Sole Survivor
Page 17

Joe drove to LAX while the coast was still waiting for dawn.
He purchased a same-day, round-trip ticket to Denver. The return flight would bring him back to Los Angeles in time to keep the six-o’clock meeting with Demi — she of the sexy-smoky voice — at the coffee house in Westwood.
As he was on his way to the gate where his plane was already boarding, he saw two young men in blue robes at the check-in desk for a flight to Houston. Their shaved heads, the gold rings in their left ears, and their white tennis shoes identified them as members of the same cult as the group that he had encountered around the bonfire on the beach only hours earlier.
One of these men was black, the other was white, and both were carrying NEC laptops. The black man checked his wristwatch, which appeared to be a gold Rolex. Whatever their religious beliefs might be, they evidently didn’t take vows of poverty or have much in common with the Hare Krishnas.
Although this was the first time Joe had been aboard an aircraft since receiving the news about Michelle and the girls a year earlier, he was not nervous during the trip to Denver. Initially he worried that he would have an anxiety attack and begin to relive the plunge of Flight 353 as he had so often imagined it, but after just a few minutes, he knew that he would be all right.
He wasn’t apprehensive about dying in another crash. Per­versely, if he perished in the same way that his wife and daughters had been taken, he would be calm and without fear on the long ride down into the earth, because such a fate would seem like a welcome return to balance in the universe, an open circle closed, a wrongness made right at last.
Of greater concern to him was what he might learn from Barbara Christman at the far end of his journey.
He was convinced that she didn’t trust the privacy of telephone conversations but would talk with him face-to-face. He didn’t think he had imagined the note of disappointment in her voice when she learned that he was not calling her from Colorado Springs. Likewise, her speech about the dangers of believing in conspiracy theories and the need for grief therapy, although compassionate and well stated, sounded to Joe as though it had been intended less for him than for the ears of eavesdroppers.
If Barbara Christman was carrying a burden that she longed to put down, the solution to the mystery of Flight 353 might be close at hand.
Joe wanted to know the whole truth, needed to know, but dreaded
knowing. The peace of indifference would forever be beyond his reach if he learned that men, not fate, had been responsible for taking his family from him. The journey toward this particular truth was not an ascension toward a glorious light but a descent into darkness, chaos, the maelstrom.
He’d brought the printouts of four articles about Teknologik, which he had gotten from Randy Colway’s computer at the Post. The business-section prose was so dry, however — and his attention span so short after only three and a half hours of sleep — that he wasn’t able to concentrate.
He dozed fitfully across the Mojave Desert and the Rockies: two hours and fifteen minutes of half-formed dreams lit by oil lamps and the glow of digital clocks, in which understanding seemed about to wash over him but from which he woke still thirsty for answers.
In Denver, the humidity was unusually high and the sky over­cast. To the west, the mountains lay buried under slow avalanches of early-morning fog.
In addition to his driver’s license, he had to use a credit card as ID to obtain a rental car. He put down a cash deposit, however, trying to avoid the actual use of the card, which might leave a trail of plastic for anyone who was tracking him.
Though no one on the plane or in the terminal had seemed to be especially interested in him, Joe parked the car at a shopping centre not far from the airport and searched it inside and out, under the hood and in the trunk, for a transponder like the one that he had found on his Honda the previous day. The rental Ford was clean.
From the shopping centre, he wove a tangled course along surface streets, checking his rear-view mirror for a tail. Convinced that he was not being followed, he finally picked up Interstate 25 and drove south.
Mile by mile, Joe pushed the Ford harder, eventually ignoring the speed limit, because he became increasingly convinced that if he didn’t get to Barbara Christman’s house in time, he would find her dead by her own hand. Eviscerated. Immolated. Or with the back of her head blown out.
2
In Colorado Springs, Joe found Barbara Christman’s address in the telephone book. She lived in a diminutive jewel-box Victor­ian, Queen Anne style, exuberantly decorated with elaborate millwork.
When she came to the door in answer to the bell, she spoke before Joe had a chance to identify himself. ‘Even sooner than I expected you.’
‘Are you Barbara Christman?’
‘Let’s not do this here.’
‘I’m not sure you know who I—’
‘Yes, I know. But not here.’
‘Where?’
