And it had all been betrayal, in the end. It had all been to protect the people who thought that the risk of this-this horror, this catastrophe-coming to pass was less important than getting power.
He thought, I will find Bilmer. I will get her notes, her evidence, back to McKay. And then I will protect McKay from these people, because whoever they are, they will destroy him before they’ll admit that they were wrong.
Shango closed his eyes. He’d be able to go over about another square mile of woods before it got too dark to see. He’d been marking them off on Mr. Dean’s map: oak tree to pond, covered. Pond to birches, covered. Birches to the second burn scar, covered.
But what if he’d missed something? What if a fox had dragged Bilmer’s body, or purse, or luggage away to its hole? The next section to search, beyond the second burn scar, might contain something, but what if the papers themselves had become exposed?
What would he do then? How would he know?
When you’ve gone over the whole area, he told himself, and haven’t found what you’re looking for, then it’ll be time to go back and look again. You can’t do it any other way.
Someone was singing.
Humming, whispering; Shango knew almost before he opened his eyes, before he shifted his weight forward to peer through the honeysuckle, that it was a crazy. He’d learned the sound of crazies over the years.
So in a way, the sight of the man kneeling beside the stream didn’t surprise him. Only that he had made it this far from civilization unharmed.
Traveling with someone, Shango deduced at once, studying the wild black hair curling from beneath that straw cowboy hat, the jangly fruit-salad Hawaiian shirts. Father or brother or pal, he was someone they couldn’t leave behind.
His back still to Shango, the man rose and sauntered along the bank with a loose-limbed casualness, a here/not-here quality that set him apart.
Every now and then, the man found some bauble in the wet earth-a water-polished stone, a sprig of greenery-and stooped to claim it, the tangle of buttons pinned to his vest clattering as he bent. Shango saw now that the fellow had a pitifully old musket, all rusted and cracked, slung over his back. What possible good might that do, even as a bluff?
Hell, thought Shango, starting to rise, it’s only an hour or so till dark, I couldn’t cover the whole of that burn scar anyway. Might as well see if I can find his family, get him back to them if he isn’t going to end up carrying nightsoil for Cadiz’s private garden patch.
“Stay where you are,” snapped a voice from the top of the bank.
The man raised his head. Crazy, thought Shango, and something more.
It was Cadiz and his men, at the top of the bank.
Shango recognized them from the descriptions: No National guardsmen would have added all those leather jackets and extra weapons belts to their cammies. The burly dude with the Air Cav patch displayed so prominently on his shoulder would be Cadiz; the sour-faced, freckled, curiously wizened man riding at his side was probably the odd and offensive Mr. Brattle. Two of the dozen or so foot soldiers who surrounded the two riders were already making their way down the stream-bank toward the brightly garbed man, who was by this time backing away.
“Sorry,” he said, in a pleasant voice, “got to go. Wish I could stay.”
“I said stay put!” snapped Brattle, in a thin harsh voice like a cough. “Where’d you come from? Nobody comes through here without us checking them out.”
And Cadiz said, “Grab him.”
That was a mistake. The man flung up his hand and shouted, fireballs flashing in the air. Shango’s breath caught in his throat. Another of them, like the firestarter he’d met near Spotsylvania, the others he’d heard of.
At the top of the bank, Brattle said in his tight cold voice, “None of that!” and stretched out his hand toward the man.
The man cried out, clutched his head, doubled over in pain. The fireballs frizzled and died, the smell of smoke thick in the air. The man fell to his knees in the stream, raised his hand as if he feared he would be struck. Brattle said, “Bring him. We’ll need one like that.”
The foot soldiers seized the man by the arms.
And at that point, one of the group around Cadiz and Brattle shifted, and Shango saw what was slung on the cruppers of their horses. Sacks of food, big plastic bottles of water such as the National Guard had handed out, a bundle of bright red-and-blue blankets lashed together. Tools-a small hatchet, a saw and some screwdrivers-bulging from faded blue-and-white-striped sheets.
You bastards, thought Shango, recognizing the few pitiful objects that had stood between the Angels Rest oldsters and starvation. You fucking bastards.
Anger rose up in him, at all those faces, from that of the woman by the parkway to that child’s he had uncovered only an hour ago-rage at what men had done out of power and hunger and greed.
You have no right, he thought, to do what you are doing- and his hammer sprang as if of itself into his hand. Chill iron centered in him, terrible and hard, and no, this wasn’t his job, he thought, moving already, striding from the dusky vines and golden flowers, and no, he knew the way to take care of this problem was not to get himself killed by taking on twelve armed guys and a wizard who had the advantage of high ground and crossbows. But sometimes, thought Shango, perfectly cold, perfectly calm, sometimes your starry-eyed bleeding-heart Band-Aid-plastering liberals had a point.
And he struck like the hammer of Thor, like John Henry driving down the steel that killed him, and knocked the brains out of one man like mac’n’cheese from a broken dish and snapped the other thug’s spine on the backhand swing. He grabbed the Hawaiian-shirted man’s arm and pulled him clear as one of the men on top of the bank fired a crossbow.
And then fear hit him. Crippling, staggering terror that iced his stomach and dropped him to his knees.
Panic flooded him, screamed at him to drop everything and RUN-
And looking up at the top of the bank, he saw the sour, freckled face of Douglas Brattle smile.
That was his power, Shango understood.
He could throw Fear.
Shango raised his hammer in his hand.
Bellowing like thunder, he charged straight up the bank, swinging the weapon around his head. A man leveled a crossbow at him, and he scrambled up anyway, not ceasing to shout, not ceasing the gush of rage that the shout summoned from his pounding heart.
Anger poured out of him, hot as blood from a wound, the anger a weapon like the hammer, that nothing could disable or fuck up.
And then something gleaming flashed across the bowman’s weapon, and he heard the fiberglass crossbow snap and the sprang! of the breaking string, the scream of the bowman as the arrow leaped wildly back into his face. The man ran shrieking into the woods, spraying blood.
The gleaming thing had been a sword.
And amid the chaos and the screams and the blood rage pounding within him, Shango realized others had entered the fray alongside him.
Brattle’s horse reared, and Cadiz drove his mount forward, spear leveled. Shango smote the spear aside with his hammer, smote aside the sword the man drew.
He grabbed Cadiz’s wrist and hauled him from the horse and into the tangle of fern underfoot, drove his boot into the side of his ribs, felt bone break, as this man must have broken the bones of Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean and the others who had taken Shango in.