Chapter Seven
I’m sorry but the number you requested is not answering. If you’d like, I can keep trying, and your phone will ring when I get through. This service will incur a seventy-five cent surcharge. Press one now. [Automated telephone message, 4/10/05]
Nilla picked at a curl of paint on the side of the shack. It came loose in her hand and she rattled it around in her fist, then threw it away from her, out into the scrub brush by the propane tank. She couldn’t stand just waiting around but what else did she have to do? Eventually Singletary would give in. Eventually he would tell her what she wanted to know.
She heard him whimpering in her head, even through the wall of the shack. Begging her to go, to stay, to listen to him. He kept prattling on about his guilty man and some place up in the mountains—probably a hallucination he’d had from being out in the desert too long. She didn’t give it much credence, since he was obviously crazy. Her presence was terrorizing him but she knew she couldn’t just leave. Not without getting something first.
Nilla, the guilty man… you are the one he’s looking for… please, it’s all up to you… he moaned. The fire… it will burn up the world.
Rage spiked up inside of her and she felt him curl like a moth in the middle of a bonfire. Her emotions pained him, excruciated him, she had discovered. Normally she tried to get control of herself, to consciously calm down when he screamed like that. This time was different—she had run out of patience. She fed her rage, stoked it until it blazed.
“I’m not working for anybody!” she shouted out loud. Her words rolled around the canyon, echoing like rippling explosions but they were far louder in her head. “Nobody but myself. I am my own…” she struggled for the right word. Boss? Master? “My own… woman!”
The word you’re looking for is ‘weapon,’ she thought. No, somebody else thought that. It didn’t sound like something Singletary would have said.
It wasn’t me! he howled. Nilla! Don’t—don’t go up there! You have to listen to me first!
Images unfolded in her head. A landscape of rugged mountains topped with snow. A herd of huge animals—enormous beasts, reptiles lumbering across lichen-ringed rock. A ring of fire that spread outwards, rippling, engulfing the entire world.
It made no sense.
Singletary had been sending her those pictures for days but he didn’t have an explanation for them. He had received them from the last ghost that happened to pass by and somehow, she wouldn't understand but really, he knew he was supposed to pass them on to her. Because she had some duty, some sacred mission to perform relating to those mountains, those animals, that fire. Nilla had no idea what they meant, not even a frame of reference to begin to piece together their significance, if they had any.
“Stop that! You tell me what I want to know and then we can play any game you want. Stop mucking about in my head and concentrate on finding my name!”
His suffering leached into her and she felt her body shiver in the eighty degree heat. She could see him through the wall, or rather, she was so connected to him she could imagine him there perfectly. He was twisted on his plank floor, one arm constricted under his body, the circulation cut off. His back arched, drool spilled from between his lips. The pain was awful.
Then stop it, lass. Stop it forever if you find it so distasteful.
“Singletary, shut the fuck up already!” she screamed. The psychic was beyond understanding her, though. In his pain he didn’t even hear her.
I hear you just fine, love. Look up here.
She turned, slowly, beginning to understand, and shaded her eyes. On top of a ridge, not two hundred yards away, Mael Mag Och sat with his long hair blowing in a breeze she couldn’t feel. He raised one hand and waggled his fingers at her.
Nilla crossed the bottom of the canyon and clambered up the rock face beyond. She kicked off her shoes and used her bare toes to dig for footholds, clawed at the weathered sandstone. She didn’t sweat, nor did she pant for breath as she climbed upwards, always upwards, but she felt the strain in her dead muscles, the pull in her back as she hoisted herself bodily to where the naked man sat waiting for her, not moving an inch to close the distance between them.
“So brutal you can be.” He tsked her, looking like he had just dropped by for a social chat. She clambered up to him on her stomach, crawling like an insect, and just collapsed. “So angry. I suppose it’s understandable. The living have been so cruel to you, haven’t they? And now you’re willing to torture them just to find out a name that doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure what to think. She was pretty sure that Mael was not at all what he appeared to be. “You have a better plan?”
“I do, lass. Would you like to hear it?”
She rolled over onto her back and lay staring up at the intensely blue sky, so rich in color it nearly turned to black at the zenith. “Your English has improved,” she told him.
