CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“They have horses, Andrew!”
One month later, Andrew sat on the couch in his apartment, feet propped on the coffee table, a freshly opened bottle of Harp in one hand, his replacement iPhone in the other, and listened as Alice chattered excitedly in his ear.
“They have stables and a barn and a riding ring and they said I could take lessons every day. They even gave my own horse! Not to keep or anything, not forever at any rate, but they said I could ride her whenever I feel like it, as much as I want. Her name is Sunshine and they let me feed her carrots. She eats them right out of my hand!”
“Gross. Horse slobber,” Andrew said, making her laugh, a high-pitched, happy sound. “I’m just kidding. I’m glad you like it there.”
“I love it!” she gushed.
As it had turned out, when Moore had sued the state of Massachusetts to have Alice released from Gallatin, in the process, he’d made sure that no one would ever be able to institutionalize her there again. He’d left specific instructions in his will, along with a sizable trust in Alice’s name, that placed her in the custody and care of Cochrane Academy, a facility in western Massachusetts specializing in the long-term treatment and care of autistic children.
“Two of the girls in my therapy group told me there are dance lessons in the fall, too. Ballet and tap. I want to take them both.”
“Wow.” He tried to feign the appropriate note of enthusiasm. “That sounds like fun.”
In the weeks since his return, Andrew had been keeping an eye on the internet, straining for any hint of news from the Appalachian region that might give him a clue as to what might have happened to Prendick.
A containment crew was dispatched from the moment we learned of Specialist Santoro’s survival, Captain Peterson had told him. Which meant that Prendick had, in all likelihood, been freed from his prison inside the garage. Suzette had told him the screamers would suffocate within a week, that the virus would cause growths to block their airways, but Andrew was no longer so sure.
Search Continues for Missing Hunters. That had been the headline on Google News, cached from the Times WV newspaper online edition two and a half weeks ago. The WV stood for West Virginia and the hunters who were being sought had disappeared from the heavily forested area surrounding the small town of Elkins in this very same state.
“How’s your ankle?” Alice asked him over the phone.
“Getting better.” As he spoke, he tilted his head back, took a long drink of beer, then looked at his outstretched leg, wiggling his foot experimentally. “A couple more weeks, and they think I can lose the cast.”
When Prendick had shot him, the bullet had ruptured his Achilles tendon, among other things. The moon boot from the hospital in Pikeville had been replaced with a plaster cast after he’d been hospitalized for more reconstructive orthopedic surgery in Pittsburgh. He’d worn the cast for several weeks, transitioning only recently into the walking variety that looked better equipped for hitting the ski slopes than the sidewalk. But his occupational and physical therapists had both been pressuring him to walk as often as he could, forcing upon him a daily regimen of exercises to support and strengthen the repaired tendon.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
“Liar.”
His mother had come to stay with him upon his release from the hospital, and had only returned to Alaska a few days earlier. To his absolute astonishment, his father had flown in from Anchorage, as well, and Katherine had told him that Eric had kept a nearly constant vigil at his bedside during his first few days in the hospital, when he’d been in and out of surgery, heavily sedated.
Eric had come to the apartment only once, and if Andrew had answered the door himself things might have wound up differently. As it turned out, Katherine was with him, and she had let Eric inside. Andrew had hobbled in from the kitchen on the damnable crutches he’d been forced to use for a time, and he’d stopped in the living room, staring at his father face to face for the first time since that awful night at the Pagoda Restaurant.
“Dad. Hey,” he’d said, a non-confrontational greeting he’d since come to blame on the Percocet he’d still been taking pretty regularly for pain.
“I brought you some kung pao pork,” Eric had replied, looking anxious, as if expecting Andrew to throw another punch at him. He held a grease-spotted white paper sack in his hand, Chinese take out. “You…uh, used to like it best, you always said.”
Andrew had shrugged, the crutches digging ruthlessly into the meat of his armpits. “I still do,” he’d said, and that was it. The big reconciliation with his dad. It wasn’t like they’d gone back to the way things were before, or like that night in North Pole had never happened, but it had been a fresh start, in any case. For both of them.
On the phone to Alice, he said, “How about you? Still having bad dreams?”
Though he heard only silence on the other end of the line, in his mind, he could see her retreating into herself, her bright expression faltering, her smile growing slack. She’ll shrug her shoulders once, he thought, and drop her eyes down to the floor. And I’ll have to coax her back now, find a way to draw her out.
“Never mind,” he said. “Tell me more about this horse of yours. What’d you say her name was, Sunset? Sunrise?”
Another silent moment, then Alice said, “Sunshine.” And with that, she returned to him, emerging from the shadows into which even passing mention of Kentucky had forced her to retreat. “She’s a quarter horse, chestnut colored with dark brown mane and tale. She has a white star on her forehead. She likes it if I scratch her there.”
“She sounds terrific,” he told her with a smile.
Were Dead Fowl Mutilated or Killed By Hunters? read another news headline, linking to an online article about a string of Canadian geese carcasses found in the wooded region outlying Horse Shoe Run, West Virginia in the expansive Monongahela National Forest.
And another from three days earlier: Body of Missing Hiker Found, describing the gruesome discovery of a woman’s eviscerated corpse following an exhaustive search in the Dans Mountain Wildlife Management Area outside of Lonaconing, Maryland.
Andrew had pulled out his iPhone and carefully plotted each of these points into his mapping application. Just out of curiosity, he’d told himself, watching with a growing sense of dread as the points had seemed to indicate a very clear, if not direct line running north from the eastern edge of Kentucky toward New England.
From right about where Moore’s DARPA facility was to here, as a matter of fact, he’d thought. It’s like someone or something is working its way from Kentucky to Pennsylvania.
He doubted either Suzette or Moore had anticipated the voracity of the virus they’d custom designed, or just how accelerated the new tissue growth would become once it had overwhelmed its host. Who knew what Prendick was capable of anymore? Given the regenerative properties the virus had imbued him with had seemingly no limitations, Andrew was willing to bet that Prendick could have not only overpowered any additional troops deployed to the compound, but escaped them as well, retreating into the woods like the screamers of Alpha squadron before him.
Where he could survive quite nicely for a long, long time, Andrew thought. Survive and hunt. And wait. And grow.