Part Twenty-Two
"Oh, Life is waiting
for you.
It's all messed up, but we're alive.
Oh, Life is waiting for you.
It's all messed up, but we'll survive."
-Our Lady Peace, "Life"
The sun had risen and was riding low on the horizon before they rested again. Cordelia drew the newest vehicle, a Dodge with flaking green paint but an engine that hadn't sputtered once, to a halt in front of a hotel in Green River, Utah. Predictably enough, the faded sign in front of the building told them that they were enjoying the hospitality of the Utah Hotel. The hotel was in the same kind of shape that the Volvo, abandoned miles back when its engine had finally given out, had been. It beat staying in one of the pristine, solemn rows of houses turned coffins, though. Virtually anything would have been better than that.
After the wolves, sleeping out in the open hadn't even been worthy of consideration.
Green River itself had the same derelict feel of all the communities that they had driven through over the course of that day and the last, as if all the citizens had simply walked out their front doors one day to go to work and had forgotten to come back. If it weren't for the gassy smell of decay, Lindsey would have thought that they had somehow wandered onto an abandoned movie set.
Cordelia turned the car off and shoved the keys into the pocket of her jeans, wincing as she stretched. A purple-green band nearly three inches in width ran across her neck and disappeared beneath the collar of her shirt, souvenir from being slammed up against the Hummer's seatbelt.
"Cordelia," Lindsey said before she could exit. She paused with door half open, looking at him from over her shoulder. Lindsey could have gotten more encouragement from looking into the eyes of a doll. "I'm-"
"Sorry," Cordelia cut him off. "I know you are, okay? I knew that when you did it. Do you think that Angel or I would have bothered if you weren't?" Cordelia's mouth twisted. "And frankly, you kind of suck at saying it."
Lindsey had the feeling that Cordelia had been the driving force behind Angel bothering at all, but it didn't seem like the most prudent of times to voice that thought. "Kind of stealing my thunder here," he said. Cordelia shrugged and folded her arms over her chest. One of her nails had been torn off to the quick recently; a thin red crust could still be seen around the cuticle. "I have to say it. I'm sorry, Cordelia. For all of it. No games, no tricks, no lawyer bullshit. If I could do it all over again, we would never go through Vegas at all."
Cordelia nodded, studying her wounded nail. "It's a start," she said at long last, and exited the car without another word.
Lindsey watched her disappear into the hotel before he struck at the dashboard, sending messengers of pain racing through his body. "Fuck," he muttered, only half aloud. The still, sullen air of the town was glad to carry the word and buoy it in the air long after it should have faded away all the same.
---
Cordelia vanished with the Dodge shortly after their meager supplies had been carried inside, reappearing triumphant hours later with painkillers for them both and penicillin for the cut on Lindsey's face. "Aspirin just isn't going to cut it," she said, knocking back two hydrocodones with a gulp of bottled water.
"Amen." Lindsey took three, earning him an arched eyebrow but no comment from Cordelia. The pills did help, tumbling him in short order into a sleep like dying on the floor of the hotel lobby with Cordelia only a few feet away. The same oppressive feeling of dollhouses waiting for the signal to wake them up again that kept them from entering the individual homes had also discouraged exploration into guest rooms for anything other than necessities. Lindsey lay down prepared to dream, ready for nightmares of broken promises and broken bodies, but rather than the standard nighttime visions of the newly redeemable and possibly repentant, he saw-
'-roses. A whole damned field of them, bigger and redder and more beautiful than anything that Lindsey had seen before in his life. He fell to his knees among them and somehow managed not to feel a single prick from their thorns or an ache from his wounds. As Lindsey's jaw fell open, a dim, unwelcome part of his brain, a part that was always on the lookout for the angle or advantage and had not been cast off with Flagg's amulet, whispered that he was dreaming. Lindsey informed this part of his mind that it could fuck right off as he continued to gorge himself on the roses' brilliance. Each flower was a universe unto itself, whole and distinct from its neighbors, and yet they also functioned as the solitary notes that taken together made up a symphony.
Lindsey followed the path of the roses as they tugged the eye ever onward towards the center of the field.
The center, where the Tower stood.
