by C. E. Murphy
“Bring him back, Coyote. Send him back to the world we came from, so the water will not rise and try to find him.”
Coyote sighed, a very human sound, and picked up the baby in his teeth, carrying him back to the hole between worlds. He set the child down in the rising water, and a sigh of joy rose up from the world below. Water receded, and all the men and women and creatures that had survived another world smiled and began to explore their new home.
All but Coyote, who sat with his back to me, looking into the hole. “Who do you think you are?” I rasped. “Playing games that bring the world to an end. Who do you think you are?”
He looked over his shoulder at me, and his face was my own.
I recoiled so violently it reflected in the physical world, pulling me loose from the bridge I’d made between Billy and Melinda. I came awake falling to the side, and grabbed for the first thing I could to regain my balance.
Unfortunately, it was Brad Holliday’s leg. He yelled and jolted to his feet. I yelled and fell over, still flailing at bedsides and chairs. It was a good thing there weren’t any IV racks near me. I sprang to my feet in a flurry of embarrassment and dismay, not sure if I was more upset by waking Brad or by what I’d seen. I was looking for a way to explain myself when he demanded, “How’d you get in here,” and my mouth replied, “Magic,” flippantly, without consulting my brain.
Anger contorted his features sharply enough that I lifted a hand in apology, though my mouth went on without any evident concern for what it was getting me into. “What’s the story, Doc?” I asked with genuine curiosity. “I know Billy’s side of it. Is it just that it’s incredibly frustrating to have a little brother everybody thinks is nuts? Don’t get me wrong.” I let go a huff of air that I thought passed for humorless laughter. “I’m really on your side of things by nature. I don’t blame you for not liking the superstitious stuff. I don’t, either. But Billy’s so into it. What’s your story?”
“That’s none of your business, Officer Walker.”
That much was certainly true. I squinted, hoping to take a look at his aura, but even that tiny shift toward using my power seemed to alert the sleeping thing in the room. I felt it gather, ready to pounce, and let go my grasp on the Sight before it even came into focus. Brad Holliday and I might not get along, but I didn’t want to be responsible for putting him into a coma. I was a little surprised he wasn’t already, after hanging out in this sleep-laden room for hours. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Brad turned away, folding his arms across his chest as he looked down at his brother. His ring caught blue light from one of the monitors, turning it green, and I found myself staring at the jewel in its weighty setting. I still hadn’t noticed if he wore a wedding ring. “Class ring?” I heard myself say.
He glanced at me, frowning, then at his hand, and scowled even more deeply. “From medical school, yes.”
A thin band popped around my heart, releasing a thin wash of satisfaction. African evil spirits seemed ever-more unlikely, but my enemy did seem reluctant to mess with topaz. I didn’t know how, or by whom, the stone had first been recognized as conducive to easy sleep and pleasant dreams, but I thanked them for it. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something, and I was grateful for a reprieve, small as it might be.
Right on cue, my cell phone rang.
CHAPTER 25
I was really beginning to detest that thing. Strike that: I detested cell phones on general principles. I was starting to have a deep personal and abiding hatred for mine in specific. Visions of taking a sledgehammer to it drifted pleasantly through my mind as I took it out of my pocket and said, “Please tell me nobody’s dead.”
“Can’t help you there,” Laurie Corvallis said. “Sorry.”
I reached for the railing on Mel’s bed, using it to support myself. “What do you mean?”
“Tell me something first. How’d you know to start on the seventh of January?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. What do you mean, you can’t help me there?”
“Try me,” Corvallis said. “You’d be surprised what I believe.” She left it alone, though, a note of cockiness coming into her voice. “There was a whole burst of sleeping sicknesses around the tenth of January, down in the southwest. Half of the Navajo Nation dropped off the planet for a couple days—”
“Half?” I demanded, genuinely alarmed. “Isn’t that about a hundred thousand people, Laurie?”
