Wide Open (32 page)

“Well, here’s the thing,” Hallie said. “I don’t know what you can do. I don’t have a weapon for you. And I’m not sure I can protect you.”

Brett looked at her thoughtfully. “The way I see it, you need two things.”

“I do?”

“You need an observer. Someone who can—if everything goes completely to hell—if you don’t … succeed. You need someone who can tell people what happened.”

“And that’d be you?”

Brett shrugged. “It could be me,” she agreed.

“What’s the second thing?”

“Don’t you think it’s remotely possible, you might need an almost-EMT when this is over?”

For quite some time, Hallie had been hearing a vehicle. She’d assumed that whole time that it was Martin, and she’d been expecting him. Now she could see the filtered gray of headlights through the gloom turning onto the old road. They stopped. She could hear the idling engine as clear as if it were right in front of her, pulled up next to her own pickup.

“You know what?” Hallie said. “Let’s hope those are good reasons, because it’s now officially too late.” She put her hand on Brett’s arm. “Sorry,” she said, because she really was. “Don’t let them see you.” Her grip on Brett’s arm tightened. “I mean it.”

Brett threw her cowboy hat through the open window of Hallie’s truck and disappeared, down into the open field and the all-consuming ground fog.

36

Hallie stood alone in the dim pool of light cast against the curling fog by her headlights as Pete’s big Ford pickup drove slowly into view. Ghosts—Dell, Sarah, Lorie, Karen—ranged behind her. She welcomed the cold they brought. She felt as if she had finally become as cold as they were, as if she finally belonged.

Dell drifted forward as the truck rolled to a stop less than ten feet in front of Hallie. She looked translucent, almost the color of the fog herself. Distant thunder rumbled overhead.

The truck’s doors opened. In the glow of the dome light, Pete reached back and plucked a rifle off the rack. Martin’s hands were empty. He stepped in front of Pete and stopped a foot or so away from where Dell was floating. She didn’t look at him, but appeared to be studying Pete intently.

Pete was still wearing the same shirt, ripped and bloody along the left sleeve. He held the rifle rock steady in his hands, though, and he seemed calmer and more focused than the last time Hallie’d seen him.

“What are you so afraid of, Martin?” Hallie asked him, indicating Pete and his rifle with a sharp nod of her head. “It’s not like I can shoot you.”

He frowned. “I can shoot
you,
though. Have you shot. We could end this right now.”

“Then do it,” she said. Because it was still games to him; he still thought he controlled the field.

“I want you to understand,” he said, shifting the ground slightly.

“No, you don’t, you tried to kill me.”

Martin didn’t reply immediately. “I was … intemperate.”

“Jesus, is that what you call it? Lorie
died
.”

“But you didn’t,” he said. “
You
didn’t.”

“So what? You think I’m like you? I’m not like you.”

“No,” he said. “But you’re not ordinary either, are you? If I could make you understand—”

“Why? Why? Because you think you’re the hero? You think you’re going to save the world? Because you think if you can just convince me, maybe you can convince other people, too. Maybe someday they’ll understand. And all your awesome won’t have to be a secret anymore? Is that what you think?”

“I’ve tried to explain, Hallie,” he said in that patient-kind voice that turned out to be neither.

“There’s a few things I have a little trouble getting past,” Hallie continued. Sarah Hale bumped steadily against her left shoulder; Karen Olsen against her spine.

Another ghost flickered into view to Hallie’s left. Shit. Who else had Martin buried here? This one wore low-slung jeans with huge bell-bottoms that covered her feet, heeled boots with squared-off toes. Her pale hair flat and straight, a long-collared shirt like something out of a movie from the seventies.

“How do you know all this?” Hallie asked him. “About magic and blood, about combining them?”

Martin smiled. Pete stalked between them and over to Hallie’s truck. Hallie stepped to the side as he approached so he couldn’t get behind her. He grinned at her and poked his gun into the pickup’s cab then stood there, staring into the creeping gloom.

“My grandmother,” Martin said, “lived in that farmhouse over there … oh, a long time before I was born. She moved in with us when I was five, but we used to drive out here, she and I. We’d sit in the car and look at where her old house had been and she’d tell me stories. She’d tell me how important it was to have power. How power could be had. I loved to listen to her, but I never thought they were anything more than stories.

