“I think that was Rebecca—or was it Nancy?” Martin went to a canister of organic dried vegetable sticks on the dresser. “I don’t know. I can’t tell the boys from the girls when they’re all dressed in the same lime green
onesies
.”
Teresa watched with a long yawn. “You know those kids and the dog you tried to run over today?”
“Screw you,” he joked and took out some dehydrated carrots.
She pushed the map and transparency aside so she could sit on the bed. “Building that quick mantle took a lot more out of me than usual. I should probably use our time here to rest. All this damn coughing, all this weakness... I can’t imagine how I’ll hold up on the 31
st
if I tire so easily.”
Martin sealed the canister. It popped solemnly in the silent room. “It wouldn’t be ideal.”
“We cannot lose even one child,” she answered his thoughts. “I think the other three would die if that happened.”
“I wouldn’t want that option anyway.”
“Me neither,” she replied.
“And I don’t think I could leave them like how we left the others, how we left Tony. Even if Cloth had them—I don’t think I could run the other away.”
“No,” she agreed. “Living to fight another day, no, that’s out. This changes things.”
He sensed the somber edge to her voice. “Take it easy. I’ll mark up the map and go through the first round of checking the artillery. Then I’ll probably make some foot pedal detonators.”
“You’re programming the circuit boards for remote activation?”
“Yes.”
Teresa tugged up the covers. “You’re calibrating the pressure between two and three hundred?”
He rolled his eyes and crumpled up a flyer from the TV stand. It bounced against the head board behind her. “You just rest, okay?” he laughed. “I got this.”
Her head dented the flat pillow. A hundred mile stare came into her deep blue eyes. “When will the Messenger decide we’re too old for this sort of thing?”
“You’ve asked that before. And speak for yourself, I’m young at heart.”
She reeled back to cough, face tensing up, but she conquered it. Martin was glad. He was sick of hearing the assault; all that retching made his optimism fizzle away. But he knew it wasn’t fair to judge her anymore, everything she was going through and him so critical. An hour ago she’d called her father in Texas with the business card from earlier. He’d hung up on her once she told him who she was. Martin was all she had.
Martin studied the oily black gun parts with a bored sigh. Teresa soon began to snore. A much better sound than coughing, indeed.
~ * ~
Teresa’s dream bled into the quiet motel room. There were hundreds of babies and Cloth wanted them all—the fragile little bundles, lined up around the room’s flaky walls, weakened by underdevelopment, were also sick, coughing up birthday gifts for her: retches wrapped in ribbons of blood and bows of green sputum. Cloth’s own children fell into the room and tore through the soft nursling flesh with spiny teeth. Red freeze-frame flashes lifted on the air in staggering parabolas. The gurgling blared in layers, as though each begging wet mouth was at her ears. The wailing. Louder and deafening. Thriving with intensity, until she opened her eyes to superheated darkness. Was she tanning on a beach somewhere? Was Martin out
bodyboarding
? This was summer. Isn’t that right? She was supposed to be relaxing... but they were crying! The babies were.
Her real eyes flew open to the motel room. She watched the woman in bed as an outsider, hacking and coughing against her own will, jerking the bed right and left. Martin brought his hand away from the long oval of blood on her pillow. This was no dream. She’d woken up. And all the blood had come from her throat. She could taste it. Her hand found the lukewarm spot on the pillow too, coming away cherry red and panic constricted her chest. Her sleeve—the white cotton blushed with violet dots and whips.
Martin was buttoning his jeans. Without zipping them, he began shoving his feet into his tennis shoes. From the nightstand he grabbed his wallet and the Messenger’s false ID packages. She watched in numbed awe. Metal salts corded through her gums and dripped down the back of her throat. Martin jammed his gun into the back of his pants.
Her eyes wandered. Such a depressing little room...
The Wrangler’s keys jangled somewhere in oblivion.
