Angelfire

SEVENTEEN

COLLEEN

Life is strange. I knew that long before I pitched horse first into the new and improved Fox River; before my life was stretched out in the icy water between a submerged snag and Doc’s hands. They say your life flashes before your eyes in moments like that. It’s true, but where I’d kind of expected a fast-forward movie, I got a slide show of random freeze frames.

Well, probably not random. These were all moments I suspect my subconscious wanted me to know were IMPORTANT. I’m pretty sure that’s what Goldman would’ve told me, anyway. And whereas I’d lived those moments from the inside, now I saw them from the outside, as if I were sitting in the audience, glancing at my watch and wondering how long this little documentary was going to last. At least I didn’t have time to get bored.

Slide one: I am smiling up at Dad, who has just helped me turn twelve years of hoarded allowances into a real, live, kicking, breathing horse.

Slide two: I am at a graveside service cringing under a twenty-one-gun salute while Mom clutches a triangle of red-white-and-blue to her breast but does not cry.

Slide three: I am helping a crumpled lawyer lead refugees out of an office building into a Manhattan blackout that might never end.

Slide four: I am watching Rory-or what’s left of him- scuttle across the street on which we live to lose himself under a manhole cover.

Slide five: I am having a quiet conversation with Doc in a moonlit wood that’s slipped sideways in space. Or maybe it’s a frozen plain that’s slipped sideways into winter.

Slide six: I am standing in a cold, damp barn in rural Illinois, half convinced that a kiss has just caused a freak ice storm. The world seems strangely upside down.

Slide seven: I am up to my neck in a frozen river, wondering if I’ve come to the last slide in the show. Doc is all that’s keeping my head above water, and the world has righted itself again, but not the way I expected.

Funny: in the moment that might be your last, you suddenly see everything clear as a bell.

Sometime after the slide show, I woke up late in the day from a very long sleep. I had no idea what day it was late in, but I was warm and dry. I was also bruised and stiff and my fingers and toes hurt, but all in all I felt pretty good for a person who’d almost been drowned, frozen, and eaten by a whatever.

I was alone in the tent with hazy memories of the cold and the fear and the pain, and of first Cal, then Doc, tending and watching over me. I tested fingers and toes, making sure everything still worked. Then I made a horrible mistake: I stretched. The muscles in my calves knotted, and fire raced through them, making me yelp. I doubled over and fumbled with the zipper of the sleeping bag.

The tent flap flew back and light flooded in, bringing Cal with it. He must’ve been hovering right outside to make that quick an entrance.

“Are you all right?”

“No, dammit! I’m not all right. My legs are cramping!”

He had no trouble with the stupid zipper. A moment later he was massaging my bunched muscles. I gritted my teeth until the knots loosened.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded. “Thanks. How long did I sleep?”

“About eighteen hours, off and on. Mostly on.”

“Eighteen hours! You’re kidding!” Hell, that was embarrassing. “Why didn’t you wake me? We don’t have time-”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Relax. You don’t owe anyone an apology. How do you feel now? Ready to get back up on that horse?”

That horse. I caught a sudden chill. “Big T?”

“Is fine. Enid took very good care of him after the dunking. All your clothes are dry and relatively clean, so you don’t have to wear men’s unmentionables anymore. Everything smells of wood smoke, but I figured you wouldn’t mind that.”

He smiled and flicked a stray strand of hair off my cheek, and I relived all those moments when our eyes met and there was a fire in the hold. I relived the kiss. I’d wanted him to kiss me. What’d they call that-irony?

I realized I was just sitting there staring at him, when he glanced away, made a nervous gesture, and brushed his hands on his jeans as if touching me had given him cooties, or maybe something else.

“Well, gosh,” I said, “time’s a-wastin’. I’d better get moving.”

“If you’re ready to. There’s hot water for washing up. We rigged sort of an ersatz bathroom on the other side of the wall. You’re probably hungry.”

I was ravenous. “How much food did we lose?” I tried not to think about the mare.

“Fortunately, not a lot. You were right about splitting up the supplies.”

“Well, hell, Cal,” I said, grinning and slapping his leg. “That’s why you pay me the big bucks.”

He gave me a weird look. “I’ll have to ask Doc if euphoria is a side effect of nearly drowning. What did you have, a near-death experience or something?”

I pulled back inside myself just a little to check. “Or something,” I said.

He hesitated, watching my face, and I thought for a moment he was going to kiss me again. He didn’t. He just moved some more stray hair off my cheek, then slid out through the tent flap.

