Sam stood in the center of the church, listening for the presence of God. It was a hot place. The air was blue with floating radioisotopes. She glanced up at the clouds and they staggered by as if the walls were falling in on her. She looked away quickly. The air flowed around her, calm and peaceful and blue. But there was no divine presence.
From the narthex, with gaping holes where the great wooden doors had once been, there came a crunching sound—footsteps. Sam whirled, and saw a man step carefully into the sanctuary, picking his way over the fallen slate and stone, and coming straight at her. His shirt was bright red, and it was the only thing in all the universe whose color remained unchanged by the radioactive blue.
There was something frightening and purposeful about the way he lumbered forward, advancing on her. Sam stumbled back a step. Her throat felt dry.
Then the man’s head shifted slightly to the side, and the light hit him a bit differently, and he resolved into Keith.
“Keith.” Sam felt weak with relief. She ran to him, wanting but not daring to hug him. “I thought you were—thought …” He took her hand, and started to remove his mask.
The boneseekers swirled and danced about him. “Don’t!” Sam gasped. The air was as bad as she’d ever seen it.
Keith took a small device from his shirt pocket. It had a semicircular dial with needle gauge, and the initials SM&B on the top. “This is a scintillation meter,” he said. “Look.” He touched a button and the needle quivered, but stayed within the green part of the dial. “It’s clean here. Nothing to be afraid of.” He reached for his mask again.
“Oh, please don’t,” Sam wailed. He hesitated, then let his hand fall away, leaving the mask in place. She hugged him in relief, and he returned her embrace.
The blue light all around her was dazzling. It bewildered and entranced her. Keith said something, and then led her to the end of the church, where the altar had once been. There was a patch of grass there now. They sat, and Keith chucked a rock or two away, clearing it off.
It was amazing how quiet the world had become. There was an old radiation logo sign nearby, with dead and withered flowers at its foot. When Keith heaved it far away it fell without any noise. Then he began gently to remove her clothing, until she was wearing nothing but her mask. And then he did the same for himself.
She was too amazed and frightened and happy to do anything for herself. It was like watching events from a distance. But still, she was surprised how differently he held her than Flinch had. His lovemaking was so unlike Flinch’s that the two could not even be directly compared.
It was an odd experience, and only slightly better than it had been with Flinch, but it would improve, she could tell, and having Keith as her lover made her happier than she thought she could bear.
Afterwards, Keith pulled away from her, so they could talk.
“You’re in a very dangerous situation,” he told her. “You make a single false move and those devotees of yours will tear you apart.”
“They wouldn’t hurt me,” she insisted. “They practically worship me.”
“That’s what makes them dangerous.” Keith sounded extremely serious. “I think it’s about time for you to start healing them.”
“But that’s what I keep telling them,” she cried in frustration. “I can’t heal them. I just see the sickness; I can’t do anything about it.
“Let me explain about faith healing,” Keith began.
Sam listened to what he was saying, but only barely. She knew she would do whatever he told her to; she was his now, and his explanations didn’t matter. She let his voice become a buzz of words, and stared at the side of his face, soft-lit and craggy in the dying light. She contemplated the revelation that had driven her here to the church in the first place. She thought of what she had read on her own arms the night before.
Looking down at her forearms, she saw the glowing lines again. Death was gathering under the skin, and she knew the date it would arrive. She had a little over a year. It was a bitter pill to swallow. But now, with Keith by her, she had the strength to accept it.
Idly, not really caring, she wondered why Keith hadn’t pulled out at the end, the way Flinch had.
Esterhaszy was angry at something. Sam could tell by the way he banged the pots and pans about as he cleaned them. Ordinarily, he treated all made things with great care and attention, all tasks with near reverence. Sam ignored him, carefully opened the copy of Gray’s Botany he had loaned her.
