The Flats, where we had dumped the corpses earlier (was that just yesterday?), seemed to continue on this side of town and, before we knew it, we were once again traveling along this unbroken yet strikingly blasted landscape. Nothing could grow here. Not even sand. It was just hardpacked dirt for mile after mile. Unbreaking. Unrelenting. The sun beat down on top of the black van with the skull and crossbones emblazoned on the side like some eerie portent.
Numb, I sat there, Brilliance clutched in my hands. The flame flickering from the lip of the urn didn"t really seem to contain any heat. Had it contained heat at one time? I didn"t know. How would this all end? Would we be able to return the flame to its rightful location? Did we want to return the flame to its rightful location? Would returning the flame only give the Nefarions more power and control over their surroundings? Would it allow them to change and rearrange our world even more than they already could? Was it really our world? Who was to say it was our world? Wasn"t it entirely possible the Nefarions were here before us and had only retreated into their special corner of s.p.a.ce and time in order to escape us like some tribe of metaphysical Native Americans? Had the entire human race successfully quarantined them? Given the history of humanity, it wasn"t hard to imagine this as the case at all.
"So," I said, placing Brilliance on the floor and rolling down the window to let in some air even though it was sick hot air and letting in the air meant letting in the roar. "Say we do return this to the Nefarions... Will they go away? Will things go back to normal?"
"It"s hard to say," Dad said. "I don"t think we can necessarily blame the Nefarions for everything abnormal happening. It"s true that, without the flame, more of them spend more time in our world than they would otherwise. But they are only here because they are searching for the flame."
"I think they found it."
"Yes. I think you"re right. Which is why we have to be especially careful now. One wrong move and we could end up dead or imprisoned."
"Do you think that"s what happened to grandfather?"
"Well, they came after him but, if you ask me, he kind of had it coming."
It was the exact kind of Dad answer I had expected. A little wishy-washy. Not exactly full of resolve, the good and bad comingling in everything.
The van continued to wobble and scream along the road, not pa.s.sing another car, and we fell into a lengthy silence. Why couldn"t we have been stuck with a car that had air conditioning?
The heat, the sporadic yet steady drone of the road beneath us, the ferocious exhaust and the unbroken boredom of the landscape conspired to drag me down into sleep, paralyzing sluggishness. The fear of once again being shot at kept me awake. I was afraid, if I dozed off, I might never wake up. While one of the original ten men had posed as my bodyguard I didn"t necessarily know the remaining men were there to protect me. For all I knew, they were just the Nefarions in disguise. After all, they seemed to contain some sort of magical ability. Dad couldn"t even see them. Hearing them wasn"t really an option since they didn"t make any noise. The whole shooting back at the motel could have just been something staged to lure me into a false sense of security. I didn"t take the fallen guy"s pulse. I didn"t even really stick around long enough to see if there was any blood. The eagle-headed man could have just fired off a cap gun and the tenth man could have fallen. I merely followed the expected reaction to that sort of thing. That is, to get the h.e.l.l out of there as fast as I possibly could.
Dad, unfortunately, did not have nearly the aversion to sleep I had. His head bobbed periodically, the van swerving off to the shoulder of the road before he jerked his head up and whipped the van back onto the road. Maybe he was hung over from yesterday. In all the years I had known him, I had never seen him drunk. I didn"t even know he drank. He said the imposter made him. I believed him. I didn"t believe him. I had trouble believing anything. Over the past couple of days he went from being the plump, blue collar dad I had always known to being a skinny imposter named Gary Wrench to being my skinny father. All of them had been completely believable. It was no great leap to think he was now my skinny father the drunk. He could have told me anything and I would have believed it at that point. Or I wouldn"t have believed it. Maybe his total lack of resolve had finally infected me. Maybe I had always shared his lack of resolve. I was never what you would call "headstrong."
