Saint Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits, prowling throughout the world, seeking the ruin of souls.
MARTIN HAD BEEN LYING SO still for so long that he had lost sensation from the waist down. His legs were not there at all, his torso was as cold as a corpse. He was famished and freezing. He’d been on the move for days, going from house to house, sleeping in attics and storm cellars, anywhere that offered a decent seal against the return of the light.
He was home now, hiding in his own crawl space.
All of this time, he’d been looking for Trevor. He’d given up on Winnie and Lindy. They were beyond his help now, given that following was a trap.
As an American, he had not felt vulnerable in the same way that so many people did in this world, perpetually frightened that their loved ones might simply disappear some night.
That didn’t happen here, and he had not anticipated the extraordinary emotional wear and tear that losing your loved ones brought. It was so emasculating that he had to fight just becoming passive.
He did this by creating a goal for himself. His goal was Trevor. He’d searched half the houses in the Smokes by now. He was planning a night raid into the town, soon, too. Night after night, the light had scoured Harrow, Kansas, and he doubted that many people were left by now. The same was true of the Smokes. It came here every night, seeking and probing, and those other things came, too, the shadowy things that he’d encountered when he was a follower.
Thunder bellowed. Another storm was coming. Soon, there would be more rain. Methane releases from permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers, the flooding of polar oceans with fresh water from the melt, the wild state of the sun—all of these things were combining to make the weather turn dangerous just when this horrific attack occurred.
For years, the U.S. had pleaded with the empires to curtail pollution, but they would not touch their development zones. Industrializing regions of Africa and South Asia had completely overwhelmed the planet’s ability to maintain balance.
More planning on the part of these invaders? He feared so. He feared that they might have infiltrated every colonial administration on earth. No doubt they would turn out to be comfortable in an atmosphere choked with what we thought of as pollution.
Despite the sodden cold of the crawlspace, he sweated.
The silence was deep, now. His watch told him that sunset was not far away. He had a mission tonight—aside from avoiding the light and the other menaces. He intended to track down a sound he’d heard off and on, that came from down toward the Saunders. Drumming, he thought. Somebody down there, perhaps.
Of course, in this world it was impossible to tell. Could be anything. Some creature from hell, or an alien machine. Or it could be people, and if so, there were more than one or two of them.
He stirred a little, just moving his body slightly. Then he waited. There was no sound from above. He raised his left hand and pressed it against the trapdoor.
After a moment, he pressed harder, causing the door to move just slightly. When there was no reaction, he pushed the door all the way open.
He made his way through the dining room, then the living room where he had spent so much time in his chair reading, where he had read to his kids, where he had listened to the music he loved.
The front door gaped. As he went through, he tried to push it closed, but it was no use, they’d torn it off its hinges. He stepped into the grass, in the long shadows of evening. He listened, heard nothing.
No, it was a night sound, that drumming, and finding its source was about the only thing he could conceive of that would draw him outside after the sun went down.
Then he heard another sound, a great whooshing overhead that was familiar to him from his night as a follower. He glimpsed, turning hard against the clouds that raged above, what looked like a gigantic bat.
He could feel it watching him. Knew that it was. And then he heard from the woods behind the house that familiar mechanical clatter.
The sun was not yet down, but the alien animals were already stalking him. The bird was the spotter, and whatever was in those woods, he suspected, was there to tear him apart.
He scrambled down the hill toward the stream, and then moved along its bank, rattling the dry autumn brush as he went through it. Tears swarmed his eyes, he was that afraid, as above him the wheeling bird wailed, and the woods behind him and around him echoed with the noise of whatever monstrosities were there.
He came to the little lake, really just a widening of the Saunders, where he sometimes swam in the summer, and ran out onto its pier. Forcing himself not to dive, he slipped into the frigid water and moved under the pier, clinging to one of its slippery pilings, concealed by the three rowboats that were there, old Mrs. Lane’s little white dingy that she used to fish for crappies, and his boat that could be fitted with a small sail and go racing across the thirty-acre lake, and the third boat, a duck hunter’s craft, camouflaged, that had not been used by anybody in years.
Then he heard his pursuers, their feet splashing softly, and heard their sounds, mutterings, clatterings, small whistles that he realized were a language and a complex one, and he wondered, then, if these might be the real aliens, or if they were creatures that had been trained like dogs or were smarter than dogs, and then if they might be constructed things, machines brought to life.
There came tapping, a claw tip on the wooden dock above his head. He heard the eager whisper of their breath, and the more intimate clattering of what he thought now must be mouth parts. There was a whisper in that clattering that suggested knife blades, steel against steel. From high overhead there came the long wail again, and he could hear in it quite clearly a tone of angry question.
Had they lost him?
Something slid into the water. It was clear and deep, the little lake, with tall water weeds that rose up from its darkness, and he saw, sailing below him, a huge shadow, blacker than black, with eight great legs outstretched around it.
He watched it sailing above the gently waving fronds, coming toward him, and felt as it came closer, more frozen, more helpless.
This was his death, then, his ugly destiny, and he’d done nothing to deserve it.
The thing in the water made a graceful turn and then came back toward the dock. He watched the shadow glide closer.
He’d lost, he’d been captured, and now, he thought, his lot must be to share the fate of the mangled boy he’d seen in the field. Perhaps he should fight more, but he didn’t know how. If he swam, the thing would be on him in a second. If he got out, he’d have to confront the ones crowding the dock.
Something brushed his leg, feeling like a whipping frond of water weed, and he saw the shadow darting there. It was closing in, it was about to strike.
He shut his eyes. Waited. Heard a sloshing sound, very light. Sick with fear but unable to bear the feeling that he was about to sustain an attack he opened them again.
There was a girl in the water beside him.
She cocked her head and raised her eyebrows, then held a long finger across her lips. She looked sketched by a Dutch master, she was so flawless, so full of glow. And also, she looked familiar, very much so, but he couldn’t place her.
He was trembling with the cold of the water. She reached a hand like a sparrow to his shoulder, and warmth came from it, soothing him and bringing him a startling sense of protection.
She raised a finger beside her ear and shook her head. Don’t listen, the gesture said. Then she held her hand out before her, palm toward him. The message was clear, don’t listen and don’t move a muscle.
But how could he not listen to that hideous wailing in the sky? It was the most terrifying sound he’d ever heard. And the mechanical chuckling of what appeared to be gigantic spiders gnashing their mouth parts—it caused sickening dread, visceral terror as it conjured thoughts of agonizing mutilation.
She frowned at him. What was she getting at, and who was she? So familiar, the face.
She smiled softly, and he thought that certain female looks define the very essence of beauty for the male, and she reached out as if she had heard that thought, and touched his cheek so very kindly, and his mind went to Lindy, and his heart almost broke in half.
This all happened in an instant, during which time she touched her temple and nodded and smiled, and that gesture, one he had seen her make before, caused him to realize who she was. This was Louise Wright’s daughter Pammy, manager of the Target…and he thought she could read his mind.
He noticed, also, that as he had become distracted by her, the things in the water seemed to have lost track of him.
There was a crackle, a huge noise. Electronic crackle.
Pammy Wright frowned.
A voice echoed, electronically amplified. “Martin Winters, I am Captain Jennifer Mazle of the United States Air Force. Please come up on the dock.”
Pammy shook her head. Then she pointed downward, and disappeared.
“Doctor Winters, I am Captain Jennifer Mazle of the United States Air Force. The situation has been stabilized and it’s safe to come out. Please come up on the dock.”
He saw Pammy’s pale body disappearing down among the water weeds. She swam right through a line of black shapes, which simply hung there, not moving.
He followed her, going deep, swimming as hard as he could, struggling and, he was sure, drawing attention to himself. He swam toward the creatures, which all spread their legs and began closing in on him. He dropped down into the water weeds, into the dark and the pressure among their roots, glimpsing a great fish, then Pammy again, far ahead, deeper yet in the lake.
How could she do it? How could she possibly manage? Waves of frantic air hunger were already coursing through his body and he was going to have to surface, he had no choice, it was essential to life, he could not manage another second—
—and then she was there, coming up from below, and she had with her a blue cylinder. She offered him a rubber tube and turned it on when it was in his mouth. As he gulped oxygen, tingling, exquisite relief filled his lungs, his blood, his crashing heart.
