We passed a group of people dressed in uniform. They were marching down the street. It made the middle of my back itch. Most had swords or spears, but they didn’t pay attention to us as we drove by them.
There was a half-mile of luxurious homes in a multitude of styles. All had various wind-tattered flags flying from their front façades or on poles in the exterior sections. Some were Victorian. Others were more modern. One had a bronze statue of an African elephant trumpeting its horn. I couldn’t help but notice that McCurdy didn’t have a historical heroic anecdote about the elephant statue. (“The elephant charged the White House in a moment of superiority over the Democratic party.”)
We traversed a bridge over a heavily wooded area and McCurdy said, “This is Rock Creek Park, if you feel like hiking through the woods, there are great trails there. You’ll have to watch out for the centaurs though. They like to kidnap young women. I don’t know why. They carry them off and then let them go after a few hours. They don’t really do anything to them.”
That almost sounded like a joke to me.
And almost too quickly we came to a stop. McCurdy parked the Stanley Steamer in the middle of the road because there wasn’t any other traffic. He glanced left and said, “That was the U.K.’s embassy. No one there except a woman who’s calling herself Queen Gertrude the 3rd.”
Stephen laughed. “She makes a lovely potato soup on Wednesdays and enjoys having all the company she can, if you feel like being sociable.”
No. I’m not sociable. I have a big sword that I can and will pull out if I’m feeling threatened. I am so not sociable. In fact, my stomach had started to hurt. It was an icky feeling. Ahead of us was a series of trees as the road turned into a rambling circle that looped around to the north. A black wrought iron fence ringed the interior. A gate sat in front of us. A District police squad car parked in front of the gate, but there were uniformed soldiers waiting there, too. The police car had been there from the time of the change, and they simply hadn’t moved it.
I leaned forward and looked out. “That’s the Naval Observatory,” I said. Nice, I said to myself. Captain Obvious at full attention again.
McCurdy nodded. “The Vice President lived there with his family. There’s also an atomic clock there. It’s the Master Clock. Before what happened, it was one of two that kept definitive time for our country.”
“It’s not really one clock,” Stephen said. “It’s a series of clocks that was a system for keeping the time correct.”
Lulu laughed. “Guess we’ll have to refigure out the time, one of these days.”
“One of these days,” McCurdy agreed. I saw the side of his face, and he smiled enigmatically. I didn’t like that much either. “Your friend and your bugs will have to stay here,” he added.
“They’re not bugs,” I said automatically. I glanced at Lulu and then at the gerbil cage. The firefly pixies had retreated inside the enclosure sometime after the last statue, and it was obvious to me they weren’t going to come out again.
“Spring,” I sang, “I have to go talk to someone. You’ll stay with Lulu?”
“We’ll stay with Grumpy-Guts-Man-Thief-Girl,” Spring sang back through the heavy material. There were other grumbling singing agreements from some of the other pixies. “Soophee will hurry back to the sisters. This place is…”
“This place is what?” I sang sharply. It wasn’t just me. It wasn’t just a cramp from not eating enough food today or knowing that power-hungry idiots hadn’t disappeared with the rest of the dogged politicians during the change. There was something about this place that bothered me, and I didn’t like it much. The firefly pixies felt it, too.
“Hurry back to us, Soophee,” Spring sang, and she never brought her head out again.
McCurdy climbed out of the Stanley Steamer and then held the door for me. I got out and smiled briefly at Lulu. Lulu put a protective hand over the gerbil cage and said to Stephen, “Do you think Queen Gertrude the 3rd has a pot of coffee going?”
I turned toward the gate.
Chapter 12
Hail to the Chief…
The three soldiers at the gate straightened up as if a puppeteer had yanked on their strings. Somewhere in the depths of my mind, I knew the two men and one woman hadn’t been in the military before the change. It was possible that McCurdy also hadn’t been in the navy before the change, but he seemed like what a lieutenant was supposed to be. Like I really knew what a navy lieutenant was supposed to be. Now I had a mental image of McCurdy as the intrepid naval officer in my head.
