The fat kid walked away, without a thank you, in the direction indicated. The cancerous thing waited, saying nothing, until the kid was out of sight.
“It will be a battle,” said the cancerous thing to a woman whose face was smudged with phosphor dots.
She nodded, and leaned closer to it. “So how does that make you feel?’ she asked, in a sympathetic voice.
It blinked, and then it began to tell her.
Town’s Ford Explorer had a global positioning system, a little screen that listened to the satellites and showed the car its location, but he still got lost once he got south of Blacks-burg and onto the country roads: the roads he drove seemed to bear little relationship to the tangle of lines on the map on the screen. Eventually he stopped the car in a country lane, wound down the window and asked a fal white woman being pulled by a wolfhound on its eariy-tnorning walk for directions to Ashtree farm.
She nodded, and pointed and said something to him. He could not understand what she had said, but he—said thanks a million and wound up the window and drovfe off in the general direction she had indicated.
He kept going for another forty minutes, down country road after country road, none of them the road he sought. Town began to chew his lower lip.
“I’m too old for this shit,” he said aloud, relishing the movie-star world-weariness of the line.
He was pushing fifty. Most of his working life had been spent in a branch of government that went only by its initials, and whether or not he had left his government job a dozen years ago for employment by the private sector was open to debate: some days he thought one way, some days another. Anyway, it was only the joes on the street that really believed there was a difference.
He was on the verge of giving up on the farm when he crested a hill and saw the sign, hand painted, on the gate. It said simply, as he had been told it would, ASH. He pulled up the Ford Explorer, climbed out, and untwisted the wire that held the gate closed. He got back in the car and drove through.
It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in the water, and then you turn on the heat And by the time the frog notices that there’s anything wrong, it’s already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the pot was bubbling fiercely.
When he’d been transferred to the Agency it had all seemed so simple. Now it was all so—not complex, he decided; merely bizarre. He had been sitting in Mr. World’s office at two that morning, and he had been told what he was to do. “You got it?” said Mr. World, handing him the knife in its dark leather sheath. “Cut me a stick. It doesn’t have to be longer than a couple of feet.”
“Affirmative,” he said. And then he said, “Why do I have to do this, sir?”
“Because I tell you to,” said Mr. World, flatly. “Find the tree. Do the job. Meet me down in Chattanooga. Don’t waste any time.”
“And what about the asshole?”
“Shadow? If you see him, just avoid him. Don’t touch him. Don’t even mess with him. I don’t want you turning him into a martyr. There’s no room for martyrs in the current game plan.” He smiled then, his scarred smile. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all.
“Look—”
“No martyrs, Town.”
And Town had nodded, and taken the knife in its sheath, and pushed the rage that welled up inside him down deep and away.
Mr. Town’s hatred of Shadow had become a part of him. As he was falling asleep he would see Shadow’s solemn face, see that smile that wasn’t a smile, the way Shadow had of smiling without smiling that made Town want to sink his fist into the man’s gut, and even as he fell asleep he could feel his jaws squeeze together, his temples tense, his gullet bum.
He drove the Ford Explorer across the meadow, past an abandoned farmhouse. He crested a ridge and saw the tree. ‘ He parked the car a little way past it, and turned off the engine. The clock on the dashboard said it was 6:38. A.M. He left the keys in the car, and walked toward the tree.
The tree was large; it seemed to exist on its own sense of scale. Town could not have said if it was fifty feet high or two hundred. Its bark was the gray of a fine silk scarf.
There was a naked man tied to the trunk a little way above the ground by a webwork of ropes, and there was something wrapped in a sheet at the foot of the tree. Town’realized what it was as he passed it. He pushed at the sheet with his foot. Wednesday’s ruined half-a-face stared out at him.