The Five

And that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

“Truitt?”

“Yes, sir?”

“One of your best qualities is that you’re determined to see a situation through to the end. I appreciate that. I’m going to tell you that you can see this one through, but you’ll have to go it alone.” The voice had paused for True’s reaction. None was forthcoming. “I’ve told the second team to stand down. As of thirty minutes ago, they were relieved of duty and instructed to come home as soon as they can pack up. I imagine Casey’s going to be knocking at your door any minute now. You say you have an errand to run this afternoon?”

“Right.”

“I can’t justify the cost, Truitt. Now, I can work with you on providing security at the venues in Dallas and Austin. But as far as having that caravan burn money and time on the highway… I just don’t see the point.”

True had known there was no use in arguing. When the large hand on the leash didn’t see the point, there was no point. It wasn’t as if he could single out anything that had happened in the past week as a reason to keep one team on the road. Everything had gone like oiled clockwork except for that incident at Magic Monty’s in Anaheim last Tuesday night, where a young man stoned on pot had set off a string of firecrackers in the crowd. The Five had stopped playing just long enough for the cops to haul the kid off to jail, and then they’d picked it right up again.

When Agent Casey had come to the door to announce what he knew True already knew, True had told him he appreciated the good work and attention to detail, and he would make sure everybody involved got gold stars on the reports. True had been so tempted to ask Casey to wait two hours, until the band had roused themselves from their late night gig at the converted church, and follow them out along Route 66 before taking off for Tucson, but he couldn’t do it. The orders had been given. The men were anxious to get home to their families.

So long, guys. We’re going on.

But after Casey had gone, True had had trouble steaming the wrinkles out of the gray slacks he intended to wear, the steam just wouldn’t come out of the nozzles, and suddenly he’d felt a hot surge of anger and when he banged the steamer against the bathroom counter he was holding a piece of broken plastic dripping water all over the floor. He realized he was hanging on the edge, and it was not a good place to be.

That was why he kept watch on the white car back there. That was why he wondered who was driving it, and why it kept such a constant speed. He thought about giving the troopers a call on his cell, identifying himself and asking for a little help in checking out a plate number.

“Who’re you calling?” Terry asked when True took the cell out of his leather bag.

“Hang on a minute.” But in only a few seconds True realized he wasn’t calling anyone. No bars, no service out in this expanse of desert. He said, “Just checking something,” and then he put the cellphone away.

“We ought to be almost there,” Terry told him. “The sign’ll say Blue Chalk.”

“Okay,” True answered, and he tried to concentrate on his driving.

Terry knew very well what he’d heard and kept when he was a child, and knew he had it still, hidden away in a place of safety. It was something from his grandparents’ house. His mother’s parents lived in a brick house a few blocks from his grammar school. They were still there, Granddad Gerald in his mid-seventies and Grandmother Mimi just turned seventy. Some days after school, Terry had gone there to get a cold drink and sit on the screened-in porch as his grandfather listened to the early autumn baseball games on the radio and smoked a pipe with a face carved on the bowl that GeeGee said was a musketeer. His grandfather played board games with him, too. Any excuse to pull from the closet the old Milton Bradley Dogfight or the Mattel Lie Detector or the really cool Transogram 52-variety game chest with all the different colored boards. And then as the afternoon wore on, and Terry didn’t want to leave because this house was small and warm and not like his own at all, Grandmother Mimi brought from the closet a small plastic keyboard that she plugged in and placed in her lap as she sat in the front room. He would never forget the sound of that keyboard coming to life when she flipped a switch. It was like hearing an orchestra warm up, the violins, the oboes, the flutes and trumpets just softly starting to awaken. An orchestra contained in a small plastic box. And then she played it with her supple fingers, and he was sure that her fingers were supple because she did play it, and maybe it called to her to play it, day after day, because they needed each other to stay young.

What stories that keyboard told! When Terry closed his eyes and listened, he could see the image in his mind of a boy on a raft with a beautiful girl clinging to him, and in the river the rapids ran fast over dangerous rocks and the boy would have to be quick and smart to get them through that treacherous stretch. Or he saw a hundred Cossacks on their horses, driving forward through the snow under a moon as bright as a new quarter. Or he saw himself, older but still young, playing that very same keyboard before a vast audience, in a great concert hall, and then the Cossack chief rode in right down the aisle and awarded him an official sword and the beautiful girl stood up from the front row and said she would be his forever.

And then, of course, GeeGee cleared his throat across the game table, and when Terry opened his eyes GeeGee puffed smoke from the musketeer’s feathered hat and slapped down the dogfight’s ‘5 Bursts’ card, which meant Terry’s Spad was going down in flames.

He began to think they were teaming up on him.

“Terry,” said Grandmother Mimi, “do you want me to show you some chords?”

Chords? You mean…like…ropes?

“Sort of,” she’d answered. “Only these ropes never wear out, and they always keep you connected to something wonderful.”

Years later, the small portable organ just didn’t wake up on one day. It was a Hohner Organetta, not the kind of instrument found in every neighborhood music store. It sat silent in the closet, gathering dust. Was it for that reason Grandmother Mimi’s fingers began to swell and twist with the onset of arthritis?

“Let me try to fix it,” said Terry Spitzenham, the high school freshman.

There was no owner’s manual. No electronics diagram. Maybe somewhere in Germany there lived a Hohner Organetta expert, but he wasn’t in Oklahoma City. Terry opened the keyboard up, and looked at the old wiring and the reeds. He replaced the electric cord, but no go. It had to be a voltage problem, according to his electronics books. Not enough voltage was being generated to produce sound. He tried this and that, and that and this, but the keyboard remained mute. Finally he decided to take it all apart, every last bit of it, and rebuild it.

It regained its voice too late for Grandmother Mimi, whose fingers would no longer let her play. But, she said, she would love to listen, because she said that when she closed her eyes and he was playing—just that small keyboard with its twelve black keys and seventeen white—she felt like she was right there with him.

His first vintage keyboard buy had been a Hohner Symphonic 320, a real nasal-sounding and nasty-ass bastard found in the back of a garage. If those old brutes weren’t the heart and soul of rock, he didn’t know what rock was.

And now, he was minutes away from seeing—touching, playing if he could—the legend of legends, Lady Frankenstein.

“There’s the sign,” he said, and he heard in himself the excited voice of a little boy.

Blue Chalk, it read. True noted that it was defaced by a pair of close-set bullet holes. He took the exit off Route 66 and started north along a cracked and uneven asphalt road. Ahead stood a mesa, purple above the burnt brown of the desert floor. True drove sixty feet and slowed the Scumbucket to a halt. He peered into the sideview mirror.

“What’s the problem?” Nomad asked. True was acting shady this afternoon; something was up, and it wasn’t just because of the second security team leaving, as True had told the band at lunch.

True was holding his breath. In his lap was the leather bag that held his pistol. He watched the exit curve very carefully.

“True, what is it?” Ariel had awakened when the van stopped, and now Berke opened her eyes and removed the earbuds.

“Where are we?” Berke asked.

True could see cars speeding by on the highway. He watched the curve for a white car that might suddenly take the same turn to Blue Chalk.

Nobody said anything else, because they realized True was not only working, he was a two-hundred pound tuning fork that had just been struck into vibration.

He saw the white car pass.

Then he let his breath go.

He gave the Scumbucket some gas and it rumbled onward.

“What was that about?” Nomad looked back, but of course could see nothing beyond the trailer’s bulk.

“I wanted to make sure we weren’t being followed.”

“Why?” Berke’s voice was tight. “Did you see something?”

“We’re good,” he told her, and drove on toward the distant mesa.

The road began to undulate, to rise up on small scrub-covered hillocks and then to fall into rock-walled gullies. Here and there were trailers with external generators because the power poles that marched this way no longer held electrical lines. They passed several houses that had collapsed under the weight of time. Maybe this had been a community when Route 66 was a leisurely scenic road, the theater of Buz and Tod in their red Corvette convertible, but now it was a footnote to progress.

The road curved in and out. If there was any blue chalk in these red walls of rock, it was hiding under camouflage paint. This place was so far off the track it was refreshingly clean, not a beer can or broken bottle or spray of graffiti to be found. An undiscovered country, True thought. Well, it had been discovered once, but in the end nature always won.

They rounded a curve and there stood the brown stone building Eric Gherosimini had told Terry to watch for in his letter. It was a hollow shell, really. An abandoned gas station. Long abandoned, from the looks of the two rusted-out antique pumps in front. A few tires that might have been perfect for a 1959 Ranchero lay in a dust-whitened stack.

“Damn!” Berke said, looking out her window. “Was gas ever twenty-five cents a gallon?”

A barely-legible metal sign leaning against a broken wall said it was.

“And who’s Ethel?” she asked, but True didn’t tell her.

Across the road were a half-dozen remnants of houses, not much left but the roofs and frames, and around them stood the boulders and shale that had over the years—decades?—drifted down from the rugged hill behind. Between two of the ruins was a rusted swingset, a slide and a seesaw. Once upon a time, a children’s playground.

The Scumbucket negotiated another sharp turn, another descent into a washed-out gully, and there the asphalt ended. Ahead the road turned to dirt.

