“Driver’s license…college ID…Domino’s Pizza buy-ten-get-one-free card…”
“Is this guy an optimist or what?” Colleen asked, slamming the hood.
She noticed now that Cal had pulled a folded paper from within some hidden pocket inside the wallet. He opened it to reveal a creased snapshot of a pretty girl with caramel skin and cascading hair the shade of autumn leaves, her brilliant dark eyes guarded but not unfriendly; wounded, perhaps.
The image was arresting, enigmatic, and-given where he had stashed it-something this young man undoubtedly didn’t want to share.
“His name’s Theodore Siegel,” Cal added, slipping the photo back into the wallet, and the wallet into Siegel’s pocket.
“Ring a bell?” Colleen asked Inigo.
Inigo shrugged. “I’m not from around here.”
“Really? And would you care to impart precisely where you are from?”
Inigo was a sphinx.
Cal turned toward Doc. “Care to ride shotgun?”
“When for once it’s actually literal? Certainly, Calvin…Er, in just one moment.” He hotfooted it over to where the dragon carcass lay crumpled in the grass.
Colleen caught the flash of Doc’s lighter flaring up. He held it over the dragon’s body, squinting closely at it. Then she saw the dancing flame glint off the metal blade as Doc pulled out his scaling knife and sawed at the beast’s dead shoulder a moment.
What the flaming blue hell…? Colleen thought.
Doc pulled something free, held it briefly in his palm, then pocketed it. Killing the light, he sidled back.
“Got something for show-and-tell, Viktor?” Colleen asked.
“Question me no questions, Boi Baba,” he said airily.
“All I can say is, it’s a good thing Mr. Pottymouth Lizard’s gone and joined his trailer-park ancestors in the Happy Hunting Ground or you might be in the market for a replacement head, mi amigo.”
“I am the soul of caution, Colleen.”
Colleen snorted so loudly the two of them nearly missed Cal loudly and pointedly clearing his throat.
Doc got the message. He slid in on the passenger side of the El Dorado, resting the rifle on his lap.
Goldman was still staring down into the valley, not moving a muscle, as if waiting to see who would blink first (and it sure as hell wouldn’t be him). Colleen nudged him in the ribs. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. Into the Valley of-”
“No, Colleen,” Cal said. “You two go back to the silo, see how the others are doing.”
“In a pig’s knuckle, Cal.”
“I mean it. We don’t want to go down there en masse and be perceived as a threat.”
“Oh, I think we very much want to be perceived as a threat.” She thought of the late, definitely-not-lamented reptile on the wing they had just recently dispatched. Better than being perceived as an in-flight snack.
Cal unbuckled his sword and laid it in the passenger well beside Doc. He climbed in behind the wheel, nodded toward the folded, nearly spindled and somewhat mutilated Mr. Siegel. “We just saved their homeboy here. Hopefully they’ll see us as allies.”
“And if they don’t?” Colleen asked. “Are we supposed to bake a file into a cake? Or maybe just carve the headstone?”
And just what would that tombstone say? I’d rather be in Philadelphia? They’d passed by Philadelphia, and it was definitely a place you wouldn’t rather be.
She shot Doc an imploring look-C’mon, Viktor, don’t be the stalwart physician here, come down on my side, for God’s sake. But he was tending to Siegel, murmuring low words, urging him to stay awake.
“Hey, when the man’s right, he’s right, Colleen,” Goldman said. He had snapped out of his swami trance just at this inopportune moment, darn his big brown eyes. “Two’s company, four’s a convention. We’d just futz things up.”
“And what about Haley Joel grunter here?” Colleen snapped. She meant Inigo, but he had that spooky look that kid from The Sixth Sense had, when he was lit from beneath and the frosty breath was curling out of his mouth, right before the ghosts came by.
“You’ll go back with them and stick around till we return, right?” Cal asked Inigo.
“Sure,” the boy assured him, but Colleen could tell by the way his eyes avoided Cal’s that he was lying his little gray ass off.
