‘You knew we’d come here even before he’d connected with us in Arizona and given us the injections,’ Jilly marveled.
‘Yes, even though I didn’t quite know who you were at first. I can’t easily explain to you how all this could be,’ Lantern acknowledged. ‘But there’s a certain harmony to things—’
‘The round and round of all that is,’ Jilly said.
Parish Lantern raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes. That’s one way to put it. There are things that might happen, things that must happen, and by feeling the round and round of all that is, you can know at least a little of what will occur. If you’re cursed with vision, that is.’
‘Cake,’ said Shepherd.
‘In a little while, lad. First, we have to decide what we must do with this reeking bag of shit.’
‘Poopoo, kaka, crap.’
‘Yes, lad,’ said the maven of planetary pole shifts and alien conspiracies, ‘all that, too,’ and he moved toward Lincoln Proctor.
The scientist thrust the gun more aggressively at Lantern. ‘You stay away from me.’
‘I told you that precognition was the extent of my new talents,’ Lantern said as he continued to cross the living room toward Proctor, ‘but I lied.’
Perhaps remembering Manuel the firestarter, Proctor fired point-blank at his adversary, but Lantern didn’t flinch from the sound of the shot, let alone from the impact of the slug. As if the round had ricocheted off their host’s chest, it lodged – with a crack! – in the living-room ceiling.
Desperately, Proctor fired twice more as Lantern approached him, and these two rounds were also deflected into the ceiling, forming a perfect triangular grouping with the first slug.
Dylan had become so accustomed to miracles that he observed this dazzling performance in a state better described as amazement, short of genuine awe.
For Parish Lantern, taking the gun from the stunned scientist’s hand required no struggle. Proctor’s eyes swam as if he’d been pole-axed, but he didn’t collapse.
Dylan, Jilly, and shuffling Shep moved to Lantern’s side, like a jury gathering to pass judgment.
‘He’s got another full syringe,’ Lantern said. ‘If he likes what the new generation of nanogunk has done to us, he intends to work up the courage to inject himself. You think that’s a good idea, Dylan?’
‘No.’
‘What about you, Jilly? Do you think that’s a good idea?’
‘Hell, no,’ she said. ‘He’s definitely not better clay. It’ll be Manuel all over again.’
‘You ungrateful bitch,’ said Proctor.
When Dylan took a step toward Proctor, reaching for him, Jilly grabbed a fistful of his shirt. ‘I’ve been called worse.’
‘Any ideas about how we deal with him?’ Lantern asked.
‘We don’t dare turn him over to the police,’ said Jilly.
‘Or his business partners,’ Dylan added.
‘Cake.’
‘You are admirably persistent, lad. But first we deal with him, and then we have the cake.’
‘Ice,’ said Shep, and folded here to there.
48
All the way back in the kitchen of the house on the lonely coast well north of Santa Barbara, when peering into the refrigerator, Shep might not have been expressing a desire for a cold drink, but might have had a prescient awareness of their final encounter with Lincoln Proctor. In fact, Jilly remembered now that Shepherd didn’t like ice in his soft drinks.
Where’s all the ice? he’d asked, trying to identify a landscape of which he’d had a foretelling glimpse.
North Pole has a lot of ice, Jilly had told him.
And it sure did.
Under a lowering sky that appeared to be as hard as the lid of an iron kettle, from horizon to horizon, somber white plains receded into a semitwilight and a gray haze. The only points of elevation were the jagged pressure ridges, and the slabs of ice – some as large as caskets, some bigger than entire funeral homes – that had cracked out of the icecap and stood on end like grave markers in some strange alien cemetery.
Cold, Shepherd had said.
And it sure was.
They weren’t dressed for the top of the world, and even though the infamous polar winds had gone to bed, the air bit with wolfish teeth. The shock of the abrupt temperature change tripped Jilly’s heart into painful stutters and nearly dropped her to her knees.