The Walking (37 page)

"I don't see my uncle," Janet kept repeating, her voice a little-girl whisper. "I don't see my uncle."

"I see my uncle," Garden said. "And I see my gram pa There was dread in his voice.

Rossiter said nothing, but Miles noticed that the agent's revolver was now drawn, and though he didn't think that would help, it somehow made him feel better.

More dead men and women emerged from the parted water.

And she appeared. She's here.

He knew instantly that this was who his father and Janet's uncle had been talking about. This was the person the homeless woman in the mall had been trying to warn him about.

She walked out of the water, naked. Her head was streaked with mud, her tangled, stringy hair green with algae, but like the others, her skin had not been eaten away, and she looked remarkably well preserved for being so long in the lake. Her head was tilted at an odd angle, as though her neck had been broken. While she was inarguably beautiful, there was something terribly off about her face, a wildness, an alien ness in her expression that filled him with fear. He did not know who she was, but she had an undeniable aura of power. Isabella.

The name came to him, from where he did not know, but he understood that it was hers. His feeling that she was somehow behind everything solidified.

She turned her tilted head, looked at him And he was at a crossroads in the moonlight, watching through Isabella's eyes as she approached the hanging body of a witch. The woman, a hag with a wild mane of gray hair, had been stripped naked and was dangling from a frayed rope attached to a lightning-struck oak. There was a faint glow about the witch, the remnants of power that were no doubt invisible to ordinary eyes, and this was what Isabella desired. There were no people anywhere near this cursed place, and even the lights of far-off villages had been

extinguished, so late was the hour. She crawled, unhampered and unseen, up the tree to cut down the body, and when it fell, she jumped on top of it. Her lips closed over the corpse's open mouth, and she began drawing in the extant power, at the same time sucking out blood and bile and bits of half digested food. It was the energy Isabella needed, desired, and he felt the strenghtening within her as her body absorbed the witch's dark force, extracting it from the dead body in the only way possible.

And then he was in an Anasazi village, Isabella taking the community's shaman in front of the shaman's brethren as part of a ceremony, draining the body through the palms of the old man's hands, wanting only the energy, but taking the blood as well in order to support the preconceived notions of the audience. Isabella was nude and moaning, allowing the blood to spatter her breasts, her stomach, her hairy crotch. The people watching prayed and chanted, giving thanks, and as she ingested the last of the man's essence, the shivers of orgasm passed through her loins.

Then the village was gone, and he was in a dark hut in which a man of power practiced his arts. The man was kneeling before a statue he had carved, the statue of a god in the shape of an asparagus. On the floor beside him lay dead women, nude and with their legs spread, stalks of asparagus protruding from their private parts. It was late spring, asparagus season, and outside men harvested the vegetables as their wives and daughters, caged in bamboo boxes, squirmed and screamed and begged to be released.

This was a different earth, an older earth, because the la rut outside was unlike anything existing today, the mountains on the horizon too tall and oddly shaped, the sky and the dirt of the fields different in color than they should have been.

Isabella had fed recently, so there was no reason to partake of the man's power. Instead, she knelt with him, the two

of them speaking in unison, praying to this an cent god, then crawling across the floor to where the prepared bodies lay. She crouched before the first dead woman, said the Words, shoved her head between the cold thighs, and started eating the asparagus.

Then he was in a huge black cave with naked men and women and creatures that had never seen the light of day, monsters that had never been drawn by the hand of man, had never emerged from even the most fervid imaginations of the world's most profane illustrators. The floor was mud, dirt mixed with blood rather than water, and Isabella was standing in the center of the cave, legs spread, arms in the air, howling. The men and women were cowed in terror before her, and she reached down, picked up one of the scuttling creatuers and ate it, crunchy slimy albino skin popping between her teeth as she chewed the unholy flesh.

She howled again, grabbed another little monster, ripped it apart with her teeth, and swallowed its essence. She cried out, an inarticulate cry of hunger and pain, and this time she leaped upon a larger creature, a segmented, multi-legged, multi mouthed multi-eyed monstrosity that squealed at her touch and attempted to right her off.

She subdued it easily, bit into the rubbery skin of its back, and killed it. "

She howled. =

And then the visions were over. He was once again here, himself, and Miles looked quickly around. Only a second had passed. He was exactly where he'd been, nothing had moved, nothing had changed. He felt dizzy, disoriented. He was not sure what had happened, but some sort of connection had been made between himself and this woman. He did not know how or why, but she had allowed him to glimpse what? Her memories? Her fantasies? Her plans? Her past? :!;

A quick look at Janet and Gardii and Rossiter told him that none of them had experienced anything similar. What 312 ever the phenomenon was, it had been reserved solely for him.

Isabella had emerged completely out of the water and was walking on the sand. She turned toward him, smiled chillingly And the vision hit.

The dam blew apart, Wolf Canyon Lake draining out in a tidal wave hundreds of feet high, emptying through the mountains and onto the desert below, completely wiping out a small town, the bodies of hundreds of people washing onto the plain.

Destruction spread across the land.

Phoenix was buried under a massive sandstorm that covered the entire Southwest and engulfed Albuquerque and Las Vegas as well. New York was in flames, the teeming streets filled with fleeing people with no place to run. Chicago sank into the ground while the waters of Lake Michigan rushed in to fill the hole. Los Angeles was shaking from an endless earthquake that seemed intent on leveling every manmade structure in the state .... As before, he saw it all through her eyes, and in a flash of insight, he realized that she had lived here at Wolf Canyon.

She had been one of the witches buried under the lake when the town was flooded.

The vision faded.

He staggered backward. Part of him wanted to shoot her, tackle her, but that was a small stupid part and it was overruled by common sense and good old-fashioned fear. Unlike the other Walkers, she was not merely an automaton. She was not following orders. She was the one giving them, carrying out her well-thought-out plans.

