“I was only trying to spare you,” his father said. “All this… disease. This death.”
Pax leaned back. “Well,” he said quietly. “That didn’t quite work, did it?”
Jo had died anyway. Deke had died anyway. It didn’t matter if Pax was in Switchcreek or Chicago or halfway around the planet. His presence couldn’t protect them, and distance couldn’t protect him.
He was alone. The sole surviving member of the Switchcreek Orphan Society. Hell, he was the fucking president.
“You have to understand,” his father said, the words slurring. “Nobody knew. I was only trying, trying to…” The smell of vintage charged the air.
“I know, Dad,” Pax said. He stood and walked to retrieve the extraction kit.
When he finally heard the banging at the front door he thought the soldiers had returned. It was 9:30, a half hour past the official curfew. Pax put down the mallet and scraper and turned off the radio. The hallway was a mess; the carpet had come up cleanly enough, but the ancient rubber backing had disintegrated into something like tar and had glued itself to the wood. It had taken him hours to scrape the living room, chipping away at piece after piece. He’d slowed as he tired, and so the hallway was taking as long as the front room.
He walked to the living room, rubbing his palms on his jeans. The banging stopped, and suddenly the front door pushed open.
“Jesus Christ, Tommy, Pax said. The beta man stood in the doorway, holding the handle. “It’s after curfew. You nearly gave me-”
“Where are they?” Tommy said.
“Where’s who?” Pax said, though he knew perfectly well who he meant. “And what the hell are you doing barging into my house?”
Tommy walked across the room, put his head through the kitchen door. “Sandra! Rainy!”
He turned, marched toward Paxton. “Are they in the bedrooms? They better not be in the bedrooms.”
“The girls aren’t here,” Pax said, and stepped aside as Tommy went past him. “I haven’t seen them in weeks, not since the town meeting.” He realized that he hadn’t seen them at Deke’s funeral either, though they might have been there. Much of the day had been a blur.
Tommy opened his father’s bedroom door, then the guest room. When he reached for Paxton’s childhood bedroom Pax grabbed his arm. “That’s enough, Tommy.”
Tommy spun and seized Pax by the throat. His grip was incredibly strong, much stronger than those thin beta arms suggested. His lips pulled back to reveal small white teeth. Then he began to march Pax backward down the hall.
Pax backpedaled, prying at the man’s fingers, and then he stumbled over the radio and Tommy thrust him away, sent him sprawling to the floor.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” Tommy said, breathing hard. “To love them this much. To feel as helpless as this.”
Pax sat up, coughing.
“I feel sorry for you,” Tommy said. “When I was like you, I felt nothing for anybody else. I couldn’t even see the point of feeling anything.” He bent, picked up the mallet at his feet. It was a big chunk of metal on a wood handle that Paxton’s grandfather had owned, a tool too primitive to wear out. “Becoming a beta saved me. Becoming a father saved me. Suddenly I could see the future-it became real. Generations of grandchildren stretching out in an unbroken line, clear as day. More real than you are.”
“The girls aren’t here,” Pax said. “I don’t know where they are.”
“Tell the truth.”
“Search the fucking house! I told you, I haven’t seen them since the meeting.”
“They weren’t at Jo’s house,” Tommy said. “This is the only other place they’d go.”
“Then maybe you don’t know them as well as you think you do.”
Tommy stared down at him. The mallet twitched in his hand. Then he crouched and leaned in so that their foreheads almost touched. Even this close, inches away, his eyes were empty, his face as indifferent as a wall.
“You won’t be seeing them again, Paxton,” he said quietly. “You won’t be able to find them. You won’t be allowed to even look for them. There’s too much that depends on them. If you even got within the same state, I’d be forced to kill you. Without a second thought.”
Tommy rose to his feet, the mallet still in his hand. “I wanted to warn you. I owe the twins that much.”
He walked to the living room. Pax sat very still.
A moment later he heard a double clunk-the mallet dropping to the floor-and then a few seconds after that the sound of Tommy’s Bronco starting.
He waited a short while longer, and then Paxton pushed himself to his feet. He went into the kitchen, opened the junk drawer, and found the flashlight. Dead, of course. He shook out the corroded batteries and replaced them with the D-cells from the radio; a few shakes and the light came on.
He grabbed his car keys, walked to the front door, then turned back to the kitchen. The bag Weygand had left for him was still on the kitchen table. He picked it up, then quickly added to it a couple cans of soup, a box of Saltines, and a small plastic jar of Peter Pan peanut butter.
He looked at the freezer door, then opened it. On the top rack were two old vials and the six fresh ones he’d extracted this morning-the most he’d ever had at one time. The father load.
Pax tucked one of the plastic tubes into his front pocket, and left the house before he decided to open it.
Chapter 20
IT WAS NOT yet ten, but the night was already pitch-black, the moon snuffed by clouds, and Piney Road was a ribbon of lesser black winding through the trees. Pax hoped the Guard didn’t have curfew patrols out on the smaller, interior roads. Or if they did, that they were already busy chasing Tommy.
Pax turned south onto Sparks Hollow Road. A hundred yards before the T intersection with Creek Road he stopped and cut his headlights. He reached for the flashlight and turned it on.
He eased the car forward, driving with his head out the window, playing the feeble light of the flashlight across the road ahead of him. A few feet from the intersection he turned off the flashlight and nosed ahead. To his right was a dim glow that had to be the guard shack or the interior lights of some vehicle. Did Humvees have dome lights?
The western checkpoint was only a quarter mile down Creek Road to his right, a straight shot. The guards would see headlights as soon as he pulled out, and then as he drove away his taillights would be glowing like fox eyes.
But he had to go east only five hundred, six hundred yards before the road bent again and he’d be out of their sight. He could drive blind for a couple football fields, right? And if he drove into a ditch, so be it. It was only a fucking Ford Tempo.
He turned the wheel left and gently tapped the gas. He could see nothing; the windshield was a black canvas. At any moment he expected to bang into a tree or tilt off the road into the ditch. He leaned over the wheel, ears straining, eyes wide.
Thirty seconds passed and he couldn’t stand it any longer. He touched the brake-and the red glow lit up behind him. Shit! He’d forgotten about the brake lights!
Fuck it, he thought. He switched on the parking lights and accelerated. The faint yellow glow barely illuminated the pavement in front of him, but he thought he could make out theedges of the road.
Thirty seconds later he almost drove into the side of the mountain as the road hooked a hard right. He cranked the wheel, then flicked on the headlights to full and gunned it. He rifled through the single-lane bridge at fifty miles per hour and swung through the next big curve with wheels squealing.
No headlights appeared in his rearview mirror, no small-arms fire shattered his back window.