mountainside angled again. “By the time my tour of duty ended, I’d
answered none of those questions to my satisfaction.
.
. and so I volunteered for another tour.”
“You stayed in Nam when you could have gone home?” she asked, startled.
“Even though you had such terrible doubts?”
“I had to work it out,” he said. “I just had to. I mean, I’d killed
people, a lot of people, in what I thought was ajust cause, and I had to
know whether I’d been right or wrong. I couldn’t walk away, put it out
of my mind, get on with my life, and just forget about it. Hell, no. I
had to work it out, decide if I was a good man or a killer, and then
figure what accommodation I could reach with life, with my own
conscience. And there was no better place to work it out, to analyze
the problem, than right there in the middle of it. Besides, to
understand why I stayed on for a second tour, you’ve got to understand
me, the me that existed then, very young, idealistic, with patriotism as
much a part of me as the color of my eyes. I loved my country, believed
in my country, totally believed, and I couldn’t just shed that belief
like . . . well, like a snake sheds skin.”
They passed a road sign that said they were sixteen miles from Running
Springs and twenty-three miles from Lake Arrowhead.
Rachael said, “So you stayed in Nam another whole year?”
He sighed wearily. “As it turned out. .. two years.”
In his cabin high above Lake Arrowhead, for a time that he could not
measure, Eric Leben drifted in a peculiar twilight state, neither awake
nor asleep, neither alive nor dead, while his genetically altered cells
increased production of enzymes, proteins, and other substances that
would contribute to the healing process. Brief dark dreams and
unassociated nightmare images flickered through his mind, like hideous
shadows leaping in the bloody light of tallow candles.
When at last he rose from his trancelike condition, full of energy
again, he was acutely aware that he had to arm himself and be prepared
for action. His mind was still not entirely clear, his memory
threadbare in places, so he did not know exactly who might be coming
after him, but instinct told him that he was being stalked.
Sure as hell, someone’ll find this place through Sarah Kiel, he told
himself.
That thought jolted him because he could not remember who Sarah Kiel
was. He stood with one hand on a kitchen counter, swaying, straining to
recall the face and identity that went with that name.
Sarah …….
Suddenly he remembered, and he cursed himself for having brought the
damn girl here. The cabin was supposed to be his secret retreat. He
should never have told anyone. One of his problems was that he needed
young women in order to feel young himself, and he always tried to
impress them. Sarah had been impressed by the five-room cabin,
outfitted as it was with all conveniences, the acres of private woods,
and the spectacular view of the lake far below. They’d had good sex
outside, on a blanket, under the boughs of an enormous pine, and he had
felt wonderfully young. But now Sarah knew about his secret retreat,
and through her others-the stalkers whose identities he could not quite
fix upon-might learn of the place and come after him.
With new urgency, Eric pushed away from the counter and headed toward
the door that opened from the kitchen into the garage. He moved less
stiffly than before, with more energy, and his eyes were less both&d by
bright light, and no phantom uncles or insects crept out of the corners
to frighten him, the period of coma had apparently done him some good.
But when he put his hand on the doorknob, he stopped, jolted by another
thought, Sarah can’t tell anyone about this place because Sarah is dead,
I killed her only a few hours ago…
A wave of horror washed over Eric, and he held fast to the doorknob as
if to anchor himself and prevent the wave from sweeping him away into