Keep Mama Dead

by S. James Nelson

  Brady stood.

  He spread his hands wide, lifted them to shoulder level, and began to spin in a circle.

  The bottom portion of the twister disappeared, just disintegrated. The leaves and dust for at least a dozen feet above the ground lost their thrust, scattering in every direction. In those dozen feet, the twirling wind went away. For a moment, it looked like Brady had chopped the tornado off at the knees. Then, the twister lifted into the air, so that its base, only a few feet wide, bounced along some invisible barrier over the heads of the still-confused zombies. Air and dust scattered along the top of that barrier in a blur that made it impossible to see anything below it.

  Thomas gritted his teeth and looked to Miss Sadie. The look on her face said she’d noticed Brady’s counter spell. Nevertheless, she kept twirling the ribbon. The flame grew taller and taller up the length of the cloth, becoming a twisting pillar of fire. She moved from side to side, so the tornado—still holding and twirling half a dozen zombies in the air—shifted to the right and left, as if testing the barrier.

  It held firm. At one point, the twister found the edge of the barrier, and touched back down on the ground. The flying dust and leaves and sticks, however, collided with the wall of the barrier.

  The flames nearly reached Miss Sadie’s fingers, and with a grunt, she let it fall. The roaring of the magic wind ended with a sucking sound followed by thunder. The burning ribbon flitted to the hard dirt of the road. Below, the tornado dissipated. The storm of dust and leaves became random, cloudy, unfocused. Zombies flew outward and landed in bushes or the river.

  “By the blessings!” she said. “He countered my spell!”

  She stepped past the burning ribbon, to pick up the figurine. As she straightened, she looked back southward, and shook her head in disgust.

  Thomas couldn’t find words. Without the tornado, the air had fallen still. Down the hill, the dust hung in a cloud, reluctant to settle.

  She continued to shake her head. “I should have had you and the horses stand in front of me, to block his view. Then he might not have seen me casting the spell. Idiot!” She turned to Thomas. Her face burned red with anger. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you have any other spells you can use against him?”

  “I have plenty, but they all take a little time to cast.”

  Brady emerged from the dust cloud riding at full speed. The zombies followed, like specters from mist. It would take more than a little toss to stop them.

  “Then we’d better run,” Thomas said. He handed her the reins to her horse, and prepared to mount his own. “Maybe we can lose them, or just outrun them.”

  She grunted and shook her head. “I doubt that, but running will give us time to think. Get us closer to your family.”

  In the last few minutes, Thomas had forgotten about his family.

  Ignore them. Take care of your Mama, first!

  His sense of urgency doubled. He mounted.

  “Then let’s run,” he said. “Like the devil was after us.”

  * * *

  They ran the horses as long and hard as they dared, up past the canyon that branched to the right, and into the narrower part of Zion’s. Not far past there, the river shifted to the west side of the canyon, forcing the road close to the canyon wall. At one point, the canyon cut suddenly further west, rising into three gigantic pillars of jagged stone with pointed peaks. They stood like wise old patriarchs watching over the valley.

  Between the winding of the path and the juniper and oak trees, they soon lost sight of their pursuers. Thomas still looked back often, wondering if a zombie had caught up and was about to leap onto his horse’s back. He kept imagining those zombies back in Hurricane, their drawn, bone-thin faces. Why hadn’t he at least thought to steal a sword back in Gateway?

  He also kept an eye on Miss Sadie. Usually, he had to lie down and sleep after a spell, due to the amount of strength it drained. But she rode on ahead of him, never faltering.

  They slowed after about twenty minutes. The animals sweated and huffed, and foam gathered around their mouths. Thomas's horse's ribs expanded and shrunk against the insides of his legs. He panted, as well, and all he’d done was not fall off a running animal.

  “Are you holding up okay?” he asked Miss Sadie.

