The Reviver (20 page)

*   *   *

Jonah found himself happy only on those rare times that Stephen was gone long enough for his mother to become herself again, to stop reflecting the opinions and personality of her new husband.

And now Jonah was in the car, with one of those times to look forward to. They were off to the airport, his stepfather going on a two-week business trip in Europe. His mother had been adamant that Jonah come along for the send-off. She was morbidly keen on pretending their family unit was a great success, and so a suitably emotional farewell was called for. The emotions had started early, Stephen misplacing his passport and casting blame on everyone but himself. Unexpectedly high traffic made Stephen grow even more tense, running lights and pushing up his speed in an effort to make up time.

‘I said, your mother was wondering if you wanted to go out this evening,’ Stephen said, his tone impatient. Jonah kept his own voice gentle. He spoke directly to his mother.

‘I hoped we’d maybe go see a movie?’

‘That’d be nice,’ she replied.

‘Remember I get in around nine your time,’ said Stephen. ‘I want you to be home when I call.’

‘No,’ Claire corrected, innocently. ‘It’ll be more like eleven. We’ll make sure we’re back by then.’

Stephen had been pressing close to the car ahead during this discussion, feet away at sixty miles an hour. He accelerated and overtook the car, oncoming traffic far too close for comfort.

‘Slow down, sweetheart,’ Jonah’s mother said. ‘We’ll make it.’

‘We’re fifteen minutes away,’ Stephen replied witheringly. ‘I’m supposed to be checked in within twenty. Unless you can travel through time, just let me get on with driving?’

As he said it, he overtook the truck ahead of them, ignoring the bend they were on, not seeing the oncoming bus.

Jonah’s mother called out. Stephen pulled on the steering wheel, tried to get back into the lane, but they weren’t past the truck yet. There was nowhere to go. He slammed on the brakes. The car swerved, starting to spin, but the bus was already on them.

‘No,’ said Claire, her voice vanishingly small as the huge vehicle hit the passenger side.

There were flashes of pain, a terrible wrenching sensation, falling and tumbling and overwhelming noise. Then dark.

In the black, Jonah was aware of a smell of gas and hot metal. He knew he’d lost consciousness for a moment. The world wasn’t moving anymore, but his mind spun. He opened his eyes carefully, unable to make sense of his surroundings. He moved his hands, holding them in front of his face and staring until they came into focus, spattered with blood. He looked around him. His mother was in the front seat, her head turned to the empty driver’s side.

‘Mom?’ he said, a dry croak. ‘Mom?’ There was no response. He unfastened his seat belt, feeling a hot stripe of pain where the belt had bitten into him. His legs felt distant. He moved them with care and leaned forward. There was a stabbing pain in his chest, which he tried to ignore.

Her eyes were closed. ‘Mom?’ He wondered where his stepfather was. The shattered web of the windshield blocked the view ahead. He had to get out of the car. The rear door on the passenger side failed to open. He eased himself along the seat to the other door. It opened easily. He stepped out, reeling from nausea as he stood. The car had come to rest in a muddy field, down a sheer thirty-foot drop after gouging through a line of saplings at the roadside. There were people at the top looking down, shouting to him and pointing. He looked along the field. It sloped up. Three men and a woman had run along the road and found a safe way down.

Stephen was stumbling over the uneven ground forty feet away, waving to them. Jonah moved around the car to his mother’s door. He wrenched it open, feeling ill at the sight of her. The side of her head was a mess. He knelt by her, taking her hand. It was warm.

‘Mom?’ He turned to the helpers coming.
‘Please!’
he yelled. ‘
Please hurry.
’ He was crying now. They were having difficulty, the mud sucking them down and slowing them.

Jonah laid his head on his mother’s lap and sobbed. ‘It’ll be OK. It’ll be OK. Help’s coming, Mom. Hold on. Hold on.’ He held her tightly. He couldn’t lose her. His voice shrank. He felt three years old. ‘Please, don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me.’

An image flashed in his mind: his real father, switching on Christmas tree lights and smiling.