He took it as a yes. “End all the anguish, finish all the sadness. Wipe out the violence and the depravity and the suffering in one fell swoop. It is a tall order, I’ll admit. Perhaps we can go one better: get them to do it for themselves.”
She hadn’t cared for Singletary’s nebulous refusals. She liked even less when Mael talked in riddles. “What are you?” she asked, sitting up, facing away from him. He wasn’t really there, of course. He was pushing himself into her head just like the psychic. It didn’t matter if she looked at him or not.
“A musician, once upon a time. And a politician. I was a sorcerer and a hunter, too. I wrestled with monsters in my day. I conversed with what you would call gods.”
She smiled weakly. Great. A Jesus freak. Or no, he had said gods, plural. A Hare Krishna. “Oh, I see. And what did they tell you?”
His voice softened. “Shall I be plain? They whispered to me in the dark and stillness of the forest that humanity is wicked. That men are born with evil in their hearts, and must expiate their corruption by deeds."
"Oh yeah? What kind of deeds makes up for somebody with evil in their heart?" Nilla asked. She wished he would get on with it.
"Sacrifice. Blood sacrifice, if necessary. The longer we go unredeemed, the steeper the payment. They told me that should the necessary rituals go unfulfilled and the good works left undone it might eventually be necessary to wipe out the human race altogether. For the good of the world.”
“That’s…” Nilla started, but she knew better than to finish.
“Crazy? I know you think it so. Your generation knows better. Your land doesn’t believe in gods. You believe everything just sort of happens for no reason, isn’t that right? You call that belief science. In my day we knew better. When the gods, especially when the Fathers of Clans spoke, we listened.”
Nilla stood up on the top of the rock and stared down at him. “Did you start the Epidemic?” she demanded. “That’s what I’m feeling here. You brought the dead back to life so they could kill all the living for you. I swear—”
“Lass, you’re confusing the author with the agent. I didn’t make this apocalypse. I serve it. As will you.”
She shook her head violently and started away from him, moving as fast as she could, walking flat-footed on the uneven rock. The sun’s heat, stored up all day in the rock, burned her feet but she kept moving. She wanted to get away from him, away from—
“You were created to be the sword in my hand. My weapon.” He stood before her. She hadn’t seen him move, hadn’t even seen him blink into existence there, he just… was there. She stopped short before she collided with him. “Why do you think your name was taken away from you?”
“Brain damage. There was no oxygen going to my brain so part of it died.”
He grinned at her. “That sounds crazy to me. Why would the Father of Clans bring you back damaged? He had his reasons, I can assure you. He wants to make this task easy for you. You have no attachments to the humans. They hate you—you may safely hate them back because you don’t remember what it is like to be one of them. You can do violence without guilt. You don’t ever need to question your own motives. What a gift you have been given!”
“Christ! I’m not some kind of evil undead warrior! I don’t want to hurt anyone!”
“Except Jason Singletary.” Mael place a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. The touch felt good—it had been a long time since anyone had touched her—but she shrugged it away. “I’ve seen through you, Nilla. You would have shaken him till his teeth rattled in his mouth if it would have gotten you a name. And what about those children? You lead them right to their deaths, even after I warned you to stay apart from them.”
She took a swing at Mael, her hard fist tight as a muscle cramp, but the blow met no resistance. She felt a clamminess in the air but there was no connection. She reached out and grabbed for his throat but her fingers just disappeared into his flesh as if she had stuck her hand into a column of smoke.
Nilla threw her hands up in disgust and turned around, heading back the way she’d come.
“His life has been one of torture. He’s been in pain since he was a child. Your heart didn’t go out to him, though. You were willing to use his pain. You wanted to make him hurt more.”
“And that’s a good thing?” she demanded. She was not surprised when she found him standing in front of her again. She tried walking right through him but he grabbed her shoulders and stopped her dead in her tracks. “You want me to do that, to hurt him?”
“Lass, you haven’t been listening. I want to stop his pain.” Mael glanced down into the canyon, toward the weathered shack. “I want to take it all away.”
Nilla looked too and her eyes nearly bugged out of her head. A dead man stood on the doorstep of Singletary’s little home. The dead man with no arms. With his head the corpse butted open the door and stepped inside.
She nearly broke her neck racing down the side of the rock.
