For several miles, that stunning revelation crowded everything else out of my mind. Yet in spite of all the undivided consideration that I gave to the idea, I could make no sense of it.
As we passed the town of Cortaro, on the outskirts of Tucson, Bridget broke our mutual silence when she said, “Well, if my father came down out of the stars, I hope he was Luke Skywalker rather than Jabba the Hutt.”
|?13?|
Surrounded by four mountain ranges, the city of Tucson occupied a high desert valley that was once the floor of an ancient sea. The first people settled there along the Santa Cruz River about twelve thousand years before the night that I arrived riding shotgun, with Sparky in the back seat once more and Bridget Rainking at the wheel. We were relying on her mojo to draw us to a vehicle that could replace the soon-to-be-hunted Buick.
Just as the sea became a desert, so in a few millennia, the city would become something other than a city, perhaps a sea again, or a jungle, because all things pass. Earth convulses violently when its magnetic poles shift, continental plates thrusting over or under one another, lowlands abruptly surging up, mountains crumbling, three-thousand-foot-high walls of seawater racing several hundred miles inland and scrubbing away everything in their path. Then there’s also the fact that to remain livable, the planet depends entirely on solar activity, which can decline and induce ice ages that last thousands of years, or which might one day flare violently enough to boil oceans and incinerate an entire hemisphere. Yet we humans have the hubris to think we can build eternal cities, stop the aging process, control the climate, and create utopia at the point of a gun. I used to believe our subconscious recognition of our true helplessness in the face of cosmic forces was what explained the insane lust for power that makes so many into murderers, rapists, thieves, and raving-mad ideologues. For their kind, such mean control allows the illusion of greatness, inspires even the foolish hope of immortality on Earth.
However, now that I was aware that there were monsters in the world with diabolical intentions, I wondered what percentage of human misery might be a product of our own actions and how much was the work of the silent Screamers. Since time immemorial, the world’s legends and faiths had included demons and other malevolent spirits, so perhaps in our postmodern rejection of the past, we cast aside more wisdom than ignorance. If envious humanity sought godlike power and fell from grace, it might be true that some race before us did the same, that we share this broken world with predators who were once beings of light and promise, but transformed themselves into creatures that worship the outer dark and wish the world to be one vast graveyard.
Those were the Big Important Thoughts that occupied me as I repressed belches inspired by pork, which escaped as hisses through my clenched teeth.
Meanwhile, we were drawn through Tucson on such a circuitous route that I began to wonder if the benefactor who granted us psychic magnetism was using it to mock us.
In a commercial district, when we stopped at a traffic light, six men, ranging in age from perhaps thirty to fifty, stood under a lamppost on the corner. Dressed in off-the-rack suits and ties, they looked too solemn to be bankers, too lacking in style to be high corporate executives. Judging by their stiff posture and pinch-faced displeasure, they might have been a firm of lawyers anticipating yet another catastrophic accident—and a brace of new clients—at this notoriously unsafe intersection or maybe college presidents in town to attend a conference on the urgent necessity of book banning.
As the light changed and they entered the crosswalk, two by two, I suddenly saw their otherness. Like those at the truck stop, their faces—such as they were—and hands fluctuated between human and not, the truth of them invisible to the other pedestrians whom they encountered in this neighborhood busy with nightlife. My first glimpse of them in the restaurant had shocked and repulsed me. But this second sighting strummed a deeper chord of horror. They were parasites made large, and yet they went about their work with as much secrecy as those roundworms that can invade a human being and attach to the walls of the intestines, there to slowly destroy the host without his knowledge.
“Six Screamers,” Bridget warned Sparky.
Watching them pass in the flux of fully human pedestrians who crossed the street from the far corner, I wondered if the entirety of human history had been infested with these creatures, swimming through civilization like blood flukes navigating arteries and veins, feeding on our pain rather than on our flesh. Or perhaps on both. The shivers that passed through me seemed to originate not in the muscles of the skin, but in my bones.