Apricot brandy (32 page)

She emptied the clip into his mouth and eyes. A blow-back of hot tissue sprayed her arms and writhed there. But for all this havoc she dispensed, still she must back-pedal, still he pushed robotically into the storm of lead till she was almost toppling backwards, his skull in shards and tatters. Yet he
would not fall
!

Turning around, she bounded from him, forcing a miracle from her rubber legs and, in that slender interval, spun again with just one heartbeat’s clearance, and into the wet hiss coming from his mouth, an almost-speech of obscene solicitation, thundered more bolts of devastation. Still, he came on as relentless as before. Though he was just a jawbone, one cheek and a shard of cranium above the neck, still he came. Karen whirled and ran—
could
run now, or nearly. There! The twelve-gauge lying in the lane. She had it! Swung it round— he was almost on her, his black hand inches from her hair— and she fired the first round point-blank in his chest. He catapulted backwards and she pumped five more point-blank at his knees. He struggled to rise on legs with damaged hinges. She ran back down the lane, seized her coat with all its shells, and shrugged it on. Ran back up reloading, and blew both his lower legs off at the knees.

“Catch me now!” she shrieked. “Come on! Let’s see what you’ve got! Get up!” Stood there swaying, panting. Feeling a chill on her breasts, absently she buttoned up her coat. “Look at you twitching! Bet you’re sorry now you tried to rape me! Twitching corpses! Undead rapists! You think I give a shit?!
I’m
not insane! The
world
is!” Still, adrenalized, enraged though she was, it seemed that this obscenity should not
be
twitching. Should lie still. She threaded more shells into the twelve-gauge. If she had to pulverize him piece by piece to make him still, then by God—

His body had begun to melt, to flatten and spread and soak into the sand— seemed not to have a single bone inside it! In moments it became a dark stain, vaguely man-shaped. And then became nothing, just dark soil.

And then Karen understood: it had not yet even
begun
.

“You’ve never left me,” she said, her voice suddenly so faint, a long-ago grieving child’s voice. “You’ve never let me go and now you want to drag me underground, forever… .”

The ground that had swallowed Wolf trembled, cracking into a network of fissures. Karen stepped backwards and backwards again. The fury that was coming, that was making this broken earth tremble, had crushed her life almost from its beginning. She saw a young girl with wounded eyes and a blood-stained dress. Saw a young woman fighting her way through a decades-long darkness of booze and anger and grief. Remotely she mourned for this girl, this young woman.

She had this shotgun. She had a short time left to live. Okay.

Head and shoulders erupted from the ground. Twice as big as life Dad was, his blown skull grown high-crested, twined boughs and plumes of vegetation grandly back-swept, nodding like a classic Mayan headpiece. His arms were great braided cables of green muscle, his hands gnarl-knuckled as an ancient oak-tree’s roots. He had new eyes of onyx, and a beard of vines, and incessantly, all the root and stalk and branch that he was woven of twined restlessly within its living braidwork. He seethed with growth.

He surged out of the earth, a full twelve feet tall, and stood merely surveying his daughter while she fired five rounds up into his face. His face re-knit as swiftly as the double-ought could spray it into sap and shredded tissue. Then his hand shot out, took the shotgun and crumpled it within his endlessly re-woven fingers. She saw there in his onyx eyes that gulf of hopeless distance she had learned to fear when his abuse of her had first begun.

From behind her, there came a roaring sound, a swiftly growing howl. Just as she turned to see, a motorcycle leapt into the air, soared over her, and crashed into Dad’s chest. The man who had dismounted just after he launched it— Kyle!— regained his feet at her side, and fired up a chainsaw. Dad caught the Harley in swift-sprouting fingers and flung it— tumbling, chrome flashing— into the orchard. The snarling chain swept through Dad’s outstretched hand, both hand and wrist flew off, and a new hand, larger and gnarlier, instantly sprouted in its place. It made a fist and swung a killing blow, and Kyle ducked under it and sank the chain-saw’s blade into Dad’s leg. Before the limb had toppled, a mightier foot and calf thrust out and gripped the ground, and Dad’s hand seized Kyle and held him fast, gripped Karen too and lofted her as well. Wrapped tight as mummies in his branching fingers, they hung before his eyes.

