Forty-eight
At the moment of transition, Richard Welk saw the
darkness as a means of escape. He reached for Sarah’s arm, and his next
memory was of wandering the woods along the banks of the Silver Ridge
River with the woman in tow.
“Billy! Billy, where are you?”
Sarah’s voice echoed mournfully through the trees,
drowned by the roar of the rapids. She turned about at random. Richard
was content to follow until he could assess his priorities.
He didn’t want to go looking for Billy Trevor. Billy
would fare better under Corin’s protection. It seemed prudent to begin
the journey back to Colonel Seth Clymer’s trucks left on the road south of
Silver Ridge.
But he hated leaving the hordes of little robots
behind. If only he could escape with just one intricate little machine
safely pocketed. Just one for analysis, to prove that the technology
existed. Later, maybe the research and development labs of Trevor
Industries would look over the area more thoroughly for bits and pieces of
whatever else survived. A dab of future technology would go a long way
toward assuring the company’s health in the years to come.
Silver flashed in the trees nearby. “Sarah, over
here!”
Sarah had no interest in his discovery. Richard
pried her hand loose and left her side to examine the flash of light. He
found a broken, two foot long drone weighing a good forty pounds, one of
Corin’s treaded vehicles with a turret and camera. It too far big for his
pants pocket and promised to be a burden on the way back to the trucks,
but he tucked it beneath an arm regardless and lugged it back to Sarah’s
side with a grin on his face.
“Billy, please answer me!”
“Sarah, the boy’s okay! Look what I’ve got!”
Sarah ignored him. Entranced by her own misery, she
scanned the dark trees in a desperate search for her son.
“Sarah, think what this machine can do for Trevor
Industries! This one gadget alone could revolutionize mechanical
engineering!”
Sarah clenched her fists and drew a deep breath.
“Billy, damn you, answer me!” She whirled about, acknowledging Richard’s
presence for the first time. “He was at that motel with those awful men.
Richard, take me back. I’ve got to find Billy.”
Her pain became his pain, but circumstances pit
Billy’s welfare against their own. “We can’t go back. We’ll only get
ourselves killed.”
“I don’t care! I’ve lost Howard! If I lose Billy, I
have nothing left!”
A twitch of impatience gnawed at him. “Damn it,
Sarah, Corin is more than any of us can handle. He’s got the situation
under control. You saw for yourself.”
But he didn’t quite believe his
own reassurance. Corin would
leave a cripple behind when he abandoned the boy. Silver Ridge still
crawled with King’s men. There had been an ominous explosion on the hill,
and a dreamlike warning of radioactive fallout. Even if the state police
or the FBI intervened, Billy would fall into uncaring hands, or wind in a
federal prison for interrogation.
“Corin said something about. . .” Sarah couldn’t
quite place her finger on the nature of the crisis at hand.
Corin had said something about a test of resolve, a
challenge that threatened them all. Richard hadn’t understood the nature
of Corin’s warning. He couldn’t remember the boy’s exact wording, and he
dared not trust his memory of confusing events that had swept over him
during the course of the day. It all seemed so bizarre and unlikely.
A piece of the tread fell off the machine in his
arms. Richard stooped to retrieve it, scraping his arm painfully on the
gadget in the process. He rested the weight of it on a knee, pocketed the
bracket and bolt, and renewed his grip on the little vehicle.
Sarah wept, her lovely face streaked with mud and
tears. She wandered a darker section of the woods. “Billy, for the love
of God!”
“Sarah, listen to me. . .”
A light took form among the trees. Richard reeled
back in shock. Standing in the center of the pale luminescence stood a
translucent figure. More of Corin’s parlor tricks he could have
assimilated without undue upset. But within this particular phenomenon
stood the image of the deceased Howard Trevor.
Sarah’s voice was a whisper of disbelief. “Howard,
is that you?”
The ghost’s smile was a cool one.
She lurched forward in shock. “Howard, it is you!”
