The Obsidian Blade (21 page)

H
ENRY
H
ALL, PERCHED ON A BARSTOOL AT THE
P
IGEON
Drop Inn in downtown Hopewell, realized that he desperately needed to pee. He descended carefully from his stool — an operation rendered hazardous due to the large number of brandy manhattans he had consumed — and made his way unsteadily toward the restroom at the back of the bar.

The restroom door was locked. Henry banged on the door.

“Hold your horses!” the man inside shouted.

Henry stood swaying as he processed this information. The voice, he concluded, belonged to Big John Swenson. Henry knew Big John, a deliberate, slow-moving man who could turn a bowel movement into a half-hour project.

Henry did not think he could wait that long.

Dragging one hand against the wall to keep himself upright, he made his way to the back door and let himself out into the alley. He was surprised to find it dark outside. He had started drinking around lunchtime. He tried to add up how many drinks he had consumed, but his pickled brain refused to cough up an answer. Henry had never been much good at math.

He was leaning against the side of a Dumpster trying to remember what he was doing in the alley when the sudden slap of running feet on pavement caused him to look up. A bearded, helmeted, sandaled man wearing a short leather skirt and brandishing a stubby sword came racing down the alley. The man ran right past Henry, never slowing down, and disappeared around the side of the building.

Henry stared after him, blinking, feeling slightly miffed that the man had not stopped to chat. Must have been a hallucination. He’d had those before. Oh, well, another brandy manhattan would help sort it out. He had taken one lurching step toward the door when yet another impossibility came rolling, tumbling, or oozing into the alley.

Henry struggled to put a name to the thing he was seeing. All he could come up with was Frank-’n’-Pork, the 1,109-pound prize hog displayed at last year’s Minnesota State Fair — but
this
Frank-’n’-Pork was legless, eyeless, and intensely, unrelentingly
pink.

Henry, a third-generation hog farmer who had dealt with pigs of all types, stood his ground. Either this was some new breed of pig or, more likely, he was hallucinating again, in which case there was nothing to fear.

As it came closer, the Frank-’n’-Pork thing looked less like a hog and more like a large pink garbage bag filled with purposeful Jell-O. It flopped, wobbled, and gushed to a stop directly before Henry. Henry searched for a point of reference on the pulsing pink surface, but his eyes skittered here and there without finding purchase. After a few seconds, he noticed an aperture, no larger than a belly button, near what he took to be the thing’s front end.

As Henry watched, the aperture expanded. By the time it reached the size of a basketball hoop, Henry could see a shimmering surface within, and he noticed his shirt front billowing out, as if the thing was attempting to inhale him.

The aperture quickly expanded into a pale, cloudy disk four feet in diameter. The creature — if it
was
a creature — was visible only as a fleshy pink band circling the edge of the disk.

By that time, Henry was too scared to care whether it was a hallucination or not. The disk was pulling at him, as if thousands of invisible fingers were tugging at every hair on his body. It wanted him.

Run!
he thought — but his legs wouldn’t move. He felt a trickle of warm pee running down his leg. He had just enough time to think,
Oh, yeah,
that’s
what I came out here for,
when, with a popping, slurping, sucking sound, he was devoured.

The Timesweep remained perfectly motionless, its disko fully dilated. After several minutes had passed, the disko flickered green. With a sound like a rupturing water balloon, it vomited Henry Hall back into the alley.

Henry landed on his butt, his mouth wide open and his eyes bulging. The Timesweep contracted its portal and rolled, oozed, or tumbled off.

Carefully, Henry stood up. The last thing he remembered was sitting on a barstool enjoying a brandy manhattan. Now he was standing in the alley behind the Drop, wearing an unfamiliar one-piece garment that seemed to be made of gray polyester, and a pair of bright-blue plastic socks.

Henry had blacked out before, but he’d never woken up in somebody else’s clothes. Even more curious, he had no hangover — no pounding headache, no sour taste in his throat, no roiling gut. In fact, he felt fantastic.

Weird. They would never believe him at the Drop. Of course, they never believed anything he said anyway, but at least they listened. He checked his garment, looking for pockets. There were none. No pockets meant no money. Oh, well, maybe he could parlay his story into a few free drinks.

Henry started for the back door to the bar, but before he reached it, he stopped, puzzled by something within himself. Something important was missing, as if he had forgotten to breathe. What was it? Henry’s mind, working better than it had in many years, flipped through its catalog of wants, desires, and needs. Very shortly he had his answer: for the first time in more than twenty years, he had no desire whatsoever for a brandy manhattan — or any other alcoholic beverage.

Henry Hall pondered that for a few moments, shrugged, and began the long walk home.

T
UCKER LANDED ON HIS FEET AND ROLLED, TUMBLING
down a steep bank studded with broken stones and tufts of dry grasses. He came to rest against a prickly bush.

He blinked away the afterimages from the flash of the priest’s weapon and looked up at the cloudless sky. The sun, already hot on his forehead, hung directly above.

He sat up, then stood. Except for a scrape on his elbow, he was uninjured. Looking around, he saw that he had rolled down the side of a dry ravine choked with thorny, small-leaved bushes. He could see the disko floating about ten feet above the lip of the ravine, winking in and out of sight as he moved his head from side to side. Would the priests come after him, or would they be afraid to enter the disko? He had no way of knowing. He watched the disko, ready to run if any yellow robes appeared.

