The Grey Dove was tethered to terra firma by bursts of negative energy called a Casimir line—for Moss, a three-month return through the void of quantum foam. The wounds she’d suffered in the orchard had healed, but their psychological effects would linger. She woke from nightmares thinking she’d heard screams. Floating in her sleeping cabin’s dim light, sweating and claustrophobic, listening to the whir of the life-support system as she emerged from dreams of Charles Cobb, a dark shape smothering her, the scent of fruit blossoms pulling at the edges of her memory . . .
Voices swam through the Grey Dove—auditory hallucinations, but they sounded like Nestor’s voice when he spoke her name in the night. Or she would startle at the crack of a gunshot and realize the sound was nothing but the sound of Brock’s suicide reverberating in her mind. The gas-station cafeteria, the flow of blood. She played music to drown out the noises in the silence. She wrote notes in pencil and erased them, a method for memorization—Esperance, the Terminus followed Libra—imagining crystallized space. So much of what she had heard was extraordinary, beyond her comprehension. Where is Esperance? she wrote. Can NSC return there? She drew a polygon in the stomach of a man. Autopsy. Nicole had seemed to recognize her that last night—but she recognized me as Courtney Gimm, she wrote. Shauna had said Hyldekrugger and Cobb ID’d her as “Courtney Gimm.”
Elizabeth Remarque, she wrote, then erased the name. She wrote it again: Remarque.
Where was Libra?
She erased the question.
When?
—
The engineers at the Black Vale who had observed the Grey Dove’s launch to Deep Waters now saw her return within a moment of her launch, disappearing and reappearing in the span of a heartbeat, the ship merely shimmering even though Moss had lived for over a year during that time. The days’ transit from the Black Vale to Earth filled her with anxiety, true time counting against Marian now. Where was she? Already lost, her body left to the woods? Or somewhere else, alive? The Grey Dove pierced Earth’s atmosphere, flaring like a burning filament, and landed at Apollo Soucek under cover of night. NSC engineers assisted Moss from the cockpit and ferried her to the “clean room,” an on-base house with a view of the Atlantic. The three-month journey through quantum foam was sufficient quarantine, time enough for any exotic viruses Moss might have contracted from the future to have incubated and run their course. Even so, her first few hours in the clean room were spent with doctors in hazmat suits inspecting her body for traces of illness. Culture swabs, blood work. The last of her doctors left a little after 3:00 a.m. Moss drew a bath, soaked away three months of the Grey Dove’s circulated air. She hadn’t noticed how she’d aged during the past year, but she realized now, swiping away a streak of fog to examine herself in the bathroom mirror. She saw a striking resemblance to her mother. Confused as to how old she really was. Biologically, she must be closing in on forty, she thought, but she had lost track. Thirty-nine? Chronologically, she should only be twenty-seven. Moss bundled her hair in a towel, wrapped another towel around her body. Almost four in the morning. She hesitated at the hour but called Brock’s cell.
“Hello?” he answered.
Her eyes filled at the sound of his voice. Still alive, she thought, swallowing back tears, relieved that his suicide bore as little weight as a daydream.
“Brock, this is Shannon,” she said.
“Where have you been? It’s been days. I haven’t heard from you,” he said—and Moss heard a woman’s voice soft in the background, “Who is it, baby?”
Brock was alive, his wife was alive, his little girls sound asleep. Moss closed her eyes and saw flashes of color that looked like veins traced in light. Exhaustion, she knew. A year since Marian had vanished—No, only seven days—
“I can’t talk for long,” she said. “Not tonight. I’ll be back with you in a few days, but you have to listen to me. Do you have a pen?”
“Hold on. Yeah, go ahead.”
“Jared Bietak, Charles Cobb, Karl Hyldekrugger, Nicole Onyongo,” she said.
“We talked with Nicole Onyongo,” said Brock. “Nestor questioned her for several hours, tracked her down using license-plate information the lodge kept. Identified her as the woman in the Polaroids we recovered at Elric Fleece’s residence—she’s been having an affair with Mursult but isn’t connected. She was distraught but cooperative, answered everything we asked. Nothing panned out.”
“We need her,” said Moss.
“We haven’t been able to get back in touch with her,” said Brock, unwelcome news. Moss tried to remember what will happen. Nicole had been questioned by the FBI, by Nestor—but she had been threatened by her husband, Jared Bietak. She had gone into hiding, Moss remembered. Out of reach.
