Shimmer: A Novel (24 page)

Gideon worked toward the tentacle’s last known position, while shouting over the roar of the crowd, “Stop the bus!” He tried to wave off Barrett, who approached from the opposite direction, but Barrett shook his head.

“What’s Barrett doing?” Liana said to Logan. “He’s in a better position to stop the bus.”

“He won’t let Gideon face the rift alone.”

“That’s stupid! He can’t—”

A bloodcurdling scream filled the bus. Smoke wafted up between the seats, bringing the acrid tang of burned flesh to the cabin. A charred body, coiled into the fetal position, spun through the air toward Gideon, who dodged at the last moment. Perhaps sensing the threat Gideon posed, the tentacle had hurled the body at him. Logan noticed the undamaged iPod and headphones attached to the charred body and recalled the red-haired coed and her chemistry text. Wherever the darkness had taken her, only her flesh had burned.

Kneeling in the aisle, the old black man wailed, “I’m blind! Lord help me, I’m blind.” His hands trembled before his face, but Logan saw that his eye sockets were bloody ruins.

The bus swerved again, and clipped a parked car with a sound like an explosion.

The darkness blasted through seat after seat, racing forward, away from Gideon’s position. Barrett tracked its progress, pulling and shoving people out of the way, but it reached the bus driver before him. Out of the pitch black shadow, the tentacle lashed forward and coiled around the man’s thick neck. The driver shook as if overcome by a terrible fever. Rather than simply trying to strangle him, the tentacle was trying to separate his head from his spinal column.

“Too late!” Logan shouted.

He grabbed Liana’s arm as the bus swerved out of control.

Barrett severed the tentacle but not before the bus driver’s death throes steered the bus into a hard left turn. A midnight blue Dodge pickup truck traveling in the opposite direction struck the front of the bus and veered off to the side.

In the next few moments, Logan tried to fight gravity. The bus rolled over with a crunching, cracking, screeching inevitability. Lights popped, glass shattered, and bodies—the living and the dead—tumbled end over end. Logan felt himself crushing Liana, but even before he could pry himself off her, she was over him and flung aside in a flutter of white cloth. One side of the bus crumpled inward as it met an immovable object with destructive, if not unstoppable, force.

The transit bus’s momentum finally played out. It lay on its side, hissing and smoking, its hazy interior also filled with the weeping and moans of its injured occupants.

Light flickered in the bus, but Logan’s eyes swept the devastation, seeking the unfathomable darkness that stalked the passengers, a deeper darkness—

—and there it was!

Sliding through the smoky air, a rip in reality, seeking its next victim.

With his aching back pressed to a crumpled seat, Logan lay in its path, too stunned to move. He’d had the wind knocked out of him. An empty black leather shoe pressed against his cheek. Nearby, Liana stirred.

Gideon called, “Liana? Logan?”

“I’m… okay,” Liana said. “But—Logan?”

“Been better,” Logan said. “About to get a lot worse.”

Behind the approaching blot of darkness, Barrett crouched, creeping forward, gauging his position. He caught Logan’s eye and winked.

“Barrett, no—!”

Barrett used one of the seats to give himself a boost and then dove, arms outstretched, leading with the tip of his sword, arcing toward the blot of utter darkness and vanishing into it. In a single moment, he winked out of existence.

Liana squeezed past Logan and stumbled. “Suicidal fool!” she hissed. Her forearms were aglow as she traced sigils from her wrists to elbows. Then, in a coaxing, almost pleading voice, she said,
“Evaris abesh. Evaris abesh. Evaris…”

For a moment, the predatory darkness became still. But only for a moment. Then the edges began to tremble and ripple.

Liana didn’t hesitate a moment longer. She leapt into the darkness after Barrett. Her golden aura seemed to dissolve in its inky depths. Logan refused to dwell on the possibility that her life had been extinguished as easily.

Metal screeched. The back of a padded seat toppled past Logan’s head.

Gideon scrambled out of a pile of bodies, his clothes torn and matted with blood. He caught Logan under the arm and helped him to an awkward standing position inside the toppled bus. Panting, Gideon looked around, wary of the slightest threat. “Liana? Barrett?”