  She nodded, unable to speak from her hard breathing. How could she not have needed a rest after casting that spell? If he hadn’t seen it himself, he never would have believed how fine and delicate she looked in a fancy dress.

  After a minute, when they’d both regained their breath and he felt confident she wouldn’t collapse, he suggested that they get going again, but she shook her head.

  “Not yet. Brady’s horse can’t run any more than ours.”

  “What about the zombies? Can’t they run without tiring?”

  “Yes, but not quite as fast as a horse. We have a few minutes to let ours catch their breath.”

  “Can’t he send the zombies on ahead without him?”

  She gave him a frustrated look. “Thomas, I know what’s going on. Trust me. He won’t send the zombies on without him because they can’t use any magic to counter the spells I could use.” She gave him a patient but pointed smile. “Any other questions?”

  He shook his head. “No, no. You certainly know better than me on how to handle the situation.” But something else had been bothering him since she’d appeared in his cell that morning. “But I do have a question. Why did Mr. Milne leave you in Gateway?”

  She laughed. “For my own protection.”

  He frowned, and failed to understand what she meant.

  “I would think that with an army of zombies descending on Gateway, Zion’s would be safer.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Her eyebrows rose as she looked at him. This time, the forced patience of the expression annoyed him.

  “Stop it with the looks. Clearly, I’m just a stupid farm boy who doesn’t understand half of what’s going on, here. I don’t have nearly the learning you have. It’s just something you’ll have to get used to.”

  “Get used to? Why would I have to get used to it?”

  Heat rose in Thomas’s face as he realized why he’d thought she would have to get used to it: he had unconsciously started planning to spend a great deal of time with her. For a long time to come. Somehow in the past few hours, he’d forgotten his inclination to detest women and how they ruined a man’s life.

  He wanted to marry Miss Sadie.

  It was ridiculous. Impossible. He’d only met her three days before, and had even rejected a perfectly good marriage scenario for a girl he’d known for many years. And Miss Sadie was a high-class, zombie-raising Moabite. Why would someone like her settle for a poor boy like him? A simpleton. Yes, she’d said she wanted to understand him, but now that he thought about it, it seemed more of an academic pursuit. He was a freak to her, and freaks fascinated people of her class.

  “Forget it,” he said. His tone became harder than intended. “Never mind.”

  She chuckled. “Thomas, are you blushing?”

  He met her gaze with an as un-amused a look as he could muster.

  “I don’t know, am I?”

  Her eyes bore into his, and he would’ve sworn that in them he saw more than just curiosity at a freak. An odd hope and anticipation built in him, a strange satisfaction and excitement. No girl had ever looked at him like that. Not even Miss Wendy.

  They stared at each other like that for several seconds, neither looking away. Their horses continued on down the road, with the trees on the right, and fifty yards of sloping hill on the left. After a handful of seconds, her eyes changed. The emotion drained out of them. In a few more seconds, she looked off to the other side of the road.

  “The barrier could go up any time,” she said.

  “What? How could the barrier go up?” Nothing about the comment made any sense. Why would she even bring it up?

  “If it does, we don’t know what will happen to me.” She shook he
r head with wry bitterness. “I’m a Moabite, after all.”

  It hit Thomas. He looked at her in surprise.

  She was a Moabite. A zombie raiser. He knew that, but he hadn’t considered the implications until that moment.

  When the barrier had first gone up, the zombies within its boundaries caught fire. In flashes of twisting flame, they turned to piles of ash. But anyone who had created a zombie or given second-life days to the raising of a zombie had no such quick death. The barrier caused insufferable buzzing in their heads. It was said that some of them went insane in moments, before they could get out of the barrier. To free themselves of the sound, they shot themselves or fell on their swords.

  The sound was said to be so horrifying that no zombie raisers dared approach Hurricane or Zion’s. In Moab and Monument Valley, mothers threatened naughty children with the barrier. And legend had it that one man, particularly angry with his wife, strapped her to a horse and sent it into the barrier to punish her.

