Radiant Dawn (15 page)

"I'm listening, sir."

"The LA field office is off the investigation. Your people are about to get the call in fifteen minutes. Lane Hunt's team is already packing up."

His chest tightened and he forgot to breathe. His assignment. His clearance. His rapport with Assistant Director Wyler. Gone. "I don't understand, sir. Why are they taking this away from us?"

"The Navy pushed its suit with the President, and he's listening to them. This is to be treated as a military affair, at least until the contraband is located. The FBI has been explicitly tasked to offer support and intelligence only, to issue from headquarters. Is that clear?"

The chill in Cundieffe's molar seemed to eat its way out of his mouth and engulf his whole head. As a Special Agent of the FBI, Martin Cundieffe thrived on the warm glow of unearthing truth, of unraveling conspiracies and flushing liars. Lies made him cringe. Lies hurt. He'd never thought he'd have to sit and listen while a fellow FBI agent, let alone a superior, lied to him. His jaw clenched, the cold sparking blue pain-telegrams down his spine. Through the pain and his cold, cold anger, he kept seeing Sibley the CIA man stuttering into his cell phone, and knew the case had ceased to be theirs, his, in any meaningful fashion then.

"Clear, sir."

"Assistant Director Wyler would like a detailed report of all your actions on the matter up until now forwarded to this office as soon as possible. And he said one more thing."

"What was that…sir?"

"'Keep doing your homework,' is what he said. That's all. Do you have more questions?" His voice strained, wrung-out, no more answers.

"No, sir. Thank you for telling me. I'll commence on that report immediately."

"Good." Warden rang off. Cundieffe set down the phone and scanned the office. Everyone still running around, dancing like headless chickens in the minutes before they realize they're dead.
Strike that last
, he thought.
That's no way to think about your coworkers
.

The Navy had come to them, spilled the bizarre details of their appalling failure on them, and now the Navy was taking it away to handle on its own. The clumsiness of it all made it seem almost too stupid to be entertained. Clearly, the Navy didn't want or even understand the case, if there was a case to begin with. Either Rear Admiral Meinsen misstepped when he brought us in, or they let us in only to get access to our database right away, and figured they could keep us quiet. Would Rear Admiral Meinsen get a paddling for his indiscretion? Would there be any visible outcome at all?

The possibility that it'd been a military exercise all along loomed large in Cundieffe's view. They didn't tell us because we were part of the test. They kept Rear Admiral Meinsen out of the loop to see how he'd dump it in our laps, and how we'd react. That was the most plausible explanation; that would be the official story if this ever got out.

And Martin Cundieffe, who'd never been able to walk away from an unfinished puzzle or an unrepaired anthill, placed a call to the Military Records division of the National Archives.

The message light on Stella Orozco's answering machine was blinking when she came in from work. A full shift riding along in the ambulance, covering for a paramedic who'd broken his ankle grass skiing; three calls and endless hours fending off the driver—but three hours passed before she took notice. After showering, fixing herself dinner—a tossed salad with fresh tomatoes from her pocket garden, salmon and steamed rice—she cleaned her apartment and read for an hour in the bath. So long as she was doing something, living in her hands and head and not her heart, she wouldn't cry. There would be time enough to cry when she could no longer work.

At ten o'clock she went round the apartment, switching off lights, prepping the coffee maker, and double-checking her alarm, when the blinking light registered. She realized then that she'd noticed it when she came in, and tuned it out. Often enough, it was an especially pushy automated telemarketer, or a too-distant relative from Mexico looking for a place to stay, or Thor the ambulance driver, who was only two years her junior, yet wore full dentures, because his motormouth had so annoyed someone once they'd kicked all the teeth out of it; Thor who supposed that if he got drunk, took his dentures out and whispered sweet lovetalk into her answering machine enough times, she'd make his Penthouse Forum fantasies come true. Work would've paged her. She listened to the first few seconds, then stopped it, her finger on the ERASE button, when the strange, stammering voice she heard sank in.

