Newt Run

Newt Run

  By Chad Inglis

  Copyright 2012 Chad Inglis

  1

  Pilgrims

  Life and Death, Hate and Love - each but Vain Pursuit;

  Tears as well as Laughter oft bear as Sweet a Fruit,

  and if in these you deem a Unity, in Truth,

  where falls the Line between the Heart of a Man,

  and the Heart of a Newt?

  - Francis Sheldon, "The Heart of a Newt", 1889 (unpublished)

  An old man is sitting by himself in a bar, muttering over a beer. His frail body is dwarfed inside of an oversized jacket, and the hands that jut from its sleeves are thin, pale things, with skin like dry paper. Slowly (all his movements are slow) he wraps them around a pint glass; there's only a finger's width of beer left in the bottom, already flat, with slender trails of foam clinging feebly to the inside of the glass.

  The world has no shortage of old men, and many of them are lonely. They sit in bars, or in parks or libraries, and they can often be seen talking to themselves, but this old man is different. For one thing, he's not interested in picking apart his own failures, making a pile of well-worn regrets or detailing a lifetime's worth of small or large misfortunes. He talks about others, people he's never met and who, if all things were as they should be, would never have existed in the first place.

  "An unusual group of travelers was making its way along the Northern Road," he says. "There were seven of them. Five men, a woman, and a girl."

  They walked slowly, keeping to the side of the road, and all around them lonely flakes of snow skipped lightly in the cold air. One of the men spat onto the pavement. He was short, and heavily muscled, with a tattoo of a stylized falcon on his neck. His broad shoulders were set against the cold, and his chin was buried in the raised collar of a leather jacket. His name was Fawkes.

  "How much farther is he planning to go?" he said. "We'll run out of ground soon, we keep on like this."

  "Only thing up ahead is the sea," said the man walking beside him. This man's name was Stevens and there was a small, white scar in the shape of a crescent moon on his cheek, just below his left eye. "He expect us to swim across?"

  Their boss, a hard, dark man named Hertzwelder, turned to them.

  "We'll cross the Greater Sea when we come to it, yeah?"

  Fawkes saluted him lazily, pressing two fingers to his temple. Stevens did the same, aping the older man.

  The three of them were all members of a private security firm, and they were on the Northern Road because they were being paid to be. Their employer, a man named Lawrence Fisher, was walking ahead of them, next to a small girl.

  Lawrence came from an old family that made its wealth during the industrial boom of the previous century, and had been in a long, phlegmatic decline ever since. As a child he'd grown up listening to stories about the military exploits and patriotism of various of his ancestors, and it seemed to him inevitable that he should also enlist, although the act of signing his name (which occurred in a bland, cramped room on the first floor of a suburban mall) was oddly deflating. He thought that after receiving his uniform or being shipped overseas something would change, but every stage of his career in the army was accompanied by a familiar twinge of disappointment and the same nagging doubts; while a capable soldier, he was never comfortable as one, harbouring a secret fear that one day he would be found out for what he was: an imposter, asked to play a role he was never suited for.

  When his father died (of a rare form of leukemia that swept through his body like a gust of cold air) it almost came as a relief, giving Lawrence the excuse he needed to resign. Returning home, he used whatever collateral he could scrape together from selling off his family's assets and founded his own security firm. It was a small operation at first, but it grew, almost in spite of Lawrence's management, and in time he would count politicians, celebrities, and business leaders as part of his client base. He was no more at ease in this life than he had been as a soldier, but as the years went by the anxieties and frustrations of his youth receded into a haze of nostalgia, until finally he was able to look back on them with a kind of fondness. At sixty he was still a lithe, fit man, although his hair was thinning, and the tattoos on his arms had long since faded. His skin was sun-darkened and worn, and pale wrinkles were etched at the corners of his eyes, neat and straight enough to have been cut with a razor.

  "The fifth man was a copy editor at a financial newswire," says the old man in the bar. "He considered himself something of a literary type. Wrote novels in his spare time that no one read."

