Pyramid Lake (62 page)

I don’t know if he even heard me.

A moment later, I was alone.

• • •

Slouched in the beanbag, facing the silent, darkened server room, I could hear noises from outside the building: distant helicopters, ground vehicles, panicky shouts. But I didn’t want to move.

A great, empty loneliness spread through me.

I lay there, feeling my damaged body shutting down. My heart hurt. Its beating felt wrong—irregular and far too fast. I didn’t really care much. Dying was probably easier than living with the guilt I carried.

Still, my family was safe now. I had accomplished that at least.

Alone in the dark, my only thoughts were of Jen and Amy. I didn’t know if I would ever see them again. I pictured wrapping my arms around the two of them and hugging them close, and the emptiness and pain inside me eased a little. But I felt so tired. My fuzzy thoughts were starting to fade…

And then I remembered. There was one last thing I needed to do.

Finding a phone in the darkened sanctum wasn’t easy. Crawling across the floor with every part of my body screaming, I finally laid my hands on one of the lab iPhones. Fighting the grayness that tried to drag me under, I managed to dial Billy Winnemucca, and he answered with a grunt.

The stabbing pain in my heart sharpened.

“Billy,” I said. “Cassie’s dead.”

C
oming awake suddenly to blinding hospital-bright whiteness. Beeps and blips from all sides. Indistinct shapes, moving with frantic speed around and above me, jostling my body. Blinking, unable to bring the blur into focus.

A crushing weight sitting on my chest.

Muted underwater shouts.

“He stopped breathing again.” “Intubate.” “Get him intubated
now!
” “Laryngoscope.”

Something forced into my mouth. Down my throat.

Then pain everywhere as my body woke up, too. The bright white fog blurring into redness, pain overriding all else.

My gut convulsing uncontrollably. An eruption of vomit, blocked all of a sudden, hurting my gorge. Gagging.

“God
damn
it. Keep that pressure on the cricoid!”

Another convulsion, like a fist ripping up through my stomach and chest. More gagging. Choking.

“Keep the airway open.” “Suction!”

“What the
fuck,
Jesse?” A voice, going high-pitched in shock. “Is that…
an
ear
?”

More scrambling, a door bumping open. Distant retching sounds.

Fading out again.

• • •

Awakening again to agony—sharp spikes of pain stabbing through my sternum. Flat on my back, one hand clutching at the sheets alongside my body. Grabbing a side rail.

Headboard alarms beeping frantically as the room dissolves into chaos.

“V-tach.
V-tach.
”
“Crash cart.” “V-fib, now.” “Get the crash cart!” “He’s arresting.” “Code blue.”

“Give me two hundred.” Cold wetness touching my chest. “Confirming two hundred.” “Everybody clear.”

Electricity jolting my body, lifting me off the foam mattress. The pain in my chest worsening.

“Pulseless V-fib, still.” “Three hundred?” “Three hundred, go.” “Clear.”

Another jolt.

“Trying three-sixty.”
“Clear.”

The constriction in my chest loosening, the pain easing. Feeling my pulse throbbing in my neck.

“Three sixty again—?” “Hang on a moment… We’ve got normal sinus rhythm.”

My body sagging against the mattress.

Falling into endless grayness again.

• • •

Time drifting by. Days and nights, with only pain to mark their passage.

• • •

I awoke in a darkened hospital room lit by the LEDs of IV pumps and EKG displays. Floating in the comfortable dimness, I listening to the soft cricket chirps of the equipment monitoring my vitals. The hallway outside was nearly silent, too—only the slow-moving sounds of a hospital at night. Near the window, I could see a small shape huddled on a chair, her thin arms and legs drawn up under a blanket. Amy was sleeping now, her face innocent and peaceful.

But why was she here with me?

The warmth of a comforting body shifted against my side. I could hear the rise and fall of breathing next to me, too—a little ragged, and oh so familiar.

Jen’s breathing.

I twisted my neck, seeing the top of her head tucked next to my ribs, her arm draped over my stomach. She lay curled on the edge of my Stryker bed, her legs folded up so she would fit on the mattress with me.

