Devoted(42)
In the living room, his smile fades as he recalls what she’d said to the boy, all that treacly crap about Jason. One line in particular incenses Shacket: He was the best man I’ve ever known.
The slut has probably known countless men, but she has never known Lee Shacket, not really known him. She has never let him through her gate, never given him the chance to prove that he is able to satisfy her as no other man ever could.
That will soon change.
At the Steinway, he considers the silver frames. He picks one up, turns it over, and stares at Megan and Jason, the prize and the thief who stole it, the hot bitch and the treacherous bastard.
His first impulse is to throw the photograph to the floor, stamp hard on it, smash the glass that protects it, shatter all of her treasured memories, just as she and her treacherous husband shattered Shacket’s hopes.
But she will hear, she will come to investigate—and this is not the place or the time that he wishes to impose the future he intends for her. Having been in her bed and previewed, in fantasies, the pleasures of her, he is intent on easing between the sheets as she sleeps, waking her by taking her. In the dark of her bedroom, while in her blindness she wonders who has mounted her and filled her as never before, he will watch with his mothy vision as Megan’s shock and fright quickly give way to rapture, her long shapely legs encircling him to pull him deeper. Archaea isn’t a bacteria, and the changes those billions have brought—and are still bringing—to him can’t be passed like influenza. If the new genetic information that has been installed in him is in his sperm, however, he’ll impregnate her with a child who will be as superior to other children as Lee Shacket is now superior to all other men.
Instead of smashing the glass in the photograph, he pries up the tabs on the frame, removes the thin cardboard backing, and extracts the picture. One by one, he removes the nine photos from the other frames.
His intention is to tuck them between the ceramic logs in the gas fireplace, where eventually he will burn them. But he decides to keep them for a better purpose. He folds them and tucks them in a hip pocket of his jeans. In the night, when he settles atop her, if she rejects him, if she fights, if she mocks and demeans him, if she prefers her dead husband and her idiot child to a new life with Shacket, he will knock her senseless and wad each photograph and force them down her throat one by one, until she chokes to death on her precious family.
42
The cold, white, smoky masses surged sluggishly through the night like the enormous shoulders and haunches of dream beasts that wouldn’t quite take form. Judging by all available evidence, the world had vaporized. No trees presented themselves, no structures, no more oncoming traffic. If pavement existed under the tires, Rosa Leon couldn’t glimpse it. The vague, rectangular shape of what might be a sign was briefly blind-stamped in the murk but appeared blank, as though no community existed anywhere ahead to be announced in this world dissolving. The headlights smeared an icy glare up the wall of fog but penetrated it no more than a few feet.
From the murk emerged a phantom, casting balls of sputtering red brightness to the ground. Rosa slowed even further, and the figure hurrying toward her clarified: a highway patrol officer laying down flares. A moment later, mysterious nebulae of hazy light swelled in the beclouded night, white and red and blue, diffused beams and blinking points and swiveling-pulsing beacons, as though a colossal alien ship had landed on the highway. As she drew to a stop behind a waiting line of vehicles, she saw that all lanes of the highway were blocked by a jackknifed eighteen-wheeler, a mangled sedan, an SUV turned on its side, police vehicles, and at least one ambulance, all of them floating in the thick mist like the flotsam of a shipwreck on a fogbound sea.
The GPS map on the dashboard screen indicated that she was north of Meeks Bay, south of the town of Tahoma. In clear weather, with the highway unobstructed, she might reach her destination in twenty minutes. Now she would be stalled here for hours.
When she checked the Pied Finder service on Dorothy’s phone, she saw that Kipp was still where he had been in Olympic Village.
She considered turning around and driving back to the south end of the lake, across the border into Nevada, along the eastern and the northern shores, to reconnect with highway 89 at Tahoe City, a couple of miles south of Olympic Village. But if the fog was likely to be thinner on the Nevada side, there was no guarantee of that, and because of the casinos over there, traffic would be much heavier.
She decided to wait where she was. Maybe the authorities would get the highway cleared sooner than she expected. Maybe Kipp was settled in and safe for the night.
In spite of her difficult life, she’d never been an anxious person. Adversity was best overcome by positive thinking and hard work. Foreboding, let alone full-blown anxiety, distracted the heart and mind, making progress less likely. However, Kipp was the most important responsibility that Rosa had ever been given, his welfare her sacred duty. If he died or were cast into a miserable situation from which he could not escape, she would not only have failed him but also Dorothy, and not just the two of them. If anything bad happened to that remarkable dog, she would have failed . . . something else, something larger that eluded definition. She felt almost as if to fail Kipp would be to fail humankind as well and somehow imperil the destiny of the world. She was not given to grandiose notions of her importance, quite the opposite, and yet Kipp’s fate weighed more heavily on her by the minute. As she waited, run aground in this sea of fog, anxiety tore at her.