Ashley Bell Page 7

  After finishing the first granola bar and deciding not to linger long enough to eat the second, she returned home. If she was a girl of action, a girl of unshakeable intentions, like the girls whom she most admired in the books that she most enjoyed reading, she could no longer shrink from the mystery that demanded her attention.

  By the alley gate, she let herself into the courtyard between garage and bungalow. Climbed the stairs. Hesitated on the balcony.

  Two weeks earlier, the gray wet day had been appropriate to séances and conjurings—and to unsettling encounters with restless spirits. Under this bright and lively sky, with the warbling and clear, short whistles of meadowlarks celebrating the recent dawn, being in the mood for Pooh was easier than being in the mood for Poe.

  Nevertheless, Bibi stood at the door, staring through the four panes in its upper half, studying the kitchen before she dared to enter. There was no corpse apparent either on the floor or standing grim and moon-eyed in expectation of her. She went inside.

  On this brighter morning, the kitchen seemed to be a benign if not entirely welcoming place, until Bibi noticed the one change since her previous visit. On the table, the spherical white vase, which had held no flowers before, not for months, now contained three withered roses. The once-green sepals of the flowers’ receptacles were brown, and the petals were mostly brown as well, with few remaining traces of red coloring. Some petals had fallen to the table, where they lay as curled and crisp as the shells of dead beetles.

  The sere and shriveled roses looked as if they had been here longer than two weeks. They were so thoroughly dehydrated that they might have been in the vase since November.

  She should have left the apartment; but she could not. Unlike many other ten-year-old girls, she did not dream of being a princess or a pop star. She wanted to be plucky, intrepid, and lionhearted. Stalwart. Valiant. Superman and Supergirl had no appeal for her; everything was too easy for them and other invulnerable superheroes, without genuine danger. Bibi knew that life could never be that way. Every surfer surfed with sharks unseen and swam with the risk of riptides. Death was real. You had to face that truth if you were ever to grow up. She wanted no caped costume with an S upon her chest. But she would have been proud to wear a sweater with a small embroidered V—a V for valiant—though only if by her actions she earned it.

  Therefore, rather than retreat from the mystery of the roses, she moved past the table toward the living-room door, which stood open, as she had left it two weeks earlier. Someone—something—had pushed it inward before she’d fled. As on that day, the door blocked her view of the threshold, where someone had been standing.

  She felt confident that no one would be standing there now.

  As she approached the door, she heard footsteps on a creaking hardwood floor, as she had heard them on her other visit. She halted, listening, but then realized the footsteps were moving away from her.

  Lionhearted girls seldom retreated when they were threatened, and they never turned tail and ran without good reason. When she passed the door and reached the threshold, trembling more than she would have liked, no one waited there.

  She saw a door swinging shut at the farther end of the living room. It closed with a bang and rattle.

  None of the furniture had been removed. After what had happened here, Nancy and Murphy didn’t want another tenant. Eventually they would dispose of the furniture, sell it or give it away to Goodwill.

  Rather than proceed to the bedroom, Bibi considered sitting on the edge of an armchair to await developments. Sometimes, patiently waiting to see what happened next was much wiser than making it happen, which was one of the differences between truly smart girls in smart books and airheaded girls in witless books.

  After a hesitation, as a weakness crept into her legs and her mouth went almost as dry as the flowers in the kitchen, shame made her cross the living room. You were either plucky or not, stalwart or not, and the lionhearted didn’t make excuses in the quick of things, when you either gave it or you didn’t.

  She halted at the bedroom door. Trying not to hear the rapid knocking of her heart, she listened for what sounds might come from the next room. She cocked her head to the left, to the right, and when her gaze drifted lower, she saw the blood on the doorknob. Red. Glistening. Wet. A single drop slid off the knob and fell to the floorboards in what seemed like slow motion.

  Valiant girls were more than spunky and resolute. They were also wary, heedful, and prudent. And they knew with clearheaded certainty when it was wise to act upon those virtues. She didn’t bolt, but she backed slowly away from the bedroom. She turned and walked across the living room, quietly through the kitchen, out of the apartment. After she locked the door, she needed to hold the handrail as she made her way down to the courtyard.

  On the back porch of the bungalow, sitting on the wicker sofa, Bibi reviewed events, a thousand threads of thought spinning through the loom of her young mind, weaving a strange fabric. She wouldn’t tell her parents what had happened. They would find no flowers or blood in the apartment, just as her father had found no intruder two weeks earlier. Besides, Bibi sensed there was something she knew that she didn’t know she knew, an elusive understanding that, if she could arrive at it, would make sense of everything.

  The morning grew mild, but Bibi remained cold to her bones.

  Bibi realized she was awake when she heard the nurse talking with a nurses’ aide. She wasn’t able to open her eyes or speak. She could only listen. One said, “She’s exhausted, poor thing.” The other took her pulse, seemed to be satisfied, and let go of her wrist. Bibi realized that she was breathing shallowly, making a sound like a soft snore. They must think she was asleep. No one witnessed the violent seizure when it felled her earlier. They pulled the sheet and blanket up to her neck. She tried to tell them it wasn’t sleep that held her quiet, but something worse. The words formed in her mind, not in her mouth. She heard the nurse and the aide leaving, then a mortal silence.

