by N. D. Wilson
The Vulture sat back in a large armchair that hadn’t been there when Millie was last awake. The darkness behind him stretched out thin tendrils of shadow, groping for him, brushing his arms, his shoulders, his hair. He seemed to feel its touch and watched it, amused.
“It always seeks me,” he said quietly. “I have walked its boundaries with the world of light perhaps more than any other man. It would like me to dwell forever in its nothingness as many will and many do.”
Millie said nothing. El Buitre tented his fingers at his mouth and stared at the chessboard. The darkness clung to his hair, smoothing it back.
And then Millie heard the ticking. First one watch, and then another slid out of the Vulture’s vest and floated slowly around him. With no noise to compete, the sound of the tiny gears and ticking hands grew into a chaotic clatter—seven watches marking seven different flows of time.
With the watches in the air, the darkness retreated.
“You could live here forever if you like,” the Vulture said, finally moving a piece. “Because there is no time. The outer darkness retreats from time just as it retreats from light.”
“I’d like you to let me go,” Millie said. “My brother needs me.”
The Vulture reached across the board and moved a piece from Millie’s side. He was playing himself.
“Your brother . . . ,” the Vulture said, and his teeth ground together even louder than the ticking. He began moving pieces more quickly. “Your brother has changed. Something was done to him in that cave that I do not understand, and there’s nothing about it in the book.” He looked up suddenly into Millie’s eyes. “What was the priest’s plan this time?”
Millie shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The Vulture’s eyes darted over the board as he moved pieces on his side with his right hand and pieces on Millie’s side with his left. “I have been as patient as the mountains, climbing into the sky. As patient as the sea, eating cliffs.” Chess pieces began to die quickly. He threw them all on the floor as he took them and his voice rose almost to a yell as he spoke. “And now . . . my . . . patience . . . is . . . running . . . out!”
He swiped the board clear with his left arm, kicked the whole table away, and flopped backward in his chair, breathing hard.
Watches floated and ticked. Millie stared into the man’s eyes. He was clearly insane, but he was the only one who could set her free.
“If you let me go,” Millie said, “I’ll tell my brother to leave you alone. I promise.”
“Leave me alone?” The Vulture began to laugh. “I just spent three years and many, many people building a grand and glorious trap for your brother in the desert. It was perfect. I opened a doorway for him into the darkness. I would have brought him to you here, but the girl he is with destroyed it with one of the priest’s toys. A toy that does not belong in the hands of children.” El Buitre re-tented his fingers over his mouth. “I have put lifetimes into this match. I want your brother dead. I want to smell his blood pooling on the ground. I want to feel the cool breeze of his spirit departing from the world for good. I have no desire for him to leave me alone.” He stared at Millie over his fingertips. “What has the priest changed about him and how?”
“I beg your pardon?” Millie asked.
“If you do not answer, I will kill you now,” the Vulture said.
Millie sat up straight and squared her shoulders, thrusting out her jaw.
“Then kill me,” she said. “I don’t know, I don’t understand, and if I did, I still wouldn’t say.”
The Vulture didn’t move. His eyes stayed on hers. Finally, he pointed at her.
“If Sam Miracle was bound in your seat, if I had him here and you were the one I was hunting, your brother would not be so loyal.”
Millie imagined Sam, tied up and stuck sitting in the dark. And she couldn’t stop a smile.
“He’d likely enjoy the quiet,” she said. “Everywhere he goes, he gets distracted. He can’t focus on serious things. He’s happiest when he’s imagining his stories, and I don’t think you could bind his imagination. I’ve tried.”
The Vulture sneered. “Of course. Imagining his stories.” He plucked a watch out of the air and examined it. “And now all of his stories—real and imagined—must end.”
El Buitre stood up slowly, his head entering the darkness just above the lantern.
“I have finished with grand and glorious. The time has come for ruthless brutality. You shall see your brother’s body soon, Millicent Miracle. If not in whole, at least in part.”
While Millie watched, El Buitre turned and walked away, trailing seven chains. The darkness opened wide to receive him, and then swallowed.
