by Marc Zicree
Me, too. That fire was all that stood between us and a pack of demons that melted into the smoke and shadow like black cats on tar paper. Only the one I’d set on fire was solid. It rolled on the ground about twenty feet away, making a sound that will haunt me till the day I die. The stench of burning hair and flesh made my stomach heave.
Shadows don’t have hair and flesh.
I sucked up close to Doc. Heat beat against my face. Somewhere, the dog bayed. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Which way?”
I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the road to Grave Creek, praying the shadows wouldn’t realize what their charbroiled buddy had—that fire can be outflanked if you half try.
We hadn’t gotten far when they figured out the fire’s limits. They did an end-around, steering clear of the burning husk, flowing to the rim of flame and around.
“Bozhyeh moy,” Doc murmured. The shard quivered in his hand, firelight dancing over the broken edges.
Cold wind nipped at us, and the air was getting soggier with the threat of rain. I didn’t want rain. I did want the wind—it whipped the flames, churned dust and smoke, and made us harder for the tweaks to see (I hoped).
They oozed like oil, glowing eyes sinking toward the ground. I had no idea how many there were—four, maybe five. I had exactly three doctored bolts.
“They… are they singing?” Doc asked.
It was unmusical and weird, but singing was the only way to describe it. Down in my gut I knew what it meant. I brought out the lighter, flicked it open, and lit the bolt in my crossbow. It blazed bravely. The singing stopped. Not good. I steeled myself for the attack.
There was a dull rumbling, and a bizarre, yodeling wail cut through the smoky air and stopped all of us—people and nonpeople—in our tracks. Sounded like a damn cartoon Indian. Then the wagon swept into my field of vision with someone standing straight up in the driver’s box like Ben Hur, wildly waving a torch.
Goldman. Bloody, frigging Goldman. The idiot was going to yodel his way right between me and a clean shot.
Horses are scared shitless of fire—not that I’d’ve expected Goldman to know that—and he was trying to drive the team straight into hell.
“Run!” I told Doc, and shoved him toward the crossroads.
He ran.
Goldman was fighting the horses for all he was worth, trying to get control of their heads. An experienced driver stands about a fifty-fifty chance of winning these little battles. Someone like Herman Goldman stands no chance at all. The horses revolted and he tumbled out of the driver’s box, landing almost at my feet with the torch miraculously still in his hand. The wagon rumbled away toward the western woods.
I dodged the banner of torch flame and raised my bow.
The arrowhead had gone out, alcohol exhausted. I cursed, flipped it out of the cradle and pulled another one from the clip. I’d just gotten it seated when they started singing again.
At my feet, Goldman howled and waved his torch practically in my face. I thrust the bow into the flame, burning my hand but lighting the barb. They were so close I imagined the heat I felt was from their eyes. Those horrible, flaming eyes were the only part of them that seemed not to move when you looked at them. Small comfort, but they made a good target. Knowing I wasn’t going to get off more than one shot, I aimed at the closest tweak.
The singing stopped and there was a sudden, dense stillness.
Here it comes.
But the volcanic eyes turned westward, and then winked out—one, two, three, four pairs—as the tweaks turned tail and vanished behind the veil of flame and smoke. I caught a glimpse of solid forms, then there was nothing moving but real smoke and dry grass. Beyond the flames the dog’s yapping faded.
I don’t know how long I stood there like that, crossbow aimed at the dying blaze, Goldman quivering at my knees. Rain came softly, pattering on the top of my head and running down my face.
He moved first, getting slowly to his feet and taking about five steps toward the wall of fire, peering through its growing gaps.
I lowered the crossbow and set the safety. My hands shook. “Goldman, you nitwit! Where are you going?”
He turned to me, his face pale in the light of his torch. His lips moved, but if he said anything, I didn’t hear it. Right about then, someone yanked me off my feet and dragged me up and across a saddle. Upside down, I caught a glimpse of blue-jeaned leg and a battered leather scabbard. Cal.
