by Lionel Fenn
"I don't know how long I spent over there," she continued. "Must have been years. I loved it, make no mistake about it. I really hated to come back."
"You used a Bridge?"
Rose stared at him. "What's the matter with you, boy? You get hit on the head or something?"
He refused to believe it, but there was no alternative. No one else could possibly know about them, no one else save those who had used them.
"Had a trouble?" she asked.
After a moment, he nodded.
"Going back?"
He shrugged. "You didn't."
"I had a man here," she said. "I loved him. When I got myself straightened out, I came back to him, and that put an end to that."
He looked to the ceiling. "He upstairs now?"
"A little farther up than that," she told him. "I shot him just twenty-two years ago today."
He looked surprised.
"You look surprised," she said. "What do you think they're trying to reclaim here, aluminum cans?"
"You shot him?"
"He was messing around with my sister. I would have shot her, too, but she was family. As it was, I broke both her legs and put her jaw in a cast."
Gideon rose, took a step toward the back door, toward the hall, toward the pantry, and stopped. He was confusing himself, and he had to get hold or he was going to scream.
"Go ahead," she said. "Screaming makes you feel good."
The temptation was there, but he resisted. "I... I think I don't want to be here anymore."
Rose smiled more broadly, stood and took his arm. "You feel a little disoriented?"
He nodded, and let her lead him to the pantry.
"That always happens when you get away from home for a while. Like a Martian who took the wrong turn at Jupiter. Or so I'm told."
She opened the door, but didn't look in.
He did, and saw the dark plain, the starless sky. Then he turned and put his hands on her shoulders. "You're trying to tell me something, right?"
She winked at him.
"You're trying to tell me that this isn't my home anymore, that it probably never really was, and as long as the world here thinks I'm dead, I should go back to my friends and the people I love, where I'll be happy, if not actually useful."
"Are you kidding?" she said.
"Huh?"
"This is a Reclamation Center, you jerk, haven't you been paying attention? It's a place where we can come when we feel ourselves slipping. Now, considering what most of us were in prison for in the first place, slipping isn't exactly swiping a scarf from the local department store."
There was noise in the hall. A lot of it. And some of it sounded like the sharpening of blades.
"Rose..."
She hugged him, reached into her robe and pulled out a small, nickel-plated revolver, which she aimed at his chest without a single waver of her spindly little hand. "He was a football player, too, the son of a bitch. You'd be amazed at how many owners know my name, especially when the other team looks like it's on a long winning streak. As a matter of fact," she added with a smug grin, "they think I killed you, too."
Gideon slugged her.
Armies of kindly grandmothers and obnoxious, wisecracking old maids marched across his vision, but he knew that every football player in the country would build a shrine to him if they knew what he had just done.
Then he slugged her again as she got up and shot him in the left thigh. The bullet burned, but not as badly as his knuckles, and he was just able to slam the pantry door shut before the horde burst into the kitchen. He staggered backward, horrified, as the door bulged, split by ax blades and splintered by feet callused from years of breaking cinder blocks and bricks, and fell in on one hinge as Daisy took the other out with his baseball bat.
He yanked it from her grasp, tripped her, and threw himself through the Bridge just as he heard Rose shrieking something about fetching the goddamned cannon before the bastard got away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There is a message in all this, Gideon thought as he staggered to his feet and wiped blades of loose grass from his jeans; there is a message here about Kansas and Toto and Robert Frost and Thomas Mann, and I don't give a shit because—and he groaned when the trench the bullet had gouged in his leg flared up, and he was forced to drop to one knee. As far as he could tell in the darkness, he wasn't bleeding all that badly, but neither would he be able to do very much until he got himself fixed up.
A message. A theme. Would he ever be the same again, once he learned what it was?
"Damn," he said, "that hurts a lot."
Once, many years ago, his sister had tried to explain why Aesop's fables were so terribly important, why their postscripts had to be engraved on his heart if Gideon expected to make his way successfully in the world.
