The Zona Read Online Free Page B

fire.  The blurred images of people shuffled from tent to tent, a group in brilliant white robes walked towards him.
    Lead held out his Preacher’s cross.
    “Attention,” he croaked, his dry throat stung with the effort.  “I demand sustenance and sanctuary.  In the name of our Lord and Savior and on behalf of the Church I demand sustenance and sanctuary.”
    Lead shook his cross at the approaching villagers.  They were pale despite the intense sun.  Each wore a robe cut from white linen, kept immaculate despite living outdoors.  The faces of their young showed the inbred traits of kinship, they all bore the same sharp nose, cleft chin, and asymmetric eyes.  An ancient woman stood with them, dressed in the same linen but with a rattlesnake skin tied around her forehead.  She opened a black, toothless maw and barked into the desert wind, like an animal.  The villagers surrounded Lead.
    Lead fell hard to the ground, cross still clutched in his hand.
    “Sustenance and sanctuary,” he whispered.
    His head pounded.  He waved his cross meekly from villager to villager, to each unknowing stare.  One of the men lifted Lead to his feet and brought him to the elderly woman.
    “You be of the Stormbringer?”  She asked.  Her breath was powerful.  Lead tried to focus on her face though it blurred in and out of his vision.
    “You be a harbinger?  You know the Stormbringer?”  She asked.  The villager who had picked Lead up, wrapped arms around him from behind.
    “You in Crystal.  You look a wraith.  You touch the Noumenal, we find you true or leave you to sand.”  She nodded her head and hissed.  The villager dragged Lead into one of the tents and dropped him into the embrace of its shade.

    Lead woke in darkness.  His tongue was large and heavy.  Thirst and sun stroke tilted his world on an axis appalling and unnatural.  Lead turned his head and vomited into the sand.  The stench turned his stomach, he vomited again.
    The tent’s flap rippled in the wind, revealing a flicker of firelight.  Near the flap lay a wooden bowl of water.  Lead tried to stand but couldn’t find his legs.  He thought of going back to sleep but stopped by the knowledge that he would probably die if he did.  He whispered a prayer for salvation and crawled out of the tent, dragging the bowl with him.
    The sun had quite the day, leaving a darkness cut only by the firelight.  Nothing was visible but the tents at fire’s edge and villagers scurrying in and out of the illumination like phantoms.  Lead observed and took a small sip of water.  His body wanted to gulp it down but his mind knew better.  He watched a group of villagers erect an iron frame and cauldron over the fire.  Lead took another sip.  He saw no well but knew a water source must be near.  The water tasted of alkali and minerals.  Water from bottle reserves did not taste this sharp and earthy.
    One of the villagers leaned back let out a long howl.  Villagers answered the call and came into the firelight.  They hovered near licking flames and watched the cauldron boil and hummed a song, some chorus from the Broken Times.  They perpetrated a scene ancestral to all of humanity though sometimes forgotten and sometimes found again; food, and fire, and song to break the fear of the darkness.  Lead watched them dance and sway to the wordless song.  Arms flailed without rhythm.  Feet kicked up clouds of dust which mixed with the smoke of the fire.
    “End!” shouted the old woman with the rattlesnake headband. “End! End!”
    The villagers stopped dancing, but the hums continued uninterrupted.  The old woman pointed at Lead.
    “You,” she said.  She licked her lips with a large pink tongue.
    “You walk from waste,” she said over the hums.  “You come from land of No Man, like Stormbringer.  You eat Jimson Datura.  You touch the Noumenal.  You people, you stay.  You harbinger you become sand.”
    Lead wanted to understand, but her words were