The soldiers saluted McCurdy and even a novice like me could tell they weren’t used to it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw McCurdy return the salute. His was crisp and snapped like the practiced soldier I assumed he was. His hand popped as the aligned fingers came to the brim of his soft cap. “As you were, soldiers,” he said, and the hand dropped to his side.
The soldiers’ eyes came to me. I don’t know what they saw. I could imagine, but I could also imagine I was incorrect. Here was a girl who was seventeen years old, with black hair and gray eyes. I didn’t know what size I was wearing lately. The last two weeks on the trains had put a few pounds back on me. (Clora was almost as good a cook as Gibby, and she liked to make three meals a day.) The girl they saw wore a heavy jacket and blue jeans with winter boots. That girl had a great sword strapped to her back. Even with the long weapon, she probably didn’t look threatening. If they were smart, then they would know that not everything was as it appeared.
McCurdy twisted toward me, and his brown eyes studied me intently. He towered over me by about a half a foot and with his extra inch or so in his combat boot heels. I don’t know what he saw either, but he already had a taste he didn’t like. “You’ll have to leave your weapons here,” he told me. “Told me” was a polite way of putting it. It was more like he commanded me just as he would have done to a subordinate.
“Will I,” I said, and it wasn’t a question. If I’d had a moment to consider it, I think I would have asked myself what was it that had me most bothered. The first thing that sprang to my mind was that McCurdy had a ‘tude. I could understand that. He was the last of a dying race. No one else was going to be the regimented military lieutenant for a very long time. He had to be the example for those to come. He supported the government that was also dying rapidly. He had to reinvent himself, and he didn’t want to do it. But he was trying. He wasn’t going to let it go either, even if it killed everyone around.
Then there was the matter of me. I didn’t like being shoved around even if it was metaphorical. I had been making my own decisions for months now. I might not be the legal definition of a grown up, but I wasn’t going to allow someone to stomp over me.
Finally, there was the crawling ache in the bottom of my stomach. A great skeletal fist reached inside my abdomen and squeezed my innards in an unearthly grip. That crawling ache didn’t like something around me. It really, really, really did not. And to be perfectly specific, I wasn’t going to give up my weapon when my gut was telling me something bad was going on.
“It’s a safety precaution,” McCurdy said smoothly, as if he was talking to a child, changing his approach so swiftly my head nearly spun. “Your sword will be fine here. They won’t mess with it.”
One of the male soldiers, dressed in a similar uniform to McCurdy, held his hand out to me, clearly expecting me to hand my sword over promptly and without question.
I spun on my heel and went back toward the car without saying anything.
“Wait!” McCurdy said after a moment. I saw Lulu’s head perk up, and she climbed out of the Stanley Steamer. We were going to have to walk back to wherever and talk about what to do next. They didn’t want representatives here. They wanted followers, and I wasn’t a follower. When I got back to California that was what I was going to tell Gideon.
“Wait, dammit!” McCurdy said, and I heard footsteps. His hand descended onto my shoulder and twisted me around. The next mo
ment I had my hand wrapped around his throat, and my thumb was pressing into his carotid artery. That was something Tomas had shown me. I hadn’t had time to pull the sword. I could see the soldiers behind McCurdy rushing forward. McCurdy started to bat my hand away, and I squeezed harder. His eyes watered, and he fought for breath.
Another voice bellowed, “Stop!”
Everyone froze. Beyond the soldiers at the closed gate stood a gray-haired man. Two other people stood beside him. They stared at us. “What the hell, McCurdy?” the first one said piercingly. “You know I wanted to speak to her.”
McCurdy glared down at me. One hand rested on my wrist. The other hand was still on my shoulder. I relaxed my grip enough so he could draw a breath. When he gasped in a breath, he said loudly, “She didn’t want to give up her weapons, sir!”
A long moment of silence ensued.
I squeezed McCurdy’s neck a little hard and he choked. I almost felt guilty. Almost.