Millie bit her lip and blinked away tears as she twisted her wrists against the ropes until the raw skin screamed. Then she jerked her ankles against their bonds as she had done already hundreds of times. Nothing budged but her own bones and her own flesh.
“If you hurt him . . . ,” Millie said quietly. “If you do anything . . .”
But she had always been honest. Always. And she knew that nothing she might threaten could possibly come true.
Millie Miracle swallowed down a sob and shut her eyes. She went looking for the West Virginia sun, the smell of pies, her father’s laugh, and her mother’s smile.
SAM AND GLORY FORCED TINY—TALL, SLENDER, AND ashamed—to sit on a bench between them at the sun-bleached and sagging train station. The Earp brothers had loaned them a pair of shackles, not handcuffs, but only Doc had bothered to come to see the two kids and their captive leave town. Which Sam appreciated, because a whole lot of locals were sure that a new western legend had just been born in Tombstone, and they were just as sure that they needed to get a good look at the Poncho Kid before the legend moved farther west.
It only took a look from Doc and people touched their hats and hustled off. As a result, the train platform remained fairly clear.
Tiny had tried to escape, but his bloody toe trail had been easy to track. Glory had insisted on leaving without him, and then—when she’d been ignored and Tiny had been caught—she had wanted to leave right away. But there were only so many trains through Tombstone. While they’d waited, Glory had picked out some boy clothes that fit her in the general store and then filled her backpack with food and loaded a couple of canteens. She also picked out a shirt for Sam. But he refused to wear gloves.
Or the snakes did.
Sam had his eyes shut, listening to Tiny grumble and Doc hustle people off and appreciating the feel of an actual shirt against his skin. Glory rose from her side of Tiny and dropped back down beside him.
Sam opened his eyes.
“Doc,” Glory said. “What’s the local newspaper called?”
Doc spat, nodded some people back off the platform, and looked at her.
“The Epitaph,” he said. “Every Tombstone needs one.”
Glory had The Legend of Poncho open and she held it out to Sam.
“There’s a copy of a news story, Sam.” She tapped a page. “With pictures. It just showed up.”
The story was dated October 26, 1881, and it had a cover photo of the clerk of the general store standing behind his bullet-puckered counter with his thumbs under his suspenders.
The headline was: “Goodness Snakes! Eight Men Hurled Into Eternity in the Duration of a Moment.”
Sam couldn’t help but smile.
In his interview, the clerk swore that he would never fix the bullet holes. He also swore that Poncho had tattoos of snakes in his arms that came alive. And his arms had moved like snakes when he’d been fighting. Faster, even. They were, perhaps, possessed by snake demons. A fat fortune-teller from Omaha confirmed that possibility. But every fool knew that the boy couldn’t have had real snakes in his arms.
The editor had then described every detail of the fight in the street, next to a grainy photo of a row of coffins propped up, with the now peaceful cowboys inside all dressed up with their h
ands flat against their chests. It was a little grisly and Sam didn’t like it. He skipped on quickly.
The editor had asked Wyatt Earp for his opinion. “The boy has a condition,” was all he would say. “I’ll thank him never to set foot in my jurisdiction again.”
Doc Holliday said simply that the Poncho Kid had the fastest hands that he—or any man—had ever seen.
But while Sam was reading, the pages began to change. The ink was crystalizing and cracking off the paper. The photos, the headline, and every single word of the newspaper story turned into sand, slid down the page, and rained out of the book onto Sam’s feet.
Sam looked at Glory. Her eyes were wide with worry.
“What just happened?” she asked.
“Nothing good,” said Sam.
A flood of sand spilled out of Glory’s backpack and flowed down around her legs and off the bench.
Tiny, with iron shackles on his wrists, nudged Sam with a pointy elbow and grinned. His one blue eye was sparkling in his elongated and scarred face. There was dislike in that eye, and even loathing. But the amusement was far more worrisome to Sam. Tiny’s mouth was coiled up in a minuscule smile, and his stare iced the air in the train car with confidence.
Glory slung her backpack down onto the ground and dug out the sand-spewing hourglass.
