“Yes.”
Staring at Witness, Bailey could see the melancholy in his eyes and could almost
“Yes.”
Tom Tran said, “The last man on Earth.”
“Technically, I’m posthuman. Hybrid. A man augmented with billions of nanomachines.”
From elsewhere in the apartment, someone called out, “Do I hear Bailey Hawks?”
Fixed to the wall above Winny, the creature hissed, and from between the halves of its sharp smile came a glistening gray tubular tongue. Winny didn’t know the purpose of that tube, but he knew the purpose of those wicked teeth, and he had no doubt that the bite would be less terrible than what the tongue would do to him, maybe act like a vacuum and suck the flesh right off his bones, leaving him as picked clean as the skeleton beside him.
Paralyzed with terror, he felt even smaller than usual. He knew that he needed to do the hardest thing, never the easiest. But his philosophy failed him now because it seemed that the hardest thing he could do was die, and he was going to die whether he fought back or tried to flee. He couldn’t battle anything this big, this strong, and he couldn’t outrun it, either. He had only two options: a quick or a quicker death.
Iris must have raised her head, too, must have seen the thing above them on the wall. Her hand relented, she stopped trying to crush his knuckles, and she plucked urgently at his sweaty fingers, his wrist, his arm, as though she thought he must have fallen asleep and needed to be awakened to defend them.
She said something then that made no sense: “ ‘We’re going to the meadow now to dry ourselves off in the sun.’ ”
Listening to her trembling voice, Winny was reminded that Iris was not the plucky heroine of the adventure story he had been casting in his head. She was a girl apart and always would be, dealt a far worse hand in life than he had been. Being skinny and shy and never knowing what to say to people and having a father who was almost as fictitious as Santa Claus—all of that was nothing, nothing compared to autism. If she could dare to take his hand, could dare to keep silent in this hiding place of bones and rotting gravecloth, in spite of all the fears and irritations with which she was plagued, then
Clinging to the wall with both its feet and one hand, the beast reached slowly toward Winny with its left arm. It pressed the tip of one long finger against the center of his forehead, above the bridge of his nose, kind of the way that a priest marked people on Ash Wednesday. Its finger was death-cold.
Iris was weak, and Winny wasn’t strong, but he was stronger than she was, and that meant he owed her a defense. His father was strong, really strong, and he got in bar fights and shoved people’s heads in toilets, but you didn’t always have to misuse strength. You could use strength, whatever little of it you might have, for the right thing, even if you knew there was no chance you would win the fight, even if you were doomed from the start, you could stand up and swing your skinny arms, because trying against the worst odds was what life was all about. And there he had found the harder thing he needed to do, the hardest thing of all hard things: do what was right even if there was no hope of success or expectation of reward.
Clutching Iris’s hand again, Winny pulled her away from the wall, scrambled with her from the bracketing skeletons, ran a few steps, kicking aside brass shell casings, and turned to confront the beast. It remained upon the wall, its head craned to one side, watching them with eyes as steady and icy and gray as tombstone granite.
Winny let go of the girl’s hand and pushed her behind him. He snatched up the old rifle with the fixed bayonet and held it in both hands, point thrust forward. He was like a rabbit threatening a wolf, and he felt fear—oh, yeah—but he did not feel either useless or stupid.
In Kirby Ignis’s restored and spotless kitchen, Mickey Dime sat at the dinette, his hands folded on the table in front of him. His face had an odd childlike quality, and his mouth curved in a sweet, almost cherubic smile. To one side of him, out of easy reach, lay a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.
Dime nodded at Bailey and said, “Sheriff.” He nodded again at Tom Tran and at the one who called himself Witness. “Deputies. I wish to surrender myself and ask for a psychiatric evaluation.”
In this apartment, the sense of the One’s oppressive hatred relented, and Bailey’s mind was clearer than it had been in a while. Yet this development was no less strange than everything that had come before it.
Picking up Dime’s pistol, Bailey said, “I’m not a sheriff.”
“Sheriff, former military, whatever. I know you’re something. I’m insane, you see, but not disoriented. I’ve killed people. Now I just want to surrender and be committed to a sanatorium. I’ll be no burden to the state. I have resources. I just don’t want to have to think anymore. I’m not good at it.”
Bailey handed his Beretta to Tom Tran, who took it as if he knew how to use it well.
To Witness, Bailey said, “What is this?”
“I didn’t even realize he was here.”
Mickey Dime smiled and nodded. “I came of my own free will. I’m quite insane. I see things that can’t be there.”
Bailey ejected the magazine of the pistol that he confiscated, saw that it was fully loaded, and snapped it back into the weapon.
He looked at his wristwatch.
The beast came down from the wall, rose onto its feet, and stood among the skeletons, regarding Winny with what he at first thought must be amusement. But then he decided that this thing wasn’t capable of being amused,