  Monday through Friday the editor sat at his desk, poring over documents emailed to him by his firm's clients (in his mind they were not his clients, nor did he consider this his real job.) When asked, he told people that he was a glorified proof-reader, a filter for financial information so time-sensitive that one minute too soon or too late could translate into millions of lost dollars. He said that it paid the bills but that the stress was hardly worth it. What he never said was that soon after taking this job he began to be troubled by visions. He saw his life stretching ahead of him, monotonous and routine, and at the end of it a picture of himself as an old man. Frail and stoop-shouldered, he moves about the rooms of a drab apartment, mumbling under his breath in a vain effort to stave off boredom. It was a pathetic image, but what most bothered the editor was that he knew the old man was almost happy; his life was simpler now, free from the resentment that his "talents" were being wasted on work that was beneath him, free from the burning, junky-like need to create, and to be validated by that creation. Free to tell stories for his own enjoyment, not even bothering to write them down, or care if anyone was listening.

  "No one knew the editor's name," says the old man in the bar. "They didn't bother to ask him."

  The only woman in the group was named Allison Gray. She was tall and fine-boned, and for the past six years she had been working at a bar catering to drunken, horny men.

  She didn't like her job, the play-acting and cynicism it required, waiting on men she wouldn't spit on in other contexts, and it had taken a toll on her. There was a sour, downward turn to her lips, and a bitterness in her voice, a hard, petulant tone born of too many years telling herself that she was happy without believing it.

  "Lastly, there's the girl," says the old man. He clears his throat, and looks with distaste at the half-inch or so of beer left in his glass. Glancing at the bartender, he weighs the relative merits of ordering another round, making a quick calculation of how much of his pension money he's already gone through this month, and whether or not he can afford it.

  "One more," he says, signaling the bartender.

  The girl was small, even for her age, with a plain, untroubled face, and large eyes set just slightly too far apart. She was awkward, and uncoordinated. Her thin legs often got in the way of one another, causing her to stumble, and once or twice she even came close to dropping the egg.

  "No one knew where she'd gotten it," says the old man. "She wouldn't say. She held on to that secret as closely as she guarded the egg. She never let it out of her sight, not for long, not even to sleep or go to the bathroom. None of the others had ever seen her apart from it, but a few of them were ready for it if they did."

  The bartender returns and sets a fresh pint down on the counter. Pleased with his decision, the old man smiles; the touch of alcohol in his system feels good, and he finds that the words are coming more easily now, as if they are already written down and all he has to do is read them.

  "The egg wasn't much to look at. At first glance you wouldn't think anything of it, or maybe all you'd think was that it was strange, seeing a little girl cradling an egg, the way other girls might carry a doll, but it did have a way of holding the eye. It was easy to lose track of tim
e, looking at it. There was a presence about the thing, a weight or heaviness that wasn't natural."

  The old man frowns, collecting his thoughts.

  "The egg was…" he says, and pauses, feebly snapping his fingers together as he tries to land on the right word. "A metaphor. The egg was a metaphor."

  The old man has never had much use for metaphors, preferring the truth, as he sees it, of commonplace reality, and the sharp, clerical representation of reporting to the muddy waters of poetry, but he knows it's a metaphor that's called for now. The egg was a metaphor of potential. It was an egg of chance.

  "The girl's name was Sarah Fisher," he continues. "She was seven years old, and Lawrence Fisher was her grandfather. He was the one who'd arranged for all the security, calling it a job, but that's not what it was. It was a pilgrimage."

  Saying this, the old man laughs, and smiles across the bar – at no one, to himself, his own reflection in the mirror opposite the counter.

  "Lawrence had no idea why his granddaughter had taken to carrying an egg around with her, and he didn't care. As long as it kept her from crying he was happy."

  Sarah's parents had been killed in a car accident when she was four. Since then she'd stayed with Lawrence, who took her in and gave her a place to live, if not exactly a home. Neither he nor Sarah ever talked about the accident, doing their best to pretend that nothing had changed, as if the girl had always lived in his large, quiet house, or had been born an orphan.

