The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (40 page)

“Hey, guys. You havin’ a party here?”

The taller of the two grins. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that.”

“So what’s the occasion?” Experience tells Lane they’re about three beers in, and loose enough to push a little.

“Sunday afternoon,” his muscular friend says. “We get Sunday afternoons off.”

“Oh yeah? Then who watches the boat?”

“For a couple of hours, the boat can watch itself just fine,” the tall one says.

“Yeah, and besides, the new owner’s sort of a moody guy,” the muscular companion
adds. “He likes to be left alone.”

“The new owner? Who was the old owner?”

“A very, very, very old guy. Like un-fucking-believably old. The new guy’s supposed to be his grandson, or something like that.”

“Weird,” Lane comments. “Hey, mind if I join the party?” He looks toward the open door.

“Only if you’re buyin’,” the tall one says with a good-natured grin.

“Yeah, I’m buyin’,” Lane says and turns to go in.

He steps across the threshold onto an old floor of worn wooden planking. A crude painting of a moored tugboat hangs over the bar. Its black hull floats in water turned turquoise with age. A narrow aisle runs the length of the place to the restrooms in the rear, with the bar on one side and half a dozen booths of varnished plywood on the other. Energized chatter sprinkled with eruptions of spontaneous laughter floats through the thick air. All the barstools and booths are filled with crew people, young and animated. Lane senses a certain sameness to them, each unfinished and still on an assembly line beyond their understanding.

He thinks he spots Johnny at the end of the bar. The hair seems right, as does the agitated motion of the hands as the figure makes a point to the girl seated next to him. But he’s facing away, so Lane can’t be sure.

A troubled stream of query flows through Lane as he closes the distance between them. If Johnny’s free, why didn’t he get in touch?

“Johnny?”

His brother turns and Lane feels the shock, the terrible shock.

Fuller Bay. Johnny looks only slightly older than he did then as a teenager.

Lane knows he should have considered the possibility, but didn’t because of denial. Facing the consequences in real time, he fights to maintain his composure.

“Hey, bro.” Johnny grins across a fissure twenty years wide. “Man, it’s good to see you. How’s it goin’?”

“What are you doing?” Lane demands. It’s all he can come up with as the room starts a slow wobble.

“I’m doing great. What about you? You okay?”

“Could we step outside?” Lane manages to ask.

“Yeah, sure.”

The smokers are gone and the parking area empty, save for Lane’s rental. A flock of seagulls screeches and flutters its way toward the open water. Lane and Johnny walk down the gentle grade toward a cement barrier on the embankment above the shoreline. They stroll in silence. Johnny offers no explanation for his disappearance or current state.

“What happened? What did they do to you?” Lane finally asks his brother.

Johnny gives an amiable shrug. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Why didn’t you get ahold of me?”

Johnny smiles at the ground. “It’s hard to explain. I’m in an entirely new space. I still need to get my bearings.”

They stop at the barrier and look out on the water. Lane glances over at Johnny, at his reborn face, and feels a great sorrow. They will never close the distance.

“Well, that’s just fucking great. So how long were you going to wait?”

“I don’t know,” Johnny answers. “I really don’t.”

Johnny lights up a smoke and puts his hand on Lane’s shoulder. “Let’s go back in. Have a beer. We chase the babes and see where it goes.”

But Lane already knows it goes nowhere. Looking back, Johnny never made it past eighteen in the first place. In a perverse kind of way, he’s now perfectly synchronized.

“What’s done is done,” Johnny says. “We go on from here. End of story.”

Lane turns away from the water. They start back up the grade toward the tavern.

“I think you should come with me,” he tells Johnny.

Johnny shakes his head. “You don’t get it, bro. It’s too late.” He sighs and stares down at the ground. Lane says nothing.

“Okay, I know you were worried, I know you tried to find me. So maybe I owe you.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a featureless metal cube about the size of half a stick of butter. “Know what this is?”

“Yeah, it’s an Exacube.”

Johnny stares at the device. “It’s all on here: the science, the technology, the documentation. It’s the only copy.” He looks up. “You’re set, bro. You’re set for life.”

