The combat took them around the small clearing that lay behind Mertyl’s house, John losing track of time and his surroundings in that peculiar tunnel vision which takes hold of instinctive fighters. The world slowed to a crawl and centered itself around the gleaming edge of the wickedly sharp knife with which Mertyl lunged at him. Moonlight flashed off its surface in jeweled gleams, throwing spiderweb wisps of glinting light around them. John skittered aside, allowing the sparkling steel to pass beside him – too close, she would have him in a moment – before again blunting the follow-up attack with his rifle.
He was peripherally aware of Fran, trying to keep her behind him, to keep her safe. But Fran apparently would have none of that. When Mertyl lunged again at John, he parried it, jabbing Mertyl lightly on the arm, knocking her a bit off balance. Fran pounced then, jumping on the old woman’s back.
Before she had sufficient purchase, though, John saw Mertyl spin in Fran’s grasp. He gasped. The old woman hadn’t just moved fast, she had moved
impossibly
, turning so quickly that she was a blur, grabbing Fran’s arms and pulling them off her neck as easily as John might have separated a mosquito from his skin.
John felt his heart sink as Fran was instantly under the power of the crazed old woman. She was dead, he knew. Fran was dead. With the insane speed and power she was possessed of, it would be the work of a moment for the old woman to snap Fran in two. John was powerless to halt what would come next, and his heart sank in despair.
But Mertyl didn’t do anything except put Fran down. John noticed that, though the school secretary moved Fran with firmness, she took great care not to hurt the younger woman.
The same consideration did not apply to him, apparently, as Mertyl returned to the attack on him with vicious fury.
John felt himself tiring, but Mertyl wasn’t even breathing hard.
What’s happening? he thought. What’s going on? His mind moved at a furious pace as he strove both to unravel the ever more tangled mysteries that presented themselves and to keep alive.
He knew he was tiring, and would have to end this quickly or fatigue would surely trip him up, so he attacked Mertyl in earnest, now driving
her
back, drawing on reserves he didn’t know he had.
He saw an opening and clipped her hard with the muzzle of his rifle, striking her knife hand along the wrist. He heard bones crack with a withering, brittle finality. The knife fell from Mertyl’s hands and he snatched it out of the air.
At the same time, her other hand extended toward him, fingers curled into old but deadly claws, like those of a harpy out of myth or nightmare. John swung the butt of his rifle around this time, swinging the weapon one-handed like a bat. The stock of the gun connected, snapping his assailant’s other wrist.
He thought that would end it, but still she came, gnashing at him with yellowed teeth, kicking him with her old woman’s legs that somehow had the power to break his skin and bruise his bone with every contact.
John held her off, and then something happened that frightened him badly. Worse than anything that had come before. Tal and Gabe rising from the dead had been one thing....
But Mertyl’s
wrists
healing up in minutes was something else.
And they must have healed, for now she attacked him with her hands again, fingers snapping at him as he waved the knife in front of her eyes, crisscrossing deadly patterns of steel through the air before her. He saw that the wrists, limp and hanging at impossible angles only seconds before, were now strong and unbruised, as though he had never touched them. Thankfully, his horror at what was happening was pressed out of his mind by the pressing matter of how he would survive. He still continued to weaken, while Mertyl looked as fresh as ever.
She couldn’t quite break through his defense, and he didn’t want to kill her. They were at an impasse, but each passing second brought a greater likelihood of an unhappy ending to this encounter.
"Mertyl, please," he whispered, his voice hoarse.
The old woman stopped and backed off. For a moment John believed it was over; that he had found an island of refuge from the sea of terror that he floated in.
Until she opened her mouth.
"They’re here!" she screamed. "Fran and John are here!" Her voice was louder than he had thought possible, almost shattering his eardrums with its volume and intensity.
Even as he reeled from the vocal blast, the neighborhood came alive as lights flashed on in all the houses. Doors began slamming, and John felt as though he was in the middle of the Red Sea in the moments before it crashed down upon the soldiers of Pharaoh.
