Angelfire

TWO

COLLEEN

My crossbow and a quiver of bolts were lying in the well behind the seat. I grabbed them as I went over. I’d barely touched down when the wagon veered sharply, slamming me hard against the left wheel well. If it hurt, I didn’t feel it.

Just ahead a child screamed high and shrill. I barely heard it over the rumble of the wagon and I barely heard that over the bass drum in my chest.

I came upright and poked my head out through the support struts of the awning. We were still aimed more or less at the crossroads, but unless Goldman suddenly learned to steer a four-in-hand, we were going to trundle by to the north, behind the… whatever-the-hell they were.

Looking at them made me want to rub my eyes. They were shadows. Spooks. No kind of tweak I’d ever seen before. I couldn’t tell how big they were, how fast, how nimble. From this distance I couldn’t tell a damn thing about them, except that they were attacking.

Cal had gotten out of their way and was circling, maybe hoping to distract them, maybe looking for time to reload his sling. The tweaks followed his movement, reaching out like shadowy fingers. A chill streaked up my spine.

I was nocking an arrow when Doc flew past. Before I could do more than yelp, he pulled the lantern off my side of the wagon and galloped his mare full tilt at the tweaks, shouting and waving the lantern at them. I ground my teeth together and shot the bolt into the cradle.

The lantern did jack. If anything, light made these things harder to see.

Fine. I’ll just have to guess what I’m shooting at.

I aimed into the pack of flickering shapes and fired.

The bolt hit something-I heard it-and one of the flickers stopped, suddenly solid. It flailed the air for a moment, then leapt. Straight at Doc. It was like a wave of quicksilver that covered eight or nine feet in a single bound.

By all rights Doc should’ve been dead. Would have been dead, if not for the blessed stupidity of animals. First, his horse shied, dodging the tweak but putting itself and Doc right between me and my target. Then this mutt torpedoed out of nowhere and started doggy-dancing all around, barking its fool head off. The horse bolted and Doc tumbled off over its rump. He and the lantern hit the ground with the sound of shattering glass. The dog disappeared, but I could still hear it barking.

My chance was gone; the wagon rumbled past the tweaks and onto the north-south road. The horses got tarmac under their feet and charged due north. I lost sight of Doc.

I jerked my head around toward the front seat and yelled at Goldman to bring us around. “Crank it!” I shouted, and mimed the motion at him.

He cranked, pulling us into a right-hand crash turn that I prayed wouldn’t tip us over. Against the force of the turn I clawed my way to the right side of the truck bed and tried to see Doc.

He was about twenty yards behind us now, pushing himself up off the ground. The lantern had fallen four, maybe five yards beyond him, and flames were spreading swiftly through the dry grass between him and the tweaks, fanned by a chill westerly breeze.

The shadow-pack would be on him in a flash.

I hefted the crossbow and tried to steady it on the lip of the truck bed. I didn’t have a clear shot, not arcing away like this. But if I had to wait until the wagon came around, it would be too late. I squinted through the fire and smoke and dying sunset for Cal, but he was riding away up the road with three children clinging to him for dear life. The other refugees were frantically dragging the litter along behind.

I was it.

Doc was on his knees, watching the tweaks from behind the spreading curtain of flame. Their bodies whipped as if caught in a fierce wind and they were making this freakish keening sound. Made my skin crawl.

They were afraid of fire.

I popped back into the truck bed, threw open a supply locker and scrabbled madly through the stuff inside. Ammunition. I needed ammunition. I found cotton wadding, cloth bandages, alcohol. I used a bandage to bind the wadding to the tip of the bolt in my bow, doused it in alcohol, and dug a cigarette lighter out of my back pocket. The small blue flame was a comfort. Scrambling, I made a handful of sloppy, drunken bolts, then slipped three of them into the magazine on the underside of the crossbow. The rest I slipped into my quiver.

We’d made a full 180 and were bearing down on the tweaks hard. Past the gleaming flanks of the team, I could see one of them circling to the left around Doc’s protecting veil of fire. I swear to God I could see through the damn thing. I had to take a shot anyway.

