He awoke to explosions.
Men were shouting, screaming, running. A bullet splintered bark from a tree not five yards from him and there were bright lights and dark shapes beyond the dying embers of the campfire, down the path up which he had come. Savage shouts echoed through the ruins, and another bullet sizzled through the air.
In a panicked instant, Hanson was on his feet, quivering and frozen motionless, like a jack-lighted deer. Somebody slammed into him, cursed, and was gone, along with Hanson’s paralysis. He grabbed at his shirt to keep from losing the gun, which he’d carefully stuck between undershirt and belt before turning in. It did not occur to him to use it.
Stumblingly at first, and then faster, he began to run. Men were shouting and crashing into things, running ahead of him, up the path. He followed blindly. Somebody grabbed his arm and he lashed out without looking, his fist smashing into a face. But whoever it was did not let go, but wrapped both arms around his waist.
Turning, he stared down into the Preacher’s fearful face.
“Don’t!” the Preacher gasped. “For God’s sake, don’t! That’s just what they want you to do. They’re just beaters. The SIs will be up the trail, waiting. I’ve seen it before! And politicians—it’s a sport to them, ambushing rievers, they get to notch bandits without any risk to themselves. Sometimes they take souvenirs.”
The old man’s unexpected lucidity broke through the haze of fear and instinct. Hanson stopped and looked around. A flare screamed high into the night. Bright lights, harsh shadows. “What should we do?”
“We’ve got to get away from the path,” the Preacher said. “This way.” Tugging at Hanson’s arm, he half pulled him over a pile of crumbling bricks and between two ruined walls. Awkwardly, Hanson let himself be led. Behind them, two SIs stooped over a fallen bandit, machetes in hand, hacking wildly, the blades flashing in the smoky light from the Wall as they rose and fell, rose and fell. One SI looked up and, seeing them, shouted.
They struggled deeper into the darkness.
Together he and the Preacher forced their way through a nightmare of noise-filled woods, stumbling over low walls, ducking under loops of vampire weed and blundering into tangles of mile-a-minute vines, flinching every time a bullet pierced the air with its shrill whine or a phased sonics cannon blanketed the area with an awful split-second of unbearable silence. There was nothing but fear and confusion in Hanson’s mind. He’d left his knapsack behind. He had nothing now but his gun and the clothes on his back.
Then the Preacher fell and did not get up.
“Stand, damn you!” Hanson seized the Preacher’s shoulder to give him an impatient shake, but his hand came away wet and sticky. He looked at it wonderingly.
Blood.
He stared down at the wrinkled old man, saw the grayness in his bruised face, how the clothes down one side of his body were black with blood. He’d been wounded all along, kept going by hysteria and fear. A flare went up in the air, and doubled shadows from it and the Wall danced in all directions. The little man wasn’t going to make it. It was a miracle he’d lasted this long. Hanson couldn’t take him along, wherever he was going—it would be useless. The Preacher needed a doctor, and Hanson had no doctoring in him; he could splint a leg or tie a tourniquet, and had several times, back at the factory, but that was it—the kind of gunshot wound the Preacher had was far beyond him. Best to keep moving and let the Preacher fend for himself as best he could, live or die as the gods willed. There was no time now for sentiment…
Cursing himself for a fool even as he did it, Hanson bent down and scooped the little man up in his arms.
“They killed an angel in Harrisburg,” the Preacher said suddenly. He did not open his eyes. “It’s in the records—not that anybody but me ever bothered to read the records… Used to do that a lot, back then, the angels. Angels passing through the Wall…”
“Don’t talk,” Hanson said. He started walking, too tired, too burdened, to run any more. If the SIs caught him, they caught him. It was hard even to care.
But the Preacher went on unheeding. “So close… I came so very close. I was not an inconsequential man… but I was afraid. Couldn’t take those final steps. I had the key to Heaven in me, and I couldn’t go.” He started to weep. “At night, I hear its voice, calling, calling… it’s never still. I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
Embarrassed, Hanson repeated, “Don’t talk.”
“Take me to the Wall,” the Preacher said, with surprising force. “I want to get that far at least. Bury me there. So I can say I went the distance.”
“Yah, sure.” Hanson’s step was slowing, and the weight of the body in his arms seemed heavy beyond endurance. He didn’t think he could go much farther. The night, so full of noise for the duration of their flight, now sank back down into silence, either because of distance or because the SIs and their political masters had finished having their fun and departed.
They came upon an overgrown Utopian road over which meandered a narrow trail, probably not even human-made but rather something created by coyotes or wyverns or thants as they wandered in their dream-sunk and instinctual rounds, and Hanson decided that it could not possibly be the same as the one that passed through the bandit camp. At any rate, safe or not, he was tired of fighting his way through the brush. The woods were preternaturally silent, not so much as a cricket or a knacker stirring. The only sound came from the Wall, a soft humming and buzzing like an infinite swarm of bees heard from a million miles away.
Abruptly, the Preacher gave a shudder and went still in his arms. With a cold seizure of the heart, Hanson knew that he was dead. He stared down at the man, so small, so light, and as he stared, a metal rod burst out of the Preacher’s chest, passing through skin and muscle and cloth as if they did not exist, gleaming, quicksilver fast. It bent, unfolded several joints, and then plunged into Hanson.
With a cry of horror, he stumbled back, slapping wildly at his chest with both hands, letting the Preacher’s corpse fall to the ground. The rod had already disappeared into him as completely as if it had never been there, sinking out of sight within his chest, leaving no trace of its existence behind.
It was gone.
Hanson was tempted to dismiss the incident, the bizarre thing that had leaped out at him like some monstrous jack-in-the-box and then plunged into his body as easily as a hot knife going through butter, dismiss it as a hallucination brought on by fear and fatigue. But he could feel it inside him, a heavy weight in his chest that shifted his center of balance and altered his movements in subtle ways. He felt a different man with it in him, estranged from his own body, an exile sitting within the control-cab of his skull, staring horrified and dispassionate out of the eye-sockets. Worse, he could feel the device’s desires like a burden of guilt or regret gnawing at the back of his mind. It was anxious to go home, and told him so not in words but in a cold mechanical yearning so intense he felt naked and near-helpless before it.
He stood shivering for a long moment, then bent and picked the Preacher back up again.