Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 12

"Don't hold back now," I said.

"I thought..." He turned away, probably to hide his face; there was a catch in his voice when he spoke again. "I don't understand why... Why you and mama had to... Why you..."

"I can't tell you why this happened. s.h.i.+t, I never even could figure out how things got started 'tween me and your mama. The two of us together never seemed to make any d.a.m.n sense. We loved each other, but I think love was something that came from need, 'stead of the other way around." Brad jerked his thumb toward Callie. "It make more sense with her?"

"It might have, bad as that may sound to you. But now... now, I don't know. This all mighta killed it.

Maybe that's how it should be. Anyhow, that ain't nothin' we have to deal with this minute."

The wind made a s.h.i.+very moan down through the rocks, and the flames whipped sideways. Brad lowered his eyes, scooped up a handful of dust, let it sift through his fingers. "Don't guess there's any more to be said."

I let his words hang.

"I keep thinkin' 'bout Mama out there," he said after a bit. "I keep seein' her like... like this little black dot in the middle of nowhere." He tossed dust into the fire. "Y'figure anything lives out here?"

"Just us, now." I spat into the fire, making the embers sizzle. "Maybe a tiger or two what wanders out to die."

"What 'bout Bad Men?"

"Why'd they want to be way out here? It's more likely they're livin' north of Edgeville up in the hills."

"Clay told me he'd met somebody lived out here."

"Well, Clay wasn't no big authority now, was he?"

"He wasn't no liar, either. He said this fella come in once in a while to buy sh.e.l.ls. Never bought nothin' but sh.e.l.ls. The fella told him he lived out on the flats with a buncha other men. He wouldn't say why. He told Clay if he wanted to learn why, he'd have to come lookin' for 'em."

"He's just havin' some fun with Clay."

"Clay didn't think so."

"Then he was a fool."

Brad gave me a sharp look, and I had the feeling he was seeing me new. "He ain't a fool just 'cause you say he is."

"Naw," I said. "There's a h.e.l.l of a lot more reason than that, and you know it."

He made a noise of displeasure and stared into the flames. I stared at them, too, fixing on the nest of embers, a hive of living orange jewels s.h.i.+fting bright to dark and back again as they were fanned by the wind. The glow from the fire carved a bright hollow between the two boulders where Callie was sleeping.

I would have liked to have crawled under the blankets with her and taken whatever joy I could in the midst of that wasteland; but Kiri was too much on my mind. I wished I could have limited my vision of her to a black dot; instead, I pictured her hunkered down chanting in the darkness, making her mind get slower and slower, until it grew so slow she would just sit there and die.

I straightened and found Brad looking at me. He met my eyes, and after a long moment he slumped and let his head hang; from that exchange I knew we had been thinking pretty much the same thing. I put my hand on his arm; he tensed, but didn't shrug it off as he might have the night before. I saw how worn down and tired he was.

"Go and get some sleep," I told him.

He didn't argue, and before long he was curled up under his blankets, breathing deep and regular.

I lay back, too, but I wasn't sleepy. My mind was thrumming with the same vibration that underscored the silence, as if all the barriers between my thoughts and the dark emptiness had been destroyed, and I felt so alive that it seemed I was floating up a fraction of an inch off the ground and trembling all over. A few stars were showing as pale white points through thin clouds. I tried to make them into a constellation, but couldn't come up with a shape that would fit them; they might have been the stars of my life, scattered from their familiar pattern, and I realized that even if we could find Kiri, I was never going to be able to put them back the way they had been. Life for me had been a kind of accommodation with questions that I'd been too cowardly or just too d.a.m.n stupid to ask, and that was why it had been blown apart so easily. If Kiri hadn't been the victim of the piece, I thought, having it blown apart might have been a good result.

I made an effort to see what lay ahead for us. The way things stood, however, there was no figuring it out, and my thoughts kept drifting back to Kiri. I stared off beyond the fire, letting my mind empty, listening to the wind scattering grit across the stones. At last I grew drowsy, and just before I woke Callieto stand her watch, I could have sworn I saw one of the tiny pale stars dart off eastward and then plummet toward the horizon; but I didn't think much about it at the time.

Five days out, and no sign of Kiri. Her trail had vanished like smoke in a mirror, and I did not know what to do. Five days' ride from Edgeville was considered an unofficial border between the known and unknown, and it was generally held that you would be risking everything by continuing past that limit.

n.o.body I'd ever met had taken up the challenge, except maybe for the man in the bubble car. We had enough supplies to keep going for a couple more days, yet I felt we'd be wasting our time by doing so, and I decided to bring the matter up that night.

We camped in a little depression among head-high boulders about fifty yards from the base of a hill that showed like a lizard's back against the stars, and as we sat around the fire, I made my speech about returning.

After I had done, Callie said with some force, "I ain't goin' back 'til we find her."

