Sole Survivor

She went to Joshua. “Together we will see the world change forever, bring the light of knowledge into the great dark loneliness of human existence. In our time.”

And finally she approached Mark. “I assume you brought two cars because you were prepared to give one to Joe and me.”

“Yes. But we hoped—”

She put a hand on his arm. “Soon but not tonight. I’ve got urgent business, Mark. Everything we hope to achieve hangs in the balance right now, hangs so precariously — until I can reach the little girl I mentioned.”

“Wherever she is, we can take you to her.”

“No. Joe and I must do this alone — and quickly.”

“You can take the Ford.”

“Thank you.”

Mark withdrew a folded one-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to Rose. “There are just eight digits in the serial number on this bill. Ignore the fourth digit, and the other seven are a phone number in the 310 area code.”

Rose tucked the bill into her jeans.

“When you’re ready to join us,” Mark said, “or if you’re ever in trouble you can’t get out of, ask for me at that number. We’ll come for you no matter where you are.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “We’ve got to go.” She turned to Joe. “Will you drive?”

“Yes.”

To Joshua, she said, “May I take your cell phone?”

He gave it to her.

Wings of furious wind beat around them as they got into the Ford. The keys were in the ignition.

As Rose pulled the car door shut, she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and leaned forward, gasping for breath.

“You are hurt.”

“Told you. I got knocked around.”

“Where’s it hurt?”

“We’ve got to get across the city,” Rose said, “but I don’t want to go back past Mahalia’s.”

“You could have a broken rib or two.”

Ignoring him, she sat up straight, and her breathing improved as she said, “The creeps won’t want to risk setting up a roadblock and a traffic check without cooperation from the local authorities, and they don’t have time to get that. But you can bet your ass they’ll be watching passing cars.”

“If you’ve got a broken rib, it could puncture a lung.”

“Joe, damn it, we don’t have time. We’ve got to move if we’re going to keep our girl alive.”

He stared at her. “Nina?”

She met his eyes. She said, “Nina,” but then a fearful look came into her face, and she turned from him.

“We can head north from here on PCH,” he said, “then inland on Kanan-Dume Road. That’s a county route up to Augora Hills. There we can get the 101 east to the 210.”

“Go for it.”

Faces powdered by moonlight, hair wind-tossed, the four who would leave in the Mercedes stood watching, backdropped by leaping stone dolphins and thrashing trees.

This tableau struck Joe as both exhilarating and ominous — and he could not identify the basis of either perception, other than to admit that the night was charged with an uncanny power that was beyond his understanding. Everything his gaze fell upon seemed to have monumental significance, as if he were in a state of heightened consciousness, and even the moon appeared different from any moon that he had ever seen before.

As Joe put the Ford in gear and began to pull away from the fountain, the young woman came forward to place her hand against the window beside Rose Tucker’s face. On this side of the glass, Rose matched her palm to the other. The young woman was crying, her lovely face glimmering with moon-bright tears, and she moved with the car along the driveway, hurrying as it picked up speed, matching her hand to Rose’s all the way to the gate before at last pulling back.

Joe felt almost as if somewhere earlier in the night he had stood before a mirror of madness and, closing his eyes, had passed through his own reflection into lunacy. Yet he did not want to return through the silvered surface to that old gray world. This was a lunacy that he found increasingly agreeable, perhaps because it offered him the one thing he desired most and could find only on this side of the looking glass — hope.

Slumped in the passenger seat beside him, Rose Tucker said, “Maybe all this is more than I can handle, Joe. I’m so tired — and so scared. I’m nobody special enough to do what needs doing, not nearly special enough to carry a weight like this.”

“You seem pretty special to me,” he said.

“I’m going to screw it up,” she said as she entered a phone number on the keypad of the cellular phone. “I’m scared shitless that I’m not going to be strong enough to open that door and take us all through it.” She pushed the Send button.

“Show me the door, tell me where it goes, and I’ll help you,” he said, wishing she would stop speaking in metaphors and give him the hard facts. “Why is Nina so important to whatever’s happening? Where is she, Rose?”

Someone answered the cellular call, and Rose said, “It’s me. Move Nina. Move her now.”

Nina.

Rose listened for a moment but then said firmly, “No, now, move her right now, in the next five minutes, even sooner if you can. They linked Mahalia to me…yeah, and in spite of all the precautions we’d taken. It’s only a matter of time now — and not very much time — until they make the connection to you.”

Nina.

Joe turned off the Pacific Coast Highway onto the county road to Augora Hills, driving up through a rumpled bed of dark land from which the Santa Ana wind flung sheets of pale dust.

“Take her to Big Bear,” Rose told the person on the phone.

Big Bear. Since Joe had talked to Mercy Ealing in Colorado — could it be less than nine hours ago? — Nina had been back in the world, miraculously returned, but in some corner where he could not find her. Soon, however, she would be in the town of Big Bear on the shores of Big Bear Lake, a resort in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains, a place he knew well. Her return was more real to him now that she was in a place that he could name, the byways of which he had walked, and he was flooded with such sweet anticipation that he wanted to shout to relieve the pressure of it. He kept his silence, however, and he rolled the name between the fingers of his mind, rolled it over and over as if it were a shiny coin: Big Bear.

Rose spoke into the phone: “If I can…I’m going to be there in a couple of hours. I love you. Go. Go now.”

She terminated the call, put the phone on the seat between her legs, closed her eyes, and leaned against the door.

Joe realized that she was not making much use of her left hand. It was curled in her lap. Even in the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see that her hand was shaking uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Give it a rest, Joe. It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but you’re getting to be a nag. I’ll be fine once we get to Nina.”

He was silent for half a mile. Then: “Tell me everything. I deserve to know.”

“You do, yes. It’s not a long story…but where do I begin?”

16

Great bristling balls of tumbleweed, robbed of their green by the merciless Western sun, cracked from their