Sean let out a little laughing gasp. “Yeah.” And in an atrocious Russian accent, he said, “‘You must stop Miss ’Onysuck! Girl is going to talk to FBI.’ I don’t think he wants the law digging around the neighborhood any more than we do!”
“Who talked to him?” I asked. “Who took his message? Did he say anything else?” But it turned out we were all done talking.
This whole time the one named Randy had been surreptitiously crawling away through the high grass. When he reached the edge of the road, he got up and hotfooted it. DeSpot saw him making his break and snatched up one of the big astrolabes that had brought me down. He didn’t bother with the gold chain but threw it like a Frisbee, and it hit the back of Randy’s head with the kind of gong that would’ve been quite amusing in a slapstick cartoon. Randy collapsed.
While this was happening, Sean scrambled to his knees. A blade flashed in one hand. I recognized it right off—it was my own knife, part of the little multitool I had stuck in my backpack. Before he could poke it into Marc’s kidneys, I twisted and threw my legs and swept his feet out from beneath him. Sean toppled backward down the embankment. His head struck the shallow, concrete-lined ditch at the bottom with a sickening crunch.
I shouted for Marc to have a look and make sure I hadn’t just murdered him. Marc knelt beside him at the base of the slope, took his pulse, and looked into his eyes. He glanced up at me with a sorry, disappointed look on his battered face.
“Bad luck,” he said. “I think he’s fine. Just out cold.”
He came back to me at a rangy lope and bent and started ripping tape free.
“You almost lost me back at Starbucks,” he said.
“I didn’t nearly lose them, I guess. I feel like a fool for not realizing they were after me. Dressed like they are, they should’ve stood out like flashing lights.”
“It’s easier for three people to tail a person than one. Besides”—he held up a set of connected brass cylinders—“they could stay farther back and still follow you. Your boyfriend down there had a telescope.”
By then he was pulling that silver shroud free. It looked like tinfoil, but it was as resilient as canvas. It flashed the sun into my eyes, and in that instant it struck me that maybe I’d come close to spotting them after all. I remembered sometimes noticing a sparkle and glint at the very periphery of my vision and wondering if I was getting faint. That had been them, hanging back, hiding in doorways, shadowing me from a distance.
Marc was looking glum and avoiding my gaze, folding and unfolding that big sheet of silver packing material. I thought I knew what was troubling him.
“You can stop worrying about what you said to me when you were so upset,” I told him. “We’re even now. More than even. I’m awfully sorry about what I had to do to Roswell.”
He nodded. “Yeah, well.”
“What’s your real name? Marc DeSpot is the kind of joke that would amuse a five-year-old.”
He glared, then said, “DeSoto. No money in a name like that.” He looked around him at the comet clowns. “Did you understand any of what he said to you?”
I sat up and stretched. Some of what Sean had babbled was the usual cosmic rubbish spouted by all of Elder Bent’s people. But I thought there’d been fragments of something that mattered mixed in with all Sean’s space-cadet nonsense. I needed time to try to untangle it in my head, see if I could make some sense of it.
When I didn’t reply, Marc murmured, a little uneasily, “He said this Elder Bent . . . knew what was going to happen. That they were all preparing for it. You think there’s any chance . . . ?” His voice trailed off.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t answer. Instead I said, “Some nasty old biddy gave me up to these white slavers here just to get my iPhone Plus. She walked off without a look back.”
“The one with the shopping cart? I saw her.” He picked his hat out of the dirt and set it on his head.
“I guess losing my phone isn’t the worst thing. I could be on my way to a dank basement cell in a house full of end-of-the-world cultists, forced to do who knows what to satisfy their demented wishes.” I had an urge to get up and walk around, kicking all of the comet kids in their heads. But it was hot and I had a long road still ahead of me. “Can you think of any way we can keep them from getting up and coming after me again? Or of going after you?”
He opened Sean’s telescope and peered down the turnpike. “Those are convicts working on the highway, sweeping up nails under the eye of the state police. Why don’t you wander down there and tell ’em you’ve got three more that belong in leg irons? I’ll tape them up in their shiny dresses, the way they taped you up, so they don’t wander off.”
He offered me a hand, and I took it. He pulled me to my feet. We stood together in a tired, comradely silence for a moment. He squinted at the blue sky.
“You think these boys are right? You think these are the end times? I had an aunt who said it was a matter of fact that this was the last human century. That anyone who understood the book of Revelation could see a judgment was coming.”
“I hate the idea these blockheads could be right about anything,” I said. “Tell you what, though. If the apocalypse holds off another couple of days, why don’t you stop by the white house on Jackdaw Street, with the staircase on the outside of the building? Or look for me across the street at the little butter-colored ranch, where my friend Ursula lives with her son. We can have a couple beers and try to brainstorm a better fighting name for you than Marc DeSpot.”
He grinned, flapped his blue denim shirt open. “Too late. Once you got a big X on your chest, who else could you be?”
“The X-Terminator?”
“I thought about X-Rated, but a lot of kids come to the fights. You don’t want to give their parents the wrong idea.”
“Thanks for rescuing me, friend,” I said. “Try to stay out of the rain.”
“You, too,” he said to me.
He squeezed my hand then, turned, and descended the hill to Sean. I hung out long enough to watch as he began to wrestle with Sean’s gown, tucking his arms inside it, wrapping it tight around him. I didn’t think I’d ever see Marc DeSpot again and wished there were more to say, but it seemed like we’d already said everything that mattered. Some people you can never thank enough, so you might as well quit after saying it once, because too much gratitude will just make them embarrassed.
I turned on my heel, crystal pins grinding under my boots, and went on into the noonday light. Behind me I heard the first loud ripping sound as Marc DeSpot tore off a strip of tape.