Devoted(92)
He felt as if he desperately needed to pee. He told himself that the urge was entirely psychological. It had better be if any hope remained for him to one day become state attorney general.
The door on the left of the vestibule opened onto a balcony overlooking the twin stacks of the immense cooling tower. This construct of sheet steel, condensation coils, and drum fans stood three stories high, the first third of it below the ground-level balcony, and was serviced from catwalks at various levels. It, too, looked like the set in a James Bond film and was no less daunting than the first chamber.
The third door, directly opposite the front entrance, opened into the plant manager’s office. In addition to the main desk, two smaller workstations were provided. A refrigerator. A microwave. Two filing cabinets. At the back of the room, the door to a bathroom stood open, no one in the small space beyond. Another door, closed, might have led to a supply closet.
Because he was all but certain that Lee Shacket wasn’t lurking in the supply closet, that the killer fled in Eric Norseman’s vehicle, Sheriff Eckman followed a deputy into the office, another man close behind him. His confidence—and a diminishment in his need to urinate—resulted from the fact that the body of Thad Fenton lay facedown on the floor to the right of the door and the corpse of another man was sprawled across the desk, each cadaver in a condition suggesting Shacket thought of them as trash that he’d discarded during his flight from the premises.
Bristling with blood-clotted hair, pieces of Thad’s broken skull lay separate from his body. His brain appeared to be missing.
The body of the man on the desk, approximately the size of Shacket, had been stripped of everything, including his shoes.
Evidently the naked fugitive was now clothed.
This second victim might have been Eric Norseman, although identification would have to rely on fingerprints, as he had been crudely decapitated, and his head was missing.
98
As the first gray light of dawn dissolved the stain of night from the low clouds, Carson Conroy parked the Fleetwood Southwind on a paved lane to nowhere that dead-ended in a meadow.
Five miles outside the town of Pinehaven, a former trailer park had once occupied nine acres of this forty-acre tract that was known locally as the Big Windy. Where mobile homes had once stood side by side, there were only cracked blacktop streets, concrete foundation pads, and weeds. The state had acquired the trailer park and the additional acreage as a site for a wind-power farm. Unfortunately, studies had claimed that the windmills would be standing in the migratory path of several species of birds, with the consequence that an estimated fourteen thousand of our feathered friends would be killed each year by the huge churning blades. Those who supported the project cited experts who believed the birds would eventually learn that windmills were a threat and would, in seven or eight years, alter their semiannual flight path, after the loss of hardly more than a hundred thousand specimens. Sadly, the experience of other wind farms seemed at odds with this optimistic assessment of the avian ability to reprogram instinct, as fields at most of those facilities were routinely littered with so many downed aviators that it looked as if all the gods of old had engaged in a pillow fight.
To await his first visitor, Carson went to the bedroom at the back of the motor home and took off his shoes and stretched out on the mattress.
He had never been so physically weary from lack of sleep and stress. At the same time, he’d never been so mentally invigorated, his mind flying through a wonderland of possibilities. He was fearful and joyful in equal measure, as he once would have thought impossible.
Shacket—and what Shacket was becoming—terrified Carson, and what research might have occupied the staff at the Refine labs in Springville was a source of dread. It was human nature to obsess on negatives, to worry the smallest of sparks into infernos. And yet as he waited for sleep, he dwelt less on the horrors of genetic chaos than on the amazing Kipp and on the other dogs of the Mysterium that he had yet to meet.
As a student of the natural world, he knew that nature was a green machine, indifferent to the creatures—from mice to men—that struggled to survive within it. Every machine is made to be used, however, and whatever power employed nature to a purpose, it was able to produce wonders, humanity being one of them, the Mysterium being another.
Dorian Purcell, through the work at the now destroyed labs in Springville, sought to find a path toward a transhuman future, when current and future generations would shed their limitations. Maybe he was right to believe that human beings could become something superior to what they now were. But he was woefully wrong to believe that such change could be forged by the application of sciences that were, for all their recent advances, still crude instruments.
Carson was charmed by the thought that whatever power used the machine of nature might be in the process of elevating human beings and improving the quality of their existence, though in a way more elegant and astonishing than the blunt hammer-and-anvil method that Purcell had funded at Refine. What if it had always been the destiny of humanity not to stand alone and lonely at the pinnacle of nature, but instead to share that exalted position with another species that didn’t compete with it, but in fact completed it? Tens of thousands of years ago, when dogs and people first made an alliance against the cruelty of indifferent nature, what if a process had begun that would lead inevitably to the gradual increase of canine intelligence as the bond of love between the species drove dogs to strive ever harder to understand, to know, their benefactors? What if, as the human-dog bond intensified, the very intensity itself became a force magnifier that sped up the changes in our four-legged companions until one day, among them arose individuals who developed telepathy to serve in place of the articulated vocal apparatus they lacked?