There were other terrors that I had only half registered when falling through the world of the mirror, a scene with the intricacy of a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch, but more horrific than anything Bosch could have conceived.
Panthea had painted this weeks before Bridget and I had been briefly plunged into a vision of this wretched, perilous future—if that’s what it was.
The mural continued on the north wall. Swarms of terrified, naked people panicked through a dark train tunnel in which cattle cars packed with the condemned rollicked along. The burning city, violent crime rampant in every corner. The shrieking horse pulling the blazing carriage. The sobbing woman with a bloody baby held in her arms. In this end-times metropolis, the Screamers moved among the rapists and murderers, as though more than observing, as though mentoring, encouraging. Yet we came to something that unsettled us more than anything we’d seen elsewhere in the mural. Floating above the dying city in a smoky sky orange with reflected fire, rendered as a pair of pale moons, were my face and Bridget’s, gazing down on the destruction and brutal murders, our expressions as they almost certainly had been when we’d looked into the motel mirrors and found ourselves plunging into the abyss.
“You painted us before we’d ever had this vision,” Bridget marveled. “You knew we’d have it.”
“I knew nothing,” Panthea said. “I really did paint it all as a sleepwalker, or in a fugue state if you prefer. When I woke, I was always chilled by the images I’d created. But when I finished it—then I knew you’d be coming and that together we would do our small part to resist the world becoming as it is here on these walls.”
Hearing this, Sparky turned to his granddaughter, his scowl so fierce that it confirmed he could have been, in his younger years, capable of merciless retribution against the enemies of his country. “Vision? You saw all this in a vision, not a mere presentiment? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was only this morning, Grandpa. Quinn and I experienced it separately. I’ve been processing it ever since. So has he. I didn’t want to talk about it until I understood it.”
“You evidently talked about it to Quinn.”
“Not really, not much,” I said. “We only confirmed with each other that we’d seen something terrible in our mirrors.”
Bridget put a hand on my shoulder to silence me.
Sparky said, “Girl, we’ve never hidden a thing from each other. We’ve been in this together.”
“And we still are, Grandpa. I wasn’t hiding it from you. I only needed time to think it through and then to understand what Quinn made of it.” She went to him and put one hand to his cheek. “You know, Sparky, it’s not just two of us anymore. It’s three of us—”
“Four,” said Panthea.
“Four of us,” Bridget corrected.
Winston grumbled.
“Five,” Bridget said. “You and me, Sparky—we’ve been through a lot together, and we’ve been great. But we need help now, and it’s being given to us. How many were in a SEAL team? Just two? I don’t think it was just two.”
Face-to-face with her, he could not hold his scowl. He shook his head and sighed. “Suddenly, I feel old.”
“You’re not old,” she said. “You’re seasoned. The squad needs someone seasoned. It doesn’t work without you.”
Sparky looked at me and said he was sorry, and I said he didn’t need to be, and he told Panthea Ching that he still wasn’t sure about her, and she said, “Likewise,” which made him smile.
Bridget withheld from him her presentiment that not all of us would survive. I wondered if she had withheld anything from me.
|?23?|
Although the desert lives with less water than seashores and forested mountains and fruited plains, the rare storms sometimes pound the earth in torrents that turn dry arroyos into raging rivers and inundate lowlying areas with flash floods. The rain that broke upon us that day didn’t gently rataplan upon the Quonset hut, but rattled against it in violent barrages, as if Nature misunderstood our purpose and, siding with the Screamers, had gone to war with us.
Panthea said that we would be called to service soon, would be leaving Peptoe this evening, and needed to have dinner to fortify us for what we might endure between now and dawn. She spoke with quiet confidence and authority. Her pellucid blue eyes seemed like windows to a serene mind incapable of deceit. Bridget, Sparky, and I didn’t doubt she was a seer and our ally; if we were anxious about what came next, we were also relieved that we’d found the person able to lead us to a full understanding of the Screamers and our purpose.