Epitaph Road (24 page)

Not mine. Not Tia's.

Somewhere off in the cold dark woods.

Which direction? I sat up. I waited.

More coughing. Then a rapid-fire series of rough, wracking, chest-deep eruptions. And this time there was no doubt about who was responsible.

Gunny.

Tia stirred. She got up on an elbow. “What?”

“Coughing. Gunny.”

“No.”

Off in the trees, a lantern came on. I finger-nudged Tia's chin in that direction — Gunny's direction.

More coughing. Not mine, but I felt it deep in my chest.

“Gunny!” Dad was awake, too.

No answer.

The lantern moved up, then side to side, as if it was waving.

Then in one more or less steady direction.

It disappeared, appeared again, disappeared, as Gunny walked among the trees.

Gradually, the intermittent lantern glow faded, the coughing quieted. Gradually, I realized what he was doing. He was leaving. Going off to die, like a wounded animal.

The lantern light disappeared. Minutes passed. I felt empty. First Sunday, then Dr. Nuyen. Now Gunny. Tia wept. She should have been out of tears by now. I put my arm around her and looked up into the blackness of the moonless night.

Ursa Major, the Great Bear, looked down on us. The sky was so clear that I felt myself staring past that constellation to other stars, wondering if this nightmare would be as endless as the universe.

“Kellen?” Dad called.

“We're here,” I said. “We're okay.”

“Say a prayer,” he said. “I'll see you in the morning.”

I heard the cry of a bird.

I opened my eyes and blinked out at the glassy gray of the lake. It was early dawn. The sun was still on its way. Low clouds, pillowing against the hills, clinging to the water, would delay its arrival. The resident loon patrolled the shoreline, looking for breakfast, reminding me of my own hunger. I sat up, trying not to disturb the blankets covering Tia, who was still asleep or pretending.

I got up and walked barefoot to the beach. The loon, thirty feet away, didn't alter his course. He was used to me by now. At my approach, a trout swirled in the shallows and headed for deeper water, but the bird, too independent or proud to accept my help, continued on.

I picked up a flat rock and sent it skipping across the surface. Then another. And more. I began to lose the stiffness in my body from another night of sleeping on dirt and cedar boughs. Seventeen nights now, fifteen in this place.

Today we were heading back — hiking to the remains of the Foothills compound, climbing into Gunny's pickup, bypassing the mines, driving to the little bay where we left
Mr. Lucky
, cruising to Afterlight and Seattle and whatever awaited us there.

Dad had led us here — the place where he and Aunt Paige and my grandmother once waited in vain for my grandfather. Dad thought it would be safer in case PAC came calling again with its armored vehicles or helicopters or a second helping of the Bear and plans to finish the job. It was a long two-day trudge from the lab, and for much of the way, even when I was watching and listening for signs of Elisha in Dad and Tia and analyzing my own state of health, I stewed over our decision not to come here earlier, before we ever set foot in the lab.

Sunday would still be alive.

But at what cost?
Dad had argued the night we arrived, and even Tia took his side. What would have happened if we hadn't been there to push the button? Would Dr. Nuyen have gotten out safely and in time to blow the place? If not, would Wapner and his men and their Formula T have killed practically every female in the world?

They convinced me, mostly.

But I couldn't forget Sunday's face in that little window.

Or Gunny's lantern fading into the night.

Or Margaret Nuyen's brave farewell from the tunnel floor:
Tell Merri I love her.
I hoped I'd get the chance to deliver that message.

I walked back up the low bank to the campsite. Tia was still sleeping. On the other side of the fire pit, Dad was sitting up, wrapped in his covers. He nodded to me, but he was distracted, studying the area of damp dirt that lay between us.

I followed his gaze.

I saw indentations. Deep impressions in the soft ground. I stepped closer. They were prints, huge ones, dozens of them, crisscrossing the campsite as if the big animal that left them was pacing back and forth, waiting for someone to wake up and give it its proper respect.

“A bear?” I said. Tia didn't stir. She wasn't faking.

Dad nodded. “Big one.”

“
Your
bear?”

He smiled. He'd filled my head with images of his bear. “I doubt it. How long do bears live anyway?”

I shrugged. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I wanted to believe it was Dad's long-ago visitor. “You want to go down to the lake?”

Dad stretched and stood. He shuffled over and settled in next to me, close. He was wearing socks, formerly white, but they were stained the color of the soil under his feet. He had a three-week growth of beard and a head full of tangled hair and rumpled ratty clothes that had been in and out of the lake a number of times.

He looked just right.

“You know when I first saw you and the girls?” Dad said. “When I got off
Mr. Lucky
and you were waiting for me on the beach?” He put his arm around my shoulders and we gazed out at the lake. “And I made the boneheaded mistake of thinking — saying — you were thirteen?”

“It wasn't a big deal. You had a lot on your mind.”

“It
was
a big deal. Even with everything else that was happening and would happen, the fact that I didn't even know my own kid's age bothered me the most. It drove me nuts. Especially when I thought about what you'd done for me.”

“Now you know. I'm fourteen. I'll be fourteen for a long time.”

“I don't want to be wrong again,” Dad said. “When you have a birthday, pass your trials, learn to drive, get out of school, figure out what you want to do with your life, I want to be there.”

