And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.
GENERAL SAMSON HAD GOTTEN THE summons back in the daily packet from Abaddon. As usual, it had been choked with demands and threats. But this time, on top of the bundle that had been thrown through the small, highly stable gateway that was here beneath the geographic center of the Northern Hemisphere on all three worlds, was a sheet of thick yellow paper.
He had known instantly what it was: a summons from Echidna.
He now sat miserably on a packed bus, on his way to the sort of meeting from which one should not expect to return.
He had come back not only to his own beloved form, the marvelous darkness of his scales, the proud flash of his bright red eyes, but also to a world where he did not need to dose himself with antiallergen, then remained rigidly shifted for hours, all the while itching like mad in every stifled scale on his body.
He didn’t want to die. But more, he was afraid of torture. And they would torture him, of course, as a lesson and warning to others. It would happen in some auditorium full of laughing, cheering underclass, delighted to witness the abnegation of an overlord.
They would rip off his still-living skin and make him dance in the cold, and kids would come up and rub salt into his white, exposed musculature. They would roast his haunches and force him to attend the banquet dressed, no doubt, as a clown.
It was she, that damned high-born Captain Mazle, she and her accursed father who had engineered this.
He had hoped that a victory over the humans would bring him real wealth at last, and the power that went with it.
Instead, the starving billions who were marked to go swarming through the fourteen huge gateways when they opened tomorrow would instead have to be kept here, and their rage and their rebellion would only become worse.
And he, of course, would have no souls to sell.
But he wasn’t defeated, not just yet. He might be able to talk his way back to earth, because even if he couldn’t open the gateways to the people of Abaddon, he could bring back all those millions of souls, full of memories of love and joy, treasures that were not available to anybody here.
But not right now. Right now, he was just another miserable, frightened man riding a rickety bus down the Avenue of the Marches to Government House, one among fifty in the old vehicle. He listened to the gas hissing uneasily out of the tank on the roof—coal gas, supposedly less polluting than the powerful fuels available to the elite. Actually, nobody cared about the brown sky. What they cared about was the fact that coal gas was cheap and, like sails at sea, therefore the best way to transport underworlders.
On both sides of the broad street stood government buildings, and ahead the grandest of them all, where he was supposedly to receive new orders.
There was a lot of traffic in the jammed bus lanes. Occasionally, also, an authority vehicle raced past in the restricted lanes. From time to time, an aircar whistled past overhead. He didn’t even look up. He deserved that life. He deserved a place among the elite, even on the Board of Directors itself.
They finally came to the Street of Joy, marking the center of the long government esplanade. The wailing cry of a siren caused the bus to stop with a jerk. Children in white-suited rows sang an anthem praising the achievements of some committee or other. The tune was always the same, but the committees changed with the political climate.
The Standing Space was crammed with as many as five thousand naked underworlders, all bound, some screaming their innocence, others in tears, others stoic. Lawyers in the bloodred hoods that signified their profession moved about among the committeemen and their friends trying to get various orders signed, buying and selling the condemned. Every so often, one of them sent a runner into the rows of prisoners, generally coming back with a young woman to be raped to death at a party later.
The stench of prisoners’ vomit was sour on the air. A platoon of Young Leaders in their sky-brown uniforms and black caps marched up to the first row, swinging their arms and singing with the choir, then began slitting throats, causing one and then the next prisoner to spray blood and writhe, then slump. The boys were getting kill badges.
There’d been a battle with the Unionists last night, a ferocious encounter at the wall, which we appeared to have won. Of course, it was always impossible to be certain, but such a cheerful Execution Morning did suggest that the news was true.
The Union was nearly finished, reduced to a few hills, nothing more than a park, really. It was surrounded by the vast planetary city that was the Corporation in all its might, its wealth beyond imagination, its poverty beyond belief.
That was why they had to expand into two-moon earth. That population pressure had to be relieved, or there was going to be an explosion here and Echidna and her class were going to have their own throats slit.
Having each done ten or fifteen victims before their parents’ cameras, the boys withdrew. One, who had been urinated on, remained kicking his victim to death. After he went strutting back to the grandstand, a soldier like Samson himself, also a general, squeezed the bulb that activated a Multi Projectile Delivery System that stood on a rickety army wagon. Instantly and without a sound, the five thousand condemned were turned to meat. Then he snapped his whip, and his great orange syrinx warbled and hooted angrily, but trundled off happily enough when it realized they were headed back to the Central Vehicle Pool.
In the bus, total silence. These were all blue-pass people, all from the underworld neighborhoods just like the people who were now being harvested by the bone spiders that had come lumbering up out of their warrens at the first scent of blood. The animals would strip off the meat and leave it behind, and carry the bones into their lairs.
Every underworlder alive was afraid he would end up in the next collection. After all, the executed had been tortured, most of them by having capsicum injected under their skin and into their anuses, or pellets of plutonium pressed into their eyeballs. He’d seen the globular orange messes that had replaced many of their eyes, had watched the steam curling up from their bobbing heads.
You’d say anything, given that kind of pain. And “anything” would invariably include implicating anybody you were asked to implicate in whatever plot might be imagined.
He might have been implicated. Maybe it wasn’t political at all. Maybe that was why he was here.
The bus started with a jerk and a loud mechanical whine. The roadside was littered with the remains of exploded buses, inside some of which could be seen the pale green bones of the dead. Behind them, shrill screaming began. The elite had flitted away in their aircars, and now people rushed out of side streets, their scavenging permits flapping on their backs, meat bags in their arms. There would be soup tonight.
The bus shuddered and popped. Would it explode?
He found himself wondering what he wanted more, an end to this misery of a life, or a chance to talk his way out of whatever trouble he was in.
Now came the four tones that preceded Morale Service announcements. Sick though everybody was of Morale Service and its lies, they all clapped and cheered.
The bus’s speakers crackled. There was a brief hiss, then a moment of earsplitting feedback. “Are you on your way to your designated earth station?” a woman’s recorded voice shrieked, crazed with delight. “Attention please, earth stations are now receiving colonists. You must be at your earth station by midnight tonight.”
All the screens on the bus came to life with children singing and dancing in some green fantasy of a world. “Yes, more and more people every day are buying their tickets. Earth is huge and it’s rich and there’s room for all. Room for all in the new lands. Room to dream.”
Samson knew the reality, of course. Much of the existing landmass was being sunk into the sea, exposing vast ocean flats that would be where these poor fools would have to build. The reason was simple—the sea floor was full of methane and sulfur hydrates, which would melt in the air and change the atmosphere to the same richly sulfurous mix enjoyed here on Abaddon.
Cheap terraforming, in other words.
Each family that went would receive a gaggle of human slaves, which would die in a few weeks or months.
At least human meat was edible, if you could manage to get used to that creamy texture.
“Building One.”
Samson got to his feet, then stepped out. He hurried across the wide, black tarmac. Somewhere in the depths of the city, there was the roar of an explosion, followed by wailing sirens and the appearance of hundreds of bright red police aircars hovering like great wasps, their grapples dangling ominously. Do anything that appeared menacing, and they were liable to snatch you up and drop you a hundred leagues out at sea. They’d go in low so that you’d drown instead of die of impact, and the press would show up to tape the spectacle. Or they’d drop you amid pleasure craft, and people would use you for target practice.
The reason for all the brutality was simple: fear works. Ten thousand years ago the Corporation had been a loose confederation of free companies, even some tribes and even more ancient political units. But with growth had come mergers, and then the disastrous battle over the two human earths that had been lost, in the end, by all the combatants. This had been followed by long years of population growth coupled with a gradual consolidation of power, until now, when an elite million ruled a land jammed with three billion underclass.
Attempting to seem confident, he strode up the steps, brushing at his uniform, trying to remind himself that it meant something in a government context. Here, a general’s service stripes were important. After all, they’d put him in charge of what was arguably the most important project in corporate history.
So why was his craw filling with vomit?
“Samson, General,” he managed to mutter when he reached the desk. He handed over his orders, his passport, his clearances. The young clerk was a pureblood, dressed in the blue silk uniform of the intelligence service. He had fine, white scales, and eyes that had been surgically altered from piercing gold to a much more genteel eggshell blue.
He read the documents, then pressed a button on his desk. Two guards appeared, one an underworlder like him in a black uniform, the other upper class and dressed in the lovely green that the fashionistas called Memory of the Sky. In a military uniform, it indicated serious power.
The only place you could still see a green sky on Abaddon was in the very heart of the Union, amid the fields and the streams.
The clerk handed them Samson’s papers. He followed them back through the lift area to a private elevator that had an ominous, even legendary, reputation. Many a soldier had ascended to these highest floors and never returned. As he stepped into the pink marble interior, he entered another world, where every detail was sumptuous and perfect. The lift had no controls. It was controlled from elsewhere, and he stood to attention as it rose.
He thought to review his life, but could not stop his mind from imagining torture and how he would fail in its rigors, and they would all see and know the cowardice that, in his most secret being, he felt defined him. He thought about death constantly, wondered at what it would mean no longer to be, and feared above all things the destruction of his soul.
This was why he had risen so extraordinarily high. It was his willingness—which he detested in himself—to do anything he needed to do to prove his loyalty to his betters, even if it involved lies, cruelty, and pointless killing. His journey upward was a desperate flight to safety.
The doors opened and bright light glared into his face. He tried to control his hearts, but could not. The rhythms synchronized into panic mode, and he knew that his state of fear would be flaring alarms in some nearby monitoring center.
What he thought might be a board member came and stood before the light, so that he was a black shadow to Samson, his face unrecognizable. “You have twenty hours before the gateways open. You’re not even close to being ready.”
Samson took a breath. He thought he knew that voice. He thought it was Beleth himself, the master of all the males, Echidna’s husband. In effect, the king of the world. “We’re right on schedule, Sir.”
“You’re a liar, of course.”
He thought as quickly and carefully as he could, considering that his mind was racing with fear. “They can’t defeat us, they’re only human.”
“That’s your mistake and I’m surprised at you. We knew you were arrogant and venial, but who isn’t? I had not taken you to be stupid.”
“No, Sir.”
