There was no hiding now. They had to hurry.
They ran across the meadow toward the railway trestle, Creath lagging behind, his breath laboring. The silence, at first, was eerie; but then Greg Morrow let out a long ululating war whoop that seemed to strike a primitive chord in the other men. The trestle was nearer now, their torches casting a red glow against the black bricks of it, their own shadows huge and manic, and others of them took up Greg’s war cry; someone fired a gun into the sky. Echoes bounded back from the trestle arches, and to the men just coming awake in there, Creath thought, it must seem as if a part of hell itself had come to earth among them. They moved sluggishly at first and then more desperately; a pitifully few men to have inspired this army, but that was irrelevant now,- now there was no returning. This was bought and paid for. Two hoboes ran shrieking into the cold river, striking out for the other side. Their heads disappeared beneath the black water and Creath could not tell, then, in the flood and panic, whether they survived or were carried away. The vigilantes were laughing, swirling their torches like kids swinging sparklers on Independence Day, but their laughter was not childish … or rather, Creath thought dizzily, it was the shrill and hysterical laughter of a child torturing a cat. There was nothing of innocence in it.
He stood still, watching. The gun was a dead thing in his hand. My good Christ, he thought, what if she is here? Seducer, temptress, succubus, the source of his sin: but he knew instantly that he could not raise this rifle to her. And Creath felt a lightness in him then, a feverish buoyancy, as if his feet might spontaneously lift him from this cold fallow ground and deliver him up to some thing or place he could not imagine: death, judgment, the stars. He knew that Bob Clawson was gazing at him, had taken stern note of his immobility, but there was no way to respond, and in truth he no longer cared.
He watched Greg Morrow whirling his torch about his head. The firelight seemed to have transformed him: his grin was maniacal and his eyes feverish. Creath guessed that the boy was paying back some old debt, avenging somehow some irretrievable humiliation. The tramps had mostly fled; the guns had been fired but only into the air; the townsmen had begun to huddle together sheepishly now in the stinking darkness. But Greg was oblivious; possessed, he threw the stub of his torch onto the roof of one of these hovels, oily pasteboard sheets that roared at once into flame. Creath felt his heart skip a beat. The heat washed over him and he thought, She could be in there.
Tim Norbloom stepped forward—playing the policeman now—and put a restraining hand on Greg’s shoulder. Just then a figure broke from the burning hovel, running for the river: Anna, Creath thought for one agonizing moment, but it was not; only a hobo, a dark and half-naked man, possibly a Negro. Creath had begun to relax when he saw Greg raise the rifle and sight along it and pull the trigger. The explosion in this confined space beneath the trestle was deafening. Creath winced, and when he opened his eyes he saw the tramp, dead or mortally wounded, spreadeagled on the ground. The light of the burning hovel danced on his skin. He might have been bleeding; in this light everything was bloody.
It changes things, Creath thought. They had come here prepared to kill. But, in the event, they had backed away from it. And it was Greg’s fault mainly: he had misled them, there was no threat in this pathetic slum. Creath saw Tim Norbloom eyeing the boy with frank contempt. Some of the men cursed The enormity of this was too great; they felt too much like murderers. You, too, Tim Norbloom, Creath thought: that guilt is palpable. In this strange hour his mind was quite lucid and Creath imagined he could read other men’s thoughts. There was a kind of skewed victory in it despite the dead man on the ground, because she had not been here… Anna was still alive, and a part of him exalted at the thought.
The men walked back to the cars. The night had soured on them. Creath, his ears still ringing with the proximity of the gunshots, watched Bob Clawson remonstrating with Greg Morrow, saw the boy’s impassioned response; Clawson went to Norbloom then and the two of them spoke heatedly. Creath heard the sound but could not make sense of it. The trestle was eerily lit by the embers of the Hoovertown and a freight train came highballing out of the east, oblivious.
Clawson and Norbloom were arguing. Norbloom turned away, his fists clenched, and climbed into the second of the two automobiles. The two parties broke up, and Creath watched Norbloom’s sedan bouncing over the rutted soil. Clawson sat at the wheel of his own car stonily,- his cheeks were flushed pink. Creath climbed in last. “Thank God it’s at least over,” he said.
Clawson looked back at Greg. Greg stared at him.
“We’re not done yet,” Clawson said grimly. “Norbloom is an idiot. It’s important to finish this. We have begun it and we are obliged to finish it.”
“One more place,” Greg said evenly. “I’ll show you the way.”
Please God, no, Creath thought, and Bob Clawson revved the motor.
Travis saw the trestle fire from a distance and circled to the south, keeping to a line of windbreak trees. White smoke curled up in the moonlight and the cold wind carried the hoarse shouting of the men across the prairie.
Bone was frightened. Travis could tell. He crouched in a drainage ditch and the alien crouched beside him. The alien must be tremendously strong, Travis thought, to have come even this far. His jacket was a mass of blood and there was fresh blood welling up now, a brighter red in the moonlight. An ordinary man would have died. But Bone was not ordinary, not a man. Bone’s eyes were fixed on the trestle and the flicker of fires there.
“You’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Travis said.
Bone did not respond, only stared. Travis took it for a kind of assent.
They crouched, hidden, and listened to the snap of gunshots. Travis glanced periodically at Bone, who seemed wreathed with a fire of his own, a flickering aura; but it cast no shadows in the darkness beneath the trees and Travis guessed another man might see nothing at all. When the shouting died away and the gunshots ceased Travis and Bone moved closer, Travis imbued with a sense of deep foreboding: now there had been violence, now some invisible border had been passed.
The hobo jungle was in embers. There was no one left here… only the body of a black man Travis had known very slightly, Harley was his name; Harley was dead from a gunshot wound to the back. Travis knelt over the body. He could not bring himself to touch it: a revulsion, not at death, but at his own utter helplessness. I knew this man, he thought.
Bone watched him kneeling… and after a moment Bone extended his arm and touched him.
Visions ran like a river between them. Travis fell back under the assault of the projected memories. This was Bone, he thought dazedly: Bone had seen too many places like this, an ocean of them, had seen men burned, beaten, trampled under foot. The cavalcade of images was stunning, faces and bodies like schools of fish. Travis gazed up in awe at that pale skull of a face. He is the ultimate exile, he thought, king of exiles; and he felt all the fists that had pummeled him, all the blows and curses,- saw Deacon and Archie bent over him, then Deacon with a pistol in his hand and Archie dead beside him; he saw the railroad cops gather about Bone in a ring and felt what Bone had felt as he struck out and sent them whirling into the chaos that separates spacetime from spacetime…
“Christ Almighty,” Travis whispered. “You can do that? You can really do that?”