Decimate, p.24
Decimate, page 24
Margot whispers, “Something tells me they’re getting us together for more than a meal.”
“To shoot us?” Claire asks.
“If that’s all we wanted, you’d be dead already,” Thomas says.
“That’s some wicked bedside manner you got there, Thomas,” Ben mumbles.
Margot helps Claire to her feet, slides Claire’s tinted glasses back on. Margot, she sees, has a pair for herself too, and suddenly they’re walking past the cells full of animal bloom with the speed of bored tourists departing a zoo they tired of hours ago.
An ATV is parked inside the barn. Margot guides Claire onto the bench seat, Ben gets behind the wheel, and a second later they’re chugging across the grass toward the main house as Thomas walks behind them. Dawn’s first light gives a faint eggshell glow to the main house’s second-floor windows.
As she mounts the front steps, Claire wonders if they’re showing her the house to prove everything she saw in Agatha’s vault was true. The house’s details match up almost exactly.
Inside, the newel post at the base of the staircase is the same; the walls are the same off-white wallpaper with columns of little green designs so small she can barely tell what they are. The same cherrywood crown molding and baseboards. The art is different, more jumbled, but like the scenes hanging on the wall of Agatha’s cell, they’re mostly pastoral images of the Old West. The old Oriental rugs are gone, replaced with newer, more monochromatic patterns. But for a second, she feels as if she’s stepped right back into Agatha Caldwell’s memories again.
Then they enter a formal dining room with a long hardwood table and mahogany dining chairs with open backs and leafy detailing carved along the shoulders. The puddling draperies are hunter green with a big valance that blocks out too much of the mountain view, suggesting the people who eat here have long since tired of it. A man she doesn’t recognize is setting out a giant bowl of salad. He seems too fit and poised to be a domestic, and he’s dressed more stylishly than the rest of them. Another man she hasn’t met yet, this one about six feet tall, is seated in the corner of the room. He’s got an Afro top fade and a closely shorn beard. He looks up from his phone as Claire enters, eyes widening before he nods curtly and looks back to his phone, like she’s a celebrity and he’s been told to keep his cool.
Her father’s seated at one head of the table, hunched over, nervously rubbing his hands together on his lap. In the spreading light of early morning, he looks like an exhausted and ruined man. There’s a bruise on his forehead and a spiderweb of angry red scratches above his right eye, probably from their car wreck. He swallows nervously as she enters. Despite almost getting them killed a few hours before, in this moment he seems capable of neither an apology nor a deflection.
Ben guides Claire to the head of the table opposite her dad; then Randy enters carrying a platter full of steaks and a ceramic bowl of scrambled eggs with a giant silver serving spoon stuck in it.
Benjamin and Thomas both take chairs against the walls. Randy sits in the middle of the table, across from Margot.
Normality, Claire thinks, that’s what this is all about. They know what I just did, where I went, and they’re trying to give me something normal to come back to.
When Ben sets something on the table next to her plate, she jumps, sees it’s the notepad and pen she was using to communicate with Poe. And when she looks up, her father is staring at it with pain and longing on his face.
But when he catches her looking at him, he focuses on his lap again.
As the mercenaries ringing the room stare at Randy as if his cheerful-host routine is proof he’s lost his mind, Randy casually spoons eggs onto Margot’s plate. When he offers some to Claire, she holds up a hand. “Just another few minutes until . . .” She gestures to her stomach. Randy nods as if it’s normal. Like it’s all normal. Like they’re dining together at a country inn. It’s strategy, no doubt. An attempt to win her over. And his men clearly have their doubts about its chance of success.
Good, she thinks.
“So, Rupert, why don’t you introduce yourself,” Randy says.
The man she’d first spotted upon entering the room looks at Randy like he’s gone nuts, but then he composes himself and says, “I’m Rupert.”
“Rupert was in charge of following Poe,” Randy says. “Sean here mostly handled you, Claire, although we rotated that duty some. The whole team’s fonder of the LA weather, I guess.”
“Just putting all the cards on the table, aren’t we?” Rupert mutters.
“You got a better suggestion?” Randy asks.
“If you didn’t ask earlier, why are you asking now?” Rupert says.
To Claire, Randy says, “We had a strict no bathrooms or bedrooms rule.”
“For what?” Claire asks.
“The cameras,” her father grumbles.
Nobody says anything for a while.
“Where did you all leave off?” Randy asks. “You and Agatha?”
Margot raises one hand. “I’m sorry, a moment here, if I may.” She focuses her gaze on Claire. “So Agatha got into your head because you inhaled her bloom, is that right?” When Claire nods, Margot continues, “And then you crossed over into her head and—”
“Head’s not exactly how I’d describe it,” Randy interjected. “Think of it as a movie theater in your brain, but it looks like someplace you remember very clearly. Someplace you loved. Behind every door in that place is a unified realm we call the vault. It’s full of your memories. So if we go with the movie-theater analogy, the doors are like the curtain, the vault is like the screen, and the ticket to the movie is something we call the key. An item of sentimental value you lost during your life. When you bring it close to a vault door, it literally enters the lock and opens the door. We believe that in a person who’s experienced a normal death, the opening of the vault triggers something near-deathers call a life review. The whole ‘life flashing before your eyes’ thing. The problem is, no one here, Agatha included, has visited the memory deck of someone who’s died a normal death, so our experience of this realm is limited. We’re dealing with a half-cocked version.”
