Doc’s eyes shifted, followed Colleen’s path of retreat. “As for her . . .” Cal caught something, or thought he did. A tenderness. “Well, you would know better than I. But my point is, we are all of us changing, perhaps rising to something we might only have dreamed of. A purpose. A destiny. Is any of this getting through to you?”
“I’m not going to lead you to your death.”
“Olukh!” Doc erupted. “Didn’t you just hear me ask you to lead me away from it?”
They glared at each other, the lilting tones of the guitar swirling between them.
“What about Roosevelt General?” Cal asked finally.
“A good doctor goes to the root of the malady.” He shrugged. “Calvin, if I could have walked into that reactor, shut it down before its poison reached out to the men, their wives and children . . .” And here Doc thought of his own dear Yelena and Nurya, gone to aching memory. He did not tell Cal. Let the dead have their secrets.
“The pestilence spread because there was no containment vessel,” Doc continued. “Here, perhaps, we can be that vessel.”
He crouched before Cal, grasped his hands. “You are a leader, Calvin, that is your self. And if you deny it, you weaken any chance you might have for your survival or your sister’s. It is arrogance and stupidity, two traits you have not evinced of late, so I would advise you not to start. If any of us care to follow you, let us.”
Cal peered into the lined, compassionate face. “And what if I’m wrong?”
“Then you’re wrong.”
After a long moment, Cal nodded assent. Doc grinned. “Speciba,” he said. “Thank you.”
Cal rose. He felt like one big bruise. Only then did he notice the tune Goldie was softly playing, nodding to himself in the golden dawn light.
“Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
Goldie lifted his eyes to Cal, and they were glistening.
He feared she might have left the apartment, but he found her in the kitchen.
“Christ, I hate instant coffee,” Colleen murmured, tossing the flat, cold remnant of it down the drain.
Cal said, “I’m sorry.”
She knew he wasn’t talking about the coffee. They both looked down, avoiding each other’s eyes. He moved closer. She took a step back.
“No water in the pipes, I’m startin’ to reek like a pair of old socks.”
“Try getting the smell of blood out of your hair . . .”
“Hey, the day’s young.”
Silence settled over them, oppressive. At last, Cal broke it.
“Colleen, Doc and I had a conversation . . .”
She lifted her eyes, their brightness returning. “Yeah? Russkie set you straight?”
Cal nodded.
The tension in her shoulders relaxed. “So you’re not gonna march into the mouth of hell.”
“Well . . . yeah, I am. But Doc and Goldie are coming, too.”
“Shit.” She averted her face, and Cal had the impression that tears had sprung to her eyes. She swiped a wetness from her cheek and turned back. “You know, when the Wizard told them to get the Witch of the West’s broomstick, it wasn’t any fucking worthiness test—it was so they’d bite the big one and be fucking out of his hair.”
“Look . . . I know it’s crazy. It’s . . . I just don’t know what else to do.”
“You’ll die.”
“Can’t promise that for sure till I get there.”
Colleen glowered.
Cal said, “Sorry I’m letting you down.”
“You?” Surprise lowered her defenses. “You’ve been a brick.”
“Sure you don’t mean ‘p’ instead of ‘b’?”
“Nah. I know the difference. You’re talkin’to a connoisseur.”
She gazed out the window then, the light full on her marble-fair skin, her eyes glinting jade. He watched her, saying nothing, wondering if she was reflecting on the long night and what remained for her in this broken city.
“Maybe hell’s a real fun place,” she said at last. “No way to know till we get there.”
And though he felt weary and weighted and grim, Cal felt himself smiling as she looked back at him.
WEST VIRGINIA
A man named Jerome Bixby wrote a story called, “It’s a Good Life,” in which the inhabitants of a town were trapped in the tiny, completely arbitrary confines of their village by a child born all-powerful, unhuman and mad.
Wilma had always hated that story; hated the nightmare of helplessness it implied, the subjection to unknowable power and rules.
She thought of it many times, in the days and weeks that followed the grunter attack on the Wishart house.
