“Sir? Uh—no.”
“A sound like breaking glass?”
“No, sir.”
Sound carries a distance in this still air, Tyler thought, across this dry prairie. He took a shallow breath, listening, but there was only silence.
“Hurry everybody along,” he said. “Breakfast is over. We have business to attend to.”
“Sir,” Joey said.
* * *
William heard the engines come to life one by one, though he couldn’t see the truckstop from this window.
I know, Rosa assured him. Soon now.
There was not much margin, the boy thought, on this brink of time.
* * *
The caravan of RVs made its way up the private road and parked in a ponderous line outside the Connor farmhouse.
Abby Cushman liked the look of the house. It was a fancy two-story frame house, a comforting contrast to the range land all around it. It occupied its space with a doughty colonial dignity.
The front door was unlocked. Abby filed in behind Colonel Tyler and his lieutenants. The inside of the house was nice, too, she thought—though a broken window in the living room had let in the wind and tumbled some of the contents.
This big, central room was decorated in a southwest/Hopi style that had been fashionable some years ago and seemed curiously misplaced on a northern prairie. Pattern rugs, beige walls, a long sand-colored sofa, and Kachina dolls on a sideboard; squat porcelain lamps. She wondered who had lived here. Someone dislocated, Abby thought. Someone out of place.
Colonel Tyler had gone off to investigate the kitchen and the cellar for supplies. Abby said, “I’ll check upstairs,” to Matt Wheeler, who was helping a breathless Miriam Flett into a chair.
It was odd that William wasn’t with her. The old woman and the boy were almost inseparable these days. Come to think of it, Miriam had been acting strangely for days.
She thought of asking, thought better of it. Mind your own business, Abby. There had been much discontent in camp lately, and none of it was mysterious. This journey had demonstrated all too graphically the emptiness of the world and the inadequacy of the human temperament. America is as empty as an old cup, Abby thought, and the best we can do by way of survivors is a cowardly old man like Tom Kindle.
Unpleasant thought.
She hurried upstairs to a carpeted hallway, cool and dim, and three closed doors—the bedrooms, Abby supposed.
* * *
William heard the rattle of the doorknob behind him. Rosa—
I know, she said. She took a step—a delicately balanced pirouette—toward the window. He felt her unsteadiness. Thank you, she said. Whatever happens.
So accustomed had Abby grown to the vacancy of the world that she was astonished, above all else, to find the second bedroom occupied. “William!” she said.
Then she looked at the window… at the thing in front of the window.
It was a delicate silhouette in the morning light. She thought at first it must be a kind of decoration—some eccentric assemblage of cellophane panels meant to break the morning light into these fractions of purple and blue. But then it moved. It was alive, somehow organic… she discovered eyes, a sort of face.
William raised his fingers to his lips, a child’s Be quiet! And Abby stifled an urge to cry out.
“Don’t be afraid,” the boy whispered.
But of course she was afraid. She saw the broken cocoon on the faded bedspread. It was an insect thing. Abby had never liked insects. Her older brothers used to torment her with caterpillars. The cocoon on the bed implied that this creature was a kind of human bug, and the idea was so distasteful that Abby wanted to flee the room or call out for help.
William appeared to sense her distress. “Abby,” he said—it was the first time William had called her by her given name, as if he were an adult—“this is Rosa Connor. She can’t speak. But she won’t hurt you. All she wants to do is leave. She’s fragile, and I’m afraid she’ll get hurt if the others find her here. Abby, do you understand?”
Of course she did not. How could one understand such things?
But she recognized the sincerity in William’s voice. He was an odd child, Abby thought dizzily. Abby knew children. She had raised a daughter of her own and had been raising her daughter’s two boys when Contact took them away. William looked a little like Cory, her oldest grandson. Cory had always been bringing things home. Stones, bottletops—cocoons. She had tried to share his interest, at least from a distance; had tried to enter that child’s world where everything was a mystery and a fascination. Perhaps William was fascinated with this—creature.
Abby’s heart was pounding desperately against her ribs. But she thought of Paul Jacopetti in the basement of the Buchanan hospital, and she resolved to quell her panic this time, not make the same mistake.
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “If it wants to leave,” she said, “why doesn’t it?”
“Abby, did you ever see a butterfly when it’s new? The wings are wet. They have to dry. Otherwise it would just fall.”
“I see. How much longer?”
“Minutes.”
“William—I can’t stop anyone from coming upstairs.”
“But if you don’t call out—”
“I won’t.” She was steadily calmer. “But Colonel Tyler is searching the house.”
“We only need a short time, Abby.”
“A short time is all you may have.”
* * *
Even in this extremity, William was impressed by Rosa’s grace. She grasped the window frame with arms as delicate as strings, fingers like threads. She pulled herself up, paused on the sill facing inward, then unfolded her wings behind her, stretched them to their full span, wide sails, coral-patterned, the blues and purples a lighter hue in the sunlight. She was like an enormous orchid blossom. When the wind blew, she trembled.
Almost, Rosa told him. Now.
Then Abby gasped, the door opened: Colonel Tyler.
