He threw an arm around her and kissed her cheek. “Never doubted your instincts for a second. Let’s ditch our packs and go up.”
They climbed the twelve sturdy wooden slats that had been nailed to the trunk of the tree and poked their heads through the opening of a platform of well-hewn wood. Kendra decided to test it first with a bit of her weight before scampering all the way up. She nodded to John to follow. Then they stood there laughing as they looked down on the small hill they had just passed over and even part of the valley they had been wandering through for the last day or so.
“A tree house. A freaking tree house!” Kendra bounded across its width and length, grinning the whole while. “This is too much.”
“I don’t think they built it to play in.” John leaned over the railing and popped a small bit of metal from a thick tree branch with the point of his bowie knife. “Look at this. I’d bet a week of guard duty this is an arrowhead.”
“An arrowhead?” Kendra examined the bit of metal, running her thumb pad along its sharp curved edge. “Ah, a hunting platform.”
“We did hear a lot of animals at night.”
She reached out her hand for his. “Let’s keep going while we have the light.”
Under the tree house again, Kendra crouched to search the nearby brush for the faintest hints of a trail. After a few minutes she tossed her chin in an easterly direction. They shouldered their packs and took off. For a long while they were following a trail of some sort, albeit a very old and rutted one. Neither the tree house and arrowhead nor this primordial path appeared to have seen any use in a long time. John wondered if they were coming to the point where they would have to turn back. They were no closer to finding this rumored presence of Orangemen on this planet, no closer to finding out who or what the Tylers were or represented. Without adequate protection from the elements or a full stock of supplies, they’d have to discuss returning soon. Besides. They had Weiss to consider, all the tensions they left behind in the city. He looked at Kendra alongside him, the line of her jaw set firm. Would she agree to it when the time came? Shrugging and returning home would not be easy for her.
They had clicked off at least another two miles after a half hour or so of brisk hiking. Kendra stopped to crouch again in the brush. “Animal tracks here—fairly fresh. No sign of our old friend, though. Jesus, help me! If only it hadn’t rained.”
“Kendra, do you think that we should consider—”
Before he could finish his thought, she had stood up and elbowed him in the ribs. He glanced in the direction she indicated. When he turned back to her, she was already smirking at him.
There, in a clearing in front of them, was a rough lean-to built of logs and sealed with hard-packed mud. Its open side was turned away from the prevailing winds. As they approached and circled it, they saw its three walls and sloping roof were in fine shape. It was definitely old, its top and part of its interior furry with wildflowers and weeds and other plants whose seeds had found its mud habitable. Never had anything looked so inviting.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “And here I was just wondering where we were going to find shelter for the night.”
“I wouldn’t curse it.” She nudged him. “Someone’s looking out for us. Anyway, it’ll give us someplace comfortable to talk.”
He looked at her, tugging at his earlobe.
She grinned in a blink-blink, mock-innocent way. “About what’s been bugging you since we left the old site.”
“Oh that. I thought you meant something important—like who’s been going nuts with a saw out here where no people are supposed to live.”
“So sure it’s people?”
“Orangemen don’t build hunting platforms or lean-tos.”
“How about plastic bowls?”
He scratched his neck. “None of this makes sense.”
“Ah,” she said quietly. “Then this is all part of the same conversation.”
“Okay. You’ve officially lost me.”
Kendra shook her head and sighed. “I’ll get the campfire going. See if you can break out something edible.”
They tore most of the vegetation out of the lean-to and had made camp within an hour. Their supplies and bedrolls were tucked in the lean-to, and a can of beans was heating on the fire Kendra had made. As night fell, they poked at the fire to keep it hot while they discussed inconsequential things: drinking their remaining coffee only in the mornings, setting traps for small game if they were going to stay here for at least another night—the sort of mundane talk people filled the empty air with when they had awkward things to say but didn’t know how to say them. They passed the remnants of their flask—the whiskey warm and good on their insides—to each other, hoping that would help.
Then the ground shook hard, a slight but very clear tremor. They waited for it to subside—a fault line nearby?—but it kept growing stronger and closer. A few seconds later John yanked Kendra up by the arm from her seat on the log and shoved her into the lean-to. Even as they covered their heads and lay on their bellies inside, they were convinced it was an earthquake, though neither of them had ever really felt one.
Rising dust blurred the air between the lean-to and the fire as the tremors intensified. And with the dust came the creaking and breaking of branches and something else—animal noises. Trumpeting and fearful animal noises, growing closer with every second.
They lifted their heads from their arms. Through the dust John could see something coming toward them, something very large. He squinted and saw legs—or what he thought were legs—flashing through the flickering campfire’s glow, dozens of them, maybe even a hundred. They came and came and came. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were legs despite their size, hairy ones the width of tree trunks carrying on them animals (or beings) he could not see through the darkness and the dust.
Kendra covered her mouth with her shirt to protect herself from the choking dust as the creatures pounded through the camp, veering away from both the fire and, thankfully, their lean-to. The clamor and the mad dash went on for many long minutes. Then the tremor diminished into a dull thud almost indistinguishable from their hearts beating against the floor.
