The Song of Glory and Ghost

by N. D. Wilson

  If you live in a nearby century, in one of a dozen different time streams, you may have heard of a town called Seattle. You may even live in some version of Seattle now, in your immediate moment. Perhaps you know it as a beautiful city of fish and hills and airplanes and electrical magic built between vast inlets of a cold northern sea and massive snowcapped mountains and lower treed foothills. Maybe you know it as a terrible city of slavers and oppression or a vibrant city of schools and libraries and churches, a rich city or a poor city, a city that loves football or a city that only plays board games. Maybe the city you know is only a great ruin by the sea.

  Seattle has been a lovely place, a wild place, and a thriving, bustling metropolis that grew and grew and grew until it discovered that its beautiful mountains weren’t so beautiful on the inside.

  Sam Miracle knew two Seattles. First a Seattle in one 2013, full of sunshine and sea breeze and the smell of fish, thriving in places, struggling and broken in places. Sam had slept in its parks and on the roof of his bus beneath its bridges and overpasses. And then another Seattle and another 2013 had taken him. The mountains had exploded. Peaks and faces and cliffs had flown up into the sky. And while millions of tons of molten stone had been passing through the suburbs and the city and had been poured hissing into the salty sound, Peter had managed to jump them all forward another twenty-one years—as best they could tell—into 2034. But they hadn’t switched time streams. The destruction remained, but it was now decades behind them.

  The Seattle where Sam Miracle stood waiting for Glory and Peter to return from their motorcycle supply run had become beautiful again—in a stark and brutal way. Beautiful in the way that graveyards can be beautiful, even abandoned and overgrown. Beautiful in the way that death and resurrection always are. Beautiful in the stillness of the black volcanic rock sprawling around islands of decaying buildings still somehow upright, but edged with ferns and crowned with moss. Lush green life had erupted along the edges of every lava bed, and the mountains still smoked quietly years after their anger, even in the drizzling rain, as if commanding the city never to wake again. Never to rise.

  This silent and dead Seattle was the Seattle Sam Miracle knew best. And it made his heart ache like one of the songs of death and yearning his sister sang when she was thinking about the places and people they had both lost. The ruined city plucked sorrows inside him because he knew the destruction was partly of his own making. Sam had failed to kill the Vulture, and the consequences of that failure had been raining down ever since.

  Sam knew that if he had chosen to kill El Buitre instead of saving his sister, he would be full of regret, and his heart would have broken completely. Millie would be dead, Sam would hate himself, but hundreds of thousands of other people would still be alive. Cities would have continued on without any sense of how close they had come to destruction.

  But that’s not the choice Sam had made. He had been so sure that he could have it both ways—Millie could be saved and the Vulture killed. Why? Because that’s what he wanted. But wants and wishes cannot erase choices. Sometimes a road forks, and both paths lead to pain.

  Since the night old Father Tiempo had said good-bye in the parking lot of a pizza place in California, Sam Miracle had gone to sleep 274 times, always thinking of the faceless thousands who had died because of him. Glory drew a little moon in a notebook every time they all went to bed, and she dragged a slash through it every time they woke. And with every slash, Sam knew that his failure had grown by another day.

  Almost half of those days had now passed in this strangely quiet place where an entire city of the west had been destroyed. How many lives were encased just in the black lava Sam could see where he was standing?

  He shook the thought away and then shivered. He didn’t feel guilty for saving his sister. How could he? No, he felt guilty for failing to kill the Vulture. For failing to stop the madman before he could unleash his bitterness and violent anger on the world. With every day that passed, Sam was sure that more lives had been lost, that more destruction had been set in motion somewhere and somewhen. And every morning, Sam woke hoping that it all might end before he had to sleep again. Before the next city burned. The Vulture would show himself and Providence would give Sam one more chance to put things right.