“And neither are the earth people. The full-blooded earth human is smarter than we are, as you know. They lack only experience, this new species, to make themselves masters of the three worlds. Remember that they already have two, which we do not.”
He seemed to want to engage in conversation. Samson was compelled to respond. He cast around for something positive to say. “They are a more advanced form than us, it’s true, Sir. But they have no idea how easy it is for them to pass through gateways. They’re ignorant.”
“Thanks to the work of our forebears. Can you imagine what a human army would do here? Bringing hope, happiness even, to people who cannot be controlled except by fear?”
“That would be an extraordinary misfortune. But I don’t think it’s one we need to worry about. They are far from realizing that they can use gateways at will, at any time.”
“How about the Union intelligence agent in the one-moon universe?”
“That’s going well, Sir.”
“In what sense, General? Have you killed him?”
“I expect that to be confirmed on my return,” Samson replied.
“But it’s not confirmed now?”
“No, it’s confirmed, in the sense that we got an assassin through. So, yes, I can confirm that.”
“How did you get an assassin into a place that we can’t penetrate, General?”
“Well, we are able to, in a limited way. And remember, the closer to the moment of passage we come, the easier it is.”
“So the agent is definitely no longer a problem? You can guarantee this?”
Samson forced acid back out of his craw and into his churning stomach. This agent had been placed only a few leagues from the center of the whole operation, and not only that, had somehow been penetrated into the inaccessible one-moon universe where he lived in direct parallel to the single most dangerous human being on the two-moon earth, Martin Winters.
It was quite an achievement. And the problem was, he had no idea at all whether or not the agent was dead. But North was a brilliant achievement, too, and he had to believe that the attack had worked.
“Can you guarantee it, General Samson?”
The only acceptable answer was “yes.” Anything less could bring torture and death. “The agent is dead.”
“Then let me report the good news to my wife. She’s been very concerned about this aspect of the situation.”
Samson fought for air. He needed to sit down, but there were no chairs here. As it was supposed to, the piercing light was making him feel naked and exposed. It was forcing him to shiver his scales, lest his body temperature rise and make him slow.
There came, from behind the horrible shadow, piercing female laughter.
It could only be her.
Then the light went out. As Samson’s eyes got used to the dimness, he had a great surprise: he saw that the entire Board of Directors was present. All of them, even Mazle’s father, he noted.
Behind the assembled Board, an enormous window overlooked the Sea of Anubis, and a great longing entered Samson when he saw a ship, a pearl-white jewel tiny in the sun, its red sails rotating slowly in what must be a light breeze. How lovely their lives must be, those simple sailors, even the ones whose jobs would make their time short, the pitch makers and the rope weavers and the scrapers. At least they did not risk their souls, not like a politician or a general.
“Come,” Echidna said. She actually took his hand. Up close, she was dazzling, a shimmering complex of the smallest imaginable scales, blushed pink under her high cheekbones, delicate blue around her smiling, sparkling, delightfully pale pink eyes. Her body, easily visible beneath a floating gown of gossamer gold thread, was superbly curved, breathtakingly desirable. She was so vastly, incredibly different from the humble women on the bus with their dull scales, sagging with untended molt, that she might as well have been an entirely different species, not a seraph at all, but something from some grander and more extraordinary world than Abaddon.
He followed her past the boardroom and into the private apartments, feeling her strong, cold hand in his. He forced his neck scales as tight as he could, but the musty scent of his desire still oozed from his pulsing glands. It made her throw back her head and laugh, and made Beleth nudge him from behind, and hiss.
Children’s toys littered the legendary floor of pure gold, and kids playing darted between the feet of their elders. In the family shrine at the far end of the great room, the mistress’s women attended their business, some sewing quietly while warming her latest clutch of black eggs, others listening discreetly to the proceedings.
“He will sit,” Echidna called as they approached her ladies.
Chairs were brought by two young fashionistas, so highly bred that their scales were like white cream, almost as pale as hers.
He found himself surrounded by gorgeous women. These really high aristocrats made even a highly bred noble like Mazle seem dreary.
He strove not to appear as he felt, thunderstruck.
Some of the children gathered, interested, no doubt, to watch whatever was about to befall him. Because he had only won the first round.
He looked across the impassive faces of the board members. Nobody was readable. All eyes stared straight ahead. The ultimate power rarely acted, and when it did, all were silent. Whatever she did, there would be absolute approval. Debate would end.
She glared down at him, then leaned forward slightly and stroked his neck. “Such interesting scales,” she murmured, and he saw something in her eyes other than the contempt he had expected. It crossed his mind that the old Echidna might have died and been replaced by another clone, and perhaps also another soul, one that might use the memories stored in the brain quite differently. With the high born, there was no way to tell who actually possessed a given identity at a given time, so this might not even be the person who had favored him and promoted him in the first place. She might consider that her memories of doing those things represented a mistake on the part of a predecessor.
She looked into his face. “I’ve seen no lying from you, but I have seen impetuousness and arrogance. I see that you despise us of good blood. You do, don’t you?”
What should he say? The light was low, so any nervous flittering of his scales would not be seen.
“Of course I hate you. But I am loyal to you and to us all. I am loyal to our beloved Abaddon.”
She tightened her grip on his neck. He began to feel his throat closing. She knew just what she was doing, the way she dug her thumbs down into the sack of his craw, pressing it up so that it would be sucked down into his windpipe and make the throttling require less force. Easier on the hands.
He could no longer breathe. He waited. His penis stirred. Sex and death were so close. He felt his sheath draw back. Two of the girls giggled. One of them stretched herself. Children gathered closer.
Time passed. She wasn’t allowing even a trickle of air. Flashes came into his eyes, and air hunger now caused his body to torsion, throwing his abdomen forward and his head back. Amid peals of childish laughter, his bladder evacuated.
Air rushed in, sputtering as the sac of his craw fluttered in his windpipe, then snapped back where it belonged. He coughed, tried to gain control of himself, then flounced back, helplessly kicking the air.
As he gagged and spat mucus, everybody laughed. Kids ran up and spat on him and slapped him as he crawled to his feet.
“He pissed on us, Momma,” one of them yelled. Then another, older one, “Kill him, damn you, you old hag!”
“Nobody kills him,” she muttered.
A boy, his face flushing with eagerness, came toward him with a throating knife. “Let me! Let me get blooded, Mom!”
“Stay away from him, you little shit.”
“Dad, listen to her!”
“Obey your mother,” Beleth said.
“You people are such assholes.”
“Watch your mouth, boy,” Beleth said. “I’d just love to beat the shit out of you.”
“You don’t have the right.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Echidna snarled. She spat. “I’ll let your sisters whip you senseless, Marol.”
Little girls swarmed her, dancing around her, pulling at her skirts. “Oh, mommy, mommy please! Yes, he deserves it, please!”
“Later, we’ll talk it over.” She clapped her hands once, and all the children withdrew. “Now listen to me, Samson. We need you to go back there and win this thing.”
“I will, ma’am.”
“How dare you lie to me!”
His blood literally dropped to his feet.
“Look at him,” one of the fashionistas hissed, “he’s scared to die.”
He thought he’d passed this hurdle. But the agent was small stuff compared to the larger problem, which was that nothing close to a billion people were going to make it through the gateways, because two-moon earth was not ready, not even close, and that was the real reason he’d been called back. “I will not get a billion people onto earth, it’s true. But I have something else that I am going to bring out. Echidna, I have the greatest treasure in history, and I lay it at your feet.”
“This had better be good, Samson. Hyperbole annoys me.”
“I have human souls in captivity. Beautiful, healthy ones.”
Her eyes widened. The only ones Abaddon ever captured were ugly, and had to be sifted for the good bits, a sweet memory here, a compassionate act there—the things that smelled and tasted so good, that could be relived endlessly, like a delicious food that would never be finished.
“A few souls changes nothing.” She sighed. “Let’s get him stripped. Get the skin off, I haven’t got all night.”
Somebody grabbed him from behind. The boy who had wanted to kill him came forward, a silver molting hook in his hand. He smiled up at Samson. “This is not gonna be fast, you shit.”
“Ma’am! Wait, ma’am. I have more than a few. More, ma’am!”
She gestured toward the eager boy, dismissing him.
“Mom!”
“How many do you have, Samson?”
“Ma’am, I have ten million of them.”
The silence that fell was absolute. This was, indeed, the greatest treasure in the history of the world.
“Ten million good souls?”
“Ma’am, any one of them is better, more fulfilling, more delicious than the best you have ever eaten in all your memory. Fabulous, rich emotions. Delight, love, sweetness, all the best stuff, ma’am.”
He saw the calculation in her eyes. “Where are they?”
He could feel the boy getting ready, could see his scales shimmer with eagerness. He had to be careful, here, or she would kill him for insolence. “Ma’am, they are under the stable gateway, ready to be brought through. I have them connected to two-moon earth’s core. They cannot escape. I can bring them through.”
She gestured toward the boy, who swiped the air in front of Samson’s torso, then hurled the molting hook at one of the board members, who dodged it, hissing and spitting.
The boy glared at him as he adjusted his uniform. “You’ll be back, bitch,” he said. “And when you get back you an’ me, we got a date, do.” He ran his fingers across Samson’s throat.
Samson backed away, bowing until he was off the gold floor and onto the marble. When he saw its blackness, he almost wept with relief.
On the way down in the lift, fear became rage. How dare they, those grunting, greedy oru. He’d like to tear their living skin off their bodies with a molting hook, even her, yes, especially her. Tear it right off!
The elevator opened and he stepped out into the lobby. As he crossed it toward the great steel doors, he gloried in the fact that the guards were now indifferent to him. Delightfully indifferent.
The doors slid open to the wide esplanade of freedom, and he went through. So beautiful, life, despite the pain, the losses, the struggle, all of it. Life itself unfolding, so sweet.
How dare they throw away his life for the amusement of a mere child! His life! As he descended the steps, part of him wanted to cry out to the brown sky, “I lived, I went to the top on a black ticket and I lived!” He did not cry out, though. As befitted a general, he strode.
He was walking toward the bus stop when a wonderful Shu, the best aircar in the world, came swooping down so close that he had to duck, lest he be clipped by it.
