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Jericho looked down at his hand as if it were a snake ready to bite. “I’m going to beat it,” he said. He dropped to the cold ground and did fifty push-ups without stopping, and when he stood again, the apparition was gone.
PUT THE WORD OUT
Missouri
Roy Stoughton rolled down his sleeves as he left the Fitter Families tent.
“That Diviner know anything?”
“A little. He got a feeling. He saw her somewhere in Nebraska, on a farm.”
“Nebraska is lousy with farms, Roy.”
“He said this farm had a girl on it. Another Diviner. Sarah Beth something-or-other. He thought it might be near a town with a B.”
“That all we got to go on?”
“That’s all he could say before he passed out.”
“We know the klaverns in Nebraska. Let me call the Grand Dragon, put the word out we’re looking for a farm and a girl named Sarah Beth. We’ll find her. Hey, Roy? You got blood on your cheek.”
Roy checked his face in the rearview mirror. Two flecks of fresh blood had settled in the lightly scarred flesh along his jaw. Theta had given him that scar. With the back of his hand, he wiped till his face was clean.
“Start the car,” Roy said. “Make sure we got enough gas to get to Nebraska.”
SACRIFICE
T. S. “Woody” Woodhouse had come up from nothing. From a cold-water tenement with six siblings, and an Irish father too sick with tuberculosis to work. Woody had shaved the lilt from his Bronx-Irish brogue and remade himself into the sort of fellow who might get invited to fancy Manhattan parties. Except that none of those fellows ever did invite him. Woody was too ambitious. Too Street. Too Irish. The smell of Bronx tenement hung on his suits like the wrong aftershave. The idea that America didn’t have a class system was a lie. Woody had liked the idea of journalism. Of sticking it to those stuffed shirts by telling the truth and ratting them out in the pages of the Daily News. But somewhere along the way, after all he’d learned about Diviners, Project Buffalo, the lies, and the walking dead, he’d become a real journalist, committed to telling the truth no matter the personal consequences.
He’d done as Margaret Walker instructed. Deep in the bowels of some musty forgotten archives, he’d removed box after box until he found what he was after. The file, the proof, was tucked inside his jacket now. Woody had pursued the truth for personal glory. Now that he’d finally found it, he felt hollowed out. Truth had a way of doing that. It had a way of making you question everything.
Woody stood before the Lincoln Memorial in the rain. He’d needed comfort, and that need had brought him here. He tried to imagine the president’s pain as the nation had come apart. Abraham Lincoln, like anyone, had been a complicated man who had done both harm and good. He wasn’t the easy hero the history books made him out to be. Nevertheless, eventually he’d taken the words all men are created equal to heart and had been willing to shoulder the hatred and scorn of half the country in order to try to make it come true. Along the way, he had buried a beloved son and lost his wife to a melancholy that turned to madness. Still, he carried on. For an idea of freedom, true justice, and equality. To steward the nation toward its stated ideals. In the end, he’d taken a bullet for it.
Sacrifice.
Woody’s Irish grandparents had left behind the potato famine to try their luck in America. They’d sacrificed everything to get here. What they’d found were NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs. It was always somebody’s turn. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Negroes or Chinese or Mexicans. A great wheel of bigotry, ever turning. Who got to decide what made somebody an American? America, the ideal of it at least, was its own form of elusive magic.
Overwhelmed by the vastness of the emotion inside him, Woody sat at the marble feet of Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Seamus Woodhouse knew that he was not a great man. Possibly not even a good one. But he was a darned good reporter. He’d changed over the past several months. It was no longer just about seeing his byline in print. About becoming famous. It was about telling the truth. It was about making sure that Jake Marlowe and the members of the Founders Club had to answer for their crimes, and about preventing them from creating an even greater catastrophe. It was about fighting back against Evil, yes, but also against all the small evils, too. It was about saving the nation that, Woody was surprised to discover, he believed in so fervently. And Woody knew that if somebody like him could change for the better, anything really was possible in America.
“‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and h
earthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature,’” Woody murmured, a quote he’d had to memorize in school. Why had it come to him now? The better angels of our nature… the better angels of our nature…
“Woodhouse…”
With a rabbit jump, Woody leaped up. “Hello?”
He was alone. Just him and the monument of a dead president in the rain. Still, he was sure he’d heard his name whispered.
“Hello?” he said again into the rain.
The hour was late, far later than he’d realized. He should be getting back to Union Station. He’d catch the next train back to New York. He’d stay up all night to write this story if necessary, because it needed to be told.
“Woody…”
“Wh-who’s there? Show yourself!” T. S. Woodhouse gripped his umbrella tightly, ready to use it as a weapon if need be. Down at the base of the steps, the ghost of Will Fitzgerald glimmered in the rain. His mouth opened and closed frantically, as if he were trying to shout a warning in a dream. And then, finally, as he faded from sight, he managed two words: “Go. Quickly.”
Under the steady rain, Woody heard the even cadence of footsteps coming closer. Two pairs of footsteps, just slightly out of time, but deliberate. Careful in the rain. On the marble. Woody could practically feel Mr. Peterson gripping his hand and delivering his warning.
