Dead on Arrival

Epilogue

“Anyone ever tell you not to fondle the pilot, Dr. Martin?”

“I’m just saying, there is no substitute for a careful, hands-on examination.”

The prop plane circled the southern edge of the Canadian Rockies. Eleanor Hall had the helm. Lyle sat in the bucket seat beside her, hand on her knee.

“Gorgeous. Not a soul out here for miles.” Eleanor caught herself after she said it and looked at him and smiled. “Not that I’m calling for wiping the planet clean of other human beings. Just a nice, quiet afternoon.”

“I could do without a newspaper for a few days.”

Three months later, the fallout from the Million Gun March had moved from the front pages. An explosive end had been averted, by the protesters themselves, after one among their ranks began discharging bullets at an empty police van. For a moment, the world watching, the fates swirled with indecision. Then a handful of other gun-toting protesters walked up to the shooter and convinced him to put down the gun. They turned him over to the cops. Silence swept over the Washington Mall.

The protesters raised their guns over their heads. In their ability to control their own, they had proclaimed their power. The next morning, they disbanded, claiming victory.

Each side returned to a stasis state, not the kind that Jackie had envisioned, not a dead one, but a living one. Ever threatening, sometimes exploding, often just on the edge. Cat and mouse, disease and immune system, the difference razor thin.

Lyle felt great relief, obviously, but little triumph in his role at stopping Jackie. Though if he’d allowed himself to admit it, his plan had been ingenious.

He’d realized that Jackie wanted him to go into the motel room to spare him the syndrome. He’d also figured out there was another way to protect someone from seizing: the use of the barbiturate phenobarbital. So he’d secretly slipped some of the drug into the soda he bought for Eleanor at In-N-Out Burger. It’s why she’d been knocked out. But it protected the pilot’s system when the electrical surge happened. When the syndrome hit Hawthorne, Eleanor had been saved.

Jackie didn’t know that. All she’d seen on camera was a comatose Eleanor. That was part of Lyle’s plan.

Lyle had left a note for Eleanor in the Miata, given her smelling salts before he’d gone into Lantern and hoped she’d revive in time to read the note, get the defibrillator, and take Jackie by surprise. Mission accomplished, with seconds to spare.

Then it had come down to figuring out the password.

Lyle always told his students: ask for a patient’s history and then really listen. When he’d asked Jackie for her final thoughts, he figured she’d tell him what was most important to her.

Hickam’s dictum.

Jackie couldn’t live in a world with myriad threats. To her, life and death struggled all the time, and she felt caught in between. Lyle understood it. For now, he could live with it just fine.

“How about there?” Eleanor asked. Up ahead a field that looked like it had been struck by fire a few years back. Little brush, no trees.

“Nice.”

“Can you turn the yellow knob there, Dr. Martin, helps lock the speed.”

“I’m not a pilot, Captain Hall. I just play one on TV.”

“Have you at least got the picnic basket?”

“Affirmative.”

She turned to Lyle and met his smile.

She guided the airplane with a soft bump into the open field, a grove of trees up ahead.