Startled by the echo, I looked from Rocky to the two women. Rocky glanced at me as I looked back at him. His eyes were gold—not yellow, not hazel, but gold, and faintly burning like embers. The room rocked around me.

  I tore my eyes away and looked back at the women, staring hungrily at Trip across the room. “Soon, sister?” asked Charlotte.

  Rocky followed my gaze, and then his golden eyes popped wide and he pointed. “Spiders!”

  I jumped at the sudden shout and then caught back a laugh. I’d never seen a grown man, even a short fellow like Rocky, screech at sighting a spider. It was a laugh we needed, trapped in—

  “Spiders!” he repeated, and he leapt toward the women like a cat at a mouse.

  “No!” shouted Trip.

  But Rocky was midair and spinning his toothpick between his fingers, and it grew as it spun into a staff as long as his height, red with golden caps at each end. He gripped it with two hands and smashed it onto Jessica’s head with a sickening crunch that made my stomach twist and drop. Jessica folded to the dirt floor like a discarded rag doll.

  “No!” repeated Trip, and this time it was a wail of despair.

  Bobby lunged for Peggy, pulling her close with the rag still over her face. Sandy and Tumbleweed stood in quiet surprise, mouths slightly open. Charlotte folded and stared at her fallen sister, shocked into immobility.

  Trip brought his hands together, palm to palm at his chest, and closed his eyes. As I stared in mute amazement, he began to chant something low and fast, words which tumbled like the wind outside and blew past my ears.

  Rocky shrieked and dropped his red and gold staff, squeezing his golden eyes shut and clutching at his hat. He dropped to his knees and tore at the hat as if it were burning him, but it clung to his head. “I saved you!” he cried, twisting to look at Trip. “I saved you!”

  Trip opened his eyes. “You killed a woman!”

  “Look at them! Really look at them!”

  Bobby clutched Peggy close, backing to the dirt wall. “What’s going on?”

  And then Charlotte turned on us, pulling her mouth unnaturally wide in a hideous shriek to expose black fangs. She flung out her arms, and there were too many of them. She sprang at Rocky with hissing rage.

  Rocky rolled, releasing his hat, and everyone scrambled backward in the too-small room. Tumbleweed reached for the rake he’d left against the wall, and Sandy took a protective step closer to Trip.

  “I’m sorry,” gasped Trip.

  “You never listen to me!” snapped Rocky, and he surged upward to punch Charlotte under the jaw. Her head snapped backward, but three of her arms caught him. Her body swelled as she bent forward, a dark carapaced torso tearing out of her calico dress.

  Tumbleweed stepped forward and swung his rake in a great horizontal sweep, clipping Charlotte as she ducked. She snarled and snapped her fangs at him, raising two limbs. Rocky wriggled one arm from her distracted grip and reached for his red staff. He planted one end in the floor beneath Charlotte and shouted. The staff burst upward, extending from the ground and punching through the chitinous body to the dusty ceiling. Charlotte shrieked and thrashed.

  I couldn’t breathe. An arm pulled me close, and I realized I’d backed into Bobby and Peggy. We stared as the spider-woman shivered and then went limp, sliding down the pole like a demonic carousel figure.

  The wind howled as we all stood still for a moment.

  “What was that?” I asked, my voice trembling. “What are they?”

  Rocky pulled free of the misshapen woman and stepped onto the body, gripping the staff with one hand. He spoke a word, and it drew in each end, shrinking into a rod in his hand.

  Trip looked at us, and his expression melted into sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you saw that. I’m sorry you were caught up in our troubles. I’m sorry.”

  Rocky coughed and folded his arms across his chest.

  “And I’m sorry I used the headache chant,” Trip added to him. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

  I forced my voice above his. “What are you?”

  Trip stopped, looked at us, sighed. “We are on a journey west.”

  “Lots of people going to California,” I said. “Most of ’em not fighting giant spider-women.”

  “True enough,” he answered. “We’re on a mission from heaven. Not everyone wants us to complete our journey.”

  Bobby had to try twice to ask. “So they are—demons?”

