Four Summoners Tales Part 34

Or maybe it is a prayer, he thought. Maybe it always is.

"Come on, Savannah," he said, slapping his hands together and moving to stand only a foot away from her, face-to-face. "Come on, bud!"

His hands were empty. Frowning, he turned to search for the pipe. When he'd thrown up, he must have tossed it aside. No, no. Where the f.u.c.k are you? he thought as he scanned the floor until he located it. He'd worried that he might have broken it, but the pipe seemed intact. He stared at it, turning it over in his hands.

The night before, he had begun to experiment with the tune that Enoch had taught them. Lester had suggested that they work together, that he bring his son, Josh, over to Zeke's ranch and they practice how to influence their children with Enoch's pipes. Zeke had refused.What they were doing was both a miracle and an obscenity, and either way it was too intimate to share.

His hands and arms and back still hurt from digging up Savannah's grave. His muscles had burned as he'd thrown himself into the work, numbing his mind and heart so he would not let horror stop him, knowing she must have awakened down there in the cold ground along with the others. But he hadn't really believed it until he had used the shovel to smash the casket's lock and then pried open the lid and seen her moving, milky eyes staring blindly through the webbing of thread that had been used to sew her eyes shut.The thread had torn loose, her ripped eyelids almost instantly healing.A corpse, to be sure-she already looked so much better than she had last night-but a corpse resurrected.

Zeke had screamed, then, but not in fear or horror. He'd screamed out the pain and grief of her death and dragged her up into his arms and sat there cradling her inside her grave, whispering to her, promising her that he would do anything to bring her back to him, all the way back to him. She had been the light in his life, the sun around which his heart and soul revolved.

He would do anything.

Once he had more or less mastered the notes Enoch had taught them to play, he had put her into his truck and brought her home, cleaning her hands and face and feet but not willing to change her clothes. Eventually he would take off her dress and put her in a pair of jeans and a sweats.h.i.+rt and boots, but not yet, because he didn't want to see the wounds on her chest and back where the bullets had entered and left her body.They'd have been sewn up, but he didn't want to see. Enoch said the wounds would heal, and so he wanted to give her a little more time.

"Time," he whispered now, standing in the stable. Zeke took a breath.Time was really the only thing of value in the world- time to live, time to be with the ones you loved.

Stuffing the pipe into his pocket, he turned away from Savannah's catatonia and went to the vacant horse stall into which he'd seen the cat disappear. Zeke unlatched the door and dragged it open. Tony had curled into a pad of hay in one corner and jumped up as he entered. As Zeke approached, the mouser tried to bolt past him, but Zeke had been wrangling cats in the ranch's old buildings since he could walk and s.n.a.t.c.hed Tony up before he could escape.

The cat struggled, but Zeke carried him out of the stall and over to Savannah. He knew that he was supposed to use the pipe. Enoch had made it clear to all of them that it would be days before any of the dead could think clearly enough to direct their own actions.Their brains were not working properly.The ritual Enoch had taught them made it possible for others to give them direction, as if the notes the pipers played turned on some kind of motor inside them and the words of the pipers were their navigation.

Zeke wanted to believe it. He needed to believe that there was a happy ending, because having Savannah back like this was worse than having her dead.Anarosa would have cursed him for it. He could endure it if he could accept Enoch's promises, but in order for him to have that kind of faith, he needed just one glimpse of the future, one hint of awareness in Savannah's eyes to prove that she was still in there.

"Look, bud," he said. "It's Tony the Tiger. Remember him? Remember when Ginger had her kittens? She hid under the stable but you heard the mewling and you were the one who found them.You were such a big girl and when I told you that you could have one you knew right away it had to be Tony the Tiger. Remember the bows you wore when you-"

Zeke took a step closer to Savannah.The cat hissed and clawed his arms and he swore and dropped the beast. It raced the length of the stable and out the door, a rare excursion. It knows, Zeke thought, his stomach dropping. Even the d.a.m.n cat can see this is unnatural. It's wrong.

"G.o.d, what have I done?" he whispered, hanging his head in the shadows.

The noise might have been the creak of a beam or the s.h.i.+fting of one of the other horses, but it sounded to him like a soft moan, deep in his daughter's throat. He whipped his head around and stared at her, catching his breath as an impossible hope emerged like sunrise within him.

Savannah had not moved. Her gaze remained vacant and distant.

But there were tears on her face, streaking the dry, waxy skin of her cheeks.

"Bud?" he ventured.

Nothing. No reaction. But the tears were hope enough.

"All right," he said, nodding firmly. "All right."

He dug out the pipe and began to play.

6 It was late the following afternoon when they boarded a school bus Lester had arranged to borrow from the city of Hidalgo. Faded yellow, with no working heat or air and windows that didn't close all the way, the bus seemed the relic of another era, but it would serve their purposes. They gathered at the Vickers ranch, dust rising from the cars and trucks that made their way up the road. People parked in a fallow field, lining up their vehicles the way they would for the state fair.

