Breakthrough

Doc took the antifreeze jug from Ryan and tried a long swallow.

“By the Three Kennedys!” he croaked, wiping his streaming eyes and nose. “A ferment drawn straight from Satan’s piss pot!”

“That good, huh?” J.B. said, accepting the jug.

“Go easy,” Ryan warned.

After a single gasp-and-shiver-producing gulp, J.B. handed the joy juice to Krysty, who whiffed it, made a face and passed it on to Jak without tasting.

In contrast to the companions’ restraint, the male villagers hit their blue jugs hard, and the effects were immediate. Joined by their headman, they started singing, waving their arms and stamping their feet in the mud. Their tuneless song was as repetitive as it was nerve grating. And they directed it, and the accompanying rhythmic hip gyrations, toward their guests.

“We are rulers of the forest and the river,” they howled. “We chill the great beasts with their own bones. Our powerful and manly seed will live forever.”

“Now there’s a comforting thought,” Mildred muttered to herself.

At that point, another woman stepped forward and laid down a heaping platter of cooked fish before them. The companions used their bare hands to tear into the char-crusted and still scorching-hot meat.

“Tastes like free-range snake,” J.B. remarked around a full mouth. He paused to extract a thin fibrous strand from between his teeth. “A hell of a lot more parasites, though,” he said, flicking the three-inch serpentine of unchewable tissue into the forest.

The dinner bell ended the village men’s caterwauling. They took seats in the shade across from the companions and started to eat. The women and children sat behind them.

Partway through the feast, one of the men gave the leader a nudge, indicating the young woman waving at him from the doorway of the far hut. The headman, who had washed down the fish course with numerous gulps of strangler wine, rose unsteadily to his feet, and said, “Sirena has been fed. You will pay your respects to her, now.”

Ryan nodded. “It would be our pleasure.”

The village leader ushered them into the tiny hut that was occupied by a withered old woman. She sat in an inverted catfish skull, a rocking chair hollowed out and packed with an excelsior of dried vine fibers. Over her skinny shoulders, she wore a fish skin cape with a tall, spiky fishbone collar. In her hand she held a long bone pipe, which gave off the pungently sweet smell of herbal tobacco. Even in the dim light filtering through the translucent yellow walls and the haze of smoke, Ryan could see that Sirena’s pupils and irises were the color of milk. Like the eel’s.

Dean was struck by this, as well, and whispered to his father, “Was she swallowed by a fish, or was she born blind?”

“If you’ve got a question, young man,” Sirena said in a gravelly voice, “best ask me direct.”

“Okay,” Dean said. “You get eaten by a fish?”

A hoarse, cackling laugh burst from the old woman’s throat. “Eaten and spit right back on the bank,” she said. “See these beauty marks it gave me?” Skeletal fingers traced down both sides of her face, pointing out the stripes of pink-white discoloration where the flesh had been etched away. Her scalp had hairless patches of the same color. “Right off, folks around here took my coming out of that fish alive as a sign and a wonderment. And it was a bigger wonderment than anyone dreamed. Inside that fish’s belly I lost normal sight, but I gained the doomie sight. Or mebbe I had it all along, and never knew until my eyes got melted away.”

The blind woman sniffed at the air like a rabbit, homing in on the exact location of Ryan’s son.

“I’ve had visions about you, young man,” Sirena said to Dean. “You and your six fine friends. Come sit here, and I’ll tell you all about them….” She spread her thin legs and patted her sagging lap.

Dean wrinkled his nose. “Not bastard likely,” he said, crossing his arms over his still narrow boy’s chest.

“If you’ve got something to say to us,” Ryan told her, “let’s hear it.”

“There’s doubt in your voice,” she said. “Looking for proof, are we? Well, how about I tell you something you already know? Your names? Your mothers’ names? Their mothers’ names?”

“Madam,” Doc said, “if you could, as you suggest, pronounce the names of all our maternal grandmothers, it would certainly be evidence in your favor.”

