Terry Brooks - The Gypsy Morph

There was a wall of mist that had settled into the mountains on all sides, thick and impenetrable, miles of it, encircling the whole of the valley.

Tessa stood beside Owl in the company of Sparrow, River, and Candle, staring at the mountains and waiting for Angel to return. It was nearing midday, and the Knight of the Word had been gone since early morning. She had left as soon as she had discovered the strange transformations, gone out into the mountains to discover its source. Others had wanted to go with her, but she had insisted that it would be safer for everyone if she went alone. So there had been nothing left for any of them to do but to wait for her return.

Tessa had waited with the others, although she already knew what had happened. Hawk had left during the night and climbed back up into the mountain pass as he had told her he must. He had done something with the magic, used it in the way that was meant to make them all safe.

Just as he had done when he had driven the rogue militia from the bridge and the demon army from the plains.

With one important difference. He had used the magic for the last time. He was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.

She could barely keep her tears in check when Angel finally reappeared and walked toward them. She was prepared for what she was going to hear but unable to imagine living with what it meant. She had struggled all day to keep from breaking down completely, and several times had gone off alone to cry. Owl must have known, perhaps the others, as well, but no one had said anything.

Angel trudged up to them, her face reflecting frustration. “I couldn’t find anything of the source,” she said. “But something’s certainly happened. That mist is impenetrable. No matter how often you go in, you come out again right where you started. As far as I can tell, it wraps around the entire valley. I tried everything to get through it. I even used the Word’s magic. Nothing worked.”

She looked from face to face, stopping finally with Owl. “It was Hawk who did this, wasn’t it?”

Owl nodded. “Tessa told me that he said yesterday he was going back up into the pass to do something. She made him promise to wait until morning, but he went up sometime during the night.”

“I didn’t see him,” Angel said. “Are you sure he isn’t here? He didn’t come back?”

Heads shook slowly. Candle was crying soundlessly. Sparrow stood with her hands on Owl’s shoulders, and River was hugging herself.

They tried not to look at Tessa, but they couldn’t help themselves. She bore the weight of their shifting gazes for as long as she could and then walked away before they could see her break down.

WILLS WALKED THE EMPTY CORRIDORS OF HELL, talking with the ghosts of the dead. A quarter mile underground, buried in his coffin of concrete and steel, he carried on his one–sided conversation with Abramson, Perlo, and Anderson–or was it Andrews? He could never remember her name. They had begun appearing to him a while back–he wasn’t sure exactly how long–come to keep him company. They were only faint presences at first, shadowy and elusive, enough so that he wasn’t sure if he was seeing things or not. It wasn’t until they began to be there all the time that he knew they were real.

He hadn’t understood what they were doing there, why they had returned, what mission they were on. Soldiers come back from the grave to haunt him–why? But after a time, he had come to realize their purpose. It wasn’t so difficult to understand. Deep Rock was their home, the final resting place of their corporeal remains, which were still locked away in one of the storage rooms … although their bodies were beginning to rot now, he had noticed, even with the refrigeration units operating on high.

In any event, it made sense that they should return. Deep Rock was their home, just as it was his.

Until he joined them, of course. Which wouldn’t be all that long.

Which was why they had come back for him.

When you were a soldier, you never left your buddies behind. You always took them with you.

It touched him deeply that they would care that much about him, and he told them so repeatedly. Well, he told Perlo and Abramson, anyway. He didn’t talk that much with the woman, and she didn’t seem much interested in him, in any case. She only seemed interested in poking about through the complex, as if searching for something she had mislaid. He thought it might be the code that would have allowed them all access to the surface and freedom. But he couldn’t be sure. He would have welcomed a chance at escape, even at this point. He would have taken it gladly, gone back to the surface, gone out into what remained of the world, even if it was just long enough to breathe the air and feel the sunlight on his skin. He cried about it sometimes. He missed it so.

Most of it, he had long since forgotten. Time’s passing had erased the particulars from his memory bank, and all he had left was a dimly remembered happiness at how it had made him feel. He asked Abramson and Perlo if it was like that with them, too, but they only shrugged. That was pretty much all they ever did when he asked them questions. But at least they were paying attention. Anderson never even did that.

“Got to make the rounds,” he told them as he walked down the corridors of the missile complex, moving from room to room, checking the computers, the monitors, the screens, the windows to what remained of his connection to the outside world. Routine was important, he reminded them. Routine was what kept you busy and engaged. Routine was what kept you from going insane.

But he was having increasing difficulty understanding why any of this mattered. Routine did all the things he said it did, but to what end? He wasn’t ever leaving this place; he had accepted that some time back. He wasn’t ever going to get out, and no one besides his friends was ever going to get in. Time was going to pass, he was going to age, and sooner or later he was going to die. The inevitability of it was the eight–hundred–pound gorilla sitting on his lap. In the face of such an overwhelming truth, what did anything else matter?

His buddies had nothing to offer. They listened to his thoughts as he voiced them, considered his questions and shrugged.

The truth was, they had known all along something he was just beginning to realize. Even routine wasn’t enough to keep your mental trolley on the tracks. Even routine could drive you crazy.

He paused at the reflective window of the door opening into the sick bay–as if the entire place wasn’t one big sick bay, ha, ha, joke–and looked at himself in the glass. He didn’t recognize the stranger looking back. Bearded, disheveled, hollow–eyed, and gaunt, the other man stared at him. A man who had let himself go, who had ceased to do anything to keep up his appearance, who had given up eating regularly, who seldom slept, who prowled the complex like the ghosts who kept him company.

A man who had become a ghost himself.

I know this man, he thought, but couldn’t put a name to the face.

He shrugged his indifference, taking a page from the book of Abramson and Perlo. Didn’t matter.

“Over here, we have the command center,” he continued, his narration of his daily routine, a smooth and practiced recitation by now. “You may remember its purpose. The missiles are monitored from here. All of them, all over the United States. All those that haven’t already been dispatched to their intended targets.” He grinned knowingly. “The launch switches are kept under lock and key, even if there’s no one but me left to launch them. Kind of silly at this point, when you think about it. I mean, why monitor all this when there’s really no reason. You know, before we had a world to be concerned about. When we had people and animals and cities and towns and hope. When we had a working civilization. All gone now.