State Of Fear

Trooper Rodriguez was still getting everybody into their cars, but there was pandemonium in the parking lot and a traffic jam on the bridge. The rain was starting to come down hard. That was making people move faster.



Rodriguez cast a worried eye at the waterfall, noting that it was a darker brown, and flowing more heavily than before. He saw then that the TV crew had gone. The van was no longer atop the cliff. That was odd, he thought. You'd think they'd have stayed to film the emergency exit.



Cars were honking on the bridge, where traffic was stalled. He saw a number of people standing there, looking over the other side. Which could only mean that the SUV had gone over the cliff.



Rodriguez slipped behind the wheel to radio for an ambulance. That was when he heard that an ambulance had already been called to Dos Cabezas, fifteen miles to the north. Apparently a group of hunters had gotten into a drunken argument, and there had been some shooting. Two men were dead and a third was injured. Rodriguez shook his head. Damn guys went out with a rifle and a bottle of bourbon each, and then had to sit around drinking because of the rain, and before you knew it, couple of them were dead. Happened every year. Especially around the holidays.



Chapter 56



FLAGSTAFF



MONDAY, OCTOBER 11



4:03 P.M.



"I don't see why this is necessary," Sarah said, sitting up in bed. She had electrodes stuck to her chest and legs.



"Please don't move," the nurse said. "We're trying to get a record."



They were in a small, screened-off cubicle in the Flagstaff hospital emergency room. Kenner, Evans, and Sanjong had insisted she come there. They were waiting outside. She could hear them talking softly.



"But I'm twenty-eight years old," Sarah said. "I'm not going to have a heart attack."



"The doctor wants to check your conduction pathways."



"My conduction pathways?" Sarah said. "There's nothing wrong with my conduction pathways."



"Ma'am? Please lie down and don't move."



"But this is"



"And don't talk."



She lay down. She sighed. She glanced at the monitor, which showed squiggly white lines. "This is ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with my heart."



"No, there doesn't seem to be," the nurse said, nodding to the monitor. "You're very lucky."



Sarah sighed. "So, can I get up now?"



"Yes. And don't you worry yourself about those burn marks," the nurse said. "They'll fade over time."



Sarah said, "What burn marks?"



The nurse pointed to her chest. "They're very superficial."



Sarah sat up and looked down her blouse. She saw the white adhesive tags of the electrodes. But she also saw pale brown streaks, jagged marks that ran across her chest and abdomen. Like zigzags or something "What is this?" she said.



"It's from the lightning."



She said, "What?"



"You were struck by lightning," the nurse said.



"What are you talking about?"



The doctor came in, an absurdly young man, prematurely balding. He seemed very busy and preoccupied. He said, "Don't worry about those burn marks, they'll fade in no time at all."



"It's from lightning?"



"Pretty common, actually. Do you know where you are?"



"In Flagstaff hospital."



"Do you know what day it is?"



"Monday."



"That's right. Very good. Look at my finger, please." He held his finger up in front of her face, moved it left and right, up and down. "Follow it. That's good. Thank you. You have a headache?"



"I did," she said. "Not anymore. Are you telling me I was struck by lightning?"



"You sure as heck were," he said, bending to hit her knees with a rubber hammer. "But you're not showing any signs of hypoxia."



"Hypoxia amp;"



"Lack of oxygen. We see that when there's a cardiac arrest."



She said, "What are you talking about?"



"It's normal not to remember," the doctor said. "But according to your friends out there, you arrested and one of them resuscitated you. Said it took four or five minutes."



"You mean I was dead?"



"Would have been, if you hadn't gotten CPR."



"Peter resuscitated me?" It had to be Peter, she thought.



"I don't know which one." Now he was tapping her elbows with the hammer. "But you're a very lucky young woman. Around here, we get three, four deaths a year from strikes. And sometimes very serious burns. You're just fine."



"Was it the young guy?" she said. "Peter Evans? Him?"



