by N. D. Wilson
Glory refused to accept her fictional end, but it still made her feel like throwing up her apple and jerky. She didn’t know how dead the priest might be. But if he was all the way dead . . . even if she survived, she might never see her own century again, let alone the Spaldings, or flush toilets, or television, or an ice-cold Coke. And if she did die like the book described, Sam wouldn’t even say a thing! Not a word! It was a ridiculous thing to worry about, but she still did.
She’d known that living a story would be so much harder than just reading one. But she hadn’t really known how much longer and lonelier and . . . scarier it could be.
She did now.
While Sam snored in the dirt with just a poncho over his bare torso, Glory shivered. And she stared at the sky. Earlier, before the moon had come and gone, the stars had crowded the dark heavens, a mayhem of pale fire and heat too far away to be felt. Glory had slept and then marveled, and slept some more. It was like sitting beneath a weed patch of worlds. Exactly like that. Because that’s what it was. Too many to count in countless lifetimes of counting.
Glory yawned.
The stars were mostly gone now, and dawn was erasing the darkness. Only the planets were left, shining in the blue.
And in the light, Glory could see Sam’s snakes watching her. Speck was on Sam’s hip. Cindy held Sam’s left hand up in the air with his limp fingers dangling beneath her head. She was listening. Glory listened, too. Faintly, she heard slow hooves on rock.
A jackrabbit hopped past Sam’s sleeping body, and Speck darted out, snatching it by the foot. While the rabbit kicked and jumped, dragging Sam’s arm around the rocks, Sam snored on. Glory shrugged off the blanket and stood. Hitching up the baggy legs of her long johns, she moved toward the railroad, trying to listen.
SAM WAS DREAMING. HE WAS STRETCHED OUT ON A TABLE on the front porch of his house in West Virginia, but the whole house was inside the huge cave in Arizona and the boys from SADDYR had gathered around to watch Mr. Spalding help Manuelito graft rattlesnakes into Sam’s arms. Trains were chugging around the ceiling and crashing out the cave mouth into the sky.
Sam’s dying father was in his rocking chair, tucked in tight under his blanket.
El Buitre was peering down at Sam over Manuelito’s shoulder. Manuelito was sharpening a knife. Baptisto was glaring at Sam with his arms crossed.
“My arms are fine,” Sam said. “Really. They are.” He tried to sit up on the table, but Mr. Spalding pushed him back down.
“Don’t fight,” Sam’s father whispered from his rocking chair. “You need the snakes.”
El Buitre scratched his oiled mustache and smiled. “Lead will break those pretty bones right up. But you do realize the snakes won’t help him one bit. They’ll kill him before I even get a chance.”
Manuelito shrugged. “I must try.”
Sam tried to roll off the table.
“Boys!” Mr. Spalding shouted, and Sam’s Bunk House brothers from SADDYR jumped up onto the porch, and an army of hands pinned him down.
Sam kicked and writhed. Mr. Spalding clamped his hand over Sam’s throat and began to squeeze.
“There you go,” El Buitre said. “What did I tell you?”
Sam choked. He kicked. He fought for air. His head felt like it was going to explode with blood. He was dying. And dying didn’t feel like a dream.
“Where is Glory?” The voice was Father Tiempo’s, young and sharp. “You can’t leave her here. Where is she?”
The priest’s face was right in front of Sam’s. His breath smelled like dirt.
“Open your eyes,” Father Tiempo said. “Right now Samuel Miracle. Open them.”
SAM’S EYES OPENED. HE WAS ON HIS SIDE, KICKING LOOSE sand and rock, his cheek and open mouth and dry tongue grinding across dirt.
His left hand was clamped tight over his own throat.
His right hand was bouncing all over, clinging to an angry jackrabbit’s foot.
The sky was rosy with dawn’s fingers. Glory’s silhouette stood beside the railroad looking up at six men on six horses.
Sam let the rabbit go and then jerked his left hand off his throat. Gasping, sputtering, pulling in rib-splitting lungfuls of life, he rose to his knees. The poncho draped around him.
Glory and the men all stared at him.
