The Burning

Angela listened to the lectures and took notes, but though she knew Derek was right, that real life went on and after all this insanity was over they would have to resume their ordinary existence, the information she copied into her notebook seemed trivial and unimportant. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make it seem anything less than frivolous in a brave new world filled with living corpses and alien mold.

The English class got out early, and Angela rode with the herd down the stairs, out of the Humanities Building and into the quad, where a crowd of people seemed to be milling about the far end, others from the periphery and from just-released classes joining the throng. Was it a concert, a rally, a speech? She started across the open space to see for herself, but as she drew closer her gait slowed. The mood here seemed not festive or intellectually engaged but angry and emotionally charged. She held back even as others ran forward, rushing toward the center of the action. Someone unseen was yelling words she could not make out, inciting the crowd, and at every lull in his speech, a roar of approval would issue from those in the front.

There was a huge cheer as a dancing woman seemed to levitate above the crowd, and for a brief moment Angela thought it was part of some magic show. Then she saw that the woman was not rising in the air and dancing; she was being hoisted by a rope tied around her neck. Her body thrashed about as the tightening rope was pulled over the limb of a pine tree.

It was Edna Wong.

Angela gasped audibly and nearly fell over. Nearby students turned to look at her, and on their faces she saw mingled expressions of disgust and satisfaction.

Edna was kicking her feet crazily, trying to gain purchase, though she was already more than ten feet in the air. Her fingers clutched at the noose around her neck, and the wild expression on her face was one of terror and incomprehension. Angela had never seen anything so awful, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, a cry from the depths of her soul, pushing her way through the assembled students toward the front of the crowd, shoving a cheering blond girl to the ground in a desperate instinctive effort to save the old woman.

Edna was jerking spasmodically, arms flailing, legs kicking out and back like those of a cancan girl, no longer making even a token effort to save herself- The crowd laughed as urine and excrement dropped from under the housing administrator's legs, her bladder voiding, her bowels evacuating as she died.

"No!" Angela cried.

"That'll teach you, you slant-eyed slut!" someone shouted in a thick New York accent. Angela saw a skinny student with a huge halo of hair tying the end of the rope to the trunk of the pine tree. She recognized him from her first day here. He'd walked by the housing office while she'd been waiting in line.

The throng cheered.

Now that she was in the midst of it, she saw black fuzzy patches on girls' blouses and on boys' pants, dark mold growing on arms and necks and cheeks. It was like being at a zombie rally, and while she was scared, she was more angry, and she started screaming at the people around her. "What are you doing? Murderers!"

A goateed guy next to her turned, his face contorted with hate, his hands balled into fists. "You stay out of it, you stupid brown bitch!"

Derek socked him in the stomach.

She didn't know where he had come from or how he had found her, but she was grateful he was here. Before the goateed guy could get up off the ground or the people around him could come to his assistance, Derek grabbed her hand and they were running, shoving their way through the crowd, elbowing people aside, making their way toward the parking lot and safety.

What had happened? How had it started? Where were the campus police? Angela's mind raced, bogged down with the impossible logistics of such a lynching, but no matter how she imagined the scenario, she could not seem to make the pieces fit. She and Derek broke free of the crowd and dashed between the two science buildings, circling back around on the outer sidewalk to the south parking lot. They were both completely out of breath from running, and with no one pursuing them, they slowed to a tired shuffle as they passed between the cars to Derek's Hyundai.

"It was Edna Wong," Angela said numbly. "They-"

"I know. I saw."

"So what do we do now?"

"Tell the police."

"And if they don't do anything ... ?"

It was a very real possibility, and discouraged, disheartened and demoralized, neither of them said another word until they were in the car and out of the parking lot, heading up the highway past Bookmans.

Before them, above the city, rose the majestic San Francisco Peaks, and in every direction the deep blue sky was as big as it was purported to be in Montana, but Angela still felt trapped and claustrophobic, as though she were in a room with walls closing in on her. This was the last straw. She could not stay here anymore. She needed to go back to Los Angeles, although at the moment even that teeming metropolis did not seem safe. It would be only a matter of time before Flagstaff was taken over. And then the rest of Arizona. And then California.

But at least it would take a while to get that far. And maybe, in the meantime, Dr. Mathewson or someone else would figure out a solution and it would all be over.

Unless she was a carrier.

Maybe that's what had happened. Maybe she was the cause of it all. Maybe she was spreading the mold.

No, she refused to let herself think that way.

But she couldn't help it. She imagined her friends turning on her, calling her a stupid brown bitch, saw in her mind's eye her mother's kitchen and her father's workroom overrun with fuzzy black mold.

For the first time, she understood the utter hopelessness felt by people who considered suicide.

They went under the train tracks and around the curve. Humphreys Street was blocked off for some reason, so Derek continued on to the next stoplight and turned left, intending to take Aspen to the police station.

"Stop the car!" Angela screamed. "Oh, my God!"

Derek slammed on the brakes, and the Hyundai slid a few inches to the right as it stopped in the middle of the street.

The car was stopped half a block in front of the hotel where she'd gone with Dr. Welkes' class.

And they were coming out of it.

The corpses from the tunnel.

Crawling, limping, sliding, pulling themselves forward with skeletal arms, broken legs dragging uselessly behind them, they emerged into the sunlight. It was a vision from a nightmare, all the more horrifying and unbelievable because it was happening in the middle of the day while smartly dressed women and business-suited men walked down the sidewalk from their offices to the restaurants where they intended to eat lunch.

"Jesus Christ," Derek said, throwing the car into reverse and backing up on the one-way street.

Angela kept her eyes focused on the scene through the front windshield, even as it began to recede. She saw men and women turn and run away the second they saw the skeletal figures moving across the sidewalk and onto the street, saw cars come to screeching halts, saw curious people emerge from stores and restaurants to find out for themselves what was happening.

A tall mummified man dressed in rotted rags shambled across the street, like something out of an old horror movie.

Someone must have called the police, because sirens suddenly sounded, growing instantly louder, and Derek backed the car into an open space at the corner of the block just as four patrol cars, lights flashing, sped by. She wanted to see what they were going to do-Try and capture the corpses? Start blasting away with their guns?-but Edna was dead and swinging from a tree in the center of campus, murdered by a gang of crazed students, and that had to be their priority. Derek must have faced the same dilemma because he looked at her quizzically, as though wondering which was to go. She said, "Edna," and he nodded, taking the car around the corner and going up to the next street so he could drive straight to the police station.

The place was a madhouse. Two police cars and two motorcycles rolled past them, lights and sirens on, as the Hyundai tried to pull into the small visitors' lot, and they had to jockey for a space with four other civilian vehicles whose drivers all seemed desperate to report something.

"I think those cops were heading south," Derek said. "Toward the school."

"We'll find out."

The only parking space left was a handicapped spot, and Derek pulled right in, parking between the blue lines. "Limp," he suggested drily.

They got out and hurried through the front door into the station's lobby, where at least a dozen men and women, although mostly men, were lined up in front of the counter and noisily declaiming their reasons for being here to all who would listen. One couple, incongruously young, looked like they could be college students, and Angela wondered if they, too, were here to report the lynching.

Lynching.

She never thought that was a word she'd be using outside of a historical context. She tried not to think about the look of agony and abject terror on Edna's face as the doomed woman tried to claw at the noose around her neck.

She wondered if Chrissie had been in that crowd somewhere. And Winston and Brock.

She hoped not.

A blue-uniformed officer emerged from a side door and stood before the front counter, hands raised. "Ladies and gentlemen! If you are here to report the incident on Aspen, we already know about it and have officers on the scene. The situation is under control. If you are here to report on the incidents at NAU or Flag High, we are aware of those, too, and our men are on it."

Incidents?

Angela looked at the young couple. The girl was now sobbing on the boy's shoulders. They weren't college students, she realized. They were high school students.

What had happened at the high school?

She was not sure she wanted to know.

Nearly all of the people, with visible relief, were heading outside, but Angela, holding tightly to Derek's hand, remained and moved to the front of the room. The officer behind the counter looked at them as they approached. "Yes?"

"We were at NAU and then we were on Aspen Avenue, so we saw both ... incidents," she said. "But I just thought you should know that they're both probably connected. There's this mold that-"

"Oh, that was you who reported that," he said, eyebrows raised in surprise. "Thank you. We were already operating on that assumption with Aspen. Obviously. The officers at the high school and college are aware of it, too. Just in case it's a factor. I don't know if Sergeant Sandidge ever got back to you, but we quarantined the apartment house on State Street and called in the CDC, which apparently one of the NAU professors had already done. I assume you talked to him?"

They both nodded.

"Well, someone from Atlanta should be here today. Possibly someone from the FBI. We're on this."

"Thank God," Angela breathed. Already she felt better.

There were still two men standing in front of the counter, one talking to the uniformed female cadet at the desk, another waiting to talk to Angela's officer. "Excuse me," he said. "We're a little overwhelmed right now. Unless there's anything else ... ?"

"No," Derek said. "Thanks for your time."

The two of them went outside, where the visitors' lot was quickly emptying. The Hyundai did not have a ticket for parking in the handicapped spot-cops definitely had higher priorities right now-and they got in, Derek starting the engine. "Let's see where they are," Angela said.

She did not even have to explain what she meant. "I was thinking the same thing," Derek said. He turned onto Aspen, planning to head back the way they'd come, but several streets ahead they could see red and blue flashing lights and striped barricades cordoning off the block containing the hotel, so he drove down to the highway, intending to come at it from another angle. There was a traffic jam on the old Route 66, however, cars and trucks completely stationary in front of them, and Derek pulled into a Wells Fargo parking lot and backtracked to an alley, driving between the old buildings toward the hotel.

There were neither sawhorses nor police cars blocking the alley on any of the side streets, and they crossed Beaver and Leroux without interference before hanging a left on the street in front of the barricades. They could have continued down the alley, entering the hotel parking lot the back way, but obviously the sight of those animated corpses had frightened Derek as much as her and he did not want to get too close to them.

Thank God.

But ... where were they?

And what had happened to the police? And the people?

Derek slowed the car as they passed by the barricades. The lights of the patrol cars were on and flashing, but it appeared at first as though the cops had run away or disappeared. Then Angela saw them, along with the onlookers who had come out from the various stores, offices and restaurants. They were lying on the ground, their faces covered with black mold that had started to creep onto the asphalt and cement beneath their dead bodies.

"No," she said, shaking her head. Her voice was small and frightened. "No. No ..."

"Where did they go?" Derek asked. His voice was louder but just as scared. He stopped the car for a moment, so they could look, but nothing was moving on the street or sidewalk. There were only the bodies of the policemen and the onlookers dead on the ground.

And then a desiccated corpse jumped out from the open hotel door and landed on all fours, its head swiv-eling around like that of a demented lion searching out prey. Angela screamed, but the windows were up and the creature couldn't hear her. If it even could hear. Naked and brown, it was so dry and emaciated that even its sex could not be determined, and its ears either had been cut off or had shrunk so small that they could not be seen. The corpse jumped again, this time into the street, hopping over the blackening body of a policeman, then past a dead woman in a red dress, then down a walkway between a frozen-yogurt shop and a travel agency.

"Follow it!" Angela ordered. She was terrified, but from some inner reserve came a strength of purpose that trumped her fear. There was no one afive here but them. If they didn't track this creature, the monsters would get away and no one would know where they were.

Monsters.

It was amazing how quickly such a childish word had become part of her lexicon, how fast her mind had adapted to a world in which there were monsters.

She could see that Derek wanted to argue, that he didn't want to go, but she shouted at him again to follow the escaping corpse, and with squealing tires he swung the car around and rolled down the street parallel to the track that the mummified body had taken. They looked between buildings, down the alley, between more buildings, down a street, until they finally saw the rotted carcass jumping out from behind a soap boutique. Even from this far away, the sight was terrifying and disturbing.

"I think it's headed for the highway," Derek said, speeding up. There was still a massive traffic jam ahead of them, but he stopped only for a second at the corner, then turned left, going east on a westbound lane.

Angela cringed instinctively, and one car heading toward them honked as it switched lanes and passed by on the right, but there were remarkably few vehicles on the road, and Angela saw that it was because a multicar collision had blocked the westbound highway about a mile up ahead.

At about the same spot where the eastbound traffic jam started.

She didn't like that.

Derek slowed the Hyundai and stopped, and only a few yards in front of them the corpse leaped out, jumping across the highway between the cars and toward the adjacent railroad tracks. It was impossible to see where it went after that, so Derek quickly shifted the transmission to park, got out of the car and climbed onto the hood so he could see over the other vehicles. He hopped down almost immediately and got back in. "It's heading down the tracks, not over them."

He put the car in gear and continued eastward. A few other drivers had broken ranks and were driving on the wrong side of the highway as well, but Derek remained in the left lane in an attempt to avoid them as much as possible.

"Where do you think the other-?" Angela began.

And then she saw it.

A black train on the tracks.

How could they have not noticed it immediately upon entering the highway? Not only were the engine and its dark cars large and clearly visible above the line of vehicles on the road, but they were decidedly unusual, though not for a reason that was readily ascertainable.

Maybe the train hadn't been there before.

That was a definite possibility. Indeed, there was an air of otherworldliness about the train, a phantom aspect. The locomotive and its railroad cars seemed strangely fuzzy and indistinct, as though made from a material not familiar to the human eye.

They reached the end of the traffic jam, another multivehicle collision, and it was instantly apparent that both accidents had occurred this close together so as to provide the corpses from the tunnel a safe corridor they could use to cross the highway.

There seemed to be a lot more of them now than there had been in that one underground passage. Edna Wong had said there were other hidden sites around Flagstaff that had been built to provide sanctuary, and Angela wondered if they were emptying out, too, if the train had arrived for them as well, some undetectable whistle from the locomotive calling them forth. For although many of the ambulatory dead were undoubtedly on the train already, she could see others atop the gravel embankment, the decaying twisted bodies making their freakish way toward open doorways in the black cars. It had been a sunny day, but clouds now blocked the sun, and though the clouds were white, they still cast a dark shadow over the city below. The corpses' tattered remnants of clothing fluttered in the slight breeze.

Down the tracks, the mummified figure they'd seen hopping out of the hotel leaped into sight.

"We have to follow the train," Angela said. She knew instinctively that if they were ever to find any answers, if they were going to get to the bottom of all that had been happening lately, they had to see this through. The dead were leaving for a reason, and where they were going might tell her what she needed to know. "How much gas do you have?"

"Half a tank."

"Fill up fast." She looked down the highway for an open station.

"I have to get my mom and my brother. I can't leave them here. Not with everything that's going on."

Angela understood-and agreed-but they would have to do it fast or they might lose the train. There was no telling when it might leave.

Derek was already speeding around the crash and the gaping spectators who'd been the victims of it; he intended to cross the tracks at the next intersection and circle back around to his neighborhood. Angela took out her cell phone, dialing 911, and as he zigzagged through the back roads of Flagstaff, she told the dispatcher about the dead police and the fleeing corpses. She didn't expect to be believed, but they'd find out the truth when they sent someone out to investigate. She wasn't sure how many other officers the Flagstaff Police Department had, but if they needed to take cops off another case, she hoped it would be from the high school and not from NAU. Edna deserved at least that much respect.

They drove fast, took shortcuts, wasted no time, but it was still fifteen minutes before they returned. Although Derek's mom had a rough understanding of some of what was going on, he decided on the way over to tell his family nothing of today's events. The truth would take too long to explain. He'd simply ask them to get into the car because there was something he wanted to show them. He hoped aloud that his brother, Steve, was home, that they wouldn't have to hunt him down at school or at some friend's house, but they got lucky on that count and he was just arriving home from a minimum day, being dropped off by a friend's mom, when they pulled up in the driveway.

There was no packing or gathering of possessions. Having driven to Derek's house, they picked up his mom and brother and drove back.

But as Angela had known, as she'd feared, the train was gone by the time they returned, although black smoke still hovered in the air above the tracks. No police, fire trucks or ambulances had responded to the accidents, and Good Samaritans were helping two crash victims who appeared to be injured. Everyone else was kind of milling around in a daze, looks of stunned incomprehension on their faces.

There'd been no talking in the car, but Angela could tell that Derek's mother had been getting more and more suspicious, and now she said, "What's going on here? What did you bring us out to see?"

Derek didn't answer but stopped the car and jumped out, leaving his door open. "Where did it go?" he demanded of the people closest by. "The train? North or east?"

The smoke smelled foul. Brimstone, Angela thought. From hell.

"I think it forked off toward Page!" someone shouted.

"Follow the smoke!" another man suggested.

That was a good idea, Angela thought. Derek obviously thought so, too, because he was back in the car seconds later and driving toward Flagstaff Mall.

"What is going on?" Derek's mom demanded. "Where are you taking us?"

"North," he said.

Twenty-five

Washington, D.C.

Rossiter stared out at the cubicles in front of his office, trying to digest what he'd learned.

On the desk was a volume of the unexpurgated memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. He'd known, of course, that presidents' memoirs and diaries were sanitized, their words edited and bowdlerized for public consumption, ostensibly for reasons of "national security," but he'd been surprised to learn that he'd needed top top secret clearance in order to view a manuscript so old. What in God's name, he'd wondered, could possibly be in there?

He'd found out quickly enough. The drunken old bastard had written down far more than he should have, had spilled the beans about a brutal massacre that had occurred in the Utah territory in which scores of innocent civilians had been killed by U.S. troops for no apparent reason. The president had gotten involved after the fact, directing the cover-up like a military operation, a tactic so successful that no mention of it had ever been made anywhere by anyone involved-except here. But Grant was maddeningly vague about the location of the slaughter or the ostensible reason it had occurred.

Ordinarily, the cover-up was worse than the crime. But in this case, that was obviously not so.

"/ most regret the incidents in emulation," Grant wrote.

/ have no means of knowing how news of the Massacre could have reached the ears of others, but it is plain to me that it has. My emissaries tell me that it is impossible to judge how many have been killed in these like-minded attacks, and though the victims be heathens and infidels, killing without cause is ever wrong.

Heathens and infidels.

It was the only clue Rossiter had as to the identity of the victims, and since vast sections of the nation were at that time uninhabited by Christians or Europeans, particularly in the West, it didn't exactly narrow down the field.

He was not one to scoff at curses and ghosts and retribution from beyond the grave, not after what he'd seen, not after Wolf Canyon. And he could understand why Grant might be targeted, why his tomb might be desecrated and his body defiled. It tied in as well with all those Civil War dead who'd been disinterred and tossed about Arlington National Cemetery. Even the White House might be fair game for vindictive spirits out to avenge a massacre.