The doctor shrugged. He said, "When was your last tetanus?"



"I don't understand," Evans said. "On the news report it said they were hunters. A hunting accident or an argument of some kind."



"That's right," Kenner said.



"But you're telling me you guys shot them?" Evans looked from Kenner to Sanjong.



"They shot first," Kenner said.



"Jesus," Evans said. "Three deaths?" He bit his lip.



But in truth, he was feeling a contradictory reaction. He would have expected his native caution to take overa series of killings, possibly murders, he was an accomplice or at the very least a material witness, he could be tied up in court, disgraced, disbarred amp;. That was the path his mind usually followed. That was what his legal training had emphasized.



But at this moment he felt no anxiety at all. Extremists had been discovered and they had been killed. He was neither surprised nor disturbed by the news. On the contrary, he felt quite satisfied to hear it.



He realized then that his experience in the crevasse had changed himand changed him permanently. Someone had tried to kill him. He could never have imagined such a thing growing up in suburban Cleveland, or in college, or law school. He could never have imagined such a thing while living his daily life, going to work at his firm in Los Angeles.



And so he could not have predicted the way that he felt changed by it now. He felt as if he had been physically movedas if someone had picked him up and shifted him ten feet to one side. He was no longer standing in the same place. But he had also been changed internally. He felt a kind of solid impassivity he had not known before. There were unpleasant realities in the world, and previously he had averted his eyes from them, or changed the subject, or made excuses for what had occurred. He had imagined that this was an acceptable strategy in lifein fact, that it was a more humane strategy. He no longer believed that.



If someone tried to kill you, you did not have the option of averting your eyes or changing the subject. You were forced to deal with that person's behavior. The experience was, in the end, a loss of certain illusions.



The world was not how you wanted it to be.



The world was how it was.



There were bad people in the world. They had to be stopped.



"That's right," Kenner was saying, nodding slowly. "Three deaths. Isn't that right, Sanjong?"



"That's right," Sanjong said.



"Screw 'em," Evans said.



Sanjong nodded.



Kenner said nothing.



The jet flew back to Los Angeles at six o'clock. Sarah sat in the front, staring out the window. She listened to the men in the back. Kenner was talking about what would happen next. The dead men were being ID'd. Their guns and trucks and clothes were being traced. And the television film crew had already been found: it was a truck from KBBD, a cable station in Sedona. They'd gotten an anonymous call saying that the highway patrol had been derelict and had allowed a picnic to proceed despite flash flood warnings, and disaster was probable. That was why they had gone to the park.



Apparently it never occurred to anyone to question why they'd got an anonymous call half an hour before a flash flood warning had been issued from the NEXRAD center. The call had been traced, however. It had been placed from a pay phone in Calgary, Canada.



"That's organization," Kenner said. "They knew the phone number of the station in Arizona before they ever started this thing."



"Why Calgary?" Evans said. "Why from there?"



"That seems to be one primary location for this group," Kenner said.



Sarah looked at the clouds. The jet was above the weather. The sun was setting, a golden band in the west. The view was serene. The events of the day seemed to have occurred months before, years before.



She looked down at her chest and saw the faint brownish markings from the lightning. She'd taken an aspirin, but it was still beginning to hurt slightly, to burn. She felt marked. A marked woman.



She no longer listened to what the men were saying, only to the sound of their voices. She noticed that Evans's voice had lost its boyish hesitancy. He was no longer protesting everything Kenner said. He sounded older somehow, more mature, more solid.



After a while, he came up to sit with her. "You mind company?"



"No." She gestured to a seat.



He dropped into it, wincing slightly. He said, "You feel okay?"



"I'm okay. You?"



"A little sore. Well. Very sore. I think I got banged around in the car."



She nodded, and looked out the window for a while. Then she turned back. "When were you going to tell me?" she said.



"Tell you what?"



"That you saved my life. For the second time."



He shrugged. "I thought you knew."



"I didn't."