The sun beat down as if it were early summer instead of the dregs of a haunted Texas winter. Zeke sat in the fifth row on the driver's side. He'd taken the aisle and given Savannah the window, but she made no effort to look out through the gla.s.s or turn away from the glare of the setting sun. He had changed her into blue jeans and high-top sneakers and a thick cotton T-s.h.i.+rt that hung loosely on her so as not to draw attention to the hole in her chest.The s.h.i.+rt had a sparkly design on it and he thought she might have borrowed it from her friend Imogene, who'd loved such things but hadn't laid claim to it after Savannah's death, either because she didn't know how to ask or because she thought it might carry some of Savannah's bad luck.

As he had undressed her, Zeke had kept expecting to feel embarra.s.sed. His little girl had been evolving into a young woman and had all the hallmarks of that transition, and fathers weren't supposed to see their girls unclothed past a certain age. But fathers weren't supposed to see their little girls dead, either. Instead of making him blush, her nudity only made him want to weep at her fragility.Without him blowing notes on the pipe, Savannah lay there and let him do all of the work, but he didn't mind. He had changed her and bathed her and held her when fever and sickness had seized her.This was his daughter, and he would walk through the fires of h.e.l.l for her.

As the last of the pipers arrived, the bus remained eerily silent. The dead did not speak and the living had nothing to say. Like Zeke, either from fear or shame, they barely made eye contact with one another. Linda Trevino sat several rows ahead of him, keeping up a constant stream of whispered endearments to her dead son. Zeke could barely breathe, watching her. Waiting for Ben to move.To reply.

"Okay, bud," Zeke whispered, turning to look at Savannah. He touched her chin and turned her to face him, noting a momentary alertness in her eyes. She had focused on him. Just for a moment, but he would take it. "We're just going for a little ride."

Enoch stood out in the road, a little man who somehow managed to look smaller with every glance. He carried a small leather bag that hung from his shoulder as if he were a college professor instead of some kind of hoodoo man, and Zeke knew that his own pipe must have been inside that bag. Aaron Monteforte moved toward the bus, playing those now-familiar discordant notes on his pipe, walking with his sister, Trish. Like Savannah's, Trish's death wounds were hidden by her clothing. If not for her complexion and the utter lack of expression, she might have been alive-just another twentysomething South Texas girl waiting for her life to really begin.

Zeke took Savannah's hand and tried not to be disheartened by the lack of any confirming squeeze from her. Time, he thought. Give it time.

People began to s.h.i.+ft in their seats, some craning around to look out the windows of one final vehicle coming down the long, dusty drive. Zeke had been counting and knew there were forty-two people already on the bus, twenty-one dead and an equal number of those who had followed Enoch's ritual to resurrect them-the ones Zeke thought of as pipers and Vickers called proxies.

Music drifted to them, a thumping, cras.h.i.+ng rhythm that started low and grew louder as the car approached. In the front seat,Vickers moved his considerable bulk and leaned over Martha-whose dented forehead throbbed like a newborn's fontanel-to look out at the car roaring up his driveway.

The music blared from the open windows of Alma Hawkins's little Volkswagen as it pulled to a stop forty feet from the bus. Big Tim looked absurd sitting in the pa.s.senger seat, jammed in and hunched over. Zeke recognized the music only because the deputy had tried to convert the whole town over to his love for the Dropkick Murphys. It wasn't the sort of thing Zeke could ever have enjoyed-headache-inducing stuff-but he figured if anything would get through the fog that clouded the minds of the returned dead, it would be that kind of jarring noise.

Big Tim didn't seem to notice. His wife came around the pa.s.senger side of her VW and opened the door. Her pregnant belly hung low as she bent to coax him from the car.Alma Hawkins looked pale, almost corpselike herself. Big Tim had a chunk missing out of the side of his face, but a kind of dry crust that was more like papier-mche than flesh had begun to fill in the hole.

"Thank G.o.d," someone said, a few rows behind Zeke. In the second row, just behind Vickers,Arturo Sanchez turned to stare into the back, looking just as pale as the revived dead.

"Please . . . ," he said. "I beg you, let that be the last time any of us mentions G.o.d tonight."

No one spoke. What could we say? Zeke thought.

With Monteforte and Alma Hawkins playing their pipes, they directed their beloved dead onto the bus and arranged them in the remaining seats. Enoch was the last to board. When he did, Vickers rose and offered up his place, which Enoch took while Vickers dropped his considerable bulk into the driver's seat.

"You all know the plan," Vickers said. "We're only going to get one chance."

The bus choked and then roared as he started it, coughing gray smoke out of the exhaust.Vickers drove the bus out to the gates of his ranch and turned south.

Out on the road, beyond the fence that lined his property, a couple of dozen cars were parked on either side and fifty or sixty people had gathered to watch them go. Enoch would allow the dead only one proxy apiece, but many had other family members who would have gladly taken the job.

Dressed in mourning clothes, they stood along the road and prayed, some with rosary beads and others hand-in-hand. Some held up photographs of the dead, back in their living years, and Zeke did not allow himself to focus on those pictures. He did not want to compare them to the pale, withered creatures riding on the bus with him.