Radiant Dawn (10 page)

"Thank you." God, was she blushing?

"But you didn't come all the way out here just to inquire about Stephen, did you?"

Stella was forced to look away from the sudden sharpness in Dr. Keogh's voice. Watching the horizon didn't take away the chilling penetration, the feeling of being opened up. When she opened her mouth to speak a moment later, she hesitated, certain he'd already seen through her. "No, Doctor, actually, to tell you the truth, I was surprised and intrigued to hear there was a hospice community up here. As a nurse in a small town, one rarely gets to make a difference. And I thought that, in such a remote area, you must have some difficulty keeping trained medical professionals on-call. I wanted to—"

"You'd like a tour of our community, Ms. Orozco?" He cut her off quite politely, but without quite leaving enough inflection for the statement to qualify as a question.

"Yes. Yes, I'd like that very much."

He stepped back toward the golf cart, then stopped her from returning to her car.

"Leave that here. It'll be safe. Leave the keys with us." She must've stared, because he added, "We try to expose our residents to as little pollution as possible."

"Of course," she said, feeling stupid. "But I have to get something out of my car. Would you—"

"Not at all," he said, and her keys weren't in her hand anymore, and he opened the car door and removed her purse and binder and presented them to her. Leaving the car unlocked, he took her arm and seated her on the cart. With no more speed but considerably less noise, they returned to Radiant Dawn.

"Why haven't I heard of this place before, Dr. Keogh?" Stella asked, instantly regretting it.
Curb your suspicion, chica, at least for now.

Keogh's expression, however, showed no ire. His eyes, hidden behind those black glass cages, might've been twinkling with pride as he said, "I'm surprised you haven't, really. After all, we've been covered in all the major papers, though we've tried to keep the media and the general public at arm's length from our work here. It would be a grave injustice to our residents to place a higher priority on publicity than on our work with them."

"And how are the pa—residents selected? Not everybody could afford something like this…"
What's wrong with you today?

Again, she failed to get a rise out of him, wondered why she couldn't stop trying. "At first, I admit, money was a factor, but we've become self-sufficient, and now operate, as much as possible, on a need-blind basis. We have a crisis intervention hotline which handles all manner of personal traumas, providing referrals to counselors, doctors, and so on. But we take a special interest in those with cancer, because no one else can tell them how to live with it, let alone why it happened to them. Those who need us most, who have nowhere else to turn, will eventually find their way here."

They cruised down the main avenue, and Stella heard nothing but the breeze and the dragonfly hum of the electric cart. Residents standing outside their houses or waiting at the intersections smiled and waved, and Dr. Keogh waved back. The residents were of all ages and races, dressed in identical light cotton tracksuits. Stella saw workers now, but they wore the same outfit, and were clearly residents themselves.

"So this place is a commune," Stella said, turning to face Dr. Keogh. His mind seemed a million miles away, and he looked at her for a long moment before he seemed to gather himself. He felt it too, the same sense of belonging that washed everything else away. Only her mistrust had spared her.

When he focused on her, however, his gaze was as penetrating as before. "We strive to create a sense of community here, Ms. Orozco, a society with its collective eye on the goal of surviving. By taking responsibility for every aspect of their survival, from maintenance to growing their own food, they come to renew their appreciation for life itself."

Great. Every hospital could save a bundle if they could convince their patients that they'd mend faster by cleaning out their own bedpans. "But your policy doesn't extend to medical staff? You have trained medical people here?"

Keogh laughed. "Of course, aside from myself, we have five other doctors, ten nurses, an anesthesiologist, an oncologist and a radiologist. All of them are also patients. Well, here we are."

The cart pulled into a cart-sized space in front of the medical center. Stella noticed an RV and an ambulance beside the door—the same one they'd picked up Stephen in. A bulky cable ran from the wall of the medical center to a port on the side of the van. "I think you'll be impressed with our facilities, Ms. Orozco. Our emergency room is especially noteworthy." He held open the door for her and followed her in. A gust of refrigerated air blew past her as she stepped in. Over her shoulder, Dr. Keogh said, "Pressurized, you understand, to minimize airborne infection. Now, as a medical professional yourself, what do you think of this?"

