Strangers

This time, the corporal obeyed. The clatter of automatic gunfire hammered the night, briefly overpowering the voice of the raging wind. Up on the hillside, the headlights of the oncoming Jeep blew out. The two hundred hard cracks of two hundred bullets erupting in a murderous stream from the muzzle of the machine gun were augmented by the sound of slugs tearing through sheet metal and smacking onto more solid barriers. The windshield imploded under raining lead, and the Jeep, which had braked immediately after topping the crest of the hill and had been descending slowly, abruptly gained speed and rushed down at them, then angled left when its wheels jolted over a lateral hump that extended across most of the slope. Obviously no longer under anyone's control, it started to slow again, hit another bump, slid sideways, almost tipped over, almost rolled, but finally came to rest just forty feet away in the already drifting snow.

Five minutes ago, when Ned had driven over the hill on the other side of Vista Valley Road and had turned south, only to encounter the colonel and his men waiting less than a halfmile south, it had been instantly clear that all the shot guns and handgunsand even the Uzi that Jack had providedwould be of no help. Considering that their lives depended on their escape from Elko County, they would have made a stand against a smaller force. But Falkirk was accompanied by too many men, all heavily armed. Resistance would have been purest folly.

And Brendan had been filled with frustration because he had not dared use his special power to ensure their freedom. He felt he ought to be able to apply his telekinetic talent to the situation. If he concentrated hard enough, perhaps he could cause the guns to fly out of the soldiers' hands. He sensed he had that muchand morepower in him, but he did not know how to bring it to bear effectively. He could not forget how the experiment in the diner had gotten entirely out of hand last night; they had been fortunate that none of them had been hurt by the careening salt and pepper shakers, and the violently levitating chairs. If he used his power to wrench the weapons from the soldiers, he might not be able to disarm all of them simultaneously, in which case the ones still in possession of their weapons might open fire in selfdefense. Or at his instigation, the guns might tear free of the soldiers' hands and go whirling through the air, out of controlfiring until their magazines had emptied, pumping bullets into everything and everyone in sight. Sure, he might be able to heal the wounded. But what if he was shot? Could he heal himself? Probably. But if he was shot dead? He would not be able to bring himself back to life. And if anyone else was shot dead, he was not sure he would be able to bring them back, either. It was no good being gifted with the power of a god if no clear instructions came with the blessing.

Now, watching scores of bullets slam into the Jeep, watching it rush like a crazed and blinded beast down the hillside, seeing it come to a shuddering stop in the headlight beams of one of the vehicles on Vista Valley Road, Brendan felt his frustration ballooning beyond containment. The occupants of the Jeep had been hit. He could help them. He knew he could help them, and it was his duty to do so, not merely the duty of a priest but the minimal duty of a human being. He did not understand his healing power, either, but there was no greater danger in trying to use it than there was in attempting to employ telekinesis. So he thrust away from the Cherokee against which he had been standing, dashed through the group of soldiers whose attention had been distracted by the drama on the hillside, and ran toward the blasted Jeep even as it came to a stop.

There were shouts behind him. He distinctly heard Falkirk warning him that he would be shot.

Brendan ran anyway, slipping on the snowy pavement. He stepped into a ditch, fell, scrambled up, ran on to the bulletriddled Jeep.

No one fired, but he sensed people sprinting after him.

The passenger's side of the Jeep was nearest, bathed in a beam of light from one of the military vehicles, so he pulled open that door first. A stocky man of about fifty, wearing a navy peacoat, was slumped against the door and fell out into Brendan's arms. Brendan saw blood, but not a lot. The stranger was conscious, though on the precarious edge of a faint; his eyes were unfocused. Brendan pulled him all the way out of the Jeep and lowered him gently onto his back on the snowcovered ground.

A pursuing soldier put a hand on Brendan's shoulder, and Brendan whirled on him, screamed in his face: "Get away from me, you rottencrazy son of a bitch! I'll heal him! I'll heal him!" Then he vented an oath of such a vicious, ferocious, and filthy nature that he was astounded to hear it pass his lips. He hadn't known he could use such obscene language. The soldier, thrown into an instantaneous fury, swung his machine gun high, intending to slam the butt into Brendan's face.

“Wait!” Falkirk shouted, stepping in and grabbing his man's arm to halt the blow. The colonel turned to Brendan and regarded him with eyes like polished flint. "Go ahead. I want to see this. I want to see you incriminate yourself right in front of me."

