Shattered Sky (22 page)

“Let him up,” Dillon told Maddy, then watched with caution as Okoya slowly rolled over, pushed himself up on all fours, and labored to his feet.

“I came here to make a deal with you.”

“Not a chance.”

“Then you'll never know the things I can tell you,” Okoya said. “And that tragic end to this world you keep prophesying will come to pass just as you expected, and you'll have no idea how to stop it.”

Dillon hesitated. Okoya was a liar through and through, serving no one's needs but his own. Dillon had to be careful.

“What kind of deal?”

Okoya took a step closer. “I can tell you what's coming, and what you need to know to stop it. I can even tell you where to find Winston. You won't find him without me—you're not even in the right time zone!”

“In return for what?”

Okoya smiled. “Your blessing,” he said. “Permission to live freely in this world under your protection.”

Dillon began to fume, thinking back to the hundreds of souls Okoya had consumed, leaving behind walking, breathing bodies of flesh with nothing living inside. Death
that mimicked life—the very negation of life itself. How could he even think of making such a deal with this
thing
?

“How many souls have you gorged on since you've been back?”

“My doings here are insignificant!” he shouted. “Whether it's one, or a hundred, it means nothing.”

Wrong answer. It meant quite a lot to Dillon. He lunged forward and grabbed Okoya by the shirt with both fists. “If you stay here among humans, I swear I will chain you up in a place where no one will ever find you, and you'll never be free to walk the Earth.”

“I was told that once before. But mountains crumble, and shackles break.”

Dillon gripped him tighter. “Not the shackles I'll give you.”

M
ADDY WATCHED, KNOWING BETTER
than to get caught in the battle zone between them, wishing she could help Dillon, but knowing she could not. Incapacitating Okoya was one thing, but truly battling him? From what Dillon had told her of Okoya, only another Star Shard could help Dillon now, and that was something she could never be.

A siren drew nearer and Maddy turned to see a police cruiser pulling up by the gas pumps where the cashier pointed the officer right toward them, as they stood there in clear view on the high platform. The woman had recognized Maddy after all.

“Dillon, they've found us.”

Okoya took that as a cue, and suddenly burst free from Dillon, took two bounds to the end of the platform, and launched himself off in a clumsy gainer to the distant scream of the cashier.

A sickening thud, and they looked over the edge. Okoya lay flat on his back on the concrete pool bottom, skull crushed,
blood running down toward the drain now clogged with bright green leaves.

Maddy grabbed Dillon, pulling him toward the ladder, leaping the last few feet to a patio where the cracks had healed, crushing out the weeds growing between them. But these weren't the only things that had repaired themselves in the short time Dillon was there. Something was moving in the shallow end of the pool. It was Okoya, who ran to the shallow end, and climbed out.

Dillon almost bolted after him, but Maddy stopped him. “No. There'll be another time.” Together they raced off into the woods before the police got there, and just kept on running.

D
ILLON KNEW
O
KOYA HAD
used him again. When he had dived off that platform, he had known that Dillon's own healing power would mend his broken body in seconds, before they could climb to the bottom of the ladder. He had used Dillon's restorative powers to escape, and it was one more weight on Dillon's head. Maddy said there would be another time, but there was no guarantee of that, and in the meantime, Okoya would be out there, feeding. Yet he had said he wasn't the enemy. How could that be true?

A half mile away, they came upon a dirt road and a small house in the woods. Now that the authorities knew their whereabouts, federal agents would be called in—it was only a matter of time until the entire area was secured. They had to get out now.

For once luck was with them: the battered jeep beside the house had a set of keys lying with the mail on the passenger seat. Maddy took the wheel.

If nothing else, Okoya had left them with one kernel of information. He had told them that Winston was in a different
time zone. Assuming he had stayed in the country, that meant he was somewhere to the west. The dirt road opened to a rural highway that led them to the interstate, and they disappeared into the flow of nondescript vehicles headed west.