  But not today. The sun was low, the clouds were high, and while most of the wintry day had been warm enough, the air carried a damp chill on a breeze that was just strong enough to keep Sam’s arms tightly crossed under his scratchy wool poncho, despite the red long johns and heavy flannel shirt he had layered beneath. His thick hair, once desert blond, had darkened in the months since he’d traveled north, and it had grown shaggy enough to make him wish for some electricity and a pair of clippers. But right now, the mop of hair was all that kept his head warm. He was wearing dusty jeans and muddy square-toed cowboy boots Millie had given him two months ago—on the day she had insisted was his birthday.

  Under his poncho, he always wore a modified two-gun holster, but both of the antique revolvers he had used to face the Vulture were hidden in a sock drawer miles away, along with the last of his bullets. Ammunition, along with food and toilet paper, was quite hard to come by in the volcanic graveyard of Seattle, picked over for decades by territorial gangs and clans. Instead of the old western guns, Sam carried one small, double-stringed black crossbow with worn silver edges—a bow redesigned and repaired by the quick and certain hands of Barto, the most mechanical of the former SADDYR Ranch Brothers.

  The bow dangled from Sam’s right holster with strings drawn and ready. The holster on his left hip was now a quiver packed full of assorted short and viciously sharp arrows. Some Barto had collected and modified; others he had designed and crafted from scraps. Sam had practiced a great deal with his new weapon. He had even hunted with it. But he had never had to use it in a fight. And that was fine with him. At least until Sam found the Vulture. Or the Vulture found Sam.

  Sam was keeping his lookout on a steep hill by the lava-rock shore of the sound, only a few hundred yards from the rusty pier where he had tied his battered metal boat. From where he stood, he could see countless ship carcasses along miles of shore, jutting up from the shallow water or partially trapped in the volcanic beds. Inland, barren rivers and lakes of black lava rock surrounded green hilltop islands crowned with partially burned and rotting structures. And all around, the mountains guilty of such vast destruction were still smoking.

  Out in the water, well beyond the wide metal boat he had tied to a steel pylon in the shallows of the sound, dozens of plumes of steam rose from the surface where underwater volcanic cracks lurked like monsters, waiting to ambush prey.

  Sam Miracle had seen many things in his many lifetimes, but volcanoes were relatively new. And intimidating. The silent desolation all around him felt like a nightmare. And he knew all about those.

  How many people in the city had survived that awful day and the days after? Where were they now, in this version of the future? In the prairie camps of Nebraska? Wyoming? Which was just another way of wondering how many people hadn’t escaped. How many souls had been lost in the rock? In the water? Poisoned by the ash? Did the Vulture know? How many of the victims had he counted? And would the guilt Sam was feeling ever fade?

  Sam rolled his shoulders, rattling slightly, and put those thoughts out of his mind for now. Glory and Peter were late. He pulled the gold watch with the broken chain out of his pocket and let it dangle against his leg. It didn’t float, it didn’t tug. The Vulture wasn’t near. But it ticked. He slid it back into his pocket and squinted down at the metal shell of a boat still bobbing in place beside the pier where they had left it. No thieves. No gangsters. Strictly seagulls. A cluster floated slowly above Sam. A few more watched him from the ground, feathers ruffling backward in the breeze.

  Beneath his poncho, he slowly uncrossed his arms. Cindy resisted, trying to slip back together with Speck.

  Cindy hated Seattle. Even when the sun was strong, there was too much m
oisture in the air, fresh from the sea. What she wanted, as much as any living creature can want anything, was the feeling of a warm rat in her belly and a hot rock to flatten herself against at the end of a long desert day. All that wanting and never getting kept her angry. She had to settle for the warmth of Sam’s blood pumping beneath her own and coiling up against his belly with her pink rival on his other hand. And Cindy had never liked a crowded den, not since that day long ago when she’d wriggled alive from her mother’s belly in a tangle of vicious siblings and had immediately fled while her mother fed on the dead. Now, there was no such thing as solitude. She spent all her time listening to the thoughts of the boy she was stuck to, and the muted impulses of the pink idiot who was as stuck as she was. In another life, she would have killed him.

  For the last hour, she and Pink had been wound tight around each other, against the boy’s stomach, tolerably warm. But now the boy was trying to stir them both, dragging them out into the air.

  Cindy felt the scales on her head plucking against Pink’s.

