She found him damping the fire in back of the farmhouse. The fire had been the only significant light on this prairie, and she was sorry to see it flicker out.
Joey wore his ancient skull-and-roses T-shirt and a leather jacket to keep away the night chill. His pistol was tucked under his belt. It was a small-caliber pistol, but Beth thought it was reckless of Colonel Tyler to have given Joey any kind of gun. It was a miracle Joey hadn’t blown his own balls off with it.
She hadn’t come looking for him. She wanted to walk a distance into the Connors’ grazing land and be by herself… watch the stars come out and try to make some sense of everything that had happened. But Joey waved her over.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I was going somewhere,” Beth said, aware of how pathetic it sounded.
“Taking in a movie? Goin’ down to the mall, Beth?” He laughed. “It’s a fuckin’ desert out here. Everywhere we go is some kind of desert or other. Doesn’t it rain anywhere but Buchanan?”
“It rains in Ohio.”
“Ohio,” Joey said scornfully.
He poured another bucket of sand over the embers until even that faint light was lost. “Some wild events this morning.” She nodded.
“I saw the whole thing. Two shots.” He cocked his index finger. “Bam, the chest. Bam, the head. You don’t want to know what it looked like. It was obvious the kid wasn’t human. Inside, he was like—shit, I don’t know. Like a watermelon full of motor oil.”
“Christ, Joey!”
He smiled at her. “Facts of life.”
“Is Abby Cushman still under guard?”
“Jacopetti’s outside her door. Not that he could stop her from coming out. I take over from him when I’m done here. It doesn’t really matter—where’s she gonna go?”
“Like Tom Kindle or Tim Belanger, maybe. Just leave.”
“Nope. I pulled the distributor cable out of her engine.”
“Does Colonel Tyler know that?”
“He said it showed initiative.” Big grin.
Beth resented Joey’s access to the Colonel. It was Joey’s influence that had caused most of their problems, she was sure of it. She remembered Tyler’s hand on her shoulder this morning. Familiar hand. She had memorized the sensation.
His touch was like a token of everything she’d gained since Contact, and Joey was everything she wanted to forget. The two of them together… it was an unbearable combination.
“Bam” Joey said, reminiscing. “I’ll tell you one thing there’s less of now. There’s less bullshit.”
It was a callous, stupid thing to say, and it made her angry. “The end of the world is a good thing because you get to carry a gun for the first time in your life? Sounds like bullshit to me.”
“If the world hadn’t ended, I wouldn’t be carrying a pistol. True. If the world hadn’t ended, you wouldn’t be fucking a doctor.”
She flushed with anger. “You don’t know who I sleep with. You don’t have a clue.”
“All I’m saying is don’t act superior when you’re out there with a Tor Sale’ sign between your legs.”
Maybe the rage she felt had been inside her all along, and maybe it wasn’t even Joey she was mad at. But, oh, Christ, after a long and fucked-up day when somebody had died, for God’s sake, to have Joey Commoner call her a slut, to be sneered at by him—it erased everything she had pretended to achieve; it was unspeakable, and she hated him for it.
She blinked back tears. Joey was watching her, was maddeningly attentive, his face calm and slack in the starlight, and suddenly Beth recalled a dream she had once had:
Joey as a wild horse. Beth the rider. She rides him to the top of some high cliff. He balks, and she spurs him. And he jumps.
Shut up, Beth. Just close your mouth. Don make it worse.
She felt light-headed, utterly weightless.
This cliff, she thought. This desert.
“Bastard,” she said. “You don’t know everything that goes on in this camp.”
“Try me,” Joey said.
Chapter 34
Precipice
Matt was not quite asleep when the knock came at the door of his camper.
He sat up and peered out the window at prairie night. The stars were the color of ice and there was a milky glow on the eastern horizon where the moon was about to rise.
Beth? he wondered. But it was late even for Beth.
