abutment.
There wasn’t any mechanical failure. The accelerator didn’t stick.
That was all a cover story we concocted.”
“You lying son of a bitch.”
Slowly, slowly, Stevenson licked his lips, as if he found his smile to
be sweet. “No lie, Snow. And You know what? If I’d known two years
ago what was going to happen to me, how much everything was going to
change, I’d have killed your old lady myself. Killed her because of
the part she played in this. I’d have taken her somewhere, cut her
heart out, filled the hole in her chest with salt, burned her at a
stake-whatever You do to make sure a witch is dead. Because what
difference is there between what she did and a witch’s curse? Science
or magic? What’s it matter when the result is the same? But I didn’t
know what was coming then, and she did, so she saved me the trouble and
took a high-speed header into eighteen-inch-thick concrete.”
Oily nausea welled in me, because I could hear the truth in his voice
as clearly as I had ever heard it spoken. I understood only a fraction
of what he was saying, yet I understood too much.
He said, “You’ve got nothing to avenge, freak. No one killed your
folks. In fact, one way You look at it, your old lady did them
both-herself and your old man.”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at him, not merely because
he took pleasure in the fact of my mother’s death but because he
clearly believed-with reason?-that there had been justice in it.
“Now what I want You to do is crawl back under your rock and stay
there, live the rest of your days there. We won’t allow You to blow
this wide open. If the world finds out what’s happened here, if the
knowledge goes beyond those at Wyvern and us, outsiders will in& L
quarantine the whole county. They’ll seal it off, kill every last one
of us, burn every building to the ground, poison every bird and every
coyote and every house cat-and then probably nuke the place a few times
for good measure. And that would all be for nothing, anyway, because
the plague has already spread far beyond this place, to the other end
of the continent and beyond. We’re the original source, and the
effects are more obvious here and compounding faster, but now it’ll go
on spreading without us. So none of us are ready to die just so the
scum-sucking politicians can claim to have taken action.”
When I opened my eyes, I discovered that he’d raised his pistol and was
covering me with it. The muzzle was less than two feet from my face.
Now my only advantage was that he didn’t know I was armed, and it was a
useful advantage only if I was the first to pull the trigger.
Although I knew it was fruitless, I tried to argue with himperhaps
because arguing was the only way that I could distract myself from what
he had revealed about my mother. “Listen, for God’s sake, only a few
minutes ago, You said You had nothing to live for, anyway. Whatever’s
happened here, maybe if we get help-” “I was in a mood,” he interrupted
sharply. “Weren’t You listening to me, freak? I told You I was in a
mood. A seriously ugly mood.
But now I’m a different mood. A better mood. I’m in the mood to be
all that I can be, to embrace what I’m becoming instead of trying to
resist it. Change little buddy. That’s what it’s all about, You
know.
Change
, glorious change, everything changing, always and forever, change.
This new world coming–it’s going to be dazzling.
“But we can’t-” “If You did solve your mystery and tell the world,
You’d just be signing your death warrant. You’d be killin’ your sexy
deejay bitch and all your friends. Now get out of the car, get on your
bike, and haul your skinny ass home. Bury whatever ashes Sandy Kirk
chooses to give You.
Then if You can’t live with not knowing more, if You maybe picked up
too much curiosity from a cat bite, go down to the beach for a few days