It stopped, though, and hung there, its yellow surface gleaming, its black windows revealing nothing of the interior. Then the passenger door went up and a pureblood leaned out. “Hey, you Marshal Samson?”
“I’m General Samson.”
“I’ve got orders to deliver this to a Marshal Samson. You got your number ID?”
Samson produced it.
The salesman thrust the ID card into the slot. Samson heard the car’s confirming bell. The salesman hopped out. “She’s yours, Marshal. Ever driven before?”
He forced himself not to gape. It was stunning: instead of killing him, she’d given him a gift of one of the finest sports vehicles in the world, a wonderful, beautifully made creation that belonged only to the highest of the upper classes. Merely possessing such a thing raised you into the aristocracy.
He entered the car. The fine interior gleamed with exotic metals, greens and silvers and golds. The leather was pale and as supple as cream. Human, without a doubt, and young.
He glanced across the dashboard, a forest of gleaming gold buttons, none of which he understood. Apparently, the car had every option you could imagine. “I have no idea how to run this.”
“You don’t need to know. It’s ensouled.”
He was momentarily too amazed to speak. Shu ensouled perhaps a thousand vehicles a year. Such a car would cost a man like him ten lifetimes of income. Driving it identified him as one of the world’s most powerful, most elite people.
“Is the soul…human?”
The salesman laughed. “Maybe next time, mister. It’s a good one, though. Very smart, very compliant. You need to ride a human ensouled vehicle very carefully, you know. They’re fast and really, really clever, but they can be tricky.”
Indeed, they’d been known to smash themselves to bits in the hope of getting release. It didn’t work, of course. They couldn’t release themselves.
But they ran a vehicle superbly.
Experimentally, tentatively, he asked the car, “Are you there?”
There was a pause, then, “Who are you?”
“The new owner. Take me home.”
It hesitated a moment as it read his ID. “Yes,” it said. He did not ask it why it had been put into a machine. He didn’t really care, as long as it did its work. It was his now, that was all that mattered.
As he soared upward, his engines singing, he called Echidna.
“You’re welcome,” she said into his ear.
“How can I ever thank you?”
“I can think of two ways.”
“Which are?”
“Open both human worlds, and I will grant you an entire city. I will break the law of blood, and let you wear Sky.”
The car swooped low into the dark streets of the back city, the real city. People looked up, some knelt, all bowed, pulled off hats, raised their open hands to sign loyalty to the Corporation, for nobody but an owner could be driving such a vehicle, a car glowing with the violet light of a soul.
The door opened. He got out. Wide, amazed eyes. Smiles everywhere, then cheering as his neighbors came to their windows, looked down, and saw his triumph. Success honored all.
He climbed the narrow stair, thick with the smell of boiling soup, and went into his apartment. There were meat parties everywhere in the street. The day’s executions had favored his neighborhood, and they all thought he was the reason, and he was cheered from every door.
Who knew, maybe Echidna had given such an order.
The gateway was open, waiting. He walked up to it. The stress waves shimmered evenly. It was as clear as he had ever seen. The approaching date was really having an effect now.
Then he realized what he was looking at. Mazle stood in their cramped headquarters space beneath two-moon earth. She was looking down at the autopsy table. On it lay the body of Al North.
He felt sick. That should not be.
He stepped through. “Is the agent dead?”
“You lived!”
“Is the agent dead?”
She gestured toward North. “This needs fixing.”
“I told her—” His mind returned to the sick, vicious boy, waiting for him with his molting hook. He shuddered. “Never mind what I told her.”
“We’re going to try replacing the brain entirely,” she said. “This almost has to get rid of the residual will. Then it’s going to work.”
“It had better work.”
“Yeah, because if it doesn’t Daddy’s gonna take away all your toys. And if you ever lie to my aunt again, I’ll help my unpleasant little cousin take off your skin, and I’ll eat it before your eyes.” She smiled. “You’re nothing, Samson, you and your ugly little car.”
He bowed to her.
NICK SAT READING THE PAGES his father had just finished. Over the past two weeks, Dad had slept maybe six hours, but he was asleep now, sprawled like a corpse across his keyboard. Of course, corpses don’t snore.
It was four in the morning and two weeks ago he wouldn’t have dared to get out of bed and venture into the dark, but things had changed, hadn’t they?
“What’s going on?”
“Hi, Mom.”
“What’re you doing up?”
“Dad’s written about being an intelligence agent.”
“Anything more than what we’ve already remembered?”
“Not really. When I came in here he was sound asleep and snoring, and he was writing.” He gestured toward the laptop. “This. It’s a description of Samson going to the demon earth. It’s horrible, Mom, really horrible.”
“Wylie, wake up.”
“Mom, leave him.”
“I don’t want him like that, he needs a bed.”
“Look, if you disturb him, he’s just gonna start writing again. He’s gonna have a heart attack. Let him sleep.”
She leaned over and read a few pages. “God, what a place. Abaddon.”
“I googled it, it means ‘the abyss.’ At least, it does in our language. In seraph, it probably means ‘Home,’ or ‘Nice Place’ or something. They’re cannibals, and even the children torture and kill. It’s, like, play for them. Like a video game to them, to skin a real person alive. They’re loathsome, Mom, and we do not want them here.”
She looked down at her husband. “I’m gonna get him a blanket at least.” She went to the linen closet and pulled one down. They covered him together, mother and son, and Nick slid the cushion from his chair under his head.
“I’m sober, I swear,” he murmured.
“It’s okay honey, it’s good.”
“Let’s fuck, baby.”
“Sh!”
He gave a long snore and smacked his lips.
“I grew up with him, remember, Mom.”
She tried to laugh, almost succeeded.
“Mom, the thing we have to ask ourselves is, not only who Dad is and who we are, but what we’re supposed to be doing, because I have to tell you, I am starting to realize that I feel this incredible kinship with somebody in his book, and I want to understand what’s going on. Trevor is, like, my soul brother or something. And another thing—this is dangerous. What happened with Al North trying to come in here, and that thing that came after Dad—it’s very, very dangerous.”
At that moment, there came a thin sound, almost like the wail of a smoke alarm, and for a split instant that’s what they all thought it was. Then Nick was running, they were all running. Kelsey stood in the hall outside her bedroom clutching Bearish and making this terrible sound, a noise Wylie had never heard his little girl make before, and which he had not known she could make.
Brooke leaped to her and enclosed her in her arms, and Kelsey sobbed the ragged sob of a child so terrified that not even her mother could comfort her. “There’s hands in my room and they were touching me and touching me, and when I threw Bearish at them, I saw a face and it was awful.”
“Oh, honey, honey, there’s nothing in your room, look, it’s empty in there, the light is on and it’s empty.”
“You saw just hands, Kelsey?”
“Yes, Daddy. They tried to grab me, and when they touched me I saw them. Then they were gone.”
“And the face, you saw it—”
“When Bearish hit it. It was bloody and awful, Daddy, it was horrible.”
He looked at Nick. Nick looked back, his eyes steady with understanding. But he said nothing.
No, and that was right. They had to be careful here, extremely so, because there was a person in the house that they could not see, who had one goal, and that was to kill.
“Let’s go downstairs and make cocoa,” Nick said. “We need some cocoa.”
“Nicholas, it’s late and Kelsey’s tired.”
Kelsey threw her arms around her mother’s waist. “Mommy, yes!”
“Just one cup, then, and we have to make it quick. Because my girl needs her beauty sleep.” She picked Kelsey up, and her little girl snuggled into her arms.
As they trooped downstairs, Nick asked Wylie, “Are we going hunting in the morning?”
“Hunting,” his mother said, “on a school day?”
“Not for middle school,” Nick replied smoothly. “Teacher’s Day.”
Wylie understood exactly what his son was doing. He could not communicate openly, not if somebody was in here and they couldn’t see him and they were listening. “We could go for pheasant,” he said quickly. “Maybe we’ll put a bird on the table. The guns are ready, so we can get an early start.”
“Let’s pull ’em out, then,” Nick said.
Wylie could feel the presence in the house just as clearly as Nick apparently could. An invisible something, and it was close, it was right on top of them.
He unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled out one of their birders and tossed it to Nick, then got himself a 12-gauge. “Get behind us,” he said to Brooke.
“Excuse me?”
“Mom, get behind us!”
Wylie saw movement, very clear, not ten inches from his face. An eye, part of a face. And he knew something about who was here: it was a man, and he was horribly scarred. Al North was back for a second try.
Then there was a hand around his wrist. He looked down at it, felt the steel of the grip. “It’s on Daddy,” Kelsey screamed, and this time Brooke saw it and she screamed, too, and not just screamed, she howled.
Nick fired into the seemingly empty space where the figure had to be, and there were a series of purple flashes in the general shape of a man, but the buckshot passed through him and smacked the far wall of the family room, shattering the big front window and leaving a trench in the top of the couch.
The hand had gone.
Nick grunted and he was up against the wall, he was being throttled, and where the body of the intruder touched his, you could see edges of a black, tattered uniform. Wylie was not a huge man, not as big as Al North, but he waded in. From behind, he put his arms around North’s neck and pulled his head back, gouging into his face, and as he did that, the face and head appeared, the stretched neck, arteries pulsing hard, and the eyes, surrounded by scar tissue and dripping blood.
Seeing this, Brooke went into the gun cabinet and brought out the big silver magnum she’d fussed and fretted for years about him even having. She waved it, not having any idea how to use it.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
Amid a showering mass of sparks, the figure flew across the room, slamming against the TV with a huge crash. It lay there, the left half of the head and face visible down to the left shoulder. Both hands and most of the left arm could be seen, also, until the hand moved across where the stomach would be, slipping into an envelope of invisibility, then coming out again with blood on the fingers.
The one visible eye was gray, glaring ferociously out of a blood-ringed socket. The surgery was crude and cruel. Until now Wylie had not realized just how poor their doctor had been.
The hand shot toward him again, like the head of a snake, and there was a knife in it, and the knife sailed at him, spinning, flashing metal, and clanged against the wall. There was a spitting, sparking sound and a burst of blue electric fire, and where it hit, reality seemed to peel back.