And it hadn’t sounded like her knock. Not that reckless. Three discreet taps. Dear God, he thought wearily, what now?
He pulled on a T-shirt and briefs and stumbled to the door.
Tap tap tap.
“All right! Christ’s sake! Hold on!”
He opened the door and stood mute in a river of night air.
“Matthew,” Tom Kindle said. “Lemme in before I freeze my balls off.”
* * *
Kindle didn’t look good. He wasn’t hurt, but he looked chastened. Matt tried to remember where he had seen that look on Tom Kindle before.
Of course: it was when he came into the hospital with his broken leg, raving about monsters. About a thousand years ago.
Matt kept the light low and poured his friend a cup of lukewarm coffee from a thermos. “You didn’t get too damn far, did you? Not much farther than Laramie, I’ll bet.”
Kindle put aside his rifle and shrugged. His eyes were lost among wrinkles like crevices. “I took a little trip south. Toward that, uh, that thing—”
“The new Artifact.”
“I admit I was curious about it. Aren’t you? Even sitting on the horizon, it’s big enough to fill half a sky.” He took a long, noisy sip of coffee. “And it’s strange, Matthew. It draws the attention. You ever been down to Moab? The canyonlands around there? Same kind of strangeness. Red rock, blue sky, and everything’s too big. Maybe a person loses some judgment. I looked at that thing a long time, and then I started to wonder if I could get up close to it.”
“Did you?”
“Get close? No, not very.” He shook his head. “Close enough, though. The air gets foul. It smells like sulphur and it burns your lungs. The ground isn’t too steady, either. Matthew—the thing is rooted to the earth! Literally, it looks like it put down roots, roots made of some kind of stone. Black sandstone or maybe pumice. Miles wide. And, Matthew, in the shadow of those roots, there were certain things moving around.…”
“Things?”
“Machines. I guess. Or animals. Or both, somehow. But they were big enough to see from miles away. Hazy in the distance, the way you might see a city from across a lake—they were as big as that. Big as a city and taller than they were wide, and different shapes, like giraffes, or gantries, or spiders, or cranes.” He shuddered. “They must have built that entire thing since last August—have you thought about that? A thing the size of a mountain in half a year? God Almighty! And, Matthew… while I was watching those creatures move around, a thought occurred to me. They must be about finished their work, I thought. It doesn’t look like a half-made thing. And it’s a spaceship, right? When it’s ready, it goes into orbit. Spaceship the size of Delaware. And here we are sitting practically on its tail. I came back north this morning and found you folks still parked here, and I don’t think that’s too intelligent.”
“It’s Tyler,” Matt said. “He claims there was a radio message. Some bad weather east of here. So we’re staying put.”
“There was a vote on this?”
“One of the Colonel’s votes.”
“Bullshit and gerrymander.”
“Yeah, basically.”
“He claims there was a radio message?”
“Well—the radio blew up.”
“While he was using it?”
“Supposedly.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Nope.”
“You put up with this horseshit?”
“He’s not a stupid man, Tom. He had the Committee rolled up like a carpet. Made me look paranoid.”
“A little paranoia’s not a ba
d thing. I was careful coming toward camp. Left my camper in back of a billboard and hiked away from the road. I spent most of the afternoon hidden behind a rise south of here watching folks mill around. Am I crazy, or is Joey Commoner standing guard on Abby’s trailer?”
Matt told him about the insect woman, about William’s death and Abby’s altercation with the Colonel.
Kindle listened carefully, eyes wide. “She had wings?”
“I saw her in the air,” Matt said. “Yes, she had wings. They looked like butterfly wings.”
“Oh, Matt… too many fuckin’ miracles,” Kindle said.
“Uh-huh.” That about summed it up.
Kindle held his rifle in his lap. “The question is, what are you planning to do about it?”
“He can’t keep Abby in her trailer indefinitely. Weather or no weather, we’ll have to move on soon.”