His eyes, dark stars, or frozen planets, were bare of any human history. He tilted his head back, opened his jaws, and a hiss like an arctic wind came out of him. His face, agelessly superhuman as a temple frieze, beheld his child and her defender, and his jaws gaped to consume them… and then his eyes were drawn from the eternity they scanned. He saw a frail shape moving through the moonlit air towards him. A slight form, moon-white leaves her sketchy flesh, riding the night-wind, her foliate garment fluttering, as she came to stand upon the air, eye-to-eye with her huge consort, seeming softly aflame in the flutter of her borrowed flesh. Her eyes, mere moonlit gaps, fixed her husband’s onyx orbs.

Long they paused there, gazes locked while, within the gnarled hugeness of Dad’s face, a subtle sundering occurred, a loosening of the brute weave of braided root and vine. Grief came to haunt the Titan’s face, and tender remembrance, long lost, returned to it. He raised his daughter closer to his gaze.

And far down the lane— for they were halfway up to the house now— far below, that black slug in its bath of moonlight shuddered. A ripple went through the compost heap’s plastic skin and tires slid off it. Something moved
within
it, something as big as the heap itself. And moved again. A tear began along its dorsal crest, a rupture a hundred feet long.

A sinuous scaly mass erupted from it. Most like a great wingless dragon it was, save for crude crooked scorpion’s legs all down along its flanks. Its eyes were myriad, amber-orange, the largest clustered on its huge-jawed head. It reared this head, and beckoned its servitor, and the sacrifices his minion held. The thing that had been Jack Fox obeyed and took one step downslope towards his master… and stopped.

His wife’s form now had turned from him, and touched her daughter’s face, and stroked her cheeks. For all Karen’s dire extremity, her tears fell like blood from cuts, a hot effusion she was powerless to stanch. “Mom,” she whispered, and felt love crack her heart like an eggshell. This pang went through her father’s hand and found his heart and mind in turn. And what had been Jack Fox stooped and set down Karen and Kyle upon the ground. As his titanic master rounded on him and surged upslope towards him in his wrath, Emily Fox’s ghost made to her husband a staying gesture and sped through the air, towards the house.

Meanwhile Jack Fox turned to confront the Titan he’d defied, a monster twenty times his size. The black voids of Jack Fox’s eyes were now lambent with rekindled self and flashed forth the spirit of a long-ago man with a heart and a mind of his own… .

The green god’s legs, like the oars of a trireme, rippled as they smote the earth. His fanged jaws flashed in the moonlight and his dragon’s body, thrashing, seemed to lash the earth as he swarmed upslope, his serrate tail a wrathful scourge, enraged enough, after centuries of insult, to scour mankind utterly from the face of his plane.

And then it was, between the ascending dragon and Jack Fox, his rebel servitor, that a wheel of fire was kindled in the sky. Seven hundred ghostly hands held forth torches of braided grass which, like a mosaic of flame, kindled a blazing puzzle in the sky. And the green god, gigantically cringing, like a commanded worshipper before the image of its deity, crouched and cringed, its dinosaurian tail thrashing, felling fruit trees right and left. Quetzal, a torch in either hand, bestrode the air. Stepped out above the crouching dragon, her voice like fine steel ringing in the shock of battle.

“Great god! Hear us! Behold! See the wheel of Time! Read the writ of the assembled gods in script of fire across the firmament! Here is the ancient, long-forespoken wheel of man’s destruction! Behold it! The time for Man to die has not yet come. You rise in rebellion against all the universe!”

For a long moment the dragon, three hundred feet long, coiled and thrashed and rippled in the moonlight. It seemed no wonder that even such a reptilian monster should pause in a momentary paralysis. For that wheel of fire, hanging just above the newly risen moon, had such an intricately epic swarm of symbols, it seemed a text as dense and cosmic as the constellations themselves, when they blaze thick on moonless nights and fill the dark with intricate hieroglyphs.

“Behold what all the gods have joined to write!” the witch cried. “The death of Humankind is not yet arrived!”

