When Skip reached the junction where the rocky path rejoined the marked trail, Oliver and the others were nowhere in sight. Spotting the golf cart by the side of the path was like seeing an old friend-if only the key had been in the ignition. Skip vaguely remembered having left it there, but with five hundred mikes of windowpane short-circuiting his synapses, fine points like that were scarcely worth the energy it took to process them.
So he continued up the trail on foot, leaning proudly on his fine, stout staff, while the universe throbbed slowly and majestically around him, gnong-gnong-gnong, like somebody’d struck an invisible gong the size of the moon. Through breaks in the patchy overhead canopy, the sky took on a bubblegum pink glow. An exquisite hush fell over the forest. Listening for the farthest sound, Skip heard the distant, dying echoes of a silvery bell.Ring it again, he thought, leaning on his staff, cupping his ear, and turning like a radar dish. Obediently, the bell rang again, faintly. By the third ring, Skip had oriented his body in the direction of the ringing-say, two o’clock, if twelve o’clock was straight ahead-and veered off the trail to follow the sound through the woods.
The going was slow and difficult.If only I had a machete, Skip thought, clubbing back the hungry branches and hindering brush with his walking stick. Then he had to laugh at himself.As long as you’re wishing, why not wish for a backhoe?
Skip almost turned back a few times. All that drove him on was his determination to find the others, warn them, somehow get them to safety. Or should he disperse them instead, send them scattering into the woods in a game of mortal hide-and-go-seek?Pender would know what to do, thought Skip-then he remembered that Pender was stretched out in the middle of the Omphalos with an arrow sticking out of his side.
“I’m sorry,” he said aloud, tears blurring his vision as he stumbled onward through the sharp-shadowed, green-gold maze of the forest at sunset, stopping only to wipe the sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of his zippered jacket. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking- Oh. Wow. Far out.”
In his blundering, Skip had finally intercepted a well-trodden path that led uphill toward the spooky chanting sound that he’d been listening to for some time without actually hearing it-or was it the other way around?
Didn’t matter. All that mattered now was following the path until it opened out onto a rocky, arrowhead-shaped bluff where his new friends sat in a semicircle with their backs to him, chanting “Vaj-ra, Vaj-ra, Vaj-ra” as the sun sank behind a jagged, tree-lined ridge.
The western sky was streaked with every red, yellow, and orange color in the Crayola box-the big box-and the air was still and green as Skip crossed the bluff and knelt behind the massive, white-clad figure in the middle of the semicircle. “Glad you could make it,” Oliver said over his shoulder as the others continued the chant. “Where’s Ed?”
“Dead,” Skip whispered urgently, his voice sounding slow and wobbly in his ears, like a half-melted audiotape. “Asmador shot him with an arrow. We need to get everybody out of here right now.”
“Calm down, son,” whispered Oliver. Then, louder, “It’s all right, everybody. Just keep chanting while Skip and I have a chat.” He rose so nimbly from his half-lotus position that he appeared to have levitated, took Skip firmly by the elbow, and led him away from the others. “Now listen to me, Skip,” he said, gently, insistently. “You need to know that you’ve taken some LSD and you’re probably having some hallucinations.”
Oh lordy, thought Skip.How do I make this real to him? Where do I even begin? “I know I’m tripping. I’m tripping my freakin’ brains out.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Please, man, would you please stop treating me like I’m fucking retarded. There is danger. It’s real, it’s really, really real.”
“I hear you, Skip,” said Oliver. “I want you to know I hear you, and I understand the danger seems real, but-”
“Luke Sweet.”
Under other circumstances, Oliver’s jaw-dropping, eye-popping double take would have been comical. “Luke Sweet?”
And now that I’ve got your attention, thought Skip. “Listen up, here’s the deal…”
However long it took for Skip to get the whole story out (by then the whole concept of time seemed like a bad joke the universe had decided to play upon the human race), when he’d finished, Oliver nodded decisively, turned on his sandaled heels, and hurried back to the semicircle of sunset chanters.
“Svaha,” he shouted, clapping his hands together loudly, then spreading them outward in benediction. “Good job, everybody. What I need all of you to do now, I need you to head back to the Center. Steve, if you wouldn’t mind leading the way? And Candace, if you’d follow to make sure no one falls behind?”
“What about you, O?” Stahl seemed to realize that something was wrong-but then, he was tripping his freakin’ brains out, too. They all were.
“Skip and I will catch up,” Oliver said reassuringly.
“Catch up, we will?” whispered Skip, channeling Yoda for some reason. The color was beginning to drain from the sky; the trainees were wandering about, dazedly gathering up their things.
Oliver shrugged. “You did say we’re the ones this Asmador is after, didn’t you? No sense putting the others in jeopardy along with us.”
Skip was impressed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I know, that’s my job.” Oliver rested his smooth, pink hand on Skip’s shoulder. “It’s a shepherd thing.”
By then, the two were alone on the bluff-Oliver’s flock had disappeared into the woods, scampering blithely down the trail Skip had just come up, and singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a ragged round. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream…
No shit, thought Skip. Then he must have spaced out for a while, because the next thing he knew, he was being jerked back to what passed for consciousness by a great commotion-stampeding footsteps, crackling brush, people shouting, sobbing. He turned in time to see the trainees boiling out of the woods in a panicky, tangled mass, looking back over their shoulders as they ran, stumbling and falling over one another, their orange clothes pale apricot in the fading light.
Last out were George and Candace; between them they were hauling Steve Stahl by the arms. His body was limp, his bare heels were scraped and bleeding from dragging the rocky ground, and sticking out from the chest of his royal blue shirt was an aluminum shaft with feathers on one end and blood on the other.