The 13 th tribe

[23]

Jagger was having the same dream he’d had at least once a week for over a year, and he knew it. But knowing he was dreaming did not reduce the sheer terror he felt, or allow him to change anything about it.

As if intentionally designed to compound the horror, the dream forced him to be in two places at once.

Jagger the Observer stood under a starry Virginian sky, feeling the icy breath of approaching winter on his cheeks and hands. He waited in the grassy median between the westbound and eastbound lanes of State Highway 287, watching for the familiar SUV.

Jagger the Participant rode in that SUV with the Bransfords. Beth had stayed home with Tyler, who’d been feverish and vomiting all day. She’d insisted that Jagger go to celebrate Cyndi Bransford’s birthday. After all, saying the Bransfords were like family underrepresented their closeness. Mark had been Jagger’s best friend all through college. They’d joined the army together, managed to transfer into intelligence at the same time, and jointly left military life for gigs in private security. Nothing weird about it: they thought alike, bounced ideas off each other, and what sounded good to one sounded good to the other.

So maybe it wasn’t so strange that when Beth started dating Jagger, her BFF Cyndi fell for Mark. Though a year younger, the Bransfords’ son, Robby, became Tyler’s best friend, naturally. When the Bransfords welcomed baby Brianna three years ago, everyone wondered when the Bairds would hurry up and produce her best friend. If Frank Capra were still around, he would have bought the film rights.

Jagger and the Bransfords were heading home to Sunset Hills from the birthday dinner in Sterling Park. They’d eaten at the family’s favorite haunt, the creative-but uncreatively named-Dinner amp; a Show. The place was a converted theater in which the seats had been replaced by rows of tables, with chairs all facing a huge screen. Dinner was served to everyone at the same time, then the lights dimmed and a movie started-always an older film, available on DVD, but the novelty of the experience kept the restaurant packed. That evening’s entertainment was Return of the King, the extended, four-hour version. Before the show, the waitstaff had delivered a birthday cake and flowers to Cyndi, and all the patrons had sung “Happy Birthday.” Now it was late, they were almost home, and the Bransfords were happy and satisfied that they’d done Mom’s birthday right.

Lights flashed over Jagger the Observer as cars passed, not as many as there would have been a few hours earlier, but in the end that didn’t matter. Goose bumps rose on his arms, a condition that had nothing to do with the temperature. The headlights of Mark’s Highlander had just come into view, less than two minutes from their Reston Parkway exit.

Jagger the Participant rode shotgun beside Mark, who always drove with his hands at ten and two and observed the speed limit with maddening regularity. Jagger twisted around to laugh at Robby in the back, sandwiched between Brianna in a booster seat and Cyndi. The movie had acted like a jolt of cinematic caffeine on the boy, and the entire drive home he’d recited scenes-verbatim, as far as Jagger could tell.

Jagger the Observer ran onto the highway, waving his arms.

Robby was retelling the scene in which Eowyn slays the Witch-king.

You fool. No man can kill me.

I am no man!

Cyndi and Brianna dozed, their heads canting toward the windows, away from Robby, as though avoiding his wildly swinging arms.

Jagger the Observer spun, and his heart constricted. Coming the other direction, a van weaved between lanes. As he watched, it careened onto the right shoulder, skimmed a guardrail, and shot diagonally across the highway. It bounced into the median, churning up sod and dirt. Instead of stopping, it picked up speed and flew out of the median in a roar of revving engine, bottoming-out shocks, and protesting metal. Jagger signaled to the driver, as to a taxiing plane, to simply cross over these lanes as he had the others and sail into the field on the other side. But the van’s tires screeched and smoked and jittered as the driver aligned it with the highway. It zoomed past Jagger, heading the wrong direction, and crashed head-on into the Highlander.

The sound pierced Jagger’s head, but it wasn’t crushing-tearing-colliding metal, shattering glass, or rupturing tires; it was screams, louder than physically possible, extending longer than the lives of the family producing them, melding with his own pointless Nooooo!

They were gone. All of them. Just like that.

Except for him. In the car, he was conscious. His left arm was smashed and pinned between the hard folds of the dashboard, which had accordioned as the front end crumpled into the passenger compartment. He was drenched in blood-not all of it, not even most of it, his own.

Jagger the Observer blinked tears out of his eyes and stared at the demolished Highlander. Smoke and steam-lighted by a single burning headlamp, angled upward-roiled over the demolished front end. Tiny squares of glass glinted like jewels on the blacktop. Blood leaked from the car onto the road, mixing with oil, gasoline, radiator fluid.

In reality, it had taken two hours and the Jaws of Life to extricate the van’s driver from the wreckage, and almost as long to remove Jagger as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time he revived he heard screaming, and prayed it was coming from the Bransfords.

Scream, he thought. Scream because you’re alive.

He’d learned later that the van’s driver had made all the noise, in agony from a shattered femur and cracked sternum.

It didn’t go down that way in Jagger’s dream. In this realm the man pushed open his door and stepped out. He saw Jagger and smiled-the same smile he had tried to hide from the cameras as he left the courtroom three months after the crash, a free man. A nurse had botched the blood test, using an alcohol-based swab to clean his skin before inserting the syringe. State law required a nonalcohol-based swab, in the mistaken assumption that the wrong swab would produce inaccurate results. Despite having a blood-alcohol level of. 17-more than twice the legal limit-the D.A. had no choice but to dismiss the charges.

“Do it,” a gravelly voice said beside Jagger.

He turned to see Mark standing there. Half of his face was gone, and glass peppered the other side like freckles. Smoke coiled out of a hole in his skull. One shoulder drooped as though his arm started at the base of his neck. His chest was caved in, his shirt pushed in with it, clinging to broken ribs. The crater was the size and shape of a steering wheel. At the bottom, over his breastbone, blood seeped through the material. It formed the Toyota logo, then spread into an indistinguishable mass. He glared at Jagger, then rolled a lidless eye toward the drunk driver. “Do it,” he repeated.

Jagger felt weight in his hands and realized he was holding an M240 belt-fed machine gun, the pride of the Rangers in Iraq. He looked up at the driver, who was facing him now, holding his palms up as if to say, Whatcha gonna do?

“Shoot him,” Mark’s corpse said. “For me, for Cyndi, for Robby, for Brianna.” He nudged Jagger’s shoulder with bloody fingers.

Jagger hefted the weapon and took aim.

“Come on, man, you know he deserves it,” the corpse said and nudged him again and again, making it impossible for Jagger to lock onto the drunk. Over the gun’s wavering sights the guy started laughing. Then he broke up and disappeared.

Jagger’s eyes snapped open. A spear of light cut across the ceiling over his head. He groaned and squeezed his eyes tight. Always the same nightmare… leaving him grieved and angry and frustrated.

Mark’s corpse nudged him again, and he jumped, rolling in bed to face the monster come to life.

Tyler was hunched beside the bed, shaking him. His lips formed the word Dad?

Jagger reached to his ear and pulled out a bullet-shaped wedge of foam. The loud clanging of a woden scmantron in the monastery’s bell tower rushed in, waking him as surely as a splash of cold water. There was no need to look at the clock; the tolling sounded every morning at 4:15, calling the monks to matins, the first service of the day.

“Tyler,” he said, “what is it?”

“The gonging woke me.”

Jagger craned to see Beth. She shifted and murmured quietly, but remained asleep. He rolled back and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Where are your earplugs?”

“I can’t sleep with them. All I hear is my heartbeat, filling my head.”

“Better than waking up this early.”

Tyler frowned. The boy had something on his mind.

Jagger propped himself up on an elbow. “What are you thinking, son?”