The 13 th tribe

[49]

The helicopter settled onto the slightly sloping rock in front of St. Catherine’s, and Owen climbed out. He stared at the smoking hole that used to be the front gate and realized he’d arrived too late. He leaned back into the cabin and spoke to the pilot, who switched on a joystick-controlled spotlight mounted to the nose of the copter. It bathed the destruction in white light. He started toward it and stopped.

A woman was coming out, carrying someone over her shoulder, only feet, legs, and backside visible from this angle. He pulled his pistol and saw a small handgun clutched in her fist. Squinting, she aimed it at him, each of them watching the other over the barrel of a gun.

“Stop!” he yelled over the sound of the helicopter’s engine and rotors. “I can’t let you take him.”

She twisted her torso, showing him the man she carried. It wasn’t Creed.

Owen gestured with his head for her to leave.

“Get that light off me,” she said. “Or would you prefer I just shoot it?”

He signaled the pilot, and the light snapped off.

Pointing the gun, watching him, she stepped gingerly through the rubble. When she’d cleared the worst of it she picked up her pace, heading for the garden side of the monastery. As she passed his position, she rotated to keep her eyes and gun on him, sidestepping, then walking backward.

At the end of the great wall, she stepped back into the shadows and disappeared. Owen kept his pistol aimed at the spot and slowly made his way toward the entrance.

As Jagger lowered his head and closed his eyes, the bells continued to resonate in his mind, clanging unmusically, pounding, settling into an unwavering, high-pitched tone, a scream sustained through eternity.

Something touched his head, and he raised it. Tyler was looking at him, through him, with unfocused eyes. His son’s hand slowly smoothed the hair on the back of Jagger’s head, caressing it. He coughed, too quietly to penetrate the scream that filled Jagger’s skull.

Jagger said something-Tyler’s name, soothing assurances-but the scream stole his voice as well. Then other sounds did break through, rhythmic pulses, as if from a variety of drums scattered around a pitch-black stadium: his heartbeat, footsteps pounding and echoing in the monastery, the thu-thu-thu of a helicopter’s rotors.

They’re leaving, he thought. What he wouldn’t have given at that moment for a rocket launcher. But he’d give more, he’d give everything, to save his son-to move and get him help. Move! Scratching in a deep recess of his brain, like a fingernail, was the thought that if he just stayed there, if he continued to simply hold his boy, time would stop, the badness would stop. Hit the pause button, freeze-frame this moment forever, the two of them holding each other, and what would happen next never would.

But if he moved-if he did the very thing he knew he had to, what every cell in his body except that scratching fingernail screamed at him to do-then the movie would go on, fast-motion, rushing to events he didn’t want to experience.

One of those drums in the darkness rose in volume, drawing close, then stopped. A scream-real now-reached him like a slap across his face. He looked over Tyler’s head and saw Beth frozen at the end of the terrace. She rushed forward. Her body broke up, prisming into disjointed shards. Jagger blinked his tears away, and her pieces came back together.

“Stop!” Jagger said, shaking his head. Beth should be there, he knew. To be with her son, to give Tyler comfort, to force Jagger to move. But he didn’t want her to see Tyler this way, bloody, barely holding on. It would rip her apart. “Beth… don’t…”

She didn’t slow but came full-on into his nightmare, tears already streaming down her face. She fell to her knees beside them. Her hands shot toward Tyler, stopped inches from him, hovered-wanting so much to touch him, but afraid her love would cause him pain, hurt him worse. Or was it, Jagger thought- scratch, scratch, scratch — that to her, physical contact and only that would make this horror real?

“Jag-What, what-?”

He heard the meaning behind each syllable. Tell me he’s fine! What do we do, what can we do?

She groaned, a mother’s agony. “Tyler-”

And what assaulted Jagger’s mind was everything Tyler ever had been-the wrinkled pink newborn, mad as a hive of bees at being extracted from the warm cocoon he had known; the five-year-old planting his entire face in his birthday cake and coming up a laughing abominable snowman-and as he was now, the boy whose love and joy was a sun that could burn away his parents’ gloomiest moods.

Beth’s torment broke Jagger’s paralysis.

“Give me your sweater,” he said. She stripped it off, and when he moved his hand from Tyler’s back to press the material against the wound, she caught a glimpse. She gasped as fresh tears poured down her face. She clamped a hand over her mouth. New energy surged through him, adrenaline and determination incited by the urgent distress of the woman he loved. In his weakest time she had become strong, willing and able to carry them both; now it was his turn.

“Keep this pressed over the wound,” he said.

She nodded and pressed her hands against the balled-up sweater.

Tyler’s legs were sprawled across Jagger’s, his bare feet canted at awkward angles on the stone terrace. Jagger shifted and got a foot under himself. He rocked forward and rose up, pulling Tyler into his arms.

“What are you going to do?” Beth asked.

“We need Ollie’s Jeep.”

“Help!” Beth screamed over her shoulder. “Someone! Help!” Jagger started to walk, Beth sidestepping with him, keeping her hands on the sweater. She said, “When I heard you and came out, I passed Father Jerome. He said they turned on the bells to call for help from the town. Someone should be coming.”

“Who?” Jagger said, shaking his head. There was a doctor in town who manned a little clinic. He’d met him once, to get a prescription for stronger painkillers when a persistent ache in his stump had kept him up three nights straight. The doc looked as old as the monastery and moved like he had glass shards in his joints. He doubted the guy had treated anything more severe than a few cuts and bruises from clumsy tourists, a stomach bug now and then. But he was a doctor; he’d have equipment, supplies. Jagger moved faster.

Before they’d crossed half the terrace, a stranger rushed up the stairs and pointed a gun at them.