Paul immediately convinced himself it was a dream. He put his hands on the Priestess again and she shook her head. “Where’d I go?”
The notes of his whimpers complemented the epic pipe organ music. The Priestess stretched out to touch him. A sheen of sweat glistened over her brow and dark circles had been hammered under her eyes. Her fingertips touched his lower lip and the contact sent his body into a sudden panic. Huddled in the passenger seat, he sought to roll into the tightest ball possible.
“What have you done?” she whispered.
Paul couldn’t answer. Her hair moved off her shoulder and it sounded like a flood of sugar notes trailing into a minor scale. Her skin fluxed between bass drumbeats. The question did process though, even if his lips were unable to shape an answer. But he heard his words: “The seeds. All of the seeds.”
Everything the Priestess did now seemed hyperactive. Reality sucked in all at once. Next she took the plastic bag he’d handed her and she smelled inside. Her eyes swelled into planets and the pipe organs transitioned to a different melody.
“All of them?”
He could only quiver as an answer. The harmonies chilled him.
“Paul, you’ve got to slow down. You’ve got to balance your garden, somehow.”
He didn’t want to understand what she meant. The atmosphere itched and he felt the world spin faster with each new blossom popping open inside his body. The strength of the universe flexed inside the feebleness of an atom. Paul drank in the seconds like golden wine.
“Slow yourself,” she repeated. “Then we can find more seeds.”
More?
She read his eyes. “You must obtain another source to cull the dark blossoms, that which controls the strides of the universe—but first you must recover command of them. You must prevent more dark blossoms from opening.”
His teeth grinded at the impossible prospect.
“Hurry,” she said. “Try Paul! Try!”
He did. He tried. He was always trying. But there was something else bubbling to the surface. Through all of the madness since the Heralding, Paul had forgotten the children. They’d been the farthest thing in his thoughts. They sang angrily along with the cacophony. The choir announced premature arrival into the world—he had to slow things down or they wouldn’t have time to thrive!
Pumpkin flesh flew into the air: birth! The children escaped from the broken pumpkins with slavering jaws. Verdant claws raked the dirt as they turned inky eyes up to the slipstream of clouds: life! Paul’s connection with them sent his mind into a backspin and he fell a thousand leagues into the deepest of all possible darknesses.
~ * ~
Thanksgiving to the bleeding black feast!
~ * ~
The babies’ screams ripped Martin into consciousness. There had been moments when he heard their needy calls, but he’d been too out of it to wake up. His body shot straight and he clutched the steering wheel with clammy fingers. He accidentally set off one blast of the horn and let go. Another baby waahed, and three hollered, squirming in their seats.
Teresa’s hands went to her forehead and she looked around dizzily.
“Hi,” said Martin. “You really need to cut that out. I have enough brain damage for the both of us.”
He squeezed his watch in the quickly dying light. An indigo window floated on his wrist. “I can’t believe we weren’t found. We were out here for a while—”
“Déjà vu all over again,” Teresa muttered. The babies’ shrieks jerked her alert. “They’re hungry, I think.”
Martin shrugged. He wasn’t really listening. They had to think of somewhere to go. Quickly. He started. The minutes on the display clock flipped away. Shadows began spearing through the car.
~ * ~
The Priestess gripped Paul’s hair and her eyes opened wider with every word. “Paul, please. Do this for me... control it, Paul. Control it.”
Paul wanted to die. Everything he ever wanted to do had already been done. The Priestess was safe. Living like this was not living. All of the dark blossoms killed the other golden flowers inside of him—a black colony that had consumed all. Time wailed from the disparity.
“Please!” she yelled.
He lingered above his field of fresh, radiant power and threw a shadow over them for a moment. The action made Paul’s bowels run. Veins engorged in his face. Something hateful traveled up his spine and caught at the base of his neck. The Priestess yelled again, miles above him, and Cloth’s children continued to sing, miles below.
Paul Quintana knew then. Controlling this was not going to happen. If anything, time would start to go even faster.
~ * ~
“Do you feel that?” Teresa asked.
Martin swallowed. “It’s like standing still with the world—”
“—racing past?”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Can you hand me my watch? It’s in the cup holder.”
Martin fished the cold, snaky titanium out and—
—handed it to Teresa. The face flashed indigo. 8:04 PM.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I—We’re getting closer to the Opening.”
Teresa jerked the key for him. He stomped the pedal and they cut out on the road without headlights. Nothing moved in the night; everything had a vacant, frozen look, from the hanging branches to the feathers of light through the trees from nearby track homes.
“You think the Messenger is doing this?”
Teresa shook her head.
9:43 PM.
~ * ~
“I’ve got the train yard in the GPS,” said Martin. The bright glowing map showed them as a green arrow traveling over an uncharted road. “As soon as we’re on a real road I’ll—”
The Wrangler stopped. The blue and red lights of a police cruiser rose up from the canyon. The jeep was obscured behind a ranch home, but had only one way to go.
Martin slapped the steering wheel. “Should I just go?” A dozen more minutes had passed and now his heart thumped in time.
“I think he’s going. Then we’ll gun it.”
Blue and red blades swept through the trees and out of sight. Martin edged the Wrangler down the road. The tail end of the patrol car could be seen just down the two lane road. A flashlight aimed from the driver’s window into the trees.
11:54 PM.
~ * ~
The flowers petrified to stone inside Paul and the garden calmed to a deadly silence. The Priestess kissed him so hard their teeth gnashed.
Something still wasn’t right. Time had gone from silk to marble. A numb feeling prickled Paul’s stomach. He spoke his first words in what felt like centuries. “Time’s stuck, Priestess. The flow has stopped! I can’t move it—it weighs too much!”
~ * ~
With trembling fingers Teresa reached for a clove. The box had been crushed when she fell. And hello, the babies? They matter, only them. Her headache rolled to the front of her head and her pulse fed the pain.
The patrol car finally vanished into blue midnight. No running around now, she thought. They had to get to that train yard fast. The front tires bumped onto the road and Martin turned on the headlights to see better in the falling night.
In the next moment, she wished he hadn’t turned them on.