“Keep your eye on the big picture,” he had told the others. " We’re not doing this for ourselves”—but it was something he had to keep reminding himself. Elevating himself into broader public view was just a means to an end. Still, he couldn’t deny the glorious feeling it gave him.
Once their campsite was established, Dillon wasted no further time in idle talk. He had left the circle of buses, and headed toward a craggy ridge a mile away.
He made his way up the rocks that reddened in the late-afternoon sun. Winston had said he was playing Jesus and Moses wrapped together, and it did feel as if he were climbing the face of Sinai as he scaled the jagged rocks.
Dillon was slowly becoming used to such comparisons, feeling more at home in the company of prophets and saviors—and he dared to wonder, when this was all over, where his name would fall in the records of the divinely touched.
These were heady thoughts. Thoughts he had caged, ever since he had found his powers—but now, on the eve of his ascension into the limelight, he needed to ponder them, for his confidence needed to grow large enough to blanket the world.
He reached the top of the bluff, and stared down at the magnificent man-made wonder that lay on the other side, still swarmed by tourists. Even from a distance, its concrete expanse was breathtaking.
Okoya arrived some time later. Dillon didn’t hear him until he spoke.
“To think it was built by mere human hands,” Okoya said, when he saw the view. “It rivals the Pyramids, and the Colossus of Rhodes.”
“Take a good look,” said Dillon. “It’s your last chance.”
Just a few short days ago, Dillon had felt threatened by Okoya’s presence; mistrustful and suspicious. But such feelings felt small and distant as he stood on the hilltop. Nothing could threaten him now.
“What will it be like after tomorrow?” Dillon wondered aloud.
Okoya sat beside him. “Once, the world was flat and sat at the center of the universe,” Okoya said. “But people learned otherwise, and they adjusted. We are on that precipice of change again. Tomorrow the world will be a very different place.”
“People will have no choice but to accept us.”
Okoya agreed. “You are too powerful to deny, and too dangerous to challenge.”
Dillon tried to imagine the days ahead. Would they usher in an era of peace? Would they find themselves in the company of kings and world leaders? He could barely imagine himself meeting world leaders, much less instructing them on global affairs. And yet that would be the task set before him.
The thought was too immense to grasp, so he laughed at it. “I wonder how they’ll feel to have the world in the hands of a pack of sixteen-year-olds.”
“You won’t always be sixteen,” said Okoya. “And it doesn’t surprise me that you’ll be rising to the throne of humanity. What surprises me is that it’s taken you so long.”
“Did you know,” said Dillon, “that I can find no pattern when I look in the eyes of some of the followers?”
“Really? That’s odd.”
“No,” said Dillon, thinking he understood why. “It makes sense if you think about it . . . . Now that they’ve dedicated their lives to the cause, they have no pattern but the one I give them.”
“Blank slates,” suggested Okoya.
“Yes—waiting for me to write on.”
“What could be better?”
Okoya stood and kicked a rock down the hillside. It tumbled, kicking up dust on the way down. “I’m worried about Michael,” Okoya said.
“He’s a loose cannon,” Dillon admitted.
“We may need to take care of him,” said Okoya.
Dillon waved it off. “Yeah, yeah—I’ll take care of everybody.”
“No,” said Okoya. “That’s not what I mean.”
Dillon stood, finding an unexpected seriousness in Okoya’s face that he couldn’t decipher. Then Dillon burst out laughing. “Very good! You had me going there. And I thought you didn’t have a sense of humor!”
Okoya laughed too, dismissing his own grave expression.
“Ruling the world is easy,” said Okoya. “Comedy’s hard.”
They chuckled a few moments more, then Okoya became pensive. Reflective.
“You remind me of someone I once knew in the Greek Isles. He was a lot like you at your age—although not nearly as gifted.”
“The Greek Isles?”
“Just because I come from a reservation, it doesn’t mean I haven’t traveled.”
Dillon took a pointedly invasive look at Okoya, to once again divine the source of his worldliness—but all he found were the simple patterns of a rural life. But that was somehow untrue. It was merely a facade, someone else he was hiding behind.
“Who are you, Okoya?”
The expression on Okoya’s face changed then, becoming open and unambiguous. “I’m someone who wants to put the world in the palm of your hand.”
Okoya left, and as night fell, Dillon found himself still transfixed by the view, eerily lit by a rising blood moon.
He resolved to remain there till dawn, preparing his mind for the task at hand. Meditating on himself, Dillon thought of the network of connections already spreading forth, linking Dillon and the Shards with signs and wonders in millions of people’s minds, as they turned on their evening news. Tomorrow those numbers would flare, as they became witnesses to the impossible—a miraculous wake-up call to the world, too huge to deny.
Forty-five days from now, there would be no doubters. That day would see an end to war, disease, and despair. There would never be another Shiprock Massacre—he would see to that. His binding strength would be a protective sheath around the world.
He looked again to the view before him. Lake Mead stretched to a rocky shore, and before it, the concrete expanse of Hoover Dam arced across a deep ravine, holding in the lake. Dillon smiled.
Tomorrow this troubled, crumbling world would believe in miracles.
