The Heavens Rise (28 page)

According to her journal, Nikki and Marshall had been in the water together only a few minutes, so that was all it took, right? Just a few minutes was all he needed. But Ben held himself below the surface, just as he used to do when he and Nikki were kids and they would compete to find out who could hold their breath the longest. It was fear that kept
him from surfacing, but not fear over what he’d done. Too much of the world had been cracked open during the past few hours for him to be seized by such a childish and reflexive instinct. No, he was simply afraid that if he surfaced too quickly, the little bastards wouldn’t have enough time to work their magic.

But then he heard the sound of Nikki sobbing, as familiar to him as if they’d never been separated; the same raw, chesty sobs she’d let loose when choir practice was interrupted and she was told that her grandmother had died. When he broke the surface, gasping for air, feeling wet clumps of the little fuckers sliding down his cheeks and up his nostrils—not sliding,
crawling
—she was cradling her father’s corpse in her arms. It looked like she was preparing to flip Noah’s body into the tank. But that wasn’t it; she was just desperate to hold him, but she didn’t want to cradle his gunshot-blasted head on her lap, so she’d slid her arms underneath his lower back, despite the awkwardness of the pose.

Then she saw Ben, floating several feet away, with only his head above the surface. He braced himself for judgment of some kind, but instead, he saw a flash of recognition in her eyes that stalled her violent tears. She was scanning the rippling surface of the tank. The tendrils of Elysium parasite had formed a starburst pattern around his head.

“I knew you would do this.” Her voice was choked. “The minute you knew about it, I knew you would do something like this . . . I knew you would want to save the world with it. So I tried to keep it a secret and do my best to save
you
.” She was fighting tears again. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? After the life I’ve lived . . . I’m still so afraid for everyone else. And that’s the worst part. You can’t use it on the people you love, not even to make them save themselves. It’s just too dangerous. You can’t. You just can’t . . .”

Ben hoisted himself from the tank, did his best to ignore the sensation of a thousand microorganisms sliding down his slick flesh as he made his way to her. Without moving from where she sat, he yanked on her father’s body suddenly, until his head was resting on her lap. His face was unharmed and she avoided touching the back of his skull. Instead, she
ran her fingers gently down the bridge of his nose, and Ben wondered if she was trying to draw solace from the fact that Noah’s death wouldn’t be marked by the same hideous transformation as the loss of her mother.

“He was dying,” Ben finally said, and he was amazed, a little disappointed, to find that his voice sounded exactly the same. “The thing he turned Jeffrey Cross into, it attacked him. His wounds were infected and he was . . . he was dying, Nikki.”

“If only it had been the fountain of youth,” she whispered.

Because there was nothing else he could think of to do, he sank down behind her and wrapped his arms around her chest, and in her ear he whispered, “I missed you. I missed you so much.” His words felt pathetic and inadequate. He closed his eyes to see if they would resonate, for him, at least. And they did, a little. Nikki shook with more sobs. He gently pulled her to her feet, then he took her hands in his. As her sobs continued, he placed his forehead against hers because he could think of nothing else to do but say her name over and over again.

He was trying for a speech, a strategy, a pitch. But all he kept seeing over and over again was Anthem’s apartment building blowing sky high like the redbrick house in Beau Chêne. All he could see was Marissa, possessed, drained of herself, dragging him into that boat propeller. And all his grand plans and clever words kept collapsing in on themselves. There was a great freedom in all of this somewhere, a clarity that would push the shadows from the path ahead.

“It’s Marshall, isn’t it?” Nikki finally whispered. “He woke up.”

“Yes . . .”

She nodded, but she was struggling for breath. Then she took his hand and they started to run.

•   •   •

Ben was astonished that Nikki owned a cell phone and a car. After what he’d just been through, he would have been less surprised to learn she’d spent the last eight years sleeping under bridges and darting between
rooftops courtesy of dragonfly wings. But instead she’d been making cell phone calls on the shiny iPhone she passed to him as soon as he asked for it, and gliding along highways in the sleek black SUV that sat parked on the other side of the ruined chain-link fence enclosing most the property. The Keep Out signs along the fence now looked as mold-bruised and weathered as the once welcoming signs for the old zoo, and the SUV’s silver grille glinted in the bouncing beam from Nikki’s Maglite.

