Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [151]
“Keep everyone inside,” he told Owl, bending close so that the others couldn’t hear. “If anything goes wrong, don’t separate—stick together. I’ll try to be quick.”
She gave a small nod, but her eyes reflected her misgivings. “What will you do if she won’t come back with you?”
He hadn’t talked to her about what he intended, but Owl could read his thoughts as easily as she could read her books. She knew what he was going to attempt and what he was up against.
He smiled reassuringly. “She’ll come.”
“Promise me that if she chooses not to—no, wait, let me finish-if she chooses not to, you will come back anyway. You won’t go into the compound and you won’t hang around waiting for her to change her mind.”
Her eyes searched his, waiting. When he hesitated, she said, “We need you, Hawk. We can’t do this without you. Promise me.”
He understood. He bit his lip, looked at his feet, then said, “I’ll come back, I promise.”
He said his good-byes to the others, went out through the heavy door that Fixit had rigged to protect their common room, and descended the stairs to the street. Standing just inside the door, he looked out at the shadowy shapes of the derelict vehicles and rubble mounds.
Then, taking a deep breath, he set off toward the compound, wanting to get this over with. He moved to the center of the street, giving a sweeping glance to his surroundings as he went, but not slowing as he did so. He had an uneasy feeling about being out here alone in the dark in violation of his own rule that no one should ever go out alone at night. He shivered as the wind blew in off the sound, chill and cutting. It felt wrong going without Cheney, despite what he had told himself. But there was no help for it. He would have to rely on his own instincts.
But his instincts weren’t like Cheney’s.
Besides which, he was tired and preoccupied.
Which was probably why he missed seeing the shadowy figure standing in the doorway across the street, watching him go.
* * *
THE WALK UP First Avenue toward the compound was still and hollow feeling and filled with shadows and ghosts. Hawk held the prod ready to use in front of him and himself in the center of the street, away from places where predators might lurk. He kept up a steady scan of his surroundings, searching out movement and strangeness and unexpected sounds that could signal danger, but found nothing. He knew he wasn’t alone in the night, but it felt to him as if he might be. He was content with that, and his thoughts drifted.
Mostly, they found their way to mulling over what had happened with Cheney the night before. He could not stop thinking about it. He kept remembering how he had begged for a miracle and how that miracle had happened. He kept remembering the way his body had changed when the healing had begun, turning hot from the inside out—how a kind of energy had flowed out of him and into the big dog. He kept remembering how Cheney had responded, almost instantaneously, and then begun recover right before his eyes. Had he really been responsible?
Accepting this changed everything he believed about himself and his place in the world. If in fact he had healed the big dog, then he was possessed of a power that transcended anything he had even imagined possible. It meant that he really didn’t know himself at all, and that was disturbing. He had never been anything special, never anything but an ordinary boy trying to survive in a world where boys were eaten up and spit out regularly. Now he had to consider the possibility that he was something more than a boy with a special vision.
He thought about that for a moment, wondering if it were possible that the vision was in some way connected to what had happened to Cheney. Even accepting that Cheney had been healed because of something he had done or something inside him that had responded