weariness muffled the tension and fear of the last few days, granting us a comfortable lassitude as we basked.
I nudged her with my beer. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Thanks for helping me get here.”
“I told you I would.”
“You sure you want to follow me into Belmont? You promised to help me find Piotr, and now we have. Job over.”
She smiled a slow, lazy smile. “Again with this? You are so stupid.”
“Ouch, right in the feelings.”
She turned to face me. “Pay attention. I’m not helping you get to this Peter guy, you’re helping me. He killed my grandfather. I’m going to make him pay. End of story.” She relaxed back into her chair, face turned up to the sky. “You of all people should understand that.”
“You have the right, I won’t argue that. But the odds are that this is a one-way trip. No amount of talking and explaining can make you understand what Piotr is like. Patrick would never want you throwing your life away, especially not for him.”
“And you think he’d want you to go in there?”
“That’s different. I think he’d understand why I have to go.”
She patted me on the arm, not ruffled in the slightest. “So do I.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I drank my beer and watched geese touch down amid the silver glitter of the lake’s surface down below. If the silence bothered her, Anne didn’t show it.
Half an hour later, Dominic called us back into the house for a breakfast of pan seared trout, wild rice mixed with tart cranberries, and roasted new potatoes dusted with chipotle powder.
He served us himself, setting plates down in front of us with a flourish. “I know fish isn’t your typical breakfast food, but I just caught these and I figured there was no sense in just letting them go to waste.”
Even if I hadn’t been starving from long hours on the road, it would have been fantastic and we said so. Dominic was self-effacing but obviously pleased at our praise.
We all have different faces that we show to the world, but we often don’t realize just how little control we have over which one we wear at any given time. It made me wonder what Dom saw in us that brought out the genial host in him. Knowing where we were headed, I suspected it was pity.
After we ate he showed us to one of the many guestrooms, and neither one of us corrected his notion that we were a couple. We simply thanked him and went inside.
As soon as the door closed, Anne threw herself onto the bed, fully clothed and on top of the comforter. She didn’t even take her shoes off. She stretched and groaned with pleasure.
“Oh, that feels good. I am so tired of sleeping in the car all the time.” She rolled over on her back and claimed a pillow. “You haven’t even been able to do that. You must be exhausted.”
I kicked off my shoes and lay down next to her. “I’m pretty beat.”
We stared quietly at the ceiling together, contemplating the ornate wooden trim and elaborate ceiling fan as if we were on a blanket at a picnic watching the clouds.
When Anne spoke, her words came out slow and drowsy. “You still trust him?”
“I shouldn’t. But I think we’re safe enough.”
“Okay.”
After a moment of silence, I turned my head to look at her. She was sound asleep. With her eyes closed and her face relaxed there was no sign of the fierce determination that drove her. She looked small and vulnerable.
I brushed a few strands of hair from where they lay against her cheek and thought about the first time I saw her, too bright and lively on my front step, and realized how dead to the world I had been then. For all of her vibrant beauty I had just stood there, unable to see it.
I could see it now.
I wanted to protect her, especially that innocent and fragile part of her that laughed at my terrible jokes and turned up the radio and sang out loud without the slightest bit of embarrassment.
There are some things whose loss you can only feel when you get them back. Being able to stand between something precious and those that would destroy it made me feel alive. Like I mattered. There was a time when doing that was the biggest part of my life.
I joined the Army after Pearl Harbor because we were under attack. The idea of fighting to defend my country drew me like nothing ever had before. I found a sense of purpose that had a rightness to it that changed my life. It was like a key turning in a lock.
Looking back now it was easy to see how that purpose and sense of worth had dwindled away as I slowly outlived everyone that mattered to me.
Before now I had been going through the motions of confronting Piotr out of a sense of duty. I knew in my head that I had to stop him, but I hadn’t felt it in my heart. I just knew that I had to try and that I would likely die in the attempt.
But now I knew that I was going to do more than try. Anne would survive. The world that she loved would survive. I would stand between her and all of the horrors that Piotr could bring to bear, and I would not be moved.
I held that sense of purpose close and slept.
25
My sense of well-being didn’t last long. I had formless, churning dreams of clenched hunger and wet fetid smells in darkness, and always the sense of endless movement in all directions.
There was also watchfulness. A singular intense scrutiny that seemed to come from everywhere at once prickled at the back of my neck, a savage bite just a second away. I was moving, eeling my way through the unseen thickness of the terrain with sleek muscular purpose, searching for I don’t know what.
The hunt was forever, I knew, but I also felt in my guts that it could end any second, and I couldn’t pull my fevered attention away from the possibility, not even to rest. Rage and hunger and maddening frustration drove me unceasingly, one eternal second of pushing and searching stretched out to infinity.
Then there was a change, a break that suddenly split my undifferentiated existence into a before and after. I could sense something. My body juddered and my nerves silvered and electrified. My teeth and jaws ached to sink through it. It was here, close.
Above and around me, a more ancient and patient hunger took notice as well. The endless churning sea of life tangling around me was insignificant, despite its vast expanse, a collection of parasites on the leviathan of our God who filled the sky in all directions. The sense of anticipation cut deep, as unrelenting as the hunger and fear.
There would be food. And soon.
“Hey.” Anne’s voice pulled me awake. My body was rigid, and I was nauseous and disoriented. “You okay?”
“Yeah, just a dream.” My eyes were gritty and my hands were sore where I had been clenching them. I sucked in air and flexed my fingers, feeling like I had just been pulled out from under some suffocating mass.
“Did you see someone in that town like I did?”
“No, it was something else, but connected, I think.”
She sat up and watched me with concern. The light from the window behind her ran fire around the edge of her hair and shadowed her features. “Tell me about it.”
I pressed my palms against my eyes, making sparks. “It was alien. No real sights or sounds, just touch and emotion. I don’t think I shared a lot of senses with whatever it was, so maybe I was just getting the things I could understand. It was all frantic hunger, like panicked starvation, and movement inside some mass of other things that were desperate in the same way.
“I was aware of this endless mass of them, but at the same time, I knew what any particular one felt, because they were all identical. It was like being an entire universe of crawling things, but also being each one
