waiting to hear back from our friend.”
“Can’t you call him? To see when he’ll come?”
“I’m not supposed to call anyone. I’m supposed to wait.”
“How long?”
She has already told him but repeats it patiently. “Six to twelve days. That’s what he said.” They are on day seven, but it feels like longer. With the shades pulled and no sense of night or day, it’s just another version of the laboratory cell they shared before.
“But why can’t you just call him and see for sure?”
“Because they might be listening.”
“You think they’re looking for us?”
“I know they are.” She squeezes him and not for the first time considers how soft his skin, how fragile his voice. For everything else he is, he’s also just a boy. “You’re a pretty special guy, you know.”
He sounds especially small when he says, “Now they know what I can do. What I can really do, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Now it’s not a secret.”
“That’s why we can’t be too careful.”
“What’s the name of the man? The man we’re waiting for?”
“His name is John Frontier.”
“Why does John Frontier want to help us anyway?”
It’s a question she isn’t sure how to answer. She asked him the same thing. Why would he take such a risk? What did he stand to gain from all of this? He had casually mentioned a trade, a deal—something to do with omnimetal and a property sale—but she didn’t believe him. There was something about the way he shifted his eyes and forced a casual voice before finally blurting out, “A boy needs his mother, okay? A boy should be with his mother.”
The Ninth Metal Page 26
