It was difficult to walk, but one beneficial byproduct of his deadened state was the fact that the fear he should have felt remained subdued, tamped down. Intellectually, he recognized the magnitude of the terrible scene that greeted him, but emotionally it did not register, and his heart was not jackhammering into overdrive the way it otherwise would have been.
He stumbled toward the front of his train where it met three others, all four seemingly from the different directions of the compass-north, south, east, west. He bent down, dropping to one knee between two crisscrossing tracks, and scooped up a handful of dirt in his palm. He felt the dirt, smelled it, touched it to his lips. There was blood mixed with this soil, the blood of his people. Chinese immigrants had been massacred at this spot, and that was a stain that would never go away.
He let the dirt fall, slipping through his fingers.
He had been summoned, Dennis realized, but it had not been by the ghosts of his people, as he'd originally thought. Most of them were caught up in this revenge play just like himself, not intentional warriors but conscripts, drawn into battle by forces beyond their control and probably beyond their ken. Despite the fact that he had been welcomed onto the train, expected even, that had not been his destination, merely his mode of transportation. Perhaps those in the passenger car had expected him to join their fight, had thought that all of the living people they were picking up would devote themselves to bringing retribution to white America, but that had not happened.
No, something else had led him here, had called to him across the miles and through the years.
And then he saw it.
In back of the locomotives, above them, towered a strange and dreadful figure he recognized from his dreams. It was the being that had summoned him here, the one whose triangular head he'd seen behind the wall of smoke at the end of the road, the one in his nightmares who had always been in the background, watching, waiting, beckoning him forward, its dark shifting form visible in the sky, above the trees, above the mountains.
Just as it was now.
If the trains were variations on a normal object, bastardizations of known machines, this was something else entirely, a form so singularly horrific and profoundly strange that had he not dreamed of it before, his brain would have been able to find no correlations or comparisons.
And yet it belonged here. As alien as it seemed, it was clearly a natural part of this land, like the mountains and the sagebrush and the rocks and the air. It was a creature of this place, had been here long before this country was settled, and would remain here long after their civilization crumbled to dust.
Dennis looked up into the moonlit sky at the wavering form. Waves of anger and displeasure rolled from it, emotions he understood but that nevertheless frightened him because their origins in this instance were so fundamentally inhuman. It had called him here, brought him to this place in hopes that he could help stop the seemingly inevitable progression of the vengeful malediction. As huge and powerful as the entity might be, it was impotent. At least in regard to this. It could not stop the retaliation to come or it would have nipped it in the bud long ago. All it could do, apparently, was draw to it people it thought could derail the process.
But what was he to do? What could he do? All of this had been put into motion by a freakish convergence of circumstances, by a curse spoken in the right place at the right moment that had burgeoned into a movement now entirely uncontrollable. He could not stop it. He had no power and knew no spells. There was no way anything he did could have the slightest effect on what was essentially the biggest class-action proceeding of all time.
Malcolm and the others were standing close behind him, frightened by the hellish landscape in which they found themselves and uncertain of what to do, looking to him for guidance. Dennis, too, was lost, and for a moment he simply stood there, breathing in the smoky fumes and staring up at the angry face in the sky.
Except the face wasn't all angry. The mouth was smiling. It was a horrible smile, and the teeth reminded him of cactus, but it was a smile nevertheless, and it was directed at the thousands of Native American men who stood on the Point, linked together and winding around the trains over the land like an endless snake, chanting.
Had they conjured up this being, this monster, this ... spirit?
Spirit.
Yes. That's what it was.
The last of the line stood directly in front of him, a short man nearly as wide as he was tall with shiny black hair that from the rear made him look Chinese. Dennis swiveled his head, trying to discern the successive links in the chain, but the line of people was as tangled and complicated as the railroad tracks beneath their feet and it was impossible to tell where it went after the first crossing.
Chain.
Everything that had led them here was part of a chain, a chain of events set in motion well over a hundred years ago. He was part of that chain, and he grabbed the hand of the squat man, then reached around and held Malcolm's hand. For a brief second, he worried that Malcolm might think he was gay- years of social conditioning didn't just disappear, even in a time of crisis-but then Malcolm grabbed the hand of the professor from Denver, who grabbed the housewife's hand behind him.
Dennis considered joining the chant, imitating the words being spoken all around him and echoing to the skies, but it did not feel right. Next to him, Malcolm started his own chant in Mandarin, something that sounded like a prayer to the ancestors, and Dennis followed suit, speaking in Cantonese, repeating the first thing occurring to him that sounded anything at all like the rhythm of the chant: an old nursery rhyme his mother had taught him as a small child. Behind them, the others began doing the same, chiming in with their own personal contributions.
It felt good to be doing this, but it didn't seem to have any real effect. On impulse, he glanced back and saw the end of the line. All of the living were attached, were connected, but . . . but something was wrong; something didn't look right.
The gap.
Yes. There was a gap at the end of the line between a long-haired young man and the train. A missing link in the chain. He was just standing there, right arm dangling uselessly at his side, while the passenger car stood less than a foot away.
The two needed to touch: the line of people and the train. He knew it instinctively, although the feeling was reinforced by that spirit in the sky. Along with the waves of anger and displeasure he sensed from the gigantic being came an understanding, a knowledge that these two opposing forces had to connect.
And it could be done only by someone Chinese.
There were a lot of factors at work here, a whole host of individual actions, links in a chain, that taken together constituted a unified movement, a surging riposte against the power of the past. He looked up at that face in the sky and felt like a game piece on a chessboard. The Native Americans had not conjured up that monstrous spirit, he realized. It had led them here just as it had him.
He let go of the short guy's hand and pulled Malcolm closer, placing the two men's hands together. Neither objected and neither stopped chanting, and indeed Dennis realized he himself was still repeating the nursery rhyme.
He dashed over to the long-haired young man, took the man's right hand in his left ...
Then shoved his own right hand against the side of the passenger car.
The results were immediate. What felt like a bolt of electricity passed through him, although whether it was going from the train to the people or from the people to the train he could not be sure. He knew only that the energy using him as a conduit was powerful, would no doubt, in other circumstances, fry him until he was nothing but a charred pile of ash.