“Gone,” Logan said with a hollow feeling in his stomach. “Both gone.”

“And the rift?”

“Right after Liana crossed over, the rift….” He shook his head, but despite his best efforts, he could only imagine the worst.  “It winked out.”

Chapter 37

Thalia rarely chose the subject matter of her paintings and sketches. At least not consciously. Instead, the subjects and the themes channeled through her subconscious to her brush or pencil and revealed themselves on canvas or paper. Little more than a physical conduit, she selected the medium and awaited the message. And yet, sometimes she believed the choice of materials was not hers to make either, but rather the message’s prerogative. This was not an artist’s conceit to describe the creative process because, for her, art was not a form of aesthetic expression. It was more like a psychic steam valve. A way to purge the prescient images and messages that continually accumulated in her mind, making coherent thought all but impossible.

She had not escaped the dark rift unscathed. Unharmed physically, but scarred psychically. As she imagined it, the ordeal had short-circuited her paranormal abilities. Arising from her psychic wreckage, her art became not a form of rehabilitation, but a means of accommodation. A way to cope but, unfortunately, not a path toward healing. Because some wounds never healed. Life was a construction riddled with mistakes and imperfections, destined to crumble. A ruin foretold at birth.

Her sanity, she recognized in lucid moments, was similarly flawed. By giving expression to her visions through art, she managed to retain an important part of herself. Even while her mind was adrift, she clung to that vital chunk of her identity and saved herself from drowning in a sea of chaos and despair.

Painting had become a survival instinct. One she no longer questioned. Letting the message, and the visions, flow out of her through brush or pen or charcoal stick was as automatic as breathing. And so, for some time now, she’d been painting a black spiral on her canvas without trying to understand its meaning. The spiral began at the center of her canvas as a wispy thread of gray and became progressively darker, thicker and more ominous with each outward turn.

Then, a sudden realization struck her with the force of a blow.

Liana’s gone!

Her camel hair paintbrush, slathered in black acrylic paint, slipped from her numb fingers and fell to the paint-spattered hardwood floor. “No, no, no,” she whimpered. “Not her. Not Liana.”

Shoving the wet canvas and easel aside with a careless backhand sweep of her arm, she ran the length of the attic studio to the lowered folding staircase. As panic and fear surged within her, tears blurred her vision. Moaning softly, she untied her smock and whipped it off her head, tossing it back toward the collapsed easel and her abandoned painting.

In her haste, she missed the first tread on the folding staircase and almost fell. She didn’t care. She finished her awkward descent, stumbled around the base of the staircase, then raced down the regular stairs to the ground floor, almost wishing for an accident and the quick release of unconsciousness. She was running without a destination in mind. Whether she was chasing something or running away didn’t matter to her.

Ambrose stepped out of his office and caught her arm before she reached the front door. “Thalia! What’s wrong?”

“She—she—
she’s gone!”

“Who?”

“Liana,” Thalia said, shaking her head wildly. “I told her to stay out of the dark! I warned her!”

“How do you—?” He took a deep breath.
“What
do you know?”

Thalia stared at him, not comprehending the question. “Too much,” she said. “Not enough.”

“Tell me,” he said calmly, attempting to soothe her.

“She was… I sensed. No, that’s not right,” Thalia said, shaking her head again. She nibbled on her thumbnail and fought the urge to scream. “Can’t you feel it?”

“What?”

“Her… absence!”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“She was… a light,” Thalia said. “A light that’s winked out. Now it’s dark. All darkness. What will I do without her, Ambrose?”

Ambrose wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. “Don’t worry, Thalia,” he said confidently. “When the others return, we’ll come up with a plan.”

“I warned her,” Thalia whispered. “Warned her about the dark.”

Chapter 38

“What now?” Logan asked.

He sat on the curb beside Gideon, who had surreptiously returned his sword to his duffel bag. The police had shut down a two block stretch of Kings Highway, enforcing a detour while paramedics treated survivors. Although none of the vehicles involved in the crash had caught fire, two fire trucks waited nearby. Using axes to smash the remaining windows on the bus, firefighters rescued the wounded and recovered bodies or, in some cases, body parts.

Gideon gave a slight nod. “They follow their training.”