He'd asked her what grapes and a fox had to do with winning a football game, and she spent an hour drawing so many comparisons that he almost believed her.
But she couldn't explain why the fox just didn't throw a goddamned rock at the grapes. If he could talk, he could throw rocks. And the crow was a jackass.
Tuesday had yelled that he was deliberately being dense.
He had retorted that deliberate had nothing to do with it, and while he was at it, the hare was an idiot and tortoises smell, and if Little Red Riding Hood wasn't too young to get it on with the Hunter, then how the hell did she fall for a wolf in Grandma's clothing?
"That's Grimm," Tuesday'd told him.
"No shit," he had said, and turned on the television to watch the local, not to mention the national, sports news not mention his name again.
A minute passed, and so did some of the burning, and he stood again, wobbled, inhaled slowly and deeply, and began to limp toward the encampment, puzzled as he realized that most of the fires were out and there was so little noise that the place might have been deserted.
He slowed when a stirring of instinct suggested that he not call out to see if anyone was home.
He slowed even further when instinct hinted that making so much noise might bring him answers he wasn't yet equipped to handle, wounded as he was and stumbling around in the dark.
When he reached the first tent, he knew he was alone.
There were no troops, no pack animals, no scavengers, no rear guards, no forward guards. The smoldering fires he saw were not campfires but tents burning to ash, and the blackened earth, visible even in the limited light, told him that either the army had moved out and, as an incentive to continuing, had left nothing behind, or that the Wamchu, or Agnes, or both, had attacked the site in full force while he was gone, leaving no survivors, perhaps even taking no prisoners.
Gone, he thought, and looked up at the sky to see if he could judge how long it had been. But there were no clues to be seen—the stars and the moon were the same, though obviously they shone down on a world that was days, or weeks, or months, older than when he had left it.
Had that dreaded Day come and gone while he was back in New Jersey? No; if that were so, Agnes most assuredly would not only have murdered everyone who opposed her, she also would have done something about the Bridges, so to fend off potential attacks as well.
Unless, of course, she didn't need to because of her newfound power, in which case this was one hell of a mess, one he wasn't going to get out of easily, if at all.
He continued to prowl and, when he was positive he wasn't going to be sneaked up on from behind, or above, or below, or from the road, he whistled for Red and received no response; he called softly to Tag, and heard only the wind; and when he found Chute's beret lying on a pile of ashes near a firepit filled with sooty bones, he stuffed it in his hip pocket and looked at the empty sky again.
This probably means trouble, he thought.
And thought of poor Ivy, once more cruelly separated from him at the junction of their reunion. Gideon also thought of Tuesday, who would probably peck him to death for deserting her.
At that moment a searing wave of
guilt dropped him to his knees—guilt for thinking only of himself when he lost the match with temptation and crossed the Bridge, guilt for believing that these people could throw him to the wolves as a sacrificial lamb merely to gain a few miserable bits of military intelligence.
Unless, he thought as he gripped his thigh just above his wound, it wasn't guilt at all but an onset of infection that was going to render him contra-ambulatory, not to mention legless.
He clenched his teeth and waited for the pain to subside.
He rose slowly, and continued his futile search.
An hour later he reached the red tent, and the sight of it, and the memory of his desertion, made him gnaw angrily on his lower lip.
The roof still sagged from the leathery flying things' assault, and the flaps had been viciously torn from their seams. The only sign of life was a flickering within. Stealthily, wincing, he made his way to the opening, whispered a name, and fell inside, his leg giving way with a creak like an old door. He rolled into a sitting position, thanked fortune for the lantern still burning atop one of the posts, and looked at his wound.
"Oh Christ," he said.
The jeans leg was soaked in blood, and the rent in its fabric testified to the size of the bullet Rose had fired at him during his departure.
He needed a tourniquet. He needed a disinfectant. He needed a doctor. He needed stitches. He needed blood.