Silence was followed by an impatient sigh. “All right. Maybe one percent. There’s no drama in that, Officer Walker. Regardless, literally hundreds of people dropped off, then woke up two days later and quietly started making preparations for the end days. There’ve been some news stories about it, but they’ve gotten about the same amount of attention than your average Christian sect predicting the end of the world does.”
“I’ve heard of a couple of those,” I objected. I could almost hear Corvallis shrug.
“There were thirty-seven separate dates that various sects believed the world would end in the year 2000. How many of those did you hear about?”
“Does the Y2K bug count?”
“No. You see my point.” She went on without worrying about whether I did or not. I did, anyway. “That was it. No more of the Dine went to sleep, and un—
“Dine?”
“The Navajo, Officer Walker,” Corvallis said, impatient all over again. “It’s their name for themselves. It means—”
“The People,” I guessed. The Cherokee’s original name for themselves meant more or less the same. A lot of Native American tribe names did. I felt vaguely guilty for not knowing the Navajo called themselves something else.
“Would you like to tell this story?” Corvallis asked. I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut, and after a moment she said, “Until a few weeks ago, nobody else did, either.”
I tightened my grip on Melinda’s bed frame. “How many?”
“Ten or twelve. Nothing like what’s going on here.”
“Do they have anything in common?” I pushed my glasses up to rub my eyes.
“Yeah. This is the weird bit. The new group who’ve gone to sleep worked in the University of Phoenix physics department. Grad students, professors, you name it. The CDC is still down there trying to figure out what did it, but it looks like it was something called Project Rainbow. I haven’t gotten past the classification yet, which probably means it’s a weapon of some kind under development for the military. You were right, Walker. You gave me a story. I really didn’t expect it. Maybe somebody’s been running tests on their weapon or, hell,” she said, sounding suddenly enthusiastic, “maybe it’s a terrorist attack. My God, that’d be a story.”
I sat down on the edge of Melinda’s bed and stared at the floor. “Physics?” I thought shamanism was outside my realm of expertise. I didn’t have any idea what to do with a bunch of physicists. “Has anybody died? Are they still asleep?”
Corvallis hesitated, which I hadn’t known she could do. “Nobody’s died, but nobody’s woken up, either. No, that’s not true.” I could almost hear her shrug, and then sly pleasure came into her voice. “Two people did wake up from the university plague. The weird thing is that they apparently have Navajo blood themselves. If I worked for a tabloid I’d be all over that link. Magic Indian blood saves—”
I pushed my hand against my stomach, feeling power flutter there like, as my younger self had said, a burp. “Ms. Corvallis. Who were they?”
I didn’t even need to hear her say it. She did, anyway, of course, triumph in her voice as I mouthed the same words she announced: “Mark and Barbara Bragg.”
I would’ve laughed, if I’d had it in me. I didn’t, so I only got off the phone with my vision blurred and my stomach roiling. I didn’t know what the link between a physics project and the sleeping sickness was, or what either of them had to do with Mark, who was an English major—
—Mark, who had told me he was an English major. I hadn’t had any reason to disbeliev
e him, except he was too good to be true. But then, so was Thor, who was good-looking and genuinely into cars and who apparently thought I cleaned up well enough to ask me on a date. So was Gary, whose steadiness and good heart had gotten me through the past seven months with something like my head on straight. So was Morrison, who might be short-tempered and grumpy with me, but whose inherent qualities were inarguably golden. I hadn’t exactly done an extensive background search on Mark, but I honestly thought that this time I’d approached the new arrival in my life with enough skepticism to give myself some credit.
And I’d been wrong despite my caution. That was bad enough. What was worse was that, however Mark was tangled up in the sleeping sickness, at least I was semiprepared for it. I’d had enough brain cells to wonder if the person who’d been dropped into my life was too good to be true, even if I’d settled into an incorrect complacency.
