Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers)

by C. E. Murphy

  I leaned forward and touched the bottom edge of Petite’s windshield. It was whole, unmarked—I never risked dings turning into cracks—and the world beyond it was slightly hazy from the thin film of dust. Other than that, though, perfect. I reached for the image that had risen from within me the day my shamanic powers had awakened: the idea that Petite’s windshield reflected the state of my soul. In my mental image, there was a massive hole punched through the windshield, spiderwebs and long cracks radiating out from it. Over the past year the cracks had begun sealing up, the spiderweb receding, glass fusing back together. Recently it had become more whole than broken, but the puncture wound was still there.

  Its edges, though, were maybe a little softer than they’d been before. The spiderweb had closed up around it until the entire fracture was only about the size of my spread hand, instead of spreading from one side of the windshield to the other. I didn’t think the damage would ever be completely fixed. Eventually it might just be a warped spot, though, just a wobble in the windshield where resin had been poured in and sealed to the unbroken whole. I tried fixing the idea of a glass-sealer to the windshield, seeing how much I could smooth out if I put actual effort into it.

  To my surprise, a delicate layer of new glass appeared, splootching across the bullet-size hole itself and filling in more of the spiderweb around it. I flattened a piece of film over it to make sure it stayed in place, and sat back to study it. I couldn’t say the whole of the scar had shrunk any, but it was bandaged, which was more than it had been for over a decade. I patted Petite’s dashboard and whispered, “Looking good, girl.”

  My father and Morrison were still talking. I thought the topic of conversation was probably what to do next, and knew I should be taking part in it. I didn’t want to. I wanted to curl up in Petite’s passenger seat and sleep for about sixty hours. It wasn’t even that I hadn’t had enough sleep, because for once I was getting reasonable amounts. I couldn’t, as usual, remember when I’d eaten last, except for a vague awareness that I had been a coyote when I had. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that Morrison had been right, I was too skinny. I’d cannibalized my body’s extra resources and been burning up muscle with all the shapeshifting I’d done in Ireland, and hadn’t come anywhere near returning to fighting weight. Food suddenly sounded more important than sleep, even if I was an emotional basket case. I got out of the car.

  Both men stopped talking like they’d been caught doing something naughty, and looked at me guiltily. I deduced they had not been discussing a game plan, but had instead been talking about me. “I don’t even want to know.”

  Relief replaced guilt, which made me want to know after all, but it was too late. “Do you guys have a plan? Because I don’t have a plan, and we’ve missed a week and I don’t know where the hell Aidan is and I don’t know what to do and somebody’s got to go tell Sara her husband is dead and I’m hungry enough to gnaw my arm off and, and, and...” I put my arms on the top of Petite’s door and put my forehead against them, completely out of steam. Muffled, I asked, “Is that diner we used to go to still open, Dad? Because I could really go for about three pounds of applesauce biscuits and grits.”

  My father, cautiously, said, “There’s going to be a lot of magic coming our way, Joanne. Eating—”

  I lifted my head to give him a flat stare. “I. Don’t. Care. Having food in my stomach has never weighed me down when I needed to work magic—” which may have been because I never remembered to eat while running around on adventures, but he didn’t need to know that, because “—and even if it did, I’ve been running on empty for most of two weeks, how can it possibly have been only two weeks since that dance concert? Two and a half weeks? Since I shot Raleigh?” That was addressed to Morrison, who half smiled.

  “Because despite your best efforts, Walker, the calendar only passes one day at a time.”

  “I guess.” I kept looking in his direction, but I wasn’t focusing on him anymore. “Oh, hell, Morrison. It’s Thursday. Never mind Dad and Lucas. We’ve been missing for most of a week. And Aidan...”

  Aidan had been pulling down power strong and focused enough that he wasn’t as wedded to arriving at the same times or places we were. For all I knew, he could have come back within minutes of us leaving. He could have returned to an entirely different location. For all I knew, he’d stepped into some already volatile location and dropped a massacre’s worth of death magic into it. If we’d been missing most of a week, we could be screwed.

  “We need to get into town.”

  * * *

  Cherokee was deserted. It wasn’t like high tourist season anyway, when people came by the thousands to go to the casinos and visit the mountains, but at noon on a Thursday there should be traffic, people coming and going to lunch, little kids out of school, buses carting older students on field trips—the usual signs of life in a small town. But it was all missing. Petite crept down the main drag, no traffic to make me drive at a normal speed, and we all peered down side streets and into blank, black business windows. Vehicles were idle, dust-sprinkled like Petite, CLOSED signs hung on normally open doors, and no one was to be seen on the streets. It felt like a ghost town.

  None of us said anything, because we all knew none of us could answer the questions we all wanted to ask. Dad was wedged into Petite’s tiny backseat, nose all but pressed against her window. Seeing the town like this had to be worse for him than me, and I found it disconcerting as hell. We passed a guns-and-ammo store and Morrison said, “Stop.”

  I did. He got out of the car and, to my eye-popping astonishment, broke the store’s front window to let himself in. Three minutes later he came out with new ammo for our duty weapons and the shotgun, and a guilty expression. “I left a couple hundred dollars on the till,” he muttered defensively.

