(And perhaps, too, some residual affection Agnes held for him-or whatever of Agnes was still left-had lent him some sort of asylum, reprieve.)
Which hadn’t made the loneliness any easier…
Until, that was, the new arrivals made it onto the scene, these two good souls, these friends…and the additional interloper who was anything but Inigo’s friend.
Inigo slid the coin into the breast pocket of Papa Sky’s suit, just behind the white handkerchief that was always immaculately folded. He said the words he always said at this point, the ritual. It was what his father had said whenever he’d given Inigo his allowance, before Dad headed out on his rounds at the facility, or set off into the Badlands.
“Something for the ferryman.”
Papa Sky nodded. “Always got to pay your own way…”
Inigo started off, but Papa Sky beckoned him back. He leaned down and whispered into the boy’s ear, the ear that was so delicately pointed, tufted with fine, white hair.
“I had a word with the Leather Man,” Papa Sky said. “He told me it’s time.”
Inigo drew in a tight breath of thin, chill air.
It wasn’t a surprise, not really. He knew this day would come. But still, he felt far from ready.
Not that any of that mattered, though.
Yoda could be a little green dude, or he could be an old blind black man, or something with scales and wings.
There is no try, there is only do.
Inigo was the messenger.
Christina returned home as the sun was dipping below the spires of the city, the sky streaked and fiery.
Her body ached from the hours of practice at the School of the American Ballet, obeying the commands of the shade that looked and sounded like the essence of the retired prima ballerina she had so idolized and emulated in recent years, years that seemed more a dream than the dream that had awakened her this morning.
Wearily, she climbed the four flights to her flat, her book bag feeling as if weighted with stones. She fished out her key as she drew near the door-then saw that it stood half-open (and she knew she had locked it on leaving that morning).
With a choked cry, she dropped her bag and the key, dashing inside, the hope surging in her like a drowning man swimming for the surface that at last he had found her-the one she could almost, not quite, remember-that he had come as he had promised her, back in the place she could not summon, but that her mind told her was named Boone’s Gap.
But the figure sitting in the one good chair, silhouetted against the dying embers of the day that slanted in through the window, was not the one she waited for.
From the outline of him, she knew he was wearing his manshape again. He drew on his cigarette in the darkness, and the red tip of it was a malevolent eye.
What monstrosities would walk the world were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds….
“What a day I’ve had,” he muttered.
She settled into the rocker that her lost mother had sung lullabies and held her in; that her lost father had torn the runners off in a fit of rage, before she was born.
Soon you’ll be past the pain, her visitor had told her long ago, on a rooftop over a thousand miles away.
She wondered when that would be.
He had never touched her in violence, never physically harmed her in any way. But he had committed horrors, and she had been the unwilling witness to much of it. Like the inhuman being in the Harrison Ford movie that was older than she was, the one who in the end found a dreadful and curious compassion.
I have done questionable things….
She said nothing as he unburdened himself through the night, opening his dragon heart to her once more.
FOUR
It took Cal and his companions nearly two hours to search out a shelter, one big enough to hold thirty road-weary travelers. In a different terrain (one with such novel variations as valleys and mountains and hillsides, not just an endless expanse of grassland), Cal would have been content securing some cave in a cliff face-ideally one with no bears, wolverines or other irritable residents, not to mention tunnels full of grunters or portals that could suddenly open onto different states.
But as Cal had learned in many a quick improvisation on this journey, you worked with what you had.
“I think this’ll do,” Cal said as they drew up rein and surveyed the square structure sitting smack-dab in the middle of all that grass that stretched from the horizon on the left to the horizon on the right (not to mention the horizons ahead and behind).
Goldie dismounted and strolled up to the entrance. The glass door that said IN was shattered and hanging off its hinges, while the door that said OUT was intact, if almost black with grime. Of course, no one paid the least attention to those rules anymore, not that anyone particularly ever had.
Seen from here, the interior appeared utterly dark and quiet. Goldie turned back to the others. “The king seems to be gone from his palace.”
“Palace?” Colleen asked.
“The Palace of Material Goods, the central image and shrine of all we once held dear. Or at least, you guys did-I myself took a path I prefer to think of as more stripped-down and Zen.”
Cal thought of the vast mountain of scavenged goods Goldie had assembled in his underground home in the tunnels beneath New York, the place Goldie had led him that first night after the Change, where Cal had found his sword. You seemed pretty damn materialistic back then, he reflected, but said nothing; he was just glad Goldie was talking again.
The sign towered over them at the head of the vast parking lot, proclaiming GATEWAY MALL, THE FUN PLACE! But it was clear that any and all fun had long since departed; had departed in fact-if the peeling paint, ruts in the asphalt, and cracked neon were any indication-months or even years before the Change. ’Twasn’t Beauty killed the Beast, Cal thought, it was the mercurial shift of economics and population growth and buying patterns.
Despite this, a scattering of RVs and dusty, pitted cars dotted the parking lot. Cal knew he’d have to dispatch Colleen and Doc with a contingent to investigate these, make certain there were no surprises lurking within.
The mall was a cavernous and intimidating space, but one well out of the wind, and readily defensible.
By now, Olifiers and his group had come up beside them. The big man peered through the glass doors uneasily. He swallowed hard, looking at all that dark possibility.
His trepidation brought a recollection to Cal of a movie he’d seen ages ago when he was eight and staying overnight at Howard Turner’s house. His own mother forbid having a set in their house (“it does to the brain what candy does to the teeth”) and certainly would have forbid him watching a film like this, which was on the whole just exactly why he was doing it, despite the fact that it scared the crap out of him and he couldn’t sleep without a night-light for months afterward.
It was the only film he’d ever seen set in a mall. A mall that was dead, literally, and overrun with the walking dead.
The Dawn of the Dead.
Funny, Cal realized, how since then he’d actually fought the living dead-reanimated grunters that had attacked the four of them outside the Wishart house in Boone’s Gap. But that event hadn’t scared him half as much; he’d just focused on the business of severing the rotted obscenities’ arms and legs and getting inside that damn nightmare of a house.
But this movie, geez…
The living-dead clown, the living-dead nun. Falling all over themselves on the escalators.
Then the cycle gang showed up, and the atrocities they committed made the ravenous dead pale by comparison.