I took a deep breath and prepared to emerge from my cocoon.

You take certain things for granted. Like walking. After making my way to the “bathroom,” I vowed I would never take that particular activity for granted again. Bathing was an adventure, too, but like they say: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I figured a little more cold wasn’t likely to do me in, especially if I confined it to one six-inch-square patch of skin at a time. Still, it was a relief to finally be dry and fully dressed.

The others were carefully repacking our supplies. Except for Doc. He was sitting on a crumbling bit of masonry sipping chocolate from our hoard of dry goods when I arrived at the campfire. I sat down kitty-corner to him on a rolled-up sleeping bag and poured myself a cup of watery brown liquid. It was hot and sweet-heavenly combination.

“I guess I’m not a better man than you, after all,” I told him, tearing open a packet of jerky. “You didn’t sleep for eighteen hours.”

He glanced at me over the rim of his cup, steam veiling one eye, a lock of thick, dark hair hiding the other. Silver ran through it. Funny, I hadn’t noticed that before. Maybe it hadn’t been there until yesterday.

“I was not pinned in a freezing river by a thousand-pound animal,” he told me.

“No, you were just standing up to your ass in the freezing river trying to rescue the woman pinned under the thousand-pound animal.”

He shrugged.

“What, no Russian proverb to cover the occasion?”

He tilted his head, contemplating the steam rising from his cup. “Ah, well, there’s probably some saying about old oxen that would apply.”

I raised a brow. “Old oxen?”

“The old ox can still plow a straight furrow. Old oxen yet may have stiff horns-that sort of thing.”

I burst out laughing. “Viktor, that’s obscene!”

He blushed violently, while across the campsite the others paused in their packing to stare at us. “I did not mean-”

“Just teasing, okay?” I reached over and touched his hand. It was warm from the steaming cup. I had a flash of vivid recall about the warmth of his hands-and about my loose lips. Embarrassed, I pulled away. “You’ll have to tell me some more ‘old’ proverbs as we go along. They’re a hoot.” I drained the last of my chocolate, pocketed what was left of the jerky, stood and walked toward the picket line, wobbling only a little.

“There is no fool like an old fool,” he murmured behind me.

I pretended not to have heard him.

We found Cal’s missing suburbia, or what was left of it. It existed as a patchwork quilt of live and dead zones. Bands of holocaust gray striped with neighborhoods that seemed almost untouched except for the abandoned cars and overgrown yards. In some places the yards had become miniature farms filled with rows of dried cornstalks and makeshift garbage bag tents that protected unseen vegetables from frost.

We saw gangs and neighborhood watch groups. There was even a little old guy out raking leaves, while a woman who was probably his wife sat watch on the front porch with a plate of cookies and a baseball bat.

There were wild plants everywhere-weird-looking shit, some of it-growing up between the cracks in the asphalt, spiraling up light posts and over mailboxes. Nothing like Enid’s glass trees, though. We steered clear of it.

We steered clear of people as well. It wasn’t hard. Even folks who acted as if they might be interested in us got uninterested when they saw how heavily armed we were. Then there were the ones who were flat-out scared of Magritte. At one point a couple of priests scurried across our path, waving crosses at us. They barricaded themselves in a church. Magritte laughed, but it was a harsh sound with no fun in it.

Things got more and more grim-looking as we drew closer to Chicago proper. The streets were littered with glass and useless junk, useful junk having been snapped up in a spasm of looting that must’ve looked a lot like the one that wracked Manhattan. A regular greed orgy. The sidewalks sparkled as if they were carpeted in diamonds-sort of a twisted El Dorado. The air was thick and almost chewy with smoke.

If there were people here, they weren’t showing themselves, but every once in a while you could hear them. A child laughing, a woman crying, people yelling at the top of their lungs.

What struck me most was that there was no gunfire. Imagine that-it took an epic disaster, but the streets of Chicago were quiet. It’s damn hard to commit mass destruction without guns. Guns can be used anonymously and without fear on the part of the shooter. Knives and clubs, on the other hand, are a little more particular and a lot more intimate.

I said something of that nature to Doc as we made our way carefully south through a place called Park Ridge. He raised an eyebrow and said, “Popalsya, kotorieh kusalsya. The biter, bit. Intimacy breeds vulnerability.”

I hate conversations that operate on more than one level at a time. I turned and gave him a long, hard look. “Message?”