She flitted away as a great, rough something whipped his back. He didn’t turn to look, he just followed her. He couldn’t suppress his fear now, not when he was swimming for his life.
But what had that voice been? Was the Air Force really out there? Maybe he would’ve been safe if only—
Pammy stopped, turned, and yelled in bubbles: NO!
He went deeper, following the disappearing form. The water was dark here, the pressure was making his ears ring, and his lungs were bursting again.
Somebody else was beside him, a young man as naked as Pammy had been, swimming hard, his eyes behind goggles also. He had the oxygen, which Martin took in huge gulps.
He was being rescued by the town kids who had disappeared, and Oh, God, maybe that meant Trev.
He swam hard, and soon found himself in a narrowing, dark space, a tunnel. Where he was he didn’t know, but they were ahead of him and he swam for all he was worth.
Then something like steel springs grabbed both of his legs, and he began to be dragged back out of the tunnel, and he knew that it was one of the things and he kicked and kicked but the harder he tried, the tighter its grip became. Also, air was getting short again and he was in too confined a space, nobody could reach him here. As he began to be dragged back, he clawed at the walls, he kicked with every ounce of his strength, but still the grip on him tightened and he knew that he had lost this struggle.
He began to be pulled backward out of the tunnel. Going faster by the second, he could soon see again. As he was pulled back into the body of the lake, light grew around him.
The walls of the tunnel were stone, he could see them now, and he had a last chance, here. He understood spaces like this, tunnels, tombs, and such. With all the strength that was in him, he thrust out his arms and the leg that wasn’t in the grip of the thing that was dragging him. As the thing met sudden and unexpected resistance, he felt a flash of pain in the ankle it had been gripping. Immediately, he kicked. Kicked again. Kicked a third time, and felt himself come free, then kicked harder as the legs or grippers or whatever they were scrabbled around his feet.
He pulled himself back into the blackness and narrowness of the tunnel, until he could barely move and had to breathe and knew that it would be water.
And he did breathe and it was water, it came sluicing down his throat and gagged him, causing him to cough and involuntarily draw in more.
It hurt to drown, it was not magic, he saw nothing of his life before his eyes as he died, only agony, only a frantic need that could not be fulfilled and then dark.
Dark. Dark.
Air, sweet in him, filling him, air but maybe only the air of wishes, the air of dreams.
“Come ON!”
“CPR him, hurry!”
Pressure on his back, a cough, water coming out, flowing out, then another breath, deep and good and he was fully conscious again, wet, aware of how miserably cold he was.
Dappled autumn woods, larks singing in the last, high light, Little Moon racing in the clouds, beloved star wanderer. And her—Pammy—standing over him and the young man, the boy—also familiar but no name, not yet.
They dragged him to his feet. “Hurry!”
High overhead, a long, chilling wail shattered the noise of the larks.
“Don’t listen!”
“Why not?”
“They home in on fear. If you’re not afraid, they can’t find you. Come on.” As she spoke, the young man sprinted away.
She tugged at his arm. “We’ve gotta go. They’re realizing they made a mistake.” She smiled shyly, her cheeks and neck turning pink. “Somebody just said, ‘Who’s back at the lake?’ and now they’re all looking at each other.” She lowered her eyes.
“You understand their language?”
She hauled at his hands, then slipped away as easily as if she had been born to the forest, her pale face glowing in a dark that was being brought by clouds that were speeding out of the north like hungry panthers, flashing and bellowing.
She had already disappeared, and he ran to follow her—and was stopped by a devastating blow from behind. And then he saw the ground, felt cold leaves in his face.
“I want you to be calm.” It was the Air Force officer, Jennifer Mazle.
He cried out in the direction the girl had gone. “Help! Help me!”
“I’m a scientist, too, Doctor Winters, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Then let me up.”
The weight lifted, and Martin pulled out from under her. She wore a camouflage vest, a rumpled hat, and heavy glasses with a split lens. Her eyes were big with sadness. “This mission isn’t going right,” she said. “I need you to come back and help us.”
“What are those things? My God—”
“You need to help us understand, Doctor Martin.”
“They were trying to kill me. The government was, too.”
She touched his hand, then gripped it. “There’s a lot of fear out there.”
He glimpsed movement behind her. She started to turn, but was struck, and hard, by a piece of wood. She turned quickly back.
Her face was distorted, the skin on the cheek where she’d been hit imprinted by the wood.
She moved to one side, her skin rippling, turning cream-colored, red where the board had hit.
What in the world was wrong with her?
She snarled, came quickly toward him. Seen full on like this, her face was—oh, holy Christ, it was—the skin was ripping like a crazy jello, the eyes were weird in the eerie cloud light, weird and gold.
He turned and ran. He didn’t think, he was beyond that. He just ran because what he had seen was so terrible that his mind had been completely stripped away, replaced by a terror so raw and so deep that this educated, civilized man was thrown back in an instant to the days when men were hunted things.
A thunder of slashing jaws rose up all around him, as overhead the wails came again and again, exultant now, joyous now, the sky, the very air vibrant with their triumph.
His fear was the beacon, but he couldn’t help it, she’d turned into a monster when that kid had hit her, and that had been the single most shocking thing Martin had ever seen, more shocking even than the explosion of the pyramid, which involved an inanimate thing, not the face of a living creature like that.
And then Pammy was there, looking down at him from a ledge. She motioned to him and he clambered up beside her.
She lay flat and he did the same.
“Blank your mind,” she said calmly. “Concentrate your attention on your body. Don’t think.”
Lying on the sun-warmed stone, he concentrated on his aching lungs, his crashing heart. Below them, he heard movement, then quiet voices. Above, the wailing came and went as the great birds began to patrol.
“Come on,” she whispered, “fast!”
The instant she spoke, there was a rustling sound, and a black-gloved hand gripped the ledge from below. He turned and ran, following her, putting all the strength he had left into his effort.
The trees shuddered and the thunder echoed, and great gusts of wind swam down from the north. Martin ran behind the fleeing girl, deeper and deeper into the woods, and rain came in sheets, a yellow deluge. Behind him he heard the cries of the strange birds and the crackle of alien voices.
“Come on,” Pammy urged.
He could remember this part of the woods. They were past the Saunders and about a mile down from his house. This was state land, part of the Prairie Heritage program. The forest here was as thick as it got in Kansas, and when you dropped down into the hollows, dense with brush. The hunting back in here had been excellent when he was a boy. Wild pheasant, plenty of turkey.
Times gone by. He’d discovered here that Trevor was not going to be a hunter, that he felt too bad for the animals. He and Lindy had come back in here when they were first married, and walked naked here, hand in hand, in some sort of sacred contact with the land that they could not articulate.
It was miserable here now, though, soaking, the rain pounding down, wind roaring. A storm like this could easily bring a tornado, too.
Then she seemed to drop down, as if into a hole. When he followed her, he discovered a tiny glade, and in it a camouflaged tent. He recognized it. They’d been on sale at Hiram’s Sporting Goods. She darted in. He approached more warily. Close to it, he could hear drums in the sound of the rain. Then the flap opened and she gestured frantically. He went in.
The first thing he noticed was that the drumming was much louder, the second that the air was stifling. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the space was filled with children and young people, perhaps twenty in all. He knew at once that these were the kids who had disappeared when their parents and siblings had become wanderers.
He looked from face to face, seeking recognition, not willing to taste again of his hope.
When he did not see Trevor, he swayed, staring, helpless to either stand or sit. He had reached the end of his tether, he was going to collapse.
Unable to defend himself from his own tears, he dropped to his knees and covered his face, and fought to keep his tears silent.
A hand came onto his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” And the tears became a helpless, humiliating flood.
“Dad?”
He’d heard the word, but—
“Dad?”
He raised his face and saw standing before him somebody he did not recognize.
“Dad, I’m Trevor.”
Then he did—behind the dirt, behind the dark cast of his eyes, behind the wild hair and the muddy camouflage suit, he knew that it was his son.
