Empire of Dust (31 page)

Damon was still alive. His eyes continued to move, and Jezebel thought she could hear a high-pitched sound coming from his mouth like a balloon when air slowly escapes it through a pinched opening. But his body was shrinking. She recalled a high school science film in which time-lapse photography showed grapes becoming raisins in several seconds.

Damon's eyes shrank in their sockets, the whites vanishing. His cheeks sank in, his stomach became a hollow concavity under his leather vest, and his arms and legs withered.

And all that fluid, those juices and secretions, blood, bile, mucus, lymph, urine, marrow, the oils in Damon's skin, the water in his stomach, every drop of moisture that he had carried in tissue and bone was being drawn through his skin, being sucked out of him by the dry and ravening flesh of Ezekiel Swain.

The moisture was filling up Ezekiel like a sweating water bag. His skin, dry and brittle and brown only moments before, had become a pale gray and was starting to ooze with the wines of life he was drawing from his victim. Jezebel saw his features forming and expanding, the face becoming fleshier, the arms and thighs pushing through the rags that hung off his shoulders and from his waist.

The larger he grew, the fuller his flesh became and the more Damon withered. The skin of his face, neck, and hands was darkening as his body seemed to implode. His ligaments lost their elasticity and contracted, drawing up his legs and arms so that he remained attached by his back alone to the parasite that had already sucked its host's life away.

Damon became less and less, and Ezekiel more and more, until the need for the bond between them was no longer there and Damon fell from Ezekiel Swain like a dry husk, a seed pod from which all the contents have floated away on the wind. Damon's body scarcely made a sound when it hit the ground.

Jezebel could hardly breathe. There he stood, her brother, her lover, back from the dead, oozing, seeping life, glistening with stolen juices in the setting sun.

"Dear God," she heard someone whisper, and when she looked beyond Ezekiel, she saw two people, a black woman and a white man, both staring at Ezekiel and both holding very deadly looking guns.

L
aika could scarcely believe what she had just seen. They had stopped the car twenty yards behind the van, planning to come up fast on foot on either side, but by the time they got out, cautioning Miriam to remain inside, the man in the leather vest was almost certainly dead.

Still, Joseph had glanced at Laika to see if she wanted to shoot, but she had given him the signal not to fire. She knew this was the killer they had been searching for, and that they were seeing it kill again. Part of her wanted to open up on it with her weapon, but another part, perhaps the scientist that she was portraying and had in a sense become, wanted merely to
watch
, to observe, to see what had been done, and how.

So they watched and marveled and trembled until the creature had finished feeding, and let its prey fall empty. It was then that Laika had spoken the words the woman had heard.

The woman, her blouse spattered with blood, looked at Laika and Joseph, then back at the bloated, slightly swaying figure of the predator as though she were both drawn to it and repelled by it, and Laika wondered if it would attack her next. But the thing seemed to be content, rocking happily like a man who'd had too much to drink and was pleased with the situation.

When the woman looked at Laika again, she asked in a quavering voice, "Who
are
you?"

Joseph said softly to Laika, "I don't think that the old 'your worst nightmare' line is going to have much impact after this."

"Put up your hands and lean against the van," said Laika, pointing her gun at the woman. Both she and Joseph walked slowly toward the woman and the man, his gray and greasy flesh swollen like a water balloon filled to bursting.

The woman did as Laika had ordered but kept her eyes on the obese swaying figure. "Ezekiel," she said to it. "Help me . . . you have to help me. . . ."

Laika heard what might have been a low laugh, a thick gurgling sound like oatmeal boiling, and the great head, as fat and round as a playground ball, seemed to shake back and forth. If the woman was looking for help from this Ezekiel, it didn't look like she was going to get it.

"What's your name?" Laika asked the woman, who shook her head as though she didn't understand. "Come
on
!" Laika barked. "Your name! Quick!"

"Swain . . . Jezebel Swain," she said.

Laika looked at the creature that stood before them, sated and smiling. "And you? Who are you?"

The words came haltingly, bubblingly, as though from a deep well with lava at the bottom of it. ". . . A follower. . . ." Dark fluids dripped from the man's lips and down over his jaw with every word.

"Who? Who are you following?"

"The . . . Divine. He calls . . . I answer. Must go . . . free Him." The dark, wet laugh came again, and Laika bit back a shudder.

"You know him?" she asked Jezebel Swain.

The woman nodded. "He's my brother. He's Ezekiel." She looked at the dead and desiccated man on the ground, and her eyes widened as if in realization. "It was Damon . . .
Damon
killed him."

Killed him?
Jesus, what was going on here? "That's Damon?" Laika asked, and the woman nodded again. Then Laika looked back at Ezekiel Swain, who, if his sister was any judge, was dead and somehow made alive again. "Where is this Divine?" she asked him.

Ezekiel Swain turned slowly around, raised a right arm the thickness of a tree, and pointed north. "Divine," he said, "in holy place."

Joseph took a step toward Ezekiel. "
What
holy place?" he said. "What does it look like?"

The man's eyes, as wet as if they were brimming with tears, got an even more faraway look, as though he were trying to figure out how to convey the image. Then he seemed to think of something, and he sang softly, "
Davy . . . Davy Crockett
," then hummed a few notes.

Laika looked at Joseph, and wondered if he got it. His next words told her he had. "Davy Crockett . . . at the Alamo. A mission? A Spanish mission?"