“Please keep trying to track her down,” she said. “She knows more than she told you.”
“I’ll send someone to her apartment, see if we can pick her up,” said Brock. “Who are the others?”
“Persons of suspicion,” said Moss. “I think these men are the killers, Brock. I think they killed Mursult, his family. Put out their names, take them into custody. I don’t know which one pulled the trigger on Mursult or who took Marian or the family, but they’re all involved. Now listen closely. I need you to search a location. Bring a K9 unit, trained to mark human remains.”
“Where?”
“There’s an access route labeled TR-31 on some forestry maps of the Blackwater Gorge,” she said. “An old logging route, easy to miss. Take that access route uphill. You’ll eventually come to a clearing.”
“What am I going to find?” said Brock.
“Look for piles of stones set out as markers. They’re called cairns. Small stacks of flat stones. Search wherever you find the markers. But it is imperative, absolutely imperative, that your men aren’t seen by anyone. Do you understand? Search that site, but no one can see you. I believe that the actor or actors have accessed or will access this site. If they’re made aware of your presence, we might lose our chance.”
“Will I find Marian?” he asked.
Already the future receded from her, like images half retrieved from dreams or like her memories were waves breaking against the shores of the real, washing away. She was cold, exhausted and cold, and visions played in the darkness of her closed eyes like lucid dreams. She saw Nestor, the forest in the night, pine sap, damp stone, a beautiful place to rest.
“Moss, is this about Marian?” asked Brock.
“I don’t know what you’ll find,” she said. “I hope nothing.”
She slept for sixteen hours. When she woke, she worked through the paperwork that Naval Space Command required to document every IFT. The packet resembled a tax book: Assurance of Fact and Statement of Faith, with Sheet 34 and Waivers 1–13. Her portion began on page 6 of 116 pages. Line 1: Did you witness any event that might compromise the national security of the United States of America? She spooled the first worksheet into her electric typewriter, three empty lines. On April 19, 1998, she typed, the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) facility located in Clarksburg, West Virginia, will be attacked. A thousand people will die, killed by sarin gas delivered through the fire-suppression system . . .
A quick breakfast the following morning, then her debriefing: a seaman drove her to the NCIS Resident Unit office, where she was shown into the conference room, a cramped space with mustard-colored walls. A single chair at the front table, a microphone, her name printed on a cardboard table tent. NSC brass from Dahlgren clustered together, talking. She spotted Admiral Annesley, who would question her. She recognized NCIS special agents from the Norfolk field office. O’Connor was there, in his seventies but spry. His nose was bulbous, lined with violet veins. His creased forehead and the wrinkles beneath his eyes were like a map of rivers run dry. O’Connor smiled when he saw her, worked his way to her. His eyes seemed like they should belong to a younger man—they belied his age, sparkling with a rich blue vitality.
“How long have you been gone?” he asked.
“Arrived September 2015, stayed through the spring,” said Moss. “With travel time about a year, slightly longer.”
“Just make sure you put in for OT pay and to count toward your retirement,” he said. “Talk with Human Resources when you have a chance. You must be getting close?”
“To retirement? I think I’m about thirty-nine, biologically,” said Moss. “A few years yet. If I met some of my high-school friends, they would think . . . I don’t know what they’d think. Twelve years older than they are. They’d think I wasn’t taking care of myself.”
O’Connor laughed. “I’m older than my father,” he said.
