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care if she's the Beast of the Apocalypse. I'm going to
find her and take her someplace safe."
Grace tightened the makeshift bandage that cir-
cled his palm. He bit his lower lip.
"Katy . . ." Ben tried again, but his nerve failed
him.
"Ben," she said, nodding toward the Uni on the
ground. "Get that, and any other gun he's got on
him. And you," she said to Stephen Grace, "you try
anything like karate or something, I'll empty what's
left in this gun into you."
Grace handed his gun over to Ben Farrell. He
never took his eyes off the woman. "You're going to
have to kill me," he said, "if you really want to protect
your daughter. Because as long as I have life, I will not
give up until that girl is dead and buried."
He saw rage in the woman's face, as if these words
had the opposite effect on her that he had wanted.
He had thought she would break down or weaken
her resolve, but her face seemed to light up with
intensity and newly released hostility. She hadn't
been as frail as he had assumed, and perhaps the psy-
chotropics the mad doctor had been feeding her had
finally kicked in. Bad timing. He was about to mutter,
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douglas clegg
"Aw, shit," but these final words were taken from him
before his lips could move.
She said, "No one — "
But that was all he heard, because the noise was
deafening, like the sound of an enormous bomb
exploding, only inside him, and he looked at Kate
Stewart with reverence and awe as he felt at least
three bullets ram into him, around his heart and in
his left lung; he tasted blood in the back of his throat;
his knees buckled; he fell to the ground like a sack;
his eyes retained the image of this woman's face, the
fury in her eyes burning through him, boring holes
into him, burning out his life.
Noises.
He heard the ocean. Not the ocean. But a sea of
noise, from the leaves rustling in the eucalyptus tree
to the sound of beetles chewing beneath the bark and
beneath his head. Also, people, but he had no con-
sciousness of who was speaking. Someone was near
him, for he felt the heat of breath, and then a chill
spread from his chest out to his arms and legs, up to
his neck. He felt something like a large rock being
lifted from his stomach. The noises lessened.
He felt like he was in a small dark place, for he saw
nothing, but had consciousness of surroundings, as if
this were a room and his nerves were hooked up to
the walls and floor and ceiling, so he knew its diame-
ter, its shape, its feel. But no sight.
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dark of the eye
The name Stephen Grace meant nothing to him,
although he thought he heard someone say it.
"He's dead," someone said. "My shadow, Stephen Grace.
Fake government I.D. Hope's sixth grade picture, too. Jesus,
Kate, what the hell are we going to do?"
But he was beginning to lose the feeling of the
place he was in, and he felt as if he had forgotten how
to breathe. There was no room to panic, just a sense
that breath was unnecessary.
Dying.
Consciousness enough to know that.
Then the darkness became a series of intersecting
dribbles of color, as if a child had spilled watercolor
paints down the walls of a room, and then the color
became geometric patterns — hexagons, spirals, pyra-
mids of blue and yellow and purple — and then the
geometry expanded outward, as if a triangular door
were opening . . . and it reminded him of butterflies,
the way the colored triangles moved against each
other, intersecting at one point and then separating
to connect at another. He remembered a girl's voice
he'd heard on some tapes saying that there were but-
terflies, and he knew, as his energy dissipated, that
what she had seen was the strange and wonderful
color of death.
297
chapter 49
family ties
5:28 A.M.
"I know the area," Robert Stewart told his driver.
Jim, behind the wheel, nodded. He was sleepy and
a little hungry, but this was his first big assignment
outside of regular duty, and he didn't want to screw it
up. He was tired of seeing every other jerk in his regi-
ment get ahead; he wanted it to be him. Hilary did,
too. She was going to have the baby, and damn if he
didn't need the extra cash just to cover the hospital
bills. "Just point me wherever, sir."
"There's a dirt road up about two miles," Dr. Stewart
said. "You go left onto it from the highway. Nothing but
vineyards. Miles of them. And you follow the dirt road
all the way until it hits the main road through town. You
cross the main road, and there's a house."
"Sounds like you know Empire pretty well."
"I grew up there. Quite a town."
"Old home week?"
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dark of the eye
"Jim?"
"Well, sir, if Task Force Oh-five-oh is to be effected
here, and if this is where you lived before, I assume
that you're combining business with pleasure."
"Jim, do you have any idea what we are going into?"
"I'd really appreciate hearing from you on that
subject, sir."
Robert Stewart glanced out the side window of the
Cadillac. Jim watched his face in the rearview mirror
for a fraction of a second. Stewart seemed calm and
not the least bit exhausted. The hills were low and
gently rounded, and seemed to go on forever to the
north. The town to their right was Perdito, and soon
they were past the chain-link and barbed-wire fence
that circled the perimeter of the Empire State facility,
and headed toward Empire.
Stewart said, "It's about ten minutes to town, but
you'll notice how the hills divide the area, how even
though we are really just a few miles from Empire, we
can't see it. There are no houses between the towns,
just farmland and empty hills, too coarse and rocky to
plant much on, although the grapes do well here. My
family lived off the land for most of their existence,
although my father, like me, was trained to be a doc-
tor. But he chose a different kind of healing. He was a
healer of souls."
"A minister?"
"Of a sort. He was a man of great spirituality, and
he established his church up and down the coastline,
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douglas clegg
coming inland only when he found the persecution
to be extreme in the larger cities. Small religious
movements have always flourished inland in
California. I have always thought it was because of the
weather being, for the most part, so temperate. Each
day is very much like the one before. It is not too
much different from the notion of eternity, which is
changeless. Most of life is predicated upon the
assumption that everything must and will change. Do
you know, even now, that the tissues in your body are
sloughing off, dying, to make way for new tissues?
Life feeds off the dying. Buddhists call it a wheel of
suffering. Christians might call it sin or error."
"Your father must've been quite a man," Jim said,
but without much interest; yet he felt it was important
to impress this man so that there might be a recom-
mendation at the end of Task Force 050.
"But my father believed that this was unnecessary,
that the wheel of suffering could be stopped, that there
was no need for a concept of sin. The study of medicine
is similar. As a medical researcher, I believe there is no
need for suffering, for death, for lifelessness. I believe [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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