“Your boy wanted to get away from it all, didn’t he?” True asked, easing on the brake. “You sure about this?”

“He said he lives a half-mile past the pumps,” Terry said. “We’re almost there.”

“I think if I’d wanted to be a hermit I would’ve chosen an island in the Caribbean,” True replied, but he pressed the pedal and the wheels of the van went round and round, raising whorls of dust behind them. “Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s just me.”

They continued on. True had been glancing every so often in the sideview mirror. It disturbed him that he couldn’t see anything through the dust. They rounded one more snakespine of a curve and Terry said, “That’s it.”

On the right was a small, regular-looking adobe-style house, nothing special about it at all. It might have been plucked from any Southwestern city suburb, with a minimalist and rock-loving landscaper in charge. But then again, most adobe-style houses in city suburbs were connected to power lines and didn’t have a pair of big metal boxes that could only be heavy-duty generators cabled up alongside. As they got nearer, they could hear a rumble like an old aircraft engine turning its propellor. An honest-to-God outhouse stood out back, along with a raised wooden platform that held a showerhead and some kind of waterbucket device operated by a pullchain. A sagging pickup truck the dun color of mole’s skin was parked on the shale in front of the house. Berke thought that it had probably used its share of twenty-five-cents-a-gallon gas.

True was getting the picture of where they were. He could see two trailers standing maybe a hundred yards further on, where the dirt road ended at a rock wall that angled toward the sky. He figured the Zen masters of hermitry lived in those trailers. Either that, or they were cooking meth and hiding from the IRS.

“You guys ever watch Western movies?” he asked. They gave him blank expressions. “Know what a box canyon is?” When there was no reply, he wondered what young people were learning in schools these days. “Well,” said True, “we’re in one.”

He stopped the Scumbucket in front of the house. A reddish-brown dog came rocketing off the shady porch, planted its paws in the stones and gave them a reception that could be heard even over the rumble of aircraft props.

Terry saw a man emerge from the house. The man stood on the porch, watching them climb out of the van. He looked as if he were trying to decide if he knew them or not. True clutched his leather bag close to his side.

Over the dog’s barking and the generator noise, Terry called out, “Mr. Gherosimini? I’m Terry Spitzenham! You remember? From The Five? You wrote me a letter saying I could come—”

“My brother!” the man shouted, and lifted his hands in the air. He had a gray beard that hung over the chest of his overalls and was decorated with what appeared to be small metallic beads. His deeply-seamed face grinned. “Finally come home!” He came striding off the porch with the gait of an energetic younger man. The barking dog put itself between him and the visitors in a posture of defense.

Eric Gherosimini was making music as he walked, though they couldn’t hear it. Tied in his beard with white and gold-colored cords were little bells. He was barefoot. Nomad thought the soles of those horny-toed feet must have been an inch thick to survive all the wicked edges. Gherosimini was thin and stoop-shouldered and bald on the top of his scalp except for a few remaining wild sprigs of gray, while the hair on the sides and back flowed down over his shoulders like opaque curtains. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that were not very different from Terry’s.

My brother. Finally come home.

Oh my God, Nomad thought. This dude’s going to ask Terry to change places with him so he can go out and paint the world red, and Terry will have to be the guardian of the secret fucking keyboards until the next sucker comes along.

But Eric Gherosimini raised his index finger to the dog and said sternly, “Stereo!” The mongrel stopped barking. Then the frail genius of the 13th Floors looked Terry full in the face, blinked his electric-blue eyes and touched Terry’s shirt, which today was black-and-purple paisleys on a background of dove gray.

“Boss shirt,” he said with admiration. “Vintage, ’66? H.I.S.?”

“You got it.” Terry remembered who he was talking to. “Sir.”

Gherosimini put an arm around Terry’s shoulder. “Come on inside. All of you. Come see the madman’s dreams.”

They followed him, with Stereo sniffing at their shadows.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

“I didn’t know if you’d be here or not,” Terry said, when he didn’t know what else to say.

“Usually here, man. Don’t get out much, but…how do you guys say it?…it’s all good.”

“Can I ask something?” True waited for Eric Gherosimini’s eyes to focus on him. It looked to True as if the man had some difficulty in that department. “Why do you live so far from town? There’s just nothing around here.”

Gherosimini’s gaze floated down along the creases of True’s slacks to take aim at the black wingtips. An impish smile worked at the corners of his mouth. “Man, I know I’ve been out of action a lonnngggg time, but they sure don’t make road managers like they used to.”

They were sitting in what passed as the man’s living room. It contained inflatable chairs in Day-Glo colors and a plaid sofa that must have come all the way from Scotland’s Salvation Army. On the woodplank floor was a blue rug with the image of the moon and sun woven into it. Some type of scrawny leafless tree in a rusted metal pot stood in a corner, its limbs bearing a strange fruit of several different kinds of multi-colored glass windchimes. A fan powered by the generator continually stirred the chimes into musical tinklings. A blue cone of incense burned in a metal cup on a table made out of what True thought might be compressed telephone books. The faintly sweet smell of the incense reminded Ariel of the way the air smelled at Singing Beach, in Manchester, after a summer rain. Several unlit candle lanterns in an ornate Moroccan style stood about, indicating that the generators were not always running. Stereo sprawled on the floor at his master’s bare feet, chewing on a green dental hygiene bone.

And it was not every living room that had walls covered, every inch except the front window, with white sound-dampening acoustic tiles. Bamboo blinds hung over the window. Tacked up in several places on the wall tiles were posters of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the rugged majesty of the Big Sur coast and the skyline of Seattle showing the Space Needle.

Gherosimini had brought them small ceramic cups of reddish-hued water that he’d said was sent to him by a fellow shapeshifter from the Lion’s Head Fountain at a place called Chalice Well, in England. He offered a part-toast, part-prayer that the world should be healed by the power of mystic waters, and that it should begin right here in this room.

Nomad thought the water tasted like it had been soaking rusty nails. He took a couple of sips and decided, mystic waters or not, he wasn’t going to run the risk of getting lockjaw.

“So far from town,” Gherosimini said, repeating a portion of True’s question. He was lounging in a bright orange inflatable chair. The windchimes tinkled softly as the fan’s breeze touched them, and Stereo gnawed on his chewie. “Nothing around here. Why do you think that, Mr. Manager Man?”

“Because I have two working eyes.”

“You sure they’re working?”

“Pretty much.” True took another sip of the water stained with iron oxide. It wasn’t so bad, but what he would pay right now for a glass of iced tea!

“How about you?” Gherosimini’s attention turned to Ariel. “You’re very quiet. Do you think there’s nothing around here?”

She shrugged, not sure how he wanted her to respond. “I guess I—”

“No,” he interrupted. “Say what you really think.”

“I think…” She saw he was forming an appraisal of her, and she decided to tell him what she really thought. “I think there’s the wind at night, and when you walk in it you can hear music, or voices, or both. I think there’s a silence that asks you who you are. I think there’s a sky of stars that would knock a person’s eyes out. I think the colors of the sunset and sunrise are never exactly the same. I think you could swim in the moonlight if you wanted to. I think you could stand in the blue cool of the evening and smell the ocean waves that used to roll here.” She could smell those right now, from the smoky cone of incense. “I think the rocks might move when you’re not looking, but if you keep looking one day you’ll see it happen. I think you could see a hundred thousand pictures in the clouds and never the same one twice. I think maybe you could see angels out here, if you tried hard enough.”

“And devils?” Gherosimini’s thick gray eyebrows shot up. “Could I see those too, if I tried hard enough?”

She nodded. “Yes. But I wouldn’t want to try that hard.”

He looked at his other guests with a smile that told them the quiet ones always ran the deepest. “What do you think about that, Mr. Manager Man?”

“I think I must be nearsighted,” he said, which really was the truth.

That made the genius of the 13th Floors laugh. The sound must’ve been unusual, because Stereo looked up from his chewie and made a weird questioning noise between a whine and a growl. Call it a whrowl. Then he went right back to chewing.

“My turn for a question,” Nomad announced. He realized Terry was looking at him with fear on his face, not knowing what John was going to throw at his hero. Nomad had heard of the 13th Floors before, sure, and Gherosimini had earned his respect for blazing a trail, but this bell-bearded sixty-something-year-old bag of hippie dust was just plain ol’ Jack to him. “You called Terry your brother and said he’d finally come home. What was that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t have a computer here,” Gherosimini answered, and then he sat there so silently and for so long that Nomad thought the tons of acid he’d swallowed back in the dark ages had come back to drop a psychedelic bomb on his brain. But then the man finished his cup of weird water. “After I got Terry’s letter, I went to the Internet room at the library in town. I went to your website. Nice site, man. Very cool, easy to navigate. I watched your videos. I wrote Terry that I bought one of your CDs. They’re hard to find. But…you know… I knew you before you were born.”

“Really?” Uh huh, he thought. Acid bomb, bigtime.

