Zanesville: A Novel by Saknussemm Kris

Author:Saknussemm, Kris [Saknussemm, Kris]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Villard
Published: 2005-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Harrowing

At the top of the garden stairs Clearfather kicked through a door. The skylight had been camouflaged from ground level and he noticed a tripwire, which he was careful to avoid. The greyhound was nowhere to be seen. It was late afternoon but from the look of the sky and the way the clouds were moving, time might have started running backward. Lightning pulsed, and the wind was heavy with ozone and nitrogen oxides. He set Kokomo down and glanced around, imagining windmills and oil pumps stampeding like frightened animals—fleeing something giant but invisible.

In fact what was closing in was about to become very visible. From the cardinal points of the compass rumbled four triceratops tanks the size of barns. Called Grim Reapers, they were modeled on giant combine harvesters but armored and equipped with terrain-leveling suspension tracks and Dark Rain cannons capable of replacing the air with jacketed steel for up to an hour without pause. Churning forward at a constant crawlspeed, the vehicles powderized pheasants and abandoned cars alike, obliterating everything in their paths. Outside this perimeter, the winter wheat had been blanketed with Jack O’Lanterns, beach-ball-sized land mines with evil faces painted on them, marching on spidery legs wherever their heat-seeking sensors directed them. Then there was the ominous orange freight train. Vitessa felt confident they had nothing to fear.

The whirring of the weather vanes grew louder, and somewhere Clearfather heard a terrible clanging of irrigation pipes. Kokomo limped into the wind farm, spreading her arms between the towers of conical steel. Her right leg, the same one he thought he’d hurt when he fell in Chemo’s trap, looked damaged, but other than that she appeared uninjured—her eyes shining tornado green. He ran to her. The weather vanes began spinning like tornadoes themselves. The great blades hummed, the rotors swimming hard to keep the turbines yawed against the wind. Clearfather wavered. How could he deny the signs the Nourisher had referred to? There was the silver spoon from his vision, the dreams he’d had of the women bleeding around the pillar—and the telltale emblem of the wheelbarrow of fire. He couldn’t dismiss all these resonances no matter how little clarity they provided. Maybe I have come back from the dead, he thought. Is this why Vitessa hounds me? He heard Kokomo begin to sing and held her in his arms. Hope surged through him. If he’d released powers within her, now he felt her releasing powers within him. They would stand together against Vitessa. Their minds would join. Let the others come, he thought. Let them bring their chemicals and weapons. Kokomo and I will unleash the wind! We will empty the pits and burrows. We will open a tunnel in the sky and send all these creatures to the stars. Together, we are One.

Still the Reapers ruthlessly advanced, the hinged track belts clanking like pile drivers striking bedrock, digging deep into softer earth, spewing out shotsprays of soil that looked like cottage cheese mixed with blood.

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