Chariot - [Millennium Quartet 03]

by Charles L. Grant

  By then he’s so tired all he wants to do is sleep. Find a cave, an empty house, an empty shop, an empty town, and sleep until it was over.

  Whatever it was.

  Nevertheless he decides to keep moving. It’s better than sitting, better than trying to find another job. In Martinsburg there’s nothing. The first wave of famine had reached the Appalachians, hit them hard, and the town had decided to shut down. No visitors. No strangers. They had barely enough to feed their own. A cop, for some reason believing Trey wasn’t as bad as he looked and ignoring the dirty cast, the healing bruises and slashes across his face, drives him to the interstate, flags down a westbound semi, and helps him into the cab.

  “Thanks,” Trey had said.

  “No problem.” Then he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of notepaper. “You know a kid named Cora?”

  Damn, he thought, but he’d nodded cautiously just the same.

  The cop handed the paper over, waved the truck on, and it was nightfall before he decided to see what was there.

  We forgot to tell you, Cora said, that Reed thinks you’re special. That’s what he meant when he said you’re like Reverend Chisholm. I think he’s nuts, but he made me tell you anyway. Get a life, mister. Stay alive.

  He laughed so hard the driver nearly threw him out.

  He returned to the dragon, and the house in the desert, deciding there was no sense leaving again. It had taken nearly twenty years, but he finally took the hint.

  And queens never looked twice at men like him.

  * * * *

  4

  The time, when it came, came without words.

  Moonbow released his hand and watched as he stretched in several directions, yawned wide enough to make his jaw pop, and scrubbed his palms over his hair, then used them to flatten it into a semblance of neatness.

  He grinned at her.

  She grinned back.

  He waved up the street, knowing that her mother was watching through her living room window, knowing she disapproved of his somewhat curious profession, knowing she didn’t mind that her daughters enjoyed his company. For the past seven months they had been the only children on the block, and while the others fussed kindly over Moonbow in particular, he seemed to be the only one who treated either one of them like a person, not some kind of fragile, pathetic doll.

  He sucked in his stomach, tucked his shirt in and hitched up his belt.

  Moonbow examined him, one eye closed, and pronounced her approval with a sharp nod.

  Starshine, a month shy of being a freshly minted teen with all the posture that went with it, would have suggested he at least shave if he insisted on looking like that. Whatever, in her eyes, that was.

  He touched his cheeks and was tempted. But not tempted enough. There were no other plans tonight. He figured he looked decent enough.

  He reached into his jeans and pulled out a thin packet of money, folded over, small bills on top, and counted it carefully. With any luck, along with any of whatever it was that made him what he was, the amount would nearly double before the morning got too old.

  Pay the bills, feed the fridge, put a little aside in the metal strongbox under the bed for the time when he was forced to find other accommodations.

  “You’re stalling,” the girl accused.

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will I be up when you get home?”

  “Not if you don’t want your mother to shoot you.”

  “You going to buy my present tonight, too?”

  He reached out and yanked a braid. “Don’t be greedy, kid. It doesn’t suit you.”

  She shrugged as if she didn’t much care.

  He rolled his shoulders and strode across his excuse for a front yard, heading for the carport.

  “Coat,” she called after him. “You’ll freeze if you don’t, you know.”

  He almost ignored her, then realized the truth in it. Being the end of April, there was supposed to be warmth, not midsummer heat. Nevertheless there had been heat lately. But at night, the desert floor not yet ready to hold it all back, the heat left and the chill returned with the stars. His shirt wasn’t thin, but the girl was right, so he veered to the porch, opened the door, reached inside, and grabbed a beaten leather jacket off the peg on the wall next to the jamb.

  He didn’t need it right now, but later, win or lose, he would. One more regret if he left it behind.

  Stop it, he ordered. Regrets belonged to memories that didn’t have to be.

  Yet they were what they were, and unless he discovered the secret of time travel, it was a waste of time wishing they were something else.

  Beggars and horses, he reminded himself; beggars and horses.

  Under the sagging carport roof was a pickup whose time had come and gone, its previous owner having extended the already spacious cab to allow for a narrow benchseat in back, if whoever sat there didn’t mind sitting with his knees in his mouth. Its paint gleamed because Trey had redone it only a couple of years before and made sure it stayed clean. And polished. Black as the gaps between the stars. Capturing the slightest light and sliding it across the hood and roof, glimpses of quicksilver fish swimming in dark water.

  He patted the hood.

  He looked in the bed to be sure no demons or stray cats had taken advantage.

