Angelfire

ONE

GOLDIE

Ihave that dream every night. The day the wheels came off the world. Bye-bye physics. Natural laws, who needs ’em? And every morning I wake, realizing it’s all real.

Okay, no buildings literally melted, nor did the sidewalks and streets actually roll like ocean waves. But the whole world experienced it, this moment of cosmic mayhem, this thing most of us refer to simply as “the Change.” At least, we think it did. Nothing we’ve seen in the intervening weeks has suggested otherwise.

I have other dreams, too, also terrifying, also rooted in so-called reality. One of them is about a girl named Tina Griffin. Like our world, she changed-or began to change- in that moment of upheaval. So did a lot of other people. But Tina’s in my nightmares because I know her. She is the reason we left New York, the reason we head inexorably west- because her brother Cal has the same nightmare, and because that’s where the Megillah has taken her.

The Megillah is my pet name for what all the evidence points to as the cause of the Change. No one else calls it that. They have their own pet names for it: Armageddon, Doomsday, Kali Yuga, the Day of Judgment, the Real Thing.

Ek velt, Grandmother would’ve said: the end of the world.

Apparently, in elite government circles it was known simply as “the Source.” A science project of sorts. Funny, the words “science project” usually bring to mind papier-mache volcanoes and ant farms, not something that has the power to rip the world apart and put it back together all wrong.

But it appears that the Megillah has that power.

Tina Griffin, all of twelve years old, was one of the things it reassembled. And after it warped her body, clothed her in light, and granted her the power of levitation, it sorted her from among its other various types of “makeovers” and simply took her. And others like her. Where or why, we have no idea. Sort of a perverted take on the Evangelical Christian Rapture.

Before she was wrenched, screaming, out of her brother’s arms in the tiny back bedroom of a run-down house in Boone’s Gap, West Virginia, the changeling Tina spoke of Something in the West-a power, an entity, an Enigma. Something that came into the world with a roar and that now grows in it like a malevolent cancer.

And so, a Quest. Or a monumental game of hide and seek. We seek the Enigma and it … well, it doesn’t so much hide as it evades. It’s that thing you’re certain is behind you in the dark. But a swift about-face only nets you empty air and a dark slither out the corner of one eye.

And whispers.

Since that moment in Manhattan when buildings did not melt and sidewalks did not ripple, I’ve heard its whispers. Which makes (lucky) me the only one with half a clue about what part of the West the Megillah inhabits. And that’s about all I have-half a clue. I listen for it; I hear its Voice and we go. Tag, I’m it. Marco Polo. Games. Rough, deadly games.

Since leaving Boone’s Gap our quest has taken us through varied terrain. Quiet pastoral countryside where cows and sheep still graze and watch our passing with little interest. Places where it seemed the earth had erupted in boils, or a giant hand had reached down, dug in, and tried to wrench the bedrock out through the grass and trees and soil.

We avoid cities. Cities are places of unimaginable darkness and violence. I suppose they always were, but it’s a different kind of violence now, at once more focused and more mindless, soul-deep and brutal.

There’s violence of a sort in the country, too. And its effects have been devastating. We’ve seen ghost towns and ghost suburbs and ghost farms. But nothing like what we saw as Manhattan unraveled like a cheap sweater.

We see other folks ever so often. And ever so often we see not-folks. Ex-people who, like Tina, had their DNA radically rearranged. “Tweaks,” Colleen calls them. I prefer “twists”-it’s a gentler word. Although there’s nothing gentle about what the Change has done to them. People tend to avoid them, and they tend to avoid people. Something I understand, completely.

Most often we don’t see them, but merely feel them. Since some of them are rather unpleasant, it pays to be vigilant. You develop a sort of ESP about these things. The sense of being watched creeps over your skin and through your brain like a trickle of freezing water. When this happens, Cal’s hand goes to his sword, Colleen’s goes to her machete, Doc’s makes the sign of the cross. Mine does nothing. At the moment, I carry neither weapons nor gods.

We’re traveling on potholed tarmac today as we head for the border between West Virginia and Ohio. Cal and Doc are mounted on fine steeds (Sooner and Koshka, by name), Colleen drives our spiffy home-built wagon, while I ride shotgun. I mean that figuratively, of course. Since the Change, no one I know has yet figured out how to make a shotgun work. This is one of those good news/bad news things.

Our “wagon” is a pickup truck from which the transmission has been removed and the engine compartment gutted back to the firewall. It still has its vinyl-covered seats, but no roof, no windows, no windshield, and sawed-off doors. You can crawl from the front seat right over into the bed. It was, as they say, a find. Only cost us our bicycles and a couple of days work in the bed ’n’ breakfast from hell.

Water barrels are ranked outboard down both sides of the truck bed, which has an awning that extends from the tailgate all the way out over the remains of the cab. We roll it down in the event of inclement weather. The whole thing looks a lot like those old World War Two troop transports; only it’s a brilliant shade of macintosh yellow. For the first time in many days, the awning is rolled all the way up to the topmost strut of the support framework.

