Just inside the barricade, a welder worked to erect a wrought iron fence that would soon take the place of the barricade. Painters coated the gate with primer.
The buildings were of the same construction as those outside of the barricade, but here, the brick had been sandblasted clean. The hydrants were painted a cheery orange, and there was not as much as a single candy wrapper in the gutter. A man in front of an appliance store swept dust from the sidewalk. An elderly couple holding hands strolled leisurely down the street and teens hanging out on a street corner greeted the couple with a smile, tipping their caps like boy scouts. A block down, children played in a park that had probably been a syringe-mined vacant lot before Tory’s cleansing presence had mutated everything caught within her sphere of influence. In a sense, a bomb had been dropped on the Miasma; a cleansing salvo that had sanitized the streets, the hearts and souls of those who lived here.
As Martin crossed another spotless intersection, he could see, on either side about a half mile away, other barricades keeping out the rest of the impure world. This place was an oasis in the midst of squalor. An abnormal, unnatural place. It reminded Martin why he was there, and what he had to do.
People nodded him a polite greeting as he passed, but their stares lingered on his bandaged eye a moment too long, and he could read an aftertaste of suspicion. They made it very clear that he was an outsider, unclean in some fundamental way. It wasn’t just his eye, or his rumpled clothes, he realized—it was the fact that he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t possess their particular brand of purity. He was half tempted to go take a piss in some corner, just out of spite—but he didn’t need to draw further attention to himself. Not now, when he was so close.
No one answered at Sharon Smythe’s apartment, and so, following the guard’s advice, he crossed the street to a church, climbing a set of wide stone steps, and entering through a partially open door.
It was a high-ceilinged cathedral. Stained glass pictorials of the life of Christ painted the sanctuary in a colorful mosaic of light, slowly fading as the sun slipped off the horizon.
A man near the entrance was on hands and knees with a scrub brush and bucket, polishing the tile floor in little circles.
“Shoes off!” he demanded as Martin stepped in. “Shoes off!” It took a moment for Martin to realize from the man’s vestments that he was the priest. Martin removed his shoes and left them in a rear pew, then strode slowly down the center aisle.
There was only one congregant in the empty church—a blonde woman of forty, hair beginning to gray at the temples. She sat in the second pew from the front, as if being in the front pew would put her too deep under God’s scrutiny.
“Ms. Smythe?”
The woman didn’t look up. She stayed in her kneeling position, finishing whatever prayer she silently recited. Martin had little patience for it. “I don’t mean to disturb you . . .” he said, loudly enough to make it clear that he did mean to disturb her.
Finally she looked up at him. If she was put off by his bandaged eye, she didn’t show it. “I suppose you’re Mr. D’Angelo.”
Far in the back, the priest grumbled upon finding his shoes in the rear pew, and took them to the entrance mat.
“Don’t mind Father Martinez,” said Sharon Smythe. “He doesn’t have much to do these days. Oh, for a while the place was packed with repentant souls and daily sermons. Now nobody comes to confession anymore. I imagine they’ve all convinced themselves they’re free of sin.”
Martin didn’t care to make small talk, or linger longer than he had to within this sterile field.
“Perhaps we should go back to your apartment, Ms. Smythe—we can make the exchange.”
She looked at the object bulging in his leather carrying case.
“Are you certain that those are my daughter’s ashes?”
“Absolutely.”
She eyed the carrying case a moment more, then she reached beneath her pew. “I have it right here.” From beneath the pew, she pulled out a box, and from inside the box she pulled out an urn. It was a white ceramic vessel, much more appealing than the one Martin had brought.
“Her life was riddled with bad luck,” Sharon Smythe said. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that it wouldn’t end with her death.”
Martin opened his carrying case, and removed his urn, making a point to handle it with more care than he really had. “It was a horrible time. So many had died when the dam burst.”
“I suppose your business was good.”
“We earn our money relieving people’s misery, not creating it.” He held the brass urn out to her, but she didn’t take it.
“I should be heartened to find a funeral home so honest it corrects errors that no one would know about. You didn’t have to tell me I had the wrong ashes—I would never have known.”
He couldn’t pull his eyes from her urn, and wondered if there might be some unholy magic yet in those ashes. “Some funeral homes have more integrity than others. But I give you my personal assurance that Tory has been respectfully cared for, and I regret any further suffering this mix-up may have caused.” He waited for her to accept the exchange, but she still held firmly onto the ceramic urn.
“So where are the papers?” she asked.
“Which papers?”
“The ones I have to sign—the ones that state I won’t sue for gross negligence.”
Martin released a quick impatient breath, then regretted it. He tried to regain a sullen semblance of empathy. “You don’t have to sign anything, Ms. Smythe.”
“Why not?” She looked up from her urn to face him again. There was more than grief in her eyes now—more than bitterness. He could sense distrust coming into focus.
“I was only instructed to bring you your daughter’s ashes. If you have any legal issues, you’ll have to take them up with my employer.”
“I thought you told me over the phone that you were a partner, not an employee.”
“Ms. Smythe, do you want your daughter’s ashes or not?”
