Lyle felt a hand around his arm. Jerry yanked him toward the door. Lyle yielded but stared at the man at the table. The guy wasn’t back to normal but he’d had a reaction. His head lolled now. Still in a state that Lyle thought of as stasis and yet not so beyond reach. Outside, the pickup had pulled as near as it could without hitting the tree line. Twenty feet to the right, the black bear sat on its haunches, growling.
“I had to shoot it,” Jerry said. “I think it can live but it’s pissed. We have to make a run for it.”
“Why?” Alex said.
“A car just passed. Heading down the road. In the direction of town.”
Jerry started running to the pickup, prompting a louder growl from the bear. Lyle followed, and so did Alex, stumbling behind. The bear started forward at them. They reached the car as the bear sped up.
“Get in, get in, get in!” Eleanor said. She laid on the horn to scare the bear.
“It’s going to eat us,” the girl screamed.
They slammed shut the door. The bear crashed into the driver’s-side door. It rocked the cabin. The girl screamed again. Eleanor had ducked to the right and fumbled from a bent position with the controls. The bear swiped at the window, cracking it. Eleanor yanked the gear shift into reverse. Without looking, zoom, the pickup spun backward. Then with a thwacking sound, paused and spun to the right. They’d hit the KOA sign.
Eleanor put the truck in drive and pulled the wheel sharply to the left. Just before she hit the accelerator she paused and saw the bear fifteen feet away, growling and bleeding. “Sorry,” Eleanor mumbled. She guided the vehicle into a sharp U-turn and back onto the main road. The truck slipped and slid and the reason was now plain to the eye: the snowfall had intensified. It wasn’t quite a blizzard and also not at all a time to be out in the middle of the night. The clock said 2:45.
“There!” Jerry said.
Up ahead, quickly getting away from them, taillights. They were heading east, away from the airport and toward Steamboat proper. A stunned silence overtook the passengers of the pickup. Not even the girl made a sound. The windshield wipers thwapped and squeaked. In the back, the boy and girl sat beside each other with Alex now on the right and the three of them huddled. Eleanor leaned forward in the driver’s seat. Jerry clicked the ammunition out of the handle of the gun and saw six bullets and clicked it back in and checked the safety. He stared vacantly out the window until he saw a sign and then said, “Two miles to town.” The industry turned more dense: a car dealership, a veterinary hospital, a shuttered café and gas station. Signs of life but not the living. Not a soul walking or driving, other than the car they had been following and could no longer see.
Lyle stared at the electrical wires running alongside the road. Then Lyle turned his head to the back of the truck. “Hey, kiddos, I could really use your help.” In his periphery, he could see the girl’s face remained choked with terror and the boy stared stoically ahead. Neither acknowledged Lyle. He said: “My wife has a son.”
This seemed to perk up the boy. “He died?”
“No, I just don’t see him anymore. It’s a long story. I’m very sad about it. I want to make sure that you guys see your parents again soon. Can I ask a question?”
It was how Lyle used to speak to patients or their families, with the human touch. Sincere in a way they might not expect from a doctor. It seemed to connect to the boy. He focused on Lyle while the snow drifted down and Eleanor followed in the direction of the ghost car.
“Do you remember when your dad got sick?”
“I was asleep and when I woke up he was . . . like that.”
“Did he move?”
“Yes, they all moved!”
It was an outburst from the girl. Alex put her hand on the girl’s back.
“What do you mean, Andrea?”
“They . . .” She was trying to tell them and she didn’t have the words.
“Did they get mad at each other?” Lyle asked.
“What? No!”
“Did they,” Lyle moved his arms around, “jerk their bodies?”
“Kind of, I don’t know, maybe like they were dreaming. I don’t know.” She sniffled. “There was this sound. I heard this sound. It was a siren. I thought the ambulance was coming.”
Lyle looked at Alex, who was staring at the girl.
“Did you hear a siren?”
Alex shook her head.
“Static, like the radio?”
“I didn’t hear a thing,” Eleanor said. She passed a motel with a blinking vacancy sign, and then another mobile home park on the right. On the left, a high rock wall buffeted the highway. Trees and tufts grew nearly at right angles. The road veered to the right.
“Stop,” Jerry said.
“Why?”