I went back to the beard, that bastion of slow glacial growth, for comfort. Sometimes I didn"t know where I would be without the beard. I had certainly resolved to grow that. And it was a resolution I had stuck with, even through the maddeningly scratchy stage where I would plunge my fingers into its thick growth until it felt like the skin beneath was raw. Of course, it was also just as likely that my intense laziness prevented me from shaving. The more the beard grew, the more work it would have been to shave it.
Dad"s head flopped down again, this time coming to fully rest on his chest. I wasn"t really too worried about the van going off the road since the side of the road was every bit as hard and durable as the road itself and there weren"t any obstructions to hit. I wondered how long we would have to shoot off in a given direction before we reached something. At that point, I think I would have almost welcomed it. The satisfying crash into some obstruction or the depthless plunge over a cliffside, at least it would have been a change from the droning monotony of The Flats.
I nudged Dad on the arm.
"You want me to drive?" I asked.
"No! No! I got it. Just needed to rest my eyes for a minute."
"You probably shouldn"t do that while you"re driving."
"No. I"m fine now. I feel totally refreshed."
"Good."
We drove for several more miles before the van made a painful kind of grinding sound, began spewing black smoke, and shuddered to a halt.
"d.a.m.n," Dad said.
"What happened?" I asked. I had always a.s.sumed fathers knew everything about cars even though I figured Dad probably knew as little about them as I did. Sure, he could probably walk you through the construction of a hot air balloon basket and maybe give you a dilettante anthropology lecture but his knowledge of anything practical (if either of those could be considered practical skills) probably ended there.
"Don"t know," he said, staring wide-eyed at the smoke furling out from the engine.
"What does this van run on, anyway? I don"t remember us ever putting any gas in it and we"ve driven a whole lot."
"I have no idea what it runs on. The car ran on fire. But this thing, all you had to do was hop in and touch the wheel. I never really thought about what powered it. There"s no gas gauge, so it probably isn"t that."
Dad popped the hood of the van and we both climbed out. We lifted up the hood and peered down into the engine. It looked like it was filled with corn. I didn"t see anything resembling a mechanical part down there. Most of the corn, still in its husk, was burnt black.
"Well, there"s our answer, I guess. It runs on corn. I bet there isn"t a cornfield within a thousand miles of this place."
I was beginning to doubt there was anything within a thousand miles of this place.
"I guess we"re hoofing it," he said.
I looked down at my bare feet. They had toughened considerably over the past few days but I didn"t know if they were ready for the heat and abrasiveness of what lay in front of us.
Then I noticed the nine men filing out of the van.
"I don"t think we"ll have to walk anywhere," I said.
A gunshot punctuated my sentence.
Dad went down onto the ground. The nine men immediately surrounded him. Another shot was fired and one of the men went down. Another man stuck his hand into his stylish black blazer, pulled out a gun and began firing at a speck on the horizon.
Now I figured they were actually there to help us and probably were not spies. Although, again, someone could have shot Dad and tried to shoot me while one of my bodyguards fired bullets into the distance but not intended for any kind of target. Always that false sense of security there to make reality that much more painful.
Dad"s arm had turned into a piece of wood. A two-by-four about two feet long. He flapped it around in the air.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"I guess," he said. "I don"t know how I feel about this arm, though."
I helped him up and into the van.
"I guess you can drive now," he said. "I"d feel safer having someone with two arms do it."
Eight men crossed to the back of the van, leaving the ninth lying there by the side of the road.
"Do you need to lie down?" I asked my father.
"No. No," he said. "I"ll be just fine."
He managed to work himself up into the pa.s.senger seat and I took the wheel. I didn"t really have to drive, I supposed. Just steer. Then I remembered. I hopped out of the van. The eight men stopped trying to push it and approached me, encircling me. I went to the downed man and felt for a pulse. Nothing. I turned to the man closest to me and put my index and middle fingers on his jugular vein. There I felt a very steady, very strong pulse. Then I put my fingers on the same place of the downed man and, again, felt nothing.