Sam’s devotees had brought her flowers, great armloads of them. She was sorting through them, placing the more interesting ones in the lap of her dress (it felt good to wear a dress again; she had thrown her NIGH purples onto the campfire the first night after leaving Spivey’s). These she carefully compared with the old black-and-white engravings in Gray’s, trying to determine which might be mutations.
“Look,” she said, holding up a small white flower. “I think it’s an albino buttercup. What do you think?”
Esterhaszy grunted.
Then Keith went hurrying by, off to arrange for the evening healing ceremonies. He threw Sam a wink and was gone. Esterhaszy threw his pots to the ground in a great angry clatter.
“Look,” Sam said in exasperation, “just what is the matter with you?”
“Matter?” Esterhaszy said. He began quietly picking up the cookware. “Nothing’s the matter.”
“Oh, come off it! You’ve been moping around for the last three days.” Ever since Keith and the church, she realized, though she did not say anything. “What is it?”
“You don’t want to hear—” he began, and then stopped. After a moment’s consideration, he said, “All right, it’s foolish and you’re not going to listen, but I’m just mad enough to tell you anyway. I’m concerned about you shacking up with Piotrowicz. And don’t try to deny it—I can hear you two from my tent.”
Sam reddened. “You don’t have to listen,” she said with some try at dignity.
“It’s not the listening that bothers me! And it’s not the difference in ages, contrary to what you might think—you’re over thirteen; nobody’s going to stop you. It’s the fact that that damned Mummer is using you. Anyone with half an eye could tell. For the price of a little nightly wriggle-and-pant, Piotrowicz gets complete control of you—and you let him.”
“What do I care?” she all but shrieked at him. “I’m just some drippy little kid with almost no hair at all, and no tits and this big ugly blotch on my forehead. I know that Keith would never give me a second look if I didn’t have something he wanted. Well, so what!”
Tears running down her face, she fled back to her tent. Flowers scattered in her wake.
The healing ceremony that night consisted of a laying-on of hands. Keith gave Sam a quick rundown, in her tent, of how the ritual would go. “Keep your eyes closed a good five minutes on each one,” he said. “Let your hands tremble a little. Throw back your head toward the end, and shudder. Make them think there’s a lot going on.”
Then Esterhaszy advised her. If he was still upset from earlier in the day, he didn’t show it. His voice was all professional detachment. “Listen,” he said. “It’s not likely, but there’s a one-in-a-million chance that you might do some good. How much do you know about faith healing?”
She shook her head.
“Well, almost all of it is bunco, but not quite all. Sometimes there’s a spontaneous cure. Belief seems to figure in this somehow—sometimes the person who’s cured believes, sometimes the person curing, sometimes both. But sometimes—and this is the interesting part—neither person believes in the cure, but it happens anyway.”
“How?” Sam asked.
“It’s an absolute bloody mystery. But as long as there’s that one shot, let’s give it your best, hey? When you lay on your hands I want you to seriously imagine, as hard as you can, that your hands have turned into vaccination guns, and that you’re shooting chelating agents right through the skin and into the bloodstream. Got that?”
> “Yeah, except—”
“Hush. I’m explaining as fast as I can. Now, a chelating agent is a very special chemical. Taken internally, it can flush out the boneseekers and other radioisotopes that cause a lot of these sicknesses. The radioisotopes are in combination with chemical components of the body—that’s how they migrated to the different organs. The chelate migrates to the same place, then combines with the radioisotopes—are you following me?—freeing them from the body chemicals. Then the chelate is flushed out of the body by normal processes, taking the mutagen with it. I want you to imagine this process all the way through with each person you read.”
“Chelating agents sound like pretty good stuff.”
“Yeah, well, treating someone with them is pretty hit or miss. Still, they’re better than nothing, and if we could get them in the Drift, they’d be nice to have.” He sighed. “Look, time to get this fiasco on the road.”
Sam paused at the tent flap, feeling butterflies in her stomach. Behind her, Bob said softly, “If things get rough out there, just remember—maybe it will work. You don’t know.”
She stepped out of the tent.