  “Not the demons you mean, but yes, something inhuman.”

  “So you killed them?”

  I answered before Trip could. “They said they wanted to eat you.”

  To my surprise, Trip only nodded solemnly. “If they devour my flesh, it will render them immortal.”

  Bobby laughed, a high, nervous sound.

  Trip smiled patiently and turned back to the dead women, or what had been women. “Should we put out the bodies?”

  Tumbleweed leaned his rake against the wall again. “I suppose we can chuck them out the door. A moment of wind and dirt is better than staring at them for the next few hours.”

  Bobby opened his mouth as if to protest and then hesitated. I understood. It seemed wrong to toss a body into the storm without dignity or ceremony; even Uncle Edgar had been left in order on the bed. But one was a great spider, almost too large to fit through the door, and the other allegedly the same, and they’d come to this abandoned farm to devour the soft-spoken Trip. It was surreal.

  Tumbleweed pulled a couple of pincer-arms over his shoulder and dragged Charlotte to the door, where Sandy unlatched it and caught it against the wind. Bobby shielded Peggy while they worked the great corpse outside. Rocky tossed Jessica out after, and they pushed the door against the wind.

  For a long moment, we sat in silence.

  “I saw the spider,” I said at last, “and I know what they wanted, so I’m not going to call you murderers. But tell me if Bobby and Peggy and I are safe.”

  Trip smiled sadly. “You are safe from us, child.”

  “I’m not a child. I’ve run our farm, what there is of it, since Mama died.”

  “I did not mean to belittle you. You have a strong spirit to have endured here.”

  I snorted despite myself. Endured. It was that we did not have a choice. We could die, or we could wait to die.

  Or we could go to California.

  I looked at Bobby, still holding little Peggy, and I wished someone would hold me as protectively. To have just a moment where I could not fear the wind or the bank or Uncle Edgar…. What were spider-women, after years of fear?

  Peggy lifted her rag and looked at Rocky. “You could see them.”

  He nodded and popped his golden eyes wide in a silly monkey face. “I can see evil.” He resumed his normal expression and glanced at Trip. “But not everyone believes me.”

  “Can you see who’s outside?” Peggy asked.

  We spun together and looked toward the high windows, dark with the midnight of the storm. If someone were there, it was impossible to see, magical golden eyes or no.

  Bobby bounced Peggy in his arms and squeezed her. “There’s no one outside, baby girl. Just the storm.”

  Rocky looked at Trip. “I told you, it’s his storm.”

  I had no idea what they were talking about, but the black blizzard outside made the words plausible, and I shivered.

  Peggy tugged the rag over her face. “I saw someone. At the window.”

  You couldn’t see a train outside. She had imagined it. I sat down at the table and faced the far end of the room, drawing a calming breath through my protective rag.

  Something banged into the side of the house.

  It should have been nothing, less than nothing. Things blew around all the time during a storm. It was only that it came on the heels of Peggy’s words, and that I’d just seen a spider-woman try to crush Rocky so it could eat Trip.

  I turned my head to catch a glimpse of the others, and they were staring at each other in the kind of trepidation where no one wants to speak it first.

  “Someone’s outside,” I said, “right?”

  “It could be someone else needing shelter,” Bobby said. “Like us.”

  Or it could be another spider-woman.

  But I thought of Mama, lost in the storm and unable to find shelter, until she suffocated and died. If there were someone outside—

  “We have to look,” I said. “We have to see if someone’s out there.”

  Sandy reached for a spade left in a corner. “I will look.”

  But at that moment we saw it, a blackness against the dark, pressing outside the window. It scraped the glass, a texture rubbing against the dust, and I had the terrible sense it was probing. And then it moved on and we could not see it.

  But it had not gone.

  “Oh, God, please,” whispered Bobby.

  I looked at him, and then at Trip, the leader, the one the monsters wanted to eat. “What’s that?”

  He sighed and looked at Rocky, who answered, “Black Wind Demon.”

  I was confused. “The storm?”

  “He is a person,” Rocky said, “but he is also the storm. In a way.” He shrugged.