Trevor had changed fantastically. He was not a boy, not at all. His expression contained an adult’s knowledge of the world—that and more—and the change had been so abrupt and so total that in just these few days he had become unrecognizable to his own father.
The heart, though, the heart sees, and Martin’s heart saw his son before him. He opened his arms and Trevor came to him, and he closed them around his son’s narrow body. His heart and mind may have grown, but this was still the same boy, fragile, almost, but with the long legs and big shoulders that said that he would soon grow much taller.
“Trevor,” he managed to rasp. “Trevor.”
Trevor pushed gently at him but he clung more tightly. He could never let him go, not ever, he could not do that again. “Dad—um—” He managed to look up into his father’s eyes. “Dad, nobody else here has any parents left.”
For a moment, Martin didn’t understand. Then he did. He was the only parent who was not wandering. He looked out across the expectant faces, the eyes that he was realizing all had the same strange shadow in them, some of them touched now by tears, others wide with sorrow, others resigned.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m George,” one of the older boys replied. “Glad to meet you.” George held out his hand, shook formally. Others followed, most of them teens, some as young as ten. There were twenty-two of them, two more boys than girls. Each in turn introduced himself. It was so formal. Oddly formal. But there was no precedent for such a meeting, was there?
Through all of this, the drumming did not stop.
Trevor glanced away from him, then murmured, “It drowns out the sound of the night riders, so the little ones won’t get scared.”
Just hearing his son’s voice, Martin felt another wave of joy.
“Dad!”
“He can’t help it,” a little girl said.
“Can you hear me thinking, kids? Is that it?”
“We sort of pick up thoughts, but it’s not like you’d imagine, Dad. People don’t think alike and thought patterns are even more different than faces. You can’t figure out what somebody else is thinking unless they know how to organize their thoughts to communicate, and we’re still learning. But they can all feel your feelings, and you’re…it’s embarrassing me, Dad.”
“I can read thought,” George said. “I’m getting kind of okay.” He looked quickly at Martin. “Not you, sir! I’d never do that.”
“I better not catch you in my mind,” a girl warned him.
“Oh, I’m not, Sylvie! I’m not!”
“Of course you are. Anyway, we have no trouble reading you morons, any girl can do it, you don’t need to have gotten zapped. You’re transparent from birth, gentlemen.” She leaned her head against George’s shoulder. George crossed his legs.
“What’s this getting zapped?” Martin asked.
Silence fell. “Dad, we want you to try.”
“Try what?”
“Don’t ask him, Trev, he has to!”
“Shut up!”
“What’s going on here?”
“Dad, you remember the night when it happened?”
“How could I ever forget it?”
“Mom was holding Winnie and I was standing beside them. You had your hand on my shoulder, you were squeezing so hard you nearly broke it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it was good. The light missed you. It hit Mom and sort of splashed on me. I went out of my body and up in the air. I saw you down there, I saw us all. Then I was out in the sky, up above the church. I saw Mom and Winnie, they were gold in the light-gold masses of sparks—and they were rising fast. But my shoulder hurt so much, I went back down.
“At first, I was in shock. I went to the back of the church with Mom. I saw you but you seemed far away. You were hollering at us. You—I never saw you like that, Dad. I felt so sorry for you. So sorry!”
“I want your mom back. I want my girl.”
Another boy shook his shoulder. “We’re gonna win, Doctor Winters.”
Martin recognized him as Joey Fielding, son of George and Moira, who ran Octagon Feed. “That doesn’t seem possible,” he replied, trying to keep his bitterness and his resignation out of his voice.
“Every one of us had the same thing happen. We were in pain when the light hit us, and it didn’t take all the layers. Who we were stayed with our bodies. What we lost were the lies, the hopes, most of our education, what we wanted, what we thought of ourselves, our hopes. We lost all the baggage.”
One of the little ones said, “We’re like, fresh. We’re new again, like we were—”
“Look at him, you’re scaring him,” a girl hissed.
“I’m not scared,” Martin said.
“Yes, you are. We’re weird and you’re scared!”
“He doesn’t scare easy,” Trevor snapped. “My dad has courage.”
“He’s gonna need it if we do this.”
Martin was aware that this conversation was happening on two levels, one he could hear and another that he couldn’t. “I think I need to know what’s going on.”
“What’s going on is we need you to try to become like us.”
How would he do that? It seemed like some sort of side effect of a failed attempt by the aliens to strip away a soul.
“That’s it,” Trevor said.
“I thought you couldn’t read minds.”
He looked down at the smashed grass that made up the floor of the tiny chamber. “Um, you’re easy, Dad. ’Cause I know you…”
George said, “It’s getting dark.”
Trevor looked at him sharply, shook his head.
“Trevor, no. NO!”
“What is this?”
Trevor threw his arms around him. “Dad, they want you to leave!”
“Leave? I can’t leave!”
A boy of perhaps ten or eleven produced a pistol. He handed it to one of the older kids. Martin saw that it was a .45 automatic. He didn’t exactly point it at Martin, so much as leave it visible.
Martin stared at it. He looked from the barrel to the young face. Those eyes again, all shadowy. These kids had changed. He gentled his voice. “Look, I need a break here.”
The boy thrust the gun toward him.
“Trevor! Trevor, tell them, I’m a good father, I’m—I’m—kids, listen. I’m needed. You need me. Yes. Oh, yes. I can be—can replace—replace…”
The boy racked the slide.
“You helped me, Pammy! Hey, you just helped me escape, now you want to do this? This is crazy!”
“Dad, if you don’t go—” Trevor pulled in his words. He was choking with tears, Martin could see it.
“Trevor, tell them, I can’t survive out there. Nobody can!”
The boy got to his feet. He had a dusting of beard, barely visible in the gathering dark. He held the gun in Martin’s face. “Doctor Winters,” he said quietly, “you get out of here.”
“Oh, God, listen, please—I’ve been running and running, I can’t run anymore. Trevor, please help me! Help your dad!”
Trevor looked at him out of his strange new eyes, and Martin saw the truth of it: the horror they had seen had made them monsters, all of them, and Trevor was a monster, too.
But then Trevor reached out a hand and touched his father’s cheek. It was not the gesture of a boy, but of a man of maturity. “Dad, it’s survival of the fittest. The reptilians are going to find you. You can’t hide from them, not anywhere, not like we can. If you stay here, you’ll lead them right to us.”
Martin backed away from the gun. “Get that thing out of my face!”
“Dad, you have to do this.” Trevor threw his arms around his father. Martin held him, felt his body shaking.
He looked to Pammy. “Why did you save me? How could you be so cruel?”
“She’s a damn asshole,” the boy with the gun spat.
“Ride the storm,” a voice said from the back. “Same as we did.”
“Doctor Winters—”
“Pammy, call me Martin, please.”
“Doctor Winters—”
She pulled back the flap of the tent. Outside, Martin saw rain sweeping in almost continuous lightning, and shadows in the nearby clearing that did not look like any shadows he cared to see. “This is crazy. I can’t.”
“Dad, do it!”
“Trev, no, absolutely not!”
His son was standing before him, looking up at him, his face stained with tears. “Get out,” he said. He turned to the boy with the gun. “Give it to me,” he said.
“Why?” the boy asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Because I’m the only one who can handle this!” He took the gun and held it to his father’s face. “Decide,” he said.
Martin looked straight down the barrel. He could see muscles working in Trevor’s hand, could see his finger tightening. “Trevor?”
Trevor screwed his eyes shut. “Now, Daddy!”
Martin tried to think—some argument, some appeal, but there were no more arguments, there were no more appeals. That weapon was going to go off in another second, and Trevor was going to have to spend the rest of his life an orphan like all these other orphans, but knowing, unlike them, that he had taken the life of his own father.
Martin raised his hand. “I’m going,” he said softly. “I’m going, son, and I want you to know that I don’t understand, but I don’t blame you.”
“Just go.”
“I know you have to look out for each other, that you can’t risk the group—”
“Damn you, GO!”
Trevor’s voice was not the same now. He’d been so gentle a boy that he couldn’t shoot a pheasant. Now here he was ready to kill his father, and his voice was low and hard, scorched with the pain of somebody who could.
