A trio of paint cans spun out from under the back of the jeep, clacking on the road. It wasn’t the first hidden treasure they’d encountered in the canyon, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“You’re sure about this shortcut?” Teresa asked.
“Now that’s a dumb question.”
They’d traded places again since he felt it too presumptuous he could bring more mantles. Driving was easier and let his senses regroup. Teresa’s .357 was trained outside to the colorless grass. It all looked like spun sugar blades out there. In the rearview they could see nothing else. But if something did poke up its head, there was no question Teresa would soundly remove it.
Shapes stood out in relief to the moonlight. They were unmoving, dense shrubs. “Teresa—you see that?”
She did. He leaned closer to the windshield. One of the Hearts squealed in a random fit of unease. The shapes came closer. Was it a cherry orchard of some kind? Or?
He hit the high beams and hundreds of eyes reflected at once.
Teresa yanked her gun back inside.
Out of nowhere, one came straight at them—Martin went left. The Wrangler maneuvered around the startled beast and headed toward an ugly rush of them cresting the hill.
“Stop!”
“I am, I am!”
Wild burros braided around the jeep. Martin waited for a break in the chaos, shaking his head while he looked at them. Above, a stone signpost pointed west. Runic scrollwork ran from the flat body to a giant reptilian claw at the base. The high beams fed a dark purple glaze brushed into each symbol, which made them glow.
“I see it,” said Teresa before Martin could ask. “Looks like some things are crossing over from the Old Domain...”
Martin nodded. One of the donkeys turned its barrel-shaped head as it passed. The eyes were the same purple as the runes, mauve tears hanging in them. The mouth tucked back to spiraling black fangs. Martin recoiled and saw the animal trot off with the departing pack.
“Did you see that?” he asked. He spotted a building. “Look there.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Pump station?”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Sewer lift station or something. There’s a Void there. We can get our bearings.”
They drove up to the silent station. The fence surrounded a concrete pad where a small block building sat amongst a large pair of pumps. There was a padlock on the front gate but it hung unclasped. Teresa lifted it off the bracket and let it fall on the gravel. After backing up, they rolled into a shadow-bank alongside the lift station building.
Martin tapped the GPS. “Yeah, we’re inside the Void.”
He didn’t really need to clarify that though. The air had become more humid and the telltale sweet taste rolled in their mouths. Voids did not protect them from Cloth though and Teresa’s grimace, whether for a clove or for this inevitable truth, told him to be quick.
The pumps drummed beneath the surface, pushing Colton sewage. Martin brought out the map and clicked on a flashlight. His finger glided to the northwest side of town. He prodded his largest Sharpie circle. “That’s where we’re going. The train yard there.”
Teresa’s face angled out the window. “But they’re coming from that direction.”
“We have to go to the train yard. It’s our best bet.”
She glanced dully at the map for a moment, as though it had no real significance. “Can we get there without running right into them?”
“Probably not.” He sighed with another glance at the stagnant clock. 12:12 still. “We can go west. It takes longer but with how things are going it looks like we’ll have all the time we need.”
“And so will Cloth.”
Martin’s head hurt so much. A cranial collapse felt imminent. All that time zipping by hadn’t given him a chance to rest.
“We’ll go west,” she said suddenly and then undid her seat belt. “I’m going to kneel on the floor back there with the babies for a while. They didn’t look that secure.”
Martin nodded. Before she opened the door, he grasped her hand. “I don’t know if this matters, but you ought to know before we get going.”
“What now?”
He let go at her sudden coldness. “The sign back there was pointing west. That’s where those donkey-things came from. Do you think there are other things out there that have crossed over?”
Teresa gave him a really slow nod. “Let’s find out.”
~ * ~
For half an hour the drive westward seemed uneventful. Only moments before, the night was plowing along in a steady ebon-blue stream. Suddenly the Wrangler banked a rocky dirt hill—and that was when it happened, when they came down the other side. The jeep crashed into a body of water. Red water. It came first through the doors, soaking the floor mats, smelling of mummified fish. Everything gurgled outside. Raw meat mist was thrown over the windows. Martin shouted, out of his mind, out of sorts. An old dead sky peered through the slashes of red current on the windshield. It was night, but a different moon hung above them, a pale green hole in a dark sheet, which stretched over merciless trees across a slash of toneless sand and rock. Just to the right another runic signpost stood proudly in a mound of stones.
“Where are we?” Teresa mumbled.
But they knew. This was the other side.
The Wrangler tilted. The floors grew heavy with red seawater. Teresa stood up. “Try again!”
He pushed the gas. It sounded like a submerged dentist’s drill. The tires couldn’t grab hold. Martin cursed and attempted another go. They were only off the shoreline by fifty feet, give or take. The tide pushed at them. The jeep sunk deeper. The tires spun in place again.
Teresa turned from the babies, and her gun came free from her pants. Martin caught movement in the trees. Figures emerged.
Orange robes, scythes and oily muskets in swaying arms, tallow faces under hoods. Some human. Some ginger-hued and reptilian. Eyes glowed with equal parts moonlight and sin. A dark faced human with a pointed mustachio put his musket eye level. Martin threw a mantle.
It was a strange feeling. The cold spot in his head felt sticky—instead of ghost matter, a sheet of ocean water lifted and surged forward, departing at once into vapor.
Martin stared for a moment.
Teresa said, “How’d you move the water like that?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Just then a sheet of sand lifted on the shore and ruptured. The approaching orange throng sidestepped and shouts were exchanged.
“Did you—?”
“I did,” she answered. “The mantles aren’t the same here. We’re not pulling matter over—here, I think we move it.”