She responded by putting her ceramic urn back down into the box, and pushing it under her seat. “It’s funny, Mr. D’Angelo, but at my daughter’s cremation, I didn’t see you there.”
Martin could feel his lies begin to fold in on one another, and he struggled to maintain the facade. “We’re a large mortuary.”
“Another funny thing was how her body was identified,” she continued. “Her bracelet. Her father gave it to her when she was very little—when she still went by his name. The bracelet said ‘Vicki Sanders.’ With so many bodies turning up along the banks of the river, no one gave her name a second thought—and when they contacted me, I wasn’t about to tell them who she really was—not with the way her name was plastered all over the news. But you just called her Tory, Mr. D’Angelo. You knew who she was.”
“Perhaps I should just keep your daughter’s remains, and leave you with a stranger’s,” he said, clinging to his story one final time.
“Do you think I’m stupid, Mr. D’Angelo? You’re a reporter, aren’t you? Either that or just one more nut.”
Martin smiled and took a long look at this woman. He admired smart women. He had married one. And this smart woman’s daughter had been an accomplice in his wife’s murder.
“Are there even ashes in your urn,” she asked in disgust, “or did you just fill it with sand?”
Well, thought Martin, there were times for diplomacy, and times for action. “Coffee grounds, actually.” He stood without warning and swung the brass urn, connecting with the woman’s cheek. She grunted with the blow, and took a breath, about to scream. He swung it again as her scream let loose, rattling the stained glass windows in the cavernous space. The second blow caught her forehead and knocked her to the ground. The lid flew off, sending a spray of earthen-smelling coffee grounds in the air. He came down on top of her as she struggled, pinning her. “This is a house of God, Ms. Smythe,” he reminded her, shouting above her screams. “And I am his messenger.
” Then he brought the dented urn high above his head. “When you don’t kill the messenger, sometimes the messenger kills you.” He brought the edge of the urn down upon her head again in a final killing blow. Then he reached under the pew, and pulled out the white ceramic urn, slipping it into his carrying case. When he stood, there was someone behind him.
“My God! What have you done?”
The priest stood in the aisle behind him, mouth agape, and dripping scrub brush still in hand. Martin found himself laughing at the absurdity of the question. “The Lord’s work,” he answered. “Isn’t it obvious?” He pushed his way past, and strode down the aisle. At the back of the church, he rinsed the blood from his hands in a marble bowl of holy water, then grabbed his shoes at the door.
17. CAUTION TO THE WIND
* * *
DREW HAD ALWAYS KNOWN THAT TORY WAS DEAD. HE HAD been there—he had been the only witness close enough to see her and Michael huddling together in the doorway on the face of the dam as it crumbled around them. There wasn’t a day when Drew didn’t think about it—didn’t dream about it. He would relive it, trying desperately to change the outcome, but it never changed. They died, he survived. Even with a broken collar bone, he had made it to safety, but was unable to help Michael and Tory in their final moments.
Survivor’s guilt—isn’t that what they called it? It became the fuel of all his track victories, personal successes, and personal failures. So, yes, he knew that they were dead, but there was a strange solace in the fact that their bodies had not been found—as if they had been raptured away from a mere mortal demise.
But then they found Michael, or what remained of him after so many months, mysteriously deposited in the desert miles away from the disaster. And now, to find out that Tory was never missing at all—that she was just one of the dead, cremated and sent home a year ago . . . to Drew there was something ignoble about it. Obscene. Such an ordinary end to her extraordinary life.
There was no direct flight from Barstow to Miami. There was no direct flight from Barstow to anywhere. They managed to take a puddle-jumper to Phoenix, as Winston refused to have anything to do with the closer city of Las Vegas. From Phoenix, they got seats on an American flight to Miami, by way of Dallas.
“So what do we do when we get there?” Drew asked Winston as they waited to board in Phoenix.
“How the hell should I know?” was Winston’s response.
“Well, you’re always the one with all the answers.”
“This isn’t Jeopardy!”
“Naah,” said Drew. “They already have the answers. Can’t win Jeopardy! unless you know the questions.”
“I’m working on that, too.”
Before boarding, Drew took out his cell phone and made the dreaded call home. “I’m taking off for a few days,” he told his parents. “Drug run to Columbia,” he joked. “I’ll be back by Tuesday. Wednesday tops.” But when his mother pressed him as to what was really going on, he told her he had to take care of “old business.”
He could practically hear his mother’s knuckles pop as she wrung her hands. They both knew that “old business” meant something to do with the shards—and his five unnatural friends were not discussed in their home.
When he had returned home last October, crushed shoulder and all, it had taken his parents months to be convinced that he hadn’t been brainwashed by a cult. His parents were among the few, the proud, the rational, who refused to accept the bludgeoning of magic the shards had inflicted on the fragile world. What made it even harder for them to wrap their minds around was that their son was an integral part of it. After all, he still went to school, still wise-cracked, still had bed-hair in the morning—he was still their son. How could someone who cavorted with gods still be their son? To his parents, denying the shards was the only way they could keep him. So he never discussed with them his weeks at Hearst Castle, his death, his resurrection, the theft and recovery of his soul.
