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."How the fuck can you say that to me? How can you tell me I can't have what they have? What kind of heartless chingalo are you, to tell me I have to die, when these people can go on raking your leaves and making your beds? We Mexicans can pick a mean head of lettuce, you gringo bastard—"His implacable calm wasn't even dented."Please understand, Ms.Orozco, that we regret this more than you can understand right now.We wish it could be otherwise, but this process can't be revised.We all serve the life force, in our way.""But as far as you're concerned, the brown people of the world can serve as fertilizer, eh?" An undercurrent of livid self-hatred rolled back on her as she slipped deeper into race-baiting.Never shamed of her heritage, she'd never invoked it for anything.Stella Orozco was a race of one, and it made her sick to hear her own voice using her Hispanic blood as a weapon."No, Stella, no.Listen to me," he said and he was closer to her than she would have allowed, just now, if she'd noticed him coming.His hands were on her arms again, but not restraining.She felt comforted, and she fought it.She lost."Where there is life, there is change.Where life fights change, it breaks through…as cancer.But if your will to live is strong, you'll see the next Radiant Dawn.This is only the first such hospice.There will be others.And you will go among them.We will teach you to live with your illness, which is the life force.We will help you to become one with it, and live."He let her go again, and steered her toward the cart.As the driver backed it out, Dr.Keogh waved to her once and went inside.As oblivious to the driver now as he apparently was to her, Stella cried some more.She was still crying when they topped the ridge beside her car and she made out the shapes of residents at work on the dusty field.They were digging irrigation ditches, laying the groundwork for turning the desert into a farm.She wiped her eyes and climbed into the car.She stopped and stood up again and craned her neck, looking at one of the fieldworkers.His ginger hair and lanky build.She'd never seen him upright, but that same perverse voice that'd urged her to flee told her she was looking at Stephen.Standing on his two legs in a field.Holding a shovel in his two hands.He was talking to someone with their back turned.She shielded her eyes against the glare and the airborne dust and strove to see just a bit more clearly, but the dust was caking her face, miring in her tears.Then the man he was talking to turned and faced her and he seemed to see her very clearly indeed.It was Dr.Keogh.He waved once more to her and watched her as she dove back into the car, started the engine and sped away.She couldn't stop crying until she got home.After a long bath, she realized that despite what Keogh'd told her, despite what she'd thought she'd seen, she was beginning to hope, and that nothing else mattered.7Storch drove out to the place where he knew they hid.The place that immediately leapt to mind when Hansen had told him she'd been missing nine years.He didn't know why he hadn't thought of it before.The skin traders.A year before, they'd come into his store.They smelled like organized crime.Three men, two bodyguards flanking an out-of-work Greek lounge emcee in a powder-blue Dacron suit that seemed to squirt sweat from strategic gutters when he walked or waved his arms.Which he did constantly, as if he were freezing to death in the hundred and three degree heat.His shopping list reinforced Storch's suspicion that they were penny-ante crooks on the lam—sleeping bags, lanterns, shotgun shells, and such—but a few unusual items, like bolts of canvas, camcorder batteries, pepper spray and handcuffs led him to believe they were going into the rough-trade porn business.They had four moving vans that came and went at odd hours from a mining hut two miles north of Thermopylae.Storch minded his own business and took their money, until about four months ago.The emcee was trying to hustle Hansen into procuring Thiopental for them in industrial volumes, and Hansen must have complained to the Field Marshal, who chased them out of town.Storch visualized the two or three underage girls he'd spotted in the van that tore out of his parking lot inches ahead of the Field Marshal's half-track.They'd never stopped in town again, but the vans kept coming and going.The mysterious combatants whose secret war had trampled his life whirled about in his mind.He couldn't figure out which side was which [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]