“Really. You were the lead singer of the Mojo Ghandis. And you were the lead singer of Freight Train South. You were up on stage fronting The Souljers, and man did you work your ass off for Proud Pete and the Prophets. Oh yeah, I knew you. Watched you burn up a stage, work up a crowd, many nights. Many, many gigs.” The wispy-haired head nodded, the blue eyes fixed on Nomad and unyielding. “I knew Ariel, too. She was the girl you went to when you needed to come down to earth. When it got real floaty and spooky up there in the high dark, and you needed a safe place to land. She was the one who told you what you didn’t want to hear, because she was one of the few people—the very few—who gave a shit whether you lived or died. And Terry…oh, yeah. He was there. In how many bands and behind how many keyboards, who can count? But he was always where he needed to be, when he needed to be there.”

Gherosimini looked at Berke. “I’m not sure,” he said, “if I ever knew you. Not in my era. The female drummer was a freak. Shit, you may be a freak too. But I do know one thing: you can bust it up with anybody who ever sat behind me. So take that compliment from a gator who drove drummers so fucking crazy they’d do anything to get out of the band, including jumping out of windows. And that guy you’ve probably heard about, who jumped into a pool at a Holiday Inn and broke a woman’s back?” Gherosimini grinned. “That spaz thought we were on the parking lot side.”

A frown suddenly surfaced. “Your bass player. Where is he?”

It hit them all, at that moment, that Eric Gherosimini had no idea what The Five had been through in the past twenty-four days. Without a computer, without the Internet, possibly without a television or a radio, maybe adverse to reading newspapers and magazines…he truly had decided to put many miles between himself and modern civilization. Maybe, Nomad thought, he just didn’t like the music anymore.

“Mike’s not with us,” Berke said. “But we’ll catch up with him later on.”

“Outta sight,” was Gherosimini’s comment, with an upraised thumb. “Oh, yeah…your question.” He focused on Nomad. “Terry’s my brother ’cause he feels the love. Of what we do. What we feel when we’re playing. And I say he’s finally come home, because he’s wanted to come here for a long time. Not necessarily this place, man, but to wherever I am. I know what I’ve done. I know who I am. Terry’s like family. He’s finally come home, and I know the why of that, too. He wants to meet the lady. Isn’t that right, Terry?”

The question made Terry’s heart race. The moment was near. “Yes,” he said.

Gherosimini stood up, and so did Stereo. “Let me introduce you.”

They followed him into the small kitchen and then through a sliding metal door into a larger room at the back of the house. He flipped a light switch. When the fluorescents came on, Terry thought this must be the first step on the stairway to Heaven.

It was another room whose walls were covered with the white acoustic tiles. The floor was of gray concrete. Within the room were several sets of speakers of different sizes, a twenty-four-track mixing board on a desk, a chair for the board rider, and cables connected to an item True certainly recognized, a multitrack reel-to-reel tape recorder. Next to the console was a wooden rack holding what the others knew to be echo and effects boxes, compressors, limiters, and other studio necessities. None of the equipment looked very new, and most of it was definitely vintage, from the late ’60s or early ’70s. If any of this stuff still worked, Nomad thought, gear collectors would piss their pants with excitement in here. Various vintage microphones were on their stands waiting for use. A plastic crate held a rat’s nest of cables, wallwarts and power cords.

On the left side of the studio stood a second desk, smaller than the one holding the mixer, on which sat a typewriter. A piece of paper was held in the rollers, with typing on it. Near at hand was a sheaf of paper, a tin cup holding some pens and pencils, and an ashtray with half of a plump brown cigarette in it that True decided he wouldn’t stroll over and examine. On the right side of the studio was a workbench with various pieces of circuitry and wiring lying atop it.

Terry was focused straight ahead. Nothing in Eric Gherosimini’s studio pulled at him but the array of mind-blowing vintage organs and electric pianos on their stands that dominated the space.

He felt for a few seconds that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t draw a breath. Something in his brain was so hit with the electric pleasure prod, and so deeply, that his automatic life-functions had gone on the fritz. But then he figured he really should concentrate on drawing in a long lungful of air, to clear his head and keep himself from passing out, because there never ever in his life would be another moment like this.

He went through a quick assessment of what he was looking at: a Vox Continental UK Version 1 with the cool black keys from about 1962; a fire-engine red Vox Jaguar 304, built to start a blaze on a dance floor; a silver-top Rhodes electric piano from 1968; a 1975 Rhodes Mark 1, a battered warrior; an ARP synthesizer…no, two ARPs, one opened up to show its internals and probably being cannibalized; a beautiful Roland Jupiter 8; a Minimoog Voyager and a Moog Sonic 6; a Prophet 600 with some missing keys on the high end; a Rhodes Chroma; an unknown thing labelled ‘Sonick’ in a suitcase with a blue keyboard and a control board with different colored knobs and what looked like a pegboard to chart the ocillators; a gorgeous wood-grained, double-keyboard early Mellotron; a glossy black Panther Duo 2200, the stage instrument of ‘The Partridge Family’ but capable of doing the nasty in any biker bar; an elegant, slightly arrogant gray Doric; two of the weird slabs of Kustom Kombos, the Naugahyde-padded “Zodiac” combined keyboard-and-stage-speakers, one in blue and the other yellow.

He saw sleek Farfisas and Cordovoxes with the ‘AstroSound’ effect. He saw a hundred-and-thirty-two pounds of double-keyboard vintage Yamaha, circa 1972. He saw the Gems: a Caravan, a Sprinter and a Joker 61. And then he came to the instruments he did not know, the ones that held no names or trademarks. The ones that were born from the acid-stretched mind of Eric Gherosimini.

He saw a sleek silver keyboard with wings, like a fighter jet awaiting takeoff. On the wings that curved back on either side of the player were dozens of rocker switches. Next to it stood a hulking black synthesizer five feet tall and about four feet wide. Above the blood-red keyboard were many banks of toggles, multi-colored cables plugged from one connection to another, knobs by the dozens and—ominously—a single broken wine glass sitting on a metal foil tray atop the brutish instrument’s ledge.

He saw an instrument shaped like a hand, with rows of gray circular buttons designed to be pressed or played or whatever by each finger. A one-handed symphony. He saw a thing that looked like a harp crossed with a washboard. He saw a five-note keyboard, three whites and two blacks, with a control console that resembled a peacock’s fan. Next to it was a red-painted upright acoustic piano with garishly-colored keys and desert plants and cacti bursting out of the open top. Was Gherosimini experimenting with organic sound-dampeners? Trying to create a naturalist sound using elements from nature?

“What’s this one?” Terry asked.

Gherosimini craned his neck to see. “Oh, that’s my planter,” he said.

And there…right there…only fifteen feet away, on the other side of the planter, she was standing white and pure on four shining aluminum legs.

Gherosimini crossed to the wall, opened a metal box and pulled a lever. They couldn’t hear the second generator kick into action, but they could feel its vibration in the floor. Green lights came on in a central command box. Lights of many colors, some steady and others pulsing like heartbeats, began to appear on the instruments. And there was a glorious hum of life.

“My brother,” Gherosimini said to Terry, “you can play anything you like. This is your home.”

Terry lowered his head.

Silently he wept tears of joy.

“Mr. Gherosimini?” Ariel was speaking from across the studio, where she’d wandered over to the typewriter to see, curious and writer-to-writer, what he was doing. “You have a new project?” She remembered the letter Terry had read. I’m working on something real, Gherosimini had told him.

“I do.” He walked to her side through the maze. He knew every taped-down cable on the floor, and every plug pushed into every multi-plug floor unit; he could walk through here in pitch dark and not be tripped up. “It’s something I’ve been writing for a while.”

Ariel didn’t want to look at what was typed on the paper, or what she’d glimpsed was typed and struck-out and retyped in the agony of creation on some of the other papers. She didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else’s lyrics, not with their song still unfinished. Mike had given his part, George had given his, Terry and Berke theirs. But not John. Not yet. And though she’d already added a line she felt it was going to fall to her to complete the song, to put it together from the different elements. To find a meaning in it, if a meaning was to be found. So far, in her nightly study of the words, nothing had come to her. Terry had tried to write a few more lines, but he’d ended up scratching them out. It seemed his part was done. Or was it? Berke was having nothing more to do with it, though she’d wished Ariel good luck.

Ariel thought John was afraid of the song. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to even look at it. He had told her this morning that today, the 10th of August, was the seventeenth-year anniversary of the death of his father in Louisville, Kentucky. He’d said that he missed his father, and that Dean Charles had been a very good musician. Dean Charles had known how to play to a crowd. How to give them their money’s worth. Dean Charles had known his role as a musician, he’d told her. But, John had said, his father had never quite figured out how to be a very good person, at least not to the people who’d cared about him the most.

I am not my father, John had said to Ariel.

I know you’re not, she’d replied.

He’d said that someday he would tell her the whole story, and she’d said she would wait until he was ready to tell it.

But that song… John, who feared nothing, feared that song.

Yet he didn’t say throw it away. He didn’t say crumple the paper and burn it, or tear it into strips and leave it in a motel’s trashcan when they drove away.

No. Ariel understood he was giving it to her to finish.

But she had fear too, and her fear was that she might make a mistake, that she might mess it up in some way, that the meaning and purpose of it might be ruined because of a slip of the human hand, or an imperfection of the human mind. Nothing created by a human was perfect and nothing could be perfect. But what did the girl at the well want this song to say? What did she want it to be?

