Crossroads (14 page)

"You are who you are," said Jen with that infuriating flat stare.

"What does that mean?" said Kira, stamping her foot on the asphalt. "I’m Kira. That’s all. Just Kira Graves."

"That is more than you know."

"Why was my father a mind reader? Why was my mother a soothsayer? Why am I a
creator
?"

Jen stared off up the road, but there was nothing more interesting ahead than there was behind, simply more mountains and somewhere ahead another town where they could not chance stopping. In the space of a few terrible deadly instants in Florida the known world had been transformed into some new and completely unknown dimension where she did not belong, where she had no friends, no family, no place to hide. She could feel the
Empty-eyed-man
close on their heels again, although they had not seen hide nor hair of him since the night in the little village.

"When you hid us from the Grigs..." mused Kira, "and the
Empty-eyed-man,
you did something else. You didn’t stop time."

"No."

"Why?"

Jen frowned. "He is strong. I don’t know if I could stop him for more than a moment."

Kira nodded.

"Do you know yet where we are going?" asked Jen.

Kira shook her head. "I just walk where my feet tell me."

Jen nodded. "And how do you think they know?"

"I don’t understand how. I just know which way I have to go now."

"As you will come to understand why you are."

"But I don’t!" said Kira, stomping again.

"Don’t is not will," said Jen.

"Why are you so sure I will understand?" asked Kira, calming herself and matching her step again to Jen’s. 

"Because that is how
you
were made."

"I wasn’t made. I was born," said Kira, sensing that she had discovered a fundamental difference between the two of them that should have been obvious all along.

"We were all made," said Jen.

"By who?"

"By the one who makes all things."

"God?" asked Kira, realizing that she had never heard Jen speak of any such belief before. She knew about God, about church, and religion, but she had no personal experience with any of them. Her parents had never spoken to her about God, and she had never asked.

"The
Great Creator
," whispered Jen, reverently.

Kira frowned, shocked. "
I’m
a
creator
."

Jen nodded.

"I’m not God," said Kira.

Jen shrugged. "What are you, then?"

"I told you! I don’t know."

"Then how do you know you aren’t God?" said Jen, a sly grin crossing her lips and her good eye twinkling.

"You shouldn’t say things like that," said Kira.

"Why not?"

"Because... because maybe if there is a Great Creator he might not like you comparing me to him."

"You do not think you are worthy of comparison?"

Kira stared at her gape mouthed, trying to understand if she was joking. "Are you serious?"

Jen waited.

"Me and God?"

Jen nodded for her to go on.

"I make funny money," said Kira. "And I turned that girl into... into something I guess, but I’m not anything like God."

"What is he like?"

"I have no idea."

"Then-"

"This is stupid!" said Kira, stomping her foot again. "What did
your
creator look like?"

Jen smiled wider than Kira had ever seen her smile before. Both her eyes lit up. "He is tall and strong with powerful hands. He wears a bright white robe and has hair as pale as his garment. His voice is like the roaring of the wind, and his touch is as soft and gentle as morning dew."

Kira was flabbergasted. Never before had Jen made such a speech, and her voice carried the inflection of deep rooted emotion instead of her normal stoicism.

"He sounds like God," she had to admit.

"He is not, though," admitted Jen.

"How do you know for sure?"

"You have told me so."

Kira sighed, trying to riddle her way through Jen’s spiral of words, but it was like talking to the breeze.

"There’s another village," said Jen, as they rounded a sharp bend.

But Kira shook her head. There was no way she was going to expose one more person to her own dangerous powers or to the powers of the Grigs and the
Empty-eyed-man.
She expected no argument from Jen, but she got one.

"Sooner or later you will accept the way of things."

"What do you mean?"

"You are not an island."

Kira sighed, shaking her head. "I thought you said I was God."

"I never said that."

"So, why not an island?"

"People are your destiny."