She was gonna stick to him like leeches to Bogart in that movie with the African boat, like something superglued to a finger that you had to make a trip to the emergency room to separate.
And if anything happens to Cal or Viktor… She fingered the hilt of the brass-knuckle-grip, Eviscerator Three Special Superknife that Rory had bought at Hunter’s Heaven in Greenwich Village back in the life before, and which she had brought along and worn at her belt in her travels since-figuring now that Rory was MIA and not quite human anymore, he wouldn’t exactly be needing it. Whereas Colleen had had to protect a man or two that she’d grown particularly fond of lately. And yeah, dammit, all right, she’d admit it, Goldman, too.
Inigo was watching her intently, caught the motion with the knife. He swallowed hard.
Good, the duplicitous puny little tweak was nervous. She’d keep him that way.
“Here goes nothing,” Cal said, and turned the key in the ignition. The big V-8 engine roared to life like a dinosaur in the jungle. Now, wasn’t that an amazing sound?
On sudden impulse, Colleen ran around to the passenger side, leaned in through the open window and kissed Doc. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.
He opened his mouth to make a joke, then thought better of it. “I’ll endeavor not to.” They looked deeply into each other’s eyes; she found some comfort there, a fact that no longer made her feel screechingly vulnerable.
He reached out and withdrew the chain from its place beneath her shirt, fingered the leather charm.
“If I may borrow this, for a short while. It may prove of use.”
“If you think so,” she responded, taking the length from around her neck.
“I think so.” Delicately, he unhooked the charm, removed the rough triangle of iridescent leather, then returned the chain with its Russian cross and dog tags to her.
Cal gave them their moment, let the engine idle, warming up. Inigo sidled up alongside the driver’s window.
“When you get down there, don’t believe everything they say,” he advised Cal. “And don’t let ’em dazzle you. Just keep an eye out for what you really need.”
“That your shopper’s tip for the day?” Cal asked.
“Nah, not mine,” Inigo murmured, and from the way he said it, Cal understood he could have added, It’s what I’ve been told to say.
Inigo bent his oversized head in the direction of the dead dragon. “You did good back there. You have a knack for saving people.”
“Thanks,” Cal said.
And though neither of them knew it, or truly knew each other yet, in that moment they had an identical hope, and the same thought.
Of Tina.
The road started out lousy, full of ruts and fissures Cal had to swerve wide to avoid. But as they continued down into the valley, it got better tended.
The bloated dead lay directly in their path. And by God, they looked real.
I see the town completely undamaged, Colleen had said. Well, there was only one way to really test that theory.
“Buckle your seat belts,” Cal said. Doc pulled his shoulder belt and snapped it in, then helped Siegel with his.
Cal floored it. With a roar, the El Dorado’s big tires shimmied laterally, then gained traction, screeching. The car surged forward.
They sped toward the grotesque heaped bodies of men, women, children. And then…
Nothing.
It was like passing through the surface of a mirror, if the mirror were insubstantial as smoke, and suddenly seeing the reflection wasn’t real at all.
“Bozhyeh moy,” Doc muttered under his breath.
“You can say that again,” said Cal
.
For in the valley spread out ahead of them, the cloud-wrack opened and the pale moon raked cleared, pristine fields of what might recently have been rows of wheat and corn. The adjacent farmhouse had smoke curling complacently up out of the chimney, and brilliant, unwavering lights blazing within. Sound echoed from inside, vibrating through the keen night air toward them, lush orchestrations, and words, impossible words, and familiar.
“Hide the ring, Frodo. Keep it safe!”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Cal whispered. There were only two possibilities: either Sir Ian McKellen himself had dropped by and was reciting his number one hits…
Or someone was watching The Lord of the Rings.
A working television, working VCR or DVD player, and electric lights.
