“Fuck it then. I’m ready to kill both of you dead right now.”

“Give me my child,” Sarah said.

“Bitch, you are gonna shut the fuck up.” Calhoun clutched Eli tighter, the gun back on the boy’s head. “I’ve got one ticket out of here and I’m using it.” And to Walker: “Keys, now, asshole, before I start killing people.”

“Who told you—” Walker started and cut himself off, staring down at Snow. “I should’ve known.”

Calhoun glared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“He’s playing us against each other.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had about a bellyful of being played with.” The pistol barrel slid over the bump on Eli’s forehead and Sarah saw the boy flinch, trying in vain to seek out some chamber of sleep where the pain couldn’t reach him. “Talk, now.”

“Stop it!” Sarah felt the emergency switch trigger in her brain, the circuit breaker blowing its cabinet door wide open. “For God’s sake, if you have his keys, give them back!”

Walker still didn’t say anything for what felt like whole minutes. Finally, he put his hand in his pocket and took out a ring of keys, handing them to Calhoun.

Taking his keys back, Calhoun actually appeared to change, not metaphorically but in actual physicality. It was only subtle for the first few moments, and then the alteration became frighteningly obvious. Time-lapse flowers, bright as poppies, blossomed in his cheeks, spreading scarlet through his pigmentation until even his irises reddened, thickened, maddened in their sockets. Invisible hooks drew the corners of his mouth down into what still technically should have been called a grin. Leaning forward, he inhaled deeply through his nose as if memorizing the scent of the room to file away for future reference.

“They’re useless, you know,” Walker said. “No better to you now than the gun in your hand.”

“Is that a fact.” Calhoun’s voice had changed, too, thickened somehow. “We’ll see about that when I shoot this piece of shit dead.”

Walker shook his head. “Frank Snow’s already dead,” he said. “He’s been dead for years.”

CHAPTER 45

45.

Mike lifted the book’s heavy cover, flipping pages until he reached the picture he’d seen before, the one that had made him slap the book shut: the little boy with the breathing tube and the man in the white coat standing over him.

No question, the little boy was the same one he’d seen in the newspaper photo, corn-silk hair with the USA sweater, Frank Snow. The white-coated man was a 1973 version of Dr. Walker, younger, immeasurably younger. Walker wasn’t looking at the boy. He was clutching something in his hands, something Mike couldn’t see from here, until—