* * *
T.R. walked shirtless down the empty main street. The glass storefront of Paulson’s Drugstore—through which he’d never quite had the guts to toss a rock—reflected his passage. The late August air pulled goosebumps out of his skin, but he didn’t mind. The cool felt cleansing. T.R. stopped in the middle of the street, shoulders slumped. The moon threw his shadow out in front of him. His shadow-head brushed the end of the asphalt where the meadow rolled away like a frozen silver ocean. A whiff of sulfur burned on the air, mixing with the bouquet of honeysuckle and smelled like some kind of strange tea. T.R. breathed in deeply and imagined drowning in that grass sea.
Maybe that would be best—his death instead of the death of someone else, of many someones. Maybe he could just eat the end of Daddy’s deer gun or get in a nice hot bath with a good sharp knife. T.R.’s teeth began to buzz faintly. He wanted to swat at the air around his head, but there was nothing there. His mind was full of…full of what? He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut, rocking a little on the broken street. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he whispered.
His shadow began to flicker and dance. T.R. spun around. A shaft of blue/white light was pouring out of the door of the movie theatre, juttering and flickering. It hit the back of the ticket-sellers booth and split into two bolts like paths. T.R.’s fists clenched. Someone was in his temple, his cathedral. His skin got hot. He stomped over to the theatre and walked inside.
Row after row of moldering seats sat empty as always, but the screen was filled with light. It was an old silent picture, like those funky old cowboy movies or those ones with that Tramp guy. How in hell people had actually liked that shit was way, way beyond T.R. Even more beyond him, was how in hell it was playing here, now. The scene was an old-timey shot of some shop-lined street bustling with people. The women wore pointy lace-up boots and frilly dresses cinched tight at the waist. Some of the men wore bowler hats and natty suits, some outfitted in bib-overalls. A pick-up truck with wooden slats for sides and big bug-eyed headlamps puttered down the muddy street. It had to be the early twentieth century. T.R. squinted through the grainy film and stained movie screen at the sign on a shop window: Paulson’s Sundries.
“Shard,” he breathed.
T.R. clumped down the aisle. He turned and peered up at the projection booth but there was no one up there, no stuttering shaft of light, no click and whir of a projector. Could it have been coming from behind the screen? No, there was nothing back there but canvas covered brick. He turned back to the movie screen and watched as everything began to speed up. T.R. eased into a seat, grimacing at the puff of mildew as it groaned and accepted his weight. The people were little more than blurs now, the days and nights flicking by and becoming a gray in-between. The wooden sidewalks rolled up and concrete squares grew in like machined toadstools. More glass window fronts appeared and signs popped in and out again. A steady stream of traffic flowed down the hardened street. Cars parked for an instant began to smooth out along their edges, less similar to wagons and more like the sleek road boats they would become.
A sense of foreboding chilled the wonder out of T.R. as fissures began to appear in the tarmac. One window after another either cracked and fell away or was boarded up. It was like watching a face rot in stop-motion as an eyeball fell in, a tooth fell out. The time-warp camera began to slow, the days and nights delineating themselves again into second or two-long intervals. After a few moments a night scene settled. The camera panned along a street that bled smoke from a hundred cuts. A lone figure stood with his shirtless back to the viewer. His upper body swam up out of the baggy combat fatigue pants, the knobs of his shoulders and spinal column in stark relief. Hey, that was T.R! Those were his narrow shoulders and he’d recognize those badass shitkickers anywhere. T.R. focused on the nape of the neck—just a tiny patch of vulnerable skin—and felt a sting of pity. He was just a boy, alone and in pain, in the dark.
As he watched, the skin over those bony shoulders began to ripple, the knobs of spinal column stretched and humped over. The hair turned liquid black and oiled down over the shoulders. The figured turned to face the camera.
“Outrider,” T.R. whispered.
The Pompiliad’s great black eyes chilled through the screen at his servant. T.R.’s mouth hung open and his cock sprang to painful attention. The Pompiliad’s head tilted to one side, and something like a smile twisted its thin lips. Puffs of dust sifted down from the old theatre speakers as the room filled with the sound of its voice.
