That's the easy way out. It's all over now, they're all gone. You did it. Sarah, did I ever lie to you? Can't you trust me now?
It hurts! Sarah opened her mouth and let out a soundless scream. She threw her head back and the blue fire swarmed over her. Oh, it hurts. . . .
And Jess Chambers, who had come awake many nights sweating and full of blood and the screech of tires, did not hesitate now. She knew that many of the wounded did not get this chance.
She reached out with both hands and grasped Sarah's arms just above the elbows.
The strength of it hit her like a train coming down a long straight track. Every muscle in her body lit up and clenched at once, and she found herself unable to move, unable to breathe, as the blue fire ran down and through her like a lightning rod, as sparks jumped from her toes into the ground. A million frozen images flashed through her mind, her life passing in one constant stream of light and dark, neurons firing like a billion stars in the great deep darkness of space.
She tried to cry out, tried to give life to the mindless scream; but nothing came, she saw nothing finally but blackness, and the only sound she heard at the end was the thunderous, throbbing beat of a heart.
--38--
She did not know exactly how long she lay there, but it couldn't have been as long as it might have seemed, because she woke to the sound of sirens.
She found herself lying stretched full-length on the ground. The spot where she had been standing before was bare and scorched.
The sirens were growing rapidly louder. She sat up, spat out the taste of iron and stale sweat. Her body ached, trembled like a newborn's. She smelled earth and burned flesh, and smoke from the swiftly growing fire that licked around the edges of the Wasserman Facility and spread through the dry brush in back.
How she had survived it she didn't know; how could she possibly have survived the sort of jolt she had taken? But the black clouds above her head had broken up and the sky was lighter now. The wind that had come out of nowhere was slackening.
It had ended, far more swiftly than it began.
Sarah lay ten feet away in the grass. Unable to find the strength to stand, Jess crawled to her side. The girl lay on her back, her eyes open and glassy. There was a lot of blood, too much blood. Sudden panic filled Jess's lungs and made her feel as if she were drowning. No. Not now, not after all that. I won if let you die. The scalp wound looked ugly, but it wasn't deep. She ripped open Sarah's top, found the dark, puckered bullet hole high in her shoulder. The bandage had slid off entirely.
Blood oozed up through the hole, more slowly now. She tore a piece of bloody cloth and pressed her palm to it to stop the bleeding.
"You're all right," she said. Her throat felt burned and raw as a wound. She gathered the girl's head into her lap, stroked Sarah's hair. A tiny spark like static electricity jumped under her hand, while she kept her other palm hard against the gunshot hole. "I told you, I'm going to keep you safe. You hear? You're going to be just fine."
Sarah gave a great, shuddering sigh. She blinked. "It-- hurts," she said.
"I know. We'll make it better soon."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to ... I didn't mean it."
"Don't you worry about that. Don't you worry. What they've done to you, they deserve it."
Tears blurred her vision, turned light into rainbows of color. The hospital had begun to burn faster now. Thicker, black smoke lifted from the roof and drifted lazily in the suddenly calm air.
A few other children emerged from their hiding places. They gathered silently to stare down at the strange couple in the grass like respectful mourners. For a moment this all felt like a dream, and then Jess looked and saw what was left of the man lying at the foot of the steps, hair smoking and skin black and cracked, saw the door blown from its hinges and the darkness inside, and she felt like screaming. She looked down the street at the bodies and the twisted wreckage of cars, and most of all the huge, gaping hole where the sniper's building had been.
It was desolation, destruction. It was Armageddon. She blinked, seeing everything through a broken prism of light. She could not make it all go away. It was too late for that.
The sirens were very close now. Any moment they would be here.
Sarah coughed and her lips stopped moving. For a moment the air crackled and spat; then the feeling dispersed like smoke from a dying fire, and everything was calm. Jess closed her eyes against the stink of the burn, the shattered remains of what had been left behind.
She waited for somebody to come.
EPILOGUE
Here are the smoking ruins, the scars, and the drift and the silence of what used to be. The Wasserman Facility left deserted among the scrub brush and the wilds of greater Boston. Fingers of burnt wooden limbs point jaggedly to the sky, as overhead a triangle of geese flap southward for winter. Soon the remains will be lightly coated with a fine snow, the first of the season sprinkled like a handful of dirt on the lid of a coffin before it is tucked away and forgotten.
The land lies abandoned as all around it life goes on. The Wasserman Facility has joined the ghosts of its kin, and memories of the laughter and screams of the children are all that remain, until even those drift away, carried by the stiff breeze.
***
The burial was held on Wednesday morning, in a graveyard in Wellesley adjacent to a white clapboard church. About fifty people gathered under a drizzling rain, their faces matching the color of the sky. Black umbrellas clutched in white-knuckled fists held off the worst of it. The expressions of those in the first row were blank, or tired, or bored.
They probably barely knew her.
But as Jess Chambers looked more closely she began to see familiar faces. A few of the mourners were colleagues; she recognized Professor Thomas with a younger woman, who clung to his arm with one hand and clutched a handkerchief in the other. Some of those gathered along the right were students, red-eyed and blowing their noses into white tissue as Jean Shelley's casket swung and scraped against dirt on its way down.
The casket was a symbolic gesture. They had been unable to recover anything at all from the wreckage of the fire. The inferno in the observation room had blazed so hot and strong that even Shelley's bones had been reduced to dust, every trace of her existence erased and blown away.
Evan Wasserman, or what they thought was left of him, would be laid to rest tomorrow in the plot adjacent to Jean Shelley, as his will had requested.
She searched the faces again, looking for those who might appear to be a bit more out of place. She recognized two of the investigators who had already spoken to her at length at the hospital, and another younger man who might be a plainclothes cop. But nobody else stood out. Anyone left from Helix or the Wasserman Facility would be too smart to come here, she thought. Their business with Sarah was done, and Shelley's and Berger's deaths had probably thrown everything into chaos. They would wash their hands publicly of the entire mess. If there was anyone left at all who knew the full truth.
The whole story was still coming together in bits and pieces, very few of which the investigators had shared with her. But they clearly didn't know everything either. What was clear was that Jean Shelley, with a large portion of the significant holdings she had inherited from her father's steel business, had founded Helix Pharmaceuticals nearly eight years before with at least two other players. It was a privately held company specializing in gene therapy and small-molecule drug discovery, and had remained fiercely independent and guarded until recently, when rumors had begun to float about an investment opportunity. It was said that the company was offering a significant stake in a particularly exciting preclinical program, before an IND had even been filed. They would need a large cash infusion to move into clinical testing. None of this had been confirmed yet, but it was likely only a matter of time before more details came to light.