He seemed startled. “None that I am aware of. Except, what you were saying-in hand-to-hand combat, one does not have the advantage of distance.” He smiled again, eyes warming. “Ah, you thought I was lecturing you, yes?”

“No, I … Okay, yeah.” Fibbing to Doc was a waste of effort.

“Do I need to lecture you about such things, boi baba?” “Trust me,” I said, “you don’t.”

His smile vanished. He nodded and turned his gaze back up to the rooftops, leaving me to wonder what the hell I’d missed.

Enid led us now, working us toward Howard Russo’s offices on Polk Street. He pointed out landmarks along the way. Everything he said began with the words “That used to be.” It was weird. Everything used to be; nothing was now.

As if he picked up my train of thought, Enid wondered aloud where all his musician buddies were now, and what had happened to all the blues clubs. “The New Checkerboard Lounge,” he said, as if the name tasted good. “That’s where I met Howard. That was my first real solo gig. My whole family’s musical. Pop was a lead guitarist-a session man; Mom was a singer; big brother Carson’s in New Orleans now. I gotta wonder…” He didn’t finish the thought, but we all knew what he wondered.

“Sounds as if you were born into a ready-made band,” said Cal.

“It was that. We was all into session work. Pop got me my first paying gigs. Backup, mostly, for pros. Man, I just sat there and made like a sponge, soaking up everything they did. I even got to sit in at the CBF a couple of times.”

“The CBF?” Cal repeated.

“Chicago Blues Festival,” said Goldie. He was dressed head-to-toe in black today, except for the paisley vest. Looked kind of like a cartoonist’s idea of a Wild West gunslinger-without the gun. We were all watching him pretty closely, but if he’d gotten any news from Source Radio, he wasn’t telling.

“Yeah,” said Enid. “I didn’t get to strut or nothin’-side-men pretty much got to stay in the pocket-but I promised myself I’d go back someday as a headliner. That Checkerboard gig was my first step down that road. Dead-end road now. Anyway, Howie was there that first night. We hooked up and he started getting me gigs. Kinda weird, actually. When you meet Howie, you’ll see what I mean. He don’t come across like he’d be that jazz savvy. He’s more like a- like a lawyer or something. No offense,” he told Cal, grinning.

“Oh, uh-none taken.”

“But I gotta admit, he knew his way around the scene.” He shook his head, dreadlocks swinging. “I sure can’t feature him doing this to me. Trying to control my music and all. Trying to twist it.”

“People change,” Cal said.

Big T chose that moment to step on a manhole cover, his hoof sending up a dull clang that made me jump in the saddle. I thought of Rory and wondered whose front door I’d just knocked on. Nervous, I checked the lengthening shadows between the buildings. Things scurried back there. Things larger than the average rat. The sky was a dull orange-red where the sun hung. I wondered if maybe the Change went all the way out to the sun, all the way to the stars, all the way to heaven.

I dragged my mind back to where and when we were. The diamonds on the sidewalks had turned to topazes, and would soon become garnets. “How much farther, Enid?” I asked. “Are we going to make it by sunset?”

“Well, we’re on Division,” he said. “If we get up on the Kennedy, we might be able to move a little faster.”

We’d been avoiding the major thoroughfares up till now. I looked to Cal. “What do you think?”

He glanced around at the littered streets and the shadows that crawled across them. The hand that rested on his sword hilt looked relaxed only at first glance. “This isn’t a place I’d like to be when the sun goes down. Up there we’d be pretty safe from ambush, theoretically.”

“Except from the air.” Leave it to Goldman to remind us of how impossibly weird our situation was.

“Here there be dragons?” Cal asked, echoing his skyward squint.

“I haven’t seen any,” said Magritte. She’d been flying point about seven feet up, but now dropped onto Jayhawk’s burnished rump. Not taking any chances.

“It’s hard to see anything with this haze.” Cal turned to Enid. “How do we get onto the freeway?”

We fell in behind our Bluesman again, our horses moving up Division at a brisk walk, their unshod hooves making a muted clatter on the weather-rough asphalt. Checking back along the line, I saw we had a straggler. I swung Big T around, slipped up behind Doc’s mare, and smacked her on the butt with my reins. She snorted and moved out smartly.

Not a peep. Doc merely took the horse a little more in hand.

“You’re awfully droopy,” I told him. “What happened to the old ox?”

He glanced at me, met my eyes for all of two tenths of a second, then looked away to scan the alleys and empty cars. “I’m introspecting.”

“Sounds serious. Are you sure it’s good for you?”

His smile was weak. “Probably not.”

