Second Chance (42 page)

When Woody made the calls, he felt as though it was six months earlier, and he was once more making invitations, but this time it was by telephone and not by mail. And this time it was not for fun or nostalgia. This time it was for life and death:

" . . . I know it sounds incredible, Diane, but we've lived through the incredible. Keith
is
alive, and he's put the whole
goddam
world
at risk! Somehow he caused what happened to
Sharla
and Alan and . . ."

~*~

“. . . your wife, Frank. Judy would never have done that on her own. It was a drug, the same drug he gave me that nearly made me kill Tracy . . . Yes,
Jesus
, of course I'd testify to that, but there's more at stake now than just Judy. It's this fucking plague, Frank, this Texas flu! There's no cure, damn it, except to take him
back
. . .”

~*~

". . . it's the only way, Dale. Otherwise, honest to Christ we're going to die along with everybody else. It's apocalypse time, man, the end of the
world
! So tell Eddie when he comes home. I'll call you
if
and
when
. . ."

~*~

Dale
Collini
hung up the phone with a trembling hand, and thought about going back, leaving his lover, his life.

He still hadn't told Eddie about the leukemia, and now maybe he would never have to. If Woody found Keith, and if they were able to go back—and those were major "
if”s
—Dale had decided to remain as well.

It had all been wrong. It was not as things had been intended, and if the dual plagues of Keith's violent life and this virus wasn't all the proof he needed, there was also the fact of his own illness. The cancer hadn't been fooled, hadn't been banished by the instant passage of years. It had only been put off, and now had come surging into his blood cells, furious at having been made to sleep for twenty years. Everything, including his Catholic upbringing, told Dale that it had all been wrong.

All right then. If he had the chance to make it right, he would. After all, he had twenty years of life he would not have otherwise had. Or twenty years of memories, at any rate. And if he forgot them when he returned to the past, so be it, he thought. Or should that be so
was
it? Or
will
it be? He started to chuckle, but stopped, and looked around the room that was filled with the souvenirs of his and Eddie's life together.

"Whatever happens," he whispered, "thank you, God, for these years with him," and he began to weep, thinking about the youth, that time of ignorance and confusion and happiness, to which he might return.

~*~

Curly was the last person Woody called. He was the strongest, the one whose help Woody would most need. Curly had been waiting for the call.

"It's all real, isn't it?" he said to Woody.

"All real. We're beyond a choice now, Curly. We have to try this. And if it works . . . maybe we save everybody's life.”

“And you mean
everybody
."

"Yeah."

"All right. We try to find him. And then we try to take him back. Twenty-four years back. So where do we start?"

"Where we lost him. And where he came back again. Iselin."

Chapter 40

October 1, 1993
:

Home. Like many another grizzled and fading old soldier, I have at last come home to write my memoirs and pass my final days. And in my case "days" means precisely that.

I had hoped that I would be granted several weeks, even months, in which to tell my story to whoever might find it, but such is not to be. I think the virus has attacked my lungs. Breathing is difficult, and just yesterday I began to cough up blood with my mucus. Blood is visible in my stool as well, and my abdomen aches incessantly.

I've been able to keep my malady from the few people with whom I've had to deal—the rental agent, primarily. God, how the town has deteriorated. When the mines ran out, the vultures ran out on the people. House prices and rentals are remarkably cheap. There is only one real estate agent in
Colver
, and he told me that were it not for his remodeling business, he would have had to move long ago.

So now I sit here, I write, and I wait for death. It's so pleasant to write outside of my mind, to see the words held within for so many years form themselves into straight rows, first as green phosphor dots, then as black letters on white paper, spewing from the printer at the speed of thought. For if I don't tell my story now, it will never be told.

For three days and nights I have transcribed my Book of the Mind onto this computer, pausing only to sleep, eat what I can, and pass bloody stool. Though I recall everything, I know I won't have the time to record it all, so I write what seems to me most important, leaving out many of the
hows
that I thought necessary to record, but including all the whys. Those who find this must know why. I must make them understand.

It's begun in earnest. The deaths are increasing. I have no television, but I do have a radio, and that keeps me informed of the spread. It's remarkable how they lie about it. I suppose the government and the media would rather have people die peacefully than panic. They don't talk about the danger to the entire populace, but rather about the heartbreak, the children, the parents, whole families dying, and of course the mythical cure that is just around the corner, down the road, at the end of the tunnel.

As yet they've said nothing about Goncourt, but surely they know by now. It would be impossible not to locate Bone as the epicenter, and from there to the Goncourt employees I infected is an elementary step. Still, they've said nothing. Maybe they know it's no use. They probably invaded Goncourt before the Nazi bastards could even start looking for a cure, as if they could find one in time.

As if anyone could find one in time.

And the thing is, they're not
warning
people. They're not saying that this is an airborne, deadly virus that will kill anyone it reaches. Don't they know? Or don't they care? Do they, accepting the inevitable, refuse to add the extra agony of terror to mankind's death throes? Or is it just that the politicians are afraid even now of alienating laboratories who may provide campaign contributions to next year's election? I wouldn't be at all surprised. However, they may be surprised to find that attendance at the polls will be considerably reduced next year.

So it goes. Not the way the world ends, but the way it
begins
again.

I can see my mother now, out my window, over the top of my monitor. She's hanging out the laundry, just as she did when I was little, and lived with her and my father in that small house below.

