Wally as they leaped for the sky.
Wally gripped the backhoe bucket with both hands and scooped a long, narrow trench out of the mound. He flung the dirt away. He did it again and again, each pass going a little bit deeper, each pass proving that Lucien wasn’t here. Proving that Lucien was alive and safe. Somewhere.
Until he hit something soft. A tiny foot, caked in quicklime, curled toes sticking up through the mud.
“No!” Wally hurled away the broken backhoe arm; it whistled out over the jungle and disappeared. A distant clang echoed back a few seconds later, along with the screeching and shrieking of upset wildlife.
He fell to his knees. He dug with his hands. A shadow fell over him: Jerusha, weeping softly at grave’s edge.
The grave held seventeen little boys and girls, their bodies all ruined by the wild card virus. Melted, crystallized, putrefied, skinless, boneless, faceless. Black queens, and jokers who had survived the transformation only to be shot in the head. Or what passed for the head.
Lucien was near the bottom.
His body had become a kite. Narrow bones like pencils formed ugly bulges in his waxy, translucent skin. They’d torn through in places, cracking his skin like fragile parchment. His face had become flat and two- dimensional, like a stained-glass portrait of a little boy. But he still had those ears, those ridiculously large ears…
Lucien had died in an American Hero T-shirt. It was part of a whole package of clothes that Wally had sent; it had his face on the front.
He lifted Lucien out of the grave. Jerusha held Wally while he cradled his dead friend. They stayed that way a long time. Wally’s tears fell on Lucien’s lifeless body, a rain of salt and rust.
Halifax
Nova Scotia, Canada
It was a generic cheap hotel room, old-fashioned enough to look that way even to Mark’s eyes. Off-white wallpaper yellowed from decades of tobacco smoke before it was banned in even such out-of-the-way precincts as these, green pinstripes and fleurs de lys, a hunting print with dogs and guns and ducks on the wall. A little TV with bunny ears instead of a cable or satellite box. He smelled cleanser, heard the cicada drone of canned laughter on a TV set on the other side of a wall not strong enough. His alter ego didn’t care much about comfort, far less luxury. All Tom cared about was security.
“Sun Hei-lian,” he said. I’ve got the mouth, he thought, and he doesn’t know. “Listen to me.”
Sitting upright in bed beside him, combing that exquisite black hair threaded in fine silver, the naked woman froze. Her eyes alone moved toward where he lay on his side, fearing to move. “Your voice
…”
“… is different. Yeah. I’m not the Radical. Tom, you call him. I’m Mark.”
Very deliberately she laid the brush down on the flimsy hotel nightstand. He knew very well that not far from it lay a compact black Makarov pistol. Sun was an expert with a handgun. “Who are you? How did you take over Tom’s body?”
“I’m the rightful owner,” he said. “The man who calls himself Tom Weathers is a squatter.” She didn’t relax. But she brought her hand down to her lap. Good sign. “You look better firsthand,” he said before he could stop himself. She furrowed her brow. “I’ve watched you, all along,” he said, thinking, Oh, Jesus, I sound like Earth’s creepiest stalker. “I see… pretty much everything Tom does. But for me it’s all soft focus. Like a dream.”
“Is this some kind of trap?”
“The Radical can make himself look and sound like anybody else on Earth. Why would he try talking with a funny voice out of his own mouth?”
It took her a moment to answer. “For a long time,” she said, not looking at him, “I’ve felt there was something inside Tom. Something gentle. Someone… kind.”
She shook her head. “I was attracted from the first. He was a beautiful Western animal, stronger and more vital than any natural human being. And there was the wildness of him. Like an element of nature. Like wind and fire.” Her hair swept across her face like soft banners as she turned to look at him. “Why am I telling you this?”
“Because I’m him,” he said. “Only not really.”
She frowned. “What do you want with me?”
Everything, he longed to say. But… what was he? What did he have to offer a woman like this? His own body was middle-aged and gawky, not prepossessing, not the body of a rebel Greek god. And he didn’t even have it. And anyway, that wasn’t the urgency that drove him like a dehydrated man’s craving for cool water. “I wanted to thank you. For being kind to Sprout. But mostly to warn you. Somebody’s got to stop him. Haven’t you seen how he’s getting shorter-and shorter-fused all the time, more violent in his outbreaks? He’s losing his inhibitions.”
“Stop him? How?” She seemed to be asking mainly from intellectual curiosity.
“I don’t know,” he said. Maybe we can’t. He quelled the thought. Plenty of time to wallow in doubt later, when he was locked safely away back in the Radical’s subconscious.
“How could you stop him?”
“Take back control.”
“Can you?”
He grinned ruefully. His lips stretched in strange ways. As with seeing, feeling was different firsthand than at one remove. “No luck so far.” He gave Tom’s golden head a slight shake, the most he dared. “I won’t tell you to trust me. Just trust your judgment. I think you know the truth already. Don’t you? No one can control him. He can’t control himself.”
That perfect mouth thinned to a line. The thin network of lines that brought out only enhanced her beauty to his lost and lonely eyes. “Even if you are telling the truth-what can I do?”
“Help me. Try to find… something. Anything. If you can’t let me out, you have to find some way to destroy us. Me. Him. Whoever
… oh, shit. I’m losing it…” He heard his voice grow vague, as if coming from ever-farther away. Her face flickered as his lids fluttered before his eyes. “Gotta go… he’ll kill you if he knows I talked to you. I don’t want anybody else getting hurt for this stupid-crazy dream of mine.”
“Dream?”
“Peace, love, justice. All that good stuff. Turned out to be not that simple-no time. I can’t stand hurting anybody else. Especially not you. But not anyone. Not ever again. If you can’t let me out, you have to find some way to destroy us. Me. Him. Whoever. Please-”
Mark felt himself beginning to spin. “-destroy-”
And away he went.
“Aaaahh!” Tom Weathers sat up in bed and took his head in his hands.
She sat beside him, brush in hand, his Chinese angel. “The dreams
…” she said.
“Yeah.” His mouth was inexplicably dry. His tongue stung. “The dreams.”
15
Thursday,
December 10
Nyunzu, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Wally gave every child in the mass grave a proper burial. Especially Lucien.
It would have gone faster if he hadn’t tossed the backhoe bucket halfway across the PPA. But he wouldn’t have used it anyway. He wondered if Lucien had been alive to see the PPA men dig the trench with that backhoe, and if so, if Lucien had known he was seeing his own grave.
Wally used a shovel he found in the ruins of a supply shed. But the handle shattered under Wally’s relentless
