Angelfire

FIFTEEN

DOC

Wind. An arctic wind, full of rain that could quickly turn to ice. That was the substance of our world. It blew horizontal to the ground, stinging as if made of microscopic shards of glass. I was transported to the Russian hinterland and knew not even an atom of homesickness.

The low tent in which we spent our nights shuddered like a drunkard forced to sobriety, fabric popping loudly enough to wake a deaf man. But not Goldie. And, as if to challenge the wind, Goldie snored.

Somewhere near dawn on this, our third day on the road to Chicago, I decided to take my chances in the open, got up and dragged my sleeping bag out to where our night watch huddled in the lee of an outcrop of rock.

“What are you doing up?” Cal asked, his voice only just audible above the railing of the wind.

“I find myself unable to sleep with the noise.”

“The wind?”

I nodded. “Yes, that too.”

Cal chuckled and glanced at his watch, a venerable mechanical device-the only kind that works in our new world. “Well, it’s pretty close to morning anyway. Not that you can tell from that penlight on the horizon. Everything all right in the tent?”

He meant Magritte, of course. Since we had left the relative safety of the Blue Mounds, she had lived in a state of unease, expecting that at any moment the Source would pounce on her. But it had not. She could hear it, she told us, had to distract herself, steel herself against it, but the call was muted. “Like I’m hearing it from inside a bubble,” she’d said.

Still, we resorted to physical restraint at night-she was literally tethered to Enid in the event the Source should break through her “bubble,” forcing him to sing. He had gone only days without blocking the Source, and already I could see improvement in his health. The grayish cast was gone from his skin and he slept soundly, which was more than I could say for myself.

“Things are quiet,” I said to Cal, “after a fashion. At least, everyone else is asleep.”

I peered into the unrelieved charcoal gray of the Wisconsin landscape. Sunrise, we already knew, would bring little real relief from the gloom. Wisconsin seemed to be perpetually in twilight. “You were raised in Minnesota, yes?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“And Minnesota is near Wisconsin, yes?”

“You could say that.”

“Are autumns usually this harsh?”

Cal tilted his head within the hood of his anorak. A banner of steam marked the movement before being stretched and flayed by the wind, and I wondered, irrelevantly, if we would ever again see a jet’s vapor trail. This led to the unwelcome memory that hundreds, even thousands, of people must have been aloft at the moment the Source exchanged our universal constants for its own in-constants.

“Winters up here,” Cal said, “have always been hard, but I’ve never seen it like this so early. When I was a kid, we’d get snow by Thanksgiving most years. Nice, fluffy snow, like a blanket over everything.” He paused, and I suspected that he had gone back in time to a place that seemed kinder through the filter of recent events. “I always knew when it’d snowed the minute I woke up. There’s no silence in the world like the silence the morning after a first snow. And the light. The light is different. It seems to come from everywhere, like… like in the Preserve.”

Ah, now that was the sound of homesickness. I had heard it in my own voice when once I spoke of Kiev. Then I had not yet understood that home is not a place, but the people in it. I had no people in Kiev now. Everything I had was here. This was not true of my friend, Cal.

“We will find Tina,” I said, “and take her there so she, too, can see the light that comes from everywhere.”

He glanced away from me. “I don’t want to take her there, Doc. If we have to take her there, that would mean there’s still something to protect her from.” He turned back to face me, his eyes burning. “It’s not enough to just get Tina away from the Source. We have to shut the Source down.”

“Then we will.”

He laughed without humor, and breathed out a long jet of steam. “You know what I was sitting here wondering just now? I was wondering if I’d be sitting here wondering if I’d accepted that job in the D.A.’s office in St. Cloud instead of buying the New York hype.”

“The New York hype?”

“You know-if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. I wanted to make it.”

“And what has New York hype to do with your being here?”