These debriefings were called informal, but Moss, who had gone through seven of these productions, knew what significance they carried. This roomful of men would evaluate her performance over the next several hours, would consider the overall viability of her operation. She was nervous, doubting herself—doubting her memories, worried she would contradict herself. A cassette recorder had been placed near her on the table, a stenographer typed her words. The Navy representatives sat together like a bell choir, deep blue uniforms, the sleeves heavy with golden stripes and piping. They watched intently as Moss read her opening statement, a summary of her IFT. She spoke about the crimes of the crewmen of the USS Libra, their alleged mutiny, their alleged participation in the murder of Patrick Mursult and his family. Admiral Annesley was genial, but his mind sprang like a lawyer’s, questioning Moss and cross-examining her answers. A politician, one of Reagan’s men, with smallish eyes that gleamed like dark gems, seeming to smile even as he peeled away at Moss’s responses—his onslaught abating only when Moss described the death of Elizabeth Remarque. A pervasive grief settled over the assembly—many of the men here had known Remarque personally, it seemed. Remarque had suffered a public execution, according to Nicole’s story, and Moss told them how Remarque’s corpse had been paraded among the sailors in the mess. Annesley was curious about Libra, curious to hear Nicole’s story of Esperance a second time, confirming that the planet was in NGC 5055, the Sunflower Galaxy. Had Libra brought the Terminus to Earth, then? Moss surmised that Libra had been responsible—that at any rate it was certainly the first ship to observe the Terminus, rather than the USS Taurus, as had been previously thought. What do you believe was the mental state of the surviving crew? Moss described Nicole’s abuse at the hands of Jared Bietak and her subsequent troubles with drug addition. Annesley picked at her answers but didn’t linger over this part of the interview. Rather he surprised Moss by his overriding interest in the cancer cure, something she initially mentioned only to color her description of the IFT. He wanted to learn about her mother’s cancer, when she was diagnosed, her initial surgeries, and how she had apparently been healed—who had healed her, how she had been chosen for the clinical trials.
“My understanding is that people with the right insurance could just walk into a clinic, receive three injections,” said Moss. “Nanotech delivery to cancerous cells.”
“And this was developed by a company called Phasal Systems?” asked Annesley, Moss confirming the information she had already repeated. “Who developed the cure?” he asked. “Do you know any of the names of the doctors involved?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t—”
“Did Phasal Systems develop communications systems, too, or were they only active in the medical sector?”
“Medical, I believe,” said Moss, struggling to recall anything she might have picked up about Phasal Systems while in her IFT, some information she might have absorbed even if on the periphery of her attention. The scientist Brock had spoken with might have had something to do with the cancer cure, she remembered—Imagine a wall made of doors. She remembered Brock had said the scientist had worked for the Naval Research Lab before moving into medical tech. “I think Phasal Systems might have had a connection to the NRL,” she said. “A spin-off company. I think Navy scientists worked on the cancer cure once they left NRL. We didn’t have Ambience, though, or Intelligent Air, if that’s what you’re asking, or any of the environmental nanotech-saturation systems popular in other IFTs. Most people still used cellular phones. But they had cured cancer.”
“Had they cured every disease?” asked Annesley. “Did Phasal Systems solve disease?”
She remembered the words of her mother’s nurse. “There was still disease,” said Moss. “My mother’s nurse told me you had to be rich to live forever.”
The debriefing ended, a flurry of handshakes, Moss realizing that Annesley hadn’t asked certain questions she was accustomed to answering: what year the Terminus had been marked, for instance. It had swung closer, to 2067 in her IFT—but Annesley hadn’t asked. He hadn’t followed up about the CJIS attack either, she realized, or even about her investigation into Patrick Mursult, or about the mutiny. There would be more paperwork, forms to fill out, she knew, and she knew she could be recalled to answer further questions at any time, or to provide clarification on statements she’d made, but the admiral’s focus on the cancer cure surprised her, the focus on Phasal Systems, a company that didn’t even exist in 1997. Her debriefings often concluded with this feeling of anticlimactic uncertainty over how much good she had actually contributed; her reports on future terrorist attacks, future wars, future economic conditions never seemed to amount to much in the way of prevention, many of the events she warned about still occurring. She felt like an American Cassandra when events she warned about came to pass. Her only solace was the belief that there was a bigger political picture the Navy accounted for that she wasn’t privy to—she saw only brushstrokes, never the entire painting.
“You did well,” O’Connor told her, back at her on-base housing. He wasn’t staying long, but he accepted a cup of coffee, sitting with Moss in the house’s enclosed back porch, the Atlantic a twilight glow beyond the reach of sand.
“Seven hours with those men,” she said. “Almost eight. I’m exhausted. And I’m never sure what they’re asking, what they’re trying to get at.”
“NSC has Senate oversight. They have their own concerns, which don’t always line up with ours,” said O’Connor. “Every IFT costs millions of U.S. tax dollars. I understand that the admiral went straight to a dinner meeting with Senator C. C. Charlie about your debriefing. He’ll have a long night ahead.”
“I’m testifying about Hyldekrugger and Cobb, killers at least, guilty of mutiny on the Libra, and the admiral didn’t seem to care,” said Moss. “These men murdered their commanding officer, and they’re tied to the Terminus. Libra might have brought the Terminus. Annesley hardly asked about Libra, or what Nicole Onyongo told me about Esperance. I was prepared to talk about Nicole.”
