The Boys from Santa Cruz (33 page)

The first indication that he’s caught up to the humans is a glimpse of blue-and-yellow fabric winking into view on the far side of a meander in the path. Asmador ducks behind a tree, peers around the trunk, and recognizes the striped circus tent canopy of Pender’s abandoned golf cart.

The key, conveniently enough, is in the ignition. As Asmador slips it into one of the jumpsuit’s many pockets, his ears pick up the eerie, inhuman sound of humans chanting. It seems to be coming from the direction in which the arrow-shaped wooden sign is pointing.

But instead of following the sound of the chanting, Asmador edges past the cart and continues up the main trail, hoping that, as the path climbs, it will lead him to a vantage point from which he can look down upon the humans and, in the remaining daylight, work out the best way to hunt them down and pick them off later, when it’s dark.

Feeling a tender hand stroking his forehead, Skip opened his eyes and found himself lying on his back with his head in Anna’s lap, posing for the Pietà. But when she smiled down at him, light streaming around her round, light brown face, he realized this wasn’t Anna, who was dead, but Juana, who was alive. Only there wasn’t really any difference, because they were all made of the
same…stuff. And death wasn’t real, either—it couldn’t be, because time wasn’t real.

“Wow,” he breathed reverently. He wanted to tell Anna/Juana so many things. How he felt as if he’d been away for eons, flying through other universes; how he’d seen terrible and wonderful sights; how he’d learned all these important lessons about life and death, time and eternity, fear and wonder, and why they call a trip a trip. He also wanted to tell her how great it felt to be back, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was another, longer “Wow.”

He looked past Juana and saw that Oliver, Steve, and Candace had gathered around and were looking down at him all relieved and happy like the farmhands at the end of
The Wizard of Oz.
Then he remembered how he’d seen Oliver turn into a lion. How mind-blowingly perfect and interconnected everything was.

But that’s acid for you. Like existence, only more so. Skip spent the last hour of full daylight in a state of pure cosmic bliss. Colors were otherworldly bright in that sun-kissed clearing, and human contact profound. They took off their tops, even the women—even old Beryl—and worshiped the sun, whose light was everywhere broken into crystalline prisms and streaming rainbows; they turned druid and bowed to the whispering aspens; they found the keys to koans that had stumped generations of seekers. The answer to “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” was
Schwingggg!
The perfect answer to “What was your face before your mother was born?” was, for some obscure reason,
Larry.

As the sun neared the treetops, Oliver asked everyone to join him on a hike up to a bluff where they could celebrate the sunset by performing something called a Bija ceremony. The others cheered, but Skip’s heart sank. To him,
hike
was just a four-letter word. He’d tried hiking before, and it was hard to say which he hated more, the pain of struggling to keep up or the anxiety and sense of abandonment he experienced when he inevitably fell behind.

Maybe it would be different this time, though, with these people. And besides, it seemed to Skip that there was a reason he needed to go with them, needed to keep Oliver in sight. The same reason why the sky seemed to darken when he thought about staying behind, alone. Something about—

But his new friends had gathered up their zafus and flashlights and jackets to follow their teacher up the rocky, uneven path leading back to the marked trail. Skip found his tan jacket folded neatly on his zafu. He put it on and zipped it up, vaguely aware that
something
was missing but unable to remember what it was. Then a nice thing happened. George Speaks, the American Indian with the Eskimo features and the long black braid, doubled back to present Skip with an aspen-limb staff, its bark and leaves stripped away to make a stout, smooth-skinned walking stick that fit Skip’s hand so perfectly it might have been cut to his measure.

Skip was so moved by the gesture that he clean forgot all about…whatever it was he’d been trying to remember. Leaning gratefully on the staff as he hurried to catch up with the procession, he heard someone behind him calling his name. He turned at the edge of the clearing, puzzled—how could anyone be behind him when everyone was in front of him?—and saw a big, bearlike figure in a little tweed hat emerging from the trees on the far side of the clearing. The sharply angled sunlight made his dark red sport coat look as if it were glowing.