Martin went out into the lightning.
WYLIE STOOD BY THE QUIET waters of the Saunders, trying to get the courage up to try and cross into the other world. If Trevor could come here, then surely he could go in the other direction, and that was urgently necessary, obviously.
He paced, he looked for some sign of the gateway. Martin was out there right now in those deadly woods, and somebody had to save the guy, and Wylie thought it might as well be him.
He could bring Martin across. If nobody over there wanted him, he could live here. Impractical though he was, professorial in a way that Wylie found infuriating, nevertheless the guy didn’t deserve this to happen. His own son, doing that to him? Good God.
Why would they save him, then just discard him? And how could Trevor—too gentle to hunt birds, for the love of Pete—ever be that hard on his dad?
Over there, it was storming. Over here, the sky was clear. The moon near the half rode high. It was close on to midnight, and from the house he could hear Brooke singing. She’d once had vocal ambitions, but life and children and a certain lack of volume had kept her away from an operatic career. Her voice was too delicate for the stage, but on a quiet night like this one, it was an angelic wonder.
He knew that she was sitting in a window looking at the moon, waiting for her man to return. She never protested his midnight walks, but they made her uneasy. It was as if her voice was meant as a kind of lifeline, reaching out to him in case he strayed too far from home.
She sang an old lullaby, one that she had sung to Nick and still sang to Kelsey, a song from her deep past, his woman of the tribe of the Celts. It was called “Dereen Day,” the little song, and it floated across the softly muttering water like a breeze.
He tossed a stone into the moonlight, listened to it splash in the deeper river. Where was the gateway now? Did it open and close? According to some of the more outre stuff he’d been reading about 2012, there were gateways all over the world, especially at the points where what were called ley lines met. He was not sure what these lines were. Planet Energy Lines would probably be the simplest definition. New Age Bullshit Lines was another contender.
He stood just where he and Nick had been, and tossed another stone. It gleamed in the moonlight, then splashed gently down.
“Damn.”
He heard something, though. He listened. It was on the other side of the river. He’d never heard anything quite like it before.
He listened again.
What was that?
Then he knew, and his blood all but froze in his veins.
That slashing noise could only be an outrider, and it was actually in the gateway, hanging between the worlds.
He hadn’t brought a gun, he’d been afraid that shooting it in the other universe would bring on some sort of catastrophe. He’d read all he could about parallel worlds, but little was actually known, except that experiments showed that they were actual, physical places. There was no scientific speculation about what might be in them. He thought that he was the only person who had ever speculated that certain animals must be able to cross this divide, that they had evolved the ability as a threat avoidance mechanism.
Had to be true. He’d seen a weir cat himself, and not far from here, when he was a kid. Damn big, damn black, and damn scary. Then gone—poof—right before his eyes.
The slashing sound grew louder. Came toward him.
Brooke stopped singing. Her voice floated across the night. “Wylie?”
Jesus, he needed to get back to the house, he needed to get his hands on a gun. Nick had been right to get them ready. That was a smart kid there. He had foresight.
The slashing was now right in front of him—but he couldn’t see it. It was loud, it was deafening—and then he could feel tickling, then pricking against his face, his neck. Crying out, he lurched back.
He fell against what felt like iron bars. Where he touched them, they became visible, and he saw that they were not bars, but the legs of what the kids called an outrider. And now the slashing sound was overhead. He was under the damn thing!
He rolled. The slashing came down toward him. He lashed out at it, kicking furiously toward the sound. Where his foot struck, he saw a section of the creature—a gleaming abdomen striped yellow, then a complicated eye, then a hooked claw on the joint of a leg.
Screaming now, he rolled.
There was a pneumatic, liquid hissing and boiling yellow sludge sprayed the ground around him. A stinger the size of his arm slashed his jacket and was gone.
But it was coming back, he could hear the mechanical slashing of the jaws, but more he could feel the thing probing with its legs, and he knew that the next time it attacked, that stinger would impale him.
A roar, huge, echoing off into the woods.
Silence.
Nothing there. Nothing at all.
“Dad?”
“Nick!”
His son scrambled down the hill that dropped to the riverbank. He carried his 10-gauge. He wore pajama bottoms and one house shoe. Behind him came Brooke. “Wylie! Nick! What’s happening?”
The moon sailed in splendor, the night birds called, the sacred peace of the Kansas night enclosed them, and the sweet little river rolled on.
Nick threw his arms around his father as Brooke came running up, seeking with her hands, almost hitting him, enraged with fear, then choking back sobs, then holding both of her men.
“An outrider,” Nick said. “I heard it and I saw it attacking Dad. Sort of.”
Brooke nodded.
“Martin’s in trouble,” Wylie said.
“We know,” Brooke responded.
“We just read it, Dad.”
“I was trying to get to him. To cross over.”
Faintly, from the house, they all heard Kelsey’s voice call out, “Is anybody home?”
“We’re coming, Baby,” Wylie called, and they all trooped back to the house, where she waited at the kitchen door, her hands on her hips.
She hugged her brother. “Thank you for saving our daddy.” Then she went into her mother’s arms.
Wylie was not too surprised at what his family knew. Kelsey was eight and an excellent reader. She was probably reading the book in everybody else’s downtime.
Brooke put on water for coffee. “I think we need to tell Matt,” she said. “We need some support out here.”
“Fighting them is acknowledging them. Believing in them. And the more we do that, the stronger the link to their reality becomes. So getting a posse out here might not be such a good idea.”
Brooke poured water into the coffee maker. “Then we need to not try to use that gateway at all.”
“She’s right, Dad,” Nick said.
“But Martin—he’s dying out there. Right now.”
Nick gave him a long, searching look.
“What?”
“Dad, just let it happen. You’re fighting and we can’t fight. We have to just write and hope they find it, and hope that it helps them. If one of us takes so much as a single step into that world—”
Kelsey’s eyes were wide, and Nick dropped it.
Brooke poured three mugs of coffee and sat down. Kelsey came into her lap.
“Nick, should you—this late?”
Nick gave him another of those searching looks. “You don’t remember?”
“He doesn’t,” Kelsey said. “He can’t.”
“Remember what? What am I missing?”
So softly that it was almost inaudible, Nick said, “I’m the guardian, Mom is the facilitator, you’re the scribe.” He glanced toward Kelsey, whose eyes were heavy. “She’s the sentinel.” He raised his eyebrows. “Remember?”
It didn’t make a bit of sense, any of it.
Nick stared into his coffee. “Our sentinel woke me up when she heard the outrider. If she hadn’t, you’d be dead now.”
He owed them his life. The bond that he felt with his family at this moment was the strongest thing he had ever known, the biggest emotion he had ever had. “Thank you,” he said.
Then he heard from upstairs, low voices.
Kelsey had closed her eyes now, and Brooke began singing “Dereen Day” again, her own voice as soft as a breeze, too soft to drown out the conversation Wylie was hearing.
He looked toward the dark stairs, then toward Nick—who jumped up and ran upstairs.
“Nick!” Wylie followed. Brooke only glanced at them, then continued singing.
Nick stood in front of Wylie’s office, his shotgun ported in his arms.
Wylie had known that there wouldn’t be anybody there. He went into the office. The voices were louder here, more distinct.
But nothing was breaking through, not here, not this far from a gateway.
“It’s my story,” he said to Nick. “My story’s calling me.”
WYLIE SAW REPTILIANS, GORGEOUS LIKE snakes are gorgeous, their scales shimmering in a bright room with white tile walls, fluorescent tubes lining the ceiling, a metal autopsy table.
Where was it?
Then he knew, and he wrote: The entrance to their lair is in Cheyenne Mountain, but the place itself is right here, right beneath us. It has to do with the mass of the planet and the power coursing through its veins, which are the ley lines, and the great confluence of lines in this place.
Twelve miles from this house lay the geographical center of the continental United States. In the other human world, their base was beneath it. And in this world, if there was anywhere that they could break through, it would be in this area, where the veil between universes was thinnest.
Wylie’s hands flew. He hardly noticed that Nick and Brooke stood behind him, with Kelsey asleep in her mother’s arms.
