Armageddon's Children Part 6

He has to tell her something more. He takes a deep breath. "I saw that I would do this in a dream," he finishes.

Margaret doesn't laugh at him. Her expression does not change at all, but there is a flicker of recognition in her eyes. "You will be the father, and I will be the mother."

He hesitates. "You believe me?"

"Why shouldn't your dream be as real as anyone else's? Why shouldn't you do what you say you will? Tessa says you're special. I know what she means. I can tell by looking at you. By listening to you. I don't have dreams anymore. I don't even have hope. I want both again. If I come with you, I think I will find them."

He shakes his head. "It is dangerous in the ruins, outside the compound walls. You know what's out there, don't you?"

"I know."

"I can't be with you all the time. I might not be there to protect you when you need it."

"Or I you," she replies without blinking. "Life is a risk. Life is precious. But life has to be lived in a way that matters. Even now." She reaches out her hand. "Take me with you. Give me a chance. I don't ask for anything else. If you decide it isn't working out, you can bring me back or leave me. You are not bound to me. You owe me nothing."

He does not believe this for a moment, knowing that if he agrees to take her with him, he is accepting responsibility for her on some level. But the force of her plea moves him. The intensity of her eyes captivates him. He sees strength in her that he has not often found, and he believes it would be a mistake to underestimate it.

"She does not belong in the compounds," Tessa says quietly.

"Nor do you."

But in the end it is Margaret who goes with him and Tessa who stays behind.

IT WAS MIDMORNING when he departed with Cheney for the waterfront. The day was overcast, but not rainy, the air thick with the taste of chemicals and the smell of putrefaction. The wind was blowing off the water, the ocean waste spills making their presence known. It was like this on the coastlines when the wind was blowing the wrong way. The spills, which had taken place even before the start of the wars, had all but overpowered the natural cleansing ability of the oceans and left millions of square miles fouled. Their poisons were dissipating, but the detritus washed back up regularly through the estuaries and inland pa.s.sages to clog the sh.o.r.elines and remind the humans that the damage they had done was mostly irreparable. Some of those poisons were carried onsh.o.r.e by the wind, which was what Hawk could taste on the air. He closed his mouth, put a cloth over his face, and tried not to breathe.

A futile effort, he knew. The poisons were everywhere. In the air, the water and the land, and the things that lived in or on all of it. There was no escaping what had been done. Not for the humans alive now. Maybe for those who would be born a hundred years down the road, but Hawk would never know.

He had waited with Owl until the others awoke, eaten breakfast-a meal consisting of oatmeal, condensed milk, and sugar, all of it salvaged from packaging that time and the weather had not eroded-then called the others together to give them their marching orders. Panther was to take Sparrow, Candle, and Fixit and try to retrieve the stash of bottled water that the latter had discovered with Chalk on the previous day. Bear was to take Chalk up on the roof and retrieve the water storage cylinders, which would have absorbed their purification tablets by now. River was to stay with Owl to help look after Squirrel. He had given strict warning that no one was to go outside alone or to become separated from the others if out in a group. Until they found out what had done such terrible damage to the Lizard they had stumbled across yesterday, they would a.s.sume that everyone was at risk.

"So that changes things how?" Panther had sniffed dismissively as he headed out the door.

Hawk had waited until Panther's group was gone and Bear and Chalk had departed for the roof, then warned Owl again to keep the door barred until she was sure who was on the other side. Just to be certain, he had waited on the other side of the metal barrier until he heard the heavy latch click into place.

Now he stood outside in the street, waiting while Cheney relieved himself, thinking of the dead Lizard, still bothered by the mystery behind the damage it had incurred and determined to find out what had caused it. To do that, he needed to visit the Weatherman. The sky had turned darker and more threatening, as if rain were on the way. And it might be, but it was unlikely. Days like this one came and went all the time, gray and misty and sterile. Rain used to fall regularly in this city, but that wasn't true anymore. Nevertheless, he wore his rain jacket, the one Candle had found for him. In one pocket, he carried a flashlight; in the other, two of the viper-p.r.i.c.ks. It was always best to be prepared.