Seven or eight people tried to leave Boone’s Gap in the twenty-four hours that followed Wilma’s attempt. Two made it back to town, scraped and scared and hornet-stung and exhausted, with tales of things heard and seen in the mist that started just beyond the confines of the town. Al Bartolo, who was gone three days, reported finding the bodies—or what he thought were the bodies—of Phil and Nancy duPone, who’d disappeared into the mist shortly before Al’s attempt. He wouldn’t say what had killed them, but he said over and over again that they were definitely dead.
No one and nothing came into the town. No news, no hikers, no supplies. On the third day Gordy Flue dug a garden in the ground that had been cleared for the housing development, planting beans, potatoes, peas: anything that would grow into late fall. Within days a dozen, then a hundred, followed suit. Hazel got the town council to push through emergency measures pooling and rationing foodstuffs and regulating water. Lookouts were posted daily with binoculars, scanning the blue summer sky above the white wall of the mists.
By Dr. Blair’s count, thirty-five children were taken with the same malady that gripped Tessa Grant, that terrible symptomless silence. The night Deanna Bartolo slid into a fathomless coma despite all her mother’s attempts to keep her from the void, Chrissie Flue cried out, in her sleep, screaming, “Don’t! Don’t!” before lapsing into absorbed contemplation of nothingness from which she could not be roused.
That night, Wilma walked the streets of the town in the darkness, until dawn stained the sky. Watching, listening, searching, though for what she did not know.
Shannon had brought her the news about Chrissie. Shannon, haggard, gray-faced with exhaustion, almost as gaunt as her daughter, who like every other one of the affected children had whimpered and struggled at the same time Chrissie was deadened. It’s spreading, thought Wilma, after the young woman left her again, sitting on her porch in the darkness. And it’s getting worse.
She put on her jeans and sweatshirt and set out on a patrol that had become almost routine to her, checking what she mentally termed the Hotspots of Boone’s Gap. She met no one. Everyone locked their doors and shuttered their windows with the setting of the sun. This was partly for fear of the grunters, though at her suggestion, the town council laid out rations for them near the mineshaft and for the most part this had ended their raids on individual houses.
On her nightly prowls Wilma always had the hope—or the fear—that she’d see Hank, but so far she had not. Worry for him, and the aching sense of what could have been, settled in the back of her mind like a constant, like the arthritis in her wrists that had somehow vanished that first night of the Change.
But other things, too, now walked the nights.
Where Shenandoah Drive crossed Main Street, even the unimaginative saw blue lights flicker and bob. Some, like Ryan, said they saw what seemed to be human figures, or skeletons, dancing or writhing, and heard their cries. Only Wilma, evidently, could see the Indian women and their dead children clearly, could smell their blood thick in the night air. But she always wondered about the dead grunter Gordy Flue found there one morning on his way to weed his crops, the one they had all recognized, despite how dreadfully he had changed, as Joe Rance, who’d worked at the garage on Front Street and had disappeared that first day.
And on the unkempt streets lead
ing to the old Green Mountain shaft Wilma saw nightly the ghostly shapes of the rioters of ’37, heard the shouting of long-dead policemen, the crack of rifles and the slap of mahogany on flesh. Sometimes she had to take cover from the swirling cyclones of maddened hornets that whirled through the darkness, but not tonight. Sometimes there were other things, dark small things like clots of hair and bone and mist, impossible to see clearly. Sometimes only green crawling streams of energy that flowed up from under the soil, or out of the dark maw of the mine.
Tonight as she watched the trickling streaks of light from an alley behind a gutted store building, she felt the tension in the air explode and saw strange ghostly fire erupt in one of the abandoned cars that still littered the streets. Sparks ignited a blowing newspaper, carried the blaze into an empty saloon. Wilma turned and ran, pounded on the door of the city watch headquarters in the old high school. The fires spread, but never grew: instead they burned with the queer slow smoldering that everyone had become aware of in these changed terrible days. While the Fire Patrol was putting them out, others burst spontaneously into being nearby.
And beyond the fires, energy flowed and swirled.
She could see it, almost. Smell it, ozone sharp in her nostrils. Hear the crackle of it in the dark air, shouts and wailing and gunshots that blended into a deep soft rumble, like a monster breath. She didn’t need to follow it. She knew where it went.