Morrison didn’t have anything like that kind of warning. I had to tell him, and I didn’t want to have that conversation while standing in front of Bradley Holliday. I waited until I was safe in Petite, who offered me some kind of psychological comfort, before dialing my boss’s cell phone.
He didn’t answer, which was so incredibly unlike him I immediately began to worry. Then I remembered it was well after midnight, which might just have something to do with it. I was about to redial the number when my phone rang, startling the bejeezus out of me.
“It’s a quarter after one in the morning, Walker,” Morrison growled in my ear. “This had better be very good.”
“This sleeping sickness. First it was Billy and Mel, but when I went in to try to help Mel, I had this dream. Everybody in the dream was asleep by the time I got to work yesterday, Morrison.” I thought it was yesterday. I was pretty sure it was the wee hours of Thursday morning now. I hadn’t truly slept since Tuesday afternoon. My grasp on when things had happened was starting to slip. So was my coherency. I struggled for a point: “Everybody but you, Barb, and Mark.”
“You called me up at one in the morning to tell me you’re dreaming about me, Walker?” Morrison sounded utterly disbelieving. I didn’t blame him.
“No. I mean, yes, but no. They’re tied into this sleeping sickness somehow, boss. I don’t understand how yet, but I just talked to Laurie Corvallis, and the point is, you’ve got to stay away from Barb.”
Morrison said, “For Christ’s sake, Walker,” and hung up the phone. I stared at it, then called back. Maybe he had the same Pavlovian response to ringing phones that I did, because he answered even though he had to know it was me.
“She’s there, isn’t she?” The very idea made my eyes hot. “Morrison, listen to me. That topaz is working. If you don’t have it, there’s nothing protecting you, and if she’s there you’re in danger. You’ve got to get out of there.”
I heard him pull a deep breath. His voice was very steady a moment later when he said, “Walker, you sound ridiculous. Yes. Barbara’s here, though that’s none of your business. You need to go home and go to bed. You’re obviously overwrought.”
“I’m over—I’m…Morrison! You told me to solve this thing! I’m telling you, she’s got something to do with it! She and Mark were—”
“Walker, listen to yourself. You sound like—” My boss was at a loss for words there for an instant, then finished as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “You sound like you’re jealous, Walker.”
I slammed the heel of my hand into Petite’s horn and shouted, “Of course I’m jealous, you idiot!” over its blare. “Could we get past that and get you out of the house, please?” I pounded on the horn, short bursts of noise that emphasized my words. Then I remembered I was sitting outside a hospital, and stopped hitting the horn.
The silence that followed was profound. Not just the silence in the car, but Morrison’s quietness on the other end of the line. He finally said, very gently, “Go home and get some rest, Walker. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” He hung up, and I wrapped my hand around my cell phone and smashed my fist into the opposite palm until I stopped wanting to cry.
It took long enough to let me decide that if Morrison wasn’t going to listen to my irrational, embarrassing self over the phone, I was just going to have to go to his house and talk to him in person. Because that would go over so well. It might help if I started with an apology, though that wasn’t going to help my general feeling of humiliation any. I was pretty sure that karmically speaking, though, the universe would approve of it as a first step.
The problem was I didn’t know where he lived. Or even if he was at home, for that matter. He could’ve been with Barb, for all I knew. The whole idea made my stomach hurt, a fishhook tug that felt like I was being pulled where I didn’t want to go. While my mind ran in circles trying to figure out how to figure out where he lived, my hand opened up and dialed the front desk at the precinct building. The guy who answered wasn’t Bruce, which it wouldn’t have been, anyway, because he didn’t work a night shift, but my heart missed a beat and hung there miserably in my chest while I asked to be, and was, transferred to the missing persons department.
Intellectually I didn’t expect anybody to be there at goingon two in the morning. My intellect, though, was still working on how to find Morrison’s house while some other part of my mind, working on automatic, actually tried doing something about it. My stomach hurt even more, a bubbling mess of sickness that roiled and twisted beneath my breastbone. I made a fist and thumped it against my diaphragm, trying to work some of the discomfort out, and narrowly avoided burping in the ear of the woman who picked up the phone, her Spanish accent tired.