The old woman dismissed her own idea with a wave of her hand. “Nah, the back sight is too easy,” she said. “And it proves nothing. There’s other ways I could’ve found out the names. I didn’t, but that’s beside the point. It’s the foresight, the telling of what’s to come, that’s the real test of doomie power. How about this for proof? There’s a new kind of human being prowling the Deathlands. Not mutie spawned. These folks come from elsewhen.”

“You mean elsewhere?” Ryan said.

Sirena turned her head, following the sound of his voice. “No, Master Cawdor, I mean what I said, else when. Another stretch of time in another place altogether. Our time and place and this other one started out identical, as alike a pair of fish eggs, but oh how different they grew. Nightmare different. These new people are a cross between us and a cockroach.”

Expressions of surprise flickered over the companions’ faces.

“My, my, it’s gotten mighty quiet all of a sudden,” Sirena said, returning to her pipe.

In the hut’s golden gloom, Ryan watched her rock and blow smoke for a minute, then said, “That’s the past, dead and buried. You said you were going to tell us the future.”

The old woman chuckled. “It is the future. Your future, Master Half-Blind. I don’t create it. I can’t change it. I only see it with these….” With the tip of the pipe stem, she indicated the pale, hard-cooked eggs that were her eyes.

“Evidence, madam,” Doc interjected, emphasizing the point by rapping the hut’s dirt floor with his walking stick. “We require substantial and convincing evidence of your claims.”

“Oh, I’ll give you all the evidence you need,” Sirena replied. “There’s a brand-new star in the sky. Hasn’t been a new star like that in more than a hundred years.”

Ryan didn’t get her drift, right off. He wasn’t alone. The companions exchanged impatient looks. “We wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said. “We haven’t seen the night sky for almost two weeks now.”

“Well, you’ll all see it tonight, over the river,” the blind woman told him. “It’s not a proper star, mind you. It doesn’t twinkle like it should. And it sails from one side of the horizon to the other in the span of twenty heartbeats. This star was planted in the heavens by a roaring, flaming spear taller than the tallest tree in the forest.”

Mildred leaned close to Ryan and whispered, “She means a goddamn guided missile. It’s not a star she’s talking about. It’s a recon satellite!”

The one-eyed man had already figured that out. If what the old woman said was true, then he and the companions had failed to permanently close the passageway between realities.

“Master Cawdor,” the doomie said, “the cockroaches are already here, they are many, and there will be hell to pay.”

“If you really can see into the future,” Ryan said, leaning close to her, “then explain it to us in detail.”

Sirena shook her head. “Even if I went over it minute by minute, it wouldn’t help you. Preparations are a waste of precious time. I’ve lived with the doomie sight since I was your boy’s age, and I know this for a certain fact—no one can change the course of what will be. My advice to all of you is to enjoy each passing moment as if it were your last.”

“In other words,” Mildred said, “we’re going to suffer and die, but be sure and have a nice day. That’s all she’s going to tell us? Why are we listening to this hogwash?”

“I heartily agree,” Doc said. “Might I suggest that our ‘passing moments’ might be more enjoyably spent away from the confines of this cramped and stinking hovel.”

“You got that right, Doc,” J.B. agreed.

As they began filing from the hut, Sirena called out, “Wait, young Cawdor! Before you go, I have a gift for you.”

From under the translucent cape, she produced a slim six-inch bone dagger in a skin sheath.

Dean immediately glanced at his father, who indicated his permission with a curt nod of his head. The boy approached the old woman and took the dagger from her. There was no cross guard or pommel. The handle was wrapped with strips of scratchy fish skin. Unsheathing the blade, he carefully tested its serrated edge on the back of his thumbnail. “Demon sharp!” he said.

“It’s made from the tip of a catfish dorsal spine,” Sirena said. “It will fit nicely into the top of your right boot.”

Dean tried it. The blade and sheath disappeared completely. “I can hardly feel it’s there,” he said. “Thanks.”

Sirena reached out and seized his wrist in a grip that was amazingly strong. “I could have told you your future,” she said, “and your children’s future, too, if you’d just sat on my lap.”

“Mebbe you could,” the boy said, jerking his hand away. “And mebbe I don’t want to know that bad.”