Kira frowned, trying desperately to understand the words. She sensed that hidden somewhere within Jen’s seemingly rambling nonsense lay answers that she needed to hear, but she couldn’t for the life of her reason them out. 

"As you are theirs," muttered Jen, taking the lead.

In the darkness they almost stumbled across a woman wearing a frayed jersey summer dress, leaning against a tree and staring toward the lights of town ahead. Kira froze in mid-stride, reaching toward Jen, but she had already noticed the woman as well. The woman seemed not to notice them approaching, closing her eyes and resting her head against the rough bark as though in pain.

Jen shrugged and shook her head, tiptoing past with Kira on her heels, but Kira couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder at the woman, at her sagging shoulders, the way her hands clenched and unclenched in her lap. Something terrible had happened to her, or she had done something terrible. Now she didn’t know what to do. For just an instant Kira wondered if the
Empty-eyed-man
had somehow gotten ahead of them, wondered if he were doing the things he did
before
they got to wherever they were going, but that seemed unlikely. She believed she would have sensed his presence even after he had left this place.

No. Whatever misery the woman was suffering, the
Empty-eyed-man
had not caused it directly. It was some woe natural to this new world. As natural as any woe could ever be.

Once they had hiked around the woman and through the small sleepy village they waited behind a billboard as one lonely tractor-trailer roared past before beginning to walk along the shoulder again. Kira could sense the desolation of the place behind them fading as though the town were one solid body of despair that they had somehow managed to narrowly escape. The world around her was sadder than she had ever imagined, filled with vast pockets of grief and misery that she sensed spreading across the landscape like sludge.

"They live it," said Jen, quietly, "but they don’t feel it the way you do."

Kira nodded, understanding down deep in her bones. All of the towners existed in a universe sinking into despondency that they didn’t comprehend and couldn’t control. That was why they'd always rushed to the show in such droves, searching for the smallest measure of joy to fill their empty lives.

"Was it always like this?" she whispered, knowing somehow that it wasn’t, knowing she was right about the part the
Empty-eyed-man
played.

"I don’t think so."

"You don’t know?"

"I wasn’t made to know."

Kira wondered if she had been made to know, either, or whether the tragedy of her parents’ murders, of Clancy’s death, of the deaths in the bank, had somehow transformed her a little at a time until she was attuned to the world in some way she had never been before.

"It’s just so awfully sad," she said.

The sound of a mournful wind through the trees along the road echoed her thoughts.

"Yes," muttered Jen.

Kira was shocked to see a tear leaking from Jen's bad eye.

"Let’s walk all night," said Kira, sighing.

The numbness of exhaustion was beginning to seem like a good thing to her. Maybe she could walk herself into brain blindness where all the hurt would just go away.

But walking was not in the cards. As they rounded a curve, just ahead they could see the tailights of a flat-bed semi loaded with boxes. The driver was tapping the tires with a long iron before heading back to the cab. Kira glanced at Jen, who shrugged. Both of them raced to the truck where Jen helped Kira aboard, and they slipped between the crates that were held firm by wide, nylon straps. After a few moments they heard the roar of the truck engine, then felt the jolt as the truck bumped back onto the road.

Chapter 18

When the truck driver slowed but did not stop at the dark, deserted highway intersection, Kira and Jen slipped stealthily from amid the banded boxes on the flatbed trailer and dropped to the ground. Jen followed Kira silently to another tiny clearing in the woods a few miles outside a small farming hamlet in northwestern Virginia. They lit no fire, since Kira feared it would call unwanted attention, and because they had no food to cook upon it. As the moon rose over the trees Kira drifted into a deep-and thankfully dreamless-sleep, curled tightly against Jen’s side.

But sometime in the night telltale clicking noises from the forest snapped Kira into instant wakefulness, to find the blood-red moon still hanging just above the spikes of the pine trees surrounding them. Jen lay perfectly still beside her, both her eyes reflecting the crimson light, reminding Kira eerily of the bright red eyes of the Grigs. When Jen nodded that it was time they climbed silently to their feet, the clicks drawing nearer by the minute. Creeping away from the sounds, deeper and deeper into the dark woods, terror-sweat trickled between Kira’s shoulder blades, and she could smell her own fear on the night air.

