Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

Visitors Center, Devils Tower, Wyoming

 

“The gasoline from these three cars must have been the cause of that tremendous fire spout we saw,” the park ranger, Don, said. He stood next to a burned out car, the one that Rene Dubois had left in the parking lot. The other two twisted wrecks were once a blue Subaru and a green truck. The air was choking with ash and smoke and Eileen could feel the baking hot asphalt through the soles of her thick hiking boots.

“Yes, surely,” Eileen said, trying to sound like she thought so, too.

Larry, the other park ranger, had driven them to the Visitors Center in his enormous Ford truck. Only twice had fallen trees blocked the road, and both of those were taken care of quickly with Larry’s chainsaw. An occasional log sent bursts of sparks and sullen smoke into the air, but the fire wasn’t going to flare up again.

“You saw him run up the trail into the rock fall?” Don asked Joe. Joe nodded. Eileen fingered her gun, which was drawn and cocked and locked. She didn’t want Joe to come. She wanted him to stay behind, where he was safe. Joe won that argument by refusing to argue.

“Ma’am, you’re making me nervous,” Larry said.

“I’m a very good shot,” Eileen said with a cold look at Larry. “This man killed Sheriff King yesterday, sir. He set this fire.”

“I know that,” Larry said. “I know your folks and I know about you. If you’re that worried about this guy, then I’m worried too. That’s why you’re making me nervous.”

“Oh,” Eileen said. “Sorry.”

“I’ve got a shotgun,” Larry said. “How about I take that, too?”

“Good idea,” Joe said. Eileen looked at him and flicked her eyes to his pocket. Joe blinked at her and dipped his chin in a tiny nod. He still had the gun she’d given him, then.

They’d gobbled nutrition bars as Larry drove them carefully up the trail from Devils Tower Junction, even as Lucy and Ted were reuniting joyfully with their little boy. Time for celebration later, time for food and drink and love. Right now they had to go back into the belly of the beast and see if it had killed their killer. It felt like going back into hell, to Eileen. The miasma that surrounded the Tower was even worse in the smoke and ash. The burnt smell that settled into her nose made her feel like she was going to go absolutely mad.

“Sorry about your truck, Don,” Larry said, with a nod to the burned out shell of the park ranger’s truck.

“Damn shame,” Don said with a shrug. “But now I get a new Visitors Center, don’t I?”

“Brand new, I betcha,” Eileen said. “Let’s walk carefully, folks. If he’s alive, and it looks like he needs help, let’s just hold back until we’re sure he doesn’t have a surprise for us, all right?”

“All right,” the three men said, and fell in behind her without comment.

They found him in the rock fall, the smartest place to go. The flames shouldn’t have reached this far, but the fire wasn’t an ordinary one, was it? He lay half under a tumble of enormous boulders, his face buried in the cracks between the rocks. The smell announced him, a smell that made Eileen wish for the cleanliness of the burnt wood. He smelled almost sweet, that was the worst. Sweet, like roast pork.

“I think he’s alive,” Don said from the trail, in a choking voice. Larry held his shotgun trained on the man curled like a fried snail in between the rocks, a revolted expression on his face. Joe turned and leaned off the trail and vomited the trail bar he’d eaten just a few minutes before. Eileen noticed with distant amusement that it didn’t look any different coming up than it had going down. Her own stomach was okay. Not happy, but okay. She’d seen burn victims before, working car crashes on the highway. Rene was by far the worst she’d ever seen. His clothes hung in patches and his skin, underneath, was purple and hairless. Where the skin had cracked it was a deep, roasted pink.

“Don, can you get the stretcher out of Larry’s truck?” Eileen said. “Joe, is this Rene?”

“I can’t tell,” Joe said, his face turned away. “He’s tall and fat like Rene, but I don’t know.”

“We’ll see in a bit,” Larry said, his shotgun held ready, his face distressed and white. “I don’t think he’s going to survive, ma’am.”

“I don’t think so either,” Eileen said. She patted Joe on the shoulder. “Hang on, everybody. We’ve got to get him to the hospital. Think about what he is, later. Right now he’s a man who needs our help.”