He’d managed to call Anthem’s cell twice by the time they reached Nikki’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. Straight to voice mail each time. He couldn’t tell if the twisting deep in his gut was just fear, or the first bloom of his immersion’s side effects.

Once he’d braced himself against the Jeep, he looked back on the warren of shadows they’d just escaped from. It was the first time he’d seen the place in its entirety, given that he’d been driven through it in a series of forced blackouts. The building they’d just fled was one of several dilapidated one-story exhibit halls that made a semicircle around a courtyard of cracked concrete. The dry fountain at its center sported a giant statue of an alligator dressed up in some sort of festive, plumed hat, its forelegs lengthened into arms that opened to welcome the dark.

“You’re going to get sick soon,” Nikki said. It was her explanation for shoving him into the backseat, and he didn’t fight her, just curled up onto the leather and screwed his eyes shut as the Jeep’s engine revved beneath him and gravel and twigs spat out from underneath the tires.

“How long?”

“We’re a half hour from New Orleans.”

“How long will I be
sick,
I meant.”

“Ben, I don’t know. It’s been eight years. I wasn’t in the habit of infecting people.”

“How bad?”

“Like the flu, I guess. I mean, you won’t be incapacitated but it’s not going be pretty and you’re gonna want a bathroom . . .” She fell
suddenly and abruptly silent, and when he rolled over onto one side, he saw she was struggling to keep her eyes on the road, the sobs threatening to take control of her again. “I wouldn’t have stopped you, for Christ’s sake. I would have
let
you make a decision. He didn’t have do that. He didn’t have to—”

“He would have done it anyway. He was planning to do it from the moment he brought me there. Some people are dying, and some people are done. He was done. That’s what he said to me, Nick.”

“I could have stopped him.” In the faint green glow from the dashboard lights, he could see she was focused on the rutted road. “I could have stopped him from going after Jeffrey Cross. He had a
list,
Ben. Did he tell you about that part? We were in Bangkok—”

“He showed me the pictures.”

“I found a list in his lab. A list of people who’d loved my mother as much as he had. That’s why I left him. We’d been experimenting on psychopaths and he wanted us to come home and switch to his
old friends
.”

She was ramping up again, and he was afraid hysteria was about to replace her grief. Chills rippled through his body, and he felt a twisting in his stomach that was resonating down into his bowels. But he reached for her through the shadows anyway, over the gearshift, until his hand came to rest on her right thigh. When he spoke his tongue felt thick.

“Do you remember what you said to me that day on the fly?” Ben said. “We went there after school, just the two of us, and it was a beautiful day. I think it was January but it wasn’t too cold and the sky was clear and the river was so high we could practically put our feet in the water. And there was soccer practice going on behind us. Do you remember?”

She was silent, both hands planted on the steering wheel. The road went smooth beneath the tires suddenly and headlights flared over Nikki’s face. They were on open freeway now.

“You told me no matter who I turned out to be, you would always accept me. You would always love me. Do you remember that day?”

“Of course I remember,” she whispered. “And then I left you.”

“You left me with that day. That beautiful, perfect day. And you left me with your kindness and your respect. Those things didn’t leave me when you did. They never will. And I’m offering you the same things in return. Always. Always, Nick.”

She reached down and took his hand and hers, and brought them to her chest.

“But Nikki . . .”

“Yes?”

“We have to kill Marshall Ferriot.”

She brought his hand to her mouth, kissed his fingers gently, and for a few seconds, Ben thought this was the only response he was going to get out of her, then she said, “I know.”

NEW ORLEANS

I
t was like being atop a floating skyscraper. The borders between river and dry land were hard to discern because the lights of the container and chemical ships passing them on either side appeared briefly as dense as the lights on shore.

After two hours on the bridge, Marshall had managed to commit a map of his surroundings to memory. Exit doors on both sides led to wide exterior staircases that zigzagged several stories down to the main deck. A long bank of radar consoles, a map table and the wheel, which was currently being manned by a tiny Southeast Asian quartermaster, took up the center of the room. Every few minutes Anthem would call out a new direction—
Port 10, Midships, Starboard 10
—and the quartermaster would repeat it in a chirpy, heavily accented voice that suggested these nautical terms might be the only English words he knew.