“I know that Annesley cared about Remarque. We all did,” said O’Connor.
“You knew her?”
“She was clever. She’d get this look in her eye, and you knew she was already a few steps ahead of you,” said O’Connor, smiling at the memory. “I didn’t know her well. We did some joint training sessions together. I remember stories—she would float the passageways of her department, make rounds, and everyone would be nervous because they knew she could do their jobs better than they could. Very high standards, very exacting. But she was patient. Everyone wanted to be assigned to her ship. Your testimony about her death was very difficult to listen to.”
“All Annesley seemed interested in was nanotech medication, cancer.”
“Well, you never know what cards Annesley is holding,” said O’Connor. “He might already have other reports about Libra that have been corroborated, or facts that contradict yours. Besides, Nicole Onyongo was never NSC, which makes her legal status somewhat hazy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No one named Onyongo was on Libra,” said O’Connor. “The other names you provided, but not Nicole Onyongo. She wasn’t a sailor. She doesn’t appear anywhere in NSC. She was never in the Navy. NSC believes that Nicole Onyongo was picked up in Libra’s future, which is highly irregular. We can only guess why Remarque would have done such a thing, but there you go. Nicole Onyongo doesn’t exist, not the way you and I do.”
Moss felt affronted, surprised that Nicole wasn’t born in terra firma. But the strange story about Kenya—Nicole saying that the people of Mombasa had welcomed the crew of Libra, that Nicole had followed Remarque only after her father had intervened on her behalf. Nicole was a stowaway from a world that never was. A ripple of uncertainty passed through Moss. Nicole was a specter, just one of countless shadows cast by Libra.
“What about the others? You found the other names I gave you? They were on the Libra crew list.”
“We did—and Hyldekrugger, he’s an interesting case,” said O’Connor.
“The celestial navigator.”
“The ship’s CEL-NAV, yes,” said O’Connor. “Vietnam. Studied philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago before NSC. He earned a master’s studying Viking death cults and rituals, a thesis on the pagan symbolism of the Black Sun. I tried to read some of it, but it’s steeped in academic jargon.”
“The ship made of nails, that’s a Viking myth,” said Moss. “Something to do with the end of the world.”
“Clean record,” said O’Connor. “But Hyldekrugger has two uncles involved in the ‘sovereign citizens’ movement, and one is serving life for the beating death of a black man. I’m assuming a connection of that type of extremist thinking to the events in your report.”
“Maybe. Yeah, probably,” said Moss, ruminating on the violence that had swept through Libra, the mutiny, the massacre. “Hyldekrugger and his followers—they killed everyone on the ship,” she said, and they had somehow survived reentry to terra firma; they had somehow returned. Moss had learned so much about the fate of Libra, but other questions grew around the missing ship like mushrooms in the dark.
“We have warrants for Hyldekrugger, Cobb, Bietak, and Nicole Onyongo,” said O’Connor. “We’ll pick up their trails, arrest these individuals, and question them about Mursult and Libra. I want convictions, but don’t be surprised if they’re offered bargains.”
“They murdered children,” said Moss. “They’ll murder Marian. She might still be alive. These men might have her—”
“Shannon, you have to understand, things have changed since you’ve been away.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“The Terminus has been marked at 2024. Less than thirty years from now,” said O’Connor. “Before your debriefing we received word that the John F. Kennedy marked the Terminus at 2024.”
“Within our lifetime,” said Moss.
“Within our lifetime, within our children’s lifetime. The last generation is already alive,” said O’Connor.
“Maybe we can still stop it, maybe if we—”
“Maybe,” said O’Connor, his voice, though, that of someone who’d already accepted a terminal stage. “Annesley is prepared to offer plea bargains to Hyldekrugger and Cobb, and any other conspirators they bring to the table, for information about their involvement in the Terminus, the location of Esperance.”
“This is bullshit.”
“And the Navy is greenlighting Operation Saigon,” he said. “Prioritizing which civilians will be included in the evacuation, if it comes to that. Thirty years is too close. NSC is mandated to load ships and launch to Deep Waters within forty-eight hours of the appearance of the White Hole, and they’re worried it might appear now, at any moment. We’ve been pulling agents from lower-priority investigations, reassigning them to Saigon. NSC wants as many of our Cormorant shuttles as we can spare. They’ll requisition them all soon.”