  She lay mute and blind and limp, unable to be sure whether she was lying on her back, on her chest, or on her side. No muscle in her body would respond to her command. A remembered fragment of verse came to her, its source for the moment forgotten: A condition of complete simplicity. She was indeed in a condition of complete simplicity, and although she should have been frightened, she was not. Valiant girl she would be, as she had been for so long, plucky and intrepid and stalwart. Lionhearted.

  A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)…

  With the second line of verse, she recalled the source: Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot.

  She took some comfort from the fact that though her body seemed to have seceded from her soul, her mind remained clear and still part of her kingdom. Fragments of other Eliot lines came to her:

  Quick now, here, now…At the still point…Neither from nor towards…Where past and future are gathered…

  Bibi drifted away once more into a nothingness that might have been a more solemn oblivion than mere sleep.

  Later she revived in a panic, acutely aware of the severe decline in her condition. Paralysis. Blindness. Her tongue cinched into a knot that would not allow her the grace of words. She had gone downhill faster than rhyming Jill after she tripped over the idiot Jack. Suddenly the Big Question was whether chemo and radiation made any sense in her case, or whether the better course of treatment, the more humane course, would be to give her a box of morphine lollipops and let her suck her way out of this world in some hospice run by kindly nuns. Valiant girl or not, she wanted to cry for herself, but if she wept, she could not feel the heat of tears or the tracks they made down her face.

  She woke again in the night, and this time she could open her eyes and see by the dimmed lamp above her bed. The orientation of her body became obvious to her, as well: She was lying on her right side, facing the first—still empty—bed, and the door at the farther end of the room.

  That door opened and a man entered, backlit by the
hall light as he approached. Even when the door eased shut behind him, closing off the light, he remained a silhouette. Bibi saw the leash as he arrived between the beds. Earlier someone had put down the railing. The dog stood on its back legs, forepaws on the mattress, favoring Bibi with the fabled smile of its breed: a golden retriever. Perhaps more than any other breed, goldens had unique faces, and although for a moment she thought that this was Olaf, it was not.

  This was just some Good Samaritan with a therapy dog named Brandy or Oscar or whatever. These days, hospitals were veritable dog parks, with hordes of well-meaning people trying to make the sick and the depressed get with the uplift program. She had seen others like these two since being admitted as the poster girl for aggressive tumor maturation, and they were all sweet, the people and the dogs, though she declined their determined efforts to help her find the giggles in gliomatosis.

  Her left hand lay palm-down upon the mattress. She could see it but not move it.

  The dog began to lick her hand, and at first she couldn’t feel that canine caress. Soon, however, her sense of touch returned, and the warm wet tongue working between her fingers filled her with a wild hope. To her surprise, she broke her paralysis, moved the hand, and repeatedly smoothed the fur on the retriever’s noble head.

  As she petted the dog, their eyes met. She knew that hers were dark and unrevealing, but the retriever’s were so gold and luminous and deep that its gaze stirred something within her. That lustrous stare awakened the slumbering child that Bibi had once been, the easily enchanted girl who, in recognition of inevitable adulthood, had taken a page from the book of bears and had hibernated through a long winter.

  When the dog dropped from the bed, Bibi said, “No, please,” but the visitors moved away.

  At the door, as he opened it just wide enough to slip out into the hall, the man turned to look back, still just the outline of a man, and said, “Endeavor to live the life….”

  Bibi had heard those words before, although in her current condition she could not quite remember when.

  Alone in the near dark, she could not decide if something extraordinary had happened or if she had hallucinated the encounter.

  She flexed her left hand, which was still moist with the dog’s saliva. She could feel her body to all its extremities. She wiggled her toes. When she tried to roll onto her back, she had no difficulty doing so.

  As a great weariness descended, she wondered if she was awake or dreaming. In the absence of the loving dog, whether or not it had been real, a bleak sense of isolation pierced her, and she felt alone and lost. Her voice shamed her for the misery it revealed. Valiant girls did not so boldly disclose the distress of mind and heart, but it was all there in his name when she spoke it—“Paxton, Pax. Oh, Pax, where are you?”—and then a wave of darkness washed her into sleep or something like it.

  The head-shed—senior commander—planners called it Operation Firewalk. They had an endless supply of colorful names for special-ops missions, some of them literary, which proved they had gotten a well-rounded education at Annapolis. There would be no firewalk, no doves from scarves, no lady sawn in half, no other illusions that made magicians’ audiences applaud, just a street-level strike that should be, to the bad guys, as unexpected as an earthquake.

  Paxton Thorpe and three guys on his team had come down from the cold hills in the night, having taken two days to make their way from the insertion point, where the helicopter left them, to the outskirts of the town. Had they been dropped closer, the helo noise would have been an announcement no less revealing than if they had been preceded by a bluegrass band on a flatbed truck draped with red-white-and-blue bunting. They wouldn’t have been able to cross the open ground and enter those streets without being cut down.

