People clawed for bread, raced down long, empty aisles, hollow people, their eyes wild, ripping open boxes of uncooked pasta, gobbling it, throwing back raw oatmeal, eating from the mashed garbage on the floor.
Gunshots. Soldiers in dirty uniforms, tired young faces, terrified eyes, shot into the crowd—and people just sat there, staring like a dumb animal stares who has no idea what’s about to happen. As they got shot, they crashed back with astonishing force into a shattered freezer, and then the soldiers passed down another aisle.
“What’s going on in there?”
“I don’t know! He’s showing me some sort of tragedy.”
“Wha-a-at?”
“Ships sinking, people starving in a supermarket—”
“Christ, will you get me what I need!”
“Damn you, Mike, what I am gonna get you is what I always get you. I am gonna get you what he has to give!”
Because Adam was showing Lauren images of the coming extinction, he might be aware of the conversation Mike had been listening to, which made continuing this way too dangerous. “Okay, that’s it. Come out. We’re done.”
“I love my baby,” she whispered, getting up from the Barcalounger. She reached out, touched the cool, soft skin of a hand that only became visible when she held it, the narrow fingers and lethal black claws fading when she withdrew.
Adam shot back an image of a mother nursing an infant, his standard good-bye. As she got up, he made one of his audible sounds, a cry like a shocked and despairing woman. Did he feel anything? She didn’t know. But she did know that he was trying for sympathetic attention.
“Adam, I know you have a message for me connected with all these disasters, and I know I’m not getting it. However, we’re asking you about a
She got no response from him. She knew why: he’d heard the words, but unless you formed your thoughts in your mind, he didn’t understand you.
“Lauren, break it off!”
“Mike—sir—”
“Lauren, there’s no time!”
No time? What the hell was he talking about? She had all the time in the world. And God knew, Adam had time. “I’m going to get this thing rolling.”
But Adam had different ideas. Adam’s mind was all around her, she could feel it. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let herself go blank.
He came into her, as always, like a dog sniffing for a buried bone. Letting him get inside her felt kind of good, but also oddly sad… a sadness that he brought with him. He would go into her memories and kind of troll there, bringing up all sorts of things from her past, things she’d just as soon have forgotten, stuff done when drunk, that sort of stuff. He liked the intense things. Sort of ate them, she thought.
She let him go deep into a familiar little corner, the cardboard box experience when she was about ten, one of the first things she’d ever done that was related to sex. She smelled the slightly damp cardboard box again, saw Willy Severs’s plump, white body, felt his hand go under her blouse—and then shut
She shot her question at Adam: the satellite image again, the town of Wilton, the houses on Oak Road.
For the split of an instant, she thought she glimpsed a boy’s face, but it was not Willy Severs. Curly hair, slightly chunky, looked about fourteen or fifteen.
“I have something,” she said. “A face.”
“What sort of a face?”
“A kid. I asked him about Oak Road and I got the face of a kid.”
“Bring it out.”
Mike was all over her the moment the door closed. “Got what? What did you get?”
“They’re interested in a child.”
“Say more.”
“He’s a boy of fourteen or fifteen, curly hair, and another thing, I glimpsed a dog. He has a dog.”
Mike became furtive. “Okay,” he said, “that makes no sense.”
“Yes it does. They’re interested in this kid.”
“Probably some kind of breeding issue. We’ll never figure it out. You’re dismissed. Operation complete.”
He was lying and he was scared—and she was suspicious. “What’s the deal with this child?”
“Look, I have to go to Washington and I’m already late. You’re done, Lauren. Thank you.”
She watched him leave. The one pleasant thing about her relationship with him was knowing that he wanted her, and denying him. She did it because—well, she didn’t like him. Just did not like the man. She was not nice to him, couldn’t be. Why, she thought, had something to do with Adam. Adam seemed suspicious of him, somehow. Wary.
“What’s going on, Andy?” she asked as she came into the control room still drying her hair.
“The boss is sure as hell in a lather.”
She went topside, and when the elevator doors opened found Mike just leaving. He was in full uniform, which was pretty unusual around here. He had his briefcase in his hand.
“You’re moving fast,” she said.
“Yep.”
“Are you going to do something to that child, Mike?”
“Look, this is not your issue. Your issue is to communicate with Adam, and to take that job one hell of a lot more seriously than you do.”
“How dare you.”
“How dare me? You’re the one with pictures on the walls down in that hellhole. That thing is a predator. It’s a monster. It’s not a damn pet, for God’s sake, woman.”
She made a decision. He was going to Washington. Fine, she was coming back here and going at it again with Adam. She would get to the bottom of this without Mike around. Because, if this child was in some kind of danger due to her report, then she had a very clear moral duty: no matter the legal blockade her clearance created, she had to protect the kid. She would not be a party to murder, and she would not follow orders that she considered to be illegal.
She watched Mike hurry out to the parking lot, and take off in his latest car, a brand-new VW Phaeton. She knew the value of that car, she’d looked it up. He’d just driven off in half a year’s pay. Where his real money came from she didn’t know, but it sure as hell was not the United States Air Force.
TEN
THE SUN PEEKING OVER THE Warners’ roof woke Katelyn. As usual, she rolled over, at first feeling entirely normal. She considered turning on the news.
And then it hit her: she was upstairs in bed, not in Conner’s room where she had gone to sleep.
Dan chose that moment to slide an arm over her. Katelyn leaped away from him as if his body was on fire.
“Hey!”
“Conner!” She ran downstairs, ran across the kitchen, took his stairs three at a time, and burst in.
When she saw that the door to the outside was open, she stifled a cry. But the lump in the bed seemed entirely normal. She knelt beside him and peeked into the covers. Conner was deeply asleep.
She kissed his freckled cheek, inhaling the milky-sour smell of his skin.
Dan came in, went over and closed the door that led out under the deck and into the backyard. “Look,” he said.
There was a puddle of water on the floor in front of it, standing on the linoleum.
