Bentley Little - The Walking

And tilted his head down to see a squat dirty woman wearing several layers of filthy ragged clothes standing directly before him.

It was as if she'd appeared out of nowhere, and only the calming influence of the cigarette kept him from visibly reacting. Though he'd never seen the woman before, there was an expression of familiarity on her face, something that made him think she had been looking for him, and he felt the first faint stirrings of fear in his chest.

He looked around, muscles tensing as he tried to spot anyone suspicious on the sidewalk or in the storefronts.

The woman pointed an accusatory finger at him. "How many were there?" she demanded.

He shook his head.

How many were there? I don't know what you're talking about," Liam said, backing away. But he did. She'd come out of the blue, her words apropos of nothing, yet he understood to what she was referring and it frightened him to the bone. He should have listened to his daughter.

He never should have left the house.

He walked around the woman, back the way he'd come. Ahead in the park he could see several raggedy men looking in his direction, waiting for him to approach. There was something threatening in the way they stood, and he turned up the alley, deciding to take a long cut home. He wasn't sure what was happening, but once again he thought of the dam, the town, and he found himself hurrying between the buildings, anxious to get away from these homeless people.

Halfway up the alley, he almost tripped over a bum's legs sticking out from behind a trash dumpster. He stopped short, and the bum looked up at him, smiling with brown tobacco stained teeth. "Wolf Canyon," he rasped.

Liam tossed his cigarette and started running. His heart was pounding, and right now he wanted only to get home. A dark shape lurched at him from the back entrance of an apartment complex, and he had time to register that it was probably female before his feet were carrying him up the alley and past the ill-kept backyard of an old house that had been converted into a beauty salon.

He heard shouts, running footsteps, and he glanced over his shoulder as he ran. Five or six homeless people were following him now, and though his lungs were hurting from lack of breath and it felt as though his heart was going to attack him, he increased his speed. He was embarrassed, ashamed of his fear and cowardice, but he knew his feelings were legitimate. What was going on here made no sense on any rational level, but made perfect sense in the fun house universe in which he'd found himself since receiving that first threatening phone call.

The increasingly loud sounds of footfalls made him speed up yet again.

His muscles were straining, and he knew he could not keep this up for any length of time. He burst out of the alley and onto a residential street, the street next to his own, and that gave him an extra burst of energy.

He did not stop or slow down to see if he was still being followed.

Though he knew how ridiculous he must look, he ran with all his might, wheezing and panting past well-manicured lawns and spotless driveways toward the end of the block. He did not know why he was being chased or how these street people were connected to the dam, to the town, to what had happened, but he accepted that they were. He was not one to dismiss things that weren't supposed to be able to happen--not after all he'd seen.

He reached his street, reached his house. Dashing up the walk, he finally allowed himself a quick look behind him. As he'd half expected, no one was following. They'd either given up, or he'd lost or outrun them. He exhaled deeply, an honest-to-God sigh of relief.

Then an extraordinarily tall man wearing a torn T-shirt and woolen earmuffs rounded the far corner onto the street, and Liam ducked quickly inside the house, heart pounding. Wolf Canyon.

He locked the door leaned against it, trembling. The phone rang a second later, making him jump, but he made no effort to answer it, and though he stopped counting at fifty, the ringing continued on.

Then

Jeb Freeman bedded down for the night in a ravine.

He'd been traveling all day, stopping only for two short rests, heading south as he had been for the past week. His feet hurt. Sam, his mount, had died two days ago, and Jeb had been walking ever since, carrying his own bedroll and saddlebag. He'd been hoping to make it as far as the mountains by nightfall, but the terrain was rougher than he'd expected, and it became clear near sundown that he would not reach his goal today. He would have preferred to remain up top, to not have to waste time hiking down into the ravine and back up again tomorrow morning, but the winds here were fierce at night, and since he no longer had a tent, the only way to stay out of them was to stay below them.

There were a few dead branches on the rocky sandy floor, swept there by the last flash flood, and he gathered them up. He made a circle of stones, then placed half of the branches inside, dumping the other half a few feet away. He laid out his bedroll. A hard piece of almost un chewable salt pork was his supper, and he washed it down with a single.

sip of warm water from his canteen.

Nightfall lingered up on top, but it came swift and sure in the ravines, and his camp was swathed in darkness even as the western sky above remained orange.

There was no sound but the birthing winds above, no scuttle of rats, no cawing of birds, no noise from anything

alive. Not only were there no people in this forsaken country, there were not even any animals. Crouching down, he sprinkled a pinch of bone dust on the branches, dramatically waved his hand over them, and spoke a few words. The fire started.

He sighed. Reduced to performing parlor tricks without an audience.

He made the fire turn blue, then green, but it did not dispel the melancholy that had come over him. He had always been something of a loner, but he had never really been alone before. Not truly alone. If he had not always had living companions, he had always been able to communicate with dead ones, to conjure up the spirits of those who had passed on, to discuss his life with those who had finished theirs.

But here he was too far out. No people had lived here, no people had died here. He could communicate with no one. He was all by himself.

He stared into the rainbow-colored fire, surrounded by silence.

Eventually, he went to sleep.

Above the ravine, the night wind howled.

He met William the next day.

Jeb felt him before he saw him, sensed his presence, and he was filled with a grateful anticipation that was almost joy. He could not remember the last conversation he'd had, and it had been weeks since he'd even seen another human being.

And this man was one of his own.

Jeb continued south, his pace swifter than it had been since Sam's death. The land here was raw and hard and open, not blunted and covered and soft like the land in the East. It was what made the west frightening. And exciting. \020The world here seemed to go on forever, and only the lack of companionship had kept it from being a paradise.

A person was dwarfed by this landscape, but Jeb did not need to see the man to know where he was. He could feel him, and when he sensed that the man had stopped, was waiting for him to catch up, Jeb increased his speed even more, practically running across the flat ground toward the mountains.

He found the man sitting underneath a low tree at the mouth of a canyon, his horse drinking from a muddy pool. The man stood, shook the dust off his clothes, and walked forward, hand extended. "Glad to finally meet you," he said. "I'm William. William Johnson. I'm a witch."

William, it turned out, had been aware of his presence for days, and Jeb chose to think that it was because his own skills were rusty, because he hadn't been using them lately, that he had not been aware of William until he was practically upon him.