Chariot - [Millennium Quartet 03]

by Charles L. Grant

  Only sand, and dust, and bits and pieces of brittle grass and dead cactus and whatever else it found lying loose on the stark desert floor. Only browns and tans and an occasional black stripe, darker in its huge long center, throwing twisting pale tendrils of itself at the rising sun and the land around it.

  The storm on Lake Superior had a beauty about it, dark and powerful; this storm had no beauty at all, just the browns and the tans and the swirling black stripes and bands he knew would vanish when it was close enough and became a solid grinding fog.

  The way it moved, its direction and speed, told him it would bypass the development a good distance to the south, and probably wouldn’t even reach the city. Tempting, then, to consider it an omen of some kind, but he couldn’t figure out what it might mean, so he returned to the street, rubbed his chest, and started walking.

  Jude called from his front door.

  He didn’t look back. He wanted to know where everyone was, and he figured getting them up this early would give him some advantage in case they had aligned themselves with Eula, the only conclusion he could reach after hearing about the festivities Jude hadn’t attended last night. Not that he was all that concerned. The only one who might give him serious trouble was Cable, who was bigger and heavier and definitely meaner.

  Unless, he realized as he stepped onto the Olins’ porch, they all brought their guns.

  He froze.

  You are, he thought, just too stupid to live.

  A snap of his fingers, and he ran back to Jude, still waiting on the porch. He said, “Your gun,” and she pulled it out from behind her back, a small nickel-plate revolver she told him was already loaded.

  “I was hoping,” she said, smiling and scolding at the same time.

  “The storm’s not coming this way. How long for the cab?”

  “They told me an hour,” Moonbow answered from the doorway, saw the gun in his hand, and turned so pale he feared she would pass out. Jude saw the reaction and wrapped her arms around her, hugging her tightly while her frown told him to get on with it, you’re wasting time you don’t have anymore.

  A nod, and he ran easily, a lope, not going full-out because he didn’t want to be winded when he reached Steph’s house.

  Once there, he took a few seconds to convince himself that this was something he really had to do. “Preemptive strike” was a phrase he remembered from the news, but however apt now, whoever used it didn’t know that he had never pointed a gun at anyone in his life. When he had to protect himself, it was always with his fists.

  It would be easy to say he would use it if he had to; he just hoped he wouldn’t have to prove it.

  He tried the door, found it unlocked, and slipped inside before he could talk himself out of it. Moving swiftly over the carpet toward the bedroom, whose door was open. There was no one inside. No one in the bathroom, no one in the kitchen. He didn’t realize how tense he was until he was outside again, and his legs felt as if they were about to turn to water.

  He grunted, breathed deeply, blew it all out in a rush, and trotted up to Hicaya’s place, then over to Lil and Muriel’s.

  Empty; both empty.

  He was well aware now that they were undoubtedly at Eula’s, watching him, scorning his pitiful attempts to unearth them. Playing hero. Action hero. Probably taking bets on who would be the one to get him, if they didn’t die laughing first.

  And the more he imagined it, the angrier he became. The more he understood how managed, how manipulated his life had been, how little control he had actually had over the past few years, the less he tried to manage his temper.

  He strode across the street, checking to be sure there was a round under the hammer, then holding the pistol down at his side. His face felt made of stone. His gaze centered on the old woman’s door, seeing nothing else, hearing nothing at all, not bothering to question what earthly good this would do because questions, now, were irrelevant. If it was true that he had a purpose unknown to him before, then he was going to do his damnedest to make sure that purpose was fulfilled.

  One way or another.

  The door was unlocked, but he didn’t open it.

  Rage was one thing; suicide was something else.

  And a voice behind him said, “Don’t bother, they’re not there.”

  * * * *

  2

  He spun and dropped into a crouch, revolver at the ready until he saw Roger Freneau in the middle of the street. The man wore only boxer shorts, and he seemed to be having a difficult time standing. Streaks of blood mixed with pus covered his face and chest, was matted in his beard and hair; his left leg was swollen to near twice its normal size from groin to knee. One eye was dark purple and puffed shut, the other squinted hard as if it couldn’t see clearly.

  “Jesus, Rog,” Trey said, standing, not wanting to stare and unable to look away.

  “No sweat.”

  Neither of them moved.

  Trey used his empty hand to gesture toward Freneau’s house. “Get back inside, I’ll call 9-1-1.”

  Freneau coughed, spat, a laugh that made him sound like an ancient raven. “Too late, man, too late. I pissed her off. Big time. My old boss, Davis, he’s got nothing on her.” He staggered sideways, belched, coughed, and spat blood at the ground. “Got to find my angel, though. She wouldn’t help me, you know?” He turned by pivoting on his swollen leg. “Got to show her what happens when you don’t do what’s right.”

  He lurched forward, and Trey came down off the porch.

  “Rog, where are they?”

  Roger, his shoulders hunched, slowly swiveled his head around. “Who?”

