Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 34

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  When I arrived at the agency, I found the alarm disarmed.

  Was someone here before dawn on a Saturday morning? Or had the last person out the night before just forgotten to punch in the code? After taking a cursory look around and seeing no one, I decided it was the second option. I could have been more thorough, but I had maybe five minutes before whatever was going to happen happened.

  I took that time to try to compose myself and prepare as much as I could. Scanning the area for weapons, I wished briefly that I’d brought along some of the guns that had been lying around after the dustup at the warehouse on Treasure Island. But they hadn’t been much use against the tomatoes, and I assumed they’d be equally ineffective here. With that in mind, none of the desk supplies surrounding me seemed to hold much promise. And time was up.

  It started at the far end of the office: the ceiling, walls, and furniture began to twist, fold, and crumple in on themselves. As the wave of distortion advanced toward me, I saw what it was leaving behind. It wasn’t the tornado-ravaged disaster I’d expected, but a tidy, orderly office—albeit one that evoked a very different era from the space on my side of the wave. Frosted glass and wood paneling surrounded an expanse of beige decor, contrasted with pastel highlights. Typewriters and rotary dial telephones sat on every desk. Ash trays were everywhere. The place was instantly recognizable. As brief as my Mad Men binge had been, I knew what was happening. Our crappy little agency was metamorphosizing into a fancy big agency that existed only on TV. It was becoming Sterling Cooper Advertising’s Madison Avenue office, circa 1962—home of the grubby little hands that were always grasping for more bourbon, cigarettes, and secretary backsides.

  Before I knew it, the reality-warping wave slammed into me with a whoosh. The space around me shook and twisted and vibrated as shape-shifting debris swirled around me. It was like being in a drier on the spin cycle.

  As the wave passed me by, I looked around to see everything in the vicinity had gotten a 60s-era makeover, including me. I wasn’t wearing my jeans and t-shirt anymore. I would have expected a classic suit, tapered at the waist over a starched white collared shirt with skinny tie. But from the various points of discomfort my outfit was causing me, I knew something was amiss before I even looked down. As I did, I discovered that I was wearing a plaid A-line skirt, pantyhose, and high heel Mary Janes. And the strap of a sensible handbag was looped over my shoulder.

  Sigh.

  I’d hate to be a woman in that office in that decade, I’d always thought. Before I could take a moment to curse out the game, I glimpsed something scuttling toward me. In fact, scanning the area, I spotted several somethings. They were scaling the walls and furniture, drawing ever closer. Finally, I saw what they were: hands. Manicured, disembodied little account executive hands.

  As I looked closer, I could see they were wearing tiny Brooks Brothers suits—tailored with three pant legs to fit the index, middle, and ring fingers that were carrying them forward. Their thumbs and pinkies protruded from their jacket sleeves, swinging at sprint speed.

  “Hey sweetheart, whip me up an Old Fashioned,” one of them shouted from no apparent mouth opening. “And don’t skimp on the bourbon!”

  This served to distract me enough for another one to sneak around behind me. It leaped up and squeezed my right butt cheek with the force of a vice.

  “Ow!” I screamed as I swatted it away. It hit the wall and splattered everywhere as I sensed its paltry three-point Life-O-Meter drop to zero.

  These things obviously weren’t the main attraction. They were just opening acts. But one of them had taken two points off my Life-O-Meter with a single pinch. And I had lost count of how many of them were crawling around. I needed to drop back to a more defensible position and cut off their ability to flank me. I turned and sprinted away, tearing open the door to an office near the front of the now unrecognizable building. I slammed the door behind me and heard the hands smacking against it as I caught my breath and braced for a possible breech.

  “Who are you?” I heard a slurred woman’s voice ask.

  I looked over to see a skinny, spandex-clad brunette clutching a glass of champagne. Beside her was . . . Frank, sporting a red tracksuit. He was holding a glass of champagne that matched his date’s, along with a nearly empty bottle. That explained the woman’s slurred speech.

  “Henry?” he exclaimed, clearly very tipsy himself and trying to make sense of my presence as well as . . . my appearance. “Why you wearing a dress?”

  “Uh . . . it’s a long story,” I answered evasively, trying to figure out what to do about the two of them.