“Then she showed me,” he said. “What real power was and how to get it.”

“Jesus Christ, Martin,” Hallie said. “That’s really pretty creepy.”

“No,” Martin was insistent. “No. It was … wonderful. Special. No one understood. They took her away from me. But I promised her. I promised.”

Pete crossed between the trucks again—was he trying to distract her?

“Quit moving,” she told him.

He kept on walking. She fired. The bullet hit the ground just in front of his right foot. He stumbled back a step and glared at her. “Stop it,” she said. “I may not be able to shoot him,” she indicated Martin with her chin, “but I can sure as hell shoot you.”

Martin held a knotted cloth in his hands. She hadn’t seen him produce it, but it was there, all the same. “They call what I do perversion magic, as if I’m perverted, but the truth is I’m the only one, the only one doing real magic. The others, they cling to their little colloquial rituals, because they’re not willing to take the step, to—”

A flash of lightning so bright and close, the concussion knocked Hallie down. She scrambled to her knees, for her gun, for cover. Afterflash danced in front of her eyes, and everything seemed eerily silent, thunder still ringing in her ears. A second bolt struck, even closer than the first. Hallie rolled under her pickup. Where was Boyd? Brett? Were they all right?

She couldn’t see anything, clouds so low and the sky as dark as midnight, though it was early afternoon still. She counted to ten, too quick, like the rhythm of her heart, scrambled out from under the truck and into the tall grass just beyond the old track she and Pete were parked on.

Shit.

She had to assume Brett was okay, hidden and safe. Because there was nothing Hallie could do right now if she wasn’t. That left Boyd. And Pete and Martin.

She still couldn’t see anything. The afterflash had faded but the fog was thicker, serious fog now, not just wispy ground-clinging stuff. Like pea soup, like fog never was in South Dakota in the fall. She could barely see her own pickup.
That’s the way you want to play,
she thought grimly.
Works for me.

I just want you to understand
sure hadn’t lasted very long.

She rose to a half crouch and circled to the back of her pickup. She couldn’t see anything, but conversely, no one could see her. She slid across the narrow gap between her truck and Pete’s and used her pocketknife to slash his two front tires.

No one was leaving until this was done. One way or another.

She used her own truck as a touchstone and circled wide, hoping she was judging correctly, that she would come to where Boyd was and that she wouldn’t surprise him, that he wouldn’t shoot her. Presumably he would know she was coming—because didn’t he know the future?—but she’d pushed her luck enough already.

She stopped when she figured she’d crossed half the distance to take her bearings. Thunder still rumbled overhead. She could hear nothing on the ground, no rustle of dry grass, no cocking of guns. The ghosts were with her. Though she could barely see them in the fog, she could feel them with her like arctic winter breath against her skin.

She moved forward again. It felt … not at all like Afghanistan, actually, the fog and the damp and the land, all different. And she didn’t have an army at her back. That was different, too.

“Hallie! Down!”

She dropped. Boyd’s shotgun boomed. Once. Twice. A sharp cry behind her, then silence.

She rose, but stayed low, gun ready. She couldn’t see Boyd. She couldn’t see who he’d fired at.

Then she heard him coming toward her, his injured leg dragging.

“How the hell are you walking on that leg?” she asked quietly when Boyd emerged from the fog.

He shrugged. “Because I had to.” He was pale, but not noticeably worse than the last time she’d seen him. She offered him her hand, but he waved her off. She moved in the direction of the cry she’d heard, and he covered her back. Just like that—no need for words.

She found Pete not five yards from where she’d been standing. He was still alive, still scrabbling for his gun. And crying. Which Hallie couldn’t even blame him for, because he’d been shot in the gut and it must have hurt like hell.

“I’m sorry.” Boyd looked shaken, though Hallie didn’t know whether it was from shooting Pete or from his own wound. “I couldn’t— He would have shot you.”

She crouched beside Pete. He grabbed her shirt. “I never meant for her to die. You have to believe me. Believe that. Martin said I killed her, but I didn’t. I
didn’t
. I would have remembered if I’d killed her. Right?
Right
? I’d have remembered.…” He drifted off into incoherent mumbling.