‘Is that your car at the curb?’ she asked.
‘The rental Ford.’
‘Park it in the next block. Two blocks. Wait there, and I’ll pick you up.’
She closed the door.
Joe stood on the porch a moment longer, considering whether he should ring the bell again. Then he decided that she wasn’t likely to be planning to run out on him.
Two blocks south of Christman’s house, he parked beside a grade-school playground. The swings, seesaws, and jungle gyms were unused on this Sunday morning. Otherwise, he would have parked elsewhere, to be safe from the silvery laughter of children.
He got out of the car and looked north. There was no sign of the woman yet.
Joe consulted his wristwatch. Ten minutes till ten o’clock, Pacific Time, an hour later here.
In eight hours, he would have to be back in Westwood to meet Demi — and Rose.
Along the sleepy street came a cat’s paw of warm wind searching the boughs of the pine trees for hidden birds. It rustled the leaves
on the branches of a nearby group of paper birches with trunks as luminous white as choirboys’ surplices.
Under a sky grey-white with lowering mist to the west and drear with gun-metal thunderheads to the east, the day seemed to carry a heavy freight of dire portents. The flesh prickled on the nape of Joe’s neck, and he began to feel as exposed as a red bull’s-eye target on a shooting range.
When a Chevy sedan approached from the south and Joe saw three men in it, he moved casually around to the passenger’s side of the rental car, using it for cover in the event that they opened fire on him. They passed without glancing in his direction.
A minute later, Barbara Christman arrived in an emerald-green Ford Explorer. She smelled faintly of bleach and soap, and he sus­pected she had been doing the laundry when he’d rung her bell.
As they headed south from the grade school, Joe said, ‘Ms. Christman, I’m wondering — where have you seen a photograph of me?’
‘Never have,’ she said. ‘And call me Barbara.’
‘So, Barbara… when you opened your door a bit ago, how did you know who I was?’
‘Hasn’t been a stranger at my door in ages. Anyway, last night when you called back and I didn’t answer, you let it ring more than thirty times.’
‘Forty.’
‘Even a persistent man would have given up after twenty. When it kept ringing and ringing, I knew you were more than persistent. Driven. I knew you’d come soon.’
She was about fifty, dressed in Rockports, faded jeans, and a periwinkle-blue chambray shirt. Her thick white hair looked as if it had been cut by a good barber rather than styled by a beautician. Well-tanned, with a broad face as open and inviting as a golden field of Kansas wheat, she appeared honest and trustworthy. Her stare was direct, and Joe liked her for the aura of efficiency that she projected and for the crisp self-assurance in her voice.
‘Who are you afraid of, Barbara?’
‘Don’t know who they are.’
‘I’m going to get the answer somewhere,’ he warned.
‘What I’m telling you is the truth, Joe. Never have known who they are. But they pulled strings I never thought could be pulled.’
‘To control the results of a Safety Board investigation?’
‘The Board still has integrity, I think. But these people… they were able to make some evidence disappear.’
‘What evidence?’
Braking to a halt at a red traffic signal, she said, ‘What finally made you suspicious, Joe, after all this time? What about the story didn’t ring true?’
‘It all rang true — until I met the sole survivor.’
She stared blankly at him, as though he had spoken in a foreign language of which she had no slightest knowledge.
‘Rose Tucker,’ he said.
There seemed to be no deception in her hazel eyes but genuine puzzlement in her voice when she said, ‘Who’s she?’
‘She was aboard Flight 353. Yesterday, she visited the graves of my wife and daughters while I was there.’
‘Impossible. No one survived. No one could have survived.’
‘She was on the passenger manifest.’
Speechless, Barbara stared at him.
He said, ‘And some dangerous people are hunting for her — and now for me. Maybe the same people who made that evidence disappear.’
A car horn blared behind them. The traffic signal had changed to green.
While she drove, Barbara reached to the dashboard controls and lowered the fan speed of the air-conditioning, as though chilled. ‘No one could have survived,’ she insisted. ‘This was not your usual hit-and-skip crash, where there’s a greater or lesser chance of any survivors depending on the angle of impact and lots of other factors. This was straight down, head-in, catastrophic.’
‘Head-in? I always thought it tumbled, broke apart.’