"—one that called in about that fella, you know, uh, the one from the accident. We talked about it some, you 'member, and you seemed real honest, like, and like maybe a fella could trust you. If'n that's true, well…I found somethin' the hospital's gonna want, but I ain't about to call 'em again, you understand. I, uh…found somethin' the fella lost. I got…somethin' what belonged on him. This is stupid, I gotta…My number's, um…just star-six-nine me, and…um…Call me, if'n I can still trust you, and if you can 'member my name. Thank you, ma'am, I hope I haven't been a bother." This last part sounded muffled, as if the man were slamming down the phone in mid-sentence. He was guilt-ridden and fearful, yet he'd called her. Because he'd found something he couldn't throw away or turn in to the police.

Somethin' what belonged
on
him

But she'd seen him there, intact, whole—and possibly standing.

Seth Napier,
the name came back.

She didn't call Napier. She called directory assistance and, using the ambulance creds, got his address. Then she called Wenda, the ambulance despatcher, and promised to cover a weekend shift if she'd look up the address of where Stephen was picked up. There was no proper address, just a rough description, but it was less than a quarter mile from Napier's house, or at least his postal box. Whatever he'd found, or thought he'd found, he'd sounded as if he'd changed his mind about telling her midway through his message. A nagging doubt about the hermit, and the whole improbability of it all, told her to bring her gun.

She was dressed and in her car in five minutes.

It took almost an hour to find the place. It was halfway to Big Pine, at an unmarked turnoff from the highway that simply wandered off into the woods behind a Bigg Piney gas station. Stella drove slowly for fear of missing it, homeward-bound tourists blasting past her, leaning on their horns. When she found it, she saw she needn't have bothered.

After the drive through the pre-moonrise blackness, under the naked starlight, radiant dust that illuminated only itself, the gas station was an alien eyesore. Steeped in a grotesque orange sodium glow that seemed to be some kind of nature repellent, a gigantic Winnebago and a Sentra full of sleeping college students draining its petroleum teats, the gas station made her wonder for perhaps the first time in her life how animals perceived human structures. The Winnebago lumbered away as she pulled into the lot.

Stella walked in to ask for directions, noticing on the way the pay phone and the row of battered mailboxes at the edge of the lot. The walls behind the counter were crowded from floor to ceiling with mounted deer heads, a forest of accusing antlers and incurious glass eyes. It took a moment to discern the cashier's mulish face peering over the counter. He knelt on the floor before the safe, which stood open. His hand went behind the cashbox and brought a revolver into view.

"I'm not a deer," Stella said.

"Yeah," he said, still gripping the gun, breathing hard. Cranked up on meth. LESTER, said his nametag. "Ought not sneak up on a man like that."

"I'm looking for Seth Napier? He lives on an old logging road near here, by the railroad tracks?"

Lester appeared to think about it a bit, or maybe he was just thinking about the gun some more. Finally, he came back and smiled much too much. "Yeah, hobo kind of guy, always buys Red Man by the box, last friday of every month." He stood and came around the counter. "He's in trouble, right?"

Stella stood her ground, dropping her arm and twirling her purse behind her back. It was only a simple, teardrop-shaped canvas sack with her pocketbook and pager, and a few bottles of prescription medications and ibuprofen, but she'd thrown in her .22 revolver and two speed-loaders for heft. "Is his house back there? Behind your station, in the woods?"

"Yeah," Lester said, looking at the gun as if he could hear it speaking. "In the woods. 'Bout a half-mile. Bunch of other cabins and trailers and shit back there, but he's the only one left."

Stella backing towards the door now. "Thanks a lot, Lester. Thanks a whole bunch, okay?" Turning away from his too-wide smile only when she got outside, running back to her car, getting in, loading the gun.

The road was dirt, of course, and hadn't been graded in decades. Knurled pine roots fanned out across the road like ribs, rocking the car on its rusty toy suspension, Nature's own speed bumps. Should she be watching out for booby traps? Beyond the range of her headlights pine trees loomed to either side of the road, pine trees and velvet blackness. Clearly, it'd been a long time since this road had been used for logging, if ever. She came to a fork after three tenths of a mile, and went right. The road immediately began to veer left, presumably arcing around to rejoin the driveway as the left fork. The pine trees parted and she saw two trailers, a silver Airstream and a fiberglass Chinook. Both had been crushed by a fallen tree. Some of the tree's limbs had been sawn off for firewood, and the trailers had both been ransacked, but she saw no sign of life. This could've happened years ago.

