Ryan didn’t get her drift, right off. He wasn’t alone. The companions exchanged impatient looks. “We wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said. “We haven’t seen the night sky for almost two weeks now.”
“Well, you’ll all see it tonight, over the river,” the blind woman told him. “It’s not a proper star, mind you. It doesn’t twinkle like it should. And it sails from one side of the horizon to the other in the span of twenty heartbeats. This star was planted in the heavens by a roaring, flaming spear taller than the tallest tree in the forest.”
Mildred leaned close to Ryan and whispered, “She means a goddamn guided missile. It’s not a star she’s talking about. It’s a recon satellite!”
The one-eyed man had already figured that out. If what the old woman said was true, then he and the companions had failed to permanently close the passageway between realities.
“Master Cawdor,” the doomie said, “the cockroaches are already here, they are many, and there will be hell to pay.”
“If you really can see into the future,” Ryan said, leaning close to her, “then explain it to us in detail.”
Sirena shook her head. “Even if I went over it minute by minute, it wouldn’t help you. Preparations are a waste of precious time. I’ve lived with the doomie sight since I was your boy’s age, and I know this for a certain fact—no one can change the course of what will be. My advice to all of you is to enjoy each passing moment as if it were your last.”
“In other words,” Mildred said, “we’re going to suffer and die, but be sure and have a nice day. That’s all she’s going to tell us? Why are we listening to this hogwash?”
“I heartily agree,” Doc said. “Might I suggest that our ‘passing moments’ might be more enjoyably spent away from the confines of this cramped and stinking hovel.”
“You got that right, Doc,” J.B. agreed.
As they began filing from the hut, Sirena called out, “Wait, young Cawdor! Before you go, I have a gift for you.”
From under the translucent cape, she produced a slim six-inch bone dagger in a skin sheath.
Dean immediately glanced at his father, who indicated his permission with a curt nod of his head. The boy approached the old woman and took the dagger from her. There was no cross guard or pommel. The handle was wrapped with strips of scratchy fish skin. Unsheathing the blade, he carefully tested its serrated edge on the back of his thumbnail. “Demon sharp!” he said.
“It’s made from the tip of a catfish dorsal spine,” Sirena said. “It will fit nicely into the top of your right boot.”
Dean tried it. The blade and sheath disappeared completely. “I can hardly feel it’s there,” he said. “Thanks.”
Sirena reached out and seized his wrist in a grip that was amazingly strong. “I could have told you your future,” she said, “and your children’s future, too, if you’d just sat on my lap.”
“Mebbe you could,” the boy said, jerking his hand away. “And mebbe I don’t want to know that bad.”
As Ryan and Dean left the hut, waves of the doomie’s shrill, hoarse laughter crashed against their backs.
IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Ryan saw it, in the tree break over the dark river. The single point of bright light appeared in the west, above the blackness of the canopy, and swept across the starry field of sky. He and the others watched the satellite arc overhead and vanish in the east.
“Fireblast!” Ryan’s curse echoed off the surrounding forest.
“Couldn’t it be something else?” Dean asked him. “Something real old…from before skydark?”
“It isn’t old, son. All the space junk fell to earth and burned up a long time ago. It has to be new. The fish hag spoke the truth. People from the other Earth had to have put it up there. No one else could have done it.”
“We should’ve chilled those four bastards,” J.B. said. “Should’ve buried them along with all their fancy chilling gear.”
Ryan grimaced. J.B. was talking about the turncoats, the members of the first scouting expedition to cross over from the parallel Earth. With success within their grasp, the warrior-whitecoats had decided not just to abandon, but to sabotage their primary mission, which was to lay the groundwork for the invasion and conquest of Deathlands by the armies of FIVE. Instead of firing the guided missiles they had trucked with them into the sky, they launched it through the reality portal in the hope of sealing the gateway forever. That done, the alternate world conquistadors went native. They stripped off the segmented black battlesuits that made them immune to blasterfire, and they dumped the tribarreled laser rifles that cut through plate steel like so much tissue paper. Ryan and the others helped them dismantle their gyroplane and they buried it deep in a sandy arroyo along with the rest of their gear.