“I bet it’s a ghost,” Casper said.
“It’s not a ghost.” Vale leaned back—he’d let Marvin drive, finally—and folded his arms behind his head. He put his sunglasses back on. “It’s a fender bender.”
Vale had drunk eight beers in his motel room the night before. Eight exactly. Not a horrible night, all told. The hangover was not bad today and he’d quickly downed another bottle in the bathroom before they left. It settled his nerves, smoothed out his guts, and now with Marvin at the wheel he felt like this was good, this was a good thing.
He’d left the rest of the beers on the dresser along with a fifty. A blessed tip for the cleaning staff. He was doing okay. He was petitioning the universe’s good fortune with hard cash.
Today was the funeral and he would make it there. Anything beyond that was cake, unnecessary. They’d left early and were making good time but by the time they passed a little town called Volta, traffic had slowed down greatly, moving forward grudgingly only after long periods of stillness. Now they’d reached more sun-blasted fields, hills blue in the distance. You could hear stereos through the open windows of other cars as emergency vehicles sped past them on the shoulder, lights pulsing.
“Nah,” said Casper from the back. “Ghost.”
“Bull.”
“See,” said Casper, slapping the back of Vale’s headrest as a truck passed on the shoulder. “CDC, not the Highway Department.”
It was like that for an hour. Everyone was getting edgy. But he found an atlas and a map of the West Coast in the glove box, and was able at least to figure out which freeways they’d need to take and the exit to get off at to reach Richard and Candice’s place. No small feat, navigating that. Casper read them snippets of the Foundation pamphlets for entertainment.
And then they rounded a curve of the highway and it turned out it was both things, that they were both right.
Two of the southbound lanes were blocked by a jackknifed semi—those lanes and again the shoulder were thronged with fire trucks, police cruisers, an ambulance. All those spinning lights so robbed of their power in the light of day. But aside from that, down past the shoulder in a field of knee high grass, maybe a hundred yards away—
“Holy mother,” Casper said, rolling onto his knees and pressing his face to the passenger window of the van like a child.
A trio of CDC panel trucks were parked further in the grass and a half dozen men in hooded hazmat suits were setting up a perimeter, a half circle of bright orange sawhorses, DANGER stenciled across them in black. Traffic oozed, stopped, oozed. A mustached cop spoke into a bullhorn: “Do not exit your vehicle. Do not take photographs. If you exit your vehicle you may be charged with obstructing traffic and endangering a federal investigation. The appropriate authorities are on the scene. Do not exit your vehicle . . .”
Within the cordon of the orange sawhorses, a ghost child stood pale and smoke-rimed in the dry grass.
They all looked as they passed, even Marvin, who craned his neck to see, the van rolling along at five miles an hour or so, the cop himself flinching at a bloop of the bullhorn’s feedback, and there it fucking was, Vale couldn’t believe it. It was right there, this thing, this remnant. A little girl.
“Prime footage right there,” he murmured.
“I don’t have a camera,” Casper said.
“What about your phone?”
“I’ve just got a burner,” he said, enrapt.
“Jesus, man.”
“I know.”
It was a young girl—impossible to tell how old from this distance—and there was that sense about her, about it. A sense of shifting; how the form stayed the same but the opacity, its thereness, seemed to waver, to bend and snap at the mercy of something the living weren’t privy to.
It stepped one way in the grass, turned, looked the other way. Its hair was dark, pulled back in a bun, its dress bone-colored and falling to its ankles. The thing’s color wavered between smoke and aged newspaper. It stood in the grass and raised its chin as if testing the air for fire or as if it heard something calling to it, and then turned around again. And then its hands went to its face and they saw, everyone saw, this tide of people, they all saw its shoulders rise and fall as it stood alone in the yellow grass of a shadowed foothill by the side of the highway.
“It’s lost,” said Vale.
Casper said, “That’s a girl, Mike. That’s a little kid.”
Vale said nothing, and Casper said it again, “That’s a person,” and something inside Vale, something that had nothing to do with the smoke, or at least not much to do with it, something way down inside him broke clean as a piece of glass.