“A movie theater without a projector, essentially,” Margot says.
“I’ll go with that,” Randy says, “but even without the projector, this half-cocked movie theater can open up a circuit to another one. If someone in this room inhales the bloom of someone who’s been exposed to the pulse and shifted—”
“Someone like Poe,” Claire says.
“Or Agatha,” Randy adds. “Something we call a bloom bridge opens between their memory deck and yours. They can enter the common area of your memory deck, and if they can find the key, they can open your vault and take over your consciousness.”
Everyone was silent for a while. Her father looked like he wanted a very stiff drink.
Memory deck, key, vault.
Movie theater, ticket, screen.
It all sounded neat and tidy until you remembered it was possible to teleport from one movie theater to an adjacent one.
Randy broke the silence. “We think this process is pivotal to whether or not someone truly passes into the afterlife or returns to their body. But we’ve never visited a memory deck in the presence of an actual dead person, so the version we know of it is . . . limited.”
“And we’ve all got a memory deck?” Margot asks.
There were enough nods around the room to indicate most of the team had inhaled some of Agatha’s bloom and let her open their vaults.
Evidence of the afterlife. And they’d all kept it a secret for . . . how many years?
“All right,” Randy says. “So, you and Agatha.”
“The cave,” Claire says. “It was coming down. She’d just shot her father.”
If they do all know the story, they bristle at hearing one of its bigger moments stated so plainly.
“All right, well,” Randy says, “guess I need to wrap things up, then.”
21
Fifty Years Ago
Agatha ducked her head, felt the heat of the blast rake her back, sending jagged little pieces of rock down the length of her body, tearing open her clothes in little strips that exposed her flesh to more and greater heat.
She started crawling backward. What at first seemed like a mercy, the womb-like shelter of the tunnel was now a prison. An oven. The granite walls around her groaned and protested.
Suddenly the cave floor beneath her gave way, as if she were crawling on a balance beam someone had dropped at one end. What had become of the entrance she’d crawled through?
She pushed herself backward with greater speed, then crawled forward again, using gravity to her advantage now that she was on a freshly made downward slope. When one of her hands touched dirt, when she felt cool night air on her arms, she realized she’d made it to what remained of the entrance and was now crawling out a newly formed opening. She almost wept with relief.
Solid ground had never felt so welcoming. When she hit it, she took off running into the trees. She was almost as far as her Pinto when she got the courage to look back.
Silence had fallen over the woods, and through the shadowy pine trunks she could see the vague outline of the granite mound on the lakeshore was now misshapen. Hikers would no longer be able to ascend cleanly to its crown, once smooth and rounded by years of exposure to snow and shaping winds. The collapse, it seemed, had happened primarily inside its central chamber, and everything above had settled down into a new formation. Now the crown actually looked more like a crown—a decayed and weathered one—with the lumpy remnants of jeweled spikes.
But it was the quiet that calmed her.
It also made her keenly aware of how badly her clothes were shredded, of the coppery taste of blood and granite dust coating the back of her throat. She blinked, became aware of the dust in her eyes. With all her strength, Agatha walked back to the mound, saw, as she got closer, that a dust cloud still hung over it, barely visible in the weak moonlight and a pale suggestion of the true violence she’d witnessed within. There were no flickers of the blue light that had turned her father into an alien being. No sense that something that had torn a hole in the fabric of reality had just operated within. Once she reached the section of cave she’d backed out of, she saw how close she’d been to being crushed.
She walked toward the other, larger entrance and saw it was now crushed like an aluminum can.
She stumbled through the trees and found the water’s edge.
The shock of the freezing water chased all feeling from her body. At first, she’d meant to walk in up to her knees, maybe clean her face and eyes of the dust that coated every inch of her. But when the water rose up around her body, she gave herself to it. Let it close over her scalp and push the sounds of the night farther away.
Then, beneath the surface, she heard a rumble.
Agatha rose, walked back toward the shore, and realized, to her sudden terror, that the sound was even louder above the surface. And it was coming from the pile of granite on the lake’s shore. The sound that split the air next was familiar. The same snap of a giant guitar string that had preceded the last and most significant blast inside the cave’s central chamber.
The entire lake lit up with a brilliant flash of white. For an instant she could see straight down into its vast glacier-carved depths. Then she was thrown backward by a single wave of force that seemed almost elegant in comparison to the riotous chaos of the cave-in. The branches above her snapped and rained down all around her. She slammed into the earth.
And it was impossible not to think that it might be his revenge, this blast. Her father’s final attempt to lash out at her from his new granite prison. But after a few minutes, she realized she was alive, bruised and even more battered, but alive. And when she got to her feet, the night was quiet again.
Agatha thought maybe what she’d witnessed had been the last gasp of something beyond comprehension puttering out and leaving this realm of existence.
