The Mirror Man, стр. 77

Chapter 38

Jeremiah leaned hard against an oak tree and slid down to a sitting position. The morning air was still cold, but he didn’t feel it. What had he done? How had he managed to blow his one chance? And, more importantly, what was he going to do now? It was almost eight o’clock. By now Scott and the others knew he was missing. Certainly, they were already searching for him, and were likely starting to suspect Brent, too. And the clone was still alive.

He looked around him. There was little chance anyone would find him here. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d ever run into another person in these woods. But he couldn’t calm his nerves. If anyone—one of his neighbors—should happen to come by, it would be a problem. He couldn’t afford to be seen. He needed to wait for Brent and come up with another plan. But he didn’t have another plan. He hadn’t thought he’d need one.

He sat still for a few minutes, trying to focus on the sounds around him. It was silent except for a slight breeze rustling the leaves and the sporadic trill of chickadees in the trees. After a few minutes, he stood up and began walking along the path toward the top of the hill, looking for Brent.

He heard him before he caught sight of him, stumbling through the undergrowth and fallen leaves, obviously out of his element. His left shoulder was hanging limply in a sling and he held his arm gingerly against his chest as he tramped up the path.

“What the hell happened? What do you mean there was a change of plans?” Brent called breathlessly as he approached. “Is he dead?”

“No.”

“Fuck. What?”

“I couldn’t do it,” Jeremiah admitted.

“And what are we supposed to do now?” Brent was frantic, gripping the top of his head with his good hand, turning circles as though the trees themselves might offer some solution. “Scott has called me four times since they discharged me from the hospital! He keeps asking me to walk him through that fight again.”

“Does he know?”

“No, I don’t think so. But it won’t take him long to figure it out once he realizes I’m not at home convalescing like I’m supposed to be. Jesus! They’re probably at my house as we speak!”

“Is Mel there?”

“No, thank God. She’s already at work, none the wiser. She doesn’t even know about this yet.” He looked down at his own injured arm. “Jeremiah, we are royally screwed. We need to get you back to the lab and just take our chances. Maybe they’ll go easy on us if we just get back there. There’s nothing else we can do. The clone isn’t dead. Maybe they’ll just look at this as a drunken rampage or something.”

“I can’t, Brent. I can’t do that. Look, I didn’t kill him, but I do have this.” He took the bloody finger from his pocket, cold now, and stiffened into a slight curl, so that any way he held it, it looked like it was pointing at Jeremiah. Brent turned his head violently at the sight of it and then turned back to Jeremiah with a shocked expression.

“What the hell? You cut off his finger? His fucking finger? What the hell?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking. I just did it.”

“Put it away. Jesus!”

Jeremiah slipped the thing back into his pocket and ran a hand through his hair, thinking.

“Maybe we can use it,” he said. “Maybe, between this and those emails, maybe it will be enough.”

“Use it how? What are you going to do with a finger? Wave it around? What good is it? You were supposed to have a body! You were supposed to kill the clone, Jeremiah! A finger isn’t going to do us any good. It isn’t enough to prove anything!”

“It might be,” he said. “We need to think. It might be enough. I mean, I have a finger in my pocket with my own DNA and ten more of them on my own hands. We can use this. We can. We just have to figure out how.”

“You go back to them with that and they’re just going to lock you up and take the finger. And that’s if you’re lucky. It isn’t going to work,” Brent said.

“I can bring it to someone,” Jeremiah said. “I can use it to show someone what they’ve done. We can prove it with this. I think this can work. At least it’s something.”

Brent’s phone rang, the sound startling them both more than it should have. Brent looked at the number.

“Scott again,” he said. “We’ve got to do something fast, Jeremiah. We can’t stay in the woods forever.”

“I know a guy on the New York Times,” he said. “Walt Thompson—a science editor. I know this guy—he’ll go public with it. He is convinced that corporate America is to blame for everything from global warming to peanut allergies. Believe me, he’ll jump at the chance. He fucking hates Meld.”

“Yeah, and how do you propose we get to this science editor of yours?” Brent asked as his phone rang yet again. “They’re looking for us. We can’t risk it. They have too much at stake here. Who knows how far they’ll go to bring you back.”

“We’ll mail it to him, then. Pack it up on ice, with a note explaining the whole thing. He’ll know what to do.”

“Yeah, he’ll know exactly what to do when some lunatic conspiracy nut cuts off his own finger and sends it to him in the goddamn US mail—because that’s what it’s going to look like, you know. He’s going to think it’s your finger. He’s going to think you’re crazy and that you’re stalking him. Then he’ll have you arrested. It won’t work.”

“Wait a minute,” Jeremiah said with a sinking feeling in his gut. “That’s it, Brent—that’s exactly what we have to do.”

“What?”

“I have to send him my own finger. We