Kendra was up in an instant and dashed to the fire to pull out a flaming torch. A second later she dove into the brush, running like mad after whatever had come through the camp. Another second and John was in pursuit, carbine in hand as he chased the bouncing glow before him into the starlit, moonless night. Then the light ahead was gone and silence engulfed him as he was left alone with his own rhythmic heavy breathing. He ran faster, holding the rifle before him to keep the branches from lashing his face.
He nearly bounded into Kendra when he came upon her in an acre-wide clearing about a half mile from the lean-to. Not far away he could hear running water—a stream, or more likely a river from the sound of it. Kendra was still wielding her brand like a club.
“They went over the water,” she said, half out of breath. “I could hear them crossing, splashing through. I couldn’t catch them. So huge, so fast.”
John put a hand on her shoulder as he gulped in the night air, colder here near the water and away from the fire. “Take it easy, Kendra. It’s okay.”
She shoved his hand away and glared at him. “It’s not okay, John. None of this is okay. What were those things? Did you see? Were they Nephilim?”
“I couldn’t see them clearly,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t think they were Nephilim.”
“Well, how would you know? You don’t know shit about them.”
“And neither do you.”
“You’re so sure, aren’t you?”
“What’re you talking about, Ken? How the hell is this stampede connected to what happened to you back then? We don’t know what that creature—he—was, other than the fact that he seemed like an Orangeman.”
“I know what he was,” she spat through her teeth, “a whole lot better than any of you.”
She marched toward camp. He
let her go and knew when he got back he would probably find her already asleep—or pretending to be—in her roll. He stood in the clearing, his breath finally coming in even beats again. He listened to the rushing water in the distance and looked up at the stars. With the morning light might come some answers, but until then all he could ask of the stars was the same question man had always asked them on his most contemplative nights.
Then he turned back toward the water and knew where they would be going, even if both of them no longer understood why.
CHAPTER 11
“Well, if the size didn’t prove it, these tracks do,” Kendra said, looking up at John from her crouch. “Nothing human—or humanoid—made them.”
“Never seen anything like them,” John muttered. “You?”
“Nope.”
He squatted down next to her and fingered the clearest set found at their campsite. Right near the fire pit, where they had spilled some water just before the stampede, were four very clear prints now drying in the mud, only two of which overlapped each other. It seemed that they were made by almost perfectly circular hoofs, very unlike any animal tracks he had ever seen. They made him think of some illustrations of demons he had seen in some of their Bibles, man-beasts standing erect on hoofed hind legs and sporting leathery bat wings.
“Whatever they were,” Kendra began, “I’m not inclined to stick around here to see if there’s more of them headed our way. How about you?”
John could hear a bit of embarrassment in her voice over her outburst last night. He let it go without comment. Kendra had never apologized in her life for anything. “Agreed. We should leave.”
Her eyes widened. “You don’t mean go back to the city?”
He walked toward the lean-to with his hands in his pants pockets. “I’ve got a better plan.”
It took Kendra less convincing than he had imagined to dismantle the lean-to—what they had called their “starter house.” And it took longer—almost two days instead of one—than he’d imagined to cart the logs they needed down to the river and to reassemble them there as a raft. As a seafaring ship it was far from ideal, but the raft floated and was large enough to carry them and the remainder of their supplies. After a couple of test runs across the width of the river, they took up their makeshift paddles and set off with the current.
Days passed without much notice. On the river the air was colder than on the banks, but both the air and the sense of easy movement was refreshing and invigorating. The country they traveled through was mostly prairie lands, varied only by the occasional clumps of trees and brush and framed by mountains in the deep distance—places they could always keep in view but would likely never touch. When they tired or needed to sleep for the night, they sought out little coves to settle into, although sometimes they had to travel longer than they liked because the shoreline was too marshy. Because the land was flat and low, they often had little protection from the elements, and they snuggled together in their bedrolls wearing all of their clothes. They were never more tender with each other than they were on those nights. Without protection or trees or even the sound of animals in the night, it seemed as if they were the only two people left in the world. That was how they felt when they’d started this trip. What they had shared since had only added to their closeness.
In the mornings they waited for the smoke to rise off the water and the temperature to warm just enough so they could risk it and jump in for a quick bath. After all their squealing and yelping in the water, they didn’t talk much when they were on the raft. Sometimes whole mornings would pass without their saying a word to each other. They would fish but caught little. They would watch the gentle current as they paddled and searched for any glimmer of life along the river’s banks. The sky was clear and the air soft. They did not need to paddle often. John felt their silence was proof of their comfort with each other. It gave credence to his belief that true intimates were the only ones comfortable enough with one another to allow long silences. But when he mentioned this idea to Kendra, she laughed. “Being dead tired every day helps.”
Her cap pulled low over her eyes, she squinted through the sunlight, wrinkled her nose at him across the raft. “You ever think you’d be a sailor?”