“Sarah, stay back!” Waddling with his precious burden, Richard blocked
her way. Sarah looked up him in complete bewilderment.
“Sarah, Howard Trevor is dead. He’s been dead for
years.”
She looked back at the ghost with mounting
confusion. Howard Trevor frowned in displeasure. “Mr. Welk, is that
you?” He peered into the twilight and chuckled. “Sarah, really. I lay
all of Boston at your feet, a veritable social smorgasbord, and here I
find you lost in the woods accompanied by one of our attorneys. What’s
that ungainly thing he’s carrying?”
Another piece of the robot clattered to the ground.
Sarah glanced back at him, losing interest in his intervention as Richard
fought to retrieve it. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve lost Billy and
he’s certainly not helping matters any.”
“Sarah, you’re talking to a ghost!"
Richard said. "He’s not real!
This is all some kind of a trick! This is what Corin told us would
happen!”
“That horrid Corin can go away and leave my poor
Billy in peace!” Sarah screamed back at him. “And you, too, and that
silly machine you’re carrying!”
“But it’s worth a fortune! The patent potential
alone. . .”
Howard Trevor wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Is
that your invention, Mr. Welk?”
“No. Corin built it. . .”
“Have you stolen that machine?”
“He’s finished with it! He doesn’t need it anymore!”
Howard Trevor chuckled again with cool amusement. “A
scavenger then. But then I don’t suppose someone like you would know what
it is to create for one’s self. I quite imagine it’s the best a simple
lawyer can do, staggering about in the dark, carrying the wreckage of
someone else’s sweat and tears in his greedy claws.”
More of the machine came loose. Richard let it fall,
holding onto the most complex part of the gadget, reasoning that it alone
would contain the most potential for useful applications.
But Howard Trevor’s accusation struck home. He felt
like a fool carrying the disintegrating machine as he tried to console a
heartbroken mother and argue with an impossible legacy of her past.
“Sarah, he’s dead,” Richard said, putting more
conviction in his tone of voice. “Billy is almost a grown man. We’ll go
find him, but it’s time to let the boy go his own way. And it’s sure as
hell time to let him go.”
Sarah’s had her attention fixed on the ghostly image
of her dead husband. She took an unthinking step closer to the ghost. In
the process, she herself turned pale and translucent.
Richard sensed the danger. This was for real. If he
wasn’t careful, he could lose her. “Sarah, please. What I do for a
living has nothing to do with what I feel as a man. We can’t all be
multimillion dollar industrialists. He gave you everything there is to be
had in the world, everything but the one thing that only I have to give.
He was a ghost even when he was alive. There’s never been anyone who has
loved you more than me. Sarah, look at me.”
She looked at him, but she sneered at him. “That
piece of machinery in your arms is worth more to you than me.”
Richard tossed it aside. It crashed to the earth and
fell into countless, useless pieces. Nobody would ever be able to put it
back together again, but it no longer mattered. “It’s just a thing,” he
said. “Without you, nothing else would be of interest to me. Please.
We’ve been together since he died. There’s nothing left in our lives but
one another.”
The trees stirred in a sudden, chilled wind. Richard
sensed it to be a stir of anger. He threw an accusing look at the ghost
of Howard Trevor, but Howard’s image was fading away. The anger emanated
from someone unseen, imminent, and far more ominous.
But it could not touch the most important aspect of
his life, and the one thing in the desolate woods of any value to him. He
could still salvage everything of any real value in his life.
Richard held out his hand to her. “Let’s go find
Billy. You and me, together.”
She reached for him. She melted in his arms with a
surge of tenderness and love that expanded outward like a silent
explosion.
As the Matrix took the two primitive humans away for
relocation, or whatever it was the Matrix did with worthless simulations,
King’s reaction was one of shocked disbelief that defeat could happen so
casually. He had felt confident that he could separate the two and foster
useful hatreds.
Regardless, he was a long way from losing his
challenge of resolve altogether. There were others to attend to.
But hadn’t he understood human nature better than
this at one time in the dim, distant past of his own lives?