“And what are we introspecting about?”

He just shook his head. A private man, our dear Dr. Lysenko.

“My daddy told me that the ‘Russkies’ had raised pessimism to an art form. ’Zat so?”

He shot me a startled look, then laughed. “Do not judge all ‘Russkies’ by this one.”

“Why not? If all Russians were you, my elementary school wouldn’t have come equipped with a bomb shelter.”

He ignored that. “Your father seems to have had strong opinions about Russians.”

“My father had strong opinions about a lot of things.” “Like father like daughter.”

I grinned at him. “Thank you. Now, just so you know, my opinion about this particular ‘Russkie’ is that he ought to stop introspecting and…” I hesitated, looking for some nice safe words. “… and start paying attention to what’s going on around him.” (And if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black…)

A smile deepened the creases at the corners of his mouth. “Da, glavah,” he said.

Oh, joy, another nickname. “What’s that mean-gla-vah?” “I said, ‘Yes, Chief.’ ”

Oh, don’t go there, I thought. “My father called me that, Viktor,” I told him. “You’re not my father.”

He looked as if I’d slapped him.

Damn. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that the way it-” He raised a hand to stop me. “I understand, Colleen,” he said, and kicked his horse into a trot.

“No, you don’t,” I murmured, then clucked at Big T and hurried to rejoin the train.

The Kennedy Expressway was clotted with abandoned cars, many of which had been stripped of tires, hubcaps, even window glass and seats. Fortunately, the Change had struck before the Chicago rush hour, or the road would have been an impassable maze. As it was, we were able to move at a trot or better if we single-filed it down the center line. It was windier up here, which wasn’t dangerous in and of itself, but made the horses a little crazy.

We’d been on the freeway for a while and had just swung southeast into an intricate cloverleaf when Magritte let out a cry of alarm. We all looked up at her, then followed the thrust of her arm eastward.

“Oh, God,” said Goldman. “What’s that?”

That was a filmy bubble of something rising over what I took to be downtown Chicago. It looked like a dome from one of those futuristic movies about the colonization of Mars, but it seemed semiliquid, like a soap bubble. A rainbow of color oozed over the scarlet-tinted surface.

“Man, that wasn’t there when we left,” said Enid. “Looks like it’s sitting right over the Loop.”

Magritte had floated upward again, bit by bit. Now she settled onto Jayhawk behind Goldie, rubbing her upper arms and shaking her head. “That don’t feel right. That’s bad.”

Cal reined Sooner closer-intense, face all angles, eyes bright and sharp. “Goldie, talk to me. What’s happening? What are you hearing?”

Goldie’s face had gone as gray as the asphalt we rode in on. “A whole lot of nothing. But it … it feels like…”

Magritte finished for him: “It feels like the Preserve, but… but dark and sticky.”

“Like the Preserve, in what way?” Cal asked.

“Like firefly stuff … sort of,” said Magritte, nodding toward the gleaming bubble.

Every drop of color drained out of Cal’s face. Watching him, I felt like I’d been plunged back into the river. If there were flares here, he’d want to believe one of them was Tina.

“No,” I said. “It’s not possible. How could there be flares here?”

Cal’s eyes burned. “How could there be flares at the Preserve?” He nodded up the dotted white line beneath our horses’ hooves. “Let’s get moving. The sooner we find Howard Russo, the sooner we can get Enid free of his contract.”

He left the part about finding Tina and the Source unsaid.

We hustled then, due south and parallel to the Chicago River, and submerged ourselves in the Chicago ’hoods again at Des Plaines Street. It was a better neighborhood than we’d been in earlier-or at least it used to be. That did not mean I was about to relax. I rode rear guard with both eyes on the shadowy road, my crossbow at ready, flinching every time someone poked their head out of a window or doorway.

I can’t begin to describe how twitchy I was, riding down that dim corridor. The others moved ahead of me in pairs, with Magritte hovering among the packhorses. I watched their backs; there was no one to watch mine. I felt naked, the flesh between my shoulder blades crawling like ants tap-danced up and down it. I decided that if we saw a police station, I was going to go in and do some clothes shopping-something black and sexy in Kevlar.

Finally, we swung east onto Polk. Enid called back over his shoulder that it was right up ahead, in the middle of the block between Jefferson and Clinton. The buildings were low rises, neither new nor old, and it looked like the zoning was mixed business and residential. Russo’s building was a four-story gray stone with that sparkly stuff in the concrete. The windows were tall, narrow, and covered with a facing of flat, vertical, fake marble columns. Very neo-something.