It took another instant for the name to come—
Pender!
he thought.
You forgot all about Pender!
—and another few seconds for the larger implications to register. As soon as he remembered who Pender was and why the two of them were there, Skip reached behind his back for the Beretta in his holster. His empty holster.

So
that’s
what was missing before,
thought Skip, as Pender charged toward him through the clover, holding his hat with one hand and waving at him with the other. Halfway across the clearing, though, Pender stumbled, seemed to catch his balance, then
collapsed heavily to the ground with a feather-tipped arrow shaft sticking out of his left rib cage.

Skip started toward him, then glimpsed a black-clad figure with a bow silhouetted in profile between two thin, now sunlit aspens on the far side of the clearing. He hit the deck as an arrow sizzled over his head, so close to his scalp that if his hair had been any longer, it would now be parted straight down the center.

One down, two to go,
thinks Asmador. It should have been three down, none to go—he knows now that not waiting until dark was a mistake. And he’d meant to wait, he really had. But when Pender had come trotting out of the trees less than twenty yards away from where Asmador stood watching, bow in hand, it had felt to Asmador as if the bow had taken on a will of its own. It had shifted to the right, made allowances for yardage and windage, led the lumbering target by the width of the arrowhead. All Asmador had had to do was pull the bowstring and release it, and down went Pender with a steel-tipped, large-mammal-rated arrow sticking heart-high out of the left side of his sport jacket.

But to Asmador’s dismay, his hurried second arrow had overshot the next target, Epstein, by a hairbreadth, and Epstein had disappeared into the underbrush before Asmador could nock a third.

But the odds are still in his favor, he reminds himself as he circles around the periphery of the clearing, heading for a gully he’d seen earlier from his vantage point on the cliff overlooking the aspen grove. By following the gully, which rejoined the main trail below the cutoff leading to the clearing, he can block the humans’ avenue of retreat. Then it will only be a matter of keeping the herd
in front of him while he singles out his targets. Which shouldn’t be difficult—with his limp, Epstein is classic predator prey, and as for Dr. O in his white pajamas, Asmador doesn’t think he’ll even need the infrared goggles to spot
him
in the dark.

And then what? Stay and pick off as many of the others as there are arrows in his quiver, and leave them for the vultures to find tomorrow? Or perhaps he’ll somehow be magically transported back to the Blasted Land the moment the mission is complete, to take up his seat on the Concilium Infernalis.

When Skip reached the junction where the rocky path rejoined the marked trail, Oliver and the others were nowhere in sight. Spotting the golf cart by the side of the path was like seeing an old friend—if only the key had been in the ignition. Skip vaguely remembered having left it there, but with five hundred mikes of windowpane short-circuiting his synapses, fine points like that were scarcely worth the energy it took to process them.

So he continued up the trail on foot, leaning proudly on his fine, stout staff, while the universe throbbed slowly and majestically around him,
gnong-gnong-gnong,
like somebody’d struck an invisible gong the size of the moon. Through breaks in the patchy overhead canopy, the sky took on a bubblegum pink glow. An exquisite hush fell over the forest. Listening for the farthest sound, Skip heard the distant, dying echoes of a silvery bell.
Ring it again,
he thought, leaning on his staff, cupping his ear, and turning like a radar dish. Obediently, the bell rang again, faintly. By the third ring, Skip had oriented his body in the direction of the ringing—say, two o’clock, if twelve o’clock was straight ahead—and veered off the trail to follow the sound through the woods.

The going was slow and difficult.
If only I had a machete,
Skip thought, clubbing back the hungry branches and hindering brush with his walking stick. Then he had to laugh at himself.
As long as you’re wishing, why not wish for a backhoe?

Skip almost turned back a few times. All that drove him on was his determination to find the others, warn them, somehow get them to safety. Or should he disperse them instead, send them scattering into the woods in a game of mortal hide-and-go-seek?
Pender would know what to do,
thought Skip—then he remembered that Pender was stretched out in the middle of the Omphalos with an arrow sticking out of his side.