His eyes closed against the pain; his palms flattened on the earthen floor and pressed down; his jaw tightened and his teeth ground together.
God, that hurts, he thought; sonofabitch, that really hurts.
There was a roiling surge of nausea and a rush of dizziness, and he fell back, groaning, trying to tell himself that the agony was all in his mind, though he knew damned well Rose wasn't that good a shot.
There were visions of Death on a giant goat, Hell yawning a pit constructed just for him, Heaven closing its gates to the tune of silver bells and harps and a tin whistle that persisted even when he reopened his eyes and saw that the sky had turned blue, the stars and moon finally gone.
He was too weak to lift his head, and so groped for his bat as the music drew nearer and there were footsteps outside. He would handle it. He had to handle it. He hadn't been thrown out of his old home and back into his new home for it all to end now, on a dirt floor in a tent that had no roof to speak of, and no comforts at all, and it was going to be hell when the winter rains finally came.
He shifted, and moaned, and the music stopped abruptly.
A shuffling outside, and a shadow filled the entrance.
He tensed, cursing his vulnerability, and his hand's refusal to take a good grip on the bat.
"My lord," a voice said, "you do manage to get into things, don't you, Gideon? Is it part of your football training, or are you that way naturally?"
With superhuman effort Gideon lifted his head and saw a man coming toward him with a ridiculous grin on his face—a thin man who obviously had once been dangerously fat, but whose subsequent weight loss hadn't been accompanied by a cosmetic tightening of his flesh. He wore a tattered purple cloak over a simple gold shirt and black trousers, a pair of dusty red boots, and a sword in a scabbard that thumped against his leg.
"Whale?" Gideon said.
Whale Pholler knelt beside him, plunged a hand into the pouch he wore on his right hip, and took out a vial, which he unstoppered and sniffed. "Jesus," the armorer said, wrinkling his nose and holding the vial at arm's length.
"Whale?"
"I never could pack for myself," the man said, replacing stopper and vial, and pulling out a smaller pouch, from which he scooped a viscous yellow salve. "I don't know what that stuff is for, but I think it would kill you if I made you drink it. This, on the other hand, is just what the doctor ordered."
"Whale?"
Whale spread the salve generously over the wound, holding Gideon down with one hand as the burning doubled, and redoubled, until Gideon lashed out with hands and feet and sent the man sprawling against the sagging tent wall.
"Whale, goddamnit!"
The burning stopped. The leg healed even as he watched. And the denim, for all that it had been through, pulled together in such a way that it left only a faint faded scar.
Gideon was not amazed, save for the fact that the salve had worked at all. Whale was not, even to his closest friends, the most effective of magicians, healers, or fighters. He preferred making armor and weapons, and only practiced the rest when circumstance and plot forced him into it.
Tuesday would vouch for that, though her language might not be quite so diplomatic. He, however, was just happy the man had shown up; the injury was taken care of, and he would worry later about whether or not his leg would turn to wood during the next full moon.
Once the healing process was complete, Whale assisted him to a chair, then fetched him water from a jug and food from another pouch, which Gideon insisted he taste first, in case it was the wrong pouch, or the wrong food, or the wrong century in the making. He was still weak when he finished, but he felt immeasurably better, and was even able to listen to his friend explain how, during every waking hour, he had felt terrible about sending Gideon into a potentially apocalyptic situation without so much as a by-your-leave and good-luck party. It had so weighed upon him that two days ago he had turned the reins of Rayn over to Jimm Horrn and had come up as soon as he could.
"But obviously," Whale said sadly, "not soon enough. What happened here, Gideon? What happened to the good lads who were going to smash the Wamchu?"
Gideon took his time answering. "If... if you don't know, then it... it wasn't the Day."
Whale frowned, then smiled quickly. "No. Not the Day, as I take you mean it. Not her Day, no." He glanced around the deserted tent. "And here? You have no idea what passed in this place?"
