The Burning

beneath a deity. Not that the Lord himself hadn't exhibited the occasional pettiness and petulance from time to time-but that was when he'd been a young God, in the Old Testament, just learning the ropes and trying to figure out the boundaries between himself and his creations.

This thing wasn't young.

She was afraid to stop praying, afraid the connection would be lost. The entity to whom she was talking might not be a god, but she felt safe in its company, protected by her communion with it. And the more she spoke, the more she opened herself and made explicit her fears and wishes, the closer she seemed to come to this awesomely powerful being. She had the impression that it knew who she was, that her coming here had been arranged or somehow preordained, although that made no sense and she could not imagine how she could help, what possible use she could be, what she could bring to the table.

Derek was still hugging her, leaning on her, sobbing and holding her tightly. Her hands were clasped behind his back, her eyes closed as she prayed.

There was movement beneath her feet, accompanied by an audible rumbling, and at that, her eyes snapped open. As a native of Southern California, she'd lived through her share of earthquakes, and those experiences had made her wary and alert to any seismic phenomena, instinctively ready to bolt or seek cover at the first sign of geologic instability. This wasn't an earthquake, though. She knew it immediately. The second her eyes opened, she saw a figure beginning to coalesce from the land surrounding them, elements of earth and sky coming together to form a single beast, as though the substance of each component making up this plain was being drawn particle by particle from its inanimate source by an invisible force and shaped into a monster.

But was it a monster?

It drew itself upward from the ground, rising as tall as a building into the still night air, illuminated by the light of the recently risen moon. It was indeed horrible to look upon, this thing of rock and sand and cloud and brush. Recognizable ingredients had been put together in such a way that the end result was not only unfamiliar but profoundly disturbing. At the same time, she was not afraid of it. She faced the massive figure. There were no arms or legs, but there was very definitely a face. It hovered somewhere in the middle of the thin wavering form: ancient angry eyes, a beak-ish nose, a lipless maw that was at once overlarge and tightly constricted. Yet despite the being's hideous appearance and overwhelming size, she was not really frightened. Awed, yes, but not scared.

She could see through it. Despite its makeup, the creature did not have the heft of solidity, was more apparition than physical presence. Had it been summoned by those chanting men? Was this an agent of protection, some sort of Native American deity they had conjured in order to save them from the dark forces that had drawn them here?

Angela didn't know. All she knew was that this was the being to whom she had been praying, or, rather, the being that had intercepted her prayers.

The spirit of America.

She wasn't sure where she'd heard that phrase before or to what it referred, but the description came closer than anything else to describing the thing that now loomed above the plain.

Derek had pulled away, either the tension in her body, a change in the atmosphere or some sixth sense alerting him to the fact that there was something behind him, and he turned to look. He was scared, but, like herself, not as scared as he should have been given the thing's size and appearance.

The spirit of America.

It might be wrong, might even be blasphemous, but once more Angela closed her eyes and folded her hands.

She began to pray.

The connection was there again instantly, an intimate sharing that was even stronger this time. She had a hard time associating such a delicate process with the monster towering above them. On the other hand, Angela had no problem relating the anger she sensed back to that formidable figure. It was a fury borne of betrayal, a wrath directed at those who had overstepped boundaries: the Chinese, the corpses, the black mold. This was a being that had been here since before there was a country, since before there were people. She had no idea what it was, but the appellation she'd come up with-

spirit of America

-rang true to her, as trite and ridiculous as it might sound, because she sensed within the being a feeling of stewardship toward the land and, perhaps, the people who inhabited it. What the spirit required, she felt, what it demanded within its purview, was balance, an equality of opposites. It could not allow the evil behind the trains to run rampant over the land.

That meant the entity was on their side. This time. But she understood that that might not be the case in the future or may not have been in the past. It was a temporary convergence of interests, and she was thankful for that. Despite the nonthreatening connection she enjoyed with the spirit she understood the potential horror of such power, and knew from the monstrous appearance of the being, a sight that had been permanently etched into her brain, that it had the capacity to be far, far worse than the black trains and their cargo of vengeful dead.

One of the trains blew its whistle, a sound not mournful but chilling. Instead of a long sustained blast, however, the noise was cut off almost as soon as it started.

She opened her eyes, though her hands remained clasped and her mouth kept whispering prayer.

The gigantic figure grinned, its teeth dark in the moonlight and resembling sandstone.

And for the first time she was truly afraid.

Dennis emerged from the passenger car feeling numb and somewhat out of it, as though he'd been anesthetized in preparation for an operation and had only just come to. His vision seemed blurred, his thought processes murky, and when he stepped onto the ground behind the housewife, he did so slowly with legs that felt thick, unwieldy and not his own.

Malcolm followed him out. Then came the rest of the living. The dead remained on board.

There was a maze of tracks on the ground before them and what seemed to be a labyrinth of locomotives, huge black engines that were all different-yet all related. One, he saw with horror, was made of corpses, hundreds of them, covered with mold and forced into the shapes of headlights, catwalks, steel plates and doorframes.

It was difficult to walk, but one beneficial byproduct of his deadened state was the fact that the fear he should have felt remained subdued, tamped down. Intellectually, he recognized the magnitude of the terrible scene that greeted him, but emotionally it did not register, and his heart was not jackhammering into overdrive the way it otherwise would have been.

He stumbled toward the front of his train where it met three others, all four seemingly from the different directions of the compass-north, south, east, west. He bent down, dropping to one knee between two crisscrossing tracks, and scooped up a handful of dirt in his palm. He felt the dirt, smelled it, touched it to his lips. There was blood mixed with this soil, the blood of his people. Chinese immigrants had been massacred at this spot, and that was a stain that would never go away.

He let the dirt fall, slipping through his fingers.

He had been summoned, Dennis realized, but it had not been by the ghosts of his people, as he'd originally thought. Most of them were caught up in this revenge play just like himself, not intentional warriors but conscripts, drawn into battle by forces beyond their control and probably beyond their ken. Despite the fact that he had been welcomed onto the train, expected even, that had not been his destination, merely his mode of transportation. Perhaps those in the passenger car had expected him to join their fight, had thought that all of the living people they were picking up would devote themselves to bringing retribution to white America, but that had not happened.

No, something else had led him here, had called to him across the miles and through the years.

And then he saw it.

In back of the locomotives, above them, towered a strange and dreadful figure he recognized from his dreams. It was the being that had summoned him here, the one whose triangular head he'd seen behind the wall of smoke at the end of the road, the one in his nightmares who had always been in the background, watching, waiting, beckoning him forward, its dark shifting form visible in the sky, above the trees, above the mountains.

Just as it was now.

If the trains were variations on a normal object, bastardizations of known machines, this was something else