Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (38 page)

The biggest quake, according to the papers,
lasted only seconds, but the aftershocks, including several almost
as severe, went on for hours. Julianne and Callie sat on the floor
in Callie's kitchen feeling a little like grease on a griddle,
ready to hop up and move around if it got too hot where they were
sitting, or if the floor suddenly split beneath them. Callie had a
big battery-operated lantern, and some of the light bounced off the
window.

When the ground finally
stilled, Juli felt as if she were
still
moving with it, the way she
felt when she took off roller skates
after
skating for an hour or two. Rain splattered on the windows that
remained, or sprinkled cold against her skin as it came in through
the broken panes in the kitchen. Callie turned around and opened a
drawer, sorting through it till she pulled out a dishtowel, which
she handed to Juli. Later Callie brought sleeping bags into the
kitchen too, and each woman lay with the bag cuddled around her,
though neither wanted to use the zipper.

Finally at dawn, twenty-four hours after the
quake, the door rattled, someone swore, and then it sounded as if
someone might be climbing through the broken window. Callie roused
as a voice said, "Shit, I cut myself."

"In here, babe," Callie
called, and scrambled to her feet. A
red-eyed man wearing a rumpled plaid flannel shirt over his
T-shirt appeared in the kitchen. The sound of mandolin music
accompanied him, coming from the case he carried into the
kitchen. The song was a Scottish one, sounding
funny on man
dolin, "The Highland Roll
Call," a call to battle whose lyrics, the names of different clans,
had the sound of rumbling thunder. It wasn't exactly a mandolin
piece.

"We have company," Calli added
unnecessarily. "This is Julianne Martin, Aldin."

Aldin's red eyes took a minute to focus, and
then he raised a weary hand and said, "Hi—here," and handed her the
mandolin, then collapsed on the floor beside them, burrowing onto
one of the vacated sleeping bags, and immediately fell asleep.

"Is that—is it Lazarus?
Did Aldin bring Lazarus home with
him?"
Juli asked, staring at the mandolin case.

"Well, sort of. It's the
mandolin we made out of the pieces,
and it
seems to work about the same."

"Why a mandolin?" Juli
asked. Callie explained. "Faron and Ellie were coming for it
tonight and then were going to stay over. We didn't want to leave
it home alone, so Aldin
took it to work
with him. Usually you don't have to stay at the
fire-department meetings, just get a briefing. We thought
he'd be home with the mandolin by the time they got
here."

Juli cradled it on her lap and let it play
through her fingers. When it switched from general disaster songs
to train songs, she decided it was just playing for enjoyment, and
reluctantly recalled why she had come, and packed it back into its
case.

"I need to go find Ellie and Faron now."

"Let's let Aldin sleep a little longer, then
we can all go look," Callie said.

"I can't wait," Juli told
her. "Something could have happened to Faron and Ellie—I know
something
has
happened. I mean, I can feel it. I just don't know
what."

The mandolin busily doodled "Way Out There,"
an old Cisco Houston song about a hobo, a moon, and a train.

CHAPTER 24

Brose Fairchild was humming "I Ain't Got No
Home" under his breath and restringing his guitar with his
Sunday-best strings, the ones he didn't regularly beat to death on
the street. He was fed up with the streets. Oh, sure, he and the
others were doing good work and all that, but as soon as they left,
he felt pretty sure the people they'd been working with would go
back to their old routine. He didn't much like the streets, having
spent plenty of time on them when he was growing up, at which time
he switched to the road for many years. Then he settled down with
the humane society and the little farm that was now full of rows of
identical houses, which was just exactly what the world needed more
of, of course.

He didn't much like some of the people he'd
been associating with lately, either. That new guy gave him the
creeps, and he knew that when you were dealing with any crowd of
people, maybe particularly a transient crowd, there would be a few
mean ones. He didn't like Jimbo's eyes, especially the way he
stopped looking at Terry or Gussie if he caught Brose watching
him.