‘Didn’t you read any newspaper accounts?’
He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t. I just imagined…
‘Not a hit-and-skip like most,’ she repeated. ‘Almost straight into the ground. Sort of similar to Hopewell, September ninety-four. A USAir 737 went down in Hopewell Township, on its way to Pittsburgh, and was just… obliterated. Being aboard Flight 353 would have been… I’m sorry, Joe, but it would have been like standing in the middle of a bomb blast. A big bomb blast.’
‘There were some remains they were never able to identify.’
‘So little left to identify. The aftermath of something like this. . it’s more gruesome than you can imagine, Joe. Worse than you want to know, believe me.’
He recalled the small caskets in which his family’s remains had been conveyed to him, and the strength of the memory compressed his heart into a small stone.
Eventually, when he could speak again, he said, ‘My point is that there were a number of passengers for whom the pathologists were unable to find any remains. People who just… ceased to exist in an instant. Disappeared.’
‘A large majority of them,’ she said, turning onto State Highway 115 and heading south under a sky as hard as an iron kettle.
‘Maybe this Rose Tucker didn’t just…  didn’t just disintegrate on impact like the others. Maybe she disappeared because she walked away from the scene.’
‘Walked?’
‘The woman I met wasn’t disfigured or crippled. She appeared to have come through it without a scar.’
Adamantly shaking her head, Barbara said, ‘She’s lying to you, Joe. Flat out lying. She wasn’t on that plane. She’s playing some sort of sick game.’
‘I believe her.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of things I’ve seen.’
‘What things?’
‘I don’t think I should tell you. Knowing ... that might put you as deep in the hole as I am. I don’t want to endanger you any more than I have to. Just by coming here, I might be causing you trouble.’
After a silence, she said, ‘You must have seen something pretty extraordinary to make you believe in a survivor.’
‘Stranger than you can imagine.’
‘Still . . . I don’t believe it,’ she said.
‘Good. That’s safer.’
They had driven out of Colorado Springs, through suburbs, into an area of ranches, travelling into increasingly rural territory. To the east, high plains dwindled into an arid flatness. To the west, the land rose gradually through fields and woods toward foothills half screened by grey mist.
He said, ‘You’re not just driving aimlessly, are you?’
‘If you want to fully understand what I’m going to tell you, it’ll help to see.’ She glanced away from the road, and her concern for him was evident in her kind eyes. ‘Do you think you can handle it, Joe?’
‘We’re going . . . there.’
‘Yes. If you can handle it.’
Joe closed his eyes and strove to suppress a welling anxiety. In his imagination, he could hear the screaming of the airliner’s engines.
The crash scene was thirty to forty miles south and slightly west of Colorado Springs.
Barbara Christman was taking him to the meadow where the 747 had shattered like a vessel of glass.
‘Only if you can handle it,’ she said gently.
The substance of his heart seemed to condense even further, until it was like a black hole in his chest.
The Explorer slowed. She was going to pull to the shoulder of the highway.
Joe opened his eyes. Even the thunderhead-filtered light seemed too bright. He willed himself to be deaf to the airplane-engine roar in his mind.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t stop. Let’s go. I’ll be all right. I’ve got nothing to lose now.’
They turned off the state highway onto an oiled-gravel road and soon off the gravel onto a dirt lane that led west through tall poplars with vertical branches streaming skyward like green fire. The poplars gave way to tamarack and birches, which surrendered the ground to white pines as the lane narrowed and the woods thickened.
Increasingly pitted and rutted, wandering among the trees as though weary and losing its way, the lane finally pulled a blanket of weeds across itself and curled up to rest under a canopy of evergreen boughs.
Parking and switching off the engine, Barbara said, ‘We’ll walk from here. It’s no more than half a mile, and the brush isn’t especially thick.’
Although the forest was not as dense and primeval as the vast stands of pine and spruce and fir on the fog-robed mountains looming to the west, civilization was so far removed that the soulful hush was reminiscent of a cathedral between services. Broken only by the snapping of twigs and the soft crunch of dry pine needles underfoot, this prayerful silence was, for Joe, as oppressive as the imagined roar of jet engines that sometimes shook him into an anxiety attack. It was a stillness full of eerie, disturbing expectation.