But how did that relate to the other unexplained incidents that were happening all over the country?

The latest was at Mount Rushmore, where twin lines had been carved on the faces of the presidents, as though a giant with a switchblade had slashed twice across the stone.

Or a train had driven sideways across the mountain.

For that was the first thing he thought when he saw the photos: train tracks. Although since that was all he'd been thinking about for the past three days, such an interpretation was probably to be expected.

Grant's head wasn't carved on Rushmore, though. So what was the connection?

And what was the significance of trains in all this?

Everything was confusing; nothing quite fit together. He was already taking heat from all the president's men for not putting this mystery to rest. The leader of the free world needed to be able to focus on a whole range of important issues that were coming to a head, the chief of staff said. But instead he was obsessing over the attack on the White House to the virtual exclusion of everything else.

As well he should, Rossiter thought.

He pressed a key on his desktop PC and the image of a train, generated from data extracted from damage to the White House and analyses of shatter patterns, appeared on-screen. The president was right. Whatever had crashed through the building may have been invisible, but it was definitely a locomotive. Rossiter pressed another key and the angle shifted, offering a three-dimensional view of the CGI train. He'd contacted railroad experts from all over the country, hoping someone would be able to identify the engine, assuming they would recognize it as one that had been in use during Grant's tenure, between 1869 and 1877. But either the computer model was flawed or the information it had been fed was contradictory, because no one recognized it. The picture looked like a typical train to him, but he was assured by a whole host of scholars and railroad professionals that it did not resemble any known locomotive.

Rossiter found that troubling.

The press had been successfully kept away from Arlington and Grant's Tomb, and were buying the cover story about the White House, but reporters were all over Mount Rushmore, and it was probably only a matter of time before the lid blew off everything and he found himself hip-deep in dog shit.

News was starting to come in from a variety of sources, and he had a whole team of agents sifting through information both new and old, trying to find connections and correlations. A lot of it was useless and had no bearing on anything, but some of it was pertinent to the investigation and he wanted to make sure nothing was overlooked. There was, for example, a report that some sort of phantom train had appeared in Zion, Canyonlands or one of those other Utah national parks. That was something that called for further investigation.

It had to be something that bore a grudge against the United States, he thought, because it was targeting not just relics from the Civil War era but buildings and land owned collectively by everyone in the country, like national parks. Whatever it was, it was not after a specific person or place; it was attacking the most potent symbols of the entire nation.

The screen on his monitor suddenly turned red, the picture disappearing, and a loud shrill beeping issued from the speakers.

There'd been an attack on the White House.

The instant his brain recognized the thought and realized what was happening, a live camera shot of the White House appeared. He felt as though he'd been punched in the gut. A huge gaping hole, almost as high as the building itself, had been punched in the structure, nearly cleaving it in half, and chunks of debris from the sides of the opening continued to be knocked out and thrown forward as if some great invisible force was tunneling through the building.

A train.

He knew it without question.

The White House was the most heavily secured and monitored building on the planet, so at the click of a mouse he could access literally dozens of hidden cameras located in each and every office, gallery, library and bedroom. But this situation was a first-nothing even remotely comparable had ever happened before- and without consulting a two-hundred-page instruction manual, he did not know how to call up the views from specific rooms, so Rossiter palmed his mouse and hurriedly clicked from one camera to another, scrolling through the progressive scenes, trying to catch up to the train. A program designed by some computer whiz specifically for a situation like this sorted the shots by order of incident, so the first section of the building hit was followed by the next affected area and the next and the next, allowing him to chart the progress of the intruder.

Rossiter clicked as fast as he could. All of this was being recorded, but he was watching it in real time and he did not want to miss a second of it as it happened, wanted to see exactly what occurred when it occurred. A microphone from somewhere in the White House captured ambient sound that did not quite match the scenes on his monitor, loud crashes and screaming that were a second or two off and made the video appear dubbed, like a foreign film.

He found the head of the invisible train. It was moving much more slowly than he expected, and he assumed that was because it was pulling to a stop. It crashed through a small office, shattering furniture and light fixtures, people leaping away in front of its unseen mass. One man tripped over a chair and was gruesomely crushed, his body folding in the middle and then splitting open as wheels with the weight of a locomotive behind them cut him in half, blood not merely gushing but shooting out and splattering all over the walls of the room.

There was no way this could be hushed up or hidden. Photos of the White House were going to be on the front page of every newspaper all over the world, video running 24-7 on CNN, Fox and every other news channel on the planet.

But that wasn't his concern. There were teams of people to deal with the press and control the spin. He needed to focus on the facts, not the fallout.

Even as he thought that, though, he couldn't help reflecting that after this there would be universal interest in potential threats from paranormal phenomena and a sudden urgent need for experts in the field, for people who had the ability and the knowledge to combat psychic and supernatural threats.

Like him.

The government and its machine would try to tone down that aspect or eliminate it entirely, might even go so far as to claim that a bomb blast from some terrorist organization was responsible for the damage to the White House. Looking at the video in front of him, such an idea seemed ludicrous, but the American people had been misled before and today's press corps were not nearly as diligent in their sleuthing as their brethren forty years ago had been. They were more likely than not to accept the party line, particularly if the White House handed out "exclusive" photo ops and interviews, passing them out to the various media outlets.

The administration might still pull it off.

Or not. And his career would go into hyperdrive.

Assuming he solved this case.

He pushed all thoughts of public perception and the press from his mind and clicked through real-time shots of each affected room of the White House, looking for the president. If he'd been injured or killed, all bets were off. It would be an entirely different game then.

But there he was as the invisible train began to come to a stop in the Oval Office, taking out one entire wall so the room looked more like a horseshoe than an oval. The president was standing on top of his desk, face red and contorted with rage, screaming what looked to be orders, although the sound of his voice could not be heard through the chaotic noise issuing from the speakers. If this video or a still from it ever made it out of the bureau into the real world, Rossiter thought, the president would look like a complete madman and his political career would go down in flames.

An agent less scrupulous than himself might leak exactly that, once all the furor died down in a few months.

The president was knocked off his desk and fell backward, bouncing off his chair onto the ground, as the train finally came to a complete stop. The rug was torn and bunched up, chairs had been tossed aside and shattered, but the desk had only been pushed a little and was still intact. From behind it, the president rose to his feet. Marine guards and a phalanx of Secret Service agents rushed into the office, followed by the chief of staff, to whom Rossiter grudgingly gave a few points for showing unexpected bravery. They all made sure the president was unharmed, then, against his angry protestations, surrounded him with a human shield.

Everyone seemed to be holding their breath, waiting to see if anything emerged from the invisible train. Ghosts, perhaps. Rossiter was holding his breath as well, and as the minutes passed and nothing happened he grew more and more anxious.

One of the marines stepped forward, bayonet extended, and tentatively tried to touch the unseen engine.

But the weapon passed through open air.

The train was gone.

Twenty-six

In the Passenger Car

The train was moving, traveling, though Dennis couldn't feel it. There was no swaying, no rocking, no sense of motion. Neither the engine nor any of the other cars made a sound. He knew they were on their way to someplace, even if he didn't know where.

He walked through the passenger car, not surprised to find that every seat seemed to be filled. The faces he passed were all Chinese and were all pale and ghostlike. It was what he'd expected, but it was unnerving nonetheless. No one seemed to be looking at him-no one seemed to be looking at anything; they just stared blankly ahead-but he knew they were aware of his presence, and he was acutely self-conscious as he walked past them down the aisle. They envied him his life, and though their faces remained passive, he could sense the resentment rolling off them in waves.

He reached the end of the passenger car and pulled open the metal sliding door to the connecting corridor. Again there was no sound, no movement, and he felt off-balance passing from one car to the next through such a calm, even space.

He slid open the door on the opposite side of the connector. This car was empty. He could have any seat he wished, and he chose one in the center so that he'd be able to see or hear someone approaching him from either direction.

Dennis looked around. Aside from the ghostly passengers in the other car, he might have been on an Amtrak to New York.

No, that wasn't quite true. For outside the windows was a world filled with darkness. And though the floor was now solid beneath his feet, and the doors and seats he'd touched seemed perfectly normal, he could still sense in his fingers, like a tactile memory, the strange, sickeningly organic feel of the handle he'd used to pull himself onto the train and those first few seconds of disgusting springiness beneath his shoes as he'd entered the other passenger car.

Where were they going? he wondered again. This-ghost-train followed no tracks, so theoretically they could be headed anywhere.

The door at the front of the car opened, the one through which he'd entered, and a lone man approached slowly down the aisle. He, too, was Chinese, but he seemed different from the other passengers, more modern in appearance, though he wore strange homemade clothes unlike anything Dennis had ever seen before. His manner was muted and subdued- dead-like the others', but there was an intelligence animating his expression. Or, more accurately, an awareness. And he stood before Dennis and bowed before sitting down next to him.

Dennis moved next to the window. The air from outside felt cold.

"Mr. Chen," the man said. It was a statement, not a question.

He had been summoned. He had been led here. The man knew his name.

"Yes?" Dennis replied. The fear revealed itself in his trembling voice.

His ghostly companion began talking, and Dennis listened as other voices filled his head, as the blackness beyond the window brightened.

And began to show him things.

Bear Flats, California

After devouring the diary (a somewhat inappropriate description since at one point Chester Williams had actually eaten the flesh of one of his victims), Jolene and Leslie asked Ned Tanner, the police chief, whether they could remove some personal effects from the Williams place. It was a crime scene, he told them at first, but after further entreaties, he admitted that investigators had learned just about all they were going to from the site. So with an officer accompanying them, the two women returned to the mansion on what was probably a wild-goose chase, looking for additional diaries that might shed some light on what they'd discovered so far.

Only it wasn't a wild-goose chase.

In the secret cellar where Skylar had been found, Jolene found another marionette made from stitched body parts lying atop two oversized leather-bound books that looked like family Bibles but that, she realized almost instantly, were diaries. Neither the diaries nor the marionette had been there before. She was sure of it. And a quick glance at Leslie's face confirmed her suspicions.

It was as if someone-something-had wanted them to find the books, had known they were coming and specifically placed the journals where they might easily be discovered.

"This is it," she said for benefit of the policeman accompanying them.

"Yeah," Leslie added. "Anna May wanted us to go through these, but we were so shaken up after what happened that we just forgot all about them."

The journals were heavy, so they each took one, declining the policeman's offer of assistance. Leslie lifted off the puppet first, and she grimaced as she did so, though she held it only by the strings and did not touch the object itself.

Skylar and his grandmother were still at Leslie's house. Jolene was afraid for them to go back home-it knew where they lived-and until she knew for certain that everyone was safe and out of danger, they were staying together. She'd even briefly considered letting Skylar go back with his father temporarily, calling Frank and asking him to drive over and pick up his son. But that was only a passing thought, a momentary lapse, because she knew that not only would such a move be emotionally devastating to Skylar, particularly in his current state; it would make it much more difficult for her to take her son back afterward. She knew what Frank was capable of doing.

No, all four of them were staying at Leslie's until further notice, and that was where she and her friend brought the journals. They told neither her mother nor Skylar what they had-it was safer for them not to know-and though they were both dying to know what was in these earlier diaries, they waited until night, until her mother and her son were asleep, before opening the leather covers.

They took turns reading.

Highway 6, Utah

Driving through the darkness, the Indian men told Henry that they had found out about him from a Pa-pago shaman in Phoenix. He didn't know any Papago shaman in Phoenix, Henry informed them, but his protestations were halfhearted. There was nothing ordinary connected with any of this, and it would be hypocritical for him to pretend that he recognized only normal channels of communication.

"I'm not sure if I'm even one one-millionth Papago," he admitted. "That was just a rumor my old man told me when I was a kid. Probably a lie."

A short heavyset man with a flattop turned to look at him. "They've come after you," he stated matter-of-factly. "Just like me. The shadows. They drained you."

Henry thought of the twins, remembered spurting semen all over the tile of his kitchenette while the shadows lapped it up, recalled the way he had felt spent and used afterward. "What's going on?" he asked suspiciously.

And they told him what they knew, what had been passed down to them from their fathers, what they had discovered in visions and dreams.

Why they were going to the Point.

Twenty-seven

November 1866

Chester Williams sat in Harrison's office glaring at the railroad president. "They cannot be allowed to work side by side with real people!"

Harrison took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed its lit end at Williams. "I'm telling you, they get the job done. They do it in half the time for half the money, and they're , willing to do work that the micks won't do for any amount. If we expect to finish our tracks on time, we need Chinks, and a lot of them. Who gives a shit if they're heathens?"

Williams leaned forward, his face red. "I do!"

"Well, I'm afraid that's not good enough. I appreciate everything you've done to help this project along, but I will not allow you to dictate the terms of employment for my company. We need those Chinamen and I'm hiring even more. Another shipment came in on the Dora Lee two days ago and they're on their way over from San Francisco even as we speak."

"You can't do that!"

Harrison slammed his fist down on the desk, causing a stack of papers to topple over. "No man tells me what I can and cannot do with my own company!" he bellowed. "No man!"

Williams knew at that moment that he had lost the argument. Facts would have no sway with the railroad owner now. Even appeals to morality and common decency would fall on deaf ears. The man felt he had been insulted, and in truth, he had. Williams harbored no respect toward someone who would hire a Chink, and if he had known it would come to this, he never would have used his pull with the Senate or invested any of his own money in this venture-no matter how noble its goal or how necessary its completion to the future of the nation.

Williams stood, put on his hat and gave a formal half bow that he knew Harrison would find insufferable. "Good day to you, sir!" He strode out of the office without looking back, angry beyond words at the way the meeting had gone. He had accomplished nothing, had in fact set his own cause back and hardened Harrison against his Objective.

Was there anything he could do at this point to stop the calamity to come? There had to be. He could not in good conscience allow the railroads to employ hundreds of the yellow devils, a step that, once taken, would further erode the moral boundaries of society and lead the country ever closer to the gradual acceptance of these heathens. That was an evil he could not countenance, and it was incumbent upon him to do all that he could to forestall such an event.

An idea was forming in the back of his mind, one that he was not quite ready to recognize but that he thought might prove advantageous in the future.

On the sidewalk, outside of the United Pacific building, he paused for a moment, looking up at the cloudy sky, already feeling a little bit better. He took a deep breath, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled on his gloves.

It was starting to get cold.

* * *

Williams stood over his wife's grave.

And spit on it.

It had been five years since he had killed the harlot, since he had taken advantage of his husbandly prerogative and strangled her until her filthy tongue had been hanging swollen from between her dead lips, and not a day had gone by since that he did not rejoice in her demise. She'd died hard. The way she should have.

But first she'd watched him kill her lover, Chin Lee.

Even now his blood pressure rose as he recalled how he had discovered them-in his own house!- mocking him, humiliating him, cuckolding him. She had to have known he'd come home, had to have heard him enter the house and walk through the parlor, then the kitchen, then the hallway, calling her name. But either she'd been so in thrall to her passion, or more likely in his view, she had wanted him to t discover her, and she had continued with Her unnatural coupling even as he burst into the room.

She'd been on her bed, completely naked in a way he'd never seen her before, legs spread wide, while ?' the Chinese servant lapped at her sex like a dog. He had never spied anything so disgusting, had never even heard of something so utterly perverse and depraved, and the animalistic cries that issued from her lips as well as the expression of passionate gratification on \ her sweaty face made him sick to his stomach. The Chinaman was naked, too, and when Alice saw Williams standing apoplectic in the doorway, and knew that she had been discovered in her sin, she had grabbed her lover by the shoulders, pulled him up and taken him inside her, gasping as his engorged organ | pierced her ready opening.

It was a direct taunt, a deliberate slap at his manhood, and if he had not been wearing his sword, things might have turned out differently. But the sword was drawn instantly and with anger, pulling easily from its oiled sheath, and Williams had sliced it across the Chink's brown back, satisfaction welling within him even as blood flowed from the cut and the coward tried to scramble off the bed to safety, screaming wildly.

This time, Williams had thrust rather than sliced, and the long blade slid easily and deeply into the servant's side. The screams were cut off, replaced with a gasping gurgle. He pulled the blade free, casually wiping it on the mattress, feeling like a man who had just crushed a particularly loathsome insect. Alice was screaming by now, her exposed stomach and breasts covered in Chinese blood, and he looked at her, watching her face as he delivered the fatal blow to the twitching, dying thing on the floor, shoving the sword through the center of the Chink's chest and leaving it there.

Then he'd turned to his wife.

Her cries had turned to whimpers, and she was hunched up against the headboard as if to protect herself, her wanton legs now seemingly glued together. But he was in the mood for justice, not mercy, and he'd strangled her with his bare hands, pressing his thumbs against her windpipe while she thrashed beneath him in an obscene echo of her earlier passion. By the time she started to claw at his arms, she had no strength left and was too weak to do any real damage. Her face turned red, then blue; her eyes bulged; her tongue protruded as she tried in vain to breathe.

And then she'd died.

He had allowed others to clean up the mess, not deigning to dirty his hands any further, although he had directed them in their efforts and made sure that his orders were followed to the letter.

Williams looked around at the other graves, content that the monument to his deceased wife was still the finest, largest and most elaborate in the cemetery. The servant was not buried here, of course. He was not buried anywhere. His body had been taken into the woods south of town and left there. The blood and the organs had attracted animals, and he had been eaten. His bones, no doubt, were rotting there even now, under exposure to the elements.

Williams smiled to himself with satisfaction.

But the smile faded as he heard the whistle of the mail train passing through the center of the city. It made him think of Jeb Harrison. The railroad president might think he knew business, but he definitely didn't know the Chinese, and if Williams was sure of one thing, it was that before the project's completion he would regret having hired those slant-eyed sons of bitches. They might seem like hard workers now, but down the line, when it was important, when they were really needed, the Chinks would not be there or would fail to do what was required of them and something would go horribly wrong. He knew it in his gut. You just couldn't trust the heathen Chinee.

Besides, this was an American railroad and should be built by Americans.

Even if they were micks.

The train whistle grew faint as it moved farther away, and Williams gave Alice's grave one last look. The half-formed notion he'd had earlier, the one that had been lurking at the back of his mind ever since, had been given additional consideration, had been thought through a little more. There was meat on those bones now, and he had no doubt that once he fleshed out the details, his idea would prove to be a most propitious one.

But for now he would just stay out of Harrison's way. And wait.