Cruising on, she saw a clapboard cabin with no ceiling, the front door standing open and a pea green Datsun pickup truck up on blocks in the living room. Beyond that, another motor home, in relatively good shape, the windows boarded up the door studded with four deadbolts—on the outside. As her car drew near, the trailer started rocking back and forth, roaring and snarling, rabid and starving. The trailer was an alarm, stuffed to bursting with dogs in a feeding frenzy. Stella noticed a chain running from the bottom of the kennel, trailing off into the woods. Nestled in the darkness into which it disappeared, she saw the pale will-o-wisp glow of a Bug Zapper lamp. She pulled her car as close as she could to the cabin, which stood off thirty feet from the clearing behind a screen of pine and willow trees, an old blue Chevy pickup out front. Watching the throbbing motorkennel, she slowly climbed out of the car, leaving the door hanging wide open, and began to walk towards the sunken porch of Seth Napier's cabin with one hand in her purse.

As horrible as the dogs' racket had been before, it was magnified now the car engine was off and her back was turned to it. It prickled her skin. It was hot. She had to tell herself it wasn't dog breath.

Halfway to the porch, the chain jerked taut.

She saw now that it ran up to a boarded window beside the front door. She saw a sliver of yellow light through the crack, saw a shadow pass across the light as the chain snapped again. Behind her, she heard the click of a lock, and the dogs were suddenly much, much louder.

She sprinted across the yard, gaining the porch in a few seconds. "Mr. Napier?" She screamed, trying to catch her breath as cramps knived her fluttering lungs. "It's me! Nurse Orozco, from the hospital! You called me! I'm outside! Please let me in! Call off your dogs!"

Her gun caught on something in her purse and wouldn't come free. She spun on her heel and saw the first dog, a misshapen gutter-mutt of pit bull-rottweilerish extraction, only twenty feet away and closing fast, with three more a few paces behind it. The dog's eyes were cloudy, rolled back in its knobby, hairless head, its muzzle bedizened with bloody foam.

Stella fired over their heads, and her purse exploded. The lead dog reared back as if to close with her on its hind legs, then recoiled, yipping in shocked pain as pills, spare change and fragments of Stella's beeper and a tumbling .22 slug rained down on it. The others crashed into it and tore at its flanks before it could hit the ground.

Stella turned and lunged for the door, noticing as she did the three Kwikset locks bored into the heavy pinewood door.
Oh shit
, she thought,
oh Jesus, I want to die of cancer…

Die running
, she thought, and seized the knob.

The doorknob turned in her hand and she fell through the doorway, into the light. She collapsed on a rug so filthy that plumes of dust shot up around her. Her first breath was mostly dog hair, and she gagged as her throat slammed shut. She kicked out at the door and heard it slam behind her, careening dog bodies pounding into it from outside.

When she caught her breath, she checked her gun and followed the chain across the living room, through a kitchenette, down a short hall, and into the back bedroom. There was no light here, and the light switch did nothing when she flicked at it. Still, she knew he was here. Breathing, regular, deeper than Carlsbad Caverns, smelling wet and meaty and—like death and new life.

"Mr. Napier?" Stella whispered, pointing the gun at the breathing, reaching around for the door behind her that opened on the closet, reaching into it, fumbling around, she found a string, and pulled it.

And the light came on.

Seth Napier lay sprawled across a bed, naked, half-covered by a woolen Army surplus blanket. His exposed flesh glistened, gelatinous, translucent, rumpled and bulging like an oversized wetsuit the color and texture of clotted rubber cement, or smegma. Napier's skin and probably most of the subcutaneous tissue beneath seemed to have spontaneously necrotized. The chain was wrapped several times around one wrist, cutting deep into it, and still twitched spasmodically on the floor.

Even as she watched, his face became almost unrecognizable. As his mouth worked, his features seemed to sag, sliding around on his head as if trying to rearrange themselves, or escape. Stella gasped and backed away, and Napier, his filmy eyes bulging out of tunnels of slime, reared up on the bed. The blanket fell away, and she saw it.