“Incriminate?” Brendan said. “What're you talking about?”

“Go ahead,” the colonel said.

Brendan waited for no more encouragement but knelt at once beside the wounded man and threw the flaps of his peacoat wide open. Blood was soaking through the sweater in two places: just below the left shoulder; and low on the right side, a couple of inches above the beltline. He rolled up the victim's sweater, tore open the shirt beneath. Brendan put his hands on the abdominal wound first, for that appeared the worse of the two. He didn't know what to do next. He could not recall what he'd thought or felt when he had healed Emmy and Winton. What triggered the healing power? He knelt in the snow, feeling the stranger's blood oozing between his fingers, acutely sensitive to the life throbbing out of the man, yet unable to concentrate the miraculous power he knew was in him. Frustration filled him again, turned to anger, and the anger turned to rage at his own impotence and stupidity, at the injustice of death, this death specifically and all death in generalA tingle. In each palm.

He knew the red circles had appeared again, but he did not lift his hands from the victim to look at those stigmata.

Please, he thought desperately, please let it happen, let the healing happen, please.

Amazingly, for the first time Brendan actually felt the mysterious energy flowing from him into the wounded man. It took shape in him and raveled out of him as if he were a spinning wheel and as if the wondrous power were the thread that he created. He whirled it into existence in the same manner by which the formless mass on the distaff was drawn into a strong filament of thread by the action of a spinning wheel, and the wounded man was the spindle onto which this power wound itself. But Brendan was not merely a single machine producing one meager thread; he felt, within himself, a thousandmillion wheels flashing round and round so fast they whistled and hissed as they spewed out a thousandmillion insubstantial and invisibleyet binding, strongly bindingfilaments.

He was a loom, as well, for somehow he used the countless threads of godlike power to weave a cloth of health. Unlike his experiences with Emmy Halbourg and Winton Tolk, during which he had been unaware of the cures he was performing, Brendan was acutely aware of knitting up the rent tissues of this gunshot stranger. He could almost hear the clatter of the pumping treadles, the thumping of the batten beating the threads into place, the reeds forcing the wet to the web, the heddles guiding the warp, the shuttle working, working, working.

Not only had he begun to acquire a conscious appreciation of his power, but he sensed that the magical force he harbored was increasing, that he was ten times the healer he had been when he saved Wintonand would be twice as good tomorrow. Indeed, beneath him, the stranger's eyes swam into focus within seconds, blinked. And when Brendan lifted his hands from the wound, he was rewarded with a sight that took his breath away and gladdened his heart: The bleeding had already stopped. He was even more amazed to see the bullet rise out of the man's body as if being expelled by some inner pressure; it squeezed backwards from the entrance wound and popped free of the flesh with a sucking sound. Even as the spent slug, wet and dully gleaming, rolled out onto the victim's belly, the ragged hole began to close as if Brendan were not watching the healing of a real wound but a timelapse film of the healing.

He quickly touched the lesser wound in the man's shoulder. At once he felt the second bullet, not as deeply buried as the first, nudging out of the torn flesh. It pushed and squirmed against his palm.

A thrill of triumph raced through Brendan. He had an urge to throw his head back and laugh into the chaotic fury of the storm, into the night, for the ultimate chaos and darkness of death had been defeated.

The victim's eyes cleared entirely, and he looked up at Brendan with bewilderment at first, then with recognition, then with horror. “Stefan,” he said. “Father Wycazik.”

That familiar and beloved name, coming from the lips of this complete stranger, startled Brendan and filled him with inexplicable fear for his rector and mentor. “What? What about Father Wycazik?”

“He must need your help more than I do. Quickly!”

For an instant, Brendan did not understand what the man was telling him. Then with sudden dread he realized that the driver of the machinegunned Jeep must be his rector. But that wasn't possible. How had he gotten here? When? Why?

For what possible purpose would he have come?

“Quickly,” the stranger repeated.

Brendan leaped up, whirled toward the onlooking soldier and Colonel Falkirk, pushed between them, slipped in the snow, stumbled against the front bumper of the Jeep. Holding on to the vehicle with one hand, he clambered as fast as he could around the front to the driver's door on the other side. It wouldn't open. Seemed to be locked. Or damaged by gunfire. He wrenched in panic, but it would not budge. He pulled harder. Still nothing. Then he willed it open, and it came

with a grinding and squealing of broken bits of metal, fell wide on twisted hinges. A body, slumped against the steering wheel, began to tip slowly out through the open door.