“Might not be time. I don’t know why Tyler’s stalling, but I don’t think it matters. That mountain on the horizon isn’t going to wait for us. It’s not just Tyler’s risk. There’s Abby—and that old lady, Miriam—”
And Beth, Matt thought. “But Tyler’s still got the Committee wrapped up.” ^ ^
“I’m not talking about a vote, I’m talking about haying. Bugging out. Soon. Say, tonight.”
“You just got back.”
“I mean everybody. Everybody who isn’t playing handmaiden to Colonel Tyler. I saw Tim Belanger headed east by himself. Obviously he’s got the right idea. So we round up Abby, we get Miriam—”
“Beth,” Matt said.
“And Beth, and we take one of these big RVs and leave before the Colonel gets his act together.”
“It would have to be this camper. I don’t want to leave my medical supplies behind.”
“Okay, this camper. There’s room for everybody until we can find more transportation. We’re only a couple of days from Ohio if we keep moving.”
“I thought you didn’t want to go to Ohio. I thought you wanted to see the Wind River Range.”
“Maybe I just want to see the last of Tyler. Maybe I don’t like the fact that he locked up Abby Cushman.” Kindle lifted his rifle and sighted down the length of it. “Or maybe some asshole talked me into thinking of this fuckin’ trailer camp as a town.”
* * *
Beth was ashamed of what she had told Joey… but tantalized by it, too.
He had reacted with an enraged denial, and here was the scary part: she liked it.
She had always liked her ability to rouse Joey from his slumberous complacency—to make him horny; to make him mad. Poke the tiger and see if he bites. Even if it was her he bit. Maybe especially if it was her.
She had left Joey by the dead fire in back of the house, had left him stewing in his own anger, and it was only fair, Beth told herself; not nice, but fair; now they were even.
She was restless in her bed with the memory.
You want to know where I’m spending the night?
In that camper, Joey had said. Like you always do.
Not every night. Not the whole night. Listen—
Remembering it made her weak-kneed. And hot. In every sense of the word.
If she left her camper now… would Joey notice?
He was guarding Abby Cushman. With her cheek pressed against the rear window, Beth could just see the light of the burning Sterno he used to keep himself warm. Joey took his guard duty seriously. He hardly ever slept anymore. He didn’t seem to need to.
He was crouched against the meager light like a troll.
Beth thought, If I leave on the other side of the camper and circle around toward the house…
It might be possible.
She put on her old jeans and a blouse. Then she took three deep breaths and opened the door into cold prairie night. She stepped out barefoot with her long hair loose, like a country girl.
There was more light than she really liked. The moon had just come up. And was it a reflection of the moonlight or was the earthbound Artifact glowing with some subtle light of its own? A pale white pulsation, as if it were storing up some peculiar kind of energy?
Beth moved lightly, silently, in the radiant night.
* * *
Miriam, back in her camper, understood that distant glow. It registered on her eyelids and behind them as she lay in bed, her body eroding from within.
Miriam was two places now: here and Home. The neocytes had worked quickly. Miriam at Home was not made of blood and skin, was not even altogether material, and Miriam became more wholly that Miriam with every tick of the clock, as this Miriam—the old and used-up and ailing Miriam—grew increasingly hollow and fragile.
She turned her head to the window and saw Home bathed in a ghostly nimbus, summoning the energies that would lift it free of the Earth.
Summoning the energies, Miriam thought, that would carry it to the stars, a human epistemos in the growing awareness of the galaxy.
Very soon now, Miriam thought.
* * *
Colonel Tyler had occupied a downstairs room in the Connor house—a room that once had been Vince Connor’s study, with a filing cabinet full of deeds, insurance documents, and bookkeeping ledgers, and a leather sofa long enough to stretch out on.
Colonel Tyler sat in what had been Vince’s favorite chair: a high-backed recliner finished in olive-green Naugahyde. Although it was very late, the Colonel was awake. He hadn’t slept for three nights now—a bad sign.