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud, tears blurring his vision as he stumbled onward through the sharp-shadowed, green-gold maze of the forest at sunset, stopping only to wipe the sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of his zippered jacket. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m
so
fucking— Oh. Wow. Far out.”

In his blundering, Skip had finally intercepted a well-trodden path that led uphill toward the spooky chanting sound that he’d been listening to for some time without actually hearing it—or was it the other way around?

Didn’t matter. All that mattered now was following the path until it opened out onto a rocky, arrowhead-shaped bluff where his new friends sat in a semicircle with their backs to him, chanting
“Vaj-ra, Vaj-ra, Vaj-ra”
as the sun sank behind a jagged, tree-lined ridge.

The western sky was streaked with every red, yellow, and orange color in the Crayola box—the big box—and the air was still and green as Skip crossed the bluff and knelt behind the massive, white-clad figure in the middle of the semicircle. “Glad you could make it,” Oliver said over his shoulder as the others continued the chant. “Where’s Ed?”

“Dead,” Skip whispered urgently, his voice sounding slow and wobbly in his ears, like a half-melted audiotape. “Asmador shot him with an arrow. We need to get everybody out of here right now.”

“Calm down, son,” whispered Oliver. Then, louder, “It’s all right, everybody. Just keep chanting while Skip and I have a chat.” He rose so nimbly from his half-lotus position that he appeared to have levitated, took Skip firmly by the elbow, and led him away from the others. “Now listen to me, Skip,” he said, gently, insistently. “You need to know that you’ve taken some LSD and you’re probably having some hallucinations.”

Oh lordy,
thought Skip.
How do I make this real to him? Where do I even begin?
“I know I’m tripping. I’m tripping my freakin’ brains out.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“
Please
, man, would you
please
stop treating me like I’m fucking retarded. There
is
danger. It’s
real,
it’s
really, really
real.”

“I hear you, Skip,” said Oliver. “I want you to know I hear you, and I understand the danger
seems
real, but—”

“Luke Sweet.”

Under other circumstances, Oliver’s jaw-dropping, eye-popping double take would have been comical. “Luke Sweet?”

And now that I’ve got your attention,
thought Skip. “Listen up, here’s the deal…”

However long it took for Skip to get the whole story out (by then the whole concept of time seemed like a bad joke the universe had decided to play upon the human race), when he’d finished, Oliver nodded decisively, turned on his sandaled heels, and hurried back to the semicircle of sunset chanters.

“Svaha,”
he shouted, clapping his hands together loudly, then spreading them outward in benediction. “
Good
job, everybody. What I need all of you to do now, I need you to head back to the Center. Steve, if you wouldn’t mind leading the way? And Candace, if you’d follow to make sure no one falls behind?”

“What about you, O?” Stahl seemed to realize that something was wrong—but then, he was tripping his freakin’ brains out, too. They all were.

“Skip and I will catch up,” Oliver said reassuringly.

“Catch up, we will?” whispered Skip, channeling Yoda for some reason. The color was beginning to drain from the sky; the trainees were wandering about, dazedly gathering up their things.

Oliver shrugged. “You did say we’re the ones this Asmador is after, didn’t you? No sense putting the others in jeopardy along with us.”

Skip was impressed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I know, that’s my job.” Oliver rested his smooth, pink hand on Skip’s shoulder. “It’s a shepherd thing.”

By then, the two were alone on the bluff—Oliver’s flock had disappeared into the woods, scampering blithely down the trail Skip had just come up, and singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a ragged round. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream…

No shit,
thought Skip. Then he must have spaced out for a while, because the next thing he knew, he was being jerked back to what passed for consciousness by a great commotion—stampeding footsteps, crackling brush, people shouting, sobbing. He turned in time to see the trainees boiling out of the woods in a panicky, tangled mass, looking back over their shoulders as they ran, stumbling and falling over one another, their orange clothes pale apricot in the fading light.

Last out were George and Candace; between them they were hauling Steve Stahl by the arms. His body was limp, his bare heels were scraped and bleeding from dragging the rocky ground, and sticking out from the chest of his royal blue shirt was an aluminum shaft with feathers on one end and blood on the other.