Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(65)

We passed St. Stephen’s and City Hall and then started up the streets that wound through the northside mansions. Freeman produced a small flashlight from his pocket. Its beam slid over once well-manicured lawns that had become thatches of weeds and wildflowers.

“And Henry wasn’t alone,” he said. “There were thousands just like him. Young men and women who came home only to discover that the war they thought they’d left behind was still lodged inside them.

An address on the side of a mailbox glimmered when the light hit it. Freeman left the street and led me across an overgrown yard. A house emerged from the dark. No, not a house, more like a castle. Freeman started down a fieldstone walk and stopped at the foot of the stairs. White columns, like palace guards, stood on either side of a nearly eight-foot-tall front door. Freeman moved the flashlight’s beam over the door’s brass fixtures and up to a chandelier hanging over the porch.

“A team of researchers decided that the solution was to reach inside their heads and pluck out their memories of the war. Without those memories, they believed, soldiers like Henry Allan Forrest would be transformed back into the people they were.”

Freeman climbed the stairs to the porch slowly, delicately, stopping just shy of the front door. He lowered the flashlight.

“Freeman, what are we doing here?” I asked. “Who lived here?”

“Charles Ellis Dumay.”

“Who was Charles Ellis Dumay?”

Freeman brushed the brass doorknob with his fingertips.

“Me,” he said.

Behind us, there was the distant beat of a helicopter’s blades as it flew over Black River. I climbed the stairs, stopping a few steps short of Freeman.

“You were one of the researchers.”

“No,” he said. “I was a scientist, though. Once. A good one. But then some people offered me a very large sum of money to do something else.”

“What?”

Freeman sat down at the top of the stairs, facing me.

“Travel the country, identifying research that had the greatest potential for profit. I became aware of the work of a small group of researchers in a lab in Atlanta. I thought it was something that could be expanded on and sold, most likely to one military or another. I bought the company, moved them here to Black River in secret, and steered their research in a direction my employers thought would be most profitable.”

“A virus.”

There was a click as Freeman turned off the flashlight, dropping us into darkness.

“Think about it,” he said. “A weapon that can erase the past. What government on earth wouldn’t want that?”

“What happened?”

He looked into the dark beside the house. “Will you go somewhere else with me?”

“Freeman—”

“It’s close,” he said. “I promise. And I think things will make more sense this way. Please.”

He left the front porch and I followed him around the back of the house and across an immense lawn that ended at a tract of woods. We pushed our way through the trees until we emerged at the edge of a paved road. On the other side of it there was a large, dark clearing. Freeman crossed the road and kept going, his flashlight picking out heaped piles of rubble that we had to maneuver around.

“Where are we?”

Freeman said nothing. He stopped and turned in a circle, playing the flashlight beam over the wreckage around us. We were surrounded by piles of charred wood, metal, and cinderblock. I saw the skeletons of tables and chairs. Two partially collapsed walls rested against each other in the distance. I was standing in the remains of a building that had burned to the ground. I suddenly realized it was a place I’d seen a thousand times before, but always from the top of Lucy’s Promise, where it looked like nothing more than a black smudge north of town.

“The Greeks believed that when you died, you had to cross five rivers before you could enter paradise.”

He was a few feet away from me, ankle-deep in ashes, moving his light over the black hills of debris.

“The first four were the rivers of hate, sorrow, lamentation, and fire. The last was Lethe. The river of forgetfulness. No one could enter paradise until they’d had their old lives wiped away.”

“What happened here?”

Freeman glanced over his shoulder. “The scientists I brought to Black River were idealists, but they weren’t stupid. They put together what we intended to do with their research and decided to expose it. My employers asked me what I thought they should do to prevent this from happening. I told them it was obvious. Infect the scientists with the virus, then take their research and start over somewhere else.”

A breeze stirred the ashes at our feet. Freeman’s eyes were gray hollows.

“Two of them escaped the lab after I infected them,” he said. “I don’t know if they made it to Monument Park that morning or if someone they infected did, but the outcome was the same.”

His light slid over the remains of a wooden desk and blackened steel cabinets. Bits of broken glass glittered in the ashes.

“When I realized what was happening, I started a fire in the lab to erase the evidence. My employers said they’d get me out, but they were lying, of course. I was a loose end. I tried to escape before a quarantine was put in place, but I was infected.”

Freeman jerked aside as I came at him through the ashes, but he wasn’t fast enough. I planted both hands square on his chest and knocked him onto his back. He tried to scramble away, but I fell on him, straddling his chest and pinning him in place. I dug in the debris beside us and lifted out a charred plank the size of a baseball bat.