They were waiting for her, the devotees were, and all she could see of them were hundreds of pained, hungry eyes. The distorted, often repulsive bodies didn’t matter. Not compared to the wet, caustic need of those eyes. They reached for her and drew her toward them, with all the magnetic tidal force of raw pain.
With a shiver, Sam broke free of the eyes, of their power, and opened her mouth to speak. But before she could say a word, a woman stretched out a bony arm and cried, “Give me children!”
“My arm!” the man beside her shouted. There were tears in his eyes, and his withered arm jerked spasmodically. “I want to be able to use my God damn arm!”
Then they were all reaching for her and making demands, their voices merging into a single dreadful moan. A man stepped forward, a halting, involuntary step, as if he were at the end of a string that had been tugged. Keith leaped in front of him, gun drawn, and when the man did not back down, struck him to the ground with a slashing blow of the pistol butt. The man howled as he fell, and blood welled up from the side of his head.
“Anyone else?” Keith shouted. The Drifters were suddenly still. “Either you control yourselves, or you won’t have the chance to be healed! Think about that now!” Silence. Keith strode up and down the line of hill people; none would meet his eye. “All right, sit down—all of you!—right where you are. I’ll send you up one at a time.”
Slowly, awkwardly, they obeyed.
The first one sent up looked to be seventy years old—though looks and age were deceptive in the Drift—and her face was slightly lopsided. She knelt before Sam, staring up with huge, fearful eyes. Her nucleopore hung loose, and what few teeth remained to her were yellow and thin. Her breath stank. “They laugh at me,” she said. “They pull down my dress and they kick me and they laugh.”
Sam placed her hands on the woman’s brow and closed her eyes. But the woman kept talking in a low, wheezing voice. “When I was little they take me in the back place and do dirty things. I tell my mama and she hit me and call me dirty slut.”
Sam tried hard to blot out the woman’s voice.
The woman was crying quietly. “I don’t do bad things, I’m a good girl. You make me smart, okay? You make me happy.”
Chelating agents, Sam thought as hard as she could. She felt sweat beading up on her forehead.
They came to a bridge that Keith had once crossed years ago. It had collapsed, and they had to decide whether to range upriver or down to find the next bridge. While Keith and Esterhaszy argued, Sam stared idly down into the river, picking out the fish, small concentrations of radioisotopes gleaming under silvery scales. A horsefly the size of a gnat settled on her arm and she swatted it, but not before it stung her.
Glancing up, annoyed, Sam was the first to see the soldiers across the river.
They were dark, almost free of boneseekers, and for this reason they stood out against the glowing vegetation. There were three or four of them among the trees, watching. One leaned casually on a rifle.
Keith looked up from his conversation when Sam gasped and pointed. He snapped his fingers, and a Drifter he had made his orderly fetched his Zeiss binoculars. They were vintage optics, over a century old, and worth a small fortune. The Drifter carried their case with exaggerated care.
Keith studied the opposite shore in silence. Finally he said, “People’s Militia. Looks like the Greenstate has finally located us.”
“What are we going to do?” Sam asked.
He shrugged. “They were bound to find us sooner or later. We’re getting close to Honkeytonk, is all. Be there within the week.” He lowered the glasses and glared at the collapsed span as if it had betrayed him personally. “Three days if it weren’t for that damned bridge.”
They followed the river upstream with the soldiers pacing them on the far side. Sam didn’t get any further glimpses of them, but several of her followers did. They seemed content simply to follow the procession.
The nights were merging one into another for Sam, and the days were fading into darkness. She was always tired. They could only safely pull so much blood from the mules, and if it was enough to feed her, it wasn’t enough to satisfy her. She was continually hungry.
During the nightly healing ceremonies, she was prone to sudden flashes of hallucination in which the devotees—she had lost all track of their number by now—merged into one grotesque beast, with a hundred mouths and great clusters of mournful eyes. It stretched out its multiple necks toward the moon and moaned in pain, the millipede limbs thrashing about in agony. And every night she had to touch it here and there, everywhere, futilely trying to heal it, trying to still its cries, trying to keep it from turning on her.