Lane takes the cube, which feels angular and cool in his hand. “Good luck,” Johnny says. He pats Lane on the shoulder and heads toward the tavern’s front door.

Lane watches his brother disappear inside, into the world of his newfound peers, a world Lane can never enter. He’s lost him, and in a particularly awful way. If he were dead, eventually there would be closure. Instead, an aching void will be with Lane always, even if they sporadically see each other.

Lane starts the rental car and drives out past the café and tavern. He takes a right on the main road, and to get his mind off Johnny, he thinks of Rachel back in Portland. Her address to the Street Party faithful at the memorial for Harlan Green was both profound and forceful. It gave her the leverage she needed to assume leadership and begin to chart a new political course that offered a positive outcome based on reason, not resentment.

Lane’s car reaches a clearing in the trees where Fuller Bay spreads out before him. Green
sparkles dancing in the afternoon sun. A small marina sits to the left, with a coarsely paved road sloping down to a boat ramp and gravel parking space. Lane drives down and pulls in, coming to a stop in front of a narrow channel where the bay meets the sound. A few hundred feet away, the tip of the sand spit, a childhood landmark, forms the far side of the inlet. Large contemporary homes rise where great tangles of driftwood once dwelled. A guarded gate most certainly blocks the entrance at the far end.

The
Eternal Heart
sits at anchor out in the open waters of the sound beyond. Lane raises his binoculars and verifies the ship’s name written on the stern, which faces shoreward. A lone figure clad in shorts and a sports shirt sits in a canvas chair on the deck above.

Lane looks over at the marina. He can’t rent a boat here. They’ll trace it off his lobe. He heads back onto the main road. He’ll have to take the long way around, the old way.

Two blocks later, he’s out of town and driving down a corridor flanked by towering fir trees. A mile farther, he pulls over and gets out onto the shoulder. Ahead of him, the barest trace of an old road runs down the slope: twin indentations in the green, fulminating mass of ferns and nettles that carpet the forest floor over a rusty bed of decaying pine needles. The canopies of the great firs form a permanent overcast, and only small blotches of sun speckle the ground.

He leaves the car and starts down, passing by fallen, rotting logs populated by the pale, pouting lips of clinging mushrooms. His feet feel the spring of the spongy ground as it yields to his footsteps.

After a few minutes, the hint of road curves and follows the contour of the slope, and then descends once more. He remembers the way. He remembers rolling down the window of the family car and sticking his arm out to catch the tree branches, which licked at the glass. He remembers his mother yelling at him not to do it. He remembers looking at Johnny and snickering. He remembers the silence of his father.

The cabin should be close, in a small clearing, but he doesn’t see it yet. Here the forest thins, and the alders take over from the firs and admit the sky once more. Lush ferns fade to tall grass, damp at the base, lapping at his shoes and soaking the cuffs of his pants.

The cabin. A few more steps give him an unobstructed view. The old structure is in ruins, sunk in knee-high grass and locked in a death struggle with the rot of rain and wandering seed. The back door and the windows have become featureless cavities, and the roof has collapsed inward, leaving the chimney to stand alone against the sky.

The past has closed in behind him, like the wake of a vessel traversing a chronological sea.

He fights his way through a tangle of brush to the cabin’s front and starts down to the beach without looking back. The grass sprouts waist-high and a dense stand of alders and cottonwoods hides the bay. Still, he can hear the distant squawk of seagulls and smell the ooze of
marine life welling up from beneath the water.

The stairs. He’s found the stairs. The railings are collapsed, but the big chunks of wooden steps remain intact. Two steps down, and the bay unfolds before him, and just beyond it, the
Eternal Heart
, its hull painted a magnificent white by the afternoon sun.

He descends the steps slowly and walks out onto the little beach. The dock here has gone to ruin. Great colonies of barnacles cover the remnants of the pilings, the dead fingers of timber point skyward.

Lane looks out across the sand spit, two hundred yards distant. From this elevation, only the mast of the
Eternal Heart
is visible above the houses. He needs a boat to get there. Any boat will do.

