“All of them?”
He could only quiver as an answer. The harmonies chilled him.
“Paul, you’ve got to slow down. You’ve got to balance your garden, somehow.”
He didn’t want to understand what she meant. The atmosphere itched and he felt the world spin faster with each new blossom popping open inside his body. The strength of the universe flexed inside the feebleness of an atom. Paul drank in the seconds like golden wine.
“Slow yourself,” she repeated. “Then we can find more seeds.”
More?
She read his eyes. “You must obtain another source to cull the dark blossoms, that which controls the strides of the universe—but first you must recover command of them. You
must
prevent more dark blossoms from opening.”
His teeth grinded at the impossible prospect.
“Hurry,” she said. “Try Paul! Try!”
He did. He tried. He was always trying. But there was something else bubbling to the surface. Through all of the madness since the Heralding, Paul had forgotten the children. They’d been the farthest thing in his thoughts. They sang angrily along with the cacophony. The choir announced premature arrival into the world—he had to slow things down or they wouldn’t have time to thrive!
Pumpkin flesh flew into the air: birth! The children escaped from the broken pumpkins with slavering jaws. Verdant claws raked the dirt as they turned inky eyes up to the slipstream of clouds: life! Paul’s connection with them sent his mind into a backspin and he fell a thousand leagues into the deepest of all possible
darknesses
.
~ * ~
Thanksgiving to the bleeding black feast!
~ * ~
The babies’ screams ripped Martin into consciousness. There had been moments when he heard their needy calls, but he’d been too out of it to wake up. His body shot straight and he clutched the steering wheel with clammy fingers. He accidentally set off one blast of the horn and let go. Another baby
waahed
, and three hollered, squirming in their seats.
Teresa’s hands went to her forehead and she looked around dizzily.
“Hi,” said Martin. “You really need to cut that out. I have enough brain damage for the both of us.”
He squeezed his watch in the quickly dying light. An indigo window floated on his wrist. “I can’t believe we weren’t found. We were out here for a while—”
“Déjà vu all over again,” Teresa muttered. The babies’ shrieks jerked her alert. “They’re hungry, I think.”
Martin shrugged. He wasn’t really listening. They had to think of somewhere to go. Quickly. He started. The minutes on the display clock flipped away. Shadows began spearing through the car.
~ * ~
The Priestess gripped Paul’s hair and her eyes opened wider with every word. “Paul, please. Do this for me... control it, Paul. Control it.”
Paul wanted to die. Everything he ever wanted to do had already been done. The Priestess was safe. Living like this was not living. All of the dark blossoms killed the other golden flowers inside of him—a black colony that had consumed all. Time wailed from the disparity.
“Please!” she yelled.
He lingered above his field of fresh, radiant power and threw a shadow over them for a moment. The action made Paul’s bowels run. Veins engorged in his face. Something hateful traveled up his spine and caught at the base of his neck. The Priestess yelled again, miles above him, and Cloth’s children continued to sing, miles below.
Paul Quintana knew then. Controlling this was not going to happen. If anything, time would start to go even faster.
~ * ~
“Do you feel that?” Teresa asked.
Martin swallowed. “It’s like standing still with the world—”
“—racing past?”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Can you hand me my watch? It’s in the cup holder.”
Martin fished the cold, snaky titanium out and—
—
handed it to Teresa. The face flashed indigo. 8:04 PM.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I—We’re getting closer to the Opening.”
Teresa jerked the key for him. He stomped the pedal and they cut out on the road without headlights. Nothing moved in the night; everything had a vacant, frozen look, from the hanging branches to the feathers of light through the trees from nearby track homes.
“You think the Messenger is doing this?”
Teresa shook her head.
9:43 PM.
~ * ~
“I’ve got the train yard in the GPS,” said Martin. The bright glowing map showed them as a green arrow traveling over an uncharted road. “As soon as we’re on a real road I’ll—”
The Wrangler stopped. The blue and red lights of a police cruiser rose up from the canyon. The jeep was obscured behind a ranch home, but had only one way to go.
Martin slapped the steering wheel. “Should I just go?” A dozen more minutes had passed and now his heart thumped in time.
“I think he’s going. Then we’ll gun it.”
Blue and red blades swept through the trees and out of sight. Martin edged the Wrangler down the road. The tail end of the patrol car could be seen just down the two lane road. A flashlight aimed from the driver’s window into the trees.
11:54 PM.
~ * ~
The flowers petrified to stone inside Paul and the garden calmed to a deadly silence. The Priestess kissed him so hard their teeth gnashed.
Something still wasn’t right. Time had gone from silk to marble. A numb feeling prickled Paul’s stomach. He spoke his first words in what felt like centuries. “Time’s stuck, Priestess. The flow has stopped! I can’t move it—it weighs too much!”
~ * ~
With trembling fingers Teresa reached for a clove. The box had been crushed when she fell.
And hello, the babies? They matter, only them.
Her headache rolled to the front of her head and her pulse fed the pain.
The patrol car finally vanished into blue midnight.
No running around now
, she thought. They had to get to that train yard fast. The front tires bumped onto the road and Martin turned on the headlights to see better in the falling night.
In the next moment, she wished he hadn’t turned them on.
A man in a suit, a man with two colored eyes. Black and
Orange
. A man and not a man. “Happy holiday!” Chaplain Cloth greeted.