  With the office remake, I hadn’t realized I’d taken refuge in what had been Frank’s office—an office I’d failed to check earlier. The mystery around the deactivated alarm was solved. I’d heard Frank sometimes brought dates to the agency to show off. Of course, in its pre-reality-warp state, the industrial park business shanty in which we worked was really only impressive to a certain demographic. And that demographic was sporty, middle-aged women who were ready to settle for anybody with a pulse and a paycheck—not necessarily in that order. No question, this was the sole motivation for Frank’s Friday night attendance of his fitness club’s step-aerobics class.

  It seemed the wave hadn’t elected to integrate them into the instance, as their apparel was their own. But the office had gotten the full treatment.

  “This remodel came out great,” Frank said, moving on from my provocative fashion choice and taking in his new leather and mahogany digs. The RIP mind wipe had obviously already started to take effect, planting the notion of a recently completed remodel.

  “You’re a regular Don Draper,” his date said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I told you.”

  “Frank, you need to leave,” I said simply, ping ponging my gaze back and forth between him and the door.

  The office outside had fallen silent, but ominously so. As much as I needed to get Frank and his date clear, I couldn’t risk taking them out that way. There was only one option.

  “You and your friend,” I continued, pointing to the newly Manhattanized fire escape now located outside his office window. “Out that window. Now.”

  I was mildly surprised to notice that any trace of timidity or deference was now gone. The audacity I’d found during my run-in with Frank at the hospital was now a permanent fixture. Alas, that didn’t sit well with him.

  “Out the window?” he scoffed incredulously. “I’m not going out any freakin’ window. And who do you think you are, tellin’ me to leave? You’re the one that needs to leave. Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for Marty’s funeral?”

  “So I can harangue his dad into signing a media contract as he sobs over his son’s corpse?”

  “Yeah,” Frank answered, deaf to the derision in my tone.

  “You’re an idiot!” I raised my voice. “And you need to go!”

  “How dare yo—” Frank started.

  “Who’s Marty?” his date cut him off, derailing his train of thought.

  “Uh . . . he’s a client,” he answered. “Was a client. He’s dead. Very sad—he didn’t sign his contract before it happened.”

  Boom! I felt the building shake as if a wrecking ball had hit one of the exterior walls.

  “What the hell is goin’ on out there?” Frank demanded, forgetting my insolence.

  I didn’t know. But there was no way the executive hand-oids had made that kind of ruckus. There was something bigger headed our way—something much bigger.

  I tossed my purse aside and opened the window to the fire escape. Then I grabbed Frank’s arm, and started pulling him toward it.

  “You guys need to get out of here, right now!”

  “You need to check yourself, mister,” he exclaimed in belligerent disbelief as his indignation flooded back. He slapped my hand away from his arm and poked a stubby finger into my chest, swaying slightly against the tide of his inebriation.

  “This is my shop, big shot. Not yours!”

  Boom! The floor shook again, more violently, as whatever was outside drew closer.

  “Leave now!” I yelled at Frank, shoving him toward the window. But he set his feet and shoved me back.

  “You want to get it on, Hubble?” he cried, idiotically. “’Cause I’ll go right n—”

  Boom! There was another thundering crash as the wall beside us was obliterated and we were covered with a shower of plaster confetti. It felt like everything was happening in slow motion and I had ample time to think “Why didn’t whatever this thing was just use the door?” I’d locked it, but surely it would have been easier to knock down than the wall. However, the mystery was solved as I finally laid eyes on the rampaging abomination, who had never used a door in his life.

  RIP’s DLC was called “Lazurus’ Kool-Aid.” How could I not have seen this coming? My dad’s digitized WWF recordings had always included the original commercials to retain maximum nostalgia value. And at the tender age of four, one of those commercials had birthed my greatest childhood fear: a horrifying, giant anthropomorphic glass pitcher that stomped his way into people’s homes, laying waste to whatever stood in his way, intent on force-feeding the resident children his blood, or whatever it was sloshing around on the other side of his transparent shell.

  “Montezuma’s mother!” Frank cried. “What is that?”

  “It’s . . . the Kool-Aid Man,” I gasped.

  Just then I registered the monster’s Life-O-Meter, with horror. Five hundred points! I thought the stat bumps I’d gotten after my tomato encounter would give me a shot here. But in the face of this deficit, those increases were a drop in the bucket. There was just one thing left to complete the nightmare come to life. I braced for it as the soulless black eyes and mouth painted on the front of the pitcher contorted with insidious delight before unleashing the bone-chilling battle cry that had sent my younger self screaming from the living room.