He did not answer me directly. “You know what I wanted more than anything, growing up? Not to be like my father. Not to do to the people who loved me what he did to us.” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

“Meaning? You are nothing like the man you described to me, Calvin. That man was selfish, shortsighted-”

“I worked evenings and weekends. Tina took buses to ballet practice, cabs to recitals. A prima donna with no one in the audience to cheer just for her. She was lonely, Doc. And I was trying so hard to fit into Stern’s zoo, I didn’t notice until she was beyond my reach.”

“Calvin,” I objected gently to his self-reproach, “you have always done for Tina what you felt she needed.”

He shook his head. “We’ve all seen it, Doc. The Source twists people physically who have already been twisted by life. And Tina… There was a hole in Tina that I put there. The Change had plenty to work with.”

The snow changed to a wafting mist. The wind eased to a mere moan, which seemed, at this moment, to come from within Cal Griffin himself.

“Now we argue nature and nurture,” I observed. “You and Tina have had much the same experience, yes? An absent father, a mother struggling to make a home for her children. The painful loss when she died. Yet, only Tina changed. Have you not considered that this perhaps was due to her nature?”

He made no answer.

I leaned close to him and put a hand on his arm. “There is an old Russian proverb: ‘Shit happens.’ ”

He let out a bark of laughter. “Old Russian proverb, huh? Is that a literal translation?”

“No. The literal translation is ‘You go uphill and the devil grabs your foot,’ but the point is the same.”

He nodded, smiling at me from the depths of his hood. “I’m going to go scramble up some breakfast. Believe it or not, it’s morning.” He stood, stretched, and made his way to where the supplies lay beneath their protective shroud of nylon. In a few paces he was no more than a vague shape in the lightening gloom.

“Nice try, Doc.” Colleen stepped into the place Cal had vacated.

I shook my head. “I am not sure he listens.”

“Why should he? You don’t. I’m beginning to think it’s one of those ‘guy’ things. Only affects people with that broken X chromosome.”

She had surprised me yet again. “What do you mean? When do I not listen?”

She crouched next to me. “Viktor, for a wise man, you have some surprising gaps in your smarts. They say a person can’t talk and listen at the same time. You’re living proof of that.”

“I don’t-”

“What did you just tell Cal: Shit happens? Why can’t you take that to heart? I bet somewhere, deep down inside, you still blame yourself for Chernobyl.”

My face grew warm, damning me, and I had to deliberately misunderstand her. “Nonsense. I have never blamed myself for Chernobyl.”

“No? But you made yourself responsible for the victims. Every one you lost, you punished yourself for. Just like you punish yourself for Yelena and Nurya.”

The anger that forced its way up into my heart was raw and searing. I meant to direct it at her for daring to trespass on this, my sacred ground, but this sudden rage did not bear her name. “You cannot pretend I was not responsible for them. I was. That was the gap in my smarts, as you call it. I made a choice between the good of many strangers and the good of those few I loved. The choice was a lie. There was no choice. I told you, I had so little effect at Chernobyl. At home-”

“And what about the choice you made back there at the Preserve? Wasn’t that a lie, too?”

For a moment I felt like a tiny ceramic man in a child’s snow globe, frozen and senseless. I turned to look at her without volition. In the wan morning light her face was more solemn than I had ever seen it. Not even a spark of humor reached her eyes.

I thought of all the possible responses I could make, but only one was honest enough to be uttered. “History repeats itself,” I murmured, and felt the chill of this Wisconsin dawn drive itself into the marrow of my bones.

I had not even let myself consider what it meant for me to be back there, within the relatively safe confines of the Preserve, while she and the others were out here, facing what only God knew. There, I was one of many, while they would have been only five against the unknown. Cal had been absolutely right, of course, for any one of us to be absent increased the chances of failure.

“And how is it,” I asked at last, “that you realized this, when I did not?”

Her gaze did not waver. “I listen. I listen to the people I trust. Especially when they can tell me things about myself even I don’t know.” She raised her hands in that so typical gesture of surrender. “Okay, so it doesn’t happen often. In fact, I haven’t really listened to anybody since … well, probably since Dad died. People worth listening to are a rare find.”

