Fight. With what? He reached down and retrieved the flat rock he’d used to dig his makeshift latrine. It felt utterly inconsequential.
Run. Where would he go? Andy had the food, the shelter, the maps. The guns.
And Marta was still up there.
He gripped the rock, cast his gaze around. A stick. A bigger rock. Something. Anything.
They were almost to the top of the hill.
Go.
He moved before he could doubt himself, hunkering low to the ground, trying to make his steps light. The damp, rotten smell of the leaves was very close now, no longer pleasant; he was dragging himself through the stuff, would probably have ticks crawling all over him, but what could he do about it?
There was a brisk clapping at the camp—sharp, but reasonable. Sane.
“Lights on, folks,” Andy called out. His voice was so steady, so full of the old reassuring charm that Wes had come to associate with him, that he doubted himself for a moment. Had he seen—heard—what he thought he had?
The glow at the hilltop brightened. Wes could hear murmuring, grumbles.
“I’m going to need you all to step out of your tents. This’ll only take a minute or two. Got to do a quick head-count.”
Wes took a few more steps, careful to stay behind the cover of a stand of trees. He could see the clearing now. Andy and the three other figures from the woods were there. They had positioned themselves evenly around the circle of tents and slightly behind them, each wearing a mining light that blazed so brightly that the people emerging from their tents could only blink in dazed confusion, holding up their hands as if to blot out the sun. In this way, they didn’t see at first what Wes saw: that Andy and the other three figures were armed with high-powered assault rifles, which were leveled at their torsos. The first to notice was Wendy Tanaka. She screamed, and Andy stepped forward and unceremoniously clocked her with the stock of his gun. Her cry was cut short, and she fell in a heap at his feet. Her brother made as if to go to her, but Andy swung the rifle in his direction, and Ken put both hands in the air in surrender. The others quickly followed suit.
“That’s one,” Andy said flatly. “Rest of you, line up. Get in the light where I can look at you.”
The others—Tia was among them, Wes noticed, and her expression of shock was either genuine or a damn good acting job—did as he asked, hands still high in the air. Andy walked from one end of the line to the other.
“All right,” he said. “Where the fuck’s Feingold?” He went to Marta. “Feingold. Your buddy. Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Wes could see the fright in her eyes even from his hiding spot. “He got out of the tent to relieve himself. Maybe ten minutes ago.”
“Check the tent,” Andy said to one of the goons, motioning.
The goon checked. “Not there,” he said in his raspy voice.
“Fuck,” Andy muttered. He pulled a revolver out of his back waistband and pointed it at Marta’s head. “Yell for him. Yell for Feingold.”
She looked at him blankly.
Andy signaled to another of his goons, the woman. “That one,” he said, pointing at Mickey Worthington.
“Wha—?” Mickey began.
The woman pulled Mickey out of line by the collar and forced him to his knees.
“Put him out of his misery,” Andy said, and she unholstered her own revolver and shot him in the temple.
Wes jolted as if he himself had been shot, every nerve in his body sending out an electric charge. In shock—he couldn’t seem to make himself move—he watched as Marta, Andy’s revolver still pointed at her forehead, screamed, “DON’T COME BACK, WES! DON’T COME BACK! DON’T COME—”
“Now her,” Andy said to the woman. She grabbed Marta by the arm and pushed her to her knees. Wes stumbled forward.
“No!” he said. “I’m here. I’m—” His chest was heaving now. He couldn’t catch his breath to say the word.
“The golden boy,” Andy said. He smiled. “The guest of honor. Violet, bring him over to our little powwow.”
The woman approached, miner’s light on her forehead a blinding eye. As she dug her fingers into Wes’s shoulder he got a look at her, and it took every bit of what was left of his will for him to keep from gasping.
She could have been twenty or sixty. She could have been of any race. The skin on her face was taut with bands of purple scar tissue, and her neck pulled down, froglike, from a sagging bottom lip. One of her eyes was shriveled to a blind asterisk; the other, bright blue, glinted at him from under a painful-looking hood of puckered flesh. It was the worst suffering he had ever seen in another living person, suffering beyond the realm of what he had understood was possible, and he would have been moved to pity for her if the gleam in her visible eye hadn’t been so full of loathing.
“You think of splitting,” she said into his ear—her breath was nauseatingly sour—“and I’ll kill every person here. Starting with your old girlfriend. You understand me?”
“I understand you,” Wes said.
“Gather round the fire, folks,” Andy said. “I’ve got one more speech to make.”
Part Two
The Shaman
Seven
One of Edie’s clearest early memories of her father was of nighttime, a long car ride home, the blur of yellow streetlights outside her window. They—her father, her mother, Edie—had been somewhere exciting, probably to the beach or Old West Mountain; Edie could reconstruct this now because there were photos of her at about three and four, some with her bottom sunk in the sand and a plastic pail tucked between her knees, others of her riding a ski lift seated next to her mother, both of them grinning and waving to the person behind the camera, her father, who had been seated in a separate chair ahead of them. Her father was almost always behind the camera. Edie’s mother, whose vision was very bad, and corrected to something slightly better than blindness by a combination of laser surgery and heavy lenses, could never take a good photo, and so the only pictures Edie had of her father were out of focus, off-center, or obstructed by a finger or some object in the foreground. In them, her father seemed more ghost than person, a mythological creature, a Bigfoot: large, brown, always in motion.