Black River Falls (26 page)

T
HE SUN ROSE
over the town and fell again. I stepped onto the bridge that spanned Black River Falls.

The Marvin barricade was a mile and a half up the road, shadowed in the blue-gray twilight. I didn't see anyone manning it, just a line of sandbags and razor-topped fence. I walked out to the middle of the bridge and knelt in the roadway. The roar of the falls was like a radio caught in between stations. I laid my hand against the concrete and closed my eyes, praying there'd be nothing there, just darkness.

But no. Greer ran past, bare-chested, a blade flashing in his hand. There was a crack of thunder and then the sound of the knife hitting the ground. The world stopped, rewound, unspooled again.

I left the road and went to the stone guardrail. Forty feet below, the Black River was a ribbon of slate turning to foam as it went over the rocks. The sound was tremendous. I saw myself standing beside you down on the bank. It was summer. A month after we'd moved. We were tossing rocks into the water and you were telling me that as soon as you learned how to kayak, you were going to be the first guy ever to go over the falls and live to tell the tale. You laughed, but then the river was gone and I wasn't on the bridge anymore. I was in the yard across the street from our house, watching as you came stumbling out of the kitchen and onto the porch. You looked like you'd been laughing, but then your hand dropped away from your side and you fell against the wall next to the open door. Dad appeared and was gone again. And then I was on the porch, taking your hand. It was cold, and you were pale. There was the sound of wind chimes. Someone struck me from behind. Greer. Running past. I was on the bridge. There was the flash of a knife and then a crack and the ping of steel on concrete. A door slammed. I was in my room. Mom was running down the stairs. I followed. Dad's eyes were red. His back was pressed up against the stove. He had a knife in his hand. He raised the knife. There was a scream, and then you came stumbling out of the kitchen and onto the porch, your hand pressed into your side like you'd been laughing. Wind chimes clattered and pinged. The world smelled like the burnt head of a match. Cardinal told me the great secret of the world, and then he slipped a knife into my hand. His armor was torn. His wings were gone. There was a crack and then a scream and then the clang of a knife hitting the ground. You came stumbling out of the kitchen and onto the porch.

I took hold of the light post at the end of the bridge and climbed onto the railing. It was narrow and peaked in the middle, so my toes hung over the edge and I tipped forward. All I could see was stone and white water. Gravity tugged at me. I closed my eyes again, but you were still there and so were Greer and Mom and Dad.

“Cardinal.”

It was a man's voice. Quiet enough not to startle me. I saw gray hair and a black coat out of the corner of my eye.

“Leave me alone, Freeman.”

“Just come down off the railing,” he said. “We can talk.”

“There's nothing to talk about.” He came closer, trying to get within arm's reach. “I said leave me alone!”

I faltered. Righted myself. Freeman backed off and put up his hands.

“You're immune,” he said. “Aren't you?”

The wind whipped at my clothes. I nodded.

He took a small step toward me. “I knew it. All that time with those kids. You had to be. Think about what this means, Cardinal. Whatever's in your blood might be able to keep people from getting this. Maybe cure the ones who do.”

“I don't care about that.”

“I know that's not true. Cardinal—”

I was sick of talking. My fingers uncurled from the lamppost and came free. I shuffled down the railing, out toward the center of the bridge where it rose the highest over the falls. Freeman shouted, but I ignored him. I stopped halfway across. Jagged rocks reached up toward me. Water spun in eddies around them and then shot away. I shut my eyes and thought of Hannah and the kids, but it lasted only a second before I was back where I belonged—with you and Greer in the Gardens of Null. I took a deep breath. The muscles in my legs tensed.

“I can make you forget!”

I looked over my shoulder. Freeman was just behind me on the sidewalk, his white hair dancing in the wind.

“The virus can be changed,” he said, his voice trembling. “Re-engineered. A version can be made that will infect you.”

“How do you know that?”

Freeman took another step closer. He held out his hand.

“Because,” he said. “I'm the one who created it.”

“E
VERYTHING STARTED
with Henry Allan Forrest.”

We had left the bridge and were moving fast up Main Street. Freeman had his head down and his hands stuffed in his coat pockets.

“Henry was a U.S. Marine from Indiana. The son of a barber and an elementary school teacher. Blue eyes. Freckles. Red hair. Twenty-five, but he looked nineteen. He served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan before returning home to a hero's welcome. Two and a half weeks later, while his parents were out getting the car washed, he used the dog's leash to hang himself in their basement.”

We passed St. Stephen's and City Hall and then started up the streets that wound through the northside mansions. Freeman produced a small flashlight from his pocket. Its beam slid over once well-manicured lawns that had become thatches of weeds and wildflowers.

“And Henry wasn't alone,” he said. “There were thousands just like him. Young men and women who came home only to discover that the war they thought they'd left behind was still lodged inside them.

An address on the side of a mailbox glimmered when the light hit it. Freeman left the street and led me across an overgrown yard. A house emerged from the dark. No, not a house, more like a castle. Freeman started down a fieldstone walk and stopped at the foot of the stairs. White columns, like palace guards, stood on either side of a nearly eight-foot-tall front door. Freeman moved the flashlight's beam over the door's brass fixtures and up to a chandelier hanging over the porch.

“A team of researchers decided that the solution was to reach inside their heads and pluck out their memories of the war. Without those memories, they believed, soldiers like Henry Allan Forrest would be transformed back into the people they were.”