“It’s called Ground Zero.”

“What?” Ariel asked.

“That’s the title of my new project. My rock opera.” Gherosimini was standing beside her, and a few feet away Nomad stopped in his inspection of all this old junk to listen, and True walked over to hear, and Berke had been scowling at the presence of a drum machine in the effects rack but she too cocked an ear in the old hippie’s direction, and across the studio Terry had been about to touch the cool white beauty of Lady Frankenstein when he heard the words my rock opera. He turned away from her, and walked nearer her creator so he might hear.

“It’s a work-in-progress,” Gherosimini said. “I’ve got some bits and pieces done. You want to hear them?”

“No,” Ariel said, and Terry almost hit the floor. But he understood when she added, “We’re working on something very important. I don’t think we should have anyone else’s lyrics and music in our heads right now. Thank you anyway.”

“Okay.” Gherosimini looked disappointed, but he shrugged. “I understand. You don’t want to muddy up the well.”

“Yes, that’s right,” she answered.

“Ground Zero,” said True. “It’s about Nine-Eleven?”

“Oh yeah, man. It’s about Nine-Eleven, and Nine-Ten, and Nine-Twelve, and Nine-Nine, and every day.”

“Every day?”

“Right. It’s about the war that goes on every day, Mr. Manager Man. Every hour, every minute. It’s about the quiet war. The one that doesn’t make headlines until something terrible happens, and people are left trying to make sense of why it happened. They’re left wondering how they thought they could’ve known the nice guy who lives down the street. The same guy who woke up one morning and took a gun over to the shopping mall. The student who barricades other kids in a classroom and opens up with an assault rifle. The decent woman who can’t stand the pressure anymore, and she hears voices in her head telling her to drown her children to give them a better life. That’s Ground Zero.”

“What’s Ground Zero?” Nomad asked.

“Human suffering,” said Gherosimini. “Ground Zero of the soul.”

Nomad glanced quickly at Ariel but her gaze was fixed on their host, who said to Terry, “Go ahead. Don’t be shy. You’re not the first one to find her, but you’re probably the youngest. She’ll appreciate a young touch.”

Terry didn’t move. He was still registering what Gherosimini had said about his rock opera.

True spoke up. “What war are you talking about?”

“The war.” Gherosimini stared at True for a few seconds. He wore a faint sad smile. “The spiritual war,” he said. “The war between the spirits, man. For the souls of people. For their minds and hearts. For their hands, because that’s what they really want. One to build, and one to destroy. Without human hands, they’re nothing. Don’t you get it?”

“You mean good versus evil, right?” Berke asked. “The cosmic wrestling match?”

“This one isn’t fixed. It isn’t predetermined. And okay, call it good versus evil. The light against the dark. The creation versus the destruction. I don’t know what it is…but I believe it is.”

Ordinarily Nomad would’ve thought the acid bomb was about to drop again, but now… after what they’d been through…especially that Connor Addison freak…

The angels are very disturbed with her, that trailer park nut had said.

It seemed to Nomad that the trailer park nut thought he was listening to a higher frequency than what was actually running through his comm line. He was picking up the low-down from Radio Stone Church, or from wherever the dark things on the other side of the glass sent out their bulletins to the branded.

As much as he hated hospitals, he thought he needed to check into one when they got back to Austin. He was going to have his head checked for brain tumors and even if they didn’t find anything he wanted to lie on one of those beds that move up and down and get plenty of sleeping pills and feel-good drugs and watch simple-minded television until all this was the hazy memory of a particularly bad dream.

“At Ground Zero,” Gherosimini said, speaking now to Ariel, “is where the war really happens. Everybody in the world suffers. Everybody knows some kind of pain, of disappointment or frustration. Because that’s the world. Things don’t go like you want them to. The richest man in the world and the most beautiful movie star…they know it. Nobody gets out without knowing it. And see, one side tries to winnow in, and drive a wedge to widen the crack that pain makes. Get in there, in the soul and the mind, and tell you you’re a failure, and everybody else is taking your share, and people are laughing at you behind your back because you’re a fucked-up old has-been with a heart full of regrets. Whatever they need to say, however they need to say it. And ohhhh yeah…they are real pros at what they do. But the other side wants to heal the crack. Not going to tell you there’s never going to be any more pain or disappointments, or unfairness, because that would be a lie. It’s a world of humans, so you’ve got to expect human failings. And that’s just how it is.”

“But,” Gherosimini continued, in a quieter voice, “the side that wants to heal the crack won’t do it for you. Maybe it’ll nudge you a little bit, or show you the first step on a path, but it’s not going to hold your hand and take you all the way. That’s your decision, and you’ve got to do that yourself. Why?” He turned his bright lights upon True and let the question hang.

“You tell me,” said True when Gherosimini’s silence went on.

“Because,” the genius of the 13th Floors said, “one side wants you to be weak and spread weakness around like a plague, and one side wants you to be strong and help other people find their own strength. But first you have to find it in yourself. That’s my opinion, Kemosabe.”

“Why should they even care?” Berke asked. Her voice sounded ragged. There was wildness in her eyes. “If these things are really out there, why should they even fucking care about us?”

“You’d have to ask them that question, sister. I doubt you’d get an answer. I never have. Maybe it’s a game, but that would only be our word for it. Maybe it’s a struggle of honor. Maybe it really does mean something, in the scheme of things. But I’ll tell you, I don’t think it’s for nothing. If I did… I wouldn’t be writing a rock opera about it, would I?”

Nomad looked at Ariel again, and this time she met his gaze.

“I need to ask you two,” said Gherosimini. “Have you been fighting? Like with the fists? And the eye and the nose got in the way? Yeah, one thing about being in a band never changes: the more passion, the more smashin’. But, you know, you need to feel the love.” He turned away and walked over the cables and between the keyboards to Terry. “Go on, man. What’re you waiting for? She needs some attention.” He pulled the swivel chair from his workbench and parked it in front of Lady Frankenstein, and Terry sat down.

The small red lights on the console burned steady, except for one at its center that slowly beat…beat…beat.

Terry began to play, just a testing of chords the way his grandmother had taught him.

Lady Frankenstein spoke. At first her voice was like one fresh from slumber, a little slurry, a little slow. She was, after all, up in her years. Her action was not the quickest. She had been in her prime long before the disco era, and now hers was the voice of a woman who had lived fully and freely with her long hair wild in the hot sparkle of the lights, her eyes glittering with expectations and opportunities, yet now she was graying and a little somber, and she wore a scarf of black velvet around her neck because she didn’t really like the way her neck was evolving, darling, and she thought she would sit over there away from the lights and tonight—one night only—just be content to watch the dancers pass.

As Terry played first a variety of chords to get the feeling of the keys and then went into his self-written song ‘Under My Window’, about a young man who watches a beautiful girl go past everyday but can’t find the courage to speak to her, he noted the red light at the center of Lady Frankenstein’s console had begun to beat faster. And faster still.

What Eric Gherosimini had said was the truth. She did appreciate a young touch.

Her voice—feminine, warm and knowing—flowed from two external speakers, one on each side of her. It was like someone singing, a cool clear tone, but then he could hear a voice beneath a voice. Suddenly there were multiple voices, and he realized it was how much pressure he put on the keys. Soft, a single voice; harder, harmonic doublings and triplings. Lady Frankenstein was not just one woman; she was a female universe.

And then the most amazing thing. Eric Gherosimini came forward and stood at Terry’s side and began to play right-handed along with him, and the voice was different—darker, maybe a little more rude—under his fingers, and Terry thought there might be heat-sensors in the keys themselves, something that transferred personal energy into the circuits and created the mood ring effect he’d heard about, that Lady Frankenstein’s voice—many voices—changed according to the emotional state of her player.

He wanted to stop playing and ask Gherosimini how this could be. He wanted to know if within Lady Frankenstein’s rapidly-beating heart there was a thermoacoustic element that translated human heat into sound. He wanted to know how her circuits were laid out, and he wanted to see for himself the intricate bundles of wiring that veined her together.

But no.

No, really, he did not.

Because she was what he knew to be the reason something had been awakened in them all, as children. Something they had heard and kept that other children had not. Something they still had, hidden away in a place of safety.

She was magic.

Listening to the music, hearing the voices of an angelic choir with a few bad girls among the bunch, True grunted and said, “Just when you think there’s nothing new in this old world.”

Ariel turned her head, as if to catch those words in her ears before they evaporated for all eternity. “What’d you say?”

“I said just when you think there’s nothing new.”

“No,” she told him. “That’s not all of it.”

He had no idea what she was talking about. He was rewinding his memory when Stereo dropped the chewie and started barking furiously toward the front of the house. The dog jumped over cables and multi-plug boxes like a champ and ran through the open door, still barking his lungs out.

Terry and Gherosimini kept playing, and Lady Frankenstein kept singing in a dozen swirling harmonies.

“What’s wrong with your dog?” True asked. “Doesn’t like music?”

“He loves music.” Gherosimini’s eyes were heavy-lidded, drugged by the voices. “Got great ears. But he doesn’t like cars.”