I scrambled back into the driver’s box, just about knocking Goldman off the seat, and used the frontmost support strut to drag myself upright. I lit the bolt, blinking at the sudden flare of light, aimed one-handed over the nose of the truck, and fired.

The bolt sailed into the shadow-thing and stopped dead. The tweak went solid. Its head twisted toward me, and eyes the color of magma speared me where I stood. In the split second I got a clear look at it, it went up like a bonfire. Bile rose in my throat.

We were almost on top of them now, and I didn’t trust Goldman to steer. I nocked another bolt, then reached down to haul on the reins.

“Jesu-Christe!” yelped Goldman. Sounded like a legitimate prayer to me.

The team swerved sharply left, sweeping by the blaze and the beasts. Just as we completed our end-around, I clipped the bow to my belt, leapt Goldman and went overboard.

Mom always said I acted without thinking-used my gut instead of my brains. It was meant to be an insult. But since it usually followed the words, “You’re just like your father,” it was hard to take it that way. She was dead right, of course. I realized that as I hit the ground-hard.

I tucked and rolled to my feet. Doc was about fifteen feet away, crouched with a large shard of the shattered lantern clutched in both hands. I dashed the remaining distance, keeping my crossbow aimed at the fire.

“Hurt?” I asked.

He shook his head, eyes wild behind a veil of dark hair. But his voice came out, as always, rock steady. “Terrified.”

Me, too. That fire was all that stood between us and a pack of demons that melted into the smoke and shadow like black cats on tar paper. Only the one I’d set on fire was solid. It rolled on the ground about twenty feet away, making a sound that will haunt me till the day I die. The stench of burning hair and flesh made my stomach heave.

Shadows don’t have hair and flesh.

I sucked up close to Doc. Heat beat against my face. Somewhere, the dog bayed. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Which way?”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the road to Grave Creek, praying the shadows wouldn’t realize what their charbroiled buddy had-that fire can be outflanked if you half try.

We hadn’t gotten far when they figured out the fire’s limits. They did an end-around, steering clear of the burning husk, flowing to the rim of flame and around.

“Bozhyeh moy,” Doc murmured. The shard quivered in his hand, firelight dancing over the broken edges.

Cold wind nipped at us, and the air was getting soggier with the threat of rain. I didn’t want rain. I did want the wind-it whipped the flames, churned dust and smoke, and made us harder for the tweaks to see (I hoped).

They oozed like oil, glowing eyes sinking toward the ground. I had no idea how many there were-four, maybe five. I had exactly three doctored bolts.

“They… are they singing?” Doc asked.

It was unmusical and weird, but singing was the only way to describe it. Down in my gut I knew what it meant. I brought out the lighter, flicked it open, and lit the bolt in my crossbow. It blazed bravely. The singing stopped. Not good. I steeled myself for the attack.

There was a dull rumbling, and a bizarre, yodeling wail cut through the smoky air and stopped all of us-people and nonpeople-in our tracks. Sounded like a damn cartoon Indian. Then the wagon swept into my field of vision with someone standing straight up in the driver’s box like Ben Hur, wildly waving a torch.

Goldman. Bloody, frigging Goldman. The idiot was going to yodel his way right between me and a clean shot.

Horses are scared shitless of fire-not that I’d’ve expected Goldman to know that-and he was trying to drive the team straight into hell.

“Run!” I told Doc, and shoved him toward the crossroads.

He ran.

Goldman was fighting the horses for all he was worth, trying to get control of their heads. An experienced driver stands about a fifty-fifty chance of winning these little battles. Someone like Herman Goldman stands no chance at all. The horses revolted and he tumbled out of the driver’s box, landing almost at my feet with the torch miraculously still in his hand. The wagon rumbled away toward the western woods.

I dodged the banner of torch flame and raised my bow.

The arrowhead had gone out, alcohol exhausted. I cursed, flipped it out of the cradle and pulled another one from the clip. I’d just gotten it seated when they started singing again.

At my feet, Goldman howled and waved his torch practically in my face. I thrust the bow into the flame, burning my hand but lighting the barb. They were so close I imagined the heat I felt was from their eyes. Those horrible, flaming eyes were the only part of them that seemed not to move when you looked at them. Small comfort, but they made a good target. Knowing I wasn’t going to get off more than one shot, I aimed at the closest tweak.

