“So what were those things back there?”
I ran my fingers over the panel. Dried blood flaked off under my touch and drifted to the scorched deck.
“I don’t know,” I told Cal. “Have you ever seen anything like them?”
“Never,” he said. “Not even down in the Lovecraft sewers.”
They could have come from the Mists, but the things that lurked there were generally alive.
I turned on the aether feed experimentally, but it was dead. We had no navigation systems, just my eyes. The fans clattered, causing more smoke to billow around us and deposit a layer of soot on our exposed skin.
The ship lurched forward when I opened the throttle, and I moved the yoke until the pitch and yaw arrows lined up. I locked the yoke in place and set the compass to true west. At least this way we wouldn’t crash. I kept us lined up with the mountains, tracking the sun as it made its way behind them.
“Aoife?” Cal said. “You all right?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t get the pirate’s face out of my mind, the spray of red, the stench as I’d thrust my hand into his rib cage. I knew in my gut the pirate had been human once, before he’d crashed into the desert. Only to rise again as … what?
Looking skyward, I saw the blot of the Gate that would admit the Great Old Ones and move them into the same sphere as the living world, until they landed upon the earth. The blot was the size of a silver dollar now, larger than the sun by half and impossible to ignore.
You did this, it whispered to me. You’re the cause of all of this—the dead rising, the dreams that are driving people mad.
Crow, the figure who lived in the place of dreams where only a Gateminder could visit, had told me their influence could herald a golden age … or the end.
Judging by what had happened on the airship, it was definitely the latter.
Cal squeezed my shoulder. “We’ll be all right,” he said. “I mean, how hard can it be to get to San Francisco? Not like it’s easy to miss.”
He thought I was worried about piloting, about finding our way to the West Coast, and I let him think that. Eventually, I’d have to admit to Cal, and to myself, the price I’d paid to get my mother back. The price I might have made the world pay. I didn’t know what the Old Ones would do when they arrived, but their influence led me to think it couldn’t be anything that would help the world.
The Iron Land was torn enough as it was—the country was in disarray since Draven’s disappearance, people were openly defying the Proctors, and those were just the obvious changes.
I stared out the windscreen again, watching the desert pass beneath us and trying not to think about what would happen when we landed.
We flew over Las Vegas in the dark, a glittering handful of jewels flung on the carpet of the desert around it, past the black, mirrored expanse of Lake Mead and over the Hoover Dam, aether rising from the refineries it powered in blue, silver and purple streams that buffeted the airship. It made me feel as if I were inside a vast dome made of light.
I didn’t sleep, just sat on the edge of the deck and watched the land glide beneath us while Cal kept an eye on the instruments. I let myself imagine just for a few hours that I’d left my troubles on the ground and when I landed I’d know exactly what to do—about the return of the Old Ones, about getting Dean back, about everything.
The illusion lasted until the airship’s balloon bladders started to lose pressure somewhere over eastern California as the sun was coming up. Relieved that it was at least light out, I started looking for a place to land. Flat land wasn’t in short supply—the earth below was barren, and I followed a dirt highway that was little more than jitney tracks carved out of scarred beige dirt, the sunrise already pale and waning as the day started.
My landing wasn’t going to win any awards, but I managed to deflate the balloon enough that we simply set down, without needing to tie the ship up and use a ladder to reach the ground. It was all I could have hoped for—I was lucky we hadn’t broken to pieces. Reaching San Francisco in the ship had been a pipe dream.
Cal and I stumbled back to the earth, and he squinted up at the sun. “This is cracked. We need to find food and water. And shade.” Ghouls were nocturnal creatures—even in human skin, they didn’t do well in direct sunlight.
“I know,” I said. The road was below us, down a slope covered in scrub and loose gravel. We just had to follow the jitney tracks. “Come on,” I said. “We follow the road long enough, we’re bound to find someone.”
We’d lost everything—my pack, Cal’s bags, all of our meager cash. Walking was our only option.
A sign, pockmarked with buckshot, announced that we were fifteen miles from Bakersfield. “We can make it that far,” I told Cal. “And then we’ll figure something out.”
He sighed, but wrapped his shirt around his head to keep off the sun and trudged after me. That was what I liked about Caclass="underline" the situation might be dire and he might be hating every minute of it, but he’d stick by me until the journey was done, and he complained a heck of a lot less than my brother would have.
Thinking of Conrad made me think of being in Arkham, what had happened to my father and how it was likely my fault.
I just had to get Dean back, and then I could help Archie. My dad would have to wait. I could deal with only one crisis at a time.
It took us half a day to get to Bakersfield, and we were parched, sweaty and covered in soot and dust by the time we stumbled into a jitney way station.
A fan made lazy, ineffective turns overhead, and the tile walls and floor put me in mind of a doctor’s office or a madhouse dayroom, a place where nobody could get too comfortable.
A lunch counter, studded with silver rivets across the front, sat to one side and a ticket window to the other. Since we didn’t have any money, I headed for the counter.
The woman behind it regarded us suspiciously from under a severe bun. “Yeah?”
I sat down, and noticed that soot and dust shook off my clothes as I did. Her frown deepened. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Could we please have some water?”
She pointed at a hand-lettered sign. “Five cents.”
“Oh, come on,” Cal said. “We got stranded and we just walked from the back of beyond.” He gave her his best gee-whiz look. “We only need one glass. We can share.”
The woman pointed again. “Water rationing’s been going on for months now. Five cents.”
“Forget it,” I told Cal, glaring at the woman with at least as much force as the look she gave me. “Some people just aren’t helpful.”
I looked at the arrival and departure board above the ticket window, and then turned to leave. There was nothing for us here.
“Hey,” the clerk said. She was younger but bore a startling resemblance to the witch behind the lunch counter, minus the severe bun and the canyon-sized frown lines.
“What?” I sighed. “We’re leaving, all right?”
“No,” she said. “You should clean up before you go. In the washroom.” She pointed to a blue door in the far wall. “Plenty of water there,” she said in a low, conspiratorial way. “Hasn’t been filtered, so it tastes like dirt, but it won’t do nothin’ bad to you.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
Washing off and getting a drink sounded like heaven, but I let Cal go first, to spend a little time in a cool room without any windows. I was sure he needed it more than I did.
“You all have an accident?” the ticket girl asked.
“You might say that,” I said. “We had a long walk, that’s for sure.”
“Sometimes folks come in’ll give you a few cents for toting their luggage,” she said. “Fare to Folsom is only fifty cents, and they have a wire office where you can have someone send you money.”