“Oh,” said True, and then it hit him.

“Neighbor drove by,” Gherosimini said. “Maybe Wally on his ’cycle. Stereo hates it.”

But he was speaking to empty space, because True had already moved and was on his way out of the studio. True looked to neither left nor right. He was unzipping his leather bag and putting his hand on the .38’s grip as he reached the front door, where Stereo was raising canine hell in an effort to get out. That had likely been how Gherosimini had heard their arrival. True went to the window, pulled aside the bamboo blinds and saw nothing but brown waves of dust floating in the air.

He eased the safety off his pistol and cracked the door open. Stereo wasn’t in a mood for caution; he pushed out like a barking battering-ram. Then True walked onto the shaded porch and looked for the car that wasn’t there.

Only dust, and Stereo in the middle of the road, legs splayed, barker aimed toward the south.

The two generators created a continuous thunder. It echoed off the rocks. True looked to his right at the pair of trailers. The dust didn’t go that far. He might be a little nearsighted, but he could see a VW van parked in front of one trailer. Alongside the other was an ugly old hulk that looked like an AMC Gremlin, up on four blocks. A friend of his had owned one of those in college. A death-trap, True had called it when parts fell out of the engine one day as it was being driven. Parked beyond the Gremlin was a motorcycle.

He turned his face toward the south. Stereo had stopped barking and was sniffing at something that scuttled from one rock to another.

Stereo was used to the muffled noise of the generators inside the house, True thought. But only a dog with great ears could detect the sound frequencies of a car or motorcycle through the acoustic tiles.

A car had pulled up in front of the house and then backed away. Probably had turned around on the other side of the snakespine curve. Its driver had surely noted the end of the road where the trailers sat.

True rechecked his cell. No bars, no service in this box canyon.

“What’s the problem?” Nomad peered out through the door. He had to talk loud.

“Do me a favor. See if you can get a signal on your phone.”

Nomad tried it. “Nope,” he reported. He saw a shadow pass over True’s eyes. His heart gave a kick. “What is it?”

“Listen,” True said. “We probably need to leave here. Right now.”

“You’re starting to freak me out, man.”

“My job is to keep you alive. If I need to freak you out to do that, I will.”

“I thought your job numero uno was to catch Jeremy Pett alive and put him in a psych ward.”

True watched the curve. Dust was still floating up from the road. Wasn’t there a song called ‘Dead Man’s Curve’? He wished he hadn’t remembered that. He made a move for the door, Nomad retreated to let him pass, and as True walked back to the studio where a chorus of ladies still sang he zipped his bag up.

“Guys,” he said, “we’d better hit the road.”

“Oh, man!” Terry cried out. He stopped playing and Gherosimini stopped and Lady Frankenstein stood silent but her red heart was still pumping hard. “We can’t go now!”

“What’s wrong?” Ariel asked, getting the distinct feeling from both True and John that all was not right in Blue Chalk.

“We need to hit the road,” True repeated. “Yes. Now.”

“Man, come on!” Gherosimini approached him. “You need to stay for dinner. I make a mean pot of chili and I’ve got some fabuloso magic mushrooms to share.”

“We can’t stay for dinner, thank you. Terry, let’s go.”

“Please, True!” Terry had swivelled his chair around, unwilling to leave it. “One hour! Please!”

Berke said tersely, “Shit’s hit the fan. Am I right?”

True looked at the faces that watched him. They were waiting for an answer. He worked his hand on the leather bag, feeling the reassuring shape of the gun. Not much use against a rifle at long range, though. But they couldn’t stay here. Not forever. Maybe it had been somebody lost, just driving. Yeah, right! But it might have been. Everybody believed Jeremy Pett was in Mexico. So why did he think that Jeremy Pett was sitting in his car on the other side of that snakespine curve? His car? The white car that had gone past the turnoff? Then what had happened to Pett’s dark blue pickup truck?

“Cool it, Mr. Manager Man,” Gherosimini urged. “Give Terry his hour. Anyway, if you don’t like mushies I want you to try some kickin’ ganja I got last time I was in Jamaica.”

“Jamaica?” Nomad asked incredulously. “You?”

“Yeah, me.” An expression of understanding spread across the old acid-head’s face. He gave a wide grin. “Oh, man! Did you think I was…like…destitute or something? Far out! Listen, back in the ’80s I sold a few of my ideas to Roland and they built some keyboards around them. My accountant says I’m worth more than the Six Million Dollar Man. I’ve never let any of my bandmates know. They’re good guys, but some of ’em are slackers and they’d be on me for money. I take Stereo to Jamaica every year for a couple of months. Love the ocean. Deep-sea fishing, rum, good smokes, all that. Next year I’m having a contractor come out and remodel the place while we’re gone. Converting to solar power. Terry, you play any Roland gear?”

“I’ve got a JV80.”

“I’m in that,” said Gherosimini. “Like I told you, it’s all good.”

True looked down at the floor, at his black wingtips.

He didn’t know what to tell his band. He hoped his mouth would figure it out when he started speaking, because his brain was only doing a half-ass job.

“Berke,” he said, “we’re good here for a while. You know me. I just get a little anxious when we’re not moving.” He directed a quick glance at Ariel, who also knew him. Then he looked at Terry.

“How about thirty minutes?”

Terry thought about it. He cast an eye over the beautiful keyboards that most people in the world never knew existed. So many to play, and so little time.

“I can live with that,” he decided.

“Good. That’s very good.” True nodded, and again he touched the shape of the .38 in his leather bag. It wasn’t much use against a rifle at long range, but it was all he had. A thought came to him. “Ever do any hunting?” he asked Gherosimini. If he was a fisherman, he might be a—

“Hate guns,” Gherosimini answered. “Worse than Stereo hates cars.”

“Okay. Just curious.” True smiled at Ariel. “I’m going to go for a walk. Not far. You know I get a little anxious.”

Then he turned away from his band, and he walked toward the front door and the road that led south.

TWENTY-NINE.

He had dust on his wingtips. It was puffing up with every stride. Small stones grated underfoot. Then he caught sight of a second shadow on the ground, coming up behind him, rapidly closing the distance.

When the shadow got in step with True’s, Nomad said, “Are you fucking crazy?”

True’s gun was out, held in the right hand down at his side. He kept walking briskly toward the snakespine curve, the sun hot on the right side of his face, his back and his shoulder. Nomad kept up.

“You probably need to go back,” True said.

“You think he’s out there? You think he followed us and he’s sitting out there waiting? If that’s so, what good is it going to do to let him see you? You think you’re going to walk right up to him, ask him to surrender to the FBI, and then it’s hero time? Oh, yeah! Make me laugh, man. He’ll blow your fucking head off before you can—”

True abruptly stopped and turned on him. “I’ve told you to stop that cursing,” he said, his eyes intense. “You don’t need that to communicate. It’s low, and you are not low. Get yourself out of the gutter, how about it?”

They stared at each other for a few seconds, mano-a-mano.

Then True started walking south again, and Nomad lost a step but caught up.

“How’s it going to help us if you get shot?” was the next question. “If you get killed, what are we supposed to do?”

“I’m just going to take a look. Very cautiously. I’m going to turkey-peek around that curve.”

“Okay, fine, but if he sees you before you see him—and from what you say about him, that’s what’s going to happen—he’ll put you down, reload and come after us. He might not know your face, but he’ll know you’re with the band. Gun in your hand…he’ll figure it out. Maybe he followed us from the club last night and he parked close enough to watch the motel. Maybe he saw the Yukon leave, and he’s figured that out too. Or maybe—maybe—he’s not sitting out there at all. But I wouldn’t want to walk around that curve and find out, because those fu…those bullets can run a lot faster than me.”

True kept going. Nomad said urgently, “How about asking Gherosimini to drive his truck out and scout for us? If he sees anybody waiting, he can get to a phone. Call for help.”

“If Pett’s there, he’s going to figure he has us in a prime position. I don’t think he’ll let anyone through. Would you like to be responsible for that man’s death?”

“The way this is heading, we won’t live much longer to be responsible for anything. Anyfuckingthing,” Nomad said, with gritty emphasis.

“This was a big mistake,” said True. “Coming here. A big, big mistake.”

“You want to tell that to Terry? Hold it.” Nomad caught at True’s white polo shirt and stopped his progress. The sun was fierce. Sweat sparkled on True’s forehead and Nomad felt it on his neck and the back of his Army-green T-shirt. “Don’t go any further. I’m asking you. Please will you not go any further?”

“John, I have to do my job.”

“Your job, Mr. Manager Man, is to get us through.” Nomad got his face right up into True’s. “Whatever it is. Keeping the van going, finding a place to sleep, a place for us to wash our clothes. Making sure nobody gets food poisoning, or if they have to see a doctor on the road you work that out too. Doing the best you can with a fucked-up sound system, or club owners who just don’t give a shit. You tell us we did really well when we all know we sucked, but we’ll do it better the next time. You get us through, man. The day-to-day grind. That’s your job. Because you signed on here as much a manager as you did an FBI gun.”