The singing stopped and there was a sudden, dense stillness.

Here it comes.

But the volcanic eyes turned westward, and then winked out-one, two, three, four pairs-as the tweaks turned tail and vanished behind the veil of flame and smoke. I caught a glimpse of solid forms, then there was nothing moving but real smoke and dry grass. Beyond the flames the dog’s yapping faded.

I don’t know how long I stood there like that, crossbow aimed at the dying blaze, Goldman quivering at my knees. Rain came softly, pattering on the top of my head and running down my face.

He moved first, getting slowly to his feet and taking about five steps toward the wall of fire, peering through its growing gaps.

I lowered the crossbow and set the safety. My hands shook. “Goldman, you nitwit! Where are you going?”

He turned to me, his face pale in the light of his torch. His lips moved, but if he said anything, I didn’t hear it. Right about then, someone yanked me off my feet and dragged me up and across a saddle. Upside down, I caught a glimpse of blue-jeaned leg and a battered leather scabbard. Cal.

He rode away from the flames, and I was well-chilled by the time he set me on my feet several yards past the crossroads. He dismounted beside me while I grabbed stirrup leather and tried not to look as unsteady as I felt.

He gripped my shoulders, eyes scouring me for signs of injury. “Are you all right?”

I nodded, glad the early twilight hid my face. “How about Goldman?”

“He’s okay. One of the refugees snagged Doc’s mare and went out with me to get him. What spooked them? Was it the fire?”

I shook my head. “They were scared of the fire, but they were working out how to get around it when they… they just took off.”

“Except for the one you shot.”

He looked down the slope to where one of our new acquaintances led the exhausted wagon team back toward the crossroads. Beyond them the dying flames cast a strange glow over the meadow. You could still see the single corpse lying there, solid, unmoving… still smoking.

Cal turned, started to mount up again.

I grabbed his arm. “Where’re you going?”

“I want to know what that was, don’t you?”

“Not especially.”

He looked down at me, rain dripping down his cheeks, matting his hair to his head. “I’m sorry, Colleen. You didn’t really have a choice, though, did you? It would’ve killed Doc if you hadn’t shot it.”

I waved that aside. “Forget it. Let’s get these people off the road before those sons of bitches come back.”

There was just enough room in our covered wagon for our new friends. Cal had carried the kids a ways up the road and stashed them in an outcropping of rocks. That was where we loaded everyone up, lit every lantern and torch we had between us, and headed for Grave Creek. We hadn’t gone far when the dog showed up, exhausted but grinning in canine bliss. He rode in the back, behind the driver’s box, and panted happily in my ear.

The obvious leader of our refugees was a white-haired guy with a young face and glacier-blue eyes. His name was Jim-Jim Gossett. The pregnant woman was his wife, Emily. Two of the kids were theirs-a boy and a girl. The oldest girl belonged to the other couple-Stan and Felicia Beecher. Stan’s leg was splinted, broken when they’d lost their wagon to what Jim’s boy, Gil, called “pirates.” That explained how they came to be wandering the outback so ill-equipped.

“It was a real wagon,” the boy told me, “not a funky one like yours.” He sat between me and his dad in the driver’s box, seeming none the worse for wear.

Kids amaze me. They handle this shit a lot better than us so-called mature adults.

Jim said things were pretty bad up in Wheeling-a lot of looting was still going on in some parts of town. The hospitals were full to bursting; the shopping malls had turned into armed camps. “Then we get out here. First we lose the wagon, and then…” He shakes his head and shivers. “Weird shit. It was like the whole damn forest was watching us. Dog was going nuts for miles.” He glanced into the one remaining rearview mirror. “Can we go any faster?”

I urged the team into a weary trot. Behind me, Goldman started humming a soulful little ditty under his breath. “What’s that?” asked Jim.

Goldman stopped humming. “What’s what?”

“That song you’re humming. I’ve heard that before.” “Huh. I thought I was making it up.”

“No. No, I’ve heard that before,” Jim repeated. He was silent for a long while, and we all listened to the hushed voices from the truck bed behind us and watched rain sparkle in the lamplight.