He rode away from the flames, and I was well-chilled by the time he set me on my feet several yards past the crossroads. He dismounted beside me while I grabbed stirrup leather and tried not to look as unsteady as I felt.
He gripped my shoulders, eyes scouring me for signs of injury. “Are you all right?”
I nodded, glad the early twilight hid my face. “How about Goldman?”
“He’s okay. One of the refugees snagged Doc’s mare and went out with me to get him. What spooked them? Was it the fire?”
I shook my head. “They were scared of the fire, but they were working out how to get around it when they… they just took off.”
“Except for the one you shot.”
He looked down the slope to where one of our new acquaintances led the exhausted wagon team back toward the crossroads. Beyond them the dying flames cast a strange glow over the meadow. You could still see the single corpse lying there, solid, unmoving… still smoking.
Cal turned, started to mount up again.
I grabbed his arm. “Where’re you going?”
“I want to know what that was, don’t you?”
“Not especially.”
He looked down at me, rain dripping down his cheeks, matting his hair to his head. “I’m sorry, Colleen. You didn’t really have a choice, though, did you? It would’ve killed Doc if you hadn’t shot it.”
I waved that aside. “Forget it. Let’s get these people off the road before those sons of bitches come back.”
There was just enough room in our covered wagon for our new friends. Cal had carried the kids a ways up the road and stashed them in an outcropping of rocks. That was where we loaded everyone up, lit every lantern and torch we had between us, and headed for Grave Creek. We hadn’t gone far when the dog showed up, exhausted but grinning in canine bliss. He rode in the back, behind the driver’s box, and panted happily in my ear.
The obvious leader of our refugees was a white-haired guy with a young face and glacier-blue eyes. His name was Jim—Jim Gossett. The pregnant woman was his wife, Emily. Two of the kids were theirs—a boy and a girl. The oldest girl belonged to the other couple—Stan and Felicia Beecher. Stan’s leg was splinted, broken when they’d lost their wagon to what Jim’s boy, Gil, called “pirates.” That explained how they came to be wandering the outback so ill-equipped.
“It was a real wagon,” the boy told me, “not a funky one like yours.” He sat between me and his dad in the driver’s box, seeming none the worse for wear.
Kids amaze me. They handle this shit a lot better than us so-called mature adults.
Jim said things were pretty bad up in Wheeling—a lot of looting was still going on in some parts of town. The hospitals were full to bursting; the shopping malls had turned into armed camps. “Then we get out here. First we lose the wagon, and then…” He shakes his head and shivers. “Weird shit. It was like the whole damn forest was watching us. Dog was going nuts for miles.” He glanced into the one remaining rearview mirror. “Can we go any faster?”
I urged the team into a weary trot. Behind me, Goldman started humming a soulful little ditty under his breath. “What’s that?” asked Jim.
Goldman stopped humming. “What’s what?”
“That song you’re humming. I’ve heard that before.” “Huh. I thought I was making it up.”
“No. No, I’ve heard that before,” Jim repeated. He was silent for a long while, and we all listened to the hushed voices from the truck bed behind us and watched rain sparkle in the lamplight.
“Is this Armageddon?” Jim murmured. “I swear I never thought it would be like this. This isn’t a war, it’s a plague of madness.”
Goldman started humming again. Guess he didn’t have an answer, either.
Not far up the road we were swept up by the Grave Creek welcome wagon—a bunch of guys on horseback armed with hockey sticks and homemade spears. To each his own, I guess. They’d seen us tangle with the tweaks and had come out to help. They seemed legitimately sorry to have missed all the action.
They escorted us into town, depositing us in the E.R. of the Grave Creek Community Hospital, where Doc was an immediate hit. He slipped easily into the role of medic, applying patches and checking wounds in the harsh light of a brace of Coleman lanterns. Within ten minutes of our arrival the two nurses on duty were following his quiet direction as if they’d been doing it for years. For my part, I tried to be a good patient, sitting quietly while one of them slathered my burnt hand with something that looked and smelled like mint Jell-O.