“You are talking about Liana and Barrett, right?”

“Of course,” Gideon said with a grim smile. “Weren’t you.”

“Are you worried?”

“Are you?”

“Mom always said, ‘Those left behind, are left to worry.’”

Gideon shrugged. “Worry is in a mother’s job description. There’s a fine line between concern and worry. I prefer to stay on the concerned side.”

“What are their chances?” Logan said. “In… there?”

Gideon shook his head. “Let’s not speculate on their survival. Remember, they’re not alone. They have each other. And the combination is right.”

“Combination?”

“In a rift crossing, you want a magic user and a sword wielder together,” Gideon said, interlacing his fingers to form a doubled fist. “Complementary strengths.”

“Right,” Logan said. His father had been lost after a solitary crossing. And Thalia, though she had returned from her rift crossing, had not returned whole. Surviving a rift crossing required might and magic. But there were never any guarantees. And Barrett—while he wasn’t out of control—had obvious self-esteem issues. He had something to prove and maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. That distraction could get them both killed. Glancing at Gideon’s profile, Logan couldn’t help thinking Liana would have been better off crossing the rift with the older brother.

“Look sharp,” Gideon said abruptly.

Logan followed his gaze and saw the Chief of Police approaching from a grim row of covered bodies, few of them whole.

Chief Grainger had arrived at the accident scene as Logan and Gideon were climbing through a shattered bus window. He’d stopped long enough to tell them to wait for him, then left to direct his people through the crisis and cleanup. Now, at last, he was returning to them, no doubt seeking answers.

“Let me guess,” Grainger said. “This… accident is the result of another rift.”

After a surprised glance at Logan, Gideon turned back to the chief and said, “You know about rifts?”

“Yes,” the chief said. “And I assume you’re part of the illustrious Walker family? You resemble the other one. Barrett.”

“Brothers.”

“Figures,” Grainger said. He looked an accusation at Logan. “You people were supposed to warn me about something like this.”

“There wasn’t time,” Logan said. “Everything happened so fast.”

“Almost everyone on that bus was killed, or seriously injured.”

Gideon sighed. “It caught them by surprise. Nothing in their experience prepared them for what happened. We tried to help them.”

“Is that so?” Grainger asked.

“Yes,” Gideon said softly, “it is.”

Logan thought there might have been a hint of guilt in Gideon’s voice, but not for any reason Grainger might have suspected. Logan recalled how Barrett had ignored Gideon’s instructions, determined to attack the Outsider rather than first stop the bus. Not exactly stellar teamwork.

Grainger glanced at the row of bodies. “Could have fooled me.”

Gideon stood up slowly and stared at Grainger with his one ice-blue eye. “What are you implying?”

“Soldiers on the front lines generally suffer the heaviest casualties, and yet you two emerged from that wreck with a few bumps and scrapes.”

“Really?” Gideon said and gritted his teeth.

“Looks that way from here.”

“Before you make any more snap judgments,” Gideon said, “you might want to know that four Walkers got on that bus.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” Gideon said. “Barrett and Liana are gone.”

Stunned by the news, Grainger rubbed his jaw and cleared his throat before speaking. “Their remains…are they…?”

“There aren’t any remains,” Logan said. “They’re gone. Completely gone.”

“That’s not possible. Unless…”

“They crossed the rift,” Gideon said. “Before it closed, they crossed to the other side, to wherever Carnifex lives, whatever hell he calls home.”

“Then they’re not dead? Liana, she’s alive?”

Gideon shrugged. “No way of knowing. Until they come back. Or don’t come back. Even then, it might not mean they’re dead. Only that they can’t find a
way
back.”

Chief Grainger sat on the curb and heaved a prolonged sigh. He brushed the back of his hand across his forehead and stared at the overturned bus. After a long moment he shook his head, seemingly at a loss for words.

Gideon sat down beside him and waited.

Logan joined them on the curb, crushing an empty soda can under the heel of his sneaker. He picked up the flattened aluminum disk and flung it into a nearby trashcan. Considering all the death and destruction around them, the civic gesture seemed ironically futile. But it was one small thing he could control.

“What’s the point?” Grainger said at last, seeming to echo Logan’s dejected thoughts.