Agents of Dreamland(15)
“Old folks round here tell stories,” says the constable, “yarns about demons way up in the hills, off towards Turkey Mountain.” He pauses and points north.
“Stories?” says Immacolata without looking at him.
“Yes, ma’am. Things that were here a thousand years before the Indians. My grandmother, she told us those stories when I was a child. She said they could fly, and that they’d crawled outta Hell to haunt the gorges and hollers. She said, back when she was just a girl, some prospectors from Montpelier went up into those hills and were never seen again. Said sometimes the demons flew down into the towns, and that she’d seen their footprints in the snow. But she was a superstitious woman—a bit touched, if truth be told—and we never paid her tales much heed.”
“Sounds as if she had quite the healthy imagination,” Immacolata tells him. Of course, she’s heard the stories, too, and she’s read Eli Davenport’s 1839 monograph collecting various oral traditions from the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, folklore that describes creatures very similar to the drowned, broken thing laid out before her. She returns everything to her bag, snaps it shut, and pulls off the rubber gloves, depositing them on the table beside the body.
“After I leave, do promise me that you’ll burn it, please. Right away.”
The constable scratches his chin. “What’s the rush?”
“I’ve noticed a few stray dogs about town,” she says, “and if they were to eat it, the flesh might prove poisonous. There even could be disease. Were I you, I shouldn’t take any chances.”
“You sure you ain’t wantin’ to buy it?” asks the man in overalls.
“I’m sure,” she says.
Suddenly, the plane bucks and shudders around her, and Immacolata is jolted rudely back to Now. There are no highways in the sky, as a Jimmy Stewart film once warned, only these unpredictable, invisible causeways of air to hold you up or drop you, their whims as capricious as any god’s. A cold front from Greenland collides with a wall of warmer, wetter weather, and here she is caught in between. Fasten your seat belts, please remain seated, and the pilot assures her they’ll be out of this shortly. She checks her iPhone for messages, but there’s nothing. Maybe the storm brewing out there is blocking the signal. So she turns her attention back to the window. Fourteen thousand feet below the jet, a roiling stratocumulus canyon land of thunderheads has hidden the sea from view.
Time is the navigator, and we are only hitchhikers.
The Third Law.
She slips, and the plane fades like mist coming apart at the end of morning.
For a handful of seconds, she’s back in that booth in Winslow, smoking and listening as the Signalman talks about Drew Standish and his followers.
“It’s all right there on the suicide drive,” he says.
Then she blinks, and now Immacolata walks the streets of a city that once was Los Angeles. To those who never left, now it is merely the City, shattered by the great earthquake of 2032, flooded, burned, and finally consumed by the invaders who came first as a terrible wasting disease carried by windborne alien spores. It’s not as if there weren’t warnings. She stops outside a crumbling building, gutted by decay and half buried beneath the glistening, ropy fungi that grows almost everywhere. She knows this place; she’s been here several times before.
The sun never shines on the City.
The black ships have seen to that.
Two weeks ago, the Pan-Asian Alliance dropped nuclear warheads all across southern India, from Thiruvananthapuram to Bangalore, in a desperate, last ditch to halt the northward progression of the invaders. Three days from now, the titular head of what remains of the United States will be assassinated by militants from the Earth–Yuggoth Cooperative. Afterwards, the EYC will burn what little is left of Washington D.C.
There are signposts in the future, just as there are signposts in the past.
A traveler can get lost here, too, easy as pie.
A young woman is standing in the doorway of the building, and she waves to Immacolata. Whatever this place once was—perhaps a hotel, perhaps a bank or office building—now it’s a filthy burrow where the blighted and dying huddle together and wait for the end. It’s been seven years since the last evacuation, and the borders were sealed long ago. The bridges blown, the highways mined. Dozens of snipers guard the perimeter day and night, making sure no one will ever get out of the ruins of L.A. Not that most here would ever try to leave. These women and men were not so much abandoned, as they allowed themselves to be left behind. Some might say that these are the resigned, the ones who saw the writing on the wall.
The New Gods rule here, the Elder Beings.
Everything old is new again.
The woman in the doorway beckons. She tries to smile, but her twisted face only vaguely remembers how, and the expression comes off more like a grimace.
“You came back,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and phlegmy.
“I did,” Immacolata replies, her own voice muffled by the mask and rebreather she’s wearing. “I said I would.”
“I was afraid we’d seen the last of you. I didn’t want to believe that, but I was starting to, all the same.”
Immacolata is carrying a backpack bulging with canned goods, mostly fruit and vegetables, and she lays it at the woman’s feet.