Blue Light (21 page)

“He was the first,” Nesta said about that meeting. “Like you’d been waiting on a deserted island for years, for your whole life, but you never knew it because you never knew that there was anywhere else. But then he crawled up on me and I held him. I felt his loss. He’d followed a scent there that then turned into a memory. He howled as I held him, and I held him for hours. With my eyes closed I was gone from here. I was out in space with millions just like me, singing the same song that Max did.”

“Were you still human?” I asked. “I mean, when you closed your eyes?”

“This body is like a uniform, Chance. I’m like a soldier. I’m proud of the colors and buttons, but they are only vestiges of the spirit that wears them.” Her amber eyes glowed in the cathedral we called home. I felt a strong anger because of the love she felt for a dog.

So while Miles Barber played the puppet master inside, the real story was elsewhere, in Claudia Heart’s womb and the streets of Sacramento.

Gray Man rose to his feet, shivering like a cold dog. He looked at himself in the mirror. His ungroomed hair looked wild. All the years that Horace LaFontaine had straightened it had killed most of the crinkling, but it was still coarse. When Gray Man brushed the clumps back his head resembled a dark brown porcupine whose quills were only half at rest.

He pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He rubbed his hand against his chest, feeling for the pain of life that the redwood had cursed him with. Then he left the room.

He walked out the flophouse door and into the street. The sun grilled down on his bare head. He wore only one black-and-white tennis shoe, the other foot was bare.

“I am Death,” he chanted under his breath again and again. “I can kill. It makes me strong.” He uttered the words, only barely understanding them. This because the redwood’s life had taken root in the soil of his dead soul.

The moment Gray Man stepped out of his door, Winch Fargo was free. The emanations from the death god got clearer as he came closer to Fargo, and Winch knew that it was not his woman’s song. He walked out from the dream of everything, giving it up gladly for the mother of his grandchildren.

He stalked forward, dreaming now only of her feet where he could curl up and worship. Winch didn’t know that her music had dried up. He was following the scent and sound of the dog now. A dog who had also licked and whimpered at the feet of Heart.

Gray Man was walking fast. Two blocks away Winch Fargo broke into a hobbling run. They felt each other, hated each other. Gray Man despised the passion that drove Fargo, while Fargo knew that Death’s light wanted to burn his soul away.

N
ESTA FELT THEIR APPROACH
and dreaded it. Max jumped from her lap and began to pace in front of her, stopping now and again to sniff and growl.

Suddenly he grew still and stared down the concrete stairs.

Gray Man was there half barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans. He was looking at Nesta with a friendly smile, the smile of a hunter at the end of a long chase.

Max scooted behind his new protector as Winch Fargo turned the corner.

In his bulky coat and short pants Fargo looked like a cartoon sorcerer, down on his luck but still with a trick up his sleeve.

Gray Man, the pain of Redwood pulsing in his temples, turned again. He regarded this new creature with confusion and disdain.

“I’m not concerned with you, half-thing. Go away and suffer what little light you have.”

“Fuck you, man,” Fargo replied. “Fuck you two times. Mess wit’ me an’ I go to war on your butt.”

Nesta wanted to run but was transfixed with the rage and pain down below her. She had never imagined that the light in her eyes could be so twisted and ugly.

“I’ll kill you with just these hands,” Gray Man said on a slender breath. Then he ran at Fargo.

“Hey, you two, stop that,” said a man selling newspapers from a wooden crate on the street.

A woman wearing white pants and a fuzzy pink sweater let out a little scream.

No one but Nesta and Max knew the threat of those skinny arms and legs.

Gray Man, sitting astride his foe’s chest, tried to get his hands around Fargo’s throat, but the ex-con held those hands away while cursing and foaming at the mouth.

As people began to gather, the men, Evil and Death, struggled against each other. They looked like street denizens, prematurely aged and demented by wine. No one moved in to stop them, more from an unwillingness to touch them than from fear of being hurt.

“Die!” Gray Man screeched.

“Fuck you, nigger!” Winch Fargo spat back.

Max the dog paced behind Nesta and then sat back on his haunches, letting out a great howl.