When the real estate man brought me here, my breathing became even more labored from nerves, ragged enough that he looked at me oddly before I was able to clear my throat and breathe normally again. It shouldn't have come as any great surprise that the house overlooked my boyhood home, for
Colver
was always small and has gotten smaller with the years, like my mother, a little widow shrunk and withered by cares.

Our old house is less than a hundred yards down a slope, and I placed the computer by a window so I could see it. The houses on either side of my mother are vacant, and on my street (an ironic appellation for a strip of crumbled asphalt) there are only two occupied dwellings, my small two-story and another diagonally across from mine, in which lives an ex-miner in his eighties who somehow gets by on social security. He is near-blind and partially deaf, if the volume on his television set is any indication, and seems unaware of my presence here.

My mother looks so tiny down there, so I took a pair of binoculars and looked at her. She's aged so much, far more than you'd think twenty-five years could do to a person. Living alone all that time, without anyone to love or love her.

I'll visit her soon. When I grow weak, but not too weak to walk down that hill, I'll visit her and tell her who I am. I'll go home to die. I could never go home before, just in case anyone was looking for me. But it doesn't matter now. Everything is settled. Everything is fine. I've done what I was put on this earth for.

So now I must go back and fill in more of the blanks, tell my story, and someday when the survivors find it and read it, they'll know why I did it, know and forgive me, and know that I was not a villain, but a hero.

I thought that now I might feel like a villain, having planted the seed that will kill so many. But I don't. I feel so much at peace, so happy. I can't hear the children crying, but even if I did, I don't think I could feel guilty. They would have died hereafter, to paraphrase Shakespeare. He will live, because he left words. I, because I left deeds.

No. I don't feel like a villain at all.

Chapter 41

Curly Rider felt like a jerk. While he was talking to Woody it all sounded possible. But trying to explain it to Donna, well,
Jee
-zus
.

First she thought he was kidding. Then, when she realized he was serious, she thought he was on drugs. Then, when she realized he was straight, she thought he was crazy.

"Look, man," she said, "just because I'm a native Californian doesn't mean I believe all this cosmic bullshit. Woody Robinson's melted your mind or something . . . I knew I shouldn't have let you go to that sixties party alone."

Trust me, he told her, and she gave him a look just like the one Brenda, his
first
wife, gave him a week before the lawyers descended. I have to do this, he told her, and she shook her head and told him it was his life, and if he wanted to play Double-Oh-Seven it was up to him.

At least she drove him to the airport, kissed him goodbye, and told him to be careful.

Still, he felt like a jerk.

Here he was, once again driving from Pittsburgh to Iselin, but not to reclaim a taste of lost youth. "I'm going to help my buddy," he said aloud, to convince himself of the reality, "catch a terrorist who's turned loose the Black Death and when we get him we're gonna take him back in time so he gets blown up when he's supposed to. And I'm also Anastasia, Queen of all the
Russias
," he added, thinking that it made as much sense as the rest did.

It all sounded so stupid that he didn't say it aloud anymore. Instead he sang old Doors songs, and said, "Believe. Believe. If you believe in fairies, Tinker Bell will live."

It didn't work. He still felt like a jerk.

Woody was where he said he would be, in a booth at
Parini's
Bar. Curly was going to hug him, but changed his mind when he saw the intensity in Woody's eyes. "So what's happened?" Curly asked.

"I've been busy," Woody said. "Took me a couple days, but I made all the arrangements with
Parini
and the kids who were living up there. Paid them off and moved them out.
Parini
still had the old furniture down in the bookstore, so that's back upstairs. I'd kept all the stuff I got from my folks' house."

"Frank didn't
wanta
help?"

Woody shook his head. "I asked him, but he'll only leave Atlanta now if he has to."

"But if we get Keith . . ."

"He'll be here for that. Everybody's ready on a moment's notice. And I've got the apartment indefinitely." He lowered his voice. "Did you get the grass?"

Curly nodded. "Same as last time, he guaranteed it." A waitress came up and Curly ordered an Iron City, Woody a bourbon. "So where do we start?"

"When he talked to me," Woody said, "there was a finality to it. He said his dream had come true, that it was too late, it was over, and something about dying. So if he's the one who spread this disease, I'm thinking that he might have used himself as the carrier."

"Typhoid Mary," Curly said. "Typhoid Keith."

"Yeah. So if he's dying, where would he go? Someplace he hasn't been able to go to for twenty years."

"Home."

"Yeah."

"Was he close to his folks?"

"He was, but his father died years ago. His mother's still alive, though."

"Where did he live?"

"Little town called
Colver
. His mother's still there.”

“It's an off chance he'd go back."

"Where else has he got to go? And what does he have to lose? Besides, it's not just a lead—it's our only lead."

"How far is it?"

"Near Ebensburg. Less than an hour."

"Go now?"

"Tomorrow morning. We'll have to check the motels, if there are any, talk to real estate people. He's got to buy or rent from somebody. Go to the Ebensburg library and check the past few days' papers, see who's renting or selling, and contact them. If the places are gone, we check them out, see who's there."

"And maybe it's him."

"Maybe it is."

~*~

The next morning Curly and Woody arrived at the Ebensburg Public Library only to find that it didn't open until 1:00, so they drove on, and were in
Colver
by 10:30.

"
Helluva
town," Curly said, and Woody snorted in ironic agreement.
Colver
was all too typical of the western Pennsylvania coal towns in which the veins had been cleaned out. The Compton Mines had closed over a decade before, and those who were still young enough to keep working moved away, seeking greener pastures and blacker mines, leaving the town to tired old men, widows, and the giant slag heaps, mountains of dark gray grit, that greeted the visitor.