Sea of Silver Light (73 page)

"Snake!" Martine hissed, sounding serpentine herself in her fright. T4b let out a muffled screech as a flailing, muscular tail knocked him over. Paul flailed through the water until he found the struggling youth, then got a grip on his arm. Florimel grabbed him, too, and together they yanked him back to the surface, bubbling and sobbing.

"Don't move!" Martine whispered. "Quiet!"

T4b might have wanted to argue, but he was too busy spewing river water. Florimel held him. The serpent was still thrashing the waters near them, but was moving away, as though it had struck them in a panic rather than by intent. When it fought its way out into the light on the east side of the bridge, Paul's skin crawled. The thing which had scraped against him was almost the size of the ore-train monster that had chased them down the mountain.

A dozen more shots thundered down, making the water hiss all around the huge tube of the snake's body. The men on the bridge were shrieking with joyful bloodlust.

"For God's sake," Martine said, "now, now!"

As she sloshed away, Paul grabbed T4b again and helped Florimel drag him toward the west side of the bridge. Behind them the wounded snake had beaten the waters to a firelit froth. The men jumped around on the bridge overhead as though they were dancing, firing shot after shot into the river and the dying reptile.

Despite a midnight hot as an oven Paul was shivering when they dragged themselves up onto me riverbank, deep in the shadows a hundred meters west of the bridge. He and his companions lay in the mud for several minutes, panting. They could still hear the party on the bridge, although the gunshots now came infrequently.

As they forced themselves to rise and move up the bank the other noises of the town reasserted themselves, screams and cries that sounded barely human, tearful pleading, more of the shouting and devilish laughter of the town's destroyers. But to Paul's amazement there was also music, something he knew he should recognize, a classical melody played on a tinny piano that yawed in and out of rhythm, as though someone were staging the torture and slaughter like a pageant and had commissioned the most incongruous soundtrack they could imagine.

Wanting to know as little as possible about what was going on in Dodge City, Paul led the company farther to the west, despite Martine's headshake of warning, but he quickly discovered that Titus had been right: within moments they stumbled onto swampy ground, and into sucking mud up to their knees.

Florimel found herself in something even more treacherous. If T4b had not been just behind her, still making quiet hawking and spitting sounds from his own immersion, she would have been gone beneath the surface of the quicksand before Paul or Martine had noticed her absence. While Tb4 clutched her, Martine—who despite her blindness could clearly see in the dark better than the rest of them—found a stick to hold out to her. When they dragged her free, Florimel too was weeping.

"It is too much," she said. "I am not strong enough—I can barely walk on level ground."

Paul turned to Martine. "Okay. You were right, I was wrong. So where do we go?"

"I cannot say for certain—this place is very distorted to my senses—but the swamp comes right up next to this side of the town. We must stay among the buildings if we wish to avoid stumbling into more quicksand."

Paul closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "Right. Here we go."

They cautiously retraced their steps to the place they had come out of the river. Front Street lay in front of them again, its buildings all in perpetual flame. A quarter of a mile away to the east a huge bonfire blazed in the middle of the street, between the main railroad line and its spur, and countless dark shapes reeled and whirled around it, celebrating a festival of destruction that had apparently been going on for days. But although most of those who had devastated the city seemed to be gathered there, dozens more staggered back and forth across the street at the end where Paul and his companions waited in the shadows, desperately hoping for some miracle that would allow them to make their way across the wide street unobserved.

Although all of Front Street's blazing buildings still stood, some of the facades had collapsed, leaving the interiors open to the companions' horrified eyes like museum dioramas—and a strange, terrible museum it was. In the saloons, blank-eyed women with scorched legs danced on burning stages, wearily ducking the bottles and sharp objects being flung by whooping audiences of replicated Dreads. Men hung upside down from chandeliers with their throats cut, blood-drained like deer being readied for the smokehouse. Other bodies lay piled in the streets, although some had been propped against buildings or on benches in ghastly tableaux. The Dread-men reeled back and forth, drinking busthead whiskey out of jugs, some so drunk they crawled in the gutter barking like dogs or danced with vomit still streaking their mouths and chests.