When Jen knelt and jerked Kira down beside her, she pressed against Jen’s side, staring into the shadows behind them as black spheres shuffled amid the bracken, sniffing and clicking, their crimson eyes as bright as roving flashlight beams. She shivered, and Jen silently wrapped an arm around her shoulders, hugging her tightly as one of the Grigs skulked stealthily through the trees toward them. It looked like a giant, black beach ball with a gaping mouth below the gleaming red eyes. Teeth as sharp as hypodermic needles radiated from its dark maw, and razor talons extended from the tips of the claws on the ends of its thin, bony legs. It stopped almost within Kira’s reach, staring directly at her, and she held her breath, ready to grapple with it when it leapt, although there appeared to be nothing that she might grab onto to protect herself from tooth or claw.

Although it clearly sensed something, the Grig didn’t seem to see
them. It angled its bulky, neckless body this way and that, the shining eyes moving across them and away, across them and away. Finally it spun and trotted off, and its companions followed, vanishing into the skein of trees like black blowfish swimming through a wide net. When the last of the creatures disappeared, Kira rose shakily, and she and Jen stole deeper still into the forest, placing each footfall carefully and as slow as a slug slithering down the face of a concrete stoop, because it wasn’t just the Grigs she sensed.

Somewhere out there the
Empty-eyed-man
was hunting them, too. The Grigs were like hound dogs, doing his bidding. Their
noses
might be better than his, or, for all she knew, they might have all kinds of senses that led them to her or Jen, but they worked for the
Empty-eyed-man.
He was in the woods this night, and intuition told her that Jen wasn’t going to be able to hide them forever.

I can feel your hours slipping through my fingers like dust.

When they reached a stream turned blood-red by the wounded moon Jen led her across, both of them careful not to splash the icy, ankle deep water. The stones were as slippery as axle grease, but Jen was surefooted, and her strong hand in Kira’s guided her safely to the opposite shore. They were barely into the shelter of brush atop the other bank, though, when more Grigs appeared on the far side, sniffing and clicking excitedly. Two of the hateful beasts raced up and down the rocky stream, bouncing into and around each other, and then more appeared, and Jen dragged Kira away.

Suddenly she realized that not only had they abandoned their packs, but she had left the wad of money stashed in her bag, having placed it there after leaving the convenience store. She cursed herself for not shoving it right back in her pocket. Jen glanced at her and shrugged, and Kira nodded. They had far bigger worries than money which could be easily replaced. Her mother’s admonitions not to use her power just didn’t hold up under their present circumstances. She had to get over that bit of useless guilt.

The Grigs hounded them all night, often so close on their tails that Kira began to wonder if they were really trying to catch them at all, or rather herding them somewhere. Was it possible that the
Empty-eyed-man
wasn’t behind them, but somewhere ahead? She tried to get a better feel for him, but all she could sense was the dull impression of gloom that his proximity always portended. It wasn’t until they had been running and hiding for hours that she realized that she no longer had the feeling of traveling toward something. Instead, she just felt lost once again, as lost as she had felt the night Jen had dragged her away from the show and into the woods to begin with.

When the clicks fell mercifully silent for a moment, she tugged at Jen’s sleeve, pulling her face down close amid the vagrant slashes of leaf shrouded moonlight.

"We’re lost," she admitted, whispering into Jen’s ear.

Jen nodded, but she squeezed Kira’s hand and led her deeper into the forest, anyway.

Chapter 19

July 30th

Sheila tossed and turned atop sodden sheets, battling her nightmare.

Her mother was slipping away into darkness, drawn into the clutches of some unseen horror that refused to reveal itself beyond the eerie shadows that surrounded both of them.