Martin didn’t understand at first. Then, light. Four small boulders from the shoreline jumped into the air. They spun around on a stiff axis and shot forward. The hooded crowd folded at the impact and some bodies were ripped backwards into the trees. Undeterred, others kept on. Some had reached the water and their orange robes glided around them in the foul, dark red broth. A reptile man had his scythe poised overhead as he trudged deeper.
“Throw more!”
“It’s... harder,” Teresa said with a grimace.
Martin’s ankles were frozen and stinging and the sensation traveled up his body as the level rose. A scaled hand stroked the front right wheel well. Sharp, translucent nails peeled curls of paint.
The Wrangler lunged. Ocean floor assembled behind them and slammed into the tailgate, moving them into shallower water.
“Yeah Teresa!”
The Wrangler’s tire caught and they were off, zigzagging through the shallows. The jeep burst onto the beach, kicking sand. Church members struck the front bumper and rolled away. Martin glanced in the rearview. Teresa draped her body over the babies.
And just in time. They hit an embankment. Hard. The Wrangler went airborne—
Martin’s teeth lathed against each other. Demented trees flung past. Gravity seemed to work better here than at home. The landing would be jarring.
But no impact came. Everything shifted around them, layers of reality peeling back suddenly. They were on flat land again, as though they’d been on land for hours now. The water in the car turned into pieces of mantle, billions of tiny diamonds in the mind. Martin combined them and formed a barrier around the back of the jeep.
They rocketed down a residential street past a costume party. A couple dressed like Popeye and Olive Oyl necked in the street. Shadowy giants in the background, Martin could see some of the industrial buildings near the house where Enrique had been staying. Their trip through the Old Domain had put them on a completely different side of town.
“Well there’s something.” He pointed at the dash and Teresa followed with her eyes. “Hope it means something good.”
12:15
~ * ~
Paul leaned forward. Their lips touched.
“The blossoms will not grow anymore, but there are too many dark... I think they’ll kill me anyway.”
Priestess said, “You need constancy, Paul.”
“There aren’t any more seeds. I took them all. I thought the Nomads would...” He didn’t finish and just tried to eat the torment.
“You can’t do this to me,” she growled.
“I love you.”
The Priestess smacked his face hard. “Love!”
Paul twisted. Strange words came to his lips. “Pipe organ. Pipes, pipes, pipes, blowing into the night, me, the night, me. The song’s going through me, a red hot shovel, twisting and tossing guts... I don’t think anything will ever make sense. Everything will fail. Soon.”
“You fought before. Fight now.”
“It’s killing me.” He couldn’t look at her, but sensed her anger with him growing.
“I don’t have time to baby you, Bishop,” she said. “You need to think of how to get more seeds.”
“How—?”
The Priestess of Morning’s eyes lit up just then. “Shut up! Wait. I see again—there they are. I’m regaining my sight. The Nomads! I see. We need to let Cloth know.”
“Why not go to Cloth?” Paul gasped and bit away a shriek. “Maybe he can help me.”
“We’ll use the telephone device, but we can’t go see Cloth, understand? We need to leave right away. With Eggert gone and you like this, I have to watch out for us both. Where can we go? It should be somewhere far away from Cloth. Can you drive? I have not learned.”
“I think, for a little while,” said Paul. He reached into his pocket and with shaking hands, handed her his phone. “I’ll need to rest now again.”
The Priestess’s warm sigh struck the cold sweat on his face. “Do you have any clue as to where we will go?”
He nodded, an idea coming to him. “I might know a way to find more seeds.”
“Are you raving?”
“I hope not.”
Paul leaned forward. Their lips touched.
~ * ~
Chaplain Cloth squeezed his chin until his jaw creaked. The Nomads had been caught in a spatial fold and were nowhere to be found. The luck these two had was one of the great frustrations of his existence. The Nomads could be in the city or a thousand miles away. He had to find them. The possibility of losing the Hearts was out of the question. Cloth wouldn’t entertain that possibility, not so close to the Opening. Things had gone from bad to worse with the space-time distortion. The feast was so inevitable he could smell the roasted gall bladders and buttered bones and cartilage. He wouldn’t lose this year. No.
A smallish, rugged man with an Australian accent and cleft lip approached from the shadows. The smell of lager hung thick on his every word. “Chaplin Cloth, what’re your orders? If it pleases you.”
Disappointing these humans were, but eager to please they were also. Usually Cloth didn’t bother with the aid of flesh beyond the body he absorbed, but this year had been very different so far.
“Search all Void areas in the city. If they’re still here, the Nomads will choose one of these locations to hide. They’ll not risk a motorway.”
“Should I inform the Archbishop?”
“Pager’s done,” Cloth replied. “Assemble some teams quickly. Do you have a phone?” The man yanked free a small, glossy black oblong apparatus and Cloth snatched it away from him. “Have someone call me if you find anything. Is that clear?”
“Chaplin?” The man’s eyes bulged in disbelief.
“I want a smaller team to find Quintana and his harlot. His power has ramped up considerably, so those who go against him must walk warily. They will only take him with words, not with force.”
“I understand.”
“Finish Quintana before he causes another problem. They’re already fleeing. Bring back the Priestess of Morning if you can. She’s still handy.”
“Thank you, Chaplin.”
The man stepped delicately past a knot of children. They were devouring one of their own, who had been trampled. They tugged out a kinky cord of bright pink brains through the orange skull and erupted in a frenzy for the prize. A warm feeling passed through Cloth and he swelled with nostalgia for the days of thrashing darkness and squealing dementia, the time before light, the time before this appalling society.