It was learning. Learning to love her. Learning to let her love it.
So easy. As easy as falling into a warm pool.
Just go under.
But the other facets…
Her love.
Kevin. Ginger. Robert.
Robert?
Yes, I'm here, honey.
Robert?
Here with you. It's beautiful…
No.
I can't, not alone, it's too strong.
You're not alone. Never alone.
But you see how wonderful it is, Tam. What joy. Oh, what peace.
But we can’t all live. Not with that thing. It will eat us all.
I want to live.
We all want to live.
WE ALL WANT TO LIVE.
Bill tugged at the hooked briars that dug into his neck. Hot blood trickled under his shirt as he fought the preacher. He remembered some of the words that Nettie had read to him, her lively eyes flicking across the pages, her voice like music, her skin as sweet as meadows. He heard the words in his head as if she were saying them now: 'He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up on the last day.'
Bill grabbed the preacher's lambent head and lifted it over the dais. Fogs leaked from the preacher's gums. Bill lost his grip on the slick, sodden skull, and the wide mouth came forward.
'So he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me.'
The preacher, Satan in wet flesh, grew suddenly stronger. Bill was pushed backward, the preacher's hands sawing at the meat in his neck.
'I am the bread of life. He that eateth this bread shall live forever.'
The preacher's head bent low and Bill was tilted over the pulpit. The devil was winning. Just as the disciple Thomas had done two millennia before, Bill suffered a moment of doubt.
The preacher's raw lips pressed against his own and the first whispers of eternal hellfire licked at the base of his brain. Satan murmured tenderly, lovingly, his saliva hot on Bill's cheek.
The pulpit toppled and Satan crawled onto Bill’s struggling form. Bill was trying to roll over and run, flee from the church door and away from salvation and damnation and trials and tribulations and temptations. But the devil was loathe to let him.
He struggled blindly, sliding on his back across the varnished floor. The devil hounded him, wagging its pulpy tongue. Bill's hands felt splintery wood. The cross. The Lord had provided.
Bill lifted the cross, the saliva of prayer on his lips, and drove the wooden tip between the screaming green eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
James grabbed the arm of the creature that leaned in the window. Juice spattered on the carpet as it smiled with rotted lips. The creature tried to speak and a drop of thick saliva hit James in the eye. At the contact, he felt a jolt like lightning, and in the same throbbing split second he was rolling, flying, soaring- sweet Jeez Louise — he was flipping out.
Suddenly he was a white woman and his name was Tamara and this had to be stress taking its toll, grief scrambling his senses, a hammer of the gods shattering the gray jewel of his brain, how else could he explain away these walking mushrooms and wait a second, that was the only explanation, he had to be dying or something, but by God he'd take one of these bastards with him, except hold on here, Mister Wallace, this creature is already dead and what the hell is shu-shaaa and who are you, Tamara?
Whoa… now we're in the 'heart-brain,' is that right, Tamara? That must be that swollen-looking purple thing there, inside what looks like a disease-ridden sewer pipe.
And this is your daughter, Ginger? And your husband, Robert. Son, Kevin. Pleased to meet y’all.
So this is how it feels to be white. Funny, but it's just the same as being black, at least from the inside. Now would you please mind telling me what the hell is going on and why am I here dying inside your dream and why isn't time passing?
And you? Herbert DeWalt, you say? Okay, let me get this straight. You're dead and you're dust and energy now but you're not going to leave until we kick this shu-shaaa thing’s ass back to whatever black hole it crawled out of, and, gee, what a swell trick this is, let's all walk in your dream, Tamara. And I thought I was crazy before, when the green eyes got worse than white eyes ever were.
No fooling? You want me to join with you, Tamara?
Because we all want to live?
In unity, in harmony? A peoplehood of people?
Sure, why not, got nothing better to do while I'm waiting to wake up in a straitjacket. Right fucking on and save the whales, sister.
You think you can beat this thing?
Yes, but you need my help? Our help?
Sure. I need some good karma to buy my way onto the soul train, so I might as well go for broke. Because, like you say, hope is our only hope.
Aaar-on-lee-ohp.
'Join with us, believe with us, because we're all one and only one of us can win.'
Tamara's thoughts were exploding, spreading bright and white and thin just like the universe did when it got jump-started by physics, heat, and shu-shaaa. She felt James in her head, she knew him, she lived his life, all in the eye of a needle of a heartbeat. She sensed his ambition, and also his bitterness, his pain. His guilt. And his hope.
And others crowded behind him, Sarah Blevins, a man named Bill Lemly who held a dripping cross, Chester, Emerland, more people joining in as if answering the call of a distant bell.
A scythe of doubt cut across her mind.
Would she fail Robert like she had her father? Would she fail her children? Was she too weak to handle the gift that had been granted her? Would she let them all down?
'I won't let you fail,' Robert interrupted. 'I won't let us fail.'
Their minds mingled like streams. She saw his weakness, his frailty, his humanity, but all was forgiven in that moment of mutual need. All that mattered was that he loved her. And the same humanity that was his weakness was also his strength. Their strength.
Funny, she'd always thought of love as an invisible but real force, only now it was taking shape and texture and color and Ginger was helping, Kevin, too, only Ginger was a lightning rod, she was harnessing and directing tremendous energy without even knowing what she was doing.
Tamara knew what the energy was.
The power of love, multiplied. Herbert, Chester, James, a dozen, no, a hundred, now a thousand human minds whose dreams and hopes and consciousness were swelling into a fat golden teardrop of heat that poured out over the shu-shaaa heart-brain, that suffocated and scorched the poisoned, throbbing alien.
It was like the Beatles song, all you need is love, only with looser harmonies, something that sounded like lip service when you said it aloud but became the most real thing in the universe when you actually experienced