In seconds he and Fran would be engulfed.
Without pause, he swung his rifle, snapping Mertyl’s chin back. She dropped, unconscious, and John grabbed Fran’s hand and they ran.
***
Mertyl regained consciousness a moment later, dimly aware of dark shapes rushing past her, like specters in the black night of a haunted graveyard.
Her head throbbed, but not where John had hit her.
No, it throbbed throughout, an incessant, rhythmic beat that slammed through her skull with the force of a jackhammer.
Each pulse seemed to carry a feeling. Not one that she could articulate, but the closest she could come was one word:
Follow.
Follow.
Follow.
She clutched her head and squinted. Gradually she could make out the shapes that sped by her prone figure. They were her friends and neighbors. They were the people she had known all her life. They were the ones she loved.
They were strangers.
They ran with awkward, unsteady paces, and she knew they were all feeling the beat of that super-liminal cadence that Mertyl was hard-pressed not to dance to herself. They held guns, knives, bats, any kind of weapon at hand. Small children ran in the crowd, holding not play toys, not plastic guns painted bright orange, but knives and forks, small implements of death.
The pounding in Mertyl’s head continued, and she rose, pushing herself up on hands and knees and then shakily standing.
But that was wrong, wasn’t it?
What was wrong?
Something’s wrong.
Her thoughts muddled about in her head, mixing up and becoming incomprehensible. She looked at her hands.
That was it. Her hands. She couldn’t have pushed up on hands and knees. Her wrists were broken. John had broken her wrists.
And why didn’t I scream when he did that? she thought. Why am I not screaming now?
She clenched a fist. Then the other. There was no pain. Her wrists were healed.
The confusion of her thoughts heightened to a dizzying altitude. Nonsense phrases from her youth mixed with the memories of yesterday. The differences between what was and what should be grew more pronounced in her mind, the thoughts more jumbled, the confusion greater.
A great, heavy blanket of darkness seemed to coil around her consciousness, like a gruesome amoeboid preparing to envelope its prey and consume it at leisure. The darkness spread, and Mertyl felt herself going, losing control.
The darkness was madness.
And when it had completely captured her, Mertyl danced. She danced in a river of her loved ones as they ran past her, not seeing her, not caring about her as she no longer cared about them.
She danced, clawing herself, tearing at her eyes, raking cracked nails across her breast.
She danced to the maddening beat that was the only sense in the blackness.
Follow.
Follow.
Follow.
But she couldn’t. The blackness held her firm, gripping her in an excruciating embrace that restrained her urge to follow.
Follow.
Follow.
She reached out and plucked a rifle from one of the passing mob. His fingers grabbed for it, but then he was past, swept away by the current.
Mertyl pressed the rifle barrel under her chin. Then something told her to move it lower. To the soft tissue where the jaw met the neck.
She pressed it there, feeling the cool roundness of the barrel penetrate the dark fog of her mind.
She pulled the trigger.
Most of Mertyl Breckman’s head disintegrated in a splash of bone and blood, and her decapitated corpse fell to the ground. Her legs twitched spasmodically, her old ankles kicking the soft grass beneath.
Even in death, it seemed, Mertyl continued to dance.
***
Malachi heard the sounds grow, and it frightened him.
He knew
he
was in no danger, but if the town had been alerted, that meant that the Controllers were trying to actively track Fran through the bracelet on her wrist.
Standard practice, really. A bracelet, a gem, a ring. The Controllers planted them through a friend or loved one, who always gave the bauble with an admonition never to remove it.
In this case, Malachi knew, the bracelet had come from Fran’s husband, Nathan. His lip curled as he thought of Fran, lying with her husband, never knowing her glorious destiny, never knowing the creature - no, the
thing
- that Nathan was.
So the sound of neighborhoods waking up frightened Malachi, because things were getting out of hand. Besides, though he was protected from the townsfolk, he knew Controllers would be coming soon. And he had no guarantee that all of
them
would respect his divine nature. Some of them might find themselves as powerless to harm him as were Loston’s citizens. But others might discover that they were able to raise their hands against him. If that happened, Malachi might be killed.
