“Yeah,” Colleen responded, “but it gives you such a warm, fuzzy feeling.”
Cal didn’t rise to it. “Let’s look at our options-”
“Okay, sure,” Colleen cut in. “Way I see it, we backtrack and try to make up for lost time, heading wherever the hell it is we’re heading. Or we mosey on down into Hidden Plague Valley-which somehow I don’t think is going to make it as the name of a salad dressing.”
“Colleen,” Doc tried to mollify. “There’s a Russian saying-”
“There’s always a Russian saying, Viktor. Geez, didn’t you guys do anything but sit around making up sayings?” She pointed an accusing finger at Inigo. “I don’t think we should have trusted this little rat bastard in the first place.”
“We’ve all had experiences with grunters, good and bad,” Cal said (not adding that it had been mostly bad).
“Yeah, but I’m the only one who’s slept with one.” She meant Rory, naturally, her old boyfriend. He hadn’t been a grunter at the time, but why split hairs?
“One of you has something…” Inigo began softly.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Colleen snapped. “Why don’t you quit with the elliptical bullshit, okay?” She wheeled on the others. “And yes, I know you’re astonished I said ‘elliptical,’ but hey, I read a book once.”
“Let him speak, Colleen,” Cal said, and the look he gave her and the firmness under his words finally quieted her.
“Go on,” he told Inigo.
“There’s something someone gave you, in Chicago….”
“What do you know of Chicago?” said Doc, but Cal silenced him with a gesture.
“You weren’t expecting it,” Inigo said with deliberation, as if coached to speak these words precisely. “But it saved you.”
Colleen’s face betrayed surprise. Then she pulled the chain from around her neck, revealing again the dog tags from her dead father, the Russian Orthodox cross from Doc…and the iridescent black scale, the charm that had saved her, had saved them all, from Primal.
She held the piece between thumb and forefinger, waved it in Inigo’s face. “You mean this, kid?” Then she glanced out at the valley, and her jaw dropped.
“Oh. My. God.”
“What? What is it?” Cal asked.
“They’re gone, they’re all gone. The bodies. And-and-” Words failed her.
It was fucking impossible.
(Watching this, Inigo nodded to himself. Papa Sky had known what he was talking about telling him to mention that charm, that blade of leather. But then, he always did.)
“I–I see the town completely undamaged,” said Colleen.
“Curioser and curioser,” muttered Doc.
“Choose one from column A or one from column B,” said Cal. “Goldie, what’s your-”
And for the first time since they’d reached the valley, Cal and Doc and Colleen realized Goldie had said nothing all the time they’d been there.
He stood transfixed staring down at the town, pure terror on his face.
Raging, red turmoil, something monstrous waiting. Thunder smashing. Blurred streaks like blood smeared on a mirror. Sparks pinwheeling. Slashing into all colors and none, a whirlpool blazing of pure, savage power, screaming, screaming, SCREAMING.
It went on forever. And that was just the least of it.
It wasn’t here yet, not yet, not completely or even at all-hey, it was Paradoxes R Us. But it was coming fast down the tracks. And Herman Goldman knew he was not ready for it, not one teeny-weeny bit. If he was a Lincoln penny, this Big Enchilada was mucho dinero.
And opening to it was like what had happened when he was twenty-three and the Devil had come calling, literally. He’d never told anyone about that-hell, they’d think he was crazy-but he had swooned into that place of insanity and assurance, had lost the world and himself, had become a universe and a god of one.
That was what this fucker thought It was.
And Goldie knew that it was what he himself would need to become, that and more, if he was to get justice or vengeance or whatever it was his eviscerated soul cried out for.
Save your hate for the Source, his love had told him.
Oh, Magritte…
Could she have saved him from the Source, from himself?
It really didn’t matter anymore.
Herman Goldman was saving up his pennies.
Now all he had to do find was the right bank.
“Not good, way not good,” Goldie said, when he finally roused himself to answer their concern, their questions as to what he saw. “Cal, I can’t go down there, at least not right now.”
“Okay,” Cal said. “Go back and join the others. We’ll see what we can suss out.”
But before Goldie could mount Later and turn his buckskin back along the road, away from this place of phantoms, of repulsion and beckoning, there was a soft rustle of footsteps behind them.
They had company.
THIRTEEN
“These friends of yours?” Cal asked Inigo.
The tweaked boy slowly shook his head, never taking his creamy huge eyes off the visitors. If anything, he seemed even more disquieted by their arrival than did Cal and the others.
Grunters.
Cal wondered where they’d come from on this flat plain with its cracked asphalt highway an enormous arrow pointing clear to the horizon. Certainly not out of the valley; all of them had been looking that way.
In the fading light of sunset, the clump of huddled figures with their bandy legs, their long bony arms, advanced with seeming timidity, like whipped strays drawn back to the company of men but sorely afraid of it. All were small compared to grown humans, of varying heights, none more than five feet. Cal could see that they had once been women and men, and a few of the shorter ones had a hyper quality that made him think they might have been-might still be-children.
In his travels, Cal learned that family members never all transformed into one kind of changeling, but that often the altered outcasts and abandoned ones found companions of like mind and form.
And although these eight twisted beings-with rapper caps pulled tight over bulbous gray heads (either wholly bald or with strands of wispy hair like chick fluff escaping out from under them), capacious Salvation Army jackets and jeans and long, thick-knuckled feet-had no doubt started life with no relationship to one another, now they were family.
Or at least, a crew, a posse. A pack.
Cal had seen other grunter packs in a proximity he’d sooner have avoided, been cornered by them in the bleak tunnels under New York and diverse spots along the map, fought tooth and claw to survive. In groups, they were invariably frightful, ravening homunculi with a wild, lithe ferocity.
But this gathering before him seemed of a wholly different cast, even if in the dimming light he could see they bore the same serrated teeth, the same yellow dirk nails.
There was none of the cunning, the calculation about them. Nor even the wary alertness of this boy who stood breathing fast beside him.
Colleen had whipped her crossbow off her back and leveled it. Doc held his machete. But Cal shook his head, motioned their weapons down. He moved toward the group slowly, with a show of calm he hoped was more convincing than he felt (because-despite all this talk about his great instincts as a leader-if he was wrong about these guys…)
The lead grunter stepped closer, eyeing Cal.
Cal addressed the newcomer. “My name is Cal Griffin. This is Colleen, Goldie, Doc. And that’s Inigo. What’s your name?”
The creature frowned spectacularly, and when he spoke, his voice was cracked and high-pitched-he sounded like Andy Devine in one of those ancient Westerns. “My name,” he said, “is Tom.”
“Just Tom?” Doc asked.
Tom shrugged, as if at an irrelevancy.
Doc leaned in close to Cal, whispered, “Even for a grunter, he appears rather-”
“Dim?” Cal finished in a whisper.