Cal started after her, but a gentle hand touched his arm, and there was a voice like music.
Colleen drew up by a sweet gum tree and glowered at the sun-burnished, twilit clouds. Nearby, a Carrara marble angel stood atop an ornate Nouveau pedestal, its arms beseeching the heavens, wings spread wide. A plaque read, “Never to Forget Our Great War Dead,” followed by a list of names- boys from the town over the hill, no doubt-all nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.
Tina flowed toward her, effortless as mercury, the blades of grass quivering as if electrified where she passed.
“You shouldn’t be where you can be seen,” Colleen murmured.
“I can’t hide all my life.” The luminous clouds refracted through the lens of her aura, sparked brilliance.
“You got me there, kid.”
Tina looked away, and Colleen followed her gaze. Goldie was still engrossed in his digging.
“You really hate him,” Tina said.
Colleen was startled by her bluntness, felt a stab of guilt. “Nah, it’s not that, it’s-he’s slowing us down.”
“Maybe where we’re going. . it’s good not to hurry.”
Colleen rubbed a weary hand over her eyes. “Look, I feel sorry for him, I do. It’s not his fault. But he’s not in control. He could draw attention, maybe get us-” She stopped as she spied the blossoming look of pain and shame on Tina’s face.
He’s not the only one to draw attention. Colleen cursed herself; her mouth should have been chained up years ago. But then Tina particularly, with that astonishing grace, made her feel like an awkward, insensitive brute. And yet she had to admit to feeling a growing kinship with the girl, seeing in her tentativeness, her shyness, a reflection of her own concealed inner landscape.
Tina was looking off toward a bank of clouds. Colleen reached a tentative hand to touch her, then withdrew it.
“You know who Martha Graham is?” Tina asked, still studying the clouds.
“Unless she invented the cracker, no.”
“She said, ‘Dancing is a call. . Free choice doesn’t enter into it.’ ” She brought her ice-fire gaze to Colleen, gave a melancholy smile. “Do you think we have a choice in life or are we just fooling ourselves?”
“I think. . we can’t choose what happens to us. But we can choose how we act.” Colleen’s eyes returned to Goldie. He stood now, brushing the dirt from his clothes. He held a wrapped parcel under one arm.
“Maybe some people can’t.” Tina gazed beyond Goldie to where an evening mist was rising, and her voice was a whisper. “No matter how hard they try.”
Colleen and Tina found Cal, Doc and Goldie gingerly unwrapping the oilskin-bound package Goldie had dug up. Inside were more layers of paper and fabric in various stages of decomposition. Then finally, the object itself, dried-out wood and rusty metal.
It was a musket, Springfield 1857 just discernible on the pitted metal screwed to the wormy stock.
“This is what you needed to dig up? It wouldn’t even work if guns did work.” Colleen snapped. “How ’bout you tell me why, Gunga Din? And don’t give me that ‘Caesar’ crap.”
Goldie straightened, hefting the weapon in his long-fingered hands with their thick nails like gray stones. “I have absolutely no idea.”
They swung west to avoid Philadelphia, traveling through the green sweet farming country that was being stripped of its horses and cows. Skirting Bala Cynwyd and Merton Station and Havertown, they would draw near travelers, scuffed and weather-worn, groups of two or three or four, mindful to keep their hands open and in sight, their weapons stowed- and Tina carefully hidden.
Sometimes Doc would dress wounds, administer simple remedies he had picked up from medicine chests of abandoned homes, first-aid kits from automobiles and RVs. Goldie might sing or dance to lull the children, do simple tricks of pretend magic-or real magic feigned as pretend-while Colleen hung back, keen-eyed, and Cal questioned the adults.
None of them had heard anything of a power to the west or the south. No, Wish Heart meant nothing to them, nor any combination of words sounding like that. Yes, they had disturbing dreams, naturally, but nothing like the revelations that had been visited upon Tina and Stern.
Curiously, as Cal and his companions journeyed on, they encountered none of the altered ones, by day or night, although some of the men and women they interrogated admitted to having heard of such creatures, and a few had even seen them, fleetingly.
Everyone they spoke to confirmed that the Change had come over the land at the same time, and that it stretched as far as anyone had seen, or that anyone they had talked with had seen. As to what it might be, or what had caused it, most had a theory, running a tabloid gamut from alien invasion or government conspiracy to warfare between the gods. Some were stated boldly, others offered with grave doubts-but none with the least hint of proof.
“It is like a Rorschach,” Doc commented as they rested in the shade of a willow grove just below Hazlettville. “Everyone sees this brave new world of ours through the lens of their perceptions, of fear, anger, desire. Casting the world in their own image. .”
“More a Thematic Aperception Test, if you want to be precise,” Goldie corrected him, tightrope-walking over a log balanced across the creek. “And, sorry to break it to you, they always did.” He was back in his expansive, talkative phase, no longer dressed down but instead tricked out in what he had taken to calling his Fall Collection-the electric-blue vest emblazoned with buttons, the Hawaiian shirts that never seemed to lose their brightness no matter how long they went unlaundered.
Colleen repeated more than once, and always with cause, that she really couldn’t tell which she preferred less, Goldie muted or Goldie loud.
In the quiet times down the long highways, Cal, intent on formulating some plan of attack, would question Tina and Goldie as to what they might sense or see of the force waiting for them at the end of their road. But on this subject Goldie had no premonitions, could summon no image nor inkling. And as for Tina, though its call grew more insistent every day, the darkness that pulled her relentlessly remained shrouded in its own secret.
Often, after they pitched camp, Cal practiced defensive moves with Doc and Colleen, Doc sharing what he had learned in Soviet basic training and Afghanistan, Colleen what she had gleaned from her father, and the streets, and the woods. They squared off bare-handed or with sheathed knives, or wielded sword or bow. Tina would hover near, watching absently, or drift off into the shadows, while Goldie sat cross-legged, humming to himself, voraciously poring over whatever stray volume he had picked up along the way, be it Marcel Proust, Stephen Hawking or Danielle Steel.
In the glow of a campfire against the chill of twilight, Colleen wrapped her arms around her knees and smiled, all the tension shaken out of her for once. She seemed to crackle and glow with energy, like the fire itself. Her smile changed her, gentled her, so that Cal wanted to reach over and touch her-to forget, for once, about the world that was changing, about the growing despair in Tina’s eyes. About the thing that they would have to face eventually if they had the grim fortune to find it.
“Fighting isn’t about hitting,” Colleen said, finishing a point she had made earlier, in the midst of their sparring. “It’s about distance, first and foremost. And it’s about always thinking, What do I do if this person goes for me?”
Distance, thought Cal, and if this person goes for me. Looking into Colleen’s eyes, he understood suddenly that this was how she regarded everything, everyone: with wariness, fear, caution. Don’t give them a weapon against you. Don’t let them into striking range. It was how Cal himself had viewed the world in what he was increasingly thinking of as The Time Between, the period from his mother’s death through his thralldom to Stern, before the Change. And it was how Colleen viewed the world still.