“You have endured much.”
T.R. could feel tears rolling out of his eyes, but his voice was steady, awed. “Yes,” he said. “My head, it’s…”
“Full of wasps.”
The buzzing churned back behind his eyes. T.R. grabbed fistfuls of his hair and suddenly it ceased. He hunched his shoulders and slotted his eyes left, right. He looked at the man on the screen. At least he thought it was a man, he couldn’t quite tell. The body was male, no titties or anything, but the face seemed suspended between sexes. Sometimes the brow was heavy and a moment later it rounded out. Constant subtle changes made it hard to know and hard to look at. T.R. kept his eyes on the lower corner of the screen. “Did you do that? Make them go away?”
The buzzing roared back. Where there had been a group of ten wasps trapped in his skull before, T.R.’s mind now filled with a swarm of a thousand, biting, stinging. His legs struck out and he pitched into the aisle. T.R. grabbed his head as if he could keep it from exploding and rolled on the gritty floor. The pain was intense, but the feeling of being chewed from the inside was the worst. Had he a gun, T.R. would have ended things then and there without hesitation. He managed to squint up at the screen and whimper, “Please.”
Silence in his mind fell like a hammer and T.R. cried out with the surprise lack of pain. Were it not for his rigid penis, he would have unloaded hot piss into his pants. He lay panting, crying. He wanted to die so much.
“Your life,” the Pompiliad boomed, “is not yours to take.”
T.R. rolled over and bathed in the gaze of his master.
“You are chosen. You have work.”
The image on the screen blurred out as if the camera lens had been twisted. When it was twisted back, the Pompiliad had been replaced by a young woman with caramel skin and expensive streaks in her hair. That was the city woman staying at the Rhodes house. She’d been asking everyone questions about property value and possible relocation. She had stopped by and talked with the Jeans last week.
She threw a flirty smile at T.R., but when she spoke it was with the grating bass of the Outrider. “Save this one,” she said. “She belongs to me.”
The focus greased out again and then George Rhodes stared out of the glowing screen. The detail was incredible. T.R. could even see the broken capillaries next to his nose. He could practically smell the drunk old bastard’s breath. “This one dies under your knife, but not yet.”
T.R. wrapped his arms around his skinny ribs. “Please,” he said. “When?”
George gave him a look that was equal parts amusement and pity. The screen blurred out again and two faces swam into clarity: his parents. “Sundown,” they said in harmony. “Begin with us at sundown. Then take us to the teacher’s house.”
The screen went out and T.R. was plunged into silent darkness. For a long time, he lay in the dark and listened to the rustlings of mice in the theatre seats. At one point, something with more than four legs crawled over his outstretched left hand, but he didn’t mind or move. He lost track of time in the absolute dark and after what felt like hours the rows of hunched seats began to resolve in colorless light. He waited another minute to be sure it wasn’t his imagination. Dawn. His parents would be awake soon. He had to hurry.
T.R. emerged into the faintest beginnings of morning and stood at the entrance of the theatre. Overhead the stars were fading as the sky turned blue again. He drew in a long breath of sulfur and mountain mist. It was a new day in Shard.
; Chapter 21
You didn’t get more prepared than Amy James was on this fine morning. She laced up her combat boots and ran her eyes over the bundle of gear leaning by the front door. In her pack she had rope and pitons, a serious heavy-duty flashlight, a helmet with its own smaller light, her lunch, a camera, and a gallon of distilled water. Her favorite rock hammer hung off a loop on the side of the pack where she could get to it easily for taking samples. She had a bowl of oatmeal warming her tummy and a cup of nuclear strength coffee heating her veins. She was ready.
Dawn sprayed pink light over the weedy parking lot outside of the old mining office where her RV squatted. She wrinkled her nose at the sulfur smell. You’d think she’d have gotten used to that by now, but it seemed to punch her in the nose every morning. How the hell Will (a wicked smile twisted her lips as she thought of him) could live here was beyond her.
