True Evil

CHAPTER 29

While Alex was walking out of the Hoover Building, Eldon Tarver was squatting beside a sandy stream, waiting for his bowels to move. He had spent the last eighteen hours in the woods of Chickamauga, while forty miles away the Natchez police, the Adams County Sheriff's Department, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol combed the area for a white van that was tumbling along the bottom of the Mississippi River toward Baton Rouge.

The doctor's motorcycle was parked beneath a sycamore forty feet away, and his duffel bag lay beside it. Eldon had come down to the stream to escape the sun, and to do his business in peace. As he rocked and strained on his haunches, he kept his eyes peeled for movement near the stream. Snakes liked this kind of ground, down in the cool hollows near water. They needed to drink just as people did. That was one of the secrets of handling them: knowing that they weren't so different from people. Cold-blooded, yes, but Eldon had learned young that many humans shared this trait. Snakes lived to eat, sleep, and mate, just as humans did. To eat, they had to kill. And to kill, they had to hunt.

Most humans hunted, too, those who weren't so alienated from their natures that they retained nothing of their ancient selves. People hunted in different ways and places now: in offices, financial markets, laboratories, and dark city streets. A few still carried the spirit of the true hunter within their breasts. Alex Morse was one of these, and that only made sense. She had been born from a hunter's loins, and she was simply fulfilling her destiny, as her genes bade her to do.

Right now she was hunting him.

Morse had a tough job ahead. Eldon knew ways of hiding that even animals did not. There had been times, he believed, when he had made himself literally invisible to people passing within a foot of him. Today was a good example. He wasn't tearing across the country in a panic, as so many people who had killed would now be doing. He was living quietly, close to the earth, and still near the sites of his attacks.

He often felt a deep lethargy after a kill, the way snakes did after devouring large prey. It took time to digest the big things. Later, of course, he would begin to stir, to focus on research again. But now he felt a deep slowness in his veins, a reluctance to engage with life that almost frightened him. The feeling wasn't new. Sometimes he felt like a retrovirus himself, neither alive nor dead, but rather half a helix-half a chain-eternally searching for a tie that would bind. He suspected that most human beings were like that: dormant, drifting, like living corpses until they infiltrated the barriers of another person. By insinuating themselves into that other life, they began to function, to act, to feel, and ultimately to reproduce. But after a time (varying in every case, but always inevitable) they began to kill the host body. Look at the desperate men and women who went to Andrew Rusk for help. Most had already attached themselves to a new host and were now consumed by a frantic impulse to flee the dying husk of the old one, the husk that they themselves had sucked dry. And they would not scruple to kill if necessary.

Eldon listened to the whisper of the creek and let his mind drift downstream. Sometimes he had trouble evacuating his bowels. Before his adoptive father came to believe that Eldon had been ordained by God to handle serpents, he had flown into rages and beaten the boy without mercy. All the anger that would have crashed onto the thick heads of his biological children was diverted onto Eldon by his wife, a living monument to passive aggression. But Eldon had understood none of that then; he understood only pain. Even now, he had more than a dozen burn scars on his body, souvenirs of his father's Kafkaesque efforts to "prove" that he was not one of the elect, that he had been touched by the Evil One. (Being burned by the flame constituted damning proof of sin.) The red-hot iron had scourged Eldon in places he had not touched himself back then-the very iron they used in church to fulfill Luke 10:19: Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. And for the skeptical, there was Mark 16:18, which Eldon had heard repeated ten thousand times before he was fifteen: They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover-

The sound of a cell phone was alien in these woods, and many creatures stopped to listen. Eldon let it ring three more times before he answered.

"Yes?"

"Dr. Traver?"

Eldon blinked three times, slowly. "Yes."

"It's Neville Byrd."

"Yes?"

"I think I may have him, sir. Or it, rather."

"Go on."

"The thing you were waiting for, you know? The mechanism."

"Go on."

"Andy Rusk just logged on to this Dutch Web site. It seems to me he's going through an authentication protocol of some kind. You know, verifying his identity."

"And?"

"Well…I mean, if he does that tomorrow, I'd say we've found the trigger, you know? Like, if he didn't log in the next day, all hell would break loose. Or whatever it is you're expecting."

Eldon found it hard to adjust to the sudden intrusion of modernity. "Very good. Call me when…you're certain."

Neville Byrd sat breathing into the phone-he was almost panting, really, and obviously puzzled by his employer's apparent detachment. "I'll do that, Doctor. Is there anything else?"

"No."

"Okay, then."

The connection went dead.

Eldon hit END, then wiped himself with some broad leaves and walked slowly back to his motorcycle. He saw a shiver in the pine straw as he walked, a shiver that filled him with anticipation. Instead of halting, as most people would have, he threw out his right foot.

A thick black snake reared up before him, exposing the milky lining of its mouth and two long fangs. A cottonmouth moccasin. The tip of its tail vibrated like a rattlesnake's, but there was no sound. This viper had no rattle like its cousin. Still, it stood its ground more fiercely than a rattler would have done.

"Agkistrodon piscivorus," Eldon murmured. "Are you a sign, my friend?"

The cottonmouth seemed perplexed by his lack of fear. As Dr. Tarver moved forward, he opened his mouth and flicked his tongue in and out, an old habit from his snake-hunting days. The cottonmouth was not brilliantly hued like the coral, but corals were rare, and the one he'd found in the park was probably dead by now. Agent Morse would almost certainly survive, even if she'd been bitten. But she would never be the same. She would have tasted the enmity that God had promised in Genesis, and she would know that her present hunt was like no other.

The cottonmouth advanced in a quick rush, showing that he meant business. Eldon laughed and sidestepped the snake, whose body was nearly as thick as his forearm. Its diamond-shaped head was big as an average man's fist. A snake like that could generate a lot of fear. In some contexts, it could be a very persuasive tool.

"I believe you are," he said. "A sign of rebirth."

As he shouldered his duffel bag and climbed aboard the Honda, his laughter echoed strangely through the trees.