He was outside the house where they had trapped John and Fran, and now he hurried to Deirdre’s form, so still in the light of the fire that John had set with his lantern bombs. Deirdre moaned as Malachi approached, surprising him. He thought for sure she would be dead.
Not dead, though. Wounded, but Malachi could tell instantly that the bullet had merely scratched her, taking a layer of skin off the outside edge of her left shoulder and cauterizing as it passed.
She would live.
God
is
watching out for us, he thought. He always believed that, of course, but sometimes it was nice to have proof. It cemented his conviction more firmly: they would triumph this night. John would die, and with him Fran. And when they were gone, the future would die also. The Dream would become reality, and the world would burn.
Malachi helped Deirdre to her feet, and Jenna, who’d been standing nearby, reached out a hand to steady her.
"What’s going on?" mumbled Deirdre, blinking unsteadily.
"They’ve put Loston on Alert," whispered Malachi.
Deirdre straightened as if shocked by a spear of white hot lightning. "What?" she whispered.
Malachi nodded and started leading her back to Gabriel’s house. "Come on. We’ll sit you down inside for a moment. You’ll need all your strength to keep up.
"Things are about to get messy."
DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
9:10 PM, MONDAY
***ALERT MODE***
The stitch in Fran’s side grew from a minor inconvenience to a major source of pain, a monster that was eagerly clawing out her insides. She clapped her free hand to it - the other John held in a tight grip, pulling her along with ever more speed - and tried not to pass out.
She considered herself to be in fairly good shape, running two miles every day and working out three times a week, a habit she had picked up in the health-conscious Los Angeles suburb she and Nathan had lived in. But no amount of weight training or aerobic exercise could have prepared her for the nightmare run they were now engaged in. Stealth was abandoned. Speed was all that mattered.
All around them sounds of a town, awakened as from a deep sleep of fairy lore, pummeled at them. They were strange, frightening sounds that Fran didn’t want to hear but had to: the sounds of people moving, running, hundreds of them following, but not a one of them speaking a word.
They ran past a house and Fran saw a boy exit as they did. The boy held a hunting rifle that he aimed at them. Fran tried to warn John but the boy fired before she could, the noise deafening even a hundred feet away. The shot zinged past them and John, in one of those strangely speedy reactions that she knew had to come from some kind of special training, spun automatically and shot back.
The boy fell with a cry, a cry that was echoed in John’s own ragged shriek of dismay.
"No!" he screamed. His voice was a study in anguish, and that anguish reflected itself on his face. "Dallas," he cried, and tears fell from his eyes. He stepped toward the porch that the still form lay on, and Fran knew John would go and kneel by the boy and wait to die.
But that couldn’t happen.
Now
she
grabbed
his
wrist and began pulling him. "No," she said. "Don’t go!"
John was oblivious to her, pulling against her, dragging her with him.
Then she saw the boy’s feet twitch and he slowly moved to his feet. Fran saw most of his head blown away. He was dead. He had to be dead.
But he moved.
"Oh my God!" she screamed. "What’s going on?"
The sight of his former student seemed to jolt John as well, and he changed course, moving away from the boy with Fran. They quickly outdistanced the boy, who was moving slowly.
They ran on.
They ran forever, it seemed, until their run dissolved into a long montage of Loston’s townsfolk running after them, of hiding in ditches and beside buildings, moving ever onward, ever farther from the town.
Now the sun was peeking over the horizon, and Fran was sleeping on her feet.
She felt a tug as John jerked her awake.
"Come on, tiger," he said, "we’re almost there."
"Where are we?" she asked. He didn’t answer, and Fran finally realized that the question had never made it past her fatigue-muted lips. She looked around her.
They were slowly picking their way up a steep dirt incline, going up the side of a mountain. Fran shook off sleep, or tried to, in order to place her feet firmly on the loose silt of the trail.