They stopped before the door. From deep in the house, more laughter and the creaking of springs: the girls were jumping on the beds.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Rachel asked.
Carter didn’t answer. Rachel looked at him closely; something shifted in her face. She understood that he would not be going with her.
“Have to be this way,” he explained. “You go on, now. Tell them hello for me, won’t you? Tell them I’ve been thinking on them, every day.”
She regarded the knob with a deep tentativeness. Inside, the girls were laughing with wild delight.
“Mr. Carter—”
“Anthony.”
She placed a palm upon his cheek. She was crying again; come to think of it, Carter was crying a little himself. When she kissed him, he tasted not just the softness of her mouth and the warmth of her breath but also the saltiness of their tears conjoining—not a taste of sorrow, strictly speaking, though there was sorrow in it.
“God bless you, too, Anthony.”
And before he knew it—before the feel of her kiss had faded from his lips—the door had opened and she was gone.
* * *
76
2030 hours: the light was almost gone, the convoy moving at a creep.
They were in a coastal tableland of tangled scrub, the road pocked with potholes in places, in others rippled like a washboard. Chase was driving, his gaze intent as he fought the wheel. Amy was riding in back.
Peter radioed Greer, who was driving the tanker at the rear of the column. “How much farther?”
“Six miles.”
Six miles at twenty miles per hour. Behind them, the sun had been subsumed into a flat horizon, erasing all shadows.
“We should see the channel bridge soon,” Greer added. “The isthmus is just south of there.”
“Everyone, we need to push it,” Peter said.
They accelerated to thirty-five. Peter swiveled in his seat to make sure the convoy was keeping pace. A gap opened, then narrowed. The cab of the Humvee flared as the first bus in line turned on its headlights.
“How much faster should we go?” Chase asked.
“Keep it there for now.”
There was a hard bang as they rocketed through a deep hole.
“Those buses are going to blow apart,” Chase said.
A scrim of light appeared ahead: the moon. It lifted swiftly from the eastern horizon, plump and fiery. Simultaneously, the channel bridge rose up before them in distant silhouette—a stately, vaguely organic figure with its long scoops of wire slung from tall trestles. Peter took up the radio again.
“Drivers, anybody seeing anything out there?”
Negative. Negative. Negative.
—
Through the windscreen of the pilothouse, Michael and Lore were watching the drydock doors. The portside door had opened without complaint; the starboard was the problem. At a 150-degree angle to the dock, the door had stopped cold. They’d been trying to open it the rest of the way for nearly two hours.
“I’m out of ideas here,” Rand radioed from the quay. “I think that’s all we’re going to get.”
“Will we clear it?” Lore asked. The door weighed forty tons.
Michael didn’t know. “Rand, get down to engineering. I need you there.”
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“You did your best. We’ll have to manage.” He hung the microphone back on the panel. “Fuck.”
The lights on the panel went dead.
—
Twenty-eight miles west, the same summer moon had risen over the Chevron Mariner. Its blazing orange light shone down upon the deck; it shimmered over the oily waters of the lagoon like a skin of flame.
With a bang like a small explosion, the hatch detonated skyward. It seemed not so much to fly as to leap, soaring into the nighttime sky of its own volition. Up and up it sailed, spinning on its horizontal axis with a whizzing sound; then, like a man who’s lost his train of thought, it appeared to pause in midflight. For the thinnest moment, it neither rose nor fell; one might easily have been forgiven for thinking it was charged with some magical power, capable of thwarting gravity. But, not so: down it plunged, into the befouled waters.
Then: Carter.
He landed on the foredeck with a clang, absorbing the impact through his legs and simultaneously compressing his body to a squat: hips wide, head erect, one splayed hand touching the deck for balance, like an offensive tackle preparing for the snap. His nostrils flared to taste the air, which was imbued with the freshness of freedom. A breeze licked at his body with a tickling sensation. Sights and sounds bombarded his senses from all directions. He regarded the moon. His vision was such that he could detect the smallest features of its face—the cracks and crevices, craters and canyons—with an almost lurid quality of three dimensions. He felt the moon’s roundness, its great rocky weight, as if he were holding it in his arms.