Shivering at the sight of the white house. At the smell of it. At what she knew from her dreams was inside.
Whatever it was, it was drawing energy, drinking it from every corner of the town. Drinking it desperately, frantically, racked and crucified and twisting in terror and in pain. Grunters had made another attempt to break into the house, and one of them could still be seen-Eddie Dayton, it had once been- dead just outside the porch, strangled with the garden hose. The smell was appalling even at night.
Did the grunters know something about it she didn’t? Was that why they tried to kill it, making attempts that they had to know would only lead to their deaths? She wished she could find Hank and ask him. Wished, more than anything, that she knew where he’d gone, and if he was all right.
Whatever it was, she thought, it was definitely generating a chaos of old pain, old horrors renewed.
And unless it was stopped, Wilma knew in her bones, it would destroy the town and everyone in it.
NEW YORK
Cal draped a canopy over the passenger section of the pedicab so that, once inside, Tina could not be seen. The rough blanket was thick and dark, and what little of her illumination leaked out along the edges appeared no more than the glow of an oil lamp. Disappearing into its folds as it sat in the living room, Tina seemed thankful to be out of sight, shielded by this fragile barrier.
They would keep her hidden as much as possible. There was no telling how many might be like her. Cal had seen at least one other “flare”-Colleen’s joking reference was sticking, he reflected-in the tunnels under Fifth. But as they traveled on their odyssey south, they would draw unwanted attention as it was; any stranger would, in this perilous world. The more they could avoid attention, the better.
In the gray chill of morning Cal, Doc and Colleen wrestled the pedicab down four flights of steps, and everyone in the building helped them carry duffels and backpacks and water bottles down. They strapped the provisions onto the rusty old bikes Goldie brought from his underground treasure trove- or trash heap, depending on one’s perspective. Colleen had ridden shotgun to fetch them. On their return, neither had spoken of what they’d encountered on their mission. But Cal had noted Colleen’s relief at being aboveground, and the dark stain on her shoulder of blood that was not hers.
Goldie was unusually quiet this morning, limiting himself to terse replies when pressed. Cal observed, too, that he had jettisoned his familiar multilayered electric wardrobe in favor of somber browns and blacks. Protective coloration? Cal wondered. Or was Goldie afraid to be striking out into the unknown, too?
The unknown, indeed. For while Goldie and Colleen had been off on their errand, Cal and Doc had pored over every map in the place, had borrowed dog-eared Auto Club guides from Eleanor Sparks and the Jamgotchians, and had found no town of Wish Heart or any like name to the south. Or the east, west or north, for that matter. Whatever siren call might lie southward, be it in Mississippi, Orlando or Tierra del Fuego, they would be seeking it in the dark.
All they could plan with any certainty, for now, was their route out of the city.
“I can get you through the old test bore of the Brooklyn subway line, no problem,” Goldie murmured, the morning heat starting to come on as they muscled the last of their supplies downstairs. “I know the guys who live there; they’ll let us through.”
Cal thought about the smears of blood he’d seen on the subway platforms, the snuffling of the crouched figures in the dark and the predictable unpredictability of Goldie’s bag of tricks. “Uh, I think Tina would probably be better off aboveground.”
“If we take the Queensboro bridge, we can work our way down through Brooklyn and across the Narrows on the Verranzano,” said Colleen, adjusting her crossbow over her back. “We can be in Staten Island tonight. Cross to Jersey tomorrow. And then. .”
Then what? Hope that Tina’s line to Nijinsky’s Voice of God or whatever it was didn’t disconnect until they had time and fortune to find it.
Into the mouth of hell. .
They told Mrs. Sparks and Sylvia Feldman and the other neighbors who crowded around them on the street that Tina-unseen, enfolded within the protective canopy-was resting now, had been utterly exhausted by the previous days’ events. The tenants nodded solicitously, pressed sandwiches on Cal to give his sister when she awoke, brooked no objection as they bestowed extra cans of tuna, bottles of Gatorade.
Colleen stood watching this, part of her scoffing at their generosity. They’d regret it soon enough, when their shelves were bare and their bellies rumbling.
Yet surprisingly, she found herself heartened, as well. It was foolish of them, perhaps suicidal. But what she was doing was suicidal, too. And for what?
For him.
When her dad was a non-com at Offutt Air Force Base, she had come running in tears at some casual cruelty of her mother’s. Holding her, rocking her, he had tried to explain that Jean lived in a world of coldness, that they two lived in a warmer clime. Colleen hadn’t comprehended it then, nor even years later.
But now, looking at Griffin and the well-wishers who surrounded him, pointedly not speaking of their fear and uncertainty, offering what little they could, she had a glimmer of understanding.
There would be terrors ahead, Colleen was sure of it, homicidal, raging nightmares to make Stern look like a cartoon in the Sunday funnies. The world had turned into a grim, hard place, and it was still turning. That was real; that was so.
But how many of her neighbors would have turned out to bid her farewell? How many even knew she existed?
We make our world, she thought, at least some of it.
Maybe in days gone by Griffin had bartered his soul in increments to Stern. But through all of it, she felt certain, he had been a decent, caring man, and people had responded, been warmed by it.
Colleen anticipated a hard road ahead, full of nothing but impediments and adversaries and, almost certainly, a very messy death.
But, thanks to Griffin, there might be allies ahead, too, even new friends.
As she had become.
A world of surprises, and not all of them bad.
Bullshit, she thought, pushing it away. But the feeling stayed with her a good long time.
They set off, west across Manhattan, for the Queensboro Bridge. As they were leaving Eighty-first Street, passing the fallen, charred timbers of what had been Sam Lungo’s house, Cal-pedaling hard against the weight of his sister and their baggage-heard a murmured litany from the canopy behind him. Reaching back, he parted the fabric and saw his sister within the halo of her phosphorescence. “For Mr. Lungo,” she said. But whether she was entreating mercy for him of their mother’s God, or of the thing that called to her, he did not ask.
Tina had told Cal of Lungo’s last moments, of his valiant, futile act. We’re changing, all of us, Doc had said, and it was true. A week ago, Cal wouldn’t have dreamed Lungo capable of such a thing.
You won’t be the last of us to die, Cal thought and, though his own faith had been shaken and splintered long ago, he sent a silent prayer alongside his sister’s.