Beyond the farmhouse was the town itself, the buildings upright and intact, night settling down snug around a scattering of lights, amber streetlamps, astonishing dependable current humming through them, a carpet of them tucked into the gentle river valley, twinkling. People strolled the main street and lingered in the gazeboed park as if they hadn’t a care in the world, as if there had never been a Change or a Storm or a Darkness to make them shed a single tear.
Cal understood now just what the people here had to protect.
A safe haven, a hiding place…
Sanctuary.
The first such town Cal and his companions had come to on their winding pilgrimage was Stansbury, near the banks of the Patuxent, where Lola Johnson, that laughing, wise Earth Mother, somehow managed to plant the suggestion to marauding passersby that they not see the town at all.
Mary McCrae used concealing fog and portals only a very few could open to keep her Preserve enclosed.
Fred Wishart had done the same with Boone’s Gap for a time, and conjured monsters.
The folks here used plague, the illusion of it, to summon up terror and keep visitors away.
“Where should we drop you, Mr. Siegel?” Cal asked their passenger.
“Call me Theo.” He was sitting up straighter now, propping himself up with a hand on the back of Doc’s bucket seat. “Left at the stoplight, it’s the only one.”
Cal made the turn and saw that laid out ahead of them were the homey brick structures of a college. A row of wire-strung power poles stood evenly spaced on either side of the street, fanning out from the campus to the rest of the town. Closer now, Cal could see that each of the poles was arrayed-like the rifle Theo had wielded, like the engine of the El Dorado-with gleaming bright gemstones. They glimmered in the illumination from the lamps overhead, and cast multihued refractions.
Cal pulled up to the Student Union.
“Thanks,” Theo said. “Hey, listen, how ’bout you come in a minute? There’s a couple friends I’d like you to meet.”
Doc shot Cal a questioning look. Cal nodded confirmation. The two of them climbed out of the big boat of a car and helped the pale young man shakily to his feet. Cal’s hand brushed the back of Theo’s neck, and he was surprised to feel a hard bump under the skin.
It was just about exactly the size and shape of one of those stones lining the streetlamps.
Theo, trying to put weight on his left leg, cried out in pain.
“Broken, in all possibility, or badly sprained,” Doc said. “What I would give for a-” Then a remarkable look dawned on his face, as he cast his eyes on all the streetlights ablaze.
“You would not by chance have a medical center?” Doc asked, and Cal caught the tentative eagerness under the words.
Supported by them on either side, hobbling all the way, Theo led them there. But not before Cal retrieved his sword from the Cadillac, buckled it around his waist, and handed Doc the rifle.
SIXTEEN
SILO
It made Inigo’s stomach hurt having to lie to Christina’s brother. But if he hadn’t, Cal Griffin would never have left him to go into town.
Still, Inigo’s mother had told him never to lie. But then, she had said she was only leaving him for a week or two, that he would be perfectly safe with Agnes Wu (make that Dr. Wu, if you please, though it had always seemed odd to Inigo that someone who pushed elemental particles around had the same title as a guy who gave you a tetanus shot), that she would be back before he knew she was gone.
And that had all been a lie.
So where did that leave him?
Telling Cal Griffin he would stay put, when that would be the most dangerous thing he could do for any of them.
No, he had to be in and out, before the Big Bad Thing got a whiff of it, in plenty of time to watch Christina dance on the corner again, to listen to Papa Sky belt out those mournful blues, to have the Leather Man not say a word or bat an eye.
Because shit, if you crossed that crazy dude, he’d say more than a word and bat more than an eye.
That scary lady with the crossbow and the knives hauled him up on her horse-Big-T it was named, was that some kinda joke, like Tyrannosaurus or what? — and held tight to him all the way to the towering grain silo where the other happy campers were stowed. That funny, schizzy guy with the black curls rode alongside them on his buckskin horse, staring at him all the way, without ever looking directly at him.
Creepy, that.
Even when they got to the silo, Xena Warrior Princess kept him walking ahead of her, breathing down his neck, never letting him get so much as a yard away.
Oh brother, they were making him work….