  In the darkness below the poncho, she could make out his blue-gray eyes as they passed hers.

  Speck. The thought muddled its way into her head from his. He calls me Speck.

  Cindy would have hissed, but she had no mouth. And she was being dragged out of her warm place.

  Pink! she fired back. And then she tried to grab onto the other snake. Together they could fight the boy. They could stay against his belly forever.

  Speck blinked, refusing to grab her back. Idiot. He had to hate the cold air as much as she did.

  Sam dragged both arms out.

  COLD. The thought flowed up from both hands, but from Sam’s left hand, it blossomed like an angry curse word in his mind.

  “Come on,” he said out loud. “It’s not bad. Just wait till Christmas up here. Then you’ll feel cold.”

  Tugging both arms away from his body, Sam shrugged his poncho up onto his shoulders and pulled a rolled and folded comic book out of his belt with his right hand.

  His sister had been thrilled to give him cowboy boots for his birthday, but Glory Spalding had known him a little better than Millie did. She’d given him a box of ancient comics—mostly Spider-Man and Hulk—and her gift had improved absolutely everything about the last few months.

  Speck, the pink rattlesnake in Sam’s right arm, contracted and bent his arm into a tight S in the cool air while Sam flipped the comic open.

  Cindy, the horned sidewinder in Sam’s left arm, was rigid, focusing on the nearest seagull. Her rattle was silent on Sam’s shoulder, which meant she was worse than angry. She wanted to hurt the gull.

  Kill.

  It was Cindy’s favorite word, the thought that his left hand sent up into his mind more than any other. There were other impulses from the snakes that he could now understand, but only when they were intense.

  “Oh, stop,” Sam said. “The bird’s not doing anything.” He forced Cindy to help with the comic book pages while Speck flexed even harder against the cold.

  “I am warm-blooded,” Sam said, flipping to the first crudely colored page of the comic. “Which means you are, too. So relax. You won’t die. You just think you will.”

  Spider-Man was perched high on a suspension bridge. If Sam had ever been to New York City, he might have recognized it. Mary Jane was bruised and battered and unconscious and draped safely in the superhero’s arms. Without reading any of the words on the page, Sam studied the image.

  Of course, he liked it. It’s what a hero was supposed to do and how a hero was supposed to be.

  And given that Sam Miracle was supposed to be a hero, given that he was supposed to have killed the Vulture two centuries prior to the moment he was in now and saved cities like Seattle from total annihilation at the hands of that time-spinning carrion villain, Sam didn’t feel anything like Spider-Man. Maybe if the picture was of the hero dropping the girl. Or the hero perched on the bridge looking out over the smoking ruin that had once been Manhattan, now swallowed by lava.

  Or maybe if the hero had hands with their own personalities that he could barely control and he was stuck guarding an empty boat in an empty city—destroyed because he had let a villain escape—while a girl who had saved him more than he had saved her was off somewhere on a motorcycle looking for food and toilet paper with another boy. If that was how the hero in the comic had been drawn, then Sam would have felt more like him. Exactly like him, in fact, even without the Spidey tights.

  The seagulls still standing on the rough remnants of the street all took a few hops away.

  Cindy sensed what the birds sensed. A possible predator was coming. The boy didn’t know. Pink didn’t know, either, or he didn’t care.

  Cindy’s rattle shivered slightly on Sam’s left shoulder, just enough to get his attention.

  Sam lowered the comic book. The animal knew something he didn’t.

  Where? he asked. Speck didn’t seem to care about anything but the air temperature. Impulses flooded up his arm from Cindy. Sam scanned the ruin in front of him. He could feel Cindy’s aggression loud and clear. He knew she wanted to frighten, to warn, to strike, but he didn’t know what the threat was or where. The only way to know for sure was to let Cindy do as she pleased.

  With a gun in his holster, he would have been more cautious relaxing his left arm. He never let Cindy control a weapon unless he was willing for things to die. But Cindy had no weapon to grab, not unless he was going to fight hand to hand using a short crossbow bolt like a dagger.