So he was either dead or he had learned to do some sort of trick to keep his heart from beating although he had now been down for more than a few minutes and I thought if anyone could keep their heart from beating that long then he would probably be either dead or in some sort of danger. Nevertheless, I was satisfied. The more I thought about anything, the more of a conundrum it became. The best thing to do was try not to think about anything at all. So I climbed back into the van and let the eight remaining men push us.
Dad sat in the pa.s.senger seat, enthralled with his new arm, waving it around in the air, beating it against the dash and the console.
"I don"t think I"ll be able to open the map," he said. "So I may not be much of a navigator."
"That"s okay," I said. "I don"t think we need a map. My bodyguards will probably do a good job of getting us where we need to go."
Twenty-five.
The travel was slow but steady. Just before dusk one of the bodyguards died from heat exhaustion. The remaining seven left him lying in the road, never stopping, continuing to push forward. Dad continued to sit in the pa.s.senger seat and marvel over his new arm.
"I wonder if it"ll ever go back?"
"It"s possible. I can"t believe Mom"s not really dead."
"Well, we hope she isn"t dead." He stared out the window, something like worry in his eyes.
"Are you scared?" I asked.
"Scared?"
"Yeah. Scared. I mean, there"s no guarantee that it"s going to be as easy as returning Brilliance and then walking away with our old lives. We"ve taken and held onto a part of their history... More than that, something very much like their life force. It would be like someone stealing a Christian"s Jesus and keeping him in a prison. What I"m trying to say is-they might be a little upset."
"Oh, I would say they"re more than a little upset. My hope is that they"ll be so happy to have their flame back that everything else will be kind of secondary. Maybe we"ll even be seen as heroes. After all, we weren"t the ones who stole the flame, your grandfather was. And he"s probably dead. I can"t really imagine that he would be alive. He"d be over a hundred by now."
"It"s possible though."
"They probably strung him up. In his day, everyone wanted to string him up. Even when he was a reputable anthropologist people wanted to string him up. But that was probably just jealousy."
We fell back into silence, the bodyguards continuing to push. Dusk darkened into night and the landscape still had not changed. How was it possible for a place to be this flat and desolate? I imagined this was what the world was like before anything started growing on it. Just miles and miles of mineral nothing. The earth probably had to start growing things because it got bored with itself. This was the earth in khaki. Endless, head-to-toe khaki.
Then the bodyguards pushed us off a cliff.
I don"t think they were trying to kill us since they went down with us. Following us to the bitter end. I looked at Dad. He held his board arm out the window and flapped it wildly, as though it could somehow stop the fall. He looked at me, panic in his eyes. We didn"t say anything. Just continued staring at one another. I closed my eyes in antic.i.p.ation of the deadening crash.
Instead we splashed into water, going deep. Once I saw that father had successfully escaped the van, I grabbed the flame and swam through the window. At first the water stung my eyes but I kept them open, seeing some faint light at what had to be the surface. I looked at the flame and noticed that it continued to burn under water. A fire that burns in the water. This was truly a magical urn I held. I was almost eager to meet the people who worshipped such a thing. It seemed so much more real and magical than a lot of other things to worship.
Two of the bodyguards swam to either side of me, grabbing hold of my arms and speeding my swim for the surface. Our heads broke through the water and I looked around to make sure Dad had made it okay. He was also flanked by two bodyguards. The other three were probably trying to salvage the van but it was a lost cause.
At first I thought maybe this was the fabled Malefic Ocean but, after spitting some water out of my mouth, I realized it was not salt water. So we were once again in a vast lake and it wouldn"t really have surprised me if this vast lake was the same vast lake we had to cross so many miles ago. Really, with such an unchanging landscape it would have been entirely possible to just drive around in circles for hours or days and not really know the difference. I envisioned some mad engineer constructing a circular road in that uniform landscape. It would be a pretty heinous joke but I didn"t really see what end it could possibly be good for.
"You okay?" Dad shouted.
"Fine. You?"
"Fine. Did you remember the flame?"
"No. I guess we"ll have to go back down for it."
