“What?” I bent closer, ear to his mouth.
“Walter’s not afraid.”
I recoiled, turning to Walter to see if he’d heard. Walter was needling the Demerol vial. He grimaced in concentration. He could have been in the lab pipetting chemicals from one tube to another. I said, “Walter? He weighs two hundred seventeen pounds. What’s the dosage?”
Walter came over and knelt. He held the syringe inverted, fully loaded.
“Did you do the math?”
He wiped Krom’s arm with an alcohol swab. “Yes.”
I held out my hand. “I’ll do the injection.”
“No, dear. Your bandages make you clumsy.”
I let my hand come to rest on the bare arm. Walter cocked his head. We regarded one another. Two colleagues with a difference of opinion over lab procedure, neither willing to allow the other to blunder ahead. We both knew I was strong enough to stop him. We both knew I could break every remaining vial in the first aid kit. We both knew there were other ways, that Demerol was simply the kindest. We both knew I could not stay awake forever.
I turned to Krom. “Help me, Adrian.”
He was silent.
“You have to say you’re sorry.”
He made a sound. It may have been a laugh.
“Tell him, Adrian. Isn’t there some part of you that’s sorry about Lindsay? Even if it’s only you’re sorry it came to that.”
Walter said, “Don’t, Cassie.”
“It’ll matter,” I told Krom. “Walter might not believe you but he’ll have to give it consideration. It’s in his bones.”
“Stop,” Walter said.
“You want a sacrifice, Adrian? He believes life’s inviolate. That’s his home base. He kills you, he kills himself.”
Nothing from beneath the mask. Nothing, now, from Walter.
A quake rocked us gently.
“Damn it Adrian give me something that will help.”
Whatever hell lay beneath that mask finally boiled out. “Sorry.”
It hit me hard, although I’d asked for it, but it did not alter Walter’s set face. I said, urgent, “Make him believe.”
“I am sorry.”
The world did not shift. The sun did not come out. Walter did not relinquish the syringe. I did not let go of Krom’s arm. The skin had gone nearly white where I clutched it.
“Sorry,” Krom said. “Sorry.”
I could stand it no longer. I snatched the syringe from Walter and fled to the doorway. Krom heard me. His voice flew after me: sorry, sorry, sorry, a raven of remorse. Sorrow filling the void. And then, abruptly, there was another voice — thunder in the distance. Eruptions again. I saw Walter straighten, listening. I watched ash in my headlamp beam, particles trapped like insects. I prayed through ash. Scare him, Lindsay. Save him.
Walter paid no heed.
I came back across the shed, grabbing an alcohol swab from the first aid kit on my way. I knelt beside Krom. Anchoring the syringe with two fingers, I worked open the swab. Clumsy work; Walter was right. I swabbed Krom’s arm.
He flinched.
It took me so long to upend the syringe and squirt out a drop, to clear the liquid of air bubbles, that Walter had time to take this in, to calculate that at best I’d released a tiny fraction of the Demerol, to recall that I had not read the recommended dosages and so had not done the math myself, to understand that I was going on his calculations. He’d done the math and loaded the syringe and now I was ready to administer the injection he had prepared.
I laid the needle to Krom’s skin and pushed. Needle found home.
Krom flinched, again. And still, I feared him. Masked, hobbled, cuffed — it did not matter. He threatened to pull in the both of us, this black hole called Adrian Krom. And Walter wasn’t scared. I’d thought, ever since Walter had appeared like a ghost at the Inn, that I had to save Walter from Krom’s wrath. No longer. I had to save Walter from his own wrath.
Walter watched me stonily and I returned his look.
Two can play this game, Walter. Don’t forget you’ve trained me since I was a kid. I’ve aped your every move in the lab and ransacked your brain. I’m yours. More even than I was Lindsay’s. I’m yours in a way she wanted, but I couldn’t give her. I signed up with you at the get-go and I’ve never wavered. I’m with you, against the enemy. You’re my home base. And you know me. You know that whatever you have in you, whatever accommodation you come to with justice, I’m capable of that too. I’ll go as far as you will. You know that about me, don’t you? Or at least you have to give it consideration. You have to fear I’m not bluffing.
I said, “We’re a team, Walter.”
He watched my fingers hook under the flanges, my thumb weight the plunger.
I hesitated.
He said, “Trust me, dear.”
I depressed the plunger, releasing the full load of Demerol into Adrian Krom.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
“Cassie?”
I fought through layers of fog, swam through ash, surfaced. My eyes were glued shut. Glue of ash and saline lachrymal fluid. Glue of grief. I rubbed my lashes apart and looked around. In the shed, home.
“Do you hear that, dear?”
We listened, trying to fathom this growling sound. What new category of beast was this? There was no point trying to escape because there was nowhere to go. There was no time. The sound was growing louder — a phreatic, perhaps. Sounded like it came from lower on the mountain, just where I predicted it would come. We lay still, watching the sky. No terror. Way beyond that, in another realm entirely. Limbo. We no longer drifted in and out of limbo; we’d taken up permanent residence.
Krom slept, at peace. He had a face again, of sorts.
“The color’s different,” Walter said.
“Of what?”
“The sky.”
“Must be dawn.”
The growling magnified, clarified. Oh, so familiar. I know this beast. I sat up.
Krom’s eyes opened.
Walter got to his knees and began to hunt around, scattering our supplies. I pushed past him — I knew just where everything was if he didn’t jumble it up first — and I found the radio and switched it on.
Static. Batteries had juice.
I lifted my face again to the sky and saw what Walter meant — the color’s different. Day’s breaking and the sky is white like a dawn that promises an overcast day, a day innocent of ash.
Voices crackled out of the radio. Voices and static. Logistics.
The growl from the beast was closer. Plain enough, quite identifiable. Whup-whup-whup-whup, beating the air, whacking us out of limbo.
Static receded, words clarified. “How many survivors?”
I gazed across the shed and met Krom’s eyes — which suck dry every look I give him — but this time was different, this time he had no further need of me. This time he broke our contact first and gazed up at the new dawn. I did not care, really.
I pressed the transmit button. “Three.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Two weeks after escaping the hospital, I was back. Visiting, this time. Stobie boomed out a greeting, sounding too healthy to be here.
I said, “Hey Stobie.”
“Cool ‘do, babe.”
My haircut. Real short, real curly. There’d been so many cemented tangles the nurses nearly scalped me. Stobie’d lost some hair as well, on top, along with some pounds, giving him the piebald look of an overworked pack horse. We chatted, lurching from the weather to hospital food to Jeanine’s new gig videotaping snorkelers in Maui, and then I told him Mike had been torn up about what happened at the race.
Stobie frowned, gathering the events. His short-term memory is patchy.
“Afterward, Mike visited you. We all did. I don’t know if you heard us.”
“Sure,” Stobie said. But he clearly hadn’t.