After a few minutes, he decided that they weren’t coming after him. Or maybe they had tried and ended up someplace else — Awn had told him that the diskos might take different people to different times and places. But what was
this
place?

She had also told him that the Klaatu used the diskos to witness “the terrible, the horrific, the irreversible.” Did that mean something awful had happened here?

Using clumps of grass and stunted trees for handholds, Tucker climbed the steep side of the ravine. He slowed as he reached the lip, then peered cautiously over the edge and looked out over a rocky, dome-shaped hill. The hilltop was barren except for several irregularly spaced posts that looked like stubby, hand-hewn telephone poles with deep notches cut into their tops. The posts were about six feet tall, with one exception: at the center of the hill stood a taller post, almost twice as tall as the others.

The post closest to him was a few feet below and a few feet behind the disko. He could shinny up it, balance on the top, and dive into the disko if necessary. Of course, that might land him back in Awn’s forest with the priests. Still, it was good to have an escape hatch.

Tucker climbed up over the lip of the ravine. Past the hilltop, a few hundred yards away, stood the stone walls of a city. He knew immediately that he was not in the twenty-first century — or anywhere near it. He could see no cars, no electrical wires, no highways. A faint haze hung low over the city walls — probably the source of the smoky smell hanging in the air. Between the hill and the city, several groups of people moved along a network of narrow dirt trails that fed into a wider road paved with stones. The road led to an open gate in the wall.

Some of the people carried baskets; others led donkeys doing the same. Most of them wore long dresses, or robes, in various colors. A man in a pale-blue sleeveless robe used a stick to guide a heavily laden camel along the base of the wall. A
camel
! Near the entrance to the city stood a group of men wearing helmets and red jerkins with armored breastplates. They carried swords on their belts. Tucker knew at once that they were soldiers.

This was not Minnesota, or even America. The people here probably didn’t even speak English. He had no place to go, no food, no water . . . nothing. Had his father preceded him here? If so, he was not here now. Tucker wanted to curl into a ball and make it all go away. He closed his eyes and imagined himself back in Hopewell. Images flickered through his head: his mom at the organ, the swing at Hardy Lake, Lahlia, Kosh . . . Tucker drew a shaky breath. It all seemed so long ago.

I’m older now,
he told himself.
Stronger.
This wasn’t as bad as being on the World Trade Center or on that pyramid with the priests.

He opened his eyes. The hilltop was as before, but it felt somehow smaller. If his dad was here, Tucker would find him. If not, he would climb up that post, return to Awn’s forest and try another portal.

The far side of the hill fell sharply into an orderly grove of trees with twisted trunks and silvery-green leaves — olive trees? Beyond the orchard lay a crazy quilt of bright green crops, and then sparse grassland giving way to brown desert. Tucker walked slowly around the crest of the hill — it was like standing on the dome of a giant, petrified skull that had pushed up through the earth’s crust. Three brush-choked ravines radiated out from the crest. The one he had fallen into was the deepest and steepest of the three.

He looked at the walled city. If his father had arrived at this place, he would have had to seek food and shelter. He would have gone to the city. A narrow, shallow valley a few hundred yards across separated the city from the hill. Tucker did not like the look of the soldiers at the gate. A boy wearing gray coveralls and bright-blue plastic booties would definitely be noticed. He sat down with his back to one of the posts and considered his situation.

What would his father do? What had his father
done
?

The camel, the walled city, the way people were dressed all added up to his being somewhere in Africa or the Middle East. He wished he’d paid closer attention in his geography and history classes because, he thought with a sour smile, you never know when you might be magically transported halfway around the world and hundreds of years into the past. But the bigger question than
Where?
or
When?
was
Why?
Awn had said that the Klaatu Diskos led to
interesting times.
What made this place so interesting?

What had Awn said?
The death of a prophet.

At the sound of leather scuffing stone, Tucker ran back to the ravine and hid behind a bush. Seconds later, a single soldier climbed onto the hilltop from the opposite side. He was dressed exactly like the man Tucker had seen running through Awn’s forest.

The soldier lifted off his helmet, set it on the ground, wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm, and ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair. He walked to the tall post, grabbed it with both hands, and shook it back and forth. The post wobbled. The soldier muttered something and trudged over into one of the other ravines. A few minutes later, he returned carrying an armful of flat rocks. He dumped the rocks next to the tall post, then fit one of the smaller rocks into a gap at the base of the post and used a larger stone to pound it into place. When he had finished, he stood and tried to shake the post again. This time, the post did not wiggle. Satisfied, the soldier repeated his task with two of the shorter posts. He retrieved his helmet, tucked it under his arm, and left the hilltop.

Tucker waited. Something would happen — it always did. Awn had told him that the diskos were inconstant but never random. There had to be a reason the portal had brought him to this place.

Two more soldiers, each of them carrying a long, forked pole, climbed onto the hilltop. They stopped near the tallest post and stood talking in low voices. Seconds later, they were followed by a squat, smiling man wearing a soiled brown tunic. Around the man’s tunic was a wide belt decorated with silver. In one hand he carried a mallet, in the other a leather sack. He joined the two soldiers, tossing the mallet and the sack on the ground near the base of the post. The sack made a clanking sound. The three men looked across the valley toward the walled city. The squat man made a joke; the soldiers laughed. Tucker raised himself higher to see what they were looking at.