He finds it on the far side of the first dock he encounters. A skiff, its oars shipped and protruding like alien ears. He walks up a short set stairs onto the property and crosses to the dock, where he walks out toward the float. Seagull droppings paint little white circles of dried chalk on the planks, and the placid water laps timidly against the pilings below.

He walks down the gangplank onto the float and stares at the boat. Of course. It had to be a skiff. Only this one is painted with a gray exterior instead of blue. Lane climbs in, and the little craft rolls under his weight as he unties the mooring and settles into the rowing seat. A seagull alights on the dock railing and watches as he dips the oars into the water and pulls away with a powerful stroke. The air is mild, the water is green, and the sun splashes little sparks across its surface.

As he leans into each stroke, he fixes on the little wake that trails off the stern. It stirs the water into a modest roil of foam and ripples. Now that he’s farther from shore, the bay becomes the bay it always was. Sun, water, sky, and the quiet boil of marine life.

He ships the oars and twists around to get his bearing. A quick strobe of Johnny the child flashes in the stern, his small hand gripping the line holding their prize fish, which trails in the boat’s wake.

“I won’t lose it, Lane,” he says. “I promise.”

“It’s okay,” Lane mutters softly as he turns back and dips the oars. “Don’t worry about it.”

He falls once more into the rhythm of rowing, and scans the shoreline and approximates the spot where an old navy plane, a fabulous metal carcass, was once beached. Gone. Instead, an elaborate docking structure houses a gleaming new seaplane.

He cuts across the mouth of the bay at its midpoint, and the drift of the tide aligns him with its outer shore. Soon, he is traveling directly toward the stern of the
Eternal Heart
.

The scale of the big boat now looms over him. It’s more than a hundred feet long, with at least ten feet from the waterline to its main deck. A ladder hangs over the starboard side of the
stern, its aluminum frame blazing in the sun, and leads to an open gate in the deck railing. The surface of the deck remains hidden above, except for a large blue canvas awning that provides shade.

Lane slows his pace and then boats the oars and moves to the bow as he approaches the stern where the ladder hangs. After extending his arm to buffer the skiff’s docking with the ladder frame, he brings the boat to a silent stop and moors it. Then he grabs the ladder’s tubular framing and plants his foot on the first rung.

Just before his head comes even with deck, he pauses and removes the small automatic from his pocket. Now he extends himself and cautiously peeks over the top of the deck.

Across the big spread of oak planking, the solitary figure sits in an aluminum folding chair and stares out at the sound.

Lane quickly scans for other people or surveillance cameras, but sees none. He grabs a post on the deck rail by the gate and hoists himself aboard. He’s sure that the man can see him out of the corner of his eye, but there’s no reaction, no shifting of the body, no tensing for action. Only the solemn stare out over the water, with the legs drawn up and the hands curled over the edges of the armrest.

Walking slowly, Lane keeps watching for other people, but sees none. They’re apparently alone, with only the smell of sun-soaked canvas drifting down from above. Lane stops a couple of steps from the man.

“Lane Anslow,” the man announces without turning to look. “Brother of Dr. John Anslow.”

“Thomas Zed,” Lane counters.

“Sort of,” Zed says wearily. He appears not much older than Johnny, at least in body.

“I’ve seen what you did to my brother. I’ve lost him for good.”

Lane brings out his pistol and aligns it with Zed’s head. “You’re facing at least one kidnapping charge and several for conspiracy to commit homicide.”

“And?”

“I’m going to give you a choice. You can either come with me into custody, or I can start shooting off pieces of your cute new face.”

“Ah, the cop,” Zed says with a mocking smile. He gets up slowly and Lane takes a cautionary step backwards. “Always the cop. So where are we going?”

Lane motions behind him. “Into the boat.”

Zed rows in long, shallow strokes, dipping the oars only partially into the water. His arms are firm and taut in the slanted and unforgiving afternoon light. He keeps his eyes cast down as Lane watches him from the backseat, the automatic trained on his chest.

“Head to the marina.”

By the time they reach the mouth of the bay, the tide has reversed itself, and the current drifts seaward. Zed is forced to put more heft behind the oars. He rows against the current until they are clear of the mouth and the pull of its current, then returns to his slow, shallow oar strokes. Lane keeps the automatic carefully trained on him.