The man leaned into the light. It was the priest. The greens and blues of the ocean patio drained into the endless seas of sand that surrounded them. Bob found himself staring into the priest’s face, into his creased wrinkles and dark eyes.
“Can we focus on practical things?” complained Bob. “I’m getting tired of—” He stumbled, sending a cascade of sand down the face of the dune whose ridge they were laboring along. Ahead, wave upon wave of sand disappeared into the distance, starkly lit by monochromatic moonlight.
“I wasn’t saying anything.” The priest turned and began walking again, his footsteps sure and measured. “You were muttering nonsense. I just asked if you were all right.” The rags hanging around the priest’s withered frame flapped back and forth with each step.
“You were just talking to me.” Bob staggered forward. “I was trying to relax, and you were talking. Why won’t you just let me be?”
Nearly a day ago, in the early morning twilight of their escape, they put several miles of trackless desert behind them before the alarm was raised. The priest led the way, to a secret oasis, he’d said, somewhere hidden.
Somewhere safe.
“You hide in the worlds in your head,” murmured the priest. “For this small suffering”—he motioned at the sand around them—“you throw this world away for another.”
Bob’s skin was blistered. Even in the cool night air it was burning. When they escaped, the morning sun had climbed and climbed into the sky, and he had no protection. He’d heard that a Bedouin could walk for a hundred miles through the open desert, but hearing about a thing was different than experiencing this scorching hell. He could almost feel the frail bubble of his immune system failing as he tracked the ultraviolet-radiation damage to his skin cells, commandeered his autonomous nervous system to retain moisture, watched his neurological signals scatter as he dehydrated. And so he retreated into the private worlds in his head, leaving his body in low-power autopilot to follow the priest.
“Why do you care?” Bob followed the priest footstep by footstep. “All you talk about is the end of the world.”
After escaping, he’d fed the rat to a Nubian vulture. He watched it tear the shrieking creature apart and gulp it in down in pink lumps. He had no choice. He needed information. By flitting into the vulture’s mind as the rat’s precious smarticles transferred into it, he got a sense of the magnetic fields in the area. Bob sent the vulture aloft to map out the terrain to the south.
Of course Toothface chased them, sending out drones into the sky and sandbots to climb through the dunes. Using the vulture, soaring high in the sky, Bob weaved between the searchers. The priest was a master at finding hollows, places to hide, disappearing as if he weren’t even there. They walked, ran, and scrambled to hide all day under the relentless sun.
All the water was long gone. Bob closed up the pores in his skin to keep every molecule of water he could in his body. This acted to heat his core more, raising his central body temperature. His body and brain were frying and on the verge of total neurological failure when the setting sun finally brought relief.
The priest didn’t even turn as he spoke, his words carried to Bob on the sirocco, the never-ending wind that blew through the deep desert. “What’s your idea of Nirvana?”
Bob whispered from between cracked lips, “Heaven?”
“Perhaps. It literally means extinction, like a candle being snuffed out.”
Bob wasn’t sure what was worse, the heat, the priest’s mouth, or the wind—none of them ever stopped. The wind was a biting aerial sandpaper that wore down the skin and stung the eyes, filling them with grit and gunk. When he closed his eyes, Bob saw the face of the man he killed, the life draining away, felt the way his hand had stuck to the dagger, glued there by the man’s blood.
“Have you seen the signs?” asked the priest.
Bob groaned. He shouldn’t have followed the priest. They were heading due south—that much he could infer from the position of the stars in the sky—but his internal data systems were failing. Soon he’d have to rely on his meat-mind, and he was worried about what was left in it.
The priest walked on, gliding across the sand as Bob trudged behind.
“Soon all will be revealed—the apocalypse—one thing changing into another, the world spinning into a vortex…”
“You mean the singularity?” It was a popular topic with the doomsdayers.
“The singularity, the apocalypse, the revealing, all different names of the same thing,” replied the priest. “Vishnu, the destroyer, and Shiva, the rebuilder, different faces of the same reality—all avatars of the same being.”
Bob was beyond exhausted. “How much further to the oasis?” Maybe he could pinpoint his location.
“It is not the destination that is important,” answered the priest, “but the journey.”
Bob stopped, leaning over, his head spinning. “I’m grateful and all”—he looked up at the priest—“but could you please stop with the metaphysics lessons?”
The priest stopped in his tracks, balanced on the knife edge of the dune whose ridge top snaked before them into the distance. “This is a fine line we are treading.” He motioned toward the inky blackness to their left and right where the dune slid into the depths. “On both sides the abyss. You are from Atopia, yes?”
This old Bedouin nomad probably heard that from Toothface. Bob nodded, expecting more religious nonsense.
“Jimmy Scadden must be stopped.”
Despite the heat, the hair prickled on Bob’s arms. “Wha… what?”
“I am not some old fool.” The priest stood up straight. His body seemed to tower over Bob. “I live in this world too. I am, like you, a prisoner trying to break free.” His eyes glowed in moonlight. “And I know things you do not.”
“What do you know about Jimmy?” Bob took a few deep lungfuls of air. Had he miscalculated this old guy? “Tell me about Jimmy,” he managed to gasp out between labored breaths.
“All in good time.” The priest leaned over and put a hand on Bob’s shoulder.
Bob felt a soothing calm.
Turning, the priest continued. “We have a long journey.”
“How much—”
“It is not the destination,” interrupted the priest, “but—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it, the journey.”
The horizon to his left was beginning to lighten, and their pace quickened as the flaming sword of the sun began to rise again.
14
Flames from fires atop abandoned buildings reflected in the dark waters as Vince raced across the submerged streets. Pregnant clouds hung overhead, threatening rain, and tendrils of smoke crawled between the abandoned buildings, the smell acrid like burned flesh. Vince gulped huge mouthfuls of air, his eyes tearing up as he stared straight ahead and gripped the frame of the battered aluminum airboat.
“Indigo,” shouted the small man driving the boat, and Vince looked away from the murky waterscape rushing toward them. “Your name, yeah?”
“My family used to farm it down here, generations ago.” The small man wasn’t an Ascetic. Vince guessed he was a worker on the sludge farms, making extra on the side driving taxi boats at night.
The man nodded. “Oh, I know.”
The noise of the engine, just inches behind Vince’s head, was deafening. Did he hear that right? “What do you mean, you know?” he yelled back.
“I know you from here.”
“I’m not from here, I’m from Boston,” shouted Vince over the roar of the airboat.
Shaking his head the man looked out into the darkness. “Oh no, you from here, otherwise, we wouldn’t be goin’ where we goin’.”
Vince paused. “And where is that?” In the background, Hotstuff was plotting possible paths and destinations, gathering as much information as she could.