He looked around for a moment, seeking out any signs of movement, found none, and headed downhill for the waterfront, Cheney leading. The bristle-haired dog padded along with his big head lowered and swinging from side to side, his strange walk familiar to the boy by now. It might seem as if Cheney weren't entirely sure where he was going, but the look was deceptive. Cheney always knew where he was going and what was in the way. He was just keeping watch. Cheney knew more than any of them about staying alive.

He had found the big dog when it was a burly puppy, foraging for food in the remains of a collapsed building in the midtown, half starved and unapproachable. The puppy growled at him boldly, warning him off. Intrigued, Hawk knelt and held out a sc.r.a.p of dried meat he was carrying, then waited for the dog to approach. It watched him for a very long time without doing anything, yellow eyes baleful and hard and suspicious. Hawk waited, meeting the other's dark gaze. Something pa.s.sed between them, an understanding or recognition, perhaps-Hawk was never sure. Eventually, the puppy came a bit closer, but not close enough to be touched. Hawk waited until he was bored, then threw him the meat, turned, and started off. He had other things to do and no place in his life for a dog, in any case. He had only just brought Sparrow and Fixit into the underground to join Owl and himself, the start of his little family, and finding food for the four of them was a big enough problem without adding a dog to the mix.

But when he had looked back again, the puppy was following him, staying out of reach but keeping close enough so that it would not lose sight of him.

Three blocks later, it was still there. He tried to shoo it away, but it refused to leave. In the end, its persistence won him over. It had stayed with him all the way back to the entrance to the underground, but refused to come inside.

Finding it still there the following morning, he had fed it again. This had gone on for weeks until one day, without warning, it had decided to go down with him.

On reaching their home, it had looked around carefully, sniffed all the corners and studied all four kids, then picked out a corner, curled into a ball, and gone to sleep.

After that, it had stayed with them inside. But it had never become friendly with anyone but Hawk. It allowed the others to touch it, those bold enough to want to do so, but it kept apart except when Hawk was around. The boy couldn't explain Cheney's behavior, other than to attribute it to the fact that he was the one who had round the dog when it was a puppy and fed it, but he took a certain pride in the fact that Cheney, to the extent that he was anyone's, was clearly his.

He glanced over at the big dog now, watching the way he scanned the street, sniffed the air, kept his ears perked and his body loose and ready.

Cheney was no one to mess with. He was big to begin with, but when he felt threatened he became twice as big, his heavy coat bristling and his muzzle drawing back to reveal those huge teeth. It wasn't just for show. Today Hawk was carrying one of the prods for protection. But once, when he wasn't, less than a year after he had found Cheney, he had gotten trapped in an alley by a pair of Croaks-zombie-like remnants of human beings who had ingested too much of the poisons and chemicals that had been used in the terrorist attacks and misguided reprisals that followed. Half dead already and shut out of the compounds, the Croaks roamed the streets and buildings and waited to die. Croaks were extremely dangerous. Even the smallest scratch or bite from one would infect you; there was no cure. This pair was particularly nasty, the sum of their rage and frustration directed toward Hawk when they saw he couldn't escape them. But they were so intent on the boy that they hadn't noticed Cheney. It was a fatal mistake. The big dog had come up on them in a silent rush and both were dead almost before they realized what had happened, their throats torn out. Hawk had checked out Cheney afterward, fearing the worst. But there wasn't a mark on him.

After that, Hawk was convinced that Cheney was worth his substantial weight in daily rations. He quit worrying when he had to leave Owl and the smaller children alone. He quit thinking that he was the only one who could protect them.

The street sloped downhill in a smooth, undulating concrete ramp that was littered with car wrecks and debris from collapsed buildings. On one side lay a pile of bones that had been there for as long as he could remember. You didn't see bones often in the city; scavengers cleaned out most of them. But for some reason no one wanted any part of this batch. Cheney had never even gone over to sniff them.

Ahead, the waterfront opened up in a series of half-collapsed wooden piers and ruined buildings that left the concrete breakwater and pilings exposed. The waters of the sound spread away in a black, oily sheen clogged with refuse and algae, disappearing offsh.o.r.e in a ma.s.sive fog bank that hung from clouds to earth like a thick, gauzy curtain. There was land beyond the fog, another piece of the city that stuck out south to north in a hilly peninsula dotted with houses and withered trees. But he seldom saw it these days, for the fog kept it wrapped tightly, a world far removed from his own.

