The water parted, not spectacularly like the cinematic Red Sea but cheesily, like Universal Studios' recreation of the event for its tourist tram ride, the section of the lake nearest them opening in a narrow wedge. Two by two, they walked out of the water, all of the dead who had walked in. The most recent emerged first, including his father, staring sightlessly forward, moving in a march that was somehow more deliberate and controlled than the gait that had brought them here. It was as if the urgency was gone, as though they were no longer striving to reach a destination but had found it and were now operating under different orders. They seemed like slaves, cowed and beaten into submission, and what Miles felt looking at his father was not fear but pity.
The Walkers in front were wearing wet, raggedy clothes, but the clothes were gone on those who came after, and they stepped nude onto the sand, marching not up the slope toward the parking lot but along the shoreline, away.
"I don't see my uncle," Janet kept repeating, her voice a little-girl whisper. "I don't see my uncle."
"I see my uncle," Garden said. "And I see my gram pa There was dread in his voice.
Rossiter said nothing, but Miles noticed that the agent's revolver was now drawn, and though he didn't think that would help, it somehow made him feel better.
More dead men and women emerged from the parted water.
And she appeared. She's here.
He knew instantly that this was who his father and Janet's uncle had been talking about. This was the person the homeless woman in the mall had been trying to warn him about.
She walked out of the water, naked. Her head was streaked with mud, her tangled, stringy hair green with algae, but like the others, her skin had not been eaten away, and she looked remarkably well preserved for being so long in the lake. Her head was tilted at an odd angle, as though her neck had been broken. While she was inarguably beautiful, there was something terribly off about her face, a wildness, an alien ness in her expression that filled him with fear. He did not know who she was, but she had an undeniable aura of power. Isabella.
The name came to him, from where he did not know, but he understood that it was hers. His feeling that she was somehow behind everything solidified.
She turned her tilted head, looked at him And he was at a crossroads in the moonlight, watching through Isabella's eyes as she approached the hanging body of a witch. The woman, a hag with a wild mane of gray hair, had been stripped naked and was dangling from a frayed rope attached to a lightning-struck oak. There was a faint glow about the witch, the remnants of power that were no doubt invisible to ordinary eyes, and this was what Isabella desired. There were no people anywhere near this cursed place, and even the lights of far-off villages had been
extinguished, so late was the hour. She crawled, unhampered and unseen, up the tree to cut down the body, and when it fell, she jumped on top of it. Her lips closed over the corpse's open mouth, and she began drawing in the extant power, at the same time sucking out blood and bile and bits of half digested food. It was the energy Isabella needed, desired, and he felt the strenghtening within her as her body absorbed the witch's dark force, extracting it from the dead body in the only way possible.
And then he was in an Anasazi village, Isabella taking the community's shaman in front of the shaman's brethren as part of a ceremony, draining the body through the palms of the old man's hands, wanting only the energy, but taking the blood as well in order to support the preconceived notions of the audience. Isabella was nude and moaning, allowing the blood to spatter her breasts, her stomach, her hairy crotch. The people watching prayed and chanted, giving thanks, and as she ingested the last of the man's essence, the shivers of orgasm passed through her loins.
Then the village was gone, and he was in a dark hut in which a man of power practiced his arts. The man was kneeling before a statue he had carved, the statue of a god in the shape of an asparagus. On the floor beside him lay dead women, nude and with their legs spread, stalks of asparagus protruding from their private parts. It was late spring, asparagus season, and outside men harvested the vegetables as their wives and daughters, caged in bamboo boxes, squirmed and screamed and begged to be released.
This was a different earth, an older earth, because the la rut outside was unlike anything existing today, the mountains on the horizon too tall and oddly shaped, the sky and the dirt of the fields different in color than they should have been.
Isabella had fed recently, so there was no reason to partake of the man's power. Instead, she knelt with him, the two
of them speaking in unison, praying to this an cent god, then crawling across the floor to where the prepared bodies lay. She crouched before the first dead woman, said the Words, shoved her head between the cold thighs, and started eating the asparagus.
Then he was in a huge black cave with naked men and women and creatures that had never seen the light of day, monsters that had never been drawn by the hand of man, had never emerged from even the most fervid imaginations of the world's most profane illustrators. The floor was mud, dirt mixed with blood rather than water, and Isabella was standing in the center of the cave, legs spread, arms in the air, howling. The men and women were cowed in terror before her, and she reached down, picked up one of the scuttling creatuers and ate it, crunchy slimy albino skin popping between her teeth as she chewed the unholy flesh.
She howled again, grabbed another little monster, ripped it apart with her teeth, and swallowed its essence. She cried out, an inarticulate cry of hunger and pain, and this time she leaped upon a larger creature, a segmented, multi-legged, multi mouthed multi-eyed monstrosity that squealed at her touch and attempted to right her off.
She subdued it easily, bit into the rubbery skin of its back, and killed it. "
She howled. =
And then the visions were over. He was once again here, himself, and Miles looked quickly around. Only a second had passed. He was exactly where he'd been, nothing had moved, nothing had changed. He felt dizzy, disoriented. He was not sure what had happened, but some sort of connection had been made between himself and this woman. He did not know how or why, but she had allowed him to glimpse what? Her memories? Her fantasies? Her plans? Her past? :!;
A quick look at Janet and Gardii and Rossiter told him that none of them had experienced anything similar. What 312 ever the phenomenon was, it had been reserved solely for him.
Isabella had emerged completely out of the water and was walking on the sand. She turned toward him, smiled chillingly And the vision hit.
The dam blew apart, Wolf Canyon Lake draining out in a tidal wave hundreds of feet high, emptying through the mountains and onto the desert below, completely wiping out a small town, the bodies of hundreds of people washing onto the plain.
Destruction spread across the land.
Phoenix was buried under a massive sandstorm that covered the entire Southwest and engulfed Albuquerque and Las Vegas as well. New York was in flames, the teeming streets filled with fleeing people with no place to run. Chicago sank into the ground while the waters of Lake Michigan rushed in to fill the hole. Los Angeles was shaking from an endless earthquake that seemed intent on leveling every manmade structure in the state .... As before, he saw it all through her eyes, and in a flash of insight, he realized that she had lived here at Wolf Canyon.
She had been one of the witches buried under the lake when the town was flooded.
The vision faded.
He staggered backward. Part of him wanted to shoot her, tackle her, but that was a small stupid part and it was overruled by common sense and good old-fashioned fear. Unlike the other Walkers, she was not merely an automaton. She was not following orders. She was the one giving them, carrying out her well-thought-out plans.