Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers)

by C. E. Murphy

  He yelled, “We’re not going to make it!” back, but that wasn’t what I’d asked. “It’s an eight-mile drive, Jo! The chopper is going to catch up!”

  “Just tell me where we’re going!”

  “There’s a track off the road up there—” He pointed at a site about two mountains over, his fingertip bobbling with our speed.

  I remembered when he said it. It wasn’t much of a track, not something a car could go up. It was rocky for the first several hundred yards, rough enough terrain that it wouldn’t take footprints or other signs of passage to any meaningful degree. He was right, though: through the twists and curves of the mountain roads, it was about eight miles away, even if I could see the stretch of road it branched off from where we were. There were chunks of green valley and steep hollers between us, nothing a 4x4 could traverse, never mind my lowslung 1969 Mustang. We hit a straight stretch, a familiar straight stretch, the last one my grandmother had ever driven, and all sorts of crazy ideas came together in my mind.

  I remembered the Pontiac’s massive blue weight, the black soot wings of Raven Mocker making mockery of its attempt at flight. I thought of the helicopter coming up the mountain the short way, blades hauling awkward dragonfly shapes through the air, and I thought, hell. I thought of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner laying down road over empty sky, and I thought, well, hell, whispered, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and slammed Petite off the side of a mountain.

  We flew.

  * * *

  The Rainbow Connection came together beneath us, every ounce of my shielding magic slapping blocks of bright-colored roadway together under Petite’s wheels. It wasn’t going to last, it couldn’t possibly last, but it didn’t have to last. It just had to get us across half a mile of clear air, an impossible shortcut to the hidden path into the hills. I drew strength from the astonished earth, pulling it up as fast as it would let me to braid it into the air bridge. I felt like Indiana Jones crossing the invisible bridge, except moving at 110 miles per hour instead of creeping on hands and knees.

  Dad made apoplectic sounds in the backseat. Morrison clutched the dashboard and stared at treetops three hundred feet below us. I grinned so broadly my face hurt. I had never had so much fun in my life. I desperately wanted to turn around and see if the helicopter had caught up, if they could see what we were doing, and how they were taking it if they could. I didn’t dare, afraid if I looked away the path I was building would fall apart, but I could imagine their expressions.

  I did not imagine them firing missiles at us, which is what happened next. Dad gave a strangled warning shout at the same time I heard them, high whistles that sounded a lot like they did in movies. Morrison roared something incomprehensible, but I didn’t dare listen. I didn’t know how fast missiles traveled. I knew how fast we were going, Petite’s speedometer clocking well over 130 now, but I was pretty sure missiles flew faster than that. I wondered if they were heat-seeking or targeted or what, then remembered everybody’s favorite deep-sea maneuver and hit the brakes, spinning the second 180 of the afternoon.

  I wished to God I could see it all from the outside. The shields I drew from the earth rearranged so fast I heard them clattering, blocks of magic crashing together to keep a surface under Petite’s wheels. She fishtailed from turning at such high speeds, but bless her little steel soul, she leapt right forward again as I leaned on the gas. All of a sudden we were charging a helicopter, and I did get a chance to see the pilots’ faces after all. There were two of them, a man and a woman, and their faces showed a range of emotion from shock and bewilderment to outright fury and determination to take us down.

  The woman, however, also looked like her every prayer had been answered, that she was seeing living proof that the world was as awesome and amazing as she’d ever hoped. She looked like someone had just proven to her that magic was real, and nothing was ever going to take that away from her. I gave her a big cheesy grin and a thumbs-up.

  The missiles behind us swung around and smashed into each other, creating a smoking fireball in the sky. I threw Petite into Reverse, not risking the time to turn around again, and flung my arm over the passenger seat so I could turn and drive backward through the airborne wreckage. I was starting to see stars, nothing to do with the missiles and everything to do with blatantly ignoring the laws of physics. I chanted, “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it,” between my teeth and clenched my stomach muscles, like the tension there could translate to magic beneath my sweet old girl’s wheels.