Brad made a noise of disgust. "You got nothin' to say about it," he told her. "Wasn't for you, wouldn't none of this happened."

"Don't you be gettin' on me!" she snapped. "There's a lot about all this you ain't got the brains to understand."

"I'll say whatever the h.e.l.l I want," he came back.

"Both of you shut up," I said.

The fire popped and crackled; Brad and Callie sat scowling at the flames.

"We're not gonna argue about this," I said. "Everybody knows what happened, and we all got reason for being here. We started together and we're gonna finish together. Understand?"

"I understand," said Callie, and Brad muttered under his breath.

"Say it now," I told him. "Or keep it to yourself."

He shook his head. "Nothin'."

"We'll go on a couple more days," I said after a pause. "If we ain't found her by then, there ain't gonna be no findin' her."

Brad's face worked, and once again he muttered something.

"What say?"

"Nothin'."

"Don't gimme that," I said. "Let's hear it. I don't want you p.i.s.sin' and moanin' any more. Let's get everything out in the open."

His cheekbones looked as if they were going to punch through the skin. "If you gave a d.a.m.n about Mama, you wouldn't stop 'til we found her. But all you wanna do is to get back home and crawl in bed with your wh.o.r.e!" He jumped to his feet. "Whyn't you just do that? Go on home! I don't need you, I'll find her myself."

A hot pressure had been building in my chest, and now it exploded. I launched myself at Brad, driving him back against one of the boulders and barring my forearm under his jaw. "You little s.h.i.+t!" I said. "Talk to me like that again, I'll break your G.o.dd.a.m.n neck."

He looked terrified, his eyes tearing, but all h.e.l.l was loose in me and I couldn't stop yelling at him.

Callie tried to pull me off him, but I shoved her aside.

"I'm sick'n tired of you remindin' me every d.a.m.n minute 'bout what it is I done," I said to Brad. "I know it to the G.o.dd.a.m.n bone, y'hear? I don't need no f.u.c.kin' reminders!"

Suddenly I had a glimpse of myself bullying a thirteen-year-old. My anger drained away, replaced by shame. I let Brad go and stepped back, shaking with adrenaline. "I'm sorry," I said. But he was alreadysprinting off into the night, and I doubt he heard me.

"He'll be back," said Callie from behind me. "It'll be all right."

I didn't want to hear that anything was all right, and I moved away from her; but she followed and pressed against my back, her arms linking around my waist. I didn't want tenderness, either; I pried her arms loose.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"What the h.e.l.l you think?"

"I mean with us. I know you can't be lovin' to me with Bradley around. But it's more'n that."

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know."

I stepped away from the fire, moving off into the dark; the hardpan scrunched beneath my boot heels.

The dark seemed to be pouring into my eyes. I felt that everything was hardening around me, locking me into a black mood, a black fate.

"You know what we need to do?" I said bitterly, not even looking at Callie. "We need to just keep on ridin'... more'n a couple of days, I mean. We should just keep ridin' and ridin' 'til that's the only thing we can do, 'til we're nothin' but bones and saddles."

I guess I figured she would object to that, promote some more optimistic viewpoint, but she said nothing, and when I looked back at her, I saw that she was sitting by the fire with her knees drawn up, holding her head in her hands.

I'd expected my mood would lift with the morning, but it did not, and the weather seconded my gloom, blowing up to near a gale, driving curtains of snow into our faces and obscuring us one from another. I rode with a scarf knotted about my face, my collar up, my eyebrows frosted. My thoughts revolved in a dismal cycle... less thoughts, really, than recognitions of a new thing inside me, or rather the breaking of some old thing and the new absence that had replaced it, solid and foreboding as the shadowy granite of the hills. Something had changed in me forever. I tried to deny it, to reason with myself, saying that a flash of temper and a moment's bitterness couldn't have produced a marked effect.

But then I thought that maybe the change had occurred days before, and that all my fit of temper had achieved was to clear away the last wreckage of my former self. I felt disconnected from Callie and Bradley. Emotionless and cold, colder than the snowy air. My whole life, I saw, was without coherence or structure. An aimless scattering of noises and heats and moments. Recognizing this, I felt to an extent liberated, and that puzzled me more. Maybe, I thought, this was how Bad Men really felt; maybe feeling this way was a stage in the making of a Bad Man. That notion neither cheered nor alarmed me. It had no color, no tonality. Just another icy recognition. Whenever Bradley or Callie drifted close, I saw in their faces the same hard-bitten glumness, and whenever we made eye contact, there was no flash of hatred or love or warmth. I recalled what I'd said the night before about riding until we were nothing but bones and saddles, and I wondered now if that might not have been prophetic.

