The Terminals Page 5

  “And have you seen this?” I asked.

  I held my iPhone out to him and started the video clip. Jian Kim, Iowa State Governor, stood before a clutch of news microphones. Behind him rose a water tower with a happy face and a logo that read Iowa: Fields of Opportunity, but vandals had scratched the L from Fields and replaced it with an N.

  “The authorities are doing all they can, but they need information. Volunteers for the search. And for everyone to report sightings of abandoned school buses.” The Asian man’s only accent was the hand slicing through the air to mark each item. “School buses can’t hide. I want my daughter back. And time is running out. Thank you to those who have already helped, and thank you for listening.”

  Brother Harkman reached down the far side of his bed and retrieved a stainless steel bowl. When it was in his lap, he breathed heavily over it.

  “Damn chemo’s making me sick,” he said. A fleck of spittle straddled his lower lip.

  The use of a swearword caused me to start, and I felt as though I intruded on a private show of weakness. But I had no time for courtesy.

  “By expert estimates, Brother, these children have as little as a day left, at most two-and-a-half. Depending on the temperature of their prison and exposure, they might be already near death. We really can’t know for certain.”

  He waved his hand for me to wait, seemingly annoyed, and then retched. When he had composed himself, he flexed his jaw muscles and turned back. He had aged years since I arrived.

  “How do I know you are for real? You listed as the Center for Disease Control or something?”

  I mourned the loss of his good nature and wondered if other Euths would see me like this, forever the bearer of unpleasant news until my case turned up. The alternative was beginning to seem more attractive again.

  “No, sir, we do not have a cover, nor are we recognized by the government. Only three non-terminals know of our existence. The heads of the CIA, FBI, and State.”

  “State. The president?”

  “Correct.”

  He shut his eyes, leaning back against a pillow and the stone wall.

  “The Terminals were active in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve foiled bioterrorism plots, a dirty bomb left over from the Cuban missile crisis, and found missing planes and submarines with onboard nukes before our enemies could.” It was much the same pitch the general had given me. But while he had convinced me to live, I was now using it to convince a monk to die. If hell existed, I had a clear pass through its gates.

  “Sounds grander than a serial killer.”

  I frowned. “Eleven kids have disappeared with the kidnapper dead.”

  “Bet one of them being the governor’s kid has something to do with it.” Charlie spat into the bowl. The reek of bile was stringent in my nostrils. I wanted to leave.

  He squinted at me, pinioning me where I stood. “You said you’d be going yourself if not for the religion mismatch.”

  I nodded.

  “So, what are you dying of?”

  “I’m not. I’m doing this for my own reasons.”

  “An actual suicide, then.” He worked himself further forward and cocked his head. “No going terminal about it.” When I didn’t respond, he continued. “You can understand why it would be difficult to be convinced by someone who could not follow through with their own suicide?”

  He regarded me, listening to the silence. I always thought priests could do that better than soldiers. Soldiers ordered silence, it was a discipline. Priests listened to it, as if learning from it what needed to be said and plucking it out like a ripe carrot. It made me realize how much silence I had in my life. I just never listened to it. I’m not sure I wanted to hear what it had to say.

  “We all have a darkness in us that we regret,” he said. From the hang of his head these were obviously not mere words. And I wondered if his darkness could be the Achilles heel I needed to convince him to join the Terminals. “But you need not let it consume you.”

  “I’m not here for counseling,” I said.

  He rubbed his stubbly bald spot. “Do you know how much time I have left?”

  “The doctor gave you six months. Terminally ill,” I replied.

  “Yes, six months.” Breath whistled through his nose. “Six months can be as full of grace as sixteen years.”

  “Could be less,” I cut in.

  He nearly kicked the bowl off of his bed. “Could be more!”

  If he expected a suicidal colonel to see the glass as half-full, he was mistaken. I reached back into my bag and felt for the smooth gloss of photographs. I fanned them in one hand and plucked out the first; names and notes were written on the backs. I held a picture of Cordell Hayward.

