His attention kept wandering to Tyler’s pistol, aimed almost casually at Beth. How much pressure was necessary to squeeze that trigger? How much awareness to keep it aimed?
He put the hypodermic needle through the rubber seal of a small brown vial and drew up a measured amount of clear liquid.
Tyler was watching him. “What is that?”
“A systemic antibiotic. Bullets aren’t especially clean.”
“Is it necessary?”
“Depends. Do you want to risk gangrene? We’re a long way from a hospital, Colonel.”
Tyler regarded him silently for a time. Oddly, he seemed to be listening. To what voice, Matt wondered. What invisible third party?
“Can you inject it into the bad arm? Because I’m not putting down the pistol. I’m not that stupid.”
“How about the leg,” Matt said. “The thigh.”
“I’m not taking off my pants, either.”
“It’s a broad weave. The needle will pass through the cloth. It isn’t very sanitary, however.”
Tyler shrugged, distracted by his pain.
Matt flushed air from the syringe, flicked away bubbles, then pushed the needle into the meat of Tyler’s leg and forced the plunger down. “May I tend the girl’s wound now?”
“Very well,” Tyler said.
Sissy, Colonel Tyler pleaded. I’m too weak. You’re not, his mother’s ghost insisted. Stay awake! Stay awake! She hovered in the corner and she smelled like stale blood—or perhaps it was the room.
You’re not hurt bad! The doctor said so. You trust him?
He took an oath. They all take an oath. But I’m so tired, Tyler thought.
You have it all, Sissy said. You have all the guns. All the guns are in this room. Joey’s gone, the girl is gone, Tom Kindle is gone, Tim Belanger is gone. The old woman is no threat. You can kill the doctor whenever you like. And there are only four in that trailer, and they’re unarmed, and one of them is a woman, and one of them is an old man. Four would be easy to kill.
All this killing, Tyler thought. He was a little dazed by it.
You must, Sissy scolded him. Or people will know.
Tyler guessed he could do it. Shoot Wheeler. Walk out to the trailer. Walking would be the hard part. Open the door and shoot until everybody was dead.
It wasn’t complicated, but it would be difficult. And he was so very tired. He lifted the pistol, which had drooped away from its target, Beth, but the pistol was oddly heavy—and a new suspicion entered the Colonel’s mind.
The light was much brighter now.
Matt crouched over Beth. He was afraid of the wound, but he forced himself to look at it. He unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it away, exposing her small breasts, her pale skin freckled with blood.
The bullet had penetrated the chest wall and allowed air to flow into the chest cavity. Each time she exhaled, bloody bubbles formed on the wound. Her inhalations were labored, choked, and liquid.
He couldn’t find an exit wound. The bullet was still inside her, might have been deflected by a bone.
He took a carotid pulse. It was weak and irregular. She was clammy and didn’t respond when he raised her eyelid.
He took another sanitary pad from the box and used the plastic wrapping to cover Beth’s chest wound. It was urgent to seal this opening, and the plastic was reasonably clean, reasonably airtight when he fastened it with surgical tape. Then he lifted her into a semisitting position with her body inclined toward the injury, and her breathing seemed to ease a little.
Beth! he thought. Her head lolled to one side.
He needed to keep her blood volume up, and he needed to get her to a hospital. Even then, with modern equipment at hand, he wasn’t sure of his ability to treat the wound singlehandedly. He might have to explore for the bullet.
He looked at Tyler.
Tyler’s eyelids were drooping. His mouth moved, but soundlessly. Who was he talking to?
Matt watched the Colonel’s hand sag until the pistol was aimed, not at Beth, but at the floor. Tyler’s mouth hung open now; his eyes were nearly closed. Matt turned his attention back to Beth.
She’ll need an improvised stretcher, he thought, and which would be the fastest vehicle? And where was the nearest hospital? Laramie? Cheyenne?
He stood up and turned to the door…
But here was an unhappy miracle: Tyler stood up, too.
He came out of Vince Connor’s old recliner like Neptune from the briny deep. His eyes were wide, his pupils small, and the blue light from the window made an eerie halo around him. “It wasn’t an antibiotic,” Tyler said.
It had been morphine, perhaps enough to kill him, certainly enough to sedate him, and what miracle of will or sheer evil had allowed him to resist it even this long?
Tyler’s good right hand came cranking up, the pistol in it.
I’m going to die here, Matt realized. In this stupid room. For this stupid reason.
Then Tyler looked puzzled, turned his head aside, and vomited massively across Vince Connor’s desk.
Matt dropped to the floor. He wanted just a little time, time enough for the morphine to do its work, as it inevitably must. He rolled into the corner of the room, knocking over a table lamp.
At the sound, Colonel Tyler jerked his head.
The pistol swiveled with his look.
Simultaneously the door crashed open.
Tom Kindle stood in the dark hallway with the barrel of his hunting rifle sweeping the room.
Tyler pivoted to face the motion.
Kindle fired.
Tyler fired his pistol.
The two sounds, in this confined space, battered the ears. Even Beth, deeply unconscious, gave an involuntary twitch.
Kindle cried out and fell back in the hallway.
Colonel Tyler fell, but soundlessly, with Tom Kindle’s bullet lodged in his heart.
John! Sissy said as he fell.
It was the first time she had said his name, the first time since he was a child.
Tyler looked at her as the life went out of him in a powerful sigh. It was as if he had been holding his breath for fifty-two years, and his breath was his life, and now he just opened his mouth and let it go.
John, she said, her voice grown faint. Now you can come to live with me again.
It’s over, Matt thought. The words seemed to circle in his head. It had been vile and ugly and there was still Beth’s terrible wound demanding his attention, and Kindle in the hallway, but Tyler was dead: that impediment was gone.
It’s over.
He must have said the words aloud as he bent over Tom Kindle, who had been shot in his bad leg and was bleeding from the calf. “Matthew, it’s not,” Kindle said through gritted teeth.
Matt wrapped the injury. “What do you mean?”
“Are you blind? It’s bright as day out there! Two a.m. and bright as day! And the sound! Jesus, Matthew, are you deaf?”
Not deaf, merely distracted.
He heard it now, a faraway rumble.
It came through the air. It came up through the bedrock.
It began to shake the house.
The Artifact was leaving the Earth.
Chapter 37
Ascension
From the doorway of Bob Ganish’s motor home, Abby was able to see the Connor house—the dark window where Colonel Tyler was holding Matt hostage—and beyond it, on the horizon, the disc of the new Artifact, glowing like a floodlight or a bright new moon.