19. Blind Run
Drew Camden was no sleuth. Constantly distracted and uncharacteristically clumsy, he was poorly suited to spy on Okoya. However, the carrot Michael had hung in front of him was powerful motivation.
He positioned his bedroll in view of Okoya’s tent, into which the mysterious Indian had retreated after dinner. For hours he listened to irritating songs around the campfires, and heard stories. Storytellers were emerging in this new order, weaving lofty dramas about the Shards that had no basis in fact whatsoever: how the Shards were ancient and ageless; how their semblance of youth was only a guise. Drew didn’t bother to contradict them.
Other followers had been assigned the task of receiving new arrivals, who drifted in from the Boulder Highway in a steady osmotic flow. By two in the morning, most everyone but the posted watch had settled down.
The night was much colder than it should have been, and the sky up above was punctuated by a brilliant spray of stars. If Michael and the others were illuminated with the fragmented soul of a star, Drew wondered as he lay there, what did that make him? What did that make everyone else? Tiny, insignificant smithereens? He wondered how long until the Shards would find people too small for their attention!
Well, thought Drew, better take my share of favors now, before Michael’s pedestal gets too high.
There was a flap of fabric, and Drew rolled over to see Okoya step from his tent. Drew slipped out of his sleeping bag and followed, taking his video-cam with him. He kept his distance as Okoya strolled among the sleeping campers. There seemed to be no destination; he merely meandered, glancing from face to face of the ones who slept beneath the open air—as if looking for someone.
Finally, Okoya stopped by a clutch of sleeping bags behind a larger tent, out of view from everyone else.
Drew watched as Okoya knelt, then put a hand behind a sleeping woman’s neck, and tilted her head slightly back, as if he were about to resuscitate her. Then, the space between Okoya and the woman arced with a wave of soft, cr
imson light that lit their faces for a few moments, then faded.
The woman rolled over, and pulled her sleeping bag up to her shoulders, never waking up. Okoya moved to the man beside her, repeating the same procedure.
Drew wasn’t sure what he was witnessing—but he did know that he must have hit the jackpot. Whatever this was, it was information for Michael—and that meant Michael had to make good on his promise.
Okoya moved on to a third camper.
All it would take to clinch this would be a video! The light created by Okoya’s strange encounters would create enough of an image to see. Drew quietly raised the video-cam to his eyes, slid his thumb over the red button and pressed it.
The machine beeped twice as it went from standby to record . . . And in the silence, those two tones might as well have been the chimes of Big Ben. The glow died suddenly, and Okoya’s head turned as smoothly as an owl’s, directly to Drew.
Drew suddenly felt like a small rodent caught in Okoya’s owlish gaze, and he bolted. Tripping over campers, barreling into tents, he tried to make it to where the Shards slept.
“Michael,” he called. “Michael, help me!” But he realized that he had lost his sense of direction in the large circle of buses, and didn’t know where he was. Whichever way he turned, Okoya was behind him. There was a narrow space between two buses, and Drew raced for it. Regardless of what had changed in his heart, head, and character, he still had the body of a runner, and flight was now the only defense he had.
He burst through the circle of buses, escaping into the open desert beyond—his legs churning as he fixed on glowing lights just over the jagged hills . . .
***
Michael, Tory, Lourdes, and Winston slept beneath a large canopy set against their bus. The ground was covered with tapestries torn from the walls of San Simeon, and they slept on beds taken from the castle as well.
As the night scraped along, Tory lay awake, plagued by Winston’s words.
“Big deal. Dillon would have brought me back.”
Did that make it acceptable, then, to take his life? Did murder suddenly have no meaning? No consequence?
“Big deal.”
She thought back to that first moment she and Winston had found Okoya sitting beside them in the coffee shop. That wasn’t a chance meeting, was it? Somehow Okoya had known who they were—and now she realized that Okoya was using them . . . but toward what end? She sat up in bed, throwing off the covers, and let the frosty night chill her bones, because comfort was now an enemy. It had kept her complacent for far too long.
Michael slept in another bed a few feet away, wrapped in several dense quilts, yet she could hear his teeth chattering. Tory realized that it was his own cold that filled the night air.
“Michael?”
She went over to him and peeled the covers away from his face. He was awake, and looked awful, as if the life had been drained out of him.
“Michael, what’s wrong? Are you sick?” And then it occurred to her that he couldn’t be sick. None of them could.
“Hungry,” Michael rasped out.
“I’ll get you something to eat.”
But he grabbed her arm before she could leave. “No,” he said. “Not that kind of hunger.”
She met his eyes, and she knew what he meant. Although there was a loud part of her mind that was screaming denial, she forced herself to listen to a quieter voice within herself, that told her what she had been afraid to hear. “This is about Okoya, isn’t it?”
Michael gritted his teeth to keep them from chattering. “Listen to me Tory: A year ago, when we killed our parasites, we thought we came away unhurt—but we were wrong. Those things left holes in us that we didn’t know how to fill. So we invited Okoya into our lives to fill them for us, plugging up those holes.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know . . . but it’s in the music and perfumes. It’s in the words Winston reads, and the food Lourdes eats.”