Moss wanted to argue, but fear clenched her, a bolt of panic at the imminence of the White Hole—2024. What would happen when the White Hole appeared? Would billions lift into the air, opened and displayed? Would they run, mindless, or stand staring? Moss felt the helplessness of a child. She felt like she couldn’t comprehend the true scope of the end. She imagined Operation Saigon, Cormorant shuttles launching in waves, the entire NSC fleet at the Black Vale at capacity with soldiers and civilians, mixes of talents and genetics, each ship launched in search of exo-Earths, each ship a seed to grow a new humanity even as humanity perished. She thought of the escaping ships, the abandoned Earth, and grew anxious at the thought of what would be left behind. She felt like she was being asked to leave Marian behind. What was one life set against every life? A despondency churned in her heart, Marian’s life abandoned for the lives of others. But maybe she wasn’t too late. She was sure she wasn’t too late. Her mind rebounded to Marian, how Marian might still be alive, how Marian might still be saved.
Moss received her discharge papers the following afternoon. She found her pickup in the lot, surprised that her battery wasn’t dead, and had to remind herself that only a few days had passed since she’d parked here. Evergreen air freshener and the reek of prosthetic liners she’d flung behind the passenger seat, just her little red Ford, but the familiar odors and the sensation of sitting behind the wheel comforted her, situated her in her own life after so long an absence. She left Naval Air Station Oceana through the main gates. Returning to terra firma was like stepping into the same river twice: everything the same as when she’d left, but it didn’t feel quite the same to her now. The year 1997 felt hopelessly retrograde in some ways, a recovered past. Returning was like traveling to a poorer foreign country where the fashions and cars, the technology and architecture lagged decades behind.
An eight-hour drive from Oceana, Moss’s house was northwest of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a ranch seated on four acres of wildflower-strewn lawn. She loved the house, loved the solitude, the single-floor layout amenable to her situation. Only a week’s worth of mail had piled up inside the front-door slot. Moss divided bills from junk mail before changing into pajamas and settling into her leather couch. The VCR had recorded The X-Files in her absence, her hero Scully, a new episode—but she grew anxious when the plot veered into spaceships and nine minutes of missing time. Her telephone rang, and she paused her show, bands of static blur over Scully’s face.
“We found something,” said Brock.
“Marian?” she asked.
“Not Marian. We found the clearing. Nothing there. We brought a K9 and scoured the area for human remains, but there was nothing.”
Too early, thought Moss. Marian could have been buried at this site at any point between now and 2004, when two men lost in the woods would dig for ginseng but find bones. Something Moss remembered of her father—how he let hose water pour down their front sidewalk and would watch the water branch out in different rivulets, diverging paths, around cracks and stones. Futures were like those forking paths of water. Marian might not ever be left in those woods.
“We broadened our search,” said Brock, “found one of your rock formations about a half mile north-northwest of your initial location. I posted two men in blinds, told them to enjoy the wildlife for a few days.”
“What did you find?”
“Rainey called it in,” said Brock. “He spotted a guy building one of your rock piles.”
“Did you ID him?”
“Not a chance. Not at that distance,” said Brock. “But Rainey tracked the actor, found that he drove a black van, a GMC Vandura, early eighties. We spotted the van twice in the area.”
“What about the plates?” she asked.
“The van’s registered to someone named Richard Harrier.”
Harrier, thought Moss, with desperation. “I don’t know that name,” writing out the name on a sheet of scratch paper: Harrier, Richard. “He might know where Marian is.”
“Shannon, I’ve met you halfway on this,” said Brock. “More than halfway. I need more from you. I need probable cause. More than just your word, or some hunch you’re playing. Otherwise whoever these guys get as their defense attorney will shred us and we’ll squander whatever intelligence led you to target them. We can’t harass someone for building rock piles. What else do you have?”
“Just stay with me on this,” said Moss, but doubt crept over her. There had been no tangible proof linking these cairns to Marian’s body. “What else do you know about this guy? Richard Harrier?” she asked. “His address? Priors? Anything?”
“No priors, absolutely clean. Harrier works at a Home Depot in Bridgeport, the vehicle is registered to his Bridgeport address. Married, has three kids—but I had one of our guys trail the van, and it looks like the driver’s been spending time at a house just outside a small town called Buckhannon—”
“Buckhannon,” said Moss, and when Brock read the address, “Off 151,” her world warped. She ran the kitchen tap, held her hand beneath the warming water until she scalded herself—the pain jolting through her incertitude. She knew the address, Nestor’s address, the house with the black van in Buckhannon was the same house she would sleep in with Nestor nineteen years from now.