March 1867

"Whoooo Woooo Woooo WooooWooooo!''

They heard the war whoops before the hooves this time, which meant that the Sioux had been close and the horses were starting from a camp nearby rather than galloping over the plains. Johnny Fowles and the other three hired guns drew their weapons, readied their backup, then checked to make sure the rest of the railroad camp were doing what they were supposed to be doing. Those with rifles were taking up position near the other men who were busy securing supplies. The Chinese huddled together in their section of camp, looking confused the way they always did, and Johnny felt angry. They were like children, the Chinese, dumb children who didn't seem to be able to learn, and their complete inaction in the face of these attacks put everyone at risk.

It was cheaper to replace Chinese than food or wood or rails, and if it appeared that people or supplies were in danger, Johnny's orders were to sacrifice the Chinese first. But that was pretty damn hard when the Chinks remained as far as possible from the fighting, expecting to be protected like they were little princes and princesses.

"WhooooWooooWooooWooooWooooo!" The attackers were almost here, and though Johnny, Tibbits and Duncan were in position and ready, Maxwell, the other gun, was still fiddling with his ammunition. "Damn it!" Johnny swore.

"I can't send a message!" Peterson yelled from the telegraph table. "I think they cut the lines!"

And then the Indians were topping the rise, looking like ghosts in the massive cloud of dust that accompanied their galloping horses. Both the Sioux and the Cheyenne had started attacking railroad workers on a regular basis, and by far he preferred fighting Cheyenne. They had the bigger reputation as warriors, but they fought cleaner, more straightforwardly. They were easier to outfox. Sioux, on the other hand, were crafty. Rather than engage in a battle head-on, they would create diversions, try to outflank and out-maneuver, arrive in waves. He was always waiting for the other shoe to drop when he fought the Sioux and that kept his focus split, made him a less effective fighter, which perhaps was the intention all along.

Johnny sighted and shot, gratified to hear the weapons of the other hired guns sound almost simultaneously. Four dark figures in the front of the dust cloud went down, then two more, then three more-Then the attackers were upon them and he could not keep track. All was chaos, and the only thing he could do was lie low and shoot at whatever was on horseback. Rifle fire was going off in all directions, and screams of agony mixed in with the war whoops the Sioux used to intimidate their enemies. He couldn't tell who was who or what was what, but when the front of the fighting moved past him and he was forced to turn around and pick off successful intruders rather than repel an attempted assault, he saw that the telegraph table was no more and the cook's tent was down. He thought he saw Buster Thornton, one of the construction foremen, fall to a bullet and go under the hooves of a horse. He, Tibbits, Duncan and Maxwell were all still in action and unharmed, and the four of them fired away, dropping Sioux warriors right and left, scores of other railroad workers also joining in and killing the natives.

Amazingly, impossibly, the Chinese stood in their section of camp completely untouched, watching what went on as if from within a protective shell. They remained stupidly in place, while everyone else valiantly tried to fight back against the aggressors.

Finally, as always, the Sioux retreated. They always seemed to know the point at which the damage they inflicted would be greater than the losses they suffered, and they invariably quit before the equation shifted. He fired after the fleeing horses and was gratified when one last warrior went down, his horse continuing on riderless.

The fight was over-for now-but it soon became apparent that they'd suffered more losses this time than ever before. Three men were dead, over a dozen were seriously injured, and quite a few were walking around telling anyone who would listen that they were quitting, that no amount of money was worth risking slaughter. A fire had been started at the north end of camp and two tents were ablaze, but now the Chinese were finally getting involved, relaying buckets of water from the creek, and it would be only a matter of minutes before the flames were out.

The goal of the Sioux had been to stop or at least forestall the building of the railroad, and at that they'd been partially successful. The tool wagon had been overturned and quite a few of the implements were either stolen or broken. You had to admire that on some level. Remaining so concentrated that even amid the chaos, in an extremely limited amount of time, the Indians had been able to wage such a specific and successful attack was indeed impressive. .

"Fowles!"

Johnny looked over to see Duncan walking toward him grinning, pistol holstered, two rifles over his shoulder. "Ten!" he crowed. "All kills!"

Johnny nodded tiredly, acknowledging the other gunman but not deigning to answer. The man was a braggart and without a doubt the most self-centered person he had ever met. Even with all of the disaster surrounding him, Duncan could see only how he was personally affected. And, characteristically, he believed he came out of it a hero.

Someone had already ordered the Chinese to gather the fallen Sioux, and the small pigtailed men were moving in pairs to pick up the deceased and take them to the tracks, where Maxwell and some of the lower hammer-swinging brutes would cut them open and leave them for the buzzards. Johnny walked past the dead and dying bodies. He would never admit it to another living soul, but deep down a part of him sympathized with the Indians. This had been their land for God knows how long, and now strangers were building a railway line right through the middle of it. He would have fought back, too, if he'd been in their situation.

A hand clapped him on the back, and Johnny spun around, nearly drawing his pistol, but it was only Tib-bits, and he relaxed a little, drawing a deep breath.

"It's over," the hired gun said. "Relax. I just came to commiserate."

"Sorry. I'm still there."

"I know." Tibbits, with his sad eyes, always looked like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and for all Johnny knew, he was. The two of them never talked about the past-or the future- only the present, but despite the man's protestations to the contrary, Johnny always got the feeling that Tibbits didn't really like killing, that he wished he'd gone into some other line of work.

As opposed to Duncan.

The younger man came between them, throwing a muscled arm around the shoulders of each. "Can either of you beat my ten?"

Johnny shook his head. The truth was, he'd never been a man to keep track. It was not something of which he was proud; it was merely what he did.

Tibbits sighed heavily. "I don't rightly know."

Duncan chuckled conspiratorially. "Well, we know Maxwell ain't even going to come close." The chuckle turned into a manic laugh that set Johnny's teeth on edge.

"Chinks weren't much help," Tibbits noted, choosing to ignore Duncan.

Johnny nodded. "Gets under my craw sometimes."

"Good workers, though," Tibbits said.

He watched two of them pass by, carrying a gutshot Sioux toward the tracks. "Yeah," he said. "I guess they are."

Another Indian raid.

Harrison was so angry and frustrated he felt like hitting the wall. This time, they hadn't attacked the crew or the camp but had damaged the rails two days east of line's end. It had been a surprisingly primitive assault, conducted not with modern weapons or stolen explosives but with rocks and sheer manpower that had been used to seriously damage the tracks. A supply train headed west toward Wyoming had been derailed, all four cars overturned. Though the engineer and the other four men on board had escaped thanks to a bevy of pack animals that had been on their way to the workers' camp to replace those lost in recent attacks, by the time agents of the railroad returned to survey the damage, the cars had all been burned and adjacent tracks piled high with debris.

Now he had to get a crew to repair the damage before another supply train could be sent to the workers-which would delay construction for at least a week.

Assuming he could find workers willing to brave the threat of attacks.

He could always ship some Chinese over there. They did anything they were ordered to do. And for pennies on the dollar. The Chinks were so happy to be in America they were willing to take on any shit job that was thrown at them.

Harrison stared out his office window at the rail yard. What about that, though? There was no way he could finish this project on time without the Chinese. Six thousand of them were on his payroll right this moment, he didn't regret for a second hiring them (but a lot of them were coming over now, and thanks to railroad work, they were dispersing across the country. He hated to admit it, but maybe that blowhard Chester Williams was right; maybe there was some sort of reason, some long-term goal. America was a big country and still largely unsettled. They'd had to kick out the British, the French and the Spanish to get where they were today, and they were still trying to put down these Indians. Maybe the Chinese were thinking ahead, planning for the future, hoping to get a piece of the pie and settle a large portion of the land themselves.

I hated to think he was contributing to that.

But what could he do about it? He owned a railroad company. It was his job to keep the trains moving, not decide who was to settle where.

Still, this was his country, and he didn't want to see il tinned. As obnoxious as Williams was, the man nnyhi have a point. The next time he was in Washington. Harrison decided, he'd bring it up with people who might have some ideas on the subject, who might have some answers, who might be able to do something about it.

July 1867

O'Hearn stood above the navvy, kicking him as hard as he could while the Chink tried to scramble away. "When I say now, I mean now!" he shouted, emphasizing each word with a boot to the backside. He had no idea if the worker understood what he was saying or even if he'd understood the original order, but it felt good to get his frustration out this way, and he continued kicking even after the man had become unconscious.

The translator, as usual, was sick and useless, sweating with a fever in one of the Chinese tents. O'Hearn didn't think he'd ever seen a more womanly man. The son of a bitch was probably a eunuch. Didn't they do that kind of thing over there in China?

The peculiar thing was, the other Chinese seemed to never get sick. Either that or they just didn't show it. His men had had the dysentery and assorted stomach ailments for half the season. But those Chinks just kept on toiling day after day, unchanged and unfazed, like machines. It was probably because they'd brought all their own food with them, with all of those weird herbs and shit. They even boiled their water before drinking it. If that food they cooked hadn't been so goddamn disgusting, he would have asked them to cook for the whole camp, but he wasn't about to subject his men to that heathen slop.

Besides, if regular people ate that food, they might get poisoned.

Or the Chinese might poison them on purpose.

They made him mad sometimes with their passivity, and on those occasions he found himself wanting to just beat the living tar out of them-which he often did. But that didn't seem to make any difference. Even with bruised and bloodied faces, they still stared at him blankly through those slanty eyes, and it made him want to beat them all the more. Every so often, though, he thought he saw something else behind the submissiveness, an inner hidden fire, a desire for revenge, and he thought that maybe the Chinks would like to poison all the rest of them.

Or maybe it was just his imagination.

The one he'd just kicked into unconsciousness lay unmoving on the ground, and his companions stood by watching impassively. O'Hearn motioned angrily for ihcm to pick him up and take him away, and four of them did so, looking at him all the while with those unreadable eyes, their fellows standing behind them motionless. Some of them had to have wives back home, he thought. He wondered, if he fucked their wives in front of them, whether that would get a reaction out of the passive sons of bitches.

It had been a long time since he'd had a woman, and even an Indian one or a Chinese one sounded good at this point. The railroad had promised to provide women when they were recruiting workers, but they'd gone back on their promise, and the men were getting restless. It wasn't right to live like this; it wasn't natural. They weren't priests.

Nearby, he heard the crack of a whip as one of the hands tried to make a recalcitrant horse team pull a load of ties to the track. That gave him an idea. Maybe tonight, for the men's amusement, he could arrange a little wager. To cheer them up. He could take out the Chinese translator, tie him to a post and whip him. The men could place bets on how long the Chink would last before passing out.

They were going to be in this pass for the better part of a week, so there wouldn't be much variety in the work. Besides, everyone knew their jobs by now. They needed the translator only under special circumstances. If he was out of commission for a few days, it shouldn't pose a hardship.

It might even teach the translator to be a little bit more of a man in the future.

O'Hearn grinned.

And the men always liked a little sport.

March 1868

Although he still kept the house in Chicago, as well as an apartment in New York, for the past five years, Chester Williams' primary residence had been in the small town of Bear Flats, California. It was near there that he had made his fortune in gold, and it was there that he had made his home, using California's finest builders to construct a house he had designed with one of New York's top architects. He felt at home here, and in this backwater village, away from the prying eyes of his peers and the gossiping mouths of their wives, he had set up a virtual fiefdom, a community in which the constabulary existed to do his bidding and the other homeowners lived in fear of his wrath. Several of the local businesses had been set up specifically to serve his needs-he was the only customer of the bookbinder, for instance, and if it had not been for him, there would be no haberdasher in town-and not only did he notice the deference the locals showed to him; he expected it.

It had been known for quite some time that Crazy Merle, the miner who lived up in Hells Canyon foolishly insisting that there was an undiscovered vein of gold running through Dodge Mountain, had taken on a Chinese wife after killing her husband in a drunken rage back in Colima. He and the woman had even had a half-breed kid a while back, and though no one had bothered them until now-afraid that Merle might shoot them on their way up the canyon, more than likely-Williams decided that that had to change. It was an abomination, a man consorting with a Chinese, and after returning from his most recent meeting with Harrison, he decided that such behavior would no longer be tolerated in Bear Flats.

Williams sent his new servant, Eton (an Englishman, no more of the darker peoples for him), to fetch Lane McGrath, the sheriff, and twenty minutes later the old man was in his study, looking warily about. This was the first time anyone from the town had been allowed within his private domain-meetings usually took place outdoors-and Lane was understandably uneasy. He knew this was something important.

Williams dragged it out, amused by the sheriffs discomfort. "Would you like something to drink, Mr. McGrath?"

"No, sir," the sheriff answered.

"I think I'll have a brandy. I always find that brandy soothes my nerves. Are you sure you wouldn't like to join me?"

"Uh, sure. I mean, thank you, Mr. Williams."

Williams smiled, poured the drinks, then sat down in the smoking chair opposite Lane's. He took a slow, deliberate sip of his brandy. "I asked you here because I would like to discuss a situation that I believe has become intolerable. I am speaking, of course, of the miner in Hells Canyon. Merle, I believe, is his name. People call him Crazy Merle."

"Yes. I'm aware of Merle."

"Are you also aware that he consorts with a Chinese woman, against the laws of California and the laws of nature?" He leaned forward. "They have a half-breed child, an abomination under God, and they are flouting their sin right under our very noses!"

Lane was obviously at a loss. "Merle's crazy but he don't cause no trouble. At least not that I'm aware of," the sheriff added quickly. "He mostly keeps to himself and we don't hardly see him except when he comes down for supplies every few months."

"That is not the point I'm making, Mr. McGrath."

The sheriff was silent.

"It is no longer tolerable to me that this evil and depravity exist in our fair corner of the world. We are abetting this wickedness by allowing it to continue and pretending we do not know what is going on."

"You want me to evict Merle?" Lane asked, starting to catch on. "From his own legal claim?"

"I want more than that," Williams said.

And smiled.

They went up Hells Canyon on horseback and on foot, the sheriff and his two deputies in the lead, Williams marching right behind, rifle in hand. A goodly portion of the town tromped behind them as they made their way up the winding road, and Williams was gratified to see such a response. There'd been nothing but support yesterday at the town meeting, but talk was easier than action, and sometimes what people said they'd do and what they did were two different things.

The miner could have shot at them from his cabin, but the throng was dozens strong and even Merle wasn't that crazy. Besides, the sheriff announced their arrival at the head of the canyon by shouting out, "Merle! We need to talk!" as though this were some sort of mobile town meeting and they'd all come this far just to palaver.

The crazy bastard fell for the lie.

He wasn't stupid enough to meet them unarmed, but with one blow to the head from the butt of his Winchester, Lane knocked the miner to the ground while one of his deputies took the man's weapon.

There was no sign of the Chinese woman or the daughter, but Williams and a host of townspeople searched in and around the cabin until the two were discovered huddled in a corner of the small mine that Merle had dug out of the cliffside.

When all three of them were subdued, Williams^ stood on the front porch of the cabin and explained' the situation, speaking loudly enough for even those; in the rear to hear.

He sentenced the Chinese to death.

Merle put up a fight, so crazy now that he seemed to think he was actually in love with the woman. He kicked backward, then thrust himself forward and broke free of the sheriffs grip. His rifle had been confiscated and was well beyond his reach in the hands of Cole Blackman, the grocer, but Merle was quick and wiry and scrambled away from Lane, grabbing rocks from the ground and throwing them as hard as| he could at everyone around him.

Lane shot him in the leg, bringing him down.

Then things happened fast.

Claude, the haberdasher, brought forth a rope and,| with the help of Jacob and two other men, dragged Merle to a dead tree and strung him up.

Williams hanged the girl himself, putting the noose around her neck as she whimpered and cried. The woman was screeching in that obnoxious babble those people called a language, and he roared that someone needed to shut her up. Little Erskine, the deputy sheriff, drew back his hand and hit her hard across the mouth. Blood gushed out from her split lips and broken teeth, but the screaming didn't stop until the deputy punched her in the stomach. Williams looked into the little girl's dark slanted eyes, saw her tears-then pulled the rope hard, jerking her into the air. She danced above them, looking for all the world like a music hall performer. Everyone was pointing and laughing, and Williams laughed, too.

Then they hanged the woman. She kicked and fought, and he noticed beneath her dress that she wore no undergarments, that her sex was open and exposed for all to see. A wave of disgust passed over him. He was reminded of Alice and how she'd opened herself to their servant, allowed him to lick her down there like an animal, and when the woman finally died, he felt no small degree of satisfaction, laughing with the others as she pissed herself.

The outing had been a rousing success. Not only had they rid the county of a madman, a Chink and a half-breed, but he had finally instilled in his fellow townspeople the importance of keeping more Chinese from coming to America and getting rid of the ones who were already here. They were not only evil; they were devious. They'd taken jobs building the railroad that should have gone to American workers, and they had even insinuated themselves into marriages with American men. Crazy Merle might have been a step above feeb, but his devotion to that Chink wife was absolute, and it was only a matter of time before the foreigners set their sights on society's other outcasts and then, in good time, regular people.

They had to be stopped now.

His assessment was met with universal agreement.

It was impossible to extrapolate from this one incident that people in other towns in other parts of the country would feel the same way, would come to see the light if they were only exposed to the truth, but he thought it was worth a try, and though winter was |,, not quite over and travel conditions were still harsh, he had to do what he knew in his heart was right.)* And necessary. '-

He headed east. ,

Williams traveled from California to Kansas, finding receptive audiences in each town he visited along the way. He stayed away from the big cities with their modern ideas and wrongheaded notions. He went instead to God-fearing communities where decency still held sway, and was rewarded with crowds that seemed to grow larger as his journey progressed, as though news of his message had preceded him.

As perhaps it had.

As he hoped it had.

He found a particularly warm welcome in rural Missouri, where anti-Chinese sentiment already ran high. He had not expected to find many Chinee so far from the Pacific Ocean, but in Selby and its environs there were apparently several Chink families living in bunkhouses on the bad side of town, the adults working in laundries and restaurants, the children running wild. And the fact that they had already migrated this far inland made him realize the urgency of his mission. It was in Selby that he met a man named Orren Gifford, an angry young buck with the gift of gab who was a carpenter by trade but was passing himself off as a preacher because the pay was better and the work was easier. He and Gifford led the townspeople in a rally where, in one night, they succeeded in getting the timid town fathers to pass a resolution barring Chinks, kikes, niggers and wops from Selby. Not only were they not allowed to own land or marry; they could not work here or even stay overnight. Jimmy Johnson, the normally milquetoast mayor, ended up in front of the crowd next to Gifford, yelling at the top of his lungs, "Any one of 'em who sets foot in our fair town will end up tarred and feathered and riding out on a rail!"

