Infernal Revelation : Collected Episodes 1-4 (9781311980007) (10 page)

He rubbed her shoulder, then stopped. "Your
mother... she said you didn't come home until later Friday
evening."

There it was. A statement. Her father wasn't
asking her where she'd been, but he was acknowledging that he knew
it wasn't home. The way he always did.

She turned back to him,
the man who had raised her, loved her, and lied to his face. "I
wasn't
sick
sick.
Just... head sick. Anxious. I needed to walk, to clear my
thoughts."

Her father nodded. "I understand,
Sweetheart. You do what you need to do to get better. Just... let
someone know, okay?"

"Okay, Daddy."

"We worry."

"I know, Daddy."

He leaned over and gave her a peck on the
forehead, smiling in such a loving, trusting way that it made her
really, really hate herself.

She watched him go, then rolled onto her
stomach, burying her face in the pillow. She hated this, lying to
him, lying to her mother. They didn't deserve this, but what could
she say? Telling the truth wouldn't get her anything but
therapy.

Maybe that's what she needed. Therapy. This
whole business was crazy bullshit, and she had too many real
problems in her life to deal with crazy bullshit.

There was another light knock on the door.
She looked up to see her mother in the doorway.

"I didn't want to bother you until after
your father had spoken to you," she said. "But there was a young
man who stopped by earlier."

Lily froze. "Was it Barny? Carter?"

Her mother looked taken aback. "What? No. It
was Sheriff Cermak's boy. Gideon. I told him you were resting."

Lily relaxed, sinking back down to her
mattress. "Thanks, Mom."

Lisa Baker pursed her lips. "That Cermak
boy... he's troubled. I don't know what he'd think you'd wanted
with him."

Real subtle, Mom. "Just some school stuff.
Nothing important."

"Oh, of course." Her mother smiled with
genuine warmth. "I'm so lucky to have such a well-behaved daughter.
I don't know how Bill puts up with that little monster."

Lily didn't say anything, nodding and
staring at her fingers, steepled in front of her.

Her mother withdrew from the doorway. "Lunch
will be ready in a few. Oh -- the Ross's will be by for supper.
Jessie is looking forward to seeing you."

"Mom, I don't think... I mean, I think I'm
just going to go to bed."

"Feel better, Darling."

She managed a weak smile for her mother's
sake, but as soon as the door closed her face reverted to blank
neutrality. She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling,
trying hard not to think about... anything. Gideon. The accident.
Derek. Melchizedek. She just wanted to ignore it, wanted it all to
just go away.

***

The desert and scrub
flew by, tinted amber by the visor of Delilah's helmet. Her dirt
bike rocketed across the Laton town limits and into the arid lands
beyond. Sometimes, when a flight of fancy took her while riding,
she liked to imagine that she flew through some post-apocalyptic
wasteland, a survivor girl on her own. Nowhere to go and nowhere to
be, no pressure but the pressure to live and survive another
day.

Other days she imagined what it would be
like to leave Laton and just keep going West past Odessa, on into
New Mexico, or maybe even all the way East to Dallas.

Could she make it that far? She liked to
think that it was possible. Load up a pack with a few weeks worth
of food and a tent. Her bike wasn't street-legal, but there were a
lot of open spaces in Texas.

When she reached the salt flats she veered
north, hugging the scrubland border. She lowered her head and rose
off of her seat, going faster across the salt-flats. There wasn't
anything to hit, so she could indulge in the purity of speed.

She loved her dirt bike, not just for the
freedom it offered to leave town, but for the connection it
represented. Her foster-brother Sean had left it behind when he
went off to Texas A&M, and she had appropriated it. Her parents
didn't notice, or if they did, they didn't mind. Not even when she
started riding it around town. Not even when the Sheriff escorted
her home with the admonishment that the dirt bike wasn't street
legal.

He was the one who suggested she take it out
into the flats around town. As big a jerk as he was to Gideon, she
did owe Sheriff Cermak that.

