“You know what? That’s the best. Case. Scenario. That’s what I’m hoping for. Because what’s more likely? What, it seems to me, is the real nightmare? Is that they are organizing themselves. That they are forming, under our noses, their own army.
“And you have to ask yourself, to what end?”
Danny sat staring at the screen. He clicked the share button and sent the recording to Joe Sabine. After thinking about it another minute, he sent it to the other survivors. All except Sam Guthridge.
—
Tuesday after shift, the Chariot seemed like a safe place to talk, although who knew? Maybe the Guthridge kid could hear them from across town or read their thoughts like the sports section of the News-Record. That was the damnable thing. You could never know.
Danny bought a round of pitchers. He sprang for the fancy ones from the brewery in Jackson Hole even though it shot his beer budget for the month and left a taste in his mouth like sucking on a penny. Danny let the other men talk. He’d planted the seed and could tell it had found purchase. Alvin McLaughlin brought printouts of blurry photos and typed witness statements. Marc Medina fancied himself an expert on DNA and the effects of gamma radiation thereupon.
“Imagine a string of letters, except only four of them, repeating,” he told Scott Lipscombe. “This radiation slices right through them. GTT slice! Like that. Then you’ve got two loose ends floating around. And they can join up again wherever.” He laced his fingers together, then bent them into a tangle. “Genetic mutation,” he said.
More rounds got bought. Troy Potter, the weeknight bartender, caught a couple of sideways looks and found things to busy himself with in the back. Talk turned to the subject at hand. What to do about Sam. They all made a point of saying they liked Sam. They acknowledged that they were indebted to him. They owed him their lives for what he did.
“With his abilities,” Danny added, throwing it out there. “What he did with his abilities.”
He let the strangeness of the word do its work on them. Some of the men nodded. Others squirmed.
Lowell Tyler, the oldest rockbreaker at the basin, met Danny’s eyes.
“I don’t like where you’re taking this conversation, Danny,” he said. “Even if Tom’s boy hadn’t saved your ass, which he did. This kind of talk doesn’t go anywhere good.”
“It’s talk,” Danny said. He held his hands up innocently. “Situation like this merits discussion, don’t you think?” He gave Lowell his best “we’re all friends here” grin. When it didn’t work on Lowell, he turned it on the rest of the room. People were eager to chime in with agreement.
Lowell had lost a kid in Iraq and trained Tom Guthridge when Tom wasn’t much older than Sam was now. He took Tom’s death harder than anyone. In the weeks after the funeral, Lowell would show up at the Chariot spoiling for it, daring the young bucks to take a swing at him, like he needed physical pain to match what he felt in his gut. No one stepped up and decked the old man even though they would have been doing him a favor.
“I’m having no part of what you’re talking about,” Lowell said. “I’ll tell you, Danny. Put it down. And you two—” He pointed at Alvin McLaughlin and Joe Sabine. “—don’t forget this asshole talked you into breaking into Antelope Valley’s locker room to shit in their helmets when you all were kids.”
“We won that game,” said Joe. His voice was a high whine.
“You two listened to it on the radio in county lockup,” Lowell said. “And Danny got himself off without a hitch. The three of you forget that part.” He held out a ten to Danny. “Here’s for the beers.”
“I got these,” Danny said.
“This is for mine,” said Lowell. Danny took the bill. He looked at it like Lowell had wiped his ass on it. They watched Lowell walk out, then turned to Danny. They weighed what Lowell said. They wondered if they ought to follow him out the door.
Danny slapped the ten down on the bar.
“Looks like Lowell stood us another round,” he said. It got the desired laugh. More important, it put Lowell Tyler’s blessing on them. Lowell said he had no part of it, but Danny had him buying the beers.
“The thing is,” Danny said, “there’s a risk this is the start of something. You can’t know where something like this is going to lead. That’s what we need to find out. The only way to do that is to go have a talk with Sam.”
There would be time later for all the survivors to reconcile their actions and their consciences. Although, as it turned out, not much time. For now they were resolved. And as Danny Randall said, “It might as well be tonight.”
—
Lucy Guthridge hadn’t been to bed since the incident. She drowsed on the sofa or in the armchair after the kids were asleep. When she answered the door in her gray uniform from the diner, she knew this was what had kept her up. A vision of this assemblage, this mob camped out on her lawn. It’s a wonder you all aren’t sporting pitchforks, she thought.
These men had visited Tom in the hospital, where Lucy had held constant vigil. They took up a collection to help Lucy and the four kids, and they kept quiet when Sam, too young to grow a patch of beard if you gave him a month and a miracle, applied for a job in the mine. They’d been at Tom’s funeral and come to the reception after at this same house whose lawn they were trampling over.
“It’s awful late, Danny,” Lucy said. She ignored the rest of them. “Is there something you’re needing?”
“We came for Sam,” Danny said, avoiding her eyes.
“Sam’s earned his rest. Don’t you
