“When I regained consciousness, they called Bonhomme. He told me that the court had appointed a lawyer for Claudia Zimmerman and she convinced the judge that her client’s rights had been violated. The judge let her go. Mackie Allitar was just down the hall from me, dying from drug abuse, they said. I asked Bonhomme about the black man, the killer.
“ ‘Oh, him,’ Bonhomme said. ‘They think he’s a judo expert. Add that to the fact that Fargo obviously has some kind of leprosy, and it looks pretty crazy out there. We don’t have anything to do with it anyway. We got Halston and Fargo. They let the warden go. Thanks for your help.’
“And I lay back, ready to die, Chance. I swear. I was ready. I lay in that bed for two days. Doctors and nurses came in and frowned at my charts. They stuck me with needles and put soft food on my tray, but they knew I was on my way out. But then the music came. It was like all the horns in the world all at once in a thousand tones, but they were all playing the same note. I was up and outta that bed as strong as I had ever been, stronger. That was about two in the morning. I met Allitar in the hall. We looked at each other and grinned like boys who just climbed over the school fence to check out the big world outside.”
The feral dog escaped from the dog pound the night they caught him. He had been knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, but when they tried to carry him from the cell to the gas chamber, he sprang to life suddenly and made a dash for it. No one could ever remember a dog with the will and intelligence to break through a glass windowpane and dash away.
They said he was badly cut, though, and was probably dead within minutes.
Claudia Zimmerman left the Bay Area. No one knew where she went.
Winch Fargo had escaped from police custody a week after Miles Barber and Mackie Allitar, with the assistance of some unknown friend. The hospital doctors, like the dogcatchers, said that Fargo was probably dead a few hours after he escaped.
Gray Man crawled back toward his desert hole, bruised and pulsing with pain. He felt his heart thrumming as if he had been frightened, but he wasn’t actually afraid. He felt the blue coyote pup following him and wondered if he would have been strong enough to fight him off.
He finally arrived and crawled down into his hole, burying himself once again. But this time his sleep was disturbed by unnamed night terrors; this time his sleep was more alive than it was dead.
Three
Twenty
“I love you, Chance,” Alacrity said to me.
We were looking out over a vista of spiky pines and cloud-rifted blue skies. I carried her in the crook of my arm while she nestled her head against my shoulder. I carried her as if she were a small child. She was young. But Alacrity had begun to grow quickly in the woods. She was more than three years younger than Wanita, but already she was a foot and a half taller than her friend. She looked closer to twelve than three.
She and her mother, Reggie and Wanita, and I were living at the Bear Lodge Country Cabins in northern California. We stayed in California, albeit many miles from the Bay Area, because Addy and I wanted to be near at hand if the remaining Blues somehow made a stand against Gray Man. We were pretty confident that he couldn’t find us easily and that we could escape as long as we were free. Also, Reggie kept saying that he felt the safest place in the world for us was close by. He spent many days scanning the countryside for our refuge, but the direction for some reason eluded him.
“I know,” I said to the young girl. “I love you too.”
I did love her, as a child who was frightened and headstrong, who was inquisitive about everything, and who needed a story before she could go to sleep at night. But I also knew that she was the daughter of a strangeling god who had prophesied the beginning of an era heralding the end of mankind.
“I don’t mean like that,” Alacrity said. “I really love you. When I grow up I’m going to marry you and give you a big house and you can read books all day long and we’ll get a telescope and look at the people in the dark stars. The ones that Wanita said don’t have no bodies except just great big eyes in a cave.”
I sighed deeply and kept my silence. It was always disturbing for me to hear the child’s dreams for the future. She had inherited some of her father’s ability with words. I had to fight the nagging sense that her desires were my destiny and my marching orders.
“Reggie an’ Nita comin’,” she said.
Far up the sloping hill behind us the two other children were coming out of the woods. It seemed as if Reggie was skipping adolescence altogether, going straight for manhood. He’d grown almost as tall as me, and his shoulders were amazingly wide. His sister, Wanita, was still a child, though, round-faced and always serious. She and Alacrity were as different as playmates could be. While Alacrity climbed towering pines, Wanita would curl up by the roots and dream of Alacrity way up there in the wind an’ stuff.
Adelaide and I never questioned the children’s powers. It all seemed natural. This was not only because of our blood experiences. We had both been lost souls before we drifted into Ordé’s orbit. You’ve already heard my story. I learned of Adelaide’s experiences while we were on the run. It wasn’t a long tale, but it had trailed her for years.
There are many circumstances and minor characters in Addy’s story, but I don’t have to bother with them. The elements are a white Christian family, a girl becoming a woman, a boy with a black leather jacket and a knife, and a dark night in an alley off Ventura Boulevard where two boys struggled over their hormones and only one survived. Adelaide never told anyone about her knowledge of the killing. She closed up her heart, opening it only to those men who cared so much about their future that they would never be concerned with her past. I was the first person she had ever confided in. But we were on the run from Death, and very little else seemed important or worth questioning.
The children and their survival had become our purpose; their abilities were our religion. Believing in them, we erased our own suffering.
“It’s over that way for sure, Chance,” Reggie said, pointing south.
“You sure, man?”
“Yeah. It’s over that way.”
“How far?”
“I can’t tell exactly, but it’s pretty far. It’s hundreds of miles, but it’s definitely over that way.”
“And if we get there, you think we’ll be safe for a while?” I asked the young man.
“We’ll be safer. We’ll be safer, but that don’t mean we’ll be safe.”
The memory of Gray Man scuttled under my scalp. But lately the kids hadn’t seemed scared at all. All that time in the woods had healed the fear in their hearts. Reggie knew the safest place to be, or at least he thought he could find it; Alacrity just wanted to play with each of us in turn and run wild in the woods; and Wanita dreamed.
Adelaide and I thought that if Wanita had any powers of godhood like the others, it must have been the power of dreams. She often came to us in the morning with elaborate tales of visions from the night before. I started to get them on a toy tape recorder when I realized that she was somehow reporting on stories that were not of this Earth or maybe not even this galaxy.
Sometimes the little brown girl would wake up in the morning hardly remembering who we were. Even her brother was as unfamiliar to her as some far-off memory. After she’d come back to us, she’d say that her dream took so long that she’d forgotten who she was for a while.