  He got in, tossed the jacket onto the passenger seat, took the keys from his other pocket, and shook them twice before inserting one into the ignition, asked silent permission to be able to ride safely tonight, and turned it.

  The engine woke instantly, growling softly to itself, pulling at the handbrake until he released it, sighed relief all seemed well, and coasted into the street.

  “Hey,” she called.

  He braked and waited.

  Her head ducked, her foot toed the ground. “I’m glad you’re smiling again.” So soft he barely heard it.

  He wasn’t quite sure what to say. “That bad, huh?”

  She nodded.

  “That long?”

  She nodded again.

  “Sorry.”

  “ ‘s okay.”

  He took his foot off the brake, turned left, and let the pickup take its own speed. As if, he thought, the engine were stretching its muscles first, before working up to speed.

  A long time ago, when Moonbow first learned about his battles with the dragon, she told him he had to have a steed, like they did in the movies and the picture books, and the steed was not, by any means, black, and it sure didn’t look like any truck she ever saw.

  “No steed,” he had informed her solemnly. “This boy rides a chariot.”

  He never told her why.

  She had looked it up herself, but it took a while before she saw the chariot he owned, not the truck. When she did, she claimed it made sense. Open in back, all the horses up front, room for one, maybe two others beside the driver. Not exactly smooth even on a smooth road. The more she talked about it, the more sense she said it made and refused to allow him to give it a name, because horses had names and chariots didn’t.

  Maybe it did make sense, maybe it didn’t, but it was the chariot that took him slowly down the street, left hand waving out the window, dust cloud spinning lazily away from the tires, headlamps dividing the night ahead into shifting blacks and greys.

  At the end of the street he stopped and checked the rearview mirror. Moonbow was gone. Settling dust hung in the porch lights’ glare, and staring at it too long created shapes that grew eyes and watched him.

  “Man,” he whispered, shook himself, and turned left onto a barely paved narrow road not much wider than a driveway, no center or shoulder lines at all, lights just behind and lights far ahead, but nothing in between but the glowing eyes of a couple of startled critters on the verge, which, when he checked again, turned out to be shards of broken beer bottles, nothing dramatic or wondrous at all.

  “What,” he demanded quietly of the dashboard, “is th
e matter with you, boy?”

  Wrong again; not the realization of the time he had spent here, but Something different. Certainly not the urge to leave, to try his luck with a real job yet again, because he knew that if he did that, some town’s ICU would have the last bed he’d ever lie in.

  Philadelphia, and all the places before, had taught him that, if nothing else.

  And it wasn’t the feeling that a late storm brewed beyond the ridge line horizon.

  Something else.

  He tapped a finger on the steering wheel, waiting for inspiration to bring him an answer. A shrug, then; what the hell. Probably prebattle nerves. Pulling back his hand as it reached for the radio.

  No; no noise.

  Not now.

  This was the most silent part of the ride, and because of the silence, it was also the longest. This was when he truly made up his mind whether to fight or not, and there had been times, were always times, three or four times a month, when his hands began to tremble and his neck muscles began to tighten and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t work up a decent spit.

  That’s when he turned around and ran for home.

  That’s when he began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t time to head on out again, give the outside world another shot, prove to the family ghosts around him that he hadn’t wasted his life, his schooling, his mind, his soul.

  That the next beating wouldn’t kill him.

  Two years, a couple of months, a handful of days, but who’s counting.

  The road climbed abruptly.

  The magic time. A convergence of illusions that had reinforced the dragon image.

  Far ahead was an interstate overpass, some trees, some darkened warehouses. At the top of the rise, they cut off the regular city lights, just for a moment, hardly more than a second or two, and left only the glow of the dragon’s scales. The first time he’d noticed it, he had stopped and stared, amazed that he could, even from here, pick out the different colors that blended into the glow that stretched for nearly a mile through the city’s heart. Shimmering. Shifting. Once in a while changing shade and hue, but never their strength.

  For no reason he could think of at the time, he thought of a dragon’s scales, probably the memory of a magazine cover, or a child’s book illustration. It didn’t matter. The image struck, and stuck.

  He liked it.

  It fit.

  Trey Falkirk in his chariot, riding hellbent to fight the dragon.

  Trey Falkirk in his old pickup, heading for the reasons Las Vegas still existed.

  It wasn’t much to brag about, but hell, it was a living.

  An airplane rumbled overhead, gliding into MaCarran. Sickness there may be, but that hadn’t stopped the tourists.

