The Walking

by Bentley Little

  "It's--" the agent began, when suddenly there was a disturbance in the lake, a bubbling of the water accompanied by a high keening sound. They all turned to look, and Miles found himself instinctively moving back, away from the slope.

  The water parted, not spectacularly like the cinematic Red Sea but cheesily, like Universal Studios' recreation of the event for its tourist tram ride, the section of the lake nearest them opening in a narrow wedge. Two by two, they walked out of the water, all of the dead who had walked in. The most recent emerged first, including his father, staring sightlessly forward, moving in a march that was somehow more deliberate and controlled than the gait that had brought them here. It was as if the urgency was gone, as though they were no longer striving to reach a destination but had found it and were now operating under different orders. They seemed like slaves, cowed and beaten into submission, and what Miles felt looking at his father was not fear but pity.

  The Walkers in front were wearing wet, raggedy clothes, but the clothes were gone on those who came after, and they stepped nude onto the sand, marching not up the slope toward the parking lot but along the shoreline, away.

  "I don't see my uncle," Janet kept repeating, her voice a little-girl whisper. "I don't see my uncle."

  "I see my uncle," Garden said. "And I see my gram pa There was dread in his voice.

  Rossiter said nothing, but Miles noticed that the agent's revolver was now drawn, and though he didn't think that would help, it somehow made him feel better.

  More dead men and women emerged from the parted water.

  And she appeared. She's here.

  He knew instantly that this was who his father and Janet's uncle had been talking about. This was the person the homeless woman in the mall had been trying to warn him about.

  She walked out of the water, naked. Her head was streaked with mud, her tangled, stringy hair green with algae, but like the others, her skin had not been eaten away, and she looked remarkably well preserved for being so long in the lake. Her head was tilted at an odd angle, as though her neck had been broken. While she was inarguably beautiful, there was something terribly off about her face, a wildness, an alien ness in her expression that filled him with fear. He did not know who she was, but she had an undeniable aura of power. Isabella.

  The name came to him, from where he did not know, but he understood that it was hers. His feeling that she was somehow behind everything solidified.

  She turned her tilted head, looked at him And he was at a crossroads in the moonlight, watching through Isabella's eyes as she approached the hanging body of a witch. The woman, a hag with a wild mane of gray hair, had been stripped naked and was dangling from a frayed rope attached to a lightning-struck oak. There was a faint glow about the witch, the remnants of power that were no doubt invisible to ordinary eyes, and this was what Isabella desired. There were no people anywhere near this cursed place, and even the lights of far-off villages had been

  extinguished, so late was the hour. She crawled, unhampered and unseen, up the tree to cut down the body, and when it fell, she jumped on top of it. Her lips closed over the corpse's open mouth, and she began drawing in the extant power, at the same time sucking out blood and bile and bits of half digested food. It was the energy Isabella needed, desired, and he felt the strenghtening within her as her body absorbed the witch's dark force, extracting it from the dead body in the only way possible.

  And then he was in an Anasazi village, Isabella taking the community's shaman in front of the shaman's brethren as part of a ceremony, draining the body through the palms of the old man's hands, wanting only the energy, but taking the blood as well in order to support the preconceived notions of the audience. Isabella was nude and moaning, allowing the blood to spatter her breasts, her stomach, her hairy crotch. The people watching prayed and chanted, giving thanks, and as she ingested the last of the man's essence, the shivers of orgasm passed through her loins.

  Then the village was gone, and he was in a dark hut in which a man of power practiced his arts. The man was kneeling before a statue he had carved, the statue of a god in the shape of an asparagus. On the floor beside him lay dead women, nude and with their legs spread, stalks of asparagus protruding from their private parts. It was late spring, asparagus season, and outside men harvested the vegetables as their wives and daughters, caged in bamboo boxes, squirmed and screamed and begged to be released.

  This was a different earth, an older earth, because the la rut outside was unlike anything existing today, the mountains on the horizon too tall and oddly shaped, the sky and the dirt of the fields different in color than they should have been.

  Isabella had fed recently, so there was no reason to partake of the man's power. Instead, she knelt with him, the two

  of them speaking in unison, praying to this an cent god, then crawling across the floor to where the prepared bodies lay. She crouched before the first dead woman, said the Words, shoved her head between the cold thighs, and started eating the asparagus.

  Then he was in a huge black cave with naked men and women and creatures that had never seen the light of day, monsters that had never been drawn by the hand of man, had never emerged from even the most fervid imaginations of the world's most profane illustrators. The floor was mud, dirt mixed with blood rather than water, and Isabella was standing in the center of the cave, legs spread, arms in the air, howling. The men and women were cowed in terror before her, and she reached down, picked up one of the scuttling creatuers and ate it, crunchy slimy albino skin popping between her teeth as she chewed the unholy flesh.

  She howled again, grabbed another little monster, ripped it apart with her teeth, and swallowed its essence. She cried out, an inarticulate cry of hunger and pain, and this time she leaped upon a larger creature, a segmented, multi-legged, multi mouthed multi-eyed monstrosity that squealed at her touch and attempted to right her off.

