Into The Inferno Part 42

"Jim?"

"Stephanie."

"You all right?"

"Yeah. You?"

"I'm at the hotel."

"The girls okay?"

"Everything's fine. It took longer than I thought. What's going on there?"

"We're just chatting."

"You and my aunt?"

"Me and the police."

"What happened after I left?"

"Nothing. I'm just getting a little air."

"Is that a loudspeaker I hear in the background?"

"They're practicing plan B for talking psychos down. Don't worry. It's not working."

"What do you mean? What about my aunt and her friends?"

"Still upstairs."

"Are they contaminated?"

"They are. I told them. They didn't believe me." At that moment, the overhead light in DiMaggio's office went off. From the parking lot I could see the greenish glow on the faces in the window. Green radiated off the side of the bald man's cheek. More green scattered through Clarice's hair, on DiMaggio's face. A troika of Halloween goblins.

"You still there?" Stephanie asked.

"Yeah."

"What's happening?"

"They just turned off the overhead light upstairs."

"Anybody else been up there?"

"That was one of my conditions for coming out of the building. n.o.body goes in, and your aunt and her friends stay up there."

"You get some clothes yet?"

"Not exactly."

"You're still naked?"

"No."

"What are you wearing?"

"Slippers and a cell phone."

Clarice's scream pierced the night like a siren. DiMaggio glared down at me. I'd never seen so much hatred focused in a single pair of eyes. I could almost see the churning gears as she strained to figure out exactly what had happened. I'd been in her vault. I must have, or I wouldn't have had access to the D#56. What else was in the vault? Soap and water was the first part of the cure, but after that, it was the hypodermic.

She vanished from the window.

"What was that noise?" Stephanie asked.

"I think they finally figured it out."

"What are they doing?"

"Clarice is standing in the window crying. The guy disappeared right away. Headed for the showers probably. DiMaggio's gone now, too."

"Bet she's headed for the safe."

"If you're right, she should be back in about-there she is."

Leaning so far out the window I thought she was going to lose her balance and fall, DiMaggio yelled to the nearest police officer, "Don't shoot him. Whatever you do, don't shoot him. He's stolen a top secret chemical formula!"

This time when DiMaggio and Clarice disappeared from the window, I knew they were headed for the showers.

"The girls around?" I asked.

Allyson came on first, doing her standard imitation of a grown-up, the pose she adopted after her mother abandoned us. "Father. Are you coming back?"

"I don't know, sweetheart."

"Tomorrow's the last day, isn't it?"

"Yes, sweetie."

"After tomorrow are you going to be like Grandpa?"

"I might be."

"Stephanie said she gave you a shot."

"Right in the behind."

Allyson laughed nervously. "And it might make you better?"

"Just in case it doesn't, I love you, sweetie. Always remember that. You've made my life a joy."

"Daddy, you're starting to make me cry. I love you, too. I want you here."

"I want to be there, but I'm tied up. Can you put your sister on now?"

At the far end of the building an ambulance crew had been waiting for a signal from the police before going inside for Donovan. Now a medic unit pulled up behind the ambulance, and from the looks of things they were going to move in without my permission.

I caught the eye of the police officer with the megaphone. "There's been a hazardous material spill inside the building. Shows up green under a black light. The patient upstairs is covered in the stuff. So are those other three. So am I. Highly contagious. They call it D number fifty-six. Lethal as h.e.l.l."

Brother, did that start a commotion.

65. NOW YOU BE A ZOMBIE.

Certain theoreticians have conjectured that more than one universe coexists with ours, that there may be dozens of parallel universes coexisting at the same time.

I believe in it more now than I used to. I believe I may be living lives in separate universes at the same time. Trick would be to jump from one of the bad ones, where you've somehow ended up in prison or crippled or blind, where you've ended up stupid or ugly, to a different universe where you're a rich kid from New Hampshire and have impeccable manners and a brown-eyed girlfriend.

In one universe you sprain your ankle stepping off a curb and go to the doctor's office, where you meet your bride-to-be in the waiting room, and afterward you go on to make her life miserable because she's an enraged people pleaser and you're never pleased.

In another universe you're hit by a car in the parking lot outside your high school graduation ceremony, your leg is fractured in twelve places, and you limp for the rest of your life. You grow alienated and sarcastic, cannot hold down a job, and become a druggie and a drunk. Your best friend is whoever happens to be sitting on the next bar stool.

Or.

Your second-grade teacher decides to run off to Alaska to be a bush pilot; your cla.s.s is taken over by Miss Bermeister, who lives and breathes teaching and who picks you out as her pet project-the effect she has on your life is profound. She instills a confidence and an enthusiasm for scholarship that propels you into higher education and, from there, into the ministry. You marry an ex-nun, remain childless throughout your life, and die of old age working in Africa in a save-the-children venture.

Or this.

Which really happened to my father. You're twelve, and one of your acquaintances shows up with his dad's revolver, which he's swiped from his old man's closet and which he swears is unloaded. He laughs, and before you can duck or even blink, he points it at your head and pulls the trigger.

The hammer falls on an empty chamber.

He points the pistol at your best friend. This time the pistol goes off with a loud crack. A bullet pulverizes your best friend's skull. You go on to live a long life-your friend wastes away in a curtained-off room and expires at twenty-six.