True wore a pained expression. He kept his eyes down. “John—”

“I’m not finished,” Nomad asserted. “Maybe your gung-ho hero boy is around that curve. Maybe he’s not. I hope to God he’s not. You want to save him because he’s sacrificed himself for a cause, because he’s seen the hard battles that took so much out of him. Something you say we’ve never done. Are you sure we haven’t? Are you sure we’ve never fought for a cause worth dying for?”

“And what would that be? To make music?”

Nomad shook his head. “To be heard,” he said.

They stood together without speaking, their shadows on the earth, the snakespine curve on one side and on the other rocks that echoed the thunder of a storm about to break.

“Get us through,” Nomad told him.

True looked toward the curve. Maybe Pett wasn’t there. If he was…

“I’ll try,” True said. “But if he’s set up with his rifle and he’s ready, he can kill somebody today. Maybe more than one. Even with the tinted glass. We can’t get a lot of speed out of that van, not with the trailer on it. Not much more speed even with it unhooked. He might go for the driver first, or for the tires. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear.”

“Will you tell the others that, or do you want me to?”

“We don’t want Gherosimini involved. He’ll think he has to do something to help, and he’ll either get himself killed or slow us down. I’m planning on driving as fast as I can out of here. Everybody else needs to get small, as much as they can. That’s not much of a plan, but it’s all I’ve got.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” True said. He retreated from the curve, regarding it with a watchful eye, and Nomad did the same. Then at a distance they turned around and walked back to the house, the black wingtips and the black Chucks stirring up dust in equal measures.

When they got to the studio, Terry was playing Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ on the Vox Continental, and Nomad thought that beautiful song had never sounded so amazing. It brought tears to his eyes, watching Terry put his soul into it. Gherosimini was standing a few paces away, eyes closed, feeling the love.

< >

True beckoned Berke and Ariel over to him, and he began talking to them in a very quiet and serious voice.

After it was done, Nomad saw Ariel nod. She lifted her chin up like a fighter, daring fate. Berke walked away a few feet and put one hand against the wall; she stayed like that for a minute, her face downcast, and then Ariel put an arm around her shoulders and Berke nodded too.

< >

Terry kept playing. Nomad saw True check his wristwatch. Thirty minutes had gone past. True bent down, because one of his shoes must’ve come untied. Then the other’s laces needed some attention too.

Terry finished the song, one of the greatest ever written for the keyboard. He blinked, as if emerging from shadow into sun. He looked around at True and asked if it was time to go, and True said it was, but first he needed to speak to him in the front room. They left the studio, and Gherosimini turned off the central switch, and all the voices went back to sleep.

Outside, as Stereo eyed the Scumbucket and readied himself for the hated sound of the engine, they wished Gherosimini well. Ariel told him she hoped he finished Ground Zero, and he said again that it was a work-in-progress. He asked them if they wanted any smokes for the road, and True had never been so tempted in his life but he said no thanks. They got into the van: True behind the wheel, Terry in the passenger seat, Ariel behind him and Nomad on the other side, with Berke in the back. Nobody spoke about the arrangement; it just happened. They would go out the same way they came in.

The engine fired, Stereo barked, Gherosimini waved, and True drove ahead to a place where he could back the trailer up and turn them around. Stereo kept barking and Gherosimini waved again—no, a salute this time—as they passed by. The dust welled up. Gherosimini and his dog were lost from view. True put his gun in his lap. He said, “All this may be for nothing. He may not be there, okay? But when I come out of that curve, I’m going to have my foot to the floor.” He was already gaining speed. The trailer groaned. “I want everybody small. Down on the floorboard. Tuck your elbows in and get your knees up. Hell, get your heads up your butts if you can.”

“Kinky,” said Berke, but her voice trembled.

“Thank you,” Terry said, as they entered the curve.

“For what?” True asked. The engine was roaring, as much as it could. The Scumbucket vibrated and the trailer slewed.

“For giving me time,” came the answer.

True was fighting the wheel. The trailer pulled at the van and wanted to go sideslipping off into the rocks, but he held it on the edge.

< >

They came out of the curve.

Jeremy Pett was not there.

Ariel started to lift her head. True said sharply, “Everybody stay down!” The Scumbucket’s speedometer needle gave up the ghost and started flipping back and forth across the numbers like a runaway metronome. Banners of dust flew back beneath the wheels. They went into another curve and then up a rise from the bottom of a gully. Loose rocks clattered against the Scumbucket’s sides. True kept the speed up, as something in the engine began to emit a high-pitched whine.

They crossed the rough divide between dirt road and cracked asphalt, a jolt that made the van shudder and the trailer wag like Stereo’s tail. Then they were coming around a sharp bend, and True didn’t know if he could hold the van on it at this speed, so he tapped the brake just a fraction, just enough to keep them from flying off into the rocks, and as they whipped around the bend there was the abandoned gas station with its antique pumps and parked at an angle blocking the road in front of it a white car.

A Honda, True thought as he clenched his teeth, determined in the next onrushing second to jerk the wheel to the left and get by that car even if he scraped both vehicles down to the smoking metal.

Bastard stole himself an Accord.

A bullet came through the windshield.

It made a hollow pop as it pierced the glass, and a second pop as it continued through Nomad’s window. With that, True realized Pett was on the right, maybe among the remains of the houses. He heard the front right tire blow, and then the Scumbucket pitched down on that side like a lamed horse and True lost control of the wheel.

They ran up over shale and rubble and crashed into the gas pumps, which sheared away in red whirlwinds of rust. Something metal caught up under the van’s belly and seized it, and the engine screamed like a voice in agony. Another bullet shattered Terry’s window and sent fragments of glass flying over him at True. The Scumbucket dragged itself to a halt, throwing sparks from beneath.

“Stay down! Stay down!” True shouted. He thrust his arm over Terry’s glass-cut scalp and fired two shots at the ruins and the rocks, just to let the sergeant know he was packing. But exactly where the sergeant was, he couldn’t tell, and he thought that by the time his eyes found Jeremy Pett he would be dead.

Berke, the tough girl, was gasping for breath. Nomad called out, “Berke? You okay?” but she didn’t answer. A bullet came through Ariel’s window, making a neat round hole.

True feared Pett was going to pick them to pieces. He felt blood trickling from a glass cut over his right eye. They had to get out of here. Get inside the building. Most of the front of it was wide open to the world. The interior was shadowy, but he could make out a tangle of stone rubble and collapsed roof beams. Make Pett come to him, so he could use the .38 at close range.

Some plan, he thought. And the idea of taking Pett alive, and getting him help…

“Listen up!” he shouted. “We’re going to—”

He paused as a streak of heat zipped past his mouth and put a hole through his window that spread out a spider’s web of silver cracks. He heard the whine of the ricochet off the building’s stones. He slid down in his seat.

“We’re going to get inside there!” he continued. They had a distance of about fourteen feet from the van to the building. “I’ll get out first and cover you! Everybody’s going to have to slide through my door! Fast as you can!” The other option was for them to go out the door on the right side, which would put them directly in Pett’s sights. “Wait for me to tell you to move! Got it?” He burned a few seconds getting his nerves in order, and then his next-best plan went up in smoke because he couldn’t get the driver’s door open. The handle had no tension; the cable was broken. A knifeblade of panic twisted in him. This was the moment every man responsible for human life dreaded. He had to do something, and do it fast.

“John! Watch your eyes!” True put two more bullet holes through the large window on Nomad’s side, and then Nomad got the idea and used both feet to kick the rest of the tinted glass out. True slid down again, opened his bag for more ammo and reloaded four chambers. He had another box of bullets, so he was okay there. “Terry, you stay where you are! I’m shooting over your head! Everybody else out! Go!”

As they scrambled out as best they could, True got off five shots. Pett would know what kind of pistol he had, from the sound. It wasn’t going to put the fear in him, but it might keep his head down. Might.

True reloaded. He heard Pett’s rifle fire, but where the slug went he didn’t know. Shooting into the building, maybe. Shooting at the Band That Will Not Die. This time, they might.

“Terry! You okay, buddy?”

“Yeah. I think.” His voice was shaking. “I’m cut up a little bit.”

“Me too. I want you to crawl between the seats and get out. I’ll cover you. Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Go!”

Terry crawled back and pushed himself through the window. True began firing through the passenger side, three shots at a ghost. Terry tumbled to the ground like a laundry bag. As he stood up to run for shelter, he was hit in the upper back on the right side and he gave a cry, almost of nothing more urgent than surprise, as he went down.

< >

He is where he needs to be. He is where he has been coming to. He has arrived, and today will belong to him. Gunny is with him in the rocks, close by his shoulder. His rifle is warm and it smells good. He is very glad that their van didn’t hit his car, because he needs it to get to Mexico. His journey will begin after this is ended. Like they say…today is the first day of the rest of your life.

It has been a challenging hunt. Tracking them from city to city, driving past the clubs, marking where they stay, and being very careful not to let those men in the Yukons get a good look at him. He has not been trained for nothing. He knows his business, and he is a prince of his profession. A hero. The Bronze Star says so, and so does Mr. Salazar.

Gunny thinks very highly of him too.