The little team rode thus deep into the night, on the tide of Wylie’s words.
He watched his own hands, then watched the screen as the words appeared:
General Samson injected himself, sucked air through his teeth as the familiar agony spread up his arm, then burned through his chest, then invaded his face and head, his whole body. It was a hateful, miserable thing to have to do every day.
Today, he did not expect to expose himself to the human earth’s atmosphere, but he was doing it under an order that he could quote precisely: “You will maintain a physical state that allows you free movement in existing planetary conditions at all times.” There was nothing about not being prepared for a day because he didn’t expect to be in their raw damn air.
“Time?” he barked as he entered the abattoir. His feet squished in blood. The place stank of raw human meat.
“01044,” Captain Mazle replied.
Lying before them on a steel table was a body. Samson looked down at it dispassionately. General Al North, big deal. He’d despised the eager creature with its idealism and its pathetically uninformed mind.
He looked at the mouth, noted the drying along the raw line where the lips had been removed and the clotted blood in both eye sockets.
“Mazle!”
“Yessir!”
He gestured. “If you fail—”
“We won’t fail.”
“It’s you, Captain. You. You will fail or you won’t.”
“Don’t threaten me, General.”
She came from a powerful family. He didn’t like it, but he must not forget it. “I’m doing nothing of the kind.”
“You’d like to, though. Anyway, I’ve already told my father what a complete piece of shit you are.”
He tried not to take her threat to heart. Her father could order death to a man in Samson’s position. “Captain, I’m sorry if you don’t like my style.”
“Your style? You have all the charm of a skerix, and you smell a lot worse.”
“It’s the anitallergens, as I’m sure you are aware. Please be reminded that my responsibilities leave me no choice.” He gestured toward General North’s ravaged body. “If we’re going to get this thing through that gateway, we have no time, so let’s get started, Captain, if you don’t mind.”
“You’d be delighted if I failed, General, of course. But I’m not going to fail.”
“This whole operation is in danger of failing, and if it does, not even your father will be able to save you. We still don’t have enough slaves and we can’t get the personnel in to control the ones we do have because the lenses are old and barely functional. We’re losing 20,000 humans a minute and we need another billion in four days.”
“Well, that’s not my issue, General. My issue is this little writer sitting in the other human earth—you know, the one you people haven’t been able to enter usefully for the past fifty goddamn years!” She strode over and slapped the chest of the inert human. “If we don’t succeed in this, we will both stand before Echidna herself. You and me, General Samson, and not all the power of Abaddon will save us.”
She crossed the room, moving toward a male who stood in silence, waiting. “Doctor,” she said to him, “it’s time for you to do your duty. Assuming that you can.”
The doctor gleamed in the light, his scales tiny and creamy. She didn’t know his name, but his appearance confirmed his class. She would be polite to him. He’d no doubt paid a lot for this job, in hope of sharing in the spoils of earth.
However, the doctor didn’t do anything.
“Let’s get moving, okay?”
Samson chuckled. “The loyal retainer. Your personnel are as promising as your plans.”
“I need more power,” the doctor said. “Forty thousand volts at least.”
“Do it with twenty.”
“Captain—”
“You do it, all you have to do is use care instead of brute force to cover your incompetence. So do it with twenty or you’re going on punishment report. I’m sick of your excuses.”
“Captain, for this to last—”
“We don’t need it to last, we need it to work for a few hours.”
The doctor threw a look of desperation toward General Samson, who did not react.
“Okay,” Captain Mazle said into her phone, “how much can you give him?” She looked at the doctor. “Compromise: you can get your forty, but only for one minute.”
“I applied for two, Captain.”
“Do it! Now!”
The doctor drew a narrow silver case from his pocket, opened it, and took out an instrument with a black, tapering handle and a long blade so thin that it was no more than a shimmer in the air. “This specimen has mild arterial damage from cholesterol,” he said, “typically associated with advance of age in this species. Do we want to invest—”
“This species,” Jennifer snarled. “Where do you get off? It’s the only other intelligent species we’ve found across a billion parallel universes and throughout our own.” She gestured toward the remains of Al North. “This creature, if it can successfully do what it’s being designed to do, could save us all.”
“I hardly think—”
“Because, Doctor, have you heard the news from home? Have you heard what’s happening there?”
“It’s an aged specimen.”
Samson broke in. “I don’t want you two sniping at each other, not when we’re working against time and there’s so much at stake. We are behind schedule so MOVE.”
“I won’t be responsible if I’m rushed!”
“Doctor, I’ll hand you over to the soultechs.”
The doctor’s scales shuddered and flushed yellow. Everybody feared the soultechs and their skills to capture the soul and to destroy the soul.
“Under what regulation? You have no right.”
“Maybe and maybe not, but I will do it, of that you can be sure.”
“You ought to do it anyway,” Mazle added.
“Shut up, bitch,” Samson said, his voice deceptively mild.
“How dare you!”
“Gonna tell on me again? Daddy’s getting old. Daddy’s not who he used to be. So maybe Daddy loses his power soon, and I get to kill your fucking little prune of a soul.”
“Talk about a hollow threat.”
“Are you willing to take the risk?”
“All you do is talk, but the clock doesn’t stop, does it, General? You’re easily distracted. You’re failure prone. Daddy says.” She curtsied.
“This thing of yours probably won’t even work.”
“A mix of biological material from both earths. It’s bound to.”
“Well, great, because if it doesn’t we can all kiss our asses good-bye. We fail here and we die here—in this facility, fifteen hundred cubits beneath gorgeous Kansas.”
The doctor began to set out his instruments. “Get support services in here,” he said, “if you want this done.”
“I’ll be your support services. This is extremely classified.”
“Nothing like a military idiot for a nurse-assistant,” the doctor muttered.
“Maybe I’m better than you think. Maybe I’ve even been trained.”
“I bought my job and your Daddy sure as hell bought yours. If I’m lucky, I might be able to flush a child’s craw. Very lucky.”
Jennifer opened the small box she had brought in with her, in which there was red liquid. “Look at it, Doctor. This is living material from the one-moon earth.”
“You’re kidding.”
“There are humans crossing between the two worlds,” Samson said miserably.
“That’s ridiculous,” the doctor replied.
“We believe it was a lucky accident. But that might not be the case. The union’s hand might be in the matter somewhere.”
Mazle, suddenly interested, strode up to him. “You didn’t tell me this.”
“You didn’t need to know,” he replied.
“This casts everything in a very different light.”
“In what sense?” the doctor asked. He had a stake in the matter, too. They all did.
“If we’re defeated by enemy action, Echidna might not be so—well, so hard.”
“Harder, never doubt it,” Samson said. “I’ve had experience in the palace.”
“I grew up with her last crop of children,” Mazle said. “My egg was honored with a place in her basket.”
“I’ve seen them running eggs through that exalted basket. A new clutch every ten seconds.”
Mazle turned on her hireling doctor. “Get to it,” she shouted at him. “Get to it now!”
He lifted the lid of the black lacquer box, looked at the blood-covered material within. “Won’t this explode, if it touches this air?”
“It’s not going to happen.”
He drew out a long, wet object. A lip. “This is dead.”
“So is the cadaver, but we’ve got its soul.”
General Samson thought of the millions of them collected deep under this room. The harvest of bodies had a certain value when terraforming began, but the harvest of souls was truly valuable plunder. It wasn’t the doctor’s business, though, or the Captain’s. For Samson, it was a guarantee of wealth beyond imagination, the kind of wealth that bought an endless supply of perfectly cloned bodies, and with them the sort of eternal life that only the highest nobility enjoyed.
The doctor unrolled his instruments, taking a fleam in his long, narrow fingers, and drawing it along the line of one of General North’s eye sockets, removing the dried flesh from the edges of the wound.
Then, using instruments like two golden chopsticks with splayed ends, he drew out a bloody ball. “This eye is not in acceptable condition.”
“Acceptable for what, Doctor?” Mazle asked.
“For use!”
“It won’t see?”
“Oh, it’ll see. For a while. Somewhat. But—look at it, look how it’s deteriorating.”
“Why is that?” General Samson asked.