After another quarter-mile she hit the old
river-bed. If it had ever had a name, she hadn't been able to
discover it. And she'd been looking.

To most of the folk of Laton, the desert,
scrub, and flats surrounding the town were empty and boring.
Delilah knew better. She found things out there sometimes, old
things, ancient things, like the dry creek-bed. Like the old
Volkswagen bus, rusting and half-buried. Like the shack.

It was the shack she was racing towards now.
She didn't know why it was there, or who had built it -- searching
the town records for information about it had been her introduction
to 'real' hacking.

There it was, ahead of her, a black speck on
the horizon perpendicular to the dry bed she was following. She'd
almost missed it the first time she'd been out here, a year ago.
She had barely spotted it out of the corner of her eye, and
impulsively decided to ride out and take a look.

Delilah leaned the bike into a wide turn and
directed herself towards the shack and, hopefully, some
answers.

CHAPTER FOUR

The shack wasn't much
to look at, just four scrap wooden walls under a corrugated tin
roof. The only impressive thing about it was that had somehow
survived the sun, wind, and rare rainstorm out in the middle of the
west Texas desert. An errant strand of cable ran up one of the
walls to a corner of the roof where it looked like a fixture had
been bolted long ago. Delilah's theory was that it had been a radio
array at one point. She liked the thought of it, some diode nerd
out here, in the middle of nowhere, sending out signals and
reaching for the very human contact he had hidden from.

Of course, she was much more interested in
its likely current occupant.

She parked her bike outside and pulled off
her helmet, hanging it from one of the handlebars. What had seemed
like a brilliant idea back in town now left her with a dry mouth
and a fluttering in her stomach.

"Melchizedek?" she called softly, stepping
through the doorway, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the
gloom.

It was like an oven inside, hot and stuffy,
smelling of faint decay. She wouldn't be able to stand it for long.
She didn't think her quarry would have a problem.

"Mel?"

Two bright pinpoints of cerulean blue
appeared in the lower corner of the shed, and it took all of
Delilah's courage to keep herself from yelping and jumping back out
of the shack.

The pinpoints swept up together in the
blackness, rising to Melchizedek's height.

"How did you find me?" His voice was placid,
almost normal.

Delilah stood her ground as his eyes
approached through the darkness, but the cadence of her words
betrayed her nervousness. "It wasn't too hard to figure out. You
would have needed a place to hide during the day, and those men,
the ones with the guns, would be able to find all the easy ones,
like the water tower or the Spot. This place isn't far for someone
as fast as you are, and nobody knows about it. Except me, I
guess."

The blue sparks halted in their advance,
peering down at her.

Delilah's own eyes were adjusting to the
dimness. She could see the scattered debris around the floor, a
ratty sleeping bag and a rusted out cook-pot, left by the shack's
builder or a later inhabitant. Melchizedek, however, remained an
inky shadow right in front of her.

"How did you know I hadn't left?"

"You haven't gotten what you wanted
yet."

A rattle emanated from the shadow. It may
have been a chuckle. "Clever girl. Why are you--"

She stumbled, almost swooning.

His thin bone-white hands emerged from
shadow to catch her by the shoulders with an incredibly strong
grip. "Are you okay?"

"Sorry," Delilah said. "It's hot in here...
and you kinda freak me out."

"We can go outside if you want."

She nodded and he helped her back out into
the sun. It was brighter here, but the air was cooler, and there
was a nice breeze.

"Better?"

In the bright light of day, Melchizedek
looked almost ordinary, if you discounted the eyes and the pale
skin.

"Shouldn't you cover up?" she asked. "You're
so pale."

"I don't burn," he said. "Why are you
here?"

Delilah unclipped the plastic water-bottle
from her bike and took a long sip. "Questions."

"That's brave of you."

"They're important questions."

"Okay." He nodded. "I'll tell you what I
can, but I only know what Marianne told me."

"I understand," Delilah said, moving into
the shade behind the shed. It was still hot, but with the breeze it
was bearable. "You said our father wasn't human?"