  Trey nodded once at Ricardo’s house, at Muriel’s, pointing with his chin.

  “Oh. Them.” He gestured toward the end of the street and the desert beyond. “Out there.” Then he pointed the other way. “I’m going this way. Got to find the angel.”

  “No, Rog.” He took a step. “Get back inside, okay? You’re too—”

  “Shit on that,” Roger snapped, swollen tongue trying to lick his chapped and bloody lips. “I’m dying, you jackass, or are you too stupid to figure that out? But I’m not dying until I find her and show her what the hell she’s done.”

  A gust of hot wind shoved him sideways, and he almost went to his knees.

  “No, Rog,” Trey said again. “I can’t let you do that. She didn’t do anything, you know that. It was Eula.”

  Freneau turned clumsily, tried to walk backward and fell hard on his rump, legs straight, arms braced on the ground to keep him from going all the way down. He cried out, the raven again, and struggled to stand. “Help me, man. I got to . . . help me, man.”

  Trey shook his head. He was fairly confident he wouldn’t catch the Sickness if he wrestled Freneau back into his house, but the way it looked now, Roger would probably put up a fight. There’d be a cut or two, a scratch, and he didn’t know just how far his protection would take him. Yet he couldn’t leave him in the street, either.

  “Look,” he said, moving closer, seeing tears spill from the man’s one good eye. “Look, I’m going to get a sheet or something, and I’m going to pull you inside and get you some help. Like the movie says, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, your choice, Rog. Your choice.”

  The wind blew dust over the raw eruptions on Freneau’s skin, and the man whimpered, lifted a beseeching hand and let it drop when the arm proved too heavy.

  “I made her mad,” he said in a desolate whisper. “I didn’t thank her, and I made her mad.” He lowered his head. “I don’t want to die, Trey. Jesus, I don’t want to die.”

  Helpless, and angrier at Eula for it, he looked down the street for inspiration, for help, and noticed Jude hurrying toward them. He lifted a hand to stop her, wave her back, but she ignored him, and Roger twisted around awkwardly, spat blood, and grinned.

  A growling, sandpaper voice: “My angel, there’s my angel, the little—”

  “Enough!”

  Roger looked at him, his s
mile revealing teeth turning black. “What, hero, you gonna shoot me? You gonna shoot the dying man?”

  Trey hesitated only a moment. “If you try to touch her . . . yeah, I will.”

  Ragged mocking laughter made him take an angry step forward, not realizing he had raised the gun until Roger laughed again and twisted around to face Jude, who faltered when she was close enough to see him clearly, veered away but didn’t stop.

  ‘Jude,” Trey said, “go back.”

  She shook her head and pointed, jabbing at the air until he turned around.

  “My God.”

  He had been wrong, really wrong; while he’d been playing hero, the sandstorm had reached Emerald City.

  * * * *

  3

  Despite the wind that grabbed at their clothes, tore at their hair, the cloud of sand and debris moved slowly, impossibly slowly. Rolling and cresting high above the rooftops like a dead-sea wave. Faint at the forefront as it moved right to left, more like thin smoke as it reached the half dozen empty homes that lay at the street’s upper end beyond Freneau’s and Eula’s. Dimming them, fading them, eventually obscuring them entirely.

  Puffs of it passed overhead, torn off by the wind, and he ducked and twisted away, protecting his eyes, unable to understand how it could move in such slow motion yet still dig at his skin, scrape and burn it.

  A window shattered.

  A handful of tiles rattled off a roof.

  “Trey!”

  The way ahead was dun and grey and tan and black.

  “Trey!”

  Mesmerized, fascinated, he backed off one careful step at a time, his free hand in front of his eyes as though to block a glaring light and he needed to see through it to what lay beyond.

  Jude grabbed his arm. “Trey!”

  Her dress was splotched with dust, the veil rippling against the contours of her face.

  “We’ll be all right,” he said, raising his voice above the wind. He swept his arm eastward. “It’s going that way.” He looked at Freneau, who tried frantically to stand, his one eye wide with terror. “We have to help him, Jude. We can’t leave him here.”

  She yanked down on his arm, grabbed his hair and forced him to face the storm.

  The cloud had stopped, a maelstrom wall that defied the wind, growing visibly thicker, visibly taller, visibly darker.

  More windows shattered, and somewhere inside was the rend and scream of tortured wood just before gunshot sounds indicated a porch torn apart.

  She begged him to hurry, to get back to the house where they could hide with the girls until it passed; Roger begged him not to leave, not to leave him in the open, then pulled his good leg under him and lunged, grabbing for Jude’s ankle, cackling and coughing, smearing the ground with yellow-streaked blood.

  She screamed, and danced and kicked out of his reach, screamed again as finally panic took her and she ran a few blind steps toward the cloud before Trey hooked her waist with an arm and turned her effortlessly around. Disgusted at the sight of Roger’s ravaged body, disgusted at himself for hesitating to help, he shoved Jude toward home, assuring her he’d be with her in a minute, he had to find something he could use to drag the man inside.

