He studied me briefly before replying. “Yes, it is. Very good. Where did you pick it up?” I had the strong impression he thought I wasn’t worthy of it. The way he weighed it in his grip, obviously trying to look casual with it—he wanted it. I wondered if he would try to take it. “It was weird,” I answered, thinking fast. “A couple days north of here we came across this mess. It looked like about five men; I really couldn’t tell. They were all dead. Looked like they’d cut each other to pieces.” I watched his face while trying not to look as if I were watching his face. “There was even a dead dog in the middle of them.”
He glanced at his friend holding the road atlas. “No shit?” he asked.
“Really. There was this one guy, dead as hell, still holding onto this sword. I’d just lost mine a few days before, and so I just counted my blessings and took that one. I figured he didn’t need it anymore, you know?”
The man with the rapier—short, squat, and looking like anything but a skilled fencer—spoke for the first time. “Do you remember what he looked like?”
“Sure I remember. It wasn’t pretty, was it, hon?” Shaughnessy shook her head. I could see she hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing. “He was cut up pretty bad in a lot of places. Looked like he may have bled to death more than anything else. I couldn’t make out his face; it was like … well, like I said, pretty bad.”
“Hnh.” He scratched the scraggly black growth on his jawline, then returned my sword to its sheath—without looking—and put it back beside the pack. Shaughnessy pretended not to notice my long exhalation.
“We’d best be on our way. We have a sort of deadline to meet.” He looked at the leader with the cutlass. “Right, Chuck?”
Chuck closed the road atlas and returned it to me. “Yeah. I guess we found out all we need to know. Thanks.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Where’d you say you folks were headed?”
“Florida,” said Shaughnessy and I.
“Long trip.”
“We aren’t in any hurry.” I looked at Shaughnessy affectionately. “We just want to find a place without too many people, maybe an abandoned farm, and settle down, you know?”
“Yeah. Well, be seeing you.”
“Sure thing. You all be careful on the road.”
They turned away. The one with the samurai sword turned back to me as the rest walked away. “Your sword—would you be willing to trade it?”
I pretended to think about it. “I don’t know,” I answered slowly. “It’s the only weapon I have. I think I ought to hang on to it.”
“Would you trade it for another weapon?”
Shit—“No, I don’t think so,” I said firmly, momentarily out of character for the idiot I was portraying. “I really like it, for some reason.”
He nodded curtly. “If you’re going to keep it, then treat it with respect. Clean it.” He looked at me contemptuously. “Don’t let anybody touch the blade. It’s a good blade, a good weapon.
“Oh.” I left my mouth open for a second. “Okay.”
He turned away. They climbed up the embankment and onto the overpass, then headed north. When they were gone I dropped my arm from around her waist. She dropped hers a second later. “Whew,” she breathed, rubbing her forearm against the hip of her jeans to wipe off my sweat. “I get the feeling that was a close one, and I don’t even know what the hell was going on.”
“They thought I might be somebody else,” I said. “Somebody they’re looking for.”
“Who?”
“You’ve heard me mention Malachi Lee?”
“A few times, yes.”
“Him. They saw the sword and thought I was him. Christ, I’m glad I played dumbshit. I just hope they believe that story I fed them. If they do, then they’ll believe Malachi is dead. Mentioning the dog seemed to clinch it for them; Malachi has his Chow with him.”
“I’m confused. Who is Malachi? Are you following him, is that why we’re heading north? And who’d send somebody out after him?”
I rolled my eyes. “Malachi Lee is somebody we met in Atlanta. He’s going to New York City to try to kill a man who rides a griffin who killed a friend of ours. The griffin rider serves a kind of sorcerer in New York called a necromancer, who offered a reward for Ariel’s horn. Ariel and I are following Malachi to New York. Our reasons keep changing, but I guess we’re doing it to help Malachi and to somehow get the price off Ariel’s head. Does that make sense to you so far, because it doesn’t to me.”
“No.”
