Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense (38 page)

Come death, American.

Inside.

The first thing to hit him was the smell, which hadn’t seemed nearly so powerful when he’d been inside the hangar earlier. Jonas had never been inside a slaughterhouse, but he imagined this was exactly what it would smell like.

A sweet tanginess mixed with the smell of blood and shit. Fresh infection. Disease.

The hangar was a tomb. Dark. Suffocating. Hot like a panting dog’s breath.

Jonas’s mind focused further as the adrenaline, what he had left of it, spiked his blood like heroin. He could no longer see anything in his peripheral vision, and he only vaguely heard the shouts around him.

Get the ladder! Get the ladder!

No response here. We need to get him down. Sweet God, I’ve got an ear on the floor over here.

His mind told him that the emergency crews were doing what they were supposed to. They were trying to save Sidams and Stages, both of whom Jonas knew—he just fucking
knew
—were already dead. The rescue crews would be grabbing ladders and trying to figure out how to get the bodies down. Some of the police were probably already headed back outside, securing the scene, calling in for back up to fend off the reporters that would inevitably digest the scene.

Jonas only knew this in his mind, because the logic of those actions somehow found a way to enter his thoughts, but only in the distance. Intangible like a dream.

His actual attention was focused on the middle of the room, where a powerful overhead light shot down on the figure of a cross. The beam was perfectly centered on the two pieces of wood, capturing the ends of the each wooden arm and everything in-between, leaving whatever fell outside the immediacy of the cross in darkness.

Not a single rescue worker paid attention to this cross. No one seemed to be concerned with it in the least.

As Jonas stared at the cross, he knew why. But his brain wouldn’t let him believe it.

The cross was empty.

WASHINGTON D.C. SEPTEMBER 4

JONAS KEYED
in the code to the second set of doors and entered Jefferson’s north unit, holding the door for Anne as she followed. He checked his father’s room but he wasn’t there. He turned to leave the room just as Monique was coming in, a blanket folded against her chest.

“Mr. Osbourne, I thought that was you.” She reached out and touched his arm. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Monique. Good to see you.”

“I haven’t seen you in awhile.”

“I’ve had a rough month.”

A slight twinkle in her eyes. “I know,” she said, her accent softening her words. “I watch the news.”

“Yes, of course. Oh.” Jonas turned to Anne. “Monique, this is Anne. My...girlfriend.”

Anne smiled and Monique nodded at her. “You must be someone special if Jonas is sharing his father with you. He’s never brought anyone else here before. He’s a private man, this one.”

Jonas felt himself blush. He willed it to go away, but he knew it was only making it worse.

“How is he?” Jonas asked.

“He is very well,” Monique said. “Ate most of his breakfast today. He’s in the community room.”

“Thanks, Monique.”

Monique stood to one side and let Jonas and Anne pass. They made their way down the sterile linoleum hallway, passing door after door of empty rooms. The community room was at the end of the hallway, next to the nurse’s station.

Jonas heard the commotion well before turning into the room.

The community room wasn’t big—just big enough to hold a few tables with six chairs each, a television, and a closet that held a variety of games and puzzles. It always reminded Jonas of an elementary school classroom, and this was where the residents of the north unit gathered, usually at the request of others, to share in the effects of their commonality and wait for things to finally end. Group therapy.

The television blared an early afternoon baseball game, the only one watching a male nurse. Several residents in wheelchairs moved back and forth with no discernable purpose, looking like battery-powered toys stuck in the corner of a room. Linda, the shrieker, belted out a horrifying series of expletives at Tom, a resident Jonas had never seen move. Three others were getting ice cream from a nurse, while a fourth decided to drop his onto the floor and roll back and forth over it, a wide grin on his face. Jonas scanned the fray for his father, whom he found sitting next to Bennie, both of them silently gazing out the window in the far corner of the room, watching the world go by without them.

Jonas grabbed Anne’s hand and pulled her through the room, deftly maneuvering through the chaos. Linda ceased her tirade on poor Tom and focused her attention on Anne long enough to accuse her of stealing her husband.

“She’s about to call you a whore,” Jonas said, looking back at Anne. “Don’t take it personally.”

As Jonas pulled Anne past the woman, Linda screeched out with venom.

“
Whore!
”

Jonas found it almost funny enough to smile, until he looked at Anne’s face. It was the face of someone not familiar with the demented mind, not yet hardened by the constant exposure to it. It was the face of someone who wondered what these people were like ten, fifteen years ago, when they were full of life and awareness, unable to see the dark and living tomb that awaited each of them.

“It’s okay,” he said to her. “We can wheel him outside for our visit. More peace and quiet.”

“I’m...I’m fine,” she said. “Really, it’s okay.”

They reached the Captain and Jonas put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. The Captain didn’t look up. He just stared straight ahead.

Bennie looked up and smiled. “Oh, my,” she said. “I know you.”

“Hi, Bennie.”

Jonas kneeled in front of his dad, and, after a second, the Captain’s bright blue eyes shifted, and he looked directly at Jonas. For a moment, his eyes widened and his lips twitched, threatening a smile.

He knows me, Jonas thought.

So much can happen in a month. Jonas was happy his father still knew who he was.

“Hi, Dad.”

The Captain’s gaze went back to the window, and he started to hum.

“Dad, this is Anne.”

Anne stepped closer. She reached for the Captain’s hand and picked it up. She didn’t shake it but she stroked the back of it for a moment before putting it back down. “It’s really a pleasure to meet you.”

The Captain didn’t look up. Bennie looked Anne up and down approvingly. “Oh, my,” she said.

