Shuttered Sky

* * *

Dillon knew Okoya had used him again. When he had dived off that platform, he had know that Dillon’s own healing power would mend his broken body in seconds, before they could climb to the bottom of the ladder. He had used Dillon’s own restorative powers to escape, and it was one more weight on Dillon’s head. Maddy said there would be another time, but there was no guarantee of that, and in the meantime, Okoya would be out there, feeding. Yet he had said he wasn’t the enemy. How could that be true?

A half mile away, they came upon a dirt road and a small house in the woods. Now that the authorities knew their whereabouts, federal agents would be called in—it was only a matter of time until the entire area was secured. They had to get out now.

For once luck was with them: the battered jeep beside the house had a set of keys lying with the mail on the passenger seat. Maddy took the wheel.

If nothing else, Okoya had left them with one kernel of informa­tion. He had told them that Winston was in a different time zone. Assuming he had stayed in the country, that meant he was somewhere to the west. The dirt road opened to a rural highway that led them to the interstate, and they disappeared into the flow of nondescript ve­hicles headed west.

16. Blind-speed

The flashpoint of human flesh, Winston recalled, was 415 degrees Fahrenheit, just like that of most other organic matter.

With both the front and rear iron doors closed, the chamber was lightless, and Winston couldn’t fight the urge to turn on his flashlight. The claustrophobic space in which he and Drew now crouched was the most uninviting place Winston had ever had the misfortune to visit. Oversized gas nozzles spaced at precise intervals on the side walls and on the low coffered ceiling were an ever-present reminder of the chamber’s purpose. The soot charred bricks of the crematorium walls still retained residual warmth from earlier that day.

Commercial mortuary crematoria, Winston recalled, reached 1500 de­grees Fahrenheit, reducing balsa wood caskets and their occupants to cinders in under three hours.

Winston turned off his flashlight, deciding that darkness was better than the view.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” delivered Drew, in an impressively accurate Oliver Hardy.

“Quiet—you’ll give us away” Winston’s nerves were frayed, and it annoyed him that Drew could keep calm. The room was dusty and dry, but quickly growing humid from their sweat. It was all he could do not to cough and give away their presence to the funeral director, who loitered just outside the closed furnace door. They had heard him on the phone, then flipping papers, opening and closing drawers, tak­ing care of odds and ends in his lucrative business of morbidity. Al­though they hadn’t heard him for at least ten minutes, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t still lurking after hours.

The average funeral home, Winston recalled, processed about four earthly departures a day. The ashes of a human body weighed approximately two pounds.

Winston’s mind, as always, was a traffic jam of salient facts, none of which helped matters. So he tried to reinitialize his mind, reminding himself of what had brought them here in the first place.

Their path to this hiding place had been a circuitous one, beginning with an investigation into the scant clues left behind by the would-be grave robber. Winston, with his vast supply of knowledge, was not a puzzler like Dillon, who could pull patterns and solutions out of chaos. And although Drew was insightful, he was no investigator either.

They had first submerged the footlocker in Lake Arrowhead, be­hind Drew’s cabin. No grave site, no way for Briscoe or any other lunatic to find Michael’s resting place. Then the two had returned from Lake Arrowhead to Drew’s Newport Beach home to begin their search.

Drew’s parents were awkward and stand-offish around Winston, not knowing his relationship with Drew and not wanting to ask. Aside from complaining to Drew that the lawn needed mowing (which un­beknownst to them, was twice daily, now that Winston was around), his parents left them alone.

Their investigative efforts led them to the hotel from which Briscoe had taken the Gideon bible, and they tried unsuccessfully to ferret out the room from which it had been stolen before being evicted by se­curity. Then, they spent the better part of two days sifting through the Internet in search of Vicki Sanders—the single name scribbled on the bible’s inside cover. Vicki Sanders of Des Moines was a retired school teacher who enjoyed quilting and Harleys. Vicki Sanders of Liverpool was a frustrated factory worker who haunted sex chat rooms while her husband worked the night shift. Vicki Sanders of Minneapolis was actually Victor Sanders, and was damned pissed off at whatever half-assed computer had proliferated an electronic sex change. And Vicki Sanders of rural Tennessee was an SWF looking for a long-term re­lationship, and currently doing five-to-twenty for armed robbery.

“It’s pointless,” Winston had complained to Drew. “Even if we found the right one, how would we know? We don’t even know what connection she has to Briscoe, if any.”

Then, toward the end of the second day, Winston tripped a land mine within his own thoughts. Something that had been there, un­derfoot, all along, that he should have considered earlier.

He asked Drew for his initial notes on the phone numbers also scrawled on the bible’s watermark. Drew had tested each phone num­ber in more than a dozen different area codes, and the combinations that actually yielded connections had no obvious relevance.

The only number that was the slightest bit troubling was that of a funeral home in the California desert town of Barstow. Barstow, aside from being home to the world’s largest McDonald’s, had been in na­tional news a year ago. With the morgues and mortuaries of Las Vegas as overbooked as the hotels in the grim aftermath of the Backwash, a good number of the dead had been diverted to Barstow.

The names of those who had died had filled news reports for weeks. The more famous names took the spotlight, of course. The former senator from Wisconsin; the prominent architect; the notorious celeb­rity attorney. But the names of common people were washed into obscurity just as quickly as their bodies had been taken under the waters.

It didn’t take much searching to discover one Vicki Sanders among the dead.

“I don’t get it,” Drew had said. “What would this guy want with some woman who died in the Backwash?”

The answer came to Winston in a slow and sickening revelation.

And so now they hunched in a Barstow crematorium chamber.

It had been hard enough to slip into the establishment unnoticed before closing, and although climbing into the chamber had seemed the only way to hide from an approaching staff member, the idea had quickly fallen out of favor, for the funeral director didn’t leave the anteroom for more than forty-five minutes. Winston couldn’t help but worry whether these devices were set to some cleaning cycle after hours.

Twenty-eight people, Winston recalled, suffered accidental deaths each year in funeral homes.

When all had been quiet for twenty minutes, Winston slowly pushed open the heavy furnace door, and they climbed into a dark room that seemed bright when compared to the chamber. There were no windows, but someone had left a light on in an adjacent closet, and a perimeter of light escaped around its closed door. The coolness of the antechamber was a welcome relief.

“I saw the main office when we came in,” Drew said. “It should be this way.”

They passed through a large medicinal-smelling room with a stain­less steel table, and instruments that were mercifully obscured in the darkness; then they opened a door into the business office. Winston turned on his flashlight to reveal a room that could have been part of any business establishment. A secretary’s desk decorated with family pictures around a computer; a copy and fax machine in the corner; and against the far wall, a row of black filing cabinets. Those cabinets suddenly were more ominous to Winston than the crematorium.

Please, let me be wrong . . . let me be completely wrong.

He had told Drew of his suspicions, but Drew reserved judgment, not wanting to extrapolate until all the