She’d miss him when she left. They weren’t going get to married or anything, that kind of spark wasn’t there, but he was definitely worth keeping in the stable. Hell, if she got her way, she’d own most of this town in the coming months anyway and that meant spending a fair amount of time here setting up a new mining operation with her shadow partner.
More and more, she was thinking it should be Erica Mendez. They’d all played nicey-nice at George’s house the other night, but Erica had impressed Amy as someone with whom not to fuck. And she had the legal expertise to make it all happen behind the scenes before her law firm or Blackstone had the faintest idea what was going on. While the fat-old-white-guys were jerking each other off under their boardroom tables, women like Amy and Erica were out on the frontier trying to make things happen. It wasn’t fair that the bosses got all the shares while people like Amy and Erica got a salary. Amy smirked—she was rehearsing the speech she would make to Erica. Damn she was excited, though.
She pushed through the membrane of leaves at the border of asphalt and forest and clicked on her flashlight. A deer trail snaked away into the woods toward the shaft head about half a mile in. The air temperature dropped a few degrees and she zipped up her jacket. It would be even colder down in the cave, unless the fire was close. It had been warm in the shaft that first time she’d walked in a little ways in, but Will’s description of the main chamber sounded like a separate cavern. Depending on the geothermal gradient, the temperature would drop inside the cavern and probably hover between fifty and fifty-five degrees.
Unless the fire was there, too.
She’d been trying not to think about it, but it was the main danger of this exploratory adventure. Amy didn’t have any breathing tanks and if she ran into an eddy of coal smoke or lost her way and the chamber filled, she could suffocate fast. There was every chance that there were unexploded firedamps still down there. Things could be going along hunky-dory; she could strike a spark with her rock hammer and get flushed out of the hole on a plume from hell.
Amy adjusted the straps on her pack and jumped a shallow stream. It was almost September and by the chill in the air, she had little doubt that trickle would ice over at least once before October. Mountains had always fascinated Amy. Going to school in Colorado she had gained an appreciation for them. She understood why ancient people revered mountains. Every culture that knew mountains had stories about the strange creatures and spirits that roamed on and in them. Perhaps it was that proximity to the firmament—what was a stairway up for us, was a path down for them.
A branch cracked behind her. Amy whirled, the rock hammer in her hand before she even knew she was reaching for it. There was nothing behind her on the deer trail. And that was probably all it had been: a damn deer. She was freaking herself out a little, thinking about spirits and mountain creatures. There was nothing more dangerous in these woods than Amy James. Even the coyotes Will told her to be careful of would shy away from her. The only thing to really worry about was poison ivy and “Giant spiders,” she whispered to herself, pushing a small branch out of the way.
Which was, of course, total bullshit. She could sympathize with Kiddo and Loraine—it’s wasn’t like Amy hadn’t had a good scare once or twice in her life—but what they swore to have seen just wasn’t possible. Amy shook her head and smiled. They were nice enough people, but the Howards were dumb shits to buy into their own fear. Anyone who got off on scaring themselves got whatever they deserved. Reminded her of the Bush Administration and all the horseshit about Code Orange and duct tape on windows.
The light was coming up now, the first gray washing in through the canopy, bleaching away the contrast from the flashlight beam and the darkness. Amy’s stride stretched out a little and her boots crunched over fallen leaves and twigs. All this mountain air and greenery put her in a singing mood and she lifted a clear, strong voice:
“It’s a holiday in Cambodia,
It’s tough kid, but it’s life.
It’s a holiday in Cambodia,
Don’t forget to pack your wiiiiiiife.”
She hummed the rest of it as she crested a low moraine. There it was: the granite wall like the base of some medieval fortress. The mouth of the mine shaft yawned open, the line of smoke drooling up from the top lip. The smell of sulfur and coal smoke shoved at her, stronger than the when she was here before. Amy wrinkled her nose and coughed. She was doing this. She set her shoulders and marched toward the opening.
Amy stopped and shone the heavy flashlight into the dark tunnel. Everything was as it had been the other day except—she squatted down and squinted—there were more footprints in the dust. Fuck. Someone else knew about her find. Had Will come back? Had he brought someone? What if they had already taken samples and had the same idea she had? Amy stood and felt the pull of potentiality; turning back meant one life and going forward a very different one. The pull of the new was too great. She’d think about who was here and what it meant later. Today, right now was for getting a look at that main cavern and maybe taking one giant motherfucking step into her future as a very rich person.
