The Arrivals
Unfortunately, the following day, when they were back at camp, Jack had no clearer idea of what to do. They’d know by the next day whether Mary’s death was permanent or not. In some reserve of hope that he still clung to after all these years, he hoped that death in this world would mean waking up back in a better one. He didn’t much care whether that better world was the one they’d once known or some sort of afterlife where the Arrivals would find peace. He told himself Heaven was a child’s hope, but if so many impossible things were real, believing in Heaven, in a forgiving God, seemed a little more possible.
His beliefs had dwindled over the years, but as he sat near Mary he whispered a prayer. Then he decided to do something he’d never done before. While Katherine slept in her tent that night, Jack went to the only other person he’d ever met who was capable of standing up to her.
Edgar looked up as Jack entered the tent. Not surprisingly, Edgar was sitting at his table cleaning his weapons. Before coming to the Wasteland, he had been a hired gun for a thriving crime syndicate, so he was as fastidious about weapons maintenance as Jack was. Edgar wasn’t quite the dapper killer he’d been when he arrived in the Wasteland, but he was still an unusual man. His word was binding; his kills were calculated. The job was business, nothing more, nothing less. His willingness to shoot was only tempered by a sense of loyalty, and Edgar Cordova’s loyalty was very narrowly assigned: Katherine was his beloved; Jack was his boss. As to which of the Reed siblings outranked the other when they were at odds, it varied, depending on what Edgar thought most sensible at the time.
“I need your help,” Jack started.
Edgar resumed cleaning the pistol in front of him and asked, “With what?”
“I hate asking you to stand between Katherine and me,” Jack started.
“But you’re going to.”
Jack stepped farther into the tent. It was as practically laid out as the man who slept in it, utilitarian but with a few unexpected exceptions. In his room in every one of their personal quarters, Edgar had a device that allowed his trousers to hang so they wouldn’t wrinkle and a clothes rack for his shirts and jackets. Beyond his clothing contraptions, Edgar’s tent was very basic. A plain dark wood partition concealed the toilet; a weapons chest stood to the side; and in the middle of the room was a bed. Jack stopped at the small table where Edgar sat.
“She’s having a hard time with Mary’s death,” Jack said.
“She always does when one of us dies.” Edgar wiped down the barrel of the pistol and set it aside. “So do you.”
“True.” Jack didn’t want to talk about his own reaction. Of all the people in this world or the last, Edgar was one of the few he didn’t keep at a distance.
“I want to wait alone with Mary,” he admitted. “I need you to keep my sister out of my tent.”
Edgar shook his head. “Kit won’t be happy.”
“I’ll tell her I ordered you to do it,” Jack offered.
The look Edgar gave him would make more than a few people piss themselves in fear, but Jack knew him better than that. If Edgar were genuinely angry, he wouldn’t waste Jack’s time or his own with scowling.
Once they returned to Jack’s tent, Edgar took one of Jack’s chairs and positioned it outside. As Jack went back inside to wait, Edgar said, “If Mary stays dead, I’m letting Kit past me eventually. You can have until midday.”
Jack nodded and resumed his vigil by Mary’s body. Now that Edgar stood outside to stop Katherine from coming into the tent, Jack would have privacy. None of the other Arrivals were particularly close to Mary; it wouldn’t require any special measures to keep them out. Edgar cared only for Katherine; Francis likewise had a brotherly fondness for Katherine. Melody was too self-centered to be close to much of anyone, and if Hector had emotions, no one knew about it. Part of Jack’s reason was simply a need for privacy if he needed to mourn. The rest was a desire for space in order to think about what might come next for the group. Over the years, the group had fluctuated slightly in number, but right now they were at their lowest. Aside from the emotional toll it would take on Jack and Katherine, losing Mary could cause problems if the next Arrival chose to work for Ajani instead of staying with them.
He sat beside Mary, thinking about what came next, but not finding any answers—or signs of returning life. It wasn’t unheard of for the Arrivals to wake a few hours shy of midday or even at dawn, but it wasn’t typical. Jack knew that, but he hoped all the same. Hours passed in silence, and more than a few prayers passed his lips. He hadn’t realized he’d even remembered them that well until now.
