“This force,” Cal asked Shango in a hushed tone, “is it something the scientists made or something they just plugged into?”
“I don’t know,” said Shango. “I don’t even know where it was located.”
“Lay you odds it’s to the west,” Goldie muttered.
“I can’t say how to stop it or control it,” Shango continued and felt his own futility. “All I know is someone was doing something they didn’t want shared, that it was about power.” But then, it was always about power.
Shango tucked the sheets into his pack, looked northward. The sun was rising high into the gray, cloudless sky, but it gave no warmth. Time to go.
Home?
Or just back?
Cal put a hand on his arm, smiled into Shango’s dark eyes. “If you’d care to come with us, we could sure as hell use you.”
And though he had his duty, though his modus operandi had been always to be alone, to rely on no one and watch his own back, Shango felt the longing rise in him to go with them, to be with them.
Reluctantly, he shook his head. “I have to make sure.”
Cal nodded. “I understand.” He clasped Shango’s hand. Looking into Cal’s eyes, Shango was reminded, strangely, of McKay.
“Keep your head low,” said Goldie, as if speaking to a man who proposed to cross a busy street, as if he had said it many, many times.
“You, too,” Shango said.
The dead of night was the worst time.
By day, the white house among the honeysuckle was as invisible to Wilma as it was to the rest of the people in the town-she didn’t see it, didn’t even think about it, except when she walked to the trailer court to help Shannon and Greg care for Tessa or down to the Senior Center, where two or three of the old people were beginning to nod and doze with that same cold constant silence. But at night it seemed to come into focus again.
That was when things came out of the darkness.
Two nights ago, skeletal wolves melted into being from the gray mists that lifted from the earth to surround the house, solidifying around burning red fire specks of eyes. Wilma had watched them from her back porch steps as they’d tried to clamber through the broken, yawning windows, through the open door. Blue lightning had sizzled and snapped from the walls, and purplish flame crept from the windows in a phosphorescent stream. The wolves howled and howled, writhing in pain as they burned, and then had melted away. But when dawn came, Wilma, looking hard, saw on the dilapidated paintwork the marks of their claws and teeth.
Last night, it had started the same, with the mist rising from the ground, rolling across the trailer court, up Applby Street. Surrounding the house in the darkness. But the thing that came striding in the mist was something Wilma had never seen before, something she could barely make out: something that shrieked in a voice that was like the wind but wasn’t the wind, like a machine but not a machine, a terrible hammering that grew louder and louder and resolved itself into pounding on the walls. On the back porch in darkness Wilma had waited, listening, hearing the boards and timbers of the house groan with the strain. Hearing the zap and hiss of those blue flames, that creeping lightning, and seeing the occasional flash of it through the murk. Smelling burning, like hair and flesh and feathers singed and consumed at once.
Knowing somehow that if whatever it was broke into the house, things would be worse than they were now.
The howling stopped about two hours before dawn, and the silence that stretched until morning was almost worse than the noise. Then imperceptibly the mists slunk away, and Wilma slept.
She sat again tonight on her porch with her cats around her and wiped her hands absent-mindedly with the dampened washrags that in some curious way were calming to her heart. She watched the house and watched the darkness, with the stillness of a cat, like Imp when he was waiting for a grasshopper to forget that he was there.
He has to come sometime, she thought.
When he does, he has to speak to me.
Movement in the darkness. The reflection of milky eyes. Somehow she knew it was Hank-the smell of him, perhaps, sharp and clear as any mouse in the grass or frog beneath the porch steps-and she settled herself more still, lest she break the pattern of stillness and cause him to flee. Beside her, Imp hissed softly and lashed his tail.
Dark against dark, Hank stepped from the bramble of the overgrown back hedge. Since last she’d seen him, a day or two after the Change, he’d altered little, though she thought he was smaller yet. It was as if his flesh and bones had compacted: the same man, yet more dense, in body and also in soul.
At least he was alive.
There was a smell in him of fear, and of madness. He carried a short length of metal pipe in his hand.
She waited until he was quite near her before she spoke, and then she spoke without moving: Hank, she said softly, speaking as she sometimes spoke without actual words to her cats. But he heard her and froze.
“Hank.”
The glinting eyes turned. Wilma rose, very slowly, and held out her hand. When he didn’t move, she descended the porch steps as if she were hunting and feared to startle a prey. His hand with the club moved a little, rose, then sank again. She felt his eyes on her and felt, too, the pain, the yearning in his heart, even before he said her name.
“Wilma.”
“Hank, will you walk with me?” In the dark she saw his face flinch, twist a little. Some inner pinch of pain. But he didn’t move, beyond the clenching of his big hand, and she came up close to him and took his arm. Her voice was the murmur of the night. “Let’s walk,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I don’t-know,” said Hank. His brow wrinkled, sharp and hard, at her question, as if even thinking put him in pain. “There’s these. . dreams.”
They had left the houses of town behind, the stink of privies and woodsmoke. The green sweet stillness of trees lay thick on the night. Wilma had led him away from the terrible flow of those glowing energies, avoiding the hot spots, the bad places.
They passed the old Simmonds house and stood in the dirt lane there, with the trees of the mountain pressing close around them. The old two-story house was dark. A hundred feet away the mist curled, pale and enigmatic in starlight.
Hank pressed his fist to his brow, as if the physical act could push down some clamor within. “I keep to myself, mainly, but. . they know I led the men out of the mines, they’re looking to me to-” He broke off, then struggled again to speak. “There ain’t too much food in the tunnels. We were okay at first, but Green Mountain’s nearly trapped out of deer and rabbits. It’s harder and harder to catch rats in the town, even. They’re talkin’ of hitting the food stores-and the houses.”
Wilma almost asked, Who are? but stopped herself. Now was not the time to break his concentration. She only waited, in the silence that was her custom now as well as his.
In time, he went on. “So there’s these dreams. And in ’em I’m hungry, and it’s his fault. Wishart.”
“Bob Wishart?”
He nodded.
“Is Bob alive?” she asked. “I know Arleta said, right at the beginning, that his machines hadn’t gone down, but now I see that might not even have been Arleta-or she might not have been in her right senses. And I know no batteries, no machines kept working. So what is in that house?”
“I don’t know!” Hank shook his head, and the gesture graded into a quiver, like a shudder of pain. His hand twitched where hers held it and the pressure of his fingers around hers was suddenly crushing and as suddenly released. “I know what you’re saying is right. And I don’t know the truth of it. But in these dreams it’s-there’s this voice saying, He’s pretending. He’s just faking us out. He’s doing it all, with the fog and the things coming out of it.”