Melissa burned hot in his grasp. His arms were heavy with fatigue, they ached dreadfully. But then, so did his legs and neck and back; his entire musculature, in fact, and skeleton, too. It felt to him paradoxically as if he were both lengthening and compressing, and the dread that filled him made him want to tear open his chest with bloody fingers and let loose a scream beyond anything his voice could proclaim.
I’m changing, too.
He knew it for a certainty, in the shivers that cascaded along his flesh, the agony that drove like a railway spike through his skull.
But this time, there would be no reprieve. Because there in the physics lab, Theo had seen Jeff Arcott consumed by the result of what he himself had built.
Jeff, who had not previously transformed into anything, who had stayed completely human…
Jeff had fixed them once upon a time, he and Melissa, had cured them. That had been shortly after the Change, when Atherton was still dark and increasingly empty as the population drifted away in search of some better place or succumbed to personal transformation, became drifters and refugees, and grunters and flares and the occasional hulking dragon, and other nameless things.
It had been a breathless, perfect evening in late summer, Theo recalled. Jeff had just gotten his first great brainstorm, had begun feverishly working on the set of wonders that would restore the town. They had been picnicking, the three of them, when Melissa took a chill and grew wan. Theo recognized the signs; he had seen it happen to others.
She was turning into a flare.
It was he who had thrown a blanket over her, hustled her with Jeff to Medical Sciences and put her on a gurney. They’d wheeled her to a room where, by candlelight and without benefit of anesthetic, Jeff had opened a flap of skin at the back of her neck above her spine and inserted a ring of sterilized garnets and amethysts, then sewn the skin together again with a surgical needle and lengths of coarse black suture.
For Melissa, all this had passed as in a fever dream. But when she woke, the fever had broken, the pain was gone, and the curious lightness she felt had yielded to the familiar sumptuous draw of gravity.
Jeff would never explain how he had known what to do, how the gems had conserved her humanity (or Theo’s, when soon after it had seemed inevitable that he would become one more grunter).
It was only much later that Theo tracked Jeff along the shadows to the railroad siding outside of town, discovered the black train and its towering master, its crew of deformed curs who were what he himself would have become…and learned from just where Jeff got his inspiration.
At the time, however, Jeff had claimed he’d simply known. Just as he had known how to revive Atherton from its extinction, give it back some semblance of normalcy.
The normalcy that had been mockery, mere illusion, now shredded and cast away.
Theo found his breaths were coming in short gasps; he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He reached the periphery of the Sculpture Garden, stumbled onto its grassy rise and set Melissa on an iron bench.
Only for a minute, he told himself, to regroup, get a second wind. We can’t let that shit catch up to us.
He ran a hand over what had been his injured leg, felt wonderingly that it was completely healed. True, it might ache like a Tin Woodman left to rust a million years, but say what you like, this metamorphosis crap sure beat major medical.
Curled in on herself there on the bench, Melissa looked like a child in an iron casket. Theo shuddered, and chased the thought from his mind.
He gazed back toward the physics building. The radiance was brighter now, surging in all directions, picking up speed as it gained assurance. Time for us to be making tracks, Theo realized, no matter how crappy he felt.
But when he turned back, Melissa was gone.
FORTY-FIVE
Well now, that’s a relief, Mama Diamond thought, even as she felt a chill run straight from the crown of her head to her little toe. She knew, too, that no one else in her party was thinking anything even remotely like it.
But then, the rest of them hadn’t been feeling particularly like a fifth (or in this case, tenth) wheel, and wondering if their insistence on accompanying this little expeditionary force into the mouth of hell hadn’t been merely the first cranky expression of a nascent second childhood raising its senile voice.
Which was merely a roundabout way of saying that Mama Diamond had been doubting her finely honed instincts right along about now.
But hotfooting it in the snowfall paralleling Highway 40 out of Rushmore, skirting the deserted, fallen structures of Keystone and its blasted, twisted billboards touting the Flying T Chuckwagon Supper and Show, Old MacDonald’s Petting Farm, the Reptile Gardens and the National Presidential Wax Museum (not to mention the Holy Terror Mine-and if that description didn’t fit the whole damn area nowadays, Mama Diamond didn’t know what did), Mr. Cal Griffin and his stalwart band of adventurers had come upon a whole herd of rusticating herbivores that might have been candidates for a petting zoo themselves if not for a little thing or two.
Namely, that they were dead, skinned and in a real bad mood…
The bitter cold wind was lifting low off the ground now, and it carried to Mama Diamond the sticky iron blood smell of the beasts, a stink that seemed to weight the air, make it hard to breathe in. There was another smell, too, the musty odor of their thick winter coats; the parts of their carcasses that still had coats on them, that was, that hadn’t been cut away by the long-departed buffalo men who were bones and dust as ancient as these animals themselves.
As if they all abruptly heard some call on the air beyond the range of human hearing (and who was to say they didn’t), the brutes raised their heads as one and appraised the interlopers with clear challenge, and imminent threat. The lead bull was grunting his displeasure with throaty deep exclamations, blowing puffs of pungent air from his nostrils. He tensed his huge shoulders and raised his tuft of tail, readying to charge.
Out of the corner of her eye-never taking her gaze off the lead buffalo-Mama Diamond could see Griffin gesturing the rest of his band closer together, keeping himself at the forefront, all of them hefting their varied assortment of absurd weaponry.
Weaponry that would no more dispatch this enormous collection of tainted meat on the hoof than a rolled newspaper. Which was, Mama Diamond felt, just what Dr. Marcus Sanrio and his ghastly inhuman buddies back in their mountain fastness had counted on.
But these hideous rejects from a meat market studding the landscape ahead as far as the eye could see weren’t the only things that had been called here-Mama Diamond herself had, too, though by a different, unknown agency and for a far different purpose. She had been touched by a dragon, and it had left its mark, awakened the dragon part within her. She understood now that her journey from Burnt Stick to Atherton to this lonely, cold highway outside Keystone, South Dakota-and for that matter, the entirety of her roving, long life, from San Bernardino to Manzanar and the fossil beds beyond-had been aimed to arrive her at this precise moment; the trajectory of her life like a toy arrow fired at a guard shack.
She realized, too, that her parlays with the horses and wolves and panther had been no more, really, than practice sessions.
At last, at long last, Mama Diamond knew just what she was here for.