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“These people died, and were brought back by medical intervention, so our mission is to right that wrong? Negate that human interference?”
“Along those lines, yeah.”
“Wouldn’t that eliminate your medical types?”
“Not necessarily. Medicine, comfort, stitching wounds, mending broken bones, treating illness. You could look at that as natural. Even transfusions, transplants because that’s one human to another. But death? That’s an end. It’s time’s up. And if they think, if they believe, man’s pushed that higher power’s will aside?”
It had, he thought, a kind of horrible logic.
“So possibly using their medical knowledge as a weapon, their mission is to rectify that moral wrong. And that goes back to your human sacrifice.”
“It does. We’re ending these lives that shouldn’t continue to be lives, to honor whatever god we believe in. He or she took them, and man had no right to take them back.”
“What does that tell you?”
On a half laugh, she shook her head. “You sound like my therapist. Well, Dr. Littlefield, it tells me—if this theory is correct—they’re religious extremists, the sort who believe, absolutely, their god speaks to them, and they know his will. They believe what they’re doing is morally just. In fact, imperative. The laws of man mean nothing when weighed against the laws of their almighty.”
“Wouldn’t there be a hitch in there?” he wondered. “How about the old ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Stone tablets, burning bush, all that?”
“But in their view, their fractured view, they’re not killing. They may enjoy it, and I tend to think they do, but it’s not murder for them. They’re giving back what was taken, righting a moral wrong. Whatever they do to fulfill this purpose, mission, imperative isn’t merely just, it’s blessed.
“This works for me. It doesn’t get me over the wall, but it gives me something to push on.”
“How do you push?”
“Step-by-step. And one step is to just let it cook awhile.” She tapped her head. “You absolutely earned the hush puppies. How about taking a walk by the lake?”
“In the dark?”
She scrubbed at the stubble on his face.
“City boy, there’s a gorgeous three-quarter moon out there. And what I can see from here, a sky full of stars. Plus, the loons are back. The waterfowl,” she added at his smirk. “All you need’s a jacket.”
So he walked with her and the dog by the lake, and heard the loons call.
“I’d forgotten about this.”
“About what?”
“That sound—the loons. I remember that sound now. I remember hearing it.”
“Not in the city.”
“No. We vacationed here when I was, what, about sixteen, maybe seventeen. It’s one of the reasons I looked for a place here.”
“You stayed in Heron’s Rest?”
“Yeah. Two summer weeks Theo and I actually enjoyed. My mother’s second husband liked coming here. He actually had a cabin. He liked to hunt, fish, hike, and he’d come here a few times a year with friends.”
“You stayed in a cabin in Heron’s Rest?”
“Oh, hell no. She’d never go for that.”
He looked out over the lake with its crystal reflection of the moon, got his bearings, pointed.
“The big lake house, at about two o’clock. We stayed there.”
“The Pinnacle? That’s ours.”