In the burning white beams, Cloth stood just off the road between a pair of flinching Eucalyptuses. In the night his kerchief flared like the head of a raw flame. Directly behind, clumps of earth slipped away and the gateway opened. Bat songs and screeching winds lifted from below, an Armageddon sigh. The ravenous grave edged closer to Cloth as he took a few surefooted steps closer. “Will you make this one last?” he asked simply. The headlights glinted off the black eye and heated the orange. “I daresay it hasn’t started well for you.”
Martin revved the engine. The jeep was so quiet he could hear the babies’ milk gurgles.
“Make this hunt count, Nomads. It’ll be the last this world ever
sees
.”
Liquid eyes filled the night around Cloth and the gateway. The children’s rolling snarls came from all around, but especially behind the Wrangler. Teresa glanced back and tried to see through the red brake light glow. Hundreds of bulbous forms crawled forward, waiting to spring.
Martin stomped the gas.
The Wrangler fishtailed as Cloth slapped them with a mantle. The back tires squealed. Martin cranked the wheel. Children exploded from the night, a hybrid species of gourds and two-legged terrors. Martin watched as they caved the hood in. Thorny arms made of pumpkin stalk thrashed for purchase through the steel. The children were more vibrant in color, supercharged. One stem-headed child gained distance toward the windshield in two metallic slaps. Headlights from a passing pickup caused Martin to jerk. More children flooded down from the right side of the canyon and swarmed them. The orange mass rolled into a ravine. An explosion flew into the air just behind. Chaplain Cloth’s silhouette slanted over the hills in a long black dagger.
“Fuck,” Martin said.
Other children clamored forward. He swerved but the creatures held strong.
“Can you do something?” he shouted.
Teresa had her eyes closed. He hoped she knew what she was doing. It wasn’t easy for her to place mantles while moving—she had no sense of building in a changing position.
Give her time, don’t panic...
The stemmed child’s mouth unhinged, revealing curling orange fangs that stretched back through the syrupy environment of its mouth. It was a call to its brother. A signal for the kill.
Martin’s heart fisted. The children leapt into the air, maniacal eyes volcanic with hungry wrath, and then their bodies collided with an invisible hammer and orange rain patterned the windshield.
“Nicely done.” Martin hit the wipers. “Here, take the wheel.”
Teresa shuddered. “Wait—?”
“Do it!”
He turned in his seat and peered out to the dark road behind, still freckled in light from the explosion. The Hearts thrashed about in their car seats, glistening eyes turning this way and that way. “Hold on kids,” he told them.
The air grew hot around him and his mind went numb with ice. He couldn’t see the mantles but he knew where they were as surely as he knew where his heartbeat was located. He knew where to lay the mantles and how to plug instigation points into them. Once set the mantles would be independent from his control. Despite the weariness inside, Martin pushed through it and brought a storm of mantles into this world, one and two and four and eight and sixteen and thirty-two and sixty-four. Ribbons of blood coursed from his nostrils and the corners of his eyes.
“
Goddamnit
that’s too much!” Teresa caught him in the rearview.
Martin staggered his invisible traps across the road and shaped them.
Teresa screamed, “Martin! Brake!”
Cars blasted through the intersection ahead. Martin crushed the brake. A horrid
hurrrrr
came from the brake pads. The babies lurched forward and began blubbering.
One of them shit
, Martin thought absently at the smell.
Sorry little one
.
The Wrangler stopped, ten feet from the stoplight.
“They’re coming!”
Martin put them in park. “Take the wheel again.”
He crawled over her and switched positions. Teresa switched off the still humming wiper blades.
Slobbering children charged down from the canyon’s inky maw. Martin waited for his traps to spring, breathed to calm himself. The psychotic exodus instantly went prone and dozens launched into the air on their backs, impaled on transparent lances.
The light changed and Teresa tore off. One of the babies cooed, enjoying the sensation.
In the rearview, a dark figure raised his arms.
“Mantle!” Martin winced.
Teresa brought her own. It was too late though. The two mantles blitzed and for a moment became visible, a thin slate shell rent into shards. The jeep spun and clipped the side of a VW bus’s tailgate. A tire blew out and the VW hobbled across the lane into a much larger bus, the front end slamming into the words
Correctional Facility
painted on the side.
Cloth lashed out again. It was meant for them but the prisoner transport slid into the brunt of it and bowled over. The wide steel body sealed the intersection between a narrowing of foothills.
Teresa sped into the dimly lit city and quickly turned down several random intersections: Franklin Street, then Tamara Drive, then Live Oaks Lane. She had lost the Church more times than Martin could count; she was good at it. With those children so powerful, Martin hoped it would work out like it had in the past. At least get them to the Void in the train yard.
“Martin,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“The clock is stopped at 12:12.”
~ * ~
In one swath of darkness, in an insignificant canyon, the
California
Rehabilitation
Center
’s inmate transport was involved in a collision with a Volkswagen Bus. The driver of the VW died instantly of a massive brain hemorrhage. Only one man was knocked unconscious in the rear of the state bus. The inmates crawled out the emergency exits. Work detail had been scheduled from noon to six thirty in the evening, but then night fell so suddenly they didn’t have the chance to finish picking up litter on I-215.
The growling, at first heartbeat, was taken for coyotes, and then with the fangs clashing like scissors there were other notions of bobcats or cougars or mountain lions or rabid jackals—who knew? These were quick considerations.
“Get your asses back in the bus,” one of the deputies whispered. But the bus was on its side. It was useless and she saw the creatures too and only took one step back in commitment to the idea.
An inmate’s eyes bugged in the moonlight. “Did they bring the night?”