I tried to imagine her as a teenager with a teenager’s faith that the people in her life today would be there tomorrow and the next day, and the next. I imagined a girl who smiled much and worried little, whose mouth turned up at the corners, and between whose brows no lines of worry had yet settled. I thought I had seen her in brief flashes over the past weeks, so I knew she had not been completely conquered by the boi baba.

We woke the others to a hurried breakfast before hastily packing our goods back onto our well-chilled horses, who had sheltered the night behind a pair of extra tents. As we worked I wandered through the door Colleen had opened in my mind and visited the room that lay behind it.

“What was a thing your father told you about yourself?” I asked her as we distributed the last of her gear across her horse’s pack.

“That I shouldn’t follow his footsteps into the military.” “And why was that?”

She cleared her throat, then said, in a voice of gravel, “ ‘You wouldn’t take orders well, Chief. They’d bust you the first time you were insubordinate.’ ”

“Chief?”

Her lips curved. “A nickname.”

“I take it, then, that your father was never insubordinate. This surprises me, considering what you’ve told me of him.” She grinned, letting the teenager peek out. “Oh, Dad was never insubordinate. Not in any way they could prove. He had a talent for saying things with a smile that… well, that might’ve started a fight or a court-martial if someone else’d said it. I sometimes thought Dad was too laid back, too easy. Now I realize that was a survival tactic. It was his way of staying true to himself in a world that wanted him to conform. Maybe it was his way of daring the world to change him. The immovable object resisting an irresistible force.”

“You are also good at resisting the irresistible,” I noted.

She shook her head. “Too good. There are some changes I want to make. I’m just not sure I can.” Her eyes strayed to where Cal moved among the pack animals, checking cinches and tarps.

In a moment he glided between us, granting each a tired smile. “Ready to go?”

“Ready,” said Colleen and returned the smile.

He gave her a quick, one-armed hug and patted my shoulder before moving to mount his horse. Watching him, Colleen shrugged and shook her head, then swung up into her own saddle, making herself busy with the packhorse’s lead.

The wind was in our faces as we set out. The day was much like the days before, a freezing, gray blur, during which I considered that riding bareback would be warmer for both myself and my poor horse. Her name, I was told, was June, but I called her Koshka-meaning “cat”-for that was what she reminded me of, not in the least because she so disliked being wet.

Theoretically, one could stay dry beneath one’s down or leather jacket and waterproof poncho, but in reality the wind drove icy shrapnel into every slit. Koshka, I had no doubt, was even more miserable than I.

There was no possibility of conversation, no landmarks to entertain the eyes. The world quickly narrowed to the view between my mare’s ears. I could barely make out the glow Magritte spread about herself at the head of the column, so I kept my eyes on Colleen’s back and wondered how it is that flares do not seem to feel the cold.

The weather did us the favor of clearing toward afternoon. There was even a sun in the sky. I had become so used to the Preserve’s golden bonnet and Wisconsin’s gray snood that for a brief moment I did not recognize it. The temperature rose enough that I put back my hood and gazed about.

We traveled off the beaten track but in sight of it as long as the sun shone. But as soon as dusk began to settle, we came down onto the road-County Highway 14, according to the signs. We were now in Illinois, I realized, and probably had been for some time.

Snow had blown across the road, cushioning our horses’ hooves. Above the soft lowing of the wind, we could not hear the sounds of our own passage. We saw no one-no people, no domestic animals. Nor did we see signs of them. The farmhouses that we saw from afar were dark, their access roads covered with pleated coats of snow and ice except for the occasional track of fox or field mouse. Whether there were no people or no people fool enough to brave the storm, we could not tell.

Now we were able to speak, but didn’t care to. The cold, the constant wind, the stinging snow, had drained us. Even Magritte was subdued, having come to rest on the rump of Goldie’s gelding. Her bright aura had dimmed, but not died. Still, she was obliged to wrap herself in one of our sleeping bags for warmth.

At that point when the day teetered between twilight and darkness, we arrived at the crest of a hill. The sun, like a baleful red eye, glared at our backs from the western horizon, while below, the land disappeared into a gloom so deep no feature could be discerned. It was a peculiar, thick, unnatural darkness that made the hair rise up on the back of my neck.