I sighed. “Okay, let’s try again. In order.” I gave her a capsule description of most of what I have told so far, stopping with the Great Shopping Mall Raid of Tuesday Last. Or whenever the hell it was.
“I see,” she said. “So they saw the sword and thought you might be Malachi Lee.”
“That’s what I said before.”
“Yes, but it didn’t make sense that time. So why didn’t they kill us?”
“Some things didn’t fit. No dog. I was headed the wrong direction, if they were to believe me. There was a woman with me.” I shook my head. “They must know some things about Malachi, though. The way that fucker touched my blade—Malachi wouldn’t have stood for it. Hell, he wouldn’t have let him see it in the first place. I wish I hadn’t.” I frowned. “Damn.”
“I take it you don’t touch a samurai sword.”
“No.” I didn’t bother explaining why not.
“But how would they know that about him?”
“I don’t know.” My frown deepened. “In Atlanta I had the feeling that Malachi and the griffin rider had met somewhere before. Maybe that would explain it.”
Shaughnessy pulled the Aero-mag and darts from beneath her clothes. “Here. These are sticking me in the ass.” I took them and put them into the belt case.
“Boo.” Ariel had come back, silent as ever.
“Anything?” I asked.
“A little. I listened from behind a billboard.”
“They didn’t see you, did they?” asked Shaughnessy.
Ariel shot her a blank look. “Madame, if I do not want to be seen, I am not.” She looked back to me. “They think you were lying.”
“Shit. About Malachi?”
“Parts of it. They think you were really part of a group that attacked him and got wiped out. They figured you looked stupid enough to get hungry enough to attack someone for his food. Your friends got cut to pieces, you ran away with your girlfriend until it was over, then came back and took his sword, his food, and some other things.”
“Why do they think that?”
She tossed her head. “Your story wasn’t convincing. They wondered why you’d be lying and that’s what they came up with.”
“But they think he’s dead?”
“Yes.”
I rubbed my hands. “Well, that’s good, at least. I hope we did him a favor. Maybe now they’ll haul ass back to New York and tell whoever sent them—Shai-tan’s master, maybe, or the necromancer—that Malachi’s dead. It ought to take some pressure off him.”
“Something I don’t understand, though, Pete.” She slid a front hoof along the concrete. When I was little I used to take those disposable lighters and turn them so that the striker was bottom most, then I’d race them across the floor. The sparks they sent looked something like what Ariel did with her hooves. “Why didn’t they seem to be looking for us, too? You’d think they would have been.”
“I wondered about that myself. Either the necromancer doesn’t know we’re coming, or he’s sent another bunch after us.”
“Possibly. But why not tell these people, too, in case they came across us? Wouldn’t that make sense?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he had his reasons for not telling them.”
“That’s what bothers me—what are those reasons?”
I saw what she was getting at. I’m slow, but I get there. “Oh. I see. What we wondered before: maybe there’s no one after us at all—because we’re saving them the effort by coming to them
instead.”
She nodded.
“So what else can we do but keep on going? We can’t turn back because of that. They win either way.”
“We keep going,” she said, “but we keep a good lookout. No walking by blind corners and stuff.”
I bobbed my head, lips pressed together tightly. “Shit. That’s my word for today, I think.” I turned to Shaughnessy. “Well, I told you things would get more interesting.”
“I’m not complaining yet.”
“You’ll probably never have time to. Don’t go looking for adventure; you might find it.”
“What if,” Shaughnessy went on, unfazed, “Malachi is only a day or so north of us and that group does hurry back to New York? You just sent them his way; they might find him.”
“I suppose there’s the chance they will. What do you want; I was making it up on short notice. But Malachi’s good at keeping himself scarce. I’m sure he’ll see them coming. It’s a lot easier for him to not attract attention than it is for us.”
“Which is one reason,” commented Ariel, “he didn’t want us coming with him.”
“Sue me. We’ll meet him in New York come hell or high water.”
