Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers) (24 page)

The missiles behind us swung around and smashed into each other, creating a smoking fireball in the sky. I threw Petite into Reverse, not risking the time to turn around again, and flung my arm over the passenger seat so I could turn and drive backward through the airborne wreckage. I was starting
to see stars, nothing to do with the missiles and everything to do with blatantly ignoring the laws of physics. I chanted, “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it,” between my teeth and clenched my stomach muscles, like the tension there could translate to magic beneath my sweet old girl’s wheels.

Twenty feet from the mountain road, I spun Petite around again and slammed us back toward solid ground. The bridge fell apart beneath her back wheels and they whirled, trying to gain purchase. Dad and Morrison both threw themselves forward, adding another few hundred pounds of forward momentum, and gravel caught beneath her wheels. She surged onto the road and I twitched a light-bending invisibility shield up around us while I slowed down enough to stop safely.

I killed the engine and it rumbled to a slow stop. We all sat there in the silence, my vision winking in and out. There was something I wanted to tell Dad. Something important. Something about keeping ad itg us hidden. I opened my mouth, said, “Ablbhlg,” and passed out.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I awakened to Morrison’s patient repetition of, “Wake up, Joanie. Wake up. Wake up, Walker. Wake up. Walker, I need you to—” and then a rough quiet gasp when I rolled my eyes open. “There you are. Drink this.”

I was willing to drink anything, especially if it had a high alcoholic content. What he fed me didn’t: it was bottled water, warm, brackish, and probably good for me. I coughed a couple of times and tried sitting up. That was when I noticed I was lying down. Mostly, anyway. Petite’s front seat had been laid as flat as it went, and I was no longer buckled in. Morrison knelt beside the door, strain deepening the lines around his eyes. “Stay down awhile, Walker. It took Joe twenty minutes to stabilize you. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Prolly not.” My voice was weirdly hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Did it work?” Obviously it had worked. We were still with Petite instead of arrested by military mooks. That was good. I wondered where Dad was. I wondered if we’d found the missing Cherokee, except clearly we hadn’t because we were still with Petite, who couldn’t possibly make it up the ravine.

“It worked. That was the...” Morrison cleared his throat in turn. “I don’t even know what that was, Walker. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Better than time travel, huh?” I felt like I’d been drinking sand. I fumbled for the water and Morrison poured a little more down my throat.

“Time travel,” my staid, sensible boss-former boss said, “is almost comprehensible, Walker. I pay some attention to science. I get the idea that time is how we perceive it. I can just about understand that if we can alter our perceptions enough, we might not have to be so linear.”

“You’re amazing,” I told him solemnly. “Best ever. Best Morrison ever. I love you. Can’t believe you’re okay with time travel. That’s amazing. You’re the best.” Now I sounded like I’d been on a three-day bender and was equal parts hammered and hung over.

Morrison crooked a smile. “I love you, too. But yeah, Walker, I can almost wrap my head around time travel. Flying Mustangs, not so much.”

“I shoulda named her Pegasus.” The thought was inordinately funny, and I giggled until I coughed. When I finished coughing I was weak as water. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Your father said you drained yourself dry.”

I mooshed my lips into a duck face. “Nah. Not me. I’m Supershaman.”

“Not even supershamans are supposed to make three-thousand-pound cars fly through the air, Walker. Apparently you pushed the laws of physics too far that time.”

“Bah. Do it all the time. Invisililliby, bility...in...vis...i...bil...ity. Shields, time travel, healing. It all defies physics. That’s why it’s
magic.
” I was not getting any less punchy, but the litany of powers I usually worked with did seem to have something in common. Invisibility shields were just bent light, and almost anything, including water, the most common element on the planet, could bend light. Morrison had just deconstructed why time travel might not be quite outside the laws of physics. Healing was incredible stuff, but what I did essentially sped up the normal process rather than redefining it g ad almentirely. My physical shields were, in fact, perhaps the most physics-defying thing I did, since as far as I knew nobody’d figured out how to turn air solid. So it was possible Morrison was right. It was possible I’d pushed that one juuuuust a little too far.

“Nah,” I said again. “Nothing wipes me out.”

“Except curing cancer.” Morrison’s eyebrows challenged me.