T
HE FLASHPOINT OF HUMAN FLESH,
W
INSTON RECALLED, WAS
451 degrees Fahrenheit, just like that of most other organic matter.

With both the front door and rear iron doors closed, the chamber was lightless, and Winston couldn't fight the urge to turn on his flashlight. The claustrophobic space in which he and Drew now crouched was the most uninviting place Winston had ever had the misfortune to visit. Oversized gas nozzles spaced at precise intervals on the side walls and on the low coffered ceiling were an ever-present reminder of the chamber's purpose. The soot charred bricks of the crematorium walls still retained residual warmth from earlier that day.

Commercial mortuary crematoria
, Winston recalled,
reached 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, reducing balsa wood caskets and their occupants to cinders in under three hours
.

Winston turned off his flashlight, deciding that darkness was better than the view.

“Another fine mess you've gotten us into,” delivered Drew, in an impressively accurate Oliver Hardy.

“Quiet—you'll give us away.” Winston's nerves were frayed, and it annoyed him that Drew could keep calm. The room was dusty and dry, but quickly growing humid from their sweat. It was all he could do not to cough and give away their presence to the funeral director, who loitered just outside the closed furnace door. They had heard him on the phone, then flipping papers, opening and closing drawers, taking care of odds and ends in his lucrative business of morbidity.
Although they hadn't heard him for at least ten minutes, that didn't mean that he wasn't still lurking after hours.

The average funeral home
, Winston recalled,
processed about four earthly departures a day. The ashes of a human body weighed approximately two pounds
.

Winston's mind, as always, was a traffic jam of salient facts, none of which helped matters. So he tried to reinitialize his mind, reminding himself of what had brought them here in the first place.

Their path to this hiding place had been a circuitous one, beginning with an investigation into the scant clues left behind by the would-be grave robber. Winston, with his vast supply of knowledge, was not a puzzler like Dillon, who could pull patterns and solutions out of chaos. And although Drew was insightful, he was no investigator either.

They had first submerged the footlocker in Lake Arrowhead, behind Drew's cabin. No grave site, no way for Briscoe or any other lunatic to find Michael's resting place. Then the two had returned from Lake Arrowhead to Drew's Newport Beach home to begin their search.

Drew's parents were awkward and stand-offish around Winston, not knowing his relationship with Drew and not wanting to ask. Aside from complaining to Drew that the lawn needed mowing (which unbeknownst to them, was twice daily, now that Winston was around), his parents left them alone.

Their investigative efforts led them to the hotel from which Briscoe had taken the Gideon Bible, and they tried unsuccessfully to ferret out the room from which it had been stolen before being evicted by security. Then, they spent the better part of two days sifting through the Internet in search of Vicki Sanders—the single name scribbled on the bible's inside
cover. Vicki Sanders of Des Moines was a retired school teacher who enjoyed quilting and Harleys. Vicki Sanders of Liverpool was a frustrated factory worker who haunted sex chat rooms while her husband worked the night shift. Vicki Sanders of Minneapolis was actually Victor Sanders, and was damned pissed off at whatever half-assed computer had proliferated an electronic sex change. And Vicki Sanders of rural Tennessee was an SWF looking for a long-term relationship, and currently doing five-to-twenty for armed robbery.

“It's pointless,” Winston had complained to Drew. “Even if we found the right one, how would we know? We don't even know what connection she has to Briscoe, if any.”

Then, toward the end of the second day, Winston tripped a land mine within his own thoughts. Something that had been there, underfoot, all along, that he should have considered earlier.

He asked Drew for his initial notes on the phone numbers also scrawled on the bible's watermark. Drew had tested each phone number in more than a dozen different area codes, and the combinations that actually yielded connections had no obvious relevance.

The only number that was the slightest bit troubling was that of a funeral home in the California desert town of Barstow. Barstow, aside from being home to the world's largest McDonald's, had been in national news a year ago. With the morgues and mortuaries of Las Vegas as overbooked as the hotels in the grim aftermath of the Backwash, a good number of the dead had been diverted to Barstow.