The beast’s skin was a riot of radiation lines, blue scars slashing across caustic pink, yellow burning an anguished track over green. They ran everywhere, forming a spasmodic tangle of arcane symbols, a pornographic encyclopedia of pain and cruelty. Often Sam would find herself flinching back from the beast’s fangs as a great gaping mouth opened, revealing a tunnel of raw flesh for her to fall into.
She would draw back in horror and then—snap—find herself in the real world again, and a girl whose skin said she had three months to live would be on her knees before Sam, begging for a boyfriend and that her boils go away.
Esterhaszy noted her deteriorating condition, and the day they crossed the river—on a stone railroad bridge, which had a twisty up-and-down path between the gaps where the support beams had melted and the stones had fallen away—he took her aside and gave her a full physical.
“You’re weak,” he said finally. “We need to feed you a little more blood, but other than that you’re okay. Hold still; this’ll hurt a bit.” He jabbed a lancet into her fingertip, drew out a drop of blood with a glass pipette. “Okay, now go aside and pee into this cup for me, and I’ll have all I need to run a good spectrum of tests.”
That night, shortly before the ceremonies, a member of the People’s Militia walked into camp.
The man created a major stir. He marched in wearing combat greens, rifle slung over his shoulder, and asked for Keith by name. Drifters scurried out of his way, grabbed up their own weapons, came running back to gawk.
Keith came out to meet the man, waved all others back, and escorted him to his tent. Four Drifters—his personal guard—cordoned off the area. After a surprisingly brief time, the two men reemerged.
The soldier left, walking out the same way he had come.
“What did he want?” Sam demanded.
“Never mind.” Keith glanced up into the hills, thoughtfully.
“Hey, look—I really want to know.”
He looked at her then, and his expression was all business. “Who’s in charge here, anyway?” he demanded. “This has nothing to do with you.”
He turned on his heel and left.
Midway through the heali
ng ceremony that night, Sam saw Keith gather together his four-man guard, and unobtrusively leave. He probably didn’t even think she noticed. She waited until he was gone, then wound up the ceremony early, pleading tiredness. Then she retreated to her tent to think.
She organized her thoughts not so much in words as in moods—there were things she did not want to put into words. But she measured her feelings, listened to her emotions, stacking jealousy up against suspicion, frustration against resentment, until she knew what she had to do. Until she could decide on a plan of action, without actually having to admit that anything was wrong.
She strode out of the tent and searched up Flinch. He was sitting by a campfire, talking with a young dwarf woman. He looked up at her approach. “Have you met Charlene?” he asked. “She’s one of my wives.”
The woman looked up at her with those too-familiar worshipful eyes. They had the same hurting kind of hope in them as did all the others, like a fly drowned in amber.
“Listen.” She ignored the woman. “I want to find out where Keith has gone, what he’s doing. And I don’t want him to find out about it. Can you help me?”
“Sure.” Flinch started to his feet. “Back soon, Charlene. Okay?”
The woman nodded.
At the outskirts of camp, they were stopped by a guard. It was Old Joe, a giant. He stood some seven feet tall, bent over, and leaned heavily on a cane. His eyes were weak, but he smiled warmly when he saw Sam, and touched his forehead. “West,” he said in answer to Flinch’s question. “There’s a little town used to be up that way, and a few of the houses are still standing. Got to be where they were heading.”
“Good stuff,” Flinch said. He clapped Old Joe on the shoulder. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this quiet, okay? You’d do that for Samantha, wouldn’t you?”
The giant straightened painfully. “I’d die for her,” he said with quiet, chilling certainty.
They followed hill trails that had once been suburban streets up into the night. Even Sam had no trouble seeing which way Keith had gone—his party hadn’t tried to disguise their passage.
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