  Grinning, I leaned over to kiss him, whispered, “Good thinking,” against his mouth, and got back to the business of creeping down Cherokee’s main street.

  We all three saw it at the same time, glimpsed out of the corner of our eyes as we passed another side street. I hit the brakes, not that we’d been moving fast, and hovered my hand above the gearshift, not quite willing to put her in reverse yet. “Was that...?”

  Dad and Morrison said, “Did you—” and, “Was that—” at the same time, making me pretty sure we’d all seen the same thing. I said, “What the...” and cautiously put Petite into Reverse. We backed up a few feet, all of us looking to the left.

  A CDC truck sat at the other end of the street. I killed Petite’s engine and we all sat there staring at it. I’d never seen one except in movies. It wasn’t particularly menacing in and of itself, but the words blazoned on the side were by their nature scary: Centers for Disease Control.

  There were no circumstances ever in the whole wide world that a person wanted to see a vehicle with those words in her hometown. In fact, a person never wanted to see a vehicle with those words anywhere, because the CDC was not an agency that fucked around. They were the people called in for anthrax scares. They were the people who maintained—for reasons I would never, ever understand—live smallpox samples. They were the people who went into Ebola breakouts, who fought the plague, who, for sweet pity’s sake, kept the live smallpox virus under lock and key within their facilities. CDC workers were goddamned superheroes, and any circumstances that required superheroes were not good circumstances for the local population.

  “Walker,” Morrison said in a thunderous voice, “please tell me we haven’t triggered the zombie apocalypse.”

  I said, “We have not triggered the zombie apocalypse,” obligingly enough, and Morrison relaxed a hair. I said, “Aidan might have,” and Morrison tensed up again, glowering at me in a fashion reminiscent of the tried-and-true Almighty Morrison.

  My father, unable to believe we were making light of the situation and possibly a little afraid we weren’t, said, “The zombie apocalypse?” />
  Right about then the CDC guys came pouring out of everywhere and surrounded my car.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A fully bio-suited man in orange threatened Petite’s window with a fist. I unrolled it slowly, trying to keep my hands visible as I did so. Morrison put his hands on the dashboard, and my father put his on the back of Morrison’s seat. The bio-suit man did not look reassured by any of that, and my brain, scared silly of what a bio-suit suggested, disengaged from smart and went straight to smart-ass.

  “Hello, officer,” I said in the most chipper voice I could come up with. “Was I speeding?”

  Morrison groaned and the bio-suit man didn’t look like he thought I was funny at all. “Who are you? How did you get in here? This whole county is quarantined.”

  “Holy crap, really? How are you controlling the bor—” That was not a helpful question. Neither was “You can’t possibly have managed to roust everybody out of the hills, have you?” which I also got halfway through before Morrison growled, “Walker,” as a suggestion that I shut up.

  I said, “I’m sorry,” after a few seconds of trying to get my mouth and my nerves under control. “We were camping. We had no idea anything was going on.”

  “We’ve been doing low flyovers for the past three days, broadcasting messages to come to a center for inspection. How could you have missed those?”

  I glanced at Morrison, who had no helpful answers written on his forehead. I swallowed and looked back at the CDC guy. “...we were spelunking?”

  “Where’s your gear?”

  The only answer to that was “In the trunk,” and I really did not want paranoid government officials opening a trunk full of shotguns and other monster-hunting gear. I did have carry permits for all of it, but they were carry permits for Washington State. I wasn’t sure how well that would go over, two thousand miles from home. I tried for distraction instead. “Officer, what’s going on here?”

  “Lady, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I need you to drive down toward the van, very slowly. When you get there you’re going remove yourself from the vehicle. You will be isolated, tested for disease and disinfected. The car will undergo forensic scrutiny—”

  A tingle of outrage danced up my spine. “Excuse me? Undergo what?”

  “Forensic scrutiny, ma’am. It means the vehicle will be stripped—”

  “Like hell it will be.”

  “It’s necessary, ma’am. We need to inspect it for any foreign material that may be able to carry disease. You’ve been inside the epicenter of a plague. The vehicle has to be thoroughly examined, even if that means destroying it.”

  Morrison put his chin in his hand and his elbow in the passenger side window, looking the other way. I didn’t know if he was fighting laughter or despair, but he was ostentatiously not getting involved in this particular argument. I smiled at the CDC guy, who took it as a good sign and therefore didn’t quite understand when I said, “Over my dead body.”

  When he caught up to what I’d actually said, he got grim. “If necessary, yes, ma’am. I have military reserves on hand and at my command—”

  “Really.” My voice squeaked with interest. “You’ve got the U.S. military on the Qualla? On land that belongs to a foreign and sovereign nation state? How’s that playing on the news, Officer? How’s that going over with the Eastern Band of Cherokee, or the Navajo Nation? You making it nice and clear they’re next, after an already embittered history of governmental dismissal of Native rights? Are you—”

  Somewhere in the middle of my little rant, I started to recognize what I was describing as being exactly what the Master, his Executioner, and the wights were probably after. I broke off with a whispered, “Holy shit. It’s that easy, isn’t it. It’s really that easy.”