  Twenty feet from the mountain road, I spun Petite around again and slammed us back toward solid ground. The bridge fell apart beneath her back wheels and they whirled, trying to gain purchase. Dad and Morrison both threw themselves forward, adding another few hundred pounds of forward momentum, and gravel caught beneath her wheels. She surged onto the road and I twitched a light-bending invisibility shield up around us while I slowed down enough to stop safely.

  I killed the engine and it rumbled to a slow stop. We all sat there in the silence, my vision winking in and out. There was something I wanted to tell Dad. Something important. Something about keeping us hidden. I opened my mouth, said, “Ablbhlg,” and passed out.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I awakened to Morrison’s patient repetition of, “Wake up, Joanie. Wake up. Wake up, Walker. Wake up. Walker, I need you to—” and then a rough quiet gasp when I rolled my eyes open. “There you are. Drink this.”

  I was willing to drink anything, especially if it had a high alcoholic content. What he fed me didn’t: it was bottled water, warm, brackish, and probably good for me. I coughed a couple of times and tried sitting up. That was when I noticed I was lying down. Mostly, anyway. Petite’s front seat had been laid as flat as it went, and I was no longer buckled in. Morrison knelt beside the door, strain deepening the lines around his eyes. “Stay down awhile, Walker. It took Joe twenty minutes to stabilize you. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Prolly not.” My voice was weirdly hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Did it work?” Obviously it had worked. We were still with Petite instead of arrested by military mooks. That was good. I wondered where Dad was. I wondered if we’d found the missing Cherokee, except clearly we hadn’t because we were still with Petite, who couldn’t possibly make it up the ravine.

  “It worked. That was the...” Morrison cleared his throat in turn. “I don’t even know what that was, Walker. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Better than time travel, huh?” I felt like I’d been drinking sand. I fumbled for the water and Morrison poured a little more down my throat.

  “Time travel,” my staid, sensible boss-former boss said, “is almost comprehensible, Walker. I pay some attention to science. I get the idea that time is how we perceive it. I can just about understand that if we can alter our perceptions enough, we might not have to be so linear.”

  “You’re amazing,” I told him solemnly. “Best ever. Best Morrison ever. I love you. Can’t believe you’re okay with time travel. That’s amazing. You’re the best.” Now I sounded like I’d been on a three-day bender and was equal parts hammered and hung over.

  Morrison crooked a smile. “I love you, too. But yeah, Walker, I can almost wrap my head around time travel. Flying Mustangs, not so much.”

  “I shoulda named her Pegasus.” The thought was inordinately funny, and I giggled until I coughed. When I finished coughing I was weak as water. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Your father said you drained yourself dry.”

  I mooshed my lips into a duck face. “Nah. Not me. I’m Supershaman.”

  “Not even supershamans are supposed to make three-thousand-pound cars fly through the air, Walker. Apparently you pushed the laws of physics too far that time.”

  “Bah. Do it all the time. Invisililliby, bility...in...vis...i...bil...ity. Shields, time tr
avel, healing. It all defies physics. That’s why it’s magic.” I was not getting any less punchy, but the litany of powers I usually worked with did seem to have something in common. Invisibility shields were just bent light, and almost anything, including water, the most common element on the planet, could bend light. Morrison had just deconstructed why time travel might not be quite outside the laws of physics. Healing was incredible stuff, but what I did essentially sped up the normal process rather than redefining it entirely. My physical shields were, in fact, perhaps the most physics-defying thing I did, since as far as I knew nobody’d figured out how to turn air solid. So it was possible Morrison was right. It was possible I’d pushed that one juuuuust a little too far.

  “Nah,” I said again. “Nothing wipes me out.”

  “Except curing cancer.” Morrison’s eyebrows challenged me.

