He swept forward. The crowd parted and followed in his wake, and Sam found himself being force-walked smartly to keep pace. Stern strode up to the guardsman. The man quailed but held his ground.
Stern cocked his head, allowed the hint of a smile. “I imagine you have a question.”
Sam could see the guardsman was little more than a teenager, a boy playing soldier in an overlarge uniform. Pimples dotted his forehead, sweat sheened cheeks that had never known stubble. Sam felt a momentary flash of sympathy and sadness, knew there was no action he could take in his marionette state.
Stern held his gaze silent on the guardsman, awaiting a reply. The eyes of the multitude prompted. Finally, in a high quaver, the words came.
“What the hell are you?”
Stern’s lips split into a broad smile, revealing those appalling, beautiful daggers. “Your death… if you don’t shoot me.”
Stern lunged. The young guardsman’s assault rifle sparked. A fleeting but deadly silence-and the bullets fell, clunking like pebbles, rolling back against the guardsman’s foot.
The boy soldier gawked. The only sound on the entire street was Stern’s laughter, like the echoing footfalls of a giant. Then Stern grabbed the gun, snapped it in two, tossed the pieces contemptuously aside. The boy turned to run, but Stern reached out a taloned hand-almost casually, it seemed-and swept a terrible slanting cut that opened him wide. The boy screamed, and his legs gave under him. Stern caught him, sent him pinwheeling into a wall, where he sprawled, wet and broken and still.
A sound of revulsion rose from the crowd. But Sam suspected many were thrilled, too, guiltily pleased.
Stern turned to face them, and this time only a few stepped back. “No man behind the curtain anymore. No army, no police.” He straightened to his full height, spread his wings so they fanned out over them. In the streaks of the setting sun, they looked rimmed in fire.
“The only thing to fear. . is us.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
WEST VIRGINIA
Come to us, the voice-voices-whispered outside the windows in the darkness. Come to us. You’re one of us, and we need you, need you, need you if we’re to be whole.
If I/we are to survive.
Fred only clung tighter to Bob. He knew that part of him, the meat part, was still back in South Dakota, where he’d been when that swirling blue-white hideousness had burst the office door from its hinges, swallowed him up, flesh and bones and brain, as it had swallowed the others. He’d seen it happen, as if at the end of a long corridor, or through the wrong end of a telescope, while he’d clutched frantically at Bob.
And Bob had clutched at him.
And here he was, sitting on Bob’s bed, holding his brother in his arms and feeling the cold unceasing pull that grew and grew and did not sleep or rest. The pull of Sanrio’s will, and Wu’s, and Pollard’s, and that other Will that was greater than them all. It would pull him in, and he would cease to be himself, cease to be anything except a part of that Thing that was all of them now.
And he sent out his heart and his spirit, gathering, absorbing, drinking in strength and energy from the earth, from the air, from time. From the hearts of anyone his heart could touch, anyone who wasn’t strong enough to defend against him, drinking it like coffee, to stay awake. To stay strong.
Just as the Source was doing.
He had to stay strong or Bob would die.
He had to stay strong or he’d be drawn back away and swallowed up.
He heard their mother’s footsteps creak through the silence of the house. Followed her with his mind. Reached out to her-it was easy, for she was one of those his mind and spirit drank from, though there was very little warmth in her, very little light. He felt bad about it, bad about draining her, as he’d felt bad that first day when he’d made her go downstairs and tell people everything was all right and to go away. But he had to. He could see no choice.
If he let go, Bob would die. He would die. And It would be stronger by that much.
He followed her with a fragment of his consciousness, down the hallway-formed precise in his mind, with its new blue carpet and its green-and-white ivy wallpaper-watched as she went mechanically about her tasks. She made food for herself in the pale-blue kitchen, but she didn’t eat it, left the sandwich forgotten on the counter beside three other sandwiches already curling and slimy in the summer heat. Filled another glass of water and left it to stand with the others beside the sink. He knew she couldn’t go on like this but didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t release her. He needed every ounce of strength. The windows that looked out onto the side yard, and those opening into the junk-cluttered rear porch, were black with night now.
His mind drifted out over the town.
Drinking.
As with his mother, he was aware a little bit of those others whose energies he drank. Aware of what they saw through glazed, enraptured eyes.
He tried not to see, tried not to think. Guilt stabbed him, worse than the awful guilt of running away from his mother, from Boone’s Gap, of leaving Bob there with that frightened, clinging woman who didn’t want either of them to leave the house. He tried to tell himself that what he was taking would only be for a little while, and it wouldn’t really hurt them. They were children, and children could take a lot.
He saw Dr. Blair taking Deana Bartolo’s temperature, shaking his head while the girl’s mother and older brothers looked on and whispered helplessly, their faces old and haggard in the gold flicker of candlelight.
He saw stumpy white-haired Marcia duPone trying to comfort Karen Souza, who could not stop weeping when she looked at her child.
He saw Shannon Grant-God, he remembered her when she was nine years old and mowing his mother’s lawn! — in quiet-voiced conference with the Hanson girls, glancing every now and then at where Tessa sat like a silent doll. He was aware of the power glowing within Wilma Hanson and wanted desperately to touch it, to drink it, to help himself with it, but he could not pierce her toughness. He could only feed on the children, and on the whispering, ambient strength of air and earth and trees.
What is it? pleaded Bob softly. I can feel it, I can feel it all around. What’s happened?
It’s nothing, said Fred, and though he hadn’t even a body anymore, he felt the familiar sickened clenching of his stomach. And then, It’s everything.
His brother’s grip closed tighter around him; he felt Bob tremble with the knowledge.
It’s everywhere, Fred said, suddenly grateful to be able to speak of it, to share both the wonder of it and the horror. I can draw it out of the earth, out of the coal; out of the blood that was spilled in olden times in the woods. Out of the trees themselves, and the animals-out of the shapes of the rocks and the stories the Indians made up about them.
He thought, but he did not say aloud to Bob, I can draw it out of the hearts of children, where it glows like little embers.
Maybe Bob knew that already. Or would come to know it and would hate him for it as he already hated himself.
I can draw it out of our mother’s love and the fear that has dominated her life.
He heard the grunters, coming across the lawn.
GO AWAY! he screamed and tried to call the flames that sometimes burst from the ground when he called upon his powers.
They were coming, ravenous hunger in their white, glowing eyes. Their big knobbed hands gripped tools from the mines, from workshops all over town, from the trunks of looted cars. Their serrated mouths hung open, and they panted with hot little barks, like starving dogs. They’d dreamed about hunger, he thought. Dreamed about everything they’d always been denied.