“I’m sure we’ll have plenty of both, and more, before we get there,” she said wryly.
We packed quickly and got the hell out of Richmond, anxious to make up for lost time. I was worried we might run into our four merry men, so I diverted from I-95 to U.S. 301 until we were out of town. It was a shorter route through the city anyhow.
I spent an hour cleaning the fingerprints off Fred. If only things had been different.
But they hadn’t been.
Fifteen
The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.
—Ulysses S. Grant
Three days later we were walking through concrete wasteland again. The green landscape had given way to the beginnings of megalopolis. The roads and cities were empty, dusty tombs of abandoned civilization. We were just south of Alexandria. I kept glancing in all directions. Sometimes we had to go off the road for long stretches because it would have taken hours longer to thread through the permanent traffic jam. Four-thirty had been early rush hour. My gaze kept drifting nervously to the Interstate and the empty, silent cars. I couldn’t shake the feeling they weren’t empty at all, that at any moment all the doors of hundreds of cars would jerk open at once and we’d be set upon by armed men from New York who had been waiting for just this chance … .
“Pete, will you for God’s sake relax?” said Ariel. “You’re making me more nervous than you are.”
“I can’t help it.” I shrugged my left shoulder, adjusting the pack strap. “I’m so glad guns won’t work—I’d freak completely trying to keep my eyes open for snipers.”
Shaughnessy made a face at the piece of beef jerky she was trying, without a great deal of success, to nibble on. “I wish I could say you were being paranoid. I’d feel safer.” She clamped down with her teeth and wrenched the piece around, trying to tear off a bite. “This stuff’s impossible. I’d die of starvation before I could get it down my throat.”
“Suffer. Try hunting rabbits around here.” I rolled my head slowly in a clockwise circle, trying to relieve some of the stiffness in my neck muscles. You’d think I’d be used to carrying a loaded pack by now. “Deer are a possibility, though.”
“Don’t get my hopes up.”
“I want a piece of peppermint candy,” Ariel whined.
“Sure,” I said. “Get me a pack of cigarettes, too. And a banana split to go, hold the pineapple.”
Shaughnessy bit her lower lip. “Oh, when was the last time I ate ice cream?”
“Or even ice?” I added.
She made a face. “I had ice enough last winter, thank you.”
“Yeah—but in your lemonade?”
“What’s a banana split?” Ariel wanted to know.
I told her in nostalgically pornographic detail.
“Sounds terribly indulgent,” she said.
“It was. You’d have loved them.”
We picked up momentum, and for the next half-hour listed things we missed. As I could have predicted, Shaughnessy missed a lot more than I did.
After a while Shaughnessy asked me to call a bathroom break. I conceded and she took off at a careful gallop, if you can imagine such a thing, behind a useless Mack truck three lanes over.
“You sure are quiet when she and I talk,” I said when she was gone.
“That’s because it’s you and her talking.”
“Bullshit. That never stopped you from sticking in your two cents’ worth with me and anybody else.”
She dipped her horn. A glossy white band of sunlight danced along her back. “It’s interesting to watch her trying to get to know you.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes. She learns about you by arguing with you. I’m not sure I’d like being a woman, Pete, no matter what you think. They’re too subtle.”
I asked her if she didn’t think perhaps she was generalizing from a single example, but Shaughnessy returned—looking enormously relieved—and we resumed walking.
Sometimes I felt I was a cartoon log-roller and the entire world was the log beneath my feet. I had to turn it under me, but the scale hadn’t changed: it was still five-foot, ten-inch Pete and twenty-four-thousand-miles-around Earth. I watched this part of it slide beneath me at around three miles an hour and wished for roller skates, at least. Heck, Bugs Bunny used to do it.
A little over a mile ahead was where I-95 turned due east. If we kept going straight it would become I-395, which ran smack into the middle of Washington, D.C., and I wasn’t about to go into that. Instead we were going to veer west at the junction of I-95, I-395, and I-495, the latter of which would take us in roundabout fashion around Washington and straight back to I-95, which I intended to tread all the way into the Big Rotten Apple itself.
