More revelatory celestial flares and tree shadows shuddered over them. Even in those changing kaleidoscopic patterns of bright and dark shapes, Colson’s face revealed that he must be near the end of his resources, physically and emotionally. Ophelia knew she looked no better than he did. She was exhausted, soaked, cold. Her thighs ached, and a sharper pain burned in her calves, and her ankle joints seemed to be coming loose, bone scoring bone. But she had lived for a long time in search of a purpose, and now she had one—killing Optime or ensuring he went to prison for the rest of his life—and she was not going to fail either because she lacked stamina or because she didn’t think things through and so walked into a trap.
“Colson, just in case the sonofabitch is waiting somewhere along the lake, how much longer would it take if we didn’t go that way, if we stayed in the forest, just at the edge of the tree line and worked our way around to come at the ranch house from the back of it instead of the front?”
“I don’t know. It depends on the terrain, the underbrush. Maybe half an hour instead of ten minutes, which is what the lake route might take. But you don’t have much left, I can see you don’t, and your shoes must be coming apart.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got the anger for it. Rage will keep me moving all night if I have to.”
“If you go down,” he said, “I don’t have enough left to carry you. I’d have to leave you. Alone. And I don’t think the bear would follow us as far as it did and then just go away. It’s out there somewhere.”
She didn’t want to say what she said next, but she said it anyway. “So I’m alone and it comes for me. That’s better than it kills both of us, ’cause then no one’s left to get your dad out of the horror under that church.”
“Jesus, Ophelia.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right. It’s not just we have to take down Optime. It’s Dad . . . where he is. And the others there, whoever they are. They can’t be left like that, none of them. I’m so whacked I wasn’t thinking. We can’t take any chances. Okay, we’ll go around. We’ll stay on our feet. We’ll make it. Both of us.”
She hugged him. “My brother, myself.”
“My sister, myself.”
For as long as Ophelia had been wise enough to see the world as it really was, she’d been aware that it was sliding away from truth and light, sliding farther every year. But she would never give up and slide with it. Truth mattered, always striving for the light. As long as there were people like Colson, there was light in the world, a chance that the slide could be halted, even reversed.
83
The sky loomed black and the land lay black. When lightning clawed at the night, it seemed to Kenny Deetle that the darkness following it was deeper than the darkness before. In the headlights, the rain on the pavement sizzled and smoked as if it were acid.
Ganesh Patel had spoken of the Other and the potential events ahead of them this sodden night as though they were racing toward a great adventure, a Spielbergian encounter with wonder, but that was just Ganesh being Ganesh. If thrown out of an airplane without a parachute, as he plummeted, he would think of half a dozen ways he might survive; well before impact, he would have calculated which of the six miraculous saves was the odds-on favorite.
Less of an optimist than Ganesh, Kenny was instead focused on the revelation that the Other had killed people in imaginative ways. Considering that it had attempted to kill him and Leigh Ann, there was every reason to suppose that it would try to kill them again. Maybe it had already killed Wyatt Rider; Ganesh couldn’t reach the detective at Rustling Willows. Wherever the Other came from, it was not a planet with rivers of honey and chocolate-drop trees, where hovering hummingbirds used their beaks to tie ribbons in ladies’ hair every morning and mice dressed as footmen polished the silver. Inevitably, Kenny thought of his old friend, Max Gurn, who hacked the computer of a drug cartel and tried to hold their records for ransom, only to end up dismembered and packed in a metal trunk and sent to his mother in Topeka. Now he worried that, in taking the assignment from Wyatt, he had Gurnified himself.
“Previously,” Ganesh said, “once it ID’d you as an enemy, we would’ve put you in a sort of witness protection program, but that’s pointless at this juncture. No time for that. The remarkable series of synchronicities that have brought us to this moment suggest we’re approaching the resolution of contesting Jungian forces that will shape the future in a major way.” He raised both arms and shook his hands as if he might shout hallelujah, but instead he said with unmistakable delight, “Tonight, no place on Earth is more exciting to be than Rustling Willows Ranch. I am ready to levitate!”