With a sense of dawning wonder, I shifted my arm slowly, painfully, and touched my wife’s head with my fingers. I needed to reassure myself that she was really here.

“Are you awake?” she whispered against my ribs.

Unable to answer at first, I brushed her hair with my fingertips. I stared up at the ceiling and my eyes pooled.

“Jen, I swear I will never hide another thing from you,” I whispered. “I’ll never lie about anything to anyone ever again. I swear to you.”

She stroked my stomach. “Don’t talk,” she said. “Sleep. We’ll have plenty of time to work things out between us when you’re better.”

Trickles ran from the corners of my eyes. “You tried to tell me what being around me was doing to Amy,” I whispered. “I never listened to you.”

“Then start now,” she whispered back. “I love you, Trevor, but I’ll never get that awful picture of her out of my head. It was a fake, but it could just as easily have been real. You understand that, don’t you? I will do whatever I have to, to keep her from getting hurt like that—even if it means never seeing you again.”

I combed my bandaged fingertips through her hair. I didn’t say anything. Only listened.

“You can’t keep on fighting the world,” she whispered. “Sooner or later, it’s going to kill you. And it’ll kill Amy and me right along with you. Is that what you want?”

I shook my head.

“You need to
change
who you are, then,” she said. “You need to do that. For us.”

I nodded.

“Now, go to sleep,” she said.

• • •

Wheeling my chair over to the window one-handed, I looked out at the overcast sky and the view of downtown Reno. Two floors below, a helicopter pad topped the roof of the parking structure. I didn’t remember anything from the emergency flight that medevacked me from Pyramid Lake. But I knew that four days had passed since I arrived, half dead and barely conscious.

Beneath my window, the gray-green Truckee River tumbled past, crossed by bridges that thrummed with morning traffic. Pedestrians drifted along the river walk that ran along its banks. Staring out the window, I raised my hand in front of me and tried to make a fist but couldn’t. The weeping burns on my forearms, palms, and fingers were stiffening as the wounds granulated, which was bad news—I didn’t want to end up a cripple.

Grunting, I worked my fingers until I managed to curl them into my palm.

Then I tried it with my other hand, where a pair of screws projected from the sides of my wrist like bolts, holding my radius and ulna together. Sweat broke out on my forehead as I fought the pain, my fingers twitching but failing to close. Five minutes later, I was shaking and exhausted. I rested my forehead against the glass and watched two slow-moving figures cross the footbridge below.

One was adult size, the other smaller. Both were curly haired and blond. Jen and Amy, crossing to grab a bite at the Wild River Grille. Jen had an arm around our daughter and walked with the tentative steps of someone still recovering from recent surgery. Seeing how Amy needed to support her injured mother, I felt a vast, wordless sorrow bubble up in my throat.

Then something else drew my attention. A long black Lexus sedan rounded the corner to double park beneath the portico in front of the hospital entrance. Two oversize black Chevy Suburbans followed it. The overhang blocked my view so I couldn’t see the person who got out of the sedan.

But I knew who it was.

And I didn’t know how I could face him.

When I heard the door of my room open five minutes later to let my visitor in, I was standing but still facing the window. I couldn’t will myself to turn around. But I couldn’t watch Jen and Amy anymore, either. It felt wrong to, as if I didn’t deserve to still have my family. Not after what my failure had cost the man who now stood behind me: a father who no longer had a daughter.

I let my vision go out of focus until all I could see was fuzzy gray brightness outside. The door clicked shut, and reluctant footsteps crossed the room to join me at the window. I laid a hand on the glass to steady myself but couldn’t turn my head to look at him.

Whatever he had to say to me, I deserved it.

Nothing I could do would bring Cassie back.

For a long time, we stood side by side in silence. Linebaugh was the first to break it.

“The site is being decommissioned,” he said without looking at me. “The base will be shut down, too. The material will be distributed to other facilities for interim storage, until we find a longer-term solution.”

Another long pause.

“It’s the right thing to do,” I said.

“It’s what Cassandra would have wanted,” he said. “I did it for her.”

My bad leg was jittering, threatening to drop me. I shifted my weight fully onto the other one.

