And she certainly hadn’t told him she was sleeping with Robin Wood, or that he wanted to marry her. After hearing she was pregnant, Robin had told her that an abortion was “out of the question,” which had shocked her.
“I’m going back to school,” she said. She grabbed Robin by the hand and pulled him into the house. “Come in and I’ll explain.”
“But—I thought we decided that we were going to get married and have the baby.”
“We did,” Lacy said. “Now I’m changing my mind. I want to go to school. I want to finish. I want to be a doctor. Maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe, after I’ve finished med school. If you still want to.”
She could see he was shocked. Men are really the weaker sex, she thought. Quick changes were never their forte.
“I’m a little confused, babe,” Wood said.
She didn’t like it when Robin called her “babe.” It reminded her of the random billboards of fashion models plastered on the bus stops in the city. It was something she heard fraternity boys call their dates. It wasn’t the only thing she had found to dislike about Robin Wood. Because he came from money he had, in many ways, never grown up. Maybe it had all happened too fast.
I don’t love this man, she thought. It was that one glaring fact that had, at the end of the day, made her change her mind about getting married. She would go down to San Francisco and have an abortion, and no one was going to talk her out of it.
“So am I. Come on, we’ll talk about it,” she said.
For the third or fourth time that morning, Lacy let the word “abortion” come to mind as she walked him toward the kitchen. Her mother and father had taught her that abortions were wicked. Robin was talking about telling her father their plans to get married. But she wasn’t listening. She felt completely trapped.
* * *
Lieutenant Bell’s commanding officer was speaking to someone in Sacramento, at Sixth Army’s headquarters. The colonel put down the phone and looked at him.
“Lieutenant Bell, you have fucked with the United States Army. I think that was a big mistake. I believe you killed Sergeant Whitney,” the colonel said. The colonel’s face was gray with anger.
Bell looked past the colonel and out to the landing field. Seventeen Apache helicopters were out on the field, their blades tied down because of the storm. Bell watched the blades on the choppers bounce in the wind, their black-nylon cords moving crazily, hoping he’d wake up from this nightmare.
“Sir, I’d like permission to sit down,” Bell said.
“Sit down. Fall down, I don’t give a fuck what you do, Lieutenant. You have disgraced this unit, and you are a liar and probably crazy. I wish you’d stick your head up your ass and disappear,” the colonel said.
Bell went to the wall by the door. There was a metal chair and he dropped into it. Light-headed, he looked down at his bloody flight suit. A corpsman had bandaged him up as soon as he landed, but the bandage was already stained red. It all seemed like a nightmare, except he wasn’t waking up. The worst part was he’d lost a friend. A good friend.
Do they really think I’d kill Sergeant Whitney? They’re crazy.
Bell heard the colonel talking to the MPs who had come into the room to take him to the Army’s stockade in Sacramento.
“It looked like we’d stepped back in time,” Bell said aloud from his chair. His tone of voice made the men stop talking, and all turned to stare at him.
* * *
“You all right, Sergeant?” Bell asked.
“I think so, sir. I don’t understand. It was just a kid and a woman,” the sergeant said. His voice was hoarse from the cold, as if he’d been yelling. The sergeant tried to spit, but the spit landed on his chin and he had to wipe it off.
The lieutenant looked down at the body of the boy. He had floated down and gotten caught on the same pile of snags that was holding the first body they’d found. Bell turned and looked at the dead woman. Her skull had been crushed by a large wet boulder that was still lodged in her smashed-to-a-bloody-pulp face. She’d died kneeling when Bell had crushed her skull. She was sagging backwards in the shallow water, bashed-in face turned toward the sky.
The lieutenant put his hand through his red hair. “I don’t know, but they would have killed us. And I know that little woman was stronger than I was,” Bell said. He stood up slowly. It all seemed impossible: the way the boy had flown through the air, the woman manhandling him as if he were a child.
“How can that be, sir? Look at her. She was a little woman,” the sergeant said.
“Let’s go,” the lieutenant said. “Before the rest of them find us.” He stepped into the creek looking for the sidearm the woman had torn from his hand. The six bullets he’d fired into her chest had done nothing to her.
“Sir. I see more of them,” Whitney shouted.
The lieutenant spotted the Beretta and picked it up out of a foot of water. He stood and looked up the creek. Six or seven of them were running like a pack of dogs down the bank toward them. He wasn’t going to call them “people” any more. Not after what he’d seen.
“I thought I saw a hunting rifle here in the water,” Bell said. “We could use it.”
Three of the things had jumped into the creek and were half-running, half-stumbling toward them through the fast moving creek. They could hear their strange awful howling, too.
“Sir, I don’t think we have time,” Whitney said.
“They’re stupid. If they just ran down the bank, they’d be here,” the lieutenant said.
The sergeant waded across the creek to Bell’s side. Bell kept his eye on the things coming at them.
He heard the loud crack of a tree branch and turned around. The sergeant had grabbed a tree limb from the snag. He tested it in the air, swinging it back and forth. They waited for the attack; no time to run.
The sergeant waded back across the creek, his flight suit wet all the way up to his waist. His face was shining with sweat. One of the things was only about ten yards away, riding the center of the current, his arms moving above his head while he howled like an ape. It was an older man, about fifty, in bib overalls and green-flannel shirt. No expression on his face, Bell thought. Nothing. It was the face of a dead man.
“Shoot him, sir! Shoot his ass!”
The lieutenant walked to the edge of the bank. The first of the three Howlers was struggling to stop and get back to the bank. The thing in the lead fought the current, trying to grab a snag. Bell waited as the man got closer. At ten feet the lieutenant fired twice: two bullets hit the thing dead in the chest. Nothing. The thing caught a snag and pulled itself to the other bank, his back to Bell. Bell could clearly see the bullet’s exit wounds—big rough chunks blown out by the hollow point bullets Bell had fired. The thing crawled up out of the water; another Howler came out right behind him.
The lieutenant panicked. He’d shot the man wearing the overalls multiple times with nine millimeter bullets in the center of his chest, and the thing was acting as if nothing had happened.
God help us, Bell thought. He was frightened; it was like no fear he’d ever felt before. Complete terror overwhelmed him. He fought every instinct that wanted to make him run away, throw down his weapon and run. But he didn’t. He looked back at the sergeant.