Sole Survivor

cracked and potholed blacktop led to a dirt driveway, at the end of which was a small white clapboard house with a shake-shingle roof.

A green Jeep Wagoneer stood beside the cabin. Joe parked behind the Jeep.

The cabin boasted a deep, elevated porch, on which three cane-backed rocking chairs were arranged side by side. A handsome black man, tall and athletically built, stood at the railing, his ebony skin highlighted with a brass tint cast by two bare yellow lightbulbs in the porch ceiling.

The girl waited at the head of the flight of four steps that led up from the driveway to the porch. She was blond and about six years old.

From under the driver’s seat, Joe retrieved the gun that he had taken from the white-haired storyteller after the scuffle on the beach. Getting out of the car, he tucked the weapon under the waistband of his jeans.

The wind shrieked and hissed through the needled teeth of the pines.

He walked to the foot of the steps.

The child had descended two of the four treads. She stared past Joe, at the Ford. She knew what had happened.

On the porch, the black man began to cry.

The girl spoke for the first time in over a year, since the moment outside the Ealings’ ranch house when she had told Rose that she wanted to be called Nina. Gazing at the car, she said only one word, in a voice soft and small: “Mother.”

Her hair was the same shade as Nina’s hair. She was as fine-boned as Nina. But her eyes were not gray like Nina’s eyes, and no matter how hard Joe tried to see Nina’s face before him, he could not deceive himself into believing that this was his daughter.

Yet again, he had been engaged in searching behavior, seeking what was lost forever.

The moon above was a thief, its glow not a radiance of its own but a weak reflection of the sun. And like the moon, this girl was a thief — not Nina but only a reflection of Nina, shining not with Nina’s brilliant light but with a pale fire.

Regardless of whether she was only a lab-born mutant with strange mental powers or really the hope of the world, Joe hated her at that moment, and hated himself for hating her — but hated her nonetheless.

17

Hot wind huffed at the windows, and the cabin smelled of pine, dust, and the black char from last winter’s cozy blazes, which coated the brick walls of the big fireplace.

The incoming electrical lines had sufficient slack to swing in the wind. From time to time they slapped against the house, causing the lights to throb and flicker. Each tremulous brownout reminded Joe of the pulsing lights at the Delmann house, and his skin prickled with dread.

The owner was the tall black man who had broken into tears on the porch. He was Louis Tucker, Mahalia’s brother, who had divorced Rose eighteen years ago, when she proved unable to have children. She had turned to him in her darkest hour. And after all this time, though he had a wife and children whom he loved, Louis clearly still loved Rose too.

“If you really believe she’s not dead, that she’s only moved on,” Joe said coldly, “why cry for her?”

“I’m crying for me,” said Louis. “Because she’s gone from here and I’ll have to wait through a lot of days to see her again.”

Two suitcases stood in the front room, just inside the door. They contained the belongings of the child.

She was at a window, staring out at the Ford, with sorrow pulled around her like sackcloth.

“I’m scared,” Louis said. “Rose was going to stay up here with Nina, but I don’t think it’s safe now. I don’t want to believe it could be true — but they might’ve found me before I got out of the last place with Nina. Couple times, way back, I thought the same car was behind us. Then it didn’t keep up.”

“They don’t have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.”

“And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out onto the porch ’cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind — does that make sense?”

“You better get her out of here,” Joe agreed.

As the wind slapped the electrical lines against the house, Louis paced to the fireplace and back, a hand pressed to his forehead as he tried to put the loss of Rose out of his mind long enough to think what to do. “I figured you and Rose…well, I thought the two of you were taking her. And if they’re onto me, then won’t she be safer with you?”

“If they’re onto you,” Joe said, “then none of us is safe here, now, anymore. There’s no way out.”

The lines slapped the house, slapped the house, and the lights pulsed, and Louis walked to the fireplace and picked up a battery-powered, long-necked butane match from the hearth.

The girl turned from the window, eyes wide, and said, “No.”

Louis Tucker flicked the switch on the butane match, and blue flame spurted from the nozzle. Laughing, he set his own hair on fire and then his shirt.

“Nina!” Joe cried.

The girl ran to his side.

The stink of burning hair spread through the room.

Ablaze, Louis moved to block the front door.

From the waistband of his jeans, Joe drew the pistol, aimed — but couldn’t pull the trigger. This man confronting him was not really Louis Tucker now; it was the boy-thing, reaching out three thousand miles from Virginia. And there was no chance that Louis would regain control of his body and live through this night. Yet Joe hesitated to squeeze off a shot, because the moment that Louis was dead, the boy would remote someone else.

The girl was probably untouchable, able to protect herself with her own paranormal power. So the boy would use Joe — and the gun in Joe’s hand — to shoot the girl point-blank in the head.

“This is fun,” the boy said in Louis’s voice, as flames seethed off his hair, as his ears charred and crackled, as his forehead and cheeks blistered. “Fun,” he said, enjoying his ride inside Louis Tucker but still blocking the exit to the porch.

Maybe, at the instant of greatest jeopardy, Nina could send herself into that safe bright blueness as she had done just before the 747 plowed into the meadow. Maybe the bullets fired at her would merely pass through the empty air where she had been. But there was a chance that she was still not fully recovered, that she wasn’t yet able to perform such a taxing feat, or even that she could perform it but would be mortally drained by it this time.

“Out the back!” Joe shouted. “Go, go!”

Nina raced to the door between the front room and the kitchen at the rear of the cabin.

Joe backed after her, keeping the pistol trained on the burning man, even though he didn’t intend to use it.

Their only hope was that the boy’s love of “fun” would give them the chance to get out of the cabin, into the open, where his ability to conduct remote viewing and to engage in mind control would be, according to Rose, severely diminished. If he gave up the toy that was Louis Tucker, he would be into Joe’s head in an instant.

Tossing aside the butane match, with flames spreading along the sleeves of his shirt and down his pants, the boy-thing said, “Oh, yeah, oh, wow,” and came after them.

Joe recalled too clearly the feeling of the ice-cold needle that had seemed to pierce the summit of his spine as he had barely escaped the Delmann house the previous night. That invading energy scared him more than the prospect of being embraced by the fiery arms of this shambling specter.

Frantically he retreated into the kitchen, slamming the door as he went, which was pointless because no door — no wall, no steel vault — could delay the boy if he abandoned Louis’s body and went incorporeal.

Nina slipped out the back door of the cabin, and a wolf pack of wind, chuffing and puling, rushed past her and inside.

As Joe followed her into the night, he heard the living room door crash into the kitchen.