Bentley Little - The Walking

This was a different earth, an older earth, because the la rut outside was unlike anything existing today, the mountains on the horizon too tall and oddly shaped, the sky and the dirt of the fields different in color than they should have been.

Isabella had fed recently, so there was no reason to partake of the man's power. Instead, she knelt with him, the two

of them speaking in unison, praying to this an cent god, then crawling across the floor to where the prepared bodies lay. She crouched before the first dead woman, said the Words, shoved her head between the cold thighs, and started eating the asparagus.

Then he was in a huge black cave with naked men and women and creatures that had never seen the light of day, monsters that had never been drawn by the hand of man, had never emerged from even the most fervid imaginations of the world's most profane illustrators. The floor was mud, dirt mixed with blood rather than water, and Isabella was standing in the center of the cave, legs spread, arms in the air, howling. The men and women were cowed in terror before her, and she reached down, picked up one of the scuttling creatuers and ate it, crunchy slimy albino skin popping between her teeth as she chewed the unholy flesh.

She howled again, grabbed another little monster, ripped it apart with her teeth, and swallowed its essence. She cried out, an inarticulate cry of hunger and pain, and this time she leaped upon a larger creature, a segmented, multi-legged, multi mouthed multi-eyed monstrosity that squealed at her touch and attempted to right her off.

She subdued it easily, bit into the rubbery skin of its back, and killed it. "

She howled. =

And then the visions were over. He was once again here, himself, and Miles looked quickly around. Only a second had passed. He was exactly where he'd been, nothing had moved, nothing had changed. He felt dizzy, disoriented. He was not sure what had happened, but some sort of connection had been made between himself and this woman. He did not know how or why, but she had allowed him to glimpse what? Her memories? Her fantasies? Her plans? Her past? :!;

A quick look at Janet and Gardii and Rossiter told him that none of them had experienced anything similar. What 312 ever the phenomenon was, it had been reserved solely for him.

Isabella had emerged completely out of the water and was walking on the sand. She turned toward him, smiled chillingly And the vision hit.

The dam blew apart, Wolf Canyon Lake draining out in a tidal wave hundreds of feet high, emptying through the mountains and onto the desert below, completely wiping out a small town, the bodies of hundreds of people washing onto the plain.

Destruction spread across the land.

Phoenix was buried under a massive sandstorm that covered the entire Southwest and engulfed Albuquerque and Las Vegas as well. New York was in flames, the teeming streets filled with fleeing people with no place to run. Chicago sank into the ground while the waters of Lake Michigan rushed in to fill the hole. Los Angeles was shaking from an endless earthquake that seemed intent on leveling every manmade structure in the state .... As before, he saw it all through her eyes, and in a flash of insight, he realized that she had lived here at Wolf Canyon.

She had been one of the witches buried under the lake when the town was flooded.

The vision faded.

He staggered backward. Part of him wanted to shoot her, tackle her, but that was a small stupid part and it was overruled by common sense and good old-fashioned fear. Unlike the other Walkers, she was not merely an automaton. She was not following orders. She was the one giving them, carrying out her well-thought-out plans.

Now he understood. Finally he'd discovered a focal point to the evil that had spread out from this spot, that had reached across the country to kill all those people, that had some to do like his father, and 'the relatives and had finally brought them here. i

Isabella.

She wanted nothing less than complete revenge. Her power would grow with each loss of life, until she was unstoppable.

The end of the world would not result of Divine intervention or cosmic accident but from the small bitter hatred of an angry witch.

Miles was shaking. With fear, yes, but also from sensory overload, overwhelmed by the intensity of what he had experienced.

He had felt her anger, the white-hot core of hate that fueled her rage, but what remained with him most was the loneliness she felt, and moral imperatives were as nothing before it, minor distractions to be ignored or tossed aside. He remembered, as a kid, watching the Apollo space shots on TV, and what he recalled most clearly was Apollo 8, when American astronauts circled for the first time around the dark side of the moon. For the entire preceding week, he had attempted to imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, to visualize what they were seeing, to experience what they felt. Loneliness was what he came up with. Everything they had ever known--water, sky, clouds, dirt, plants, animals, mountains, people, buildings, bugs--was a million miles away, encapsulated on a sphere they saw floating far off in the blackness of space while they were crammed into a small metal room surrounded by absolute nothingness. And when they circled around the dark side of the moon, when their radio transmission was cut off until they orbited back around, they were denied even that, stuck with only each other and the silence of space without so much as a glimpse of their blue globe world in the distance. They were alone, completely alone. i What he had felt when seeing through Isabella's eyes was

a comparable loneliness, a similar estrangement from the currents of life. Only it was somehow worse because it was something he could not understand. Her emotions and thought processes were so profoundly alien to him that he could deduce nothing from them, could make no predictions regarding past or future actions. The only thing he knew was that she could not be dissuaded from the course which she had chosen, that she was unalterably set upon her path and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do to change that.

Isabella looked past them, through them, and kept walking, following the others along the edge of the lake.

She didn't know that he'd seen!

His hart began racing. On the edge of despair only a second before, cowed and intimidated by her awesome power, he now saw a ray of hope.

Whatever connection had been established between them, she was unaware of it. Somehow, he had tapped into her intentions without her knowledge.

It was not much of an advantage, but it was something. The fact that she did not know he had gained access to her thoughts meant that she wasn't perfect, wasn't all-powerful. She'd looked in their direction after coming out of the water, but if she'd seen them or noticed them at all, she'd thought of them as little more than bugs or plants, totally irrelevant.

The constant tingling in his midsection faded as she moved between the paloverde trees away from them, angling inland from the shoreline. The other Walkers now seemed to Miles to be driven before her like cattle.

He knew that if anything was going to be done to stop her, they would have to be the ones to do it. How they would accomplish this was another matter. He looked over at the others, wanting to tell them what he'd experienced, but there was no way to convey the scope of it all. Rossiter was still holding his drawn weapon, but he had not fired a shot, and Miles could tell from the expression

on his face that the agent had been stunned into inaction. Janet was staring blankly out at the water.

Garden spoke first. "What the hell was that?"

"I don't know," Rossiter said.

Miles finally found his voice. "Isabella."