She disappeared into the shaft.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Amy hung in space like a giant spider herself, twisting at the end of her rope line and not breathing. The cavern was vast, stretching out for hundreds of yards. Stalactites and stalagmites that had reached for one another and joined together over the centuries held up the ceiling like columns in an ancient temple. Low light emanated from the rocks themselves. That could be from some kind of fluorescent mineral; something from the zeolite group maybe. But where the hell was the UV coming from? Those suckers didn’t glow without UV. It all looked like emerald, but it couldn’t be. Emerald crystal didn’t form up like that.
Amy dropped down the rest of the way and hit bottom with a grunt. Wait a minute. She stomped her foot. The ground was metallic. It was like walking around on a big tin drumhead in here. “What the fuck?” she whispered. How could a formation like this even happen? Volcanic activity was the only possibility. This cavern was a huge bubble in a magma intrusion. That also explained the rhyolite in the little tunnel off the shaft. But the floor was like refined iron. This wasn’t supposed to happen in nature.
Amy unhooked herself from the rope and switched on her flashlight. Its beam shoved the gloom aside and a white circle of light slid over the columns, the ceiling, the floor… Amy almost dropped the light. “Holy Mary, fuck me twice.” There was a pile of white crystal growing out of the floor about twenty yards away, roughly in the center of the cavern. These had to be Will’s diamonds, the dragon’s bed. Will had also said the dragon first appeared to be a second heap of emeralds layered on top of the diamonds, but she couldn’t see any evidence of that. And of course she wouldn’t. That any of his concussion dream was real was more than far out. That the part about the gigantic pile of precious stones was real... Well, she’d just have to buy him a shiny new tin star when she owned this town.
Amy forced herself not to run, but couldn’t help a little skip in her step as she approached. Her footsteps echoed off the floor and walls;
it sounded like she was wearing tap shoes. She tried to keep her heart from racing. There was every chance that these white crystals were quartz, not diamonds, but something in her didn’t buy that, couldn’t. She crouched at the base of the pile and reached out, almost afraid to touch them. She shone her light on the stones and her head went swimmy. These sure as hell weren’t quartz. The edges were rounded, but polished as if something had dragged a rock blanket over them time and time again. She set her light on the floor and pulled out her rock hammer. She spun it around with a flick of the wrist and wacked the point into the crystal. A hunk about the size of a tennis ball cleaved off the main mass and fell to the floor, throwing weird snare-drum echoes around the cavern.
Amy pulled a rock loupe out of her pocket and picked up the crystal. She couldn’t tell if the weight was right for diamond—she’d never held a gem the size of a child’s fist before. She fit the rock loop to her eye and held the stone over toward the flashlight. Her breath caught and she sat back hard on the floor. “Oh. My. God.” What she had in her hand alone would fetch millions. She looked at the pile—it was a circular mound maybe twenty-five feet in diameter and about four feet high in the middle. And that was assuming that it wasn’t the cap to an igneous intrusive pipe that could go for a mile or more into the earth. Even if only five percent of the mound was diamond she’d have more money than she could ever spend in her life. Amy James would become one of the richest women in the country overnight.
Now, all she had to do was steal it.
You could just go with what you have in hand and still be fucking rich. Two little vertical lines etched her brow as she frowned. That sounded like her internal voice, but it wasn’t what she wanted in the slightest. Even if she did leave with the massive hunk of diamond she had chipped off the pile, it wasn’t like she had the faintest idea where to fence it. If she tried to legitimately sell it to a jewelry wholesaler, or whatever the hell you were supposed to do, she’d have to explain where she got it. Blackstone would end up with the gem and the mine. No, she needed to get the rights to this place first. If she was going to beat the company, she had to think like the company and steal everything on paper, nice and legal. Amy pulled her pack off and shoved the gem inside. If she was going to get Erica’s help she’d at least need a visual aid.