The crowd ate it up.

The next morning, Gifford took Williams outside of town to a series of mud pits. It had been rumored for years that Indians had once used the pits for healing baths, like they did at some of those fancy health spas out West, but the boiling mud was far too hot for a person to sit in, and when a local farmer's boy had fallen in a few seasons back, walking with his dad on the way to town, he'd died instantly. By the time the farmer found a big enough branch to fish him out with and a boulder to balance the branch over, the flesh had been stripped from the boy's bones. The kid looked like he'd been in a fire, and the sight was so bad that even his own mama hadn't been allowed to see him.

The mud in the pits gurgled and bubbled, some of it brown, some of it gray, some of it white.

"Lot of deer carcasses been thrown in there," Gifford said. "Elk, too. So's they wouldn't attract the buzzards. I imagine a fair number of local boys have tossed other things in as well." He looked meaningfully over at Williams. "Not a one of them has ever bubbled to the surface."

He let that sink in.

"I'd bet there's room in them pits for a lot more."

Williams smiled. "I'll bet there is," he said.

After stopping in Kentucky and Virginia, he continued on to Washington, D.C., where he found, to his surprise, that Harrison had already been speaking in private to some of the congressmen whom Williams had intended to approach about the Chinese problem.

Apparently, the railroad president had learned a few hard lessons lately and had come to see the error of his ways.

Just as Williams had predicted.

Nothing had been decided, nothing was set in stone, and as was always the case with politicians, no one was willing to commit to a specific course of action. Still, the general consensus seemed to be that once the railroad was finished, something had to be done, and that was probably the best that could be hoped [ for.

For now.

May 10, 1869

It was a day of celebration for America, and Harrison wished he could be everywhere at once. Parades were planned for Chicago and New York City, where hundreds of people were expected to line the streets to commemorate this historic occasion. In cities all along the route, picnics and festivities to rival Independence Day would be occurring, and in Sacramento and Omaha, the two ends of the line, even greater galas were scheduled.

But on this important day, his place was here, at Promontory Point, where the lines would finally be joined. Despite having had to blast through the Sierra Nevada and navigate some of the most dangerous and unforgiving terrain known to man, the Central Pacific had finished its half of the railway first, on April 30. They'd been waiting for the past week and a half for the Union and United Pacific workers to hurry and finish their portion. Harrison attributed it to the fact that the Central Pacific had more Chinese. If there was anything those Chinks knew, it was dynamite, and their expertise with explosives had helped the line through many a rough patch.

Although Harrison found that worrying as well. Thousands of soon-to-be unemployed foreigners with extensive knowledge of explosives was not a situation he found comforting.

He looked over the heads of Doc Durant and Iceland Stanford to see Chester Williams deep in conversation with one of the generals who had come West with a regiment of men and was now standing near the Union locomotive with assorted other dignitaries. He still didn't trust that man. There'd been rumors in Washington that he'd been trying to secretly negotiate backroom deals involving the railroads, but nothing seemed to have come of it. He was glad of that. The last thing he wanted was to be in business again with that blowhard. Harrison took his wife's arm and turned away, not wanting to catch Williams' eye accidentally and have the man come over to him.

The president hadn't come. He'd expected as much, but General Grant's absence was still disappointing, and even the sheer number of other officials who'd made the trip out here to the middle of nowhere could not offset the loss of the president.

It was getting hard to hear, and he assumed that meant that the ceremony would be starting soon. Three bands seemed to be playing at once, and because there were enough people here for twenty band concerts, the sound was cacophonous. Someone somewhere let out a whoop and fired a shot in the air, and Harrison knew that once that golden spike was driven into the rail, the air would be filled with celebratory gunfire.

A boy came to get him and bring him to the spot where the last rails were to be laid. Coins had been tossed and it had been decided that Stanford and Durant were to do the honors, but all of the partners needed to be present for pictures. Flashbulbs started going off the moment he approached the tracks.

The official ceremony began, and the last two rails were laid, Chinese workers carrying one, Irish workmen the other. Bands played, the crowd cheered, and photos were taken from every which angle as the steel rails were put in place. Poses were struck, more photos were shot, and a half hour later, Stanford and Durant finally drove in the golden spike.

Americans could now ride the rails from coast to coast.

It was indeed a glorious day, and Harrison imagined he could almost hear the people celebrating all over this great nation. There would be fireworks tonight. And drinking. And, for the single men, carousing. It would be a party to remember, and appropriately so, for the project that had been completed here today would change the face of transportation-and the face of America-forever.

Still, despite the congratulations from friends, enemies and peers, despite the constant flash of cameras and the hearty praise from unknown society gentlemen, he found himself glancing over at Chester Williams, who stood by himself, an unnerving smile on his broad florid face as he stared across the tracks at the tent encampment of the Chinese.

Williams was up to something. He was sure of it.

The man had some sort of plan, some sort of scheme he was hatching. Harrison was curious-who wouldn't

be?-but the more he looked at that unsettling grin, the more he decided that it was probably best not to know.

The crowds were gone, the trains departed, and only the workers, the militia and a few straggling souls were

left behind. The soldiers were supposed to have left, too, and some of them had, but a hefty number remained.

Because Williams had paid them to do so.

Despite his contacts, despite his power and influence, his attempt to make headway with those politicians in Washington had come to naught. They'd been too afraid to act, some citing moral qualms, others bringing up constitutional concerns, others simply admitting that unless their brethren went along, they would not sponsor such legislation. He had tried to play upon their antagonism with the president, but that hadn't worked either, so he'd gone straight to the source and hired members of the U.S. Army to do the dirty work. He knew already that the boys in uniform were underpaid. He knew as well that some of the younger ones who had yet to see action, having come along after the end of the war, relished the idea of killing some enemies.

It was a match made in heaven.

The deed could be done only after the public was gone, though, after the press had left. This "operation," as the general Called it, had to be performed with the utmost secrecy.

Williams had had the translator tell the Chinks that because they had done such a wonderful job building the railroad, there was another job in the offing, one that paid twice as much. Many of them still left, going back to their families in San Francisco or even back to China, unhappy with the life of a navvy and unwilling to take on such a burden again. Others had departed with the Irish crews and the other workers, dispersing eastward.

They could be taken care of another day.

But a lot of them stayed, and Williams estimated there were at least two hundred in the east camp and significantly more in the west camp. Quite a few of these were slaves, men who had been brought, bought and beaten into submission. Others believed the lie and were willing to remain behind an extra few days for the chance at earning more money and forging a better life.

They struck at dawn.

Most of the Chinks were asleep in their tents, and when the cavalry came galloping through, ripping apart the canvas with swords and bayonets, they ran screaming out onto the field, where other soldiers rounded them up like cattle and herded them away from the tracks. Williams watched it all from his post atop a hillock, using a spyglass the general had lent him, and he smiled with delight as the soldiers beat and kicked the men, whipping them when they got out of line as they drove the heathens northward. Clearly it paid to hire professionals.

He followed behind as they headed away from the camp, as the soldiers gathered the Chinese together in the center of the plain and began circling around. He wasn't sure how large the militia was, but their horses kicked up enough dust to blur the rising sun, and soldiers encircled the hundreds of workers with only a few feet between each.

At the general's command, rifles were raised.

And fired.

The noise was deafening, and smoke from the rifles joined the dust in the air to create a haze as deep as fog that temporarily obscured everything. Several Chinks bolted from between the horses, figuring they had a better chance outside the circle on the open plain, but they were quickly shot down. A few small figures attempted to crawl away, and in the dust and chaos a couple actually got pretty far, but eventually they, too, were hunted down and killed.

The slaughter was not quick. An hour later, the soldiers were still reloading and firing, although by that time most of them had come down from their horses and were walking over broken bodies to stalk wily bands of survivors. The smell was overpowering, a sickening stench that not only made Williams gag but had several of the younger soldiers vomiting onto the chaparral. Emulating some of the older, more experienced fighters, he pulled his shirt higher, buttoning it over his mouth and nose so the cloth acted like a filter. He smelled dirt and his own sweat, but it was vastly preferable to the disgusting scent of blood and death.

Sometime later, the general came to him and said the deed was done: the Chinese were no more. He invited Williams to come with him and tour the battlefield.

He went in with his knife.

And helped finish off the ones who were still moving.

Summer 1869

It was a new day.

After their success at Promontory Point, Williams followed the line east. He heard through friends that the righteous slaughter of the heathen Chinee had been kept quiet, that the president himself had arranged for the site to be cleaned up and the bodies burned, and had decreed that no one was to know what had happened in Utah. Williams took a grim satisfaction in knowing that his adversaries were so highly placed, but what the president said did not affect him. He did not have to abide by any presidential order. He was Chester Williams, man of means, and he would still be so when Ulysses S. Grant was once again a retired drunken general.

And while the newspapers might be persuaded not to report what had happened, he himself was bound by no such constrictions. He could say whatever he wanted.

And did.

His words incited a riot in the ordinarily peaceful town of Spellman, Wyoming, encouraging citizens to ignore the namby-pamby police chief and take matters into their own hands when the chief declared that the Chinese family living in a tent by the Baptist church was entitled to full protection under the law. The townspeople stormed the jail, locking the chief and two policemen in a cell; broke the windows of a grocer who had sold fruit to the Chinks; smashed the printing press and equipment in the newspaper office; and, finally, set the Chinks' tent on fire. The family attempted to escape, the mother carrying a baby and the father pushing two other children out in front of him, but they were beaten back with sticks and rakes, brooms and pitchforks, forced to return to the fiery tent. When they tried to dash out the other side, where flames had already destroyed the canvas, they were again beaten. This time, the baby, its clothing already burning, was knocked out of the mother's hands and flew onto the hard ground, where it remained still and lifeless. The mother refused to be deterred by the blows rained upon her, attempting with single-minded determination to reach the body of her infant even as a hoe cracked open her head. The rest of the family were battered as they endeavored to escape the growing flames, and one by one they fell. In Stanton, Nebraska, three Chinese men were brought bound before Williams almost as soon as he'd entered the town. They'd stayed behind after the railroad crew had passed through, and had been captured

over a month ago, kept in captivity in the mayor's basement until someone could decide what to do with them. Williams toured the basement and noted with approval the leg-irons, the tin of drinking water, the filthy straw. The men were animals and had been treated as such. He followed the mayor back upstairs and looked over the emaciated Chinks. He could see collarbones and ribs, joints in the legs and arms. The oversized heads with their sunken cheeks, long teeth and narrow eyes looked positively inhuman.

"String them up," he said.

He watched with satisfaction as the three strangled to death in the air.

His journey was long, and on the way he began taking souvenirs: ears, noses, fingers, toes. The Indians did that, he was told, to frighten their enemies and savor their victories, and some of the veterans of the Indian wars with whom he came into contact had adopted the practice as well. It was in the town of Sycamore that he first took knife to flesh and sliced off an ear, and the exhilaration he felt when he sawed through the gristle was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Later, traveling, knowing that the ear was wrapped in a leather bag carried with his personal effects, he was filled with a sense of power. He felt better, stronger, more successful than he ever had, than all of his money could make him, and he began to think it was because of this talisman, this ear. He knew the thought was superstitious, but it felt true to him nevertheless, and he decided he needed to collect even more talismans in order to amplify this euphoric sensation.

He returned to Selby, Missouri.

It was here that he'd been headed all along. Although left unspoken, this had always been his ultimate destination, and he'd been savoring the prospect of returning, even going so far as to draw it out, taking side trips to other locales merely for the sake of prolonging the delicious sense of anticipation.

Orren Gifford greeted him like a long-lost brother. The carpenter-cum-preacher had not heard of the events at Promontory Point, but Williams filled him in, and the eyes of the other man gleamed. "We chased out six Chink families from Selby, tarred and feathered five men since you was here. But there's still twenty or so living in the woods, on the outskirts. I count at least fifty head in the other towns in the county: Waterbury, Cottonville and North Newsom." He grinned. "The pits are still waiting."

They rode by night, a posse of nearly a hundred men, bearing torches and weapons, hunting Chinee. Some were burned; some were shot; some were dragged by the horses through rough ground until dead. Those were the ones who had put up a fight, the ones who might have caused trouble. But the rest were captured and brought along, and well over two dozen stood bound, bruised and battered in front of the mud pits the next morning.

In the bright light of day, some of the men were clearly having second thoughts. They were brave under the anonymity of night, but when it came time to stand up and be counted, they did not have the courage of their convictions. It was up to Gifford and himself to set the example, and they threw the first one into the mud pit themselves. With the preacher at his side, Williams grabbed a scrawny young man by his queue and pulled him to the ground; then the two of them picked him up and swung him into the boiling earth. There was a split-second scream of unbearable agony, then silence as the body sank into the thick white mud.

One of the brutally beaten fellows awaiting his fate began chanting something very loudly in Chinese. There was a cadence to it that seemed unlike their normal babble, a rhythm that sounded almost poetic, like a nursery rhyme. Others chimed in at what had to be specific cues, for they spoke in unison, and it occurred to Williams that the heathens believed this was some sort of prayer. Or spell. It was nonsense, though, and he moved forward and grabbed that man and, again with Gifford's help, dragged him to the edge of one of the pits.

The Chink looked at him. There was fear in those slanted eyes, but beneath that was calm and a knowledge, a certainty, that frightened him. Williams turned his head away, looking instead at the bubbling mud. The infidel had been chanting the entire time, the others still chiming in, but now the doomed man stopped. His English was broken and heavily accented but still understandable: "We come back. How long it take. Get your children and their children-"

Williams had heard enough, and he threw the bound man into the pit. Only Gifford didn't know he was going to do so and continued to hold the Chink's feet, so only his head and shoulders dropped to earth and fell into the mud. He should have been screaming, crying out in terrible agony, but in the last few seconds before his face was eaten away, the man said clearly, "Be back."

Then Gifford tossed in his feet and the whole body rolled into the mud and disappeared.

It had been a curse. And though he was a Christian and had no truck with any pagan religions, he believed it. Deep down, where it counted, he thought the curse was real.

They all did.

As cowardly as it might be, he was glad at that second that he did not live in Selby, that he did not live anywhere in Missouri. Once this was over, he would never be back. Gifford, the other townspeople and their kin would remain here and have to deal with this, but he would be long gone.

Everyone was silent.

Williams kept on as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as though anyone who believed in the sort of mumbo jumbo spouted by the dying man was a rube and an imbecile. He grabbed another Chinee on his own, a small woman, and pulled her to the edge of another pit, kicking her in. He glanced over at Gifford, who still stood there flummoxed. "What are you waiting for? Get to work!"

The preacher did. They all did, and within the hour all of the Chinese had been fed to the pits, where their flesh burned off and their bones mingled with the mud. By the end of it, the mood was festive, as though everyone had forgotten all about the curse, and Williams smiled as he watched the last heathen exterminated, four burly white men dropping in a thin screaming boy.

This, by God, was America.

Twenty-eight

St. George, Utah

They lost the train's tracks, no pun intended, somewhere around Page, but despite the pleas from Derek's mom and brother, they did not turn back. Instead they continued on into Utah until, sometime after nightfall, they reached St. George. It was a small town in the southwest corner of the state, and the only motel with a vacancy was a small mom-and-pop place that, despite the beautiful flower patch out front and the quaint name of Jacaranda Country Inn, reminded Angela of the Bates Motel.

They were all tired, none of them had any ideas, and for dinner they found a pizza place, eating in silence beneath a too-loud television tuned to ESPN.

Angela felt discouraged, but she was not completely disappointed that they'd lost the train. For beneath her determination was fear, and the truth was that she'd had no idea what they would do if .they successfully trailed the locomotive to its eventual destination.

She felt better out here on the road. The horror was still there, but away from Flagstaff, outside the confines of the city, it did not seem quite so oppressive. Nor quite so bleak. For most of the day they'd been traveling through vast expanses of nothingness, past Lake Powell and the Vermilion Cliffs, past tan sand and tan buttes where no plant grew. She found it hard to believe that the mold could make it through here. Or past here.

If it weren't for that train ...

After dinner, they walked back to the motel. From within the houses they passed, Angela heard the canned laughter of sitcoms, the nursery-rhyme chanting of rap music, the crying of babies, the lecturing of parents, all of the ordinary sounds of everyday life, and she envied those people their ignorance and their bliss. There was nothing she would like more than to be able to go back to a time when her biggest worries were how well her Friday night date would go and whether she would get an A or a B on a test.

She wondered what was happening at Babbitt House right now.

She hoped the cops had raided the place and locked everyone up under quarantine.

That wasn't fair. The Chrissie who'd called her a stupid brown bitch was not the Chrissie she'd been living with since the beginning of the semester. That was the mold talking. And as easy as it might be to take her cue from science fiction movies and assume that the mold brought out and amplified her roommate's true deep-seated feelings, Angela knew in her heart that wasn't the case. The black fungus had imposed those ideas on Chrissie and the others, had made them that way.

But why hadn't she been affected? She was the one the corpse had grabbed.

She had no answers, only questions.

Back in the motel room, they turned on the television. Derek and his brother, Steve, were sharing one queen-sized bed, while she and Derek's mother took the other. No one except Steve cared what they watched, so they let him flip around until he found a local independent station showing reruns of The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Derek's mother went in the bathroom to take a shower, and Angela dozed off for a while.

When she awoke, the lights were off and the news was on. Only Derek was still awake, and he put a finger to his lips, telling her not to make any noise.

On the Salt Lake City newscast, the top story was a massive gathering of Native Americans who had assembled in the northern portion of the state and had come from all over the country for no apparent reason, or at least no reason they were willing to divulge to television reporters.

A handsome man with a microphone stood on railroad tracks before a jam-packed crowd that had to number in the thousands. "Promontory Point was the spot where the Central Pacific and the combined Union and United Pacific railways met to form the transcontinental railroad in 1869, and where the golden spike that joined the two was driven in by Le-land Stanford and Thomas Durant. Why so many people have been caught off guard here is that there is no anniversary involving events at this location, and there do not appear to be any speakers or performers or any other reason for this historic gathering. So as of this moment, what's happening here at Promontory Point remains a mystery. We will keep you informed as events continue to unfold."

Derek turned down the sound with the remote control. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but Chinese workers helped build that railroad, didn't they?" he said, speaking softly.

He was right. She didn't know why that was important; she just knew that it was.

Promontory Point.

"That's it," Angela said. "That's where we're going."