Now he understood. Finally he'd discovered a focal point to the evil that had spread out from this spot, that had reached across the country to kill all those people, that had some to do like his father, and 'the relatives and had finally brought them here. i

Isabella.

She wanted nothing less than complete revenge. Her power would grow with each loss of life, until she was unstoppable.

The end of the world would not result of Divine intervention or cosmic accident but from the small bitter hatred of an angry witch.

Miles was shaking. With fear, yes, but also from sensory overload, overwhelmed by the intensity of what he had experienced.

He had felt her anger, the white-hot core of hate that fueled her rage, but what remained with him most was the loneliness she felt, and moral imperatives were as nothing before it, minor distractions to be ignored or tossed aside. He remembered, as a kid, watching the Apollo space shots on TV, and what he recalled most clearly was Apollo 8, when American astronauts circled for the first time around the dark side of the moon. For the entire preceding week, he had attempted to imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, to visualize what they were seeing, to experience what they felt. Loneliness was what he came up with. Everything they had ever known--water, sky, clouds, dirt, plants, animals, mountains, people, buildings, bugs--was a million miles away, encapsulated on a sphere they saw floating far off in the blackness of space while they were crammed into a small metal room surrounded by absolute nothingness. And when they circled around the dark side of the moon, when their radio transmission was cut off until they orbited back around, they were denied even that, stuck with only each other and the silence of space without so much as a glimpse of their blue globe world in the distance. They were alone, completely alone. i What he had felt when seeing through Isabella's eyes was

a comparable loneliness, a similar estrangement from the currents of life. Only it was somehow worse because it was something he could not understand. Her emotions and thought processes were so profoundly alien to him that he could deduce nothing from them, could make no predictions regarding past or future actions. The only thing he knew was that she could not be dissuaded from the course which she had chosen, that she was unalterably set upon her path and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do to change that.

Isabella looked past them, through them, and kept walking, following the others along the edge of the lake.

She didn't know that he'd seen!

His hart began racing. On the edge of despair only a second before, cowed and intimidated by her awesome power, he now saw a ray of hope.

Whatever connection had been established between them, she was unaware of it. Somehow, he had tapped into her intentions without her knowledge.

It was not much of an advantage, but it was something. The fact that she did not know he had gained access to her thoughts meant that she wasn't perfect, wasn't all-powerful. She'd looked in their direction after coming out of the water, but if she'd seen them or noticed them at all, she'd thought of them as little more than bugs or plants, totally irrelevant.

The constant tingling in his midsection faded as she moved between the paloverde trees away from them, angling inland from the shoreline. The other Walkers now seemed to Miles to be driven before her like cattle.

He knew that if anything was going to be done to stop her, they would have to be the ones to do it. How they would accomplish this was another matter. He looked over at the others, wanting to tell them what he'd experienced, but there was no way to convey the scope of it all. Rossiter was still holding his drawn weapon, but he had not fired a shot, and Miles could tell from the expression

on his face that the agent had been stunned into inaction. Janet was staring blankly out at the water.

Garden spoke first. "What the hell was that?"

"I don't know," Rossiter said.

Miles finally found his voice. "Isabella."

They all looked at him. "She's a witch who was here when the town was flooded, and somehow she survived. She's behind everything. She's old, older than we can imagine, and she's angry at what was done to her. I don't know if she was killed and struggled back from the dead or if she was just weakened and put out of commission for a while, but it's taken her until now to build up her strength. She reached out and killed the people responsible for the dam, the people who built it, the people who oversaw it, and she's gathered to her the people from Wolf Canyon, the other victims." He nodded at Gar den. "Like your grandfather." He took a deep. breath. "And my dad. I think they're, like, her army, and she's going to use them to help her--".

What? Destroy the world?

It sounded so stupid and childish and melodramatic.

"--take revenge," he said lamely, vaguely.

Rossiter nodded, but that was the only response. No one questioned him, and the irrationality of that made him realize just how crazy things had gotten. There were plenty of questions to ask. Why were Isabella and the Walkers leaving the lake after all these years? Where were they going from here? Perhaps the others didn't want to know more. Perhaps they understood on some instinctive level that what he'd told them was true, and that was enough for them.

Janet shook her head uncomprehendingly. "Did you see your father?" she asked Miles.

He nodded. "Yeah."

She turned to Garden. "Your grandfather?"

"And my uncle."

"Uncle John wasn't there." Her voice was filled with something like relief. "Maybe we did bury him. Maybe he is back in Cedar City and he's not involved in all this."

"Maybe," Miles agreed. He wasn't at all sure that Uncle

John's fate was so benign, but he wanted to ease her suffering. She did not deserve this. He was sorry he'd brought her along, but he knew that the only reason he could say that was because Garden and Rossiter were here. The truth was, he had had her come along solely because he hadn't wanted to be alone. Now he wished that he had left Janet back in Utah.

Garden was staring at the spot where they had last seen the Walkers heading into the desert, toward the hills. The track of disturbed sand that marked their passing was clearly visible. "What do you think we should do?"

"Follow them," Rossiter said, but his voice lacked conviction and his face betrayed a complete lack of desire to do any such thing.

Miles shook his head. Logically, that should be their plan, but something about it seemed wrong. It didn't feel right, although that seemed like a nebulous objection. "No," he said.

His authority challenged, Rossiter's spine stiffened.

'"they'll get away. If you're right, they need to be stopped.

And we're the only ones who've seen them. We're the only ones who know where they are."

"It's too dangerous," Miles said, and though he didn't know why he thought that, he did

"You coming?" the agent asked Garden.

The young man looked confused, ttmaed from Rossiter to

Miles, licking his lips.