Crossroads (9 page)

"No," said Kira, realizing her plan was going awry.

Jen shook her head, grabbing Kira by the shoulder to stop her from running back to the old man.

"They’ll kill him," insisted Kira, struggling as Jen dragged her back up the narrow path. "We can’t leave him."

A crash sounded, and Kira knew that more Grigs were inside the forest and that they had abandoned stealth. She jerked out of Jen’s grasp and raced back toward the fire, but Jen caught her again, lifting her kicking and swinging off the ground and carrying her back toward the tracks.

"They’ll kill him," she said, sobbing, her breath catching in her throat.

Then Jen’s broad hand slapped over her mouth, and she could not even cry out to call to the Grigs.

It was all too much like the attack on the show, so sudden, so frustratingly unstoppable, so deadly. Tears flowed hotly down her cheeks as Clancy’s first scream rent the night, filling the air with pain and anguish, betrayal and terror, and as each succeeding shriek faded away behind them, Kira knew that it was all her fault, that she and Jen could never again allow themselves to endanger another person the way they had Clancy. Her parents’ deaths and those of her friends in the show had not been her fault. She had paid for what she was, whatever she was, and everyone in the show had paid as well, but that had not been her fault.

Clancy’s death was.

She sagged in Jen’s arms, letting the big woman carry her rapidly over the embankment and along the tracks that shielded them from the trees but did little to cover the sound of the old man’s last cries.

Chapter 13

Clancy’s death dragged on Kira’s shoulders like a weight too impossibly heavy for her to bear. The entire world had suddenly gone mad, and she wondered how she was supposed to survive this
penance.

When Jen released her she leaned against a tall oak tree, staring across the fields at the highway in the distance, watching the headlights of long-distance trucks as they raced through the darkness like a line of giant lightning bugs in some mysterious parade. It wasn’t fair. She was just a fourteen-year-old girl with one little talent that she hadn’t even really learned to use. What was so special about her that it was worth murdering people for?

"We shouldn’t have left him," she moaned.  

Jen rested on the ground beside her, shaking her head.      

"We shouldn’t have," insisted Kira, wiping away the last of her tears. "It’s my fault. I should have done something."

"The Grigs came for you. There was no way of knowing they would go for the old man," said Jen.

“We could have made more noise to distract them.”

“Then they would truly have come for you. I could not allow that.”

Kira wanted to slap her. Jen was like some kind of rock, nothing touched her, but Kira wanted something to. She wanted the pooka to feel her pain, her guilt. How could
she
be immune? She had slept in Clancy’s camp, had eaten from his pan. She wore the pack he had given her on her broad back over the denim jacket that he had stolen for her.

"Don’t you care?" she shouted, immediately afraid of the sound of her own voice carrying. "You made it so they couldn’t see me. Didn’t you?"

"I am not made to care about others. Only you."

Kira stared at her, realizing that that was the most Jen had ever said about why she had suddenly appeared in her life.

"You would have stayed with Clancy if I’d stayed," whispered Kira, understanding that the guilt was even more hers than she had realized before. "You’d have hidden both of us."

"As long as I could."

"But you dragged me away," said Kira, searching for redemption, for any excuse that might salve her growing guilt and shame.

"After you decided," said Jen, slamming that door shut in Kira’s face.

S
he
had chosen to run. It was her fault, not Jen’s.

"What do you mean made?" she asked.

"We are all made."

"But you said you were made to care about me. Why? Who made you? And why for me?"

Jen shrugged again, and Kira sighed loudly this time, frustration raging worse than ever.

"You know what’s going on," she said, "don’t you? You know why the
Empty-eyed-man
and the Grigs are after us. Why they attacked the show. Why they murdered my parents. Why?"

"You know almost as much as I do."

"I’m paying a penance."

"Yes."

"But I didn’t do anything."

"No."

"That’s not fair."

Another infuriating shrug.

"I miss Mama and Daddy."

Jen nodded.

"I want them back."

"You know you cannot have them."

But the knowing was no solace. In fact it was a thorn that pierced her until she felt like screaming. She wanted them all back. Mama and Daddy, Fat Alice, Whiskey Coot, Bennie the Barker, all of them. She wanted her life back, her future, her family, her friends. She couldn’t be responsible for them being gone. She just couldn’t, and she couldn’t accept their loss, either.

The moon rose over the forest behind them, illuminating the fallow field between them and the highway, and suddenly the long rows of plowed soil reminded Kira of the roofline of the vast, alien complex she’d seen in her dream, and she shuddered, clutching the jacket tighter around her, smelling Clancy’s pipe smoke on the rough material. A light breeze wafted past, and she could have sworn she got a whiff of her mother’s perfume as well. Sobs wracked her, although her eyes remained barren and dry as the field.

"Can you stop them?" she whispered. "Can you kill the Grigs and the
Empty-eyed-man
?"

Jen shook her head. "That is not in my power and not my purpose."

"Then what
is
your purpose?" gasped Kira. "Why are you here? You don’t help!"

Jen stared at her until Kira had to turn away from her own lie.

Jen
did
help. Without her she would not have had the strength to run away into the night when the carnival was attacked. She would not have made it onto the train. She would have remained frozen at Clancy’s camp or worse, run back to her own death. Jen was like a tool that only worked when its owner knew how to use it, and Kira knew she had been using it badly. Because of her ignorance people were dead. That
was
her responsibility. She drew in long slow breaths, willing her heart to stop pounding, willing her anger to cool and her grief to subside. She had no right to be angry at Jen for being what she was anymore than she had a right to be angry at her mother for telling her that she was being punished for things she hadn’t done. Neither of them had any more control over what was happening than she did, but she had to find control. She had to discover some way out of this predicament for both of them.

