End Time (20 page)

Perfect Clem. He'd never mentioned it to Billy. Compartmentalize.

Now Jasper was texting:
At office/Alerted Howard Hughes.
The IT chief must have made it down to the office in twelve minutes, not twenty—an all-time record. Billy walked away from Wen Chen's terminal, leaving it on standby.

One last stop before he skedaddled off to find a motel room and a cheeseburger; time to talk to the authorities—if any.

The empty Texas town of Van Horn was ten or so miles from the R&D hangar and looked even emptier than the subdivision or the lab.

No moving cars. No people in the Motel 6s or IHOP.

Never mind a subdivision, a whole town disappears and nobody notices? Not the neighbors, not the Feds, not the fire department? The Van Horn FD truck bays were closed, lights off. Even on Christmas the Fire Department keeps a light on. Not even an Old Mrs. Hubbard in San Antonio calling out the state police because her children failed to call her like they did every Sunday from Van Horn?

Billy Shadow parked the van and got out.

The courthouse and the local constabulary were housed in the same building. The courthouse door yawned open, the long hall with the sheriff's office to one side, door open as well, light on. Silent … This time he brought a firearm, a Browning semi-auto in a holster. Middle of a Sunday there should have been a deputy on duty, the police band burbling in the background. Billy's footsteps echoed dryly off the Spanish floor tiles.
Tak … tak … tak … tak …

Billy touched the strap from his holster but didn't unsnap it. The Van Horn sheriff's door opened to show him the office. A desk with papers strewn across: police reports, budget requests, a bill from an auto body shop, the Quartermaster catalog for cop gear. A half-eaten sandwich lay on a plate—American cheese, lettuce, mayo on white bread. The bread stale, the cheese curling at the edges.

Off the main office, an open door to a file room. Most of the file cabinet drawers were open, and their contents scattered over the floor. A paper shredder stood in one corner over a pile of twisted ribbons, a large manila folder crammed in its maw, only partly devoured, the machine jammed.

Housecleaning? Or some guilty person trying to destroy the files, but interrupted halfway through the job?

Next to the paper shredder sat a squat refrigerator marked
EVIDENCE.
Empty, except for some baggies with paint scrapes, hair samples, blood traces. The blood now black in coagulation, the dates some months ago. Useless.

The freezer drawer yielded something else. A quart-sized evidence bag, neatly labeled
CHEN HOUSE/LILA
and a recent date. What looked like … flesh? The contents were all mixed together—a dried prune with bits of charred wood. The metal earring gave it away. A blackened shriveled ear. A dangling earring. Human remains. From what Billy could tell there had been no effort to actually process the stuff. Send it out to a lab, analyze the DNA.

“Christ.”

Billy would find a lab to analyze the mess of flesh and earring along the line. On the way out of the office, he paused over the desk again. The PC was still on. Whoever last sat at the terminal had been working the federal databases for missing persons, uploading an individual's profile and photo. A photo of the Chen girl, Lila Chen, sat on the desk. Billy pocketed it and then stopped.

A legal pad sat on the desk; the page was filled with doodles, as if the scribbler had been scrawling away while on the phone. Little caricatures of ants, some in red, some in black. A nice rendition of the girl, taken from the photo; but the scribbler had touched it up with a goatee.

In the lower corner, the round grinning face of a cat. Bright eyes, creepy grin. A squashed mosquito adorned the caricature, a blot of dried blood. It flew, it fed, it got squished on a cat doodle.

Nothing here.

Disgusted, Billy left the office and headed for the door without turning off the lights. Out in the long hall he stopped short. Goosebumps suddenly popped up along his arm; the hair on the back of his neck grew stiff. Quiet movement ten yards down by the courtroom doors caught his eye.

The lithe sway of an animal crept along a shadowed wall. A large animal—a cat of all things—slowly approached on its velvet paws. Then it paused, looking at him.

An ocelot, nearly four feet long. Fifty pounds of coiled muscle.

First dogs, now cats.

He unlatched the strap from his Browning, drew the weapon. In a flash of his own confusion the phrase
raining cats and dogs
scrolled across his brain. During medieval times animals often bedded down in thatched roofs; when it rained hard they slid off. In Van Horn, Texas, when the people vanished now it rained cats and dogs.… Where was this mental cabbage coming from?