“I’m going,” she said. “I have to see—”
“Moss, wait—”
The porch with the wooden rockers, walks along the acres, Nestor, the constellation of freckles over his heart—Why there, why of all places there?
She threw on jeans, her holster. Imagining Nestor—Maybe Nestor didn’t know, she thought. Nestor’s connection to the house in Buckhannon might not exist yet, might not ever exist. This might all be a coincidence, she thought, a coincidence of houses, like Courtney’s house. Desperate to believe that Nestor was innocent, that right now he might still be innocent, that he might have always been innocent.
A half-hour drive from Clarksburg to Buckhannon, after midnight. She pushed a hundred on empty rural roads thinking of Marian buried in the woods. Wild thoughts of Nestor, of Nestor kidnapping Marian, of Nestor killing her, of Nestor as he would look years from now, of Nestor here at this house in Buckhannon, here, here. She pulled from 151 into the gravel drive, skidding as she braked. A pear tree grew in the front yard, and there was a hedgerow in front of the porch, but otherwise the house was the same as it would be years from now. Moss left her truck, every fondness for this place curdled. A black van with a red racing stripe was parked near the house. The barn doors were lit with a floodlight set to a motion sensor that had tripped. Around the far side of the barn, a Winnebago without wheels was up on cinder blocks—I’ve seen that before, she thought. The house itself was dark, but the living-room windows pulsed blue with television light. Someone was home.
Moss pulled her weapon. The van had been left unlocked, and she swung open the rear doors, found blood on the walls and floor, a rumpled plastic tarp and twine. Marian’s blood. Anticipating where to find Marian, she remembered the flimsy side-door lock that Nestor had never bothered to fix. She looked in through the side-door window, but the interior was too dark for her to see, so she braced herself, shouldered the door, and it gave inward with a snap. Loud volume on the television, moaning, the sounds of sex, like an echo of her memories here. Weapon leveled, through into the kitchen, television glare across the linoleum, through into the living room. A naked man sat sprawled on the couch, his head leaned back. A woman was on her knees between his legs sucking him off, her body rippled with cellulite and waves of fat, her hair a brown mess.
“Federal agent. Get down on the floor,” said Moss. “Get on the fucking floor.”
The woman yelped and shrieked, clutching her heart. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” flopping forward, breasts flailing, her hands spread in front of her, gripping the carpet. The man skipped up onto the couch like he’d just seen a rat scurry, covering himself with a throw pillow and bawling, body lit by Playboy Channel lesbians. “Jesus, lady, don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me!” The woman’s hair would one day gray like a mop of sooty yarn—Miss Ashleigh, Ashleigh Bietak, Nicole’s mother-in-law.
“On the fucking floor,” Moss said again, and the man dropped to his knees next to Ashleigh and spread his arms out wide, ass in the air. The living room was the same as Moss had known it—the same mirror hung above the mantel, the painting of the dead Christ hung in the spot it would hang when Nestor would live here. Her confusion and heartbreak screamed like twin sirens in her mind. Marian, she thought, her name an anchor. Moss cuffed the man but only had one set of cuffs so had to leave Ashleigh free.
“Where is Marian Mursult?” asked Moss. “Miss Ashleigh, where is she?”
“What is this?” said Ashleigh. “What girl? This is bullshit, is what it is. Fucking, I want my lawyer. Who are you? Where’s your warrant? Fuck this. You can’t be here—”
“Marian Mursult,” said Moss. “Where is she? You, where is she?”
“I don’t know,” said the man. “These are too tight, these cuffs. I want my clothes. I’m not supposed to be here, I’ve got a wife. Please, I shouldn’t be here. My wife will find out.”
“Where is Marian Mursult?” she asked again, shouting, but didn’t wait for their answers. She went down the hallway toward the back rooms, the bedroom, Nestor’s bedroom where she had slipped from her clothes and slept so many nights. Wooden gun racks, rifles and machine guns. “Fuck me,” said Moss, recognizing the German antiques, the stock of the Eagle’s Nest. “Damn, no, no . . .” Circling back to the living room, she checked the two and found them still facedown on the carpet. She found the basement door just off the kitchen and climbed downstairs, aware Miss Ashleigh wasn’t cuffed, aware the woman could fetch any one of those Nazi guns and ambush her while she was down here or as she came back upstairs.