Toward midafternoon, the wind dropped off and the snow lightened. What I'd thought were snow peaks on the horizon proved to be clouds, but rocky brown hills burst from the hardpan, leaving a narrow channel between them along which we were pa.s.sing. Though there was no sign of life other than patches of silverweed, though the landscape was leached and dead, I had a sense that we were moving into a less barren part of the flats. The sky brightened to a dirty white, the sun just perceptible, a tinny glare lowering in the west. I felt tense and expectant. Once I thought I spotted something moving along the crest of a hill. A tiger, maybe. I unsheathed my rifle and kept a closer watch, but no threat materialized.

That evening we camped in a small box canyon cut about a hundred yards back into the side of the hill. I did for the horses, while Bradley and Callie made a fire, and then, with full dark still half an hour off, not wanting any conversation, I went for a walk to the end of the canyon, pa.s.sing between limestone walls barely wider than my armspan and rising thirty and forty feet overhead. A few th.o.r.n.y shrubs sprouted from the cliffs, and there was an inordinate amount of rubble underfoot, as if the place had experienced a quake. In certain sections, the limestone was bubbled and several shades darker than the surrounding rock, a type of formation I'd never seen before. I poked around in the rubble, unearthing aspider or two, some twigs; then, just as I was about to head back to the campsite, I caught sight of something half-buried under some loose rock, something with a smooth, unnatural-looking surface. I kicked the rocks aside, picked it up. It was roughly rectangular in shape, about three inches long and two wide, and weighed only a couple of ounces; it was slightly curved, covered with dust, and one edge was bubbled and dark like the limestone. I brushed away the dust, and in the ashen dusk I made out that its color was metallic gold. I turned it over. The inner surface was covered with padding.

It wasn't until a minute or so later, as I was digging through the rubble, looking for more pieces, that I put together the fragment in my hand with the golden helmet that the driver of the bubble car had worn.

Even then I figured that I was leaping to a conclusion. But the next moment I uncovered something that substantiated my conclusion beyond a doubt. At first I thought it a root of some sort. A root with five withered, clawed projections. Then I realized it was a mummified hand. I straightened, suddenly anxious, suspicious of every skittering of wind, sickened by my discovery. At length I forced myself to start digging again. Before long I had uncovered most of a body. Shreds of bleached, pale red rags wrapping the desiccated flesh. Bigger fragments of the helmet. And most pertinently, a hole the size of my fist blown in the back of the skull; the edges of the bone frothed into a lace of tiny bubbles. Gingerly, I turned the body over. The neck snapped, the head broke away. I fought back the urge to puke and turned the head. Black slits of eyes sewn together by brittle eyebrows. It was the face of a thousand-year-old man.

There was no exit wound in the front of the skull, which meant -- as I'd a.s.sumed -- that the wound could not have been made by a rifle, nor by any weapon with which I was familiar.

It's strange how I felt at that moment. I wasn't afraid, I was angry. Part of my anger was related to memories of that pitiful little man and his red car and his foolhardiness with the apes; but there was another part I didn't understand, a part that seemed to bear upon some vast injustice done me, one I could feel in my guts but couldn't name. I held onto the anger. It was the first strong thing I'd felt all day, and I needed it to sustain me. I could understand why apes danced, why tigers howled. I wanted to dance myself, to howl, to throw some violent shape or sound at the sky and kill whatever was responsible for my confusion.

I think my mind went blank for a while; at any rate, it seemed that a long time pa.s.sed before I next had a coherent thought. I didn't know what to do. My instincts told me that we should head back to Edgeville, but when I tried to settle on that course, I had the sudden suspicion that Edgeville was more dangerous than the flats, that I was well out of there. I knew I had to tell Brad and Callie, of course.

Nothing would be gained by hiding this from them. I just wasn't sure what it all meant, what anything meant. My picture of the world had changed. Everything that had seemed to make sense now seemed pitiful and pointless, thrown out of kilter by the last day's ride and my discovery of the body; I couldn't see anything in my past that had been done for a reason I could understand. I was sure of one thing, however, and though knowing it was not an occasion for joy, it gave me a measure of confidence to be sure of something. The flats were not empty. Something was living out there, something worse than Bad Men. And I knew we must be close to whatever it was. We might die if we were to stay, but I doubted now that it would be by starvation.

As I've said, I intended to tell Brad and Callie about the dead man, but I wasn't eager to do it. At the end of the canyon, the stone sloped up at a gentle incline, gentle enough so I could scramble up it, and after I had done this, I walked along the rim of the canyon wall until I could see the glow of our fire. I sat down, my feet dangling, and went with my thoughts, which were none of them of the happy variety. I still didn't know what course to follow, but the more I studied on it, the more I wanted to find out what had killed the man in the bubble car. It was a fool's mission. Yet I could not let go of the idea; my hold on it seemed unnaturally tenacious, as if it were something I'd waited all my life to pursue. At last I wore out on thinking and just sat there stargazing, watching a thin smoke rise from our fire.