  Sam relaxed the muscles in his left arm. For a split second, he felt Cindy’s pleasure. Then his left hand snapped down to his holster and back up, twisting quickly backward and pointing a shiny, short arrow directly behind him.

  “Whoa there,” a man said. “No need, boy, no need.”

  Sam turned around, following his arm. Beside a ruined wall a dozen feet away, a scrawny man with a tangled beard and an oversize hooded green raincoat stood fidgeting with a half-raised ax.

  Speck was pointing now, too, but the pink snake hadn’t bothered to go for the crossbow on Sam’s hip. Instead, his right hand held the comic book coiled up in a tight tube.

  “Move along,” Sam said. “I’ve got nothing for you to take.”

  “Your hand shoots arrows?” The man laughed. “Help! Save me!”

  “They could have killed you already,” Sam said. “You’re lucky. So just keep walking.”

  The man cleared his throat and shuffled nervously, glancing back over Sam’s shoulder.

  “That’s a nice poncho you’re wearing.” The man’s hands twisted on his ax handle as he took a step forward. “I think it might just fit me.”

  Sam dropped his comic book onto the ground. Instantly, Speck snatched the crossbow off his hip and began to rattle. Cindy joined in. But Speck wasn’t pointing at the ax man. Sam’s right arm bent his elbow backward, pointing well outside of Sam’s peripheral vision.

  “Boy,” the ax man said, “you’re twisted all in a knot.”

  Exhaling slowly, Sam shut his eyes and tried to quiet his mind enough to sense what his hands were seeing. Cindy was focused on the warm shape of the ax man. But Speck had three other shapes to worry about. One small and two large.

  “You brought friends,” Sam said, with his eyes still closed. “The three of you can stop right there.”

  “Your arms,” a girl said. “The way they bend . . .”

  She sounded young. And horrified. Horrified was good right now. Sam needed to seem scary. Especially when he had four potential enemies and a bow that could only fire two arrows.

  “They don’t just bend,” Sam said. “They never miss.”

  He opened his eyes, staring at the ax man but thinking about the shapes behind him.

  “You’re . . . rattling,” the girl said.

  Sam didn’t answer. If they attacked him, running for the boat wouldn’t solve anything. He couldn’t leave Glory and Peter, and he had no idea how much longer they would be.

&nb
sp; Turning slowly, Sam left Cindy behind to stare down the man with the ax, then focused his attention on Speck’s three problems.

  The girl had red hair in a loose curly storm around a smooth, pale face. Her eyes were the color of the sunlit sky behind her, and she was wearing a too-large red down vest and ancient jeans tucked into high rubber boots. Most important, she was flanked by two big bearded men, obviously brothers, both wearing tattered old sweaters and pointing rifles at Sam’s chest.

  Sam steered Speck and his crossbow toward the man on the right.

  “You can’t shoot us both,” the man growled.

  “I don’t want to shoot either of you,” Sam said. “Or little Raggedy Ann in the middle. But I will.”

  The girl blinked slowly. “Raggedy Ann?” she asked.

  “Red hair. Like the doll.” Sam shook his head. “Never mind. My sister had one. In another time. Now why are these guys pointing guns at me?”

  “I’m Sam,” the girl said. “These two are Bull and Dog and we call that one with the ax Dice. What’s going on with your arms and why are you scavenging here? This isn’t your turf.”

  Sam Miracle grinned. “I’m Sam,” he said. “And if you’re friendly, my arms are nothing for you to worry about. I’m just waiting for some friends. I won’t be here long.”

  The big man on the right—Dog—leaned over until his beard was in the girl’s red hair. Then he whispered loudly.

  “He doesn’t have friends. Just wants us nervous. We should take his boat.”

  “I heard that,” Sam said. “And it’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Unless you don’t like breathing.”

  Girl Sam took a few steps forward, crossed her arms, and studied Sam with curious eyes, slowly taking in everything from the comic book on the ground to the old poncho to the scaled reptilian heads grown into the backs of his hands.

  “You’re from the comics,” she said. “But for real.”

  Sam shrugged as both his rattles twitched. “I guess,” he said.