  “This is why Yulong has been suffering,” Sandy said with a sympathetic glance at the horse. “Since we came to this place, with the drought and the storms of dust. He came ahead to wait.”

  “The storms came years ago,” I said bitterly.

  “We’ve been traveling this way for years,” Tumbleweed said with a shrug.

  “And he wants you?”

  “All of us,” Trip said, “but mostly me.”

  “So he can eat you and be immortal.” I fought fear with skepticism. “Does that mean you’re immortal?”

  Trip laughed. “Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” I repeated, as if it made perfect sense in a black blizzard tearing apart the very ground around two dead spider-women.

  “What if it gets in?” Bobby’s voice was tight, his eyes on the window.

  “He hasn’t found a way in yet,” Sandy answered, tracing the perimeter of the house with his gaze.

  “What are we going to do about him?” The question was expectant, and I turned to Bobby with fresh respect. He set Peggy down. “That door won’t hold against someone who really wants it down.”

  “Black Wind Demon has waited years for us,” Rocky said. “He will take his time now.”

  Something crashed into the outside of the house, and the boards and packed earth shook visibly.

  Rocky’s gold eyes narrowed and he glared at the wall.

  “Find rope,” Trip said.

  Why had I set off from home without so much as a handkerchief? I had a pocketknife and twelve cents in my dress. I had walked straight into a duster with nothing. Foolish, idiotic, stupid.

  But Bobby found a short coil of rope in the bottom drawer of the bureau beside two dead mice. “What are we going to do?”

  “I hope nothing,” Trip answered.

  It struck the wall again. Sandy reached for his spade and Tumbleweed his rake.

  Peggy lifted her rag. “I’m scared.”

  Bobby scooped her up. “Hold on to me, baby girl.”

  The wall shook again, and sprays of dust pushed through fresh cracks. Trip stood, and Rocky stepped in front of him.

  “We can’t stay here,” Tumbleweed said quickly. “We have to get out. Go out the back while he’s trying this side.”

  “He’ll see us,” Sandy protested.

  “Even he won’t see anything in this storm. If we stay here, we’re sitting ducks.”

  “There’s a barn behind us,” Bobby said grimly. “About a hundred feet. I saw it when we were running here. Will he follow us?”

  Trip shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”

  “He can’t see us when he’s the storm,” Rocky said. “He’s got to sniff us out himself. He probably found this house following the spiders.”

  The wall cracked and the air began to cloud.

  “The rear window,” Tumbleweed said.

  “What about Yulong?” asked Sandy.

  “Leave him!” barked Tumbleweed, already starting for the window.

  Sandy looked distressed. Bobby caught my arm. “Here.”

  I tied the rope about my waist and tried not to think of Mama caught against a barbed wire fence. Bobby tied on next and pushed Peggy’s hands against the rag over her head. “You hold that tight,” he cautioned her. “Really tight.”

  Tumbleweed boosted himself to the window’s height with a chair and levered it open with his rake. The storm rushed in like a torrent of angry bees. He shielded his eyes and, with a wet rag over his nose and mouth, crawled outside.

  “You know where the barn is?” shouted Trip.

  Bobby nodded.

  “Then you two next.”

  I held Peggy while Bobby climbed out the window and then passed her to him. She curled like an infant against the wind but it was too loud to hear if she whimpered or cried. I followed them.

  The grit slapped into my face like sandpaper, and I bent my head away from the blast, hiding as best I could behind my shoulder. My bare legs screamed with the sting of the storm. I ducked behind Tumbleweed, leaning against the wind. Bobby pointed and Tumbleweed started into the dark.

  The barn was a hundred feet, Bobby had said. I don’t know how far we had gone—distance is a hard thing in a storm—when Tumbleweed stopped suddenly. I heard his curse even through the howl of the wind and then he bolted back toward the house, quick as his namesake.

  I did not understand, half-turning to squint after him. Had he given up on finding the barn? Bobby pushed into me from behind and shouted. “Keep going?”

  I took six steps before I saw the bear.