  “Ohhhhh yeah!”

  I’ll never know how some 70’s era marketing executive could think their monstrous LSD-induced hallucination would be a good way to sell fruit punch to kids. But they did.

  Of course, as I looked at the crazed carafe of diabetes juice staring me down in the fictional Madison Avenue ad agency, the higher-level theme was clear. I’d dedicated my life to the unsavory profession of marketing, so RIP had sentenced me to reap what I’d sowed. And I was reaping it up the ying yang.

  The monstrosity charged toward me. My inexperience in heels dulled the boost I got from my Twinkle Toes stat but I still managed to dodge to the right and avoid a direct hit. Alas, the glancing blow was enough to send me flying through the air, until I crashed into a book shelf and fell to the floor.

  “Ohhhhh yeah!” the Kool-Aid Man bellowed again, as I felt my Life-O-Meter drop sixteen points.

  “What is happening!” Frank’s date screamed.

  She turned to Frank, furiously.

  “Did you put something in my drink?”

  “No!” he answered. “Did you put something in mine?”

  It was only a matter of time before their brains were zapped and they were seeing and experiencing something less impossible. But for the moment, it was all Kool-Aid Man. And they finally decided to listen to me. They turned and sprinted for the fire escape. But it was too late. A torrent of fruit punch exploded from the Kool-Aid Man’s mouth like a fire hydrant on full blast.

  At first I couldn’t make sense of it. My RIP adversaries had never directly targeted bystanders. And Frank and his date were fleeing. Why bother harming them? I didn’t like the answer. As Frank and his date were drenched in the red sugar elixir, they started to scream and twitch and spasm. Their bones twisted and broke and their flesh stretched and tore and took on a different color and texture as their bodies reconfigured. Brutal as it was, it was over in seconds. Frank and his date were gone. In their place, stood more horrendous manifestations of my childhood TV commercial memory-scape. I stumbled back, mouth agape, as my brain revolted against the apparition before me: lumpy, rock-skinned Cro-Magnons better known as . . . Cavity Creeps.

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  While my younger self had found the malignant oafs less frightening than the demented punch pitcher with arms and legs, they were certainly more intentionally unsettling. The antagonists of the Crest toothpaste commercials, the Cavity Creeps existed for one purpose and one purpose only: to bore holes into the teeth of any kid who so much as thought about a sugary snack.

  While the reality-warping wave hadn’t found a use for Frank and his date, the Kool-Aid Man had—and it was a perfect pairing with his sucrose serum.

  I thanked God I’d sought a secluded setting for my final showdown. I’d feared any bystanders in this matchup would be collateral damage. But it was worse. They were minion makings. And once again, the game wasn’t playing fair. The Cavity Creeps should have been about a millimeter tall, sized for an assault on Toothopolis. But at six foot a piece, these two specimens were built with bigger ambitions. That said, they seemed no less dentally fixated.

  “We make hole in tooth!” the one that had been Frank declared in a barely intelligible vocalization as he raised a pick axe that had replaced the bottle of champagne in his hand. The Creep that had been his date raised a sledge hammer and repeated, “Hole in tooth!”

  Given the size of their tools, I highly doubted my teeth were the only things that would have holes in them when the Creeps were done with me. But as I staggered back away from them, I was reminded that they were just two of my problems.

  “Eeeeeyow!” I caterwauled, as I felt a discorporate hand grab my right butt cheek hard enough to tear a chunk out of it. The giant hole in the wall had made the office decidedly less hand-oid proof. I dropped unsteadily to one knee as the thing made off with its pound of flesh and the Cavity Creep with the hammer took the opportunity to bash me in the side of the head. My heightened Skin Thickness prevented my skull from busting open like a water melon, but I was sure I’d sustained a concussion and my Life-O-Meter dropped another seven points to forty-three. Alas, there was no time to lament that, because now that the minions had softened me up, the boss was ready to make another play.

  “Ohhhhhh yeah!” he intoned as he crashed into me once more, this time landing the direct hit I’d evaded on the last go around. His angle of attack sent me careening through the hole in the wall and into the pile of rubble left in the wake of his initial approach. Compared to the book shelf he’d flung me into previously, the rubble provided a relatively cushioned landing, and the distance traveled gave me more time to decelerate before impact. But, again, it had been a direct blow and it still knocked twenty points off my Life-O-Meter. I was far more than half dead now, with only twenty-five points left in the tank. I added a couple of cracked ribs to my list of injuries. That list was getting very long. But I had to set that aside if I was going to come out on top here. Thankfully, the muted pain receptors that came with my Skin Thickness helped.

