Cal gazed down at his sister, her eyes closed, the points of her ears peeking out between fine strands. It’s what he’d wanted for her. A bubble of safety. A line of defense between her and what he’d increasingly come to see as an assaultive world.
“It could be about more than just keeping his brother alive.” Cal’s gaze lingered on Tina, on the long pale lashes of her closed eyes. “Fred could be hanging on to Bob to keep hold of himself somehow, remind himself of who he is.”
“Or maybe just hold on,” Goldie said, not looking up from the catalogue. “I believe Fred’s a wanted man. By the Big Kahuna. The one wanting to chow down on all us tweaked ones. Source-zilla.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Colleen snapped. “It’s all goddam guesses.”
Turning to Wilma, Doc asked, “The energy drain. The sickness. How bad?”
“The children are getting weaker. Some of the old people, too. A few, we can’t rouse anymore.” She drew in a sharp breath. “And it’s spreading.”
“Calvin,” Doc said quietly, “whatever is sapping these people, there is a battle: Fred, clinging to Bob, and something else absolutely determined to break his grip. And soon I think, very soon, more than just those creatures will start to die, unless the deadlock is broken somehow.”
Wilma drew her shoulders back. “Well, we survived company thugs. We survived cave-ins. We’ve even survived the damn economy.” Turning to her guests, she inquired, “So what do we need to do to get these battlers the hell out?”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Colleen said softly, “We kill it. Even though it kicked our ass. We find some way to kill it.” It occurred to Cal that she was calling Fred Wishart it rather than he to distance herself.
In the dust gloom of the attic, they contemplated how precisely they might destroy something that only one of them had even been able to glimpse. But to Cal, it was not the doing of the thing but the act itself that disquieted him. For in annihilating what dwelt in that shattered house, might they possibly destroy not just the illness but the cure?
“No,” he said at last to the others. “We need to know more.”
“Right,” said Colleen. “We’ll commission a study.”
“Like you said, it’s all guesses,” Cal replied. “Only doesn’t it feel like Goldie’s right, that Wishart’s fighting the same fight we are, that we’ve got a common enemy? And even if that guess is wrong, Wishart’s still our only link to- what did you call it?”
Cal’s eyes were on Goldie, but it was Doc who responded, “ ‘The real one.’ ”
“Look. I want to shotgun this nightmare out of existence, too. But we’ve got to try another way.”
He added, with the certainty of a decision already made, “What Tina felt, and what I felt from Fred Wishart once we got close, was fear. Panic. And you don’t approach that with aggression, you approach it with-”
“Hold it, hold it.”
“Colleen. .”
“Tina also came up with ‘crazy,’ right? Any hands here on how we should be approaching that?”
“Sometimes,” Goldie murmured, “you talk to a crazy like he’s okay, and he can become okay.”
“No, no, no-”
Cal cut in over Colleen. “Fred Wishart is terrified and he’s alone. . so alone is how I need to go in there.”
“Cal?”
The soft voice turned them all. It was Tina, eyes barely open. He knelt quickly beside her, taking her hand. It felt cold, but her fingers tightened about his.
“You okay?” he asked. She nodded and snuggled against him.
Wilma leaned close. “Cal, you’re tired, and you’re not thinking. I went in only with concern, knowing them, and totally unescorted.”
“I know.” Cal stroked silken hair. “But it’s not just aggression that fuels fear, it’s. . well. Wishart wanted to scare you, and he did.”
Doc asked, “Calvin, are you imagining you’re going to be able to go back in there and not be afraid?”
“Hell, why would he be afraid? “ Colleen answered for him. “Our boy here likes the idea of wearing a Frigidaire for a hat.”
Cal turned his gaze back to Tina. Her exhaustion appeared to have brought her back to herself, and him, at least for now.
“Tina?” His voice was almost a whisper. “Tina?”
Her eyes fluttered open.
“We’ve never broken our word, have we?”
Her expression clouded.
“I need to break it now. I need to try something that may mean I won’t be able to come back to you.”
“That’s not the deal,” she said in alarm, drawing back, rousing herself. “I can help you, like in the fog with the hornets.”
“Tina. .”
“You need me, to talk to Dr. Wishart. To get through, beneath. I’m the one plugged into Mutant Central.”
She had heard them, all of them, talking, he realized. But had she forgotten, was she unaware of her imprisonment in the attic?
The others were silent, empty of suggestion. Wilma drew Cal away from Tina, out of earshot.
“I can’t tell you what to do. That child, though… she has a gift. Maybe she has it for a reason.”
“If that thing gets hold of her-” Cal protested.
“Something’s got hold of a lot of children in this town. They’re dying of it.” Wilma sighed. “I can’t tell you, but I can ask: Give all those other children their chance.”
Her hand in his was warm in the night air, and weightless. A dragonfly, Tina flowed beside him toward the Wishart house. The light about her had returned, its pastel mists veiling her.
At the perimeter of the gouged, ravaged front yard, Cal halted and released her hand. The scattered, butchered remains of the grunters lay cold and insensate among the weeds.
Deliberately, Cal drew his sword and stuck it point first into the damp earth. Then he unclasped his belt and scabbard, laid them alongside it. He straightened and looked at his sister, into the sapphire flame of her eyes, saw her disquiet and her resolve. He took her hand, turned back toward the house.
“Dr. Wishart, please. We need to talk with you.”
He had tried for a normal tone, but his voice sounded harsh to his ears, invasive. He tensed, waiting. But all was stillness, save for the cicada hum.
We’re not going to hurt you. Cal aimed the thought toward the house, made a mantra of it. He pressed away what Wishart had tried to do to him, locked his fear behind a door in his mind.
He took a hesitant step onto the ruined lawn.
NO. The word, forceful and blunt, came at them. Cal flinched, and he saw Tina wince with it, wondered how much louder it seemed to her.
The body pieces of what had once been the sons and husbands and fathers of the town did not stir. Warily, Cal moved past them and, with Tina, climbed the broken steps of the porch.
In the porch, the battered, bloodstained corpses of the books heaved and fluttered as if blown by a breath but did not fly at them. There was a sound, a deep creaking groan, like the whole house shifting on its timbers. A sense of watching, of waiting, rose from the walls, from the air about them.
They crossed the porch, stepped through the place where the kitchen door had been torn from its hinges, and entered the house.
Wilma had finally gotten the Russian doctor to agree to lie down, but only when she had positioned her sofa by the front window so that he could monitor the progress of Griffin and his sister toward the Wishart house. Under his guidance, Wilma had redressed his wound-the impromptu bandage was soaked through-and washed the blood from his face, the doctor all the while protesting impatiently. But now, at last, he lay quiet and watchful.
Wilma glanced out the window, saw that Griffin and his sister had crossed the Wishart porch with nothing rising to bar their way. A promising first step. She said a silent prayer as they vanished into the house.