The raging deity twisted in the moonlight, roared defiance, and started once more upslope towards his human sacrifice. The ghosts rained down their torches on him, but they sizzled powerless on his scaly hide. On he surged towards his priest and the priest’s daughter. Then Jack Fox saw where his ghostly wife sped back to him, a glittery object in her leafy hands. Karen and Kyle were slow to understand it, but Karen’s monstrous father seized it like a sword of salvation, seized the brandy cannon like life itself, and drenched his grotesque body with satiny, gurgling sheets of hundred proof. Soaked and shining, he reached down and seized up Karen’s dropped twelve-gauge, even as the dragon surged still closer to striking distance. Karen looked up into her father’s eyes and touched her fingers to her lips. He reached a massive hand towards her and touched her face as gently as an alighting butterfly. Oily tears leaked from his night-black eyes. After thirty years, Karen looked into her father’s eyes, her
real
father’s eyes, while from his inhuman jaw, a hiss emerged, a gasp of grief unutterable, a whisper of farewell.

And then his massive hand found strange finesse— sneaked a tendril through the trigger-guard and replicated his first suicide. The self-aimed salvo sparked to flame the brandy shroud he’d donned. Ablaze now, Jack Fox, a burning giant speeding towards a greater giant, leapt flaming down the slope, the greedy fire he wore towering from his mighty shoulders as he sprang to meet the green god, whose onrush set the orchard earth trembling under the impact of his crooked legs.

Kyle seized his chainsaw in one hand and with the other helped Karen, barefoot and limping, to the truck. “You’ll have to drive. I’ll need to run the saw. We’ve got to clear our pathway as we go.”

They stood a moment, looking back. Her mother hung above them, looking too. The green god in its wrath, jaws agape, leapt upon Jack Fox, but as they closed, reflexively the dragon recoiled from the flames. The rebel priest leapt high, seized his master’s fangs, and hauled his flaming self within his master’s maw. Now the dragon coiled and writhed and hammered the earth with its tail, and dug with its claws in its jaw to dislodge the agony of this flaming meal it had been forced to eat. Xibalba bit and chewed to quell the stubborn meal, to sunder and extinguish in his own sizzling throat what fought too powerfully to be expelled, even as it was divided and re-divided, within those colossal fangs. Oblivious in anguish and agony, the green god devoured his blazing servant and, in his agony, clawed at the earth, and dragged his hugeness underground once more.

Now Karen’s mother’s foliate fingers touched away her tears, and told her, in that touching, they would meet again. There was a gentle leaf-fall, and a parting movement of the air as she joined the ghostly wheel. The ghosts also shed their raiment, and bore the witch away thorough the moonlight. She raised her hand, saluting Kyle and Karen, and was gone

“Karen. We have to go. Can you handle the wheel? The highway is… alive.”

“I can handle the wheel better than that chainsaw.” She fired up the truck, and rocketed them out to the highway. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For coming to help me.”

“What else was I going to do? Just be ready to steer.”

Thus it began, and was beginning elsewhere in the Midwest. Jack Fox had not climbed from that cenote alone, nor indeed had he and his companions been the only ones to enter it and re-emerge. Scores of men, zombied remnants, or apparently intact, had radiated from that focus. The CIA had seeded the region with thousands trained to spread mayhem and murder, and a surprisingly large percentage of these had found their way to that fertile pool, or to its equally fertile environs. And all of these had brought back to their homeland a mission as ruthless and murderous as they had taken with them, though a mission far more “global” than they’d previously had any conception of.

Late on the following morning, Karen and Kyle reached Foothill National Park. The refugees of Gravenstein and Dry Creek filled the campsites, the great majority still sunk in the sleep of exhaustion. A couple dozen sat awake at an impromptu council spot where park benches had been dragged together and a low fire kept a kettle of coffee hot. Helen and Skip Carver, Cherry and Sal rose from this group to embrace these last arrivals. Karen held Helen hard, and lost herself in tears it seemed would never end.

And when at last she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and with a wry smile looked at the exhausted faces around her, she was struck by something puzzling in this scene of snoring families and dazed-looking coffee-drinkers. “So… ” she said, looking at her companions. “We’re not running. Kyle’s told me what you’ve been through. Is this… safe? Everyone… lying on the ground like this?”

“That… witch was here.” This was Sheriff Ruddy. Karen had no way of knowing what a plump, comfy-looking lawman this gaunt, haunted refugee had been just yesterday afternoon.

“Quetzal,” Helen Carver gently amended.

“Yes. Quetzal. Came back to us here late last night. Her and her… soldiers, I guess you could say. God knows a lot of us owe them our lives… ”