He reached the waterfront and stood looking about for a moment, Cheney working his way in front of him, left to right, right to left nose to the ground, eyes glittering in the thin light. Left, the steel skeletons of the shipping cranes rose through the mist like dinosaurs frozen in time, dark and spectral. Right, the buildings of the city loomed over the dockside, their windows thousands of black, sightless eyes whose gla.s.s had long ago been broken out. The waterfront itself was littered with old car hulks and pieces of the buildings that had come down with the collapse of the piers and the concrete viaduct that had carried traffic through the city long ago. A dark figure moved in the shadows of a building front, one of the few still standing, there for just an instant, then quickly gone. Hawk waited in vain for another look. It was something more scared of him than he was of it.

He started down the waterfront toward the places where the Weatherman could usually be found. He kept to the open s.p.a.ces, away from the dark openings and rubble where the bad things would sometimes lie in wait. Croaks, in particular, were unpredictable. Even with Cheney present, a Croak would attack if given a chance. Of course, anything would attack street kids because they were the easiest of prey.

He had walked perhaps a hundred yards north when he heard the Weatherman singing: A tisket, a tasket, The world is in a casket.

Broken stones and dead men's bones, All gathered in a basket.

The Weatherman's voice was thin and high and singsong in a meandering sort of way that suggested his mind wasn't fully focused on what he was doing. Hawk suspected the old man's mind hadn't been fully focused on anything for years. It was a miracle that he had survived this long on the streets, alone and unprotected. Almost no adults lived outside the compounds; only kids and Freaks lived on the streets.

Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb.

Sweet and kind and slow of mind, it really didn't know.

That everywhere that Mary went, Mary went, Mary went. Everywhere that Mary went, bad things were sure to go.

"Which accounted for its untimely demise the day Mary decided to visit the waterfront and ran into the big, bad wolf. h.e.l.lo, Brother Hawk."

The Weatherman emerged from the shadow of a partially collapsed building along the dockside, his ravaged face like something out of a nightmare-the skin pocked and mottled, the strange blue eyes as mad as those of any Croak, and the wispy white hair sticking out in all directions. He wore his trademark black cloak and red scarf, both so tattered it was a wonder the threads still managed to hold together.

"Are you the wolf that Mary should have stayed away from?" Hawk asked him.

You never knew for sure what the Weatherman was singing about.

The old man hobbled over to him, giving Cheney a pa.s.sing glance but showing no fear. Cheney, for his part, kept his yellow eyes fixed on the scarecrow but did not growl. "Hadn't given it much thought. Do you think I might be?"

Hawk shrugged. "I think you're the Weatherman. But you could be a wolf, too."

The old man came right up to him. He reeked of the streets, of the waterfront smells, of the poisons and the waste. His eyes were milky and his fingers bony as he lifted them to his scraggly beard and tugged on it contemplatively.

"I could be many things, Brother Hawk. But I am only one. I am the Weatherman, and my forecast for you this day is of dark clouds and cold nights and of a heavy wind that threatens to blow you away." The mad eyes fixed on him.

"My prediction calls for a Ghost watch. Keep a weather eye out, boy, until I have a chance to provide an update."

Hawk nodded, not understanding at all. He never understood the Weatherman's predictions, but out of politeness he pretended he did. "We came across a Lizard yesterday. It was all torn up. You know something out there that could do that, Weatherman?"

The ragged head c.o.c.ked and the gaunt face tightened. "Something searching for food or establishing its territory. Something like The times we live in-who would have believed they would come to pa.s.s? Do you know, Brother Hawk, that this city was beautiful once? It was green and sparkling, and the waters of this bay were so blue and the sky so clear you could see forever. Everything was lovely and new and filled with color and it could hurt your eyes just to look at it."

He smiled, the gaps in his teeth showing black and empty. "I was a boy like you, long ago. I lived over there, beyond the mist." He pointed west, glanced that way as if he might see something of his past, and then looked back at Hawk, his face stricken. "What we've done! What we've allowed! We deserve what's happened to us. We deserve it all."

"Speak for yourself," Hawk said. "I didn't do anything to deserve this.

