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“Where are all the people? Johnny, did we just chug into a ghost town?” Zarilda asked.
“Bells Junction,” Theta said, reading the sign next to the depot. The fog thinned to a smoky haze. The houses dotting the hillside looked as if they’d been deserted for a hundred years. Ash settled over the rooftops and trees. It was as if a giant dust cloud had come through and wiped the place clear of every living thing.
“I wonder what happened to it,” Theta said.
“One of those boomtowns-gone-bust, I’ll bet,” Zarilda said, snugging the sash up on the train window again. She wiped her hands free of some of the dust that had drifted down the hill. “I once saw a boomtown spring up in the Texas panhandle after they discovered oil there. Shoot, within three months that town went from one thousand to twenty thousand people. And when the oil dried up a few months later, the town dried up with it. There and gone in under a year.”
“Huh,” Sam said. But to him, Bells Junction didn’t look like it had been left behind.
It looked like it had been eaten alive.
As Isaiah watched Bells Junction disappearing from view, he thought about Sarah Beth’s strange warning: There’s something in the towns.
FACE THE FUTURE
“I want you to tell me everything you can about the Eye,” Ling said to Jericho. They were driving west from Knoxville to an Elks Lodge outside Nashville. She and Jericho sat at the back of the bus, feeling the hum of the road under them while Doc drove and the Haymakers caught a much-needed nap.
“It’s a monster. Just like him,” Jericho said.
“But how does it work?”
“Only Marlowe knows how it works.”
“Can you remember any details?” Ling asked.
Jericho searched his memory. He’d been so horrified by what he’d seen that he’d tried to forget. “In the center is the heart of the thing. I hesitate to use that word because that machine is utterly heartless. The souls of the soldiers are inside.”
“And they’re caught in a time loop, living out that same terrible day the rift was opened?”
“Yes. Somehow, that loop, their suffering, powers the machine and keeps the portal between our worlds open. But it needs an extra boost of energy from time to time to keep it open, to stabilize it.”
“That’s where the other Diviners come in.”
“Yes. Marlowe has a control—Sam’s mother. Her energy is a balance between the heart
of the machine and the other Diviner, somehow.”
“What is it about her?”
“I don’t know. Hence my use of the word somehow.”
“You don’t have to get sore. Or use hence.”
“The other Diviner’s energy is sent up into the rift,” Jericho continued. “But in the process, the Eye drains that Diviner’s life force. I think some Diviners are able to withstand the draining for longer than others. And no, I don’t know why or how. It seems to be completely individual.”
Ling shuddered to think that she’d once considered Jake Marlowe a hero. “Seems like he needs to do it more often now.” She tapped her finger against her chin while she thought. “The rift is in danger of collapsing. Or the King of Crows wants Marlowe to think it is. Either way, that uranium- and Diviner-enhanced energy is going straight to him. He’s building up this enormous, possibly catastrophic power, and Marlowe and the Shadow Men are too dumb to see that.”
“But why? What does the King of Crows want?” Jericho asked.
Ling stopped tapping her finger. She sighed. “Good question. He’s raising an army, but for what? What can an army of the dead do?”
“He wants to take over the country, maybe the world,” Jericho offered.
“So does Jake Marlowe,” Ling said pointedly. “But for what reason?”
“What if there is no reason?” Jericho said after a moment.
And Ling found that answer the most chilling of all the possibilities.