Two policemen came running down the stairs toward the scuffle.

“Stop!” Nesta cried.

“All right, that’s enough of that now,” one of the officers said.

He was a large man with close-cut brown and gray hair that stood straight out from his head. He grabbed Gray Man by the shoulder. Gray Man shot out with his left hand, taking the policeman by his lapel, and yanked down hard, slamming the unsuspecting man into the concrete curb.

With one hand free Winch Fargo threw Gray Man off him and rose. He was panting, almost exhausted from the incredibly strong hands of Death. Winch Fargo planted one foot behind him and looked around for a weapon while he waited for the second attack.

Gray Man was on the ground, but he didn’t look tired. He rose smiling at his adversary. But before he could attack again he was struck from behind by a police stick. It was a hard blow that might have laid out a professional boxer. But Gray Man was only stung. He turned on the second policeman, and the woman in the pink sweater yelled louder.

A crowd had gathered now.

Gray Man broke the second policeman’s neck, but when he went for Winch Fargo again, he found the now barechested savant armed with a police stick.

Fargo used his weapon well. He struck again and again, going backward as he did. Men and women were shouting all around them, but no one tried to interfere.

One man, standing up from the corpse of the first cop, yelled, “Someone get the police!”

Fargo kept striking with deadly accuracy, turning Gray Man’s head around to his shoulder with each blow. And Gray Man advanced, seemingly stronger for every blow that was struck.

Fargo backed up the stairs to get better leverage with his swings. Finally Gray Man bent low and caught Fargo by his legs.

And again Gray Man was trying to get his hands around Winch Fargo’s throat.

Fargo felt the closeness of blue death for the first time since he’d witnessed Philip Martel’s demise. Only now, the death approaching was his own. The snake in his brain writhed and thrashed against the inside of his skull. His hands were failing. Gray Man was beginning to breathe hard too.

Unexpectedly Winch pulled Gray Man toward him, butting the black death god with his own tortured skull. Gray Man sat up. He released Fargo and smiled. Before Winch could react, Gray Man grabbed his left arm and stood up. Placing his foot in Winch’s armpit, he wrenched and tugged.

The arm came out of the socket and ripped away from the shoulder with a sick tearing and sucking sound. Winch cried out and Gray Man laughed. People in the crowd began to run and scream.

A blur of brown fur went for Gray Man’s throat, knocking the little man down the stairs.

Nesta pulled off her denim jeans and wrapped them around Fargo’s narrow shoulders to staunch the bleeding. His blood came fast, but not as fast as a normal man’s blood. Then Nesta Vine grabbed the dismembered arm.

Gray Man had gotten the dog by his front legs, but before he could do any damage he was assailed by the meat-and-bone club.

Nesta’s image of herself was powerful and strong. She wailed at the weakened personification of death. She clubbed him while Max snarled and snapped.

Gray Man finally ran away, feeling Redwood attack him from the inside even as Nesta and Max struck from without.

The frightened mob parted before Gray Man. Max pursued him to the end of the block, then came back to Nesta, who was holding Winch Fargo in her lap.

“Am I dead?” he asked her, coming to consciousness for a moment.

“I don’t know yet,” Nesta Vine replied.

A dozen policemen were pressed into action for the disturbance that had broken out on the state building steps.

They found two dead cops, a seemingly mortally wounded Winch Fargo, a feral dog, and a blood-spattered black amazon.

It took six hours for two dozen police detectives to question the witnesses.

Miles Barber, Briggs, and Bonhomme arrived after the violence was over. When he was told of the battle with Gray Man, Barber suffered a seizure that left him unconscious and hospitalized. His coma was short compared with mine, only fifteen days. And it wasn’t really even a coma, because he remembered a dream. He was still a policeman, with two eyes. He walked out of the state building onto the scene of the murders. There he came upon a pool of blood left by Winch Fargo’s wound.

“But there was something odd,” the ex-detective said, remembering the dream. “The blood wasn’t drying. It was still wet and had blue veins all through it. I went over to inspect the blood, but it flowed away from me, down the stairs. At first I had this crazy thought that it’s ’cause of gravity that the blood is flowing downward. Can you imagine that? Havin’ a scientific reason in your dream.