John raised his eyebrows and glanced back at her. “You mean in general? Or because of what happened to my father and brother?”
“Being on water can’t be easy for you.”
“I swim at the beach all the time.”
“That’s different—and you know it.”
“Suppose it is.”
He watched some reeds near the eastern bank blow in the wind, all curved down smooth like a combed head of hair. When it died down for a moment, everything was completely still. Then the silence gave way to the whoosh of that breeze again and the lackadaisical dipping of their paddles in the water. He hadn’t realized what it would be like being away from the unrelenting noises of New Philadelphia. Out here, so many thoughts rushed to fill the silence his ears heard but his city-bred mind couldn’t fathom.
“It wasn’t easy for me, especially at first. My grandfather hadn’t died long before. You might not remember. I expected Dad and Christian to come back from the first seafaring expedition with so many stories. I figured they’d be heroes. It was such a huge adventure to me, something that kept me from getting in too much of a funk about Grandpa. I never expected them to just . . . disappear. To not have closure like that—”
Something between them had shifted. John found himself still talking. “My mother has always seemed to take it better than me. She said, ‘The Almighty has his own purposes.’ I think she read that somewhere. Maybe it gave her comfort, the idea.”
“I think I’m with your mom on that one.”
“Oh man. You’re gonna go all Petra Giordano certain on me?”
“No.” She smiled. “In the long view, these things may make sense. To us who are so finite, so limited in scope and understanding, so close to tragedies, they just don’t.”
“That’s what they tell us in school about the Apocalypse whenever someone asks why God would let the world get so bad that he’d need to destroy it.” He glanced at her. “But do you really think tragedies happen for a reason?”
She was quiet for a while and focused on the bending reeds. “Enough has happened to me—and I guess enough time has passed—for me to believe that they do. That invisible forces work on us at every moment of our lives, even though we might not see them or feel them or understand why.”
He smiled at her. Never had honesty and fortitude looked so good in a Defense Forces cap. “I didn’t have your faith, Kendra. Not after I lost my father and brother. I shut down, unsure of anything, unwilling to get close to anyone else.”
“That explains Sofie Weiss,” she said flatly and almost with a smirk.
He dipped in his paddle to correct their course.
“When she was my drill sergeant, everyone heard how she supposedly threw you over to marry Gordon Lee. But I never bought that story. I’d catch her now and then looking at you whenever you’d pass. She was crazy about you. Still is.”
He said nothing.
“You broke it off with her—right?”
He looked at her.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Sofie always . . . questioned things. Not the way you or I might. She questioned everything, everything except her own certainty. She was so sure she was right about everything. Hard being around someone like her. And it got a lot worse after the ship was lost. Her endless questioning—it made everything worse.”
They had long since stopped paddling and kept only an occasional eye on their direction. “So what restored your faith?”
He snorted a laugh. “You.”
“Me?”
“You. On that mountain. I never understood the certitude of saints until then.”
“I’m no saint,” she muttered with distaste through her teeth.
“No. You’re not even sort of close.”
“Oh thanks.”
“Wait. What I mean is, despite what happened, you were still whole. You still made jokes. The part of you that made you who you were was untouched and remained untouched, even after we got back home and all those people said all that shit about you. You took the worst life had to offer and were still fully alive. Lots of people deal with a lot less and wind up far more broken.”
She shook her head, an incredulous look on her face. “I think you’re laboring under a delusion about what I am, Johnny.”
“Nope,” he answered. “You’re just laboring under a delusion that you need to keep this mask still.”
“Mask?” She let out a throaty laugh. “Why, Captain Giordano, in another life you might’ve been a poet.”
“In another life, a bad one. No, what I mean is—” Something out of the corner of his eye silenced him. “What’s that?”
Kendra turned in the direction he was facing, shielding the sun’s glare from her eyes with the edge of her hand. In the mid-distance of the flatlands off the eastern bank, an undulating black mass was spreading across the green-brown ridge of the plain. At first it seemed to spread like a wildfire, but then the mass tipped up the ridge and rotated left, then right, before pulling back over the ridge out of sight, leaving the plain as verdant as it was before.
Kendra glanced at John. “Was that what came through our camp?”
“Dunno.” He plunged his paddle into the water and turned toward the riverbank. “Let’s find out.”
After five minutes of hard paddling, they had landed on the eastern shore not far from where they had seen the black mass disappear over the ridge. They tied their raft to some brush, then, as a further precaution, tossed their gear ashore far from the edge of the river’s high watermark.
“If we travel light,” Kendra said as she checked her rifle, “we’ll be at that ridge in three, maybe five minutes.” She grinned. “Ready?”
“Just go slow as we approach,” he cautioned. “We don’t know what we’ll find on the other side.”
They crossed the expanse freed of their packs and with their carbines held high. The ground was flat and even and apart from some high grass offered an unobstructed view of the ridge as they approached it. John motioned to Kendra to ease up at the bottom of the embankment, and she did. They crept toward the ridge to slow their pace and calm their breathing. Halfway up, they dropped to their bellies to peer over the edge.
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