Rogue (22 page)

“Any lions?” asked Nick.

“No, just many more of the same sorts of nightmarish species that we've previously encountered since our arrival…although there is a herd of something that looks quite a lot like zebras…except that their stripes are all vertical…Oh, I see why now…”

“Why?” asked Jericho.

“They're all standing upright…on what appear to be kangaroo legs.”

“Zeb-karoos,” said Nick.

“That's just wrong,” said Elise.

“Wait,” said Ajay, looking farther off to the right. “There is something else moving out in that direction…on the far side of the river…It's rather large…Ah, yes, it's an extremely large cloud of dust and it goes on for quite a while…along a road or a byway of some kind, paved with stone…Something appears to be on that road…that is to say
traveling
along that road…Oh my, oh, dear…”

Ajay suddenly sank down to a sitting position, facing them, looking frightened.

“What is it?” asked Will.

“Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. Perhaps you'd better take a look.”

Will retrieved his field glasses from his bag and sat up on one knee. He looked first with the naked eye in the direction that Ajay had indicated until he could vaguely make out a smudge that could be the cloud of dust he'd described. Then he raised the glasses.

It was difficult to see much detail through the roiling dust but as his eyes adjusted, he eventually started to make sense of what appeared to be raising the cloud, and why it extended back so far.

“It's an army,” he said.

“That's what I thought,” said Ajay.

“For real?” asked Nick.

Jericho asked for the glasses and rose up to take a look; then he moved the glasses slowly back to the left. “They're traveling toward those mountains. That road looks like it runs all the way there.”

“What kind of army?” asked Elise.

Ajay, Will, and Jericho answered at the same time: “Monsters.”

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #12:

IN THE FACE OF OVERWHELMING ODDS, DO ONE SMART THING AT A TIME.

“What kind of monsters?” asked Nick.

“Listen to me carefully, Nick,” said Ajay. “Close your eyes and use your imagination. Picture every sort of terrifying beast that we've encountered so far. Both here and back home.”

“Okay,” said Nick.

“Now imagine creatures that are many times worse than that,” said Ajay. “Larger, more hideous, much more dangerous-looking. And there are thousands of them.”

Nick thought about it. “Well, that sucks.”

“Do you think they'll spot us here?” asked Elise.

“Unlikely,” said Will. “They're making a forced march of some kind. Trying to get somewhere fast.”

“Their focus will be on the road,” said Jericho, looking at Nick. “I don't think they'll notice us. Unless we do something stupid.”

“Would you stop looking at me when you say that?” said Nick.

“Why so many? What do you think they're up to, Will?” asked Elise, rising up and grabbing the binoculars to take her own look.

“Dave told us they were preparing for an attack in here, remember?” said Will. “An invasion against our world. You heard him, too.”

“So he wasn't lying or exaggerating,” said Elise.

“Franklin kept dropping knowledge that something big was in the works, too,” said Will. “But he also told me that it was nothing to worry about because the Knights were in complete control.”

“How'd he figure that?” asked Jericho.

“He said the Others could plan invasions of Earth from now until the end of time, but none of them would ever come to pass because they didn't have the ability to create a way back into our world on their own.” Will took the Carver out of his backpack. “Unless they got their hands on this.”

They all stared at the device for a moment.

“So using the Carver to cut a hole in time/space back into our world from this side,” said Ajay slowly, “is the only way they can possibly get back across to Earth.”

“That's what Franklin told me,” said Will.

Nick looked around and was the first to express what the others were feeling. “Dude, one question: Then why did we bring it in here with us?”

“We don't know that Franklin was telling the truth or that he even knows the truth,” said Will. “What if the Makers have found a way to come across on their own, or they're on the verge of figuring it out?”

“If they're smart enough to create all this…,” said Elise, looking around.

“Exactly, then they're probably smart enough to do that. Franklin told me the original design for this came from them, so why couldn't they build another one?”

“Dude, I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer,” said Nick, “but we still brought it in here.”

“The Carver is the only way to get here, and it's the only way we're going to get back,” said Will. “So what other choice did we have?”

“Uh,” said Nick, looking around at the others, “not coming?”

“But we need to free Dave,” said Will, feeling his own conviction start to wobble. “So he can let the Hierarchy know what's going down and get their help…so they can stop the invasion.”

“That might not be able to take place,” said Ajay slowly, “unless they have the Carver.”

“So what's stopping us from using it right now to cut our way back and get the frick out of this unholy mess?” asked Nick.

The question stunned him; Will looked around in dismay. Even Elise looked like her faith might be starting to waver.

“Hold up,” said Jericho. “Let me see that thing.”

Will handed him the Carver. He weighed it in his hand, feeling its heft. Thinking. They all waited.

“So your old granddad told you this is the only one of these that exists,” said Jericho. “Anywhere.”

“That's right.”

“And this man is—let me see if I've got this right—a grandiose, homicidal lunatic who's spent his whole life selling out everyone around him, and by that I mean not just his own family but also our entire species, in order to realize some fanatical plan of rewriting human destiny. On top of which he holds an unbreakable faith in his own delusional beliefs about…pretty near everything.”

“More or less,” said Will.

Jericho turned to the other three roommates and asked calmly, “Question for you: Who are we going to trust, our friend Will, or his messed-up messianic gran'pappy?”

Ashamed, everyone either pointed to Will or mumbled his name.

“I happen to agree with you,” said Jericho calmly. He handed the Carver back to Will and said, “You were saying.”

Will stuffed the Carver into his backpack, unable to meet anyone's eye for a moment. “So, obviously, we have to protect this thing and…not let them get their hands on it. Just in case.”