  It was a huge bear, with dark fur rippling in the duster winds and claws that extended a hand’s-breath from its dinner-plate paws. I could not imagine a bear so large outside of nightmares, much less in the stricken panhandle where even rabbits died for lack of food. I stood still, paralyzed with confusion and fear.

  The bear rose on hind legs and swung its head around as if to search the lot, heedless of the wind and flying dirt that blinded me. It roared through the howl of the wind, and it seemed to me there were words in the sound. Tang Sanzang!

  Some folk, when things were getting desperate, had said they’d seen the face of Jesus or Satan in the black rolling clouds.

  I groped for Bobby’s arm. I knew when he saw it by the way he went rigid in my grip. That meant I was not imagining it.

  “Help,” I said, though it was not possible anyone could hear me. “Bear.”

  But then there was a rush of motion beside us, and I saw Rocky. His golden eyes burned in the dusty dark and he did not shrink from the wind. He pulled his toothpick from his bared teeth and it grew into a staff as long as his height, red with golden caps at each end.

  “Come back!” shouted Bobby. “I’ve got Trip!”

  I stumbled, trying to squint through the storm at Rocky rushing the bear. I kept going in what I prayed was a straight line, one arm over my eyes and one hand outstretched, reaching, hoping, grasping for—

  The house.

  I kept my hand on the wall and crept alongside, searching for the broken window. Something grasped my ankle, and I gulped a mouthful of dust to scream before I realized it was Sandy. He helped me inside and turned to the others.

  We all crowded away from the gaping window, a dirtfall choking the air, and Sandy put a protective arm around Trip. “Are you all right?”

  Trip nodded, choking and spitting black mud like the rest of us. “Where’s Tumbleweed?”

  “That pig,” growled Sandy. “He’s probably hiding somewhere.”

  “What about Rocky?” I asked, coughing.

  “He’ll be all right,” Trip said, but he looked worried.

  Sandy closed the window, leaving Rocky and Tumbleweed on their own. Dirt and wind still sprayed through the damaged front wall.

  “That is a bear,” Bobby said, pointing in the direction we’d come. “A bear.”

  “That is not a bear,” Trip corrected him quietly, or as quietly as possible over the wind. “Or not only a bear. Rocky said he would lead him away and kill him.”

  “Why not kill him now?” asked Bobby, and I saw his face change when he realized the answer for himself. Rocky couldn’t be sure of killing him, so he had to lead him away first.

  The horse Yulong nickered nervously.

  Peggy started sweeping dust off the chairs and table. It was almost cute, had it not been so hopeless.

  Hopeless. I turned into the bedroom and dropped on a crude stool, hopelessness sapping my energy.

  “Tilly.” Trip came and squatted in front of me. He took my hand, but it was not oppressive or leering as when Tumbleweed did. He held it firmly but gently, as if comforting a child. “I am so sorry you have been caught up in this.”

  I shook my head. “The storms come to everyone.”

  “Not this storm, it seems.” He cast a worried glance at the ceiling.

  “The land is full of sin,” I said without thinking. “You said heaven sent you on this journey. The world is being scoured clean, imperfections sanded away.”

  “Oh, child,” he said quickly, and his voice brimmed with sympathy and concern, “you are right and you are wrong. The world is full of sin, indeed, and it is sin which causes suffering, often even that suffering which appears to be from nature and from heaven. It was not greed which brought the wind, but it was greed which stripped the land to be carried away.”

  I nodded. The new soil conservation men had explained the mistake of turning the sod and destroying the bison grass.

  “But whether heaven sends the wind or the rain, it is not the end. There is more to understand than the price of a bushel of wheat. Sometimes we must lose what we think matters to find what does matter.”

  Anger rose in my chest. “You talk in pretty riddles just to hear your own cleverness. We’ve lost everything, even the things that matter. My uncle died yesterday, and he was the last of my family. The farm is wasted and gone. The fields are empty, the stock long dead. There is nothing left that matters.”

  Trip looked down. “I am truly sorry.”

  “I want to go west,” I said, surprising myself. “I want to go to California, where there’s water and work. Where there’s money.”

 

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