“...” Nope. I couldn’t come up with an argument. Curing cancer had left me just about this rattled, and it was just about as impossible a task as building a road out of thin air. I shut my mouth, then decided changing the subject was my safest bet. “Where’s Dad?”

“Making sure your invisibility shields hold. He says he never thought of doing anything like them, so he’s got to pay attention. You kept them going.” Morrison’s voice dropped a note, respect blending with bewilderment. “Even unconscious, you kept them going until he was able to pick them up.”

“Had to, or they woulda found us. Woulda defeated the point of all of...” I waved a hand toward the valley. “That. Do we have any food? Shoe leather will do.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay.” I tried sitting up again, and was able to this time. “How long’ve I been out?”

“About an hour, and you should’ve been out a week, and in the hospital. You were in bad shape, Walker. You were gray. If your dad hadn’t been here...” The strain returned to Morrison’s eyes.

I leaned over to flop against him, relieved to not stand up yet. “But he was, and I’m okay now. I could eat a donkey, but I’m okay.” I wondered how many times I could say that, and whether any of the repetitions would make Morrison believe me. “I think I gotta go talk to Dad. We need to go find everybody. We have to...”

My thoughts disintegrated again. With Dad, without Dad, whatever: I had pushed myself way too damned far and my brain was full of static. It took a long time just to remember the problem: that we’d disappeared out from under the military’s nose, after they’d fired missiles at us. Even if I suspected a media blackout on what was happening in the Qualla, somebody was going to notice that. It would behoove the military to get to us before the news broke. They’d no doubt been searching the mountains already, but they were going to redouble their efforts now. I drifted from that into “I’m sorry, Morrison.”

He tipped me back so he could frown at me. “For what?”

“I’m going to make a hash of your career, aren’t I? Seattle police captain involved in high-speed military chase. Involved in the mystery of the missing Cherokee. Involved in the zombie apocalypse. That can’t look good on a resume.” Exhaustion and weariness made my eyes fill with apologetic tears. I was screwing up
everybody’s
lives.

“Good thing you only gave them your name.” His mouth curved again, rueful little smile. “And at least you quit the department two weeks ago, before you riled up the military.”

“
Riled
. You’ve already been in the South too long, using words like
riled
. I didn’t hand in a letter, Morrison.” At least, I didn’t think I had. It was hard to remember. I stared at him, trying to hold my thoughts together. “I just told you I was quitting, right? Is that enough?”

My former boss looked ever so slightly shifty. “I may have taken some liberties there, Walker.”

For a few seconds my haze-filled brain didn’t get it. Then I blinked at him in astonishment. “You forged my resignation letter?”

His voice went soft. “I didn’t think you would be coming back. Not as a cop, anyway. If you’ve changed your mind...”

“No.” Fuzzy-minded or not, I was firm on that. It meant finding a job when I got home again, but that was the least of my problems, given that right now I was too tired to stand up. I sent a feeble request to my spirit animals for help, and they all gave me flat looks. I mumbled a silent apology to them and returned my attention to Morrison. “No, it was a good call, especially with this going on now. At least it makes me a former employee, and...” I exhaled, unable to complete the thought without effort. “And I guess, I don’t know, we keep us under wraps for a little while? Until people stop talking about this?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Not really, but I want to cost you your job even less.” I snorted. “Besides, if we keep it quiet awhile the department will start a betting pool on when we’ll come out. Maybe we can get Billy to game it for us. Okay. Help me up. I’m...God, I’m tired, Morrison. I shouldn’t be this tired. I don’t tap out like that.”

“You’re too skinny, you haven’t eaten, and you’ve been throwing magic around like it’s fairy dust, Walker. Nobody can keep anything up forever. Not even you. C’mon.”

He did help me up, an arm around my waist to keep me steady, and we went to find Dad, who was sitting just far enough away that he could pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping. I didn’t believe it, but I didn’t care enough to call him on it. He spoke when we got close enough. “You got the invisibility shields idea from that comic you used to read, didn’t you? The one with the blonde woman and the rock man. It’s a good idea. Unique. I’m not sure you’d have thought of it if I’d trained you. I’m more traditional than this.”

That was, in fact, where I’d gotten the idea. I’d loved Sue Storm as a kid. “You seem to have gotten the hang of it.”

