against the brilliant white background.
She screamed, “Oh, my God, Travis, no!”
She dropped her flashlight and Jake’s pry bar onto the concrete floor, the noise reverberating forever in the concrete canyon, and ran to her son.
“Get out of here!” she yelled. “Oh, my God, get out of here!” She ran to her baby, scooping him up on the fly and dragging him out toward fresh air. In the rush of adrenaline, he weighed nothing. “Hold your breath, honey!” she yelled. “Hold your breath!”
But Travis couldn’t hear any of it. “Hey!” he yelled indignantly. “Put me down! There’s a cop outside!” Jesus, she’s strong!
Jake saw the commotion and put it together in an instant. He followed his family out into the open, running as best he could in the bulk of his protective suit to catch up. What the hell was he doing inside?
Carolyn had the boy over her shoulder in a kind of fireman’s carry that was as awkward as it was effective. With him wriggling to break free the whole time, she carried him out of the hideous stain of the exclusion zone and into the world of living underbrush. From there, it was another twenty-five or thirty yards down a small decline to a stream they’d seen on the aerial photo. She heaved Travis like a sack of potatoes off her shoulder and into the swollen, quick-running stream.
Good idea, Jake thought. She was going to try and decon him. But it’d be tough going in her moon suit. Pulling his arm out of his sleeve, Jake fished around his pants pocket for his knife.
“Hey!” Travis yelled. “Listen to me! There’s a-”
Suddenly, he found himself immersed in frigid water, with his own mother holding him under the surface. As he struggled to rise to the top, she stepped into the stream with him, straddling him with her legs and crushing his rib cage with her knees. He could breathe, but not without taking a mouthful of water.
“Mom! Jesus! What the-”
She pulled at his soaked clothing, and suddenly he found himself shirtless. He tried to fight her, but there was nothing he could do. She was a crazy woman. Every time he thought he had a grip on something, it would slip out of his hands. “Mom! Stop! Ow, you’re hurt-”
Now he was upside down in the water, face submerged, and she was yanking on his pants. As he felt them slip down past his butt and on toward his knees, he tried to kick and squirm, but it was useless. His choice was to cooperate or drown.
A new pair of hands appeared out of nowhere and grabbed him under his arms. It was his dad, and he was in regular clothes again, but with the air pack still in place. “Hold still,” he yelled, his voice muffled by the mask. “We’ve got to get your clothes off! You’re contaminated.”
With two against one, there was little choice but to cooperate. One last hard yank ripped the pant legs clear of his feet while nearly yanking his legs clear of his hips. Once his pants were off, the struggling stopped, and Travis realized to his horror that they’d stripped him of all his clothes. He was naked!
As Jake struggled out of his air pack, Travis scrambled to cover himself up.
“Stay away from those clothes!” Jake commanded.
“But Dad, there’s a cop-”
The sound of a gunshot killed the words before they could form in the boy’s throat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Sherman was getting too old for this crap: walking through the woods, trying to sneak up on people. If he were halfway as smart as he pretended to be, he’d have waited for the backup that had to be on the way by now. Nan wouldn’t have wasted even a second getting the call in to the state boys. So why did he keep on going forward? Another damn good question. Personal glory, he supposed. Because this was his town, and if the Donovans were down there like he’d been led to believe, he stood in a position to get payback-to punish those bastards for sucking the life out of the place he’d always known as home.
His heart fluttered like a butterfly as each step brought him closer to death; if not at the hands of the Donovans, then at the whim of his own body as he inhaled the unknown dangers floating in the air. He heard noises ahead; man-made ones this time. The realization made his heart pound even harder.
Why the hell would anyone…
He heard a yell. The sound of a child in distress. Sherman quickened his pace-something else he hadn’t done in a very long time-and he hurried across the last roadway separating him from the foul-smelling desolation of the exclusion zone. The best speed he could muster was a moderate jog, and the out-of-sync swinging of the equipment in his Sam Browne belt slowed him down even more.
He chose to scale the final mound rather than go around it, in hopes that the elevation would grant him an element of surprise. Sherman expended enormous effort scrambling up the steep slope, using his left hand to pull himself up while gripping his revolver in his right. It was tough going until he cleared the top of the giant doors, and then the slope eased a bit, allowing him to scramble the rest of the way more or less on his feet.
The view from the top took his breath away. The world here had changed; an entirely different place than what he knew Arkansas to look like. Everything was monochrome, like an ancient daguerreotype photo.
“Holy Mother of God,” he muttered to himself. He heard more yelling, again sounding like a child, but it was from somewhere off to his left. He moved to head in that direction, welcoming the opportunity to break his gaze from the desolation before him, but movement in the doorway to the magazine itself made him freeze. As he watched, a man dressed in one of the green suits with which he’d become so familiar, courtesy of media obsessiveness, slowly crossed the threshold, carrying a bag in his arms. He transported the bag with care, as if there was something fragile inside. The spaceman look-alike moved carefully but deliberately as he walked to the perimeter of the dead vegetation and placed the bag on the ground. Then out of the grass he lifted another body bag-this one having a fluorescent orange color, which contrasted sharply with the olive drab of the first-and proceeded to flap it open. That done, he placed the green bag inside the orange one, then zipped it up.
Sherman’s mind reeled at the impossibility of what he was watching. When the spaceman stood and headed back inside, Sherman knew it was time for him to act. He stood among the bushes that lined the crest of the mound and assumed a shooter’s stance.
“Police officer!” he yelled. “Don’t move!” But the man didn’t even slow his deliberate gait.
Shit. He can’t hear me.
He tried it again. “Police officer! Don’t move!” Still no response. The man just kept striding back inside to continue whatever his mission was.
That really left Sherman with no choice. He took aim and pulled the trigger.
Five minutes earlier Nick had suddenly realized that he was alone inside the magazine. One second the three of them were inspecting the bones they’d found, and the next, Jake and Carolyn had dropped their hand lights and disappeared, leaving him there by himself. He figured one of the two had developed a problem and that they’d headed out together. He was a bit miffed-it was their butts, after all, that he was helping pull out of the fire-but that part of himself that was task-oriented swung into gear and he focused on what needed to be done.
As he loaded the skeletal remains into the green body bag, he marveled at how small the bones were and at what kind of madman it would take to kill such a small child in the first place, only to wreak all of this destruction to cover it up. One fragment in particular grabbed his attention, and for a moment, he wasn’t even sure it was a bone. He spent a moment examining it, then tossed it in with the others. Better safe than sorry.
He desperately hoped that Jake’s hunch was right-that by identifying the remains, they might have a shot at bringing the real perpetrators to justice. If ever there was a person who needed to suffer the wrath of the law, it was the monster who did this.
After he’d picked up every bone he could find and placed them inside the bag, he found the zipper in the dark and pulled it closed. The feather lightness of the package made his eyes moist as he carried it toward the door, and as he stepped over the remains of one of his colleagues from so many years ago, he realized that in another two minutes or so, he’d be done with the announced reason for reentering the magazine.
Then it would be time to pursue his own agenda.
The second body bag in the grass outside was Nick’s addition to the plan. He’d anticipated the acute dust