He was just tuning the last string when
someone pounded at the door. Dan was on the phone, talking to
Lettie and Mic Chaves in Tacoma. They'd called to talk to Gussie,
but since she was gone, Dan was filling them in, and when the quake
came, he added, "Oh, wow, and we just had an earthquake. How big? I
don't know, let me see," he said, and switched on a television
set.

Brose could hear him
talking as the room shimmied, giving
him
the feeling that he was aboard a ship in rough seas. The pounding
at the door grew more intense. Brose carefully set down the guitar,
lumbered to his feet, and opened the door. There stood Jimbo
himself, all afroth with excitement.

"We gotta go and you gotta take me with
you," he said.

"What you talkin' about, man?"

"Disaster. Didn't you feel the quake?"

"Well, yeah."

"It's caused floods all over. And there were
twisters wiped out half of Tulsa."

"Holy shit," Brose said. Then to Dan he
said, "Better tell the Chaveses we need to pack up Lettie's mama
and Terry and head south."

"Jeez, will you look at that!" Dan said,
pointing to the TV. "Look, you guys, I got to go," he told Lettie
and Mic. "That quake I just told you about? It's causing all kinds
of problems—tornadoes and floods and stuff. We got to try to find
the others. Yeah, Anna Mae and Juli are out there on their
own."

"I just know with so much bad luck
happenin', there's bound to be some of our people smack dab in the
middle," Brose said.

"You got to take me along," Jimbo insisted,
and Brose looked at him like he was crazy, which he was, of
course.

* * *

Now, the Debauchery Devil was no fool. She
knew that Willie MacKai had the ability to lift the spirits of
those flood and tornado victims, and she also knew it would have
cheered him up to do so. It would have solidified the whole effort
of reintroducing the music to the States to have had all of the
singers together with Willie in the lead, which was exactly what
Torchy could not allow to happen. If Willie could do a thing like
that, he might start to get the idea he had better things to do
than to sacrifice himself for her sake.

So she took him as far from the flooding
rivers and earthquakes as she could get him, and as far from people
as possible, back to his old stomping grounds at the ranch. Roundup
was over, the cattle sold off, and the cowboy poets were all away
at writers' conferences, where they were learning that poetry was
impractical, unless it was used to write advertising jingles,
advice which, them being cowboy poets, they paid no attention to
whatsoever.

But Willie was no fool either, and he was
not as completely under her influence as she thought, nor was he as
easy to manipulate as she hoped. He noticed a whole lot more than
she thought. He had always been a tad psychic, and messing around
with ghosts, astral travel, magic banjos, and such hadn't exactly
blunted his natural psychic talents.

So maybe it was the same mental alarms
Julianne had sensed, or maybe it was the just-fresh infusion of
ozone in the air, but even though he had no contact with other
people or the media, when the storms commenced elsewhere, Willie
started feeling a little agitated, kind of more energetic than
usual. The wind from the storms picked up heat as it drove down
through Texas, until all Willie could scent was a hint of rain on
it and see the dust kicking up its heels in the acres of nothing
all around him.

He decided to do a little target practice
for recreation and picked up a rifle and walked away from the
house. He couldn't find any beer cans or nothin', though, because
the boss was into recycling along with the rest of the state, and
all the beer cans had been duly packed off before the boss left for
his meeting. Willie hoped the boss and the cowboy poets would be
back soon. He had finally gotten his fill of bein' alone. The ranch
hands were a colorful bunch to talk to. In absentia, however, they
were as damned dull as everybody else.

Finally Willie spotted an old truck hubcap
that had been discarded out by the barn, and he squeezed off a few
potshots at it.

He was serious about his shooting, more
serious maybe than he'd ever been about his music, up until he went
to Scotland with Sam's banjo, and he was concentrating so hard that
if the intruder who walked toward him from the prairie on the right
had been ill intended, he could have shot Willie dead while Willie
was murdering the hubcap.