“Once I saw what you’d done, sure. I don’t know how you kept it up until I took over, Jo...anne. You shouldn’t have been able to. I’ve never seen anyone that deeply drained of energy and still alive.”

I said the same thing I had to Morrison: “I had to, or it all would have been pointless. The real question is how we’re going to keep it functioning once we head into the hills, because no way am I leaving Petite exposed up here for the military to find and tear apart.”

“No, Joanne.” Dad got up, hands in his pockets, a crease between his eyebrows. “The question is how you did that. You’re not understanding me. When I say you shouldn’t have been able to I mean I’ve been a shaman for more than forty years and I’ve never seen anyone do any of what you’ve done today. We use power circles and sweat lodges to alter perceptions and to heal. We don’t just fling ourselves in without preparation. We shield ourselves against sorcery, but we don’t wind that magic into nets and walls that affect wide spaces or many people. We don’t drive cars across open air and then keep invisibility shields active when our hearts are stuttering. You barely had enough life in you to keep breathing, Joanne, and you were still pouring magic out into the world. We don’t do that. It would kill us. We’d be dead before we began. We
can’t
do that.”

“You can’t.” I had no other argument, and barely enough energy for this one. In fact,
I
wasn’t having an argument. Maybe Dad was, but from my perspective it was a detailing of rote information. “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe it’s the two heritages. Shaman and mage. Maybe it’s being a brand-new sparkly fresh soul. Maybe it’s not being hobbled by tradition. Maybe it’s because I learned the hard way. Maybe it’s that I just don’t know what I can and can’t do, so I do it anyway. I mean, hey, yeah, okay, it’s pretty clear I shouldn’t try the flying-car stunt again. Or healing cancer,” I said with a sideways glance at Morrison. “But mostly the only way I find out I shouldn’t do something is by doing it. I don’t have any preconceptions, Dad. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. I never have.”

That wasn’t true anymore. I actually had a pretty good idea what I was doing now, and it had become clear that most of my limitations were self-imposed, failures of imagination rather than failures of raw power. I couldn’t figure out how to track magic, for example. I’d never been able to convince my slightly near-sighted eyes that it would be okay for me to heal them, though I had no doubt if I went in for LASIK surgery that it would work just fine. I accepted that I shouldn’t try healing major illnesses without a power circle to support me, at the very least. That kind of shit was dangerous, and despite my reckless behavior I wasn’t really trying to get myself killed. I just didn’t know where the line was until I crossed it.

And when I got right down to it, I didn’t have a problem with that. I was not going to become increasingly conservative as I grew to understand my power more fully. In fact, backed by Rattler and Renee and Raven, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t become less conservative, especially in cases where I’d learned where the lines lay.

Looking at my father, at the worry pinching his face and at the barely restrained disbelief in his eyes, I thought for the first time that maybe I was more like my mother than I’d imagined. I’d never thought of Dad as conservative, but it was the first word that would’ve come to mind for Mom. The second one was
stubborn,
or maybe
willful.
The woman had concentrated herself to death, after all, to make sure she could be in the right spiritual place and time to save my
tuchus
more than once. It was inconceivable that she would let some piddling opinion like
“you shouldn’t have been able to”
stop her from doing anything. I rolled that thought around in my mind a few seconds, then spread my hands and shrugged. “This is how it works with me, Dad. You’re just going to have to get used to it. Now, what are we going to do about Petite?”

My father looked at me for a long time, with much the same expression he’d often had when I was younger. It was the one I’d interpreted as “How the hell did I get stuck with a kid?” but now I thought maybe it was really more like “How the hell do I roll with the insane punches this kid throws?” After a while he shook his head and pointed his thumb up the mountain. “There’s a cave system up the road a ways. We can bring her up there and tuck her in. If you don’t know where it is, it’s hard to find.”

The military was likely to be combing every inch of the mountain, and I doubted they’d miss it, but it was better than nothing. Maybe I could do something very rash, like bring a little rock-fall down over the cave mouth, except that would leave fresh scars for them to find, which would again defeat the point. And besides, the idea made me stumble with exhaustion, even though I wasn’t moving. Morrison tightened his arm around me and my father glanced at us, worry etching his face again.

I hadn’t quite put that together, that he might thhis arm a be worried about me, and shifted uncomfortably. “I’m okay, Dad. I’m fine.”