She stepped into the room, and all doubts about the integrity of Radiant Dawn crumbled away. Whatever they were, they weren't just peddling snakeoil.

The emergency room boasted three trauma stations and an on-site radiology station. Peering in the window of what she thought was an odd closet, she saw a baby MRI apparatus. She'd never seen a model half that small before. There were a dozen beds, lining the L-shaped room. All empty.

At the crook of the bent room, a middle-aged woman in a track suit sat at the nurses' station. Four computer workstations alternated patient charts and video feeds from different parts of the building. A massive wall monitor behind her displayed a schematic of the hospice community, with red dots moving across it. One by one, the nurse highlighted a different dot and clicked on it. A health chart that appeared to be monitoring in real time sprang up. Satisfied, she closed it and moved on to the next.

"Our patients regain the world by getting out of their beds, but they receive more attentive care than any health enterprise in the world could provide relative to our costs."

"How do you track—I mean, how do you monitor them?"

"A computer chip in their ID bracelets monitors their functions and location for us." He looked at her and saw her next question gathering, cut it off. "Stephen had the misfortune to have misplaced his."

She watched the board as he talked. She counted eighty-five residents on it. "Not a lot of people for such a big place," she said, trying not to sound like she was angling. What was she angling for?

"The residents we have take up all our time. We do much more than merely care for them. We do quite a bit of research, as well. That's what occupies the upper floors. We're looking for a cure, but in the meantime, we try to teach our residents to live with their cancer."

"So nothing like what happened to Stephen has ever happened before," she said, more sharply than she intended.

"Oh, no. Stephen had other issues which contributed to what happened. We deeply regret it, but there's nothing one can do for another who has simply renounced the life force."

"Is his body going to be sent on to his relatives?"

"He had none, I'm afraid. We're going to bury him here in Radiant Dawn. The state recently granted us license to inter remains here. It may seem paradoxical, but we find it helps to maintain the network of mutual support we've built here, to allow the dead to continue to provide comfort for those still engaged in the struggle."

After talking to Dr. Keogh last night, she'd reviewed the morgue records, and by computer, those of Lone Pine and Independence. In the thirteen months they'd been in operation, they'd had twelve deaths, all of cancer. The bodies were delivered to the hospital in Lone Pine, which was a smaller facility and took a more parochial view of autopsies and such. Which explained why she'd never heard of them. But now they were burying them here. Why now?

Stella suddenly felt that same wind she'd felt before at her back, and she turned to see Dr. Keogh was holding the door open for her. "Well, I hope you've learned all you hoped to learn from us. I've got to return to visiting with my residents, so, if you don't mind…"

She hurried through the door and retrieved her notebook from the cart. Dr. Keogh approached her. Plunged back into the blasting high desert heat, she was breathless, her lungs seared, and her mind bleached clean of lies.

"Dr. Keogh, I think you should know the real reason that I came to see you," she stammered. "I'm a fully trained, registered nurse with five years' experience in trauma medicine. I also have cancer—of the liver. The doctors have said it's inoperable and I have a year, maybe less, to live. I saw how advanced Stephen's cancer was, and how strong his body was even in the cancer's metastasized state. I'd like to come here. I don't want to die."

Dr. Keogh gently took her in her arms, stopping her from pulling out her resume or her charts from the hospital in Fresno. He held her for a long time, waiting for she knew not what. And then she was sobbing, and she knew this was it. She hadn't cried in front of anyone for as long as she could remember, perhaps not since her mother died. And now here she was with her puffy-eyed face buried in the shoulder of a strange doctor, bawling her heart out for a life lost before she even knew what to do with it. He held her and let her cry, drew the pain out of her like venom, and let her cry some more, until she felt nothing but the peace Radiant Dawn had given her when she'd first seen it. Dr. Keogh let her go and looked into her eyes, and she could almost see her sorrow swimming around behind them. "I'm sorry, my dear, but it's quite impossible right now."