Where there had been a blank wall, there was now a door with a blue-shimmering frame, and beyond it a kitchen with a twisted, melted countertop, a toaster that looked like melted wax, a Sub-Zero fridge that had been clawed and melted and was hanging open.
There were people there, and one of them looked in this direction. Wylie knew what he was seeing, and it was even more terrible than he had imagined when he was writing about these humanoid reptiles, because it was so sleek, so beautiful with its shimmering pale skin, and so terrible with its empty, hard eyes, quick eyes that focused fast on this room, then came alive with a glitter that could only reflect eager delight.
Seraph, they called themselves, but we had names for them, from every culture in the world, from every time in history, but all these names amounted to the same thing, the one word that described something so exquisite and yet so ugly: he was looking straight into the eyes of what mankind in both human universes had identified as a demon.
Kelsey ran—toward it. She ran with a child’s blindness and raw, instinctive hunger to find safety. No doubt, she didn’t realize what she was seeing. Maybe she saw a policeman—black uniform, silver buttons, red collar patches—or maybe some other form of deliverance, but she ran to the thing, right through the opening and into the other universe. The dying universe. The place where they tore souls out of bodies and made wanderers of little girls.
Wylie tossed Nick the twelve-gauge. “Blast it,” he yelled, “it’s getting up.”
“KELSEY,” Brooke screamed, running after her, leaping, trying and failing to grab her flying nightgown before she went through the door—which made a faint, wet sound, a sort of gulping, as she passed through. She stood shimmering with bright violet light, as if she’d been trapped in some kind of laser show.
The creature waiting for her went down and opened its arms, but the smile revealed rows of teeth like narrow spikes, and the golden eyes were not eyes of joy, they had in them the look of a famished wolf.
Wylie dove in behind his daughter, feeling a hammering electrical pulsation over his whole body, followed by gagging nausea as he landed beside her. She was icy cold, her skin gray, and he had the horrifying thought that her soul was already gone.
The demon had white hair, thin and soft, waving around its head like a halo. “Hi,” it said, “I’m Jennifer Mazle. It’s good to meet you, Wylie.”
The words were like blows delivered with a silk—clad hammer, so soft were they, so vicious the tone.
He turned—and faced a blank wall. The door was no longer visible.
“You’ll need to come with me,” the demon snapped, “you’re here to stay.”
But Wylie remembered the wisdom that has come down from one human age to the next, the whispered knowledge, and knew that she could only lie, and therefore threw himself and his daughter at the wall anyway.
Behind him he heard a cry, “Shit!” and then he was home again, Nick was blasting the shotgun into the assassin, and Brooke was rushing to them, now grabbing her baby, now throwing both of them down behind the couch.
“Stay behind me, Dad,” Nick said.
“Use the magnum for Chrissakes!”
“No bullets!”
Another blast of the 12-gauge rocked the world. Behind them there was a crackle and a hiss of rage, and the demon stepped through into the room. As it did so, it became human. “You’re under arrest, Wylie,” Jennifer Mazle said softly.
What the hell universe did she think she was in? “Not here, sweetheart,” Wylie snarled. He’d picked up the empty magnum, and now hurled it at her head. There was a flash of white-purple energy when it struck her. She turned away, her skin spurting red smoke. She gasped, gasped again, put a long hand up to her jaw, then straightened up and produced a weapon of her own. It was blacker than night, this thing that was in her hand, with an ugly, blunt snout.
Somehow he knew that he mustn’t allow her to fire it, that it wouldn’t tear them apart, not physically, that what it would do would be to splash out that light of theirs, and rip the souls out of the whole family, and hurl them into the control of the soul catchers, and make this little family of his the first wanderers in this universe.
He threw himself at her, and as Nick kept Al North back with blasts from the 12-gauge, he waded into her, his fists hammering, delivering blow after blow to what turned out to be a body hard with some sort of armor. Somewhere in there, he knew there would be something soft and vulnerable, a lizard’s delicate meat, and he hit where seams might be, at the waist where she had to bend, and then the face, he hit the face, and it was just as hard, like steel, this structure of scales.
She was like a thing made of garnet or steel, not a living creature at all.
He went for an eye. Grabbing the skull with his fingers, he gouged his thumb into it and found there a softness that made him snarl with pleasure. Beat the devil, Wylie, why do you think you’ve got that name?
Behind him, WHAMWHAM, WHAMWHAM. Nick had had the presence of mind to reload the magnum, and he knew how to use it, too, holding it in both hands to compensate for his size and its power.
Wylie routinely cleared him on all the guns. If they were going to be in the house, the kids were going to know their proper use and safety. Kelsey, too, when the time came.
Whatever he was doing, though, it wasn’t helping, because something had just jumped on Wylie’s back. Shot up though he might be, Al had one hell of a lot of staying power.
Then Wylie had an eye under his thumb. He damn well had an eye! Jennifer Mazle reeled back, hissing like the most enraged possible cobra, HRRSSTT! SSTT! Her mouth opened wide, the teeth glittering, the interior as white as a snake’s. The tongue gleamed black, was as thick as a finger and as long as a rope, and it came up slowly out of the throat.
He’d never seen anything so menacing. Never imagined menace like this being possible.
Then the thing on his back let go, and he turned and saw Nick and Brooke standing over it. Nick had one of Wylie’s superb Abba Teq hunting knives, and was thrusting and pulling expertly, and deep purple guts were spilling, and North’s mouth gaped wide.
The general’s whole body shimmered, then began flickering like a light turning on and off, and there came great thunder, and outside and inside blue flashing light, and then they were both gone, him and Jennifer Mazle.
“They’re here,” Wylie shouted, “still here!”
Nick thrust his knife at the air. Wylie picked up the 12-gauge and delivered a random blast into the ceiling, which rained down like the ceiling of Third Street Methodist had when Ron Biggs had emptied his 12-gauge into it, in the two-moon world.
Outside, there was long thunder. Then he heard shouts, voices crying out in an unknown tongue, voices and the clatter of machinery.
“What is it?” Brooke hissed.
“Sh!”
They could see shadows cast on the floor, on the walls, big shadows, but not the people and machines making them. The physical people were in the version of the house that belonged to the Winters family, but as the twenty-first approached, the fabric that separated the universes, in this very unusual corner of the world, was becoming thin indeed.
Wylie listened, he watched the shadows—one in particular as it crossed the wall, something low being moved by two hunched figures. Then the figures bent over even further, and lifted something that looked like a long sack and merged its shadow with the shadow of the object, then moved off.
“What is it, Dad?” Nick asked. “What’s going on?”
“I believe that seraph medics are carrying them out on gurneys.”
“Oh, Christ, you’re right,” Brooke said. “That’s what that is, all right. My God, what we’re seeing here—I mean… just, my God.”
The shadows were gone now. The house was quiet. The family came together, the children and the parents, struggling each in his own way with a trauma almost too intense to be borne.
“Mommy, can Bearish have a drink? Because Bearish would like an absinthe.”
“Absinthe?” She gave Wylie a careful look.
“Be it far from me.”
“Daddy has a bottle of it in his liquor drawer in his office.”
“Wylie?”
“There is no liquor drawer. There is no absinthe. I mean, it’s illegal.”
“Come on, baby, show Momma the absinthe.”
“Excuse me, we just nearly got killed here!”
As if this return to their old life was the most welcome thing she could know—which it probably was—Brooke marched off to his office, followed by her little girl.
“Oh, come on,” Wylie muttered, hurrying after them.
“Dad, don’t lose focus now. This is not over.”
“Brooke, there is no absinthe!”
“Dad, come back!”
“Watch our backs,” he yelled to Nick.
He entered his office behind Brooke, who was opening the desk drawers.
“It’s behind the fake back in the file drawer,” Kelsey said.
Wylie saw the empty desk. Saw that there was no laptop there. Saw that his old typewriter was melted like the Winters’ toaster had been melted, his beloved old Corona oozing down the side of the desk like molten plastic.
“The computer is gone,” Brooke said. She looked at him. Her eyes were practically bulging out of her head, tears were flowing.
“Dad, get down here, please,” Nick called.
“What do you mean, gone?” Wylie said. “It can’t be gone.”
But it was, and with it their window into the other world.
He felt suddenly numb. As if lobotomized. As if soul-robbed. “Do you have that copy?” he asked.
She thrust her hand into the pocket of her jeans. She shook her head. “They got it.”
“They have blinded me…”
Brooke said, “Which is what they probably came here to do.”
“Dad, you better get to the front window right now.”
Coming from outside, from the front, he heard it, a deep rumbling sound, regular, the unmistakable noise of a big engine.
He went to the window, looked down. Initially, he saw only blackness. Then he understood.
What stood at their doorway was the most ominous thing he had ever seen.
“It’s just sitting there, Dad,” Nick said.
The huge Humvee gleamed black. Its windows were as dark as a cave, its engine growled on idle.
They had gotten one of their vehicles through the gateway.
The engine stopped. There was movement behind the black windows. The doors began to open, and what they saw coming out was not human, not even remotely.
ALL NIGHT THE LIGHT HAD worked the town and the outriders had patrolled the woods and the rain had come in endless sheets, and the drums had muttered on. The kids were in a trance, Martin thought at first, then later that they were beyond trance, they were in a space that despite all that had happened to him he could never reach. From time to time, though, Trevor’s hand would come through the dimness and touch his own, and he would know that there are things that never will change no matter how much we change, that a child needs his parents, that there is love in families that is beyond understanding.
In the late hours he found himself under a pile of little ones, all of whom were trying to be close to the largest male in the place. Mike and George and the other older kids tried to control them, but eventually everybody gave up and he contented himself with holding the little beings in his arms as best he could.
The beauty of mankind touched him as they did, softly with their little hands, and looked at him with their great, admiring eyes. One of them, a little girl called Tillie, who reminded him so much of Winnie that it made his blood ache, said to him, “You have to be our soldier. We need one and we ain’t got one.” Her eyes had studied his, and he had felt her mind enter his mind, and it felt like smelling flowers feels, or lying in grass. She’d tossed her head, this tiny, perfect girl, then raised her hand to his cheek and tapped it. “Soldier,” she had said.