Cal halted atop the hill, perplexed. “We should be able to see something. There are towns down there. We should be able to see fires, smoke…”

“It’s weird. It almost looks like a-a canyon,” said Goldie, making a north to south sweep with one arm. “Or a black hole.”

“It’s supposed to be fringe towns and bedroom communities-incipient suburbia. They wouldn’t have electricity, but…” Cal shook his head.

“Well, whatever it is, we’re sure as hell not going to find out tonight,” said Colleen. She gestured with her head. “Judging by that cloud mass up north, we’re in for some weather.”

Cal forced a long, steaming breath between tight lips and nodded. “You’re right. We should make camp.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the ribbon of snowy road behind. “There was a farm back about half a mile. I’d like to go check it out.”

The house had been gutted by fire, but the barn was intact, a fine, sturdy building with thick double doors and shuttered windows. It was empty of life, except perhaps for some mice. There was also hay, grain, and a number of other things that would be a welcome supplement to our supplies. I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the animals and the people that had lived here; of them there was no sign.

We scavenged unburnt wood from the house and built a fire in a trash barrel, while Goldie set light-globes blazing. Then we bedded down the horses and ate our supper, none of us, I suspect, tasting much of the dried meat, fruit, and flatbread we consumed.

After our meal, Cal spread his map out on a bale of hay and pored over it, while Colleen hovered at his shoulder. Enid sat next to me on a bale just opposite them, watching silently. On an adjacent bale, Magritte slept at the end of her tether, her aura drained away.

Enid had taken his harmonica from his pack, but not to play. Instead, he turned it ceaselessly in his hands, end over end over end. “This is a weird time for me,” he murmured, slanting a gaze at Magritte. “Here I been jamming twenty-four/seven, trying to keep music happening-now I gotta keep music from happening. It’s unnatural. And I gotta wonder how long it can last.”

“Have you any idea how it is the Source has not heard her?”

A sort of music came to us from Goldie, out of sight among the box stalls. He was humming and singing in turns, tapping out rhythms on whatever surfaces presented themselves.

Enid turned his gaze from Magritte to follow the sound, a faint smile touching his lips. “I got my theories.”

“I don’t get it.” Cal’s voice pulled my attention to where he and Colleen studied the map. He ran his fingertips over it in a gesture that reminded me of a circus Gypsy reading tarot cards. When he was done, he shook his head. “We should be approaching the outskirts of Woodstock by now. But there’s nothing there.”

Enid straightened. “Where’d it go?”

Cal searched the map again, a smear of violet brilliance following the movement of his hands. Tangled networks of light leapt into being, culminating in a knot. To the east and west of this gleaming web was darkness.

“That’s Lake Michigan,” said Cal, pointing to the easternmost point where the light cut off abruptly. “I’d expect it to be dark. In fact, I’d be worried if it wasn’t. But I have no idea what this is.” He tapped a finger in the middle of the lightless area on the map.

It lay between our present position and the knot of light I knew must be post-Change Chicago. An enigma.

“Are you sure you’re reading that right?” asked Colleen.

Cal glanced up over his shoulder at her. “I … Yes, I’m sure it’s right. I mean, it’s wrong. There should be something there.”

“You mean there used to be something there,” said Enid.

Goldie moved from the stalls at the back of the barn to pace along its front wall, still humming, providing accompaniment with a little wood and skin rattle he had pulled seemingly out of nowhere-a gift from Kevin Elk Sings. Enid tracked him for a moment, then turned to watch Magritte sleep.

Colleen sighed and dropped to a crouch next to Cal, leaning wearily against his leg. “Maybe we’re just plain lost.”

The drumming suddenly quit and Goldie said, quietly, “We’re not lost. Chicago’s on the other side of that hole in the map, we just need to find a way to get across it.”

Cal turned to look at him, standing before the barn’s double front doors. “You’re sure?”

“I’m never sure of anything. You know that.”

