The Big Dark Sky (79)
He didn’t know how long he was on the road to the girl. Time never felt the same. A little time could seem like a lot, a lot like a little. He just kept moving, not thinking how long, how far.
He thought about the girl, about finding her, how she would know he was alone and make things right for him. Maybe because he thought about the girl so hard so long, he suddenly thought he could help her as sure as she could help him.
This was a new thought. He never helped anyone before. He never knew how. He was wet and alone, but he felt nice if he could help.
The girl wanted to know about the Thing, what it was. She needed to know because the Thing wanted to hurt her.
Jimmy could tell her a little about it. Even if he couldn’t talk, maybe he could tell her. Somehow.
Whenever the Thing moved into him and did what it wanted with him, he kind of moved into the Thing a little, too. He didn’t try to move into the Thing. It just happened. So he knew some about the Thing. Some he understood and some he didn’t, but he knew some.
Lights came out of the dark far away. Jimmy went quick off the road and behind some bushes, on his knees.
The lights came and came and came through the wet, and there was a sound louder than the weather, and then the lights passed and the sound, too.
He started to get up, but lights came the other way now, so he went to his knees again.
Just then he thought of Father on his knees and crying. This was long ago. Jimmy forgot about it. Until now. This was when his mother went to God. Father on his knees beside her bed, crying and crying like he couldn’t ever stop. Listening, Jimmy was confused and sad and afraid and even sick, so he threw up in the toilet and went to his own bed and cried for a while.
Remembering now, alone behind the bushes in the wet and the wind and the dark, he cried again. He cried very hard. He was crying for his mother gone to God, even if going to God was a good thing, crying for his hurt father, but not only for them, crying for all kinds of things he couldn’t name, only feel.
He tried to get off his knees but couldn’t, and then he was sitting in the wet grass, his legs in front of him, water falling out of the sky and water falling out of his eyes, like the weather was around him and inside him and everywhere.
Just like happy, sad didn’t last. There was mostly the place between, so the tears stopped before the weather did. No lights were coming from anywhere except sometimes out of the sky, so he got up and went back to the road.
The white lines were still there, some broken and some not, so the girl was out there, too, not gone to God. He walked the lines, not sad and not happy, just between, moving along the way he did that made some people laugh and some afraid.
He knew something maybe the girl needed to know, though for a while he didn’t know what it was he knew, like the tears washed it out of him. But then he knew again.
The girl needed to know about the Thing that wanted to hurt her, what it was and where it hid. Jimmy could help her.
He knew some of what the Thing was and knew where the Thing hid. He didn’t know how to get at the Thing where it hid, but the girl might know how.
The Thing was not nice. It never was nice, not even when the girl was little. It was less nice now than before, like something had gone wrong with it.
68
With bright bolts blazing across the sky, violent crescendos of rain stuttering in the stroboscopic light, thunder crashing down the peaks and through the passes, Asher Optime can almost believe in gods, ancient malevolent gods forgotten for millennia but still possessing power here, rising now out of riven rock to rage at the mortals who no longer worship them. Wind howls with the fury of deities forsaken, the worst gusts rocking his Land Rover. Even at high speed, the windshield wipers are not able to sweep the glass clear for more than an instant at a time. The blurry world seems to be continuously dissolving and forming again, as if he moves through the veils between a series of realities.
Where it is good hardpan, a naturally cementitious clay, the unpaved forest-service road will likely remain passable to an all-wheel-drive vehicle for hours yet. In this fierce deluge, however, where the roadbed is a more porous soil, even the Rover, jacked up on wide tires, will be at risk of bogging down.
Asher has the same trail maps that the escapees are using, and he knows the best place to lie in wait for them. At the end of a box canyon, two ridgelines meet—the one they headed for after breaking out of the church, and the second ridge that intersects with the first at the end of the canyon. This service road crosses ridge number one a quarter of a mile from that junction. But if Asher becomes stuck before he gets there and has to proceed on foot, he will never catch up with Poole and Fielding.
His best option is to turn around while he is still on firm hardpan—even that is getting greasy—hurry back to Zipporah, and go overland to the county road. Open fields, thatched with grass and weeds and brambles, offer sufficient traction to ensure he will make it to the paved highway.
Even though the storm has gotten so powerful so fast that he is forced to change his plan, he isn’t worried. If they have chosen the best trail—the one leading most directly out of the mountains and down to Lake Sapphire, to the nearest inhabited ranch, Rustling Willows—he can be at the eastern shore of the lake maybe two hours before they are. He’ll be ready to cut them down with the shotgun, load their bodies in the SUV, and take them back to the basement of the church, to add them to the necropolis, where they belong.