Origin - Season One (21 page)

“Mister,” Ned said, now on the verge of tears, “I promise I won’t tell anyone I dropped you off here.”

“And I promise that once you’ve swallowed that, you won’t be able to. Now I’m in a hurry, so decide what you want to do.”

Ned closed his eyes, placed the capsule on his tongue and swallowed it. When nothing happened he relaxed a little and slumped back into the seat. Lester reached over, grabbed the mic to the CB radio and pulled the spiral cord out of the receiver. He opened the door and climbed out without saying a word.

– – –

As soon as the door was closed, Ned thrust the gear lever forward and crunched the third gear before pulling it back and finding first. He popped the clutch and the truck jerked forward. In the rear-view mirror he could see Lester standing at the back of the trailer looking at him. Ned pushed the clutch down again and this time found fifth instead of third. When he finally got the truck back on the road and up to fifty, he began to sob, his whole body shaking like a man in the throes of hypothermia. He reached under his seat with one trembling hand and brought out a small waist pouch. When he finally got the zipper open and looked inside, he saw the spare phone he kept in there was gone. Ned grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and began to scream, rocking back and forth in the seat.

“Son of a bitch!” he yelled. “Son of a fucking bitch! You just fucking wait till I get to a phone you cocksucker!”

When his voice finally gave out and his shouts subsided into a series of hoarse whispers, he stopped.

The blood began to drain from his head and his anger gave way to an unexplained optimism. His head felt light. For a moment he couldn’t even remember what he had been screaming about. When he looked down at the speedometer he saw the red needle bend slightly. Several of the numbers around the dial had fallen off and gathered in a pile at the bottom of the instrument panel. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the dial and the numbers were back in place. He looked back up and saw a spider the size of a Rottweiler scurrying across the highway. He tried screaming again but nothing came out. His heart stopped beating for several seconds, then it kicked back in and began to pound. Ned’s breathing grew heavier and his body began to tingle as if he had pins and needles in every limb. Then voices began speaking in his head in what was either a foreign language he had never heard, or no language at all.

The vague idea that he needed to stop the truck was overshadowed by the sudden powerful certainty that he was either Jesus Christ or God himself, and the idea actually made him laugh, although what escaped his mouth was little more than a series of rasping croaks. His final vision was of a tall wooden cross standing in the middle of the road in front of him.

It was burning.

The truck breasted the top of a gentle slope and began to speed up under its own weight. When it reached seventy-five, Ned suddenly sat up and opened his eyes. In the dim light of the cab, they looked like the milky blind eyes of some deep-sea monstrosity. The man that no longer looked quite like Ned fumbled at the wheel, turning it sharply to the left. The big truck crossed the central divide before tipping over onto its side, sending a bright shower of sparks flying in all directions.

The cab hit the guardrail and came to a sudden stop, half the trailer still blocking both eastbound lanes. Ned was projected through the windshield like a rag doll into a field of timothy grass. Where his right arm had been, there was only a short stump of shredded flesh. One side of his chest looked like it had been crushed in a vise. He showed no sign of being in pain, but was actually smiling like a lunatic reflecting on some particularly pleasant memory. He turned his head up to the sky and began to speak, the words distorted by a steady stream of blood running from his mouth.

“I am the light of the world,” he said, then his heart stopped beating and he collapsed face-first into the grass.

– – –

Several miles away Lester had turned his attention to the verge along the road and found what he was looking for. The tracks were unmistakable. He recognized the smaller footprints of the girl and the wavy tread pattern of her shoes. They had crossed the corner of the field and made their way along Highway 55 towards the Saint Lawrence and the city of Three Rivers.

Lester followed.

After less than a mile the tracks stopped. At the edge of the road a single tire track formed a narrow semicircle in the dirt. Lester studied the tread patterns for a moment before heading on. Five minutes later he heard sirens coming from up ahead and moved off the road. Three police cars and an ambulance flew past, heading back towards the junction. When they were out of sight he returned to the road and resumed his walk.

