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“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial”
*
“So it's true,” Mike says, leaning against the car. “Or am I imagining things? Dreaming?”
“I'm sorry, have we met?” She pushes past him to unlock the door.
“Apparently not,” he says, turning toward her, just enough to allow her to see the barrel of the gun in his hand. “I think it's time we got better acquainted.”
He doesn't take his eyes off her as he walks around to the passenger door. In a way, she supposes she's been preparing for this for months. The gun is an empty threat, but he wants answers, and she knows that if he doesn't get at least some of them, he's just going to keep following her around. She unlocks the passenger door and chucks the groceries in the backseat; she might as well toss them out the window, since they're completely irrelevant now. She'll never go back to that house again.
“Drive,” he says, but she's already put the car into gear.
She drives them out into the desert, just a few miles outside of town. He doesn't speak.
“All right,” she says, killing the engine. “Obviously you didn't come all this way just to kill me again.”
“I don't think you can afford to take that for granted right now,” he says, leaning back against the passenger door, a move that puts some more space between them and allows him to face her.
She unbuckles her seat belt. “I know this is a surprise,” she says. She's stalling; there's only one way this can end, and she's not looking forward to it. “You must be a little shell-shocked.”
He lets out a short, bitter chuckle. “It was a surprise, at first. Dee's the one who saw you first, just a tiny corner at the edge of a surveillance video. They were tracking a guy who just happens to shop at that market. She thought she was going crazy. I did, too. But then I took another look at The Premature Burial: he has catalepsy, he's not dead. Once I figured that out, I had to find out if it was true. Because it couldn't be true.”
“Not so surprising, then,” she amends. “I guess you've had some time to get used to it.”
“You were cremated.” It's surreal, such a ridiculous thing to hear. She suppresses a laugh.
“Friend of a friend helped with that,” she says.
“Start from the beginning.” He's trying hard to sound authoritative, as if there's some sort of power imbalance now.
“I don't know about that, Mike, it's kind of a long story.” She lowers her window, then his. He doesn't object. “Are we going to have enough time before your backup gets here?”
“It's just you and me,” he says.
Outside, the sky is black and nearly starless; the endless California desert stretches out around them on every side. Any backup that might be coming will be visible from miles away, when the time comes.
“I'll pretend I believe that,” she says, looking back at him. His face, barely illuminated, is haggard. Lack of sleep. Lack of food. Alcohol? He's aged five years in just a few months, and she wants to apologize for her role in that, but she's pretty sure it would fall on deaf ears. “What do you want to know?”
“Joe Carroll.” He shakes his head. “You really believe all that 'salvation in death,' Edgar Allan Poe crap? I just can't reconcile that with... anything else I thought I knew about you.”
“Of course I don't believe that crap,” she says.
“Then what are we doing here?”
She doesn't respond.
“Please,” he finally says. “Help me make sense of this, because I'm starting to think that I really am going crazy.”
She hesitates, but something about his urgency is persuasive. She chooses her words carefully. “Carroll contacted me years ago. He was becoming interested in techniques used by cults to recruit and indoctrinate new members. He'd come across an article of mine in his research. He wanted to talk.” She shrugs. “So we talked. Just from a historical perspective. And then it turned into, 'So how would you do it?'”
“Do what?”
“How would you manipulate someone who didn't know they wanted to be manipulated? I figured you could pick up elements from different religions, but you'd have to bring something unique to the table.” She keeps her tone flat. “It was just an academic exercise.”
“So,” he says, “whose idea was it to start picking off co-eds?”
“Carroll and I fell out of touch long before any of that happened. It was just talk. It's important that you understand that, Mike,” she says.
He lowers the gun, just slightly, and pinches the bridge of his nose with his free hand. “OK, but eventually, you had to know what he had done. So how did we get here?”
“He called me out of the blue to tell me that he was going to put our old blueprint into use. He wanted to bring in the Edgar Allan Poe, 'salvation in death' crap, and he was going to use the Internet to get his message out.”
“Did you help him?”
“With what, setting up a website?” She laughs.
He's not amused. “Why would he tell you what he was going to do, if he wasn't asking for your help?”
“I think it was a test. I knew I should be horrified by what he was planning, but I wasn't—I couldn't... it's hard to explain.” How can she tell him the truth? That there's a vacancy in her humanity?
“Try.”
She pauses. “You believe people are inherently good. Worth saving,” she says slowly. “Experience tells me otherwise.”
He doesn't ask her to explain. Even in the dark, she can see the gears turning.
“Ah,” she says. “I take it you talked to my sister. She's a real trip, right?”