  “Eleven children.”

  His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

  “Cordell, twelve years old—loves art and music—wants to be a fireman.”

  I let it drop to the stone floor, revealing Jake Altman.

  “Jake, eleven years old—particularly good at spelling even though he’s dyslexic, wants to be a writer.”

  Alistair Dexter broke my heart. In the photo, he worked a piano with an intense, very adult concentration. He was engulfed by a tuxedo, and I suspected that the piece he played was powerful.

  “Alistair, twelve years old—staged his own play this year in front of church, a monologue about saving the Earth—you can catch it on YouTube.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” Charlie said, and his color deepened.

  “Nathanial—prefers Nate, eleven-years-old, he’s a competitive swimmer, father beats him, and Nate takes it out on the water, swimming two hours a day.”

  “Please,” he pointed to the door.

  But I didn’t stop talking even as I moved toward the exit. My voice lifted over his pleas, my tone growing shrill, like a Sunday morning preacher trying to bring a congregation to a feverish pitch; I rattled off the children’s names. When my hand touched the doorknob, he shouted.

  “Get out!”

  Then he wilted, the strength leaving him, and he sagged into the rough woolen covers.

  I hated myself. “Hillar McCallum slowly drains the blood of his victims and then tears their eyes out. We’ve never found any of the eyes.”

  “Get out,” he whispered.

  “Maybe he actually does take their spark, too.” I shrugged. “You’d know better than I.”

  “Get out …”

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” I replied. “That is two percent of what these children have left.”

  Outside the cell, I leaned heavily against the door. Footfalls echoed down the cloister’s stone corridor. Someone had been listening—the general wouldn’t like that. I ran fingers through my hair, palm grazing my cheek, numb with scar tissue. I pulled my hand quickly back as if burned.

  The weight of my request struck. Secret government agencies, a demand to suicide, tacit confirmation of an afterlife, talking to the dead … it was a lot to swallow. Charlie’s decision couldn’t be easy. The general said everyone had his price, and I wondered what Charlie wanted more than the months of pain he had remaining.

  Dusk streamed through the arched windows that looked out upon a garden. Pebbled paths circled a gnarled tree, and on a branch, a goldfinch sang. I shuffled to rest against the cool sill of a window and leaned into the garden, smelling the rich, humid air.

  “Are you prepared to die today?” I asked the bird. It angled its head and hopped further along the branch. I wondered just what I was trying to prove to myself. Music and the flicker of candlelight meandered through the waxen leaves of the tree. Coaxed by the light and the desire for distraction, I walked around the quad and stopped at a twin set of doors leading to the chapel.

  Beneath the vaulted frame, one door was ajar. I pressed my palm against the thick, iron-studded wood and leaned in. A rare dua
l monastery that shared the chapel if not the cloister, the monks’ and nuns’ chanting echoed without accompaniment, a melodic cadence, rising and falling. The interior smelled of candle wax and lemon-scented furniture polish. The light beyond the window glowed blue through the stained glass, and the candlelight cast warmth over the cowl-framed monks lining the pews on one side and made moons of the faces of nuns the other. I listened, mesmerized; so seldom had I entered a church, let alone attended a service, that it seemed as mysterious as the ritual of any secret cult. I stared at the brass cross, ablaze in the light.

  My vision blurred, and when I blinked, bodies were strewn over the altar, and in the glow the black-and-white tiled floor looked the same as the floor in the pictures from the diner. I gasped at sightless eye sockets and exploded soldiers, both my own crimes and Hillar’s meshing into one. Now the burning cross appeared as the haft of a sacrificial knife.

  I looked away and down at the crosses that scarred my wrists. I’d cut them both, digging horizontal and vertical incisions over my skin, the blade biting deep and sure. If not for the nearby military hospital, I would have never survived. Charlie hadn’t needed concern himself with my ability to complete the task. I had nothing to prove. I had my own orders and I would follow them or be damned, likely both.

  “I am,” I answered for the little yellow bird.