“My life —” Should I tell him I had dreams of moving here — to the Peninsula — when I got older? Living the life of a loner?

Did I, still, after everything I'd learned and seen?

“As soon as I can,” Dad continued, “I want to find some moorage for
Mr. Lucky
and me on the Seattle waterfront. I can go fishing from there and still spend a lot of time with you.”

My chest filled with something warm. I thought of my long-ago poem, the one on the wayfarers' wall. The words —
thinking of me
— were true, after all.
They were true.
But for a moment I considered telling him not to do it, that it would mean giving up his freedom, being under someone's —
everyone's
— thumb again.

But did he really have freedom here in the hinterlands? In the end, the throwbacks and loners of Afterlight and the rest of the Peninsula had only one freedom — the freedom to die.

And a new dream was beginning to materialize in my head. If Dad came to Seattle, maybe I could live with him on
Mr. Lucky
. Because the idea of moving back in with Mom after all this, even if Aunt Paige returned to the house, even if Tia was still there, felt like a nightmare.

“That would be great,” I said. I would bring up my new dream later. One step at a time.

Dad gave my shoulder a squeeze and let me go. I found Tia's hand in the mound of blankets and tugged her to a sitting position. “Come on,” I said.

She rubbed at her eyes. “What, Kelly?”

Kelly. Her new nickname for me. A term of endearment, she called it. Coming from her, it was okay; I'd put up with anything that might soften the pain in her eyes.

For more than two weeks Dad had observed and sympathized with that pain, too. He'd decided to team up with Tia, adopting the
Kelly
tag, with only an occasional and secretive twinkle and wink of his eye.

I still called Tia
Tia.
As often as I could.

“We're going down to the lake, Tia,” I said. “Take a look for Dad's bear.” I gestured at the tracks all around us.

Her sleepy eyes grew wide. She scrambled to her feet, grasping my hand hard, scanning our little clearing for signs of something big and bad. When she was satisfied that the something had gone away, she gulped in a big breath and let it slowly out.

We walked to the water's edge. The loon was out of sight. The morning had grown brighter. I wondered what was happening out in the world. How many throwbacks and loners and innocent kids and bystanders had died from this Elisha? Had the quarantine worked? Or had someone miscalculated? Had Elisha spilled over? How much information had gotten out? We had no radio, no news, true or otherwise.

How would we be treated when we returned?

Dad stared across the water at the opposite shoreline, eyes narrowed against the gathering light. Tia and I followed his lead. Did he see something? A shadow moving through the undergrowth? An image conjured from a memory?

“Sunday would like it here,” Tia said.

I felt pain at the sound of Sunday's name. I welcomed it. I wouldn't ever let myself forget that she'd died because of me.

“She'd want to meet this bear,” Dad said, making Tia smile.

A breeze kicked up, rippling the lake, reshaping the wisps of fog.

“Will they believe us about Formula T?” I said.

“They
have
to,” Dad said.

“Dr. Nuyen said it was up to us to stop Wapner, Kelly,” Tia said. “We did it.”

For now
, I thought, remembering her words from a couple of weeks ago that seemed like a couple of years ago. Until the next wacko scientist decided to even the score. Would someone else be there to stop him?

And what about the world's reigning wacko scientist, Rebecca Mack? Would anyone ever stop her? What was going to happen when old age finally took her? Or someone — a militant Fratheist, maybe — decided to speed her death along?

That idea — putting an end to her — intrigued me for a moment as I once more pictured Gunny slipping away to die and I imagined all the others who were massacred on Rebecca Mack's orders. But would PAC wither up and die along with her? Or would it be like Hercules slicing away at the Hydra — two fresh and fearsome heads replacing her one?

From somewhere far down the shoreline, the loon cried again. The sound, skimming unhindered across the water, was sad but reassuring. It will be okay, it said
. It will be okay.

I kept staring. On the distant bank, something moved.

The wind, I suspected at first. The wind in the tall spidery bushes bordering the lake.

But I kept my gaze fixed on the spot. I held perfectly still, waiting. And deep into that long breathless moment, I swore I glimpsed a flash of silvery brown, the wagging side to side of a huge shaggy skull, the sweep of a giant paw.

I swore I did.

The surface lost most of its chop as Dad steered
Mr. Lucky
around the breakwater and into the harbor. From a quarter mile away, Afterlight looked like a ghost town. But as we approached the refueling dock, I saw, through the morning fog and drizzle, a wispy column of gray smoke rising into the sky from the back edge of town. And then I saw people — all females — on their feet, shuffling along, carting stuff from shore to dock to boat.

Dad aimed us at a berthing space. “Half the boats are gone,” he yelled from the wheel as he maneuvered us close and I threw a line to a woman standing near the stern of an ancient wreck of a boat. “And I don't think they've gone fishing.”

The woman glanced at Tia but saved most of her attention for me, then Dad, as he stepped onto the deck. “Where you been?” she asked him as two girls — nine or ten years old, maybe — emerged from the cabin of the old tub, staring.

“At sea,” Dad said. “Up north. What happened here?”

“The Bear,” the woman said, blank-faced. She eyed the name on our boat. “You got lucky. Missed the Bear, missed the Coast Patrol.”