A wind blew, and Murdoch anchored himself between the pillars of the gas pumps.

Here was the strangest and most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He felt both fragile and grateful; he had been lifted up, exposed to the elements, abandoned to this vision. His uniform was a rag. He felt his own tenuous existence flickering inside it. This was the moment he had saved himself for.

He opened his mouth to make some exclamation, to vent his human awe. But what came out was: “Suh—suh—Soo!”

He felt her presence.

He felt it so strongly that he looked left, looked right. He was alone, of course. She was with him, but not here; with him in the new life. He was rising now. He was lighter than air.

Murdoch gazed at the Home growing out of the plain, at its astonishing size and its interior lights and its reflection on the snowy plain.

“Soo,” he said faintly, proudly. And she reached for him.

The wind took what was left of Murdoch, took his rags and his skin and carried them away, up beyond the snowbound Colorado flatlands, up and away from the mountains.

Chapter 22

Flesh

On a windy afternoon late in January, Tom Kindle found a human skin snagged on the leafless azalea bush outside his front door.

The skin had been carried some distance by the wind. It was tattered and incomplete, bleached by the weather to so colorless a shade that Kindle thought for a moment it was some old ghost that had fetched up on his doorstep.

Kindle studied the object for a time, then ducked back into the warmth of the house and telephoned Matt Wheeler.

Matt drove the short distance to Delmar Estates with his black bag on the car seat beside him. Not that this was a doctor’s job, if he had understood Tom Kindle correctly. A coroner’s, perhaps.

He examined the skin where it was trapped in the naked branches of the azalea, his expression fixed but emotionless. Then he looked at Kindle. “Do you have a pair of tongs?”

“Pardon me?”

“Kitchen tongs. Barbecue tongs.”

“Well… I think Abby brought over a pair. Hang on.” He disappeared into the house and returned with a pair of kitchen tongs. The handles were cartoon-blue plastic; the business end, stainless steel. Matt used them to lift the tattered skin away from the spindly bush and carry it into the garage, out of the reach of the wind.

He laid out the tissue with some care across the gasoline-stained concrete floor, unfolding it meticulously, layer by layer, until it resembled a nearly transparent pair of body tights torn beyond any utility. One leg ended in frayed nothingness at the knee. One arm was missing entirely. The head—there was very little of the head.

Kindle stood well back. “I wonder who the hell it is? I mean—is it somebody, like a corpse? Or just a piece of somebody?”

Matt crouched over the object. It didn’t frighten or disgust him—he had encountered worse things as an intern. But he was careful not to touch it with his naked hands. “This is the first one I’ve seen.”

“First?” Kindle cocked his head. “There are others?”

“You should have come to the meeting Sunday night. Bob Ganish found a couple of them in his neighbor’s house. Paul Jacopetti says the farms out in his area are all empty—except for these.”

“Jesus, Matthew! Empty skins?”

He nodded.

“What about the people inside?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?” Matt shrugged.

“So,” Kindle said, “does everybody end up like this?”

“I think so. Eventually. Except us, of course. Abby said she’s worried about her husband, her grandchildren. She says they’re getting… well, thinner. Paler.”

“Jesus,” Kindle repeated. “What about—”

He checked himself. But the question was obvious. What about Rachel?

Matt couldn’t bring himself to form an answer, not even to himself.

Kindle looked back at the fragile envelope arrayed on the floor of the garage. “Matthew, is there something—I mean, what should I do with it?”

“Put it outside. Let it blow away. It won’t last long. A few days in the sun and it’ll turn to dust.”

“Not much to leave behind,” Kindle said.

“What is?”

He drove home to Rachel.

She had arrived at the house this morning and hinted that it might be her last visit. Matt made the obvious connection between this and the discovery of the skins throughout Buchanan. But it was an impossible thought, a thought he must not allow himself. The image of a dry shell of Rachel, of his daughter, abandoned to the wind, lonely and empty in the cold rain—dear God, not this.

He told her what the call from Tom Kindle had been about. He described the skin, described it clinically, made himself the Doctor Machine, because this was his last defense, his only defense. And when the telling was done, he shook his head, dazed at his own story. “It isn’t human, Rachel. I know what you’ve said. But this isn’t—it isn’t something human beings do.”

He expected an argument. She only nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

She was pale, somehow ethereal; she moved with a certain new lightness—and these observations, too, Matt didn’t care to mark or consider.

“Maybe too much has changed. Maybe the word ‘human’ doesn’t apply anymore.” Her voice was solemn. “I don’t feel different—not basically different. The basic part of me is still Rachel Wheeler. But there’s more now. More layers. More ways of seeing things. If I leave this behind—” Gesturing at herself, her body. “Am I Rachel? Am I human? I don’t know.”

She might have been confessing to some disease, some terrible wasting illness.

She seemed to feel the thought. Lately she had seemed able to interpret the smallest nuance of his expression, although he was laboring to conceal his grief.

“Daddy, I’m not sorry. About any of it. You’re a doctor—you know how many lives were saved. Even at the local hospital, how many terminal cancers were cured? How much heart disease? And in the world, my God, all the starvation, the malnutrition, the crippled lives—”

But Matt could not dispel the memory of the skin that had fetched up, a pathetic and unassailable statement of grim fact, on Tom Kindle’s leafless azalea bush. “Rachel, is this better?”

“Yes.” Firmly. “We couldn’t have gone on, you know, the way we were. The planet wouldn’t support us. We were damaging it beyond recognition, beyond its ability to recover. Something had to change, something human had to change. Do you know who said yes to Contact? Who accepted the offer of eternal life? Almost everybody. Everybody—including dictators, pickpockets, child molesters, murderers… people who killed people for their wristwatches, killed them for their tennis shoes. People who tortured children to death in front of their parents. But it was immortality with a price. They had to understand what it means to hurt someone, to damage someone. And if that didn’t work, if they could witness human pain and understand it intimately and still not care, or worse, enjoy it—that meant they were flawed, broken, not complete. So they had to be repaired.”

“They can’t choose to commit violence?”

“Anyone can choose anything. But only if they understand what they’re choosing and why.”

“Rachel… it sounds like compulsion.”

“Daddy, you’ve told me since I was a baby that there’s no good reason for all the wars, all the bullying, all the hurt in the world.”

It was what one told a child. And, pressed, he would have admitted to believing it himself. But the fact was—as Scott Fitzgerald had written, if Matt remembered his American Literature correctly—the fundamental decencies were parceled out unequally at birth. “There’s no excuse for it. But people don’t seem to know that.”