Everything Cal had learned since the Change made this a miracle. Automobiles were useless; engines were useless. Since that watershed day in July, no one on earth-to Cal’s knowledge-had been able to run a motor or plug in an appliance. That was the essence of the Change. There was no clause exempting late-model Caddies. It was as if a living mastodon had wandered down the road-more surprising in fact; the Change might well have revived a few mastodons, but the automobile should have been irrevocably extinct.
The dragon lost interest in the grunter child and spiraled upward, sculling for altitude.
Tom came running out of the high grass, grabbed the child up in his arms and dashed back to hiding.
The automobile crunched to a stop. The driver’s door flew open and a young man stepped out.
The driver appeared to be in his twenties, a short, amiable-looking guy with glasses, thinning black hair and a bristle-length goatee framing his mouth. He wore a black T-shirt under a Day-Glo orange vest. At the sight of the dragon, his expression betrayed shock and surprise. Whatever he’d come here for, it wasn’t this.
He reached into the car, grabbed up something from the backseat.
He pulled it out, wheeled around with it, braced himself against the roof of the El Dorado.
The dragon screeched and whirled, red eyes flashing.
The newcomer fired his rifle-
And that was impossible, too. Cal had seen people attempting to use firearms in the immediate aftermath of the Change. The result was a slow fizzle at best, as if the gunpowder were burning at an inhibited speed. No bang, no bullet.
But the stranger’s rifle-which was decorated, oddly, with what looked like garnets or rubies-barked and kicked.
The bullet went wide.
“You son-of-a-fuckin’ bitch!” Enraged, the dragon dove at the stranger, batted the gun aside. It seized him by the shoulders, thorny yellow claws digging deep into his nylon vest, clenching the muscles beneath so tightly that the young man’s arms involuntarily stuck out from his sides. His eyes rolled with pain, and he screamed as the dragon flew up with him into the dazzling sky.
It hovered there, clutching him tightly-and drew the knife-blade talons of its free paw forward to eviscerate him.
But by now Cal had reached the car and grabbed up the rifle. He pumped another shell into the chamber. God, let this miracle work again. He aimed and fired.
The dragon screamed, dropping its captive, who fell the dozen or so feet to the ground, landing with a cushioned whoomph in the high grass.
Its enormous wings reduced to limp fabric on a sagging frame, the dragon plummeted to earth, hitting the highway with a satisfying thud.
Its body twitched once and fell silent, conspicuously dead, the iron stench of its blood thick on the air.
The grunters, terrified, had vanished.
Cal lowered the still-smoking gun. The acrid tang of gunpowder was in the air; Cal loved that smell, had loved it since he’d been a kid with cap guns.
Colleen sidled up alongside him, impressed. “Pretty slick shooting, ace.”
“Yeah, well, my dad made me go to firing ranges when I was a kid.” How Cal had hated those excursions, his father’s attempts to make him a “real man”-when Dad hadn’t the least notion that being a real man had nothing to do with the way one handled a gun and everything to do with the way one handled life. “Turns out I had a knack.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, next time we have the need.”
By now, Doc was crouching beside the fallen newcomer. Cal and Colleen joined him. The stranger moaned, half conscious.
“No obvious broken bones,” Doc remarked. “Under ideal conditions, I wouldn’t think of moving him.” He cast a glance at the dragon carcass in the tall grass, and at the sky. “But getting him to his people would not be inadvisable.”
Inigo spoke from behind him. “He came from back there.”
Cal saw he was gesturing toward the valley. And the town.
“What do you want to do, Cal?” Colleen asked.
Cal took a deep breath, and the icy air filled him. They were looking to him, it was his call. They, along with the strangers back at the grain silo who now folded their lives in with him, would follow wherever he might lead. He looked at the dead thing in the grass, this thing that had been a man once (though, if Stern was any indication, not a very estimable one), then turned to look at the way they had come, the long, shadowed land behind them and then the valley ahead, with its hideous phantom of plague and decay-if Colleen’s talisman could be trusted.
The talisman the enigmatic old black man Papa Sky had given them in Chicago, the talisman that had saved them from Primal when the chips were down.
Then he looked at the boy, the grunter boy who had brought them here, to this place of faux plague and real dragons and jeweled guns that worked.
Inigo.
My name is Inigo Montoya…. Prepare to die.
Real or Memorex?
You go with what you know.
And when you don’t know, you go with your gut.
A leader leads, and a lawyer searches for expedience and loopholes. He figured this was as good a time as any to be both.
“Let’s take him home,” Cal said.
II
It is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.
— Black Elk
FOURTEEN
Mama Diamond was quiet for the next couple of days’ traveling, riding one horse and leading the other as Shango pedaled his ridiculous rail bike. The land was flat now, scrub prairie, the skies by daylight as blue as Dresden china. It was brutally cold, though, as they tended east. Mama Diamond had unpacked a fleece vest and wore it over her flannel shirt and under her leather overcoat with the elk buttons and rabbit lining. She wore a woolen cap to keep the breeze from biting at her ears.
The animal encounters had left her puzzled and disturbed, and she spent much of this time in profound thought.
Stern, it seemed, had taken something…and left something behind. Something more than the life-her life-he had promised to spare.
But exactly how had this happened, and why? Stern seemed like a man-a creature-an individual-that rarely if ever did anything by accident; beyond the huge joke-of-fate accident of his own transformation, an event which Mama Diamond felt certain he’d had absolutely no say or choice in.
As was the case by and large with everyone who had changed or gained some weird power or discovered some uncanny new talent.
Which now, surprisingly, unexpectedly, included Mama Diamond herself.
Someone or something-maybe God His Own Self-had rolled the dice with the whole damn world.
Not that she believed in God, at least not some old white dude with a beard. She wondered what her dead and buried Buddhist parents might have said about all this. Some creaky old Zen parable, undoubtedly. She could never make heads or tails of those. They weren’t like a gemstone or a fossil bone you could hold in your hands, solid, real, undeniable.
But now so was the fact that Mama Diamond was possessed of a truly distinctive new social skill.
Not possessed in the Salem inquisitor’s sense of the word. No, when she spoke to the animals, it was she, Mama Diamond, who had done the talking. She felt-knew-that she had spoken from the deepest and truest core of herself, the most authentic part of her, and that was the most unsettling thing.
Because, if that was the case, Stern hadn’t actually given her this power. It had merely been dormant and, deliberately or inadvertently, he had simply awakened it.