‘Please, don’t leave me…’ he said, his voice almost gone. There was a brief torrent of light and noise that he didn’t understand.

He sensed something. Three seconds later his mother spoke.

‘Jonah?’ The voice was odd: distant and vague and lost. He froze, stunned, still not looking at her. Part of him knew, even then. Eleanor Preston’s story had come to light six months before, a curio he had read with fascination, unaware of the significance. His mother’s hand in his, part of him grasped what this was. The rest was overwhelmed with the belief that his mother was alive. ‘Mom?’ He raised his head, his smile faltering. There was no life in her eyes. No expression on her face. Something was terribly wrong. Yet his need for her to live overrode all doubt. ‘Mom?’

He could hear the voices of the people approaching, coming to help.

His mother spoke again. ‘Please. Please, let me go.’

He stared at her.

‘Jonah. Please, let me go.’

Understanding rushed in, hitting him hard. ‘I don’t know how,’ he said.

The people reached the car. ‘Let me help,’ said a woman. ‘I’m a doctor. Let me…’ She stopped, staring.

‘Please, let me go,’ his mother said. Jonah heard a sound from behind him, a man swearing, the word filled with disbelief. The doctor turned her stare to Jonah, unable to speak. Jonah spoke instead, hiding from the truth of it.

‘She’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘She’s…’

‘My God. What are you doing?’

Jonah turned his head. Stephen was leaning on another man, holding his head with one hand, watching with shocked anger. ‘
What the hell are you doing?
’ he said.

‘She’s going to be OK,’ said Jonah, through tears and a smile that was forced and breaking. Stephen stared with horror as the body of his wife spoke.

‘Please. Jonah. Let me go.’

His mother’s words broke Stephen’s inaction. He lunged, throwing Jonah back into the mud, Jonah’s hand letting go of his mother’s, the contact lost. He felt her leave, relieved by it and devastated even so. Stephen held his wife and sobbed. The others were all staring at Jonah, fear and confusion and horror in their eyes.

Jonah Miller looked up at the sky, trying to lose himself in the clouds. There was no sanctuary.

The only person he loved – and the only person who loved him – was dead. He was alone.

*   *   *

Jonah woke before dawn, with the sense of loss as raw as it had been twelve years before. He went to the bottom drawer in his bedroom cupboard and took out a small ring box he had found three months after her death, in a container of keepsakes in the basement that his mother had sometimes shown him and that Stephen Brinley had no interest in. Jonah had gone through the keepsakes, mourning his parents, when he had seen the ring box and taken it, not willing to risk its discovery by Stephen.

He opened it now and took out his mother’s original wedding ring, which she had only stopped wearing the day she told Jonah she was to marry again. He took out another item from the box. His father’s wedding ring. She had kept them together. There was one other thing the box contained, a note Jonah had held and read so often it was as fragile as smoke. A note to his father, in his mother’s hand. He didn’t take the note out now, too wary of damaging it.

I miss you,
it read.

Jonah replaced the rings and closed the box.

15

Four days later Annabel Harker woke at eleven in the morning to a knock at the front door. She had slept on her own bed, still dressed. She cursed as she remembered: she’d put in a grocery order late in the night. The thought of venturing out to a store repelled her, and she needed the food. She had used her laptop for the first time since her arrival, her father’s Wi-Fi settings unchanged since her visit last year.

A week’s worth of microwave meals, milk and cereal. She took the bags inside with gruff thanks and closed the door.

Once she had unpacked it all, she made herself have a bowl of cornflakes. Standing at the kitchen work surface, she managed to splash milk out of the bowl as she poured. She grabbed a paper towel and wiped it up, her eye drawn to the clean line she’d made through the growing layer of dust. She stared at it, vacant and lost. She wiped again, extending the clean patch. Then something gave way inside her. She wiped every surface she could see, taking away the dust and feeling better for it.

Without a pause, she hunted down her father’s vacuum cleaner and moved her way around the house room by room, a mixture of agitation and elation growing as she went. There was an element of panic in what she was doing, and she knew it.