He was looking out the right side of the car at Elk River Guns.
Eleanor kept driving.
“Pollyanna,” Jerry muttered.
Eleanor almost retorted but she was distracted by the emergence in front of them of a downtown strip. Lyle was still turned backward, talking to the children, but his eyes were elsewhere: on Alex.
“Did you feel anything in your body, Andrea?”
“My head hurt.”
“Have you ever had a shock, like getting your finger stuck in a light socket?”
“No.”
“I got one when I walked on the carpet in my socks,” Tyler said.
“Did it feel like that?” Lyle asked.
Both children shook their head.
“Is that what it feels like?” Lyle asked Alex.
“What?”
“When you were in the airplane and all those people got stuck. Is that what it felt like?” He really was eyeing her now, with great intensity. She shrugged. Lyle kept trying to place her and her knowing look. It looked like she felt some intimacy. Was she grasping at straws and seeing him as a source of stability amid this chaos? Or was it something more?
Did she have the disease? Was this what it looked like, a kind of intensity or derangement? Maybe this was onset. But why did it take her so long to get it? Did it have to do with her limp? Something odd about that.
“Alex, do you have that thing I found in the plane, the little golden rectangle?”
“Oh, sure, right here,” she said. She reached into her pocket. “Wait, I . . .” She looked around some more, in both jacket pockets, her pants pockets. “I don’t know, I—”
“Did it fall out back there?” Jerry said.
“I was running, with the bear and everything,” she said. “Is it important?”
Lyle was considering his answer when Eleanor suddenly hit the brakes. It prompted everyone to turn around and see what she was looking at. Ghost town. A beautiful, serene, peaceful ghost town. The main drag, Lincoln Avenue, unfolded before them for a good ten blocks, shops on each side, traffic lights overhead, most of them turned off. One, a few blocks down, blinked yellow. It had all the looks of a quiet mountain town in the middle of the night, with one exception. Two blocks down, a police car had smashed into the window of a shop. It looked like it had spun out and driven directly into the glass and then gotten stuck there, its back half sticking out into the sidewalk.
Four blocks farther ahead, the car they were giving chase to took a left-hand turn onto a side street.
“Any reason I shouldn’t follow?” Eleanor said.
No one spoke.
Eleanor stepped on the gas. They all looked at the police car smashed into the front of a business advertising local art. The pilot kept going. On Seventh, she took a left turn. Now things turned residential. One- and two-story houses, some just shy of ramshackle, others not fancy but tasteful and even recently remodeled. Lots of sport utility vehicles. One house had a fence with slats made entirely of old skis. They cruised through the deadened residential area, reaching foothills just a few blocks later. They followed the car when it took a left and then wound up a hill, reached a plateau, and revealed another valley, this one dark and, evidently, not much inhabited. The car in front of them had begun descending and they followed. A half mile later, they took a left turn onto a dirt road.
“He’s leading us somewhere, obviously,” Eleanor said.
A minute later they drew near to a house. In front of it was parked the station wagon. In the middle of nowhere, a two-story cabin made of thick logs, looking, at least in this dim light, expertly manicured, hand-crafted. Two horizontally rectangular windows cut the top floor, suggested two bedrooms. A picture window took up the middle of the bottom floor but a curtain concealed whatever was behind it. A rocking chair sat on the narrow porch behind the front door. Parked in front, steam rising from the hood, was the station wagon but not the person who had been driving it.
“What next?” Eleanor said.
Nobody responded.
“I’m concerned this person may be violent,” Lyle said.
“Ditto,” said Jerry.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the precautious way to think,” Jerry said.
“Precautious?”
“This syndrome, it might impact how people behave. I’m not sure about that.” Lyle was thinking about how the man on the airplane had been hit in the head. Someone had done that.
“What does that have to do with the radio waves?” Eleanor said. “You keep asking about them.”
“I’m thinking of onset. Sorry, dumb fancy word. When this syndrome hits, what happens. Do we feel something, or react in some way? How much time do we have before . . .”
His voice trailed off.
“Maybe the guy is just as scared as we are,” Eleanor said. She pulled up the pickup parallel to the station wagon, left it idling.
There was a flash of light and—rat-tat-tat—bullets tore through the front of the pickup.