When morning came, Katherine’s cussing and Edgar’s calm words broke the silence, and Jack felt a moment of guilt for keeping Katherine out. His sister wanted to be there for him, and he knew she’d been close with Mary, but the cold truth was that he didn’t want his sister there watching him. He didn’t love Mary, had never known the sort of love Katherine and Edgar shared, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was capable of it. What he did know was that Mary had loved him, and right now he wanted to be worthy of that love.
“If you come back, I’ll try to love you,” he promised.
Mary didn’t stir.
For several more hours, Jack alternated between praying and making promises to the dead woman in his bed, but by midday, she was still motionless.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, and then he left his tent.
Edgar looked up at him when he walked out. Beside him was Katherine. They both opened their mouths to speak, but Jack shook his head and said, “I’m going on patrol.”
His sister reached out to him, wrapping her arms around him, but all he could say was “I’m sorry,” even though the words weren’t any more use to her than they had been to Mary. Yet another of the Arrivals was dead, and in the next few days, someone else would appear in the Wasteland to replace her, and Jack would once again try his best not to fail that person. And all the while he would try to convince him or her not to join Ajani—even though that was the only surefire way Jack knew of to keep the newest Arrival from permanent death. That was the ugly truth of it: if they worked for Ajani, they’d be truly free of death. Unfortunately, they’d also be indebted to the one person in the Wasteland whom Jack would willingly die or kill to destroy.
CHAPTER 5
When Chloe opened her eyes, she was stretched flat on her back, staring up at an odd-looking sky. She wasn’t sure where she was, but she was sure that it was not Washington, D.C. Although she hadn’t seen the whole of the city in the few months she’d lived there, she could pretty much guarantee that there were no sand dunes or fields of what looked like cotton in the heart of the nation’s capital.
All she could move was her head. From her neck down, her body was tingling. She tried to move her legs, to sit, but all that happened was a weird jerking, as if her body was trying but couldn’t complete the movements. She could feel the trickle of sweat rolling off her skin like small insects crawling all over her, but she couldn’t move to wipe it away.
She tried to stave off panic by studying what she could see around her. To her right was a barren stretch of desert surrounded by a sturdy but peculiar-looking metal fence. A rutted road of dirt and sand cut between the desert and the field. The cotton plants had tufts of white on them, but they didn’t look nearly as prickly as real cotton plants.
Above her, the sky looked … wrong. It was mostly blue like skies were supposed to be, but the sun was high above her as if it were midday even though sunset streaks of reds and purples were painted across the blue. She frowned as she looked to her left: there were two moons visible in the sky.
The more she looked, the more she suspected that she had to be hallucinating—except it had been a long time since she’d even smoked a joint much less taken anything that would result in full-color hallucinations. She’d broken her sobriety last night, but that seemed unlikely to have led to something this severe. It wasn’t like she’d been sipping some sort of potentially toxic moonshine. She’d been in a bar where even the well liquors were high end.
The ability to move seemed to be slowly creeping downward. Chloe wiggled her fingers and stretched her arms. The pins-and-needles feeling was a welcome sensation. She fingered the pendant she wore on a chain around her neck. Her aunt had given it to her for five years’ sobriety—which she had ended last night.
The last thing she remembered was having an obscenely overpriced drink in a suit-filled bar. It wasn’t her usual sort of digs, but it was the first place she’d seen after she’d found her fiancé, Andrew, and her boss humping like feral bunnies. She’d walked out of her apartment, the apartment he had moved into only a month ago. She hadn’t even slammed the door. She’d left them there fucking in her home and wandered for a few hours until the warm light of a bar beckoned. It had been a long time since she’d even come close to breaking her sobriety, but it was either that or go home to a bed she couldn’t sleep in now. The images of walking into the bar, of ordering several drinks, of ignoring Andrew’s calls: those were all clear. After that, it was all a blank until she woke up wherever she was now.
“I told you she was bound to be out here,” a man’s voice said.
Chloe turned her head to see a man who looked like he’d stepped out of a western TV show, dressed in patched brown trousers and a plain button-up shirt.