“Is this Armageddon?” Jim murmured. “I swear I never thought it would be like this. This isn’t a war, it’s a plague of madness.”

Goldman started humming again. Guess he didn’t have an answer, either.

Not far up the road we were swept up by the Grave Creek welcome wagon-a bunch of guys on horseback armed with hockey sticks and homemade spears. To each his own, I guess. They’d seen us tangle with the tweaks and had come out to help. They seemed legitimately sorry to have missed all the action.

They escorted us into town, depositing us in the E.R. of the Grave Creek Community Hospital, where Doc was an immediate hit. He slipped easily into the role of medic, applying patches and checking wounds in the harsh light of a brace of Coleman lanterns. Within ten minutes of our arrival the two nurses on duty were following his quiet direction as if they’d been doing it for years. For my part, I tried to be a good patient, sitting quietly while one of them slathered my burnt hand with something that looked and smelled like mint Jell-O.

The kids, being kids, only wanted to compare notes about the “monsters,” and loudly interrupted every adult attempt at conversation. To them this was high adventure. They pretty much ignored Doc’s swabbing and patching, and chattered to Cal, faces flushed and shining. The two girls, Lissa and Melanie, flirted with the good-looking guy-the only adult who seemed interested in their take on things-while Gil pretended he’d never been scared once.

Their parents were grim and silent and clingy. I met Emily Gossett’s gaze over her son’s head. She gave me a weak smile that was more a wince and clutched her little boy’s shoulders so hard, he stopped talking, looked up and said, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

Cal paced. He fielded a few questions about what we’d seen on our westward trek, but quickly turned the questions back around. I could just imagine him in a courtroom-suited and tied, curly, fair hair carefully trimmed and styled-summing up before a judge. But no judge’d ever heard questions like these: Had you, Jim Gossett, ever seen these particular tweaks before? Were they nine feet tall or ten? Did it seem to you they were a little transparent? Did they seem intelligent?

Objection, Your Honor: this calls for conjecture on the part of the witness. (Okay, I used to watch Law amp; Order now and again. Guilty pleasures.)

They had seen these tweaks. Or thought they had. They’d picked them up earlier in the day below someplace named Moundsville, but until sunset the tweaks had kept their distance. “Lurkers,” Jim called them. The word put a chill into me.

Goldman, I noticed, had gone to ground in a corner, his back against the wall, his knees pulled up under his chin, his eyes open, staring at nothing. He’d been like that since we got here. Even while Doc patched him up he’d been silent. Not a gasp. Not an “ouch!” Not a peep.

This was unlike Goldman. He wasn’t a quiet person in any sense of the word. Sometimes he seemed peaceful enough on the outside, but even then I suspected there was still noise in there, like the little wheels that run his brain never stopped turning. Cal once described him to me as having bees in his head. For a long time now the bees had been asleep; the wheels had stopped.

It was creeping me out a little, and I’d just about decided I was going to slip over and see what was up when I realized Cal was talking to me.

“You said they just wandered off,” he said. “Any idea why?”

I blinked at him and shrugged. “Search me. They just split. They were afraid of the fire, but they’d figured that out. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe they don’t like getting wet.”

“Uh, no… no. It was as if they were, um … called off.”

Cal and I turned in unison. Goldman had gotten up and wandered into the middle of the exam area. He stopped in front of Cal and tucked his hands under his arms as if to keep them still.

“Called off?” Cal repeated. “What do you mean, called off?”

“What do I mean, ‘called off.’ I mean, like… dogs. Like, uh, pets. Like a hunting pack that hears the horn or catches a new scent.”

“Whose hunting pack?” asked Jim. He’d been watching Doc check his wife’s blood pressure. “Those weren’t any kind of animals I’ve ever seen.”

“Hold on,” I interrupted. “Anything might’ve drawn them off. It was cold, wet, windy. And, jeez, this is Goldman talking.” I gave him a sidewise glance.

He was nodding, his eyes on Cal’s feet. “Yes, that’s right. This is Goldman talking, and he’s a loon, so you can discount everything he says. But not this time. This time, listen to me.” He looked up and hit Cal with a dark, laser beam gaze. “Someone or something called those guys off. I heard it.”

“What did you hear, Goldie?”

