“He is very close to death.” Joe’s voice was low. “I have done what I can for him.”
“We’ve got to get him to a hospital!”
“A hospital cannot help him now. And anyway, there is no hospital. Not for thirty miles. Even if we could carry him there, he would be dead before we arrived.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
“You are going to eat and drink.”
“I don’t want anything.”
Joe’s eyes flared. “This boy risked his life to take you out of Silent Creek. You won’t help him by sitting there dehydrating. He wanted to take you back to your mother and I will make sure that happens. But for now you must trust me.”
“Can you help him?”
“I have already helped him. I have called for the shaman. The shaman will be here soon.”
Daniel nodded. There was a bottle of water and a basket containing fruit, bread and some sort of dried meat. He forced himself to eat. Joe was right. He could hardly believe it but the nightmare of Silent Creek was finally behind him – and it was all thanks to this boy he had never met but who somehow knew his mother. He glanced across at the silent figure. He remembered the moment when the bullet had hit him as they sped out of the compound. It seemed so unfair. One more minute and they would have been away.
The morning wore on. The sun rose, becoming ever hotter. Jamie had been placed in the shade, protected by a great boulder. Daniel was worried that someone would find them – the police must surely be looking for them by now – but Joe seemed unconcerned. Yet of course, Native Americans had spent years hiding in the mountains. Not being found had been the only way for many of them to survive.
A little before midday, there was a movement and a figure appeared, on horseback. At first it was difficult to see who it was. The sun was behind the person, who seemed to shimmer, out of focus, as the warm air rose up from the ground. Joe sprang to his feet, relief flooding into his face. Daniel understood.
It was the shaman. The medicine man.
The horse and its rider seemed to take for ever to reach them, struggling against both the steepness of the slope and the heat of the day. Daniel saw the shaman kicking at the horse, but not very hard and with little effect. At last the figure drew close and he was able to see the man in whom Joe had such faith. He wasn’t impressed.
The shaman was one of the oldest men Daniel had ever seen. He had the sort of face one would have expected to see on a corpse, the skin withered and yet at the same time stretched tight over the skull. What few teeth he had left seemed to be on the edge of falling out. His arms were emaciated and there was a hollow in his throat you could have put your fist into. His hair was silver. It was long, hanging down to his shoulders, but tied with a piece of black ribbon. Only the shaman’s eyes were truly alive. They were grey in colour but seemed to shine with an inner strength.
Very slowly, he climbed down from the horse. Joe was still standing there, his hands clasped in front of him, his eyes turned down.
“Goddamn horse!” The shaman turned and spat. “I’ve only been on it a couple of hours and I swear I’ve been sitting on a cactus.” He turned to Joe. “Don’t just stand there, Joe Feather. Make me a cup of tea! And I wouldn’t say no to a piece of pie if you happen to have one.”
It was only now he heard the voice that Daniel realized the shaman was not a man but a woman. Her body had reached such a stage of decay that it was hard to tell the difference. Suddenly he felt her eyes on him.
“You Danny?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Danny wasn’t sure what to call her.
“How long they keep you in that prison of theirs?”
“I was there for thirty weeks and three days.”
“You counted every one of them.” She shook her head. “There’s evil people in this world. People who don’t deserve to walk the land and that’s the truth. Now, let’s take a look at this boy.”
Her manner changed as she approached the silent figure of Jamie. She knelt down beside him and rested a gnarled hand against his forehead. Joe was busying himself with a kettle but she called out to him. “Forget that, Joe. Come and help me turn him.”
Joe hurried over and the two of them turned Jamie onto his side. The back of his T-shirt was saturated with blood. Daniel could see the hole where the bullet had gone in. The shaman examined the entrance wound, touching it gently with the tip of her finger.
“Is it bad?” Joe asked.
“It’s bad. It couldn’t be much worse. The first thing we’re going to have to do is get that bullet out. Lucky you’ve got a fire burning. We’re going to need that.”
“Is he going to live?”
The shaman shook her head as if dismissing the question. She turned to Daniel. “I want you to go back into the tepee,” she said. “I know you want to stay and help, but there’s nothing you can do and this is something no young child should have to see.”
“Please…” Daniel wanted to argue, but one look at the old woman’s eyes told him not to waste his time. He did as he was told.
The shaman nodded at Joe. “Take off his shirt.”
Joe knelt down beside Jamie. He didn’t try to pull the shirt over Jamie’s head. Instead, he used a knife to cut the material, then ripped it apart, exposing the wound. The skin was bright red and puffed up around the bullet hole. Meanwhile, the shaman went back to the horse and untied a leather bag that had been strapped to the saddle. As she returned to the unconscious boy, she opened it and took out some muslin packets tied with strips of sinew, some bowls, two glass bottles and a wooden wand, about ten centimetres long, with an eagle carved at one end. Finally she produced a knife. Joe looked at it and winced. There was nothing ancient about the knife. It was a straightforward surgical scalpel.
She caught his eye. “The spirits will only do so much,” she said. “To start with, we have to cut the bullet out.”
Joe nodded.
“Tell me when my tea is ready,” the shaman said.