I glance at the sky and realize that’s likely to change. It’s a chill, cloudy afternoon-unseasonably cold. The sky presses down on the land like a heavy, gray sponge full of rain. Somewhere, there are calendars that say it’s autumn, but it feels like half-past winter, and the trees are turning rapidly, as if hurrying to catch up.

Along the road ahead I see a strip of maples with prematurely nude branches. It’s only when we get practically on top of them that I realize the leaves are merely transparent. They look like those blown glass things that once glittered in Manhattan shop windows. And as the moist breeze stirs them, I hear them, too-a fine shimmer of sound that’s almost music.

Fascinating. The rocking of the wagon no longer seems so soporific. I swing out over the chopped-down door and hit the ground running.

A sharp snarl snatches at me from behind. “Goldman! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Replying to Colleen’s question while galloping into the forest would waste breath, so I don’t bother. I make the trees and gingerly reach up to touch the crystalline leaves. They’re beautiful, but hard and cold, with sharp, biting edges. A breeze moves through the branches and stirs them to song. I imagine an entire melody is cradled in those branches, but then I imagine a lot of things.

I’m enchanted. I take off my cowboy hat and carefully dislodge several of the leaves into the crown. They fall with a sweet tinkle of sound.

“What is it?” Cal Griffin peers down at me from his horse, hazel eyes darting from me into the deeper woods. His hand is on the hilt of his sword.

I hold up one of the leaves. Steely sunlight sparks cold fire in the tracery of veins. “We may have to rename a couple of seasons,” I say. “How about spring, summer, shard, and bleak?”

Cal leans down from the horse and takes the leaf from my fingers. “Ouch. You’re not kidding. I’d hate to be standing under a tree when these things fall. If they fall.” He lays the leaf carefully on the palm of my hand. “Better get back in the wagon. Colleen might slow down or even stop for you if you apologize for scaring her like that.”

I carefully tuck the leaves into the pocket of my buckskin jacket and set the cowboy hat back in its rightful place. As always, my hair-too thick, too curly, and too long-puts up an admirable fight, but I cram the hat down until it submits peacefully.

“Scare Colleen,” I repeat. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

He smiles fleetingly and jerks a thumb toward the wagon, which has come to a stop down the road with Doc hovering near the tailgate. “Get.”

“Maybe it’s just a paradox,” I say, moving away from the trees. “Or an anomaly, or a mere flight of fancy.”

Cal clicks Sooner into a lope and leaves me to chug my way back to the wagon.

Colleen stays stopped to let me climb in. Then she gives me a chill glance, laces the reins through her fingers like she’s done it every day of her life, and clucks the team into motion. In this nippy weather they are rarin’ to go, as they say in the Wild West. They toss their heads, paw the ground, and pull at their bits. Colleen manages them effortlessly.

“You’re sure good at that horsey stuff,” I tell her, chipping at the brittle silence. “I guess it’s because you’re a native Corn-husker and all, huh?”

She gives me a cool green glance. “You think?”

I shrug. “Okay, I don’t know why you’re good at it. You just are. You’ve been around horses a lot, I’d guess.”

She repeats the glance, then puts her eyes back on the crusty tarmac ahead. One callused hand smoothes back her hair, which is almost as spiky as her annoyance. Scissors still work, but Colleen is careless of such niceties. I think she does her hair with her pet machete.

“Yeah. I got a horse when I was thirteen. Before Dad died. You never forget the feeling of the reins in your hands, the ripple of muscle between your knees, the smooth glide of a horse at a full gallop. To this day, whenever I get stressed out or pissed off …” A pointed glance. “.. I walk myself through bridling and saddling a horse just to chill. Well… and to prove to myself I remember how to do it.”

Her eyes go back to the road then, and she closes up tight as a clam. Conservation of intimacies, I guess. I play with my glass leaves, trying to shake music out of them.

After about five minutes of this Colleen speaks again. “You know what, Goldman? That’s damned annoying.”

I wrap the leaves in a handkerchief that’s made its way into my breast pocket and put them away. “You know what, Ms. Brooks? No one’s called me Goldman since my sophomore baseball coach. Well… and my probation officer.”

“Your what?”

Loose lips, the curse of an unquiet mind. “Oh, look,” I say. “A road sign.”

There is, indeed, a road sign. It proclaims that there is a town not far ahead. Grave Creek. Nice, ominous little name for a town.

“Eight miles,” says Cal, drawing his horse up close to the wagon. “If we hustle we might make it before the sun goes down.”

On a clear day we’d have some wiggle room, but the oppressive cloud cover puts us uncomfortably close to twilight. Since the Change, out after dark is not something you want to be. If the world is peculiar when the sun is up (and it is plenty peculiar), it is insanely scary when the sun goes down. Colleen nods and clucks her team into a brisk trot.

Barely half an hour later we hear a shout from Cal, who’s taken the vanguard. He lopes back to us through the gloamin’, waving an arm. Doc draws up along our right flank to see what all the hoo-ha is about. Pulling up, Cal points southwest.

The clouds have lifted at the horizon and a baleful red sun glares at us from beneath the edge. Against the bleed of crimson, a water tower stands in sharp silhouette. Firelight flickers atop the squashed sphere.