Jeremy wears his Triple-T Truck Stop ball cap. He has taken his sunglasses off, the better to acquire his targets through the scope. The sunglasses had belonged to Grandmother America. They didn’t look like an old lady’s sunglasses, they were pretty cool. In the Accord’s locked glovebox he’d found a hundred and sixty dollars in a bank withdrawal envelope. Why did they call it a ‘glovebox’? Just wondering; it had been on his mind during the long drive from Tucson to San Diego. Gunny had occupied the backseat on part of that drive, but he had no opinion.

Now, Jeremy sees that they’ve gotten out of the van into that building. He feels a pressure here, because even though this place is a perfect shooting gallery—except for that van being in the way—somebody may come along at any minute and that would not be pretty. So he does feel a pressure. He felt that same pressure when he saw the van and the trailer go off the highway and he figured he’d better drive on a distance since the van was just sitting there, he didn’t want to spook them, but then the next chance to turn around had been fifteen fucking miles west because a trooper got behind him and to cross the sandy median would have made him visible.

So here they are. He has just shifted his position a dozen yards, and it paid off because the different angle gave him a clear shot at the guy with the skinned head. He thinks that was a good shot, right through a lung. He’s waiting for the man with the .38 pistol to get out. Okay… okay…here he comes, out the window the others shimmied through. And now he’s leaning over trying to help the guy on the ground. The pistol in his right hand. Little piece of shit.

Jeremy sights and fires, just to let that man know what he thinks of the pistol, and he sees the man’s right elbow explode and the pistol drop from the shot-stunned fingers.

Bite that, motherfucker, Jeremy thinks.

Oh, here comes the long-hair. The lead singer. Running out of the building. Jeremy wants to know if that dude, that fucking Nomad, thinks he’s walking on a street under a burning sun. If he thinks that his blood is red, white, and blue.

“Hope they bury you where the grass is green,” Jeremy says to the image in his scope. His finger is on the trigger.

Nomad has emerged from the building to help the man with the shattered elbow, whose arm is out of the action, Jackson. Now they both try to help the skinhead. Terry, that’s his name. Spitzenfucken or something. Terry is up on his knees. They are trying to get him on his feet. Now, look at this: here comes the hippie chick to help, and the drummer girl stands at the edge of sun and shadow for a few seconds and then she comes out too, and Jeremy can hear their voices drifting toward him, telling each other to hurry.

He has a shot right on Nomad’s head. Right between the eyes.

Gunny tells him to hit the hippie first. Gunny has gotten very troubled about that girl, though he won’t say exactly why. He says hit her now, stupid!

Jeremy has a shot, but he hesitates.

Say what you will, those people are not Blue Falcons.

They’ve almost gotten Terry standing.

Jeremy shifts his aim and sends another bullet into Terry’s back, and as Terry falls on his belly again and the others are frozen in shock Jeremy resights on the hippie chick’s head but the drummer girl has her by the arm and is dragging her toward the building, and—shit, that bitch must be strong, because she’s picking the hippie up and running with her the last few feet.

Then Nomad gets his head under the man’s broken arm and drags his ass into the building too, and Jeremy fires twice more into the shadows that have covered them.

It is time to reload.

Gunny asks what he thinks he’s doing. Gunny sometimes doesn’t seem to understand who is in charge here. Gunny doesn’t appreciate patience or understand that you can respect the bad guys, no matter how bad they are. Jeremy knows he would have been an outstanding gunnery sergeant, if they’d given him the chance. He would have been an example for the men. Of how you fight back from adversity. How you never say die.

Only they didn’t want him, did they?

No, Gunny is quick to remind him. They did not. He tells Jeremy to get his mind back on his business, and that he is going to have to go down there and finish the job with the .45 that is tucked in his jeans. And he is going to have to go down like right now, because this is what you call a Mexican standoff, except for the fact that Jeremy has two guns and the man who had one gun now has a broken arm and is bleeding torrents, so move before somebody comes along that road.

Jeremy wants to know what’s so special about that hippie chick. She’s a fucking girl, and maybe she’s a liar and dark-spirited, but why is she so special?

Gunny tells him that it’s over his head, that he’s on a mission he needs to finish before he can start his new life in Mexico. That he just needs to go down there and kill her, and then he can leave the rest of them to rot, as far as he cares.

But why? Jeremy wants to know. What’s the big deal about her?

Gunny seems a little agitated. A little pissed, really. He looks like he wants to spit blood and fire.

It’s about the war, he says.

Yeah, Jeremy knows that already. It’s about that lying video. About the lies that say we went over there and killed children. Just shot them right out of their shoes. Shot them knowing it was murder. And then came back over here and didn’t tell a single solitary soul, because we were good guys, loyal and patriotic, and that’s not something you can talk about, not even to your buddy who does nothing but offer you an empty smile from his wheelchair at the Veteran’s Hospital in Temple.

Nice day for a white wedding.

Yes it is, he thinks.

Jeremy stands up like a soldier. He begins walking through the rocks toward the road, and the building beyond. He is hot and thirsty and ready to finish his mission. With two more strides he goes crash into the first moment of the rest of his life and he walked to the white car. He held the rifle at the ready, and his other hand went under his shirt to touch the automatic pistol. He could feel Gunny, walking at his side. He passed the skinhead, lying on his belly alongside the crumpled van. Where was the pistol? It had fallen somewhere around here.

One of the others must’ve picked it up. He drew his .45 and, holding it ready before him, he eased toward the building, step after step. Gunny was beside him, and Gunny began to chatter about killing the girl like an excited kid on his way to a carnival.

< >

Terry heard music. It was himself, playing ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ on the Vox Continental. He was hurting. He was fading in and out, like a broken speaker. His wires were severely damaged. But oh, that music he could hear. He knew he was dying, but if he could hear music to the very last…then what was death, but an all-access pass to a bigger stage?

But this thing underneath him, whatever it was, hurt like fucking hell.

It was underneath his left side, pressing into his ribs.

He slowly shifted his body. His breathing gurgled like the pipes in a motel he remembered. He felt under himself to move that hard pain so he could listen to the music in peace, and his hand fell upon something metal. His fingers made out what it was: True’s pistol.

He was aware of someone moving past him. Walking toward the building where his friends had gone. It was a man wearing a ball cap. It took Terry a few seconds to focus because his Lennon specs were gone and everything was blurry and turning red, but he could make out that the man was carrying a rifle and a handgun.

Terry thought he didn’t have a whole lot of time or a whole lot of strength left. But maybe he was where he needed to be, when he needed to be there. He put his hand on the grip and found the trigger.

He sucked in his breath and rolled over to bring the gun up, and as the man caught the movement and started to turn Terry squeezed the trigger just as he used to do on the firing range in Oklahoma City. The bullet went in low on the left side, a few inches away from the spine, and when he felt the jagged ripping pain Jeremy knew he was in deep shit, because it had been a killing shot. He staggered, and he heard Gunny give a sigh of exasperation, as if this was the stupidest thing that could ever have happened in the world, but Jeremy thought Gunny had been too busy crowing about killing that girl to be watching his back.

Terry tried to pull the trigger again, but his finger and hand would not obey. His arm gave it up too. The pistol fell to the ground. Jeremy walked to him, more angry at Gunny than anything else. He thrust the .45 out at Terry’s face, about to blow the head apart, and then he saw Terry faintly smile and Terry’s eyes glaze over as he died.

Fucker looked like he was hearing something that could not be heard.

Gunny told him to get in there and finish it, because now he knew where the gun was. Kill the girl, Gunny said. Okay, kill them all, but kill the girl first.

Jeremy nodded. He could feel the blood running out of him. His shirt was wet back there. Maybe a nicked artery. Sonofabitch. Fucking amateur had gotten off a pro shot. He wanted to laugh, but he feared he might start crying, and that was not how he wanted to go out. Besides, he did have the mission to finish. But he wasn’t getting to Mexico in this lifetime. Neither in this lifetime would he be working for the federales, or have a house on the beach, or find a new career as a hit man, or be much of anything in a very short while.

He did cry, just a few tears. He was crying when he walked to the edge of sun and shadow, and he saw them in there because they had nowhere else to go. Most of the roof had fallen in and the timbers and rubble blocked the way to the windows at the rear. The man with the shattered elbow was lying with his back against the stones, his face bleached by pain, a glass cut bleeding over his right eye, one arm supporting the shattered elbow. His polo shirt used to be white. The drummer girl was beside him, her eyes fixed upon Jeremy with terror. In her hand was a rock, like she was about to throw it. He said, “Don’t do that.” His voice sounded distant.

Nomad shifted his position. He was standing where he’d been desperately trying to dig through the debris to one of the windows, but it was hopeless. His right ankle had twisted as he’d tried to support Terry, and had twisted more severely when he’d helped True. Beside him was Ariel, her hands scraped and dirty from working at the same mound of rubble.

Jeremy sighed. He decided he would not finish them with the pistol after all. They were not Blue Falcons, and so he would take them out with respect. The pistol was so ugly, but the rifle was a work of art. He pushed the .45 into his jeans, and touched the wound at his back. His hand came back looking like a crimson glove. He chambered a round and saw with disgust that he was getting blood all over his weapon.

