Shifting

what are you doing out here?”

“Checking my traps,” he said. “The center is just over the hill. We are gathering all the food we can for winter. But I tell you, I’m still hoping I can get through another year without finding out what muskrat tastes like.”

“Gathering traps in the dark?”

“It’s dawn. Got to get to the traps before the foxes do.”

I nodded and followed him back toward the center. He had a sack of somethings over his shoulder. Occasionally, the sack quivered slightly.

“Not much meat on a rabbit, you know,” he said.

“Even less on a squirrel.”

He snorted in agreement. “But tell me how it went? What did you do? How did it go?”

I told him an edited version of my tale. For now, I left out the part about my fight with the Captain and my altered hand.

“So there’s a city of dead things down there?” he asked with great concern.

“Essentially.”

“Well, great. That’s just grand. I suppose she can turn into a bat and come in our windows as well, eh?”

“I hope not.”

We got to the Center then, and I found my way quickly to my bunk. Monika lavished my dirty face with kisses, and then began to gently bathe my cheeks and forehead with medicated wet wipes she’d gotten from somewhere. The sting of the alcohol in the wipes felt good drying on my face. I kept my left hand jammed in my pocket, and she left it alone. She said a few things to me in her own language, speaking softly and not really expecting an answer. They sounded like the kind of things you might say to a tired, sick and frightened child. I liked it, and closed my eyes.

I wondered if criminals went home like this and enjoyed every kindness they could absorb with intensity before the inevitable heavy knock came at their door. I fell into a sleep as deep as the lake itself.

The heavy knock came about three hours later. I awakened with a jolt of unwanted adrenaline. My dreams tore apart like frosty spider webs and in a few hazy moments of blinking, they were gone forever. I sat up.

The knock came again, three sharp reports. I felt I knew who it was before I opened the door. I almost forgot about my left hand, but managed to jam it deeply into a pocket before the door swung open.

It was the long lost Preacher. Somehow, I’d known that forceful, undeniable knock of confident authority. Seeing his stern face, I knew relief and dread all at once. We studied each other’s faces for a moment, and I knew that mine was honest and showed my feelings plainly. It was difficult to be duplicitous when awakened from a deep sleep.

“John Thomas,” I said in a raspy voice. “Welcome back.”

“The same to you, Gannon,” his voice rolled out. As always, I liked the resonating quality of it. He had the kind of voice that everyone could hear in church-you couldn’t help but hear him. Even when the babies were all crying at once it seemed that you could hear his every syllable in the furthest pews.

I really was glad to see him, glad that he had survived all this time, somehow, just as we had. I was grateful too for the leadership and guidance I knew he would provide us. Just the same, I feared him. He, like no other, would soon divine any secrets I might try to hold back.

His gaze flicked from my face, to Monika, who sat up in the bunk behind me. Monika had no poker face, she wore her fears on her brows. What’s more, I knew that she already knew something was wrong with me. She had said nothing last night, but that was all the more telling.

He took it all in. Her expression, mine, the two cots which were pushed together now, he examined it all in a moment. His eyes even paused on the sword and my pocketed hand. In the dim room, even with reflected sunlight streaming in behind him, the sword still glimmered.

All of this took no longer than three seconds before his eyes were back to my face, boring into my eyes. He always stared you in the eye, unblinkingly. He nodded. He gave me a thin smile.

“I imagine you have quite a story to tell,” he said.

“I certainly do,” I told him. “I bet you do too.”

“Yes, I truly do. Let’s get some breakfast and cleanse our bodies.”

I followed him and Monika followed me. Her hand reached out and I felt her light touch. I reached back my right hand, my good hand, and clasped hers. She was still with me, I knew. Had she, during the night, touched me and caressed me, in my deepest slumber? Had she, perhaps, felt the gray, leathery thing that rode in my other pocket? Or was it simply a sense she had that all was not well? I was again impressed by her natural quiet empathy. She was one of those rare people who didn’t speak much, but was very much involved and always knew the score. I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back, faintly.

It was about then that I saw the thing on the Preacher’s belt move on its own. It didn’t jump, exactly, but it certainly did shift its weight. A black, wooden handle protruded down from his belt, and I recognized that he carried an axe as he had the last time I’d seen him. He had it attached to his belt with a loop of thick leather, with the head of it resting against his waist the way a carpenter might carry a hammer. The handle, not as long as the usual handle of a wood axe, but perhaps only two feet long, ran down his leg. I could see that he would be able to grab the haft under the head of it and pull it free quickly.

It was the handle of the thing that moved. It switched from one side to the other, first sliding around behind his knee, then rolling forward. The movement was not due to any action on his part, I was sure of it, even though I had not been staring at it directly when it moved. I would have assumed it to be a natural thing some months ago before the world had gone mad, but not now. I knew that when odd, impossible things happened, they happened for a reason and I knew the rippling sources of those reasons intimately.

I knew, instantly, that the axe on his belt was not the same as the last time I’d seen it. I knew that it had a power now, that it was, in a way, alive. I stopped dead and Monika pushed up against my back. She didn’t run into me, she wrapped herself up against my back and peeked around me. She was already aware of what I had just noticed, I realized. She never missed these things. Maybe this was the reason for the look of fear on her face when the Preacher had come calling.

I stopped dead and, after two forward paces, the Preacher stopped too. We were almost out to the lobby. Around us, faces were watching, I now realized. There was Jimmy Vanton, Holly Nelson and Nick Hackler, who chewed on a sandwich. Holly Nelson’s unwashed, rat-tailed hair slipped down into her face, but she paid no attention. Her eyes simply slid back and forth between the Preacher’s back and my face. She had something in her hand. Something very sharp, of course.

“Preacher,” I called out.

He turned his head back and raised an eyebrow at me.

“What rides on your belt?” I asked.

He turned his body around slowly, fully. We stood perhaps twenty feet apart in a corridor that was perhaps ten feet wide. He put his hands on his hips. The thing attached to his waist moved again, this time the metal edge of the axe seemed to be black and shiny, and it twisted and gleamed at me. I realized then that it wanted him to reach down and grab its handle, that it wanted him to pull it out and swing it. He glanced down toward it, and then slid his eyes back to me.

“As I said, Gannon, we both have long tales to tell.”

“But what is it? That is not natural.”

His brow darkened somewhat, the very first hint of anger I’d seen from him today.

“Gannon,” he said, in a voice that told me he struggled to speak as gently as he could. “One might ask you about the shimmering blade strapped to your side. Or-” he paused here, and I knew he was about to say, Or the hand you keep jammed in your pocket. But he didn’t. “Or where you’ve been and who you’ve talked to.”

I chewed my lip for a second, and then nodded. “All right, let’s talk then-now.”

The crowd of pale faces that poked into the hallway breathed a collective sigh of relief then. There would be no clash of wills or weapons. Not yet, anyway.