Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

Oh lordy, thought Skip. How do I make this real to him? Where do I even begin? “I know I’m tripping. I’m tripping my freakin’ brains out.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“ Please , man, would you please stop treating me like I’m fucking retarded. There is danger. It’s real, it’s really, really real.”

“I hear you, Skip,” said Oliver. “I want you to know I hear you, and I understand the danger seems real, but-”

“Luke Sweet.”

Under other circumstances, Oliver’s jaw-dropping, eye-popping double take would have been comical. “Luke Sweet?”

And now that I’ve got your attention, thought Skip. “Listen up, here’s the deal…”

However long it took for Skip to get the whole story out (by then the whole concept of time seemed like a bad joke the universe had decided to play upon the human race), when he’d finished, Oliver nodded decisively, turned on his sandaled heels, and hurried back to the semicircle of sunset chanters.

“Svaha,” he shouted, clapping his hands together loudly, then spreading them outward in benediction. “ Good job, everybody. What I need all of you to do now, I need you to head back to the Center. Steve, if you wouldn’t mind leading the way? And Candace, if you’d follow to make sure no one falls behind?”

“What about you, O?” Stahl seemed to realize that something was wrong-but then, he was tripping his freakin’ brains out, too. They all were.

“Skip and I will catch up,” Oliver said reassuringly.

“Catch up, we will?” whispered Skip, channeling Yoda for some reason. The color was beginning to drain from the sky; the trainees were wandering about, dazedly gathering up their things.

Oliver shrugged. “You did say we’re the ones this Asmador is after, didn’t you? No sense putting the others in jeopardy along with us.”

Skip was impressed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I know, that’s my job.” Oliver rested his smooth, pink hand on Skip’s shoulder. “It’s a shepherd thing.”

By then, the two were alone on the bluff-Oliver’s flock had disappeared into the woods, scampering blithely down the trail Skip had just come up, and singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a ragged round. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream…

No shit, thought Skip. Then he must have spaced out for a while, because the next thing he knew, he was being jerked back to what passed for consciousness by a great commotion-stampeding footsteps, crackling brush, people shouting, sobbing. He turned in time to see the trainees boiling out of the woods in a panicky, tangled mass, looking back over their shoulders as they ran, stumbling and falling over one another, their orange clothes pale apricot in the fading light.

Last out were George and Candace; between them they were hauling Steve Stahl by the arms. His body was limp, his bare heels were scraped and bleeding from dragging the rocky ground, and sticking out from the chest of his royal blue shirt was an aluminum shaft with feathers on one end and blood on the other.

The shortcut, obviously, had been a success. Asmador had regained the marked trail a quarter mile below the sign pointing to the Omphalos, long before the humans could possibly have reached it. To make sure, he’d knelt to examine the tracks again, and had been pleased to discover that those few footprints that could still be distinguished in the trampled dirt all pointed uphill.

By then, the sun was working Technicolor wonders in the west. The sky in that direction, what little Asmador had been able to see of it through the leafy canopy, had turned pink, shot through with bloody streaks of crimson. Nearer the ground the air seemed to have taken on an eerie goblin green glow. He’d marched on, lightly tapping the ground with the springy, curved tip of the bow every few steps, while chanting the names of the Infernal Council:

Furcalor, Hornblas, Satan, Rosier,

Lucifer, Xaphan, Succor, Dozier.

Astaroth, Azazel, Abadon, Moloch,

Paimon, Rimmon, Kobadon, Misroch.

Exael-

Hearing the sound of human voices a little farther up the trail, Asmador had ducked off the side of the path to count them off as they hiked by. There’d been twelve altogether, ten in orange bracketed by two in blue. But no Oliver and no Epstein. Turning his back on the trail, Asmador had plunged deeper into the woods, circling downhill in his stealthy half crouch until he’d cut ahead of the humans again. Then he’d showed himself, stepping into the middle of a straight, tunnel-like stretch of trail and assuming the classic archer’s position.

The blue shirt in the lead had braked and spread his arms wide to shield the ones behind him with his body. “Let’s turn around, troopers,” he’d called calmly over his shoulder. “Candy, take them-”

Asmador still wasn’t sure whether he had released the arrow or it had released itself. Either way, it had felt so right and so preordained, the twang of the bowstring, the zzzzip of the arrow, the dull thump of the arrowhead striking home, the faint, shivering vibration of the feathers at the end of the shaft. Then the target had collapsed backward, and all was chaos at the other end of the tunnel, and all was calm at Asmador’s end. Coolly, he had reached behind his back for another arrow, but by then the humans had fled screaming up the trail, the last two dragging Blue Shirt’s body between them.

And now it is nearly dark under the trees; the undersides of the leaves are black against the violet gray of the sky. Asmador shucks off his backpack, returns the unused arrow to the quiver, and rummages around for the night-vision goggles. It takes him a few minutes to figure out how to work them. There are two switches, one to activate the goggles and the other to turn on the narrow infrared beam mounted above the eyepieces, which focus like binoculars. He soon gets the hang of it, though, and sets off up the trail again, following the bobbing neon green shaft of light up the glowing neon green tunnel, and taking up the singsong chant where he’d left off earlier:

Exael, Mastema, Beliar, Carnivean,

Minos, Asmodeus, Belial, Leviathan.

Beleth, Beelzebub, Behemoth, Baal,

Adramelech, Gressil, Hauras, Rofocale…

At first there is no I. No self, no other. No here, no there. Just: is. But what is?It is. And what is this it that is ? It is: green.

And with that first concept, the concept of green, the words, the ideas, follow one upon the other. Green is a color. A field of color. A field of clover. I am in a field of clover. But what is I?I is… seeing. I is… thinking. I is… I am…

I am! Here! Now!

And so what if I can’t remember my name, he thought, lying on his side in the damp, sweet-smelling clover, resting his head on his outstretched arm and gradually drifting back like a cosmic jellyfish into the warm, black, amniotic sea of no self, no other, and no problems, pal, no problems whatsoever.

“Over here, everybody!” called Skip, hunkering down next to Oliver. Behind them Beryl, a retired nurse, was crouched over Steve, crooning at him to hang on, telling him everything was going to be okay, which Skip, hearing the breath bubbling in Steve’s lungs, rather doubted.

“Gather round, kids, we haven’t much time,” Oliver began, when the trainees who were more or less functional had finished rounding up the ones who weren’t. Of the once glorious sunset, there remained only a few streaks of pale yellow melting regretfully into the gray sky. “There is a sick man out there, an armed man with a troubled mind, who wants to do us harm.”