  “...” Nope. I couldn’t come up with an argument. Curing cancer had left me just about this rattled, and it was just about as impossible a task as building a road out of thin air. I shut my mouth, then decided changing the subject was my safest bet. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Making sure your invisibility shields hold. He says he never thought of doing anything like them, so he’s got to pay attention. You kept them going.” Morrison’s voice dropped a note, respect blending with bewilderment. “Even unconscious, you kept them going until he was able to pick them up.”

  “Had to, or they woulda found us. Woulda defeated the point of all of...” I waved a hand toward the valley. “That. Do we have any food? Shoe leather will do.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay.” I tried sitting up again, and was able to this time. “How long’ve I been out?”

  “About an hour, and you should’ve been out a week, and in the hospital. You were in bad shape, Walker. You were gray. If your dad hadn’t been here...” The strain returned to Morrison’s eyes.

  I leaned over to flop against him, relieved to not stand up yet. “But he was, and I’m okay now. I could eat a donkey, but I’m okay.” I wondered how many times I could say that, and whether any of the repetitions would make Morrison believe me. “I think I gotta go talk to Dad. We need to go find everybody. We have to...”

  My thoughts disintegrated again. With Dad, without Dad, whatever: I had pushed myself way too damned far and my brain was full of static. It took a long time just to remember the problem: that we’d disappeared out from under the military’s nose, after they’d fired missiles at us. Even if I suspected a media blackout on what was happening in the Qualla, somebody was going to notice that. It would behoove the military to get to us before the news broke. They’d no doubt been searching the mountains already, but they were going to redouble their efforts now. I drifted from that into “I’m sorry, Morrison.”

  He tipped me back so he could frown at me. “For what?”

  “I’m going to make a hash of your career, aren’t I? Seattle police captain involved in high-speed military chase. Involved in the mystery of the missing Cherokee. Involved in the zombie apocalypse. That can’t look good on a resume.” Exhaustion and weariness made my eyes fill with apologetic tears. I was screwing up everybody’s lives.

  “Good thing you only gave them your name.” His mouth curved again, rueful little smile. “And at least you quit the department two weeks ago, before you riled up the military.”

  “Riled. You’ve already been in the South too long, using words like riled. I didn’t hand in a letter, Morrison.” At least, I didn’t think I had. It was hard to remember. I stared at him, trying to hold my thoughts together. “I just told you I was quitting, right? Is that enough?”

  My former boss looked ever so slightly shifty. “I may have taken some liberties there, Walker.”

  For a few seconds my haze-filled brain didn’t get it. Then I blinked at him in astonishment. “You forged my resignation letter?”

  His voice went soft. “I didn’t think you would be coming back. Not as a cop, anyway. If you’ve changed your mind...”

  “No.” Fuzzy-minded or not, I was firm on that. It meant finding a job when I got home again, but that was the least of my problems, given that right now I was too tired to stand up. I sent a feeble request to my spirit animals for help, and they all gave me flat looks. I mumbled a silent apology to them and returned my attention to Morrison. “No, it was a good call, especially with this going on now. At least it makes me a former employee, and...” I exhaled, unable to complete the thought without effort. “And I guess, I don’t know, we keep us under wraps for a little while? Until people stop talking about this?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Not really, but I want to cost you your job even less.” I snorted. “Besides, if we keep it quiet awhile the department will start a betting pool on when we’ll come out. Maybe we can get Billy to game it for us. Okay. Help me up. I’m...God, I’m tired, Morrison. I shouldn’t be this tired. I don’t tap out like that.”

  “You’re too skinny, you haven’t eaten, and you’ve been throwing magic around like it’s fairy dust, Walker. Nobody can keep anything up forever. Not even you. C’mon.”

  He did help me up, an arm around my waist to keep me steady, and we went to find Dad, who was sitting just far enough away that he could pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping. I didn’t believe it, but I didn’t care enough to call him on it. He spoke when we got close enough. “You got the invisibility shields idea from that comic you used to read, didn’t you? The one with the blonde woman and the rock man. It’s a good idea. Unique. I’m not sure you’d have thought of it if I’d trained you. I’m more traditional than this.”