But even in that moment, she suspected she was wrong.
Suspected, on some level, that what had happened that night would never be truly over.
That she had not killed her father’s invention after all.
Shock, when it came, took the form of a low and constant tremor in her bones, a sense the world she moved through now was paper thin, and one tear might release monsters beyond imagining.
Some instinctive, self-protective part of her brain had decided whatever flash of light she’d been exposed to on the lakeshore would eventually kill her. Maybe before the night was over, maybe within days. Either way, this knee-jerk assumption made the consequences of all that had unfolded in such a short span of time seem easier to deal with.
Dawn’s first light was pushing against the sky behind the mountains when Agatha drove back to the ranch.
Hilde stood on the front porch, dressed exactly as she’d been at the abandoned ranger station. She did not flinch or even widen her eyes at the mutilated state of Agatha’s clothes or her matted hair or the bright red scrapes and bruises that lashed her face and arms. Hilde, Agatha saw, had failed to wipe several spots of Edward’s blood from her face, and they’d dried across her right cheek.
Finally, the old woman descended the steps, took Agatha gently by one elbow, and steered her into the house. On the stairs, she paused for a second, noticing the constant tremor in Agatha’s bones, but she said nothing, just kept directing her up the stairs, then into her bathroom, where she sat Agatha down on the toilet lid while she drew a bath. She did not turn on any of the lights, but by then the vague predawn glow through the frosted window above the tub cast a milky pall across the porcelain surfaces.
Once the bath was halfway full, the water temperature to Hilde’s liking, she tapped the edge of the tub three times. What would have seemed like a petty gesture a day before seemed suddenly momentous. An invitation to cross some line into whatever awaited them now that they’d both taken life. It seemed as if their separate acts of violence that night had placed them in a precarious balance that might swing out of alignment at any second.
What would it take for one of them to drown the other in the bathtub and make sure the secrets of this night were kept forever? Strength, Agatha realized. It would take strength neither of them had left.
Agatha stripped, sank into the water. Its warmth only served to remind her of the lake’s freezing wash. The tremor in her bones intensified. She drew her knees up to her breasts, held them there. Sitting on the toilet, Hilde shook a cigarette from her pack and lit it. She extended the pack. Before, the woman had rarely smoked in her presence, much less offered her a cigarette. It was a gesture that said everything had changed, that Agatha, in the course of one night, was no longer a young girl.
“What did you do with him?” Agatha finally asked.
“Better you not know.”
They fell silent. Her scrapes were bleeding gently into the water, making little red swirls just under the surface.
“And you?” Hilde asked.
Agatha stared at her.
“Did you do what your mother asked? Did you stop it?”
“I stopped him. Not it.”
Hilde flinched, brow furrowed. She took a long, careful drag from the cigarette, as if she was desperate to know what this meant but couldn’t stomach any of the possible answers.
“We’ll figure out what to do next, then,” Hilde said. “Together.”
So she wanted an agreement. A peace treaty between them. Maybe she thought killing Edward had earned her the right. The cigarette was an inch from Hilde’s mouth, like she’d meant to take a drag but forgotten about it.
“It won’t be easy for you,” Hilde finally said. “You will have to learn things.”
“What things?”
“How to live with those you’ve beaten. It’s what all victors must learn. Unless they plan to kill them. Or put them all in camps.”
Hilde rose and went for the door. Her hand was on the knob when Agatha said, “What’s your name?”
Hilde turned, studied her. “Gertrude,” she finally said.
“What’s hers?”
The old woman’s eyes filled with tears over the thought of her blinded daughter. Her jaw trembled. Was it grief for their old lives, their lives before this night, before the war? Perhaps if you had her history there was no difference.
“Greta,” she whispered, then left the room before the tears slipped free.
Once Agatha was alone with her own body, she studied her hands, her arms, looked for evidence of what had been inflicted on her aside from the scrapes and bruises. Looked for burn marks or lesions or anything else that might suggest something toxic and poisonous in that bright white flash of light that had illuminated Lake Michele down to its depths.
But the only wounds she could find were shallow and on the surface.
Agatha did not go with Hilde to pick up her mother from the hospital. A week had gone by, and she and Hilde had disposed of the truck her father had driven to the caves. A week had gone by, and Agatha had suffered no nausea or hair loss or anything else to suggest the pulse had been toxic.
On the day of her mother’s release, Agatha fought the selfish urge to remove all evidence of her father from the master bedroom. Her mother wouldn’t be able to see any of it, and if the police came around asking questions, it would look suspicious. Hilde had already gone to file the police report, and thanks to multiple canceled appointments for both Drs. Caldwell and Hall, word of their disappearances had spread through town.
When she heard the Pinto’s engine, her stomach clenched.
Then came the careful footsteps of both women on the stairs. She left Catherine’s nursery and moved into the hallway. Her mother’s eyes were still bandaged. Most of her golden hair was gone. It would have been easy for a stranger to assume she’d cut her locks so they wouldn’t get tangled in the head dressing she’d be wearing for some time, but Agatha was sure the severe haircut had been spawned by the same violent urge that had led her mother to gouge out her own eyes.
