Page 98 of The Drifter

The ground hit me like the flat side of God.

Light went through the world, white, total.

Then, dark.

32

CLINT

The world came back in pieces.

Sound first. A high, thin ringing, one long tone, like a wire pulled tight across the whole sky. Then, the ground under my back, hot. Then, light—light with shapes swimming in it that would not hold still. I lay there and let my eyes do their slow work, the way you wait out a dust storm, because there's no rushing either one.

The shapes settled.

Blue sky. The rim of the world, tilted. And when I got my head turned, moving it like a cracked thing⁠—

My mother.

She was sitting cross-legged beside the trail, a few feet from me, in her nightgown, her white-streaked hair lit up at the edges by the sun. She had a little pile of flowers in her lap. Blackfoot daisies. The tough, little, white ones that grow out of caliche where nothing has any business growing. She was picking through them with both hands, laying stem against stem, building a bouquet with the patience of a woman who had nowhere else on earth to be.

She was doing it the way she did everything when we were boys. Completely.

"Mama." My voice came out like gravel poured from a bag. "You okay?"

She didn't answer. She turned a daisy in her fingers, checking it from all sides, and added it to the bunch.

Alive. Whole, near as I could see—no blood on her, no wrong angles, nightgown dusty but nothing worse. Sitting in the wreckage of the loudest thing that country had ever heard, making a bouquet. Whatever room her mind had gone to, it was a gentle one. I lay there one more second and let myself be nothing but grateful for it.

Then, I remembered.

Max.

The gold streak going away down the trail with the pack under his chin. The blast coming up like the earth firing back. Poor, brave, holy animal—he'd taken it out of my hand. He'd known, some way that I'll never get to ask him about, and he'd taken it and run it away from us, and the explosion had been huge, and he'd been carrying it.

What was I going to tell Cash?

The thought put me in motion before I'd cleared it for takeoff. The house. I had to get us back to the house. I got an arm under me, got a knee planted, pushed⁠—

The back of my head detonated.

Pain like nothing in my catalog, and my catalog is long. It came up the back of my skull and over the top in one white sheet and took my vision with it. My knee hit the trail again, then my hands, and I knelt there in the dirt with my head hanging, breathing through it like breathing was a skill I was relearning.

"Max!" I called it out at the ground, at the country, anywhere. "MAX!"

Nothing. The ringing. The windmill of my own pulse, pounding. I've been concussed before—it comes with the trade, you learn its neighborhoods—but this was somewhere new. This was the part of town where the lights don't work.

I got my head up to call again.

And stopped.

There was something on the trail.

East, down where the dust was still standing in the dead air, low to the ground, hazy—a shape that swam and doubled and would not resolve. I blinked at it, once, twice, telling myself the truth the way I always tell myself the truth: concussion. Mirage. Want, wearing a costume.

It kept coming.

I blinked again, hard. My eyes finally did their job, and the shape came together out of the heat shimmer, low and tan and moving wrong—hitching, one leg off its rhythm—but moving. Coming up the trail. Coming to me.