The kids, being kids, only wanted to compare notes about the “monsters,” and loudly interrupted every adult attempt at conversation. To them this was high adventure. They pretty much ignored Doc’s swabbing and patching, and chattered to Cal, faces flushed and shining. The two girls, Lissa and Melanie, flirted with the good-looking guy—the only adult who seemed interested in their take on things—while Gil pretended he’d never been scared once.
Their parents were grim and silent and clingy. I met Emily Gossett’s gaze over her son’s head. She gave me a weak smile that was more a wince and clutched her little boy’s shoulders so hard, he stopped talking, looked up and said, “What’s wrong, Mom?”
Cal paced. He fielded a few questions about what we’d seen on our westward trek, but quickly turned the questions back around. I could just imagine him in a courtroom—suited and tied, curly, fair hair carefully trimmed and styled—summing up before a judge. But no judge’d ever heard questions like these: Had you, Jim Gossett, ever seen these particular tweaks before? Were they nine feet tall or ten? Did it seem to you they were a little transparent? Did they seem intelligent?
Objection, Your Honor: this calls for conjecture on the part of the witness. (Okay, I used to watch Law & Order now and again. Guilty pleasures.)
They had seen these tweaks. Or thought they had. They’d picked them up earlier in the day below someplace named Moundsville, but until sunset the tweaks had kept their distance. “Lurkers,” Jim called them. The word put a chill into me.
Goldman, I noticed, had gone to ground in a corner, his back against the wall, his knees pulled up under his chin, his eyes open, staring at nothing. He’d been like that since we got here. Even while Doc patched him up he’d been silent. Not a gasp. Not an “ouch!” Not a peep.
This was unlike Goldman. He wasn’t a quiet person in any sense of the word. Sometimes he seemed peaceful enough on the outside, but even then I suspected there was still noise in there, like the little wheels that run his brain never stopped turning. Cal once described him to me as having bees in his head. For a long time now the bees had been asleep; the wheels had stopped.
It was creeping me out a little, and I’d just about decided I was going to slip over and see what was up when I realized Cal was talking to me.
“You said they just wandered off,” he said. “Any idea why?”
I blinked at him and shrugged. “Search me. They just split. They were afraid of the fire, but they’d figured that out. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe they don’t like getting wet.”
“Uh, no… no. It was as if they were, um … called off.”
Cal and I turned in unison. Goldman had gotten up and wandered into the middle of the exam area. He stopped in front of Cal and tucked his hands under his arms as if to keep them still.
“Called off?” Cal repeated. “What do you mean, called off?”
“What do I mean, ‘called off.’ I mean, like… dogs. Like, uh, pets. Like a hunting pack that hears the horn or catches a new scent.”
“Whose hunting pack?” asked Jim. He’d been watching Doc check his wife’s blood pressure. “Those weren’t any kind of animals I’ve ever seen.”
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “Anything might’ve drawn them off. It was cold, wet, windy. And, jeez, this is Goldman talking.” I gave him a sidewise glance.
He was nodding, his eyes on Cal’s feet. “Yes, that’s right. This is Goldman talking, and he’s a loon, so you can discount everything he says. But not this time. This time, listen to me.” He looked up and hit Cal with a dark, laser beam gaze. “Someone or something called those guys off. I heard it.”
“What did you hear, Goldie?”
Cal pays serious attention to everything Goldman says because, according to him, Goldman sensed the Change before it happened and tried to warn him. I had to admit I’d seen him do some pretty eerie things myself, so there were moments I could believe that. This was not one of them. Right now I was pretty sure Herman Goldman was not living on the same planet as the rest of us.
“Wait, wait,” Jim interrupted. “Guys? What guys?”
There was a moment of awkward silence that was about as full of wretchedness as a moment can get. Cal glanced at me, then said, “In our experience the Change seems to affect only human beings.”
I looked down, picking at the piece of gauze on my hand. Damn burn was already itching.
“Those were people?” Emily Gossett put a protective hand on her swollen belly.
I felt Cal’s eyes on my face. He’d ridden down to the scorched field. Taken a close look at the body. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod.