He hated the dark. In the dark, Sissy tended to disappear; and as bad as her presence was, to be alone was often worse. The days were all right. In the day there was sunlight, a horizon. At night, doubts came swarming.
Doubts… and sometimes madness.
It seemed to Colonel Tyler that his madness, which had once been a sealed box, had spilled out into his everyday life. Madness was everywhere: in Sissy, whose persistence was probably not normal; in the derangement of the world; in the appearance of the insect woman and the death of the pseudo-child William.
And today Tim Belanger had left camp, and that seemed the worst omen of all, the symptom of a disintegration that had begun to move from the peripheral Tom Kindle to the more central Tim Belanger and would eventually strike at the core: Ganish, Jacopetti, Joey, even himself…
“Colonel Tyler?”
He looked up, startled.
Beth Porter stood in the doorway. He hadn’t heard her knock. He cleared his throat. “Beth?” He summoned up the daylight Colonel John Tyler.
She glanced at him and then at the service revolver he had placed on the arm of the recliner. “Are you okay?”
Who had last asked him that? A. W. Murdoch, he thought. In that little town in Georgia. In Loftus. “Certainly I am.”
“May I come in?”
He nodded. She stepped into the meager light of a single lamp and closed the door behind her. She was not a child, Tyler thought, nor yet quite an adult; she still moved like a teenager, with a teenager’s unconscious coltishness. “What brings you out so late?”
“Just that I was lonely,” Beth said. “I thought it might be warmer in here.”
* * *
Matt and Kindle approached the Sterno fire in front of Abby’s trailer expecting a brisk who-goes-there from Joey. The fire cast tall, nervous shadows on the aluminum wall of the camper. The camper was dark and the door was closed, but Joey wasn’t there.
“Maybe he got tired and found somewhere to sleep,” Matt said. “Or took a bathroom break.”
Kindle shook his head. “Joey doesn’t sleep, and he pees in the bushes when he figures he’s alone. This is peculiar.” He rapped his bony knuckles on the door.
Abby’s voice, sleepy and chastened, came from inside: “Who’s there?”
“Me,” Kindle said. “Me and Matt. We need to talk.”
A few seconds later, she was at the door in an old blue nightgown, looking at Kindle with sleepy eyes and a stew of emotions. “You selfish son of a bitch—you left.”
“Selfish SOB came b
ack,” Kindle said. “Abby, I didn’t know he was going to lock you up.”
“Where is Joey?” Abby wondered.
She turned her head at the sound of the gunshot.
* * *
“Hold up!” Kindle said. “Christ’s sake! Hold up!”
He stopped Matt and Abby before they ran across the open space to the Connor house. The shot had seemed to come from there. “Think about this. Who’s in the house?”
“Tyler, probably,” Matt said. ” I don’t know who else.”
“Which room is Tyler using?”
“Around the side.”
“Show me. But stay back from the house.”
They circled clockwise in the dark behind the row of RVs, where lights had begun to come on.
“That window,” Matt said.
It was a small side window with a roll blind across it. They saw a second flare of light in that confined space, a second gunshot; and moments later, a third.
* * *
Rosa Perry Connor didn’t hear the shots. She was far away, attending to another summons.
She had flown miles from the Connor farmhouse. Carried more by wind than volition, she had flown south past the Artifact, had soared high above the faint smudge of Denver, an abandoned city, and then away from the mountains and across the plains in a wordless ecstasy of flight.
Her lifespan in this altered body was short but sufficient. Night fell. She approached the stars on gusts of colder, darker air. She grew lighter as her physical resources were exhausted.
It was time to go Home. The summons had gone out all over the world. Sojourners in the air, the sea, on the land: come Home, come Home now. Time for the great departure. But like a guilty child at bedtime, Rosa lingered a moment longer.
The moon rose over the lightless immensity of the high plains. One wingbeat more, Rosa thought, one more, savoring the brisk night wind that would carry her dust away.
The Harvest Page 40