“So I followed the blood down to the curb, but it keeps on going down the street. The faster I chase it, the faster it goes until I’m running after this blue-veined pool of blood that’s rushing down the street.” As it always was with Barber, he began to experience what he was telling. His breath came quickly and there was visible strain in his body and hands. “I was runnin’ so fast that I couldn’t see where I was going. I ran right into him. He stayed on his feet, but I tumbled to the ground. And when I looked up I saw that it was him; all black and big, real big. He was naked and his eyes were red. And then he bent down over me and he was whispering. Everything around me turned black like him, and all I wanted was to hear the words. I concentrated as hard as I could and then, just when the last of the light was gone, except for his red eyes, I heard him say, ‘It’s never over,’ and everything went black. And then I was coming out to see the blood again. It all happened all over again. Everything was the same except that I knew it.

“When I regained consciousness, they called Bonhomme. He told me that the court had appointed a lawyer for Claudia Zimmerman and she convinced the judge that her client’s rights had been violated. The judge let her go. Mackie Allitar was just down the hall from me, dying from drug abuse, they said. I asked Bonhomme about the black man, the killer.

“ ‘Oh, him,’ Bonhomme said. ‘They think he’s a judo expert. Add that to the fact that Fargo obviously has some kind of leprosy, and it looks pretty crazy out there. We don’t have anything to do with it anyway. We got Halston and Fargo. They let the warden go. Thanks for your help.’

“And I lay back, ready to die, Chance. I swear. I was ready. I lay in that bed for two days. Doctors and nurses came in and frowned at my charts. They stuck me with needles and put soft food on my tray, but they knew I was on my way out. But then the music came. It was like all the horns in the world all at once in a thousand tones, but they were all playing the same note. I was up and outta that bed as strong as I had ever been, stronger. That was about two in the morning. I met Allitar in the hall. We looked at each other and grinned like boys who just climbed over the school fence to check out the big world outside.”

The feral dog escaped from the dog pound the night they caught him. He had been knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, but when they tried to carry him from the cell to the gas chamber, he sprang to life suddenly and made a dash for it. No one could ever remember a dog with the will and intelligence to break through a glass windowpane and dash away.

They said he was badly cut, though, and was probably dead within minutes.

Claudia Zimmerman left the Bay Area. No one knew where she went.

Winch Fargo had escaped from police custody a week after Miles Barber and Mackie Allitar, with the assistance of some unknown friend. The hospital doctors, like the dogcatchers, said that Fargo was probably dead a few hours after he escaped.

Gray Man crawled back toward his desert hole, bruised and pulsing with pain. He felt his heart thrumming as if he had been frightened, but he wasn’t actually afraid. He felt the blue coyote pup following him and wondered if he would have been strong enough to fight him off.

He finally arrived and crawled down into his hole, burying himself once again. But this time his sleep was disturbed by unnamed night terrors; this time his sleep was more alive than it was dead.

“I
LOVE YOU, CHANCE,”
Alacrity said to me.

We were looking out over a vista of spiky pines and cloud-rifted blue skies. I carried her in the crook of my arm while she nestled her head against my shoulder. I carried her as if she were a small child. She was young. But Alacrity had begun to grow quickly in the woods. She was more than three years younger than Wanita, but already she was a foot and a half taller than her friend. She looked closer to twelve than three.

She and her mother, Reggie and Wanita, and I were living at the Bear Lodge Country Cabins in northern California. We stayed in California, albeit many miles from the Bay Area, because Addy and I wanted to be near at hand if the remaining Blues somehow made a stand against Gray Man. We were pretty confident that he couldn’t find us easily and that we could escape as long as we were free. Also, Reggie kept saying that he felt the safest place in the world for us was close by. He spent many days scanning the countryside for our refuge, but the direction for some reason eluded him.

“I know,” I said to the young girl. “I love you too.”

I did love her, as a child who was frightened and headstrong, who was inquisitive about everything, and who needed a story before she could go to sleep at night. But I also knew that she was the daughter of a strangeling god who had prophesied the beginning of an era heralding the end of mankind.