He reached the river and crossed the bridge shortly after ten and carried on along Highway 55. An hour later, he stopped. The tire track was less clear here, but the tracks of the three people who had gotten out of the vehicle were not. Lester mused at the stupidity of the man. He might be dangerous, but he was also careless.

They had carried on up the road for another mile and stopped outside a ranger station.

He surveyed the site. The gate was locked and there didn’t appear to be anyone inside the small office building in the corner of the compound. Lester walked along the outside of the perimeter fence until he was shielded from the road by a truck, then scaled the fence and walked to the building. Neither of the two windows along the back wall was barred. He studied the one nearest to him and when he was satisfied the building did not have an alarm system, he picked up a stone and shattered the glass.

He found himself standing in a large white-tiled bathroom with two toilet cubicles on one end and a row of sinks and a single shower unit at the other. The first room he came to was a small lounge with a tattered couch along one wall and a flimsy table with a coffee machine piled high with old magazines.

The second door had a brass plaque on it with the word
Administrateur
etched in cursive letters. It was locked. He stepped back and kicked it. The bolt held, but both hinges broke and the door went flying into the room. There was a row of three filing cabinets standing against the far wall next to a large window that looked out onto the yard. Above these there were a number of framed pictures, each showing the smiling face of a man in the same uniform with a brass name-plaque underneath. He turned to the filing cabinets and surveyed the labels on the drawers, then opened the one marked
Registre de voyages
and pulled out the notebook tucked in front of the files. It showed a list of entries for trips made by the station’s vehicles, including dates, destination and mileage. There was only one entry for Wednesday July 19. The destination listed was the ranger station at Lisotte and the name of the person making the trip was Valerie Tremblay. The round trip distance was listed as 547 kilometers.

Lester took out his phone and called his brother.

“Have you found them?” Eugene asked.

“No,” Lester said. “But I’m close. They came through the city of Three Rivers yesterday. It looks like they were taken on from here by a local park ranger.”

“Do you need him located?”

Lester moved over to the desk, picked up the Rolodex and flipped to the T’s.

“I need a call made in French from the Three Rivers police to this number requesting he come to the ranger station at once. Tell him there’s been a burglary. The name is Valerie Tremblay.”

Lester gave him the phone number.

“Give me a minute,” Eugene said and hung up.

Lester moved to the pictures on the wall. Valerie’s was the first in the row. He studied the man’s face, then sat down at the desk and waited. Two minutes later his phone rang.

“The call’s been made. He’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Lester looked though the drawers of the desk until he found a set of keys. He unlocked the gate to the compound, returned to the office and found a road map of Quebec Province on the bookshelf behind the desk.

It took Valerie fifteen minutes. He was driving an old Saab that now looked more matte pink than red. He drove through the gate and skidded to a stop only five or six feet from the door to the office. Before Valerie could get out, Lester emerged from the building and rounded the front of the car.

Valerie lowered his window. He was about to say something when Lester reached in, put one hand behind his head and slammed his face into the steering wheel, breaking his nose. Lester kicked him into the passenger’s seat then drove out of the gate and got out to close it again.

When he got back in the car, Valerie had come around enough to be fumbling for something inside the glove compartment. Lester reached past him and pulled out a black semi-automatic Colt 45. He pushed Valerie’s head down onto the dashboard, brought the butt of the pistol down on the back of his neck and Valerie went limp.

– – –

An hour later, they reached a bridge across the Saint Maurice River. Lester left the road and crossed it, then turned off onto the first road they came to on the other side. It was a dirt track that looped around and ended on the edge of a small clearing on the bank. Valerie was still unconscious. Lester reached over and slapped his face twice. Valerie stirred. When he opened his eyes and saw Lester, he pushed himself up against the door.

“Vous etes qui?” Valerie asked.

“Never mind,” Lester said.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”

“You drove three people up this road yesterday. Where did you take them?”