  The vibration of the iPhone interrupted my reverie, and I snatched it from my pocket to find a message from Morph. Dying for a reason is a good reason to keep living. It was a twist on the code the Terminals lived and died by, which sounded better in Latin: causa moriendi est causa vivendi.

  The phone slid back into my pocket. Only twenty minutes had passed, but I decided that the kids didn’t have an hour to waste. And listening to silence was dangerous to my health.

  Chapter 7

  After she had worked the gag from her mouth, Ming probably should have stayed quiet.

  “Please stop,” Ming begged. “Stop hurting us.” The woman toiled in lantern light and silence. Her teased hair, streaked blond, hung over her face and hid her reaction.

  Ming waited for the woman to respond. When she didn’t, Ming’s voice broke as she added, “Please, miss, let us go.” Listening to the echoes of her plea, she gathered herself. “My daddy’s gonna help us.” Ming glared, wishing the woman would look up and see the conviction she held for her father.

  Still silence.

  “My daddy,” Ming warned. “My daddy’s going to hurt you.”

  Their captor stood slowly, stepped around the lantern to Ming, and retrieved the gag she’d spat out. Ming whipped her head back and forth, but the woman calmly stuffed the cloth back into Ming’s mouth, fingers easily evading her teeth.

  Then, humming a tune, the woman returned to the circle of light and knelt back over the small body, a boy named Nate.

  “Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye,” the woman rhymed as she worked. “And a long tail which she let fly.” Her hand reached to the ceiling as she pulled the thread. “And every time she went through a gap—” Her voice acquired a tone of merriment, as if delighted by her wit. Ming regretted her outburst, believing it had added to the woman’s enthusiasm. “A bit of her tail she left in a trap.” The woman waited until her words repeated to nothingness, and then she began again. “Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye …”

  Bound to the cage that ringed a ladder leading upward, Ming wished they could be freed from this woman; that she would just stop and leave.

  If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, her father would say.

  She chewed on her gag, trying to work it out of her mouth again so she could talk to the others, all similarly silenced. But a gag didn’t stop tears, and the other children made mewling sobs in the darkness. Ming was out of tears. She felt the slow prickle of fear as her turn approached.

  The psycho with the jagged sideburns and pale, drained eyes had already been gone for hours and hours when the woman started chattering to herself, debating the start of her little sewing project. She had climbed the ladder, and when she had reached the top, Ming had caught the faintest whiff of fresh air. After a minute, the woman had descended, and the debate over the sewing project had ended and a new one begun: who to start with and which eye.

  Nate moaned and the woman passed the rag over his mouth. The pungent scent of chloroform filled the chamber. The first time they’d used the drug on them, it had left everyone vomiting when they woke tied to the ladder.

  A lantern flickered beside the woman, illuminating Nate’s face and the stitches. His eyelid pulled back as her hand lifted and then stretched out as it dipped. Try as Ming might, she couldn’t process the horror before her. All she could think about was who might be next.

  Ming surveyed her friends: Luke to her left, Cordell on her right, all part of their church fieldtrip to President Hoover’s birthplace.

  Someone whined in the dark, and Ming strained to see Alistair. He was so thin; this was his first year in the church, smart as a whip, but totally ignorant of some things. His mother had homeschooled him and passed along her strengths and weaknesses. Hoover? he’d said, when the deacon told them about the field trip. Isn’t that a vacuum cleaner? The memory died, replaced by an image of him, pale and thin, wearing scuffed penny-loafers, replete with shiny penny.

  Alistair had held Ming’s hand on the bus. When the woman had pulled a knife to encourage their cooperation, Ming had told Alistair she’d protect him. He’d squeezed her fingers in response. They’d clutched one another, all the way, until the killer had stopped the bus, then blindfolded, drugged and bound them. But Ming had lied to Alistair. She couldn’t protect him. Hanging from the bar, fear bloomed in her belly and climbed into her throat. And she couldn’t protect herself.