Cal pays serious attention to everything Goldman says because, according to him, Goldman sensed the Change before it happened and tried to warn him. I had to admit I’d seen him do some pretty eerie things myself, so there were moments I could believe that. This was not one of them. Right now I was pretty sure Herman Goldman was not living on the same planet as the rest of us.

“Wait, wait,” Jim interrupted. “Guys? What guys?”

There was a moment of awkward silence that was about as full of wretchedness as a moment can get. Cal glanced at me, then said, “In our experience the Change seems to affect only human beings.”

I looked down, picking at the piece of gauze on my hand. Damn burn was already itching.

“Those were people?” Emily Gossett put a protective hand on her swollen belly.

I felt Cal’s eyes on my face. He’d ridden down to the scorched field. Taken a close look at the body. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod.

“How …?”

“How does it happen?” Doc Lysenko pulled the blood pressure cuff from Emily’s arm and finished the sentence for her. His English is better than mine, but it’s laced with the Motherland. “We don’t precisely know. We know only that it is, em, selective. Few people are changed. But there is no way to predict who will be, or when.”

The silence threatened to suck the air out of the room. Our two hovering nurses had stopped chattering, too, and turned grim attention to Stan Beecher’s bad leg.

Cal turned back to Goldie. “What did you hear?” he repeated.

“Hear-what’d I hear?” He started humming.

“Oh, jeez!” I said. “He didn’t hear anything because there was nothing to hear. Fire was roaring, those things were wailing like banshees, that damned dog-” I glanced over to where the dog in question snoozed peacefully under a gurney. “It was like you said, they caught another scent.”

“I said that,” said Goldman, jabbing a thumb into his chest.

Like that was real important. I said, “We know fire stops them.”

Cal nodded. “That makes sense. Light sensitivity seems to be a by-product of the transformation. We’ve certainly seen that with the grunters. Tina… Tina was bothered by it too.”

Every muscle in his face went tight, like someone had turned a ratchet somewhere in his head. Happened every time he spoke her name, and every time, it reminded me of losing Dad. Of course, where Dad went, there was no road back, and that was a long time ago, so it didn’t really bear thinking about. We had at least a chance of finding Tina.

Cal glanced at Jim and Emily. “But you said you saw them in daylight.”

“Only in the depths of the woods,” she said. “They stayed in the shadows. They never once came out where we could really get a good look at them.”

“Until the sun went down,” Cal finished.

Emily nodded.

“I wonder how far they range,” murmured Cal. “They could be local, regional-we have no way of knowing.”

He was right. So far we’d only seen three sorts of tweaks that seemed to crop up repeatedly-typy, to use a term from my horsey past. We’d heard them called by various names- sprites or flares, trogs or grunters. Dragons. There was no other word for those. Grunters liked to skulk in shadows and holes, dragons favored skyscrapers or other aeries, and flares, we had been discovering, were becoming scarcer by the day. It seemed the Source, or whatever was at the bottom of this abyss the world had been slam-dunked into, was sucking them up like they were Gummy Bears.

And why? Of all the changes a power like that could make, why change us? People in general, I mean, because I sure hadn’t changed. I couldn’t fly, I didn’t care to burrow into holes, and I didn’t hear Voices with a capital V. None of it made sense to me. None of it. Cal had this deep conviction that everything we learned about our new world gave us a better chance of dealing with the Source, I wasn’t nearly so sure. Hell, there were days I wasn’t sure what we were doing on this road trip. I mean, sometimes a little voice in my head (small v) told me the best thing to do would be to just hunker down in some quiet backwater like Boone’s Gap or Grave Creek and ride it out. Except that things were kind of looking like there was no “out.”

“It’s hard to believe they were once human,” murmured Jim.

“Strictly speaking,” said Doc quietly, “they are still human.”

The memory of singed hair and charbroiled flesh rose up to choke me. I’d had about enough of this conversation.

Cal put a hand on my shoulder, as if he knew what was going on in my head. I like that about him. I hate that about him.

“Look,” he said, “we’re all going to need something to eat and a place to stay…”

One of the nurses, a young thing with Coke-bottle lenses and big, doe-brown eyes, pulled off her gloves with a snap. She turned her big eyes on Cal. “I can show you to the cafeteria.”

