A stinging burnt smell hovered in the air, though there was no sign of smoke or haze. Sulfur, Miles thought, but he didn't want to think about what that meant.
"Let's get out of here," Claire said. Her voice was subdued "We need to get help. Police, National Guard... some body. We can't handle something like this on our own, just the four of us."
"I'm with Claire," Hal admitted.
Miles said nothing. He began walking across the dirt to where the witches' legs stuck up from the ground. There was room enough between the double rows for him to pass, and he proceeded down the gruesome aisle, looking from left to right, trying to determine which pair of legs belonged to his father--and which to Isabella.
He had the feeling she wasn't here
Indeed, looking ahead, he saw a single pair of footprints heading out across the hard ground.
Only they weren't exactly footprints.
There were far too many toes, and the tips produced small round holes in the dirt--like claws or talons.
She was in the canyons, he thought, looking into the distance. She was waiting for them there.
She wanted them to come.
The thought frightened him. He didn't know why a creature with her obviously awesome power would wait around, playing hide-and-seek with a small ragtag group of ill equipped ill-prepared pursuers when she clearly had much bigger plans in mind. But nothing about any of this made sense, it had been irrational and crazy from the start, and he had no trouble accepting that she was doing exactly that.
The others had followed him and caught up. Hal tentatively touched the sole of one Walker's foot. Claire had refused to pass between the twin rows of dead witches and had circled around the aisle to the opposite end.
'2 vote that we ball," Hal said. There was no mistaking the trepidation in his voice.
"Go if you want," Garden said. "We don't need you." 'fflae hell you don't. I'm the only one here who's armed."
"You think that's going to make one damn bit of difference?"
"Look, I'm not going to leave you here. We're all going. There's no reason for this insanity."
= "Fuck you!" Garden said. "Who are you? You just show up here and start giving orders, you self-important asshole." "Knock it off!"
Miles roared, glaring at them both. Garden glared back, though it looked like he was about to cry. "I came here on my own, and I'm going forward on my own. I don't need any of you--"
"My dad's here, too," Miles reminded him.
That shut him up.
No one said anything for a while, and they stood between the protruding legs, looking for signs of positive identification.
Miles saw a slender feminine foot and ankle, a hairy leg with webbed toes. He saw dark skin, freckled skin His father's foot.
He didn't know how he recognized it, but he did, and though it was ragged and water-damaged, he recognized the
pant leg as well. It was the pair Bob had bought at Sears and that he'd helped to pick out. Looking down, he saw his father's waist disappearing into the dirt.
Anger was what he felt most strongly. Hatred. His father should not have been subjected to such outrageous indignity after death. He should have been allowed to rest in peace. Such a callous exploitation of Bob's body made Miles furious and all the more commit tod to catching up with Isabella. Sadness and horror were mixed in as well, but it was anger that motivated him, hatred that spurred him on.
They must have all burrowed in at the same time, he reasoned. May probably crawled into the ground at the exact moment all of the other Walkers had done the same. Which meant that Isabella was probably an hour and a half to two hours ahead of them.
She was moving fast, increasing the distance between them while they dawdled and argued among themselves.
He put down the jar, glanced at his wrist. His watch had stopped. He tapped it, shook it, but the second hand remained stationary, and when he held it to his ear' he heard no tick. It occurred to him that though they had been traveling now for several hours, there'd been no change in the position of the sun shining opaquely through the clouds.
He cleared his throat. "What time is it?" he asked.
Hal looked at his watch. "I don't know. My battery seems to have run down."
"Mine, too," Claire said.
All four of them shared a glance of understanding that negated the need for words.
"We'd better get going," Miles said.
Garden nodded.
Like himself, the young man was probably torn, not wanting to leave his uncle and grandfather half buried in the desert like this, wanting to either bury them completely or bring them back to civilization for proper treatment. But
there was really nothing they could do for the dead right now, and at this point it was more important that they continue their pursuit of Isabella.
Isabella.
The vision hit as before, instantly, totally, placing him in the precise center of the action.
Dams were bursting one after the other, in Arizona, in Utah, in Colorado. He saw them from above, from her point of view, and in serial sequence nearly identical walls of water flooded towns and drowned families in what was the first strike in a massive retaliatory effort.
And then he was in a cave, looking out. He knew this spot. He had seen it before, only then it had been through the eyes of a younger Isabella in an earlier time, and it had been from the doorway of a hut.
The area had changed over the millennia, but there was no mistatdng the peculiar appearance of the rock formations, no disguising the fact that the country outside the cave was the same unique landscape he had viewed from this same vantage point in an unknown era that predated recorded history.
Above the cloud cover, he heard the roar of a military jet.
And then it was over, he was out, he was once again himself. He was facing the horizon, that surreal version of Monument Valley, and he recognized that this was the area he had just seen in the vision. The angle from which he had viewed it could only have originated in the canyons up ahead.
From that direction came the fading sound of a jet above the clouds.
Once again Miles wondered why he was being shown this. As much as he tiled to tell himself that it was coincidental, that he was accidentally tapping into some psychic wavelength like an antenna catching television signals, he could not help feeling that specific knowledge was being provided to him intentionally.
Claire touched his cheek, looked at him with concern. "Are you all right? It looked like you were..." She trailed off, not knowing how to describe what he'd been like for those brief seconds he'd been out.
"I'm free," he assured her. He turned toward Garden and Hal, tried to ignore the legs of his father scissored into the air next to him. "I know where she went," he said. "I know where she is."
Hal's gaze followed the claw-foot tracks into the distance. "How far is it?"
'l'hose canyons up ahead." "You think we'll be able to get there before it gets dark?"
Miles glanced up at the filtered light of the unchanging sun. "Even if it takes all day."
They were all silent.
"What do we do when we get there?" Garden asked finally.
Miles picked up the jar, Started walking. "Don't worry. We'll think of something."
-The land here seemed wrong. The geologic formations of the earth itself were odd and disturbing, containing angles and shapes that appeared nowhere else in nature, and even the consistency of the air seemed different the closer they came to the canyons. The cliffs and crags, the mesas and bluffs, all looked similar to what he had seen from the entryway of the cave, and Miles knew they were approaching their destination.
Isabella's tracks--if that was indeed what they were-had disappeared almost immediately, fading into the increasingly soft sand, but Miles knew the direction in which she'd been headed, and he had no trouble staying on course. They'd been hiking for what felt like the entire afternoon,