“We’ll be fine,” she said. “We did this before, we’ll be fine.”
Tiny’s eye stayed on Sam.
“Kid,” Tiny said. “How much do you remember? Every time that priest bounced your soul back and forth it must’ve done wonders.”
Sam didn’t answer. His memories were much sharper than he would have liked. He still felt sick from the gunfight. Like a heavy black blanket of skunk smell and queasiness had been thrown over him. Guilt was a strange pain, worse than anything physical, and he wanted it gone. He couldn’t let himself feel guilty for the bodies that had been dropped in the dirt street of Tombstone. Those men had made their own choices. He felt guilty for all the bodies that had chosen to lie down for him, for all the people who had believed that he was worth more than they were.
He turned away from Tiny’s stare, scanning the town around them for any sign of El Buitre’s rewriting.
Glory stood up, holding the hourglass away from her body, trampling in a pile of sand as she tried to look in every direction.
“Sam remembers more than enough,” Glory said.
“The very beginning?” Tiny asked, and his smirk grew. “Where you’re from? Before Arizona and West Virginia?”
“Baltimore,” Sam said.
Glory looked at him, surprised.
“Good,” Tiny said. “Baltimore. But your mind is pointed backward. It’s hard to point memory forward. Just isn’t designed for it. You don’t know where you’re from, do you?” He laughed. “You don’t even know when you’re from.”
Sam didn’t answer. In the distance, a train was approaching, dragging a steam plume behind it.
“Me,” Tiny said. “I was born in Licking, Ohio, in the year 2014.” He smiled. “That’s A.D.”
Sam knew the man wanted to confuse him, wanted Sam to ask how that was possible. And so he didn’t.
But Glory couldn’t resist. “When was Sam born?” she asked.
Doc’s nods had stopped working on the crowd. They were accumulating quickly now, but they weren’t looking at Sam. They were watching Glory and the sand.
“What’s going on?” Doc asked.
Sam stood up beside Glory and flexed his fingers. He could feel his rattles shivering against his skin. And then sand stopped draining.
Glory was breathing hard, waiting. Sam braced himself for the whirlwind.
The first explosion was on the other end of town, and it threw an entire hotel into the sky. Women screamed. The thunderous echoes died as timber rubble clattered to the ground in the distance. Faint shouts and cries for help followed. A bell began ringing wildly. And then another. Most of the townspeople on the train platform retreated. Only a few of the men raced toward the wreckage.
“I have to get down there.” Glory took a step forward, holding her hourglass like a weapon. But it wasn’t swirling yet, and Sam grabbed her shoulder, holding her back.
The second blast was close enough that Sam felt it like a kick in the stomach. Another building had been obliterated.
Doc raged on the platform beside Sam. He wheeled on Tiny, his eyes on fire and his sunken cheeks more skull than face. “They’re blowing the mines! Who is doing this?”
Tiny began rocking in place, his smile gone.
“Answer me!” Doc shouted.
“The Vulture,” Sam said quietly. “He’s hunting me.”
“Then get out of here and away from our people,” Doc said. “Out of town. Now!” And he limped quickly toward the smoke.
As Doc loped down into the street, the entire center of Tombstone went straight up in a pillar of fire. Flames and smoke and dust climbed higher than the distant mesas, higher than the circling vultures, up to where the air was cold, and only then did the pillar flatten. The concussion knocked Sam and Glory backward, and a slow-rolling wave of rock and soil expanded outward from the explosion in a ring, heaving every building off its foundations and bucking and rolling them into splinters and rubble as it went.
Sam scrambled to his feet. Houses and hotels and saloons were rolling toward them in a wave of jutting timbers and snapping walls.
Sam grabbed Glory by the arm and pulled her to her feet. “Hurry! Use the glass!”
A whirlwind was already stretching out of the hourglass, sucking up all the sand off the platform. Glory’s lip was bleeding, and she stumbled against Sam, hanging on to him as she raised her storm like a whip.
Tiny’s long leg kicked up past Sam’s face. His big motorcycle boot smacked into Glory’s hand and the hourglass flipped away behind them and landed, spinning and swirling, on the plank platform.
