The water roiled in front of him, tossing the gobby chunks he’d just spit up back into the boat and over him. When they landed, they started running around, forming tails and legs.
“She’s coming!” Bob cried in his thin, dry voice. “The lady of the lake is coming!”
“This is a river,” Albert argued, “not a lake.” Somehow it seemed important to point that out. “Shouldn’t she be called the lady of the river?”
Before Bob could answer, a typhoon suddenly took shape beside the boat, erupting from the water. Gory parts of corpses and whole bodies twisted up in a column of water that shot over twenty feet into the air. A woman formed of the water, as black as ebony and smooth as marble. Her eyes were green rot scraped from a mildewed coffin, and her teeth as hard and thick as tombstones.
Still, she was beautiful when she smiled.
She reached for Albert, lifting him gently from the boat. At first her watery grip felt soothing and warm, like a bed in the middle of winter.
Then the flesh began to melt from his bones as the acid ate into him.
Chapter Twenty
“You’ve gone far from your roots, Krysty. Far, far away. You may never become at home again. Just a rolling stone, and rolling stones gather no moss. No more gathering ye rosebuds as ye may.”
Krysty Wroth walked through the garden and felt sick to her stomach. Everywhere she walked, all the green and growing things died. She halted and looked back along the path of destruction she had made through the garden.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
The voice belonged to a female, but that was all she was certain about. And the words were hauntingly familiar.
Ryan and the others walked ahead of her, easily within hailing distance, but Krysty chose not to call out to them. They walked in formation, the way Ryan would have ordered them to, but no way would she have been walking drag at his request. Not unless Ryan or J.B. was severely wounded. They all appeared healthy. Where they walked, the grass didn’t die beneath their feet.
A wild rose vine brushed against the back of her hand. Immediately, as if in fright, the vine recoiled like a child shrinking from a nighttime monster.
“Gaia,” Krysty said, turning her face up to the rad-blasted orange sky, “help me to understand.”
“Gaia no longer hears you,” the voice continued in a childish taunt. “You are only fallow ground as far as the Earth Mother is concerned. You have no future, Krysty, and now you have no past. You have only today, and that is but fleeting hours.”
Krysty cried, feeling the tears course down her face. She called out to Ryan, but evidently he didn’t hear her. She was torn, unwilling to continue across the beautiful garden and leave only blighted ruin in her wake.
The companions drew even farther away from her, not even bothering to turn to look in her direction to make sure that she was there. Ryan always made sure when they were on patrol that two others watched over one, and the one was responsible for looking over two others. It was a network that had saved their small party a number of times in the past.
“Ryan!”
Even Krysty didn’t hear her own voice this time, though she knew for a fact that she had screamed her lover’s name. Frightened now, she ran across the garden, taking huge bounding leaps so she wouldn’t trample as much of the greenery. But when she looked back, she saw that a wide strip of the garden was dead anyway. All she had to do was pass over it, not simply touch it.
“Your time is past, Krysty,” the voice taunted. “All that you’ve been taught to revere, you’ve walked away from. Mother Sonja wanted you to build, but you haven’t built. You’ve had a hand in more destruction than anything else. You and your precious Ryan Cawdor.”
“Not true,” Krysty denied. “Sometimes we couldn’t fix the horrors, or we would have been killed ourselves. But at times…we made a difference.”
“Lies,” the voice contradicted her. “You’re misremembering events and things as badly as that old cretin, Doc Tanner. Do you know why he forgets? Because it’s bastard convenient, that’s why. But Gaia doesn’t forget, Krysty, and you’ve broken covenant with her. Time and again you’ve asked her to help you, asked her to help you help your precious companions. And what have you done for her?”