“Well, let the little gal keep that big ol’ sword then,” the gray-haired man drawled. “I figure I can outrun her before she tries to chop my head off.”
Abruptly and without warning, I let McCurdy go, and he immediately backed up, watching me warily. His eyes had a hint of shock. He hadn’t thought that I would fight back. Was McCurdy the one that Landers spoke to?
Suddenly the world was full of secrets again. Oddly, I thought we had left that behind the moment I had sliced the Burned Man’s arm off.
“Right this way, Sophie,” McCurdy said to me mockingly. He coughed once and cleared his throat. He indicated the gate. I could tell he wanted to rub the red marks at his throat but didn’t want me to see him doing it. I turned a little and went past him. A quick glance over my shoulder showed that Lulu and Stephen were standing outside the steam car staring at us. Lulu had a hand on her KA-BAR and a frown on her lovely face. Stephen was shocked. His eyes were large and round.
I passed the guards who stepped away from me. The two men next to the gray-haired man pulled the gate open for me.
“I’m Corbin Maston,” the gray-haired man said smoothly. He grinned at me and revealed about a thousand gleaming white teeth. He was a fine-looking man in his sixties. He wore a button down shirt and casual khaki pants. There was a handsome black and blue sweater over the shirt, and he held a putter in one hand as if he had been on the back nine of the local course. He appeared normal. All he needed was the proper baseball cap to shield his forehead from the brilliant sun on a winter’s day. Once, he had been a United States Representative from Texas. Now, he was the President of the United States of America. My, oh my, how the world turns.
“My name is Sophie,” I said and stopped about ten feet away from the gate. I could be smooth, too. I should have been impressed by meeting the President of the United States, but it was just a title and not even the Electoral College had elected this man.
The President chuckled. “No need for last names, is there? We have about a thousand to two thousand people in the Capitol now. I think I’ll be talking to just about each and every one of them, and I’ll probably know all their names by the end of next year. Elections you know. It’s not according to the Constitution, but we need a consensus about who will be leading us.”
“How very democratic,” I said. I was proud of myself. It didn’t even come out as sarcastic, although that’s how it sounded in my head.
Maston regarded me evenly. Wheels were turning in his head, and I couldn’t even begin to hope to keep up. “These are my bodyguards, Mario and Jack. They voted democrat in the last election, but I won’t hold it against them.”
The two men gazed at me. Mario had mirrored sunglasses on. Jack was wearing a gray sweatshirt with Washington Capitals on it and the red, white, and blue-stylized eagle beneath the letters. Thank God neither one of them had gone for the traditional Secret Service black suit, or I would have snorted out one of my lungs.
“Come on up to the house,” Maston invited. “Dinner’s almost ready. It ain’t like my wife used to make it, but it’s a nice enough pot roast. Someone found a stash of potatoes in the Brazilian Embassy’s basement. The carrots were frozen, but they survived all right.”
My stomach roiled. It wasn’t because I was hungry but because something was off. I just didn’t know what it was. I looked over my shoulder at Lulu. She shrugged.
“Your cute little friend can come if she has a mind,” Maston said. “I’d be right honored to have two lovely ladies at my dinner table.”
I didn’t think I was going to be able to swallow a drink of water much less eat. I glanced at Lulu again, and she shook her head, pointing at the firefly pixies. I didn’t want to argue because the truth of the matter was that I didn’t trust McCurdy around the girls. He didn’t like them anymore than he liked me.
“She wants a rain check,” I said.
Maston waved genially at Lulu. “You betcha,” he called. “I’ll send some food down to ya’ll. The soldiers want to eat, am I right?”
McCurdy stepped past me and cast me a lingering look. An anticipatory look. He stepped through the gate, and for a single slice of time, everything seemed to stop. It was just a particle in time where the wind stopped blowing, the earth stopped spinning, and even the sun stopped shining. Then he was through the opening and gazing over his shoulder at me. I couldn’t help the start of surprise. What had just happened?