She reached her own bedroom and took the sheets off the bed, gathering the small heap of clothes she’d been wearing.

Her father’s room, then, her breathing fast, her desperation shooting up. She managed to remove the bedsheets before she fell to her knees, distraught and sobbing, days of suppressed emotion coming out at last.

When she gathered herself, she saw it.

Under her father’s mattress, it had dislodged as she’d pulled out the sheet. A notebook. The notebook her father had always kept to hand, under the bed to keep away the prying eyes of his wife and daughter, even when those prying eyes were long dead and far away.

Annabel grasped it and flipped through the pages. Notes for his new novel. She recognized the name of a private detective character he’d used in a previous book. She kept flipping. There must have been forty pages of notes, before the final few entries.

And they were different. Two pages, the first a jumble of abbreviations and scrawled phrases, question marks, arrowed lines and heavy underscores that made no sense to her, and in the middle of the scrawl, a date. Three weeks before her father had disappeared, written beside the initials T.Y. Next to that, circled, was the word
UNITY.

The second page had another date, three days before the disappearance, and the words:
T.Y. NO SHOW.

Her father had mentioned to her that he’d been looking into something nonfiction. Here it was.

She’d assumed he’d meant something simple, innocuous. The dates being so close to his disappearance could change everything. Thoughts intruded in her mind, of how this could lead to a benign reason for his absence, but she couldn’t allow herself to think like that. False hope would only torment her.

No. She would unravel the scrawled text, and if it was relevant she would contact the police.

The capitalized words and abbreviations were the least illegible, and she listed them:
TY, UNITY, BL, AB, BPV, AL.

She went to her laptop.
BPV
was the first to succumb, the name of a drug used in revival. A line connected it to
TY,
and beside the line was the number fifteen.
BL
seemed likely to be ‘Baseline’. She found no clear match for
TY
or
UNITY.

AB
seemed to suggest Andreas Biotech, the biggest sponsor of the Baseline project.
MA
could have been Michael Andreas, the company founder; a thick arrow ran from it to
BPV.

She read up on Michael Andreas. His face was familiar, and his profile had been high when Baseline had first formed, his company contributing significant money and expertise. Some of the coverage from the time was vaguely suspicious of the man, still under forty, crazily young to have amassed so much wealth. Five years before Baseline, a very public declaration of his personal aims had prompted ridicule: Andreas had stated that death would be eradicated within a century.

He was known to have invested in cryogenics, buying out a whole-body cryogenic storage facility in Nevada, rich clients hoping to avoid the inconvenient permanence of the grave.

When he got involved with Baseline, some commentators derided what they saw as an obsession with death, but as she read through various articles Annabel wondered why they would be surprised: the biggest contribution to the investigation into revival had come from a man fascinated by mortality. It was a fascination some articles traced back to the death of his first love, nine years before revival came to light. How they portrayed the loss depended on the tone of the article, ranging from heartbreaking romance to unhealthy fixation.

Baseline would have suffered without his involvement. Revival was faced with public, political and corporate unease; companies didn’t want to be too closely associated with it, and the same went for international funding. Even the United States government was careful to distance itself once the initial rush of public fascination subsided.

Andreas had done the opposite, drawing plaudits at first from the press, but in time cynicism won out. Why was he investing so much of his own money? What was his angle? They attacked him for his morbid obsession, they accused him of profiteering. When Baseline had finally closed down, many wondered if Andreas had had enough. He had withdrawn from the public eye by then, averse to being in the spotlight, behaviour the press interpreted as pique.

Annabel looked at her father’s notes. Andreas had been key in developing the drug BPV, which apparently inhibited post-traumatic stress in revivers. Why her father should highlight that link, Annabel had no idea.

She kept the abbreviation
AL
to the end, thinking she knew what it was and wanting to put it off. The only relevant hit was ‘Afterlifers’, as she’d expected. In the notebook, there were words dotted around
AL
that she couldn’t make out, but she finally deciphered one arrowed connection to
TY. Abscom if know,
it read. Another Web search took her to an old article about Afterlifer extremism.