Quicksilver(49)
“John Ching just called. You can’t go to Bailie’s place,” Hakeem warned. “Not now. Not ever. That helicopter was carrying ISA agents. Eight or nine of the bastards. They’re already at Bailie’s house. They’ve commandeered his SUV and two of the sheriff’s patrol cars. No doubt they’ll be here as soon as they can get anyone to tell them how to find my place, which won’t be right away because the people of Peptoe don’t traffic with their kind. You’ve got to go straight to Panthea. Bailie would have sent you to her after you’d visited with him. Panthea has been expecting you for weeks.”
“Weeks?” Bridget said. “We didn’t know we were coming here until yesterday.”
“Yes, but Panthea sees.”
“Sees what?”
“What a seer sees when a seer dreams.”
“Well, of course. Silly of me not to understand.”
“You must go to Panthea. She’s waiting for you. You’ll be safe with her. No one will think to look for you there.”
I was sure that was true, because even I would never have thought to look for me there, wherever “there” might be. “Yeah, okay, but I don’t know anyone named Panthea. Panthea who?”
Hakeem regarded me with frustration and amazement, unable to comprehend how the miracle baby from the stars could be so clueless. “Panthea who? Panthea who? Panthea Ching, of course!”
|?22?|
Winston had arrived at an understanding of the purpose of a toy. During our trip from Hakeem’s outpost to Panthea’s home, to which the UFOlogist had directed us with extravagant gestures, the pooch lay on the back seat, beside Sparky, incessantly squeaking the white lamb, all the while happily slapping the seat with his tail.
“I knew a guy,” Sparky said, “wanted to protect his children, he had an attack dog that lived up to its name. If you’d tried to give it a toy, it would’ve taken off your hand and eaten it.”
“Seems dangerous, a dog like that around little kids,” I said.
“Not these kids. They were tough little bastards. The dog had profound respect for them.”
With afternoon light slanting across the still and colorless land, short shadows of low cacti and mesquite prickled the earth; but the usually reliable sameness of a desert day would not sustain until nightfall. A tide of dark-gray thunderheads stacked on squall clouds was surging in from the southwest, soon to drown the sun. In advance of the storm, the hot air began to cool, and its faint alkaline scent faded.
Panthea, the daughter of John Kennedy Ching, didn’t occupy one of the family’s five houses in the vicinity of Ching Station. She lived beyond the vaguely defined limits of Peptoe, in that otherwise unpopulated suburb that, I knew from my research, locals referred to as Dead Dan’s Wasteland, though Dan was so lost in the dust storms of history that no one remembered who he’d been, when he’d lived, or how he’d died. Panthea’s place was at the end of a gravel road, in a large, insulated Quonset hut that she’d converted into a residence. The structure dated to early World War II, when the government had conducted secret experiments here that no one dared speak about, resulting in thirteen deaths and the toxic contamination of the soil that took over half a century to resolve. Rumor had it that an unintended consequence of the experimentation had been the mutation of six-legged Jerusalem crickets into terrors as big as dachshunds, with teeth that would shred bone as easily as flesh, creatures that had to be exterminated with flamethrowers and submachine guns in a desperate three-day bug war. Eighty years had passed since then, and no one had seen such a fearsome beast. So whatever else had happened here, the cricket business must have been an apocryphal story with no more substance than the rumor that, in the same decade, an atomic bomb had been developed elsewhere in a program called the Manhattan Project.
Three satellite dishes were fixed to the curved roof. Like Hakeem, the resident considered connectivity a high priority.
Now thirty, Panthea had moved at a distance from her family when she was eighteen because she had foreseen that eventually she would be murdered in the night by unhuman assassins, and she didn’t want her relatives to be collateral damage. As he’d finished giving us directions, Hakeem Kaspar, who’d seen a door in the day and a hole in the sky, who had shaped the previous twenty years of his life according to the belief that the territory hereabouts served as a hub of extraterrestrial activity, had winked when he told us about the unhuman assassins and said, “Panthea is a bit of an eccentric, but this territory produces more than a few. All in all, in spite of the unhuman assassin silliness, she’s a great lady and true seer.”
Having heard the Explorer approaching, Panthea was waiting for us in the open door of the Quonset hut. She was five feet one and weighed maybe ninety-five pounds, prettier than any desert flower, of which there are many that dazzle. If her ears had been slightly pointed, I would have been convinced that she had elf DNA, for her blue eyes were quite large and so limpid that you could see the radiant pleats of the layered muscles in her irises.
Although she had the physique of an adolescent and the innocent face of a child, she was an undeniably powerful presence, standing spread-legged, wearing a blood-red tunic and gray jeans tucked into black combat boots. Her black hair was chopped in a short shag, her hands fisted on her hips, as if she was confident of being able to Jackie Chan us all if we proved to be a threat.