The Gypsy Morph

  But Fixit already knew the problem. He had warned them about it when he had watched them wiring the charges the day before, sent to see if there was something he could do to help by Logan. Nobody wanted his help; nobody cared to listen. He was a fourteen-year-old boy; what did he know?

  In fact, he did know something. The detonator was wired to a central relay, and the relay sent a signal to the various charges. If the relay failed to function, the charges would not ignite. No one thought that would happen. The relay was solar-powered and had a backup battery. But it still relied on the wires from the detonator to trigger its internal mechanisms, and the wires, though carefully protected, were still suspect. Too many things could happen to break their connection to the relay. Use Redline wireless, he had argued. Use Bluetooth Extreme. Use something that wasn’t hardwired. It was more dependable, less subject to malfunctions than the more rudimentary system they were using might invite.

  So now, kneeling several yards behind them as they struggled to correct the problem from the command station, he knew at once that they were going to fail. There wasn’t enough time for them to do anything from there. Not now. The once-men were coming out from behind the barricades, challenging the cover fire laid down by the retreating defenders, seeing an opportunity to cross the bridge and seize it intact. Even Logan Tom, turning to face this new assault, seemed at a loss.

  But Fixit knew what to do. Without stopping to think about the wisdom of it, he came to his feet and charged onto the bridge. Shouts and cries trailed after him, and Logan’s outstretched arm barely missed him. The relay was strapped to a bridge truss fifteen yards away, protected by steel girders and a makeshift steel frame. He raced straight for it, ignoring the ranks of approaching once-men and the stray bullets that whizzed by his head. He threw himself down as the weapons fire increased, crawling and rolling the last several yards until he was behind the steel frame and pressed up against the girders. He raised himself up on his elbows, keeping his head safely behind the steel supports, and snapped open the relay box.

  Inside, he found the wires still connected.

  He had been wrong.

  Furious with himself, he began searching the relay mechanism for other possible failures, convinced that the problem was here, not somewhere else. The weapons fire had grown heavier, and he could sense the steady approach of the once-men. Logan was using his staff to keep them back, aided by the bridge defenders, but the once-men were pressing forward anyway. Even without risking a glance to see how close they were, he knew it wouldn’t be long until they were on top of him.

  Then he found it. A tiny bit of debris had wedged itself between the contacts, breaking the circuit and preventing the signal from activating. He blew hard into the mechanism, cleared the contact, jammed the relay box back into place within its protective frame, and was on his feet once more, racing back the way he had come.

  His heart was pounding. How long did he have? Didn’t matter. If he was quick, he should still be able to rea

  TWENTY-SIX

  T HE THIRD DAY OF THEIR MARCH dawned very much the same as the previous two, the sky bright and cloudless, the sun a white-hot ball in the eastern horizon, and the air already heavy and sweltering. All around them, the land spread away in an unchanging landscape of barren earth, wintry scrub, and open plains dotted with clumps of dead grass. Now and then they would cross through a shallow depression or climb a low rise, but most of what they saw was endlessly flat and empty.

  Tessa walked with Hawk as he led the way, the caravan still moving north and east, headed for distant mountains that were no more than a faint tracing against the skyline. She had chosen not to ride this day, at least for the first part of it, but to stay by him. He knew she missed their time alone, which had eroded to almost nothing, the demands placed on him as leader taking away what little privacy they might have enjoyed. They talked when they could, they slept together when Hawk slept at all, but mostly they were apart.

  Today Panther drove the Lightning AV with Owl and a handful of smaller children as passengers. Panther grumbled at the assignment, mostly because he grumbled at almost everything, but it got him out of Hawk’s hair for a few hours, which was the best he could hope for. Sparrow, River, and even Candle had decided to walk, and they formed a small group with Bear not too far back from Hawk and Tessa, but far enough to give them their privacy.

  Strung out behind them, the children from the compounds followed with their caregivers, and farther back still Lizards, Spiders, and a growing handful of others.

  Where those other creatures, humans mutating into something new, had come from was something of a mystery. Hawk was aware of them right from the start. Some of them were already in camp when they had departed the bridge and begun the march, but others had joined them since. There was no way of telling how they had found their way to him or knew that it was all right to stay. Perhaps word had gotten around in the camp that he was taking anyone who chose to come along. Perhaps they were just hoping for something better in their lives.

  There were even a few children and adults who had arrived from as far away as Portland and Seattle. Strays, they had made their way overland in an effort to escape from places where they were no longer safe. Last night, a skinny girl with lank brown hair and haunted eyes, traveling in the company of several other kids, all just a little younger than she was, had caught up to the caravan. She had been asking about a man carrying a black staff, saying she had done what he had told her and come north along the roads he said to follow and now she was looking for him. Hawk asked her name, but she refused to give it. He left her with Tessa, who spent a long time with her. She didn’t seem to want to talk to him. She just wanted to know what had happened to Logan.

  “Are you still thinking about Chalk?” Tessa asked him suddenly.

  He shook his head. “I was just wondering about that girl, the one I asked you to talk with. Did you ever find out anything about her?”