Focus. What did he know about wild cats?

They were pretty rare; but since the hunting bans they were becoming a nuisance on the edges of suburbia. No natural predators. Mountain lions ripped people from bicycles in California. And ate children playing in their backyards.

In Texas? They still roamed the brushlands—but ocelots had been nearly hunted out of existence for their pelts. No two alike, the black, white, and golden camouflage. Most of them never grew to more than three feet and weighed no more than thirty pounds. But now Billy was stuck in a bare hallway with four feet of feline lightning.

Damn, he didn't want to kill the thing, but he didn't want it coming any closer, either. And Billy knew that if he moved an inch the cat would pounce. He saw his hand shaking as he held the gun. That did it.

Animal brain to animal brain, the big cat saw his hesitation. The ocelot's yellow eyes flashed at Billy for a moment, and then the body erupted in motion, a blur. In one bound it nearly closed the gap. Billy fired once, twice; the third time the cat was in the air claws outstretched. The muzzle flashes lanced toward the animal's chest. The brass cartridges pinged against the wall, and Billy found himself sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, the warm slide of the gun smoking over his thigh.

His heart slowed; ears rang from the fired shots. Long hall empty. No cat. The cartoon character Tweety Bird flitted into his mind. Little Tweety chirping with this silly speech impediment: “I tawt I taw a puddy tat! I did, I did taw a puddy tat!”

He felt a dab of wetness on his cheek. Touched it. Blood from a long scratch like a dueling scar. A claw wound. The cut began to bleed in earnest. What cat?

He found a kerchief in his back pocket and pressed it to his cheek, the wound beginning to throb. There was an emergency medical kit in the van. Time to find it. And a hospital as the notion of rabies touched his mind. No saliva. Still, mess of shots to be on the safe side. Swell.

He stumbled out to the rental van with half an eye scanning for big puddy tat. Nope, no ocelot. All the while knowing in his primitive brain that whatever attacked wasn't what it looked like. For one thing, if he'd hit the thing, it'd be dead. If he'd missed it, ole Billy'd be dinner. And neither had happened.

He couldn't have missed. Not that close.

A thought danced around the edges of memory: the old stories. So old and so powerful he felt reluctant to visualize the words. Actually just two words. Two words he didn't want to say. Crazy crackpot stuff from old times at the rez. He really didn't want to think these two words. They reminded him of the chanting with the beads and the animal claw necklaces and the angry braves stamping to the drums. The hopeless ghost dancers and the wish to set the world on fire, burn it down, build it up again.

The two words were
Skin Walker
.

Inside the van he turned on the roof light. He'd had the rental place remove the backseats so he could stow his gear: a sleeping bag and other necessities, a citizen's band radio, a police scanner. In one corner he had plugged a Koolatron Kargo Kooler travel refrigerator into one of the passenger cell phone jacks; the fridge held a small green Zero Degree tote, cool and ready to use. He stowed the evidence baggie of Lila Chen's burnt ear in it.

Next, the medical kit in a small foot locker. He peered into the med-kit's mirror and soaked the wound good with hydrogen peroxide. Then some antibiotic ointment, and finally slapped a pad of QuikClot emergency dressing across the slash. Great stuff; hold it in place for a couple of minutes, it was crazy glue for ripped skin, holes, and blood.

Now what about the three different types of antibiotics—two oral, one with a syringe? Doxy. Cipro. Amoxicillin. Decisions, decisions. His mind was getting fuzzy. Mild shock. No surprise there. Wasn't doxy for bronchitis? He couldn't remember now. Google it? Who said they had Wi-Fi out here anyway? The names on the labels were starting to blur together. He'd find the first hospital in Lubbock. First thing, right after a little nap. First thing—

His eyes fluttered closed; the van floor called him.

Almost at once, Billy dreamed the most curious dream.

The sun had gone down to dusk. The ocelot from the courthouse hallway circled the van, padding round and round and mewing into the dark. When he struggled to get a better look at it through the van windows, Billy's arms were too heavy to move, his legs like lead. Yet he didn't feel afraid. Or even angry at the animal. The wild thing had done what was natural. No real harm in that. The large cat put its paws up on the van hatchback and scratched the latch; it wanted in.