“You have a cafeteria?” I asked.

She laughed and answered me without taking her eyes off Cal’s face. “It’s more like a hickory pit barbecue, but it’s a source of food.”

He smiled at her, no doubt making her day. “That’d be great.” He looked to Doc. “Unless you need to keep them here?”

“Only Mr. Beecher,” Doc answered. “The leg is most definitely broken.”

Cal nodded, gave my shoulder a squeeze, and turned to gather his charges. That was when Goldman planted himself firmly in Jim Gossett’s path and unloaded a gush of questions.

“On the way in, you said you felt as if the woods were watching you. What did you mean by that? Did you-I don’t know-uh, feel dread, excitement, impending doom, indigestion, bad juju-what?”

We all stared bug-eyed at Goldman as if he were a space alien. (I’ve wondered.)

“We were scared,” said Emily.

Goldman persisted. “But did you… did you hear anything? Did something speak to you?”

Jim cast Cal a fleeting and unreadable glance. Is this guy for real?

“I heard angels.”

The voice was small and came from somewhere around Jim Gossett’s kneecaps. Lissa had slipped unnoticed into the circle of adults.

Cal crouched so he could meet her eye-to-eye. “What do you mean by angels, honey?”

“Like angels singing. Oscar and I heard them. I think Gil heard them, too, but he pretended not to.” She sent the little boy an arch glance.

“Who’s Oscar?”

She pointed to the dog, who’d opened one eye at the mention of his name. The eye rolled shut.

“He heard them, I know he did, ’cause he barked at them and howled…” She paused to demonstrate, making Oscar’s ears twitch. “… and he tried to run away to find them.”

“Oscar barks at everything,” Gil commented.

Cal glanced up at him. “Did you hear the angels, Gil?” “It weren’t angels. Prob’ly just deer or something.” “Deer don’t sing,” said Lissa.

“It weren’t singing.”

“But it was like singing-it was.” Lissa looked up into the ring of grown-up faces. “Honest. Sure, Oscar barks at lots of stuff, but he hardly howls at all. He howls when he hears music. That’s why I think it was angels. Because Oscar could hear them. Dogs can see and hear angels,” she added.

“That was a movie,” said Gil. “This is real life.”

I swear to God, those were the most chilling words I’d heard all day.

“Real life,” murmured Goldie, and wandered out into the corridor that led into the wards, his shadow stretching eerily ahead of him.

Cal’s eyes followed him. He straightened and looked to the nurses. “Is there a hospital administrator here? Someone in charge?”

The nearsighted nurse-“Lucy” according to her name tag-nodded. “Dr. Nelson. He has an office right down that corridor to the right.” She pointed in the direction opposite where Goldie had gone. “I could take you-”

“Thanks, but I think I can probably find it myself. I would appreciate it if you could show my friends to the cafeteria, though. Colleen, would you…?”

“Play Bo Peep? No problem,” I said. “I’m kind of hungry myself. I can keep an eye on Goldman for you while I’m at it.”

He shot me the ghost of a grin. “Thanks.”

Lucy took us to their makeshift mess hall. She pointed us at the chow line, which was hopping at this time of evening, and hurried back to the E.R. I didn’t imagine for a moment that Stan Beecher’s leg was the big draw.

I scanned the room. Even in the uneven lantern light Goldie wasn’t hard to spot. He was a real fashion plate, if you thought a purple and red paisley vest and a green plaid shirt made the perfect ensemble. He was sitting alone at a table near the glass sliders that gave out onto a large patio.

Through the glass I could see ranks of grills and hibachis and other low-tech cooking devices-the kitchen, I guessed. There were five or six people scrambling to make sure all the cook stoves were completely beneath the awning and out of the rain, which was suddenly coming down in buckets.

I hesitated for a moment, then went over and plopped down across from Goldman, who was busy worrying a piece of bread to tiny bits. He didn’t so much as glance up. I opened my mouth to ask how he was doing.

“Kids are very perceptive people,” he told me. “They hear angels.”

“Angels with hunting packs?”

“Maybe the two things are not connected. Just because two occurrences are synchronicitous doesn’t mean there’s a causal relationship.”