She leant over Jamie and made the first cut.
Daniel waited for as long as he could. He tried to sleep, but now that the sun was up it was too hot, even in the shade of the tepee. He wished he could talk to his mother but he doubted that the shaman carried a cell phone – and anyway it was the wrong time to ask. Perhaps he did manage to doze off in the end, because the next thing he knew, there were long shadows falling across the tepee and the heat seemed to have lessened. Once again, he crawled out through the flap not sure what he expected to find.
Joe was sitting next to Jamie, who looked no better than he had the last time Daniel had seen him. He was lying on his side with a dressing over the wound. The shaman had made some sort of poultice. Daniel could both smell it and see it, seeping through the bandages. The shaman herself was further down the slope, on her knees, facing the sun. It was late in the afternoon. The sky was already tinged with red. The campfire was still burning, sending a thin trickle of smoke up towards the clouds.
“How is Jamie?” Daniel asked.
Joe turned round angrily. “Stop!” he said. “You must not say his name.”
“Why not?”
“It is our practice. When someone dies, you mustn’t speak their name for four days.”
“When someone… ?”
The full impact of what Joe had just said hit Daniel. “You mean…” He forced himself to finish the sentence. “He’s dead?”
There was a long silence. Then Joe spoke. “We took the bullet out,” he said. “The shaman cleaned the wound with yarrow and other herbs. But there was nothing more she could do. He has crossed to the other side.”
Daniel felt the tears well up in his eyes. He looked down at Jamie lying there, at peace. He couldn’t believe that it had ended like this. He had met Scott, Jamie’s twin brother. The two of them were so alike. When Jamie had come into the cell the night before, it had been like the beginning of a new friendship, the first chapter in a story that still had pages to run.
And now??
?
“I thought…” Daniel began. His voice choked. He turned away and looked at the old woman, who was muttering something, holding the little wand in her hand.
“What’s she doing?” he asked.
“You mustn’t ask questions,” Joe replied. Then, more gently, he continued. “She is doing what she can. She is using powerful magic. Summoning up what we call we ga lay u. Her spirit power.”
“What is that? I don’t understand.”
Joe’s eyes narrowed. “The medicine men get their powers from helpers who give them guidance in their work. They take many forms – but always animals or birds. This woman may not look it but she is very strong. She is not from my tribe but she is famous. You saw her wand with the wooden carving. Her spirit power is the eagle.”
“But if he’s dead…”
“The eagle is the only spirit power that can cross over and bring him back. It is so powerful that none of my people will even keep one eagle feather in their house. It can do too much harm. But she has summoned it to help her. Look…”
Joe pointed.
Daniel didn’t see it at first, and when he did he wasn’t sure if he was imagining it. A bird was swooping down, flying directly out of the sun as if it had just been born in the flames. As it descended, it cried out, a sound that echoed across the mountains. It didn’t land, but flew over them in a circle.
The shaman raised her arms. Her spirit power had heard her call and it had come.
The eagle circled twice more, then soared back into the sky.
SCAR
This time it wasn’t a dream. Jamie was sure of that much. There was no sea and no island, no seven foot tall man waiting to deliver a cryptic message. And anyway, the world he now found himself in was too real. He wasn’t just seeing it: he could feel it and smell it too. And it was cold. He rubbed his hands together and found himself shivering. It wasn’t possible to feel cold in dreams – was it?
He looked up. Wherever he was, it certainly wasn’t Nevada. The desert sky had been an intense blue by day, the deepest black with a scattering of stars by night. The sky here was a strange mixture of colours, as if someone had spilled a dozen different pots of paint – but it was predominantly grey and red with dense, writhing clouds and no sign of any sun. Jamie took in the ancient trees, which could have been carved out of stone rather than wood; the wild, swaying grass; the twisted rock formations. Not only was he not in Nevada, he wasn’t even in America. Even the breeze was wrong: slow and sluggish and smelling of cinders, wet mud and … something else.
Where was he?
He tried to remember what had happened. He had been standing in the back of a truck which had managed to break through the prison fence, but then he had been shot. He remembered the searing pain as the bullet entered his back, just next to his shoulder. He had felt his legs fail him and had collapsed onto the floor of the truck. That was all. He had thought he’d heard someone shouting, but then the darkness had closed in.
Until now.
He looked around and saw that he was surrounded by corpses. There were dozens of them, lying broken and twisted as if some unstoppable force had scythed through and killed them all in the same instant. With a growing sense of horror, Jamie stumbled to his feet and limped over to the nearest. They were all men, dressed in the same shades of brown and grey. Soldiers. He could see that now. But not modern ones, not like the soldiers he had seen on the TV news, waving and putting their thumbs up on their way to some faraway war.
These men were wearing strange clothes: long jackets that came down to their knees and loose-fitting trousers. Some were hooded, the dark material sweeping round their heads and over their shoulders. They didn’t seem to have any guns. Instead they’d been armed with swords and shields, but even these were like nothing he had ever seen before. The shields were small and round with a single spike sticking out so they could be used either for defence or to stab anyone who came close. The swords were different shapes: some straight, some curving, some with multiple blades. There were arrows all around but they were made of metal, not wood, and with some sort of black leaves taking the place of feathers.
