Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(81)

When he turned to the porch, a woman was standing on the steps next to the cat. He felt relief more than surprise.

“Hello, Mother.”

She looked almost the same as always, but the high fashion had a slight bulk to it, which meant under the chic dark red jacket she probably had on some sort of light body armor. She’d also be carrying. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, which made the lines of her face more severe. Her features bore the stress of an ongoing puzzlement and pain of some kind.

“Hello, Son,” she said, as he brushed by her.

Control let her talk at him as he opened the front door, then went into the bedroom and began to pack. Most of his clothes were still clean and folded in the drawers. It was easy to fit some of them quickly and neatly into his suitcase. To pack his toiletries from the adjoining bathroom, to get out the briefcase full of money, passports, guns, and credit cards. Wondering what to bring with him from the living room, in terms of personal effects. Definitely a piece from the chessboard. He wasn’t hearing much of what his mother was saying, stayed focused on the task in front of him. In doing it perfectly.

Grace had stood there waiting to receive the director and he had pleaded with her to leave, pleaded with her to turn from the door and to run like hell for some kind of safety. But she wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t let him pull her away, had summoned a reserve of strength that was too much against his panic. But let him see the gun concealed in a shoulder holster, as if that might be a comfort. “I have my orders and they are no concern of yours.” As he fell out of her orbit, fell free of everything at the Southern Reach.

His mother forced him to stop packing, closed the suitcase, which he had piled too high anyway, and took his hand, put something in it.

“Take this,” she said.

A pill. A little white pill.

“What is it?”

“Just take it.”

“Why not just hypnotize me?”

She ignored him, guided him to a chair in the corner. He sat there, heavy and cold in his own sweat. “We will talk after you take the pill. After you take a shower.” Said in a sharp tone, the one she used with him to cut off discussion or debate.

“I don’t have time for a shower,” he said. Staring at the wallpaper, which began to blur. Now he would inhabit the very center of corridors. He would put no hand to any surface. He would behave like a ghost that knew if it made contact with anyone or anything its touch would slide through and that creature would then know that it existed in a state of purgatory.

Severance slapped him hard across the face, and he could hear right again.

“You’ve had a shock. I can see that you’ve had a shock, Son. I’ve had a few myself the last few hours. But I need you to start thinking again. I need you present.”

He looked up at her, so like and unlike his mother.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He took the pill, lurched to his feet while he had the will, headed for the bathroom. There had been nothing recognizable in the director’s eyes. Nothing at all.

* * *

In the shower, he started to cry because he still couldn’t get the feel of the wall off his hand, no matter how hard he tried. Couldn’t shake the thinning of the rain, the look on Whitby’s face, Grace’s rigid stance, or the fact it had all happened only an hour ago and he was still trying to piece it together.

But when he stumbled out, dried himself off, and put on a T-shirt and jeans, he felt calmer, almost normal. There was still a slight wobble, but the pill must have kicked in.

He used hand sanitizer, but the texture remained on his hand like an unshakable phantom.

His mother was making coffee in the kitchen, but he went past her without a word, through the sudden cold of the air-conditioning vent, and opened the front door, letting in a blast of humidity and heat.

It had stopped raining. He could see down to the river, to a horizon that held, somewhere, the Southern Reach. Everything was quiet and still, but there were vague coronas of green light, of purple light, that shouldn’t be there. A vision of whatever was in Area X spilling out over the land, spreading out across the river to Hedley.

“You won’t see much from here,” his mother said from behind him. “They’re still attempting containment.”

“How far has it spread?” he asked, shaking a bit as he closed the door and entered the kitchen. He took a sip of the coffee she had set in front of him. It was bitter but it took his mind off his hand.

“I won’t lie, John. It’s bad. The Southern Reach is lost. The new border isn’t far beyond the gates. They’re all trapped in there.” The suggestion of the rain thinning behind the director. Grace, Whitby, who knew who else, caught up in a true nightmare now. “It might stop there, for a very long time.”

“You’re full of shit,” he said. “You don’t know what it will do.”

“Or it might speed up. You’re right—we can’t know.”

“That’s right—we can’t. I was there, right in the middle of it. I saw it coming.” Because you put me there. A howl inside of betrayal, and then a thought that struck him when he saw the tired, worried look on her face. “But there’s more, isn’t there? Something more you haven’t told me.” There always was.

Even now she hesitated, didn’t want to divulge a secret classified in a country that might not exist in a week. Then said in a flat voice, “The contamination at the sites from which we extracted the surveyor and the anthropologist has broken through quarantine and continued to grow, despite our best efforts.”