I hate it when he talks over my head. “Yeah, and maybe there’s not much oxygen on your world.”

“I think somebody or something saved our bacon.”

“You know what I think? I think our lurker friends had dinner plans, and that the only reason they backed off was to keep from becoming tweak flambe.”

A spark of amusement crept into his dark eyes. “Oh, clever. And you continued the food metaphor. I’m impressed. But a minute ago you were suggesting the big sissies were afraid of a little rain.”

Before I could offer a tart comeback, he added, “There’s something in that woods, and I think it’s important we know what it is.”

“Goldman, I’ll tell you what’s in that woods-weird, creepy, bloodthirsty critters that were once-upon-a-time human beings, just like you and me. They didn’t get called off. They just got scared because one of them bought the farm.”

“And you were forced to kill him… or her. I’m sorry, Colleen.” He gave me a liquid brown look of utter sorrow that bit through me like a north wind, then got up and headed across the room.

I was stunned. “What-sorry? Do I look like I need your sympathy?”

Part of me wanted to chase him down and make him take back his pity. Another part was just plain embarrassed, because people were staring at me. My dignity circuit kicked in. I grinned and shook my head, as if I hadn’t just let him get to me. I was still sitting there about twenty minutes later when Cal came in and sat down across the table.

“Where’s Goldie?” were the first words out of his mouth. They pissed me off.

“Just missed him.”

Cal’s eyes tried to catch mine and read them. “Did he say anything more to you about what he heard out there?”

“Nothing that made any sense.” I changed the subject. “You talk to the admin guy-Nelson?”

He nodded, looking down at his hands clasped on the tabletop. Something about the expression on his face… “What?”

He raised his eyes to the sheet of glass and looked out into the rain. Flames from the cook stoves were bright blossoms in the dark. Our reflections watched us watching them.

“They have some very real needs here, Colleen. They’re short doctors, nurses… mechanics.” He shot a glance at me. “You name it, they need it.”

“He asked us to stay.”

A nod.

“You’re not seriously thinking about it?”

“I don’t want to think about it, but…” He closed his eyes. “Just after you left, they brought in a kid with severe slash wounds. Deep slash wounds. I didn’t think they’d be able to stop the bleeding. Dr. Nelson didn’t think they’d be able to stop the bleeding. Doc did. And between the two of them, they pulled it off. The kid’s unconscious, but Doc thinks he’ll recover.” His eyes opened and pinned me to the back of my chair. “When I first walked into his office a while ago, Darryl Nelson struck me as a man who was worn-out-almost used up. No light in his eyes, no hope. He said it was the end of a long day, but it was more than that. When he shook my hand just now …” He turned his right hand over on the table, palm up, and I realized the cuffs of his shirt were stained with blood. “…he was a different man.”

I touched the stained sleeve. “That the kid’s?”

He pulled a wry grimace. “I’m a paramedic now.”

“And they need paramedics.”

“They need everything.” He sat back in his chair. After a moment of silence he looked at me, his eyes sharp and cool. “You know as well as I do that there’s not a lot we can do in just a few days. This place has problems that would take an ongoing battle just to keep under control. But…” He gazed around the cafeteria at the little knots of people scattered around the room-families, children. “We can make a little bit of a difference here, and the rest could only help us.”

I had to admit, the thought of setting up camp here, even for a couple of days, was awfully appealing. We were all exhausted. Even Cal, for all that he seemed to have an endless supply of high-voltage batteries. This wasn’t an easy decision for him. Fear for Tina, fear that we’d be too late for her, for everyone, just hovered in the back of his head. You could see it in his eyes if you looked real close, as I often did.

“If you want to move on…”

He shook his head. “We’re going to be here at least for the night. Let’s just… be here now, or whatever Yoda said.”

I snorted. The thought of Cal being here now was a bit of a stretch. “Yeah, right.”

He almost smiled. “Look, why don’t you go get some sleep? I’m going back down to the E.R. and make sure Doc doesn’t pull an all-nighter.”