  I rolled to my feet and looked around. I’d landed in the wreckage of the steno pool and considering the number of typewriters littering the area, my relatively soft landing was somewhat miraculous.

  There was a crunch from the direction I’d come, and I saw the Cavity Creeps wading their way through the rubble as they emerged from Frank’s office.

  “We make hole in tooth!” the one that had been Frank grunted.

  “Hole in tooth!” the one that had been his date concurred.

  With no clothing or distinguishing anatomy on the things’ rocky forms, the only way to tell which one had been Frank and which one had been his date was that he was brandishing the pick axe instead of the sledge hammer.

  The Kool-Aid Man was obviously the chief threat here, but from how hard they hit, these guys had to qualify as sub-bosses. And you can’t take out a boss with sub-bosses hacking away at your health. I needed to deal with them before they got too many more licks in.

  Alas, I didn’t get a great start. As the crazed golem wound up and swung the pick axe with a perfect tennis forehand, I tried to dodge, but this time my Twinkle Toes stat wasn’t enough to overcome my inexperience in heels. I slipped on some of the rubble around me and fell directly into the Creep’s swing.

  “Owwwww!” I cried.

  Staring down, I saw the pointy end of the axe was buried several inches deep in my shoulder. Even as I clambered back, shoving the blade back out, I felt my Life-O-Meter trickle down to twenty.

  Yanking off one of my high heels, I swung it hard into the Creep’s noggin, heel first. But the heel snapped off on contact, leaving nothing but a tiny divot. Worse, it made no divot at all in the Creep’s Life-O-Meter, which was full, at seventy-five points. What? I thought. My Muscles stat may not have been even with the Creeps’, but it wasn’t too shabby. How could the attack have done nothing?

  Then I remembered my showdown in the warehouse. Even if the Creeps were made of rock, they couldn’t be invulnerable. There had to be some kind of shield spell at work, just as there had been with the tomatoes. Granted, I doubted eating the Creeps was the answer.

  I needed time to think. Kicking off my other shoe, I turned and limped away, trying to buy some time. The Creeps fell in behind me in hot pursuit, and behind them, the Kool-Aid Man came crashing out of Frank’s office, making a second hole.

  “Oh yeah!” I heard him bellow idiotically.

  As unnecessary as the second hole in that first wall was, I noticed him veering to his right to smash into yet another wall that was well out of his way.

  Apparently, he couldn’t help himself. See wall, smash wall. The guy had a problem. Just the same, he’d eventually catch up. But not as quickly as the Cavity Creeps. They were closing fast. I hobbled down the hall, desperate for some way to bolster my chances—some cheat code that could give me a real shot against them. Of course, as I stumbled through the Sterling Cooper office thinking about cheating, one face flashed in my mind: Don Draper—the lying, philandering, con man of Mad Men fame who knew how to come out on top even when the odds were stacked against him. However, as I pictured his grinning visage in my mind, his cheating ways weren’t the thing I seized on. The thing I seized on was his preternaturally brilliant smile. The guy’s chompers were as white as fresh snow falling from heaven. This, despite the three thousand cigarettes he smoked per episode. That could only mean one thing. Invigorated by hope, I limp-sprinted toward the back of the agency.

  The Cavity Creeps continued to gain on me, but didn’t catch up before I bashed my way through the door of what I knew to be Don Draper’s office. Scrambling behind his desk and yanking open drawer after drawer, I found what I sought. It was a tube of Gleem toothpaste. I’d never heard of the brand but it had to be a spot-on bit of 60s authenticity like everything else in the place. And the logo didn’t matter. What mattered was the call-out on the label: “Flouride 700!”

  As the Cavity Creep that had been Frank charged me, I spun the cap off and squeezed the tube with both hands, like I was firing a flame thrower.

  “Eat fluoride, jerkwad!” I screamed, as toothpaste splattered all over him.

  He staggered back, groaning like a mortally wounded bear. The toothpaste now covering his chest was steaming, devouring the surface around it like acid. He crashed into the wall, knocking loose an abstract painting which fell on his head as he flopped onto a green sofa which buckled and collapsed beneath his tremendous weight. As I registered his Life-O-Meter bottoming out, I knew my guess had been right on the money: the only way to beat the Cavity Creeps was proper oral hygiene.