  “Walker?”

  “I’m sure the government has got a media blackout on this anyway, but holy shit, Morrison, it’s perfect. Whether there’s a real disease or whether Sara didn’t listen and burn the bodies—”

  My father said, “Burn whose bodies?” but I wasn’t going to stop and explain just then.

  “—and if they rose and have created more wights, either way it’s a perfect excuse to bring the government into the reservations. And there’s still bad blood there, there’s always going to be, so once word gets out that the government is trampling Native rights and invading reservation territory again, it’s all over. Either the First Nation peoples are going to revolt and be killed, or they’re going to be taken away, spread out, and assimilated into nonexistence. It’s putting a shiny red bow on the genocides. And I bet anything Aidan’s out there stirring up the will to fight instead of to sit back and take is all passively. Where is everybody?” I demanded of the CDC guy, and behind his glass plate mask I saw a hint of uncertainty flicker across his face.

  “You don’t have them, do you.” A smile started to stretch my mouth. “You people came in here like a load of bricks, threatening and angry and scared, and the People told you to fuck off, didn’t they. I mean, I’m sure some of them stayed. Lots, even, I mean, not everybody in this area has Native blood, never mind cares enough to stand up to the Feds, and somebody called you in, after all. But a whole lot of ’em just went to the hills and now you can’t find them, can you. You’re afraid there’s a whole disease center out there somewhere, and it’s completely out of your control. Tell me, who called you? Was it Sara Isaac from the FBI?”

  The guy’s whole face pinched up. “We have an FBI agent missing?”

  My grin went wild and broad for a couple seconds. “No. She’s not missing. She’s just chosen her side. Look, listen to me, buddy. If you come across bodies with an ash mark on their forehead, like a fingerprint burned in? Just burn them. Don’t do an autopsy, don’t try to figure out what killed them or if it’s infectious. It’s not infectious, except through a touch like the one on the bodies, and you will never understand what killed them, not really. If you want to help, burn the bodies to keep them from rising—”

  CDC Man turned white. I took that to mean he’d seen some of them rise, and I was fairly certain he’d lost some men to the newly risen.

  “—and otherwise, stay out of the way and let me do my job.”

  He rallied a little. “Who are you? What do you know about this? Disease control is our job, not yours. Who are you?”

  “My name,” I said, mostly under my breath, “is Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, and I’m the answer to all your prayers.”

  * * *

  It seemed appropriate to throw Petite into Drive and roar off down the road after a line like that, so that’s what I did. CDC guys flung themselves out of the way, I pulled a 180, and we tore back the way we’d come, hitting ninety miles an hour in about a quarter mile. I cackled the whole way. Morrison covered his eyes with one hand, then dropped it. “I can’t believe you told them your name.”

  “Oh, come on, Petite is unique. It would only take them about fifteen seconds to find out who I was anyway, and it was a great exit line. C’mon, Morrison, you gotta admit, that was an awesome exit.”

  “Walker, I’m a police captain. From the law’s perspective, that was not only incredibly dangerous—you could have killed someone!—but also unbelievably stupid. They’re only doing their jobs, and we should help them with that.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “From a personal perspective, though, yes, I’ve got to hand it to you, Walker. You do know how to make an exit.”

  My father said, “You should have seen the exit when she left the Qualla,” and right about then the military boys started giving chase.

  There was no chance they’d catch us in land vehicles. Unfortunately, they had a helicopter. I gunned Petite, sending her well over a hundred miles an hour, and we shot up a mountain road that wasn’t intended to be taken at fifty. I downshifted ahead of a sharp corner that my reflexes remembered
more than my eyes saw. Morrison hit a high note I didn’t think a man of his size could produce as we swung around a curve with nothing but hope keeping us on the road. Then he clamped his eyes and mouth shut and hunkered down while I proved to myself, my God, and anybody else within a six-mile radius that I was still the best damned driver in the Qualla. All my shakes and emotions disappeared into the adrenaline rush of dangerous speeds. It was as good as, better than, a drum circle: this was all me, skill and a love of the road tying together to make the best possible antidote for fear and exhaustion.

  Raven bounced around in my head, cawing and kloking and squealing with excitement that only encouraged me. Rattler swayed, hissing gleefully, and I tapped into the speed he’d been known to offer me, increasing my reflexes just that much more. The downshifts came half a heartbeat later, the upshifts that much sooner, eking extra yards out of each action. I didn’t care that a helicopter had the advantage. I was going to outrun it, and disappear us into the hills right under the military’s noses. I bellowed, “Renee, what can you give me?” and my newest companion animal, who didn’t seem naturally inclined to outrageous activity, stepped up.

  Time slowed down. That happened a lot, when things were going badly, but for once it was just for the pure outrageous joy of pushing myself, my car, and my magic to the limit. I saw—Saw—the road unfold in front of me with astounding clarity. Saw patches of gravel, fine sprays of water, the smear of some unfortunate possum who’d played chicken with a car and lost. I twitched the wheel fractions of an inch, feeling Petite respond to the most minute requests, and over the roar of her engine I shouted, “Where we going, Dad?”