It all ends in death. n.o.body gets out alive.

After all is said and done, a hundred years after you're dead does the length of your time here really make the tiniest bit of difference?

Is a life with 5,110 sunsets better than one with 27,000 sunsets? Or 40,000? And anyway-how many of those sunsets can you remember when you're on your way to paradise? Fifteen? Twenty? I can ask the questions, but I can't furnish the answers.

When all is said and done, perhaps fewer years are better years.

In one life I'm a man with a skull full of pudding.

In another I've survived the narrowest escape possible, have become the centerpiece in dozens of newspaper and magazine articles-a man who's come back from the brink.

I had stumbled through a lot of crossroads in my life, and except for our divorce and the way Lorie left me, which I'm not certain I didn't deserve, I lived a fairly decent life. It started with a father and a mother who loved me in the best way they knew how and ended with me loving my girls in the best way I I knew how. Wasn't that as good as it could get? For anybody? knew how. Wasn't that as good as it could get? For anybody?

EPILOGUE.

These days I don't get too worked up about things. Trouble washes over me like a warm and gentle tide. I do what I can to keep in a good frame of mind and try not to let outside events I cannot control frazzle me. I soak up love and sunshine where I find it. I shrug off aches and Arctic blasts.

It feels like afternoon. I no longer live by clocks, so I have no idea what time it is. I am sitting in a low chair staring out the window, my eyes refusing to focus. Sunbeams streaming through the window warming my arm and leg. I am luxuriating in one of the simplest pleasures on the planet. Sunshine. Warmth. Vitamin D free for the taking.

After a while a woman enters the room and speaks softly to me, kisses my cheek, strokes my mussed hair with a gentleness reserved for newborns, puppies, and the rest of those helpless souls most people overlook.

Without turning, I know who it is-from her scent and from the lovely sound of her voice.

Stephanie. Glued to me for the rest of her life by legal and moral obligations. Poor baby.

She picks up my cold, limp hand, pats it between her palms, and holds it for a while. Later, I sense rather than see she is moving across the room to my father, speaking in a normal tone of voice as if he might actually reply, just as she has spoken to me. As if I might actually reply.

My father says exactly what I said, which is nothing. Nothing at all.

Those of us who'd been involved in the North Bend Syndrome, as the world press came to name it, had never really brushed up against evil until that freezing night in February, not true evil, not the sort of wickedness that discards the lives of strangers over a casual meeting at corporate headquarters. By earthly standards I'd lived a fairly uneventful thirty-four years. One marriage. Two daughters. A home. A few close calls as a firefighter. On the other side of the world there were countries, entire regions, where a child was beating the odds to live past age five, where young girls died giving birth at fourteen, where children worked as slaves until they escaped or grew into shrunken adults, their minds atrophied from years of mindless drudgery and lack of proper nourishment.

Thirty-four years of healthy, productive living was nothing to gripe about.

It wasn't as if the world were going to clunk to a halt without me.

I'd gotten over that notion long ago.

Life was a river. Remove a cupful of liquid and the river never even knew you were missing.

I sit in the sunshine and know a lot of things. Some of these I know instinctively, some through the vexations of memory, some through a sort of spiritual process that I would have denied the existence of prior to that week last June.

I know Stephanie has moved from Ohio to North Bend, that she will probably remain in the area for the rest of her natural life. I know she is with my girls and that they love her and she loves them, that she shows it to them every day. I know there will be problems because there will always be problems in any family. But they will be minor problems, and life will go on. The river will continue to flow.

My cupful, your cupful, notwithstanding.

When they are ready, the North Bend Fire Department will hire a new chief, perhaps even Steve Haston, Mr. Disaster, but it is not a debacle I trouble myself over. Things have gone well for others, or so I've been told. Karrie Haston's body has accepted the antidote; she has resigned from the fire service and given herself over to social work in the South Bronx.

There is a peace in me I've never known before, and that peace involves knowing that no matter what happens in this room, or whatever room I end my days in, my daughters will remain forever bound together as only sisters who'd gone through great trauma can be. I see them as college students, still friends, still close, still doing things together. They will be heartbreakers. The thought warms me as much as the sunshine through the window does.

Their nights will be tinged with sadness because of what might have been, but the Swope family will move on. Life is for the living. In time, one or both will have children. If I am fortunate, the sounds and smells of babies will invade my s.p.a.ce, talc.u.m powder, cries for mother's milk, for missing toys. As long as my heart beats, love will surround me.

Stephanie will continue to fetch news of the outside world to this room. She will read pertinent newspaper articles aloud, such as the one about the indictment of eight officers of Canyon View on charges ranging from manslaughter to murder and arson.

She will bring further news of civil suits and of former employees ratting out the Canyon View bigwigs. She will continue to investigate the occurrences of that week and learn that Hillburn and Dobson of Jane's California Propulsion really did stay on in North Bend for a couple of extra days on other business.

As the years pa.s.s, Stephanie will find her own niche in the medical world. She will grow old gracefully, as her sister had not been allowed to do. She will come to understand better the demons that drove her early years. Maturity and serenity will take over her countenance. And I hope she will come to know me in a way that includes forgiveness as much as it does love.