Slapping her would've elicited less shock. "What? You won't…take me?" She sniffled and choked up in the middle of talking, hated herself for her weakness. The cleansed, open space he'd made inside her filled with hurt and red, red anger.

"We can't admit anyone once the residents have embarked upon their journey into the life force. There's no catching up, Stella. These people have transcended their illness, made themselves as one with it."

Her tears came again, but this time they were hot, stinging. Her hands ached to slap and scratch them. She made them hold each other back and scratch each other as she yelled at him. "How the fuck can you say that to me? How can you tell me I can't have what they have? What kind of heartless chingalo are you, to tell me I have to die, when these people can go on raking your leaves and making your beds? We Mexicans can pick a mean head of lettuce, you gringo bastard—"

His implacable calm wasn't even dented. "Please understand, Ms. Orozco, that we regret this more than you can understand right now. We wish it could be otherwise, but this process can't be revised. We all serve the life force, in our way."

"But as far as you're concerned, the brown people of the world can serve as fertilizer, eh?" An undercurrent of livid self-hatred rolled back on her as she slipped deeper into race-baiting. Never shamed of her heritage, she'd never invoked it for anything. Stella Orozco was a race of one, and it made her sick to hear her own voice using her Hispanic blood as a weapon.

"No, Stella, no. Listen to me," he said and he was closer to her than she would have allowed, just now, if she'd noticed him coming. His hands were on her arms again, but not restraining. She felt comforted, and she fought it. She lost. "Where there is life, there is change. Where life fights change, it breaks through…as cancer. But if your will to live is strong, you'll see the next Radiant Dawn. This is only the first such hospice. There will be others. And you will go among them. We will teach you to live with your illness, which is the life force. We will help you to become one with it, and live."

He let her go again, and steered her toward the cart. As the driver backed it out, Dr. Keogh waved to her once and went inside. As oblivious to the driver now as he apparently was to her, Stella cried some more.

She was still crying when they topped the ridge beside her car and she made out the shapes of residents at work on the dusty field. They were digging irrigation ditches, laying the groundwork for turning the desert into a farm. She wiped her eyes and climbed into the car. She stopped and stood up again and craned her neck, looking at one of the fieldworkers. His ginger hair and lanky build. She'd never seen him upright, but that same perverse voice that'd urged her to flee told her she was looking at Stephen. Standing on his two legs in a field. Holding a shovel in his two hands. He was talking to someone with their back turned. She shielded her eyes against the glare and the airborne dust and strove to see just a bit more clearly, but the dust was caking her face, miring in her tears. Then the man he was talking to turned and faced her and he seemed to see her very clearly indeed. It was Dr. Keogh. He waved once more to her and watched her as she dove back into the car, started the engine and sped away.

She couldn't stop crying until she got home. After a long bath, she realized that despite what Keogh'd told her, despite what she'd thought she'd seen, she was beginning to hope, and that nothing else mattered.

Storch drove out to the place where he knew they hid. The place that immediately leapt to mind when Hansen had told him she'd been missing nine years. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of it before.

The skin traders.

A year before, they'd come into his store. They smelled like organized crime. Three men, two bodyguards flanking an out-of-work Greek lounge emcee in a powder-blue Dacron suit that seemed to squirt sweat from strategic gutters when he walked or waved his arms. Which he did constantly, as if he were freezing to death in the hundred and three degree heat. His shopping list reinforced Storch's suspicion that they were penny-ante crooks on the lam—sleeping bags, lanterns, shotgun shells, and such—but a few unusual items, like bolts of canvas, camcorder batteries, pepper spray and handcuffs led him to believe they were going into the rough-trade porn business. They had four moving vans that came and went at odd hours from a mining hut two miles north of Thermopylae.