Cal staggered to him as Olifiers pumped out his life, red onto the snow. Doc was there, too, now, as were Colleen and Goldie, but there was nothing he could do.
Olifiers was drowning, choking on his blood, struggling to gasp something out to Cal.
“Why?” Cal asked, tortured, wanting to turn back time, to take the spear that had been meant for him, not Olifiers. “Why did you do that?”
“They,” Olifiers gurgled, “need…” He reached up a big meaty hand, wet with blood, and grabbed Cal’s shoulder hard as Cal bent over him. His eyes were fierce as they sought out the younger man.
He didn’t need to say the rest.
They need you.
Olifiers fell back, and was gone.
Perez had followed his men-the ones who were still alive, who could still ride-away into the night, across the flatlands.
They didn’t come back.
The three grunters still crouched nearby, not moving, eyes huge and wary, staring at the big dead man, and the four beside him.
“Go on,” Cal told them. “Go where you like. You’re free.”
Two of them fled into the darkness that so suited them. But the other remained, drew timidly up to Cal.
“Want…” it said tentatively, “to follow you.” Its eyes moved from Cal down to the body beside him, awash in its own blood, then back to Cal.
Cal weighed the offer, and then said, “What’s your name?”
The grunter-whose name was Brian Forbes, and who had been a man once in Detroit-followed silently on padded feet as they carried Olifiers back into the mall.
SEVEN
In the years to come, those who were there would tell their children and grandchildren what they saw, and call her Lady Blade. But her real name was May.
The wind off Lake Michigan was a knife that hard near-winter day, cutting through the passersby as they hurried on, driven by the cold and the fear of the streets that were a hunting ground, now that Chicago was no longer the Ruby City and Primal was dethroned and destroyed, and his palace in shambles around him.
The city had reconstituted itself, in a fashion, devolved or at least returned to something of its former power structure, the old Party Machine, in this world where machines no longer ran but power and politics and greed held the whip hand, as they always had.
May felt nothing of the wind, tuned only to the still certainty within her that she had found the terminus of a search that had drawn her across many long miles and through many black places.
She stood at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, cloud shadows painting her light and dark as they moved, studying the twisted metal framework that speared into the sky like the flayed fingers of giants. The rubble was piled high at its base, big scorched stones, a testament to rage and chaos and, perhaps, the inevitability of ruin.
Tons of stone and insulation, wiring and furniture, pipe and cement-fifty stories’ worth-thrown into a blender to spray out over the terrain. Left here to the snow and sun and rain, to wear away like a mountain of pride torn down. No one in Chicago had the equipment anymore to haul all that debris away, nor the inclination, she supposed. Better to leave it as a monument, or unmarked grave, or abandoned killing ground. She noted that the men and women hurrying by averted their eyes as they passed, shied to the other side of the street, pretended it wasn’t there.
But May could look it straight in the face; it was hardly the worst she had seen, or been forced to endure.
Once the structure had been the Chicago Media Building, home to Primal Records, punching up off the pavement five hundred feet in its assurance and arrogance. Then it had transformed, mutated as so much had mutated in this spinning world, into something far grander and more terrible, into cathedral and fortress and keep, where a demigod Beast held sway, a demon who had beaten back the Storm and granted safe haven to some, the privileged, for a time.
But May knew that it had been no haven for him, whatever largesse he had bestowed, for in the secret place of his soul he was lost.
Those here who had served and feared him and lived by his whim called him Primal, but they had not known him, not like she had.
For in the time before that time, May had called him husband, and known his true name.
It was not the same as the fitting names her people gave each other, that she herself had, but it bore something of the same intimacy, the same history.
“Listen,” a nervous voice beside her piped up, “it’s not safe to stay here. We gotta move on.”
“In a minute,” she said. She looked sidewise at the one who had brought her here, whom she had found at Buddy Guy’s club down on Wabash, who had been brave enough to answer her questions when no one else would meet her gaze or dare speak of the past and what had gone down.
But Gabe Cordell, with his shining black hair and broadly muscled arms, was a man with spine, even if he was in a wheelchair.
Rolling at a determined clip she’d had to walk briskly to keep pace with, Gabe had led her out into the night and brought her to a barricaded street of tenements and the home of a furtive man named Wharton, who for a time had been a follower of Primal’s.
Wharton had cherished the order and safety Primal had secured him; in truth, had loved him. In this day and age, when photographs were hard to come by, Wharton understood that memory could hold only so much, an image that faded with the corrosion of time.
From its hiding place under the floorboards, he withdrew the metal toolcase that had once held other keepsakes, unlocked it and gently lifted out the plaster cast. He held it up to May, angled it to catch the light of thick candles.
He had taken the death mask of the broken, ill-used man as he’d lain abandoned and discarded among the wreckage, so much garbage in the dirt.
The plaster face revealed little of the easy intelligence, the soft sweet eyes, the compassionate, off-center grin that had made her love him. But the round face was there, the delicate features, and May had no doubt. It was Clayton.
Who had left her, because he’d had to.
So now she stood at Randolph and Dearborn, alongside Gabe, who at last had brought her the answers she had journeyed so long in search of.
May reached inside her coat of many pockets, the black leather duster, and withdrew the folded paper she’d carried across three states and nine hundred miles. The wind caught at it and made it flutter like a bird frantic for release, but she held tight to it, strode across the broad street to the pile of stone that had been the final stopping place of the one that had shared her life, in the time before this time, when he had been a man and nothing more.
She didn’t read the words on the paper, didn’t need to; they were written as surely on her heart, with a knife that had gone deep, the scrawl of words scar tissue within her now.
May, Clay had written in that queer, spidery hand of his. Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids.
(How strange it seemed to May that he’d said “kids,” when only their son had survived past infancy. Linda, their delicate storm child, their boy’s adored younger sister, had barely lived past her first year, and then succumbed to the faulty aortic valve that had been her birthday present upon her arrival into this world. She had died literally of a broken heart. May understood broken hearts now, but incredibly, inexplicably to her at the time, she herself had continued on. Once, she recalled, she had come upon something Mark Twain had written in his autobiography. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Curious, how Twain could know precisely her life when he had died almost a century before.)