The Dark River

27

Two of the Tabula mercenaries hiked up the slope to the helicopters and returned with a portable electric generator. The generator was placed near the storage hut and attached to a sodium light. Michael glanced upward. The thousands of stars visible in the night sky resembled little chips of ice. It was very cold now, and the moisture from everyone’s lungs left a faint haze in the air.

Michael was disappointed that neither Gabriel nor his father was on the island, but the operation wasn’t a complete failure. Perhaps the team would find documents or information on a computer that would lead them to a more promising target. Word would get back to Mrs. Brewster that he had brought in the splicers and demanded an aggressive approach to searching the huts. The Brethren liked people who took charge.

He sat down on a slab of limestone and watched Boone give orders to his men. When the backscatter device told them that the person inside the hut was neutralized, a man with an ax attacked the heavy oak door. Boone told the mercenary to stop working when he had chopped a jagged hole about two feet square. A moment later, one of the baboons peered out of the hole like a curious dog. Boone shot the animal in the head.

The two remaining splicers inside the hut began calling to each other. They were clever enough to sense danger and stay away from the hole. The man with the ax resumed his work. Fifteen minutes later he had completely destroyed the door. Boone’s men moved cautiously, pushing away storage containers and raising their shotguns before edging inside. Michael heard more shrieks and then gunshots.

One of Boone’s men had started a fire in the cooking hut and served mugs of tea to the others. Michael used the cup to warm his cold hands while he waited for more information. Ten minutes later, Boone walked out through the wrecked door. Boone was smiling and moving his body in a confident way, as if he had somehow regained his power. He accepted a cup of tea and strolled over to Michael.

“Is the Harlequin dead?” Michael asked.

“Maya wasn’t in the building. It was a young woman from Los Angeles named Victory From Sin Fraser.” Boone chuckled. “That name always amused me.”

“And she was the only person in the building?”

“Oh, someone else was there. Down in the cellar.” Boone hesitated for a few seconds, enjoying the tension in Michael’s face. “We just found your father. That is…your father’s body.”

Michael took a flashlight from one of the mercenaries and followed Boone into the storage hut. The floor and walls were splattered with blood, still bright red and glistening. A plastic cloth covered the four dead splicers. A second cloth covered Victory Fraser, but Michael could see the scuffed soles of her shoes.

They climbed down a staircase to a cellar with a gravel floor and passed through a door into a side room. Matthew Corrigan lay on a stone slab with a white muslin cloth over his legs. As Michael looked down at the body, images from the past overwhelmed him with an unexpected force. He remembered his father weeding the garden behind the farmhouse, driving the family’s battered pickup truck, and sharpening a carving knife for a Christmas turkey. He remembered his father chopping wood on a winter’s day, the snow clinging to his long brown hair as the blade of his ax rose up against the sky. Those childhood days were gone now. Gone forever. But the memories still had the power to move Michael-and that made him angry.

“He’s not dead,” Boone explained. “I got the medical kit stethoscope and heard a heartbeat. This is how you look when you cross over to another world.”

Michael resented Boone’s cocky smile and his insinuating tone of voice. “All right, you found him,” he said. “Now get out of here.”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t need a reason. If you want to keep your job, I would recommend you show some respect to a representative of the executive board. Go upstairs and leave me alone.”

Boone’s mouth became a tight line, but he nodded and left the cellar. Michael could hear the other men walking around the storage hut and pushing boxes against the wall. Holding the flashlight in his left hand, he gazed down at Matthew Corrigan. When Michael was growing up in South Dakota, adults always said that Gabriel looked like their father. Although Matthew’s hair was gray and his face was deeply lined, Michael could now see the resemblance. He wondered if there was any truth to the rumor picked up by Tabula computers. Had Gabriel been on this island and had he discovered the body?

“Can you hear me?” Michael asked his father. “Can…you…hear…me?”

No response. He touched his father’s throat and pushed hard. For a second, he thought he felt the flutter of a pulse. If he got rid of the flashlight he could squeeze the throat with both hands. Even if your Light was traveling through another realm, your body could die in this world. No one would stop him from killing Matthew. No one would criticize his judgment. Mrs. Brewster would see his action as another demonstration of his loyalty to the cause.

Michael placed the flashlight on the ledge in the wall and stepped closer to his father’s body. His breath appeared and then vanished in the cold air. In his entire life, he had never felt so completely focused on the moment. Do it, Michael thought. He ran away fifteen years ago. Now he can disappear forever.

He reached out again and peeled back his father’s eyelid. A blue eye stared back at him with no spark of life in its dark pupil. Michael felt as if he were looking at a dead man-and that was the problem. In one world or another, he wanted to confront his father and force him to admit that he had abandoned his family. Destroying this empty shell meant nothing; it would never provide him with satisfaction.

A memory flashed through his mind of a schoolyard fight back in South Dakota when he was a teenager. After Michael had punched and kicked his opponent, the other boy had fallen to the ground and covered his face with his hands. But that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t what he was looking for. He wanted complete surrender. Fear.

He retrieved the flashlight and walked upstairs to the blood-covered room where Boone and two mercenaries were waiting. “Load the body into one of the helicopters,” Michael told them. “We’re taking him off this island.”