“What indeed?”
In the light of the westering moon, the four of us quickly transferred our luggage from the Ford to the Mercury.
If as a child I ever imagined becoming a supernaturally gifted guardian of something or other, I’d never have thought that my powers would be so lame as they turned out to be, nor would I have imagined that I’d spend a significant part of my time dickering for used cars. If the idea was to keep me humble, so I wouldn’t become arrogant like the Rishon of the first universe, it was working.
When we were all aboard our new wheels, with Bridget again in the driver’s seat and Sparky in back with Panthea and the dog, I said, “Are we going to lay a trap for them? Are we going to take down the Nihilim, Erskine? What about Wallace? He’s not a Nihilim. He’s a dork, a pathetic feeb, but he’s also a bad guy.”
“We aren’t taking down either of them. They’ll be too wary. Anyway, we can’t exterminate all the Nihilim in the world. We’re only one of many teams. Isn’t that right, Panthea?”
“So I believe,” said Panthea Ching.
“Besides,” Bridget said, “when I touched Erskine, I saw where we need to go, and we need to go there soon. Things are about to get wild and desperate.”
Before I could ask what our destination might be, Sparky said, “What the hell happened in that stupid damn autonomous zone?”
By the time we explained, we had cruised several miles on the two-lane blacktop and then turned onto a gravel road, which was when I finally asked Bridget where we were going and what she’d seen in her series of quick visions occasioned by touching the Nihilim.
“Tonight, we’re going to ground. Tomorrow . . .” She fell into silence, and in her profile I saw, for the first time, unalloyed fear. The happy warrior who found at least a thread of humor woven through every danger, every horror, could find nothing to make her smile at what waited for us tomorrow, could apparently not even bring herself to speak of our destination.
From the back seat, Panthea Ching said, “It’s a weird place about six miles outside the town of Ajo.”
Bridget looked at the rearview mirror. “You’ve seen it, too?”
“The moment you touched the Nihilim,” Panthea said, “I received a vision of the place we must be tomorrow. He calls it ‘the Oasis.’ He says that the dark waters are holy, that they confer eternal life.”
“He who?” I asked.
“He conceals his true name, calls himself ‘the Light.’ He calls his flock of followers his ‘soul children.’ But they’re neither his flock nor his children in any sense. Some have succumbed to his propaganda, been brainwashed into a condition of pretend happiness. Others live in abject misery. In truth, they are his slaves. This Erskine and Wallace you met, they regularly supply him with drugs—recreational drugs but also pharmaceuticals that he uses to control the soul children.”
Sparky said, “Any guy who calls himself ‘the Light,’ somebody needs to switch him off.”
“And the Oasis is no refuge, no haven,” Panthea said. “Every day in that place is night. His darkness is a reduction of ordinary darkness, a bitter black syrup of hopelessness. Of all the things worth dying for, nothing is more worthy than dying to put an end to the Light and his Oasis. But . . .”
“But?” I asked.
Panthea said, “But I do not want to die.”
After we rode in silence for a minute or so, I said, “Well, you know, maybe we can put an end to him and the Oasis without dying. Maybe we haven’t been brought into the world and then been brought together only to die on our first mission.”
“Yes,” Panthea said, “isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Bridget said nothing, nor did she glance at me. She stared straight ahead, following the gravel lane to a dirt track, the track to a paved road, seeking the place where we would go to ground for the night. The moon was high, yet the desert remained shrouded in gloom. In that wasteland, it seemed we might be traveling backward in time, searching for a lost Eden to which no paved or unpaved road would ever bring us.
|?29?|
In a solemn and weary silence, we passed under the interstate near where the San Pedro River, swollen with storm water, raced sullen and untamed and intractable toward Mexico. Putting distance between ourselves and Peptoe, leaving the ISA to search Graham and Gila Counties, we followed a state highway south toward the town of Tombstone in Cochise County, but then we took a second highway west toward Nogales and soon turned south onto a third. We continued to Sierra Vista, a small city on the eastern slopes of the Huachuca Mountains. Psychic magnetism drew us to a motel where four rooms were available and cash was acceptable. The license plate number of the Mountaineer was the only ID required. Shortly before midnight, we were ensconced in our rooms, having agreed to set out for the Oasis after breakfast.