“You?” It shocked him. Not that Colleen felt fear-after all, she was human-but that she would admit it to him.
“I don’t want complications in my life,” she said. “I don’t want to be blindsided anymore, I don’t want the unknown. I’m sick to death of not knowing what I’m gonna face around each and every corner.”
“So you agree with me.”
“Hell no, you idiot. I’m not talking about the Source, I’m talking about Viktor!”
Cal couldn’t help but smile. “Avoiding a relationship is not a good excuse to kill yourself.”
She peered again into the blackness. “This is all your fault, you know. Dragging me to hell and gone, getting me to feel all over again…What a friggin’ mess.”
For all her feigned gravity, he knew she was speaking playfully, chiding him to move him off his position, get him to yield. Another weapon in her arsenal, one she wielded as capably as all the rest. What a remarkable woman, he thought, and she had been there all along, living right on Eighty-first just down the street from him. And would he have ever noticed her if not for the Change?
No.
He’d have stayed entombed in his trivial, small life, pursuing the phantom of stability, security. Living in illusion, bracketed between interpreted past and assumed future, hardly in the present at all. Asleep to all the wondrous possibilities around him, to the miracles as well as the horrors.
How hard it was, even now, to be fully awake…
Yet she worked at him-they all worked at each other, the four of them, orphans and outcasts, to stay alert, to not fall into complacency, to be truly alive.
Incredibly, he realized in this moment, with the snow feathering down, the night surrounding them like a blanket, with who knew what lay ahead of them, or what pursued from behind-that he loved her; not romantically-not anymore, he had jettisoned the growing pearl of that, but intensely, deeply, gratefully.
And that, absurdly, in this fragile, transitory moment, this present-in both senses of the word-he was happy.
He leaned out of the saddle toward her, brought his lips close to her ear, nearly touching it, as if it were a kiss. “Don’t be afraid to enter uncharted terrain,” he said. “The past is not the future.”
She let out a hard breath that might have been a laugh. “So that’s my answer to you, too, Cal Griffin. And here’s one other meaty little tidbit-maybe you don’t need to know how to beat it…maybe you just need to know how to have it not beat you.”
He mulled on that, both of them as quiet as the snowflakes that drifted about them.
Finally, Colleen said, “How ’bout we both find out how the story ends?…” She held a hand out to him.
After due consideration, he took it.
Cal and Colleen dropped the sundered tent where they hit asphalt, then guided Sooner and Big-T back through the night toward the derelict mall, the stars like glittering eyes of ghosts above them.
Colleen was relieved Cal had opened up to her, still seemed able to talk to her, even though she’d chosen Doc rather than Cal. Her family had disintegrated when she was fifteen. Her father had died physically; her mother had died emotionally, leaving Colleen an orphan and an exile.
But now Doc and Goldie were her family…and Cal.
She looked over at Cal, riding on his horse like a city lawyer would, sitting so badly in the saddle despite all her advice on how to ride. He caught her looking at him.
“What?” Now it was his turn to question.
“Nothing…only I was just wondering what sweet young thing might be waiting down the road to twist you round her little finger…. You smile, you think you’re immune? We could take out an ad-at least, if there were still newspapers-‘Wanted: single female, race not important, preferably human.’”
It felt good to laugh.
FIVE
“Man oh man, I’m tellin’ you, it was just like they were this big vacuum, came down the highway just suckin’ everyone up….”
Mike Olifiers was hunkered around the campfire as it flickered low in the Food Court, its thin trail of smoke ascending to the skylight and out into the night. The rest of the fugitives, those who were not posting guard on the roof, sat or lay around it in a circle. The dim chiaroscuro of the firelight lent their faces a worn beauty, a wary grace.
While Colleen went off to join Doc at his station topside and Goldie dozed beside one of his glowing orbs on the periphery-a rarity for him to sleep-Cal knelt across the fire from Olifiers, drew from the ragged ones their stories, their pasts. Mechanics, teachers, physicists, all caught in the net of the slavers.
“It did not matter who you were or where you were from,” Moabi, an exchange student from Botswana, told him in a sweet accent redolent of molasses and honey, shaking his dreadlocks ruefully. He had been a filmmaker and performance artist, but none of that made the least difference. “You were a pair of hands to pick, a pair of legs to walk the corn rows, the soybean fields…. Beyond that, you were precisely nothing.”
“Sunup to sundown,” added Tori Feldman, who had been a historian in a former life. “Can see to can’t see.”
“Did you get any sense of what authority they represented, if any?” Cal asked.
“Some were National Guard guys gone freelance, some regular army, presumably AWOL,” Flo Speakman responded. “Lots of other strays and bully boys. We picked this up chiefly by osmosis-”
“The hard way,” Don Anderson, an amiable guy with severe scoliosis, chimed in, rubbing a vivid welt that ran across the left side of his face. This drew murmurs of agreement from the others.
“They weren’t exactly forthcoming with their resumes.” That was Rafe Dahlquist, the physicist, in his late fifties but still powerful and solid.
“It wasn’t like these guys were anything special,” Al Watt, a little bald guy with a timid, ready smile, piped up. He’d been a researcher on the Internet before the Change-an obsolete profession, if there ever was one. “I mean, we heard about all these dudes claiming to be the government, trying to get everything nailed down, these generals on the East Coast, up around the Great Lakes. Word was they had the Speaker of the House on a leash. But then there were all these other factions claiming they were the real guys in charge. I mean, you just hear this stuff, pick it up along the road. Everybody fighting everybody else.”
“Kinda like Yugoslavia after the USSR pulled up its tent,” said Krystee Cott, a lanky brunette with a sweetness about her that all the recent hard wear had not dispelled. Cal thought Doc might have a trenchant observation or two on her comment. Before leaving the navy, Krystee had been a demolitions expert-another area of expertise rendered null and void by the new modus operandi.
“Then there was the Storm…” Mike Kimmel said, and everyone else grew quiet. Kimmel was “Little Mike” to Olifiers’s “Big Mike,” a former wrestler turned part-time actor and balloon folder (“Big Mike’s the awesome behemoth,” Kimmel told Cal upon their introduction. “Me, I’m just the behemoth.”)
“I saw it do its handiwork on the outskirts of Philly,” Kimmel continued. “These fuckin’ clouds came in from the west and anyone with a glow on”-he meant the ones like Tina, the flares, fireflies, angelfire-“just got drawn up into it like it was this big magnet and they were iron filings. You shoulda heard it. I mean, I’m talkin’ thousands of ’em, screaming….”
“It’s like that everywhere anybody seen it,” Olifiers added. “It spreads like a cancer, does whatever the hell it wants-whatever the fuck it is. Nobody beats it, that’s the rule, nobody gets out alive…Except where you been.”
Cal saw now they were all looking at him with that same worshipful gaze they had given him on their first meeting. The firelight danced in their eyes, they squinted against its heat and smoke.