  Tessa’s brow furrowed. “I found out more than I wanted to. She’s had a hard time of it. Her parents are dead, her family gone, and she’s been out on her own for weeks. She’s had a lot done to her, none of it good. She said she found Logan while he was traveling south toward the mountains in Oregon. He shared his food with her and told her to come north across the Columbia and then east to find us. She managed it somehow. Found some other kids along the way and brought them with her.”

  “So she’s got a new family now, I guess.”

  “Like all of us.” Tessa looked away. “I miss my mother. I know I don’t have any reason to, not after what she did to me. But I do. I wish I could have done something to help her.”

  “Everyone wishes that about someone,” he said, thinking suddenly of Chalk. “But regrets don’t help. We have to forget about what we couldn’t do and concentrate on what we can.”

  She gave him a sideways glance. “I just wish I could do more to help you. I don’t like not being able to do anything more than this.”

  “Than this?”

  “This. Walking with you. Keeping you company. Giving you a chance to talk with someone who won’t judge or criticize or demand anything.”

  He smiled. “Because you love me.”

  She smiled back. “Because I do. Very much.”

  “I liked it when you had to sneak out of the compound to meet me. Not putting you in danger like that, but the adventure of it. It was exciting.”

  “Everything we did was exciting,” she said. “I liked it, too.”

  They walked in silence for a time, their boots scuffing up clouds of dust on the dry flats, their faces streaked with dirt and sweat. Hawk felt the heat of the day bearing down on him, a great weight that reflected accurately the weight of his self-doubt. In the distance, gusts of wind blew up dust devils, their funnels churning through the hazy air in wild bursts. The sun had crested the mountains and flooded the sky with a panoramic wash of blinding white light.

  “Is it a long way to where we have to go?” she asked him af
ter a while.

  He shrugged. “Couldn’t say. I don’t know yet.”

  She grinned. “Do you even know where we are?”

  “Not really. Do you?”

  She brushed at her curly dark hair and frowned. “I think so. I was talking about it with Owl. We both remember this country as being a part of an Indian reservation in the old days. Long time ago, when there was a government. Not much to look at now, is it?”

  He shook his head. “I wonder if they’re still holding the bridge against that army. I wonder if they’ve been able to keep them from crossing.”

  Tessa didn’t say anything. They walked on, and he found himself listening to the soft drone of the Lightning following several dozen yards behind. He glanced over his shoulder at the caravan, stretched out behind him for almost a mile, a jumble of vehicles and figures, shrouded in dust and sweltering heat. Behind them, the Cascade Mountains were a strange gray-blue smudge against the horizon, jagged peaks stretching north and south for as far as the eye could see.

  “I don’t think they can hold that bridge for long,” he said, dark eyes intense as he studied the land ahead again. “I don’t think anyone could. Not against what’s coming.” He shook his head. “It’s odd, but I can see the shape of it, can sense its power, even without knowing what it is exactly. I can make out just enough, in my mind’s eye, to know that it’s too much for anyone.” He paused, looked at her again. “I really can, Tessa.”

  “I believe you,” she said.

  “I wish things could go back to the way they were,” he said softly.

  She reached over for his hand and placed it against her stomach. “Everything?”

  He smiled. “Okay, maybe not everything.”

  She hooked her arm through his and pressed against him.

  AT MIDDAY, when they stopped to eat, Owl joined them. She wheeled herself over from the AV to where Hawk and Tessa sat apart from the other Ghosts in the dappled shadow of a skeletal tree stripped of leaves and life alike. She handed each a small hunk of cheese she had been saving, her face lined with worry.

  “Are you all right?” she asked them. “You look tired.”

  They were, of course. Everyone was. But Owl wasn’t looking for an answer; she was trying to give them a chance to talk about it.

  “We’re okay,” Tessa assured her, a smile brightening her dark face. She patted the soft swell of her belly. “Baby says to tell you not to worry.”

  “Maybe you should ride with us after we eat,” Owl suggested.

  “She should.” Hawk pounced on the suggestion. When Tessa started to object, he shook his head. “You should, Tessa.”

  They ate in silence, concentrating on the food and trying to ignore the heat. The rest of the caravan had stopped as well, strung out for more than a mile behind them, the vehicles halted, the children and their caregivers and the others who had come with them taking a small rest before continuing on. Hawk was thinking that Helen Rice was right, that if this heat continued they would have to think about traveling at night. It was too hard on the children to keep going like this during the day.

  “Do you think we have much farther to go?” Owl asked him after she had finished her meal.

  He hesitated before answering. She was trying to hide it, but he could hear the concern in her voice, a ragged, furtive thing. Normally, Owl was the steady, optimistic one. She was the center of their family; she held them all together. He didn’t like what he was thinking.

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted finally.

  No one said anything. The midday heat beat down on them, baking their bodies within the oven of clothes long since gone stiff with sweat and dirt, their minds as tired as their expectations. Hawk couldn’t remember his last real bath. None of them had done more than wash off a little dirt and cool down their faces at the end of each day’s trek since they had set out. Before that, things hadn’t been much better. Food was growing scarce, too.