The Ghosts didn't do anything. Grown-ups did. Tell me what you know about the Lizard."

But the Weatherman wasn't ready to move on yet. "Not all grown-ups are bad, Hawk. Never were. Not all are responsible for what happened to the world.

Some few were enough to cause the destruction-some few with power and means. It was different then. Do you know that people could speak with each other and see each other at the same time through little black boxes, even though they were thousands of miles away? Did you know they could project images of themselves in the same way?"

Hawk shook his head. "Owl reads to us about that stuff, but what's the difference? That's all gone now, all in the past. What about the Lizard?"

The old man stared at him as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing, then nodded slowly. "I guess it really is gone. I guess so." He shook his s.h.a.ggy head. "Hard to believe. Sometimes I think about it as if it never really happened. An old man's dreams."

He sighed. "There are things coming out of the earth, Brother Hawk. Things big and dark, birthed by the poisons and the chemicals and the madness, I expect." One eyebrow c.o.c.ked. "Haven't seen them myself, but I've seen evidence of their pa.s.sing. Like your Lizard, a whole nest of Croaks, down by the cranes at the south end, torn to pieces. They fought back, but they were no match for whatever got them. That sound similar?"

Hawk nodded. Most creatures simply avoided Croaks, especially if there were more than one. What would attack several and not be afraid?

The Weatherman bent close. "It's not safe in the city anymore. Not on the streets and not in the buildings. Not even in the compounds. There's a change in the weather coming, Brother Hawk, and it threatens to sweep us away."

"It won't sweep me away," Hawk snapped, angry at having to listen to yet another bleak prediction. His lean face tightened and his patience slipped. "You make these forecasts, Weatherman, like they don't have anything to do with you.

But you're on the streets, too. What are you going to do if one of them comes true?"

The other's smile was gap-toothed and crooked. "Take shelter. Ride it out.

Wait for the storm to pa.s.s." He shrugged. "Of course, I'm an old man, and old men have less to lose than boys like you."

"Everyone has a life to lose, and once it's gone, that's it." Hawk didn't like what he was hearing. The Weatherman never talked about dying. "What kind of weather are you talking about, anyway?"

The old man didn't seem to hear. "Sometimes it's best to get far away from a storm, not try to ride it out."

Hawk lost the last of his patience. "I'll be leaving here one day soon, don't you worry! Maybe I'll leave now! I'll just pack up and go! I'll take the Ghosts out of this garbage pit and find a new home, a better home!"

The words came out of his mouth before he could stop himself. He didn't really mean to speak them, but the old man was always predicting something dire, always forecasting something awful, and this time it just got to him. What was the point, after all? How much worse could things get than they were now?

The Weatherman didn't seem to notice his distress. He turned away and looked off into the mist that hung over the bay. "Well, Brother Hawk, there's better places to be than here, I guess. But I don't know where they are. Most of the cities are ruined. Most of the country is dust and poison. The compounds are the way of things now, and they won't last. Can't, with what's coming. The worst hasn't reached us yet, but it will. It will."

Hawk shifted his feet from side to side, suddenly anxious to be gone. He glanced around the waterfront, then back at the old man.

"You better watch out for yourself," he said. "Whatever's out there in the city isn't anything you want to run across."

The Weatherman didn't reply. He didn't even look around.

"I'll come back down in a few days to see if you've seen anything else."

No response. Then suddenly, the old man said, "If you leave, Brother Hawk, will you take me with you?"

The question was so unexpected that for a moment Hawk was unable to reply.

He didn't really want to take the old man with him, but he knew he couldn't leave him behind.

Taking a deep breath, he said, "All right. If you still want to come when it's time." He paused. "I have to go now."

He walked back down the dockside, unhappy with himself for reasons he couldn't define, irritated that he had come at all. Nothing much had been accomplished by doing do. He glanced over at Cheney, who was fanned out to his right, big head lowered and swinging from side to side.

From behind him, the thin, high voice tracked his steps.

Happy Humanity sat on a wall. Happy Humanity had a great fall. All of our efforts to put him to mend Couldn't make Happy be human again.

Without looking back, Hawk lifted his arm in a wave of farewell and walked on through the mist and the gray.

Chapter SIX.