Lindsey added the capitalization without conscious thought, for one glance made it clear that this Tower was different from all the other towers on all the other worlds of the universe, of any universe. Black and looming so far into the clouds that Lindsey had to crane his head back and squint to even catch a glimpse of its spire, it was cold where the roses were warm, forbidding where the roses were continually inviting one to step closer and experience their joy. Lindsey was amazed by it even as he was afraid of it.
"It feels as though it is waiting, does it not?" Lindsey turned his head by a fraction and saw a man standing a few paces off, staring at the Tower with the most naked expression of lust that Lindsey had ever seen or would ever see again. The man was both aged and ageless, with black hair that was rapidly shading into the color of the guns that he wore on his hips and eyes so blue that they made Lindsey's seem like dime-store baubles in comparison. He seethed with a primal sort of charisma; once Lindsey had set eyes on him he couldn't take them off again, and he wondered how the stranger had managed to draw so close to him without drawing attention the way a magnet drew slivers of iron.
As soon as the man who was both fascinating and unnerving in equal measure had mentioned it, Lindsey discovered that he Icould/I feel it, a low, belly-deep thrumming that radiated from the Tower like lust, like a princess aching for her prince to come for her. Lindsey didn't think he wanted to meet this maiden on the other side of midnight. She was every bit as likely to eat Prince Charming after his seed had been shot as she was to profess her undying love. The roses seemed to shiver as one; a sound like far-off wind chimes filled Lindsey's ears.
"Did we make any difference," he asked, "Cordelia and I? Any difference at all? Flagg is still alive."
"Alive," the stranger agreed," but now he doubts. Oftentimes that can be enough. You bought time for the others to find their feet, and fulfilled your part." The stranger lifted his hand towards the Tower. "She's still standing, isn't she? You fulfilled your part."
Lindsey swiveled his head back to look at the midnight princess. The more he stared, the more it seemed as if the Tower was holding up the roses rather than the other way around. "Yes."
The stranger nodded, barely seeming to hear Lindsey at all, so intent was his gaze upon his dark lady. There was the kind of hunger in his stare that men wore when they got into bar fights and woke up hours later with blood on their hands and no memory of what had occurred. A dead man's finger trailed up Lindsey's spine and, charismatic or not, he wanted to be away from the-
((broken knight))
-lunatic more he had wanted anything in his life. Whatever it was that this man sought, it had driven him right out of his mind. The gleam in his eyes said it all.
"All we are, in the end, is this place," the man said. From his tone Lindsey got the impression that he wasn't being spoken to at all. The stranger sounded like a man who had been pushed to the very edges of his endurance and beyond, into a world so foreign that he couldn't even fathom how he had gotten there, let alone how to get back. "In blood and bone and a handful of destiny, we serve her." His mouth twisted as he said it, as if he were so unused to such silken turns of phrase that even the one had exhausted him.
But "destiny" was not the word that he had used. It was merely the one that Lindsey's mind had chosen to make sense of a far larger, grander concept, like skipping a rock across the surface of a lake and pretending that this allowed him to see beneath the surface. The word itself was short and brutal, meant to be spit out with as little mercy as it showed. It was-'
"Ka," Lindsey murmured as he opened his eyes. The room seemed different, cheaper, and Lindsey had to stare at the deep red of a lampshade for nearly a full minute before he realized what it was. Compared to the roses, he was setting a street corner whore next to a duchess. Lindsey winced and rubbed at his eyes as the images began fading out of memory like dew in the sunshine. A dangerous man who wore six-shooters slung low on his hips. Eyes only a shade or so bluer than ice and roses red like a fanatic's patriotism, all twined around a word that seemed like destiny on the surface but really meant so much more.
"My compliments to the chef," Lindsey said, sitting up and making it about half-way before every muscle in his body began to scream that this was wrong and bad and, really, wouldn't he like some more pills? "Those meds are Igreat/I." The third attempt got Lindsey upright, though he immediately reached for the miracle bottle and dry-swallowed one the presents inside. "Hey, Cordelia. If we push it we should be in Colorado by nightfall. I haven't dreamed of Mother Abigail being in Nebraska since Vegas, I think she's on the move…" Lindsey drew to a halt as the last of the spiderwebs blew out of his mind. Cordelia's things were there. Cordelia herself was not.
