fire and he watched as several rose up into the sky like fireworks and disappeared behind the penumbra of moisture that made the roof of the world.
A millions voices droned. A billion. More. Metal stars wheeled above, whispering along. Everything speaking all at once. A crowded world delivered in tremendous violence, a world that sipped war’s offering and was fueled by its captures and casualties to ascend to heights that Connelly had never guessed existed.
A dawn. A rebirth. Bought with terrible sacrifice, a great suffering to drown out all others. But one that would give birth to a new age.
And for that age, a new Death. Something that had been forged in desperation and beaten hard until it was inured to all pleas and did not know the meaning of mercy. Something that would bring this suffering without hesitation and so usher in the future.
Connelly looked up. Something stood across the river from them. Something familiar. It gestured to him, calling him.
“Don’t,” whispered the scarred man at his feet. “Don’t do it.”
Connelly looked back down at the thing on the riverbank. He lifted the stone in his hands and took a breath.
“It’ll be worse,” the scarred man said softly. “So much… So much worse.”
“Bastard,” said Connelly.
“Just die. Just die and leave it. Don’t go across to it. Let it be.”
“Fucking bastard,” said Connelly. He lifted the stone higher.
“No,” said Shivers. Blood sputtered from his mouth and lips. Connelly saw a wild fear in his eyes, the same fear he had seen a lifetime ago in Memphis when Death had seen him and perhaps had seen the future as well. “No,” Shivers said again. “No, don’t. Don’t!”
Connelly brought the stone down. It struck the scarred man on the eyebrow and his head snapped back and his eyes went sightless. Then Connelly lifted the stone again and brought it down again and again. And again and again.
All other things fell away. The sound of the stone on blood and flesh echoed into the chamber and the mindless action seemed simple and crude and glorious. Connelly thought there was a song in it, wild and primal. And somewhere in it was the rhythm of the world.
Savage and perfect. Hungry. Endless.
He kept hitting him long after he was dead. He could never be dead enough. Not ever.
Finally he stopped. The stone clattered to the ground beside his feet. He wiped his brow and held his hands before his eyes and watched them tremble with joy and exhaustion. Then he looked back at the thing across the river.
It beckoned to him again, calmly waiting. Patient enough to wait out ages. Connelly looked into its black eyes and over its scars. Looked at its thick beard and long black hair. Then he imagined he saw something under all of it. Under all of the scars there was a face he knew. A face like his.
A predecessor slain, a mantle won. A torch and sword to bear among the coming billions, passed down as it had been before.
The figure extended its hand to him.
Connelly nodded. “All right,” he said softly. “All right.”
And he waded across the river.
EPILOGUE
Dawn falls across the country.
The sun’s warming fingers reach down into the plains. What little growth there is stretches to its touch but goes ignored by the shifting thread of people that wanders by it, heads bowed. They have traveled far but will travel farther, maundering the edges of these cracked lands as they search for a place that can sustain them for a little while longer.
The people are many and know countless countries and many creeds. They know no nation and no course, no government and no law. They navigate by hunger alone and in doing so survive another day. They are pilgrims and nomads, drifters and wanderers, bound to nothing more than whatever fruits the earth is willing to offer. From the Great Lakes to the Pacific. From where the Rocky Mountains form their long wall to where the Atlantic swirls its muddy waters. They have walked there and called these places home and made their names and then moved on.
They have seen much and they will see more. They have been here before. Have always been here. Will always be here until the world fails and only then will they be truly homeless and pass on.
From somewhere among them comes word. Rumors of the scarred man who still moves among their ranks, bringing with him his coat of night and his grim smile. We have seen him, some say. We have seen him treading the very ground we tread now. He’s come back. Come again.
The whispers grow as the dawn rolls across the land. He comes from the west, they say. Comes striding from the west, eyes forever fixed on the east. A great, tall man with wild hair and a thick black beard, scarred from head to toe. But he is different now. Not half so wicked, not half so savage. He has grown to be a huge thing, blank and dour, his face expressionless yet grim. He is a new man who walks in a different way and so leaves something different in his wake.
From a cabbie comes word that with each step he takes one can hear the footfalls of thousands falling in line, an army marching somewhere in the shadows behind him. When he sets up camp and starts his fire the smoke forms shapes in the air that suggest a crowd of people huddling with him, millions of them, gray and cold and hopeless. The gypsy-folk whisper that when he slumbers in the fields his chest makes sounds of screaming steel and from his nose and mouth comes a thick black smoke, like burning oil. And a street-preacher claims that when the scarred man passed through St. Louis the entire city was struck with nightmares, envisioning a great fire, and that fire spread and consumed the blind eye that made the world.
They say that in his pockets he does not hold the fates of single men but the fates of cities, of countries, of the world. To him we are as ants, scuttling around the face of our hill. With a wave of his hand he scorches the sky and merely by closing his eyes a whole city may perish. He brings the new way. He brings the new world. He brings tomorrow, and so we grieve.
Others listen. The word spreads. Soon it is among all of them, all the drifters, all the travelers. It seeps into towns and bleeds into the cities. Jumps among ports and swims down rivers. And as the story spreads they become aware of a growing darkness, a sense of deep dread as the ground beneath them moves and revolves and twists itself into a new form.
Things are changing, they say. Time is moving on and leaving us behind.
They quiet and for the first time they stop walking. They stop shifting all at once and stand where they are and lift their heads. The people in the cities and the people in the farms, those at work and those at rest, men and women, young and old, they all stop and turn to the horizon, to the east and to the west, toward what is brewing there and what hides behind the next second or month or year.
Something is close, they whisper as the clouds darken above them. Something is near.
Listen. Listen. Do you hear it? Listen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A thousand and one thanks to Carrie, Carla, Ashlee, Jameson, Josh the ever-ready cameraman, my astoundingly patient family, Cameron and DongWon for taking a gamble and giving me a shot, and anyone else who