“Marian?” Moss called out. “Marian, I’m a police officer. Are you down here? Let me know if you’re down here. Say something, please.”
A dank basement, the stink of bleach. A metal weight-bearing column near a central floor drain. Browned rags and bloodstains on the concrete floor, stains on the cinder-block walls. There were gags, restraints. Moss pictured the girl tied to the metal column, hands bound behind her back. Brown stains in the utility sink doused with bleach. Marian had been tied up here, brutalized . . .
Rumbling across the ceiling. Moss heard them run, Ashleigh and the man, Harrier. Fuck, she thought, pointing her gun at the ceiling, contemplating shooting up through the floorboards, maybe hitting the bottoms of their feet or passing up through their groins for a kill shot, but she wasn’t justified. She lowered the gun toward the stairs to shoot if she saw their legs descending but heard the slap of the side screen door and knew they’d sprinted from the house. She took a breath, knowing she was making mistakes. She climbed the stairs to the kitchen, alert—but there was no one.
Moss followed outside, where the barn floodlight blazed the darkness white. Miss Ashleigh and Harrier must have run this way, she thought, must have tripped the light. Maybe they’d gone into the barn or to the far side of the Winnebago. The Winnebago looked like it was a fixture of this place, weeds grown up around it. As Moss crossed the lawn, the Winnebago’s door opened and a man stepped outside—blue jeans and old combat boots, an olive-drab shirt unbuttoned, exposing his chest. A huge man with tawny hair cut into a ratty mullet. Cobb, she realized—twenty years younger than when she had first seen the man, when she had grappled with him in the orchard and slit his throat. Charles Cobb, she was sure of it. He held a tallboy beer and took massive swigs, looking out over the fields—he hadn’t seen her, didn’t know she was here, she realized, not yet. Wherever Miss Ashleigh and her man had run off to, it wasn’t to the Winnebago.
“Federal agent,” Moss said, sighting her weapon to the center of Cobb’s mass, thinking, If he moves, I can kill this fucker twice. “Get down on the ground. On your fucking knees. Now. Now.”
Cobb flinched at her voice—she’d surprised him. He set his beer can on the step of the Winnebago and raised his hands in surrender but didn’t go to his knees. This man has walked on an alien world, she thought. This man has seen his friends flayed and spread in the air. Sirens on 151, Moss noticed, distant blue lights. Brock must have called the Buckhannon PD, figured she would come here alone.
“Do you have a warrant to be here, Officer?” asked Cobb, his voice measured if not calm. His voice unnerved her, and she felt the moment slipping from her, an intuition that she wasn’t in control.
“On your knees,” said Moss. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“You’re a cripple,” he said. The barn light timed out. Pitch-black. Cobb ran—she heard him, taking off around the far side of the Winnebago. She heard him crashing through the field beyond and knew there was no way she could chase him down, no way she could outrun him through the tall grass. Everyone was escaping—she felt like they were melting from her.
The dark was pierced by the firelight of muzzle flashes, automatic-weapon fire. Bullets zipped overhead and chewed into the mud several feet behind her. The darkness had saved her; whoever was shooting couldn’t see her, didn’t know where she was, and she dropped to the grass, a second volley whining past. She saw the muzzle flash from the Winnebago window, trained her weapon on the flash. She took a shot. A second shot. A third.
Sirens pulled in to the driveway, blue waves against the barn and Winnebago, a half dozen vehicles at least, more arriving. Another round of fire chewed into the cars, shattered windshields.
“Shannon?” she heard—Nestor exiting one of the cars. She turned her gun on him, aimed at his chest, an easy shot from this distance, felt herself apply pressure to the trigger.
“It’s me,” he said. He knelt behind the open driver’s-side door of his car, an FBI vest, his sidearm pulled.
Moss’s vision had tunneled, focused on his gun. This is his house. This will be his house.
“Shannon, it’s me—it’s Nestor. Lower your weapon, please.”
The world rushed to her. He was still just a young man, still FBI. “One person, on foot through those fields,” she said. “Two more at large, might still be on the premises. One in handcuffs. The shooter’s in the Winnebago.”