“How … ?”
“How does it happen?” Doc Lysenko pulled the blood pressure cuff from Emily’s arm and finished the sentence for her. His English is better than mine, but it’s laced with the Motherland. “We don’t precisely know. We know only that it is, em, selective. Few people are changed. But there is no way to predict who will be, or when.”
The silence threatened to suck the air out of the room. Our two hovering nurses had stopped chattering, too, and turned grim attention to Stan Beecher’s bad leg.
Cal turned back to Goldie. “What did you hear?” he repeated.
“Hear—what’d I hear?” He started humming.
“Oh, jeez!” I said. “He didn’t hear anything because there was nothing to hear. Fire was roaring, those things were wailing like banshees, that damned dog—” I glanced over to where the dog in question snoozed peacefully under a gurney. “It was like you said, they caught another scent.”
“I said that,” said Goldman, jabbing a thumb into his chest.
Like that was real important. I said, “We know fire stops them.”
Cal nodded. “That makes sense. Light sensitivity seems to be a by-product of the transformation. We’ve certainly seen that with the grunters. Tina… Tina was bothered by it too.”
Every muscle in his face went tight, like someone had turned a ratchet somewhere in his head. Happened every time he spoke her name, and every time, it reminded me of losing Dad. Of course, where Dad went, there was no road back, and that was a long time ago, so it didn’t really bear thinking about. We had at least a chance of finding Tina.
Cal glanced at Jim and Emily. “But you said you saw them in daylight.”
“Only in the depths of the woods,” she said. “They stayed in the shadows. They never once came out where we could really get a good look at them.”
“Until the sun went down,” Cal finished.
Emily nodded.
“I wonder how far they range,” murmured Cal. “They could be local, regional—we have no way of knowing.”
He was right. So far we’d only seen three sorts of tweaks that seemed to crop up repeatedly—typy, to use a term from my horsey past. We’d heard them called by various names— sprites or flares, trogs or grunters. Dragons. There was no other word for those. Grunters liked to skulk in shadows and holes, dragons favored skyscrapers or other aeries, and flares,
we had been discovering, were becoming scarcer by the day. It seemed the Source, or whatever was at the bottom of this abyss the world had been slam-dunked into, was sucking them up like they were Gummy Bears.
And why? Of all the changes a power like that could make, why change us? People in general, I mean, because I sure hadn’t changed. I couldn’t fly, I didn’t care to burrow into holes, and I didn’t hear Voices with a capital V. None of it made sense to me. None of it. Cal had this deep conviction that everything we learned about our new world gave us a better chance of dealing with the Source, I wasn’t nearly so sure. Hell, there were days I wasn’t sure what we were doing on this road trip. I mean, sometimes a little voice in my head (small v) told me the best thing to do would be to just hunker down in some quiet backwater like Boone’s Gap or Grave Creek and ride it out. Except that things were kind of looking like there was no “out.”
“It’s hard to believe they were once human,” murmured Jim.
“Strictly speaking,” said Doc quietly, “they are still human.”
The memory of singed hair and charbroiled flesh rose up to choke me. I’d had about enough of this conversation.
Cal put a hand on my shoulder, as if he knew what was going on in my head. I like that about him. I hate that about him.
“Look,” he said, “we’re all going to need something to eat and a place to stay…”
One of the nurses, a young thing with Coke-bottle lenses and big, doe-brown eyes, pulled off her gloves with a snap. She turned her big eyes on Cal. “I can show you to the cafeteria.”
“You have a cafeteria?” I asked.
She laughed and answered me without taking her eyes off Cal’s face. “It’s more like a hickory pit barbecue, but it’s a source of food.”
He smiled at her, no doubt making her day. “That’d be great.” He looked to Doc. “Unless you need to keep them here?”
“Only Mr. Beecher,” Doc answered. “The leg is most definitely broken.”
Cal nodded, gave my shoulder a squeeze, and turned to gather his charges. That was when Goldman planted himself firmly in Jim Gossett’s path and unloaded a gush of questions.