“It’s a pile of rubble already,” Dave shot back. He took down another swallow of water and imagined it tasting like Beam, but it was plenty good enough as it was. “More than that. It’s a graveyard.”
Neither JayDee nor Olivia spoke. The doctor shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and Olivia regarded her little rack of letter tiles as if she actually was concentrating on the game and not just trying to avoid thinking too much about the onrushing future.
“We’re all going to die here,” Dave went on. “We can’t hold out. That’s what’s impossible.” He fired a quick dark glance at JayDee. “I’ve been asking around, if anybody has ever heard of ‘the white mansion.’ So far, nothing. I’ve asked if anybody’s got a road atlas, but again…no. Maybe somebody’ll come up with something, maybe not. In the meantime, I know there’s a library at the high school.” From the high school is where much of JayDee’s medical supplies had come, and some of the canned food, but Dave’s last trip there had been months ago. “I’m taking a horse over there in the morning, and I’m going to see if I can find anything…some maps, maybe…anything that could help.”
Olivia said, “You can’t go out alone. You shouldn’t have gone out alone after Ethan. It was foolish. And you know you shouldn’t go out at all, unless you’re looking for food and ammo.”
“Yeah, but I’m going anyway. I won’t ask anybody to go with me, I can handle it.”
Olivia paused, examining her tiles again. She decided to save her blank and placed dart on the board, then she chose three more tiles, one a dreaded Z. “You believe in this?” she asked quietly, as the oil lamps made soft guttering sounds. “That Ethan is wanting to go to a real place? That he’s feeling…what would the word be…summoned? And that this white mansion place isn’t halfway around the world?”
“Summoned?” JayDee managed a crooked smile but it quickly slipped away. “Summoned by what? A voice in a dream? That’s what you have to go on?” The question was aimed at Dave.
“I have to go on what the boy tells me,” Dave replied firmly. “Sure, that’s all I’ve got…but I do know I saw the earthquakes. Felt ’em, too. I believe he knew the spring was there before it came up. I think he sensed it. Don’t ask me, I can’t explain.” He leaned forward slightly, looking from John Douglas to Olivia and back again. “He’s asked me to help him find this place. He thinks it’s real enough, and he says it’s pulling at him. Can it be found?” Dave shrugged. “Is it fifty miles away? A hundred? A thousand? Don’t know. I have to get to that library tomorrow and try to find some maps. That’s the best I can do. And John…you know what those bruises looked like on his chest and back. You said it yourself…you were surprised his lungs hadn’t burst and he was still breathing.”
“True, I did,” JayDee answered, but there was a note of pity in his voice. “I am amazed he’s alive. But Dave…that doesn’t mean he died and has risen from the dead.”
Dave was silent for awhile. The rain thrashed harder against the crooked roofs and broken walls of the Panther Ridge Apartments, whose glory was a distant memory.
Dave looked directly into JayDee’s eyes. He said in a low, restrained voice, “But what if it does?”
JayDee slapped the edge of the table with both hands, upsetting all the little tiles of all the little words. He stood up, a frown etched across his face. “I’m not listening to this. Thank you for the company. I’m getting some sleep now, goodnight to you both.” He motioned toward the door. “Push hard, it sticks.”
Dave and Olivia said goodnight to JayDee. Dave picked his Uzi in its holster up from the floor beside his chair and Olivia hefted her rifle. Dave did have to push hard against the door. In the outside corridor, they walked together toward the stairs.
“It seems to me,” Olivia said, breaking their silence, “that you want to believe in something very badly.”
“Yeah, that’s probably right. Sad, huh?”
“Not sad. I have to say…I wonder about Ethan myself. John does too, only he doesn’t want to say so directly. It’s hard to believe in very much anymore. That there’s a purpose to anything.” She stopped walking, and so did Dave. “So you believe that Ethan has a purpose? And it’s beneficial to us, somehow? What might that be?”
“No idea. But the things he’s done so far have helped us. I don’t know what he is or why he’s here, but I say…if he can help us…then I need to help him do what he’s asking. If that means following a direction he heard in a dream, to the best of my ability…yeah, I’m for it. You should be too. We all should be. Otherwise, we’re just waiting to fill up the graveyard, and I don’t want to wait for that anymore.”
“Hm,” said Olivia, and she pondered that before she spoke again. Rain was pouring off the roof to their right. Lightning flickered across the troubled darkness. “I suppose…maybe I’m afraid to believe. That would mean opening yourself up again, wouldn’t it? I guess it’s safer to sit in a room with a picture of your dead husband and think…not too much longer now, and we’ll be together.”
“Don’t give up,” Dave said.
“Trust in a boy who has no memory? Trust in three words from a dream? That’s hanging on with your fingernails, I think.”
“Sure it is. But it is hanging on.”
Olivia nodded and smiled faintly. There was so much pain behind the smile that Dave had to lower his head and look away. “I’ll go with you tomorrow,” she told him.
“You don’t have to. No need for two of us to ride out.”
“Maybe I also want to hang on a little longer. Besides, they’re my horses.” The herd had come from the ranch she’d owned with Vincent. Watching them being slaughtered and eaten, one after the other, had been at first devastating, and now a matter of survival.
“Okay.” Dave put a hand on her shoulder. “Meet at the corral at eight?”
“I’ll be there.”
Dave had no doubt she would be. Shielding themselves as best they could from the downpour, they parted ways at the bottom of the steps. Dave returned to his apartment and his sleeping bag on the gray sofa. Olivia went to her apartment, touched a match to the wick of a lamp and sat at her desk, and there she picked up the Magic Eight Ball Vincent had given her. She turned it between her hands, remembering the day this had come to her wrapped in red paper with a silver ribbon. It had been, it seemed, a lifetime ago.
And now, against all logic and reason, she had to ask a question. It was whispered, as if into Vincent’s listening ear.
“Should I believe?”
She shook the ball and then turned it over.
The little white plastic die emerged from its inky soup.
Maybe it was Vincent answering her, maybe it was Fate, maybe it was only happenstance, which she certainly thought was the most likely.
But the answer was: You may rely on it.
She took the lamp with her, and she went into the next room and undressed. She slid into her bed where good dreams and belief in miracles did not come easily, but that always had a pistol tucked under the pillow.
Eight.
A brooding yellow sky stretched overhead. There was no
wind, but the air smelled burnt. The horses were skittish, nervous to the touch. Dave rode alongside Olivia as they went through the metal-plated door that had been opened for them. As soon as they were descending the road, the door was closed and locked again, according to Olivia’s orders. At each corner of the wall that had been rebuilt and fortified around the Panther Ridge Apartments the machine gunners sat behind their weapons, scanning both the silent sky and the ominous earth.