“The spastic kid stays,” a heavy cowboy said. “But, missy, you and that horse are coming with us. You’re too pretty to leave out here.” He drew his gun and pointed it down at Glory. “Saddle up, sister.”
“Hey,” Sam rasped. Adrenaline and anger were boiling inside him. Panic. Terror. Frustration. Every emotion that comes from having your own hand try to murder you in your sleep. “No way!” He panted for enough breath to snarl. “Drop your gun and ride off.”
Six cowboys grinned.
“You a short little toad.” The heavy one laughed. “This don’t concern you, Poncho. Get back to kicking in the dirt.”
Sam wasn’t in the mood. Speck jerked his right revolver from under his poncho and fired.
The big cowboy squealed as the shot smacked the gun from his hand. And Sam didn’t stop. As five more guns rose up in five more hands, five more shots slapped, sparked, punched, stung, and struck.
Revolvers clattered in the rocks. The cowboys whooped and spurred their horses away like the thunderous echoes of the gunshots, trailing a pillar of dust behind them.
Sam was still breathing hard, and the gunpowder in the air burned his throat.
Kill.
The desire washed up Sam’s left arm just as Cindy tried to draw his other weapon.
“No!” Sam shouted, locking his left arm in place and splaying his fingers. “What’s your problem? Don’t even touch it. You tried to kill me!”
Glory looked at Sam. “He called you Poncho.”
“I don’t care what he called me.” Sam shrugged. “Who were those guys?”
“I don’t know.” Glory looked at the dust trail dissipating over the railroad. “But we should go before they come back.” She stooped, rolled up the legs of her long johns, and tucked them into her shoes. “We need to be on the first possible train to San Francisco. And I’m starving. And I don’t feel like chewing jerky for breakfast.”
Glory rode in front. The farther away the snakes were from the horse’s head, the better.
Sam rode on the back, leaning forward on her backpack, trying to sleep without Glory noticing. But every time he dozed off, Speck dragged his right hand around Glory’s waist while Cindy slid up and perched his left hand on her shoulder.
“Sam!” Glory tried to shrug Cindy off.
“What? I’m here.” Sam mumbled the words straight down into her backpack.
“Wake up! Seriously.” Glory thumped her elbow back against Sam’s head. He jerked upright and his hands released.
Glory twisted in the saddle, glancing back at him. “I get that this is totally crazy and you’re still not strong from being shot and you’re hungry and tired, but you can’t forget why we’re here. Stay focused. And don’t sleep on me, all right?”
Sam blinked. Dirt had grown his freckles together into one big smudge.
“Why are we here?” he asked. “And remind me again why you’re wearing dirty long johns?”
“You’re here to kill the Vulture,” Glory said. “Because your sister needs you.”
“But why are you wearing long johns?”
Sam could see a town on the horizon over Glory’s shoulder, and the railroad they were following bent in a slow curve toward it.
“That Tombstone?” Sam asked.
“Must be,” Glory said. She heeled the horse forward.
“Wake me up when we’re there.” Sam leaned his head back down onto the backpack. Glory elbowed him in the stomach.
“We’re there,” Glory said. She elbowed him three more times. “We’re there, we’re there, we’re there.”
Sand spilled out of Glory’s backpack into Sam’s face.
Sam sat up and slid back onto the
horse’s rump. Glory bent backward in front of him. Her pack was expanding quickly, spilling sand, busting zippers.
“Sam!” Glory yelped. “Stop it. You’re pulling me off.”
“I’m not even touching you,” Sam said. “Something’s in your pack.”
Glory tried to slip out of the pack, but the straps were digging deep into her shoulders. Cindy began to rattle. The horse reared and Sam slid over the rump and hit the ground. It bucked and Glory spun through the air, landing on her back in a tangle of sagebrush.
As the horse galloped away, Sam began to laugh.
“Not funny!” Glory shouted. She writhed free of her pack, stood up, and then dragged it out of the brush.
The pack was still spilling sand out of every seam. Pale sand—almost white—was growing quickly into a mound. While Sam watched, Glory dropped onto her knees and dug into the pack.