She felt angry when she said it. She didn't know why it should make her angry, but it did. Maybe because now she felt a sense of obligation, or amp;or amp;she didn't know what. She just felt angry.



"Sorry," he said.



"Thanks," she said.



"Glad to be of service." He smiled, got up, and went to the back of the plane again.



It was odd, she thought. There was something about him. Some surprising quality she hadn't noticed before.



When she looked out the window again, the sun had set. The golden band was turning richer, and darker.



Chapter 57



TO LOS ANGELES



MONDAY, OCTOBER 11



6:25 P.M.



In the back of the plane, Evans drank a martini and stared at the monitor mounted on the wall. They had the satellite linkup of the news station in Phoenix. There were three anchors, two men and a woman, at a curved table. The graphic behind their heads read "Killings in Canyon Country" and apparently referred to the deaths of the men in Flagstaff, but Evans had come in too late to hear the news.



"There's other news from McKinley State Park, where a flash flood warning saved the lives of three hundred schoolchildren on a school picnic. Officer Mike Rodriguez told our own Shelly Stone what happened."



There followed a brief interview with the highway patrol officer, who was suitably laconic. Neither Kenner nor his team was mentioned.



Then there was footage of Evans's overturned SUV, smashed at the bottom of the cliff. Rodriguez explained that fortunately no one was in the car when it was carried away by the floodwater.



Evans gulped his martini.



Then the anchors came back onscreen, and one of the men said, "Flood advisories remain in effect, even though it is unseasonable for this time of year."



"Looks like the weather's changing," the anchorwoman said, tossing her hair.



"Yes, Marla, there is no question the weather is changing. And here, with that story, is our own Johnny Rivera."



They cut to a younger man, apparently the weatherman. "Thanks, Terry. Hi, everybody. If you're a longtime resident of the Grand Canyon State, you've probably noticed that our weather is changing, and scientists have confirmed that what's behind it is our old culprit, global warming. Today's flash flood is just one example of the trouble aheadmore extreme weather conditions, like floods and tornadoes and droughtsall as a result of global warming."



Sanjong nudged Evans, and handed him a sheet of paper. It was a printout of a press release from the NERF website. Sanjong pointed to the text: " amp;scientists agree there will be trouble ahead: more extreme weather events, like floods and tornadoes and drought, all as a result of global warming."



Evans said, "This guy's just reading a press release?"



"That's how they do it, these days," Kenner said. "They don't even bother to change a phrase here and there. They just read the copy outright. And of course, what he's saying is not true."



"Then what's causing the increase in extreme weather around the world?" Evans said.



"There is no increase in extreme weather."



"That's been studied?"



"Repeatedly. The studies show no increase in extreme weather events over the past century. Or in the last fifteen years. And the GCMs don't predict more extreme weather. If anything, global warming theory predicts less extreme weather."



"So he's just full of shit?" Evans said.



"Right. And so is the press release."



Onscreen, the weatherman was saying, "is becoming so bad, that the latest news isget thisglaciers on Greenland are melting away and will soon vanish entirely. Those glaciers are three miles thick, folks. That's a lotta ice. A new study estimates sea levels will rise twenty feet or more. So, sell that beach property now."



Evans said, "What about that one? It was on the news in LA yesterday."



"I wouldn't call it news," Kenner said. "Scientists at Reading ran computer simulations that suggested that Greenland might lose its ice pack in the next thousand years."



"Thousand years?" Evans said.



"Might."



Evans pointed to the television. "He didn't say it could happen a thousand years from now."



"Imagine that," Kenner said. "He left that out."



"But you said it isn't news amp;"



"You tell me," Kenner said. "Do you spend much time worrying about what might happen a thousand years from now?"



"No."



"Think anybody should?"



"No."



"There you are."



When he had finished his drink he suddenly felt sleepy. His body ached; however he shifted in his seat, something hurthis back, his legs, his hips. He was bruised and exhausted. And a little tipsy.

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