Cal glanced over at Enid, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know about Chicago, but Howard’s still there.”

“On the other side of the void?”

“Yeah.”

Cal stood and turned to Goldie, the map in his hands. “And is the Source on the other side of the void, too?” Goldie smiled uncertainly. “You’re asking me?”

“Who else would I ask? Goldie, we’ve been on the road for days, moving straight toward Chicago. I haven’t asked you if the Source is there because I figured if it was, you’d tell me. And if it wasn’t, you’d tell me. You haven’t said a word, one way or the other. Now, I’m asking. What’s your sixth sense telling you about the Source?”

Goldie looked down at the rattle. “My sick sense, you mean.”

Cal’s hands clenched on the map, crushing it. Pale violet light seeped from between his fingers. “Goldie, we’re practically on top of Chicago-or at least we ought to be. And we’re coming in from the West. Is the Source east of us now, or west?”

There was no sound in the barn but the hollow chuckle of fire in the barrel and wind tormenting the riven walls.

“Wow, what do I say? Never could tell my east from my west.”

“Goldie, dammit! You-” Cal stopped the words with visible effort. “You’ve been hedging this since before we left the Preserve. What is it you’re trying so damned hard not to tell me?”

Goldie’s eyes darted around as if seeking a place to hide. “That I don’t know what to tell you. I’m getting mixed signals. Static. Too many voices.”

“Voices from Chicago?”

“Sometimes.”

“And was it just coincidence that Chicago was where Enid and Magritte needed to go?”

Goldie’s eyes met Cal’s in a collision I felt as a sudden tightness at the back of my neck. “I’m not making this up, Cal. Yes, I thought it was farther west before, but things change. That’s the nature of life nowadays, isn’t it?”

“Jesus Christ, Goldie-if I asked you if something was black or white you’d tell me it was gray!”

“Things are gray. Things have always been gray.”

Cal threw the crumpled map to the floor. “Goldie, for God’s sake, can you please stop sounding like a fucking sphinx? I’ve had enough riddles and conundrums and-and puzzles to last me a lifetime. Right now I need answers, and you’re the only one who has them.”

But Goldie was shaking his head. “I don’t have answers, Cal. I never have had.”

“No, of course not. You don’t have answers; you just have manias. How convenient.”

“Cal!” Colleen scrambled to her feet and stood poised, as if ready to put herself between the two men.

Goldie’s laughter was harsh. “ ‘Convenient’ isn’t exactly the word I’d use.”

“No? What word, then, Goldie? What word would you use to describe the way your sense of direction comes and goes? Huh? You tell me in one breath that the Source could be in Chicago. In the next, you tell me you’re not sure. One moment you’re setting course with abandon, and the next you’re dithering around like a-a-”

I finished the sentence for him. “Like someone with an extreme mood disorder? For the love of God, Cal, where are you going with this?”

Goldie drew back, shadows falling across his face. “No, Doc, it’s … it’s okay. He’s right. I’m … two bricks short of a load. Common knowledge.” He dropped his eyes to the rattle again before going on, his voice a raw whisper. “Look, Cal, I’m sorry I can’t be more clear-headed. More… like you or Doc or Colleen. But I’ve tried everything I can think of to keep up my end of this. Up to and including opening genie bottles I’d just as soon leave corked. You can’t imagine some of the scary shit I’ve had to let into my head to be able to hear those Voices.”

“Goldie …” Cal said.

“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Jeez, Goldman, you eat scary shit for breakfast.’ Granted. But it costs me to stay connected to the Source. To hear those Voices night after night. When I’m on the edge, Cal, they make stepping over sound… easy.” He raised his eyes to Cal’s face, and Cal went white at the look in them. “Sometimes it’s all I can do to hold on to the little piece of sanity I’ve got left in here. I know you want yeses instead of maybes and answers instead of riddles. But I don’t have them. Not right now.”

There was a vacuum in the room. No one spoke or moved. The wind rattled the doors and pried at the windows.