Glory stood up, breathing hard, puffing her hair back out of her face. She held the hourglass out at arm’s length, and a pillar of sand was streaming out of it.
Sam was stunned. “What on earth? Where did you get that?”
Glory didn’t answer. She moved quickly over to Sam, spilling sand across his legs. But she wasn’t even looking at the hourglass. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the landscape. Her worry erased Sam’s amusement.
“The priest gave it to me,” Glory said. “Someone is messing with time. But he said the hourglass would keep us rooted.”
Sam stood up quickly and the sand trickled off his legs. “What does that mean?”
“I think we’ll know soon,” Glory said.
Sam’s rattles quivered. He felt . . . blurry. Like he did whenever his dreams changed. Whenever his mind started seeing something different than his eyes. “Foggy,” Sam said. He didn’t know why.
Glory slapped his face, and Sam jerked in surprise. His cheek burned.
“Focus,” Glory said, shaking out her hand. “This isn’t a game. If that didn’t hurt enough to keep your brain clear, then I’ll keep trying until something works.”
Sam blinked. He wasn’t sure where he’d been going a minute ago, but his sister and the man with all the watch chains were in the front of his mind now.
The sand spilling from the hourglass had slowed, but it was still flowing.
“Well, we’re not waiting here for whatever is coming.” Glory looked at Sam. “Stay really close. Let’s walk on the white sand if we can.”
Glory shook out her backpack and then put it back on. Then she turned and began to walk toward Tombstone. The crotch of her long johns hung almost to her knees. She had the top rolled down and the sleeves tied around her waist.
Sam hopped up and jogged after her, poncho flapping against his bare skin.
“Glory!” His rattles both buzzed. He tried to focus on his arms for just a moment. “Stop it!” he snarled. Glory glanced back at him. “Not you!” he said quickly. “That was for the snakes. Sorry! And thank you. That’s for you.” Glory turned away and kept moving. Sam caught up to her quickly. She held the hourglass out in front of her, and the two of them walked silently side by side, keeping their steps on the pale scattering sand, following the long, slowly bending railroad.
Memories arranged themselves awkwardly in Sam’s head.
“Did you check the book at all?” Sam finally asked. “How does it end?”
Glory’s face was slick with sweat, and she was squinting against the sun, but her voice was flat and cold. “You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I do.”
“Nope.” She shook her head. And that was that. The way her jaw was set, Sam knew asking again would get him nowhere.
AFTER A FEW HUNDRED YARDS, GLORY FINALLY LOOKED AT Sam. She looked at his face, at his hands, at his guns, at his feet scuffing and scrambling across the loose, freshly fallen white sand. Then she looked up into his clear but distracted eyes. This was the hero that she had loved and then hated, that she had wanted to help and even save. She didn’t have much, but she had risked all of it to change a boy named Sam Miracle into the legend she had always wanted him to be.
She wasn’t sure it was working.
Glory looked ahead to the ramshackle town on the horizon.
“I’m not telling you what the book says right now, Sam, because we’re going to tear out all of those pages anyway. All of them. And then some extras just in case.”
She would have smiled, but the hourglass jerked her forward. Glory tripped, staggered, and slid down onto her knees.
SAM WATCHED GLORY FALL. HE WATCHED THE HOURGLASS turn over in her hands and all the sand that had poured out began streaming back in. Then he felt the ground shake beneath him, and not because a girl had fallen.
Glory blinked and spat as sand attacked her in a cloud. She left the hourglass on a rock and slid away backward as a white, stinging tornado formed above it, funneling down inside.
“How is this helpful?” Glory scrambled up onto her feet, covering her face with her hands.
Sam didn’t answer. He didn’t hear her. The entire sand path they had walked was roiling toward them, and even that didn’t hold his attention. He was watching the landscape change all around them.
“Glory . . .”
Sam reached for her without looking, and Cindy clamped his fingers tight onto her arm.
Glory didn’t even try to pull away.
“Am I dreaming?” Sam asked.
“Maybe,” said Glory. “But I’m in the same dream.”
