The Burning

anywhere in Missouri. Once this was over, he would never be back. Gifford, the other townspeople and their kin would remain here and have to deal with this, but he would be long gone.

Everyone was silent.

Williams kept on as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as though anyone who believed in the sort of mumbo jumbo spouted by the dying man was a rube and an imbecile. He grabbed another Chinee on his own, a small woman, and pulled her to the edge of another pit, kicking her in. He glanced over at Gifford, who still stood there flummoxed. 'What are you waiting for? Get to work!'

The preacher did. They all did, and within the hour all of the Chinese had been fed to the pits, where their flesh burned off and their bones mingled with the mud. By the end of it, the mood was festive, as though everyone had forgotten all about the curse, and Williams smiled as he watched the last heathen exterminated, four burly white men dropping in a thin screaming boy.

This, by God, was America.

Twenty-eight

St. George, Utah

They lost the train's tracks, no pun intended, somewhere around Page, but despite the pleas from Derek's mom and brother, they did not turn back. Instead they continued on into Utah until, sometime after nightfall, they reached St. George. It was a small town in the southwest corner of the state, and the only motel with a vacancy was a small mom-and-pop place that, despite the beautiful flower patch out front and the quaint name of Jacaranda Country Inn, reminded Angela of the Bates Motel.

They were all tired, none of them had any ideas, and for dinner they found a pizza place, eating in silence beneath a too-loud television tuned to ESPN.

Angela felt discouraged, but she was not completely disappointed that they'd lost the train. For beneath her determination was fear, and the truth was that she'd had no idea what they would do if .they successfully trailed the locomotive to its eventual destination.

She felt better out here on the road. The horror was still there, but away from Flagstaff, outside the confines of the city, it did not seem quite so oppressive. Nor quite so bleak. For most of the day they'd been traveling through vast expanses of nothingness, past Lake Powell and the Vermilion Cliffs, past tan sand and tan buttes where no plant grew. She found it hard to believe that the mold could make it through here. Or past here.

If it weren't for that train ...

After dinner, they walked back to the motel. From within the houses they passed, Angela heard the canned laughter of sitcoms, the nursery-rhyme chanting of rap music, the crying of babies, the lecturing of parents, all of the ordinary sounds of everyday life, and she envied those people their ignorance and their bliss. There was nothing she would like more than to be able to go back to a time when her biggest worries were how well her Friday night date would go and whether she would get an A or a B on a test.

She wondered what was happening at Babbitt House right now.

She hoped the cops had raided the place and locked everyone up under quarantine.

That wasn't fair. The Chrissie who'd called her a stupid brown bitch was not the Chrissie she'd been living with since the beginning of the semester. That was the mold talking. And as easy as it might be to take her cue from science fiction movies and assume that the mold brought out and amplified her roommate's true deep-seated feelings, Angela knew in her heart that wasn't the case. The black fungus had imposed those ideas on Chrissie and the others, had made them that way.

But why hadn't she been affected? She was the one the corpse had grabbed.

She had no answers, only questions.

Back in the motel room, they turned on the television. Derek and his brother, Steve, were sharing one queen-sized bed, while she and Derek's mother took the other. No one except Steve cared what they watched, so they let him flip around until he found a local independent station showing reruns of The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Derek's mother went in the bathroom to take a shower, and Angela dozed off for a while.

When she awoke, the lights were off and the news was on. Only Derek was still awake, and he put a finger to his lips, telling her not to make any noise.

On the Salt Lake City newscast, the top story was a massive gathering of Native Americans who had assembled in the northern portion of the state and had come from all over the country for no apparent reason, or at least no reason they were willing to divulge to television reporters.

A handsome man with a microphone stood on railroad tracks before a jam-packed crowd that had to number in the thousands. 'Promontory Point was the spot where the Central Pacific and the combined Union and United Pacific railways met to form the transcontinental railroad in 1869, and where the golden spike that joined the two was driven in by Le-land Stanford and Thomas Durant. Why so many people have been caught off guard here is that there is no anniversary involving events at this location, and there do not appear to be any speakers or performers or any other reason for this historic gathering. So as of this moment, what's happening here at Promontory Point remains a mystery. We will keep you informed as events continue to unfold.'

Derek turned down the sound with the remote control. 'Correct me if I'm wrong, but Chinese workers helped build that railroad, didn't they?' he said, speaking softly.

He was right. She didn't know why that was important; she just knew that it was.

Promontory Point.

'That's it,' Angela said. 'That's where we're going.'

Twenty-nine

Promontory Point, Utah

'Holy shit,' Henry said.

It looked like a Native American Woodstock. For as far as the eye could see, people and tents, campers and pickup trucks, were packed like sardines across the open land. The air was filled with a thousand separate sounds that coalesced into a single ebb-and-flow hum. His companions

made no effort to join the throng, to find its center and purpose; they simply parked the pickup on the edge of the gathering and started to set up camp. This consisted of placing a rusty hibachi next to the truck, grabbing cans of beer out of the cooler and spreading out sleeping bags on the dusty ground.

They talked to no one.

They didn't have to.

He understood why they were here, knew now the story behind it, but there was still something of a disconnect. He felt as though he were watching himself do things rather than doing them. According to Wes and the other Papagos who had picked him up, there was a purpose to their pilgrimage, yet none of them seemed at all focused. Rather, they were on autopilot, following some predetermined plan rather than making conscious decisions.

Henry didn't like that.

They sat around, talked of nothing, drank, exchanged occasional greetings with other men from other tribes.

Night fell.

And with darkness came the shadows.

There were women and men, as well as figures so vague they were impossible to identify, and they came up from the ground, down from the sky, in from the plain. He should have known they would be here, but he had not expected it and it did not appear that many of the others had either. The shades moved seductively, enticingly, their purpose explicit, and Henry noticed that they were more solid than before, more dense and real. He was seized by the terrifying notion that despite what Wes and the others believed, the Indians had all been lured here for this purpose. They had been tricked into congregating in one area-in this area-so they could be assaulted, used and drained.

He looked about him at the approaching figures. There were gradations of darkness now, areas that suggested eyes, nose and mouth, pubic hair and nipples. There was, in addition, the promise of something more, the suggestion that if allowed to finish what they had started, these forms would become real, would gain flesh and substance and provide the complete pleasure they could only simulate now.