Morning brought new necessities. There were twenty-two human beings here, they needed food and water, they needed decent sanitation and children are not good at sanitation. They were growing up fast, but as nobody could leave the tent at night, they used things like an old plastic bucket they’d brought with them and plastic bags which they seemed to have in abundance, and these tended to get spilled. They were not modest, the little ones, but the poor teens were desperate for privacy, the boys trying to control their vital young bodies, the girls trying to put them at their ease.
It was altogether the kindest, most forgiving, and smelliest group of people Martin had ever known. The roughest dig he’d ever been on did not even begin to compare to this.
There were two kids called flap guards who remained at the door of the tent, making certain nobody opened it after dark and, above all, nobody went outside. The drumming was loud enough to drown the sounds generated by the outriders and the nighthawks, so the little ones might cry for their parents, but they did not experience the kind of fear that would have brought the things leaping down on the tent.
As the hours slid past, Martin felt more and more trapped in the damned thing. The kids absolutely refused to stop their drumming or go outside even for a few seconds, not until dawn. They wouldn’t let him leave either, not that he wanted to. Trevor clung to him. His bevy of little ones did, too, and he would never deprive them of that comfort, no matter how illusory he feared that it was.
After they had forced Martin into initiation, and to some extent to be transformed himself, he had found Trevor with strange, pink sweat on his face and staining his filthy shirt. Martin thought he knew what it was—from the stress of sending his father to face that test, capillaries on the surface of his son’s skin had burst. His boy had sweated blood.
Over the long night, Martin had tested his new mind and found true changes. He still thought as he always had, but there was new information and there were new things he could do with his thought.
Trevor had spoken of another world he had seen, a world a lot like this one but with other people, and no evidence that it was under attack. He had gone through a gateway, he said, and there had read a book, and it was the book of their suffering and the secrets of their days.
Martin was familiar with the multiverse concept, of course, and he was aware of the recent discoveries at the Four Empires Supercollider in Switzerland that had suggested that parallel universes were real. But that there would be gateways that you could just walk through—well, this was going to be interesting to see.
There was a stirring in the tent as the sun rose. The drumming became haggard, then stopped. Then it got very quiet.
“What’s up?” Martin asked Trevor.
“I think something’s wrong with Wylie. I think the seraph have broken through to his world,” he replied.
Martin realized that he could see, in his mind’s eye, a shimmer hanging over the Saunders river. It could as easily be a spiderweb gleaming with dew as an entrance into another universe. He saw, also, that outriders were pacing there, looking for all the world like enormous tarantulas. They had been designed by the seraph to strike terror into the human heart, and even seeing them in this way touched him with fear, and made them lift their forelegs and eagerly test the air.
He withdrew.
“Any thoughts, Dad?”
“It’s a gateway. If it wasn’t it wouldn’t be so heavily guarded.”
“Okay,” Pam said, “we’re gonna take the opportunity to move the tent off this sludge factory, then I’m taking a supplies detail into town.” She glanced at Martin. “You stay here.”
He couldn’t disagree with that.
Martin followed the others into the kind of morning that comes after great storms, when sunlight washed pure seems to cleanse the world. Golden columns of light marched among the pines, and when they walked out and it fell on Martin, he had a shock, because it was just the sun but it felt as if somebody was there.
A couple of the kids, aware of his thoughts, glanced at him. He was going to have to somehow get used to this lack of inner privacy—and the deep sense of belonging that came with it.
Gentle, probing fingers seemed to be touching him, the fingers of a being that was deeply accepting of him, of life, of everything.
Who was this? Was the sun alive?
“It’s all alive,” Trevor said. “Everything is alive and everything is conscious. All the stars, all the grass, the trees, every little animal there is. And some of them have high consciousness. The bees do, Dad. When you’re in a glade with them, you’ll see.”
“The brain of the bee is microscopic, son, so they couldn’t really be all that conscious.”
Trevor smiled a little. “Just let yourself happen, Dad. You’ll be fine.”
Watching the chaos of kids moving here and there with stakes, with boxes and ropes, singing, laughing, you would never think that they were working together, and carefully organized at that. But they were, and exactly at the moment the tent shuddered and collapsed, four of them came out carrying all the bags and buckets of refuse that had accumulated inside.
Not a word was said as it was rolled and folded and carried off, followed, improbably, by a little boy who was completely overshadowed by the huge Cougars bass drum balanced on his head.
Their efforts looked a lot like those of worker bees, Martin thought, and then that a shared mind would naturally be far larger than any single component.
It hit him then—all mind is shared. That’s the way things work. Just surrender to it. Let yourself happen, like Trevor said.
“Okay, Dad, let’s go.”
Of course, Trevor could read his thoughts.
“Don’t let it bother you.”
“But I can’t read you.”
“Sure you can.” He headed off into the caressing sunlight.
Following him, Martin did see into his son’s thoughts, which were of that gateway, and going through it. But that wasn’t possible, look at the river!
“It’s possible, Dad. But you have to not think about it and not worry about it. Concentrate your thinking on your body, the way your feet feel as you walk, your hands, every physical sensation.”
—Why?
—This is why, what you’re doing right now.
Martin was stunned. The exchange had been so perfect. Of course, he understood the recent advances in mind-to-mind communication that were being achieved at Princeton, but that was with the help of implanted microchips.
—No implants here, Dad.
Trevor headed up the sharpening rise that separated them from the Saunders and the gateway. Martin looked ahead in his mind, and saw the outriders still guarding the gateway, and the water just a literal torrent. As soon as his mind touched them, though, every outrider turned this way and raised its forelegs. Some of them began to march.
“Blank your mind, go to your body!”
He forced his awareness into his flexing muscles, his feet, his heart and lungs. Although he could no longer see the outriders in his mind’s eye, he could still have clear awareness of them, and he knew that their alarm had subsided.
To do this successfully, you had to be like animals were, looking out at the world without looking in at your thoughts. Not easy for a professor.
—If you start to hear that rattling noise, stay in your body. Do not let your mind go out to it or they’ll be on you.
Why was nobody else coming? This was obviously extremely dangerous and more would be safer.
Trevor glanced over at him. His eyes said it all: this is my job. Our job.
At that moment, they came up the rise, and Martin saw that the Saunders, even in just the past few minutes, had risen more. It had been bad before, but now it was a great, surging mass of gray-black water full of trees, roofs, walls, floating staircases, even a car’s wheels appearing and disappearing as it went tumbling downstream.
Across the stream, he could see their house, the windows dark, empty, and forlorn. The water extended almost to the front door. And water wasn’t the only problem, five outriders lay curled up on themselves halfway down the ridge, ready to spring into action if anybody came into their range. And the ones on this bank still patrolled.
“This is impossible,” he said aloud.
He was confused to see the water getting closer, looming up toward him. Then he realized that he was seeing it through Trevor’s eyes. His son was scrambling down the bluff right toward the patrolling outriders and the thundering river.
Martin raced down behind the last of his children, throwing himself forward, trying to reach him, to at least get his attention—whereupon one of the outriders on this bank turned from its patrolling and came straight toward him…but past Trevor, whom it did not seem to see.
And indeed, Martin felt a surge of fear, he couldn’t help it. The thing’s metal fangs moved so fast that they sparked.
“Run downstream, son,” Martin bellowed. He picked up a rock and threw it at the thing. It bounced off the head, causing it to rear back and hiss, and making two more of them come prancing toward him.
To his utter horror, Trevor walked right into the flood. “Son! SON!”
He could not escape the outriders and Trevor was about to be killed. But he could escape, all he had to do was to leave his fear, leave his mind, let himself happen. He paused in his headlong dash, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind. He put his thought on his roaring blood and the roaring water. His prayer came to him then, Franny’s prayer, and joined itself to the whisper of his blood.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself face to face with an out-rider. Its eyes stared straight at him, its jaws moved slowly. Carefully, he stepped around it, then past another, so close that he could see that there was venom caked to its abdomen, and a stinger tucked in the size of a butcher’s meat hook.
Trevor was now well out into the flood. Martin threw himself in and began swimming.
The water grabbed him as a giant would, and he saw a great oak, stately, from somebody’s yard over in Harrow, no doubt, come sweeping toward him and with it death in the tangle of branches, drowning as he was swept away.
Trevor still waded forward, though—and then seemed not to be wading but walking. He was visible inside the water—but not affected by it. Walking inside it. “Trevor!” Martin forced himself to dive to avoid the oncoming tree, forced himself to swim, felt the water ripping at him—and then saw Trevor beside him walking easily as water and limbs and pieces of cars and houses and bodies and drowned cattle went not only around him, but through him. In the other world, of course, the stream wasn’t in flood, so crossing this way would be easy.
He looked down at his own body, and saw that a great limb of the tree was moving through him, and a human arm, white and bloated, and a spatula and dozens of poker chips, all passing right through him and leaving not the slightest sensation. A lawnmower went through him, then theater seats, a TV, a tangle of shrubs.
He took another step forward and the flood was gone. Instead, he was on the far side of the Saunders. Behind him, the little river flowed quite normally, tinkling faintly where it hurried across some stones.
“Be very, very careful, Dad. I don’t know what’s going on up there.”
“I can’t hear your thoughts.”
“Not over here, it doesn’t work.”
Martin looked back toward the Saunders. The bluff was there, but everything was quiet, washed with golden early sun. It was a view he’d looked at a thousand times, and on summer Sundays heard from here the faint bells of the town.
They had gone through the gateway, and on this side, in this universe, the Saunders wasn’t in flood.
“Come on, we’ve gotta see what gives with that Hummer.”
“It looks like typical army issue.”
“Their military’s Hummers are all camouflaged. This is something the seraph brought here.”
“They’re here?”
“Apparently.”
Trevor started off, moving quickly up the familiar hill toward the familiar house. As he walked behind his son, Martin experienced a sense of déjà vu so powerful that it was actually disorienting, even painful. This looked like home and it felt like home but it was not home. It was not home.
Trevor stopped. “They’re noisy,” he said.