It's not real,
Paul tried to tell himself.
It's just like a netshow—not even that. These aren't even actors, just puppets.
But it was hard to make himself believe it when every smell and sound was so horrifyingly real, and especially when he knew the things around him could hurt him or even kill him.

Up the street, one of the Dreads rolled a barrel into the huge bonfire, then stood gaping as the ammunition inside began to explode. Within seconds the instigator was cut into bloody ribbons by flying lead, but others of his kind came running toward the fire, excited by the noise. Some went down in the hail of random bullets, but the others seemed to find the spectacle vastly amusing and formed a whooping circle around the fire.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Paul signaled the others forward, out into the open street. They loped silently to the railroad tracks that ran down the middle of Front Street, trying not to look too long at the mostly female corpses tied to the tracks. There was not in any case much left to see, since someone had run a locomotive back and forth over them several times before apparently tiring of the game and setting the locomotive itself on fire. The remains of the engine still stood on the tracks like the blackened skeleton of some huge sea creature, affording them a moment's shelter from any eyes which might look their way, but the stench of the mutilated bodies quickly drove them on.

They had almost crossed into the safety of the shadows beyond the end of the street when Martine suddenly slowed and clutched at Paul's arm. Although most of the Dread-men were now capering around the bonfire at the far end of the street, Paul and his companions were still in the open, exposed to any chance gaze, and his nerves were screaming, but Martine pushed at him insistently.

"Can't go this way," she gasped. "Head toward the cross street."

He had learned his lesson. Without argument, even though it went against all his instincts, he turned and trotted a short way back up Front toward the center of the town before turning north into a side street beside a two-story building whose smoldering front still proudly proclaimed it "Wright, Beverley and Co." They had only just stepped off the main avenue when a group of riders came thundering around the corner from the direction where they had just been heading, a small troop of drunken Dread-men riding mutant horses, bellowing as they went past the shadowed cross street where Paul and the others pressed themselves back against the side of the building.

The music was louder in the side street, as though they stood near the speakers in a hellish amusement park, but there was something in the wobbly sound of it that made Paul want to turn away from it and brave the main thoroughfare again. His more logical side won out: he waved for the others and they headed away from Front while the noise of the piano rose and fell.

"Mozart," Martine breathed. "He told me he liked Mozart."

Paul did not have to ask who she meant.

As they hurried up the side street, trying to stay in the pockets of shadow, Paul at last saw the piano player. The room in which he played might once have been the back parlor of one of the saloons which faced out onto the main street, a secluded nook where cowboys or gamblers with money in their pockets could spend a little private time with the town's professional women, but some explosion had taken out most of the wall, and privacy was in any case clearly a thing of the past. The player was an old black man, although his color now was much closer to gray. He was surrounded by swaying duplicates of Dread who were either too drunk to move much or were actually attending to his warped rendition of Mozart. The failings of the music became even more understandable when Paul saw that the legless pianist had been tied to his bench with barbed wire, and sat like a becalmed ship in a spreading pool of his own blood.

Now it was Paul's turn to stumble, gagging, and to be helped along by the others.

It took them long minutes to dodge from building to building, the fires making their skin itch, their ears full of the cries of the dying and those pleading for death—an agonizingly extended walking tour through the inferno. Paul had to fight to keep going. Every bit of sheltering darkness seemed to offer an oasis of peace. Each open space felt like it was watched by hundreds of eyes.

Thank God we came after they'd been at this for days,
he thought as he struggled to catch his breath in the smoldering, smoky depths of a livery stable.
Thank God those Dread-clones have wallowed in this evil so long that they're almost senseless with it.
He could not let himself think about the hundreds of Dodge City inhabitants whose misery had given him and his companions this chance.

They had crossed their second street and stood in a trembling huddle in a doorway across from the ruins of a newspaper office. A pile of what at first seemed to be some kind of animal skins lay in the dusty street. Paul had only just recognized them as the remains of more citizens—they had been run through the printing press until rolled bonelessly flat, and one unlucky victim even had a "Dodge City Welcomes Visitors!" headline printed across his now greatly extended body—when Martine waved tor silence. Since none of them had the breath to speak, it seemed a bit unnecessary.

