He turned and ran, following her, putting all the strength he had left into his effort.
The trees shuddered and the thunder echoed, and great gusts of wind swam down from the north. Martin ran behind the fleeing girl, deeper and deeper into the woods, and rain came in sheets, a yellow deluge. Behind him he heard the cries of the strange birds and the crackle of alien voices.
“Come on,” Pammy urged.
He could remember this part of the woods. They were past the Saunders and about a mile down from his house. This was state land, part of the Prairie Heritage program. The forest here was as thick as it got in Kansas, and when you dropped down into the hollows, dense with brush. The hunting back in here had been excellent when he was a boy. Wild pheasant, plenty of turkey.
Times gone by. He’d discovered here that Trevor was not going to be a hunter, that he felt too bad for the animals. He and Lindy had come back in here when they were first married, and walked naked here, hand in hand, in some sort of sacred contact with the land that they could not articulate.
It was miserable here now, though, soaking, the rain pounding down, wind roaring. A storm like this could easily bring a tornado, too.
Then she seemed to drop down, as if into a hole. When he followed her, he discovered a tiny glade, and in it a camouflaged tent. He recognized it. They’d been on sale at Hiram’s Sporting Goods. She darted in. He approached more warily. Close to it, he could hear drums in the sound of the rain. Then the flap opened and she gestured frantically. He went in.
The first thing he noticed was that the drumming was much louder, the second that the air was stifling. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the space was filled with children and young people, perhaps twenty in all. He knew at once that these were the kids who had disappeared when their parents and siblings had become wanderers.
He looked from face to face, seeking recognition, not willing to taste again of his hope.
When he did not see Trevor, he swayed, staring, helpless to either stand or sit. He had reached the end of his tether, he was going to collapse.
Unable to defend himself from his own tears, he dropped to his knees and covered his face, and fought to keep his tears silent.
A hand came onto his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” And the tears became a helpless, humiliating flood.
“Dad?”
He’d heard the word, but—
“Dad?”
He raised his face and saw standing before him somebody he did not recognize.
“Dad, I’m Trevor.”
Then he did—behind the dirt, behind the dark cast of his eyes, behind the wild hair and the muddy camouflage suit, he knew that it was his son.
Trevor had changed fantastically. He was not a boy, not at all. His expression contained an adult’s knowledge of the world—that and more—and the change had been so abrupt and so total that in just these few days he had become unrecognizable to his own father.
The heart, though, the heart sees, and Martin’s heart saw his son before him. He opened his arms and Trevor came to him, and he closed them around his son’s narrow body. His heart and mind may have grown, but this was still the same boy, fragile, almost, but with the long legs and big shoulders that said that he would soon grow much taller.
“Trevor,” he managed to rasp. “Trevor.”
Trevor pushed gently at him but he clung more tightly. He could never let him go, not ever, he could not do that again. “Dad—um—” He managed to look up into his father’s eyes. “Dad, nobody else here has any parents left.”
For a moment, Martin didn’t understand. Then he did. He was the only parent who was not wandering. He looked out across the expectant faces, the eyes that he was realizing all had the same strange shadow in them, some of them touched now by tears, others wide with sorrow, others resigned.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m George,” one of the older boys replied. “Glad to meet you.” George held out his hand, shook formally. Others followed, most of them teens, some as young as ten. There were twenty-two of them, two more boys than girls. Each in turn introduced himself. It was so formal. Oddly formal. But there was no precedent for such a meeting, was there?
Through all of this, the drumming did not stop.
Trevor glanced away from him, then murmured, “It drowns out the sound of the night riders, so the little ones won’t get scared.”
Just hearing his son’s voice, Martin felt another wave of joy.
“Dad!”
“He can’t help it,” a little girl said.
“Can you hear me thinking, kids? Is that it?”
“We sort of pick up thoughts, but it’s not like you’d imagine, Dad. People don’t think alike and thought patterns are even more different than faces. You can’t figure out what somebody else is thinking unless they know how to organize their thoughts to communicate, and we’re still learning. But they can all feel your feelings, and you’re…it’s embarrassing me, Dad.”
“I can read thought,” George said. “I’m getting kind of okay.” He looked quickly at Martin. “Not you, sir! I’d never do that.”
“I better not catch you in my mind,” a girl warned him.
“Oh, I’m not, Sylvie! I’m not!”
“Of course you are. Anyway, we have no trouble reading you morons, any girl can do it, you don’t need to have gotten zapped. You’re transparent from birth, gentlemen.” She leaned her head against George’s shoulder. George crossed his legs.
“What’s this getting zapped?” Martin asked.
Silence fell. “Dad, we want you to try.”
“Try what?”
“Don’t ask him, Trev, he has to!”
“Shut up!”
“What’s going on here?”
“Dad, you remember the night when it happened?”
“How could I ever forget it?”
“Mom was holding Winnie and I was standing beside them. You had your hand on my shoulder, you were squeezing so hard you nearly broke it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it was good. The light missed you. It hit Mom and sort of splashed on me. I went out of my body and up in the air. I saw you down there, I saw us all. Then I was out in the sky, up above the church. I saw Mom and Winnie, they were gold in the light-gold masses of sparks—and they were rising fast. But my shoulder hurt so much, I went back down.
“At first, I was in shock. I went to the back of the church with Mom. I saw you but you seemed far away. You were hollering at us. You—I never saw you like that, Dad. I felt so sorry for you. So sorry!”
“I want your mom back. I want my girl.”
Another boy shook his shoulder. “We’re gonna win, Doctor Winters.”
Martin recognized him as Joey Fielding, son of George and Moira, who ran Octagon Feed. “That doesn’t seem possible,” he replied, trying to keep his bitterness and his resignation out of his voice.
“Every one of us had the same thing happen. We were in pain when the light hit us, and it didn’t take all the layers. Who we were stayed with our bodies. What we lost were the lies, the hopes, most of our education, what we wanted, what we thought of ourselves, our hopes. We lost all the baggage.”
One of the little ones said, “We’re like, fresh. We’re new again, like we were—”
“Look at him, you’re scaring him,” a girl hissed.
