Taking a deep breath, he said, “All right. If you still want to come when it’s time.” He paused. “I have to go now.”
He walked back down the dockside, unhappy with himself for reasons he couldn’t define, irritated that he had come at all. Nothing much had been accomplished by doing do. He glanced over at Cheney, who was fanned out to his right, big head lowered and swinging from side to side.
From behind him, the thin, high voice tracked his steps.
Happy Humanity sat on a wall. Happy Humanity had a great fall. All of our efforts to put him to mend Couldn’t make Happy be human again.
Without looking back, Hawk lifted his arm in a wave of farewell and walked on through the mist and the gray.
Chapter SIX
AFTER HIS MEETING with Two Bears, Logan Tom climbed back into the Lightning AV and drove it out into the country to a spot off the road where the prairie stretched away in an unobstructed sweep on all sides. There he parked, set the perimeter alarm system, crawled into the back of the vehicle, and fell asleep. His sleep was deep and dreamless, and when he awoke at dawn he felt fresh and rested in a way he hadn’t felt for weeks. He stripped naked outside the AV in the faint light of first dawn and took a sponge bath using water from the tank he carried in the back. The water was purified with tablets, clean enough for bathing if not for drinking. No one had drunk anything but bottled liquids in years, and when the stockpiles that remained were exhausted, it was probably over for them all.
Dressed, he ate a breakfast of canned fruit and dry cereal, sitting crosslegged on the ground and staring out across the empty fields, his back against the AV. On the horizon, the windows of the farmhouses and outbuildings were black holes and the trees barren sticks.
As he ate he thought about Two Bears, the task the Sinnissippi had given him to accomplish, and the impact of what it meant. In particular, he thought about something O’olish Amaneh had said and passed over so quickly there hadn’t been time to take it in fully until now.
A fire is coming, huge and engulfing. When it ignites, most of what is left of humankind will perish. It will happen suddenly and quite soon.
Logan Tom stopped chewing and stared down at his hands. It wouldn’t matter what any of them did after that, demons or humans. If he was to make a difference as a Knight of the Word—if anyone was to make a difference—it would have to happen before that conflagration consumed them all. That was what Two Bears was telling him; that was the warning he had been given. Find the gypsy morph and you find a way to save the remnants of humankind from what is coming.
He wasn’t sure he believed that. He wasn’t sure he knew what he believed.
It seemed to him that the world was already come to an end for all intents and purposes, that even a conflagration of the sort the Sinnissippi was foretelling couldn’t make things worse. But he knew as soon as he thought this that it wasn’t true. Things could always get worse, even in a world as riddled by madness as this one.
He finished his breakfast, took out the finger bones of Nest Freemark, and cast them on the black square of cloth in which they had been wrapped. The bones lay motionless for a moment, then began to wriggle into place, forming up as fingers. Creepy. He watched them shift until they were pointing west. He stared down at them for a few moments longer, then scooped them up and stuffed them back in his jacket pocket. He had his marching orders; he might as well get started.
He drove slowly through the early morning, following the bro-ken ribbon of highway across the remainder of the state under overcast and hazy skies. It was not yet midday when he reached the Mississippi River. The waters of the Mighty Miss flowed thick and sluggish between their defoliated banks, the waters clouded and gray and choked with debris. He could see the shells of old cars and trucks jammed up against the far bank. He could see parts of houses and fallen trees. He could see bodies. He could smell death and decay, a heavy sickening odor hanging in the windless air. He shifted his gaze to the bridge again, a broad concrete span stretching ahead into Iowa.
The bridge was littered with bodies.
The smell wasn’t coming from the dead in the river; it was coming from up there.
He stared in disbelief for a moment, not sure that he was seeing things correctly. The makeshift crossing gate told him that this had been a checkpoint for the river, a place staffed by militia serving some local order or other. But the number of bodies and abandoned vehicles and accumulation of debris told him that everyone had been dead for a while now. It told him, as well, that the end had come suddenly.