With the skills he would need.
Not to mention Goldie and Doc and Colleen.
Cal had been laboring so hard to find excuses to jettison those traveling with him, to safeguard them, to shield himself from responsibility and guilt and loss.
But if he was going to accomplish anything, if Olifiers’s life and death were going to have any meaning at all, Cal wouldn’t have time for such luxuries.
The one he needed to jettison was himself.
Print the Legend….
He saw that Colleen was watching him intently, almost as though she could read his mind. And why not? She had been the first to throw in her lot with him, before Goldie, before Doc. Before any of the warriors and wayfarers and holy fools that had accompanied them for a time.
He realized he would need many of them back again before this was done.
“Big Mike was the first of you to die,” Cal said, by way of eulogy. “But if you follow me, he won’t be the last.”
Then he told them everything he knew about the Source.
Cal found Goldie in the heart of the mall, squatting at the top of the escalator, peering into the darkness, the nothingness of the vast, brooding space. Since he had dispatched Perez’s magic man, pulverized or transported him to parts unknown, killed or banished him, Goldie had said little, done what was asked of him, kept his distance, deeply shaken and withdrawn, and folded in on himself.
“‘Your old men will see visions…’” Cal intoned softly, climbing the stilled metal steps until he stood just below him, his face level with Goldie as he crouched.
“‘Your young men will dream dreams,’” Goldie completed the quotation. Revelation, what Goldie had said to him on that day of days, just before the world had come spinning to a halt and they had been thrown together, launched on this mad, uncertain trajectory.
“It’s a bitch to be lead dog,” Cal said.
Goldie nodded. “Canary in a coal mine’s no Swiss picnic, either.”
“Got any line on what you did with Eddie back there?”
“Nope. Just did it.”
“Are you getting better at this, Goldie…or is it getting the better of you?”
“This multiple choice?”
“I’ve got this twitchy feeling we’re getting close real soon, ready or not.”
“Yeah, I’ve got that feeling, too.”
“We’ll need every trick we can muster, every reinforcement along the way.”
“Portals aren’t a snap to open, Cal; it’s not like making a call. Correction, like making a call-”
“Used to be, I know.” Cal sighed. So much of their associations were what used to be, as if they themselves were lingering ghosts who didn’t know when to depart. “Look, I’m not asking for miracles…okay, I guess I am. Get as good as you can, as fast as you can. Ask for what you need. Don’t be a solo act.”
Goldie was staring off into the darkness again, enclosed in solitude. Cal grabbed his shoulder, forced his attention. “We’re family here, Goldie,” he said, and meant it.
“I’ve done family,” Goldie replied darkly, in his unshared, black memories. He turned to Cal at last, and smiled wanly. “What you’ve worked up here trumps it, believe me.”
Then he added, “I’ll do my best, Cal, really and truly. But take some advice from the unsettled set-have a fallback plan…. And if you need at any propitious moment to ditch me as thoroughly as Jerry Lewis dumped Dino, then you do it, and do not look back. You got that?”
Cal nodded, hoping he wouldn’t need to, not knowing if he could.
They sat a long time in the dark, sharing the silence.
While Colleen and Doc took morning watch, Cal returned to the gutted Waldenbooks with the torch Perez had discarded. What remained of the stock was patchy, but sufficient to Cal’s purpose.
Extinguishing the flame, he settled himself beside a crack in the wall where a shaft of dawnlight filtered through, and began to read.
He started with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s A Call to Conscience.
Soon enough, he would move on to Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War.
Cal didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until an awareness of a nearby presence startled him awake, adrenaline surging in him. He threw himself back and grabbed for the sword at his hip. But the misshapen figure didn’t move.
It stood watching him silently in the shadowed part of the room, away from the shaft of daylight, the dust motes dancing in the air.
From its shape, Cal could tell the creature was a grunter, and for an instant he thought it was Brian Forbes, the one he had liberated from Perez, and who had asked to join him. (Curious how a small minority of the grunters, like Howard Russo and Forbes, lacked the viciousness of their brethren, sharing only the same air of forlornness and pain.)
But then Cal saw that this grunter was smaller. And even though he was smaller, even in the dimness, Cal could glean from his body language and the expression on his face and a thousand subtle other things that he was far more formidable than either Russo or Forbes.
“My name is Inigo,” the grunter boy said.
Having seen The Princess Bride on countless occasions-it was a ritual with Cal and Tina to watch it together on her rare sick days, in the close times before her life had been consumed by ballet and his by law-Cal half expected him to complete the statement with, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
But thanks to the deeper education his mother had given him before her death, Cal also knew of another Inigo, Inigo Jones, a renowned British architect of the Renaissance, who had studded the realm with glorious palaces, churches and halls.
So which Inigo’s spirit would this inhuman boy embody-the builder…or the destroyer?
“There’s somewhere you need to go,” he told Cal.
ELEVEN
Familiar as these ancient hills were to Mama Diamond, even they had changed some since the world lost its way in recent days.
Physically they were the same: the expelled marrow of volcanoes a million years extinct, the compressed effluvia of what must once have been the floor of a primordial sea…and couldn’t you just feel it here, the weight of those centuries stacked one atop another like the laminar striations in a canyon wall?
I’m just one more fossil now, Mama Diamond thought. The difference is, I happen to be breathing.
A half-moon lit the chilly sky. She understood that she would have to find a place to make camp before moonset. Cope and Marsh, her horses, stepped lightly and a little nervously along a trail Mama Diamond had first explored thirty years ago. The train tracks were periodically visible, looping up a gentle incline from the east and crossing a canyon on a steel trestle. Mama Diamond had followed the tracks most of the way from Burnt Stick. But the horses disliked that high trestle and she had accommodated them with this back route.
In the distance she heard the howling of wolves-a great many of them, it seemed to her. That tribe had prospered since the collapse of technology drove human beings out of these hard lands. They feasted, she thought, on our leavings. Now they were getting hungry again.
It was late, but Mama Diamond felt remarkably fresh. She wondered how that could be. The encounter with that dragon, with Stern, had left her sore and dispirited…but life had crept back into her over the course of the day, maybe too much life, a strange euphoria.
Why did she feel stronger rather than weaker? Was it possible the Change had not left her untouched after all? But Mama Diamond disliked that thought and dismissed it from her mind.
She was able to avoid the trestle because she knew these hills, knew them perhaps even more intimately than the surveyors who had laid down the rail routes way back when. And she doubted the extra time would put her far behind Federal Agent Larry Shango, who was depending on pedal power and force of will to carry him up the incline. But some difficulties she could not avoid…such as the upcoming tunnel that was blasted through the most difficult rock face these eroded hills had to offer. A half mile of darkness by day or night.