  The Creep that had been his date stomped in and looked at him, then at me, then at the tube of toothpaste in my hand. I don’t know if she was reacting to the fact that the tube was mostly spent, or the look of panic on my face when I registered that fact. But she came at me with no further hesitation, rounding the desk in barely a second. I ducked a baseball swing of the sledge hammer and fell to the floor as I tried frantically to work the residual toothpaste toward the top of the tube. But it was no good. I grabbed at the desk, trying to pull myself to my feet, but my hand caught the edge of an open drawer and it slid free, landing on my chest as I fell all the way over onto my back.

  The Creep lifted the sledge overhead and swung it down toward me like she was trying to ring the bell at a carnival strength tester. But I rolled to the left across the scattered contents of the drawer just in time to avoid the hammer head as it smashed into the floor beside me, cracking the underflooring and denting the carpet.

  Then, as the momentum of the blow carried the Creep forward a few steps, I saw my salvation lying amidst the scattered contents of the drawer: a flat white plastic box. Of course. A smile like Don Draper’s wasn’t possible with brushing alone! Snatching up the box of floss, I pivoted up behind the Creep and launched myself onto her back as I dispensed a length of the waxy thread. Then, looping the makeshift garroting wire under her chin and across her throat, I craned back like Princess Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt. I sensed her Life-O-Meter draining away, five points at a time. But for good measure, I seesawed the floss from right to left and left to right, yelling “9 out of 10 dentists recommend you die!”

  Not a masterpiece, but a solid one-liner. Deep down, I guess I still wanted to make my dad and the Holy Trinity of Johns proud. And that I did. Because the plastic thread suddenly jerked toward me. At first, I thought it had broken. But as the Creep’s head rolled off her shoulders and across the office, I realized that I may have flossed more aggressively than was strictly necessary.

  The headless body flopped down on the floor and I fell to my knees, adrenaline spent, lungs pumping in double-time. Then the reality finally settled on me. Had I just killed my boss and his girlfriend? Self-defense or no, were they really gone? Based on what had happened with Marty Malomar, I feared the answer was yes.

  Alas, I didn’t have time to feel the feelings crashing over me. I had no time to rest. I spotted something scrabbling across the floor near the wall. Snatching up the beheaded Creep’s sledge, I started swinging wild. The first swing did nothing but leave another dent in the carpet. But the second and third swings splattered two hand-oids. A third crawled up my leg and I grabbed it and slammed it into the wall with enough force to liquify it.

  Then my streak ran out. The fourth one got me right in the keister. But I ignored the agonizing sensation of it pinching off yet another chunk of cheek, maintaining the presence of mind to get ahold of it and turn it into a stain on the wall that matched its brother’s.

  By my count, I’d taken out five of the pinchy little bastards and there were no more in sight. But that last pinch had put my Life-O-Meter at just sixteen points.

  I thought that the rest I needed so badly might finally be in reach, but . . . no.

  Boom! The wall behind me exploded, and the Kool-Aid Man finally made his entrance. Looking around at the melted, headless Creeps and smashed hand-oids, I thought he might change his tune, as Becky’s sidekick Warren had when things hadn’t gone as planned. But instead of bawling “Ohhhh no!” he just stood there, stupefied by the scene.

  I exploited his moment of shock and took a running swing with the sledge. I figured big glass container plus big hammer would add up to “game over.” But I was wrong. The sledge bounced off with a deafening clang, as if I’d hit a belfry bell. The recoil sent me spinning back across the room, where I fell to the floor, dropping the sledge.

  When I looked up, I saw the fiendish pitcher’s expression had gone dark, his eyes narrowing and his lips curling down at the edges. Apparently, killing all his minions and hitting him with a sledge hammer had really soured his mood. The shot had taken a preposterously low twelve points off of his Life-O-Meter. The fact that it had done so little damage was bad, but the fact that it had done any damage at all was arguably worse. It meant there was no shield to puzzle out, no one-and-done short cut to beating him. This was a slugfest. And he had way bigger slugs.

  He charged. I tried to dive out of the way, again managing to half-dodge the attack, taking the brunt of it with my legs.