Ezekiel Swain's head bobbed up and down like a buoy in a calm sea. "
Holy
place," he said. "Called me. Had to answer. No matter what . . . matter what. . . ."

Still keeping his gun trained on the strange siblings, Joseph walked to Laika's side and spoke softly to her. "You know who he's after. You know who's . . . responsible for him."

She nodded. "You saw the mission in your dream. He sees it too."

For a moment, Joseph looked sick. "My dream is . . . a coincidence. But everything else . . . what we just saw him do, the draining of that man's body, the fact that this thing's sister says he was dead and now he's alive again . . . it
has
to be connected to this prisoner. It's the only truly paranormal thing that we've actually seen, along with the apport of that sculptor back in New York. There's
got
to be a connection."

"You got religion real fast," Laika said, with just a trace of smugness.

"I believe in what I can see, and I can see this. I'm not saying it's supernatural or paranormal—it could be natural and normal in a way we simply don't know anything about. But we're never going to understand the processes behind it if we don't find this prisoner." He looked at Ezekiel Swain. "And this . . .
guy
may be the way to do it."

"I was having the same thoughts," said Laika. "We'd better do this fast."

But Ezekiel Swain was already moving. He was shuffling away toward the north, ignoring the pleas of his sister to stay and help her. Laika caught up to him easily. She didn't think the threat of the pistol would have much effect on him, so she used another tactic.

"We can take you to your master," she said, "to the Divine. It will take you forever on foot, you can see that. There are mountains and deserts between you and your master, places where there are no . . . where you wouldn't be able to feed. But we can go much faster in a car. We'll take you, if you want us to."

Please say yes
, she thought. Otherwise they would have to try and force him to go with them, and she wasn't sure just how easy that would be. She wasn't even sure they could kill him, if it came to that.

The shuffling figure stopped, the huge head turned toward her, and the swimming eyes regarded her. Then Ezekiel Swain looked ahead at the desert and the hills beyond. "Long way," he said. Then the head moved up and down. "Yes. . . ."

"All right. Come back to the car. We'll have to hide you there. Other people will be coming who won't understand. Hurry."

He did, moving faster than she would have thought possible. "Open the trunk," she called to Joseph. Laika glanced at Miriam, who, wide-eyed, had been watching all the activity from the backseat. This was going to take some major explaining. Still, even if the girl talked to someone, the operatives would be long gone.

Laika put out a hand to help Ezekiel Swain, but thought better of it and drew her fingers back from that suppurating flesh. "What are you
doing
?" asked Jezebel Swain, as she saw her brother clamber heavily and awkwardly into the spacious trunk. He seemed indifferent to the accommodations, concerned only with reaching his goal. Jezebel took a few steps toward him, but Laika waved her off with the gun. Laika could hear a siren from the direction of the roadhouse.

"Dr. Tompkins," she said to Joseph. "Can you put that into the trunk, too?" She pointed to the dried body of the young man. Joseph knelt and lifted the corpse, careful to touch it by its clothing.

Its lightness made it seem to float upward, and he carried it easily to the trunk and set it in next to Ezekiel Swain, who was lying, sated, on his back, his body resting diagonally across the trunk, his head against the closed rear seat-back, his eyes looking peacefully at the bottom of the backseat ledge.

"Close it," said Laika. Then she turned to Jezebel Swain. "All right, listen to me. You just keep your mouth shut about what happened here. Damon ran away after you got stuck, understand? And we caught up with you, and that's all that happened. I don't know what went on back there at that roadhouse, but if you go along with what we say, we'll try to help you eventually, even though you have to go with the police now. You get what I'm saying? If you care at all about your brother, don't say a word. Because if they find out about him, they will take him and poke him and prod him and cut off pieces of him, and make whatever is left of his life a living hell. Got it?"

Jezebel Swain nodded. The sirens grew louder, and Laika saw a big white car coming down the road. They were only fifty yards away from it with no cover. The driver would spot them for sure. She hoped it was Yazzie and Tony.

Laika had Joseph watch Jezebel Swain, while she opened the car door and looked in at a pale Miriam. Laika tried to smile, to indicate some stability in the midst of all this insanity, of these things that could not be. "Okay, I know you've see a lot of weird things going down, but strange as it may seem, everything is under control. Just sit tight and don't say anything when Officer Yazzie gets here, all right?"

Miriam nodded. "All right."

"And by the way," said Laika, slipping her weapon into the glove box again, "don't worry if you hear anything in the trunk behind you."

"T
here they are," Tony said, pointing to the rental car and the van on the dirt road up ahead to their right. They had pulled into Abner's only a few minutes earlier to find the place in chaos, with two dead men on the floor and another one badly wounded. The proprietor had been talking a mile a minute, but he and Yazzie had finally comprehended that the killers had driven south, and that a man and two women in a dark green car had gone after them.

Since they were late for their dinner with Laika, Joseph, and Miriam, and the Camry wasn't in the lot, it was natural for Tony and Yazzie to assume that the pursuers were their colleagues. So Yazzie had hit the siren and the lights, and they had headed south.

Now Yazzie swung the big white Fury onto the dirt road, kicking up a cloud of dust behind them, and brought the car to a sliding halt next to the other two vehicles. Joseph was holding a weapon on a woman who was spattered with blood. Laika was standing near the car, and Tony was relieved to see Miriam, seemingly unharmed, in the backseat.

"Well, Dr. Tompkins," said Yazzie, walking up to Joseph and eyeing his Glock. "The National Science Foundation sure gives its scientists enough firepower."