No Survivors Read Free Page B

the modest facility, his lawyer and financial director, who flew in from his corporate headquarters in San Antonio, the flight attendant who fussed over him as he was flown back home to Texas—they all used that same word: miracle.

FIVE YEARS LATER:
    January 1998

4
    S amuel Carver’s room had a million-dollar view, clear across the water to the snowcapped peaks that rose in serried ranks beyond the southern shore. While the mountains stood solid and immutable, the skies above them displayed an infinite variety of light, color, and temper, concealing the glorious landscape one moment, illuminating it the next. On a clear day, a man could stand at that window and see all the way to Mont Blanc. He could practically reach out and touch the black runs.
    But Carver wasn’t standing. Having visited death upon so many, he was now condemned to a half-life, trapped in a solitary purgatory. He was lying in bed, his body twisted in a fetal curl. The room was centrally heated, but his shoulders were hunched against the cold. It was silent, yet the palms of his hands were cupped over his ears, his fingers clawing at the back of his skull. The light was gentle, but his eyes were screwed tightly against a scorching glare.
    Then he began to stir. He jerked his back straight, then arched it, throwing his head up the bed and opening his mouth, uttering soft, wordless moans, while his limbs thrashed in random, spastic movements. His twitching became more frantic and his cries grew in volume.
    By the time Carver woke, he was screaming.
     
     
     
    “Wake up, wake up!”
    Alexandra Petrova placed her hands on Carver’s shoulders and tried to free him from the nightmare’s grip, gently shaking him back into consciousness. His body felt weak and flabby, softened by months of inactivity. His face was rounder, his features less clearly defined as the bones disappeared behind pouches of flesh. His eyes were red-rimmed and fearful.
    The screams petered out, replaced by a confused, semiconscious muttering and then the familiar sequence: the panicked, darting looks around the room, his body half raised from the bed; the gradual relaxation, sinking back onto his pillows as she stroked his hand and reassured him; finally the answering squeeze, the attempt at a smile, and the single whispered word, “Hi.”
    And then another, “Alix.”
    It was Carver’s name for her, the one he’d used in the days they’d spent together, before his months of confinement in this private clinic on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a sign that he recognized her, and was grateful for her company, though he could not yet recall what she had meant to him before. But then, he did not know who Samuel Carver truly was, either: what he had done and what others had done to him.
    “Still the same dream?” she asked.
    He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment as if to drive the last fragments of the horror from his mind, then answered, “Not the same dream. But the same ending, like always.”
    “Can you remember what happened at the beginning of the dream this time?”
    Carver thought for a while.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    He sounded indifferent, not quite seeing the point of the question.
    “Just try,” Alix persisted.
    Carver screwed up his face in concentration.
    “I was a soldier,” he said. “There was fighting, in a desert . . . then it all changed.”
    “You were probably dreaming about something that actually happened. You really were a soldier.”
    “I know,” said Carver. “You told me before. I remember that.”
    He looked at her with eyes that sought her approval. For the umpteenth time, she tried to persuade herself that the man she loved was still in there somewhere. She imagined a time when the blankness in his eyes would be replaced by the fierce intensity she had seen in them on the night they met, or the unexpected tenderness he had revealed in those stolen hours when they had been alone together, keeping the world at bay.
    They’d both