TERRY AND JOHN KELTON CAME out of the woods, both with high-powered rifles. As they strode past Dan, Terry knelt and fired into the trees.
Lauren leaped through the snow—which here had drifted as high as her chest—leaped and struggled in a slow-motion nightmare, feeling the cold of it sear her in places where she had never been cold. She clawed on anyway, because she knew without fully understanding that this was one of those tiny, secret moments on which a whole future turns.
She saw John laugh and stride forward so powerfully that the snow seemed to part for him like the Red Sea, as if he was helped in some way by the purity of evil itself.
“Rob,” Lauren screamed. “Rob,
Rob struggled to raise his gun, his whole body shaking with the effort.
Three of the Keltons zeroed in on Conner. Lauren saw that they were converging with a fourth, a boy of about fifteen. She recognized him from that last session with Adam: he had the hair, the face, the build of the image of the boy that Adam had put in her mind and that she had described so carefully to Mike.
“Oh, Mike, you are good at what you do.” He had turned the grays’ own decoy into one of Conner’s assassins.
She broke free of the drift and ran hard, but all the hunters except the fifteen-year-old were too far ahead of her. “Rob,” she shouted in his direction, “Rob, stop them!”
Rob stood as still as if he had frozen, and Lauren feared for a moment that he had done just that, but that limp, flopping arm still came up, still carried the heavy pistol. He grimaced in agony, his face now lined with bars of frozen blood.
She watched the shattered arm rise impossibly higher and higher, the gun wavering in it. Then she launched herself in a final burst and took down Jimbo. He exhaled with a whoosh and fell, and she grabbed his shoulders and kept smashing his head into the ground as hard as she could, so hard that it soon packed the layer of snow beneath it and began to make thudding sounds, and his eyes began to roll.
Rob raised the gun higher. Higher. And kept raising it up right
Rob’s face worked, his eyes rolling. She looked up to where the gun pointed and cried out, astonished, a red-hot knife of terror stabbing her heart as she saw just a few feet overhead, a gigantic shimmering triangle that looked so much like the sky above that she hadn’t noticed it before.
The gun blasted and Rob hissed through bared teeth in his agony as the kick flashed torment down his arm. With his mangled left hand he shoveled snow against his face to force consciousness back, and fired into the thing overhead again and again.
“Alert. Auto destruct in ten seconds. Nine. Eight—”
As Mike twisted the controls, the TR wheeled away from the clearing, its huge wing skimming the treetops, leaving behind billows of snow.
“Five. Four.”
He slid down to the hatch. The treetops were five feet below him.
He leaped. As he did, he felt a fierce blast of heat from the dying TR. He crashed down among the wide pine branches and landed hard in a billow of snow. He checked himself, got to his feet—and realized that his ankle was broken.
Rob Langford stood not ten feet away. Mike’s pistol was gone, but he began to hobble toward Langford anyway.
“Rob, you’ve got to help me.”
“I can’t do that, Mike.”
“Rob, you don’t want the whole human race loaded with chains. You’re too good a man to want a thing like that.”
“They’re not loading us with chains, Mike, they’re giving us wings.”
“How the hell would you know?”
As Rob stood staring at him out of filmed eyes, Mike dragged himself closer.
He watched as if in a balletic nightmare as Rob’s pistol slowly rose from his side, clutched in a hand that looked like gnawed meat, and braced by a burned claw.
The pistol came to bear. He saw Langford’s teeth grinding, his eyes squinting with effort. He was almost on him now, just a couple more feet.
But the hammer went back, and he knew he had lost.
THIRTY-THREE
THE GUN WENT CLICK. AGAIN, click. Langford dropped it into the snow and Mike reached him, shoved him back, and pounded him in the face with all his might. But Langford was also a powerful, resourceful man, and he fought back, finally hurtling Mike off him with his feet, sending him sprawling in the snow.
Mike tried to get up. He pushed at the ground and struggled with all his strength to raise himself but he could not. More than just an ankle was broken, he knew that from the blood frothing his lips.
Then a fist came down, and the lights went out.
Somehow, Rob got to his feet. Somehow, he moved toward the clearing. He hoped that Wilkes would be out, at least for a couple of minutes. But he knew the colonel. The colonel was one to be reckoned with.
Screaming in agony, he forced his mangled hand into his pocket. As he got a fresh clip into his pistol, he gagged, bent double, and retched from the agony of using the hand.
Step by agonized step, he moved toward the tableau in the clearing. His uniform hung in tatters, blood gushed down his right arm and left a frozen trail in the snow. Now the gun came back up, this time pointing toward John Kelton.
John raised his rifle but he was not a military man and Rob got off the first round, which sent him flying back thirty feet into the trees. It hadn’t been a fatal shot, Rob saw, as John clutched a bleeding shoulder.
Snow cascaded down around Terry, who cried out when he saw his dad go down. Mrs. Kelton came rushing through the woods screaming.
Good, Rob thought, they were distracted. He prepared to shoot them both the moment he had clear lines of fire.
Dan lay in the sanctity of his wounds, looking into the peace of the darkening sky. He remembered Katelyn on the catwalk in the secret world of their childhood, when the grays had stitched their lives together. He remembered her thin summer nightgown, and that face, Katelyn in the summer of her girlhood, became what he would take with him if now was when he traveled on.
Lauren got off the inert form of the Kelton boy she had taken down. In that moment, Rob appeared. He looked through his one unswollen eye. Like a stone, the pistol dropped from his hand. His head lolled to his chest. “The others are coming,” he slurred. “Got to stop them, Lauren.”
As he toppled forward, Lauren shouted, “Somebody help him!” But there was nobody to do that. Rob was so caked with frozen blood he looked like he was wearing the uniform of a butcher.
She went down to him and embraced him, telling him that she would save him. She ripped off her own parka and put it under his head. He smiled a little. “You’re gonna freeze your ass,” he said. Then his eyes closed in the way people’s eyes close when they are dying and she cried out again, “Help us, somebody help us!”
Suddenly, the eyes opened. They bored into hers. “You’ve got work to do, soldier.”
Crying, begging God for his life, she picked up his pistol and ran to her duty in the woods.
It was dark and silent in among the trees. She peered ahead. Every time she moved, snow came in cascades off the pines. But the movement of others was easy to follow, because their passing had done the same thing.
She listened.
At that moment, a shocking and, she thought, totally inappropriate thing happened. She was plunged back into her babyhood, and was walking again for the first time.
That was Adam’s signature!
