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And made it about five feet.
The walking cane he’d begun to use was back where he’d left it, leaning up against the stainless steel cabinet, the hook of the grip linked onto one of the pulls. For a split second, that old familiar fury at how much he had lost hit him, but the flash of anger burned out fast because he just didn’t have the resources to hold anything for very long, whether it was an emotion or something as basic and physical as his balance.
Or even a rocks glass.
Shuffling back over, he locked his hand around the crook, and fell into what had become his new-normal of walking, the cobble, cobble, cobble together of swinging legs and arms kind of seasonal given that it was November: Gobble, gobble, gobble.
Maybe he should have put pumpkin into his Jack Daniel’s.
At the slider, he hung the cane on the wrist of his left hand and opened the sheet of glass. Minding the lip at the base of the frame so he didn’t catch a toe and die facedown on the flagstone in a shatter, he stepped out into the cold, moonlit night.
Upstate New York was beautiful in the fall, but it was no longer autumn, the chill in the air having gone from the nip of a golden retriever puppy to the chomp of a Belgian Malinois—and nature had respondedaccordingly. On the far rim of the meadow behind the mansion, everything was off the tree branches and browning to a crinkle on the ground. Funny, with time running out, he was noticing the seasons more.
The spring, the summer. Now the fall. Would he see another snowfall?
He thought of the scans that had been done on him. He had the feeling Lydia was getting the results right now because she’d made some deliberately offhand comment about going down to the lab “for a quick sec.” Like she had any other reason to take that elevator deep into the earth? No doubt it was a pregame for when they broke the bad news to him, but like he didn’t already know? He was living in his body. He knew his breathing was worse, and when he sorted through the symptoms he’d been dealing with, he was pretty damn sure that some of the fun and games was the cancer getting a further jump on him rather than just side effects from the pharmacy’s worth of shit they’d been pumping into him.
Closing things up in his wake, he looked past the discreetly lit terrace and winterized pool to that ghostly tree line. It was about a hundred yards away.
It might as well have been a matter of miles.
Going on a catty-corner angle, navigating by the heavens’ blue light, he eighty-year-old’d it over the cropped grass, all of which had turned a uniform brown, none of which was disturbed by any weedgrowth. C.P.’s lawn was kind of like him, medicated for better performance, although in its case, the metastases were kept at bay.
Maybe he just needed some Miracle-Gro.
Halfway to goal, he took a breather, bracing himself on the cane, opening his mouth, panting in a way that, as recently as the spring, would have only come from a full-out sprint. Glancing over his shoulder, he considered giving the security detail a little wave. The estate was up-the-ass with high-tech infrared cameras, no privacy to speak of inside or outside or anywhere—but he didn’t think anyone was going to come rushing after him like he was a toddler who’d wandered off. He’d been doing these after-dark wanders for the last couple of weeks. If someone had had a problem with them, he’d know about it by now.
Did the men who watched him hobble off feel sorry for him? he wondered. Was he a cautionary tale to all of those who were where he had been as recently as April?
He’d been a highly trained soldier, too. He’d had weapons and strength and cunning—and a secret mission. Granted, he’d worked for the government, and been sent here to wipe out C.P.’s lab… but then just like the way his body’s cells had betrayed him, he’d learned that all was not how it seemed on the surface.
And now that laboratory was fighting for his life.
Like a camera lens being focused, the house in his rearview suddenly registered with clarity. The massive stone structure was gleaming in the soft illumination of its security lights, the multitude of windows and doors covered with a reflective film that meant there were one-way mirrors all along the various elevations, nothing but the dark, barren landscape projected back at him, all that white furniture and art hidden from view.
The people, too.
As he scanned the glass panels, he wondered who might be looking back out at him and his conscience squeaked a protest somewhere below his conscious thoughts. What the hell was he doing, sneaking out to the woods again? Especially considering what he was bringing with him.
Turning back around, he kept going, and when he finally reached the trees, he penetrated their ranks in a random location so he didn’t create a trailhead that might show in the daylight. And then, as he continued along, he did what he could to leave the foliage undisturbed. Just like the whiskey and soda in his hand, and what was in the pocket of his jacket, this whole covering his tracks thing was a holdover from his old life, the one he had lived for twenty-nine years, five months, and twelve days.
A gunshot wound that should have been fatal had been the gateway to what was actually goingto kill him—or his knowledge of what was cooking under his surface. That cough that wouldn’t go away? The one that sometimes came with a little blood? The tiredness? The weight loss?
Not allergies, as it turned out. Not his bad diet, his lack of sleep, or the stress that came with keeping Lydia from becoming collateral damage while he executed his mission.
When the docs at C.P. Phalen’s had X-rayed his chest to assess the damage… that was when they’d seen the cloud in his lung. The secret his body had been keeping from him was out, and the second era in his life had begun.
Daniel had to go slower now that he was in the woods, and it was hard to believe that there was a downshift below “snail’s pace,” but there it was. As a buffering fog set into his mind, his disorientation in what should have been a familiar landscape made him panic, everything suddenly looking foreign even though he could see quite well, the trees forming no pattern that he recognized even though he’d been tromping around in here for at least two weeks, the ground cover an obstacle course he couldn’t remember how to get through.
Getting his phone out to use the flashlight seemed like a lot of work, especially because he wasn’t sure how more illumination was going to help his—
He was saved by a broken branch.
The inch-thick, five-foot-long maple shooter had been split by a pair of hands, the messy crack in the wood no longer fresh, the angle pointing in a direction about seventy-two degrees to the right. A little farther on, he found another that was propped in the juncture of a birch, and as he kept going, he crossed paths with a third.
He’d left the arboreal arrows because chemo brain was real, but also because working a plan, even if it was as simple as designing an orientation system that covered only a hundred and fifty feet, made him feel like he wasn’t completely useless.
And there it was.
