Dillon had seen little of Michael’s friend since his life had been restored. For several days he had withdrawn into the Celestial Suite, as if cocooning himself. Then, when he emerged, there seemed to be something markedly different about him—but since Dillon hadn’t known Drew before, he had no real basis for comparison. All he knew was that Drew in recent days appeared to be a slippery character, never lingering long in anyone’s line of sight.
Dillon took a step closer, but Drew took a step back. “What’ll you give me?” Drew asked. “What’ll you give me if I keep this video to myself, and don’t tell the others you were spying on them?”
Dillon stopped short. His rapport with the others had frayed to a tether. If they knew he was secretly watching them, it wouldn’t help matters. He hadn’t been expecting to be blackmailed by Drew, though. “I gave you back your life,” he told Drew. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?”
Dillon took another step toward Drew, and once again Drew backed up—this time into a shaft of light, where Dillon could get a good look at him.
Drew uncomfortably shifted from one foot to another, and back again, as if the ground were constantly sliding beneath his feet like the floor of a funhouse.
Dillon quickly sized Drew up. No, this was not the same person he had fished back from death two weeks before.
“I got an idea,” suggested Drew. “Why don’t I do the spying for you? Sure—the others’ll never suspect me. I’ll catch them all on tape, and in return, you could give me a shitload of ‘servants.’ Yeah! Just like the rest of you have. How does that sound?”
“You’re kidding me, right?” But there was no hint of jest in Drew’s shaky voice.
Drew lowered his voice to a whisper. “I could tell you things,” said Drew. “Things I’ve seen, that I’ll bet you haven’t. Like the way Winston reads—his eyes don’t even move, as if it’s not words he’s getting from the page, but something else. Or how about Michael—those CDs he keeps feeding into his Walkman—I tried to play one, but there was nothing on it . . . at least nothing I could hear. And how about Tory’s oils and perfumes? They have no scent! I could find out more for you . . . for the right price.” He offered a twitching, feculent grin. “Come on—you can trust me . . .”
Trust? Dillon didn’t think so. Of the many unusual things Dillon sensed in Drew’s current life-pattern, integrity didn’t figure highly. In fact, a lack of integrity— in every sense of the word—was what Dillon felt more than anything else. Drew was . . . “out of focus.” Each twitch of his eyes, every tremor of his hands, spoke of incohesion—he seemed to be falling apart from the inside out, and it wasn’t the type of thing Dillon could fix any more than he could fix the focus of a blurry snapshot.
No, “trustworthiness” was not currently on Drew’s list of attributes. Still, the way Drew buzzed in and out of everyone’s business made him the perfect fly on the wall. The things he claimed to have seen—could they be true, or were they just figments of a mind out of balance? The latter was much easier for Dillon to swallow.
“Tell you what: you keep a good videologue of everything you see, and maybe I’ll assign you an assistant.”
Drew became more shifty, more fidgety. “How about two?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Drew took another step back, stumbling over his own feet, and when Dillon reached out to steady him, Drew pulled out of his grasp with a violent jolt.
“Don’t touch me, man!” Drew backed away, his posture a gangly knot of misdirected energies. “Just don’t touch me, okay?” And then he turned and ran, vanishing into the darkness.
As far as Dillon was concerned, Drew’s behavior was just further proof that the world was falling apart.
Eighty-four people to fix the next day.
The busy-bee faction of the Happy Campers didn’t bother bringing the wounded into the castle. The vans and trucks that carried them, simply dropped them off in the huge courtyard between the castle and the guest houses. They were all laid out before him, beneath the unshielded sun, like a scene from a brutal war.
Dillon knew he was still sidestroking.
But it was more like treading water, wasn’t it?
He wasn’t getting any closer to shore—he wasn’t anywhere near getting things under control. And all their good work wasn’t mending the fracturing world. Why was that? Each day there were more followers—not just the numbers of the healed, but others who had heard the stories and made the pilgrimage up the road from the Coast Highway. There were always people coming up the road now, all hours of the day and night, longing to be a part of the Big Fix, longing to be part of something larger than themselves.
“It’s human nature to see divinity in anything larger than oneself,” Okoya had said. Did these pilgrims making the trek to the castle think they were entering a new Jerusalem?
Dillon found himself wondering what his followers did all day while he threw his energies into repair work. Today he found out.
“We’ve tried to organize them for you,” said a woman with a clipboard as she stepped obliviously over the bodies beneath her. She had been there every day. Dillon had come to call her Nurse Hatchet, although she tended to speak more like a Realtor showing a house—which was probably her profession before she wound up here. “Broken bones and internal injuries are to the left, lost limbs and such to the right, and those that died during transport are by the fountain. Would you like something to drink?”
“No thank you.” Dillon looked around, hoping Lourdes would show up, to ease the pain all around him. But the others, he was told, were taking their time in coming.
“What about the sick?” asked Dillon. “Tory’s going to need to know where they are.”
“None today,” said Nurse Hatchet. “Only wounded.” She offered him a clean white smile, with teeth straighter than they had been yesterday.
Dillon didn’t return the smile. He wouldn’t force what wasn’t there. “What, have we cured all the sick in local hospitals?”
Nurse Hatchet hesitated. “Well . . . . yes,” she said. “That, too.”
Dillon turned to her, feeling a fresh pit open in his stomach. “What do you mean ‘too’?” He tried to read a pattern in her face, so he could divine what she meant—but found her strangely void of patterns. Strangely empty.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “we gave up on hospitals days ago. Too much trouble. Besides—you never know what kind of people you’re going to get.”
Dillon stared at her, still not understanding. And so she pointed to a battered man by an overgrown bush. “That particular client is an architect,” she said cheerily. “He’ll help us build dormitories when there’s no room left in the castle and guest houses.” Then she pointed to a woman in a makeshift neck brace, who gasped every breath of air. “And she’s a well-known attorney. With her on our side, we can keep the authorities away for as long as we want.”
“What are you telling me?” demanded Dillon.
“Don’t you see?” said Nurse Hatchet. “We made them for you to fix!”
Dillon felt the realization begin to surround his spirit, suffocating him with a truth he couldn’t yet face. What this woman was saying was unthinkable.
The woman grinned as if she had just sold a house. “And that’s just for starters. We’ve sent people out to bring you back some special orders. They’ll be showing up with some very important clients for you!”
Dillon felt his balance slipping and fell back against the fountain, almost falling in.