"I don't," he admitted glumly. "I was home when it happened."
Whale's greying hair seemed to stir, and his weary watery eyes, the only part of his face that was not vaguely equine, narrowed. "You were home?"
"I found a Bridge."
"You found a Bridge?"
Gideon felt terrible. "I took it, I'm afraid. It was there, and I took it."
"You took it?" Whale's jaw, wattles, and chest sagged. "You took it? You... you actually used a Bridge when your people were on the verge of active extinction? You deserted them? You left them in the lurch? You... oh my, this is a terrible situation, Gideon. Oh my, yes, this puts a whole new light on things, it really does."
"I don't know what came over me," he said softly. "I guess it was a combination of things, but mostly it was the plan. I felt... used. Unwanted. Expendable. Unneeded. Unloved. Like a fifth wheel. A third for tennis. A tenth for baseball. A second for solitaire." He clasped his hands in his lap. "I know, I know. They're pretty rotten excuses for what I did."
"Oh, I don't know," said Whale, pulling up another chair and sitting in front of him. "They sound pretty good to me. I probably would have done the same thing."
"You're just trying to make me feel good."
"No, I'm not," Whale said. "You ought to feel damned shitty for what you did. All I said was, they were pretty good excuses. Besides, there was no plan."
"You're kidding."
Whale tugged at a wattle. "Did you ever consider that they might have been too afraid to go after those things? After all, we're talking about the Wamchus here, you know."
Jesus, Gideon thought, what an idiot I am. What a fool. What a sucker for ignoring the obvious and homing in on the metaphoric, as well as the nonexistent.
"Oh well," said Whale. "What the hell."
Gideon looked at him, looked back at his lap, and decided that gratitude for his healing overrode the urge to kill. "So now what do we do?"
"Well, if I had a crystal ball, I might be able to find out what happened, and where everyone is. But I don't. So I guess we'll just have to follow them."
Bracing himself against pain that never came, Gideon shifted to sit straighter. "Wh
ale, we can't follow them. How can we? They're gone. Days ago, maybe even weeks. Well, maybe not weeks, because some of the fires are still burning, but they didn't leave last night, you can bet on it."
Whale glanced toward the opening in the wall. "And you truly believe an army this size isn't going to leave a trail?"
Gideon thought for a moment. "Well, it was dark when I got here."
"I see."
"And now that I think of it, I was in a lot of pain."
Whale nodded.
"So I suppose you could say—" Suddenly, his eyes narrowed and his hand reached for his bat. "You left Rayn and came right up here? Two days ago? Two days?"
The armorer spread his hands. "But of course."
"Two days?"
"Is that significant, Gideon? Is that something important where you come from?"
Gideon pushed himself to his feet, waited to be sure his leg would support him, then took one long stride to place himself in front of the other man. "It didn't take me two days," he said. "It took me a hell of a lot longer than that."
"Yes, I suppose it would, using that escalator and all."
"You... you knew about the escalator?"
"Well... yes."
Gideon puffed his cheeks, held his breath, blew it out when his eyes started to cross, and walked stiffly out of the tent. Whale followed, muttering and murmuring, and suggested that it didn't matter how they had arrived here, did it, since they were here, and now they had a task to perform.
"Two days." He turned sharply, and Whale staggered back a pace. "If I could have gotten here in two days, none of this might have happened! Do you realize that? None of this might have happened!"
Whale tugged at a wattle under his chin, scratched nervously at one beneath his left ear, and shrugged. "I may have made a mistake in sending you off so quickly, Gideon. I guess I did. But all's well that ends well, wouldn't you say?" He brightened. "You discovered your true home, your true love, and your true calling. Now, I wouldn't quibble about a couple of days with results like that, right?"
Gideon thought about it, thought about the fact that he would probably never see a Bridge again and was therefore stuck with these people for the rest of his life, and decided that being charitable in a situation like this was better than losing his temper.
