because his program won’t allow him to kill himself, but damn if I’ll kill him until he tells us everything we need to know to find what nest these sonsofbitches come from so we can go in and burn it out. That’s
Nummy realized that Mr. Lyss must have had his feelings hurt about a lot of things over the years, maybe since he was a little boy. That was really something to think about.
Chapter 54
The seeming void silent and dark above, the snow materializing out of that inverted abyss, the houses bright or dark but each as still as a mausoleum, and the deserted white street from which this swaddling winter might have robbed all dimension if not for evenly spaced streetlamps dwindling toward other neighborhoods …
As the band and collet and prongs of a ring existed to display the gemstone, so it seemed to Rusty Billingham that everything his senses perceived in this glittering scene existed to display the jewel of a woman at the center of the intersection. From a distance of seventy feet, as he approached her, walking the middle of the street, she promised to be extraordinarily beautiful, and when he was still sixty feet from her, he knew that promise would be kept, perhaps more fully than he could imagine. Although it must be but a trick of lamplight and diamonded threads of snow, she appeared radiant, luminous from within.
Rusty was certain now that she’d been the one who screamed, because she was clearly in a state of shock. Standing there with snow well above her ankles, perhaps barefoot, wearing a short silk robe that offered no protection against the night, she seemed to be oblivious of the piercing cold. She had fled from something, out of a house into the street, but now she didn’t run to him as a frightened woman seeking protection ought to have done. He asked her again what was wrong, and this time she didn’t even ask him to help her, just stared at him as if in a trance.
As he closed to within fifty feet of her, Rusty realized that his reaction to her was as unusual as was her catatonic stare. Seeing a woman in distress, whether she was beautiful or not, he would have ordinarily hurried to her, but he moved not slowly but deliberately. Unconsciously, some experience cautioned him, some reference to the past that he could not in the instant recall — and when the engine sound of a fast-moving vehicle rose from the west, Rusty came to a halt, still more than forty feet from the woman.
She turned her head to her right, peering along the cross street toward the approaching vehicle, suddenly bathed in its headlights. She made no attempt to get out of its way, seemed rooted or perhaps frozen to the pavement.
Braking, snow chains stuttering, a Chevy Trailblazer appeared and came to a stop beside the woman, its headlights now past her. Four or five people were in the SUV.
The front passenger window purred down, and a grandmotherly figure leaned out. “Honey, are you all right, you need some help?”
Suddenly Rusty knew why he’d been inexplicably cautious. Four years back. Afghanistan. A woman in a burka, only her eyes revealed. She approached a checkpoint with U.S. Army security. He happened to be at a window half a block away when she detonated the bomb strapped to her body, out of the danger zone but witness to the horror.
The blonde’s silk robe revealed the contours of her voluptuous body so completely that no bomb could have been concealed under it — but in some way that Rusty could not comprehend,
People were screaming inside the SUV, maybe four people very loud, but then three not so loud, and the vehicle rocked from the power of what was happening in there, creaked and twanged, bounced on its tires, springs singing a tortured song. Only one person screaming now. A couple windows cracked but didn’t break, something
He took several halting steps toward the Trailblazer as it coasted across the intersection. But by the time it shuddered to a stop in the hedge, he knew there was nothing he could do to help those people. There might be nothing he could do to save himself, either, but he broke into a run.
Chapter 55
Deucalion conveyed a third group of children to Erika’s place, bringing the number of refugees sheltering there to forty-two, which seemed beyond the maximum the house could handle. She insisted she could accept even more, and Addison Hawk agreed that together they could manage half again as many if they set down dormitory rules. They had enough food for the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours, and in the meantime, Deucalion could bring supplies.
When the fourth group proved to number thirty-four, however, the decision had to be made to take the kids elsewhere. With Carson’s and Michael’s help, Deucalion got them lined up on the benches along the walls of the cargo box and in two facing rows on the floor, crowding them together to a degree that would have been intolerable if the trip hadn’t been just two minutes long. They were trying to be brave, a few crying but quietly, others actually excited by the adventurous nature of this sudden nighttime excursion.
Because every point in the world lay as close to the Samples house as Erika’s place, Deucalion drove out of the driveway, turned left, and pulled into the parking lot at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, high in the great mountains of northern California. In addition to the abbey with its guest wing and church, the seven-acre property included St. Bartholomew’s School, which was an educational facility and orphanage for children with physical and developmental disabilities. The monks oversaw the abbey and church, and Benedictine nuns, under the guidance of their mother superior, Sister Angela, operated the school.
Deucalion had lived here, in the guest wing, for over two years, while considering whether to become a postulant. Over the centuries, he dwelt for extended periods in the monasteries of different faiths, where he was never considered a freak, always a brother, and to his surprise sometimes served as a mentor to those he thought were wiser than he was.
He had left St. Bart’s less than twenty-four hours earlier, drawn first to New Orleans, then to the sprawling landfill in which the original Victor perished, and then to Carson and Michael in San Francisco, compelled by the sudden certainty that Victor was alive again and engaged in the pursuit of his utopia, which like all utopias was a kind of hell.
As he got out of the truck, he blew the horn twice, hoping to summon help. He went to the back of the truck, opened the door, and said, “We’re here. You’re going to like this place. You’ll be here only a little while, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
The children clambered out of the truck, amazed to discover they were somewhere they had never seen before, not more than two minutes after they set out on this trip. In early October in these mountains, no snow had yet fallen and stuck. The night was cold but clear, a sea of stars overhead, the blizzard magically undone.
As the last of the kids disembarked and as Deucalion closed and bolted the cargo-box door, a monk arrived. The giant was not surprised that of all the confreres, the first to respond to the horn happened to be Brother Salvatore, also known as Brother Knuckles. He was Deucalion’s best friend at St. Bart’s, the only one who knew