“Civilization ho,” I say.

“A lookout?” asks Doc, his eyes on the tower.

“Or a beacon,” Cal says. “Maybe it’s a friendly hello to wayward travelers.”

Wishful thinking. “You know, there were these pirates up Newfoundland way that used to set signal fires on the cliffs to beckon to merchant ships. After the ships piled up on the rocks, the pirates would go out in little boats and collect the booty. Survivors were offered a choice: join the jolly pirate band or die.”

“Judas Priest, Goldman!” says Colleen. “Do you have to be such a friggin’ fountain of helpful information?”

Doc Lysenko hides a smile in the twilight over his shoulder. “Ah, a child’s daydream. Didn’t you ever want to be a pirate, Colleen?”

Colleen’s face goes through the most amazing set of expressions: Doc has surprised a smile, but she aborts it and stretches it into a grimace, then inverts it into a scowl, then smoothes it into a look of prim disapproval. “What I want,” she says finally, “is to be somewhere other than out in the middle of nowhere when night falls.”

“Then we’d better get a move on.” Cal turns his horse and leads on toward the looming silhouette of the tower. Unaccountably, I shiver.

Our road descends into a shallow, triangular valley where the woods stand back from the edge of the grassland like spectators at the scene of an accident. The bottom of the triangle is a mile or two distant, and a second road runs north to south along it, merging with the one we’re on. As we make the descent, my eyes are on the place where the town should be. I can just make out more flickers of light sprinkled about the base of the water tower. I do hope they’re not pirates.

“We have company,” murmurs Doc from our starboard bow. He’s staring across the valley to the north-south road.

“Where?” asks Colleen, tensing.

“There.” Doc’s gesture is almost lost in the twilight.

A small group of people moves along the converging road toward Grave Creek, clearly visible against the dark woodland that hugs the road. They seem to be struggling with some sort of litter. Three of the people are very small. Children. Or munchkins, maybe. These days it could be either.

“I think they may have injured,” Doc says. “They could likely use our help.”

“Hold on, Doc,” Colleen warns him. “Let Cal scope it out first, okay?”

Cal is already doing that, I realize, moving down into the valley at a leisurely, nonthreatening trot.

“I’ll light the lanterns,” I say, and do, suspending them from hooks-one on each side of the driver’s box. Kerosene, no less. I just love modern conveniences.

Cal’s nearing the floor of the vale when yet another group of folks comes out of the woods to our north. This new bunch heads down across the meadow on a course that roughly parallels the north-south road. There is a flicker of fire as someone in the road troupe lights a torch. There is no answering flicker of light from the folks in the meadow. They just keep pressing through the tall, dry grasses.

The newcomers, I realize, are moving very smartly. Maybe this is because they aren’t hauling someone on a litter, or maybe because they’re in a bigger hurry. The new folks overtake the first party and swing wide as if to pass them by. Then they veer sharply onto an intercept course, and suddenly it’s as if I’m looking at them in a funhouse mirror. They become indistinct, fluid around the edges, a school of shadows flowing across the landscape as if pulled by currents.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Hair rises up on the back of my neck and I wish I could borrow Colleen’s machete-or Doc’s faith.

There is a shout up ahead as Cal digs his heels into Sooner’s flanks and tears off across the meadow.

“Oh, shit!” Colleen voices my sentiments exactly before she brings the reins down hard on gleaming horsehide.

The horses plunge into sudden and frantic motion-hot-blooded engines snorting steam into the twilight. The wagon jerks and my cowboy hat goes flying. Liberated hair tumbles into my eyes, blinding me. I hear nothing but the agonized squeaking of the truck’s springs and the labored effort of the team. The truck is heavy, awkward, and probably a bitch to pull, but Colleen steers them off the road entirely and sends us bumping straight across the meadow. We’re on a path that will take us directly into collision with the others … if our wheels don’t fall off first.

Ahead of us, where the two roads meet, the first band of travelers has gathered to make a stand. There are seven of them. Three are children; two are women-one extremely pregnant. One of the two men is stretched out on the litter, brandishing a torch. The others have torches, too, and baseball bats, and a wildly barking dog. Slim defense against what they face. Advancing on them are strange, dark beings that are less men than shadows of men-vaporous, nebulous, writhing.

Cal rides Sooner into the breach between the two groups. His sword is still in its sheath, but he’s swinging a loaded sling. Slowing Sooner only a little, he looses a scatter of golf-ball-size rocks into the shadow troupe.

Surprise! The rocks connect. The sound that results is not one I ever want to hear again. It is as if the air itself has cried out-a siren of rage that drowns out the baying of the dog and the thunder of our charging horses.

The shadows seem to melt back into the tall grass. But only for a moment. Then they’re back. I try to count them and fail. The shadows uncoil and ooze forward, pressing Cal and his horse back toward the crossroads and the frightened refugees.

Colleen shoves the reins into my hands. “Take the team!” she yells, then rolls off the back of the seat into the truck bed, leaving me with a handful of fat leather noodles.