He got up then, automatically reaching down to adjust the position of the sword that hung against his thigh. The sword he’d pulled, like Excalibur, from a pile of trash in the Manhattan underground. Sometimes I thought the thing was more than a weapon. A familiar, maybe-like a witch’s black cat. Okay, that’s creepy, but these days you found yourself thinking stuff like that all the time.

I gestured at it. “You’re gonna forget to take that thing off one of these nights, and wake up with it fused to your leg.”

This time he did smile, and the smile got all the way up into his eyes. It was a smile that made you feel, irrationally, that he saw the end of all this, and it was a good end. He laid a hand on the sword hilt. “Darryl said if you go to the admissions desk, they’d find a room for you. With a real bed.”

“A real bed? I don’t know if I remember how to use one of those.”

He left, and I got a bite to eat-bread, jerky, dried fruit. Just about everything is dried or jerked these days. Then I fetched my pack out of the wagon and went up to Admissions and got myself a room on the ward. The guy there actually had me sign a guest register.

“Hey, when this is all over,” he said, “these kinds of records might be the only way of tracking people down.”

Either that made sense or I was groggier than I thought. I signed in and the guy handed me a towel and told me how to get to the showers. The showers, for godsake! I was so dazzled by the thought of showers that I didn’t take offense at the suggestion that I needed one.

The admissions guy warned me that at this time of night the fires under the hot water reservoir had been banked down for hours and wouldn’t be stoked until just before dawn. “Water might be a little cool,” he said.

It was merely lukewarm. Felt great anyway. After, I dragged myself to my room, lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. I don’t know how long I lay there trying, but I finally gave up, rolled out of bed, and wandered out into the hall.

From the ward I could look down toward the core of the building and the lobby, a two-story atrium with a lot of plate-glass windows and a skylight-almost like being in the open woods at night. I made my way down the hall past the gift shop (now a small supply store that took barter rather than money, according to Admissions Guy) and into the atrium. I curled up on a sofa in the lounge, my head resting on the arm so I could look up and see the sky.

The rain had stopped and the moon was still there, wearing a veil of clouds. She wasn’t full; it looked like something had taken a bite out of her. No matter. As days passed, she’d wax and wane and wax again. And there were stars, twinkling like a promise.

Something in the darkness of the west wing caught my eye. A shadow shifted, oozed. Static electricity arced across every nerve junction in my body.

I rolled my head a little to one side so I could see the mouth of the corridor from the E.R., which opened right next to the door of the pharmacy. After a moment of watching, there was more movement. Someone or something had just slithered around the corner into the darkened store.

I put the thought of shadows or lurkers aside and rolled off the sofa to slink across the moonlit floor, keeping low and using the groupings of furniture as cover. I passed soundlessly through the glass doors and paused to let my eyes adjust to the deeper darkness in the cluttered room.

My ears found the movement first; a secret scuffling, as of really big mice, came from the storage area behind the pharmacist’s counter. I crab-crawled across the front of the room, then slipped up and around the counter.

I could now see a tall figure standing at the head of a row of shelves filled with drugs of every description. A bluish flame glowed. By its light, he was reading something that hung from the shelf-a clipboard. Papers shuffled. He sighed.

He moved quickly then, down the row of shelving into even deeper darkness. I waited a beat, then scuttled forward to the head of the row of shelves.

The light flared again. He was kneeling at the far end of the row, exploring something on the back wall. The blue flicker revealed a cross-hatch pattern. Metal clattered on metal. He was trying to break into the lockup where I suspected they kept the really potent stuff.

I glanced around, looking for some source of real light. On the counter next to the deceased cash register was an oil lamp. I scurried, stretched and fetched, then fumbled the lighter out of my pocket.

The rattling was fainter and more purposeful suddenly. Whoever this was, he seemed to know how to handle locks. I moved with all speed back to the shelves.

He’d doused the light, but even in the dark I could tell the thief was making progress. The rattling stopped and the door of the cage creaked open.

I crept up the aisle, holding the lantern and lighter at the ready. Inside the lockup, he was fumbling in the drawers.

36 / Marc Scott Zicree amp; Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” The voice was a croak.

I lit the lantern and thrust it through the door of the lockup. “Hey!” I said. (Original, huh?)

He froze, hands full of bottles and packets, something like pain in his dark eyes.

“Goldman? What the hell are you doing?”