  During his years in the army Lawrence received a thorough education in ignoring the truth and blocking out suffering, but for Sarah it was different; she was just a little girl, and she didn't know what to do with the hard, black stone of grief in her chest that was all she had left of her parents. She never spoke about the accident because Lawrence never spoke of it, and the strain of keeping it inside her was too much. She often had nightmares, and woke up in the middle of the night screaming. She'd also developed a fear of being in cars; having the seat belt strapped across her chest felt like being held down by an awful hand. She couldn't breathe, and she cried, working herself into a panic.

  "That's why they were walking," says the old man. "Myself, I wouldn't have put up with it, but Lawrence had a soft spot for his granddaughter. Not that he ever really had a choice about it, not after what happened with the egg."

  On the night it began Lawrence was late coming home from work. He paid the babysitter a little extra, and after seeing her off he went up to check on Sarah. He didn't expect the girl to be awake – it was past midnight, and the sitter had told him she'd gone down easily, but Sarah sat up as soon as he opened the door. She stared at him across the dark room. From where he stood, Lawrence could just make out the small motion of her hand as she rubbed something beneath the blankets.

  "Granddad," she said. "We have to go."

  He wasn't used to this; Sarah was normally a quiet, well-behaved child. She never asked him for anything, placing little or no demands on his time, content to be on her own, at least until a nightmare drove her from her bed and down the hall to his room.

  "Sarah, it's late," he said. "We're not going anywhere."

  The girl shook her head.

  "No! We have to leave now. If we don't it'll be too late."

  "Too late for what?" asked Lawrence, caught by the urgency in her voice.

  "I don't know!" she said. "But it will be bad. Look!"

  She thrust her hands out to him, holding up an egg. Lawrence recoiled from the sight of it, as if it was something hideous, an insect, or rotten slab of meat. He felt sick, and had a sudden urge to vomit, and then all at once the distance between himself and the egg fell away, until it occupied his entire field of vision, the last and only thing left in an empty world, and then it was gone.

  The egg was gone and Sarah and her small, white bed and the room he'd been standing in were gone with it. Lawrence was nowhere, was nothing, and then a thought came, a command:

  "DO AS SHE SAYS!" shouts the old man, banging his fist on the counter. At the far end of the bar a group of young people, three men surrounding a single woman, abandon their conversation to look at him. Quietly, the bartender approaches him.

  "Look," he says. "I don't mind you in here, but I can't have you bothering other customers alright?"

  The old man apologizes, nodding over and over again, and the bartender walks off, shaking his head.

  "Do as she says," mutters the old man, gripping his pint glass. "Do as she says."

  The words were fairly burned into Lawrence, coming from outside of the world, some far, deep place that accounts for the reasons of things, and then he was back in his granddaughter's bedroom and she was there in front of him, the egg cupped in her hands.

  "Pack a bag," Lawrence told her, and half an hour later they were ready to leave.

  "We're going to need help," said Sarah, almost singing the words. Now that they were going, her mood had changed, and she laughed, skipping down the stairs in front of their house while Lawrence locked the door behind them. She felt light, as if she might fly off at any moment, carried away on a gust of air.

  "What kind of help?" asked Lawrence.

  "I don't know," said the girl. "But you do!"

  So Lawrence made a phone call and within the hour Fawkes, Stevens, and Hertzwelder had joined them. If any of the men thought it was strange to be accompanying their employer and his granddaughter on a midnight walk, none of them said anything. They'd all been too well trained, and too well paid.

  But a week later they were still walking. Every day they woke up around dawn, and although they made frequent stops to accommodate the legs of the little girl, they kept on walking until dark. If there was a hotel nearby they would spend the night there, and if there wasn't they'd set up camp in some quiet spot, a park, or a farmer's field, cooking beans and toast over small fires they built with whatever wood they could find.

