Colleen leapt to the lip of the chasm, caught the glint of the cans as they fell and were lost. “Great, just great. . just about every meal for the next week.”
A rustle of leaves alerted her. The invader was trying to crawl away.
Colleen grabbed him, pinned him with her knee to his chest. “Where you think you’re going, you rat bastard?”
“Easy, easy there,” Cal said, drawing up to her. “He’s just a kid.”
And Colleen saw, in the darting milk-white eyes and the trembling chin, that it was true. She eased her knee off him, and the boy scooted back up against the rock face, terrified and cornered. Barefoot, he wore the tattered remnants of jeans and a Darth Maul T-shirt, and Colleen wondered if he shivered from fear or from the cold, if he could feel cold.
Cal crouched down to his level. “What’s your name, son? Where are you from? It’s okay, we’re not gonna hurt you.”
He said nothing, rocking, his arms tight around himself.
Doc pulled a hunk of bread from his pocket, held it out. “Here, boy.” And then, to Colleen’s accusatory glare, “The boy is hungry.”
The nightcrawler boy snatched it, gobbled it down. But he would say nothing to their questions.
And then a warm glow, melting green and red and blue, breached the clearing, and the boy looked up in wonder.
Tina drifted liquid to him, and it was clear from his face that he had never seen her like before. They appraised each other with their altered eyes, tilting their strange, large heads, and there was kinship on their faces, and loss.
“I’m Tina Griffin,” she said, settling before him like a soap bubble, throwing dancing colors onto his face. He squinted at her, the light hurting his eyes but unable to turn them away.
“Freddy Salvo,” he said finally, his words distorted by tumbled razor teeth. “From Brandywine, down the road…”
“Pretty weird, huh?” She nodded at her weightless arms and legs, toward his gray, leeched skin.
Tears pooled in his pale eyes. “This sucks, man. My mom freaked, threw me out on my sorry ass. . I try to catch stuff, you know, squirrels and shit, but it’s a joke.”
“Freddy,” Cal kneeled beside him, spoke gently. “Do you have a feeling of someone trying to pull you somewhere?”
“Nah.” His eyes ducked away, furtive. Then, still not looking at them, he mumbled. “I don’t listen to it. Nothin’ to do with me. It’s blurry, far off and shit.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
He considered, then motioned. To the west. The south.
Cal compressed his lips, thoughtful. So it wasn’t just Stern and Tina sensing it, not just New York. It was all the changed ones, at least the three kinds they knew about.
“You not goin’ there, are you?” Dread and awe mixed in Freddy’s voice. “Don’t do it, man.”
Cal asked, “Why?”
This seemed to catch the boy up short. After a moment, he merely gestured, uneasy, vague. Then, watchful of his captors, he rose shakily to his feet. “Can I. . go?” He eyed them, looking shamed. “Didn’t mean to steal your stuff. Been better, me in that ravine.”
Cal hesitated, weighing the thought before asking, “Would you like to come with us?”
The boy met this with a sharp, fearful intake of air. He shook his head.
Doc asked, “Is there anything we can do to help?”
A kind of desolation passed over Freddy’s face. Again, he shook his head, then turned to leave.
Something made him pause as he passed Tina. He glanced back, her aura dancing in his great white eyes.
“Do you know,” he asked her, “what’s going on? Do you know if we’re gonna be okay?”
His manner was intent, almost pleading. Tina searched in vain for words of comfort. She averted her eyes.
In silence, he disappeared into shadow.
In the morning, Goldie caught a white perch off Gunpowder Falls, which provided them breakfast. But it was clear, with the loss of the pack, that they needed more food. Still, Colleen cautioned against going near cities and the more populous towns.
Under flocks of red-winged blackbirds migrating south, they wound their way across the coastal plain, passing fields of tobacco and corn, along the asphalt tributaries of the 702, the 150, the 97, to the 3, just north of Bowie, near the banks of the Patuxent.
Afternoon found them on a rolling green bluff, peering through stands of sugar maple and white oak at a tiny village of one main street with three blocks of shops and a defunct traffic light. A rusty sign on its periphery, pockmarked by BBs, proclaimed, “Stansbury, pop. 72.” It was so small, they would have passed it by if Goldie hadn’t stopped them.
“No,” he said, squinting fixedly at it. “Here.”
Cal unstrapped his sword, stashed it in the pedicab. And then, with Colleen, Doc and Tina hanging back in the dappled shadows, he and Goldie strolled into town.
The only resident on the main street was a heavy-set woman in a billowy flower-print dress, her long black hair streaked with white, settled in a pine rocker before an empty coffee shop. Its sun-parched, peeling sign read, “The Buttery-Real Home Cooking.”
“That open for business?” Cal asked.
“It is now,” she said, rising with a smile like sunshine emerging from clouds.
There was no meat, but the corn chowder was astounding, and the vegetable stew a marvel.
“Raise ’em myself, in my garden,” the woman-whose name was Lola Johnson-explained as she dished out apple pie. Cal noted that her wrists were twice as big around as his own, yet she seemed robust rather than flabby. “I’ve always had a knack with growing things.”
“And a talent for understatement,” Al Tingly chimed in. Over the course of their meal, other denizens of the town had appeared: Tingly, a lean, stoop-shouldered man who introduced himself as a “hardware merchant”; Laureen Du Costa, who ran the antiques shop three doors down; a scattering of others, none younger than fifty. Goldie eagerly sopped up remnants of stewed tomato with his corn bread. Doc had joined them, too, while Colleen remained secreted with Tina-no need to alarm the townsfolk with visitations, angelic or otherwise.
Stansbury, it emerged, had dwindled since its posted population, its younger citizens having long since fled to brighter horizons, the remnant content to look back on live-lier days and be thankful for present calm.
“Used to get more fresh faces before the interstate bypassed us for New Carrollton,” Laureen said. “But since all this hullabaloo, we’ve been grateful for a little anonymity.”
“You haven’t been eager for authorities to arrive, get everything running again?” asked Doc.
Tingly snorted. “Electricity always was a finicky cuss. We got used to lamps and candles. As for water, our system’s gravity fed, so there’s no squawk there. And if you’re asking us if we’d like a lot of government stooges stompin’ in here and-”
“Don’t get Al started,” Lola cut in, laughing, “or he’ll bend your ear about what a prime SOB Harry Truman was.”
After they had eaten their fill and more, Cal voiced their need to stock up on supplies, and Doc offered to trade medical services. But surprisingly, no one in town had any physical complaints to speak of, nor had anyone fallen afoul of any mysterious new ailments. In fact, since “the Big Nothing,” as Al Tingly called it, even his psoriasis had cleared up.
“Remarkable,” Doc murmured. “To what do you ascribe-”
“Go on, Lola.” Tingly smiled. “Take ’em over and show ’em your potato patch.”
“I could get used to this,” Doc said, as the three of them rocked on the pine glider on Lola Johnson’s porch and the breeze blew through rust and gold maple leaves. The bang of a screen door heralded Lola’s emergence from the house, bearing a tray with pitcher and glasses.