Sole Survivor

their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock. They're doing bad things to me. They're mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me .
        Whatever else he was-sociopathic psychotic homicidal-he was also a child. A beast, an abomination, a terror, but also a child. He had not asked to be born, and if he was evil, they had made him so by failing to teach him any human values, by treating him as mere ordnance, by rewarding him for murder. Beast he was, but a pitiable beast, lost and alone, wandering in a maze of misery.
        Pitiable but formidable. And still out there. Waiting to be told where he could find Rose Tucker. And Nina.
         This is fun.
        The boy enjoyed the killing. Joe supposed it was even possible that his handlers had never instructed him to destroy everyone aboard Nationwide Flight 353, that he had done it as an act of rebellion and because he enjoyed it.
         Make them stop or when I get the chance… when I get the chance, I'll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I'll do it. I'll kill everybody, and I'll like it.
        Recalling those words from the transcript, Joe sensed that the boy had not been referring merely to the passengers on the doomed airliner. By then he had already made the decision to kill them all. He was speaking of some act more apocalyptic than three hundred and twenty murders.
        What could he accomplish if provided with photographs and the geographical coordinates of not merely a missile-tracking facility but a complex of nuclear-missile launch silos?
        “Jesus,” Joe whispered.
        Somewhere in the night, Nina waited. In the hands of a friend of Rose's, but inadequately protected. Vulnerable.
        Rose seemed to be taking a long time.
        Rapping on the restroom door, Joe called her name, but she did not respond. He hesitated, knocked again, and when she weakly called “Joe,” he pushed the door open.
        She was perched on the edge of the toilet seat. She had taken off her navy blazer and her white blouse; the latter lay blood-soaked on the sink.
        He hadn't realized she'd been bleeding. Darkness and the blazer had hidden the blood from him.
        As he stepped into the restroom, he saw that she had shaped a compress of sorts from a wad of wet paper towels. She was pressing it to her left pectoral muscle, above her breast.
        “That one shot on the beach,” he said numbly. “You were hit.”
        “The bullet passed through,” she said. “There's an exit wound in back. Nice and clean. I haven't even bled all that much, and the pain is tolerable… So why am I getting weaker?”
        “Internal bleeding,” he suggested, wincing as he looked at the exit wound in her back.
        “I know anatomy,” she said. “I took the hit in just the right spot. Couldn't have picked it better. Shouldn't be any damage to major vessels.”
        “The round might have hit a bone and fragmented. The fragment maybe didn't come out, took a different track.”
        “I was so thirsty. Tried to drink some water from the faucet. Almost passed out when I bent over.”
        “This settles it,” he said. His heart was racing. “We've got to get you to a doctor.”
        “Get me to Nina.”
        “Rose, damn it-”
        “Nina can heal me,” she said, and as she spoke, she looked guiltily away from him.
        Astonished, he said, “Heal you?”
        “Trust me. Nina can do what no doctor can, what no one else on earth can do.”
        At that moment, on some level, he knew at least one of Rose Tucker's remaining secrets, but he could not allow himself to take out that dark pearl of knowledge and examine it.
        “Help me get my blouse and blazer on, and let's go. Get me into Nina's hands. Her healing hands.”
        Though half sick with worry, he did as she wanted. As he dressed her, he remembered how larger than life she had seemed in the cemetery Saturday morning. Now she was so small.
        Through a hot clawing wind that mimicked the songs of wolves, she leaned on him all the way back to the car.
        When he got her settled in the passenger's seat, she asked if he would get her something to drink.
        From a vending machine in front of the station, he purchased a can of Pepsi and one of Orange Crush. She preferred the Crush, and he opened it for her.
        Before she accepted the drink, she gave him two things: the Polaroid photograph of his family's graves, and the folded