But the stranger had no such
intentions. And the stranger was only ten years old.
"
Señor, señor, por favor
—"
the boy called out, and Willie whirled at the sound of the voice,
but lowered the barrel of the pistol to the ground. He knew enough
not to point guns at anything you weren't sure you wanted to
kill.

"
Que
pasa
?" Willie asked, and the boy in rapid-fire Mexican
Spanish told him his folks got in trouble trying to ford the Rio
Grande the night before, and in spite of his mother's protests he
had come for help. There were many in their party, and if
the
señor
wanted to report
them to the federales, that was as it might be, but without help
many in their party would die, as several already had of
drowning.

In many a barroom conversation, Willie had
sometimes been heard to talk against the wetbacks and other illegal
immigrants. The fact was, these were the people he was brought up
among, and he was used to them and thought of them as neighbors,
even if they were from as far away as Monterrey or Mexico City.

He took the kid with him to the house and
called the number of one of the workers who didn't live right on
the main part of the ranch, but up in the little town the boss
provided for his workers with families.

The worker, Juanito Sanchez, was the stepson
of the cook, who was the sister of Dally Morales, and he quickly
brought around his pickup truck and some blankets and a couple of
extra half-grown boys in case anything funny was going on. He also
brought a big bowl of cold refried beans and a covered pan full of
fresh tortillas.

"That's mighty nice of Carmencita," Willie
said.

"She does it mostly because she will annoy
Dally," Juanito shrugged. "She don't like them Mexicans from Mexico
any more than we do, but she knows he's s'posed to keep 'em off the
place, so of course she's ready to help."

He said it in English, so the boy couldn't
understand.

Now, this was all handled within a few
hours, everybody was saved, and as a matter of fact, no federales
were called. Willie, wetbacks, and all went back to Carmencita
Morales's place to eat and bed down. There was a guitar belonging
to Carmencita's first husband, Rosario, and one of the newly
rescued men, as easy as if he were saying "Thank you kindly," made
up a song for Willie and Carmencita and them and sang it on the
spot, which made Willie trot out his repertoire, and even though
the Mexicans could understand only his Tex-Mex border ballads,
everybody had a very good time and seemed to appreciate all the
music. Willie felt a whole lot better than he had at any time since
before he returned to the United States.

* * *

"Well, goodness, that's a lot of disasters
for a short period of time," Heather-Jon said.

"Where have you been? Didn't you hear about
it?" Shayla St. Michael asked.

"No. I was in Germany, actually."

"Well, I was in St. Louis for a Green
convention, and I remember it vividly. Silly me, I thought it was
caused by shifts in tectonic plates. I should have known it was
diabolical supernatural forces," she said with an archly lifted
eyebrow in Ute's direction.

And Mary Armstrong looked up at Ute with an
expression that was both grave and startled. “You don't mean the
storms this year? The ones a few weeks ago?"

"The very ones."

"Why do I get the feeling this is leading
somewhere?" Heather-Jon asked.

"I'll be glad to answer that in just a
little bit, but I got some finishin' up to do on this yarn
first."

* * *

Anna Mae Gunn's ghost train looked the same
as a real one to her, a really old one, beat up and disused, with
mice in the upholstery and rust all over the metal parts. She knew
it was what Sam said it was, however, when it pulled up right at
the corner where he told her to wait. There weren't any ghost
conductors or ghost engineers or other ghost passengers she could
see, so she swung herself and her instruments aboard and took her
pick of the least ratty seats. They were the old long seats, not
all divided up like they are nowadays, and since she was tired, she
stretched out on one and went to sleep while the train bumped
silently over weed-grown ground scarred with torn-up tracks and the
ghosts of tracks that ran through deserted shopping malls and
darkened apartment houses and through the panicked traffic that was
packing partially washed-out or collapsed six-lane highways. It was
a good thing Anna Mae didn't know she was riding through all of
that, or it might have given her a bad turn . . . but probably not.
She was a tough sort of woman, and she had learned by now to take
things on faith.