  Sarah was the one who set their course, relying on the egg to guide her. Lawrence did his best to hide this from the others, but they weren't stupid, and they caught on quickly enough. All three of his men believed that Lawrence had lost his mind, but while Fawkes and Stevens laughed about this privately, Hertzwelder was worried; he wondered how much longer he'd be willing to follow a crazy old man, and a girl who spoke to an egg.

  It took the better part of two weeks for them to reach the city.

  The editor was on his lunch break, eating a sandwich on the patio in front of a small cafe. He saw them pass by, an old man and a girl, and three other men who were obviously security, and he tried to think of what possible reason they could have for being there, but nothing he came up with sounded believable. He noticed that the girl was carrying something, a small, white object that she rubbed or petted, but thoughtlessly, as if she wasn't aware of doing it. She turned in his direction, and one of her hands fell away. Beneath it was the egg. Without thinking, the editor stood up and left the patio.

  The security men were aware of him at once, moving quickly to block his path to the girl. The editor stopped in the middle of the road. He started to speak, but realized that he had nothing to say; he frowned, trying to remember why he'd gotten up in the first place. He didn't feel like himself. Something inside him, some small but important connection had been severed, cutting him off from whoever it was he'd been just a moment before. He felt his joints being tugged at by dozens of invisible threads; his movements were jerky and exaggerated, like those of a puppet's. He didn't know what was going on, or why, and he felt a sudden desire to laugh.

  "What do you want?" Lawrence asked him.

  "He's coming with us," said Sarah. Her eyes were on the egg. "If he doesn't something bad will happen."

  Lawrence looked at her.

  "Fine," he said, at last.

  Hertzwelder stepped toward him.

  "What are you doing?" he asked in a low voice.

  "Just do what you're told," snapped Lawrence. He walked away, and the editor, not knowing what else to do, fell into
step behind him. Fawkes and Stevens exchanged glances.

  "Let's go," muttered Hertzwelder. Fawkes shrugged, and then spit onto the pavement. He didn't move.

  "What is this anyway?" he asked. "What are we doing here?"

  "Field trip," said Hertzwelder. Fawkes snorted.

  "More like babysitting. Don't know who needs it more, the girl or the old man."

  Beside him, Stevens grinned, his lips parting smoothly over chemically-whitened teeth.

  "You know what I think?" Fawkes continued. "I think all of this has to do with that egg of hers."

  "No one cares what you think," said Hertzwelder.

  "Oh?" said Fawkes. "That right? How about it Stevens? You don't care what I think?"

  "Wouldn't put it that way exactly," said Stevens.

  "Shut up, both of you," barked Hertzwelder. "Just do your job and keep your mouths shut."

  He walked off. Stevens laughed, looking at Fawkes, who shrugged, and started after him.

  Before they left the city they stopped at a market for supplies. Sarah went in the store with her grandfather, leaving the security guards and the editor outside. Fawkes and Stevens went off together, talking in loud voices about unrelated things, a woman Stevens had been sleeping with, and who he was glad to be away from. Hertzwelder watched them go.

  Inside the market Sarah and her grandfather filled a cart with bread and dried meat and bottled water. Not knowing for certain where they were headed, or how far they still had to go, Lawrence planned to buy as much food as they could carry; outside the city there were a few small towns, but mostly it was farmland, and beyond that nothing but uncultivated fields and forests, and the narrow, lonely roads that lead at last to the mountains.

  Sarah moved slowly through the aisles after her grandfather. She felt sluggish, and soon she stopped altogether. A moment later Allison Gray rounded the corner. Seeing Sarah, she lost her grip on the carton of milk she'd been holding. It fell and broke apart on the tiled floor, slopping whitely over her feet.

  "Sarah was her daughter," says the old man.

