“No!” the Outcast cried. “The killing’s over.” He looked down at the dead black man. “Everything’s over. He was our last chance. He could have saved everyone without more violence, without more death.”
“What happened?” Ray asked.
“He was killed by one of the jumpers.”
“What exactly the hell are you talking about?”
“He could have connected us with the shamans,” the Outcast told Ray, “powerful men and women who could have taken us to a place where we wouldn’t have to fight, where we wouldn’t have to be killed.”
Ray was suddenly deathly tired. “That sounds good to me.”
The Outcast sighed, then winced and tucked his elbow tight against a bleeding wound in his side. “It won’t happen now.,’
“Because this guy is dead,” Ray said.
“That’s right.”
Ray looked at Cameo. “Maybe we can help you.”
Upriver, the fog finally grew thin.
He detoured around the Rox, its battlements still cloaked in mist. He could feel its presence even if he couldn’t see it. He knew they were there. Bloat and his demons. The jumper bastards who had taken Pulse and Mistral and used them to kill and kill and kill. The antlered hunter and his terrible hounds. All of them were down there, with Danny.
He wondered what she’d been like, that seventh Danny, the one he never knew.
North of the Rox, flying high above the fog, he angled out over the Hudson, and headed north.
He saw the towers of Manhattan dimly through moving curtains of mist, scattered lights burning forlorn and frightened in the night. The fog had shrouded the whole island now. How far would it spread? Did Bloat’s power have a limit? Could he cover the whole city? The state? The world?
The George Washington Bridge was a steel shadow in the foggy night. Even here, no traffic moved. New York was a ghost town.
He pushed on. Now the Bronx was on his right as he floated up the Hudson, and finally the fog was thinning out. The gray curtains turned to a drifting gauze and then to pale white wisps and then to nothing. The night was crisp and clear, with a moon above and the river rolling blackly beneath him.
Danny’s blood had dried on his arms and chest. When he scratched, it fell away in brown flakes.
There was no air in the shell. Most of his screens were dead now. He could smell the circuits overheating. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He could see well enough to fly.
He was far past thinking.
The Bronx was behind him now. He moved up through Westchester. The New Jersey Palisades loomed up ahead of him. When he was a kid, Dom DiAngelis took him there with Joey, to the old amusement park. He still remembered the jingle. Palisades amusement park, swings all day and after dark. Gone now, like so much else.
North he went, and north, following the course of the Hudson, staring into the dead screen in front of him, hardly moving. The shell was full of ghosts. His parents. Dom DiAngelis. Joey and Gina. Barbara Casko, who’d loved him once. Dr. Tachyon. Jetboy. Thomas Tudbury. They were all looking at him. Whispering to him. But he was past hearing. Somewhere up where the Palisades rose high and white in the moonlight, he slowed, then came to a stop.
All his microphones were off. There was no sound in the shell but his own ragged breathing. But he could still hear her screaming.
He turned away from the dead screen.
The river rolled below him, black as death. The Hudson. It could have been the Styx. As if it mattered. He watched it for a long time.
Then he thought of a wall.
He was and he wasn’t.
That was the state of how he discerned himself.
After all, he had never been dead before. At least not that he recalled.
He contemplated all this while he drifted… somewhere. This was not the upper world, nor the lower world. It was not the earth. It was not the dreamtime.
He felt no temperature, yet no discomfort.
He could detect no direction home, yet felt certain he was moving. But from where, and to where, he had no idea.
It could have been millennia.
But after a certain amount of time (or non-time) had elapsed, he heard/saw/felt a voice. More than one.
Wyungare. It was more a statement than a question.
“I’m here.”
We would speak with you.
“Then you’ve found me.” The voice(s) were naggingly familiar. He had dealt with them long before.
We must know certain things of you.
“Then be direct. I’m dead, you know. Pomposity is lost on me.”
He felt a reaction very much like amusement. We shall be direct, then. About the boy, the one called Bloat. We have to make our own decisions.
“So what do you want from me?”
You taught him. Tell us of his lesson.
“It’s not as though I’ve a grade sheet,” said Wyungare. “No report card. I’m not granting or denying him passage to another form.”
We know that, Wyungare. The sensation of exasperation. Tell us.
Then a new, individual voice. One spoke with what Wyungare recalled was a West Texas twang. Never mind those high-minded sidewinders, man. You and me, we’ve got one hellacious more set of lives in common than them.
Wyungare would have smiled, had he lips. “Buddy?”
None other, pardner. Mighty sorry you won’t be seeing me at the Texarcana Club this go-round.
“Me too.” And then he remembered Cordelia. And tried not to remember Cordelia. That would come later.
About the Bloat kid, said Buddy.
“All right, why didn’t you say so?” said Wyungare. He gathered his thoughts, concentrated, molded a tight-beam image, and launched it like a bottle into the ocean from a desert island. No, more like a sounding rocket blasting into the mesosphere.
The young boy walks away from the place that was his home. It was not a happy place, but it was the only home he had known. And now he’s on his way. Gone. Trudging toward the forbidding trees that begin to forest the verges of the road.
Over his shoulder, the boy has packed the belongings that are important to him in a wrapped kerchief The corners are tied and the bundle is impaled by the stick the boy lays back over his shoulder.
As he walks, he realizes just how heavy his belongings are. He glances back and sees that the bundle has grown. It balloons as he watches, expanding into an enormous and untidy mass.
The boy turns hack to his course and resolutely forges forward. His burden grows even heavier. Yet the voices inside him, the voices of his old home, remind him that he has to carry it all. Every ounce, every pound, every ton of it.
— until he suddenly realizes that he no longer has to do that. There is no purpose served.
He releases his grip on the stick. He looses his hold on the burden that has somehow now grown to be larger than what he ever could have imagined he could carry.
It’s gone. Left behind him. He cannot believe how easy the final decision was.
As he continues down the road, he glances from side to side at the enveloping trees. They no longer seem as ominous.
The boy whistles. Not to warn away monsters. But in joy.
We see, come the voices. This was your perception?
“It is,” says Wyungare.