Racket of automatic fire. Return fire from the police—they filled the Winnebago with hundreds of rounds. Nestor emptied his clip, but another volley of fire roared from the Winnebago. Bullets shattered his windshield and door, pumped into Nestor’s chest. He spun to the grass, yelling. Moss emptied her gun at the Winnebago. Reloaded. Shot again. Someone shouted—the gunman inside the Winnebago was hit. Nestor was alive. He made it back to his knees, the sleeve of his shirt ripped and soiled with blood.
“Vest,” said Nestor. “I’m all right. I’ve got a vest—”
Relief, seeing Nestor safe. Other officers, men in uniform, fanned out across the lawn—a squad from Buckhannon, along with state police. Nestor advanced on the Winnebago, gun in his left hand, his right arm hanging. Moss followed. Nestor crept up alongside, yanked open the door. Moss saw blood. She climbed the step into the Winnebago. Blood spattered the floor, the kitchenette. Nestor followed inside, moving past the kitchenette to the sleeping cabin. The side of the Winnebago had been perforated with bullets, and light from the barn streamed in through the holes. The gunman had collapsed onto the foam bed, shirtless, bloody. A tattoo on his chest, a golden eagle, wings outspread. Jared Bietak, she realized. Blood gurgled from the man’s mouth and sucked from the wounds in his chest as he tried to breathe.
“Apply pressure,” said Moss. She found a blanket and pressed it to the man’s chest, but she knew he would die. The man coughed out a gulp of blood. Too slippery—she wiped the blood off Bietak’s chest with the blanket and tried to reapply pressure but felt his body go still.
“We need to check the barn,” said Moss, giving up on him. “Marian’s here, or was here.”
The barn doors were padlocked and chained. One of the state officers pulled bolt cutters from his trunk, snapped the chain, slid open the doors. Enough light from the floodlights to see a lemon-yellow Ryder truck—rusted out years from now, abandoned in the field, the turning point on our walks together. Nestor followed into the barn, said, “What is all this?” Someone found the lights, revealing a series of tubes that ran the length of the rafters, illuminating stainless-steel drums and plastic barrels, glass equipment, flasks and beakers. The place looked like a methamphetamine lab.
“Everybody out,” said Nestor. “Move.”
“No, I need bolt cutters,” said Moss.
She cut the lock on the Ryder’s rear doors, swung them open, and a wave of rot rolled over her. She fought her rising vomit but heard a county cop retch. A heap of bodies had wasted away in the back of the Ryder truck, their eyes covered in weeping sores, their skin burned—their flesh raw and red where it was still flesh, their mouths nearly sealed shut by blisters and screaming red wounds.
“Oh, God,” said Moss. “My God, my God—”
She saw the girl. Moss started to climb into the truck, but Nestor grabbed her shoulders, held her back.
“Get off me,” she said.
“Chemicals,” said Nestor. “You can’t breathe this.”
The girl was in the heap. Her head was so thoroughly burned that she had lost all but a few clumps of her raven hair. Her teeth were exposed through gashes in her cheeks. Only a few white patches of her body had the soft smoothness of a young girl’s body, the rest wrinkled and ridged with scar tissue and wounds, covered in so many maggots it looked as if someone had dumped rice over her. Marian. Marian. Marian.
“Find a blanket,” Moss cried to Nestor. “We need an ambulance, please. Please call an ambulance.”
“This place is a gas chamber,” said Nestor. “Get outside.”
She buried her head into his chest and wept and let him lead her from the barn. The lawn was alive with siren light, the hectic business of police flooding the scene, but a hush had descended over the rumors of what was inside.
“The dead outnumber the living,” Nestor said. “My father used to say. But my father told me about the new bodies we all receive at the end of days, bodies robed in light. What a glorious thought, to be reborn in God. The dead will receive new bodies.”
Moss separated from him. No one should see her being coddled, not here—she didn’t want these officers to see the only woman on scene being coddled by a man. Moss wiped her eyes.
“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” Nestor asked. “For that child’s sake, please believe.”
Moss imagined the entire history of the dead beneath the soil climbing up to claim the Grace of God and receive new bodies made of light. She imagined the corpses in the Ryder truck receiving bodies unfettered by pain. Sirens and the sound of engines, two trucks pulled in to the field. New bodies made of light—naïve hopefulness, the dreams of children. She was touched on the hand, and she found Brock’s brown eyes, eyes that had seen pain before but that still broke with sorrow, eyes that still longed for some kind of peace.