“General, I know you go topside because I prepare your allergy kit. Think if you entered their world without your serums. You’d disintegrate, and this eye is disintegrating.”
“But if we get it back to its home world, then the rot will stop, won’t it?” Mazle asked.
“This is all ridiculous. This can’t work.”
She persisted. “Can you attach it to the cadaver?”
“Um, sure.”
“THEN DO IT NOW GOD DAMN YOU!”
He began using his instrument to touch the left eye socket, gingerly, experimentally. As the doctor touched the socket just with the tip of his probe, his fingers working with a pianist’s virtuosity, immense generators that drew their energy directly from the planet’s core started up deep beneath the facility.
Tiny sparks appeared around the eye, until the whole rim of the socket was shimmering as if with millions of little stars, each one of which was actually an enormously complicated object in itself, a whole miniature universe consisting of billions upon billions of stars no bigger than dust motes on a gnat’s toe.
“Is the tissue going to explode?” Samson asked.
“No,” Jennifer said.
“I can’t be sure,” the doctor responded. “We’ll have to see.”
“We’ll have to see? We could all be killed!” Samson shouted, backing away from the table where the operation was taking place.
“Good,” the doctor said. He then rested the instrument in its case and took the eyeball between the gloved fingers of his left hand.
“How dare you say that!” Samson hissed.
“Look, I’m here because I have to be. This whole thing—taking this planet like this—it’s wrong. These creatures don’t deserve this kind of treatment because of the avarice of a bunch of developers, and to be drafted by the military to do the work of a greedy few, it’s sick and it’s evil, General, and I don’t give a rat’s ass who knows what I think.” He inserted the eyeball, which settled into the socket with a sucking plunk. “Well, whaddaya know, it didn’t explode. Too bad, we live on.”
“I ought to have you disensouled,” Samson muttered.
“Ah, the hollow threat again. You two are certainly expert at tossing those around. Problem is, you can’t do without a doctor, therefore I’m not in any danger, am I?”
He inserted the second eyeball, then attached the lips. The doctor stared for some time at a photograph.
“Hurry!”
“The lips are too fat.”
“Thin them, then!” Samson glared at Mazle. “Time?”
“01048.”
Still staring at a photograph of Al North, the doctor pressed a glittering cloth against the lips, the contours of which gradually grew more and more to resemble those of the general.
He then addressed his attention to the genitals and rectum, which were taken out of the box and attached to the body. In the end, it appeared fresh and undamaged.
Finally, he stood back. “It’s completed,” he said.
“Bring up the soul,” Samson said.
Jennifer Mazle spoke into a fist-sized walkie-talkie, and in a few moments two of her soultechs appeared carrying between them the enormous glass tube that contained the living soul of Al North. The light inside the tube no longer flashed and twisted, but clung close to the copper filament, which glowed deep red. “You think this will actually work?”
“Postoperative reensoulment isn’t exactly gravitic science,” the doctor said. “If you could stuff him for me, Captain.”
Jennifer drew Al’s body up, and hung the head back over the end of the table until his mouth lolled open. She sprayed into it from an aerosol can gaily painted with hieroglyphics, in colors familiar to anybody in any of the three parallel worlds, because all three of them had evolved Lysol spray. Then she lifted a thick, black cable that was coiled on the floor at the head of the operating table, and pushed it deep down Al’s disinfected gullet.
“This soul’s been cut the way you want it cut, right, General Samson?” the doctor asked.
“I approved your pattern.”
“Because with all these shittily completed new connections, once the soul goes in, the only way you’re gonna get it out again is by tearing this body to pieces.”
“Am I going to want to do that, Mazle?”
“It’s been debrided of every thread suggesting independence.”
“And the brain?” Samson asked.
“Its memories have been erased back to two days before it entered Cheyenne Mountain,” Mazle replied.
One of the soultechs held the tube, which was about four feet across at its top, tapering to a diameter of perhaps nine inches at its base. Another inserted the cable into the socket.
“How old is that equipment, Mazle?”
“My dad’s company buried it in the Egyptian desert, at a place called Dendera.”
“When?”
“Eight thousand years ago.”
“What cheap bastards you people are. What if the humans had found it?”
“Not too likely.”
“Still, eight thousand years, and we have to rely on it. That’s criminal irresponsibility, in my opinion.”
“The objective is to create wealth for garbage like you to enjoy, General, not spend it on extravagant equipment we can do without. And I can’t help it if my family has been running a successful enterprise for twenty generations and you’re a propertyless consumer.”
The body began heaving. “Don’t lose this, Mazle.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Doctor?”
“Normal,” he snapped.
“Fill it,” she said to her soultechs.
One of them began raising the impedance in the tube until the soul was a purple spark dancing on the end of the filament.
The body heaved again, then again.
“You’re sure these seizures aren’t a problem?” Mazle asked the doctor.
“You can’t expect this to work like modern equipment.”
Samson snorted derisively, but made no comment.
Slowly, the color of the filament went from purple to violet, then to white. The body’s eyes flickered open, the chest gave a great, oily heave. The muscles rippled, the skin flushed, and there came from the gaping mouth a noise, earsplitting, like a hiss of gas escaping a broken pipe. A scream, Samson realized. That had been a scream.
And then Mazle said, “Look.”
The tube that had contained the soul was as black as a shroud. Al North’s eyes were open, though, wide open.
General North was crying.
THEY’D MADE A SORT OF evil Golem, a monster that would be incapable of disobeying its orders. But it was more than that. Wylie saw the idea behind it. They had used the eyes and lips and tongue and the other parts they had managed to cut out of poor John Nunnally from down the road, and grafted them into the body of Al North. Because the result was mixed of flesh from the two earths, they probably hoped that it could move more freely in our world, and get around the fact that, because we ignored them, they could not enter freely here.
Unlike the outrider and the wanderers from the other earth, it would be able to enter this world fully.
So far, the only person who had managed that, seemingly without any restriction, was Trevor. But now there would be another, and this one would come with blood in his eye, a monster in the truest definition of the word.
Wylie wanted to stop writing, he wanted to warn his family, but his fingers moved relentlessly on, taking him where they chose to take him, on a journey he could not stop and could not control.
He was aware that dawn was coming, but he could not stop, he could not speak. He couldn’t even turn away from the keyboard. Nick slept in the easy chair that stood in the corner. Brooke, he thought, was in their bedroom.
The problem was that this monster was intended to cross the gateway and come up that hill and come to this house and kill them all, and now they were asleep and they were not reading and so they could not see this warning, and as hard as he tried, he could not call out to them, and he knew that time was of the essence.
Then he was swept away, far away, to the last place he cared to go, almost as if some larger force was at work, a silent wizard controlling the whole horrible catastrophe.
Here, he saw dark, complicated heaps up and down sidewalks, bits and tatters of paper and clothing and all manner of debris blowing in a north wind, and there was a smell, thick, sweet, that he recognized as the odor of many dead.
He was in New York, the New York of the two-moon earth, and these were people who had leaped from their apartments up and down Fifth Avenue, and there were more of them, Wylie was sure, on every single street everywhere in the city.
Detail struck him—an Armani purse lying open on the sidewalk, a doorman who had shot himself at his post, his brains hardened on the wall behind him, his kind old face crossed by a path of busy ants, a bicycle lying neatly against a lamppost.
He moved with a dreamer’s gliding ease but the horrible precision of reality, into a side street. Here was a little restaurant called Henri’s, all of its sidewalk tables bare, a full bottle of Cliquot champagne standing on a waiter’s station beside a copy of the Times for the day New York got hit, December 6. Headline: BIZARRE TRAGEDIES SHOCK WORLD.
There was a flag snapping before a brownstone, and he could see that it was an art gallery, but he didn’t go in, not in this storm-tossed, broken morning.
He fought to stop his hands, to pull away from the laptop. He could feel Al North standing, moving on wobbling legs, coughing, gasping, staggering, see him held up by sleek, creamy Mazle and black, gleaming Samson with their lithe bodies and long claws and their cruel reptile faces.
New York gave way to the ocean, big green waves involved with complicated little waves, and off through the bounding whitecaps the heeling dark shape of a great liner. She wallowed in the storm, and as he drew closer he saw that her bows were well down, and every time a wave struck her streaming flank, a great spray of water shot up, pushed across her by the driving wind like her own private rainstorm.
