The Last Hour of Gann (62 page)

The yellow patches on Meoraq’s throat brightened fast and slowly faded. “Accidentally…” he breathed.

“Why can’t we just go back the way we came?” Amber asked. “There were lots of buildings back there that were still standing.”

“Because I don’t want to lose ground, Miss Bierce, and I’m not going to stand here and argue with you. All I want right now is for the liz…Meoraq here to do his job.”

Amber cast a cautious glance up at Meoraq to see how he was taking the news that he was now in
Scott’s employment. Meoraq did not appear to have reacted in any way. He breathed, counted slowly to six and started over again. The yellow stripes on his throat fluxed, but seemed to be dimming overall.

Scott
waited, growing first an impatient frown and then a puzzled one and finally the worried one that Amber had been working on for some time. “Is he okay?” he asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know.
”

The storm crawled steadily closer. The smell of the crater stayed pretty much the same. The people watching them began to whisper at each other.

“Okay,” said Scott at last. “You stay here with him and I’ll take the others—”

Meoraq tipped his head forward and opened his eyes. He looked at
Scott with a solemn, vaguely curious expression as the rain came down harder and the lightning worked its way closer. He said, “I really don’t like you,” in the way of a man who has suspected this for some time but only recently found it to be true and perhaps worthy of some response.

Scott
took a step back. So did Amber.

Meoraq started walking back down the hill. He didn’t tell them to follow, didn’t look to see if they needed to be told. He showed no sign that he even saw the humans shuffling out of his path, just marched himself through them and onward.

“What’s his problem?” Scott demanded, but he made sure to ask it well out of earshot.

“We are,” said Amber, her heart sinking.

“Can’t you talk to him?”

“And tell him what?” she asked. “That he’s not doing his job?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Besides, you pissed him off before I even opened my mouth.”

“
Yeah. I know.”

They started walking together, well behind all the rest of them, side by side and silent. The rain came—fat, infrequent drops that
became a pouring downfall in seconds, plastering her hair to her skull and her clothes to her body—and the thunder got louder and longer. Lightning came in spears and sheets and sometimes just going off in crazed sky-broad flashes deep behind the clouds. It was going to be a bad one, all right, and she guessed it was silly to camp in it when there were all these empty buildings lying around.

“Truce,”
Scott said, angrily enough to make the offer a lie at its inception. “Truce, okay? Look, Bierce, I have got to know…Is this guy safe to have around?”

“
Yes.”

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“It doesn’t do a whole lot of good to ask when you don’t trust me.”

“Why should I? I know you
and I know what the two of you are doing,” he added in a petulant sneer. “I don’t know why I thought that you might actually put the safety of your own kind—”

“What the hell do you mean, you know what we’re doing?”

“Don’t even try to deny it, Bierce. He doesn’t. The only thing that matters is whether we can trust him to look out for us or not, because the last few days, all I’ve seen is an armed, dangerous alien getting increasingly hostile and unbalanced.”

‘You mean he’s not putting up with your bullshit,’ Amber thought, but didn’t say it. She
also thought, ‘And while we’re on the subject of people becoming increasingly unbalanced,’ but didn’t say that either. What she did say, as mildly as possible, was, “I trust him. I don’t think he’s crazy. He’s just not a people-person.”

“People-lizard,”
Scott muttered. “Look, just tell me how I’m supposed to get through to him. How do I make him listen to me?”

She had to laugh. “
Sure, like he listens to me.”

“I’m serious, damn it! I can’t afford to have all this…confusion! People need to see him respecting me!”

“Yeah, well, I think marching us off into the middle of Plaguesville today has pretty much shot that dream to shit, but maybe the next time he tries to ‘do his job’ and guide us safely around a place like this, you ought to let him.”

Scott
didn’t answer, just walked and fumed and glared at Meoraq’s back as the city receded. The wind picked up as streets narrowed and the buildings shrank, although everything was still clean and well-maintained. The rain fell harder, throwing sheets of water up from the pavement directly in their faces. The first of the really big clouds reached them, bringing on the dark too early and making up for it with near-constant waves of high, flickering lightning, like a visual metaphor for Scott’s bad mood.

The street ended at a neat square of disturbingly well-manicured greenery
. On the other side of this little park were more buildings—great, grey cubes with smaller blocks butting up against them, all of them connected by second-floor corridors, fanning outward from the only building that made any effort to look nice. Warehouses, then, or some sort of shipping company. It seemed they’d come out of the downtown area into the industrial district. Here, Meoraq stopped and looked back, counting heads as they all came out of the street to stand in the grass. He saw her alone with Scott, away from everyone else, and even at this distance, she saw his spines go flat.

But
Scott didn’t notice. He was looking at the buildings beyond the little park. One of the cube-shaped warehouses had a hugely gaping wound in one wall where a tree had fallen. Scott jogged away through the rain to get Eric and investigate, leaving Amber to trudge over to Nicci under Meoraq’s baleful stare.

“You okay?” she asked, and was distantly dismayed to realize she didn’t care how Nicci answered.

“I’m soaked,” said Nicci, shivering. “And my feet are killing me. Can you carry my bag?”

Amber took it wordlessly. I
n the next instant, a scaly hand snatched it out of her grip. Meoraq slung the pack onto his shoulder, not looking at either of them. His spines were still flat.

“Y
eah, but admit it. You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” said Amber.

He
gave her a scathing sidelong glance and did not reply.

“This is perfect, Meoraq!”
Scott called.

Meoraq opened his mouth and hissed quietly through his teeth.
Scott, busy climbing the fallen tree that had bashed through the wall of the warehouse or whatever this place was, did not notice. He checked whatever lay inside, made some gestures to Eric and then climbed down and came running back to them.

“Perfect!” he said again, giving Meoraq a clap to the shoulder.