  “Oh yeah!” he bellowed, finally finding his voice again as the blow sent me helicoptering across the room and into the wet bar. Wood splintered and glass shattered as I hit the floor. But I knew I’d gotten lucky. By my math, a direct hit would have zeroed out my Life-O-Meter. As it was, it fell another fourteen points, to four.

  The pain I’d felt in my right ankle was nothing compared to the pain I now felt in my left thigh. It had to be a fracture. Even with the buff my Skin Thickness provided, the pain was unbearable. But I wasn’t contending with the blood loss I’d faced in my battle with Becky. So I was able to keep conscious and keep my focus on the fact that this big red, sloshy son of a bitch was the only thing standing between me and saving Robbie.

  I struggled to my feet, leaning all my weight on what, until a minute ago, had been my bad leg. But I was standing. Granted, I was standing with my back to a wall. And one of the more unique lessons I’d learned in life was that you don’t want to be cornered by the Kool-Aid Man. So as he came back around to draw a bead on me, I ambled through the door that opened back into the common area.

  He promptly turned and ran through a section of wall next to the section he’d already demolished, right behind me. But then there was a crash to my left as he veered over to take out another wall. After all the hits I’d taken, one of my legs could barely take any weight, so I wasn’t exactly moving at top speed. But the Kool-Aid Man’s Achilles heel was hindering his pursuit. The dude couldn’t resist a wall.

  I zig zagged through the space, enticing him with walls to the left and right. And he was taking the bait, making small detours through each wall and back, sounding his mantra with every collision like some OCD basket case.

  “Oh yeah!”

  Crash!

  “Oh yeah!”

  Crash!

  Rounding a corner, I cut through a central conference room and out the other side, continuing through a corridor that ran all the way around the office. I was well out of the Kool-Aid Man’s line of site and I’d built a decent lead on him. But as I stumbled forward, wheezing and grasping the walls around me to keep my feet, I knew I couldn’t keep this up forever.

  As I passed by Frank’s office, I impulsively leaped through one of the gaping fissures in the wall and dived into a corner, for all the good it would do me. I didn’t know how the Kool-Aid Man was tracking me, but I suspected my hidey hole wouldn’t keep me safe for long.

  Of course, I couldn’t keep running around in circles. And fleeing the office might buy me time, but it would most likely put bystanders in danger and/or give the Kool-Aid Man more minion fodder. Alas, I also couldn’t stand and fight. I had virtually no chance against the seemingly indestructible juggernaut. I tried to fend off hysteria as I racked my brain for some insight that could turn the tide. But I had nothing.

  And then . . . my phone rang.

  My newly developed Pavlovian panic response to the ringing was super-charged by the fact that the noise was advertising my position. I couldn’t even figure out where it was coming from. But on the second ring, I deduced it must be in the purse I’d discarded. I rifled through some rubble and unearthed the bag, yanking the phone out and silencing the third ring as it started to sound. Then I glanced at the display, hoping it wouldn’t say what it said. Obviously, I wasn’t in a phone-answering situation. But there was one number I couldn’t ignore, no matter the circumstances.

  I didn’t know what excuse Darla had made for my absence, and I knew there was a chance Margaret was just calling to dress me down for ditching her and Robbie. But there was also a chance that the worst had happened—a chance that Robbie was . . . I couldn’t even think the words. Bottom line: this wasn’t a call I could screen.

  “Hello?” I called out over the sound of another wall detonating down the hall.

  “Henry?” Margaret responded. “What’s that noise? Where are you?”

  “It’s . . . I can’t explain right now. Is everything okay?”

  “It’s Robbie . . . ”

  The chaos unfolding in my world went quiet and my heart leaped into my throat. Until she finished the sentence.

  “He woke up.”

  A surge of relief ran through me. But it ebbed as she continued.

  “It was just for a minute, but he was babbling. Babbling about you.”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘Tell Uncle Henry he has to attune to them.’”

  “Huh?”

  “He said I had to tell you right now. I think he was delirious but he was so insistent.”

  Suddenly, like a light tower appearing through the fog, Robbie’s words signaled the way. Was his timing an unbelievable coincidence? Maybe the product of some psychic vision? I had no idea. But his feverish outburst had just earned him his mentor stripes ten times over. I knew what I had to do to give myself a chance.

  “I just . . . ” Margaret continued. “He drifted off again and he’s stable, but . . . where are you? Darla said that—”

  “Margaret, I promise I’ll be there soon,” I said and dropped the phone, hoping I’d be able to keep that promise.