Fight
. Teresa wasn’t weak. She could fight. She could sit up. She forced a hand to her chest. It felt good to press there. She wheezed; blood sprayed up from her lungs into her throat.
Martin yelled, “Let’s go. Now.”
She hadn’t noticed its intensity before, but his short, cropped, brown hair ran silver at the temples. His hazel eyes were sunken, intense, unrelenting, abused, terrified.
Desperate
. Martin crossed the bed and grabbed her arm. “I’m not fucking around anymore. This is bullshit. You have to see a doctor. Whatever kind of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy or pill you have to take, you’re taking it.”
“Stop being stupid,” she rasped. “It’s impossible for us to go—you’ll get the Hearts killed.”
His eyes suggested she had a point but he wasn’t giving up. “I can handle this on my own. But you need to go.”
She pulled her arm away from him. “It’s just some blood. It looks like more because of all the spit. I’ll be fine tomorrow. Just calm down. We’re not going anywhere until it’s time. They’ll find us.”
“Let them come then. I’ll kill everyone in a black suit. I don’t care. Let’s just fucking go, Teresa. Come on!”
“Quit it. Please? Just stop talking. Stop
this
.”
Martin looked to frantically search for something to demolish. When he found nothing he slumped down on the bed and snatched an escaping sob through his lips. “Fucking hell!” he shouted through clawing fingers. “
Fucking hell
,” he whispered now, shaking his head. “I won’t let it end like this. I promise you.”
Teresa wanted badly—needed—to force out the snag in her lungs, but she wouldn’t allow it. She willed the fit away and clutched his shoulder to brace for the interval. The room dimmed. Her hand looked so spotty, an old lady’s hand, decaying flesh over rickety bone. She wanted to chop it off rather than see some ancient sickness pooling up. Softly to him, she said, “Imagine the world with every day another October 31
st
. That’s what you’d do. There’s
four
of them, Martin. That’s too much power to play around with. That gateway will slip open wide enough for the columns to hold it in place—that’ll be that. The Eternal Church will destroy everything we know.”
He turned, looking crazy with fatigue. “Stop—I don’t care about that shit anymore. Just so you know: you’re not going to leave me alone.”
Teresa’s eyelids drooped. She was about to say something else and suddenly, without warning, she began to cough. This time the fit would not be controlled; this time the pressure in her lungs wasn’t going to linger but live on forever. She wouldn’t even be able to die because she’d be too busy coughing, like a machine built by cancer, caught in an endless logic loop.
Then something slammed into the side of her head and that loop stopped. Martin said something that trailed away with consciousness. “I’m sorry
... not gonna happen
.”
She couldn’t be sure, it might have been a dream, but somehow, somewhere, Teresa could feel rain sliding down her face. Martin had lifted her body into the air. She heard the jeep’s doors shut. Heard an engine turn over. The tentative raindrops pitter-patted on the Wrangler’s windshield. Her thoughts ended before they fully formed.
Martin, no...
Not long ago the grain silo had sat in obscurity on a bald hill, but now from the gateway’s mouth an overgrowth of poison-green vines laced the ground in a myriad confusion. While most vines stretched so far into the distance they were lost, a few journeyed downhill and coiled around a cell phone tower. Others explored a dismantled tractor all but vanished in a coiffure of weeds. Some vines were as thick as bridge cable, and others thin as spider web. The disparity in size extended to the pumpkins as well. Cloth’s pumpkin was a definitive monster in size, a Great Dane of gourds, but all the pumpkins shared the same cruel appearance, a horde of orange Pit Bulls. Cloth sat on his pumpkin, casting down his black and orange gaze, making for an odd-looking king atop his spherical throne. “How are you and the Priestess of Morning getting on?”
Cole hadn’t heard Paul speak the entire way here. The man probably hadn’t been in a hurry to return here.
Poor baby
, thought Cole with an inward sneer.
“Splendid,” replied Paul, though his voice had no flavor for the word. “We’re getting along just fine.” He pushed a shock of blond of out of his eyes.