We passed a sign that read JUNCTION 395-495 1 MILE. “Look up ahead,” said Ariel. “In the air.”
We did. Slowly circling black glider shapes flapped occasionally. “Buzzards?” I asked.
“I think so. Scavengers.”
“Something’s dead.”
“Or dying.” She blinked. “We might want to steer clear.” Funny how she’d picked up expressions. She probably didn’t know what “steering” was.
“We’ll take it slow and see what’s going on,” I decided.
A few minutes later it was obvious from the shapes on the road that nothing there was about to bother us. The buzzards circled high overhead, and occasionally one swooped down to an abrupt halt on the asphalt and pecked leisurely at one of the corpses. The smell was pretty bad, but that wasn’t what made me feel sick. In my mind’s eye I’d seen close to this exact scene in Richmond as I’d lied to that group about how I’d found Fred.
Though there wasn’t much left to make out, I recognized them. Three bodies sprawled on the road. A small grave had been dug in the grass nearby. Flies buzzed a summertime drone. A severed hand still clutched a cutlass. A double-bladed axe had been cut cleanly in two through the handle. Dried blood darkened the asphalt in a huge patch. A white Chevy in the left lane had been discolored by a streak of red on the left front fender. It had dripped as if from a sloppy paint job.
These were the remains of three of the four men who’d been after Malachi. Judging from the dismemberment, disembowelment, and decapitation, they had found him.
Shaughnessy turned around and clutched her stomach. I glanced at her and walked closer to the carnage. They all had weapons drawn but looked as if they’d been cut down in mid-stride.
Ariel called me from the side of the road. I went to her and looked. The rapier had been thrust point-first into the head of a small grave. The metal was dark brown along the edge of the bottom half, broadening to a completely bloodstained six inches toward the tip. The grave
looked hurriedly dug. It was poorly squared and incompletely tamped down. Probably shallow. I was surprised predators hadn’t gotten to it yet. A torn-off back binding from a paperback book was tied by a piece of string to the handle of the rapier. It dangled from the bell-shaped guard, moving slightly in the warm breeze. A name was written in blue ink on the white side:
FAUST
I looked at Ariel. There was nothing to say, really. Finally I drew in a deep breath and said, “I, uh, I’m going to see if Shaughnessy’s all right.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes from the grave. “I don’t know which makes me feel worse—Faust’s death, or Malachi’s loss.” Her voice was a slender thread, barely audible. “Pete, I can think of a lot of people I’d rather see dead than this dog.”
I touched the softness beneath her eye and went to Shaughnessy. She had stopped vomiting but was still on her hands and knees before the mess, eyes closed, absurdly reverent. I patted her back, ignoring her admonitions to leave her alone, removed the bota from its precarious sling—she had hung it diagonally across her torso and it dangled over the mess—and forced her to sip from it. She choked and spit, then took a few more long swallows. “Thanks,” she gasped.
I screwed the cap back on. “You all right?”
She nodded and stood shakily, stepping back a few paces. I removed the cap from the bota once more. “Here, cup your hands and splash some water on your face. It’ll make you feel a little better.”
She complied and then wiped her cheeks dry against her T-shirt sleeves. “I just—I’ve seen people who’d been killed before, you know? But never … not like this.”
“It’s okay. It’s happened to me, too.”
“Your … friend did this? By himself?”
“Yes. At least, I’m fairly sure he was by himself.”
Ariel stood behind me. “Something’s missing. Did you notice?”
“Yeah. Our man with the samurai sword.”
She nodded. “One of the bodies, the one with the cutlass. His arm was cut off, but that’s not what killed him. His throat was ripped out.”
“Faust?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Well, at least he took one with him.” I put a hand on Shaughnessy’s arm and handed her the bota. “We’d better get moving before somebody else shows up to investigate. Those buzzards can be seen from a long way off.”
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