Thief of Souls (27 page)

The slovenly man clinked glasses with him. “Yeah. Too bad nobody's taking bets.”

I
T WAS SUNSET WHEN
Radio Joe pushed his way through the anxious crowds around the Mirage, determined to see for himself the sight that had arrested the attention of the city. The rumor was that federal agents were about to close the
whole place down, until they could either discover or fabricate a rational explanation for the wall of water. But Radio Joe suspected that no amount of government intervention could close this Pandora's box.

He shouldered his way through, creating his own right-of-way, against the disapproval of those around him, until he was finally in the lobby. Police in riot gear fought a losing battle to peacefully disperse the crowd, but they were outnumbered, and their strategies were all geared toward angry mobs, not joyous ones. With so many children present in the arms of their parents, no one dared authorize the use of tear gas or lethal force, and so Radio Joe watched as the line of police gave way. The eager hundreds funneled forward, leaping over the reception desk, toward the shark tank. Radio Joe became just one among many pressing their palms forward into the wall of water, wanting not just to see the miracle, but to
feel
it as well.

As he reached his hand forward, Joe's fingers went from air into cool salt water, without any hint of a barrier between. A bright yellow fish swam between his fingers. Tiny bubbles dislodged from the hair on his wrists and floated up, out of sight.

Around him the wide-eyed throng was being dragged away one at a time by police officers, but still more kept coming. Radio Joe wondered if these people understood what they were witnessing. That this place, this moment in time, marked the end of the Age of Reason. A new time was coming, and Joe feared what this new age might be. He now knew that the devouring spirit he had pursued was just one of many players in a dark and bewildering pageant. There would be hundreds of souls by now that the Quíkadi had devoured, and there was no hope of Radio Joe ever cleansing the world of its waste, much less fighting it. Who knew what other mystic acts had taken root in the world as well?

He pulled his hand out of the water-wall, knowing there was only one thing for him to do now. He would leave here, go to the place where life began, and wait there for it to end.

As he turned, a woman in the crowd made eye contact. He read her quizzical look, and although he shielded his face, he wasn't quick enough.

“Shiprock!” she said under her breath.

He turned and ran, but was met by the crowd pressing in, pushing their way toward the water-wall.

“The Shiprock Slayer!” screamed the woman. “It's the Shiprock Slayer!”

More eyes turned to Radio Joe. He heard more voices now, seconding the accusation. One of the riot policemen turned his way.

He knew if he was to escape, he would have to use the crowd to his advantage, and so he dropped down on all fours, serpentining an unpredictable path through the forest of legs.

“That way!” he heard a voice shout. “He's over there!”

But the farther away he got, the less interested the crowd was in his identity. The only thought in their mind was getting to the water-wall before the whole lobby was shut down. He battered his way through them, and out of the lobby. Once outside, the crowd wasn't quite as dense, and he could move more quickly, but so could the ones pursuing him. To his left and right were more crowds, more police, and up ahead was a railing that guarded an oasis of palms and ferns. In the center of the Oasis stood a mock volcano that erupted with precise regularity on the hour, twenty-four hours a day. Once a highlight of the Strip, it was now just part of the scenery. The five o'clock eruption had already begun, gas jets spreading fire over waterfalls and into the dark lagoon. Tongues of flame licked out, covering the surface of the water.

“Stop him!”

He felt a hand grab for his collar, and miss. There was only one route for him now, and no time to linger on the decision. He climbed the railing and leapt into the flaming lagoon, leaving his destiny to the fires of the volcano.

D
ILLON NEEDED SOME TIME
alone that afternoon—some time to prepare.

The other Shards had spent much of their hour-long ride from Las Vegas riding the high of the glorious day. Dillon had to admit, he got caught up in it, too.

