whistled through the air over my head, rained down to start dozens of little fires in the dry brush that surrounded us. I pushed myself to my feet, pulled the hood of my parka up over my head and ran on.
I found Garth sitting on the ground, legs splayed out in front of him, back braced against the trunk of a tree. His eyes were still glassy and half-closed, but at least he was conscious. I squatted down beside him, turned back and squinted through my smoked glasses at the conflagration I had started.
The car was a roaring inferno of orange-white flame that was rapidly spreading through the dry brush and leafless trees on either side to form a wall of fire between us and the Children of Father. The wind was blowing from our backs, carrying the fire toward the Children, who were beginning to beat a fairly hasty retreat, and the orchards on the other side of the road. It looked like the beginnings of a fairly decent forest fire which could well reach and destroy the buildings of the commune itself.
'Hooee,' Garth mumbled in a slurred voice.
'You took the word right out of my mind. Does this utterance indicate that you've decided to stay awake for a while?'
'I'm positively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,' Garth said as he tried to rise and promptly slid down the tree trunk. He made it on the second try. 'Nice work, brother-whatever you did. I wish I'd been around to see it. The last thing I remember was feeling this prick in my shoulder.'
'Oh, I was brilliant. Actually, losing the car may be for the best; we probably wouldn't have gotten far in it, anyway. Maybe the bad guys will think we burned up in it.'
'Sure. Besides, who needs a car? How long a walk is it to Pennsylvania?'
'Oh, probably fifteen hundred miles or so, as the crow flies.'
'That's good,' Garth mumbled, pushing off the tree and starting to walk southeast. 'I was afraid it might be farther.'
As we walked through the night forest, Garth gradually became more alert. After a couple of miles I realized that he was softly whistling; when I recognized the tune as 'We're Off to See the Wizard,' I lunged sideways and drove my shoulder into his hip, pushing him into a bramble bush.
23
We rode the rails for almost three weeks, two weeks longer than necessary, in order, as it were, to let things cool down and encourage any speculation that we might have died in the car explosion. We ate in hobo jungles, paying for our meals with a few of the gold coins I had taken from the commune. For the most part the other 'bos' were friendly, and only once did Whisper have to dissuade potential thieves. During this time our symptoms did not become better; on the other hand, they didn't grow worse-and we were willing to settle for that. It gave us faint hope that the shadows in our spinal fluid were not growing larger.
We abandoned our mode of transportation when we reached Scranton, walked from the yards into the center of the city, where we found a coin dealer who was willing to put up with our smell long enough to examine our treasure with no questions asked. The coins turned out to be, literally, worth more than their weight in gold, since they were quite rare. We sold three-quarters of the bag's contents for twenty thousand dollars. We bought clothes and a few items we thought we might need for our assault on Ramdor. Then we checked into a hotel to clean up and change.
Happy time was over. With the dirt off me, I could see scales growing on the backs of my hands and feet; there were gossamer webs between all my toes, the beginnings of one between the thumb and forefinger on my left hand. We immediately checked out, bought a used van and headed for Centralia.
Viewed from the turnpike, there appeared to be a gray cloud, in an otherwise azure sky, hanging over the section of the state where Ramdor was located. It jogged my memory, and I recalled reading how Centralia, along with a large area surrounding it, was situated over hundreds of miles of coal mines and raw seams that, almost two decades before, had somehow caught fire. The underground fire still raged, eating through the black, bituminous veins and arteries of the earth like cancer. Occasionally the fire would gnaw through the skin of the earth in and around Centralia, bursting out with blastfurnace heat approaching two thousand degrees, spewing sulphur and other poisonous gases into the air; whole houses had disappeared into sinkholes that suddenly opened overnight. It was a perfectly hellish place, and we were sure the Loges felt right at home.
A few discreet inquiries around town told us that Siegfried Loge had been able to buy up hundreds of acres north of Centralia-ostensibly for a dairy farm-some three years before, at what could only be described as fire sale prices. If the owner of Ramdor occasionally lost a dairy cow or two to the natural barbecue pits riddling his property, he did not seem overly concerned. His neighbors did not care at all; their only concern was with somehow finding a buyer for
Loge had picked up a lot of cheap real estate, but reports were that he'd sunk a lot of money-probably the Pentagon's-into it. A lot of blasting and building had been going on, and this spooked the other residents, who could not understand why anyone would want to build anything around Centralia. Also, it was said, some very strange people worked there.
We had no difficulty finding the place. A dirt road snaked off the main highway into a thick, slightly singed forest. In the distance was what looked to be an escarpment, and at the top of the escarpment, situated at the very lip, was a windowless building that gleamed in the sunlight like stainless steel. There was a heavy gate across the entrance to the dirt road, and at the gate was a brown-uniformed, black-gloved sentry. We kept going, driving around the perimeter.
A flimsy rail fence surrounded the property, and there was no sign of more guards, Warriors of the Father or otherwise. Although we passed a few meadows where, in spring and summer, diligent cows might be able to scare up a snack, Ramdor certainly did not look like a dairy farm; what it looked like was something Dante had thought up and then rejected in an early draft as too depressing. Although this part of Pennsylvania was in a heavy snow belt, there was no snow on the ground here; the earth was obviously too hot. There were numerous fissures, surrounded by wasted earth where escaping fire and poison gas had scoured away all the vegetation. In some places fire leaped out of the ground and licked like the tongue of a blowtorch at the sky; the air was filled with the smell of rotten eggs-hydrogen sulfide.
We parked the van in a ravine off the highway, some three miles from the main entrance. We prepared some food over a portable butane stove, prepared backpacks, then got some much needed sleep. Some time after midnight we stepped over the rail fence onto the grounds of Ramdor, headed toward the escarpment.
Our plan, out of stark necessity, was starkly simple; snatch somebody. If Siegmund Loge turned out to be at Ramdor, we'd grab him and use a little gentle persuasion to force him to administer an antidote to Lot 56, if an antidote existed-or cook one up in a hurry, if it didn't. If Father wasn't there, we'd grab Siegfried or Auberlich for use as a bargaining chip, breakable, until the elder Loge was sufficiently inspired to halt the death working in us. Then, regardless of what Seigmund Loge did or didn't do, somebody was going to pay for Tommy's and Rodney Lugmor's deaths.
That was all there was to it.
Dawn found us in a copse of scrub evergreens on a knoll overlooking the main buildings of Ramdor. Considering his surroundings, Siegfried Loge had chosen the site well; it was a valley of black stone, which protected the wood-frame buildings from the fire beneath. The black-stone cliff rose from the valley floor like a periscope from hell, and at the top, inaccessible by any route we could see, was the windowless metal building we had glimpsed from the road. At the base of the cliff, built into it, was a ranch house, its stone front yard decorated with potted plants. A hundred yards to the left of the ranch house was a barn, and beyond that a smaller building which could have been a bunk house. To the east was the forest; to the west, at the end of the valley, were green and brown patches of meadow.
If not for the owner, and if not for the ominous building-a new, or backup, Volsung-on top of the escarpment, it might all have seemed rather quaint.
'I'm really glad we have a plan,' Garth said wryly as he peered down at the complex through his binoculars. Two brown-uniformed Warriors on horseback clattered past the ranch house, waved to a third Warrior standing guard at a gate. All three men wore what appeared to be machine pistols in shoulder holsters, standard dairy
