“Thanks as usual for telling me more than I’d ever need to know,” Colleen huffed. “Anyhow, if you’re right about that paddyroller stuff, what’s coming down the pike won’t be the best of anything. It’ll be a royal ass-kicking, and I’d just as soon it not be us on the receiving end.”
“Ducking out on a fight?” Cal grinned devilishly. “That doesn’t sound like the Colleen Brooks I know.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Russell Crowe in Gladiator.” Answering their looks, she added. “Okay, okay, maybe I am Russell Crowe in Gladiator, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it…at least, not all the time.” Another glance back at Olifiers and his group. “All I’m saying is, just because these folks are charter members of the Cal Griffin fan club doesn’t mean we should run interference for them till spring thaw.”
“So what would you have them do, Colleen?” Doc asked. “Return to the life they so recently fled?”
“They claim they fled. Honestly, Viktor, we don’t have to believe everything Joe Apocalypse and his brother tells us. I mean, look at the mess it got us into back in Chicago.”
Anguish blossomed in Goldie’s eyes, was quickly suppressed.
Colleen was instantly repentant. “Oh God, Goldman, I’m sorry…. I use my mouth like most people use a sledgehammer.”
For the briefest moment, Cal flashed again on Agent Larry Shango, whom he’d seen use a hammer like that most effectively, and fortuitously, when Shango had entered the fray at a deserted creekbed in Albermarle County and saved Herman Goldman from paramilitary raiders; before Shango had shared the secret list naming the scientists of the Source Project with them. He wondered on what path that fierce, self-contained traveler might now be embarked.
Cal forced his mind back to the here and now, to doing what he did best…smoothing the rough edges, binding the four of them back together, keeping them on track.
“We’re all worn to the nub,” Cal said. “Let’s get these folks bedded down for the night. Then we can recharge, get some perspective.”
Goldie nodded, urged his horse forward. But for the rest of their ride, he was silent.
TWO
Outside Medicine Bow, Wyoming
Mama Diamond was alone in her house of rock and bone when she heard the whistle far down the tracks and over the horizon, and mistook it for a memory.
Mama Diamond was old. She was thin as chicken bones, and a cataract had clouded much of the vision in her left eye. She wore rings on her fingers, the rings fixed in place by swollen knuckles, a part of her now. The rings were cheap silver melted down from old forks and spoons, set with garnet and turquoise. She had made them herself, back when her lapidary and fossil business just off the juncture of highways 30 and 487 was a going concern, here at the foot of Como Bluff. One of the richest fossil beds in the world, it was a perfect spot for tourists to wile away an hour or two on the drive from Laramie to Casper, just a long shout out of Medicine Bow in the flyspeck little town of Burnt Stick. She was Japanese-American, but the tourists took her for Blackfoot. She made no effort to disabuse them of the notion; it was good for business.
But now there were no more tourists, only wanderers and marauders and crazy, lost pilgrims on the way from somewhere to nowhere or back again.
Mama herself was a long way from the place she’d once called home in the San Bernardino Mountains of California. There she’d had a different name, been called Nisei among other things, and had parents who told her bedtime stories of their growing times in Osaka and San Francisco, at least in the days before she and her family had been gathered up like raw cotton in a sack and carted off to the internment camps at Manzanar and Heart Mountain.
So she had set off on her own journey long years ago, been a wanderer and a pilgrim herself, traversing the Utah, Colorado and Montana ranges and even the far-flung Gobi, until she had come at last to Wyoming, to this place of long skies and fierce winters. She liked living in a place with hard weather and harder people, in the shadow of the mountains that told the truth of the land. Folks said America was a young country, but those granite spires put the lie to that. It was a realm like everywhere else in this old world, with layer upon ancient layer, and the history there in the rock if you just took the time to listen for it. The stones and bones of the buried past beckoning to be discovered, prized out, dusted and shined and revealed in their true glory.
She sat now on the porch of her old house in the bent-birch rocker, bundled against the gray noon wind in her weathered leather overcoat with the elk buttons and rabbit lining. Winter was coming on, she could feel it in the late November bite of the air, and she wondered if it would be harsh-where one ran a rope from building to building so as not to get lost in the demon-breath of blizzard-or the milder variety of the past few years. Since the Change, there was no telling what the future might bring.
Only the likelihood that today would be like yesterday and the day before. Forecast: solitude, with more of the same.
She liked to sit on her porch and read in the afternoon, now that Burnt Stick was a ghost town.
Or at least “depopulated.” All the people had gone away, or died, after the Change. Without pumped water, Burnt Stick was simply too dry in the hotter months to keep a population. These days, you had to know how to find water, how to carry it, how to store the rainfall-skills only a scavenger rat like Mama Diamond readily possessed. She was not exactly the only living thing in Burnt Stick-she had seen coyotes in packs, pronghorn, mule deer, and those things, not quite human, that shambled through the streets now and again after dark. The only living ordinary human person, that she was. Well, maybe not “ordinary” in the old sense. But un-Changed. Human flesh. All too.
She lifted her canteen, sipped tepid water, squinted her good eye at the book she’d carried out. It was a Tom Clancy novel from the Benteen Avenue lending library, more pages than pebbles in a quarry. It would last her a good long time. There were no new books anymore. But Mama Diamond didn’t figure she would run out of books, not before her eyesight failed altogether.
The pace of the novel was slacking now. Everybody was lecturing the President about some crisis. Boys, Mama Diamond thought, you didn’t know a crisis from a wood louse.
In these silly, diverting books that wiled away the time, virile men were always saving the world. But her dusty long experience had taught her that no one ever saved the whole world, not really, only their own little part of it. And truth to tell, it was more often the women doing the saving than the men, whatever the history books said.
All those submarines and aircraft carriers must have shut down at the Change, just like the TV stations and the automobiles. Maybe there were aircraft carriers still floating at sea, all the sailors long since starved to death. Had they taken to cannibalism as a last resort? Or would they have scattered to open boats and made for land, trusting themselves to the whims of wind and fate? As everyone now had, really. Amy Hutchins, who used to run the grocery store across the street, had had a boy in the navy. Amy was long gone now, of course. Everybody was gone.
The train whistle sounded again.
It was a train whistle, unmistakably so. The old-fashioned kind, not that bleating honk the freighters made; a whistle that called over the chill range land like a lost love, that brought strange, dark carnivals in its wake and disarranged time.