Twenty-nine

Promontory Point, Utah

"Holy shit," Henry said.

It looked like a Native American Woodstock. For as far as the eye could see, people and tents, campers and pickup trucks, were packed like sardines across the open land. The air was filled with a thousand separate sounds that coalesced into a single ebb-and-flow hum. His companions

made no effort to join the throng, to find its center and purpose; they simply parked the pickup on the edge of the gathering and started to set up camp. This consisted of placing a rusty hibachi next to the truck, grabbing cans of beer out of the cooler and spreading out sleeping bags on the dusty ground.

They talked to no one.

They didn't have to.

He understood why they were here, knew now the story behind it, but there was still something of a disconnect. He felt as though he were watching himself do things rather than doing them. According to Wes and the other Papagos who had picked him up, there was a purpose to their pilgrimage, yet none of them seemed at all focused. Rather, they were on autopilot, following some predetermined plan rather than making conscious decisions.

Henry didn't like that.

They sat around, talked of nothing, drank, exchanged occasional greetings with other men from other tribes.

Night fell.

And with darkness came the shadows.

There were women and men, as well as figures so vague they were impossible to identify, and they came up from the ground, down from the sky, in from the plain. He should have known they would be here, but he had not expected it and it did not appear that many of the others had either. The shades moved seductively, enticingly, their purpose explicit, and Henry noticed that they were more solid than before, more dense and real. He was seized by the terrifying notion that despite what Wes and the others believed, the Indians had all been lured here for this purpose. They had been tricked into congregating in one area-in this area-so they could be assaulted, used and drained.

He looked about him at the approaching figures. There were gradations of darkness now, areas that suggested eyes, nose and mouth, pubic hair and nipples. There was, in addition, the promise of something more, the suggestion that if allowed to finish what they had started, these forms would become real, would gain flesh and substance and provide the complete pleasure they could only simulate now.

Most of the men weren't responding, were trying to chase the shades away, and even those who did succumb seemed to be fighting it, desperately attempting to keep their clothes on, to stop themselves from interacting with the spirits. Henry was thankful for that. And relieved. Surrounded by those like himself, their moral support granting him a strength he did not possess when alone, he found that he was not aroused by the twins when they came to seduce him. Once again, he was able to see the female body for what it really was: a collection of nerve endings and orifices with grotesque physiological functions. And while the twins did not exactly have bodies, the idea was enough to dampen his already wan libido.

As strange as it might seem to someone else, it felt good to be himself again.

One of the Chinese twins-they were Chinese; he knew that now-sidled next to him, running her left hand slowly over her voluptuous breasts even as her right hand reached out. The other sister stood in front of him, rubbing herself between her legs, her body undulating in time with the movements of her hand.

He was not aroused in the slightest.

And, as before, he could sense under the surface sensuality an anger, a seething rage hidden beneath the sexual behavior.

Henry looked up at the bed of the pickup where Wes and Milton were trying to shoo away the full shadows of two slight boyish-looking teenage girls.

"It is our life force," Wes explained. "That is why the dead crave our seed. It gives them what they do not have."

To Henry's right, one older man had succumbed and was masturbating furiously, pants around his ankles. As he reached his climax, a horde of shadows flew about him, attempting to ingest his semen. Henry's twins fled there as well, and he watched in fascination as their forms seemed to change, became more like the rounded buxom matron seducing the elderly man before they merged into one figure identical to the man's seductress.

From here and there, throughout the crowd, came cries of anguish or remorse, grunts of pleasure, but gradually those noises were supplanted by the rhythms of conversation, by the sounds of radios, tape decks and CD players being cranked up as men turned away from the shadows, ignoring them in favor of the mundane trivialities of ordinary existence. This continued for the better part of an hour, the shadows growing ever more frantic and desperate in their attempts at seduction until finally, as one, they departed, not retreating the way they had come but fading away, blending into the night. They made no noise-they never did-but from the earth itself came a strange rumbling sound, a howl of frustration muffled by layers of dirt, and it was then Henry knew for certain that they had been thwarted in their efforts. He felt good, proud of himself and the others around him.

"Thank God," Wes breathed, brushing back his hair.

They looked at each other, and Henry thought that they would talk about what had just happened, finally have a heart-to-heart about why they were here and what they were going to do and ... everything.

But they didn't. Either of them. They fiddled with their sleeping bags, they got cans of beer out of the ice chest with Milton, Antonio and Jack, and all of them stood or sat there silently as the night deepened around them.

And they waited for the train.

Thirty

Washington, D.C.

Promontory Point.

Rossiter watched the DVD of spliced-together stories from four network newscasts and six local stations that Agent Saldana had quickly burned and brought to him. Pathetic, he was thinking as a bland man with blond hair reported from the site. With all of its massive intelligence-gathering capabilities, the FBI was relying for information on Cal Perkins, third-string feature reporter for one of Salt Lake City's independent television stations?

So much for the conspiracy theorists who imagined the FBI as a monolithic well-oiled machine with unlimited resources that was secretly and effectively compiling information on every individual in the United States-although this did give ammunition to the other side, those critics who saw the FBI as a bunch of ineffectual know-nothings who falsified evidence to justify incompetent investigatory work and who couldn't solve a crime if it bit them on the ass.

Shit.

They just couldn't win.

Rossiter forced himself to smile at the junior agent.

"Good work, Saldana. You're thinking out of the box. I like that."

"Thank you, sir." The agent beamed as he walked back to his desk.

Rossiter had been honing his interpersonal, organizational and leadership skills over the past several days. It was still too early to know for certain, but he had the feeling that a promotion might be in the offing after this. Smiling while offering encouragement and words of praise did not come naturally to him, but putting on a happy face was a small price to pay if it meant moving up the ladder.

Although with all of the speculation in the press about the physical damage to the White House and the president's questionable decision to stonewall rather than deal honestly and publicly with the situation, the pressure was on. If he didn't wrap this up and quickly, his ass was out.

He replayed the DVD, watched it again. He had no idea why all of those men from all of those tribes were gathering at Promontory Point-no outsiders did, and the men who were there weren't talking-but the fact that that was where the two sides of the transcontinental railroad had met meant that it was an important site in the history of trains.

And though Lincoln had signed the Pacific Railroad Act, the railway had actually been completed during Grant's tenure.

Trains.

Everything was coming together.

Sort of.

He sifted through printouts of other reports that had been gathered for him, incidents that might be related, might not. One group in particular stood out.

In several states for the past month or two there'd been sightings of mysterious black trains speeding by on disused rails or even on Amtrak routes. Concurrently, in quite a few of those towns, ghosts had been heard, mysterious disembodied voices in homes or stores or, in one instance, a gas station restroom. They were always described as speaking gibberish, some incomprehensible babble that one churchgoing woman in Missouri said sounded like "a gay man speaking in tongues."

Only yesterday, in Bear Flats, California, a police officer had come across just such an incident in a house where a gruesome murder had recently occurred. He'd had the presence of mind to record it on his cell phone, and the recording had buzzed instantly around the Internet, catching the ear of Ron Banks, one of the agents on Rossiter's team. Banks had conducted a follow-up interview, filing a report, and Rossiter looked over the printout now. He'd glanced at it less than half an hour ago, just before Saldana had brought in the DVD, but something about it nagged at him, and he read through Banks' summary again.

Chester Williams.

That's what it was. The name Chester Williams rang a bell, although he'd been so overloaded with reading and bogged down with research since being assigned to this case that he couldn't remember where he'd read or heard the name before. He circled it on the page so he'd remember when he came back to it.

He hadn't had a chance to actually hear the recording of voices that the police officer had made, so Rossiter went over to his computer and called it up. The sound was muffled and crackly at first, with ambient noise from the officer's breathing and footsteps that was louder than anything else, but gradually the voices came to the fore. Two of them: a man and a woman.

The ghosts were speaking Cantonese.

He recognized the language instantly. It had been over ten years since he'd made a name for himself in Rio Verde, Arizona, but those few weeks had been etched upon his consciousness with a razor, and one of the things he remembered clearly was the unique cadence of Cantonese. He had no idea what they were saying, but he knew what language they were speaking.

A lot of Chinese had worked on building the transcontinental railroad.

Again, everything seemed to be tied together. If he could just figure out the connections ...

He decided to call the Wings. The family had been very helpful to him in Rio Verde-the grandmother had been a veritable sourcebook of arcane lore-and maybe they could assist him here as well.

Very helpful'? Assist him? Who was he kidding? He'd merely been tagging along on that venture. If it hadn't been for the grandmother, his bones would probably be bleaching in the desert right now-along with those of the entire population of the town. He owed his career to the Wings.

He made a few phone calls.

The Wings, it turned out, had flown away. Their restaurant was closed, and the family no longer lived in town. Rio Verde itself was thriving. There were two new gated communities, both with man-made lakes, one with a golf course, and the rebuilt downtown featured all sorts of trendy eateries and boutiques. The dude ranch was long gone, but in its place was a resort and spa that catered to wealthy Phoenicians. With the influx of new money, though, must have come a new attitude, one that rendered obsolete the old-fashioned Chinese restaurant of the sort the Wings had owned.

Or maybe they'd just wanted to get out of town after everything that had happened.

He expected that sack-of-shit police chief to be a little more help than he turned out to be, but either the man knew nothing, or more likely, he wasn't willing to divulge what he knew, and after a short conversation Rossiter hung up the phone angry.

He would just have to track the family down. He had all of the resources of the bureau at his disposal, and not only could he learn their various addresses fairly quickly, but he could probably download satellite photos of their houses. Indeed, in a matter of minutes he learned that Sue Wing was an English teacher at a Chinese school in Irvine, California. Her parents and brother lived in Tucson.

The grandmother had died.

Rossiter was sorry to hear that. And not just because it put a roadblock in his path. As hard as it was to believe, time had softened him, and over the years he had come to not only respect the old woman but admire .her knowledge, skill and bravery. In the back of his mind, he supposed, he'd always assumed she would be around, a source of information he could consult whenever need be. It was something of a shock to learn that she was gone.

He decided to call Sue Wing. She was the one he had dealt with, his go-between with the rest of the family, and it was she who seemed to have been the closest to her grandmother and the most interested in supernatural phenomena. Besides, her parents barely spoke English. And her brother had been too young when it happened; it was doubtful he would know much.

Her number appeared on his screen, and he dialed it, clearing his throat so as to sound as professional and unthreatening as possible. She picked up on the second ring. "Hello?"

"Sue Wing?" he said.

"Yes?" came the tentative voice on the other end of the line.

"This is Agent Rossiter from the FBI-"

The line went dead.

He immediately called back, but the line was now busy. He tried once more, just in case, but he knew she had taken the phone off the hook. He felt a flash of anger and was tempted to call one of his old asshole comrades from the Phoenix field office who was now working in Southern California and have him haul her in for questioning, but he quelled that impulse.

What would the girl know, anyway? The grandmother was the expert. With her gone, his chances of learning anything worthwhile dropped to nearly nothing.

Hcsidcs, he couldn't allow himself to be distracted. Time was ol the essence, and he couldn't afford to fuck things up.

Rossiter glanced down at the printout next to his computer, saw the circled name.

Chester Williams.

He'd almost forgotten about that, and though he still couldn't remember where he'd come across the name before, it would be easy enough to track down. He called up another screen and typed in "Williams, Chester," and an entire page of distilled information appeared. Now he knew why the name was familiar. Williams had been an investor in the United Pacific Railroad. He had been influential at the beginning of the drive to build the transcontinental railroad, but his involvement had faded as time went on. He'd spent his final years in Bear Flats, California ... where he'd formed an organization called the ACL, the Anti-Chinese League, which had spread across the country and at its peak had over two hundred chapters and featured among its supporters a wide array of politicians.

That was one coincidence too many.

Rossiter pressed a button on his speakerphone. "Agent Saldana," he said. "Come in here, please." He'd intended to say "Get in here," without the "please," but at the last second he'd softened it. He was getting pretty good at this if he did say so himself.

A moment later, there was a knock at the door and his assistant let in Saldana. Rossiter stood. "I need you to lead a team of four men to the town of Bear Flats, California. A police officer reported hearing ghostly voices speaking Chinese and recorded an incident on his cell phone. This occurred in a house where an unexplained murder recently took place, a house built by railroad tycoon Chester Williams. I'll message over everything I have. I suggest you print it out and bring a laptop."

The agent seemed surprised instead of flattered. Wrong response, Rossiter thought, but he kept his expression neutral.

"I assumed I would be going to-"

Rossiter cut him off. "I'll be leading the team at Promontory Point. I want you to lead the second team--"

"But I thought-"

"Or not." Rossiter turned away dismissively and pressed the button on his speakerphone.

"No!" Saldana practically shouted. "I'm sorry! Thank you, sir. I will be happy to go to Bear Flats."

"Step on it, then. I want you there tonight. And I expect hourly reports once you're in town."

"Yes, sir."

Rossiter looked at the unmoving young man. "I said I would send you everything I have. Is there anything else?"

"No, sir."

"Then what are you standing there for? Get moving!"

Saldana practically tripped over his own feet at-t tempting to flee the office, and Rossiter smiled. Being nice had its place ... but there was nothing like good old-fashioned fear to light a fire under someone's ass.

He glanced at the clock. Time was wasting. He wanted Saldana in Bear Flats tonight, and he wanted to be at Promontory Point with his own team by midnight. He doubted they would make it, but he sure as hell was going to try. He went over a list of agents in his mind, trying to decide not only who would be the most thorough, knowledgeable and self-motivated- but also who would be the least annoying on the flight over.

Successful FBI work sometimes required more than merely brains and ability.

He pushed the button on his speakerphone. "Hanson," he said. "Singh, Worthington, Munoz ..."

Thirty-one

Bear Flats, California

Jolene looked down at the faces of her mother and her son. Both appeared more peaceful in sleep than they ever did awake, and she wished they could always be this way. Skylar shifted position, one arm flopping above his head, and her heart went out to the boy. Although he was strong, although he coped, adapted and survived, her greatest wish was that she could make his life easy, that she could spare him these hardships and give him the kind of carefree childhood he deserved.

She reached out and touched his cheek. It was soft, almost as delicate as it had been when he was a baby. A fierce protectiveness rose within her. If anyone or anything ever attempted to harm one hair on his head, she would kill them.

Her mother shifted in her sleep, muttered something unintelligible, then sank again into deep slumber.

Her mom had been doing very well. She'd found a small liqueur bottle in Leslie's cabinet yesterday that she'd polished off, but that had been it, and when they'd all gone to the store this morning, she hadn't even gone down the liquor aisle. Jolene was proud of her, and she wished she knew how to tell that to her mother without sounding patronizing.

She straightened, massaging her stiff neck with one hand, and glanced around Leslie's living room. Her friend was at work. She had been great through all of this, and though Jolene had not seen her in years, had not even bothered to keep in touch, the two of them had picked up exactly where they'd left off. It was as though she'd never moved away. Once best friends, always best friends, Jolene thought, and the sentiment brought her close to tears. She hadn't had a friend since to whom she'd been anywhere near as close. Part of it was due to the demands of being an adult. With work and family and the responsibilities of life, there just wasn't the free time to hang out together that there had been in high school. But part of it was also the mysterious chemistry that had brought them together in the first place, that had led them to bond over their shared disdain for jocks and cheerleaders in the back of Mrs. Wilson's social studies class. They'd been kindred spirits back then, instantly attuned, and connections formed at that pivotal age were always much stronger than those created later.

She or Leslie or both of them might move away in the future, but Jolene knew that they would not lose touch this time. They were bound together, friends forever.

Her throat felt dry, and she made her way to the kitchen to get a drink of water. Although the drapes were drawn, Jolene avoided looking at the windows. Leslie's curtains were frilly and sheer, and she was afraid of what she might see. Outside these walls, normal life went on for everyone else in town, but more and more she felt trapped within the house, barricaded against evil forces she could not hope to fight against. She knew that wasn't healthy, knew it was fostering an attitude of fear and paranoia, but she was afraid. For her son as much as herself. And after reading those diaries and seeing what she'd seen, she knew that there were evil forces.

Evil was not an abstract concept or metaphoric construct. It was real. And it lived.

They want revenge.

She wished Leslie would hurry up and come home.

Jolene walked back out to the living room, turning on the television but keeping the sound low. Jerry Maguire was on. She'd seen that movie with Frank. Before Skylar was born. Although the film itself still seemed recent, that period of her life felt like a long, long time ago, and thinking about it now made her sad.

She turned off the television.

There was the sound of movement from within the bedroom. It was probably nothing, but she couldn't afford to ignore it. She walked over to the bedroom doorway to check.

And Skylar awoke screaming.

In his dream, Skylar was himself, but he was also a marionette. His strings were being worked by the ancient Chinese man who'd spied on him and his mom through the window and who'd kidnapped him in the school bathroom. The wrinkled face grinned down at him as knotted fingers tilted and twirled the strings to make him dance. He didn't want to dance-he wanted to run-but his own will and muscles were no match for the overpowering force of the strings.

Suddenly there was another puppet approaching him. It was being controlled by a scowling bearded white man in an old-fashioned suit and hat. This marionette was made from the body of a mummified child, and its eyes and mouth were sewn shut with black suture that gave its face the appearance of a shrunken head. The strings made its skeletal arms and withered legs move up and down in a grotesque approximation of walking. Skylar's instinctive reaction was to run, and he tried to do just that, but the old Chinese man holding his strings started cackling and forced him to approach the other puppet with arms outstretched, as though inviting a hug.

Skylar wanted to scream but couldn't. He had no voice.

All of a sudden, there was a knife in his right hand, and with a hard, painful yank, the string attached to that arm made it thrust forward. Within seconds, he was jabbing at the other puppet, stabbing the mummified child in its shriveled stomach, in its bony chest. No blood emerged from the slices and tears in the dried skin, only puffs of dust, but despite the furious machinations of the bearded puppeteer, the marionette began to slow down, like a toy whose battery was dying. Another hard yank on the string connected to his right arm, and Skylar was stabbing the puppet in the face. Sutures ripped open, and opaque eyes glared out at him. The toothless mouth screamed silently.

Then he was being hoisted into the air, his feet scrambling up the collapsing skull of the marionette, his hands grasping the strings attached to the mummified child and climbing to the top, where he leaped upon the bearded man's hands.

His Chinese controller was laughing loudly now, no longer cackles but full-out guffaws. The bearded man at first let out a grunt of surprise, but Skylar sliced the muscle of his arm and then he was crying out in pain and fear, cries that turned to whimpers as Skylar moved up to his shoulder and began stabbing his neck and cheek and ear, the blood spurting out and covering him in a spray of crimson.