  The woman clucked her tongue as she inspected her needlework and nodded. She dragged Nate by the handcuffs to where he had hung on the ladder beside Alistair. As Nate passed, Ming got a good look at her friend. If not for the sutures and the blood that coagulated thick and black in his eyelashes, the constant look of surprise might have been comical. Luke’s moaning was muffled by his gag. The sound of the cuffs snapped tight, and Nate vomited, choked and vomited. At his gurgling, the woman removed the gag until he recovered and moaned. Then she stuffed the rag back into his mouth.

  Ming clenched shut her eyes as if she could save them. A rising whine filled her ears, followed by a great slap and a whimper. The whine began again and the woman stomped back over to slop more chemical over a rag. She wore jean shorts and a tank top clingy with the sweat and humidity of their prison. Ming drew a deep breath as the woman passed, wishing to be drugged so that she wouldn’t see what happened next. She only caught the thin line of the woman’s mouth and the concentration of an artist in the midst of her work.

  The woman hauled Alistair by the arm until his head lay within the circle of lantern light. Alistair’s jaw was slack and his eyes closed, for now.

  “Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye.” The rhyme began again, and again the needle dipped.

  In the mind-numbing horror, it was difficult for Ming to do what she knew she must. The side-burn psycho would either return and kill them all, or this witch would sew them into some freakish doll collection. Ming had to come up with a plan; after all, she was the governor’s daughter.

  Chapter 8

  I strode back around the cloister to confront Charlie Harkman and startled a nun coming through Charlie’s door. I reached for the phone and brought it around like it was my Beretta.

  “Excuse me,” I said, attempting to keep alarm from my voice, while my thumb activated the camera feature.

  The nun fidgeted, glanced back into Charlie’s cell, then down the hall. When she looked at me, I snapped her photo. Tiny divots pocked her cheeks as if she’d suffered from terrible acne. The veil stretched across her forehead and the creases at her eyes gave the impression that she was the one with ca
ncer rather than Charlie.

  “What’s your name?” I asked before she could recover.

  The nun looked as though I’d taken something personal rather than a simple picture. Her eyelids twitched and eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t take him,” she said, and turned and ran.

  I swore as I sent the image on to the general along with a message, What do we do with possible security leaks?

  Charlie didn’t look over when I entered. He stared at the ceiling and fingered the injection site of the IV that trailed up to the bag of fluid behind him.

  “Sister Angelica,” he said. “When she arrived, she still trembled from withdrawal. But she’s a good woman and a good nun. The cloth is a haven both for those who care too deeply and those who have been too tempted by worldly sin.”

  “She seems aware that you might be leaving here,” I accused.

  “She won’t tell anyone.”

  “You just implied to me she was a drug addict.”

  “Still is. Addictions don’t disappear. But she’s a nun and no one would believe her anyways.” Charlie regarded me. “However, Colonel Kurzow, I haven’t given you my decision.” He held up a restraining palm. “Four days ago, I had twenty to thirty years to live. Three days ago that was reduced to six months, or so. Allow me some time to mourn my loss of life.”

  I shifted uncomfortably and suddenly felt so tired. I wondered how doctors did it. How did they deliver these diagnoses? I tried not to care. This was simply a man who was dying, and he could help others by forgoing a few months, or so, of life. The decision from my perspective was simple. If necessary, I’d shoot myself to prove my point. Why not? The guy could hardly say no with my brains blown out over his door.

  “Those who know about my disease come to me and say, fight it,” he continued. “You can do it. Come on. Miracles happen every day.” He flushed. “I hated them—there is dignity in going quietly without a fight, because it’s not a battle you can win or lose. Right?” He looked up and he must not have seen any agreement in my eyes because he looked away and went on. “The outcome is determined even if we don’t know it yet. I will treat this cancer and see how far that takes me, but I will not rage against it. It is a part of my body overexcited about growing.” He shook his head. “But what you’re asking, that is quitting. I won’t throw the race, either.” His chin lifted suddenly and I was caught by the fire in his eyes. “Life is sacred, Christine. I could never be that example to the other monks and nuns.”