  That was, in fact, where I’d gotten the idea. I’d loved Sue Storm as a kid. “You seem to have gotten the hang of it.”

  “Once I saw what you’d done, sure. I don’t know how you kept it up until I took over, Jo...anne. You shouldn’t have been able to. I’ve never seen anyone that deeply drained of energy and still alive.”

  I said the same thing I had to Morrison: “I had to, or it all would have been pointless. The real question is how we’re going to keep it functioning once we head into the hills, because no way am I leaving Petite exposed up here for the military to find and tear apart.”

  “No, Joanne.” Dad got up, hands in his pockets, a crease between his eyebrows. “The question is how you did that. You’re not understanding me. When I say you shouldn’t have been able to I mean I’ve been a shaman for more than forty years and I’ve never seen anyone do any of what you’ve done today. We use power circles and sweat lodges to alter perceptions and to heal. We don’t just fling ourselves in without preparation. We shield ourselves against sorcery, but we don’t wind that magic into nets and walls that affect wide spaces or many people. We don’t drive cars across open air and then keep invisibility shields active when our hearts are stuttering. You barely had enough life in you to keep breathing, Joanne, and you were still pouring magic out into the world. We don’t do that. It would kill us. We’d be dead before we began. We can’t do that.”

  “You can’t.” I had no other argument, and barely enough energy for this one. In fact, I wasn’t having an argument. Maybe Dad was, but from my perspective it was a detailing of rote information. “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe it’s the two heritages. Shaman and mage. Maybe it’s being a brand-new sparkly fresh soul. Maybe it’s not being hobbled by tradition. Maybe it’s because I learned the hard way. Maybe it’s that I just don’t know what I can and can’t do, so I do it anyway. I mean, hey, yeah, okay, it’s pretty clear I shouldn’t try the flying-car stunt again. Or healing cancer,” I said with a sideways glance at Morrison. “But mostly the only way I find out I shouldn’t do something is by doing it. I don’t have any preconceptions, Dad. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. I never have.”

  That wasn’t true anymore. I actually had a pretty good idea what I was doing now, and it had become clear that most
of my limitations were self-imposed, failures of imagination rather than failures of raw power. I couldn’t figure out how to track magic, for example. I’d never been able to convince my slightly near-sighted eyes that it would be okay for me to heal them, though I had no doubt if I went in for LASIK surgery that it would work just fine. I accepted that I shouldn’t try healing major illnesses without a power circle to support me, at the very least. That kind of shit was dangerous, and despite my reckless behavior I wasn’t really trying to get myself killed. I just didn’t know where the line was until I crossed it.

  And when I got right down to it, I didn’t have a problem with that. I was not going to become increasingly conservative as I grew to understand my power more fully. In fact, backed by Rattler and Renee and Raven, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t become less conservative, especially in cases where I’d learned where the lines lay.

  Looking at my father, at the worry pinching his face and at the barely restrained disbelief in his eyes, I thought for the first time that maybe I was more like my mother than I’d imagined. I’d never thought of Dad as conservative, but it was the first word that would’ve come to mind for Mom. The second one was stubborn, or maybe willful. The woman had concentrated herself to death, after all, to make sure she could be in the right spiritual place and time to save my tuchus more than once. It was inconceivable that she would let some piddling opinion like “you shouldn’t have been able to” stop her from doing anything. I rolled that thought around in my mind a few seconds, then spread my hands and shrugged. “This is how it works with me, Dad. You’re just going to have to get used to it. Now, what are we going to do about Petite?”

  My father looked at me for a long time, with much the same expression he’d often had when I was younger. It was the one I’d interpreted as “How the hell did I get stuck with a kid?” but now I thought maybe it was really more like “How the hell do I roll with the insane punches this kid throws?” After a while he shook his head and pointed his thumb up the mountain. “There’s a cave system up the road a ways. We can bring her up there and tuck her in. If you don’t know where it is, it’s hard to find.”