"That's right."

"What was he? What does that make us?"

"I don't know exactly. Marianne spoke of him
with such reverence... like he was a god. He might have been an
angel. Or a demon."

"Neither of those things are real," Delilah
said. "They're just stories."

"And yet, here I am, looking like this and
wrapping shadows around things."

The girl bit her lip. She liked to consider
herself a skeptic, a staunch rationalist, but part of that was
accepting what she saw and experienced. Science was about letting
go of paradigms that no longer proved to be true.

"You're proof of something. Something
different and maybe even supernatural. I don't know what, but that
doesn't mean that you're part angel."

"I can't argue," Melchizedek said. "Marianne
was a very religious woman. The way she talked about life in
Polvorin, about our father, I think they might have been some kind
of a cult."

"What was his name?" Delilah asked. "Our
father?"

"Nicholas Kantor."

Delilah looked down at her water bottle. "A
Cantor is a church singer."

"Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's a
made-up name. But she said he could perform miracles. Water into
wine. Healing the sick. All kinds of things."

"What did she think he was? A prophet?"

"I asked once if he looked like me,"
Melchizedek said. "She said he could look like whatever he wanted
to."

Delilah took another sip of her water. "What
do you think he was? An angel or a demon?"

Melchizedek smiled. "Who says there's any
difference?"

***

Each pound of Lily's
feet on the asphalt shook loose more of her worries and
insecurities. They fell away as she ran the track behind the
school. There was nothing that cleared her mind so completely as
the raw physicality of running. When she was in motion she could
let everything else go, all her worries, all her concerns, all of
the stress she had been carrying, and just exist in a state of
quietude.

She didn't even feel bad about sneaking out
down the tree outside her room to avoid lunch with her family. That
guilt, the loss of her friends, the conflict with Derek, even the
strangeness of the dark-clad Melchizedek faded with each step until
there was nothing left but running, the function of a
well-maintained organic machine. Hips moved, knees bent, arms
pumped, lungs breathed, and Lily ran.

It was moving meditation. It was the next
best thing to flying.

She wasn't alone at the track. There were
always a few kids hanging out behind the school, even on weekends,
simply because there wasn't much to do or many places to actually
go in Laton. Sometimes, when it wasn't too hot out, the entire
track team would show up to get some practice in, leading to some
impromptu races. There were only two of Lily's teammates present;
Sally Dee and Kimberly Hudson, jogging on the outside track, but
she didn't spare them more than a nod.

Harder to ignore was the football team
running scrimmage on the field that the track ran around. It wasn't
the noise of their collisions, which she could block out, but the
presence of Derek and Barny. Her boyfriend wasn't a real problem --
if she didn't feel like talking to him, she could always skip out
before their practice ended, and he respected her need for
solitude. Barny, on the other hand, still irritated her. She could
feel herself growing angrier every time she passed the point where
he was standing.

As she lapped Kimberly and Sally again, the
sudden awareness that both girls were staring at her broke through
her runner's trance. She realized that a few of the players and
other kids hanging out had taken notice as well.

She didn't know why.

She didn't really want to know why.

As Lily rounded the bend where the field was
closest to the road, she slowed herself to a jog and left the
track.

Why wouldn't everyone just leave her
alone?

***

Barny watched in a
state of dawning shock as Lily Baker left the athletic
field.

He'd made a note of her when she'd arrived,
of course. He still owed her for laying him out the way that she
had on Friday. He wasn't going to do anything to her directly --
not yet -- but she was obviously unstable, and when she had a
complete break-down he wanted to be there to take as much advantage
of it as possible.

She hadn't said anything to Derek about
their altercation yet, at least not as far as Barny had been able
to discern through careful probing and bro-talk. He didn't think
Derek was clever or restrained enough to keep something like that
quiet. He'd take it upon himself to avenge Lily most chivalrously.
At this point, Barny's nose had yet remained un-punched.