“It’s dead quiet.”
“That’s the problem. His car is in the garage, but it’s just really quiet.”
He saw what looked like a Saab in the open garage. “It’s blue.”
“Their cars have all sorts of different colors. Blue, red, white.”
Martin had never heard of anything so outlandish. Who would be willing to drive around in a colored car? Cars were black. This Wylie must be an eccentric, which fit the literary pretensions, he supposed.
Trevor approached the place cautiously, moving up the steep hill, his eyes always on that Hummer.
Martin whispered as loudly as he dared, “Trevor!”
His son motioned at him furiously. The message was unmistakable: Shut up!
Trevor dropped down on all fours, then onto his stomach. The Hummer was between him and the house, but he could almost certainly be seen if anybody looked closely enough. From the Hummer, definitely.
Then he motioned again, this time indicating that Martin should come forward.
Eagerness flashed through him. He jumped to his feet. Trevor’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open—and then there was a terrific crash and something went whanging off into the woods. “Get your ass outta here,” a voice crackled. “We got you in crossfire, shitheel!” A shot whipped past him so close that he felt a hot blast of wind.
He threw himself to the ground. “No,” he called, “we’re friends!”
Another shot kicked up gravel beside his head. He tried his best to back away, attempting to reach the brow of the hill so that he could slide back down.
But then a shot rang out behind him, and this one was closer, much closer. There was only one thing to do. He stood up and raised his hands. “Okay,” he said, “okay.”
From the woods came a boy’s voice, “It’s a guy, Dad. A guy and a kid hiding by the Hummer. Back wheel.”
Silence.
“We mean no harm,” Trevor called. “Please, we need to talk.”
The boy appeared coming up the far side of the driveway. He carried a big rifle, hefting it expertly. Martin realized what was happening here, that this was an historic meeting, the first contact between human beings from two different universes.
“Hello,” Trevor said as he stood up. He walked out from behind the Hummer, into full view of the house. “Mr. Dale, I’m Trevor.”
“You got the laptop?” Wylie Dale asked.
“No.”
“This is my dad, Martin,” Trevor said. “We need to look at the book again.”
“The laptop was stolen. Plus, it’s been rough around here. Real rough. I haven’t even thought about writing.”
Martin realized that the smell he had been noticing was meat, and it was coming from the Hummer. As he walked closer, he could see blackened ruins in it, the shattered bodies of seraph. And then, around the side of the house, one of the outriders. For a moment, he froze, but then he understood that they had destroyed it, too.
“So you’re Trevor,” Wylie said. “Hey, Brooke, here’s the people from my goddamn book, come to life!”
The boy had walked up to Trevor. “Hiya, Nick,” Trevor said.
“Hey.” Nick put his hand out.
Trevor looked at it. “Can we?”
“Dunno.”
Martin watched. Wylie watched. His wife Brooke watched. A little girl’s voice said from behind the very lovely mother, “Bearish thinks it’s okay.”
Bearish! Winnie had called her stuffed toy Bearish, too. As the mother and daughter came closer, Martin saw that her Bearish wasn’t a zebra but an elephant.
“He’s cryin’, Mommy.”
“They’ve lost Winnie and Lindy,” Brooke said, “you know that, honey, you know what they’ve lost.”
“What happened here?” Trevor asked.
“You better get inside with us,” Wylie said.
The house showed signs of a terrific fight. Martin was quietly astonished. These people were unhurt, obviously, but there had been a lot of killing around here, a lot of it. The rugs had blood on them, and he thought he saw a bloody body wrapped in a sheet behind the couch.
“There’s been a spot of bother around here, boys,” Wylie said. “But me an’ mine, we did ’em.” He drew a long brown object out of a pocket of his heavy leather jacket. “Cigar?”
Martin watched in silence, unsure of what, exactly, was meant. The intonation of the unfamiliar word had suggested a question. Was it some sort of offering? There must be differences between the universes, obviously there would be—look at the colored cars—but this was perplexing. Surely it wasn’t a sacrificial offering, they must be past that.
“I think I’ve earned house rights,” Wylie said.
“Wylie.” Brooke strode to him, threw her arms around him. “You are the most amazing damn man,” she said, “smoke your lungs out, lover.”
“Ew, Mommy!”
He inserted the thing in his mouth, produced a book of matches, and lit the free end of it. He gave Martin another glance. “It’s a Partagas straight out of Fidel’s humidor.”
“It’s tobacco,” Trevor explained. “They burn it and eat the smoke.”
“But…it’s powder. Snuff is powder.”
Nick said, “Dad, I don’t think they have cigars.” Nick regarded Martin. “You, do you know what he’s doing?” Then he frowned. “Jesus, look at their eyes.”
“You haven’t read my book as well as you imagine, son,” Wylie said as he ate smoke. Or rather, breathed it. Martin enjoyed snuff, but he didn’t care to join the hordes with cancer of the sinuses, so he’d sworn off. No doubt this method eliminated that problem. They could smoke the tobacco, he guessed, without fear of health problems.
“Your friend Fidel makes those things?”
“Well, he’s dead, but yeah, they’re genuine Cubans, imported all the way to Kansas City.”
“Tobacco is legal in our world, but it’s dangerous. It’s sold in a powder called snuff.”
“Dangerous here, too. These suckers are really cancer sticks. But I do love ’em.”
“Ask him about Fidel Castro,” Brooke said.
“I have no idea who that would be,” Martin replied. “Do you know, Trev?”
“No.”
Nick said, “Cuban dictator, died a few years back. Communist.”
“Communist, as in, uh—Trev, can you help me, here?”
“A nineteenth-century philosopher called Karl Lenin invented a system of labor management that became a huge movement in this universe. Dad, they’ve had total chaos here for over a century. That’s why they’re so tough. It’s why there are dead seraph and outriders all around this house and these people put fire in their mouths. In this universe, human beings have been at war so long they’ve become incredibly strong.”
“No wars in your universe?” Wylie asked.
“No, Wylie, not really. The British and the French bicker over their African holdings, of course. And the Boer Contingent is an irritant for the British in South Africa. The Russians had a war with the Japanese.”
“Wait a minute.” He puffed on the cigar. “Sarajevo. Mean anything?”
Martin couldn’t think what it might be. He shook his head.
“World War One?” Wylie asked. “World War Two?”
Martin was mystified.
“Dad,” Trevor said, “they have huge wars here.” He pointed to a blood-spattered bookcase. “War books,” he said. “I’ve read some of them.”
“Look, we’ve been at war on this little earth of ours ever since the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.”
“An archduke? Assassinated? That’s hard to credit.”
“You still have them, don’t you?”
“Of course. And Cuba is an American colony and there is no Fidel in the colonial leadership, and this business of an obscure historical figure’s gimcrack philosophy meaning anything—”
“Communism was the scourge of our world for seventy years,” Wylie said. “It took half a billion lives, and the world wars three hundred million more. It’s been carnage.”
Martin looked at the wall of the family room, dominated by its gun case. “We have too few of these.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Brooke said. “Violence attracts violence.”
Nick picked up what looked like a hand cannon that was lying on a table. He blew on the barrel. “Doesn’t it, though, Mom?” he said.
No child would ever address an adult like that at home, least of all one of his parents. “Wylie,” Martin said, “I’m wondering if you have any specific ideas about what we might do? Given your own toughness.”
“The shitheels are tough, too, and we’re likely to take a beating from ’em, big time. And soon.”
“But you’ll—you’ll shoot.”
“Buddy, I seem to recall that your president tried a hydrogen bomb on Easter Island and it didn’t do jack shit. That isn’t exactly a lack of aggression, there, not by my definition. But the fact that it didn’t work—when I wrote those words, I have to tell you that I felt sick. Real, real sick. Because a hydrogen bomb is the best we’ve got, too.”
“However, if your world is at war all the time, you won’t have a British Battle Group demanding an explanation, will you? Not like us. By the time we got the superpowers to take an interest, it was all over.”
“The first wanderers were in England.”
“It takes a big empire like that a long time to act. In this case, too long, even if there was anything they could’ve done.”
“Wylie,” Trevor asked, “do you know why we’re here?”
“You had a conference last night and decided that you wanted to open up direct communications. Problem is, I have no more idea than you do what’s gonna help. I mean, you are already looking at one hell of a megadisaster. I don’t see how you can do anything. I have to tell you, I think you folks are done.”
Trevor asked, “Without the computer, can you still write?”
“No kid, I cannot. I tried using Nick’s laptop and Brooke’s laptop and Kelsey’s pink Mac, and nothing came. Nothing at all. Whatever magic there was, there ain’t.”
“Which we sensed,” Trevor said, “and why we came. Because we knew that things were going wrong for you.”
“You people are so—I don’t know, precise. The way you go about things, moving slowly from A to B to C—do you think you might be a little slower than we are? Mentally. Not quite as smart?”
“We’re not as aggressive,” Martin said. “Obviously, given all your wars, the communists, the smoke breathing, which I interpret as domination-symbolic—”
“Speak Greek. Your English is for shit.”
“Actually, I do have a little Greek. I’ve done some dig dating there, you see. Dating the Acropolis, which turned out to be noncontroversial, unlike some of my other work.”
“Which I know all about, of course. We have strange ruins here, too. Same ones. Plus very similar legends. A war in the sky, a great flood, all of that.”
“Meaning that they were here, too.”
“Momma,” Kelsey asked, “when are we gonna kill the man in the crawl space?”
“What man?” Trevor asked quickly.
“Dad’s got this really fucked-up guy from your universe trapped in our crawl space. He’s human, so we have this cop we know, he’s on his way to take a look.”
“It’s Al North, isn’t it? General North?”
“He’s in rather iffy shape,” Wylie said. “But I’m not gonna go killin’ people without the cops say it’s okay. If you get my drift.”
“Could we question him?” Trevor asked.
“Sure, waterboard the fucker, for all I care.” He sucked on the cigar, pulled it out of his mouth. “Use this on his eyes. Make ’im chatty as hell, be my guest.”
Trevor took the thing from him, held it. “How would we?”
Nick laughed.