He could not see, and he fought against the strings with all of the strength he had, just so he could wipe

the blood from his eyes. The straining paid off and he finally overcame all resistance. He used the backs of both hands to wipe off his eyes-

And he was back in that cellar, lying naked on the hard dirt ground. Only he was not alone. The same bearded white man was unwrapping a piece of folded wet linen on a wooden workbench. He was not dressed in suit and hat this time but was clothed only in his underwear, which was stained red with blood, some of it dried, most of it not. There was blood on his skin as well, and when Skylar sat up, he saw that the man was withdrawing from the dirty wet linen a human hand. The stump of the wrist was ragged, as though the hand had been yanked off an arm rather than cut, and in the middle of the red was a circle of white bone.

Chester Williams, he thought. The man's name is Chester Williams. The old Chinese man had told him that. He remembered it from last time.

Williams picked up a long knife from the workbench and lovingly used it to sever a finger from the hand. A thin trickle of blood dribbled out.

Skylar gagged, throwing up on the ground next to him, and that captured Williams' attention. The bearded man turned around, and Skylar saw with horror that he had an erection.

He pointed to Skylar with the dripping knife. "Don't worry, sweetums. You're next."

And then Skylar was in a dark place that didn't seem like anyplace at all. He couldn't tell if his feet were on the ground or if he was floating in some limitless space, because there was no resistance against the soles of his shoes or any other part of his body. He put his hands out in front of him and tried to walk, but the darkness was so complete that he had no idea if he was moving forward or remaining in place or spinning in the open air. He sensed that he was not alone-although he was not sure of it until he heard the voice speak to him.

"Skylar."

It was not the same voice as before, the voice of the Chinese man, the puppeteer. There was something inhuman about it and vaguely snakelike, especially in the way it drew out the sibilance of his name.

He did not answer, tried to make himself small, tried to hide, though for all he knew the entity could see in the dark and was watching him right now.

"Destroy the house. It is the key."

Images accompanied the words. But more than imiges. Understanding. He understood what he was noelng, comprehended the reasons behind it.

And what he saw was the mansion where he had been taken, the one with the secret cellar that he knew now to be the Williams place. Chester Williams had been a bad man, an evil man, and much of that evil had been brought to the house. He'd heard his mom and his grandma and Ms. Finch talking about Chester Williams and his diaries when they thought he was asleep, and he remembered seeing the scalps and toes and other severed body parts when he'd been brought into that hidden cellar, but that was only part of it. Chester Williams had done much, much worse within those walls, and though Skylar saw some of it, he knew he was being shielded from the worst atrocities, and for that he was grateful.

And still the house stood, its secrets protected through the generations by Chester Williams' son and then his grandson, not just a monument to the barbarity of the man but a living repository of his evil deeds. Williams himself was still there somehow, not as a ghost, not exactly, but woven into the fabric of the building itself: the walls, the floor, the ceiling. It was the house that was keeping his presence alive, and it was the house that served as the focus of hatred for all the victims of his hideous crimes. They had been waiting for a long time, in a place as dark as this, for the chance to strike back at the man who had rallied mobs against them, who had tortured them and had them killed, and now they had a mob of their own, an army of the murdered, who had finally been able to connect with each other and now had the means to exact revenge not only on Williams but on the society that had condoned his actions.

"Destroy the house," the voice repeated, and Skylar understood that this would help stop the old Chinese man and his brethren by taking away the focus of their anger. It was the anger that drove them, that had kept their spirits alive all these years. Without it, they had no purpose, no meaning, and would undoubtedly dissipate, fading away into wherever it was that the dead normally went.

A muscle in his arm twitched at the memory of the string that had controlled him.

"Why me?" Skylar asked.

The answer was not clear. There were more images: his mother in her border patrol uniform discovering a family of corpses in a ditch in the desert; a group of huddled Chinese workers from long ago, dead in a tunnel, looking very similar to the family in the ditch; Skylar himself playing with Carlos, his best friend back in Yuma; Skylar again, walking by the mother-daughter grave site. There was a message he was supposed to take from that, but he had no idea what it was. "You were chosen," the voice said, but he didn't really know what that meant, and he wondered if what it really came down to was that he'd been in the right place at the right time.

Or the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Who . . . who are you?" Skylar asked the disembodied voice.

There was a lightening of the darkness as the entity showed itself.

And Skylar awoke screaming.

Jolene held her son tightly. Her mother had awakened as well, shocked instantly out of sleep by Skylar's primal piercing cry, and Jolene was both heartened and surprised to see that the expression on her mom's face was one of ferocious protectiveness. She did not know this woman. This was not the mother with whom she had grown up-although it was the mother she had always wanted-and for the first time she was filled with the hope that her son might finally have the grandmother he deserved and that she herself might eventually be able to forge a real relationship with her mom.

If they made it out of this alive.

Skylar's screams had turned to sobs, and she murmured generic reassurances in his ear. "It's all right. . . . It's okay. . . . Mommy's here. . . ."

There was a knock at the front door. She assumed at first that it was Leslie, home from work, but the knock came again. Leslie wouldn't knock. She had a key. "Who is it?" Jolene called out, heart pounding. She passed Skylar to her mother and went into the living room, looking around for the carving knife she'd been keeping close by, just in case.

"Agent Anthony Saldana. FBI."

That was the last response in the world she had expected to hear, and it came so far out of left field that she was too stunned to respond.

"Are you Jolene Connor?" the man asked.

"Yes," she answered through the closed door. She looked back at her mother, who was staring with wide frightened eyes. Skylar had stopped crying and was wiping the tears from his face, his gaze focused and

alert.

"May I speak with you?"

"Go right ahead."

"I need to talk to you about your experience in the Williams house. I interviewed Chief Tanner about an hour ago and just finished talking to your friend Leslie Finch, who told me where to find you." There was a pause. "Would you open the door, please?"

The voice belonged to someone used to being obeyed, and she was not sure if that was a request or an order. She was still suspicious and didn't want to let anyone in, but with trembling hands she turned the dead bolt and opened the door a crack, peeking out from beneath the chain lock. The gray-suited man on the front porch was holding out a sheathed badge and ID card. In the drive-behind him, another man was waiting in a black car. She thought of bringing up the fact that until recently she'd been a border patrol agent and so was a fellow alumnus of federal law enforcement, but she didn't think it would carry much weight.

"Open the door, please," the agent said.

Jolene obeyed, although she remained standing in the doorway, refusing to invite him in.

"I understand that you were in the house when Anna May Carter was killed and that your son was found in the basement hysterical and in a state of undress. Is this true?"

Jolene nodded.

Saldana looked over her shoulder at Skylar, who had come out of the bedroom with his grandmother. "Is that the boy?"

"What is it exactly that you want to know?"

"You have in your possession a series of journals kept by Chester Williams, journals in which he describes in detail killings and acts of violence committed by himself and his followers. You're also the one who discovered severed body parts that Williams cut off of his victims for his own personal use."

"Yes," she admitted.

"Can you tell me of any unusual or unexplained occurrences that have happened in or around the Williams house recently?"

She frowned. "What is this? What's going on?"

He looked her in the eye as the other agent got out of the car. "Have you seen any ghosts or spirits, Mrs. Connor?"

She paused for only a second. "Yes." Jolene exhaled deeply. It was a relief, somehow, to be able to unburden herself, to explain what she'd seen and experienced to someone in a position of authority. Both agents came inside and sat down, and although she had done her best up until this point to keep the worst of it from Skylar, she spoke freely now in front of him, knowing that it was time for him to learn what was going on. She handed the diaries over to Saldana when she was through describing what was in them. "Here," she said.

"I would like you to accompany us to the house of Chester Williams," the agent told her. "I want you to show us where everything occurred."

"I'm going, too!" Skylar announced.

"No, you're not," Jolene told him. "You stay here with Grandma."

"I have to go. I have to be there. I'm the one it talks to."

I'm the one it talks to.

She suddenly felt chilled. "I don't want you anywhere near that house, do you understand me? You-"

"Who is 'it'?" Saldana asked Skylar.

"I don't know. But I dreamed about that old Chinese guy who kidnapped me, and I dreamed about that Williams guy, and then I was in this dark place and this really big ... thing"-Jolene saw the shadow of fear pass over his face-"talked to me and said the only way to stop all this was to destroy the house."

"All 'this'? All what?"

"I don't know. All the stuff you're here about, I guess. All the stuff you're supposed to stop."

The two agents looked at each other. "He's coming with us," Saldana said.

"No, he's not," Jolene insisted.

"He's coming with us."

Thirty-two

In the Passenger Car

Time was fluid in here. Dennis knew, objectively, that it shouldn't take more than a day to reach their destination if they really were riding on a train. But sometimes it felt as though he'd been in here over a week- and sometimes it seemed that only hours had passed by.

They made no stops, at least not to his knowledge, but other people wandered into the passenger car periodically. People like himself. Living people. Chinese people. They seemed as confused as he had been upon entering, and, as with him, the ghostly man sat next to each of them in turn and explained things, showed them scenes outside the blackness of the windows.

Afterward, the newbies came to sit by him, either drawn by his warmth or repelled by the others' cold.

What was happening was wrong, Dennis knew. He recognized the reason for the rage, even felt some of it himself. The desire for revenge was understandable and perhaps even justified given the circumstances, but two wrongs didn't make a right, and no matter what various religions said, the sins of the father should not be visited upon the sons.

Not everyone agreed. One of his fellow travelers was a college professor from Denver, another an elderly housewife from Oregon who reminded him of his mom, and both of them believed retaliation was entirely appropriate. They had been told and shown the same things he had, but it seemed that they had known already. Like the old man he had seen in the Selby cemetery, they had been practicing rituals handed down from their parents and grandparents, rural rituals from old religions that were intended to lead to the very end they were experiencing now: the resurrection of the dead. Their people had been grievously wronged, the professor said, not merely exploited but murdered because of their ethnicity, and those who had died deserved the chance to strike back at the society that had fostered such hatred. Whatever punishment might be meted out was more than deserved. Dennis definitely did not agree, and he thought perhaps it was a generational thing, or maybe it was because he considered himself more American than Chinese. He was relieved when another young man-a medical student from Las Vegas-seemed to be just as clueless and horrified as he was.

The odd thing was that none of them seemed to be freaked-out by the fact that they were riding in this phantom train-himself included-and he wondered if the others had experienced the same sort of subliminal pull that had compelled him west, that had led him from state to state, town to town, and finally to here. He wondered if, like himself, they looked at this dark ride as the logical continuation of a journey they had already been on.

At some point, the train would reach its final destination. Probably sooner rather than later. He was not exactly sure what would happen there-well, he knew what, although he did not know how-but he realized that he needed to find some way to stop it. He thought of what he'd seen out the windows. An army of Native Americans was waiting for them at Promontory Point. Aligned originally against the white society that had abused them both, the Native Americans had gone from allies to enemies over generations due to the all-consuming hunger of the Chinese dead. Dennis had no idea how the men of the tribes had discovered that it would happen at the Point, the burning place, or what was behind their gathering; all he knew was that if they failed, the dead would have free rein and no one would be safe. He could not allow that to happen. In school, in the ethics class he'd taken the semester before dropping out of college, there'd been endless discussions about how choosing not to act was still a choice and choosing not to act against evil made one complicit in that evil. They had all sworn that were the opportunity to arise, they would take a stand no matter what the personal consequences.

Now he had the opportunity to act on that promise.

If he could only figure out how.

He wished Cathy were here. His sister might be young, but she was smart and good at thinking on her feet.

On an impulse, he tried his cell phone, but it didn't even turn on. There was no light, no beep, nothing. He pressed his face to the window. On the other side of the glass, no historic scenes were replaying themselves for his benefit. There was only darkness.

"Dennis."

He looked over at Malcolm, the medical student. "Yeah?"

"You think it's all true?"

Dennis nodded. He did. Like that of any other minority group, the known history of the Chinese in America was pretty bad. To discover that it was even worse and more brutal than he'd been led to believe was not exactly a shocker.

"But it's still not worth retaliating for?"

"Against people who had nothing to do with any of it and don't even know what happened? No." He frowned. "Why? Are you changing your mind?"

"No. No, not at all. It's just that ... why are we here? What do they need us for? What do we bring to the table? You know what I'm saying? There must be a reason. But ... what is it?"

"I don't know," Dennis admitted.

"It worries me," Malcolm said.

Dennis nodded. "Yeah. Me, too."

Thirty-three

Promontory Point, Utah

What surprised Angela most about the gathering was its size. The shots on television had not done it justice. There it had looked like the crowd of an ordinary football game behind the reporter. Viewed here from the road, however, there seemed to be enough people to fill five or six stadiums. The sight was impressive ... but also a little creepy. The fact that this many individuals had suddenly, inexplicably and simultaneously walked out on their ordinary lives and used whatever means necessary to get to this place left her feeling not only frightened but overwhelmed. If whatever they were dealing with had the power to summon thousands of people over such a broad geographic area, they had no hope in hell of combating it. They might as well turn tail right now and run as far away from here as they could get.

The car approached the edge of the gathering. A brown sign by the side of the road read golden spike national historic site. Somewhere in the middle of this massive assemblage was a visitors' center, were roads and parking lots that led to the structure, but the amorphous nature of the crowd and its incredible scale had engulfed those permanent fixtures and temporarily changed the topography of the land. She could not tell where anything was located.

Derek pulled next to a CNN news van. A satellite dish atop a long pole protruded from the center of the van high above the gathered throng. Black wires and cables ran in bunches from within the vehicle's open center door outward into the crowd.

"The train's not here," Derek said.

"Yet," Angela emphasized. For she felt certain that it would be. And soon. She had no clue as to why it was late or what detour it could possibly have taken, but she knew in her gut that the corpse-hauling locomotive would arrive. This was where it was headed; this was its destination.

She unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. Her legs hurt from being cramped in the same position most of the day, and she stretched gratefully, thankful to have freedom of movement once again. As Derek, his mom and his brother got out of the car, she walked over to the news van to see if she could find out what was happening. Poking her head in the open door, she saw banks of electronic equipment and a row of six small television screens showing six different shots of the crowd, but no person inside the vehicle. She glanced from one screen to another, looking for some kind of clue, something that would give her an idea of where to go and what to do, but there were only scenes of campers and crowds, people milling around.

"Can I help you?" someone asked behind her.

She pulled her head out of the van to see a clean-cut young man only a few years older than herself carrying what looked like a video camera and an extra length of coiled cable. "Uh ...," she stammered, caught off guard. "I, uh, was just wondering ... uhm ... no," she said. "Sorry." She moved away to let the man into the van.

"What now?" Derek asked, coming up next to her.

"I don't know," Angela admitted.

"These are close quarters. If that train gets here, if those . . . zombies come out and that mold starts infecting people?" He shook his head. "It would spread really fast."

She'd been thinking the same thing, but she had no idea what they could do to prevent any of it. She felt helpless, powerless, useless.

"Maybe we should leave," Derek's mother suggested.

His brother, Steve, nodded nervously. "Yeah."

"No," Angela and Derek said simultaneously.

They looked at each other and smiled. Where there's humor, there's hope, she thought. She wondered what her parents were doing right now, wondered what they would say if they knew she was here and why. She hadn't talked to them for the past two days. For all she knew, they thought she'd been kidnapped, and were calling Flagstaff police to send a search party after her.

The sun was starting to go down.

"What do we do about sleeping arrangements?" Angela asked. "I don't think there are any hotels around here."

"I don't even think there's a bathroom," Steve said.

Derek shrugged. "I guess we'll just sleep in the car."

The temperature was dropping, too.

Angela looked around at the crowd of Native Americans. They all seemed to be men, but they were old and young, fat and thin, crew cut and ponytailed. One thing they had in common was that they completely ignored one another. The communal spirit usually present at large events like concerts and football games was absent. It was as if thousands of individuals with absolutely nothing in common and no interest in one another happened to find themselves in the same place at the same time.

Between the crush of bodies, she thought she saw a portion of railroad track.

It's coming, she thought. It will be here tonight.

She said nothing to Derek. But when he took her hand, she squeezed it tightly, hoping to stop her trembling.

The second day passed slowly. They had run out of things to talk about and none of their immediate neighbors seemed in the mood for discussion, so mostly they sat around silently and waited. Henry wished he'd brought some reading material, but he hadn't and no one else had either. He could have spoken to reporters, given them his take on the situation for broadcast. But he had a career to think of after all of this was over, and it was more important to maintain his credibility than provide himself with diversions. Toward the middle of the day, he hiked around a bit, surveying the surroundings and trying to strike up conversations with other sojourners to no avail. He returned hot, tired and frustrated.

Lookiloos arrived, conspiracy buffs and New Age ninnies attracted by stories on the newscasts who'd come to see for themselves what was going on.

"They're in for a surprise," Wes said simply.

The others nodded.

The temperature dropped as the sun went down. Shadows grew long and then blended into the darkness as dusk became night.

Henry'd had a lot of time to think things over, to ponder what he'd learned and what he'd been told. It seemed to him that the Native American peoples had had a symbiotic relationship with the Chinese massacre victims from the beginning. Since both had been exploited by white men and the railroad, their interests converged; they each had a vested interest in taking revenge on their persecutors. The Chinese even seemed to have adopted some of the native beliefs for their own purposes. He recalled the first time he had dreamed of the twins and then when he had initially seen their shadows. They had revealed themselves slowly, seducing him, and while he had known nothing about them, and had found them profoundly alien and frightening, the shadows had from the beginning acted as though his capitulation was not only inevitable but preordained. He understood now that the shades had been gaining strength for well over a century this way, and Henry had no doubt that initially the arrangement had been agreed to by shamans or chiefs or even the native peoples themselves. But over the years, knowledge of any such pacts had been lost and forgotten, and the current generation not only resented and objected to being used but rejected the very premise of the massacre victims' resurrection. What was past was past. And wrongs could not be avenged, only righted.

From somewhere in the night came the sound of a train.

The hair prickled on the back of Henry's neck and arms. The mournful cry of the whistle was familiar .. . yet there was an added dimension to it, a fullness, an eerie haunting quality that gave it far deeper resonance than expected. Around him, people were getting uneasily to their feet, their faces blanched, their eyes filled with fear.

It was coming.