* * *
It was remarkable, Abby thought, how quickly Tyler seemed to grasp the situation. His eyes flickered from Abby to William to the insect woman. He was obviously shocked. But not shocked motionless, as Abby had been. His hand was suddenly active.
He drew that pistol he always carried.
“No,” Abby said.
The Colonel paid her no attention. His attention was wholly focused on the creature William had called Rosa, and his face was a twisted grimace of distaste. Abby had been afraid, but the Colonel—the Colonel, she realized, was offended.
He stood with his legs braced apart and aimed the pistol at Rosa with both hands.
Abby felt as if time had slowed to a miserly crawl. There was time to see everything. See William’s sadness and concern. See the insect woman arching her impossible wings against the morning sky. See Tyler’s pistol in all its intricacy, a complex steel-gray machine.
She heard the rasp of her own breath in her throat like the tick of a metronome. Time to see; no time to act.
But now William was moving.
For all the compression of time, Abby thought, the boy was quick. Impossibly quick. Inhumanly quick.
He threw himself at Tyler’s body. The impact turned the Colonel’s pistol toward the ceiling. Tyler fired, and the sound in the enclosed room was an insult to the ears, cruelly loud. Plaster rained from the ceiling. There was a hole there, ragged and small. “Christ!” Tyler raged.
Abby looked to the window, where the insect woman’s wings lifted, caught air, rippled; and then Rosa was away, dropping in a long trajectory, a glide… then rising…
Tyler staggered to the window, raised his pistol once more.
William was beside him, tugging his arm down.
Tyler pushed the boy aside. Abby heard William’s head crack against the wall.
“No!” she cried.
It was not a decent way to treat a child.
William straightened, unhurt; but Tyler’s gun was pointed at hi
m now. “No!” Abby said furiously. “Colonel, stop!” Was he deaf?
William turned his face toward her. It was absurd, but Abby felt he wanted to reassure her. To tell her he would be all right. He was not all right.
The boy looked at Colonel Tyler and said, quite clearly, “I know what you are.”
Colonel Tyler pulled the trigger. William’s chest exploded. “NOOOO!” Abby’s voice was a wail of grief.
Tyler fired again, now at William’s head, where his eyes were still blinking. Abby could not bear the sound of the shot or the result of it. So much blood. She could not help thinking of Cory or her other grandson, Damian; of her daughter Laura. She had lost Laura to an airplane tragedy and Cory and Damian to the Greater World and although William wasn’t family Abby could not tolerate the loss of another child, any child, for the sin of impeding Colonel John Tyler’s line of fire. So she did what William had done, hurried across the room through slow-motion time, knowing it was too late, seeing but not seeing the impossible amount of blood, and threw herself at Colonel Tyler, who fell backward. Then they were wrestling for the pistol, Abby surprised by her own physical strength and the strength of her hatred, eyes blurred by tears, wanting to rip the pistol from Tyler’s hand and punish him with it but managing only to twist it in his grip, and Tyler pulled the trigger twice more, both shots wild, chipping paint and dust from the wallboard, until at last her strength and courage ebbed and Tyler thrust her aside and sat with the pistol aimed at her—Abby thinking Shoot me, go ahead, you child-murdering bastard!—then someone was holding her from behind, and Tyler, horribly, was pointing his pistol at the boy’s corpse:
“Abby, he’s not human. Look!” Nudging the limp body with his foot. “This isn’t blood! Christ’s sake! It looks like thirty-weight motor oil! Jesus!”
Did any of that matter?
No, Abby thought.
In a gesture that surprised even herself, Abby collected all the saliva that remained in her dry mouth and spat into Colonel Tyler’s face. Her aim was precise.
Tyler froze.
Everyone in the room—a crowd, now, including Bob Ganish, Paul Jacopetti, and Joey Commoner, who was holding her from behind—froze and waited.
“Take her to her trailer,” the Colonel said. The spittle ran down his cheek, and his voice was a razory whine. “Take her there and keep her there. I’ll deal with this later.”
* * *
Rosa Perry Connor rode the morning thermals up long inclines of warming air until the ranch was far below her.
She moved in the sky with an easy familiarity. The sky was not an empty space, not a vacuum; it was an ocean, Rosa thought, rich with currents, inviting discovery, appreciation, acrobatics: glides and sweeping, sensuous curves. It was intoxicating.
She watched her shadow flow across dry rangeland, over scrub and cheat grass like ocean swells far below. The sun was warm on her wings.
She knew what had happened in the Connor house. She felt William’s release. It was premature. He had been a sojourner like herself, an old man in a boy’s body. She broadcast her sorrow in the direction of Home. The ecstasy of flight and this unhappiness mingled in her. William accepted her consolation, but lightly; he was also sharing her pleasure in the flight.
It was the human tragedy that saddened him.
Tragedy is what they live in, Rosa thought. Tragedy is their ocean, William—their air.
He touched her with a sad rebuke that was not quite contradiction. You were human once.
Yes, Rosa acknowledged. She fixed her attention on the far peak of Home, china-blue in the morning light. Human once, she thought. But not anymore.