Wylie said, “Waterboarding is a form of torture, makes the chappie you’re curious about think he’s drowning. And as far as that cigar you’re holding is concerned, boy, you stick the business end of that thing in the sore eyesocket General Al is nursing, my guess is he’ll tell you more than his address.”
Trevor thrust the thing away from himself.
Wylie caught it before it could touch the floor. “Cuban, remember?” He sucked it, made a great cloud of smoke. “A thing of beauty.” He got up and strode across the room and into the kitchen.
Martin reflected that he might be a writer by trade, but he had the speed and power of a soldier about him. The boy did, too, and with her hard-set lips, the woman looked as if she could kill a man as soon as look at him. Only the little girl seemed vulnerable, or perhaps that was just because her cuddle toy was also called Bearish, and Winnie had been such a gentle child.
Wylie opened a trapdoor. “Howya doin’ down there, General? We’re gonna torture you in a min’, just wanted to let you know.” He closed the trap. “It’s called softening ’em up.”
“He’s not playing with a full deck, Dad,” Nick said.
“Always remember this son, if they’re just playing with a half a deck it don’t matter as long as it’s your half, or even one card, if it’s the card you need.”
“We have no idea how to deal with Al North,” Nick said. “And neither do they.”
Silence followed. It was true enough.
Wylie opened his cell phone, dialed. “Where in fuck’s name are you, Matthew? I just finished your last Partagas, incidentally.” He listened. “Well, I’m telling you, the weirdness index up here has just shot through the roof. You need to put the fricking donut back in the fricking box and get your ass moving.” He hung up. “You know, I’m not saying a whole lot on the phone, so he thinks I’m bullshitting him some way, but I gotta tell you—” He stopped. Suddenly the bravado blew away like so much sea foam. He closed his eyes. Shook his head. “I saved my family,” he said softly, “me and my boy did.” Then he sat down. He took a long drag on the cigar.
A truck came bounding up to the house, its gears grinding as it negotiated the steep driveway. It came to a stop. “Ah, wait until the gentleman of the law does his body count.”
A tall man in a police uniform opened the front door and came in, using the same striding, aggressive walk that, it seemed to Martin, characterized them all.
“What in hell kind of a Hummer is that,” he said as he entered. Then he sniffed the air. He looked toward Brooke. “He dope you up or something?”
“He’s getting a reward for saving our lives.”
“From what? Some drug dealer’s fancy Hummer? Man, that’s a U.S. Army vehicle, full scale. You don’t see many of those puppies around. And in limo paint, no less.” He looked at Wylie. “Don’t tell me you purchased that thing? Buddy, that is gonna piss me off.”
“Matt, I want you to turn around and look at that man standing in front of the fireplace trying not to wet his pants. I want you to look into his eyes and tell me what you see there.”
The lean, narrow-faced man turned, and as he did, Martin saw that he did not carry a small firearm like Bobby, but a gun almost as big as the family’s hand cannon. Martin looked to the pistol and the great ham of a hand dangling beside it, then, reluctantly, up to the face. He let Matt look into his eyes.
“What happened to you?”
“I—it’s—”
“It’s a rapid evolutionary change induced by extreme species stress,” Wylie said. “That would be correct, wouldn’t it, Martin?”
“I would say so.”
“But, uh, excuse me, I don’t think we’ve been introduced.” He thrust out his hand. “I’m Matt. Uh, hi.”
“Hi.”
“You—” He motioned with his chin, an expressive gesture.
“That’s right, we’re from over there. This is my son, Trevor.”
“So you’re the one lost Lindy and Winnie. Oh, Jesus, you poor guy.”
“Matt, I would recommend a very stiff scotch, but we don’t have time. What we do have is one of his compadres tied up in our crawl space. A very weird, very altered piece of work that used to be a general over there in their version of the U.S. Air Force, but is now a sort of monster designed to be able to function freely in both universes, apparently by being made into a cut-up mess. You wouldn’t believe it. I mean—you remember the guy downstate with the mutilated face?”
“Nunnally. Sure do.”
“The missing pieces have been sewn onto this man.”
“What?”
“Sewn onto him to provide a physical connection with our universe. Give him greater freedom of action. The theory. In fact, bullshit. It’s the seraph who have trouble moving around in our universe, not people. And he’s people. Was.”
“Okay, I’m getting an occasional word. There is a man in your crawl space that has—Nunnally—Nunnally’s body parts—”
“In a misbegotten attempt to enable him to function more freely in our universe.”
“And this is Martin and his kid.”
“Yessir.”
Matt looked at them again. He held out his hand. Martin shook it. “Wow,” Matt said. “You sure this is for real, Wylie?”
“Oh, yes, and what we need is for Frankenstein down in the cellar to tell these people something—what, Martin? What might he know that would help you?”
“If we could stop the seraph coming through, that would help us. If we could understand how to close their gateways, that would help us. Anything at all.”
“You’ve read the part about Samson’s journey to Abaddon?” Wylie asked. “Do you see a vulnerability there anywhere?”
“They’re in a hurry. So we need to slow them down,” Martin replied.
“Thing is, I also keep seeing an ending to my book, and in it I see these filthy huge cities full of starving seraph, and they are in your world. I do not see New York and Washington and London. Sorry, fellas, but I just don’t. What I see there is open ocean. Right now, looks like you lose.”
“Can this man extract information? Does he know these techniques?” Martin asked.
“He knows ’em, Martin,” Wylie said. “He’s served in the Mideast in his time.”
“So you’ll torture General North for us?” Martin asked.
“I can’t do that!” Matt burst out.
“You gotta, buddy,” Wylie said. “Because once the seraph finish with these guys, we’re next.”
“We’ll cut their hearts out,” Matt muttered.
“What we’ve been through here, believe me, it will be mutual. No, we don’t wanna have them show up here, believe me. And this North cat is the key. So you are gonna help us. You are gonna devote five minutes to this effort.”
“It’s totally illegal!”
“He doesn’t exist in this universe, therefore has no legal standing. Therefore, Nick, go get your skateboard. I think we can do this with a skateboard and a towel.”
“I am not going to waterboard a goddamn general in any goddamn air force!”
“Yeah, you are.” Wylie pulled the trapdoor open. A stench of urine and blood rose from the crawl space. He looked inside. “Good morning, again, General. Visitors!”
General North’s eyes stared. His chest did not move. Wylie knew it at once: Al North was dead.
GENERAL AL NORTH HAD NEVER experienced pain like this. Although he had seen torture in Lebanon-men getting phosphorus splinters jammed under their fingernails and lit—he did not think for a moment that their pain, as awful as it was, approached this.
He was screaming, he knew that objectively, as if from a distance, but he also knew that no sound was coming out. He’d come into this strange place—a parallel universe, he had come eventually to realize—faithful to his orders, to carry out an assassination. He’d never expected to be asked to do such a thing, but this was war and we were desperate and the military and intelligence communities were in chaos, so, yes, he got why he had been called upon, and he resolved to do his duty.
Something is wrong!
He lay listening to the voices overhead. The man he had been sent to kill had proved to be a tiger, and his son was just as ferocious. Very frankly, they had overpowered Al, who was not a small man, and had excellent personal combat skills. He had not expected an adversary ready, willing, and able to gouge out eyes with his bare hands, or a child who would pick up a damn handgun the size of an anvil and just literally blow a grown man’s guts out. A child!
They’re not the enemy!
What was that? It was like part of his mind was yelling at him from behind a closed door. He had to get the hell up and get back out there, because those folks needed killing and they were still walking around. He was going to do them all. Massacre them, the women, too. Kill them all.
Don’t!
Yeah, that’s great, disobey a lawful order transmitted to you in person by your commanding officer, who also happened to be the acting commander in chief. He did not like Tom Samson, never had. The president had made a grave mistake giving him his appointment. But this was wartime and they’d just about had it, and under such circumstances you have no choice but to trust your superior officer.
You trust your own soul!
That voice—it was saying something. “Soldier,” perhaps. “Soldier, you’re dying,” that’s what it was saying.
He had not completed his mission and he had to get out of this hole and do the damn deed!
He fought to rise, could not. He closed his working eye, took a breath, then pressed downward with both hands. Rivers of agony swept up and down his arms and through his bubbling chest. His head went light. He fell back. His heart was thundering. Below the waist, no sensation at all.
He’d seen others in the house, he’d seen a Hummer come up.
It was them. THEM!
It had been some kind of an enemy unit, he could see that, but even they had taken a hell of a beating from these people. The mother cut up some of their exotic weaponry with a damned axe, and the little girl—what, seven, eight—stood there watching and laughing. “Mommy’s killin’ a big spider.” Tough sonembitches.
That was an outrider and outriders belong to the enemy, soldier, and you are working for them, and you need to FACE THIS!
The trapdoor was opened again. Light swamped his eye for a moment. Then he saw a silhouette.
“This man isn’t dead! This man is breathing!”
Another head appeared, disappeared. “Fuckaroo, he’s right.”
The woman’s voice: “Kill him!”
“You can’t do that, Brooke! I gotta call EMS, I gotta try to save his life. And—Kee-rist, you got a man all shot to hell in your crawl space, so nobody leaves. Got that? Nobody leaves!”
“It was self-defense, he attacked us.”
“I know that, but I got procedures, buddy. This is serious.”
“He’s from our universe,” another voice said.
General North listened to them up there, murmuring together. Those bastards had figured out how to get through a gateway, and they were gonna mess this whole operation up.
You’re not sad about that! You’re glad! It’s good, it’s a triumph, for God’s sakes, listen to your soul!
His mind cast about, trying to find a way to carry out his orders. There had to be one, there always was.
There were guns upstairs, plenty of them. But down here there was nothing, only dirt. His own gun was long gone. So, did he have anything else that might cause damage? Belt—sure, but he wasn’t going to be able to garrote anybody. Pins on his medals, big deal. Teeth. He could bite, maybe damn hard. So there was that. He could bite through one of their cheeks. And clutch with his left hand. He tested it. Yes.
So he needed them to pull him out. He’d take it from there.
He waited. Nothing. No more voices that he could hear. Stomping that faded, then faint shouts. They were looking at whatever the intelligence unit had done.