He’s delirious, Tory thought. He has to be . . . . But her voice of denial was losing its bite in the face of what Michael said. How many mornings had she woken up to luxuriate in a hot bath scented with oils Okoya had supplied? It would whet her appetite for every indulgence the day had to offer. And when she was hungry, it was no longer food she desired, but the charged aroma of purity Okoya was more than happy to provide. Tory had heard of holy men who never ate, and who were said to draw their sustenance from the air itself. Was this transcendental appetite part of the Shards’ curious physiology? And if so, what had they been dining on?
“You did the right thing when you left the bus this afternoon,” Tory told Michael. “Okoya is... I don’t know what Okoya is—but she’s not our friend. It’s not our friend.”
Michael rolled over in bed then, and Tory caught sight of his face—pale and wan—just as it was a year before when his soul had harbored the blue-flamed beast.
Okoya is like that beast, thought Tory, but different. Not a parasite, but a predator—which was far more dangerous.
She took his hands into hers and tried to warm them but it did no good. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Sing to me, Tory,” he whispered. “Something bright. Something warm.”
And so she slipped beneath the covers with him, holding him to share her warmth, and with her lips to his ear she began to gently sing an old Genesis tune she remembered. “I will follow you, will you follow me . . .’” Michael laughed at her choice of song, for there had been way too much following lately. "‘ . . . all the days and nights that we know will be . . .’ " She sang to him until she could feel the slightest warmth begin to return to his fingers, and the sting of chill begin to leave the night air. Perhaps it lacked the feeding emotional flood of Okoya’s music, but it was something.
“We have to find Dillon and warn him about Okoya,” Tory told him.
Just then came the clattering sound of tent stakes flying and the tearing of nylon.
“Michael! Michael, help me!” yelled a far-off voice.
There was a commotion way across the campsite—the shouts of people suddenly woken as someone crashed over them.
“Oh no!” said Michael. “It’s Drew!”
He heaved himself out of bed, finding the strength to walk. Tory led the way, pulling Michael along with her.
“I told him to watch Okoya—to find out what he was up to.”
They crashed over the debris of overturned tents, until they came out of the circle of buses. About twenty yards out, was a red blinking light. They ran toward it, to find Drew’s video camera lying in the sand.
In the distance, two figures sprinted across the desert, one in pursuit of the other.
“We’ll never catch them,” said Michael, but even so, he threw his legs out before him, running as best he could.
“Let me help you,” Tory put her arm around his waist and threw her weight into his stride. Together they forged toward the lights of Hoover Dam.
***
Okoya’s will was more powerful than anyone’s on Earth—but there were limitations to his stolen human body. Although he drove that body to pursue Drew Camden, Drew was a fast runner, and Okoya could not overtake him—but he did not lose sight of him, either. He pursued Drew past the jagged hills—where Dillon slept alone that night, dreaming of greatness—until he reached the two-lane highway that rode along the ridge of Hoover Dam. Drew was already at the dam, in a panic. Under the bright spotlights, he tried to flag down help, but traffic was sparse this time of night—and what few cars came his way, had no intention of stopping for a lunatic waving his arms in the middle of the road.
Okoya ran onto the dam’s paved rim at full speed, as Drew hurried to a metal doorway and pounded on it—but it would not give. However, a guard farther away had seen him, and crossed the road toward Drew. Okoya picked up his speed to intercept.
“What’s all this about?” said the guard, obviously thinking he could get this situation under control.
“He’s trying to kill me!” screamed Drew.
“Hold on, son,” said the guard. “No one’s going to—"
Okoya reached them, and wasted no time. He took the guard out with a single punch to his Adam’s apple. The guard crumpled, and Drew took off again, climbing the waist-high stone guardrail on the canyon side of the dam. Drew balanced himself precariously, as Okoya grabbed for his feet. Then Drew leapt—disappearing over the edge.
It was almost eight hundred feet to the bottom of Black Canyon, and Okoya was sure that Drew had taken his own life, saving Okoya the trouble . . . until Okoya climbed the guardrail, and saw Drew heading down a narrow flight of metal stairs leading to a catwalk that hugged the dam’s curved face. Okoya resumed his pursuit. Down below, Drew reached a rusted metal door in the middle of the massive face of the dam—it was where the catwalk ended. Okoya practically glided down the steps toward him as Drew kicked the door again, and again, until its rusted lock gave way, and the door burst inward into darkness.
Okoya frowned. Luck had no business being with this boy tonight, and Okoya resolved to make Drew’s end doubly cruel because of it. Okoya followed him into the narrow concrete-lined access corridor. Its walls were wet with seepage and there were no lights in the tight, claustrophobic space. The distant vibrations of the power plant down below made it impossible for Okoya to hear Drew’s footsteps. He knew Drew would head toward the power plant, where there would be night workers to hide behind.
Fine, thought Okoya. See how he does in the dark.
Okoya strode forward, confident within the blindness . . . . For darkness was not a stumbling block to the Bringer, but a comfort, and a reminder of home.
Thief Of Souls ss-2 Page 21