AFTER HIS MEETING with Two Bears, Logan Tom climbed back into the Lightning AV and drove it out into the country to a spot off the road where the prairie stretched away in an un.o.bstructed sweep on all sides. There he parked, set the perimeter alarm system, crawled into the back of the vehicle, and fell asleep. His sleep was deep and dreamless, and when he awoke at dawn he felt fresh and rested in a way he hadn't felt for weeks. He stripped naked outside the AV in the faint light of first dawn and took a sponge bath using water from the tank he carried in the back. The water was purified with tablets, clean enough for bathing if not for drinking. No one had drunk anything but bottled liquids in years, and when the stockpiles that remained were exhausted, it was probably over for them all.

Dressed, he ate a breakfast of canned fruit and dry cereal, sitting crosslegged on the ground and staring out across the empty fields, his back against the AV. On the horizon, the windows of the farmhouses and outbuildings were black holes and the trees barren sticks.

As he ate he thought about Two Bears, the task the Sinnissippi had given him to accomplish, and the impact of what it meant. In particular, he thought about something O'olish Amaneh had said and pa.s.sed over so quickly there hadn't been time to take it in fully until now.

A fire is coming, huge and engulfing. When it ignites, most of what is left of humankind will perish. It will happen suddenly and quite soon.

Logan Tom stopped chewing and stared down at his hands. It wouldn't matter what any of them did after that, demons or humans. If he was to make a difference as a Knight of the Word-if anyone was to make a difference-it would have to happen before that conflagration consumed them all. That was what Two Bears was telling him; that was the warning he had been given. Find the gypsy morph and you find a way to save the remnants of humankind from what is coming.

He wasn't sure he believed that. He wasn't sure he knew what he believed.

It seemed to him that the world was already come to an end for all intents and purposes, that even a conflagration of the sort the Sinnissippi was foretelling couldn't make things worse. But he knew as soon as he thought this that it wasn't true. Things could always get worse, even in a world as riddled by madness as this one.

He finished his breakfast, took out the finger bones of Nest Freemark, and cast them on the black square of cloth in which they had been wrapped. The bones lay motionless for a moment, then began to wriggle into place, forming up as fingers. Creepy. He watched them shift until they were pointing west. He stared down at them for a few moments longer, then scooped them up and stuffed them back in his jacket pocket. He had his marching orders; he might as well get started.

He drove slowly through the early morning, following the bro-ken ribbon of highway across the remainder of the state under overcast and hazy skies. It was not yet midday when he reached the Mississippi River. The waters of the Mighty Miss flowed thick and sluggish between their defoliated banks, the waters clouded and gray and choked with debris. He could see the sh.e.l.ls of old cars and trucks jammed up against the far bank. He could see parts of houses and fallen trees. He could see bodies. He could smell death and decay, a heavy sickening odor hanging in the windless air. He shifted his gaze to the bridge again, a broad concrete span stretching ahead into Iowa.

The bridge was littered with bodies.

The smell wasn't coming from the dead in the river; it was coming from up there.

He stared in disbelief for a moment, not sure that he was seeing things correctly. The makeshift crossing gate told him that this had been a checkpoint for the river, a place staffed by militia serving some local order or other. But the number of bodies and abandoned vehicles and acc.u.mulation of debris told him that everyone had been dead for a while now. It told him, as well, that the end had come suddenly.

He took a moment to scan his surroundings in all directions, cautious of what might be hidden there. Finding nothing, he eased the S-150 ahead in a crawl, weaving carefully through the makeshift obstacle course that blocked his path. On the bridge, nothing moved. He began to cross, pa.s.sing bodies with arms and legs flung wide, fingers clutched in agony, heads thrown back and necks stretched taut. Then he saw the first of many faces turned black and leathery, and he knew.

Plague.

This strain was called Quick Drain for the speed with which it stole life from the body. It was carried on the air, a human-made recreation of what centuries earlier had been labeled the Black Death. It was chemically induced, contracted through the lungs, and fatal in less than an hour if you weren't inoculated against it beforehand or treated afterward at once. From the quickness with which it had obviously overtaken those on the bridge, it must have been a particularly virulent variety. It would have dissipated by now, its life span short once released. There was no way of knowing where it had come from, whether released on purpose or by accident, whether by attack or mistake.