  Seven years earlier Allison had gotten pregnant. It was an accident, and the man she'd been with walked out on her almost as soon as she told him about it. Allison had no steady work, and from one month to the next she struggled to come up with the money to pay her rent and utility bills, as well the interest on her credit cards. She was in no position to have a baby, but more important was the fact that she was terrified by the thought of a child. She didn't trust herself to know what to do or say, to answer its questions when it got older, or to make a proper home. She couldn't imagine being a mother, and so she set her mind to an abortion. For as long as a week she believed that's what she was going to do – she even made the appointment at the clinic – but when the day arrived she found she couldn't go through with it. It was not that she was opposed to abortion on any moral grounds, but when she tried to leave her apartment her feet refused to move. She sat on her couch, staring at the window across the room, and she stayed that way, long after it grew dark. The next day she began looking into the process of adoption.

  She saw her daughter just once, on the day she was born, and she didn't cry when the baby was taken from her.

  "I'll see her again," she said, and her friends and co-workers were sympathetic. They thought this was her way of dealing with the stress of the adoption, but as the years passed, Allison's insistence that she'd be reunited with her daughter began to sound imbalanced, the words of a woman who couldn't, or wouldn't allow herself see the truth: that her baby was gone, and that she was never coming back. Legally, Sarah was not even her daughter anymore. Allison had relinquished all rights to her when she'd signed the adoption papers, and while she understood all of this and accepted it rationally as true, none of it changed anything. She thought of the baby she'd held only once, and in her mind's eye she could see her growing older, becoming a little girl with wide eyes and clumsy limbs. She knew that no matter how much time passed she'd always be able to recognize her daughter, and now she was there, standing no more than four meters away, and the force of this, the weight of it, was like a rod of iron shoved down the length of Allison's spine.

  "It's her," she said, the words pulled from her throat in a soft, full whisper. She watched as Sarah brought the egg to her ear with a look of intense concentration on her face. The girl nodded, and scanned the space around her. When her eyes landed on Allison she smiled.

  "It's ok," she said. "You can come too."

  When Lawrence heard Sarah's voice he turned around, expecting her to be right behind him. He cursed himself for taking his eyes off her, and when he found her in the next aisle talking to a woman he'd never seen before, he experienced a low shiver of fear.

  "Who's this?" he asked.

  "A woman," answered Sarah. "She's coming with us too."

  The girl looked back at Allison.

  "You will come won't you?"

  For a moment Allison couldn't answer. She'd been more than half-afraid that all of this was just a sick fantasy, that she'd reach out to touch her daughter only to have the girl's real mother appear and snatch her away. But Sarah was the one who'd spoken first, just as if she'd been waiting for her, and that was all the proof Allison needed.

  "Yes," she said. "I'll go with you."

  Lawrence watched as Sarah took the woman's hand and led her from the store. He wanted to protest, but there was nothing he could say, and at last he went after them, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

  A week later they were in the mountains, pitching tents wherever they could find a level stretch of ground and shivering in their blankets at night, and a few days after that they were on the Northern Road.

  By this time they were all aware that it was Sarah, not Lawrence, who was guiding them, although she never said where they were going, never explained why she took one turn instead of another. Every morning after breakfast she pointed in a direction (usually vaguely south) and the group set out. They often saw her whispering to the egg, holding it up to her ear and nodding, as if she was receiving instructions.

  During all of this the grumbling of Fawkes and Stevens increased, and Hertzwelder felt himself less and less inclined to curb it; he didn't understand what was happening any more than they did. Maybe if Lawrence had ever talked with them, explaining what Sarah had been through in losing her parents, or if he'd simply taken command the way he used to, things might have turned out differently. But it wasn't in his nature to be open about personal matters, and his experience with the egg had only deepened his reserve. When he looked at his life and found he no longer understood it, as if all the systems he'd ever followed, from the structured, military discipline of the army to the stark realities of owning a business, were no more important or logical than accompanying his granddaughter on an insane trek through the mountains. Life, he now saw, was a much stranger proposition than he'd ever imagined, and so instead of taking the time to reassure his men, telling them that they should think of this as a kind of paid holiday, he walked ahead of them in a fog, seeing very little of the world or what passed in it, all his attention turned inward.

  "Their last day together dawned clear and cold," says the old man. "Around noon the sun disappeared behind a thin layer of cloud, and the first few flakes of snow began to fall."