The ground rumbled as the train approached. The air shifted, growing warm, then cold, pressing forward and backward, though it was not wind and disturbed very little. Even the thin hairs on the top of his head remained unmoving as great blocks of air were displaced. He had no idea from which direction the train was coming or where it would eventually stop. He knew only that the waiting was over.

The whistle sounded again, and this time it resembled the crying of a beast.

The wheels on the rails emitted a monster's roar.

And then they saw it. From the edge of the plain to the east came a hulking black shape that sped along the tracks toward them, a vortex of darkness that seemed to suck into it all of the ambient light from the moon, the stars and assorted flashlights and lanterns. It looked like a train.

Looked like a train.

But wasn't.

As it grew close, Henry could see that the massive object hurtling toward them was made of writhing bodies, hundreds of them, covered with what looked like black mold and contorted into impossible shapes that fit together like parts of a jigsaw puzzle. The portion of the crowd that had gathered near the tracks was parting, people frantically dashing to one side or the other in order to get out of the way, leaving behind tents, cars, coolers and chairs as they tried desperately to get as far away from the onrushing train thing as they could.

He knew without being able to see faces that the squirming bodies were Chinese. They had built the rails and now they were using them, gathering victims from across the country and bringing them here, to the site of their greatest triumph and greatest tragedy.

The giant black shape did not brake or slow down or gradually halt. It did not have to follow the traditional laws of physics. All of a sudden, it simply stopped. There were none of the after noises associated with

real trains, none of the steam hissing or mechanical clanking. It sat there in the center of the gathering, at a standstill, ominous and silent.

The bodies were no longer moving. Although they'd been constantly writhing while the train was in motion and had appeared almost alive, they were now very definitely dead. Their eyes were closed, and the layer of thick black mold that coated them bound them together and sealed them in like a cocoon.

News crews were yelling, shouting, hauling equipment, shoving their way past people, moving through the crowd to get to the train.

Or trains.

For there was another one now, coming from the opposite direction. This one was silent and shadowy, and Henry shivered as he saw the silky way it moved along the tracks. It reminded him of the twins. It may have resembled a mechanical object, but as impossible as it seemed, there was something sensual and seductive about the oversized form.

The two trains bumped, touched.

He and the other Papagos made no effort to move any closer. Indeed, most of the individuals on the periphery of the crowd remained where they were, and quite a few of the men who'd been closer to the tracks were now moving outward and away, trying to distance themselves. It was only the news crews and the tourists who were excitedly rushing forward, who appeared not to understand the seriousness of the situation-or the danger.

They all seemed to be white, Henry suddenly noticed.

They were the enemy.

As if on cue, the Others came. They did not emerge from either train, did not come out of the sky or the ground. They were just there one moment, moving through the throng of people, on the hunt. Henry did not know what they were, but these were the beings responsible for the killings, for the deaths, for slaughtering Laurie Chambers and Ray Daniels. They had no shapes to speak of and appeared to be formed from fungus and claws. He wasn't even sure how they moved; they seemed to sort of roll and scuttle at the same time. But he was afraid of them, and he instinctively moved back toward the pickup truck, his heart hammering in his chest as though it were about to burst.

One of the creatures reached a young man and woman. College students. The girl had an expensive still camera with a telephoto lens, the guy a palm-sized video recorder. They were capturing events for a college newspaper/TV station, for a class, for their own personal interest or perhaps because they hoped to sell the shots to another media outlet and make some money.

The creature sliced off their heads.

It happened in an instant, before they could even cry out. A shapeless smudge of fungus with razor-sharp talons lashed out and in one quick move cut through first the guy's neck, then the girl's. Both bodies took one extra step before crashing into each other and collapsing in a heap, blood geysering from their severed arteries while their heads landed on the ground. The people around them shouted and screamed as they were splashed with the spurting blood.

Henry felt an ice-cold sliminess slide against his back. It passed through the thick material of his shirt like it wasn't there and for a brief frigid second it seemed as though a gigantic raw oyster were being drawn across his skin. He spun around and saw one of those creatures passing right next to him. Even this close, he could see no details in the blackness, only the vague fuzziness of the mold and the occasional sharpness of randomly jutting claws. It sped by quickly, and he stood stock-still, afraid to move, those around him doing the same until the monster had disappeared into the crowd, into the night. Henry backed away.

The creatures were everywhere, attacking the tourists, the reporters, the cameramen, the technical workers on the news teams. He saw arms lopped off, stomachs rent, people torn apart, as the black shapeless figures passed through the crowd. Oddly enough, what brought it home to him, what made it seem truly real, was the fact that famous people were being killed. Both NBC and CNN had well-known national correspondents on the scene, and to see them die so gruesomely, these men and women who had been on his television countless times over the years, reporting from crime scenes and trouble spots as he'd been eating his dinner, made him realize that this was actually happening. And yet the men of the tribes remained untouched. It wasn't fair, and while he was one of those spared, he felt the unjustness of it, knew it was wrong and felt guilty about it. This had to stop.

He glanced over at Wes, Milton, Antonio and Jack. They and the group of Pimas next to them looked as stunned, sickened and abashed as he felt. And still more trains were coming. The air was moving again. Not wind but the same sort of huge displacement that had heralded the previous arrival. There was already chaos in the crowd from the murderous attacks, but it grew worse as survivors began running frenziedly about, trying to anticipate where the next locomotive would be coming from. For railroad tracks were springing up beneath their feet, rising out of the hard earth, an impossible crisscrossing network that seemed to extend in every direction. Henry nearly fell over as rails and ties pushed up from the ground, and he looked frantically both ways to make sure nothing was bearing down on him.

The dark murderous entities that had been rushing wildly through the crowd and tearing people apart seemed to have disappeared, although perhaps they'd only moved on to another section of the huge assemblage. This area was on a slight rise, and Henry could see all the way to the original tracks. It was dark out there and he couldn't be sure, but it looked to him as though some of the creatures were merging with the eastbound train, the shadow train, not climbing aboard but being absorbed by the locomotive, becoming part of it.

And the train grew darker, more solid.

Fresh screams arose from the south as the new locomotive arrived, barreling through the throng on one of the emergent tracks, running over dead bodies and shoving other people out of its way, sending them flying. Despite its tangible concrete presence, this train, too, made no sound, and though smoke seemed to be belching from its chimney, Henry saw as it sped by that the smoke was comprised of shadows, the hovering forms of those seductive shades who'd been violating his people.

His people.

How quickly he had come to identify himself as Papago after years, decades, of seeing himself as Caucasian and thinking of his father's story as nothing more than a fanciful rumor.

A hot wind engulfed him as the behemoth passed, smelling of sulfur and death, blowing the long hair of the men around him and causing his own shorter hair to whip backward painfully. He saw blood and bits of flesh both on the scoop in front of the engine and spinning around on the wheels. In the passenger cars that followed, the countenances that stared out were rotted and skeletal, the faces of corpses long dead.

From the north, a fourth train emerged from the night, this one seemingly more ordinary, although any real determination was impossible to make at this distance. Its sound and appearance were those of a traditional locomotive, but it was arriving on one of the spider's web of new tracks rising from the plain, so it couldn't have been anything close to normal. Like the others, it drove through the multitudes, over stray individuals, heading directly for the heart of Promontory Point-the spot at which the golden spike had been driven.

Just as they had in 1869, when the lines met and the transcontinental railroad was born, two trains faced each other on the original east-west tracks while a huge crowd watched. This time, however, two other trains on a pair of the newly emergent tracks faced each other from the north and south as well. It was an awesome and frightening sight. The four engines looked like gigantic creatures holding a conference, and in a way, Henry supposed, that was exactly what was happening. For these were not mere vehicles in which passengers were being carried; they were entities of their own, created for a specific purpose, incorporating yet superseding the corpses, shadows, ghosts, mold and whatever else made up their individual components. He had no idea what came next, but it was not hard for him to imagine the four locomotives merging into one, forming a single supernatural force capable of crisscrossing the nation in endless pursuit of vengeance.

The ground rumbled again. None of the trains were in motion, but there was movement beneath the earth, as though something was attempting to break through to the surface, and he imagined an army of corpses emerging from the soil, their skeletal faces frozen in expressions of rage and hate.

Henry smelled smoke, felt heat, although whether it was coming from under the ground or from the engines themselves he could not be sure.

This was it. This was what they'd come for, what the shamans had predicted. It was time for them to take a stand, to align themselves against the trains and the rapacious dead, to reclaim for themselves the power that the Chinese had appropriated. A shudder seemed to pass through the crowd. Only it wasn't exactly a shudder. It was more like a collective shift, a uniform movement that seemed almost choreographed in the way it migrated from one side of the gathering to the other.

Henry felt Wes reach for his hand, and he reached out to hold Milton's. Who in turn grabbed Antonio, who ...

It spread like a wave through the gathering, and Henry watched as all of the disparate individuals who had heretofore resisted any and all attempts at social connection formed a sort of human chain, linking themselves physically with one another, with every pilgrim who had made his way to the Point. This was why they were here. There was a calming effect as he stood between the two men, holding their hands, a soul-soothing emotion that radiated through him as though conducted by the hands holding his, and it felt at once comforting and cleansing.

Along with this came a chanting, words he did not recognize and did not know but that he picked up through simple repetition of the syllables. He joined in, starting hesitantly but growing louder, stronger and more confident with each round of verse. Many of the other men seemed unfamiliar with the words as well at first, and he wondered from which tribe the chanting had originated. He had the strange feeling that it was not from any tribe, that the words were in a language familiar only to shamans, and the thought made him recite more forcefully, suddenly certain that doing so would give the words power.

The calming influence was superseded by an energizing force that likewise seemed transmitted by the hands of the men around him. Transmitted and amplified. He was suddenly filled with the desire, the need, to confront the trains and whoever or whatever lay behind them.

It was time to fight back.

Thirty-four

On the Passenger Train

The train lurched.

It had stopped seconds before, and while Dennis could still see nothing out the window, there seemed a slight lessening of the darkness, as though the outside world had caught up to them and was gradually coming into focus. The lurch was strange, jarring and definitely unplanned. Even a couple of the ghosts were thrown forward, and the identical expression on their formerly blank faces was one of confusion. Instead of growing more corporeal, as planned, they seemed to be growing less solid, and it was clear that this was a development that had not been expected.

Dennis stood, as did Malcolm, but it was difficult to do so. Something about the railroad car had changed. It was less solid than it had been, weaker. If before they had been cocooned within the substance of the train, now that cocoon was slipping, shrinking, tightening around them, trapping them.

There was another hard lurch, as though they'd been hit from behind, and the dead surrounding them flickered off and on like lightbulbs.

They needed to get out now, Dennis knew, or they might not be able to get out at all. Even the professor from Denver and some of the people who'd been craving revenge were now frightened and desperate to leave the train. The dead remained in place, unmov-ing, their faces betraying the fear they now felt. All of the living people were making their way up the aisle toward the exit. It felt to Dennis as though they were slogging through water, so thick did the air seem to be, and he carefully kept his hands at his sides after accidentally touching the back of a seat and feeling a hairy sliminess that made his skin crawl with revulsion.

He reached the door and tried to open it, but the latch pressing against his hand did not retain its shape or function and squished out from between his fingers like rotten black gelatin. Crying out in surprise and disgust, he flung the bulk of the mess onto the ground, wiping the rest on his pants, rubbing his skin compulsively against the material until he was sure it was completely gone.

Malcolm had passed through the connector to the car in front, and Dennis cut in front of the professor and followed.

Only the car wasn't there.

The connector remained the same as it had been when they'd initially entered, but the first passenger car had been replaced with what appeared to be a grotto made from mold and mud. Faces peered out of the walls, faces that looked vaguely familiar, that had no doubt been the passengers they'd passed on their way in, but they were frozen in expressions of agony. It was how they'd looked at the second they'd died, Dennis realized, and he understood that whatever process had brought them to this point was reversing itself. The dead were reverting to their previous forms. If the rest of them did not get out at this instant, they could be trapped here forever-wherever here was. Malcolm backed up and so did he and so did the professor. The housewife and a computer programmer, meanwhile, had found a way to open the door. The slimy goo that had been the latch was still lying in globs on the floor where he'd thrown it, but the rest of the door had somehow remained intact and was sliding open. Through the doorway, they could see night sky and what looked like thousands upon thousands of people holding hands and chanting on a desert plain.

Promontory Point, Dennis thought.

This was where it had all begun, and this was where it was destined to end.

Other trains were here, he saw, other railroads carrying more of the wronged, the massacred, the dead.

The programmer and the housewife stepped down, went outside.

Taking a deep breath, Dennis followed.

Thirty-five

Bear Flats, California

They pulled up in front of the Williams place in the FBI agents' car: the two agents, Skylar and Jolene. Her mother remained back at the house in case Leslie showed up. Their headlights shone on another car already parked in the circular drive and on two more identically attired agents who stood with Ned Tanner and an officer she didn't know, who were obviously waiting for them to arrive.

Jolene got out of the backseat, holding tightly to Skylar's hand. She still didn't want him to be here, but she recognized that he was connected to all of this in some strange way she did not understand. Even if she tried to keep him out of it, he was involved, and the safest thing to do was keep him with her at all times.

Ned smiled a greeting, and Jolene nodded back, walking over. The four agents met by the other car and briefly conferred before splitting apart. Saldana seemed to be the man in charge, and he approached the police chief. "You have the key?"

Ned handed it to him.

"I'd like to see the spot where Mrs. Carter was killed."

"It's in one of the bedrooms."

"Show me." The agent motioned to Jolene and Skylar, indicating that they were to come, too.

Ned instructed the other Bear Flats officer to stay outside while the rest of them entered the house. Just inside the doorway, someone flipped on the lights. It looked the same as it had two days ago, when she and Leslie had come back for the diaries, but the atmosphere was different, stranger, more sinister and overtly threatening, the way it had been the day Anna May had been murdered.

And Skylar had been naked in the cellar.

She didn't want to think about that.

"Ow!" Skylar said. "You're hurting my hand!"

"Sorry," Jolene said. She'd been unaware that she'd been squeezing so hard.

Ned led the way up the stairs. Darkness lay at the top of the steps, and no one seemed to know where the light switch was. There was some fumbling around by Ned and one of the other agents, and Jolene was filled with the irrational certainty that the two of them would be engulfed by the darkness and eaten by whatever was hiding in there. Her breathing grew shallow, and she had to make a concerted effort not to squeeze Skylar's hand too tightly.

Then Ned found the switch and the upstairs hallway was illuminated before them. Everyone was here, everyone was fine, but the sense of dread did not dissipate. If anything, it became stronger as they approached the bedroom. Jolene remembered the loud thump they'd heard from downstairs when Anna May's body had hit the floor. She recalled with perfect clarity the way the old woman had been not only beaten, her head nothing but a bloody pulpy mess, but slashed open, the gashes in her legs so deep that the white of bone was visible through the red of flesh.

"I don't think I closed that door," Ned said in front of them, and Jolene could tell that he was scared, too.

He pushed open the bedroom door.

They stood there, looking in, flashlights shining on blackness. The interior of the bedroom was now completely covered with mold. It was impossible to tell whether the black fungus was consuming the room or transforming it, but it was no longer merely a faint shadow on the walls. A thick layer that looked like the fur coat of an animal grew over every available inch of space-floor, ceiling, furniture-erasing distinctions and imposing uniformity. The enclosed area looked less like a room now than a cave.

No. Not a cave. There wasn't the haphazard naturalness that a cavern would possess. Instead, the metamorphosed walls possessed an almost mechanical aspect, and she thought that it looked more like a boiler room or ...

Or the cabin of a train engine.

Even the FBI agents seemed caught off guard by the condition of the room.

"Where was the body?" Saldana asked. The police chief pointed. Neither made an effort to enter.

Jolene pulled Skylar away from the doorway, back down the hall. From somewhere else within the house came the faint sound of laughter. It was muffled, hard to hear, its source impossible to pinpoint. Though the tone was a deep masculine baritone, there was something flighty and vaguely feminine about the cadence, and the juxtaposition sent a shiver down her spine.

"Ow!" Skylar said.

"Sorry," she told him, loosening her grip.

"Where was your son found?" Saldana asked. "I want to see that basement."

They descended the stairs, none of them remarking upon the black room they had just left, and Jolene found herself more frightened than she had been before. Whatever small confidence the authority of the FBI had instilled in her was gone. Saldana and his men could not have learned much from their brief look at the bedroom, and they certainly hadn't accomplished anything. Which meant that the agents were as lost as she was in the face of this horror.

Still, they all went down to the basement, although she and Skylar ventured no farther than the bottom of the steps in case they had to make a quick getaway.

The door in the floor was closed. Ned again expressed surprise at that, since he was the last person who'd been in here and it had been open when he'd left yesterday afternoon.

Saldana pointed. "That's it? Down there?" His voice was not quite as loud as it had been, as though in deference to this place.

Jolene nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

"And there's no other entrance or exit?"

"None," Ned said. "I checked myself." He was about to pull open the trapdoor when from beneath the thick wood came an indistinct scratching followed instantly by the sound of wood hitting wood.

Someone was down there.

As one, the FBI agents and the police chief drew their holstered guns. Jolene's heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear over the thumping in her ears. She backed up, holding tightly to her son, retreating slowly up the steps. She thought of that low terrible space with its dirt floor, its foul smell and that single bookcase in the center. It had been ghastly enough in the middle of the day. At night, it seemed more terrifying than anything she had ever encountered or could ever have imagined, and the thought that Skylar had had to spend even a second alone in that dark horrible space filled her with anguish.

Ned and the FBI agents had formed a ring around the trapdoor, their drawn weapons pointed at arm's length at the wooden hatch. Saldana nodded to the agent closest to the handle, indicating that he was to pull the door open. He was Asian, Jolene noticed for the first time. She wondered if he was of Chinese descent.

As before, the spring-hinged door came up fairly easily, and for a brief moment she saw the top of the primitive ladder.

Then the agent was gone.

She could not tell if he fell into the opening or was somehow drawn in. All she knew was that one second he was standing next to Saldana and the next he was tumbling into the blackness with a short surprised scream.

The trapdoor slammed shut.

The screaming continued.

Grew worse.

Jolene yanked Skylar's arm, pulling him the rest of the way up the stairs. They had to get out of here. Now.

"We have to destroy the house!"

She stopped. Her son's declaration was so loud, so authoritative, so unlike his usual quiet voice, that for a brief second she thought he might be possessed, thought something else might be speaking through him. But when she peered down at his face, illuminated by the light from the kitchen above, she saw only Skylar, and while the look of determination on his features was far more intense than usual, it was definitely his own.