  Roger lunged at them again.

  Jude bolted, this time in the right direction.

  “Bitch!” Freneau screamed after her. “Goddamn angel, get your ass back here, you gotta see what you—” He choked, spasmed, rolled onto his back while his heels pounded the ground. Froth bubbled between his lips. Fresh lesions broke over his face, and Trey couldn’t help thinking he looked as if he’d been blasted with shotgun shells packed with needles.

  Something stung and burned the back of his neck, and he looked quickly to the storm, groaned because the cloud-wall had begun to move his way, its thinner, lighter outer edge catching him with debris. And no longer silent as sand hissed and scratched along walls and roofs, while twigs and pebbles hammered tiles and glass.

  Constant noise that sounded too much like rasping laughter.

  Instinctively he backed up, trotted a few paces after Jude before he remembered Roger, cursed himself and turned back.

  Stopped.

  Damn, he thought; this is . . . damn.

  Movement inside the cloud, dark grey ghosts passing through it toward him. Indistinct and indistinguishable, rippling as if they were submerged in muddy water.

  He had no doubt what they were. Who they were. What they wanted. Still, he made one more move toward the stricken professor, and immediately changed his mind when Roger rolled again, this time to his hands and knees and snarled, teeth bared, growling what might have been words as he crawled toward him, reaching.

  The ghost-figures grew, and grew nearer.

  “Damnit, Rog,” he said helplessly, took another look at the cloud, and ran. Thinking the only way he was going to get any of them out of this was by taking the pickup, even if he had to drive it on the rims, the only way he could outrun the sandstorm—if that’s what it was, and he wasn’t about to take any bets. Sandstorms don’t change directions as if they’re being steered; sandstorms don’t stop and wait; sandstorms don’t shelter ghosts in the center of their hearts.

  As he sprinted past Hicaya’s house, Jude and the girls on his own porch, urging him on, waving, shouting, he glanced to his right and stumbled in surprise, and slowed. Frowned. Shook his head and decided to stop asking himself stupid questions, like how the storm could keep moving east toward the city as if it were perfectly normal, yet leave part of itself behind. A check left between houses and he saw it there as -well, just as he’d seen it before.

  An answer suggested itself as he picked up speed again—camouflage. The part of the storm that followed behind him was using the whole storm to hide it from whoever else might be watching. A traffic helicopter, maybe, dispatched as soon as the storm had been spotted, seeing nothing unusual below except the damn storm itself.

  His side and legs protested, the wind swirled around him, nearly blinding him, nearly choking him, and he couldn’t push any longer. He slowed while Jude screamed at him, not to; he stopped while the girls shrieked at him to move it.

  The hell with it, he thought, and long before he reached the house, he turned around to face them.

  * * * *

  Walking out of the cloud, untouched by sand and wind as Eula had been the afternoon of her return. They were confident. Smiling; actually smiling. Each carrying a thick-knobbed club at their sides, swinging them easily, as if they weighed nothing.

  On the right was Cable with his everpresent cap, and a face smooth and clean, Stephanie beside him, shortening her stride to keep in step; on the left was Rick Hicaya, waving with the hand that used to wear a glove, and . . . Muriel? Despite all that he had seen, all that he had been through, he could scarcely believe that slender woman in shirt and snug jeans was Muriel Carmody, looking like a model.

  Only the figure in the center held no surprises.

  Lillian on a pinto, riding bareback and laughing, sliding off, leaping on, sitting backward, facing forward.

  Showing off.

  Behind them, still veiled by the roiling cloud, another figure he assumed was Eula. Riding what looked to be a horse much bigger than the pinto. As if she were herding them, encouraging them, and reminding them of whatever promises she had made to turn them against him.

  It didn’t take more than a second glance at them all to understand exactly what those promises had been.

  He ran again, not as fast this time, putting another hundred yards between them before he had to slow down.

  “Oh, God, Trey,” Starshine called, and over his shoulder he saw what she had seen—Roger crawling down the street, still trying to get to Jude. He must have known who and what was at his back, but it didn’t seem to matter. He crawled, he clawed at the ground, he finally looked at them and Trey could hear him laughing. Could see him stop. Could see him lift a hand that started out as a greeting and ended up as a plea when the others stopped while Lillian rode on, c
ircling the fallen man, swinging the club playfully at his head, blowing him a kiss before riding up on her own front yard, turning around, and charging.

  Moonbow screamed with her sister; Jude took them hastily in her arms and held their faces against her as Lillian and her mount methodically, gleefully, trampled Roger to death.

  * * * *

  4

  Trey watched; he couldn’t help it.

  He had stumbled mostly backward until he was home, stayed in the street, breathing hard, a hand pressed to his side, and watched.

  He watched Lillian balance on the horse’s back, spread her arms wide, and bow; he watched her sit and watched the horse bow; he watched the others for any signs of remorse and saw only broad smiles that reminded him of sharks.