The Big Dark Sky (69)

He wants a glimpse of the stars and the void between them, but the storm clouds are rolling in faster by the minute. The day sky will be shrouded before the light dies away, before the true sky of cold infinity reveals itself.

Wind-battered, squinting against a sudden greater explosion of dust and chaff, he turns toward the saloon.





57


The GPS messenger wasn’t on the trestle table, and neither was the bowie knife that Steven Fielding had carried.

Alarmed by the shotgun blasts, Ophelia left the Tac Light with Colson, so he could check all the compartments in the backpacks, and she went to the one front window that wasn’t boarded over. The panes were cloudy, etched by more than a century and a half of weather, but she could see enough of the street to be sure it was deserted. Shadows pooled, and tides of wind blew a spume of dust through the town, and the day was swiftly ebbing. Even before rain broke, the incoming clouds would damp the twilight and hasten night’s arrival. In mere minutes, visibility might decline to the extent that she wouldn’t see Optime until he was almost at the steps to the saloon’s veranda.

“Have you found the bowie knife?” she asked.

“No,” Colson said.

“The GPS?”

“Not yet.”

She had no weapons other than the nail that she had pried out of the wood floor in the church, and the boy’s Swiss Army knife, which she held in her right hand, the worn spear blade deployed, trying to convince herself that in the right circumstances this might be enough.

If Optime was her destiny, if indeed she had been spared when Octavia died for the purpose of bringing an end to the horrors that this madman perpetrated, then fate or God or something should have better armed her for the task at hand. She believed that the world had meaning, that it had been shapen to a purpose, but through hard experience, she had also become convinced that no script existed according to which the drama of any life unfolded. She and everyone else formed the cast of an elaborate improvisation, one of enormous but unknowable purpose, each writing the tale to his or her desires, each at the mercy of all the others. Grateful for her life, she had made her peace with this hard truth years earlier; but now, in this desperate moment, anger nevertheless overcame her, anger that she was allowed only a Swiss Army knife and a damn nail.

“Colson?”

“Still looking.”

“Maybe he’ll come in the back way,” she said.

“Yeah. Then we’re dead.”

Before Ophelia could decide by which entrance the murderer was most likely to arrive, he appeared in the windswept street, the 12-gauge shotgun slung over his left shoulder. He stopped and tilted his head back and stared at the sky, as if transfixed by some sight, the wounded day pouring its last bloody light on his upturned face.

Taking one step back from the time-fogged glass, she dared speak only in a stage whisper. “He’s here.”

Colson said, “Let’s go.”

Still Optime stood gazing into the sky, as if oblivious of the skirling wind, and for a moment Ophelia felt that she was safe only as long as she kept him in sight, that the moment she turned away from him, he might no longer be in the street, might be anywhere, everywhere, even in the back room waiting to cut them down. That superstitious fear lasted only a second or two before she pivoted from the window and crossed the room to Colson, who stood in the doorless doorway, fingers over the lens of the Tac Light, so that only a thin beam escaped.

Following the boy out of the front room and toward the door by which they had entered, past the stacks of stored supplies, she saw that he was carrying a backpack. Outside, she carefully closed the door behind them and hurried to keep up with him as he ran through the tall grass, toward the river.

When he reached the riverbank, turned south, and continued moving, she said, “What’re you doing? Where are you going?”

“Dad and I came north along the river. There’s a place a little way ahead where we can get across.”

“Across to what? Hide in the forest?”

“I jammed some stuff in this backpack.”

“The GPS?”

“No. Didn’t find the bowie knife, either. Trail maps, a compass, half a dozen energy bars. We can find our way to help.”

“It’ll soon be dark.”

He brandished the Tac Light, which he had switched off. “We have this, as long as the batteries last.”

“I’m not a Girl Scout.”

“And I’m not a Boy Scout, but I know how to do this.”

They came to the crossing. The bank sloped gently to a shelf at the water line. Beyond lay an array of stepping-stones that were flat enough and set close enough to one another to be negotiated. Foaming water raced between them, though after maybe a hundred yards the currents became calm, and the river rolled lazily past. If she slipped and fell, she might not be swept helplessly downriver to drown. The far bank was maybe eighty or a hundred feet away.

Less for Colson’s information than to reassure herself, she said, “I can swim.”

“Good. But you’re not going to fall in. Piece of cake.” He shouldered the backpack and secured the strap. “Just follow me and try to do what I do. You’ll be all right.”

The first link in the natural bridge lay close to the river’s edge, and he stepped easily from the shore to that stone.