The reaction was subtle, but Lester saw it as clearly as if the man had come right out and said it. Valerie shook his head and said, “Not me.”

Lester produced the map. “Show me where you took them.”

Valerie shook his head again. Lester picked up the gun in his lap and, without so much as an expression of warning, put a bullet in Valerie’s right thigh. Valerie screamed and pushed himself harder against the door.

“Where did you take them?” Lester asked again. He sounded calm and perfectly reasonable, as if he thought Valerie might not have heard him the first time.

“Fuck you!” Valerie said through clenched teeth and Lester shot him in the other leg. This time Valerie shouted several profanities in French and closed his eyes. Lester lowered the barrel of the gun until it was pointed at Valerie’s right kneecap. The man’s face changed, defiance giving way to terror in a single blink of the eye. Lester pulled the trigger. The top half of Valerie’s knee exploded in a shower of red meat and bone. Somehow he managed to stay conscious. He was crying and praying in both English and French. His pleas came in gasping spasms between sobs that sounded more like the howls of some wild animal. Lester moved the barrel to the other knee.

“Where did you take them?” he repeated.

In the end it was the calm, not the gun or the pain, that broke him. Valerie would never have believed that a man could be this violent and stay so serene. Through the fog of agony he considered his friend, whose name was almost certainly not Maurice, and how he might fare when this monster caught up with him. He didn’t know who Maurice was – had never asked – but he knew the man could be dangerous. But he had also concluded long ago that Maurice was a good person doing good things. The kind of things, he had suspected, that couldn’t be done in the light of day by people in official positions. The fact that this creature was after him seemed to vindicate that belief. He thanked God that he didn’t know more than he did, because something told him the man in the seat next to him couldn’t be lied to.

“Lake Commissaires,” he said and pointed to the lake on the map.

“Where exactly?”

Valerie tried to focus on the map through his watering eyes and placed a finger on the shoreline where he had dropped them off.

“Good. Where were they going?”

Valerie shook his head and Lester confirmed his suspicions by not pursuing the matter. Instead he raised the barrel of the pistol to Valerie’s abdomen.

“Consider yourself among the lucky,” Lester said.

Valerie had no idea what he was talking about and he didn’t care. He heaved in a final breath and spat a mouthful of blood into Lester’s face. “Go to hell!”

For the first time in his adult life, Lester felt the iron grip on his emotions falter. The man was smiling at him through bloody red lips. And he was laughing. Lester raised the gun to Valerie’s face and emptied the entire magazine into it. Valerie’s features disappeared one at a time in a spray of blood, tissue, bone and gray matter. The window behind him shattered. Lester reached over, opened the door and kicked the body out onto the ground. He climbed across the seat and out of the car and began kicking the corpse until he was panting with effort. He stood over the body, his chest heaving, and looked up at the cloudless sky. Behind the rage, something unfamiliar was shining through a thin crack in his mind. A saner man would have known it for what it was; fear.

Lester looked at the gun in his hand and dropped it, as if the gun itself had been the source of his rage. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that the man lying at his feet had somehow infected him. It was the taste of Valerie’s blood on his own tongue that had set him off. Was it not then possible that something in that bitter metallic substance was now spreading inside him? The very thought of it threatened to send him into another fit.

When he felt a little calmer, Lester dragged the body to the back of the car and piled it into the trunk. He got back in and used a strip of oily cloth he found in the glove compartment to wipe the blood from his own face, then picked up the map and pierced it with his finger at the point Valerie had shown him.

Houston, Texas

Thursday 20 July 2006

0900 CDT

Mitch came around for the third time at nine o’clock on the day following his arrest. The first time he woke he had been in the back of a car. That memory was vague. He thought it had been at night, although he couldn’t be sure. The car had been moving fast and the motion had made him want to keel over and vomit again. When the car finally stopped, someone – he thought it had been the driver – had stuck something sharp into his leg and the lights had gone out again.