The Night Parade(76)

“Don’t be so reactionary. You and I need to talk. ASAP. Wherever you are, I’ll go there and meet you, face-to-face. We don’t need to involve your daughter at this point. I understand your reservations. I just want to talk with you and explain things.”

David barked a laugh into the phone. “Meet me? Are you serious? You’ll never find me.”

“We will,” Craddock said. There was not a waver in his voice. “It may take some time, but we’ll find you eventually. I just hope it isn’t too late by then.”

“You can keep your threats.”

“You keep answering your phone,” Craddock said. “There must be some part of you that questions what you’re doing. What happened to your wife will not happen to Eleanor.”

“Empty promises,” David said.

“And then there is you, Mr. Arlen. Your condition. How long do you think you can keep this up?”

David stepped away from the table, out of Ellie’s earshot. She watched him go.

“Have the hallucinations started?” Craddock said. “The nosebleeds?”

“Lies,” David growled into the phone. “I’m not an idiot.”

“We can’t help you, Mr. Arlen,” Craddock said, his voice as smooth as silk sheets, “but we can help your daughter. And your daughter can help the world.”

“You’re just trying to trick me.”

“For what purpose? Do you think my goal here is to torment you and torture your little girl? No, Mr. Arlen. My goal is to save people. I can understand why you’re not convinced of that at the moment, so that is why I’m asking you to sit down and talk with me. Let’s reach an agreement. An understanding. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Go to hell,” David said.

“You can’t run forever,” Craddock said. “Based on the results of your last blood test, I can’t image you have much time left at all.”

“We’re gone,” David said into the phone. “Do you hear me? We’re gone. And if you keep this up—if the cops or the CDC or the f*cking FBI or whoever else continues to look for us—I will personally hunt you down and kill you. Do you hear me?”

“David—”

“Go f*ck yourself.” David hung up. His whole body vibrated. The milk shake in his stomach felt as if it had started to curdle.

He stood there for a moment, not trusting himself to maintain his composure if he returned to Ellie too soon. He watched the dust swirl in off the roadway. He listened to a pair of young boys playing behind the burger joint, probably the children of the proprietor. He looked in their direction and saw two dark-skinned, slender boys chasing butterflies through a field. So many butterflies. Whole regiments of them.

Beyond the boys, deeper in the field, stood a figure. It was a man, though his face was obscured by a plain white mask with two eyeholes cut into it. It looked eerily like the paper plate mask Sandy Udell had been wearing the day he threw himself from the classroom window.

Despite the distance between them, the figure appeared to be staring directly at him.

Then a sound registered in his ears. Upon hearing it, he realized he had been hearing it for several seconds now, but was only now realizing it. The goddamn whirring blades of a helicopter.

No sooner did he realize this than he looked up and saw the bright silvery frame of a chopper cruise out from behind the roof of the burger joint. It was much too low to the ground to be a casual flyby, and it sent dust and debris twirling like dervishes across the parking lot. The striped umbrellas above the picnic tables rattled and flapped in their frames. Ellie looked up as the helicopter rushed by overhead, its shadow momentarily darkening her as it whipped along the earth. She covered her eyes with one hand as grit whipped across the ground.

David watched it head in the direction of the setting sun. The land was flat, and he was able to watch it for a good long time before it shrank first into a pinpoint, then vanished into nothingness altogether.

“Who were they?” Ellie asked, staring out at the horizon. “Cops?”

He hadn’t made out any insignia on the helicopter. “Not sure. Military, I think.”

“Should we get back in the car?”

“Yes.”

Before leaving, he looked back toward the field. The two boys were still frolicking in the tall grass, but the man in the mask was gone.





38


Fifteen minutes later, as they continued heading east along I-70, a police car appeared in the rearview mirror. It seemed the past couple days could be summed up by a procession of police cars in rearview mirrors. They’d passed a few on this lonely stretch of highway, either parked on the shoulder against endless fields of corn or seated behind a billboard, their windshields golden with pollen, but this was the first one on the road. David kept his eyes on it for a while, and at one point he thought that the cruiser was keeping a deliberate distance between them. When David slowed, it appeared that the police car slowed, too. For a moment, he considered pulling onto the shoulder of the road to see if the cop would pass him, but he decided that was a stupid idea. What if the cop stopped to see if he needed some assistance? He’d be inviting disaster.

After a time, his mind returned to the man back at the burger and ice cream shop, the guy who’d been appraising the Oldsmobile while spooning frozen yogurt into his gullet. Ninety-nine Cutlass, am I right? It wasn’t a goddamn Lamborghini; why had that guy been so interested in the car?