“Don’t be smug, Jack.” The woman who came to stand beside him was wearing a strange skirt that was hitched up above her knees in the front but hung to her ankles in the back. The strange cut of it exposed a pair of what looked like battered red leather boots that laced up to the knee. The peculiar skirt was topped with a snug, low-cut blouse that exposed far more bosom than even the most daring swimsuit Chloe owned.
The woman held out a hand to Chloe. “Name’s Kitty.”
“This is a very vivid hallucination,” Chloe told her.
“And that’s Jack … short for jackass,” Kitty continued as if Chloe hadn’t spoken. She kept her hand outstretched. “Come on now. Standing’s going to hurt no matter when you do it.”
When Chloe didn’t respond, the woman reached down, gripped Chloe’s hand, and hauled her to her feet.
Chloe’s legs weren’t quite as reliable as her arms were. She wobbled and had to close her eyes against a wave of dizziness that was followed instantly by the pressing need to vomit. Kitty held her steady as she did just that.
“Hush,” Kitty murmured. “It passes soon enough. What are you called?”
“Chloe.” She kept her eyes closed as she marshaled the strength to stay upright. After a few moments she opened one eye tentatively to see the two strangers watching her.
The man held out a neatly folded square of cloth.
“It’s clean,” Kitty said.
After Chloe took it and wiped her mouth and chin, Jack bowed his head slightly. “I’m Jackson, but everyone calls me Jack.”
The woman holding her upright interjected, “Except when we’re calling you—”
“This is my sister, Katherine,” Jack continued. “She’s not nearly as vulgar as she appears.”
“Kitty, not Katherine,” the woman corrected. She smiled and cajoled, “Come on, Chloe. You’ll get your bearings soon enough, or you’ll succumb to madness. Either way, it’ll be easier after you get past the travel sickness and rest awhile.”
“Travel sickness …” Chloe echoed. “I’m just hungover, and you’re a hallucination … or a coma dream.” She glanced toward the pasture, where she saw what looked like an elephant-size iguana. “This is all a coma dream.”
“Of course it is, sweetie.” Kitty’s arm tightened around Chloe’s waist. “Why don’t we head back to the camp? You can catch some sleep, and then we’ll talk about everything.”
After a moment’s pause, Chloe decided that there weren’t a whole lot of options before her. She could go along with the people in her dream/hallucination, or she could stand around staring at the giant lizard while she waited for reality to right itself.
“I’m not dead, right?” Chloe asked.
Jack flashed her a grin before saying, “Well, no one’s ever accused Katherine of being an angel.”
“And jackass here isn’t as much a devil as he’d like everyone to think,” Kitty added in a soft, consoling voice. “It’ll all be all right, Chloe. We’ll go back to camp and rest a bit, and soon enough you’ll feel right as rain.”
CHAPTER 6
They were only a mile outside camp when Jack noticed the unfamiliar tracks and decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to carry the disoriented woman. She’d been chattier than most, rambling about concussions and brain tumors affecting her perceptions and then explaining that she must be in a hospital filled with drugs that were creating elaborate hallucinations. She finally fell quiet when Jack lifted her into his arms and walked faster.
Katherine picked up her pace without question.
Jack did his best to think about getting them to camp safely—without thinking about the last woman he’d carried into camp. Mary was truly dead. Thinking about her didn’t change anything. The new one—Chloe, he reminded himself—was lighter than Mary. It was harder each time to remind himself that they were all individuals, people, not simply replacements for the Arrivals who’d died.
He knew that this one—Chloe—was from a later year than most of them, possibly around Mary’s time period. Her clothes were different. She wore the tightest pair of denim trousers, of jeans, that he’d ever seen. A blouse of some sort of delicate material was covered by a soft leather jacket that narrowed at the waist like a woman’s dress would. With such revealing clothes, any man would’ve noticed her. Jack was neither a saint nor a preacher; he definitely noticed her charms—and immediately felt guilty for it.
As Jack, Katherine, and Chloe reached the perimeter of the camp, Jack saw Edgar leaning against the barrel that served as a stool at the guard point. He looked at them with his usual methodical assessment.
“Kit,” Edgar said with no obvious inflection. Then the taciturn man glanced at Chloe, who rested half asleep in Jack’s arms. “Jack … and …?”