They had all been mutilated. Some were almost unrecognizable as human beings. As the smell of the freshly spilled blood rose in his nostrils, Jamie turned and threw up, then staggered away, desperate to hide himself, to try and make sense of what he was seeing.
He had woken up near a ruined building perched on a hill. It loomed high above him, built out of red bricks and shaped like a giant thumb with a curving terrace where the nail should have been. There was a wooden door hanging off its hinges and, inside, a spiral staircase leading up from what had once been a circular entrance hall. The fortress – for that was surely what it was – had recently been set on fire. Parts of it were still smouldering and it was obvious that the men in front of him had died trying to defend it.
Still nauseous and disorientated, Jamie stumbled over the rubble until he reached the entrance, resting his hand against the door frame. He winced. The wood was too hot to touch. Rubbing his palm, he continued round the back of the building, away from the dead bodies. He found a patch of grass and sat down, forcing himself to keep control. His heart was beating twice as fast as it should have been. There was a foul taste in his mouth and his head was spinning. He wanted to be sick again but there was nothing left in his stomach.
It was now that he realized he was no longer wearing his own clothes. Someone had re-dressed him in a coarsely woven grey shirt that was buttoned up to the neck without a collar. There was a leather belt outside the shirt, above his waist. His feet were bare. He looked very much like all the dead men around him.
Except he was alive.
Or was he? It suddenly occurred to him that he might have been killed trying to escape from Silent Creek and that this might be the result. Jamie had read bits of the Bible. He’d been to church a few times. Marcie had forced it all on him and Scott as part of their home-schooling. He knew about heaven and hell, although he’d never believed in either of them. Now he wondered if maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe this was hell. There were no flames and no devils with horns, but hellish was exactly the word to describe where he was right now. This could be the place where bad people went after Judgment Day.
But he knew it wasn’t true.
He reached behind him and tried to find the place where the bullet had entered his back. But there was no sign of any wound, and even as he moved he knew he wouldn’t find one. He wasn’t in pain. It was as if the gunshot had never happened.
“I’m alive!” He whispered the words to himself as if hearing them could somehow prove them to be true. He turned his hands towards his face and flexed his fingers. They obeyed him. His stomach felt hollow and his throat was raw, but otherwise he was fine.
So if this wasn’t a dream and he wasn’t dead, could he be suffering some sort of hallucination? He’d seen that sort of thing on TV, in science-fiction programmes. A woman in a car accident hits her head and wakes up somewhere weird. She thinks it’s real, but in fact she’s just imagining it and she’s really in a coma in a hospital bed. That was more likely. Jamie lowered his hands and gazed around him again. The great tower did not look like a hallucination. There was one way to make sure. He gritted his teeth, counted to three and slammed his fist into the brickwork. He yelled out loud. It hurt! He looked down and saw blood on his knuckles. Well, surely that had to prove something. He swore quietly to himself and licked the wound.
Was it possible that he had been knocked unconscious on the way out of the prison? Could it be that Colton Banes or Max Koring had captured him again and brought him here as a punishment? No. That didn’t work either, because “here” was too different. The bullet wound had gone. And what about all these dead bodies, lying there in their strange clothes? Some sort of war had taken place. And he had just woken up on the losing side.
There was no simple explanation. Jamie realized that he had to accept the situation as it was and try to make the
best of it. After all, his entire life had been completely insane, from the day he’d been abandoned in a cardboard box and left on the edge of Lake Tahoe to the time he’d found himself being chased across America for two crimes he hadn’t committed. He was a freak. A mind-reader. He’d learned to live with all of that, so why not this? Somehow, in some impossible way, he had been transported to another place … maybe even another planet. And it seemed that he was on his own, the only living person for perhaps miles around. He could stay here, cowering in the corner, or he could move on.
There was no choice really. It was time to go.
He wiped his mouth on his arm, then stood and began to make his way down the hill. The further he went, the more bodies littered his path, until he found himself stepping over them, doing his best to avoid treading on them while at the same time trying not to look too closely. The wounds were too horrible.
The battlefield stretched on all the way down to the bottom of the hill and beyond. Jamie saw more broken swords and shields. He came upon a young, fair-haired man pinned to a tree by a spear that had gone straight through him. The man was holding some sort of flag – a blue five-pointed star in a circle set against a white background. Jamie began to understand. This was like one of those battles he had seen at the movies. All these dead men could have been warriors. But who had they been fighting? Their enemies, whoever they were, had been utterly ruthless. It was possible that they had taken prisoners, but they had left nobody alive on the field.
Jamie looked further down the hill. The field stretched on towards the horizon, which formed an almost invisible line between the darkening sky and the grass. Even though he had moved away from the fortress, the smell of burning was growing stronger and he realized that the clouds were actually smoke, that something huge – a town or a city – had burned a short while ago and that although the fire might now be out, it had left a pall that had smothered the sky. If so, this battle was probably one of many. And the carnage might stretch on for miles.