  Surrounding the town were fields once tilled, now fallow. The last planting had never been harvested. Months of searing heat and stinging cold and skirling winds had threshed the crops and withered the remaining stems into finely chopped straw and dust, all of it so soft that it produced little sound underfoot. Depending on where he stepped, Pax caught a musty scent that reminded him of the feed bins and hayloft in the barn on the Texas ranch where he had been raised.

  The moon had risen in daylight and had set behind the mountains before midnight. Under feeble starlight tens of thousands and even millions of years old, the four men relied on night-vision goggles.

  As far as the world was concerned, this place ahead of them was a ghost town. If you believed in spirits, you would want to pass on by, because here the hauntings, if there were any, would surely be horrific. The remote town had been established above a rare aquifer in otherwise barren territory, and the citizens tapped the deeply stored water to transform the surrounding fields into productive farmland. For a few generations, people had lived here in rural peace, unschooled and mostly happy in their ignorance. And then the barbarians arrived in a fleet of stolen military vehicles, bearing rocket-propelled grenades and automatic carbines. Perhaps six hundred residents were killed in the taking of the town, half the population, and the flag of the conquerors—black with a red slash—flew on every street by the second day. After the prettier women endured gang rape and dismemberment, the remaining citizens—men, women, children—were executed in the following three days. Bodies were stacked by the hundreds in pyres, sprayed with gasoline, and set afire. On the sixth day after the invasion, the killers took down their flags and left. They had wanted nothing in that settlement, only its destruction.

  Savages though they were, they nevertheless filmed the massacre and made a recruitment video that spoke to the souls of like-minded radicals everywhere. It had found an eager audience on the Internet.

  Seventeen months after the massacre, Lead Petty Officer Paxton Thorpe and three warriors, three friends, three of the finest men he’d ever known—Danny, Gibb, and Perry—were on the hunt for big game where, only a week earlier, no targets were thought to exist. Some in the American media called their primary target the Ghost, which lent him an air of glamor—intentionally or not. Pax and his guys called their quarry Flaming Asshole, FA for short.

  Back in the day, FA had led the assault on this village, but that was not the only crime for which he was currently sought. It seemed unlikely that he would return to such a place of slaughter, far from the comforts of civilization that terrorist leaders now felt to be their right, far from most of his multitude of admirers. But the head sheds had intel that they found convincing, and they were far more often right than wrong.

  They were in a nation not worthy of that designation, but at least it was not currently an active supporter of terrorists or colluding with anyone against the United States. And its wrecked economy could not support a military adequate to regularly patrol most of its territory. Pax and his men had gotten in without an encounter, but now it might be fan-and-feces time.

  The town contained more than two hundred buildings, mostly one and two stories, none higher than three, some of stone, many of mud bricks covered with stucco, crudely constructed, as if no engineer existed in this country with more than a medieval education. A third of the structures had been reduced to rubble in the assault, and the remaining were damaged to one degree or another. If FA and six of his most trusted allies were holed up here, they would most likely secret themselves in a central building, so that no matter from which point of the compass a hostile force might arrive, they would have plenty of warning that a search of the town had commenced.

  Intel suggested that a three-story building at the northwest corner of the burg offered an ideal observation post. The team’s attention needed to be focused only east and south for some sound or sign of habitation. The roof had a parapet behind which they could remain hidden, conducting surveillance with two periscopic cameras.

  As Paxton, Danny, Gibb, and Perry came quietly out of the fields to the back of the building, they passed the horned skeletons of what might have been three goats, which regarded them with hollow sockets as deep as caves. The savages w
ho killed the people of the town had also shot the livestock, leaving the animals to rot where they fell.

  The back door had long ago been broken down. They cleared the rooms as though they expected resistance, but found no one. The walls were bullet-pocked. Spent cartridges littered the floors; also chunks of plaster and broken crockery and what might have been bits of skull bones with streamers of human hair attached. Debris-strewn stairs led to the flat roof. The four-foot-high parapet was as described. In the liquid dark of the arid night, they dared to stand, surveying the ghost town to the south and east, looking for the smallest of lights, whether mundane or supernatural, finding neither.

  Having arrived safely, they slept two at a time, the other two always alert and listening, watching. Every sound would travel far into the hush of the dead town, and therefore they said nothing to one another. They had been through so much together that none of them needed conversation to know what the others must be thinking.

  They remained on the roof after sunrise, when the chill of night only half relented, though they stayed below the parapet. They would not execute a search on foot until they had given their quarry and his men twenty-four hours to inadvertently reveal their location. They had their periscopic cameras, their ears, and patience.

  Nothing had happened by 4:00 P.M., when Pax raided his MREs for beef jerky, chicken-noodle slop, and a PowerBar. He ate sitting on the roof, his back against the parapet wall. He wore body armor, but his MOLLE-style web system with all the gear attached was a separate rig that could be taken off and set aside. His pistol lay on the roof a mere foot from him: a Sig Sauer P220 chambered for .45 caliber.