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Merwin took his and drank, easily holding the boat on its station with slight turns of the wheel and little thrusts of the engines.
“I’m seventy-four years old,” he said, and shrugged again, this time like he was trying to get that fact to roll off his shoulders. “I was drafted into Vietnam. Way before your time, but it was a nasty war, that one.”
“I guess wars usually are.”
He smiled and laughed a little. “Yes, they are, generally. Well, there was this kid, just been bumped to corporal on account of the regular corporal was dead. Nice enough fellow. Only one day, after he’d had no sleep for three days, and no hot food in five days, and had two buddies shot . . .” He stopped then for a moment, breathed hard, and looked away.
She waited.
“As it happened, they captured an NVA—sorry, North Vietnamese Army regular. This NVA was injured, so he couldn’t keep up when his compadres retreated. So, corporal decides to question him. The NVA spits in the corporal’s face. Long story short, the corporal shot him in the neck.”
Silence.
“War crime, that was, shooting a helpless prisoner. Court-martial offense. At least it would have been if anyone had ever reported it.”
“You didn’t report it?”
Merwin shrugged, heavily this time. “No, ma’am. No one reported me for shooting that man in the neck. Because we were all of us hungry and tired and scared and very, very angry. And the oldest of us was just twenty years old.”
“Sam wouldn’t . . .,” she started to say.
“Oh, well, Ms. Temple, there are genuine saints in this world: I married one. But there aren’t many. I like to think Drake—my grandson, Drake, not that old corporal—I like to hope, anyway, that he found the strength to . . . But he was always a troubled boy. Especially after my son died. The s
tepfather . . . young Drake’s stepfather . . .” He blew out a breath. “But I don’t know and you don’t know.”
“What happens when we do know?” she asked in a small voice.
“I suppose we’ll behave like a bunch of holier-than-thou hypocrites. Because the alternative is to look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we are capable of dark and terrible things.”
They were quiet on the ride back to the dock. Connie shook his hand.
“Thanks for taking me and for talking with me. That must be a very hard thing to carry all these years.”
The old man smiled, and there was a glint of steel in his eyes. “Not the way you think, though, Ms. Temple. See, what’s hard is knowing I took pleasure in that act of revenge. And knowing if I had to do it all again, I’d still pull that trigger.”
She slowly released his hand and stared, stricken, into eyes that were cold and cruel, as he said, “Dark and terrible things. And the joys they bring.”
EIGHTEEN
27 HOURS, 13 MINUTES
GAIA WAS MOVING faster, almost at a normal walking speed. The leg was healing. It would have healed altogether if she’d been able to sit and focus on it. But the two mutants were on her trail, and in addition to that she had to keep moving to stay ahead of the fire, which had quickly burned to the edge of the forest and merely awaited some encouragement to spread farther.
It had occurred to Gaia that inhabiting a body meant she, too, was vulnerable to smoke and fire. She had run through her mental inventory of powers that would save her from smoke inhalation. Nothing.
At least the pain was under some control now. The music in her ears helped distract her. The song was called “When All the Lights Go Out.” There was a lot of yelling. Gaia decided she liked yelling music best.
She walked straight down a gravel road, counting on the fact that she had a small lead and was in open ground now where she would see Sam and Caine before they caught up to her. They were a manageable threat. What worried her far more was the knowledge that Little Pete was looking at her. She could feel him watching her. And while Nemesis was fading fast, he wasn’t dead yet.
Bodies were definitely a mixed blessing—they kept you alive, they focused power, and they allowed you to move about. But they felt pain, and they could be killed.
What would happen to the great and glorious creature called the gaiaphage if this body died?
The truth was, she didn’t know. She might end up like Little Pete, a disembodied ghost. Or she might actually, truly, die. Cease to exist.
They hungered, these bodies. Constantly. It was like an insistent, nagging voice in her head: Feed me. Feed me now!
She found a dead body by the side of the road, a boy. At first glance he didn’t seem to be injured. But when she used her foot to push him over, she saw a chunk of wood protruding from his back near his spine. He might not even have known it was there, and had simply bled to death as he walked from the lake toward Perdido Beach.