“You have roughly a week,” he said. “I’ve smoothed things over for you with the DoD and Homeland Security, but I can’t touch law enforcement—not county, not state, not federal. A police officer died at your hands. He was dirty, but they’re never going to let that go. I bought you a few more days, but you need to wrap up your affairs, then leave the United States and disappear.”

A trapped, panicky feeling seized my heart. I couldn’t ask Jen to bring Amy and flee the country. I couldn’t do
that
to my family, too. They had already suffered enough because of me.

Jen had reassured me last night that we would have plenty of time to work things out between us.

Now we wouldn’t.

The tension sagged out of me like a balloon deflating. I tasted bitterness. Leaning my forehead against the window, I closed my eyes and whispered, “That’s fair.”

“It was the best I could do for you, son.”

“Why?” I asked, finally turning my head to look at him. “Why would you do
anything
to help me?”

The slick politician was gone. All I could see was the man, his head bowed in grief, his shoulders slumped by the crushing weight of heartbreak we shared.

“Because she would have wanted me to,” he said.

O
verhead, the stars were fading from the indigo sky. Sitting in Billy’s red jeep, parked at the end of an almost invisible dirt road, the two of us watched dawn’s glow spread across the horizon above the distant lake.

Faint gray light painted the empty, undulating hills that stretched in front of us for miles. The hills looked much the same as they had two hundred years ago, when Chief Truckee, Billy and Cassie’s great-times-five grandfather, had stood in the same place, and laid eyes on the approaching wagons of the white settlers for the first time.

He hadn’t then understood what he was really seeing: the end of the Pauites’ world.

The edge of the sun appeared over the mountains, firing the morning’s wispy clouds with pink and peach. Dawn’s colors reflected in the glass-smooth water of the lake below. Billy slid something from around his neck: a familiar flint arrowhead on a chain. He hung it from the rearview mirror and glanced at me.

I nodded. Then I looked down at the rifle in my lap—the high-powered Knight’s Armament .308 Billy had ordered for me. Loading the magazine one-handed was awkward. I had a cast on the other arm, and most of my body was swaddled in leaking bandages, like some Egyptian mummy. But before I left, we needed to do this thing together in Cassie’s memory—this Paiute tradition, the dawn rez varmint hunt.

Billy loaded his .308, an older bolt-action Winchester 70. He didn’t glance at me again. We didn’t really have a whole lot to say to each other.

I stared out the windshield instead, watching the hills brighten.

Chief Truckee had seen the first settlers’ wagons and run with open arms to embrace the newcomers. Ascribing only the best of intentions to his long-lost white brothers, Truckee had welcomed them to his land.

It hadn’t worked out so well for his people.

Two hundred years later, in the same place, humanity’s first encounter with a sentient being more technologically advanced than itself had come close to ending just as badly for us. Frankenstein’s awakening had been a fluke, I knew. Still, machine intelligence and self-awareness were an inevitability that mankind would sooner or later have to come to terms with. But why did the futurists assume that our sentient creations would automatically reflect our highest and best ideals?

What if they instead mirrored humanity at our worst?

I didn’t know what the future held anymore. I no longer had all the answers.

Billy opened his door and got out. I tried to do the same but couldn’t. I’d been sitting in the same position for too long, and my bandaged wounds had stiffened. Billy tried to help me, but I shoved him away. It took me two tries, but with a wet, painful crackle of half-formed scabs, I finally managed to pull myself out of the jeep’s seat.

Carrying the heavy .308, I staggered around the car to join Billy at the rear, and together we raised the trunk lid.

Blinking and squinting up at us, Roger tried to block the dazzling sunlight but couldn’t, because his wrists were bound behind him with wire. I reached into the trunk with my good arm and hauled him out, dropping him into the dust at our feet.

Billy had found Roger exactly where I had told him he would: up by Moses Rock, near the reservation border, in an old mine that Roger had converted into a survivalist bunker.

The stupid dumb-shit had even pointed the location out to me once, when we were driving back from our day at the shooting range. He had thought better of it and quickly tried to change the subject, not expecting me to figure out what he had almost let slip.