“Jen? What’re you doing there?”
“Joanie? What are you doing calling?” Tired didn’t cover it. She sounded exhausted. I thought I probably sounded the same. “I’m popping NoDoz and drinking Jolt,” she answered. “I fall asleep if I’m at home, so I thought I’d hang out here and try to get some late-night work done.”
My face crumpled. “Are a lot of people doing that?”
“All over the place. Everybody’s trying to stay awake. What are you calling MP for, Joanie? Is everything okay?”
Talking about staying awake made me yawn. I tried to keep it tight so it wouldn’t set Jen to yawning, too. “I have kind of a weird question.”
“Is it weirder than asking me to find a modern-day kid from a reference painting of mythological figures?”
I lifted my eyes to look blankly through Petite’s windshield. “When you put it that way, no.” For a moment my vision fused with the Sight and I could see spiderweb cracks all through Petite’s window, streetlight glinting on the damaged lines. “I need Morrison’s home address.”
The silence that followed was long and profound enough I found myself shifting uncomfortably in Petite’s bucket seat. “What,” I finally said, “is that weirder than the painting?”
“The jury’s still out,” Jen said after another long several seconds. “Why don’t you just call him?” She sounded, I thought, suspiciously like a teenager waiting to get the dirt on a topic she’d been polite enough not to ask about until now. I began to wonder if I was the last one who’d picked up on my own emotional conflict regarding Morrison. I hoped not. I hoped, at least, that Morrison was still a step behind me.
That seemed painfully unlikely, especially at this juncture.
“Can you just get me his address, Jen?” I had to at least try to draw a line in the sand. I had no illusions about how long it’d stay drawn if Jen insisted, but I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
Jen said, “Huh,” and then, “Just a second,” leaving me to eye my reflection and the phone in the rearview mirror. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
“All right, here it is. You have something to write with?”
Apparently it could be. I scrambled for a pencil, writing down the address and repeating it back to her. “Thanks, Jen. Look, the topaz seems to be working. You can probably sleep safely if you’re hanging on to it. It looks like it’s k
eeping Billy’s brother from going under, anyway.”
She said, “Huh,” again, then, “Ok, if I get desperate. Thanks,” and hung up on me. I glanced over my shoulder as I keyed Petite on, and pulled out onto the street wondering what I was going to do if Morrison wasn’t home.
I didn’t have to worry about it. Morrison’s Avalon was parked next to a quarter-ton Dodge Ram in the driveway of a two-story cream-colored house with trim that looked black in the nighttime city lights. Curtains lined the insides of windows. I didn’t have curtains on my windows, only the blinds the apartment had come with when I’d rented it in college. At a glance, Morrison was Suzy Homemaker, compared to me. Of course, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were probably Suzy Homemaker, compared to me. I bet Morrison cooked his own meals, too. He certainly mowed the lawn, right up to the edge of a picket fence that matched the trim. I’d never thought of Morrison as a picketfence kind of guy. Young spruce trees bordered the fence, with hedges growing up between them. They looked like they probably reduced the noise off the street, which might help a cop sleep better at night.
Unless, of course, he had employees calling him up in the middle of the night to rant and rave and profess jealousy to him. This minute examination of his front lawn was not getting me any closer to dealing with my embarrassing behavior or the woman in Morrison’s bed. The Ram had to be hers. I couldn’t imagine Morrison owning a recreational vehicle.
I gritted my teeth and left Petite, following a stone footpath up to Morrison’s front door. Yellow rosebushes lined the front of the house, and a wheelbarrow sat up against the bushes on the porch’s far side. A blue tarp was tucked neatly around the barrow’s burden, a plastic-wrapped set of shears weighing it down for good measure.