He had watched the news on the bus's TV screen and had enjoyed the sight of his own face. Locally, their little show had supplanted the Shiprock Massacres as the leading news stories. If the bloodbath in Shiprock was a sign of the coming chaos, then Dillon was already stealing focus and seizing control. He relished the expert attempts to explain his windowless wall of water, which, like the pool at Hearst Castle, would remain until someone chose to drain the water out. It made Dillon feel big—so much larger than life, he felt he might burst out of his own skin and swell until he stood taller than the mountains.

“Keep your eye on the big picture,”
he had told the others.
“We're not doing this for ourselves”
—but it was something he had to keep reminding himself. Elevating himself into broader public view was just a means to an end. Still, he couldn't deny the glorious feeling it gave him.

Once their campsite was established, Dillon wasted no further time in idle talk. He had left the circle of buses, and headed toward a craggy ridge a mile away.

He made his way up the rocks that reddened in the late-afternoon sun. Winston had said he was playing Jesus and
Moses wrapped together, and it did feel as if he were climbing the face of Sinai as he scaled the jagged rocks.

Dillon was slowly becoming used to such comparisons, feeling more at home in the company of prophets and saviors—and he dared to wonder, when this was all over, where his name would fall in the records of the divinely touched.

These were heady thoughts. Thoughts he had caged, ever since he had found his powers—but now, on the eve of his ascension into the limelight, he needed to ponder them, for his confidence needed to grow large enough to blanket the world.

He reached the top of the bluff, and stared down at the magnificent man-made wonder that lay on the other side, still swarmed by tourists. Even from a distance, its concrete expanse was breathtaking.

Okoya arrived some time later. Dillon didn't hear him until he spoke.

“To think it was built by mere human hands,” Okoya said, when he saw the view. “It rivals the Pyramids, and the Colossus of Rhodes.”

“Take a good look,” said Dillon. “It's your last chance.”

Just a few short days ago, Dillon had felt threatened by Okoya's presence; mistrustful and suspicious. But such feelings felt small and distant as he stood on the hilltop. Nothing could threaten him now.

“What will it be like after tomorrow?” Dillon wondered aloud.

Okoya sat beside him. “Once, the world was flat and sat at the center of the universe,” Okoya said. “But people learned otherwise, and they adjusted. We are on that precipice of change again. Tomorrow the world will be a very different place.”

“People will have no choice but to accept us.”

Okoya agreed. “You are too powerful to deny, and too dangerous to challenge.”

Dillon tried to imagine the days ahead. Would they usher in an era of peace? Would they find themselves in the company of kings and world leaders? He could barely imagine himself meeting world leaders, much less instructing them on global affairs. And yet that would be the task set before him.

The thought was too immense to grasp, so he laughed at it. “I wonder how they'll feel to have the world in the hands of a pack of sixteen-year-olds.”

“You won't always be sixteen,” said Okoya. “And it doesn't surprise me that you'll be rising to the throne of humanity. What surprises me is that it's taken you so long.”

“Did you know,” said Dillon, “that I can find no pattern when I look in the eyes of some of the followers?”

“Really? That's odd.”

“No,” said Dillon, thinking he understood why. “It makes sense if you think about it . . . . Now that they've dedicated their lives to the cause, they have no pattern but the one I give them.”

“Blank slates,” suggested Okoya.

“Yes—waiting for me to write on.”

“What could be better?”

Okoya stood and kicked a rock down the hillside. It tumbled, kicking up dust on the way down. “I'm worried about Michael,” Okoya said.

“He's a loose cannon,” Dillon admitted.

“We may need to take care of him,” said Okoya.

Dillon waved it off. “Yeah, yeah—I'll take care of everybody.”

“No,” said Okoya. “That's
not
what I mean.”

Dillon stood, finding an unexpected seriousness in Okoya's
face that he couldn't decipher. Then Dillon burst out laughing. “Very good! You had me going there. And I thought you didn't have a sense of humor!”

Okoya laughed too, dismissing his own grave expression.

“Ruling the world is easy,” said Okoya. “Comedy's hard.”

They chuckled a few moments more, then Okoya became pensive. Reflective.

“You remind me of someone I once knew in the Greek Isles. He was a lot like you at your age—although not nearly as gifted.”