“Chloe.” The girl lifted her head from Jack’s shoulder and looked at Edgar. “I’m not sure of anything else today, but I’m definitely Chloe.”
Jack lowered Chloe’s feet to the ground, but he kept an arm around her waist. She wavered a little as she stood, but despite the exhaustion, shock, and lingering travel sickness, she was upright. In truth, she was doing remarkably well. “Go with Katherine, Chloe. You’re safe here.”
Without any of her usual sass, Katherine stepped up to Chloe’s other side and wrapped an arm around her middle just under Jack’s arm. “Lean on me,” she offered.
Once Chloe shifted her weight onto Katherine, Jack lowered his arm and released the woman into his sister’s care.
Edgar lit a cigarillo. He was studying Katherine as intently as he always did when she returned to camp after a patrol. Katherine continued pretending not to notice, but neither of them persuaded anyone—including themselves. If anything ever happened to Edgar, Jack would have no idea how to look after his sister. He was tempted to lock the two of them in a room to sort themselves out, but he’d tried that once before with less than grand results.
The two women slowly tottered toward Katherine’s tent. Once they were inside and Katherine closed the tent flap, Jack turned to Edgar. “She’s the new Arrival.”
“I figured, but you don’t usually cart them in like that,” Edgar said, holding out a second neatly wrapped cigarillo.
Jack shook his head. “Can’t. I need to do another patrol, and the stink of that makes it harder to scent what’s around me.”
Mutely, Edgar pocketed the cigarillo.
“You’ll stay at the gate?” Jack prompted.
Edgar took a drag and exhaled a plume of smoke before he answered. “I don’t shirk my duties, Jack. I’ll talk to her after my shift.” His tone was mild enough, but he was undoubtedly already tense after Katherine had insisted on going out with Jack. Typically, Edgar patrolled with Katherine; he stood night watch when she was in camp. Right now Katherine was struggling. She never coped well when one of the Arrivals died, worse when it was someone like Mary, whom she’d called a friend.
Jack nodded. It was the best he could hope for, all things considered.
“What’s she like?” Edgar asked.
“The new Arrival? Hard to say.” Jack pulled his attention away from the tent. “She kept calling us hallucinations.”
Edgar snorted. “Another Francis. Did she tell you her ‘real name’ was Dewdrop or Star?”
Jack grinned. “No. Near as I can tell, she isn’t from the same years as him. She feels … newer than anyone else has been.”
Each new Arrival wasn’t from a later time than his or her predecessors, but they were from a general window of time. Jack and Katherine had lived in the late 1800s; Mary had been from almost a century later. No one had come from a time earlier than Jack’s, and everyone else was from the 1900s. The areas weren’t the same either. Edgar was from Chicago; Melody wouldn’t give the same answer twice on where she was from. Francis thought he’d been in somewhere called Seattle when he’d been brought over to the Wasteland.
Jack and Katherine had been the first, and Jack had spent more than a few nights wondering if they were all here as a result of something he’d done forever ago. He had no idea what that something could’ve been, and he’d thought on it often enough the past twenty-six years. He’d also spent years trying to figure out a pattern to the times and places, but he’d had very little luck. All he knew for sure was that those who arrived in this world needed someone to help guide them, and he’d taken that task as his own. The transition to this world was hard. If he could have spared everyone from having to make it, he would.
For a moment, the only sound was the crackling of the tobacco in Edgar’s lit cigarillo. Neither he nor Jack mentioned the fact that they’d been expecting Chloe—or someone like her. Nor did they mention the worry that she’d attract Ajani’s attention too soon.
Jack had been waiting for that peculiar itch under his skin that always heralded a new Arrival; he’d wondered more than a few times if Ajani felt the same thing, but there was nothing to indicate that Ajani was anything more than a Wastelander who’d found the Arrivals particularly useful as employees. For Jack, though, there was a pull to a particular location, generally near to where the last of their group had died. Even without a sense of it, Jack would know to watch for the Arrival. Mary had only been dead a little over a week, but the replacement almost always arrived within a month. That was how it went: when one of them finally died, someone else arrived in the Wasteland. The only oddity was that Chloe had arrived much sooner than they usually did.
