Rift (18 page)

“Wait a minute. You were there? You knew they shot Tom and you didn't help him?”

“We tried to help, but by the time we tracked you down, it was too late. He'd already lost too much blood. I—”

But I don't want to hear any more of this. I throw open the door and lunge out of the car. I want to yell. I want to scream. I'm so fucking mad and confused I could just run shrieking into the woods and never come back. Noise swells between my ears, fills my brain. Swirling noise blown in the wind. Red noise like north Texas dirt. Like rage. Fuck this. Fuck
this.

“Cameron.”

I try to answer, scream
Leave me alone!
, but what comes out is a tongue-twisted, garbled mess. My eyes sting and my nose runs. I'm weeping. Weeping so violently that I can barely stand on my two feet. Tom is dead. My best friend is dead, and it's my fault.
I
did this. Me.

“Cameron.”

“I killed him. I can't believe I killed him.”

“Tom knew what he was getting into, Cameron. He took money from us. Why don't you come inside and let me ex—”

But the noise drowns her voice, covering all ambient sounds like a layer of volcanic ash.

         

A voice. A sweet voice. The sexy, muffled voice of a young woman. Muted by the snowfall of red ash under which I am buried. Under which I am suffocating. I can't breathe. My diaphragm won't move, will not flex the same way it has done a billion times before. It will not flex it will not move I cannot
breeeaaathhhhe
. . .

The voice again, stronger.

Coughing now, violently, clearing my throat of this godforsaken red ash that presses me downward, downward into the—

“Cameron! Breathe, goddammit! Wake up!”

Weight upon my chest, pressing again and again.

“Cameron!”

Her mouth against mine. The burn of sugarless cinnamon gum. The soft flesh of her lips.

“Cameron!”

“Okay,” I croak. “Okay. I'm okay.”

My eyelids flip open. Crystal hovers above me. The planes of her face are flat and smooth. Her blue eyes are youthful. Beautiful. Staring into mine.

She pushes away and stands. I am lying on a sofa of some kind. Apparently I made it into the cabin somehow.

“Jesus, I was afraid you'd
never
wake up. What the hell happened?”

“I don't know.”

“You just got out of the car and started convulsing. Earlier you mentioned blacking out, but you didn't say anything about seizures.”

I sit up and then look away from her.

“When?”

“When I first got to Flagstaff. I stopped at a convenience store to ask for directions, and I . . . well, you know the rest.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“The guy working there. A young kid, maybe twenty or so. He said I convulsed pretty badly.”

“Did he call an ambulance?”

“Yes, but I left before it got there. He gave me directions to the mountain and told me I was crazy for not seeking medical attention.”

“Cameron, what if he calls the police? When they find the car, this town will be crawling with cops, FBI, everyone. I thought we could lie low in this cabin for a few days, but now it looks like we'll have to bump our schedule forward a little.”

“I'm messed up, aren't I? Something is really wrong with me.”

She frowns. “Don't jump to conclusions. We'll get you to a doctor, and whatever it is, I'm sure he can find a way to treat you.”

But somehow I don't think so. If the transmission has altered my body somehow, it could be at the atomic level, at the
quantum
level, even. A doctor can prescribe medicine to ward off infection, or to alter your body chemistry, but what can he do if your body had been changed in a more fundamental way?

What the fuck did Batista do to me?

“How do you feel now?” Crystal asks.

“Okay, I guess.”

“If your arms hurt, it's probably because I had to drag you into the house. You pretty much collapsed out there in the carport.”

I look away from her, at anything but the pity in her eyes. I don't want it. I don't want to need it. Acknowledging her compassion is the same as admitting something is drastically wrong with me, something that sends me into convulsive fits. I cannot face this. I have managed to push my fear out to the periphery, into mere background noise, and I want it to remain there.

Crystal senses my distress and slinks away. She disappears around a corner and enters what sounds like the kitchen. Drawers open and close. Water runs.

I'm sitting in what must be the great room, and another sofa and two overstuffed chairs join the sofa on which I awoke. A television stands beside the fireplace. Out of nowhere I remember Tom, that he's dead, and tears blur my vision.

I kept hoping he had survived somehow, had made it to a hospital and was wondering when I was going to show up there. But he is not waiting for me. He'll never be waiting for me again, will never beat me in golf again, will never laugh at me as I down a pitcher of beer in his favorite strip bar. He's gone.

After a moment, Crystal rejoins me, bearing mugs of what appears to be coffee or hot chocolate. She sits in a chair beside the sofa.

“How much did you pay him?”

“What?”

“You said that Tom took money from you. How much did you give him?”

“Does it matter?”

“I want to know how much my friendship is worth. How much money it costs to sell me out.”

“Cameron—”

“Will you please just tell me?”

“One hundred thousand dollars. Tom asked for a year's salary.”

“He doesn't make a hundred thousand dollars a year.”

“We checked. He filed ninety-seven and change last year.”

I don't know why I'm surprised. It doesn't make much difference now, does it?

“Don't be so hard on him, Cameron. When we first approached Tom, he told us to shove it. We kept upping the money and he kept ignoring us. He only agreed to help after we convinced him that you would be a whole lot worse off on your own than if we were involved. And we couldn't really get involved without his help.”

Tears flood my eyes again. I can see him there, on the ground, imploring me to run.

“That man, Ivan, he knew Tom was onto him. When he caught me by the river, he demanded to know what I knew. He thought we'd set him up. I guess we had. I just didn't know it.”

“You'd only have been more at risk if we had told you. If you knew before the transmission, you probably would have spilled the beans to Batista, and in that case he would have killed you. If we had told you afterward, those men would have known for sure. You wouldn't have acted normally. They might have grabbed you right away instead of just watching.”