On the ground, True said hoarsely, “Jeremy. Sergeant Pett. No.”

< >

Kill the girl first, Gunny instructed, as if Jeremy had forgotten already.

Ariel had realized two things: Jeremy Pett was probably bleeding to death from the wound Terry had delivered, and he was going to kill them all.

Those were the facts. Another fact was: she knew what had brought him here.

Though her knees trembled and she peed a little bit in her panties, Ariel stepped forward.

“You want me,” she said.

Because it was the truth, and it was the only way.

“Ariel!” Nomad reached for her and limped after her but she didn’t even look at him. When he grasped her shoulder and tried to turn her to face him, she pushed him back.

“Yes, you do,” she told Jeremy. Her voice was calmer, now that she’d decided. She could look him right in the eyes and accept it. “I am what you want to kill. You and whatever’s with you.”

“Shit,” he said, amazed. “That’s Gunny. Can you see him?”

Ariel said. “I’ll go with you, out of here. If you kill me, would you let my friends live?”

A trick, Gunny said with a wary sneer. Kill her where she stands.

But Jeremy, who felt his time streaming from him, frowned and said, “Maybe.”

“No way! No way!” Berke’s face was streaked with tears. She stood up, still gripping her rock.

It had occurred to Ariel that if she could get him far enough away from the others, even if he killed her—when he killed her—he might not be able to get back.

“I’m ready,” Ariel told Jeremy. Her voice threatened to crack; she wouldn’t allow it. “The thing that’s with you wants me dead. So if you need to do that, I’m ready. I’m just asking you… please, to let my friends live.”

A trick, Gunny repeated.

< >

Nomad picked up a board with nails sticking out of it. His face was gray and bits of glass were caught in his hair. He tensed, about to lunge forward as fast as he could—if he could—and start swinging. Ariel saw Jeremy’s bleary eyes fix on him, and she said quietly, “John, don’t.”

She came closer to Jeremy Pett. She came right up next to him. She looked into his face without fear, and she said the three hardest words she’d ever spoken in her life.

“Walk with me.”

She reached out to take his bloody hand, and to guide him away from her family.

Jeremy stepped back.

Something is wrong here, he thought.

Something was all mixed up. The good and the bad and the weak and the strong, all mixed up. It seemed to him that she should be sobbing and begging for her life. He had the rifle. She had nothing. He didn’t understand this; it went against all his training, that a weak unarmed enemy could look at a rifle and see their death in it, and not fall terrified before it. And she was weak. She was a weak, dark-spirited…

…liar?

He felt like he was about to pass out. It was close on him, this oncoming darkness. He could feel himself not only bleeding, but filling up with blood on the inside. He was a bladder, and something was about to burst.

I did kill a child, he thought. I did. I committed murder. I did.

It had eaten at him for so long. It had chewed and chewed at him, down in the belly of the beast. It had misshapen him, and warped time into a long midnight that never moved. It had driven itself into his bones, and made a nest in his heart.

It was pecking at him, even now. It never stopped.

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

God had punished him for that murder. He was certain of it. Call it fate, if you wanted to, but it was God who made him pay. But Jeremy thought, as the world began to slowly turn around him and the taste of blood was thick in his mouth, that if only…if only he’d been able to tell someone about it. To tell Karen, and ask her to pray for him, but the accident took her away before he could. To tell his father, and get a kind hand on the shoulder, but it would only be another fist. To tell any of the officers, or the men, or any of the doctors at the hospital where he hoped one Wednesday somebody would ask him how he was doing. To have someone…anyone…listen, and say what he needed to hear most in this world. But, as the Christian In Action had said, our meeting never happened.

And now, in a place where it was the least expected, the person he’d least expected to help him with this burden was listening. Of all people, it was the hippie chick. She was standing before him, unafraid of his rifle, and he could tell she’d made up her mind to die for the others, and what more could you say about a person?

< >

“I murdered a child.” Jeremy said to Ariel. “In Iraq.” The words came out with thorns on them. They were tough to dislodge. “I’m not a good guy. But the others…the soldiers…they weren’t all like me. You were wrong to say those things. We didn’t go over there to kill children. We went to do our job. They weren’t all like me.” His voice shattered, and fresh tears began to course down his face. “Do you hear?”

She felt what he wanted. His eyes were frightened, and he was starting to waver on his feet. She focused on this moment, this moment alone, and with an effort that redefined the limits of her willpower she put aside her grief at the things this man had done.

She knew. And she knew that whatever was with him in this place, whatever had brought him on his long journey, whatever it had promised him, whatever it had proclaimed, it could not give him what she was about to offer. It was so simple, yet so important that the lack of it could crush a soul.

“I hear you,” she said.

Oh my God, Jeremy thought. Oh Jesus… I have killed innocent people. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Maybe this band had been harsh in their interview with Felix Gogo. Maybe they’d been wrong in their judgement of his fellow soldiers…but how did the video itself lie? How was it not an accurate depiction of the choices that a soldier had to make, and no matter how tough you were trained you only had seconds to decide matters of life and death? How was it not the truth, showing the darkness that can swirl down in an instant and peck you to pieces?

I am the liar, he thought. Me.

And Gunny.

Gunny’s a liar, too.

There is no need to kill anyone else today, he thought. This battle is over.

< >

Jeremy felt his face begin to come apart. A knot rose, writhing, on his forehead. He reached up and pushed it down. His right eye began to sag from its socket. He took his fingers and put it back in its place. His mouth opened, wider and wider, and his jaw began to unhinge, but he pushed his jaw up with one firm hand and his mouth closed and the little ripplings and tremors that moved across the plains of flesh and bone ceased to be.

< >

He shivered. He lowered his rifle, and when he did a small figure stepped out from behind Ariel Collier, and held onto the edge of her dirty blouse with one hand, and from the shadowed face the voice of a little boy said, Daddy? You can come home now.

Gunny screamed in Jeremy’s ear that this thing lied.

Screamed that it was not what he thought. Screamed that it was a trick, that he should not—could not—let his eyes fuck up his brain. Screamed You have a mission, you dumb fuckstick.

But for a brief moment, as Gunny shrieked and babbled in first one ear and then the other, Jeremy Pett was allowed to see beyond the glass.

They were not alone in this ruined place.

There were other figures, at the edge of sun and shadow. They stood amid the rubble, behind Ariel Collier, John Charles, Berke Bonnevey and Truitt Allen. They stood silently, only watching. But Jeremy heard Gunny give a cry that began with bitterness and ended with ache. Jeremy looked from the hippie chick to the long hair to the drummer girl and then to the man on the ground. He looked at the small figure, whose eyes held centers of light that made Jeremy think of candles.

“Please forgive me,” he said to all of them, to every listening ear. He backed away. He dropped his rifle.

He walked a distance, to get his bearings, and then he began to slowly and painfully climb a small rise of shale and stones that stood behind the building. Halfway up he took the .45 from his jeans and dropped that too, and then at the top of the rise he faced a huge expanse of open desert, brown-dusted and white-streaked under the hot blue sky.

He went on.

He was sure the Elysian Fields lay in the direction he was travelling. He wouldn’t get there today, though. It would be a long, hard journey to—

He fell. He felt no weight on him, but he had the impression of hearing wings and the dry rattle of claws, and the sensation of something gripping his back and chewing at his neck. He tried to get up and could not. Tried again, but failed. He felt scrabblings at his flesh, and the noise of huge wings thrashing the air just behind his head.

Maybe on one side ten thousand times ten thousand screamed and capered, and on the other side ten thousand times ten thousand shouted and cheered for the man in the arena, the bloodied man, the man forsaken and cast aside, betrayed, yet the warrior spirit never broken.

It all came down to sharp edges, the wings of a crow, black origami.

That, against a Marine who was determined to stand.

Jeremy cast it off like an old skin. He walked on, staggering. The horizon was lost in the red descending mist. He knew he wouldn’t get to the Elysian Fields today. He had too much to account for. Too much innocent blood on his hands, to be allowed entrance today to the Elysian Fields. But wherever he was going, it would be a step toward the Elysian Fields. He told himself that whatever he had to do to get there, even if it was the impossible, he would find a way. He would never give up the fight to reach his wife and son—whatever they had become—on the other side of this.

The thing descended upon him again, but this time did not drive him down. As he staggered forward it beat at him, and clawed his back, and tore at his head with a beak like a piston.

His back bowed but unbroken, Jeremy remembered something Gunny had said to him, in the truck on the highway outside Sweetwater. That had been a lie, too. Its opposite was the truth.

“Without me,” Jeremy whispered to the enraged air, “you’re nothing.”

He shrugged the thing off. It whirled around him in a dark blur.

Gradually, whirl by whirl, the dark blur subsided. It did not vanish so much as it melted, oozing itself away in tendrils and chunks that also melted away into smaller and smaller pieces.

Jeremy fell to his knees.

He drew a breath, and he had a good look at the land that lay before him. Black clouds were rushing toward him, shot through with terrifying pulses of electricity. He smelled the ozone of war, the burnt scent of calamity and chaos. He figured he was in for a long hitch.

And in the last few seconds until his next mission began, he braced himself for the storm.