  Sarah was unusually happy. She ran on ahead, jumping up to grab at the snow, or trying to catch it with her tongue. Allison watched her with an unsteady mixture of joy and pain; a part of her was thrilled to see her daughter so happy, but at the same time she was acutely aware of all the years she'd missed, all of the memories like this one that she'd been denied (or had denied herself), by letting Sarah go.

  "Never again," she said. Her determination to stay with Sarah, regardless of where she went or what happened, was the shape of a bullet lodged in her chest; at times it even hurt her to breathe, and she had to hold herself back from reaching out to the girl and crushing her against her breast.

  T
he editor was worried. He'd spent the majority of his time since joining the group watching Fawkes and Stevens. He noticed that they often sat apart, talking together in hushed voices and stealing glances at Sarah and the egg. The editor didn't know what they were thinking, or what, if anything, they had planned. Even if he did know, he was in no position to stop them. He was just a hack writer working at a newswire. By rights, he shouldn't even be there, and he knew it. It didn't make any sense. The entire idea that a group of people as disparate as this one could wind up marching after a little girl and an egg was preposterous. It was like something out of one of his own bad stories.

  That thought struck him, and he looked at the road and the others around him, the branches of the pine trees moving in a low wind, and all of it began to seem increasingly unreal to him, increasingly vague. Where was he, exactly? He found that he didn't know, and he laughed, because if he really was a character in one of his own stories then he was little more than a word on a page and nothing he did or said would make any difference. He realized that more than anything else he was curious to see how it would end.

  Fawkes was restless. His aggravation had grown worse as the days stretched into weeks. He knew that in the end he'd be well paid for his time, but he wondered how a journey without purpose or destination could ever come to an end, and how long he was supposed to wait. He wanted answers. Most of all he wanted to know about the egg.

  It weighed on him, often appearing in his dreams, where at last he was able to hold it in his hands, and stare at it for as long as he wanted. As he looked, the egg would begin to show a faint, trembling light, and Fawkes imagined that he could hear something, a sound like a voice calling out to him across a far distance. He tried to walk toward that voice, but no matter how far he went he never reached it. He woke up from these dreams sweating, his empty hands straining to grasp the egg that wasn't there.

  One night, while the rest of the group was sitting around a fire they'd built in a small clearing, he tapped Stevens on the shoulder.

  "Come on," he said. "Let's get some more wood."

  Stevens nodded, and the two men walked off into the trees, far enough so that they could only just make out the soft glow of the fire between the branches.

  "It's that egg of hers," said Fawkes. "That's the reason for all of this, all this bullshit."

  "Maybe," said Stevens, noncommittal.

  "Otherwise why all the trouble?" Fawkes persisted. "Why are we all out here? I swear that little bitch talks to it. It's the key. I'm sure of it."

  "It's an egg," said Stevens.

  "You're blind," replied Fawkes.

  "And you're crazy. Think about what you're saying."

  "I'm going to take it from her."

  "What are you talking about?"

  Without warning, Fawkes took Stevens by the collar. Fawkes' eyes were all but lost in the dim light, but Stevens could feel the older man's breath on his face, hot, and thick with the scent of poorly cooked meat.

  "Listen," said Fawkes, his voice rough and gloating. "I know about what happened in the desert. You thought no one saw, but I did."

  Stevens shoved him hard in the chest, but Fawkes' grip didn't waver.

  "Get your hands off me," Stevens said, and gasped as Fawkes' punch took him just below the ribs. Deftly, Fawkes clamped his hand over Steven's mouth, causing the younger man to struggle for breath, his wide nostrils flaring.

  "I saw her," whispered Fawkes. "I saw what you did. You want anyone else to find out about that?"

  Fawkes smiled, the barest hint of laughter concealed in a soft exhalation of breath; at last he let Stevens go. The younger man doubled over, sucking back lungfuls of cold air.

  "What do you want me to do?" Stevens asked once he could finally speak.

  "We'll have help," Fawkes told him. "The day after tomorrow. Be ready."