The people had disappeared from the deck like so much sea foam, but he was not long there, he was inside in the great sweep of a restaurant with chairs waltzing to the roll of the ship. But there were also others there, men in tuxedos, women in long dresses standing at the tall windows of what he supposed was the main restaurant. What was so appalling was that they had been made wanderers here, and had simply starved to death. He could see trenches in the carpeting under their feet. They had continued to walk after hitting the wall. He could see their sunken, gray faces.
I have to get home! Somebody help me!
And then he was on a twisting street, there were pushcarts everywhere, little motor bikes, signs in an unknown language and dogs barking and monkeys chattering in the blaze of day. But the streets were empty, and not only that, water was coming, and the buildings were heaving like women beneath the plunging weight of the night. And small, intricate waves came farther each time the place shook, the careful water licking the motorbikes and the paper signs and the cold sidewalk bakeries where naan had been sold for a few rupees.
India, some great city, and it was dead and it was sinking.
He was alive in it completely. Standing at an intersection. Down the street a luxury building in the chaos—a Four Seasons hotel with curtains blowing out the windows. He looked down at the sloshing water, how very carefully it licked his bare feet, how clear it was despite being floated with cigarette ends and Fanta bottles and plastic bags and sodden, gray disks of naan from the dead bakery.
Then he was in woods. His woods. And he saw a man.
Nick! Brooke! Kelsey! For the love of heaven, wake up!
Al North was walking and his movements were strange, purposeful but odd. He was flickering as he walked, like he wasn’t entirely there. When he blundered into brush, he would mutter and groan, and there would be blue flashes all around him. Where his feet touched grassy places, there was flickering blue fire.
“Mommydaddy! Mommydaddy!” Kelsey flew in, throwing her arms around Wylie—who still could not stop typing. And Nick slept on.
“Daddy, Papa Bear is in the woods.”
At last Nick woke up. He shook his head. “Hey, Baby,” he said to his sister. “Daddy’s busy.”
Look at the book, Nick! Look this way!
Kelsey went into her brother’s lap. “Yeah, Kelsey, it’s Papa Bear,” Nick said. He reached over and shook Wylie’s shoulder. “Dad, you want to stop for a second? A little girl wants to say good morning.”
“There’s a papa bear in the woods, Daddy.”
With every ounce of strength in him, Wylie tried to react. But his hands swept the keys and his voice remained as paralyzed as it always was when this seizure-like state was upon him.
Look at what I’m writing, for the love of all that’s holy. He tried all caps, LOOK AT THIS! HELLO, NICK, IT’S AL NORTH IN THE WOODS!!!!
“Why don’t we pull out the guns today, Dad,” Nick said, the sleepy calm of his voice revealing that he had NOT looked.
“Oh, no, Nick, it was just Papa Bear!”
“We need the guns to be ready, Kelsey.”
“Mommy, Nick is scaring me!”
“Nick!” Brooke came in. She glanced at Wylie. He could feel her looking at the screen—but then Kelsey ran to her and she was distracted.
DANGER DANGER DANGER!!!!
There was a change, he thought, in the way they moved.
“Dad, we’re gonna go downstairs now.”
The three of them left. A moment later, the clattering of the keyboard stopped. He tried to move his hands—and they pulled away.
At last!
He leaped up and dashed down the stairs. “Get the guns out,” he shouted, “Al North is in our woods!”
They were in the family room, the three of them. The gun cabinet was open. The Magnum lay on the coffee table. Kelsey sat on the couch with her thumb in her mouth and her knees pulled up under her chin. She had saved them all, Wylie thought. He went to her. “What did Papa Bear look like, honey?”
“He’d been eating strawberries!”
“And how do you know that?”
“His mouth was all red.”
The crude surgery.
“Dad,” Nick said, “He was just here. He came right up to the house. I thought he was going to come in but something either went wrong or he changed his mind or something.”
“Because he didn’t come in? You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m not sure! Maybe he’s in the crawlspace, maybe he’s in the attic, maybe he’s invisible or something. I have no idea.”
“But you didn’t hear him come in?” Wylie went to the window.
Nick came beside him. “There,” he said after a moment.
“I don’t see him.”
Then he did—a splash of red in the shadowy woods. His crude surgical wounds. Then he saw also a flash of metal.
There was a figure back among those trees, most certainly, and in its hand was a very big, very ugly gun.
MARTIN HAD CIRCLED AROUND AWAY from the clearing where he’d seen the moving shapes of the monstrous spiders the kids called outriders. He’d gone up along the ridge line that led eventually to his house. But not in that direction, no way. The idea of going anywhere near that misshapen ruin sickened him.
It had been raining hard, but now that had stopped and second moon was low on the horizon, casting its glare over the tumble of rocks and twisted little trees that he could see below him.
He was trying very hard not to think about the future, of which he obviously had none, and above all not to feel angry at Trevor.
Of course, the son he’d loved, little Trevor, was no more. The strange being who had taken his place knew the world in a whole new way. “But I love you,” Martin whispered to the silence. He always would, the little boy whom he had held tight in the scary nights, who had looked at him with joyous, dependent eyes, who had so admired his dad.
No matter how far beyond the edge of the known world Trevor went, Martin would follow in his heart, trying to understand, trying still to give what he could of love and support.
Then it hit him again: He threw me out. He did it. And he asked himself, what could set a son to do such deep evil?
He had never believed in the devil myth. He’d seen that the Christian devil was the horned god of the old witch cult of Northern Europe, nothing more than that, and the horned god was the old Roman god of festivals, Pan. In other words, a pagan deity had been made into the enemy of the new god. Similar things had been done throughout the history of religion, the gods of yesterday becoming today’s demons.
Still, it did seem as if something had tipped the balance against the good of the world, and that was why Trevor had done what he had done, and why his own soul was about to be captured or, more likely, to die, and his body to become somebody else’s property.
Thunder clapped and the rain came again, and in the lightning Martin saw deer. Then he heard, high above, the cry of a nighthawk. Dawn was coming, but these new clouds were so thick that it was, in effect, still night.
He clapped his hands over his ears, then turned and pressed his face against the rock. The cleft he was in wasn’t even two feet deep and hardly longer than he was tall. Rain splashed against his back, and the wind, now wintry cold, now storm heavy, came in under his torn windbreaker.
He was as miserable, he thought, as it was possible for him to be. And maybe, he thought also, with an upwelling of sorrow, maybe it was, quite simply, time for him to go.
Lindy and little Winnie were gone, something that he was beginning to think of as an always. It had been hard to accept, and Trevor’s rejection on top of it was rawest agony.
But how do you manage to commit suicide when you dare not move a muscle? Perhaps if he tried to force his way back into the tent, the kids would shoot him. But how could he make Trevor participate in such a thing?
Another cry came, full of eagerness now, trembling above the rumble of the thunder. Martin shifted, and looked out across the clearing. Somewhere out there was the Saunders, and the Saunders might be running high. When it flooded it was as dangerous as hell, and with this rain it was going to be doing just that.
If he dove in, the rocks would knock him senseless before they broke him to pieces. Hard, but better than gnawing his wrists open.
In relation to the stream, then, where was he? Directions were guesswork, but if he moved down the long slope of the land and stayed in the folds and meadows rather than crossing the ridges, eventually he had to reach the Saunders. Unless, of course, he was taken first.
He looked out across the dark land, and it was an alien place, the surface of another planet, it seemed—this little woodland where he had hiked and hunted all his life, where he lived.
These same trees, these rocks, this speeding storm—all would continue after he ceased to exist. Beetles, hungry in the grass now, would soon find a feast.
He stood up into a sheet of rain, then set off running into the roaring dark. The wind made him stagger and the thunder made him cringe as he plunged along. He would have been blinded because of the rain and the dark, but there was so much lightning that it enabled him to find his way. He heard another sound, then, that he could not quite make out. It was deeper than thunder, an enormous sound but with hiss in it, and booming, faint but strong enough to shake the lungs.
