It’s funny: The world always manages to ensnare you, even when you’re most sure you’re free and clear of its hooks. After I wrapped up Yolanda and said good-bye to her, it seemed to me that I’d come unplugged from the emotional charge that keeps most of us going, day in, day out. I was like a circuit board that had been popped out of the big, lively, whirring machine of human society. I didn’t serve anyone; I didn’t solve anything; I didn’t have any useful functions to offer. Without Yolanda I was obsolete hardware.
Then Sean started talking about going after Ursula and Templeton—who had taken me into their house when I was in shock, fed me, and tended to me—and I felt a sick frisson of alarm that finally sent some strength to my limbs. Not enough to do me any good, mind you. I tried to get on my hands and knees, and Sean put his boot in my ass and slammed me back down onto my face. Lying there with my nostrils full of dust and needles sticking into my chest, it came to me that if anything happened to Ursula and her son on my account, I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
“Yeah, that’s right, Sean! The Big Flash is coming!” Randy said. “In ten weeks Ursula Blake, her kid, Honeysuckle—they’re dead meat, along with all the rest of the disorganized, and we’ll be with the Finders!”
“Learning how to make universes of our own,” Pat whispered in a reverential hush.
“So . . . so what did we decide?” Randy said, and he licked dry lips with a sandpapery tongue. “Nail her?”
“No. Better. Save her,” Sean said. “We’ll bring her back to Elder Bent and force an awakening. Come on. Let’s wrap her up.”
He drew a big folded square of that crinkly, foil-like material out of a backpack and spread it on the ground next to me. The other two wrapped me in it just like they were rolling up carpet. I tried to kick my way loose. But I was too weak to work up a decent struggle, and in a minute they had me wound up with my arms pinned to my sides and that tough shiny fabric wrapped around me from ankle to throat. Sean was down on one knee, with a roll of black electrical tape, binding my silver cloak tight around me when I hawked a fat gob of spit into one of his eyes.
He flinched. Pat shrieked, “Gross!”
Sean wiped his eye and glared at me. “If I were you, I’d save my spit. Elder Bent takes the view that physical suffering prepares your spiritual energies to leave the body behind. You aren’t likely to get much to drink in the next couple months.”
“If physical suffering is good for building up spiritual energy,” called someone from up in the road, “I am about to fully recharge your batteries. Get ready for a high-voltage ass-kicking, you sonsa bitches.”
We all looked around, and there was Marc DeSpot, who I thought I’d ditched back at Starbucks. His stony visage stared out beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. His shirt flapped open to show the magnificent black X inked across his reddish-bronze chest. His right hand was clenched in a fist. Nails stuck out between his fingers.
The Three Stooges gathered around me had one moment to gawp before he fell upon them, dropping down the side of the embankment so fast his hat flapped off. Randy was the only one of them who still had an astrolabe to fight with. He was pulling it from around his neck when DeSpot got to him, throwing all his weight behind his right fist. He hit Randy so hard they both fell over. The side of Randy’s face was raked off like he’d been struck with a gardening fork. DeSpot’s nail-studded fist clawed deep red furrows in his cheek, puncturing straight through into his mouth.
The one named Pat screamed, then turned and ran. He tripped over me with both feet and hit the dirt. Well, that was his one and only chance to get away. By then Marc DeSpot was back up, growling like a dog sick from the heat. He caught up to Pat and kicked him in the ass and drove him back down onto his stomach. Pat flattened with a cough. Marc kept going, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked his head back. He grabbed Pat’s nose and gave it a horrible twist. It made a sharp, brittle crack, a sound like someone stepping on a china plate. To this day I have never heard another sound so horrible. He dropped Pat, and the chubby boy went down squirming in a kind of palsy.
In all this time, Sean, the team’s Christ look-alike, hadn’t moved. He stood frozen, his eyes wide, his face rigid. When he heard Pat’s nose crack, though, it broke his paralysis, and he turned to run. I guess it doesn’t hurt your quantum energy none to be a lickspittle coward who leaves your buddies in the dirt.
DeSpot caught up to him in three lunging steps, snatched him by the back of the tinfoil gown, and yanked him right off his feet. As Sean fell backward, DeSpot snapped up his right knee and clubbed him in the base of the skull. If that was how he fought in the ring, I never wanted to meet any of the men who’d beaten him.
Sean stared up at him, his eyes rolling like those of a panicked horse. Marc was about to stomp on his face when I hollered, “Wait!”
Marc glanced at me with an irritable frown, like he thought I was going soft and womanly on him. I rocked to the left, then to the right, and finally I was able to roll across the slope until I thumped up alongside Sean.
We were stretched out side by side, me in my shroud of silver wrap, him in the weeds with Marc’s boot resting on his chest.
I stared up into DeSpot’s face and said, “They were following me?”
He peered down at me, his brow furrowed. “All morning long. I was sitting there with Roswell when I saw them the first time. Following you from two blocks back. Didn’t look right, so I figured I’d trail along and see what they wanted with you. Thought it was the least I could do. When I had a minute to collect myself, I kinda got to feeling like I owed you.”
We latched gazes, but only for a moment; he blushed and looked away.
I twisted my head to stare into Sean’s dazed, frightened face. “Why the hell would you and your empty-headed pals follow me five miles just to bushwhack me, three against one? What’d I ever do to you besides make fun of the way you dress and the way you talk and all your stupid crackpot ideas?”
His voice, when he spoke, was rusty and thin. “You were going to tell! You were walking to Denver to meet with the FBI and tell them what we’ve been up to! You were going to tell them that Elder Bent, of all men, knew the rains would fall! He knew! He was foretold!”
“What do you mean, he was foretold?”
“He knew what was coming. He knew the hour and the day, when the ignorant would be cut down, leaving behind only the prepared. Only us!”
I considered that for a moment, then said, “And what gave Elder Bent the idea I was going to the FBI? Did he get that information from one of his contacts in the seventh dimension?”
Sean bit down on his lower lip as if he felt he had already said too much. Marc DeSpot put his weight on his left foot, pressing down against Sean’s chest, and the air exploded out of the kid.
“The Russian!” he cried. “He left a message! It said you knew what we had been up to and if we didn’t stop you, Elder Bent would be hauled away by the FBI! Because of what he knew about the rains!”
“Andropov left you a message?”