“Sorry I haven’t been around, Dad.” Jonas straightened the collar on the Captain’s polo shirt. “I’ve been busy.”

“Too busy to see your own father?” Bennie tsk-tsked. “Yes, Bennie. Even too busy for that. It’s quite a story.” Bennie smiled. “I like stories. Tell it to us.”

Jonas looked at her, studying the wrinkles around her eyes, the wisps of eyebrows, the hair still struggling to be well kept.

“It’s not a happy story, Bennie.”

“Are they ever?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s okay. Any story would be good. Please sit down and tell it to us.”

Jonas thought about it for a few seconds. “Okay, Bennie. I will.”

As Jonas and Anne took seats next to the Captain and Bennie, the male nurse who’d been watching baseball came over.

“You’re the man,” he said to Jonas. “From the news.” Jonas nodded. “Yes.”

“This is your father?”

“Yes. He is.”

“I had no idea.”

“Why would you?”

The man didn’t seem to know what to say next, so he stood there and watched Jonas instead of baseball. Jonas wanted to ask him for privacy, then decided against it. What the hell, he thought. He can listen, too.

Then he spoke. Quietly at first, as if sharing a secret. But then louder, drawing more attention to himself.

He gave them the detailed first-hand account so many news stations clamored for but never got. In this place, this world of the forgotten, Jonas never held back. He started from the beginning, from the moment he met Rudiger Sonman, a muscular, scarred youth patrolling the dirt-covered streets of Mogadishu. He decided to tell everything, even more than he thought he’d told Anne. Of all the death. The blood of innocents. The head of a baby and the ear of a girl. Of a woman who died because she recognized her brother. Of people nailed to crosses because a man thought he heard God tell him to do it. And of the horror of that day in Denver.

As he spoke, the walls seemed to dissolve around him, and he realized he wasn’t telling a story, but he was convincing himself all those things were
real
. That they had actually happened, and the things he saw would be with him the rest of his life. There would be no suppressing of the images this time. They were a part of him, and that was how it was going to be.

Bennie nodded every few seconds, smiling politely despite the graphic horror Jonas described. The Captain kept his gaze fixed out the window, his humming growing louder occasionally before finally ceasing altogether. The male nurse—his name tag said
Roger
—listened intently, his hands folded in front of him. At one point Monique came over to tell Roger to get back to work, but she too stopped to listen and soon took a chair near Jonas.

Others came, some drifted in and out of the periphery, but many stayed, Jonas realized he was holding court for the north unit, residents and workers alike, and they sat intently and listened as Jonas told of his time in the airplane hangar, and what he had to do to find Anne. He spoke of the horrible deaths of Senator Sidams and Ambassador Stages, whose brutal demises may have, ironically, contributed to the perceived success of the Peace Accords.

Jonas finally finished his story.

The only thing he didn’t mention was how Rudiger was not on his cross when they returned to the hangar, nor had any trace of him been found since that day. He didn’t know why he didn’t include that part. Maybe because he was still trying to believe it himself.

He looked about the room and he realized it was the most silent he had ever heard it. They were gathered around him, school children at a macabre story hour, their eyes pleading for more. All except the Captain, who kept staring out the window, as if something he’d been waiting for his whole life was just over the horizon.

Jonas noticed an old black man staring in his direction. It was the resident from his last visit. The one who told Jonas the North Wing was a
bad place
. The one who told him
I don’t know where I am.
Jonas smiled at him, but the man was somewhere distant, a place smiles don’t reach.

Then the Captain mumbled, and Jonas went back on one knee in front of him.

“What did you say, Dad?”

And the Captain grinned, the kind of grin that merely replaced thought and function, a reaction of inability. Lips twisted, face twitching, the Captain came alive, aware, present for a moment, if only to speak a handful of words. But they were words, real words, and Jonas heard them even if no one else did. Heard them and understood them, the first words his dad had spoken in clarity in over a year.

“You are my son.”

Once spoken, he repeated it, the second time with more strain, as if the words themselves were struggling to find light after traveling from deep within him. Then the Captain’s face softened and his gaze resumed its posting at the window. Jonas watched his father drift back into the other world, the one where he now lived, a soft hum slowly building from his chest and coming through trembling lips, the wheezy tune rising and falling, creaking like a ghost ship
adrift on a forgotten sea.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many read a book by a new author and assume it’s the first book that person’s ever written. In a few rare cases that’s true. Most times, not. So the road to publishing a first novel often has years of struggle and discarded manuscripts behind it. Write. Rewrite. Collect rejections. Repeat.

Book after book.

All the while, the author depends on a vast support system, so you can understand those lucky enough to see their work in print for the first time have much credit to give. Starting with you, the reader, without whom stories cease to exist. Thank you for letting me tell you a story. I hope I didn’t disappoint.

Huge and warm thanks to my agent Pam Ahearn, who has the patience of Job. You guided me into becoming a stronger writer without telling me what to do. You didn’t give up on me when you easily could have, and I will never be able to properly express how much that means to me. Thank you to Joe Pittman and the fine people at Vantage Point Books, a scrappy new imprint who took a chance on me. Here’s hoping I bring success to you, and you to me. To

my friends at Old Possum: Ed, Linda, Dirk, Sean and John. You told me what was good and what sucked, and you were right almost all the time. To Jessica, who not only is my rock and has supported me through this process on so many levels but read everything with a wonderfully delicate eye for detail. To Sole, who makes me happy when she says she’s proud of me, and to my beautiful children Ili and Sawyer, who tell their friends their daddy is a writer. To my mom, sister, and the rest of my family, who read every word and supported it all, even the gnarly bits.