“He may think he’s indestructible,” she said, “but he’s not.”
“You care about him,” Harry said.
“Of course I care about him.”
“I mean care about him.”
“Well … I don’t know.”
“I know.”
“I know too,” Chrissie said.
Sam returned at one o’clock, grimy and gray-faced. She’d made up the spare bed with fresh sheets, and he tumbled into it still half dressed.
She sat in a chair by the bed, watching him sleep. Occasionally he groaned and thrashed. He called her name and Chrissie’s—and sometimes Scott’s—as if he had lost them and was wandering in search of them through a dangerous and desolate place.
Bureau men in decontamination suits came for him at six o’clock, Wednesday evening, after he’d slept less than five hours. He went away for the rest of that night.
By then all the bodies, in their multitudinous biologies, had been collected from where they had fallen, tagged, sealed in plastic bags, and put into cold storage for the attention of the pathologists.
That night Tessa and Chrissie shared the same bed. Lying in the half-dark room, where a towel had been thrown over a lamp to make a night-light, the girl said, “They’re gone.”
“Who?”
“My mom and dad.”
“I think they are.”
“Dead.”
“I’m sorry, Chrissie.”
“Oh, I know. I know you are. You’re very nice.” Then for a while she cried in Tessa’s arms.
Much later, nearer sleep, she said, “You talked to Sam a little. Did he say if they figured out … about those animals last night … where they were all running to?”
“No,” Tessa said. “They haven’t got a clue yet.”
“That spooks me.”
“Me too.”
“I mean, that they haven’t got a clue.”
“I know,” Tessa said. “That’s what I mean too.”
39
By Thursday morning, teams of Bureau technicians and outside consultants from the private sector had pored through enough of the Moonhawk data in Sun to determine that the project had dealt strictly with the implantation of a nonbiological control mechanism that had resulted in profound physiological changes in the victims. No one yet had the glimmer of an idea as to how it worked, as to how the microspheres could have resulted in such radical metamorphoses, but they were certain no bacterium, virus, or other engineered organism had been involved. It was purely a matter of machines.
The Army troops, enforcing the quarantine against news-media interlopers and civilian curiosity-seekers, still had their work to do, but they were grateful to be able to strip out of their hot and clumsy decon suits. So were the hundreds of scientists and Bureau agents who were bivouacked throughout town.
Although Sam would surely be returning in the days ahead, he and Tessa and Chrissie were cleared for evacuation early Friday morning. A sympathetic court, with the counsel of a host of federal and state officials, had already granted Tessa temporary custody of the girl. The three of them said see-you-soon to Harry, not goodbye, and were lifted out by one of the Bureau’s Bell JetRanger executive helicopters.
To keep onsite researchers from having their views colored by sensationalistic and inaccurate news accounts, a media blackout was in force in Moonlight Cove, and Sam did not fully realize the impact of the Moon-hawk story until they flew over the Army roadblock near the interstate. Hundreds of press vehicles were strewn along the road and parked in fields. The pilot flew low enough for Sam to see all the cameras turned upward to shoot them as they passed over the mob.
“It’s almost as bad on the county route, north of Holliwell Road,” the chopper pilot said, “where they set up the other block. Reporters from all over the world, sleeping on the ground ’cause they don’t want to go away to some motel and wake up to find that Moonlight Cove was opened to the press while they were snoozing.”
“They don’t have to worry,” Sam said. “It’s not going to be opened to the press—or to anyone but researchers—for weeks.”
The JetRanger transported them to San Francisco International Airport, where they had reservations for three seats on a PSA flight south to Los Angeles. In the terminal, scanning the news racks, Sam read a couple of headlines:
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