“But just in case they've figured out a way to build another one,” said Elise firmly, “we have to finish what we came here to do.”

Will nodded.

“Right on,” said Nick.

“We'd better move along, then,” said Ajay, standing up and shouldering his pack. “Hadn't we?”

“Let's head for the lake,” said Will. “We'll try to hook up with Ajay's drone. See what that tells us.”

Will set off ahead of the others down the hill toward the plain. Elise was about to walk after him when Jericho nudged her slightly and shook his head.

“Give him a minute,” he said.

The others started after him, single file, down the path, Ajay leading the way.

As he pushed ahead, Will ran through all the scenarios in his head, over and over again, from every angle. He kept bumping into the same thorny conundrum:

Did what he hope to accomplish here justify the risk they'd taken? In his urgency to take action, had he led his friends into unspeakable danger? And not just his friends. The stakes soared so high beyond their own dire straits that he couldn't even get his head around them.

Because they didn't get any bigger than this: In his eagerness to do the right thing, had he put the fate of the whole world at risk?

And if that was the case, was he any better, really, than his own bat-shit-crazy grandfather or the Knights of Charlemagne? What if, acting with all the best intentions, he'd actually made the one mistake that could make all of
their
mistakes a reality?

Where is this coming from? How did this happen to me? Is there something in my family's makeup, an arrogance in our bones or blood or DNA, some fatal defect in our way of thinking, that leads us into making these kinds of horrific, destructive choices?

Or does it have more to do with whatever alien genetics they spliced into me?

He found no relief as he rolled the situation around, no easy way out. He was either right or wrong about it, and they'd find out soon enough.

But either way, he knew there'd be a price to pay.

The path narrowed as Will reached the bottom of the final hill and stepped out onto the plains. A narrow path forward appeared through the wild grasses ahead, which grew even higher here, almost to his shoulders. Since they were well over Ajay's head, there was no point in having him go first to scout, so Will stayed at the head of the line. Still brooding, he didn't even look back at the others.

Elise moved up to take the position behind him, watching him trudge forward, his shoulders slumped, weighted down with more than the bulk of his pack.

Don't think you have to do this alone,
she sent to him.

I don't.

You didn't force us to come with you. We all made a choice. And nobody regrets it.

No one but me.

He glanced back at her with a rueful smile. Elise didn't have an answer for that. She thought she'd never seen anyone look as lonely as Will did in that instant.

Will, as he had done periodically since they arrived in the Never-Was, turned his eyes forward and sent another mental transmission out to Dave, a sort of broadband telepathic SOS. He hoped with all his being that he'd receive something in return, at least some indication that Dave could still be saved, and if so, that they were headed in the right direction. The creeping fear that he'd led his friends on a suicide mission that might well lead to global catastrophe made him want to crawl out of his skin.

He concentrated fiercely, listening for a response. He hadn't heard a syllable from Dave and didn't honestly expect to hear anything back from him now. But instead of the cold silence he'd gotten up until now, this time he heard…something. Not words, or an identifiable voice, or anything that was definably “Dave.” It came to him as muted as a whisper on the wind.

He zeroed in on it. More a feeling than a sound. A single blip on a radar screen. But it was something. Then he felt it a second time. And as he tried to place it, as vague as it was, it seemed to be coming from those distant mountains. Not much, but maybe just enough on which to hang a fragile strand of hope.

Behind Will and Elise, Ajay fell back alongside Jericho, talking low and fervently.

“You know, Coach, it's occurred to me that, with regard to our previous conversation, there's an emerging school of thought in quantum physics that may have some relevance here,” said Ajay. “A number of scientists are exploring the idea that all of creation, the entire known and unknown universe, might in fact be nothing more than a hologram.”

Jericho thought about it. “Guess that isn't any crazier than the idea that the world was created by an all-powerful rock floating in a void.”

“A rock?”

“But the rock had nothing to use all his powers on, and he got bored, so one day he opened his veins and his blue blood ran out and created the water and sky, and before he knew it, his body had softened and rounded and he had become the Earth.”

“Yes, of course,” said Ajay, looking up as he located the memory. “The story of Inyan and the Lakota creation myth.”

Jericho looked down at him with mild surprise. “Is there anything you
don't
remember?”

“If there is, these days it's not for very long,” said Ajay, almost apologetically.

Jericho looked around at the lifeless, false fields of dry grass and up at the pastel-painted sky. “If this is all a hologram, who thought it up? Somebody still had to put it in play, right?”

“That is the fundamental chicken and egg question, sir,” said Ajay, trailing his hand through the grass. “Although it may well be unanswerable for the time being, as far as our version of ‘reality' back home is concerned. But it raises an even larger question for me: If our own cosmos is just a construct, or a simulation, some sort of ultimate game within the confines of some limitless, unknowable cosmic mind, then what does that make us? Insignificant pawns on someone else's chessboard? Vague figures in some old god's dream?”

“Why does that worry you so much?”

Ajay looked anguished. “Because if that's true, how does anything in us or around us have meaning? And does it actually really matter what we do about anything?”

Jericho thought about it for a moment. “It matters to us,” he said. “It matters right now.”

Ajay looked up at him searchingly. “Because if it doesn't, what?”

“Nothing means anything,” said Jericho. “So we may as well act as if it does.”

“I find that…oddly reassuring.”

“Remembering a bunch of facts is one thing,” said Jericho, not too harshly. “Knowing what they mean is something else.”

“Knowing isn't understanding,” said Ajay thoughtfully. “Yes. And to that point, there's a relatively obscure school of Tibetan philosophy that believes the true mind isn't even located in the brain. They believe it resides here, in the stomach.”

Bringing up the rear, Nick had moved up close enough to hear their last exchange.