“The Greek Isles?”

“Just because I came from a reservation, it doesn't mean I haven't traveled.”

Dillon took a pointedly invasive look at Okoya, to once again divine the source of his worldliness—but all he found were the simple patterns of a rural life. But that was somehow untrue. It was merely a facade, someone else he was hiding behind.

“Who are you, Okoya?”

The expression on Okoya's face changed then, becoming open and unambiguous. “I'm someone who wants to put the world in the palm of your hand.”

Okoya left, and as night fell, Dillon found himself still transfixed by the view, eerily lit by a rising blood moon.

He resolved to remain there till dawn, preparing his mind for the task at hand. Meditating on himself, Dillon thought of the network of connections already spreading forth, linking Dillon and the Shards with signs and wonders in millions of people's minds, as they turned on their evening news. Tomorrow those numbers would flare, as the world became witnesses to the impossible—a miraculous wake-up call too huge to deny.

Forty-five days from now, there would be no doubters.
That day would see an end to war, disease, and despair. There would never be another Shiprock Massacre—he would see to that. His binding strength would be a protective sheath around the world.

He looked again to the view before him. Lake Mead stretched to a rocky shore, and before it, the concrete expanse of Hoover Dam arced across a deep ravine, holding in the lake.

Dillon smiled.

Tomorrow this troubled, crumbling world would believe in miracles.

D
REW
C
AMDEN WAS NO SLEUTH
. C
ONSTANTLY DISTRACTED
and uncharacteristically clumsy, he was poorly suited to spy on Okoya. However, the carrot Michael had hung in front of him was powerful motivation.

He positioned his bedroll in view of Okoya's tent, into which the mysterious Indian had retreated after dinner. For hours he listened to irritating songs around the campfires, and heard stories. Storytellers were emerging in this new order, weaving lofty dramas about the Shards that had no basis in fact whatsoever: how the Shards were ancient and ageless; how their semblance of youth was only a guise. Drew didn't bother to contradict them.

Other followers had been assigned the task of receiving new arrivals, who drifted in from the Boulder Highway in a steady osmotic flow. By two in the morning, most everyone but the posted watch had settled down.

The night was much colder than it should have been, and the sky up above was punctuated by a brilliant spray of stars. If Michael and the others were illuminated with the fragmented soul of a star, Drew wondered as he lay there, what did that make him? What did that make everyone else? Tiny, insignificant smithereens? He wondered how long until the shards would find people too small for their attention.

Well,
thought Drew,
better take my share of favors now, before Michael's pedestal gets too high.

There was a flap of fabric, and Drew rolled over to see Okoya step from his tent. Drew slipped out of his sleeping bag
and followed, taking his video-cam with him. He kept his distance as Okoya strolled among the sleeping campers. There seemed to be no destination; he merely meandered, glancing from face to face of the ones who slept beneath the open air—as if looking for someone.

Finally, Okoya stopped by a clutch of sleeping bags behind a larger tent, out of view from everyone else.

Drew watched as Okoya knelt, then put a hand behind a sleeping woman's neck, and tilted her head slightly back, as if he were about to resuscitate her. Then, the space between Okoya and the woman arced with a wave of soft, crimson light that lit their faces for a few moments, then faded.

The woman rolled over, and pulled her sleeping bag up to her shoulders, never waking up. Okoya moved to the man beside her, repeating the same procedure.

Drew wasn't sure what he was witnessing—but he did know that he must have hit the jackpot. Whatever this was, it was information for Michael—and that meant Michael had to make good on his promise.

Okoya moved on to a third camper.

All it would take to clinch this would be a video! The light created by Okoya's strange encounters would create enough of an image to see. Drew quietly raised the camera to his eyes, slid his thumb over the red button and pressed it.

The machine beeped twice as it went from standby to record . . . . And in the silence, those two tones might as well have been the chimes of Big Ben. The glow died suddenly, and Okoya's head turned as smoothly as an owl's, directly to Drew.