The hair on the back of Lindsey's neck rose. Memories of the attack that had driven them out of Los Angeles soon had the hair switching from merely standing into doing a tango. Cordelia's possessions were still arranged neatly beside the place where she had been sleeping, no signs that she had fought anyone. Lindsey had the slippery, sluggish thoughts which suggested that he had been sleeping so deeply as to be nearly comatose, but even so…
If a sound had not issued from deeper within the hotel, it might have been dawn before Lindsey found her. He followed the noise until it led him to one of the guest rooms on the first floor, its door shut as firmly as all of the others. The other doors, however, did not have the sounds of thrown furniture and breaking glass echoing from them. It was either Cordelia or a zombie. Considering the world that they lived in, there was an equal chance of either. A tinkle of shattering porcelain bled out into the hallway and Lindsey put his hand upon the doorknob. The low, muffled sound of Cordelia's sob stopped him. It was the sound of a mother who had lost her child, a wife who had lost her husband.
A woman who had lost her dearest friend.
Lindsey's hand hovered over the doorknob for a few seconds more before he turned away, leaving Cordelia to the sanctity of her grief.
---
They followed the back roads, avoiding the worst of the jams and babying the new vehicle-a shiny Taurus that had once been the apple of its owner's eye-through the ones that could not be driven around. Boulder, Colorado arose on the road before them shortly after sunset of the next day. How they knew where they were going, Lindsey could not say, except that he would not be surprised to discover that it was a close cousin to the sense that guided geese across thousands of miles of unmarked sky and dogs home after a decade of separation. It was a constant, insistent nipping at the heels, hurryuphurryuphurryup. More than once Lindsey expected to glance over his shoulder and see a wizened brown face watching him from the back seat.
The city limits came far too soon.
"Not sure I can do this," Lindsey said as they stepped out of the car, joining the steady stream of people walking up the steps of an elegant Victorian home. The woman who was very possibly the most powerful human being left on the planet waited in a rocking chair on the porch to meet them.
The smile that Cordelia flicked him over the hood was distracted. "You'll be fine." She fiddled with the sleeves of her jacket, taking it off and making as if to shove it back into the car before something hard and nearly defiant moved across her face. When Cordelia strode up the walk towards Mother Abigail, it was as the woman that she had become rather than the woman that she had been.
Lindsey took a deep breath and followed more slowly, having to force his unwilling feet into each step. He had a sudden, terrible image of the old woman rising from her chair and pointing a gnarled brown finger down at his face. "Sinner!" she would shriek in a voice like abused guitar strings. "Trying to bring his evil into our midst, just like any other weasel in the corn! Out with him!" While Cordelia walked up the steps, Lindsey hovered down at the foot.
Cordelia grasped Mother Abigail's hands and knelt at her feet like she would in the presence of a venerated grandmother. Mother Abigail stroked Cordelia's hair with a surprising dexterity, the white head bent over the dark in sorrow. Lindsey couldn't catch the question that Cordelia asked, but Mother Abigail's answer carried well enough. "You bought us time. Sweet girl, you gave us the very thing that we needed." A bit of memory surfaced in Lindsey's mind, there and gone again before he could chase it to its source. Cordelia clattered down the steps past him. Lindsey thought that she might be crying.
"I don't see like I used to, son," Mother Abigail called down to him. "You're going to have to come closer than that if you want me to get a good look at you." Lindsey crossed the final few steps of distance between them with cement in his feet.
Mother Abigail sucked in her breath sharply. "Well-a-day," she said, her voice dry and cracked like autumn leaves. "I guess I ain't so old that I can't see what you are." Lindsey tensed until Mother Abigail reached out and took his hand in her own. "It was such a long journey, wasn't it, son?"
"Yes." Mother Abigail's hand was small and warm as a bird in his own, but she didn't feel like the fragile one. Lindsey fell to his knees without feeling even a whisper of the pain.
Mother Abigail cradled his face in her free hand. "Oh, child," she murmured. "You poor child. It's all right now. You've made it."
End.