All around them, brick walls with soaring black iron peaks and glistening glass domes were erupting out of the ground. Boulders and rocks shattered into gravel and became smooth. A huge iron obelisk crowned with a vulture hatched up out of a single massive boulder. Gold clocks dangled from its wings.
There were workers doing all of it—humans, Sam assumed—but they were barely visible, gusts of wind and streaks of vapor, forms spread so thin by their speed that eyes could not possibly track them. Sam stepped away from the sand toward the obelisk.
“Sam!” Glory grabbed his poncho and pulled him back. “Stay here. Father Tiempo said the hourglass would keep us rooted.”
Sam and Glory stood side by side, blinking and squinting out of their hissing cloud of sand as the walls climbed and the world changed around them.
“Oh no,” Glory said. She spun in a circle. “We’re in trouble.”
“Is it a prison?” Sam asked. He looked back over his shoulder. Walls were rising on every side. Walls without doors. They were completely penned in.
Glory snatched the hourglass off the rock and raised the tornado of sand up above her head like a torch.
She grabbed Sam’s right hand, and Speck gripped her fingers tight.
“C’mon!” she yelled. “Run!”
A tall black wall now stood between Sam and Glory and Tombstone. Together, they raced straight toward it, trailing their hissing funnel cloud behind them like a steam engine’s plume.
“Is it real?” Sam asked. “Can we run through it?”
Glory didn’t answer, but the wall did. Sam’s left hand hit cold black stone and Cindy immediately flinched, pulling his hand back.
“There has to be a door.” Glory spun around. “Do you see one?”
Sam wasn’t looking for a door. The sandstorm was twisting in the air directly above them, swinging its hips like a kid with a Hula-Hoop. On each twist, it grazed the wall, and when it did, the funnel went suddenly dark with black sand.
“Glory!” Sam grabbed her shoulder and pointed straight up. “Whip it! Let it eat the wall.”
“Samuel Miracle!” The voice was El Buitre’s, but it sounded like it belonged to a multitude, like echoes stacked on echoes.
Sam spun around. A small door had opened in the bottom of the towering obelisk one hundred feet behind them. While Sam watched, the Vulture eased himself out of the doorway into the sunlight. He flickered where he stood, sprouting streaks like a smudged painting. His seven chained watches weren’t just floating; the
y were snapping and lashing at the air all around him.
“You should not have taken such a direct route. You should not have taken such a direct time. Now put down your glass,” El Buitre said. “That trinket will not keep you from me. The darkness I walk is outside of every where and every when.”
Glory swung the hourglass above her head, and cracked her enormous sand whip across the gravel courtyard. As she did, the writhing funnel cloud grew, disintegrating the surface of every wall it touched and slurping up the fresh gravel on the ground. Glory’s storm blackened again, and the hissing sand began to rattle and crack as it collected larger stones.
Sam stepped closer to Glory as her devastation grew. The faint wisps and gusts that had been building the walls were being swallowed up all around them. Sam was sure he heard a scream.
The Vulture retreated back into his doorway and began to laugh.
“That was unkind! One hundred men have been working for three years on these walls.”
Sam moved forward, rattles buzzing, snake arms taut, fingers flexing. Sand and gravel whipped through his hair.
El Buitre stepped to one side of the doorway and beckoned for Sam to enter.
“Set down the trinket and I will take you to your sister. There is only one outer darkness. Through all of my doors, she is. But when she dies of madness, I promise to bury her under the earthly sun.”
Sam took another step toward the outlaw, his quivering arms ready to explode into action. As he moved away from Glory, the Vulture sharpened and solidified. As did the walls all around him.
“Sam, no!” Glory hurried forward, bringing her swirling storm whip around and lashing it straight down at the Vulture and his tower.
The Vulture drew both of his pearl-gripped guns and emptied them at Glory.
But he and his bullets vanished beneath the vicious funnel cloud. With a hiss louder than the ocean eating islands of lava, the tower collapsed into a massive seeping black dune. Glory spun, immediately attacking the wall with her hourglass storm, lashing a huge breach in the wall. Then she grabbed Sam’s wrist and dragged him through cold shin-deep sand, and out into the hot Arizona desert.