Brendan grabbed Father Wycazik, dragged him out of the driver's seat, and laid him on the cold blanket of snow. This side of the Jeep was touched by less light than the other. In spite of the darkness, he saw his rector's eyes, and as if his tortured voice were coming from a great distance, Brendan heard himself say, “Dear God, no. Oh, no.” The shepherd of St. Bette's had flat, sightless, unmoving eyes that gazed at nothing in this world but at something far beyond the veil. "Please, no." Brendan saw, too, the furrow of a bullet that had dug its way along the skull, from the corner of the right eye to a spot just past the ear. That was not a mortal wound, but the other was: a devastating hole in the base of the throat, gaping horribly, filled with shattered flesh and stilled blood.

Brendan placed his trembling hands upon Stefan Wycazik's ravaged throat. From within himself he felt the threads of power spinning out again, a thousandmillion filaments in a multitude of colors and tensile strengths, all invisible yet sufficient to provide the wet and warp of a strong and flexible fabric, the very fabric of life. 'Iben, reaching psychically within the cooling body of this man he so deeply loved and respected, Brendan tried with all his mysterious skill to weave those threads upon the loom, to repair the torn cloth of life.

However, he soon became aware that the miraculous healing process required an empathy between the healer and the healed. He realized that he had previously misunderstood the process, that he was not both the spinning wheel, providing the threads of power, and the loom which wove them into the cloth of life. Instead, the patient had to provide the loom to use the threads of lifegiving power that Brendan provided. In some strange way, the healing was a bilateral process. And no loom of life remained in Stefan Wycazik; he had died within seconds, had been dead before Brendan reached the Jeep. Therefore, the multiple threads of healing power only tangled and knotted uselessly, unable to sew the damaged flesh together. Brendan could heal the wounded and cure the sick, but he could not do what had been done for Lazarus.

A great, thick sob of grief shuddered from him, and another. But he refused to surrender to despair. He shook his head violently in stubborn denial of his loss, choked back

another sob, and redoubled his efforts, determined to raise the dead even though he knew he could not.

He was dimly aware that he was talking, but it was a minute or two before he realized that he was praying as he had prayed so many times in the past, though not recently: "Mary, Mother of God, pray for us; Mother most pure, pray for us; Mother most chaste, pray for us.........

He was praying not by reflex, not unconsciously, but ardently, with the deep, sweet conviction that the Mother of God heard his desperate cries and that, by the combination of his new power and the Virgin's intercession, Father Wycazik would be raised up again. If he had ever lost his faith, he regained it in that dark moment. With all his heart and mind, he believed. If Father Wycazik had been taken wrongly, before his appointed time, and if the Virgin handed these pleas, wet with her own tears, to Him who can never refuse His Mother anything she asks in the name of love, then the ruined flesh would be made whole and the rector would be restored to this world to complete his mission.

Keeping his hands upon the wet and awful wound, kneeling, wearing no priestly raiments other than those the pure falling snow painted on his humbled shoulders, Brendan chanted the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. He beseeched MaryQueen of Angels, Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs. But still his cherished rector lay motionless on the bosom of the earth. He pleaded for the Virgin's mercy, she who was the Mystical Rose, the Morning Star, the Tower of Ivory, Health of the Sick, Comforter of the Afflicted. But the dead eyes, once so full of warmth and intelligence and affection, stared unblinking as flakes of snow spiraled into them. “Mirror of Justice, pray for us; Cause of our joy, pray for us. . . .”

At last, Brendan admitted that it was the will of God that Father Wycazik move on from this place.

He softly concluded the litany in a voice that grew shakier by the word. He removed his hands from the monstrous wound. Instead, he took one of Stefan Wycazik's limp dead hands in both his own and held fast to it like a lost child. His heart was a deep vessel of grief.

Colonel Leland Falkirk loomed over him. "So you've got limits to your power, do you? Good. That's good to know. All right, then, come on. Get back there with the others."

Brendan looked up into the sharp face and polishedflint eyes, and he felt none of the fear that the colonel previously aroused in him. He said quietly, "He died without an opportunity to make a last confession. I am a priest, and I will stay here and do what a priest must do, and when I'm finished I will rejoin the others. The only way you'll move me now is if you kill me and drag me away. If you can't wait, then you'll have to shoot me in the back." He turned away from the colonel. Face wet with tears 'and melting snow, he took a deep breath and found that the Latin phrases came to his tongue without hesitation.