"He be all right in the trunk?"
"Did you hear that cough? He won't be all right anywhere. Not for long. You remember who his neighbor is?"
It took a moment for it to sink in. When Curly answered, his voice was low with dread. "The virus?"
"Probably. If it's really Keith in there and not a guy named Harold Hall."
"But he. . . he talked right into my face. That means that I'm . . .”
"Exposed. Right. But if it's any consolation, Gus Pulaski probably infected us already, if we weren't before. So we've got our own lives to save now by taking him back."
"You knew that? You realized that before, and never mentioned it?"
Woody shrugged. "If this plague of his is what he implied, we'll all be exposed sooner or later. So now we've got to save our own lives too."
Curly sat silently for a while. "It's like gathering all the demons and putting them back in Pandora's box," he finally said. "Not quite. More like sending one demon back to hell."
Chapter 43
It is finished. The last day has come. Breathing is so difficult. It's as though I have to pull in ten times the normal amount of air for every breath, as though my lungs have a hundred small pinholes through which the air escapes. My bowels are burning now, and sometimes I think I actually lose consciousness without knowing it. I write, I lose my way in the middle of a sentence, and by the time I find the path again, ten, fifteen minutes have passed. I'm very afraid that I'll slip into a coma without being aware of it, slip in, and never come out.
So it's time to visit my mother. I've written as much as I can, something from all the years, and nearly everything from the past six months, the most important time. All that's left is to hail the survivors who read this, and beg them to learn the lessons I've tried to teach. May you and the great mother earth live in harmony forever.
Your friend, and I hope your savior,
Keith Aarons
Carrying the bag, he walked out the back door and down the hill, tripping several times, falling once, lying still for a long time. Then he pushed himself to his feet, tried to ignore the agony that burned him from groin to neck, the ache that stretched his legs and filled his head, and walked on, stumbling through the brush until he was in the back yard where he had played cowboys and cops with his friends, been Wild Bill Hickok and Joe Friday and Superman and Dick Tracy, been all the heroes who made things better for the people of the west and Metropolis and Los Angeles and everywhere.
And he stood there in the dark yard, the bag in his hand, and he thought that he really was a hero now, the greatest hero of them all, and he smiled and coughed black blood and spat and shuffled on, until he was at the back door. He put his hands on the wood, thinking that it felt warm and alive, like an old dog happy after all these years to see its master home again.
He stayed there for a long time, leaning against the door, listening to soft music inside, the same records that his mother had played when he was little, some man crooning. Was it Como? Crosby? He didn't remember, it was so long since he had heard that kind of music. The music and the light streamed out between the cracks of the door and the windows, warm and welcoming, and now he heard another song, a deeper voice, tell him that he should come home if he was weary, come home, come home, and he took a deep breath that tore him as it sustained him, and he knocked on the door.
She knew him as soon as she opened it.
She stood there, the bright, round fluorescent light on the kitchen ceiling illuminating her gray-white hair from behind like a halo. "Keith?" she whispered, and when he heard her voice he couldn't breathe at all for the love that was choking him, and he pulled air in, pulled it with all his strength, until something inside him gave way, and the air and the blood mixed inside him, and he staggered, grasped the door frame, and she grabbed him and held him up.
"Keith," she said again, sure now, and moved into the house, pulling him along. One arm was around her, and the other clutched the bag to his side while the hand hopped along from door to kitchen chair to table to counter, holding him up, grasping for balance, gripping to keep the pain at bay.
"Come on," his mother said, and he did what she said, he came on, through the kitchen, the little dining room, and God, he marveled, how so little had changed, how so much was the same. The tears came on too, and he heard himself cry and heard his mother cry, and then they were on the sofa together, the bag between them, and he let her hold him.
"I saw you," she said between sobs, "that day in the cemetery. I thought it was a ghost . . . or a dream . . . but I knew that somehow you were still alive . . . somehow."
"I kissed you," he told her, the pains making him shudder spasmodically. "I wanted you to feel it when you woke up . . . I wanted to help you, kept track of you through the years. But I couldn't . . . thought about putting money in your account . . . but they might've traced it to me . . ."
She sat up straighter. "Where have you been? What have you been
doing
?" There was no anger in her words, only the yearning of a mother to know about her child.
"Been . . . saving the world. Trying to. Finally doing it.”
“You seem so sick . . ."
He nodded. The movement hurt his neck, and the pain pushed into his upper chest so that he gagged before he spoke. "Am. Dying. But what kills me, kills us, saves the world. Got to believe." He made himself smile, and the pain in the decaying muscles of his face brought more tears. Then it passed, and he seemed momentarily free of the agony.
"I'll get a doctor, call the ambulance." His mother started to get up, but he clapped a hand on her leg.
"No. Too late. Couldn't do anything anyway. It's the virus, you see. The virus."
A look of pity claimed her face, pity instead of fear, and it was the first time in so many years that someone had been concerned for
him
rather than for themselves. There was no terror at being so close to the death he carried. 'That . . .
flu
? That Texas flu?"
He nodded. "I'm sorry, Mom. I'm so sorry. But it couldn't be helped. I had to come home. You would have gotten it event—" Pain knifed him in the stomach, and he broke off.
"I don't care," she said, and hugged him again. "You're home, and I don't care how or why or what happens now, but my boy's home . . . oh Keith . . ."
"Had to come," he said when the cutting was finished, and he could breathe again. "Couldn't let you hurt like this . . . have to keep you safe."