  Time was as thin as hope.

  “Will the King of the Silver River help you?” she pressed.

  He shook his head and shrugged.

  “Has he spoken to you since we set out?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Then how do you . . . ?”

  “Owl, I don’t know!” he snapped, silencing her. He regretted his anger at once. He gave her an apologetic smile. “I wish I did know. I wish I knew everything about what we are doing instead of nothing. I think about it every day, all day, and then at night I lie awake and I think about it some more. I hate it that so much depends on me. But I don’t know what else to do other than what I’m doing—to just keep going.”

  “Faith has gotten us this far,” Tessa offered quietly.

  “Faith is pretty much all we have,” Owl agreed.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’ll tell you something. The truth? Faith isn’t what keeps me going. It isn’t what drives me. Fear does. I have faith, but it’s the fear that won’t let me give up. Fear that if I fail, everyone will die. I can’t deal with it. I’m running all the time. Not to the King of the Silver River so much as away from the fear.”

  Owl reached over and touched his cheek. “I shouldn’t be asking you questions,” she told him. “I know better. I know you are doing the best you can. I can’t help myself. I’m afraid, too. I want our family to be safe. I want all of them to be safe.”

  “We just have to keep going,” Tessa declared firmly. “We just have to remind ourselves not to lose hope.” She took Hawk’s hand and squeezed. “The King of the Silver River said you would find him, didn’t he? He said you would reach him if you followed your instincts, if you did what they told you. And that’s what you’ve done.”

  “But I can’t help wondering how all this will end,” he replied, squeezing her hand in response. “Even if we find him, how will he protect us? If the world really is about to be destroyed, how can we be safe anywhere? Besides, what’s the point? The world’s destroyed—what’s left for us?”

  “A new world,” Owl said at once. “Even if the old is gone, there will be a new one born of it. That’s the lesson of life. New replaces old. It will be like that here, too, don’t you think? We are staying alive so that new generations can be born. Like your baby.”

  “Owl is right,” Tessa agreed. “Like our baby.”

  Hawk nodded, pretended he was in accord, but inside he found himself fighting doubt and confusion. New worlds born of old sounded good. So how did that happen exactly? What did it take for people to survive a cataclysm of the sort that had been promised? Their world was already ravaged beyond repair. Even back in Pioneer Square in the city, they had been doing little more than surviving, living hand-to-mouth, day-to-day. How could it be any better when things got worse?

  There were no answers to such questions, of course. Wouldn’t be until they got to where they were going—wherever that was—so that they could discover what was waiting.

  A leap of faith was required. A huge leap.

  Sure, he thought. Tell that to Squirrel. Tell it to Chalk. Tell it to the other children they had lost. Tell it to all those who would be taken from them before this was over. He felt his throat tighten. How many more lives, he wondered, would his leap of faith cost?

  He found himself thinking anew of the vision of the boy who would lead his children to the Promised Land, of the boy who would find a safehold where all could survive the coming destruction. A vision rooted in dreams, but not necessarily in reality. He had believed in that vision so strongly when he was waiting for it to come to pass. He had never doubted it, never questioned that he would be the one to do what it had shown.

  For the first time ever, he was wondering if it had played him false.

  LOGAN TOM PARKED THE AV at the lee of a long, low rise that snaked through the barren, empty land. When he was satisfied that it was safe, he climbed out to look around. The sun boiled down out of the cloudless sky, a ball of fire that had baked the surface of the drought-starved terrain until it was riven
with cracks. From where he stood, gazing out across the flats, he might have been alone in the world.

  Using the directions Cat had given him, he stood by the outcropping amid the wilted sage and measured off the twenty-nine yards north-northwest on his compass that led to the burial site down inside the shallow ravine. Then he walked it off, black staff held ready. On reaching the final steps, he saw where she had dug, the earth already beginning to harden anew in the heat. Chalk and the other children, all jammed together, less than three feet down. He felt renewed rage for the thing that had done this. A demon of the worst sort, a killer that enjoyed playing games with the helpless and unprotected.

  But just another demon, as well, he told himself. One he intended to hunt down and destroy before it could take any other lives.

  He thought suddenly of Fixit, another casualty of the madness that had enveloped them. Dead without knowing what had happened to his best friend. Gone in the blink of an eye.

  He had sent Cat on ahead with the surviving bridge defenders, telling her to let Hawk and the others know what had happened, asking her to warn them to stay close together and inside the camp perimeter until this was over. She had refused at first, unwilling to leave him. But this was something he knew he must do alone, and he had told her so in no uncertain terms. She had been hurt by his insistence, but she would be safe. There was no room for argument.

  They had stood looking at each other in the aftermath of his insistence, the silence between them uncomfortable, and then she had walked right up to him, put her arms around him, and buried her face in his shoulder.

  “Don’t make me go,” she had pleaded again. “Let me stay with you.”

  He relented enough to hug her back, to put his hand on her hair as he held her. “We’ve had this discussion,” he replied. “It won’t help to have it again.”