And so on the rare occasions that Drew invoked the “old business” clause, his parents gave him a wide berth, as a matter of self-preservation.
On the line, he could hear his mother talking to his father in hushed tones. “Does he have enough money?” he heard his father say—quite a change from his father’s standard threat to shut down his credit card. But even if he did, it didn’t matter. He was eighteen now, presider over, if not master of, his own choices, with enough money of his own to do as he pleased.
They didn’t press, they didn’t try to talk him out of going. He was both relieved and disappointed.
“Do something for me, Ma,” he asked before he got off the phone. “Unpack, will ya?” He could imagine his mother still sitting there amidst the storage boxes, still seeking and believing a sensible explanation as to why she was so compelled to box and order her life. She agreed noncommittally, and Drew hung up, pondering the phone long after the connection had severed.
DREW FOUND THE AMERICAN terminal in Dallas to be like one of those nightmares where you keep running but never get anywhere. Five massive terminals boasting more than 150 gates, all of which were equally inaccessible, regardless of which gate you were connecting from. Their connection to Miami was at gate A-19. They had arrived at gate C-23, and naturally, the shuttle train was on the blink.
Moving through the terminal became a study in petit Armageddon. Sky-caps drove golf carts at breakneck speeds with less regard than usual for human life, and gate agents had long since abandoned their facades of officious geniality. The crowds around them were larger and more fractious than the normal airport hordes. There were distraught clusters of waylaid travelers caught in the growing number of flight cancellations and delays that epitomized the times. And there was also a large contingent of vagrants who had taken up residence within the terminal buildings. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.
“Airports are high-maintenance facilities,” Winston explained as they power-walked through the terminal. “As things start to go bad, places like this get hit first.”
“ ‘Go bad’—you make it sound like the world is a container of milk that’s been left out too long.”
They passed a small gaggle of self-proclaimed Colists—one of countless disconnected and misinformed groups that had sprung up like crabgrass in public places, claiming to be followers of Dillon. This particular group had a Santeria flavor, and evoked blood-curses on the beleaguered security guard that tried to roust them. It seemed airport security, which had become so tight after 9/11, had now loosened to an all-time low.
“Eventually,” said Winston, “as things slip further and further into chaos, there won’t be enough employees to keep a place like this running. The airlines will begin to shut down.”
Drew had read just a few weeks ago how United had dropped service to a dozen smaller cities. Apparently it was a sign of things to come. It boggled him to the point that he felt like burying his head in the sand, the way so many others did. “How could the Backwash be responsible for all of this?”
They had reached a moving sidewalk between terminals A and C, and they paused to let Winston catch his breath.
“Great events flow like ripples through civilization,” Winston explained. “Assassinations, bombings. Acts of war. But Dillon—even unintentionally—is far too good at both creation and destruction. What he did to that dam, and that river, was the precise event, in the precise place, at the precise time to hit a pressure point of civilization with such power, it sent out a series of fractures, rather than ripples.”
Drew tried to consider it. He supposed everyone had psychological pressure points—events that can define you, or destroy you . . . but the human race was not a single personality; it was a collection of seven billion disparate identities. To consider some cabalistic interconnectedness of the body human didn’t sit well with Drew. There were simply too many people he did not want to be connected to.
“I don’t know,” Drew said. “It’s all too Jedi for me.”
“It’s not ju
st mysticism,” said Winston. “There’s a logic to it. Everything is a series of actions and reactions. Dillon’s very presence brings order to it—lining things up in a series of chain reactions. What Dillon did—what we all did—not only defies rational explanation, it kills the very concept of rationality. Civilization began with rational thought. Take away that cornerstone and everything crumbles.”
As if to prove Winston’s point, they found their flight cancelled when they reached the gate, adding to the collective misery of the airport hordes.
“Flight crew shortages, and too many travelers,” the gate attendant told them. “It’s like that with all the beach cities; all of a sudden everyone’s going on vacation.”
And so their night was spent in the airport on a wild goose chase to every gate that promised a flight to Miami. But with so much competition, getting on stand-by was like winning the lottery. They watched three flights arrive, watched them all leave, and were no closer to getting a seat.
At 7:00 a.m. they sat in uncomfortable airport chairs on a long stand-by list for the fourth time.
“Why does it even matter if we find Briscoe?” Drew grumbled, wishing he could be home in a comfortable bed. “I mean, yeah, it’d be great if Dillon could take Tory’s ashes and bring her back. But even if Briscoe does get her ashes, it’s not the end of the world.”
“Are you so sure of that?” Winston asked.
After a night with no sleep, Drew didn’t feel like tackling the big questions. “I don’t follow.”
“You told me yourself—Briscoe said he’s on some ‘divine mission.’ Maybe there’s something to that—although I don’t think it’s anything divine.”
“Or maybe he’s just a psycho.”
Winston considered it and shook his head. “I keep having this dream—more like a vision. There’s three figures standing on a ledge and they’re waiting for something. I believe Briscoe is in the dream, too—or at least he used to be. It’s him they’re waiting for.”