  He could hear, but couldn’t see, a fighter squadron either heading into or away from Nellis. Or maybe, he thought with a sardonic grin, Area 51, hot on the trail of the latest batch of invading UFOs.

  When the road eventually intersected with the highway that led into town, he switched on the radio, searching for some music to get his blood and anticipation flowing. Sometimes it was rock, sometimes the twang of real country; tonight, skipping rapidly over the news so his mood wouldn’t slip away, he found a station that beamed in from Arizona, and it made him laugh and shake his head: good, old-fashioned, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, soul-dancing, eyes raised to heaven and feet moving like wind gospel. Nothing less would do.

  A sign, because it was the last thing he had heard leaving the ridiculously named Emerald City. The kids may not like it, and he may not believe its message, but there was no denying the infectious good feeling it engendered.

  He absolutely knew it was a sign when the first song he heard was an up-tempo, full choir, honky-tonk piano and guitars and fiddles version of “Good News, The Chariot’s Comin’.” He had never heard it that way before, most of the time it sounded to him like a plodding, by the numbers, not much of anything song, and by the time it was done, he never wanted to hear the old way again.

  Screw the real world.

  Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

  He was on his way to fight the dragon.

  * * * *

  2

  1

  M

  uriel Carmody stood at her living room window and watched that bum hold that poor little girl’s hand. He was no good. She knew it. He was one of those child molesters. She knew it. She could tell. She wasn’t the smartest woman in the world, that was a fact, but she read enough books and she watched enough TV to know about what they called the profiles of such monsters, and that bum fit them. All of them. She knew it. She could tell.

  Thank God the other one had run away.

  What she didn’t know was why their mother put up with that bum, letting him spend so much time with the girls without adult supervision. Parental neglect, no question about it. The woman was a flake anyway. What kind of mother called her child Moonbow? Or Starshine, for God’s sake? What kind of names were they? Stupid ones, that’s what, and Muriel would bet her life that as soon as those children could, they’d change their names to something more respectable, more normal.

  If she hadn’t felt so off-kilter,’ she would have gone out there and told the bum off, told him to leave the children alone. She coughed lightly into a fist, swallowed hard, and whispered a quick prayer that it was only her usual spring cold.

  Of course, it could be the storm on its way. Her head felt banded in iron, her sinuses plugged with cotton. That always happened when a storm was on its way. It made no difference if the weatherman’s map didn’t show any clouds. She knew. She could feel the fool thing.

  “Muriel?”

  She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t leave the window. She wanted to make sure the child was all right. She wouldn’t sleep if she left now.

  “Muriel!”

  “I’m in here,” she said, and snorted. My God, you couldn’t sneeze in these houses without someone hearing you up the street, so why the hell did Lillian insist on calling when all she had to do was poke her head out of the fool kitchen and look. But that would mean she’d have to get up. God forbid Lillian would ever get up unless she absolutely had to. God forbid she did anything unless she absolutely had to.

  What was she going to do when they had to move, wait around for someone to carry her, for God’s sake?

  And that damn music was driving her crazy.

  Whenever Eula was home next door, she played it louder than Gabriel’s trumpet, slipping through the windows and walls as if they weren’t there. Every fool night, most nights of the week. Didn’t the woman have any other kinds? Something nice? Something classical?

  Gone for days at a time, being a bigshot, then back in that house and blasting the street with that. . . that music.

  It made her yearn for the old days, not all that long ago, when the street was quiet. Peaceful, except for a party now and then, or somebody gets drunk or mad or miserable and starts screaming. But that hardly ever happened. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she recalled complaining how dull it was out here.

  Please, Lord, she thought, please make it dull again.

  And Eula, what kind of name was that anyway? Moonbow, Starshine, Eula, it was like living in the middle of a damn hippie commune or something.

  God knew she wasn’t a bigot, but sometimes she wondered about people like that. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, and all they do is sing and clap their hands and make like the Lord doesn’t know what’s going on. Their whole lives in church without a clue what’s happening in the real world.

  “Muriel, what are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, leave the poor man alone. He’s not hurting anybody.”

  “He’s a bum.”

  Dragging footsteps behind the thump of two crutches.

  A miracle: Lillian was actually leaving the kitchen when she didn’t have to.

  When a lamp switched on, Muriel jumped
away from the window, scowling. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I can’t see in the dark, you know.”

  “But he can see me!”

  Lillian lowered herself gingerly onto the couch, sighed the sigh even God must be weary of, slipped her arms out of the crutch sleeves and let them lean against her baggy-jeans legs. “You’re impossible.”