He held his left arm around her, and opened the bag with his right hand, hoping she didn't hear the paper crinkle.
"We'll keep each other safe now," she said. "Whatever happened, whatever's wrong, it'll be all right . . . but let me call the doctor, get someone to take care of you . . ."
She pushed away from him, and it was then that she saw the silenced pistol in his hand.
"I don't want you to hurt," he said, bringing up the muzzle to stare into her eyes. "I don't want you to suffer like this."
His trained hand did not fail him. No pain racked him, made the pistol tremble, yanked the trigger before he was ready. He killed his mother as coolly and smoothly and efficiently as he had ever killed anyone. The pistol hurled the bullet through the barrel and the silencer, trapping the sound of the explosion so that only a flat, sharp bark escaped, like the parody of a smacking kiss, a deadly kiss that left the imprint of bloody lips on his mother's forehead, one more kiss, twenty years later, from her lost son.
Chapter 44
A hundred yards away, in the silence of early night in a dying town, Woody Robinson and Curly Rider heard the muffled sound of the gun.
They were standing on the back porch of Keith
Aarons's
rented house, holding their weapons as though wearing clothes too big for them. They had approached the house only five minutes before, after having watched the lighted windows for a half hour, seeing and hearing nothing inside. Their weapons loaded, they had walked quietly through the trees and peered through the windows, but saw no one inside. Woody had gingerly tried the front door, but found it locked. They had just moved around to the back porch when they heard the sound from below.
"Know what that is?" Curly whispered.
"A gun?"
Curly nodded. "Silenced. They still make a noise. Think he's down there?"
Woody turned and tried the back door, which opened so easily that it startled him. "Come on," he said, and they went inside.
As they blundered through the house, Woody thought that if Keith Aarons had been there, he would have had plenty of aural warning that he had company, but the place seemed to be empty.
"Hey, Woody," Curly said from a window near the rear of the house, "look at this." He held a thick pile of white papers in his hand.
Woody flipped through it, and as page after page made their grim confessions, he realized what it was. "Jesus," he said. "It's Keith all right." He turned to the last few pages, anxious to see how this all could end, and scanned them.
"His mother," he said finally, looking up at Curly. "That's his mother's house."
They went back onto the porch, and trotted carefully down the bank, holding their weapons at the ready, but their fingers outside the guards. Curly had the safety off the shotgun, and Woody had cocked the rifle.
When they arrived at the back yard, they moved slower, keeping away from the slash of light the open back door threw onto the grass. At the door they paused, listened, smelled the scent of burnt gunpowder, wrapped their fingers around the triggers of their guns, and went inside.
From the kitchen they walked into a small dining room, wincing at each creak of the floorboards. A floor lamp was on in what Woody figured was the living room, and he moved very slowly and quietly around the separating wall until he saw the end of a sofa, and a person's hand resting on the worn fabric of the arm.
He held up a warning hand to Curly, brought his rifle to port arms, and moved his head by inches until he saw the old woman to whom the hand belonged. She was sitting there, eyes closed, her head down, but not down far enough that Woody could not see the small, neat hole in her forehead just above her right eye, and the stippling marks like black freckles on her face.
Woody's mouth opened, and he stifled a gasp, but heard it anyway, then realized that it was not he who had gasped, but someone else, someone still hidden by the separating wall. He took a deep breath and moved farther to the left, until he could see Keith Aarons sitting on the sofa next to the dead woman. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing, albeit raggedly. He held a pistol in his right hand.
Woody moved back again and motioned for Curly to keep still. Then he pointed toward the room and nodded vigorously.
Keith?
Curly made his mouth form the word, but Woody heard no sound, and he nodded again, then mimed holding a handgun, and Curly nodded back.
Woody decided he would let Keith know he was there before he left the shelter of the wall that separated dining room from living room. He hugged the wall and spoke his old friend's name.
~*~
Keith
.
Keith
Aarons's
eyes opened. He had not imagined it. Someone had called his name. It wasn't his mother, because she was dead now, free from pain and plague. But it was a voice he knew, a voice he had heard recently. Someone from Goncourt? Had they somehow tracked him down? No. Impossible. Then who? There was no one in the room.
"
Keith!
"
Oh God, of course. Now he knew. The voice was coming from the dining room, and it was—
"Hello, Woody." He chuckled, tasted blood in the phlegm the chuckle brought up. "Welcome to
Colver
."
"I need to talk to you."
"Feel free. But you better hurry."
"You've got a gun. How do I know you won't use it?"
"You've probably got a gun too, Woody. You wouldn't be stupid enough to visit me without one, would you?"
There was a pause. "No. You're right. I have one."
"All right. I promise not to use mine on you if you promise not to use yours on me." The pain hit him, heart, lungs, gut, and his head twisted, but he made no sound. He bit through his lower lip until the worst of it was gone. He would have wiped the blood from his mouth, but he wanted to save his strength.
"All right," Woody said. "Deal. And that goes for Curly too.”
“Curly? Curly here too? Who else?"
“Just us two."
"Come on then, come where I can see you."
The two men rounded the corner, Woody first, his rifle pointed toward the ceiling, then Curly, his bald head shiny with perspiration. Keith kept his right hand at his side on the sofa. "What a nice reunion," he said. "Curly, I haven't seen you in ages."
"Hi, Keith," Curly said. His voice sounded hushed, filled with awe.
And why not?
thought Keith. He was meeting a legend, the savior of the world.
"Your mother?" said Woody, nodding to her.
"Yes. I didn't want her to suffer, to go through . . .“