  If the barrier went up with Miss Sadie behind it, deep into Zion’s, she would have no hope of getting out before going insane.

  “Well, why are you with me? You should be running the opposite direction, getting as far away as you can.”

  “We’re not certain what will happen to me. I don’t remember ever being directly involved in raising a zombie or helping with the spell. But I might have when I was very little. I don’t remember. It’s possible. I was raised by the Lich Mayor.”

  He stared at her, trying to comprehend why she would put herself in such danger.

  "The barrier spell can go up at any moment?”

  “Presumably. That’s what Mr. Milne said.”

  “You've been in danger the entire time you've been here."

  She nodded.

  "You're in more danger the deeper into the canyon you go."

  She nodded again.

  "Then why are you going?"

  She chuckled and grinned at him.

  “Thomas, I told you back in your cell—I want to figure you out. I don’t understand you, whereas I can understand everyone else.”

  “I don’t believe it.” And he truly didn’t. “There must be more to it than that.”

  “There isn’t.”

  Her eyes bore into him, in the same way they had only a minute before: full of emotion and longing.

  “We should get going again,” she said. Looking away, she shifted her weight in the saddle, and kicked her horse to a run.

  Thomas watched her back for a moment before urging his own horse on. He had no idea what had just happened.

  Or what would happen.

  When my parents died, I fled. But like Jonah of old, I could not escape my responsibility. Turns out that Mr. Milne was the whale. Years later, when I told him that, he laughed at me. He only quit his laughing when I punched him in the nose.

  Chapter 28: The third gift

  The canyon continued to wind northward, alternately narrowing and widening, until it finally made up its mind and settled in at about half a mile wide. The canyon walls rose higher, varying in height from eight hundred to a thousand feet. Bands of white and red ran horizontally through the cliffs, telling the story of the canyon’s past in a manner that Thomas couldn’t comprehend. The canyon made him feel small. Insignificant. A mere speck in time.

  The road became little more than a trail, just wide enough for a wagon to pass along. In fact, the wagon the Bakers had taken that morning had left clear trails in the dirt. So had the hooves of Mr. Milne's and Charles's horses. The road followed the contour of the hills below the cliff, winding along on the left side of the river, although staying a little higher up. Squirrels chattered among the pinions and juniper trees. Down to the right, near the riverbank, cottonwood trees often blocked their view of the river.

  Thomas watched for Angel’s Landing. Though fifteen years had passed since he’d seen the spectacle, he remembered it clearly. A thin spine of dark cliffs extending a quarter mile out from the canyon, standing fifteen hundred feet higher than the riverbed, as if whoever had created the canyon had forgotten to erode that particular bit of stone—or had designed an intentional anomaly. A place of unusual beauty and holiness.

  When it came into view, as they rounded a bend and entered a somewhat wider portion of the canyon, Miss Sadie pulled up on her reins and stopped her horse in the center of the road. Her mouth hung open as she stared up at the rock. Thomas pulled up next to her, admiring the stone shining in the morning sun.

  It looked just like he’d remembered it. A little shorter, perhaps, but he was probably twice as tall as he’d been at his last visit. Their horses breathed fast and heavy, but even they looked up at the mountain as if comprehending the splendor before them. They also seemed to worry that Thomas and Miss Sadie would make them go up there. Well, they were safe. No horse could get where they needed to go.

  “What is that?” Miss Sadie said, pointing with her chin.

  “Angel’s Landing.” He whispered, suddenly remembering the admonition at the canyon’s entrance. “That’s where we’re going.”

  She looked at him half with surprise, half with horror. “Up that thing?”

  He nodded.

  “How is that even possible? It’s a sheer cliff. It’s just this huge . . . rock, standing out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “There’s a way up the back.” He pointed to the left, where the spine neared the wall of the canyon. “Up that way, there’s a little canyon we’ll go up.”