Only near dawn did she circle back, after visiting every one of those places in the town—and there were nearly a dozen of them—where she sensed energy of some kind was being drawn out of the ground, out of the mine, out of the past. Silently flitting from shadow to shadow, night-sighted eyes probing the darkness, she returned home, to catnap and rest for a day, to lie in the sun and wash, which she did with dampened facecloths six or seven times a day, not because she needed to but because it made her feel better. And in the darkness, as she turned the corner of Applby Avenue, she paused as she always did, shivering though the night was warm.
Shivering at the sight of the white house. At the smell of it. At what she knew from her dreams was inside.
Whatever it was, it was drawing energy, drinking it from every corner of the town. Drinking it desperately, frantically, racked and crucified and twisting in terror and in pain. Grunters had made another attempt to break into the house, and one of them could still be seen—Eddie Dayton, it had once been— dead just outside the porch, strangled with the garden hose. The smell was appalling even at night.
Did the grunters know something about it she didn’t? Was that why they tried to kill it, making attempts that they had to know would only lead to their deaths? She wished she could find Hank and ask him. Wished, more than anything, that she knew where he’d gone, and if he was all right.
Whatever it was, she thought, it was definitely generating a chaos of old pain, old horrors renewed.
And unless it was stopped, Wilma knew in her bones, it would destroy the town and everyone in it.
NEW YORK
Cal draped a canopy over the passenger section of the pedicab so that, once inside, Tina could not be seen. The rough blanket was thick and dark, and what little of her illumination leaked out along the edges appeared no more than the glow of an oil lamp. Disappearing into its folds as it sat in the living room, Tina seemed thankful to be out of sight, shielded by this fragile barrier.
They would keep her hidden as much as possible. There was no telling how many might be like her. Cal had seen at least one other “flare”—Colleen’s joking reference was sticking, he reflected—in the tunnels under Fifth. But as they traveled on their odyssey south, they would draw unwanted attention as it was; any stranger would, in this perilous world. The more they could avoid attention, the better.
In the gray chill of morning Cal, Doc and Colleen wrestled the pedicab down four flights of steps, and everyone in the building helped them carry duffels and backpacks and water bottles down. They strapped the provisions onto the rusty old bikes Goldie brought from his underground treasure trove— or trash heap, depending on one’s perspective. Colleen had ridden shotgun to fetch them. On their return, neither had spoken of what they’d encountered on their mission. But Cal had noted Colleen’s relief at being aboveground, and the dark stain on her shoulder of blood that was not hers.
Goldie was unusually quiet this morning, limiting himself to terse replies when pressed. Cal observed, too, that he had jettisoned his familiar multilayered electric wardrobe in favor of somber browns and blacks. Protective coloration? Cal wondered. Or was Goldie afraid to be striking out into the unknown, too?
The unknown, indeed. For while Goldie and Colleen had been off on their errand, Cal and Doc had pored over every map in the place, had borrowed dog-eared Auto Club guides from Eleanor Sparks and the Jamgotchians, and had found no town of Wish Heart or any like name to the south. Or the east, west or north, for that matter. Whatever siren call might lie southward, be it in Mississippi, Orlando or Tierra del Fuego, they would be seeking it in the dark.
All they could plan with any certainty, for now, was their route out of the city.
“I can get you through the old test bore of the Brooklyn subway line, no problem,” Goldie murmured, the morning heat starting to come on as they muscled the last of their supplies downstairs. “I know the guys who live there; they’ll let us through.”
Cal thought about the smears of blood he’d seen on the subway platforms, the snuffling of the crouched figures in the dark and the predictable unpredictability of Goldie’s bag of tricks. “Uh, I think Tina would probably be better off aboveground.”
“If we take the Queensboro bridge, we can work our way down through Brooklyn and across the Narrows on the Verranzano,” said Colleen, adjusting her crossbow over her back. “We can be in Staten Island tonight. Cross to Jersey tomorrow. And then . . .”
Then what? Hope that Tina’s line to Nijinsky’s Voice of God or whatever it was didn’t disconnect until they had time and fortune to find it.
Into the mouth of hell . . .