* * *
Abby Cushman was confined after some struggle in her camper with Joey standing guard at the door.
Dazed beyond thinking and weak with grief, she pressed her face against the window and watched Rosa’s orchid-colored wings grow small in the southern sky.
Chapter 33
Provocation
Beth came out of her camper at the sound of the gunshot and hurried into the farmhouse. She found Abby Cushman in tears, Joey and Bob Ganish leading her away.
Upstairs, Matt Wheeler was arguing with Colonel Tyler. Beth stood at the stairway end of the corridor, too far away to hear the argument clearly, but she was startled by the ferocity of it and by the way Colonel Tyler’s hand hovered near his pistol.
The unexplained violence in the air made her dizzy. These two admirable men, Matt in faded jeans and shirt, the Colonel in a threadbare officer’s jacket, looked used-up, worn out by their own anger.
She heard Matt say something about killing. And Colonel Tyler, fiercely: He was some kind of spy.
Not human, she heard Tyler say.
Who were they talking about?
Then Matt told Tyler he couldn’t make a prisoner of Abby Cushman, and Tyler said the doctor wasn’t in a position to give orders, and there were more of these bitter, clipped words, until Matt stalked away—Beth concealed herself in an empty bedroom as he passed—and the argument was finished.
She was surprised by a sudden thought that both of these men had touched her: Tyler with his large hand, Matt more intimately. Somehow, she was a party to this.
She walked down the corridor to Colonel Tyler.
He registered her presence, though his eyes were distant.
Beth said, “What happened?” Peering past him into a room where the window was open, broken, and there was an acrid smell—“Is that blood in there?”
The Colonel put his hand on her shoulder, another touch, and steered her away.
“I’ll explain,” he said.
It was William who had been the spy. The boy was dead.
* * *
The Colonel explained, and Beth retired to her camper.
They had acquired all these vehicles at a dealership in the Willamette Valley, on the eastern side of the Coast Range where the storm hadn’t done as much damage. It was strange, Beth thought, everybody driving these $40,000 Travelaire and Citations with connections for running water and TV sets, these fancy boxes on wheels.
Everything we ever made, Beth thought—we human beings—most of it was boxes. A house is a box, she thought; an office building is a box. A TV is a box, and a microwave oven is a box of radiation. All these boxes. Nobody made boxes anymore. All the boxes we’ll ever need, Beth thought idly, people left them lying around for free.
Alone, she listened to the morning’s violence echo and rebound through the camp. Footsteps, doors slammed, angry voices now and then.
She wasn’t accustomed to violence. Her family had never been violent, unless you counted her father’s occasional deer hunts. Her mother was a careful, prim woman who left home and moved to Terre Haute with a new husband when Beth was fifteen years old. Her father was often angry, but he never actually hit her. Since that trouble when she was fourteen, her quick D C at a Seattle hospital, he had seldom even looked at her. Nobody had looked at her, except to laugh or make fun—except Joey.
She dozed through the afternoon, afraid of what might be happening outside. At dinnertime, she left the camper and found Tyler and Joey and Paul Jacopetti building a fire in a barbecue pit behind the farmhouse: people didn’t want to eat a meal inside the house where William had died. The Colonel ignored her; Jacopetti ignored her.
Joey watched her the way he always watched her—following her with i his eyes, not making a big deal of it, but relentlessly. She felt his attention like a toothache. He had been watching her like this every day since they had left Buchanan, a casual proprietary surveillance that made her itch with indignation.
She decided she wasn’t hungry. She turned her back on the men and walked to the front of the farmhouse and inside, although the hot-metal odor of this morning’s bloodshed was still hanging in the air. Miriam Flett was inside, sitting in a chair doing nothing. Watching the dust float. Beth approached her with caution. She imagined the old woman must be horribly sad. It was obvious she’d liked that boy; even if he
was a spy, not human.
Miriam looked up at Beth’s approach, her face crowded with wrinkles.
“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It’s all right.” Miriam’s voice was a dry whisper.
“You must—” Was this the right thing to say? “You must feel terrible. I’m sorry about what happened.”
“They told you about it?”
“The Colonel did. He said William was—uh—”
“Not entirely human,” Miriam supplied. “But I knew that about him.”
“Did you? Still… he died. It’s sad.”
“If he wasn’t human,” Miriam said primly, “he didn’t die.”
It took Beth a moment to interpret this. “I guess not. It’s hard to get used to the idea, though.”
Then Miriam did something Beth had not seen her do before: She smiled.
“It was hard for me, too,” she said.
* * *
There was some talk of moving on, or back to the truckstop, some place away from this unhappy house, but Colonel Tyler vetoed the idea, at least until morning. They could sleep in their vehicles; there was no real urgency. Beth supposed he was right. But the encampment that evening was steeped in an ugly silence.
Just before dark, while there was still a rosy light around the high slope of the human Artifact, Tim Belanger unhooked the camper-trailer from the rear of his pickup truck and went roaring away east. He escaped, Beth thought, just like Tom Kindle—another refugee.
Another one gone, Beth thought sadly.
Nine of us left altogether.
She wished it had been Joey who left.
* * *