Meoraq stiffened and looked at his shoulder. Yellow flared on his throat and began to fade again almost immediately. “Don’t do that again,” he said in a distracted, indifferent way that Amber felt sure hid a deep desire to snap someone’s fingers off.

Oblivious to danger, perhaps thinking that he was showing his faithful Indian guide some appreciation in the hopes that respect would soon be reciprocated,
Scott moved off and started herding people across the park.

Amber followed, holding Nicci’s hand but looking sideways at Meoraq.
“Are you all right?”

“You keep asking that.”

“You keep scaring me.”

He grunted—one of his s
arcastic grunts—and said, “You’re not scared enough, human, or you would not be here.”

“Oh come on, look at that!” Amber waved her hand toward the approaching storm, which threw out a strobing flare of lightning that lasted se
veral seconds without stopping, almost as if it were waving back.

Meoraq gave it an incurious glance. “So?”

“So we can’t walk in that!”

His flat spines shifted against the top of his head, trying to flatten even more. “A man can walk anywhere in God’s favor.”

“Yeah, well, maybe God wants us to sleep here tonight, did you ever think of that? If he can put trees and people in your path, why not this place?”

“
Do not be blasphemous,” Meoraq said curtly. “His Word commands His children to let the ruins and all the trappings of the Ancients fall to dust. This is not shelter. It is nothing but a grave.”

Ahead of them,
Scott was busy directing people into a queue. Dag boosted them up onto the sloping trunk of the tree, while Crandall waited on the wall to help them over. Eric was nowhere to be seen; presumably he was inside, helping people down. Amber watched people climb, crawl, and drop in this orderly procession, with the black wall of the storm howling ever closer in the background. She could understand Meoraq’s hesitance, given his beliefs (his stupid beliefs, if he really thought strolling through a thunderstorm was somehow more righteous than sleeping in an empty building), but she didn’t see any alternatives.

“For what it’s worth,” she said
finally, “I’m sorry we didn’t listen to you earlier. But we’re here now. I don’t know how bad this storm is going to get—”

She stopped there, frowning at the tree. Then she looked at the ground, turning in a slow circle so that she could see the whole park stretching out behind them.

“What’s the matter?” Nicci asked, watching the line move on without them.

“The tree,” said Amber, beginning to be alarmed. She turned around again,
this time looking beyond the park and in all directions, her hands cupped against the weather. At one side, Nicci fidgeted, hugging herself and casting longing looks at the promise of shelter. At the other side stood Meoraq, unmoved by the wind or rain, watching only her. And on the tree itself, waiting impatiently for Nicci to notice him and need the hand he kept holding out to help her up, was Scott.

“For Christ’s sa
ke, Bierce!” he shouted finally. He had to shout, and even that was scarcely perceptible over the howl of the storm. “What are you looking for?”

“Trees!” she shouted back. Amber pointed at the massive thing under his feet. “Where did that come from?”

Scott raised himself up cautiously against the wind and looked around, then dropped down again to clutch at the trunk of the broken tree. “Who cares?” He twisted around to say something to someone on the inside, then came back around to shout, “Right! Maybe they grew it here! You never heard of landscaping? Get in here!”

“There’s no hole!”

“What?”

“Amber, come
on
!” Nicci moaned. “It’s raining!”

“There’s no hole!” Amber pointed at the root ball of the broken tree, where huge clods of disturbingly fresh dirt still clung,
then at the unbroken ground.

“So it fell a long time ago!”
Scott shouted. “I repeat, Bierce, who gives a damn?”

“No, it didn’t
!” Amber insisted. “The wood is too fresh!”

“Oh for…What, you think it fell out of the sky?”

Amber looked around again, past Nicci and her imploring, wind-burned face, past Meoraq and his thoughtful stare, past the empty waste of the ghost-city, to the distant clumps of prairie trees, which were all of the small, whippy-limbed variety. She looked back at Scott. “Yes!”

He glared at her, then shook his head again and started to work his way down the tree and into the building. “Fine! Stay out here and freeze!”

“Wait!” cried Nicci. She took a step, looked back at Amber.

She waved her sister on ahead, but moved closer to Meoraq. “Where did it come from?”

He glanced at the tree without much interest, then pointed out into the nothing.

She looked, but could still see no
large trees. “How can you tell?”

“By the angle of impact,” he told her.

“But how did it get here?”

He cocked his head at her, then bent over and plucked a blade of brown grass. He held it up for her inspection, then opened his fingers and let the wind rip it away.

Amber looked at the tree—thicker than she stood tall, a broken stub still fifteen meters long at least—and tried to picture the storm that could uproot it, much less bring it hurtling through the air from who knew how far away to land here.

Meoraq’s hand closed around her upper arm. He propelled her forward a few steps, then released her and looked away, frowning,
back at the city.

“Are you sure you want us in there?” Amber asked uncertainly.

“I am sure I don’t, but I want you together. If it has to be together in that building, so be it. Go.”

She let him push her toward the tree, but didn’t start climbing. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“Soon. I need to make a patrol.”

“I’ll come with—”

“No. Stay here and keep your people together.” He walked away into the storm.

Amber
struggled up into the tree, which was not as easy as even Nicci made it look. Her hands, numbed by freezing rain, couldn’t seem to hold their grip; her technique consisted of lunging and sliding until she could climb onto the broken wall itself. There was a large heap of debris directly beneath her, so she wiggled over as far as she safely could before dropping down. Her boots hit the ground with a painful shock that went straight to her knees, which buckled and pitched her directly into the pile of concrete chunks and tree bark she’d been so careful to avoid falling on. It wasn’t a bad fall; she scraped her palms, thumped her elbow, bunched up her shirt and scratched her side, but that was all. She was fine.