Hitching a deep sigh, Koda reaches back into her bag and pulls out a pre-filled syringe. The mortally wounded soldier has his eyes glued to her every move. “You know what this will do,” Dakota says, giving the young man every chance to back out.
He nods, more surely this time.
“And this is what you want.”
“Please.”
Third time pays for all, Dakota thinks as she reaches for the IV tubing, her eyes never leaving the soldier’s.
A second later, it’s done. The man’s grip convulsively tightens on her shirt, then falls away as his eyes, once bright and shining, become flat and dull; the eyes of a discarded doll on a trash heap as large as the world. Dakota closes those eyes gently, then rests her hand briefly on an already cooling forehead, whispering a prayer so ancient it seems inborn rather than taught.
Manny grips her shoulder and squeezes once in comfort. After a moment, Dakota shrugs off the grip and walks across the cramped space to her next patient, never looking back.
4
The air is cold with wind and melting snow, but not too cold to carry the mingled scents of burned wood and living pine needles. Tumbled into random hummocks of brick and charred beams, the remains of the park office lies before her. Those cabins she can see in the dim light are in no better condition, and when the wind shifts slightly, clocking about to the east, she can smell dead flesh among the ashes and the firs. Asimov whimpers softly at her side, and Kirstin stretches out a hand to pat him almost absently.
She has driven now for two days and a night without rest. She needs a place to lie up and sleep, or she will become a danger to herself on the road. Ain’t life a bitch. And then you die. She sighs. It’s the truck or nothing. Kirsten tugs at Asimov’s collar. “Come on, boy. Gotta get some sleep. Both of us.”
She turns back toward the vehicle, glancing up at the clearing sky. It is near dawn, but in the west the stars blaze down with undiminished brilliance. All the hackneyed metaphors—ice, glass, diamonds—march by for inspection, and none is adequate. The stars blaze down, cold and detached as the eyes of angels, so that for the first time Kirsten believes with her heart as well as her scientist’s brain that they truly are lifetimes distant. From somewhere among the trees comes an unidentified grunt. Deer? Bear? Skunk?
The exalted speculations of a moment before come crashing down, and she petrifies there on the edge of day, trying not to make a sound, not to breathe, most of all not to smell attractive to bear or polecat. In the east the stars begin to pale, not so much a dimming of their light as the gradual leaching of the darkness. A white shadow ghosts along the treetops with the rising wind, its wings making no sound as it hunts the last of the night.
Kirsten’s breath catches in her throat, and her belly tightens. Abruptly tensed, the long muscles in leg and back as abruptly relax. She does not fling herself flat, praying not to be noticed. The rational part of her brain, that bit of it not befogged by need for sleep, observes sarcastically that owls do not eat humans and reminds her that pterodactyls are long since stone. Yet death has passed over. Hunting someone else, this time. Next time, maybe her.
Last time, it was her. And the time before and the time before that. She knows she will be prey again.
God, I need to sleep. Afraid of an owl. Next thing you know I’ll be hallucinating.
Above her head, the first rays of the sun strike the tips of pine needles to blazing gold. From somewhere behind her, Kirsten hears the beat of great wings lifting. She turns, and a hawk sweeps past her, all bright bronze and copper, climbing into the dawn. A blood-stopping kreeee-eeeer! rings out over the forest. The hawk cries again, twice, and spirals up toward the strengthening sun and her day’s work.
As Kirsten begins to move back toward her truck, a stray breeze carries a half-charred piece of blue paper between her feet. She jerks away from it, startled, then catches her breath and picks it up. Christ, spooked at a goddam tourist flyer. Gotta get some sleep. Now. Idly, she glances at the brochure in the growing light. It is a map of the park, showing lake, fishing dock, cabins (now deceased) and a network of deep limestone caves underlying the bluff along the river. Phrases register disjointedly in her mind. Walkways. Stairs. Constant 60°Fahrenheit.
Salvation.
“C’mon, Asimov.” She whistles the dog to her, climbs into the truck and heads toward the first prospect of real comfort she has known in days.
An hour later, she has established a camp several hundred feet below the surface of the bluff and half a mile in. Two trips from the van have set her up with a Coleman stove, now heating yet another can of stew because she is ravenously hungry as well as weary, a pile of sleeping bags apiece for Asimov and herself and an electric lantern. For the first time since leaving Washington, she is able to take off her jacket and double layer of sweaters and sit lightly in her shirtsleeves. Her shoulders feel as though half the world has rolled off them to go bouncing down the pale rockflows of the cave. From above her comes a low thrumming sound, almost below the threshold of her hearing, that she knows is the voice of the river, singing.
Singing, singing. . . .singing her to sleep like a mother, rocking her in her rock cradle, loose, light, stoned in her house of stone, the deep waters singing of warmth and refuge and release from pain, singing, singing. . . .
She has just enough presence of mind to turn off the stove before she sinks back onto her bed and into the darkness where there is only the voice of the river, singing the song of the earth, rocking her home, singing and singing now and forever. . . ..
It seems to Kirsten that she has not slept at all. Yet she rises up lightly, easily, borne almost on a breath of air. The small stove no longer burns but still radiates warmth, a visible glow in the darkness around her. That seems strange to her, though not so strange as to be disturbing. Nor is she alarmed that Asimov, too, seems to shed his own light where he lies snoring, lost in dreams.
Kirsten glances down at her hands, and they, too, seem to glow palely. Just under the skin, she sees the outlines of a double spiral and a lightning bolt forming, rising to the surface in red and black and ochre paint. When she raises her hands to her face, she can feel the same sigils taking shape beneath her cheekbones, patterns traceable under her fingers. Her palms are painted with sun and crescent moon. Strangely unalarmed, she turns to see her body still lying where she has left it, sprawled with no particular grace across the blankets.
So. She does not seem to be dead. At least, this is not how she has ever seen the experience described. With no more than a thought, she finds herself kneeling by her body, which is still breathing, the chest rising in deep, slow inhalations. Rising on another thought, she drifts across the rock floor to Asimov, who whimpers softly at the faint ruffling of his fur made by her passing.
Not dead then. But if not dead, what?
She can feel a force, gentle but insistent, pulling her further into the depths of the cave. With a last insubstantial brush at Asimov’s ears, she allows it to draw her as it will. She has no idea how long her journey takes her, or what distance. Where she is there is no time, no space beyond that which surrounds her. Her bare feet skim the limestone floor of the cave without feeling its chill.
Like the walls, like the pillars of calcite that seem to extend upward without end, milk-white as the columns of some great temple, the stone itself is suffused with a soft light. Rising up to the roof, she drifts among colonies of bats in their thousands, tens of thousands perhaps, all lost in their winter’s sleep. Some part of her scientist self remains even now, and she notes that they are Myotis socialis, hanging single file in long, precisely aligned rows, so neatly arrayed that she can see the nose of every bat in each rank. A bat army. Bat Marines. She raises a hand to her forehead in salute and drifts on. She passes lace curtains formed of glittering mica, crosses a pool setting each foot precisely into the surface tension of the water. Always wanted to do that. Move over, Jesus!