Page 36 (1/2)

"Grab a cable!" she yelled

A moment of incomprehension

"Do it and hold on!"

Did he understand what she had in mind? It didn’t e to the roof of the elevator, pointed her rifle doard at the cable plate, and pulled the trigger

Freed frohts plunged doard A hard yank and then aforce rocketed them skyward: Peter experienced their ascent in a blur, a sense of pure motion that focused on his hands, his only link to life He would have lost his grip entirely if not for Alicia, who, below hi hi into the s, they spun wildly, overwhelmed by a bombardment of physical data beyond Peter’s ability to co up the shaft behind the fro theap

But Alicia did Unlike Peter, whose senses were yroscopes as their pursuers; her awareness of time and space andher not only to rip but also to point her rifle doard It was the grenade launcher she intended; her target was the package on the elevator’s roof

She fired

Chapter 26

FEDERAL STOCKADE, KERRVILLE, TEXAS

Major Lucius Greer, late of the Second Expeditionary, non only as prisoner no 62 of the Federal Stockade of the Texas Republic-Lucius the Faithful, the One Who Believed-aiting for someone to come

The cell where he lived elve feet square, just a cot and a toilet and sink and a small table with a chair The room’s only illuh on the wall This was the room where Lucius Greer had spent the last four years, nine e was desertion-not completely fair, in Lucius’s esti his command to follow Amy up the mountain to face Babcock, he had simply followed orders of a deeper, different kind But Lucius was a soldier, with a soldier’s sense of duty; he had accepted his sentence without question

He passed his days in conteh Lucius knew there were ed it, the ones whose howls of loneliness he could hear at night The prison had a small courtyard; once a week the inmates were allowed outside, but only one at a time, and only for an hour Lucius himself had spent the first six o mad There were only so many push-ups a man could do, only so much sleep to be had, and barely a un to talk to hi, the weather and the hts and memories, the world beyond the walls of the stockade and as happening out there now Was it suht? As the ly on his jailers: he was convinced that they were spying on him, and then, as his paranoia deepened, that they intended to kill hi; he refused to exercise, even to leave his cell at all All night long he crouched on the edge of his cot, staring at the door, the portal of his murderers

After some period of time in this tortured condition, Lucius decided he could endure it no longer Only the thinnest vestige of his rational self remained; soon it would be lost to him completely To die without a mind, its patterns of experience,yourself in the cell wasn’t easy, but it could be acco on the table, a determined suicide could tuck his head to his chest, tip forward, and break his neck in the fall

Three times in a row Lucius attean to pray-a si God’s cooperation Helpfrom its multiple impacts on the cement floor; he had cracked a tooth Once le of his fall, and cast hiravity

He returned to consciousness after so on his back on the cold ceain the universe had refused hiripped hi to his eyes

Lucius, why have you forsakenso si of a voice-a gentle, guiding presence that lived beneath the surface of the world

Don’t you know that only I can take this from you? That death is mine alone to make?

It was as if hisa hidden reality He was lying on the floor, his body occupying a fixed point in space and ti with a vastness he could not express It was everywhere and nowhere; it existed on an invisible plane the mind could see but the eyes could not, distracted as they were by ordinary things-this cot, that toilet, these walls He plunged into a peacefulness that flowed through his being on waves of light

The work of your life is not done, Lucius

And, just like that, his incarceration was over The walls of his cell were the thinnest tissue, a ruse of matter Day by day his conte with the force of peace and forgiveness and wisdom he had discovered This was God, of course, or could be called God But even that term seemed too small, a word made by men for that which had no name The world was not the world; it was an expression of a deeper reality, as the paint on the canvas was an expression of the artist’s thoughts And with this awareness cae that the journey of his life was not complete, that his true purpose had yet to be unveiled

Another thing: God seee, a the sisters; he had no memories of his parents, of any other life At sixteen he had enlisted in the DS, as nearly all the boys in the orphanage did in those days; when the call had gone out for volunteers to join the Second Expeditionary, Lucius had been aht after the event known as the Massacre of the Field-eleven faht people killed or taken-and many of the men who had survived that day had joined up as well But Lucius’s motives were less decisive Even as a boy he had never been swayed by the stories of the great Niles Coffee, whose heroics seeht , restless as are all youngwatch on the city walls, sweeping the fields, chasing down kids who broke curfew Of course there were always dopeys around (picking theh frowned upon as a waste of aenerally allowed if you didn’t overdo it) and the diversion of the occasional bar brawl in H-town to break up But these things, distracting though they were, could not co on with a bunch of death-loving lunatics was the only other option for Lucius Greer, then so be it

Yet it was in the Expeditionary that Lucius found the very thing he needed, that had been absent froned to the Roswell Road, escorting convoys of arrison-at the time, just a threadbare outpost In his unit were t recruits, Nathan Crukshank and Curtis Vorhees Like Lucius, Cruk had enlisted straight out of the DS, but Vorhees was, or had been, a farun But he’d lost a wife and two young girls in the field, and under the circu to say no The trucks always drove straight through the night, and on the return trip to Kerrville, their convoy was ambushed The attack ca with Cruk and Vor in a Humvee behind the first tanker When the virals rushed theht: That’s it, we’re done There’s no way I’ out of this alive But Crukshank, at the wheel, either didn’t agree or didn’t care He gunned the engine, while Vorhees, on the fifty-cal, began to pick them off They didn’t know that the driver of the tanker, taken through the windshield, was already dead As they ran alongside, the tanker swerved to the left, clipping the front of the Humvee Luciushe knew, Cruk was dragging hie The tanker was in flaone, vanished down the Roswell Road

They’d been left behind

The hour that folloas both the shortest and the longest of Lucius’s life Tiain, the threetheir bullets until the last instant, often when the creatures were just steps away They ht have tried to make a run for it, but the overturned Humvee was the best protection they had, and Lucius, whose ankle was broken, couldn’tin the roadway, they were laughing till the tears streamed down their faces He knew that he’d never feel closer to anyone than the two men who’d walked with hiht

Roswell, Laredo, Texarkana; Lubbock, Shreveport, Kearney, Colorado Whole years passed without Lucius’s cohts His home was elsewhere now His home was the Expeditionary

Until he ed

He was to receive three visitors

The first ca in September Greer had already finished his breakfast of watery porridge and co calisthenics: five hundred push-ups and sit-ups, followed by an equivalent number of squats and thrusts Suspended fro of his cell, he did a hundred chin-ups in sets of twenty, front and back, as God ordained When this was done, he sat on the edge of his cot, stilling his an with a rote prayer, learned from the sisters It was not the words that mattered, rather their rhyth before exercise, preparing the hts were halted by a thunk of tu open

"Somebody to see you, Sixty-two"

Lucius rose as a woht of build, with black hair threaded with gray and small dark eyes that radiated an undeniable authority A woman you could not help but reveal yourself to, to who a small portfolio under her aruard, a heavyset eant You ot to know one’s jailors, and he and Lucius ell acquainted, even as Coolidge seemed to possess no idea of what to make of Lucius’s devotions A practical, ordinary rown sons, both DS, as he was

"You’re sure?"