Hallie unwound his fist from her shirt and rose. “Stay here,” she said to Boyd. She put her hand on his arm, held it tight like she would never let him go. “You’ll stay here, right?”

He looked at her.
Looked
at her. “I’ll stay,” he said.

When she released his arm, he grabbed her shirt and pulled her a half step back so she had to look at him again. He cupped her chin, looked at her for a moment without speaking, then gently turned her head thirty degrees to her right. “He’s forty-five yards that way,” he said. “He was headed almost straight north.” He made an intersection, one hand over the other—the path she would follow, the one Martin was on. “That’s all I can tell you.”

She gave him a sharp nod, but she didn’t say another word. She didn’t think she could.

She’d gone about ten yards when she stopped and looked back, expected to find that he’d disappeared, that she was alone again, but she could still see him. The fog had lifted without her noticing, not completely, but she could see maybe twenty, thirty yards ahead now. To her left was the old storage building and the chair where Boyd had been sitting.

All right,
she thought, oriented now
. All right.

She found Martin not ten yards farther on, headed straight for her.

“Hallie.” His face was completely emotionless, like he had been wiped clean. “I heard gunshots. I thought—”

“Thought maybe it was all over?” Hallie said. “Thought maybe Pete had saved you the trouble?”

“I never wanted it to come to this,” he said.

“You
always
wanted it to come to this.” The fog continued to lift, though it was still gray and overcast, low clouds with occasional flashes of lightning so high, they looked like distant explosions. Hallie wasn’t sure why the fog was lifting, and she didn’t care, assumed there were limits to his power even now, to how long he could sustain things, how much blood was required.

She was hyperaware of where they stood, so close. She moved a few paces to her left. Martin turned with her, but he didn’t move.

Move, goddamnit
.

She paced back to her right. Dell and the other ghosts were at her back. She wanted them in front of her. Why could they not just this once do what she wanted?

“You can’t defeat me,” Martin said.

“It’s so easy,” Hallie told him, pacing back and forth, coming a little closer to him all the time. “Ole has bodies. I gave him bodies.”

“You think a jail can hold me?” He took a step back, away from Hallie.

Yes, thank you
.

“I don’t know,” she said. The grass was taller just beyond the two of them, clustering in shadowed mounds and low spots, like tiny limestone sinks. “But you sure won’t be able to pretend you’re doing this for charity anymore.”

“I could rule the entire world,” Martin said. Dell drifted in front of Hallie. Martin took two more steps away from her. “I control the weather. I’m immune to guns.” He looked pointedly at the pistol in her hands.

“And yet, you’re backing up, Martin,” Hallie said. “Why is that?”

He stopped. “I’m not afraid of you,” he said.

“You should be.”

She dropped her gun, took two quick steps forward, and hit him as hard as she could in the chest with her fists. He stumbled three quick steps back but didn’t fall.

Hallie grinned at him without humor and stepped toward him, into the old Jasper cemetery.

Cold descended like a blizzard off Mount McKinley. Ghosts rose from every old grave. Ghosts everywhere—Hallie’s ghosts and strangers, surrounding her and Martin.

Ghosts.

So cold.

Martin staggered again, but he still didn’t fall. The ghosts alone were not enough. Hallie had known they wouldn’t be, had known since back on the road when Boyd got shot. She’d known. She took a deep breath and grabbed Dell, which immediately started a chain—Dell to Sarah to Lorie to all the ghosts in the cemetery …

To Martin.

Pain stabbed through Hallie’s head so sharp and sudden that she fell to her knees. She struggled to rise. She could see Martin as if through a film. On his knees. Falling onto his side. Something passing from him to the ghosts so that they were bright, more solid, the effect moving rapidly from one to the next, straight to Hallie. The pain in Hallie’s head grew until it was a white-hot rail spike straight through her skull and down her spine. Her vision blackened. She couldn’t see Martin at all anymore.

Then Dell drifted away from her. The pain receded. She could breathe.

She staggered to her feet. She swayed, blinking fiercely. Six feet away, Martin had already climbed to his knees. In another moment, he, too, would be back on his feet.