Freeman climbed the stairs to the porch slowly, delicately, stopping just shy of the front door. He lowered the flashlight.

“Freeman, what are we doing here?” I asked. “Who lived here?”

“Charles Ellis Dumay.”

“Who was Charles Ellis Dumay?”

Freeman brushed the brass doorknob with his fingertips.

“Me,” he said.

Behind us, there was the distant beat of a helicopter's blades as it flew over Black River. I climbed the stairs, stopping a few steps short of Freeman.

“You were one of the researchers.”

“No,” he said. “I
was
a scientist, though. Once. A good one. But then some people offered me a very large sum of money to do something else.”

“What?”

Freeman sat down at the top of the stairs, facing me.

“Travel the country, identifying research that had the greatest potential for profit. I became aware of the work of a small group of researchers in a lab in Atlanta. I thought it was something that could be expanded on and sold, most likely to one military or another. I bought the company, moved them here to Black River in secret, and steered their research in a direction my employers thought would be most profitable.”

“A virus.”

There was a click as Freeman turned off the flashlight, dropping us into darkness.

“Think about it,” he said. “A weapon that can erase the past. What government on earth wouldn't want that?”

“What happened?”

He looked into the dark beside the house. “Will you go somewhere else with me?”

“Freeman—”

“It's close,” he said. “I promise. And I think things will make more sense this way. Please.”

He left the front porch and I followed him around the back of the house and across an immense lawn that ended at a tract of woods. We pushed our way through the trees until we emerged at the edge of a paved road. On the other side of it there was a large, dark clearing. Freeman crossed the road and kept going, his flashlight picking out heaped piles of rubble that we had to maneuver around.

“Where are we?”

Freeman said nothing. He stopped and turned in a circle, playing the flashlight beam over the wreckage around us. We were surrounded by piles of charred wood, metal, and cinderblock. I saw the skeletons of tables and chairs. Two partially collapsed walls rested against each other in the distance. I was standing in the remains of a building that had burned to the ground. I suddenly realized it was a place I'd seen a thousand times before, but always from the top of Lucy's Promise, where it looked like nothing more than a black smudge north of town.

“The Greeks believed that when you died, you had to cross five rivers before you could enter paradise.”

He was a few feet away from me, ankle-deep in ashes, moving his light over the black hills of debris.

“The first four were the rivers of hate, sorrow, lamentation, and fire. The last was Lethe. The river of forgetfulness. No one could enter paradise until they'd had their old lives wiped away.”

“What happened here?”

Freeman glanced over his shoulder. “The scientists I brought to Black River were idealists, but they weren't stupid. They put together what we intended to do with their research and decided to expose it. My employers asked me what I thought they should do to prevent this from happening. I told them it was obvious. Infect the scientists with the virus, then take their research and start over somewhere else.”

A breeze stirred the ashes at our feet. Freeman's eyes were gray hollows.

“Two of them escaped the lab after I infected them,” he said. “I don't know if they made it to Monument Park that morning or if someone they infected did, but the outcome was the same.”

His light slid over the remains of a wooden desk and blackened steel cabinets. Bits of broken glass glittered in the ashes.

“When I realized what was happening, I started a fire in the lab to erase the evidence. My employers said they'd get me out, but they were lying, of course. I was a loose end. I tried to escape before a quarantine was put in place, but I was infected.”

Freeman jerked aside as I came at him through the ashes, but he wasn't fast enough. I planted both hands square on his chest and knocked him onto his back. He tried to scramble away, but I fell on him, straddling his chest and pinning him in place. I dug in the debris beside us and lifted out a charred plank the size of a baseball bat.

“Wait. Cardinal, please.”

“You did this. You did
all
of it.”

I lifted the club over my head, aiming for his skull.

“I wasn't lying when I said I could make you forget!”

My arm froze where it was. I tightened my grip on the end of the plank.

“Your friend,” Freeman said. “In the National Guard. Can he still get you out of Black River?”

I nodded. He pointed awkwardly to his right coat pocket.

“Take them,” he said. “Please.”

I kept one eye on him as I reached inside and pulled out four small black notebooks.

“What are they?”

“My memory,” he said. “Everything I wrote before and after I became infected. Names. Dates. Enough to make sure everyone who needs to be held accountable for what happened here will be. There are details about the virus too, how we engineered it, how it works. With that and whatever's in your blood that's made you immune, I think Dr. Lassiter will be able to make a cure. A vaccine at least.”

I got up slowly, holding the plank in one hand and the notebooks in the other. Freeman scurried away and retrieved his flashlight.

“You've had these all this time? You could have sent them to the police. The newspapers.”

“They've been watching me,” he said. “They're always watching me.”

“Who?”

Freeman nodded toward the notebook on the top of the stack. I opened it, and he shined his flashlight across the pages. They were filled with names and dates and formulas that meant nothing to me. But one thing stood out. A name was referenced on nearly every single page. As soon as I saw, it was so obvious that I wondered how I hadn't realized it before.

“Martinson Vine,” I said. “They were your employer. That's why they pushed to take over the quarantine from the Guard. Why they arrested you that first day.”

“And why they ransacked my library,” Freeman said. “They wanted to see if I was still a loose end. Luckily, there's no better place to hide a few books than a library. My antic disposition was enough to convince them that I wasn't a threat.”

I weighed the notebooks in my hand. “What about . . .”