Dr. Carradine led Meg into Davey the Goliath, clearly long
established as a command center. Ling was talking to Carlos with
quiet intensity at the dinner table. “I do not see how I can be
any more clear or emphatic, that your strategy is not only
ineffective, but quite dangerous,” the Asian said. “Following
groups of revenants may seem safe, when they number in the dozens or
low hundreds, and I will grant that it was reasonable enough in the
initial conditions of the outbreak. But those conditions have been
changing, constantly. The groups have been on the move, and we have
proven beyond the slightest doubt that they have an inerrant tendency
to move towards each other. By following them, you head straight for
another group of equal or greater size, and when the two join
together, as you are well aware, they fan out over a wider area.
With any group larger than a few hundred, there is no way to get
behind them. Either you are ahead of their leading edge, or you are
in their midst.” He fell silent as Meg sat down on the couch next
to Joe.
Dr. Carradine gave a quick and guarded account of what had happened,
summarizing, “She clearly believed she recognized the revenant, and
she did give an accurate description of the shoe. I had a clear view
of the individual in question myself, and I am quite certain that it
is not among the bodies here.”
“Let me see that shoe,” Carlos said. “Aye, it's yuppie
leather, an' the stuff's better'n a lot that I've seen. Good
workmanship, too; my guess is it was made legit, and somebody bought
'em up and slapped the fancy labels on. Thing is...” He took a
look at the sole. “It's in good shape. Nothing but normal wear,
and not a lot of that. Not what you'd expect if, say, a guy walked
more'n a hundred miles cross-country in 'em. Never mind if he did it
in less than 48 hours.”
“Where individual revenants have been tracked, they have
consistently covered longer distances than their known speeds can
account for,” Dr. Ling said. “Often, their feet and footgear
appear to be in far better condition than could be expected.
Unfortunately, many people feel that the most significant data,
specifically reports of individuals being followed by revenant family
members, represents hearsay at best and hysteria at worst.”
“Aye,” said Carlos, "just about
everybody still 'round has at least one story about one of those
things that just homes in on one particular person and stays on the
trail. Me, I never seen it, least not that I could attest to m'self.
But
once, we pick up a new guy, and we end up with a bunch comin’ up
from behind. We stop, an' I get out my binoculars an’ check ‘em
out. Then without even looking, he describes one in particular, and
he starts telling me details even before I can make 'em out. He's
seen it before, no question. He says he's been seeing `her' behind
him, now an' then but regular, over the last two weeks an' what he
reckons to be more'n ten thousand miles. He's sure it was his kid.
Most all of them say something like that. But then, how many people
see a thing like that wi'out it stickin' in the mind?"
“Very few forensic scientists would accept such an identification
as conclusive,” Ling said. “Indeed, it is something of a trade
secret that family and loved ones can be very unreliable. All kinds
of things can and do happen to bodies. Even a cadaver that remain
basically intact can be subject to swelling, shriveling, and
discoloration sufficient to render it literally unrecognizable. It
is common, if generally unspoken, wisdom not even to invite an
identification by a loved one unless one is already reasonably
confident. Even then, problems occur. I have had one personal
experience in particular, after one of the `disturbances’ between
my country and the Soviets, when I was assigned the task of giving a
senior Party official the body of his son. Our morgue was filled
well beyond usual capacity, and a number of bodies were being stored
out in the open, one of which had been left uncovered. I was about
to apologize for the carelessness, when the official embraced this
body of a complete stranger and `confirmed’ that it was his son.”
Joe shrugged. “So what? All you people look alike anyway.”
“Aye, what it really comes down to is, most of the time, most
people see what they expect to see,” Carlos said. “But then,
like you said yourself, it works both ways. I’ve thought about that
quite a bit. Most people would notice if they’re bein’ followed
by a kudlak that even looks like somebody they knew. But what
if it’s one that’s too messed up to recognize, or a complete
stranger to begin with? It seems to me, this could be happenin’ a
lot more than we know about.”
“You do no understand,” Joe said. “You think like white man.