  “Is there even room to stand on it up at the top? It looks narrow, like it comes to a sharp point.”

  “From this angle you can’t tell, but there’s actually a pretty wide space up there. It’s not flat, but there’s probably a hundred feet of gentle enough slope to stand on. The altar is carved out of the rock at the highest point.”

  She looked at the canyon walls to the left and right. “I’d thought it would be the tallest thing in the canyon, but it’s not.”

  “No, not by a long shot. The walls are a few hundred feet higher, but when you reach the landing, you’re basically standing fifteen hundred feet up, in the center of the canyon. You can see along most of the canyon we’ve come up, and further up into the canyon. There probably aren’t many more spectacular views than there.”

  “Or harder places to get to.”

  He shrugged. “Quite possibly.”

  She turned and looked back the way they’d come. Because of the trees, they couldn’t see far down the path.

  “I don’t see them coming," she said. "I think we’ve put some distance between us.”

  “I was wondering what good that would do us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re going to climb this mountain, but once we get to the top, we won’t have anywhere to go. We’ll be cornered, with only long drops on three sides. If they follow us up, eventually they will catch up to us.”

  Worry creased her forehead.

  “There’s not much we can do about it. Unless you want to forget about them, let them resurrect your mother. And we go a separate direction.”

  The thought had occurred to him, but he’d discarded it as quickly as it had entered his mind. He needed to stop his family from bringing her back. That was his first priority. He would figure out everything else when the time came. If it came.

  “Maybe Mr. Milne will know what to do,” he said. “Or maybe we’ll be in a position that your tornado spell will work.”

  She looked skeptical. But beautiful.

  They continued on, and in just a minute or two came to a fork. The road on the right went downhill, toward the river and around the landing. The road on the left led uphill, toward the narrow canyon they would have to climb.

  Their trail began to wind, giving way to the shape of the steep hills. They moved at a fast walk since their horses were worn and tired; pushing them hard would have proven dangerous. The trail took them closer and closer to the cliffs on their left, and to the landing directly ahead of them,
until finally, they reached the base of the cliff.

  To Thomas’s surprise, they found three horses—including Mr. Milne’s—tied to the last bit of juniper trees, and an empty wagon sitting in the middle of the trail.

  “Why did they leave everything here?” Miss Sadie asked.

  “Look,” Thomas said.

  He pointed at the trail ahead of them. It consisted of a series of steep switchbacks carved right out of the rocky side of the mountain. Despite the vividness of his memories, he couldn’t remember that part of the climb.

  He shrugged. “They probably figured they couldn’t maneuver the wagon around those.”

  “So they’re carrying the coffin up by hand?”

  “Must be.”

  He hoped they were making Papa and Charles do it, but supposed that Eli and Franky would end up doing most of the work. Or even Mr. Milne.

  He followed the trail with his eyes, trying to determine if they had any reason not to take their own horses. He counted six switchbacks, each about a hundred yards long, each very steep. He thought the horses could make it into the canyon. They might not like the steep drop off to the east, but they could make it.

  She looked back down the way they'd come, and gasped.

  "By the blessings!"

  Thomas followed her gaze with his. About half a mile down the trail, the zombies and two men on horses pursued them. Apparently Farrell had recovered the horse that had run from the tornado.

  She urged her horse past the wagon. He followed, and as they reached the next switchback a hundred feet up, it became apparent why his family had left the wagon: the road narrowed to just two or three feet wide. The horses, already tired, labored hard to make it up the slope. He felt bad about it, and wondered how Stanley had fared. Probably just fine. Nobody expected him to do anything but keep quiet and not eat their food.

  Without speaking, they ascended the length of two switchbacks. When they again turned southward, they regained a clear view of the approaching zombies and two riders. If he and Miss Sadie stopped and waited, they would probably have about five minutes before their pursuers caught up. Fortunately, the Moabite group didn’t seem to be moving any faster than Thomas and Miss Sadie.