Finally, Cal spoke, his voice careful, gentle. “Then we’ll make do with maybes and riddles. I … I know you’re not making this up, Goldie. But I’m blind right now. I’m not sure what we’re facing.”

A ghost smile touched Goldie’s lips. “Welcome to my world.”

Cal’s expression changed subtly in the exchange their eyes made. “Yeah. I … I get it,” he said finally. “If you … sense anything, hear anything-”

“You’ll be the first to know. Trust me.” He turned back into the rippling shadows and disappeared into the stalls.

Cal picked up the crumpled map and smoothed it against his stomach. “I’m sorry, you guys. I … I don’t have any excuses. It’s just… another day in a long nightmare.”

Colleen laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. Everybody’s worn-out and a little tired of surprises.”

Cal shot a glance back into the shadows where Goldie had gone. “I’m worried about him. He’s our compass. Always pointing almost due west. Now it’s as if … the pole has moved. Maybe it’s these dreams we’ve been having … maybe they’re confusing things.”

“Well, one thing I’m not confused about,” said Enid. He pointed toward the southeast corner of the barn. “Howard is that way.”

Cal took a deep breath. “Then we go that way.”

Enid nodded, as if content with that, and lay down on his hay bale, pulling his sleeping bag over him. I realized how hungry for sleep my own body was. I had laid out my bedroll in what was left of a haystack along the inner wall of a stall. Now I went to it and crawled in, facing the common area, almost numb with cold and weariness. I could see Cal and Colleen standing where I had left them, both looking at the hard-pack floor rather than each other.

After a moment Cal dropped the map onto a hay bale and moved to stand by the fire barrel, where he made business of warming his hands. Colleen hesitated, then followed him.

“Could the Source really be in Chicago?” she asked, her voice low. “Is that what we’ll be facing on the other side of the void?”

“That’s one of the things that doesn’t feel right. All this time, I’ve assumed that when we get to the Source, I’ll know it. I’ll hear it, or I’ll sense it in some way. And I thought…”

“What?” prompted Colleen, her eyes tight on his face.

“That when the time came, there’d be something for us to use-some tool or weapon or … knowledge that we don’t have now. Some way to defeat it. We’ve got Enid, but I don’t know how he fits. His music is like a shield, but is it a weapon? And… I’ve always assumed that I’d find it-this weapon-whatever it is. The way I found the sword. I feel as if there’s a piece missing. Something I’m not understanding.”

Colleen shrugged. “Maybe we have the missing piece but we just don’t know it. Or maybe it’s out there, somewhere.” She tilted her head toward the same wall Enid had pointed at moments before. “Or maybe it’s here, inside us. Not just one or another of us, but all of us together. You found the sword, but Goldie led you to it, didn’t he?”

Cal tilted his head and smiled down at her in the fire’s glow. “You say the most amazing things.”

She took a half step back from him. “What? What’d I say that’s so funny?”

“Not funny, profound. You said something … Doc might’ve said, or Mary maybe. That it isn’t just one of us- it’s all of us.” He took back the half step she’d given up. “I wasn’t laughing at you, Colleen. I wouldn’t laugh at you.”

She opened her mouth to respond, sarcasm battling something else in her expression. But before a word could come out, he bent his head and kissed her.

I rolled over onto my back, casting my eyes deep into the darkness of the hayloft. Good. This was the way it was supposed to be, was it not? It was what Colleen had hoped for. Clearly, it was what Cal wanted. It was what I had expected, encouraged.

Then why did I feel no contentment?

Fierce, sudden wind slammed against the barn’s broad flank. The entire structure shuddered as if the earth had bucked beneath it, and the front doors blew in, admitting wind and sleet mixed with rain.

Colleen and Cal were startled into action, while I sat up as if on a spring. They had pushed the doors shut and lifted the oaken latch bar into its iron cradles before I could struggle from my bedroll. Dirt and hay scooted across the floor, pursued by the chill wind that stole beneath the doors and through every seam and crack.

Cal pulled a hand through his wet hair and grimaced. “Looks like it’s going to be a rough night.”

It was.