The names of those who had died had filled news reports for weeks. The more famous names took the spotlight, of course. The former senator from Wisconsin; the prominent architect; the notorious celebrity attorney. But the names of
the common people were washed into obscurity just as quickly as their bodies had been taken under the waters.

It didn't take much searching to discover one Vicki Sanders among the dead.

“I don't get it,” Drew had said. “What would this guy want with some woman who died in the Backwash?”

The answer came to Winston in a slow and sickening revelation.

And so now they hunched in a Barstow crematorium chamber.

It had been hard enough to slip into the establishment unnoticed before closing, and although climbing into the chamber had seemed the only way to hide from an approaching staff member, the idea had quickly fallen out of favor, for the funeral director didn't leave the anteroom for more than forty-five minutes. Winston couldn't help but worry whether these devices were set to some cleaning cycle after hours.

Twenty-eight people
, Winston recalled,
suffered accidental deaths each year in funeral homes
.

When all had been quiet for twenty minutes, Winston slowly pushed open the heavy furnace door, and they climbed into a dark room that seemed bright when compared to the chamber. There were no windows, but someone had left a light on in an adjacent closet, and a perimeter of light escaped around its closed door. The coolness of the antechamber was a welcome relief.

“I saw the main office when we came in,” Drew said. “It should be this way.”

They passed through a large medicinal-smelling room with a stainless steel table, and instruments that were mercifully obscured in the darkness; then they opened a door into the business office. Winston turned on his flashlight to reveal a
room that could have been part of any business establishment. A secretary's desk decorated with family pictures around a computer; a copy and fax machine in the corner; and against the far wall, a row of black filing cabinets. Those cabinets suddenly were more ominous to Winston than the crematorium.

Please, let me be wrong . . . let me be completely wrong.

He had told Drew of his suspicions, but Drew reserved judgment, not wanting to extrapolate until all the facts were in. Now, neither would speak of it, as if speaking it aloud would baptize their hunch into reality.

I'm wrong
, Winston told himself as they approached the filing cabinets.
I have to be wrong.

Winston found the drawer labeled “SA-SN” and tugged it open. The files smelled of age—apparently these folders went back for many years, and since the dead rarely returned to audit their own records, no one had bothered to input them into computers.

“There it is,” Drew said.

“I see it.”

Vicki Sanders's file was a new manila folder, sandwiched between the aging ones. Winston pulled it out, but didn't look at it just yet. He took a deep breath, and then another, feeling lightheaded from the stench of embalming fluid that had followed them in from the mortician's station.

“You want me to read it?” Drew asked.

“I'll do it.” Winston clenched his jaw. There was some knowledge that came easily, and other knowledge that came with great pain. Either way, he couldn't wait anymore. He flipped open the file, spread it across the open drawer, and shone his light at it. It was minimal—just a few pages. Information forms, medical examiner's report, death certificate, liability releases, and finally a signed order to cremate.

“Tell me,” said Drew, who, despite the calm he had showed earlier, wouldn't bring himself to look at the pages.

“Vicki Sanders,” began Winston. “Body found in the Nevada desert, last October 21st. Cause of death: acute physical trauma consistent with fall. Sixteen years old.”

“Oh, Jesus . . .”

Winston blinked then blinked again, the information leaping off the page making his eyes sting. “Her mother came all the way from Florida to claim the remains.” He took a deep breath before imparting the news. “Her mother's name was Sharon Smythe.”

Drew pounded his fist on the filing cabinet, the sound tolling through the moribund silence of the funeral home.

“Vicki Sanders—
Victoria
Sanders—went by her mother's last name,” said Winston. “It's Tory.”

M
ARTIN
B
RISCOE COULDN'T BE
bothered with the taxi's seatbelt. No matter how bad the Miami cabby drove, Martin knew there could be no accident. His mission put him above such things. He was protected against such inconsequential concerns.