Just behind the ship’s glowing, flickering nerve center, a pull curtain
hid a messy navigation area that contained a battered gooseneck lamp and two computers that looked older than any of the three men currently on the bridge. Both computers were off, and a nicotine-stained dot-matrix printer was attached to each one. Right behind this cluttered area, the ship’s main interior staircase entered the bridge. Next to this entrance, the door to the small bathroom drifted and swayed with the giant ship’s almost imperceptible motions.

In front of the wheel, radar screens and empty pilot’s chair, there was enough walk-through space for Anthem Landry to stand and devour a plate of hamburger patties and sliced potatoes brought to him by the ship’s cook. His view of the river wasn’t perfect. Four giant cranes lined the ship’s hull, perpendicular to the bridge, and Marshall figured the long, swaying hooks and chains attached to each one were used to open the grain containers that filled the ship’s hull.

There was enough room at the long counter lining the windows for Marshall to sidle up to him, but he chose to stay back. No video cameras were visible; he didn’t even see any protrusion in the ceiling. But there was no telling where they might be hidden. Best to hang back and play as small a role as he could, just in case the whole thing ended up on film. “You okay?” Marshall said.

Anthem nodded. His eyes were saucer wide in the glow from the brightly lit cranes outside. But his mood seemed morose, distant. It was just the two of them on deck with the quartermaster now. The jovial Greek captain had disappeared after introducing himself when they first came aboard. The chief mate had poked his head in a few times, but it was clear they were all resting up before they took to the Gulf of Mexico on their own.

“You bored?” Anthem asked.

“Nah uh,” Marshall answered.

“Should be about another half hour before we reach the base of Canal Street. Then we’ll hand off to the next pilot at Chalmette. You sure you don’t want coffee or anything?”

“I’m good.”

“Thank you. For coming. I appreciate it.”

“It’s good. It’s all good.”

“It’s funny. When it’s light out, we’ve got pigeons all over the hull, eating at the grain. Dancing around like they’re all hopped up on crack.”

“What do you do? Chase ’em off with a broomstick?”

Without a smile, Anthem said, “You heard about Deepwater Horizon, right? I mean, you were probably still . . .”

“The big oil spill. Yeah. I read about it.”

“Friend of mine worked with the cleanup efforts out in the Gulf. He said they used these big booms to corral all the oil and then they’d light it up to burn it off. Most times they did it, they’d have birds and turtles and stuff caught in the oil. But they didn’t give a shit. They’d light ’em all up anyway. Sometimes I can’t get it out of my head, that’s all.”

“Can’t get what out of your head?”

“The thought of those birds trying to take to the sky, oil all over their wings, flames racing after them, taking ’em down just when they got airborne. Sometimes I close my eyes, and they’re all I see.”

“Never thought you’d turn out to be some animal rights guy, Landry.”

Anthem managed a weak smile, but his eyes were still locked on the hull below, like he was seeing the dancing, grain-drunk pigeons that typically flocked there when the sun was out.

“Sometimes I just wonder if there’s always gonna be a price for living here,” Anthem whispered. “That’s all.”

“There’s a price for living anywhere, isn’t there?”

“True. But it’s getting steeper here.”

Marshall said, “I’m gonna take a leak.”

“Don’t fall in.”

Once he was behind the pull curtain in the messy navigation area, Marshall removed the pistol he’d been carrying in the back of his jeans and tucked it in between one of the ancient computers and its accompanying printer. He made sure the barrel pointed toward the wall, and
the handle was extending slightly out from the edge of the shelf, as poised and ready for action as a ripcord.

Everything had fallen into place and nothing else mattered. So what if Anthem’s soul burned more brightly than the others? Marshall knew he could get his hooks into the man—he’d already done it once that night—and now that all the pieces had fallen into place, that was all that mattered. Because if things kept going as well as they’d gone for the past few hours, he would only need to drive Anthem for a short time to bring about a perfect ending for a not-so-perfect hero.