“You sure about this one, sir?” he asked the President.
“It’s a bright, shiny new world, McCurdy,” Maston said with a guffaw.
McCurdy shrugged.
“You coming in or not, Sophie?” Maston asked genteelly, ever the Texas gentleman. There was his oversized grin again. Once that grin had gotten him elected and probably some other stuff I didn’t want to think about.
The sick feeling increased as I approached the gate, and I caught a sight of something that reminded me of the town in Colorado. There was a shimmer in the air, and I pushed through it. My feet were stuck in mud for the longest time, and I struggled to pull them away. Then I was through, and the world suddenly felt like a very different place.
Both McCurdy and Maston looked at me with very different expressions. One was slightly disappointed. The other one was complacent. The President held out his hand to me. The sick feeling began to ebb away, but a vision appeared in my head, and it wasn’t pretty.
Maston caught my arm as I began to sway. “Hey there, little lady,” he said. “You a might hungry or such? Rush her off the train without even a by-your-leave, McCurdy?”
McCurdy shrugged, and I caught myself. I deliberately looked back at Lulu and caught my breath. She was fine. She stood next to Stephen with her arms crossed over her chest and one hand resting on her chin.
Okay, now that I was here in D.C. talking to the makeshift President of a country that didn’t really exist anymore, what was I supposed to say? “I could eat.” A conversational genius. That was me.
“Of course,” Maston replied smoothly. “The house is up the hill,” and he indicated a large two-storied house beyond a stand of leafless trees. It had a decorative tower on one side. “It’s Queen Anne style and was built in 1893. At least that’s what McCurdy tells me. Did he mention he’s got a degree in history from Annapolis?”
I looked at McCurdy and shrugged. “I gathered he has an interest in history.”
“The house wasn’t originally intended for the Vice President, you know,” Maston went on as if I hadn’t spoken. He took my arm and ignored my flinch. He guided me like I was a valued guest. My hand rested on his forearm. It felt a little weird. “It was supposed to be for the superintendent of the Naval Observatory. However, the Chief of Naval Operations liked it so much that he took it over in the 1920s. Rank has its privilege. Then it became the official residence of the Vice President in the 1970s.”
More history lessons. I guessed the President was trying to break the ice.
“Why did you want to meet with me in particular?” I asked when he stopped speaking.
“I should have guessed you were the direct kind of person, Sophie,” Maston said. He patted my arm. “It’s just like I said to McCurdy. It’s a bright, shiny new world. Consequently, we need bright, shiny new people to help guide it. People like you, Sophie.”
I thought of the recent vision of Lulu. There had been blood and tears and death in that vision. Lulu had been wearing a peacock blue dress out of a fashion magazine and the blood spilling down her front nearly obliterated the color. It made my stomach twist more. But I had discovered that the visions could be changed. “Most survivors have something. We think that’s the reason they woke up the next day.”
Maston nodded. “Everyone remembers that morning. I was spending the night at the Vice President’s house. John Quenby, do you remember?”
I shook my head. “Politics were the least of my worries then. I was worried about SATs and whether my father would find out that I was leaning toward an East Coast university instead of the West Coast one he wanted me to go to.”
“The day of the change, John Quenby was the Vice President,” Maston explained. “He was a close family friend. We were attending a conference the next day, and he invited me to dinner that night. We spent the evening with a few sifters of brandy. He also invited me to spend the night in one of the guest bedrooms. It was, as you might realize, a significant incident.”
I could have guessed the rest. “You woke up a little late the next day. Missed your conference, is that correct?”
Maston chuckled. “Missed a whole lotta things, I’ll tell you what. The Georgetown condominium where I lived was burned to the ground that same night. Who knows why? My wife was in Texas, although she didn’t make it. I’m told that all that was left in my Texas home was clothing in the bed and a set of wedding rings.” He glanced at me. “I had a group of soldiers go down that way. They checked for me. It was against the odds, but I had to know.”
Mountains of Dreams Page 12