“Your family thinks you're dead. I'm guessing that's what you wanted.”
“Kind of a side benefit.”
He avoids looking at her. “All those dead girls, they weren't worth saving? They deserved what he did to them?”
“Not at all,” she says. “I didn't condone it. It just didn't horrify me.”
“You sure spent a lot of time pretending. But let me guess: 'Everything I ever said to you was the truth.'”
“Not everything,” she allows.
He's silent for a long time.
“What are you going to do?” Her voice is low, barely audible.
He takes a different approach. “You know what happened to Ryan? What your friend had planned for him if he survived the lighthouse?”
“I don't ask those questions,” she says gently. “I know Hardy killed him.”
“And you know Claire Matthews is dead?” Like he's challenging her to feel something.
“Look, we weren't buddies. He didn't call me up to talk about his marriage or his feelings. The time had come for me to get out, so he gave me a way out.”
“And you know we killed one of those guys who buried you, right?”
We. She'd figured it was Hardy. God, poor Mike. “They didn't know anything about what was going to happen next,” she says. “It all had to be real, to get Hardy to the next step.”
“Why did he even go to the trouble to induce catalepsy, of all things?” he asks. “Why not just leave you there? What makes you special?”
“Carroll's erratic and emotional, but he values loyalty,” she says. “Did, anyway.”
He looks at her with something like pity, then: “Were you in love with him?”
“That's offensive,” she observes. “Of course not. Would you ask Hardy that question?”
“His motivations make sense,” he points out.
She sighs. “I'm tired, Mike. I told you what you wanted to know.”
“You haven't even scratched the surface,” he says, his voice rising. “Were you working against us the entire time? All those agents, all those innocent people that got killed, their blood is on your hands.”
“I was just keeping Hardy in line. When he wanted out, I brought him back in. He had to end up at that lighthouse. That was my end of the deal.”
“What happened to Ryan, what happened to me... Did you feel anything?”
She stares at her hands for a long moment. “Why do you think you're alive?”
When she looks up, his mouth is set in a hard line, but his eyes are wet. She reaches out to him, tentatively, and pulls him into an awkward, twisted semblance of an embrace; he's still holding the gun in his right hand, but his left hand is tangled in her hair.
“I'm sorry,” she says, over and over, and she's surprised to find that she means it.
“If you come back with me,” he finally says, “I'll tell them you were abducted. I won't tell them about any of this, on the condition that you help us find every last one of the monsters you helped him create.”
“Cultivate,” she murmurs. She extracts herself.
“What?”
“He didn't create them.” She knows that he won't understand, or care about, the difference, but she presses on anyway, delaying the inevitable. “He just exploited what was already there, cultivated it.”
“I just offered you the only out you're ever going to get, and that's your response?” He raises the gun again. “I thought I saw you for a minute there, but I guess I was wrong. Start the car.”
“Mike,” she says. “It's about five miles back to town. If you start walking now--”
“You know I can't do that,” he says.
“Yeah,” she admits. She pulls her old service weapon out from under the driver's seat.
“Deb,” he says, equal parts warning and entreaty.
She offers him a wan smile. “'Hardy was too late,'” she recites. “'Agent Debra Parker was dead.'”
She fires. Once, in the right shoulder. The sound is deafening. His hand opens, and she takes his gun. He's staring at her, mouth agape, but if he's making noise, she can't hear it over the blood pounding in her ears.
She comes around to the passenger side and opens his door, then lowers him onto the ground. He doesn't protest. After she's laid him out on the side of the road, he just clutches his wounded arm; he doesn't even try to struggle to his feet. The will to fight seems to have drained out of him.
With quick action, she knows that he shouldn't bleed to death, and they should be able to prevent infection, so she gets to work. She kneels beside him and rifles through his pockets to find his phone, then disassembles it and throws the pieces as hard as she can into the desert.
“Please don't keep looking for me,” she says. “Don't make me your Joe Carroll. You saw what it did to Hardy. I don't want that for you.”
She thinks she hears him say too late as she closes the passenger door, but she's not going to turn back now, as tempting as it might be to call the whole thing off.
She drives for five minutes before she calls 911, but she can still see the ambulance lights flashing in the distance as she turns onto the freeway. Check in, ditch car, new car, keep going. She recites the to-do list like a mantra, as a distraction, but all she can hear is too late, too late, too late.
Mike was a good man, before; she had meant that. Maybe the only one she'd known. Now?
Time, she supposes, will tell.
Good and bad no longer existed. It was all degrees of evil now, Carroll had written. "Oh, shut up," she says aloud.
She rolls the windows up and starts the long drive north.