Then it
was
inside. The ocelot lay on the footlocker across from Billy.

Billy touched the cut on his cheek, the place where the cat cut him open. In his dream it felt completely healed. A thin little white scar. The ocelot flicked his tail and rubbed an ear with a front paw. Slowly the big cat underwent a subtle change; the tail curled away like smoke, the paw thickened.…

Grandma Sparrow stared at him.

She found a comfortable place on his footlocker and smoothed out the pleated skirt she always wore, her face a thousand smiles.

“Hey there, Tweety Bird,” Grandma Sparrow teased him. “Did you see a very large animal in that police station? Did you?” A naughty smile played up and down her face. “You can tell Granny; she'll believe you.”

He liked the idea that Granny knew what he'd seen, knew what had happened; that he could trust her to believe him no matter how crazy it sounded.

“Yes, Granny, I saw a big cat,” he managed to tell her. “I shot it, but it flew away, leaving only a little scratch behind. A magical cat.” Granny's wizened face warmed to him, sharp eyes narrowed. She understood.

“Yes, a good cat, not that bad cat they paint on walls. A very special cat, William Howahkan. You were one of us before, but now you're even more so. Those of us who can walk in the dark, and see with great eyes.” The old woman was touching on the edges of old memory—those scary two words back in the hallway outside the sheriff's office. Those two words he couldn't say out loud, which he tried to put out of his mind.… The old grayhairs stamping their feet and the chanting and the drums. Granny Sparrow's wizened face shone at him. The old woman was trying to tell him a secret; now that he saw the puddy-tat and
it taw him.
…

That he was a Skin Walker too.

The legend said that in order to be one, to change into animals, to see into the night, to walk as a ghost among men, you had to kill one of your own: a child, a brother, a sister, mother, or father. An outcast act, by an outcast who would walk the world alone. Well, maybe the legend was wrong.

Or misunderstood.

Billy realized he wasn't afraid of how he may have changed. He touched the white scar on his cheek again. And it tingled back in a delicious sort of way.…

He opened his eyes—the quiet van on the empty streets of Van Horn came back strongly all around him. His cheek throbbed a little, no, not healed yet. But Billy woke with a sense of peace and contentment. In fact, a little sorry Granny Sparrow wasn't there to talk to him. He liked her sitting across from him on the footlocker. Like a guardian angel.

Outside the car, it felt like the middle of the night. The first thing he sensed was that he probably didn't have rabies. Never would. But he couldn't tell you how he knew. What did rabies feel like, anyway? Crazy paranoia? Thirst but fear of water? Hallucinations? Okay, well scratch that one. He took a deep gulp out of a water bottle. There were too many other things that seemed much more interesting. Important things in the dark; things he could sense even from inside the car. The night opened out to him with new eyes, his hearing exquisitely sensitive.

Across the street a family of bushy-tailed woodrats gathered by the storm drain where they made their home. Billy Shadow could hear their faint breathing, even the pitter-pat of their little hearts. Their rodent tongues faintly squeaked at each other, simple precise thoughts:
search, food, look, now.

A large scorpion clicked along the gutter by the curb toward the storm drain on crab-clawed feet, and the rats stopped hustling—pausing, frozen, their minds going back and forth:
Get him? Leave him? Get him? Leave him?
Four on one:
Get him!
They pounced. One of the rats snapped off the scorpion's tail stinger in the first bite. Billy heard it crack. Some quiet thrashing, then snapping sounds as the arachnid was pulled apart. Quiet returned.

Except for the whining of a mosquito a hundred yards into the darkness.

Billy felt stumped. No way was he going to find any answers in this place. Abandoned subdivision, vacant research hangar, ghost town … He was a blind man rattling a tin cup on an empty street, his look-see turning into a hopeless grope.

With all these dead ends, where next? Of course, have Lattimore or Jasper track Professor Bhakti Singh's company-issued credit card purchases—they could access those at least, see if the man swiped plastic anywhere. Provided Bhakti was alive. And the cards weren't stolen. Maybe Jasper had thought of that already.