I'm not sure when I first noticed that some of the stars were moving; I believe I registered the fact long before I began to be alarmed by it. There were three stars involved, and instead of falling or arcing across the sky, as would have been the case with meteors, they were darting in straight lines, hovering, then darting off again. What eventually alarmed me was that I realized they were coming closer, that theywere following the line of the hills. And what put the fear of G.o.d into me was when one of them began to glow a pale green and from it a beam of emerald brilliance lanced down to touch the slopes and I heard a distant rumble. At that I jumped to my feet and raced along the main rim of the canyon, fear a cold knot in my groin, shouting to Brad and Callie, who peered up at me in confusion.

"Get the horses!" I yelled. "Bring 'em on up here! Now!"

They exchanged concerned glances.

"What's the matter?" Brad called out.

I looked out across the flats; the three stars were getting very close.

"Now!" I shouted. "Hurry, d.a.m.n it! Trouble's comin'!"

That got them moving.

By the time they reached me with the horses, I could see that the three stars weren't shaped like stars at all, but like the spearpoints the apes used: curved cylinders with the blunt tip at one end, thirty or forty feet long, with a slightly convex underside. I couldn't make out any details, but I had no desire to stick around and observe. I swung onto my horse, reined it in, and said to Bradley and Callie, "'Member that cave we spotted up top?"

"What are they?" asked Callie, staring at the three stars.

"We'll find out later," I said. "Come on! Head for the cave!"

It was a wild ride we had, plunging up the dark slope, with the horses sliding on gravel, nearly losing their footing, but at length we made it to the cave. The entrance was just wide enough for the horses, but it widened out inside and looked to extend pretty far back into the hill. We hobbled the horses deep in the cave, and then crept back to the entrance and lay flat. A couple of hundred feet below, those three glowing things were hovering over the canyon we had just vacated. It was an eerie thing to see, the way they drifted back and forth with an unsteady, vibrating motion, as if lighter than air and being trembled by an updraft. They were bigger than I'd judged, more like sixty feet long, and the white light appeared to be flowing across their surfaces -- metal surfaces, I supposed -- and was full of iridescent glimmers. The light was hard to look at close up; it made your eye want to slide off it. They made a high-pitched, quivering noise, something like a flute, but reedier. That sound wriggled into my spine and raised gooseflesh on my arms.

I was more frightened than I'd been in all my life. I s.h.i.+vered like a horse that has scented fire and stared with my eyes strained wide until I was poured so full of that strange glittering white light, all my thoughts were drowned. Then I yanked at Callie and Brad, and hauled them after me into the cave. We scuttled back deep into the darkness and sat down. The horses snorted and s.h.i.+fted about; their noises gave me comfort. Brad asked what we were going to do, and I said, What did he want to do? Throw rocks at the d.a.m.n things? We'd just sit tight, I said, until our company had departed. I could barely see him, even though he was a couple of feet away, but talking to him stiffened my spine some. Yet with half my mind I was praying for the things outside just to go away and leave us be. I could still hear their weird fluting, and I saw a faint white glow from the cave mouth.

Callie asked again what I thought they were. I said I reckoned they must be some sort of machines.

"I can see that," she said, exasperated. "But who you figger's flyin' 'em?"

I hadn't really had time to think about that until then, but still, it struck me as particularly stupid on my part that I hadn't already come up with the answer to her question.

"The Captains," I said. "Has to be them. Couldn't n.o.body else make a machine like that."

"Why'd they be chasin' us?" Brad asked.

"We don't know they are," said Callie. "They could just be after doin' their own business."

"Then why'd we run?"

I realized I hadn't told them about the dead man, and I decided that now wasn't the time -- it would be too much bad news all at once.

"We did right to run," I said. "Believe me, we did right."

"'Sides," said Callie, "we don't know for absolute sure it's the Captains. I mean what your pa says makes good sense, but we don't know for sure." We were silent for a bit and finally Brad said, "You think Mama run into them things?"

I gave a sigh that in the enclosed s.p.a.ce of the cave seemed as loud as one of the horses blowing out its breath. "I was watchin' 'em for a long time 'fore I hollered," I said. "From the way they're patrollin'

the hills, I figger that's possible."

There followed another silence, and then he said. "Maybe after they gone, maybe we should try trackin' 'em."

I was about to say that we'd be doing good just to get shut of them, when the cave mouth was filled with an emerald flash, and I was flung back head over heels, and the next thing I knew I was lying in pitch darkness with dirt and stone chips in my mouth, and my ears ringing. Some time later I felt Brad's hands on my chest, heard him say, "Dad?" Then I heard the horses whinnying, their hooves clattering as they tried to break free of their hobbles. I wanted to sit up but was too woozy.