Once inside, though, things took a serious upswing. Biker Girl and Hippie started talking to the rest of the gang, making sure they were warm, the fires well stoked, everybody with enough food in their gut and no grumbling from anybody. Plus they had to hip them to what Cal and Dr. Russian were up to.
A lot of ground to cover, chores to attend to. And finally, finally neither Goldie nor Colleen was watching him, and Inigo was able to slip out the door and into the night.
To where the other silo was waiting.
Since his transformation-and long before that, actually-Inigo could move on swift cat feet, covering a ton of ground making no sound at all, like wind rippling on the air, and nobody, not even an owl or a wood mouse, getting the least hint he was there.
He was a good way from the grain silo now; it was the barest silhouette against the night sky. The terrain spread out before him was a featureless expanse of mottled snow and high grass.
In the normal scheme of things, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, wouldn’t have been able to find the hatch set flat in the ground. But this was far from the normal scheme of things, and he wasn’t a normal anything anymore.
Generally, he hated being the stunted, twisted freak he was-the bonsai distortions the Storm had laid on him made him studiously avoid mirrors. But for once, he was thankful for the milky, big, egg-membrane eyes of his that could pierce the darkness like a night-vision scope and better. It was a snap finding the big steel hatch, lifting it effortlessly with those long, lean superhuman arm muscles of his.
He peered into the deep, black hole. Hot air rushed up out of it like the exhalation of the biggest junkyard dog in the world. Cloaked in the night, Inigo could spy downward with perfect assurance, see the dead elevators, the emergency handholds set at regular intervals in the wall down the endless length of the shaft.
This would be the hardest part of all, harder even than hanging on to that shrieking hell-train as it screamed underground and punched up into the air like the Devil himself being born. But Leather Man had coached Inigo thoroughly, given explicit directions. There’d be a lot of hard traveling, and he’d have to move fast, but if he was really on his toes, kept a sharp lookout, he could find shortcuts, doorways on the fade that hadn’t winked out yet, that he could still squeeze through.
And, of course, he’d have to keep clear of the lurkers in the dark, the smilers with the knives, the dark little men who would cut him open and eat him raw without the least hesitation….
Man, he hated being one of them.
Leather Man
would leave that last back door open for him, or else he’d never get back, not in a million years of Sundays-the door that almost nobody else could get through, certainly no human, certainly not Cal Griffin. The Big Bad Thing would sense a thing like that for sure, and crush anyone flat before he so much as drew a breath.
But a little gray guy, particularly under just the right protection and at the right moment, might just slip on by, be taken for one of the ground crew, one of the staff.
Because as Leather Man and Papa Sky had drilled into him and into him…
Grunters It drove crazy (except for him, for the time being), flares It swallowed whole to fuel the furnace, and dragons-
Well, dragons were another thing entirely.
Time to go home. Or at least what had once been home, and now was-
“Hold it right there, you lying little creep.”
The voice came from behind him, stunningly close. Inigo turned around slowly.
Colleen Brooks stood there, not ten feet off, her crossbow aimed right at him.
He hadn’t heard her coming at all.
Damn, she was good…for a human.
“You wanna talk about it?” Colleen glared at him. “No? Suits me just fine, because most sphincters I run into just want to yak and yak. C’mon, we’re heading back.”
Busted. He took just one step toward her, when abruptly someone dashed up from behind and to the right of him, grabbed him hard and threw him down into the snow.
Which was the only thing that saved him, or his hypersensitive sight at least, because right then there was this explosion of light around him, and Colleen Brooks screamed.
When the light cleared enough for him to look up, Inigo thought for one terrible instant that she had been melted to nothing right there on the spot. Then he saw to his relief that she had just dropped to the ground and was rolling around in pain, holding her eyes and cursing, blinded-temporarily, he hoped.
Then whoever it was behind him grabbed him again.
“Move,” the voice said, and shoved him toward the open shaft. The two of them crawled in quickly, hanging from the handholds.
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