  She subdued it easily, bit into the rubbery skin of its back, and killed it. "

  She howled. =

  And then the visions were over. He was once again here, himself, and Miles looked quickly around. Only a second had passed. He was exactly where he'd been, nothing had moved, nothing had changed. He felt dizzy, disoriented. He was not sure what had happened, but some sort of connection had been made between himself and this woman. He did not know how or why, but she had allowed him to glimpse what? Her memories? Her fantasies? Her plans? Her past? :!;

  A quick look at Janet and Gardii and Rossiter told him that none of them had experienced anything similar. What 312 ever the phenomenon was, it had been reserved solely for him.

  Isabella had emerged completely out of the water and was walking on the sand. She turned toward him, smiled chillingly And the vision hit.

  The dam blew apart, Wolf Canyon Lake draining out in a tidal wave hundreds of feet high, emptying through the mountains and onto the desert below, completely wiping out a small town, the bodies of hundreds of people washing onto the plain.

  Destruction spread across the land.

  Phoenix was buried under a massive sandstorm that covered the entire Southwest and engulfed Albuquerque and Las Vegas as well. New York was in flames, the teeming streets filled with fleeing people with no place to run. Chicago sank into the ground while the waters of Lake Michigan rushed in to fill the hole. Los Angeles was shaking from an endless earthquake that seemed intent on leveling every manmade structure in the state .... As before, he saw it all through her eyes, and in a flash of insight, he realized that she had lived here at Wolf Canyon.

  She had been one of the witches buried under the lake when the town was flooded.

  The vision faded.

  He staggered backward. Part of him wanted to shoot her, tackle her, but that was a small stupid part and it was overruled by common sense and good old-fashioned fear. Unlike the other Walkers, she was not merely an automaton. She was not following orders. She was the one giving them, carrying out her well-thought-out plans.

  Now he understood
. Finally he'd discovered a focal point to the evil that had spread out from this spot, that had reached across the country to kill all those people, that had some to do like his father, and 'the relatives and had finally brought them here. i

  Isabella.

  She wanted nothing less than complete revenge. Her power would grow with each loss of life, until she was unstoppable.

  The end of the world would not result of Divine intervention or cosmic accident but from the small bitter hatred of an angry witch.

  Miles was shaking. With fear, yes, but also from sensory overload, overwhelmed by the intensity of what he had experienced.

  He had felt her anger, the white-hot core of hate that fueled her rage, but what remained with him most was the loneliness she felt, and moral imperatives were as nothing before it, minor distractions to be ignored or tossed aside. He remembered, as a kid, watching the Apollo space shots on TV, and what he recalled most clearly was Apollo 8, when American astronauts circled for the first time around the dark side of the moon. For the entire preceding week, he had attempted to imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, to visualize what they were seeing, to experience what they felt. Loneliness was what he came up with. Everything they had ever known--water, sky, clouds, dirt, plants, animals, mountains, people, buildings, bugs--was a million miles away, encapsulated on a sphere they saw floating far off in the blackness of space while they were crammed into a small metal room surrounded by absolute nothingness. And when they circled around the dark side of the moon, when their radio transmission was cut off until they orbited back around, they were denied even that, stuck with only each other and the silence of space without so much as a glimpse of their blue globe world in the distance. They were alone, completely alone. i What he had felt when seeing through Isabella's eyes was

  a comparable loneliness, a similar estrangement from the currents of life. Only it was somehow worse because it was something he could not understand. Her emotions and thought processes were so profoundly alien to him that he could deduce nothing from them, could make no predictions regarding past or future actions. The only thing he knew was that she could not be dissuaded from the course which she had chosen, that she was unalterably set upon her path and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do to change that.

  Isabella looked past them, through them, and kept walking, following the others along the edge of the lake.

  She didn't know that he'd seen!

  His hart began racing. On the edge of despair only a second before, cowed and intimidated by her awesome power, he now saw a ray of hope.

  Whatever connection had been established between them, she was unaware of it. Somehow, he had tapped into her intentions without her knowledge.

  It was not much of an advantage, but it was something. The fact that she did not know he had gained access to her thoughts meant that she wasn't perfect, wasn't all-powerful. She'd looked in their direction after coming out of the water, but if she'd seen them or noticed them at all, she'd thought of them as little more than bugs or plants, totally irrelevant.

  The constant tingling in his midsection faded as she moved between the paloverde trees away from them, angling inland from the shoreline. The other Walkers now seemed to Miles to be driven before her like cattle.

  He knew that if anything was going to be done to stop her, they would have to be the ones to do it. How they would accomplish this was another matter. He looked over at the others, wanting to tell them what he'd experienced, but there was no way to convey the scope of it all. Rossiter was still holding his drawn weapon, but he had not fired a shot, and Miles could tell from the expression

  on his face that the agent had been stunned into inaction. Janet was staring blankly out at the water.

  Garden spoke first. "What the hell was that?"

  "I don't know," Rossiter said.

  Miles finally found his voice. "Isabella."

