After Death(86)

Even as that thought occurs to him, an extraordinary thing happens. A quarter of a mile earlier, leaving Protean Cybernetics, Gog and Magog crossed the nearest highway; they are a mile and a half from the next two-lane back road, between towns and in rough terrain. They top a rise, and at the bottom of the hill stands an SUV, recently arrived and warm enough to project a strong heat signature. As the dog-form robots pass the vehicle, an eerie figure materializes beyond it, a tall man, all but faceless in this green light that favors shape over detail. He isn’t as bright as the SUV, though brighter than everything else in the night. In his arms, he’s carrying what seems to be the limp body of a woman. Michael takes control of Gog and Magog, halting them, turning them toward this apparition. Man and machines face off at a distance of fifteen feet. By its fabricated shape, which contrasts with the rambled wildness of grass and brush, one other object declares its significance—what appears to be a spade that has been spiked in the earth by its blade and stands erect.

After a frozen moment, the green figure, like a specter that might have risen out of dark waters deep in the hollows of the Earth and might now wither back into that sea of damnation, instead drops the body in its arms and pivots toward the SUV. The dead woman doesn’t strike the ground and lie in a pale greenness of tangled limbs, but disappears entirely into the grave that has been dug for her. The license plate of the SUV is fuzzy, the numbers and letters like smeared ink on the green background, but readable. Gog and Magog record it, and Michael burns it in his memory. Although no trial seems necessary to determine guilt, he doesn’t command the robots to shoot down the killer, and they return to the journey on which they were embarked as the engine of the SUV fires up and it wheels away from the open grave.

Before his death—or something like death—Michael lamented the evil that humanity condoned. Since his return to life, he’s come to see that the evil he previously recognized was like an ultrasound image of a suspicious mass; with his new gift, he has surgically opened the patient and has found that the cancer is more widespread than he ever imagined. If it is true, as some say, that a beast of supernatural nature is the prince of this world, then no task of greater importance exists than to bring hard justice to him and his legion of princelings in the name of the innocent and generations yet unborn. Since coming to life in a makeshift morgue, Michael has not been able quite to see the shape of his future, to understand how he can best use his power. The encounter at the lonely grave has clarified his intentions for him. If he survives this night, he has a good idea how to be the agent of truth that events have made him.

Already he has slid into the DMV records and learned the name of the owner of that SUV. He has obtained the GPS code from the manufacturer of the vehicle and will know where it stops when the fleeing murderer garages it. He has also found a smartphone GPS locater issuing from the identical position of the SUV and moving with it now. It surely belongs to the killer.

Rifle in hand, he hurries into the kitchen. Nina and John have packed one cooler and closed it. The boy is almost done layering the last of the money in the second cooler, and Nina is shaping a length of aluminum foil to lay over it. Michael puts the AR-15 down and helps with the ice, then with the cans of soda and beer. They’re finished with the task in two minutes.

Nina expects to load the containers in the back of the Range Rover, but Michael says, “No time. Leave them here and come with me. Bring your Tac Light.”

“Come where?”

“Upstairs. An attic if there is one. As far off the battlefield as we can get.”

John is confused. “We’re hiding?”

“I’ll explain when we’re safe.” He snatches the rifle off the counter. “They’re less than three miles away, maybe eight minutes out.”

Mother and son are equally baffled and speak simultaneously: “Who? Who is?”

“The cavalry,” he says and further startles them by unlocking the back door.

He brooks no further delay, herding them through the ground floor to the front stairs.

Throughout the kitchen work, Michael has been both there and elsewhere, scooping ice but also swimming through the shared data networks of the nation’s telecom providers, seeking a name to match with the GPS signal issuing from the SUV that had been parked near the grave. By the time that he follows Nina and John as far as the landing between floors, he has the identity of the man who possesses the phone; it’s the same name the DMV lists as the owner of that vehicle. The murderer.





THE MYSTERY OF EVIL




Like a falcon on its hunting gyre, Calaphas circles the house. The stillness of the night’s creatures is reminiscent of the hush of the funeral home in which he was raised. Soon he will silence three more voices, bringing an even deeper quiet to this isolate, fateful property. His rifle comes with a sound suppressor attached, but even if the crack of a shot carries some distance through these hills of sleepers dreaming, and if a few awake, they will not know from what direction the sound came and will think it’s merely part of whatever stories they were telling themselves in sleep.

The hugeness of the moon, as he perceives it, and its icy appearance remind him of the terrible eyes of a woman named Britta Holdstrom, who was brought to Calaphas’s father on a December night, almost two months after the Halloween when Durand pinched off the breath of the old man on the gurney in the basement holding room. Britta was a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher, a beauty, who came home from Christmas shopping one night when a student, seventeen-year-old Gerry Grady, was lying in wait for her in the furnace closet off the garage. He rushed her after she unlocked the door between the garage and the laundry room, and a struggle occurred from there into the kitchen, where Britta fell and struck her head on the refrigerator and again when she collapsed to the floor. Not the brightest of lads, Grady intended to kill her after raping her, but somehow make murder pass for a suicide. Now she appeared to be dead. Coupling with a corpse didn’t excite him. Panicked, he decided to drag her into the garage, load her in her car, drive her to the old quarry road, and push her sedan into the depths of the abandoned stone mine with her behind the wheel, which he imagined would be taken for an accident. He conveyed her as far as the garage before his panic overwhelmed him, whereupon he fled the house. Britta was found two days later, after lying on a concrete floor beside her car, where the temperature had fallen to twenty-five degrees. The coroner concluded she didn’t die of head injuries. Still alive when Gerry Grady dragged her into the garage, she perished of exposure—essentially froze to death—while lying there unconscious.