"s.h.i.t."
"Just kidding." I held up the flame, glowing brighter than ever.
"b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said under his breath.
I began swimming but, apparently, the bodyguards couldn"t really stand to see me exert myself so they immediately flanked me again. They were much better swimmers than I. We reached the other sh.o.r.e in no time. I had to squint my eyes against the bright lights. These were not the fluorescent lights of the City of No like I had at first feared. These were lights of buildings, trains, cars, advertising, life... Curious, I thought, that what we often called life is completely the opposite. Maybe it was a sign that living things were actively doing something but, all of that light, all of that electricity, all of that fuel, was actually sucking away at life, using up the earth"s resources, filling the air with toxins that we breathe in every day, killing us even quicker. Unfortunately, this city was at the top of what was nearly a cliff.
The other three bodyguards were already at the top. They had fastened rope ladders and unfurled them down the face of the cliff. I had no idea how they made it up there. I grabbed onto the lowest rung and began pulling myself up but one of the bodyguards insisted, through a series of complicated hand gestures, that I mount his back. So I did. It was very hard to argue with someone who didn"t talk. I climbed on a bodyguard"s back and the other one crept up behind us, his hand on my a.s.s to keep me supported. It was like being strapped into a roller coaster. If either of them let go I would have gone tumbling back down into the water, possibly even damage myself on the jutting rocks of the cliff. But I had complete and total faith in them. Even when someone began shooting at us from above.
They shot at me first. I a.s.sumed this was because I was the easier target since I held the flame and, therefore, gave them something to shoot at. The bodyguard whose back I rode upon took a bullet in the head and, whereas the other bodyguards had died after taking bullets, he kept on going. Granted, his head did become a giant flower but it was a flower with a sense of direction. One of the bodyguards at the top of the cliff must have apprehended or driven away the shooter before he could get off a more accurate round.
It took us a while but we finally reached the top. Collectively, we struggled over the edge. I hopped off the bodyguard and straightened myself up. The bodyguard with the flower head dropped dead as soon as I got off his back. That left six. Hopefully, we wouldn"t lose any more. Even though they had absolutely no personality I found myself growing close to them, admiring them for their grim determination.
"I"m guessing this still isn"t the place we want to be, is it?"
"I"m afraid not," Dad said. "But we may be closer than you think."
"How so?"
"Somewhere in that city is a ship that will take us past the island of the Nefarions. All we have to do is find it and book pa.s.sage."
"That shouldn"t be too difficult."
"You haven"t been in this city before."
"Have you?"
"Once. A long time ago."
I turned my gaze toward the city. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of skysc.r.a.pers rose into the night sky. The whole city pulsed with so much light that it threw a corona out into the surrounding night sky. The buildings were all covered in huge screens, flashing advertis.e.m.e.nts for various products and, it looked like, even people. A huge sign flashed at the entrance to the city: WELCOME HOME. WELCOME HOME. WELCOME HOME. Approaching the city, several things became apparent. There was an awful smell. Like mounds and mounds of garbage and maybe some vomit and p.i.s.s, wafting out. And the sounds, from this far away, were like loud white noise, occasionally punctuated by gunfire, squealing brakes, sirens, honking, the clatter and whistle of trains.
"The important thing to remember," Dad said just before we entered the city. "Is to try not to talk to anyone. There will be many people trying to sell you things and if you talk to them they will not leave you alone. I find a good punch to the stomach works with most of them."
Sounded like fun.
We entered the city, the six remaining bodyguards forming as much of a wall as they could.
Twenty-six.
A clear plastic wall, about twelve feet high, surrounded the city for as far as I could see. A man in a uniform very similar to a police officer"s stood outside the wall. He held out his hand in a "stop" gesture. Strapped to his back was a large, clear bucket, filled with various coins and bills.
"You"ll have to pay the toll if you want to get into the city."
I remembered what Dad said about not talking to anyone so I kept my mouth shut.
"You can"t make us pay to go in there."