Chaplain Cloth’s ghostly lips spread with perfect pearl rows. He leaned back on the massive pumpkin and his voice sprang with mockery. “Did her
royalness
have any luck locating the Heart?”
Paul’s jaw muscle twitched but he remained quiet. The kid at least had some smarts. This would be tricky, delivering news like this. Was it disrespectful to know more than Cloth?
“She acquired them only for a moment, Chaplain,” Cole answered, filling the silence. “The Nomads left too quickly for her to take in the area thoroughly—but we have learned that there are four Hearts of the Harvest this year. Infants, Chaplain.”
The black eye cooked with oily lust; the orange eye fermented tangerine. “
Four
? How did she discover that?”
“A break in weather earlier. The Nomads... they were visiting the Bearer.”
As he sat up Cloth’s black suit
shhhhh
ed
like fingertips running over an obituary. The sound made Cole grimace. “So the Nomads have them?” asked Cloth curiously. He adjusted his black necktie, though it looked perfectly straight.
“The priestess said the Nomads were alone in their vehicle.”
“It makes sense. The Messenger knows we’ve sighted the Nomads. This was a foolish way to track them.” Chaplain Cloth let go of his tie and nodded, processing something else.
Paul spoke up, “The Priestess gave some clues to the Bearer’s location. It’s not much, but we have acolytes on the streets.”
“We’ll find them,” Cole put in.
Cloth’s dark form slid off the pumpkin. Cole was a foot taller than the Chaplain, yet felt as though he could sink between the grains of sand beneath his shoes. After all these years he’d never gotten use to the monster and he was glad to not be scrutinized. Instead Chaplain Cloth ran his eyes up and down Quintana. He stepped closer to them. The black licorice breath floated on the air. “Are you scared, Bishop Quintana?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I need someone in this world to bring my children to me.” He studied Paul closely and decided. “No, you don’t look honored.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that this isn’t what I’d planned for.”
“Well, most good plans are malleable.”
Cloth pressed his fingertips into Paul’s chest and closed his eyes. Paul looked to Cole, who nodded, and tried to communicate through his expression
just let this be, for both our sakes.
The corpselike hand twisted. Cole knew what the burning touch felt like and he even pitied Paul its silent torment.
“The marrow garden inside you
is
interesting,” Cloth observed. “Unbalanced, but interesting. Curious.”
“Unbalanced?”
“If you draw too much, the blossoms wither and die. If you don’t draw enough, the blossoms overtake the vessel. A balanced garden distributes power equally like a fork in an efficient waterway.”
“How do I bring balance back then?”
“Sow more seeds from the healthy blossoms until you find balance. Takes time and patience, and depends on the fertility of your soul.” Cloth chuckled, as though he found the idea deplorable in regards to Paul. His hand dropped away. “You can only learn the power boundaries and stay within them.”
“How do I discover my boundaries?”
The chaplain twisted around, his bone white face twisted and disturbing. “I believe Bishop
Szerszen
will show you those boundaries right now.”
Paul’s face shot over.
“A Heralding can be deadly Quintana,” said Cole. “You must know when to hold back and when to surge forward, just as we practiced earlier. Keep yourself open to the Old Domain, no matter the pain that comes. You will know when to close again.”
“And what will you do to help me along?” asked Paul.
Cole leaned forward and whispered, “Oh you’re doing this alone. All my energy goes to the Archbishop. That will not be easy.”
Paul’s eyes flared.
“You
owe
me,” added Cole.
“It only takes one to bring them,” said the Chaplain. “Whether you die or not makes no difference to me, Quintana. My children are calling and they deserve a guide that will light their way here.”
“Your Priestess wanted this,” Cole reminded him. “Make her proud.” He guided a dejected Paul Quintana then, led him to an open area in the vines. Now he really felt sorry for him. Cole told Paul to lie down in the dirt and get comfortable.
~ * ~