"Over that way," she said at last. "It was just a moment, but I . . . I felt it."

"Felt what?" Florimel's voice was flat with shock and fatigue.

"A gateway, I think."

T4b stirred. "Anywhere, gotta be better."

They followed her along the gutted buildings and then west down Walnut Street. Behind them the Mozart was slowing like a gramophone in need of cranking. As they staggered out into the shadows west of the town, Paul saw that the moon was just now climbing above the peaks of the mountains, as if confused by the cataclysmic changes to its familiar plains.

"This way," Martine panted.

It was such a relief not to be surrounded by burning walls that Paul could almost feel the darkness cover him like a cool, damp cloth. They made their way northwest along the edge of the swamp, squelching through the mud, slipping and sticking, but it seemed a thousand times preferable to what they had left behind. Even when a buzzing thing as large as a rat alighted on Martine's shoulder, making her shriek and fall to the ground, Paul felt the bargain was worthwhile. He plucked it off her with the nonchalance of complete, exhausted misery, and twisted it between his hands until it splintered, oozed, and died.

"There," Florimel gasped as Paul helped Martine to stand. "I think I see it!"

She was pointing at a pale, low protuberance a quarter, mile away, burnished by moonlight until it seemed the lop of a giant's buried skull. Despite their sagging weariness they broke into a trot across the slickly treacherous flats.

"Fenfen!"
T4b cried out, his voice full of despair. For a moment Paul thought the youth had fallen, but when he turned he saw T4b was peering back at a cloud of small fires that had detached themselves from the greater burning that was Dodge City. "Torches," T4b moaned. "Following us, like."

Paul pulled the boy until they were both moving at a stumbling trot once more. "Hurry!" he shouted to the others. "Someone's seen us!"

The ground around Boot Hill was harder, drier, and when they reached it they broke into a sprint. Paul tripped and the earth seemed to leap up toward him, smacking him like a heavy hand, but now it was T4b who reached down and tugged Paul back onto his feet.

The graveyard on top of the hill was surprisingly small, a couple of dozen wooden crosses and a few modest stone markers littering the uneven ground. There were more rocks than monuments. Other than buffalo grass, the only object on the hilltop higher than Paul's waist was a slender ash tree with a noose dangling from a long branch—a hanging tree.

"Where is it?" Florimel asked. "The gateway?"

Martine was pivoting slowly from side to side like a radar dish sweeping the skies. "I . . . I cannot tell. It will not reveal itself to my command, and there seems nothing here large enough to contain it. A grave. . . ?"

"Want me to dig, tell me," T4b said, bending to scratch at the nearest mound like a crazed dog. "Need to get out now—for true!"

The torches were moving toward them with terrifying speed, and now Paul could see that the torchbearers were at least a dozen Dread-men mounted on the strange black horses with hands. As the war party sped up the hill, not slowed in the least by the horses' bizarre gait, Paul felt himself sinking into apathy. He dragged Ben Thompson's pistol out of his pocket. It felt heavy as an anchor.

"Javier, be quiet!" Martine shouted from behind him. "Let me think!"

Paul sank to one knee, trying to steady the gun. The first of the Dreads had reached the bottom of the slope. Paul did his best to aim, wishing for the only time in his life that he had been the kind of boy fascinated by weapons. He waited as long as he dared, sweating so that he could barely keep his finger on the trigger; then, when the rider was less than twenty meters away, he shot.

Whether from blind luck or some vestige of the original simulation favoring the human participant, his shot struck the ape-horse and sent it crashing to the ground. It must have rolled on its rider, for he did not rise after the horse had skidded to a leg-flailing stop. The other Dread-men veered away sideways, taking a circular path around the base of the hill, screeching now with rage, or perhaps even with pleasure at the diversion. Many of them were armed with rifles and pistols; their guns cracked and bullets whined across the hilltop. Paul flung himself to the ground. Florimel and T4b did the same. Martine did not.