Artimis shook her head. “My sense is that it does.”
“Mine, too.”
“Have you alerted our agency partners that a site containment plan may have to be triggered?”
“I’ve been making calls. Homeland Security can establish a perimeter on a four-hour notice. Pentagon has patrol helicopters, surveillance drones, and fighter jets standing by at Malmstrom Air Force Base. The National Security Agency, the FBI, and the EPA are ready to move fast.”
“What about the Centers for Disease Control? There could be a disease risk.”
“We’re trying to keep them out of the first phase. They’ll want to lock down Montana for thirty years.”
“Okay. So I’ll start drilling down on Rustling Willows, and you go wait for your Jungian moment of synchronicity.”
Only Artimis could lead this hunt. Her talent was unique.
Ganesh got to his feet and met her lustrous eyes for a moment before he said, “You really find the work fulfilling?”
“I really, really do. Oh, sometimes it all becomes a bit too much, making history the way we are. But this chase after the Other ought to be fun, a welcome change of pace from our main business.”
“Keep me informed of your progress. Goodbye, Artimis.”
“Goodbye, Ganesh.”
As he turned away, expecting to hear a click of disconnection, she surprised him by asking, “Do you ever dream of me?”
Facing the large video screen again, after a hesitation, he replied, “Yes. Sometimes.”
She said, “I often dream of you. Is that wrong?”
“No. We’re colleagues. We’re friends. We’ve come a long way together. Besides, I can’t control my dreams.”
“They have rules against relationships between members of the project staff.”
“You and I . . . we’re different,” he said. “Whatever there might be between us, the rules don’t apply.”
Her smile was still lovely but melancholy now. “I feel the same. It’s good to know you dream of me. Let’s get together soon.”
“We will,” Ganesh said. “When this is done, and if we all survive it, we’ll get together.”
The screen went dark.
Ganesh returned to the elevator, rode up to the main floor, passed through the security vestibule, and returned to his SUV in the parking lot.
The day was warm. He started the engine and turned up the air conditioner.
He sat behind the wheel, staring through the windshield at the warehouse that wasn’t a warehouse, thinking about Artimis Selene.
If he was not always ebullient, as she had said, he was with rare exception a happy optimist. Now a terrible sadness came upon him, a twilight of the soul here in the morning sun. Sorrow might have grown into depression if he had been a less positive person, but his lifelong experience was that every spell of darkness lifted soon enough, so that light came again into the soul and mind and heart, which were not made for darkness.
37
As morning becomes afternoon, the angled sunlight imparts some dimension to the ghost town, an illusion of vitality. Asher Optime’s shadow returns and gradually elongates as he strips off Dr. Steve Fielding’s backpack, empties the historian’s pockets, and carries everything into the saloon.
Although he prefers to kill his captives in the church, so that it’s then easy to tumble the dead down the stairs into the basement, Asher is prepared to transport a corpse the length of town with a minimum of effort. From the saloon, he retrieves a sturdy, formed-plastic pallet on wheels, with a four-foot handle. The bed of the pallet is six feet long and three wide. He loads the historian onto it and secures the cargo with two bungee cords that clip to rings in the perimeter of the conveyance.
Weeks earlier, it occurred to him that an occasion might arise when he would have a captive or more than one locked away in the church, their terror maturing into the collapse of hope that he wished to see before executing them—when suddenly he would find himself with a fresh corpse on his hands. Conveying such a bundle into the testamentary necropolis under the church would then become a logistical problem. He, of course, has solved it.
He takes satisfaction from his thoughtful preparations for this mission and his practicality. He would have been a most meticulous surgeon if he had followed the family tradition, though saving human lives is an evil that he’s not capable of committing.
As Asher pulls the inelegant hearse along the runneled hardpan of Zipporah’s only street, crows circle overhead, shrieking as if singing a dirge for the deceased, though their cries are in fact a celebration of carrion. They aren’t bold enough to dare Asher and settle on the corpse in motion, though he would not chase them away. As a devoted student of Xanthus Toller and a valiant soldier in the Restoration Movement, Asher is at peace with all the many conscious creatures of the planet—animal, vegetable, mineral—except for his own kind. He is pleased to think that following his death, carrion eaters will feast on his flesh, though he must be careful not to die among cannibals and, by being eaten, sustain a human life.