Sam let go of Glory and spun around. Tiny was already sliding after it, already rising up beside it and raising a heavy boot. Sam took two quick steps and dove for the glass. But Tiny’s bloody boot slammed down before his fingers reached it, and broken shards sprayed across the scaled backs of Sam’s hands.
The whirlwind died. The sand grew still. Tiny, hands still shackled, turned and raced away with a long loping limp.
“Run!” Glory screamed, tugging at Sam’s back. The roar of the rolling demolition behind was growing fast. He didn’t have time to hate Tiny. Right now, he had to survive.
Sam jumped to his feet and Glory pulled him into a sprint. As the wave heaved up the train platform behind them, Sam dragged Glory to the side, and they both leapt down onto the tracks.
The steel rails began to whine and shriek beside them. The metal twisted and arched, flinging hundreds of heavy spikes into the air, tumbling tarred timbers on their heels.
Sam Miracle knew what it felt like to die. It felt like this. His body still strained, his legs churned, but his mind was calming, finding peace, taking note of every little thing as if time had stopped and nothing mattered.
“Sam!” Glory shrieked as a heavy steel rail whipped beneath their feet and then swung up over their heads and back down again before springing away to the side. Sam leapt after Glory, barely clearing the whining, lashing rail. It was the deadliest game of jump rope he would ever play, but it felt simple. And quiet. He was just a page torn from a story, floating on a breeze through no effort of his own.
“Sam!” Glory screamed again. He was beginning to fall behind. “Sam! He’s here!”
Up ahead on the tracks, a white-haired Father Tiempo faced them with his arms raised. A train was steaming toward him from behind, toward Tombstone and its own destruction. The priest was too far away. They would never beat the wave. They would never beat the train. They were dead and he was dead.
“You run, Sam Miracle!” Glory yelled. Her face was on fire with anger. “Right now! You’re losing to a girl!”
The train whistled desperately. The brakes
screamed on the rails, but it wasn’t going to stop in time. Father Tiempo was as still as a statue, but sand was swirling around his feet. Glory was somehow accelerating, and she had managed to lurch Sam’s mind back into full roaring speed. His jaw was tense to the point of pain. His strides grew.
Chased by rolling wreckage, Sam and Glory raced headlong toward the man who stood between them and the shrieking, steaming train.
The train was too close and coming too fast. Thirty yards. Twenty. Sam slipped. Glory staggered. Father Tiempo would be crushed before they reached him.
And then the earth heaved beneath Sam’s feet. It lifted him up, and he was suddenly running downhill with Glory beside him. The moving hill snapped, flinging them forward with tarred timbers and gravel.
Sam and Glory flew toward the priest. They hit the ground, tumbling to his feet just between the screaming train and the roiling wave of wreckage.
Father Tiempo dropped his hands.
Sam felt himself dissolving into sand, and the train blasted through him like a hot wind. He saw it, ghosting around him, launching up the bucking ground and twisting off the tracks. Faintly, he saw the train sliding to a stop in the flattened remains of Tombstone, and then it was gone.
Daylight had vanished. Sam and Glory were tangled up on asphalt, beneath a clear night sky.
“Ow,” Glory said. “What just happened?”
The priest was still on his feet above them.
The asphalt was warm on Sam’s back. He gasped, breathing heavily, staring up at the stars that swarmed above him. Every inch of his body throbbed. He was going to need a minute before he could speak. He had just been in a collision between a train and a Vulture-made earthquake. In his game of hide-and-seek through the centuries, El Buitre had just destroyed an entire town trying to catch him.
His heart was kicking hard, almost cramping. Sam was alive, but he didn’t feel like he had escaped. Escape should have brought relief. Instead, an enormous heaviness pressed down on Sam, and his stomach twisted like the ground beneath Tombstone.
From his back, Sam looked up at the white-haired priest. Even seeing Father Tiempo alive again couldn’t offset the weight of what had just happened. And clearly, the old man felt the same. While Sam watched, Father Tiempo shut wet eyes and lifted his face toward the stars. His lips moved with a whispered prayer.