  They all looked at him. "She's a witch who was here when the town was flooded, and somehow she survived. She's behind everything. She's old, older than we can imagine, and she's angry at what was done to her. I don't know if she was killed and struggled back from the dead or if she was just weakened and put out of commission for a while, but it's taken her until now to build up her strength. She reached out and killed the people responsible for the dam, the people who built it, the people who oversaw it, and she's gathered to her the people from Wolf Canyon, the other victims." He nodded at Gar den. "Like your grandfather." He took a deep. breath. "And my dad. I think they're, like, her army, and she's going to use them to help her--".

  What? Destroy the world?

  It sounded so stupid and childish and melodramatic.

  "--take revenge," he said lamely, vaguely.

  Rossiter nodded, but that was the only response. No one questioned him, and the irrationality of that made him realize just how crazy things had gotten. There were plenty of questions to ask. Why were Isabella and the Walkers leaving the lake after all these years? Where were they going from here? Perhaps the others didn't want to know more. Perhaps they understood on some instinctive level that what he'd told them was true, and that was enough for them.

  Janet shook her head uncomprehendingly. "Did you see your father?" she asked Miles.

  He nodded. "Yeah."

  She turned to Garden. "Your grandfather?"

  "And my uncle."

  "Uncle John wasn't there." Her voice was filled with something like relief. "Maybe we did bury him. Maybe he is back in Cedar City and he's not involved in all this."

  "Maybe," Miles agreed. He wasn't at all sure that Uncle

  John's fate was so benign, but he wanted to ease her suffering. She did not deserve this. He was sorry he'd brought her along, but he knew that the only reason he could say that was because Garden and Rossiter were here. The truth was, he had had her come along solely because he hadn't wanted to be alone. Now he wished that he had left Janet back in Utah.

  Garden was staring at the spot where they had last seen the Walkers heading into the desert, toward the hills. The track of disturbed sand that marked their passing was clearly visible. "What do you think we should do?"

  "Follow them," Rossiter said, but his voice lacked conviction and his face betrayed a complete lack of desire to do any such thing.

  Miles shook his head. Logically, that should be their plan, but something about it seemed wrong. It didn't feel right, although that seemed like a nebulous objection. "No," he said.

  His authority challenged, Rossiter's spine stiffened.

  '"they'll get away. If you're right, they need to be stopped.

  And we're the only ones who've seen them. We're the only ones who know where they are."

  "It's too dangerous," Miles said, and though he didn't know why he thought that, he did

  "You coming?" the agent asked Garden.

  The young man looked confused, ttmaed from Rossiter to

  Miles, licking his lips.

  "Fine." Rossiter started off on his own. "I'm not letting them out of my sight." He started down the slope, jogging to maintain his balance until he reached the beach at the bottom.

  "Don't!" Miles called after him, and he was surprised by the power of his own voice.

  "I have to! They'll get away!"

  "Let them. We'll go after them later. We need to talk about this. We need to plan--"

  "Nothing to talk about. Nothing to plan. You pussies stay here. I'm going." He was already moving away from shore and was past the first paloverde, heading around the column-like bulk of a saguaro.

  "Maybe we should go," Garden said.

  Janet shook her head fiercely. "Miles is right. It's dangerous You saw them."

  "I saw my gram pa and uncle."

  'Tthat's not who they are anymore," Miles told him. He looked Garden in the eye and saw that he was only stating what the young man already knew,

  Rossiter disappeared into the deert.

  "What do we do?" Garden asked.

  Mil
es didn't know. He knew what felt wrong, but he didn't know what felt right. Isabella needed to be stopped. But he did not know how to do that, and it seemed criminal and irresponsible to stand around here, waiting for inspiration to strike instead of taking action.

  "What's going to happen to him?" Janet was looking off toward where Rossiter had disappeared into the desert brash. "I hope nothing."

  "But you don't think so?

  Miles shook his head. Until Janet had forced him to confront the fact, he had not realized that he never expected to see the agent again. He was surprised at himself for not feeling anything, and once again he realized what a bizarre turn everything had taken, how. off it all seemed.

  "Where do you think they're all going?" Garden asked. "Maybe we could call the police. I don't know how strong that Isabella is, but maybe they can be overpowered. Maybe

  if we get a group together and confront them we can..."

  He trailed off. "I don't know what we can do, but maybe we can do something."

  Miles nodded absently. He was listening for the sound of gunfire, expecting Rossiter to catch up with the Walkers and, once cornered, use his revolver. =

  But there were no shots, and the optimistic thought briefly occurred to him that the agent was trained in this sort of thing. He might be tailing them without their knowledge. Maybe he would see something or learn something that they could use to stop Isabella.

  Hope died in his chest as Rossiter emerged from the brush, shuffling through the sand, hands hanging loosely at his sides, eyes white and wide, his mouth open in a stunned expression.

  His face was bright lobster red. The thudding of Miles' heart rose to a drumbeat loud enough to drown out all incoming sounds. Rossiter looked as though his skin had been doused with red paint, but as he drew closer, starting up the slope toward the parking lot, Miles saw that the redness came from a transformation of the skin itself, like some ultra-extreme sunburn. The agent looked up at them and began talking, but the noises that came out of his mouth were like nothing that had ever issued from either human or animal.