White men no understand walking dead men. Fish People know.” All
eyes were on him as he rifled in his bag, and expectations clearly
went down a notch when he took out a MAD magazine. He opened it to
the inside of the back cover, with the fold-over hidden-picture gag.
“A walking dead man is not like ghost,” Joe said. He touched the
creases of the page. “Walking dead man go here to here, he cannot
fly on the wind, or go to the Place of the Great Spirit and come back
down, no, or use white man’s engines. He walk, step by step. But,
he can take short cut.” He folded the page. “Many miles. One
step.”
Meg was jarred by a memory from when she was a girl. She had read a
little science fiction in her preteens, before she dived into her
mother’s romance novels because she wasn’t supposed to be reading
them. Her interest had been limited as well as ephemeral, but the
books of Madeline L’Engle had connected with her, well enough to
sustain her interest. “A Wrinkle In Time,” she said. Then she
added as the name came to her, “You’re talking about a
tesseract.”
Joe shrugged, while Dr. Carradine nodded. “It fits with common
elements of Native American folklore,” the professor said. “A
number of entities are characterized as physical entities, while at
the same time being credited with superhuman or wholly supernatural
abilities. For example, the skinwalker, their version of the
werewolf, is said to be able to travel hundreds of miles in a matter
of hours. Then there are legends connected with Bigfoot in which the
entity is said to be able to disappear, a detail which actually is
reported in a number of well-substantiated sightings.”
Ling gave Joe a clearly incredulous look. “Let me see if I
understand correctly,” he said. “You are suggesting that an
ambulatory cadaver has the capability to fold space-time, and
that it uses this ability for the express purpose of terrorizing a
single waif.”
Joe shrugged. “What would you do with it? Go to the moon?”
“That’d be a bit of trouble,” Carlos said. “The orbit and
rotation of the moon are completely different from Earth, and you’d
experience the difference as instantaneous acceleration on
touch-down. The potential energies’d make a bug on a windshield
look like a soft landing. They never talk about that on Star
Trek.”
He lifted the shoe, and slapped the heel down once on the table.
“That leaves us with one thing to deal with right here and now:
What happened to the rev that was wearing this shoe? 'Cause he
bloody well wasn't walkin' away. By all rights, there should barely
be enough left to twitch.”
“The possibility that the revenants have some capacity for
regeneration has been under investigation for some time,” Ling
said. “No conclusive evidence has been produced, and no one has
had any particularly good ideas what evidence or experiments could
prove it either way. Ultimately, the issue is only a symptom of a
more fundamental problem, which is that we simply do not know how the
revenants function or how much or little damage is truly necessary to
eliminate them.”
“Aye,” Carlos said, “but still, any kind of vehicle impact
usually does the trick. We find them on the roads all the time, and
we’ve run down quite a few ourselves. We see busted heads, broken
backs, missing limbs, and never any sign of anythin’ growing back.”
“This one different,” Joe said. He pointed at Meg. “He come
for her. Don’t need reason, just her. His strength is her, and he
grow strong from her. Then she will get weaker, and he will be
bolder, and the others will follow, until she is one of them.”
“Roighta then,” Carlos said, “that oughta be simple enough. So
long as we got what he wants, we know where he’s gonna be, and all
we gotta do is be ready for ‘im.”
Joe shook his head emphatically. “No. No help her by killing him.
Maybe make it worse. Must break the link. Make him go. Only way.”
“Okay,” Meg said, gazing at her own trembling hand. “How?”
“Do not talk to the dead man,” Joe said firmly. “The Law of
the Fish People says, do no summon a dead man. If dead man come to a
living man or wise old woman, they speak the words to tell him he is
dead and return to the dead. But a dead man come to young woman must
no say anything, only summon a man or an old woman. For, when a
young woman speak to old man, she make him think he is young again,
and if young woman speak to dead man, he will think he is alive
again, and he return. But if the young woman do no speak, and a man
and a wise woman speak the words to banish him, sometimes he go, and
no return.”
“If that doesn't work,” Meg said, “then what?”
Joe shrugged. “Don't know,” Joe said. “Maybe you die.
Sorry.”