"What do we do now?" she whispered.

Jen, too, stared out across the moonlit field, her one good eye glinting in the golden light.

"Keep going."

"Going where?"

"To where you are supposed to be."

Kira closed her eyes and prayed for patience. "I don’t have any
idea
where I’m supposed to be."

"Neither do I," said Jen, smiling as she rose languidly to her feet.

"Then how do we get there?"

One final infuriating shrug.

"We walk," said Jen, starting out across the grassless furrows, "and follow the dream."

Chapter 14

They hiked until they were exhausted, then slept the rest of the night away in a shed behind a house on the outskirts of another nameless small town, Kira waking more than once to stare out through the one filthy window toward the dark home to assure herself that they had not brought death to the people sleeping peacefully inside. After sunrise, when she heard a car start up she awakened Jen, and they watched as a mother and father and one little boy piled into the family sedan and left. She nudged Jen, and they crept to the back door, finding it open.

She hated breaking into someone’s house. Towners thought of carneys as thieves and reprobates, anyway, but she had never been one, and she hated the
Empty-eyed-man
and the Grigs for forcing her into it, but they had to eat, and she refused to chance befriending one more person to do so. Jen found a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, and while she made a huge pile of sandwiches Kira poured two large glasses of milk. She was surprised when Jen took the plate of sandwiches into the living room, flicked on the TV and plopped herself into an easy chair, but Kira sat on the ottoman at her feet, watching the screen dully as she ate.

A newscaster was reporting a horrible shooting in a school. Some kids had brought high powered rifles into the gym and murdered dozens of their fellow students. Blood was everywhere, and the cameraman seemed to have a fixation on one large pool surrounding a little girl’s head. Kira jerked the remote from the coffee table and changed channels. A man and a woman, sitting on tall stools and sipping coffee were introducing a young man who entered walking with a cane. He appeared to be in his teens, and he had something wrong with his face. When he turned toward the camera one cheek drooped, that side of his lips hung downward, and that eye bulged. Jen grunted, and Kira glanced at her, but Jen just shook her head, and Kira was drawn back to the screen.

The woman asked the young man to tell the audience about his affliction, and he explained that there was no known cause for the disease that was slowly ravaging his body. He was on the show to ask for support for a foundation that had been established to do research, but since there were only a handful of people in the entire world suffering from the same illness it was hard to drum up funds. He didn’t expect to die from the disease, only to suffer for the rest of his life as his body slowly fell apart.

Kira flipped the channel again.

This time the people on the screen were obviously actors. The set looked cheesy, as though the walls of the bedroom were constructed of painted cardboard. A scantily clad brunette with impossibly large breasts clung to a musclebound man in a tight business suit, begging him not to return to his wife. In the background police sirens sounded, and someone hammered at the door.

"How about cartoons?" muttered Jen.

Kira flipped until she finally found a children’s channel, but even as Jen laughed uproariously at the onscreen antics, Kira found herself as disturbed by the show as she had been by the three previous ones. The story seemed to center on some kind of malformed, half-dog, half-cat that could not agree with itself on which direction to take to save its own life from falling pianos, attacking aliens, or some crazed man with an axe. The very image of the mutated creature was troubling, but the sense of the inevitability of its approaching
demise
reminded Kira of their own predicament. She couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that no matter how many channels she turned to she would only find more to depress her. Had the world always been this way?

Being constantly on the road her family often had no television hookup, and having little experience with the media, Kira had never really missed it, just like she had never missed the Internet, although she had heard enough references to it to be at least curious. Now she wasn’t so sure she’d even like to know any more about that than she did about the programming she’d seen.

"It’s all bad," she said.

"Falling apart," muttered Jen around a mouthful of peanut butter.

"What?"

"Falling apart," Jen repeated, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

"What is?"

"Everything. Nothing sticks together anymore. It’s all getting mixed up."

Kira stared at her, trying to reason out the meaning in the words that seemed to say more than what they
said.
She sensed a strange sort of depth behind Jen’s bad eye, as though through it the woman could see past the world around her right down to the glue that held it all together.

And the glue was failing. Nothing stuck together anymore.

What did that mean? Kira didn’t think the world was going to blow apart like one of the break-away targets in the Shoot-Em-Up Gallery. She was certain that Jen’s meaning was something far subtler but somehow even more distressing than that.

She remembered standing in the center of the midway at night, letting the towners slip past her in endless waves, listening to clips of their conversation like the disjointed sounds of distant cries in a nightmare. After a while the words all flowed together until they were simply an audible blur making no sense at all, but the
feel
of them had still made her nervous. There was an underlying current of despair, of need about them. As though the people in the crowd were searching desperately for something that was never there for them, and so they hurried on to more and more empty destinations. She had asked her mother what was wrong with the towners.

"They feel something they don’t understand," said her mother, softly, resting her arm across Kira’s shoulder. "They’re afraid they’re not real."

Kira frowned, staring at the people who seemed to be laughing too hard, rushing too fast. "Not real?"

"Look up there," said her mother, waving her hand at the broad bowl of stars. "Galaxies within galaxies. For every galaxy there are a million worlds, all different as snowflakes, and yet all they can see is what’s in front of their eyes. They want reality to fold neatly into the palm of their hands. They are afraid of the wonder of what
might be real."

"They’re just so sad."

"Something is gone from their lives that they never even knew existed. So they don’t know how to find it, or even where to look. They scramble through their days in a constant search for anything that will make them real, and they collect things, believing that the things they can hold and touch are real, therefore they assume that
they
must be real as well. But that’s not how it works."