We drew to a stop in front of the building and Enid turned to Cal. “Now what? Do we just go in and get in his face?” “That’s my vote,” said Cal.

I raised my hand. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I would like to raise a practical issue. What do we do with these horses while we’re getting in Howie’s face?”

The cool thing about these older neighborhoods is the way they hid things behind their storefronts. In this case, what looked like a garage door led down an alley into a courtyard that contained a patio set with a folded-up umbrella, a woebegone Fiat, and an equally forlorn motorbike. There were also some trash cans and two bicycles sitting in a metal stand. Correction: locked in a metal stand.

We left the horses in the yard under the watchful eyes of Goldie, Doc, and Magritte, while Cal, Enid, and I entered the building from the rear. Cal’d drawn his sword. Enid’s weapons of choice were a switchblade someone had tossed into his guitar case during one of his street corner “giggles,” as he called them, and a bayonet he told us had been taken off a dead cavalryman by his great-grandfather, Soldier Heart, at Little Big Horn. In close quarters I like a good baseball bat. Especially if you don’t want to damage the other guy too badly. I was glad I’d thought to bring one.

Splitting up made me nervous, since I’d noted that the locks on those bicycles were brand new. We could only hope that nothing would happen in the courtyard that would separate Magritte from Goldie by more than a few feet.

Enid took us straight up to the third floor, but started

shaking his head as we came up onto the landing. “He’s not

here. But he’s in the building somewhere-I can feel him.” Cal peered up the stairwell. “We go up or down?” Enid’s brow furrowed, then he closed his eyes. “Down.” We went down. Enid first.

I traded glances with Cal before we moved to follow. “What do we do if he’s not here?” I asked in a whisper.

“I heard that,” said Enid from below. “He’s here.”

Cal cracked a smile. “We search the offices. We might find something. Maybe the original contract.”

I shrugged. “Which would do what for us?”

“Enid tried destroying his copy and couldn’t. I had a

thought that maybe we have to destroy the original first.” “Better light a lamp,” Enid called. “It’s dark down here.” “Could it be that simple?” I asked as Cal put a lighter to

the lamp wick.

“Now that would be refreshing, wouldn’t it?” He looked up, caught my eyes and smiled. In the lamplight his eyes looked more gold than hazel. Breath stopped in my throat and my face felt suddenly warm and tingly.

“You comin’?” asked Enid from the darkness.

“Yeah,” Cal called down, then set the chimney firmly over the flame and started down the stairs, giving me a backward glance.

I allowed myself to breathe again and followed him. Russo wasn’t on the second floor or the first.

“Little shit’s hidin’ out in the basement,” muttered Enid. “He probably felt me coming.”

The basement was a warren of storage and utility rooms, all arranged around a central area. I could tell right away that somebody lived here. Furniture had been dragged into the corner of the main room: a table, a leather chair, a futon, a shelf loaded with books, a small but nice Persian carpet. Very tasteful. There was something wrong with the picture, though-something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“Smells funny,” said Enid.

Cal was looking over some stuff on the table. He held up a cigar butt-well chewed. A tendril of smoke curled limply from the end. “Still warm.”

Enid and his great-granddaddy’s bayonet stood guard in the “living room” while Cal and I made our way down the hall toward the storage areas. We got to the first door, a storage room. Cal set the lantern down in the corridor while I checked the lock. It had been jimmied.

“You open,” Cal whispered. “I’ll go in.”

I shook my head. “You open.”

“Colleen…”

“All right. I open, we both go in.”

He nodded.

I mouthed a three-second countdown, then flung the door against the wall with a bang, in the hope that if Russo was in there, he’d freak and blow his cover. I mean, how used to being stalked through a dark building by armed commandos could he be?

No one leapt out of the stuff that filled the storage room. It would take a thorough search to find anyone in there. I took a step farther into the room, wielding my bat.

“Hey, Howie. Come on out and say hi.”

Out in the hall a door slammed and someone pounded down the corridor. Enid shouted. Cal and I whirled in unison and vaulted out of the room and down the hall to the main chamber.

Enid was facing us, bayonet in hand, his lamp held high and a stunned expression on his face. Cowering between him and us, trying to shield its bulging, white eyes from the light, was a grunter in a brown tweed suit coat and little else.

Now I realized what was wrong with the charming domestic scene we’d stumbled into. There were no lamps.

Enid took a step forward, lowering his lantern. “Shit, Howie. Is that you?”