  "What about Hertzwelder?"

  "Leave him to me. Worry about the old man. The rest will be easy."

  "Any signal, or how am I supposed to know?"

  "You'll know," said Fawkes, starting back through the trees.

  Two days later they were on the Northern Road. Gradually, the hills grew smaller and the sea came into view, stretching gray and cold to a dim horizon. To their left a gentle slope was covered in a thick growth of pines, while on the right the ground fell away sharply, ending at last in a wide, tree-filled valley.

  "There's an instant before an event takes place," says the old man. "We may not be able to see it, but it's always there, a moment when anything can happen, and then the one thing, the thing that was always going to happen, does."

  A gunshot shattered the morning; Hertzwelder shouted and fell, clutching his stomach, and then many things occurred at once: Allison screamed, and Sarah took it into her head to run. Fawkes swore and started after her. Lawrence reached for his gun, but Stevens was aware of him, and faster; he drew his own gun and fired, catching the old man in the shoulder. The editor scrambled for cover. His instinct was to get out of whatever was happening, to run; he'd seen a man shot and he found he didn't care why, or what it meant. His mind was blank, and his flight put him in the path of the bullet when Stevens fired again. He was hit in the base of the neck, and he fell to the ground, dead. If anyone had stopped to examine his face they would have said he looked confused.

  "So that boy died without getting any answers," says the old man, drinking thinly. "But that's how it goes. Not many of us do."

  Allison, who up until then had stood frozen, watching the events unfolding before her like images flickering over a screen, finally took action. Crying, she threw herself at Fawkes, sending them both sprawling, and the gun flying from his hand.

  "It came from the ridge!" shouted Hertzwelder. Lawrence looked to the tree-lined slope above them, and another shot rang out. He dropped to his knees and shouted at Sarah to run, but she wasn't listening; spent, her adrenaline firing in all directions at once, she stood in the middle of the road, her head titled to the side, for all the world as if she was listening to someone whispering in her ear. Her arms hung limp, and the egg dangled loosely in her small hand.

  Fawkes tore himself free from Allison, and twisted, catching her in the stomach with his knee. She curled into a ball, retching. Fawkes turned, and saw his gun lying on the pavement a few feet away. He also saw Sarah, and the egg she held so lightly in her thin fingers. Thoughtlessly, he lunged for the egg.

  A bullet split his head, blood and bits of brain and skull spattering over the ground, all the way to the edge of Sarah's skirt; Hertzwelder had gotten hold of his gun and in almost the same motion he used to shoot Fawkes, he twisted on his back and fired blindly at their assailant on the ridge.

  Stevens had a clear shot at Hertzwelder's back, but he took it too quickly and fired wide. As Hertzwelder wrenched himself around, a spasm of pain to took him. He clenched his teeth and aimed again, but by then Stevens was already disappearing into to the trees. Hertzwelder let him go.

  Allison dragged herself to her feet and stumbled toward Sarah. She picked the girl up roughly, causing her to lose her grip on the egg. It fell to the ground and shattered.

  From around Allison's shoulder Sarah was just able to see the brittle white shell breaking into pieces. Pieces, and that was all: there was nothing else, no yolk, no small, half-formed creature, just the smallest breath of air, a breath that was quickly swallowed by a gust of wind, and carried on down into the valley.

  That was all Sarah knew or saw before her face was pressed to Allison's chest and she was blind.

  Allison tore down the side of the ridge in the direction of the town lying in the valley. The fact that there hadn't been a town there a second ago didn't bother her. No one left alive on the road was even aware that a change had taken place.

  "Sarah could hear her grandfather calling out to her, but that was all she heard, and soon his voice was lost in the distance. Whether because Hertzwelder had hit their unseen attacker on the ridge, or for some other reason, no othe
r shots were heard above the town of Newt Run that morning."

  The old man nods, finishing the last of his tepid beer. The bar is nearly empty. Standing up, he moves to the door and shuffles into the cold.

  2

  Outsiders