When they rolled him over, grimacing helplessly and trying not to touch his wounded and raw flesh, they saw that his face was almost unmarked. He’d buried his face deeply enough into the rocks that the blowtorch of flame had crisped everything but the skin of his face. It wouldn’t be enough, Eileen thought, to save him. She helped strap him in and took a Glock semiautomatic pistol from his belt as they settled the blanket around him. She searched as carefully as possible and discovered he only had the one. Perhaps there were more weapons in the car in the parking lot. That was for later. For right now, there was only wrapping this horribly burned fat man into the stretcher and making sure that there was no weapon that he could bring out, like the last scene in a cheap horror movie, and kill them after all.

He didn’t come around until they had him in the back of the truck and Larry was driving as quickly as he could back towards Sundance and the hospital there. He’d be flown to Rapid City, of course, to the intensive care unit there, if they thought they could save him. More likely he’d be stuffed full of painkillers until he died, which seemed inevitable.

Rene’s eyes opened. They were black and expressionless pools, the doll’s eyes that Lucy had described. Joe, who was steadying him on the other side of the stretcher, bent over him and touched his forehead, which was unburned.

“Hang on, fella,” he said gently, and Eileen felt something fierce and warm in her chest, something that was pride and love and astonishment, all at the same time. What a man this was, this Joe Tanner.

“Joe Tanner,” Rene whispered in a cracked and thready voice. He smiled. “Been looking for you, mon ami.” His arm twitched as though he was trying to reach the gun that Eileen had removed.

“So I’ve heard,” Joe said. “We’re getting you to a hospital right away, so hang on.”

“Water?” Rene whispered. “So thirsty.”

Joe held the bottle for him and he drank thirstily until the bottle was gone. Then he threw up with a grunt, ejecting a gush of water out and down the blanket that covered his chest.

“Hang on,” Joe repeated helplessly.

“I didn’t know the fire would jump the road,” Rene said. His voice, though faint, sounded cheerful, as though the pain of his burnt body didn’t bother him a bit. Eileen had read somewhere that burn victims were euphoric, the ones that were going to die. The body knew it was over and dumped all sorts of happy juice into the human system. Or something like that. She could hardly stand the smell coming off this man, the smell of cooked flesh and coming death.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “We would have saved you if we could.”

“Up there,” Rene said. “I saw you up there in the light. On top of – You took my wallet. My dad.”

Eileen, who’d taken charge of Rene’s wallet, dug it out of her backpack as Joe helped Rene drink again from his water bottle. This time the water stayed down. Rene closed his eyes as Eileen found the picture of the little boy and his dad. Her throat closed tighter as she looked at the happy little boy.

Rene opened his eyes. She held the picture in front of him. He smiled gently, and happily, and his inhuman eyes looked odd set in his human face.

“Who paid you, Rene?” Eileen whispered. “We – I, really want to know.”

“Just me,” Rene said, not moving his gaze from the picture of his father. “Just me. My dad, he was a cinematographer. He was blacklisted, do you know that word?”

“Yes,” Eileen said.

“So he got sent back to France, destroyed him. Destroyed – me. Reagan, he – he blessed the movement, made it legitimate to hurt my father.”

“President Reagan?” Joe asked, eyebrows raised. Then his face cleared. He understood. Eileen, too, realized what Rene was trying to say. “You wanted to kill the missile defense program. Because it was Reagan’s concept, that’s why.”

“Almost did it,” Rene mumbled. “It was my hobby, really. Just for fun.”

Eileen saw Joe’s hands clench into fists and he shut his eyes as though he couldn’t look at the burned, talking thing on the stretcher for one more second.

“So these jobs were on the side?” she asked calmly, to allow Joe to get hold of himself.

“Just on the side,” Rene said, closing his eyes. “Just me, just to destroy something of America that I hated. Right?”

“Right,” Eileen agreed, but now her own hands were balled into fists. She looked outside the truck as Rene babbled on, describing horrors that she couldn’t force herself to listen to or comprehend. But the small digital recorder she had clipped onto her shirt was listening, the recorder that Lucy had pressed upon her as they’d left, an interesting CIA toy that Lucy kept with her in her fanny pack.

She met Joe’s eyes across the stretcher and they looked at each other as though they were leaning over an open sewer, a bubbling evil thing. And even though Rene was evil he was also terribly sad. He was dying, a boy who’d loved his father and never found his way in the world, a boy who’d lost his way in a terrible wilderness. In a sense, Eileen thought, the manitou had taken him instead of them, a burnt offering to the evil that brooded in this place. She tried to think of something else, anything else, and found herself looking at Joe, Joe who was even now helping Rene take another drink of water.

“We’ll be there soon,” she mouthed at him when he looked at her, and he nodded.