“So the tests they performed on me after I arrived, those aren't enough to tell if I'm messed up? Someone has to observe me?”

“It's no secret why Batista wanted you to stay a couple of days before you went back to Houston. Transmission-related neurological problems typically take a few days to manifest themselves.”

“Take a few days to manifest themselves?”
Terror sends a short burst of adrenaline into my bloodstream, and its electric taste forces me to take a sip of my hot chocolate. “It's only been forty-eight hours since my transmission. Are these problems going to get
worse
?”

“I don't know,” Crystal says.

“Have the other volunteers had problems like me?”

“I don't really know, Cameron.”

Silence floats between us, and I try to get my mind around all of this. So much doesn't make sense.

“You know the volunteers are at risk.”

Crystal nods.

“But you don't tell the volunteers or the media or the FBI or anyone.”

“We know you are at risk, but we don't have any proof. That's a big difference. If I had flown to Houston and told you not to transmit, how would you have reacted? Would you have believed me?”

“It certainly would have made me think twice about going through with it.”

“Would you have approached Batista about me? Asked him if what I said was true?”

“I guess I might have.”

“See,” she says. “And when he realized you were onto him, he would have killed you both.”

“
Killed
us?
Then?
”

“This is serious business, Cameron. Batista isn't taking any chances.”

Crystal reaches forward and puts her hand on mine.

“I am so sorry about Tom. You may think he sold you out, but he honestly believed you were better off with us than dealing with NeuroStor by yourself.”

I look away, because otherwise she'll see my eyes shining.

“And sure, I have my own motives. I won't deny it. But I'm also honestly trying to help you. If you look at the situation objectively, I think you'll see that.”

“It's hard to be objective about anything when your best friend is dead. And I don't know whether to blame Tom or myself.”

“How about no one, Cameron? We all made decisions that were the best choice at the time. You transmitted. We offered Tom money to help us track you. Tom took the offer to help you and us and make some money in the process. There is no way to know how things would have turned out for you and Tom if I had never entered the picture. But they wouldn't necessarily be better.”

A good point. Assuming nothing about the transmission itself played out differently, which Crystal had nothing to do with anyway, I would still have been followed by Ivan and Ed. Without Tom's prior knowledge, we both probably would have been caught on the golf course. And even if
that
had played out in similar fashion, who would I have turned to after I got away? No one but myself. So it's like Crystal said: She has her own agenda, but she's still trying to help me.

Hell, of course I want to believe her. Of course I want this striking woman to be looking out for me, fighting for me, acting as if I am the most important person in the world to her. I'm a man, aren't I?

“Are you involved with Lee? Romantically, I mean?”

Crystal's shoulders relax and she reclines in her chair. “Lee would sleep with me if I let him. He's nice enough, and I've thought about it, but I think it would just screw up everything.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Why, Cameron? Are you going to get fresh with me?”

“I was just asking.”

“You're blushing.”

She has embarrassed me into silence.

“I'm surprised Tom was able to drag you into The Wildcat. You don't seem the type.”

“I don't seem like the type of guy who is attracted to dancing nude women?”

“No. More like you'd think it was demeaning to them.”

“I used to think so. But no one forces women to dance nude. How can a voluntary action be demeaning?”

“Does your wife mind?”

“Misty? No. She posed for
Playboy
once. One of those coed pictorials.”

“Did she make the cut?”

“Yeah. I was the envy of all my college buddies.”

“That's sweet, being married so long. So, you don't have any children?”

“We had a son. He lived three weeks. We tried again but were never successful.”

Normally, when someone broaches the subject of Luke with me, I answer with the cool, detached demeanor that comes from being thirteen years removed from my son's brief life. But for some reason, the pain right now seems closer than ever, as if his tiny form was taken from me just yesterday.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“It was a long time ago. You don't have to be sorry.”

Crystal leans toward me. “But it still hurts you.”

“Not usually. I guess the stress . . . everything that's happened to me since I got to Arizona . . .”

“It's okay,” she says.

“It's not. I mean, he died thirteen years ago. He was barely an infant. I can't remember what he looked like without a picture.”

“He was your son.”

“He was also a vegetable whose cerebrum was the size of a pencil eraser. I loved him because he was my son, but really he was nothing more than a human shell.”

A description to halt any conversation. Misty would slap me.

“I can't imagine how painful it must have been,” Crystal says. “But thirteen years is a long time, Cameron. My dad passed away four years ago, a man I idolized for twenty-two years, and I've let it go. Time passes and the pain fades.”

Crystal is speaking pure logic, of course. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one to death knows this to be true. What she doesn't understand is that Luke's death signaled my own, because that's what I've been for more years than I care to remember. Dead.

But now I want to live.

“A person can't mourn that long, Cameron. Your mind protects itself from that sort of degeneration. I think it's something else.”

“You think what is something else?”

“Your pain. It's caused by something other than your son.”

“What do you mean, ‘my pain'?”

“Come on, Cameron. Don't bullshit me.”

I look away from her. How can I get out of this gracefully? Is there someplace I can go, like to the bathroom or over a cliff?

“Cameron, look at me.”

I don't. The trees outside are beautiful through the windows. Ponderosa pines reaching for the sky, as if their branches request salvation.

“Come on. I saw it in your eyes when we first met. You slump when you walk, you don't make eye contact, you hardly smile. I bet it took every bit of your courage to feign bravado with me at The Wildcat.”

“What the hell do you know?” I say, still staring out the window.

“If we're going to talk, Cameron, I want to talk to
you,
not some fucking facade you've created to deal with the real world.”