A hint of exasperation crept into his voice, as though he knew ahead of time that he wouldn't be taken seriously because he was a kid, but when he spoke it was with the same strength. "Trust me. I know what we have to do."

"We can't-" Saldana began, his eyes never leaving the closed trapdoor.

"It's the only way to stop it!"

Muffled laughter sounded from the lower cellar, a deep evil chuckle that was accompanied by a strange juicy sound she could not quite recognize. The screaming had stopped.

"We have to destroy the house!" Skylar's voice was more whiny now than authoritative. "We have to burn it down!"

Jolene pulled him into the kitchen. She didn't care what the rest of them did, but she was taking her son and getting out of this fucking building.

The two of them dashed through the kitchen, out into the first-floor hall, through the foyer and out the front door.

"Jolene! Skylar!"

It was her mother's voice.

Jolene pulled her son down the steps, running into the drive. She squinted against the patrol car searchlight until she found her mom. And Leslie. The two had driven here in Leslie's Toyota and were waving them over.

"Jolene!" Leslie called, her voice filled with relief.

"Is everything all right, ma'am?" It was the officer who had remained outside. Jolene had no idea how to answer that-so she didn't. She continued running.

"Skylar!" Her mother took him from her, hugging the boy and holding him close.

He pulled away. "We have to destroy the house!" he repeated in a tone of supreme frustration. He was almost crying. "It's the only way! We have to!"

"He's right. He knows."

Jolene looked at her mom. Was this the same woman who'd angrily told her and Skylar that they hadn't seen anything at the window? How could she have come around so quickly-and without even having seen what was inside the house? Jolene wasn't complaining, but she didn't understand. She loved her son, but even she hadn't been entirely persuaded until only a few moments before.

Leslie opened the trunk of the car. In it was a pile of dirty rags and a case of whiskey she had obviously brought from the restaurant. "We can make Molotov cocktails."

Leslie had been convinced, too.

"Chief!" the policeman shouted.

Jolene looked up as Ned emerged from the front door, battered and bloody, his clothes torn.

He was alone.

He staggered down the porch steps, leaning on a post for balance as the waiting officer rushed to offer him assistance. No one came out of the house behind him, and Jolene knew without having to ask that the four FBI agents were dead.

"Stay here!" she ordered, and started across the drive to help. She changed her mind halfway over and quickly hurried back. "Stay together!" She grabbed Skylar's wrist. He was already holding his grandmother's hand, and with Leslie running alongside, the three of them made their way over to the patrol car. Within the house, lights seemed to be flicking on and off at random.

"Are you okay?" Jolene asked the police chief.

His eyes were filled with agony. "They didn't make it."

"We have to destroy the house!" Skylar shouted.

"He's right," Ned said, breathing heavily and with difficulty.

"I brought a lighter and rags and bottles of alcohol," Leslie offered. She seemed to realize that what she was proposing was illegal, was in fact arson. And premeditated arson at that. She glanced quickly from the police chief to his underling.

"Then let's burn the place down," Ned said.

The chief was in pain and seriously injured, but through sheer determination he hobbled across the drive to Leslie's Toyota. He looked into the open trunk and nodded approvingly. "Joe," he said to the other officer. "We have five gallons of gas in those emergency canisters in the trunk of the car. Get them out."

The policeman hurried off. Ned tried to lift up the carton of whiskey bottles but couldn't do it, so Leslie lifted it out for him "Go take it over to Joe," he said. "Set it down in front of the porch. I'll get a couple of rags. All we need is one incendiary device. We'll douse the place first, then set it off."

Jolene found herself wondering what would happen once this was all over. // it was all over. There would be four murdered FBI agents in a house burned by an arson-set fire. Under Ned Tanner's orders, the Bear Flats Police Department might not come to any conclusions, but with feds involved, she had the feeling that there would be outside investigations into the deaths.

They couldn't worry about that now. The important thing was to destroy the house.

She watched with her mother and Skylar as Joe hauled out the gas cans and Leslie began unscrewing the caps on the bottles. They worked fast. Under Ned's instructions, Joe dashed briefly into the Williams house carrying two canisters of gasoline. Jolene held her breath until he emerged empty-handed a moment later. He then went over to the north side of the building, broke one of the windows, poured gasoline inside and threw the can after it. He did the same thing in another ground-floor room on the south side ₍ of the house.

Ned tried throwing a bottle through the open doorway but succeeded only in tossing it onto the porch. It didn't even break. He quit instantly, not wanting to waste their limited resources, and Joe began pitching bottles through the doorway and then through an open window on the upper floor.

The house was dark now, no lights were on, and it felt to Jolene as though the building lay there waiting, | like a predator preparing to pounce. She pulled Skylar back a few steps.

There were only two bottles left. The police chief took a long swig out of one, handed it to Joe, who did the same before passing it back, then pressed one of the rags through the bottle neck. He took the lighter from Leslie. "Stand back!" he ordered.

Joe held the bottle while Ned lit the rag.

"Now!" the chief yelled.

The policeman threw it through the doorway, and there was a whoosh of hot air and a sudden roar as the foyer went up in flames. Jolene didn't know what Joe had done on his quick trip inside the house, where he had dumped the gasoline, but he'd obviously known what he was doing because the building was instantly ablaze. There was a loud metallic thump, then the tinkling shatter of glass as one of the gas cans smashed through the picture window in the sitting room and came shooting out toward them, hitting a pine tree and bouncing to a stop next to the police car.

They all backed up.

The second bottle had been saved in case the first wasn't enough to start a fire, but that wasn't necessary. Flaming drapes blew outward through the broken picture window, accompanied by billows of black smoke. The sitting room and the foyer were hellish infernos. Another window shattered. And another.

They stood staring, the night darkening around them as the fire grew brighter, moved to other rooms, came onto the porch where Ned's unbroken bottle had landed, touched the shake roof.

Jolene thought she heard a cry of rage from somewhere deep within the blaze, a crazed infuriated bellow that blended with the roar and crackle of the conflagration. Would the fire reach the cellar? she wondered. Even in the upper basement, there wasn't much to burn. Although it seemed highly unlikely that the flames would penetrate the trapdoor, a living person would still suffocate down there from lack of oxygen and probably die of smoke inhalation.

But whatever was down there was neither living nor a person.

Perhaps the heat from above and the weight of the collapsing house would crush the cellar until it was nothing but a pit full of smoldering ashes.

Skylar looked up at her. "He wasn't in the basement," he said, as though reading her thoughts. "Not really. He was in the whole house."

He hoped he was right.

And as he watched the fire, held tightly to his small hand and heard once again that bellow of rage, she thought that he probably was.

Thirty-six

Promontory Point, Utah

An old guy who looked like a prospector with three cameras hanging around his neck lay butchered at her feet, his torn, broken body covered with blood and vomit.

Her vomit.

Angela wiped her mouth, her stomach still feeling queasy, the stench of death strong in her nostrils. All about her were the dead and dying. She had no idea what that thing was that had come through here, all wild claws and silent destruction. She knew only that it was made of mold, the same black mold that had been transferred to her by the corpse in the tunnel, that had taken over Babbitt House and corrupted her roommates.

But just as in Flagstaff, she was apparently immune. The mold had no effect on her. As far as she could tell, it had no effect on any of the Native Americans either.

It affected only white people.

The conclusion appeared inescapable. In Flagstaff, it turned them into raging bigots. Here, it slaughtered them with abandon. Angela could only assume she had been spared because she was of Mexican descent, a minority.

As crazy as everything else was, the concept of a politically correct monster seemed the most ridiculous and hardest to believe. How else to explain what had happened, though? The Chinese dead and their cohorts had spared her and all of the Native Americans but struck down with fury the Caucasian camera crew from CNN. Did that mean . . . ?

She looked around frantically until she saw in the crowd the familiar face she'd been searching for.

Derek.

He was still alive.

They'd been separated in the melee, and she was irrationally, exuberantly grateful that he was unharmed.

She recalled the photo of Derek's father she'd seen in his house, Mrs. Yount standing next to a man considerably darker than herself.

Derek saw her the same instant she saw him. He ran over, giving her a hard, desperate hug. Her heart skipped a beat, and she was suddenly suffused with a feeling of dread. Where was his mom? And his brother? She hugged him back and could tell from the lurching of his shoulders and the tight way he pressed his face into her hair that he was sobbing.

No, she thought.

Yes, she knew.

Around them, as if on cue, perhaps following the same instinct that had led them here in the first place, the Native Americans joined hands and started chanting. It reminded her of that Hands Across America thing her parents had done before she was born, although there seemed something vaguely religious about it as well. Many of the men's eyes were closed, and it looked to her like they thought they were going to die and had decided to passively await their fate, the hand-holding and chanting demonstrating their acceptance of death.

As two heavyset men moved to join the line of hand-holders, Angela saw, lying on train tracks behind where they'd been, the body of Derek's mother slit open from throat to groin, her bloody innards spilling onto the railroad ties. Sickened, she looked away, trying hard not to throw up, though she doubted there was anything left in her stomach to disgorge. She felt a distressingly deep void within her, an aching hole that threatened to grow wider and wider until whatever self she had left fell in and disappeared. It was like a sharp stab to the soul to see her friend's mother that way, and to know that his little brother lay somewhere around here as well, murdered and mutilated. She started praying. It was conditioning more than anything else. Habit. Praying made her feel better, gave her comfort in time of need.

Always before when she'd prayed, there'd been uncertainty behind it. She'd sent out her wishes and gratitude hoping they would be heard. But this time to her complete and utter shock there was an immediate connection. She was filled with the unexplainable yet irrefutable knowledge that she was speaking directly to an entity that heard and understood her. Only . . .

Only she was not sure it was God. It was powerful, no doubt about that. But she sensed things about this being, and its attributes were definitely not those she associated with the Almighty. It was close by, for one thing, not an omnipresent force but a specific entity existing within a clearly defined space. For another, it seemed offended somehow, angry, filled with the sorts of petty human emotions that should be beneath a deity. Not that the Lord himself hadn't exhibited the occasional pettiness and petulance from time to time-but that was when he'd been a young God, in the Old Testament, just learning the ropes and trying to figure out the boundaries between himself and his creations.

This thing wasn't young.

She was afraid to stop praying, afraid the connection would be lost. The entity to whom she was talking might not be a god, but she felt safe in its company, protected by her communion with it. And the more she spoke, the more she opened herself and made explicit her fears and wishes, the closer she seemed to come to this awesomely powerful being. She had the impression that it knew who she was, that her coming here had been arranged or somehow preordained, although that made no sense and she could not imagine how she could help, what possible use she could be, what she could bring to the table.

Derek was still hugging her, leaning on her, sobbing and holding her tightly. Her hands were clasped behind his back, her eyes closed as she prayed.

There was movement beneath her feet, accompanied by an audible rumbling, and at that, her eyes snapped open. As a native of Southern California, she'd lived through her share of earthquakes, and those experiences had made her wary and alert to any seismic phenomena, instinctively ready to bolt or seek cover at the first sign of geologic instability. This wasn't an earthquake, though. She knew it immediately. The second her eyes opened, she saw a figure beginning to coalesce from the land surrounding them, elements of earth and sky coming together to form a single beast, as though the substance of each component making up this plain was being drawn particle by particle from its inanimate source by an invisible force and shaped into a monster.

But was it a monster?

It drew itself upward from the ground, rising as tall as a building into the still night air, illuminated by the light of the recently risen moon. It was indeed horrible to look upon, this thing of rock and sand and cloud and brush. Recognizable ingredients had been put together in such a way that the end result was not only unfamiliar but profoundly disturbing. At the same time, she was not afraid of it. She faced the massive figure. There were no arms or legs, but there was very definitely a face. It hovered somewhere in the middle of the thin wavering form: ancient angry eyes, a beak-ish nose, a lipless maw that was at once overlarge and tightly constricted. Yet despite the being's hideous appearance and overwhelming size, she was not really frightened. Awed, yes, but not scared.

She could see through it. Despite its makeup, the creature did not have the heft of solidity, was more apparition than physical presence. Had it been summoned by those chanting men? Was this an agent of protection, some sort of Native American deity they had conjured in order to save them from the dark forces that had drawn them here?

Angela didn't know. All she knew was that this was the being to whom she had been praying, or, rather, the being that had intercepted her prayers.

The spirit of America.

She wasn't sure where she'd heard that phrase before or to what it referred, but the description came closer than anything else to describing the thing that now loomed above the plain.

Derek had pulled away, either the tension in her body, a change in the atmosphere or some sixth sense alerting him to the fact that there was something behind him, and he turned to look. He was scared, but, like herself, not as scared as he should have been given the thing's size and appearance.

The spirit of America.

It might be wrong, might even be blasphemous, but once more Angela closed her eyes and folded her hands.

She began to pray.

The connection was there again instantly, an intimate sharing that was even stronger this time. She had a hard time associating such a delicate process with the monster towering above them. On the other hand, Angela had no problem relating the anger she sensed back to that formidable figure. It was a fury borne of betrayal, a wrath directed at those who had overstepped boundaries: the Chinese, the corpses, the black mold. This was a being that had been here since before there was a country, since before there were people. She had no idea what it was, but the appellation she'd come up with-

spirit of America

-rang true to her, as trite and ridiculous as it might sound, because she sensed within the being a feeling of stewardship toward the land and, perhaps, the people who inhabited it. What the spirit required, she felt, what it demanded within its purview, was balance, an equality of opposites. It could not allow the evil behind the trains to run rampant over the land.

That meant the entity was on their side. This time. But she understood that that might not be the case in the future or may not have been in the past. It was a temporary convergence of interests, and she was thankful for that. Despite the nonthreatening connection she enjoyed with the spirit she understood the potential horror of such power, and knew from the monstrous appearance of the being, a sight that had been permanently etched into her brain, that it had the capacity to be far, far worse than the black trains and their cargo of vengeful dead.

One of the trains blew its whistle, a sound not mournful but chilling. Instead of a long sustained blast, however, the noise was cut off almost as soon as it started.

She opened her eyes, though her hands remained clasped and her mouth kept whispering prayer.

The gigantic figure grinned, its teeth dark in the moonlight and resembling sandstone.

And for the first time she was truly afraid.

Dennis emerged from the passenger car feeling numb and somewhat out of it, as though he'd been anesthetized in preparation for an operation and had only just come to. His vision seemed blurred, his thought processes murky, and when he stepped onto the ground behind the housewife, he did so slowly with legs that felt thick, unwieldy and not his own.

Malcolm followed him out. Then came the rest of the living. The dead remained on board.

There was a maze of tracks on the ground before them and what seemed to be a labyrinth of locomotives, huge black engines that were all different-yet all related. One, he saw with horror, was made of corpses, hundreds of them, covered with mold and forced into the shapes of headlights, catwalks, steel plates and doorframes.

It was difficult to walk, but one beneficial byproduct of his deadened state was the fact that the fear he should have felt remained subdued, tamped down. Intellectually, he recognized the magnitude of the terrible scene that greeted him, but emotionally it did not register, and his heart was not jackhammering into overdrive the way it otherwise would have been.

He stumbled toward the front of his train where it met three others, all four seemingly from the different directions of the compass-north, south, east, west. He bent down, dropping to one knee between two crisscrossing tracks, and scooped up a handful of dirt in his palm. He felt the dirt, smelled it, touched it to his lips. There was blood mixed with this soil, the blood of his people. Chinese immigrants had been massacred at this spot, and that was a stain that would never go away.

He let the dirt fall, slipping through his fingers.

He had been summoned, Dennis realized, but it had not been by the ghosts of his people, as he'd originally thought. Most of them were caught up in this revenge play just like himself, not intentional warriors but conscripts, drawn into battle by forces beyond their control and probably beyond their ken. Despite the fact that he had been welcomed onto the train, expected even, that had not been his destination, merely his mode of transportation. Perhaps those in the passenger car had expected him to join their fight, had thought that all of the living people they were picking up would devote themselves to bringing retribution to white America, but that had not happened.

No, something else had led him here, had called to him across the miles and through the years.

And then he saw it.

In back of the locomotives, above them, towered a strange and dreadful figure he recognized from his dreams. It was the being that had summoned him here, the one whose triangular head he'd seen behind the wall of smoke at the end of the road, the one in his nightmares who had always been in the background, watching, waiting, beckoning him forward, its dark shifting form visible in the sky, above the trees, above the mountains.

Just as it was now.

If the trains were variations on a normal object, bastardizations of known machines, this was something else entirely, a form so singularly horrific and profoundly strange that had he not dreamed of it before, his brain would have been able to find no correlations or comparisons.

And yet it belonged here. As alien as it seemed, it was clearly a natural part of this land, like the mountains and the sagebrush and the rocks and the air. It was a creature of this place, had been here long before this country was settled, and would remain here long after their civilization crumbled to dust.

Dennis looked up into the moonlit sky at the wavering form. Waves of anger and displeasure rolled from it, emotions he understood but that nevertheless frightened him because their origins in this instance were so fundamentally inhuman. It had called him here, brought him to this place in hopes that he could help stop the seemingly inevitable progression of the vengeful malediction. As huge and powerful as the entity might be, it was impotent. At least in regard to this. It could not stop the retaliation to come or it would have nipped it in the bud long ago. All it could do, apparently, was draw to it people it thought could derail the process.

But what was he to do? What could he do? All of this had been put into motion by a freakish convergence of circumstances, by a curse spoken in the right place at the right moment that had burgeoned into a movement now entirely uncontrollable. He could not stop it. He had no power and knew no spells. There was no way anything he did could have the slightest effect on what was essentially the biggest class-action proceeding of all time.

Malcolm and the others were standing close behind him, frightened by the hellish landscape in which they found themselves and uncertain of what to do, looking to him for guidance. Dennis, too, was lost, and for a moment he simply stood there, breathing in the smoky fumes and staring up at the angry face in the sky.

Except the face wasn't all angry. The mouth was smiling. It was a horrible smile, and the teeth reminded him of cactus, but it was a smile nevertheless, and it was directed at the thousands of Native American men who stood on the Point, linked together and winding around the trains over the land like an endless snake, chanting.

Had they conjured up this being, this monster, this ... spirit?

Spirit.

Yes. That's what it was.

The last of the line stood directly in front of him, a short man nearly as wide as he was tall with shiny black hair that from the rear made him look Chinese. Dennis swiveled his head, trying to discern the successive links in the chain, but the line of people was as tangled and complicated as the railroad tracks beneath their feet and it was impossible to tell where it went after the first crossing.