Lightning flashes revealed a wall of haze. He stopped running, because he was going toward it. Then he glimpsed its shape—it was a thick funnel cloud, immense, and probably not more than a few miles away, whipping toward him across the broken prairie.
He threw back his head and screamed and laughed at the same time, and saw in the storm a black shape sailing easily, a nighthawk. It seemed to be circling him, and he ran toward a stand of trees, to get in where a thing like that couldn’t go.
“Oh, God, Lindy, I’m so sorry. I am so damn sorry.” He should never have taken them to that damned church, he should have followed his own instincts and hidden his whole family in the storm cellar.
Another flash revealed shapes around him. It was only the briefest vision, but it made him howl like a frantic dog. He whirled round, but they were behind him, too, and closer there. But also, rising into the sky now like a great wall, was the tornado, a looming pillar of death, with darker objects speeding in its funnel. He saw cars, roofing, trees, bodies like akimbo swimmers. He ran toward the storm—then saw just ahead what appeared in the inky rain to be tall bars, and slung among them, a black thickness striped with yellow. A claw of lightning flailed in the clouds, revealing by its silver flicker that he was looking at the raised forelegs of a spider the size of a small horse.
Then he was down, his breath gone, his head smashed against the ground so hard the crack of his jaw sounded like a shot and he saw flaring stars in his stunned eyes.
What breath he had left was sucked out of him as the ground shook, and in another flash of lightning he saw the thing that had been menacing him shoot off into the sky like a demon flying, or rather, sucked away by the advancing tornado.
Light slipped down from the darkness with the shuddering grace of an aurora. Lying on his back, the rain swarming in his eyes, he nevertheless saw his death coming in the great detail with which legend tells us we see our ends, the way the light quested downward like syrup dropping quickly, white and alive, and raindrops when they touched it making hurrying patters of smoke.
But no peace came, not with this strange numbness—and then the seeing, the seeing—a great alteration of vision, and he felt a kind of ecstasy in his skin, and saw a forest of tapered furniture legs, and knew that he was seeing out of his own infant eyes, his mother’s room where he had taken his first steps, and it was like flying, this wonderful new state of walking on two legs, and the happiness, oh dear Lord in heaven, childhood is the kingdom, it is the kingdom.
And he saw how very valuable this commodity called memory was, all the gold of his life capable of being tasted, touched, and smelled, feeling just as if it was happening again and always, and he knew that the human being is a device that records perfectly the rustle of every leaf and every sweated passage, the happy flying days and the gray ones, and his last thought was how grand, how incredible, what a miracle and no wonder it took the old earth five billion years to create us.
And then: I am to be boxed, cataloged, and sold like dope to somebody who has lost all happiness, all joy, all decency, and is more hollow inside than death and the zero cold of space. I—my eternal being—is to be sold.
Red. Voices—a voice, a voice of gold, an angelic, perfect voice.
The red became noise, rushing, slapping. Became fire. Fire on his hip. Somebody sanding his skin, no, worse, cutting. They were cutting and they were sliding the knife between the muscle and the skin.
He was being butchered in the field.
Trevor’s face beaded with rain, swimming with tears. Trevor, ancient being, journeyer.
Like me.
Journeyers together, father and son.
The wind screamed, rain and hail struck like bullets, and Trevor screamed, “Dig in, Dad, dig in!”
He clutched the ground. All grew silent. It seemed as if the last possible bit of air was pulled from his lungs. He felt his legs rising, heard the deepest rumble he had ever known, and saw the ground just ahead suffused by electric green light.
Whereupon there was an earsplitting roar and a truck crashed down from the sky, its lights as they flashed drilling into the rain. It was huge, an articulated thirty-two-wheel poultry mover.
Then chickens were everywhere.
The clucking, squawking, crowing clumps of feathers and terror flounced like great, fluffy snowballs in the rain.
The weight left his back. He turned, and a figure was helping him up, a strong male figure. He could not see the face.
“They’ll be back any second, they won’t stop!”
Trevor ran off into the dark and Martin did not stop to think or even try to understand what had just happened. He followed, running with all his might, and he found that he could see in the dark of the storm just by wanting to, and could run like an angel with the wind at his back, and he could go and go, his heart ticking like a slow engine.
Trevor stopped, grabbed a couple of chickens, and ran on. Martin did the same.
They went into deep and deeper woods. The storm passed, bringing with it first moon, tiny and bright and with it stars, but also, to the north and west, another massive tower of clouds. They never seemed to end, the storms, as if the unbalanced universe itself must expend energy at every level until equilibrium once again prevailed.
Martin heard drumming, and it was soon clear that they were moving toward the tent.
“Trevor, they’ll shoot—”
“No, they won’t.” He snapped the necks of his chickens and laid them next to the tent wall. Martin did the same, then put them beside the others.
At that instant, there was a soul-freezing scream, then another and another and another, and a dozen great shadows dove at them. One of them swooped right into Trevor’s face. It screamed, its red eyes burned—and it flew around him, wheeling tight, as another made the same maneuver.
Then Martin was enclosed in cold skin that reeked like garlic and embalming fluid, and claws came against his chest, slicing his jacket and his shirt and slipping into his skin as a knife does into hot wax.
It was fear, they had said, fear that the things used as their beacon. Very well, he would take his fear and put it in a box inside him, and close it.
The thing glared at him, its eyes so close he could see the fire inside, its mouth open, the white tongue shuddering as a maggot does in the sun.
He found, somehow, Franny Glass’s Jesus prayer and breathed it again and again, and it took him away from his fear, no matter that he was not a believer, it still bore its power to distract a terrified heart.
The thing leaped back, giving him a look out of the side of its eyes that was mixed of regret and rage, and a touch, even, of humor that this miserable little man had bested it.
Pam held the tent flap for them as they went into the candlelight and the drumming. There was not a lot of light, but Martin could make out Len Ward and Claire James beating the drums. He noticed Harrow Cougars emblems on the skins.
He saw so clearly, every detail, the eyes of the others gleaming in the candlelight, and he recognized their youth in their scent, the young, powerful smell of his son, the blooming scent of the girls, and he saw them, really saw them—and he knew that only at a few moments in his life had he ever seen people with this clarity, this love, and the abiding compassion that he felt now.
Michael Ryan, the Cougars’ star tackle said, “Hey,” and looked up at him with those strange, shadowed eyes they all had.
Then Pammy began to clap. Trevor threw his arms around his dad. Except for the drummers, they all clapped.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Dad,” Trevor said, “please try to understand” Tears streamed down his face. Martin embraced him. Then a girl he thought was called Crystal something came over. She had a mirror in one hand and a candle in the other.
A face looked back at him. It was dirty, wet, thin and covered by a day’s old growth of beard. It was the face of a street person, a hobo, somebody from the lower depths, a miner in the dark of the earth.
The eyes looking back at him gleamed darkly, very darkly, in the yellow candlelight. In fact, they were as black as coals, his eyes, just like those of the kids around him, and his son.
His soul seemed to fill the air of the tent, to mingle with their souls, and it was like picking up a song you’d known always, and singing again.
Martin understood, now, what had been done to him—the same thing that had happened to these kids when the light tried and failed to take him.
Something was gone, though. It had certainly taken something. Not his essence. He was still Martin Winters. He felt lighter, though, and far more in touch with the world—not the world of streets and companies and archaeological digs, however. Rather this world of the here and now. The rain, the trees, the kids in the tent.
He was alive, Martin was, more alive than he had ever been before.
They hadn’t discarded him, not at all. Rather, they had done to him what natural human societies had always done to their shamen and their priests, their healers. They had made him face death, and so come free.
That was the difference. The kids in this tent had not been captured by the light, but rather made free by its failure to capture them.
Martin was free, too. Trevor was smiling at him. His son’s face was soaked with tears. It had been a near thing out there. It had been real. He might not have made it.
“Thank you,” he said to them all, and to his son. Trevor came to him, and leaned against him, and instantly the exhausted boy was asleep in his father’s arms. Martin slept, too, and the lives of the kids swept on, racing toward the destiny that awaited them, now, in just a matter of hours, that would bring them new life, or extinguish forever these last few sparks of the human soul.