They told Mrs. Sparks and Sylvia Feldman and the other neighbors who crowded around them on the street that Tina—unseen, enfolded within the protective canopy—was resting now, had been utterly exhausted by the previous days’ events. The tenants nodded solicitously, pressed sandwiches on Cal to give his sister when she awoke, brooked no objection as they bestowed extra cans of tuna, bottles of Gatorade.
Colleen stood watching this, part of her scoffing at their generosity. They’d regret it soon enough, when their shelves were bare and their bellies rumbling.
Yet surprisingly, she found herself heartened, as well. It was foolish of them, perhaps suicidal. But what she was doing was suicidal, too. And for what?
For him.
When her dad was a non-com at Offutt Air Force Base, she had come running in tears at some casual cruelty of her mother’s. Holding her, rocking her, he had tried to explain that Jean lived in a world of coldness, that they two lived in a warmer clime. Colleen hadn’t comprehended it then, nor even years later.
But now, looking at Griffin and the well-wishers who surrounded him, pointedly not speaking of their fear and uncertainty, offering what little they could, she had a glimmer of understanding.
There would be terrors ahead, Colleen was sure of it, homicidal, raging nightmares to make Stern look like a cartoon in the Sunday funnies. The world had turned into a grim, hard place, and it was still turning. That was real; that was so.
But how many of her neighbors would have turned out to bid her farewell? How many even knew she existed?
We make our world, she thought, at least some of it.
Maybe in days gone by Griffin had bartered his soul in increments to Stern. But through all of it, she felt certain, he had been a decent, caring man, and people had responded, been warmed by it.
Colleen anticipated a hard road ahead, full of nothing but impediments and adversaries and, almost certainly, a very messy death.
But, thanks to Gr
iffin, there might be allies ahead, too, even new friends.
As she had become.
A world of surprises, and not all of them bad.
Bullshit, she thought, pushing it away. But the feeling stayed with her a good long time.
They set off, west across Manhattan, for the Queensboro Bridge. As they were leaving Eighty-first Street, passing the fallen, charred timbers of what had been Sam Lungo’s house, Cal—pedaling hard against the weight of his sister and their baggage—heard a murmured litany from the canopy behind him. Reaching back, he parted the fabric and saw his sister within the halo of her phosphorescence. “For Mr. Lungo,” she said. But whether she was entreating mercy for him of their mother’s God, or of the thing that called to her, he did not ask.
Tina had told Cal of Lungo’s last moments, of his valiant, futile act. We’re changing, all of us, Doc had said, and it was true. A week ago, Cal wouldn’t have dreamed Lungo capable of such a thing.
You won’t be the last of us to die, Cal thought and, though his own faith had been shaken and splintered long ago, he sent a silent prayer alongside his sister’s.
They made their way across midtown in the hard, merciless light, the concrete-amplified heat. The air, rank with sewage, thrummed with flies. The people they encountered moved quickly past, many openly carrying weapons or objects that could serve as weapons.
It took them two hours to get across the Queensboro Bridge. The metal span wasn’t choked with people, not yet; that would come in the days and weeks to follow, if what Cal dreaded came to pass. Only three days in, most had not seized the initiative. But without water, without lights, with its food supplies hemorrhaging down the hungry throats of six million people each day, New York would soon be little more than just predator and prey. As it was already starting to be.
Dying things, and those that fed off them.
Already, the refugees heading outward numbered in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. Many no doubt lived elsewhere, had gotten stranded in the city and had finally jettisoned waiting for the fix that would reanimate the cab, the plane, the train. Scared people, angry people, desperate people, pushing shopping carts full of bottled water or liquor, confused people with satchels and suitcases and shoulderbags. A heavy-muscled fat woman with a mouth like a trap herded eight small children, each loaded with luggage, like little pack beasts on a rope. Three college kids pushed a dumpster full of bags of flour, books, blankets. An elderly man walked a bicycle so loaded down with bulging plastic bags that he could barely be seen. And everywhere, nuclear families and extended families and the haphazard, improvised surrogate families that outcasts from all corners had created in New York. White, brown, black, yellow people and every permutation between, helping one another, shoring each other up, trying just to get to the end of the bridge.
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