Edgar interrupted Jack’s musing when he asked, “Do you need me to do anything?” His tone said what his words didn’t: he had no special thing in mind, but if Jack did, he’d be obliging. That was one of the joys of dealing with Edgar: there wasn’t a lot of guesswork where he was concerned.
Jack pondered the question. Sometimes he had a better sense than others about what to do about the new ones. With Edgar, Jack had known almost instantly that he needed to keep the man away from any weapons until Edgar had determined that the Arrivals weren’t a threat to him. With some of the others—people long dead now—they’d had to keep weapons out of reach to keep them from harming themselves. Chloe didn’t fit into either of those categories.
“Not right now,” Jack said. “Maybe take Katherine out tomorrow so I can talk to Chloe without her hovering and badgering.”
Edgar nodded.
“I don’t know if she mentioned it, but Daniel was in Covenant.” Jack kept his voice pitched low.
“She hadn’t mentioned it yet.” Edgar’s characteristic calm failed a little; his nostrils flared and his lips pressed together tightly. In a blink, though, the expression vanished, and he asked in a deceptively calm voice, “Anything interesting happen?”
“Katherine shot him,” Jack started, and then he summarized what he knew of the meeting. He paused a moment before adding, “He warned her that Ajani is crazier than usual of late. I trust my sister, but she’s far too forgiving where Daniel is concerned.”
“I’m not.”
“Likewise.” Out of habit, Jack flicked open the chambers of his revolvers. Neither the silver bullets in the right gun nor the cold iron ones in the left were much use against demons, but there were plenty of other monsters in the dark.
Silently, Edgar held out one of the shotguns that they kept at the perimeter for patrols—or for any attempts at infiltration. Jack took it, cracked the barrel to check that it was loaded, and ignored Edgar’s small snort when he did so. They both knew it was loaded, and they both knew that neither one of them would be able to walk into the darkness without checking for himself. Trust didn’t outweigh habit.
“I’ll be back within two hours,” Jack said, and he left camp. When he could, he patrolled on his own. The rest of the team usually worked in pairs, but Jack needed his space, especially in the wake of a death. They all dealt with defeat in their own way. Some of them didn’t seem to react to the losses at all, but Jack suspected that he and Kitty felt each death more powerfully because they had been here the longest. So many people had arrived, become part of their family of sorts, and then died.
Jack couldn’t make sense of it, wasn’t sure what came after this life—or if anything they did made a difference. The others all looked to him for answers that he no longer even thought he might have. All he knew was that whether it was in the world he’d once known or here in the Wasteland, the only time he thought there might be some great divine deity out there was when he was alone with nature. So he patrolled in the Gallows Desert, watching for demons or monks as he trekked across sand and rock under constellations that were nothing like those he’d seen in the California desert.
CHAPTER 7
In a house far from the stifling heat and pervasive sand, Ajani rested in a darkened chamber. It wasn’t his most comfortable home, but it was opulent enough to be tolerable as he recovered from his latest endeavor. Somewhere nearby, an indoor waterfall splashed and murmured in soothing tones. He kept his eyes shut and tried to concentrate on the relaxing sounds, on the steady inhalations of breath, on anything but the raging headache that made him feel as if dying would be preferable to this pain.
The headache had lessened some in the hours since the new Arrival had come through to the Wasteland. Ajani no longer felt like his body was being reorganized inside, and the vomiting had stopped. As long as he didn’t move, the nosebleed would stay away too. Better, however, didn’t mean well. Opening a gate to the other world was somewhere between magic and science. It felt like magic, like turning a body inside out and squashing it into space that didn’t quite want to hold body-shaped things. Regardless of whether it was magic, science, or something in between, it hurt like the devil.
Sometimes it seemed that the headaches had grown worse over the years. Other times, Ajani suspected that he’d simply become less tolerant of pain. It didn’t matter, though: great men had always suffered for their causes. He would suffer for his, and in time, the natives would thank him for his sacrifices and those back home would know that he was a true visionary. He might not have discovered the path to a new world in the same fashion as most explorers had, but like the rest of those good men who’d expanded the queen’s empire, he’d made sacrifices. He was shaping an entire world for her empire instead of a mere island or continent. Numerous mines employed teams of natives extracting precious metals and gems from the ground to be delivered to the queen.