So they’d called EMS and now that was done, they were showing the cop the rest of the damage around the house. Not good. He needed them to pull him up before some EMS bunch showed up to spirit him away.
He took a breath, deep as he could, and let his pain possess him. He knew how to manage pain, and he’d been doing that, but now it was time to change his approach. As he let out the breath, he made himself scream.
It worked amazingly well. Damned well. He took another breath, did it again. The sound was odd, a lost, bansheelike howl, and it caused the river of pain to start flowing again.
It also caused the trap door to open. “EMS’ll be along directly,” the new voice said.
Then that other voice again, somehow gentler, thinner, “He’s from our world and he’s evil, you have to let us—”
“I don’t have to let you do one damn thing, Doctor Winters! This man is shot, he is here, and what you have to do is let me do my job.”
“He’s a criminal in our world. Wearing a military uniform but working for the enemy. He belongs to us.”
“Don’t you push me,” Matt said.
“Hey, guys, knock it off,” Wylie responded. “Martin, you’ve got gumption, after all.”
“We need to take that man back with us,” Martin insisted.
“Sounds like you need to take the whole damn Marine Corps.”
“We had a Marine Corps, too, did you know that? And they are gone. Gone! The military was done in the first wave. Worldwide. Done. So unless we can stop the seraph, they are coming here tout de suite.”
“Matt—”
“Fellas, I’m gonna show my piece here in a second, and I do hate to do that.”
“Did you know that you have an equivalent in our universe? Who is also a lifelong friend of mine, just like you are of Wylie’s? His name is Bobby. He’s disappeared and we think he’s wandering—alive but without a soul.”
“And you will be, too,” Trevor added, “if they come here. Wandering with your soul locked up just like Wylie has seen—or worse, you’ll be like that man down there, so twisted and turned around that he works for the enemy and thinks he’s working for his own kind. You’ll be just like that, and possibly within days.”
“Look, this shooting is the most serious thing to happen in this town in my entire career.”
“You should see the one my mommy shot. It looked like a big spider and when she blasted it, it sent out hot stuff that smelled like when you burn bacon.”
Listen to them! They’re your friends.
He sucked another breath, howled another howl.
“Let us take him back,” Trevor pleaded. “Let us find out what we need to know.”
“You can question him in the hospital,” Matt offered.
Wylie laughed scornfully. “Oh, for shit’s sake, Matthew, this cat needs to be waterboarded at the very least. He needs a live rat stuffed in that eye socket. At the very fricking least. Hospital. Do you put a goddamn cobra in a hospital?”
“If you’re me, you sure as hell do. In an animal hospital. Departmental requirement, all injured animals are provided treatment.”
“That is not what I meant.”
The ambulance was coming soon, so Al had to make a maximum effort here, a supereffort, or this was not going to come out right. He had more than one job to do, he knew that now, because he had to kill every one of these damn people, especially the ones from the his own universe.
How had things gone so wrong? He had to kill them and get back and warn General Samson that things were out of control, they were way out of control.
Then the cop came down into the crawl space. Just like that, he was standing over him. This was his chance, his only chance.
As the fool bent down, he reached up and pushed the pistol out of the holster with the heel of his hand.
It hit his thigh with a thud that shook him but which he didn’t feel.
“Excuse me,” the cop said, reaching down.
Al was faster. Al got the butt of the weapon between thumb and fore-finger. He felt along the side of it, and got his finger around the trigger.
He raised the weapon.
“Shit, he’s got my gun! He’s got my fucking—”
He shot upward wildly, through the floor. There were cries from above. He had no way to know if he’d hit anybody, so he shot again and again, until there was only one bullet left.
By now, the cop had skittered back up there, too, and they were all yelling.
He knew what he had to do because he knew the stakes. They needed information that he did indeed possess and it sounded as if they were going to drag it out of him with pliers. They would succeed, too. Our expertise at torture was child’s play compared to what these bastards sounded capable of.
Give it to them! Tell them everything!
There was one gateway they knew nothing about. But he knew about it, because he’d been taken through it, and they were not going to find that out.
They couldn’t destroy the seraph, not even close, but they might slow things down, and that was the issue, wasn’t it, because every day after the twenty-first, things were going to get harder, and around the twenty fifth, the gateways would once again close, and Abaddon would be denied all but minor access for another thirteen thousand years. They’d have to go back to sending through agents provocateurs to derange human civilization, cause wars, spread starvation and greed and confusion, and keep the bastards weak.
Keep YOUR people weak, you mean. Listen to yourself, General, you’re thinking with the enemy.
He got the barrel of the gun nestled under his chin, prayed to the good lord above that he had killed the man he’d been sent to kill, and pulled the trigger.
Then he climbed up out of the crawl space and into the kitchen. Wylie, whom Al had been sent to kill, was unhurt. They were all unhurt.
And Al was elated.
The next second, he understood that the person still lying down there in that crawl space with a splayed head was him. And, all at once, he realized what he had done. “Uh, hey! Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Sorry!”
He remembered the Mountain, going down into the rock with that woman, Captain Mazle. He realized that she had been seraph. Samson was one of them, too. They were heavily disguised and they used drugs to enable them to live in our air, and they had stolen his will.
Needles, sharp scissors, clipped flesh wobbling in silver trays—brain being removed, brain being installed.
They had stolen his memory. They had subverted his honor.
This soldier owes his duty to his country, NOT TO THEM!
He’d been working for the enemy.
As he watched, EMS technicians came running in. He watched them jump down into the crawl space.
“I can tell you what you need to know,” he said.
The cop hurried out behind the EMS doctors. Wylie and his family came together, holding each other. Martin and Trevor left, and began to move off down the hill.
Al ran outside. “Wait! Listen to me! I made a mistake, but I can help you!” He went up to them. He shouted into Martin’s face, “Listen to me! I can help you!”
Nothing. He grabbed Martin—and his hands went through him. Martin shuddered and said, “I feel like a goose just walked over my grave.”
“Dad, we have a problem here, because when we go back, we’re gonna hit really fast water. Remember, in our world, the Saunders is in flood.”
Al could hear every word. “Can you hear me?” he bellowed.
“Yeah, that’s right, we can’t cross, not with the flooding on the other side.”
“What about the Hummer?”
“Yeah!”
No! NO! You fools, it’ll float right down the river!
They started back up the hill. “It’s full of dead seraph.”
“Take ’em with us, save Wylie and Matt a lotta trouble.”
“Plus, the back’s caked with venom. They must’ve brought that busted up outrider with them in it.”
Al had followed them. He was right with them, just inches away.
LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN NOW!
They set about pushing reptile bodies into the back of the Humvee.
Al inventoried his situation. You still exist, you can think, you can see and hear, you can move effortlessly wherever you want to go. But how in hell do you communicate? A quick review of his knowledge of ghosts and such, and the answer was immediately clear: you don’t.
He was a damn ghost, was what he was.
But no, this ghost was no cute little Casper and—he hoped—no raging banshee. He had a much larger vision of his life than before. His conscience was very, very powerful now. He saw deep into the arrogance that had made him who he was, the entire falsity of it, and how profound feelings of worthlessness were the foundation of the ego that had led him across all his life, all the way to this final predicament.
He knew now who he was, he knew the mistakes he had made, and he knew just exactly how to help the people of his world turn everything around. They could completely defeat Abaddon—these people, this man and this boy, if only they knew what he did. He had to tell them—but he couldn’t make them hear him or see him.
Martin and Trevor opened the doors of the Hummer and shoved two gray, lifeless seraph bodies into the back, then, as an afterthought, Trevor pocketed one of their hand weapons. Al knew those weapons, electrical-centrifugal handguns that could propel thousands of light-weight plastic rounds at five thousand clicks an hour. The only sound they made was the crackle of the rounds breaking the sound barrier, but they could slice a man in half a mile away. Or a dozen men…or a thousand.
“How do these work?” Martin asked.
“Let’s test ’em.”
Holy shit, be careful!
“It doesn’t look very lethal,” Trevor commented.
Martin held one of the black disks away from his body, pointing its three short barrels in the direction of some trees. He pressed the two triggers, top and bottom. There was a brief snarl, and three of the trees literally flew apart, a foot-wide chunk of their trunks turned instantly to sawdust.
“What is this thing?”
The U.S. military has the same thing. Bigger, vehicle mounted.
“It’s a seraph weapon,” Trevor said, producing a dark blue box with seraph hieroglyphics on it. “Here’s some ammo.”
“Wylie and Nick would love this.”
“You like them. Their macho and their guns and all.”
“They’re winners, Dad. This whole universe—it works better than ours, it’s more dynamic.”
“It’s been at war with itself for a hundred years.”
“And we live in a world of kingdoms and empires where nobody’s really free.”
“We’re free.”
“We are and the French are and the English are, at least at home. But look at the rest of it, Dad, it’s a vast system of slavery—orderly, easy to live in, but—”
The Hummer roared to life. Al watched, no longer trying to stop them. He knew that he couldn’t. The dead did not communicate with the living. Just didn’t.
So when you finally understand and you can tell them everything they need to know, this happens.
They closed the doors and drove the Hummer down toward the bank of the Saunders—here, flowing gently. There were places where you could jump across it, even, but certainly not into another universe.
They needed to know about the seraph headquarters, deep underground and just a few miles from here, had to be told what he had remembered about being in there.
If they could enter it, they could free millions of trapped souls, they could wreck the power systems, maybe even stop the lenses from functioning. They could cause core damage to Abaddon’s plans, maybe kill Mazle and Samson, even.
He raced down to the Hummer, shot into it right through one of the windows. “Hear me! HEAR ME!”
“There’s the gateway,” Martin told Trevor.
“Is it big enough for this thing?”
“They got it through.”
Maybe this was good, maybe the gateway was too small, maybe the Hummer wouldn’t fit and they wouldn’t kill themselves, the damn fools.
“Do we just aim at it or what? I’m not sure I know how to go about this.”
“I’m not sure, either, Dad.”
Don’t try, please.
“We have to try.”
Please.
As Martin backed the Hummer up, Al did everything he could think of, attempting to project his thoughts into Martin’s mind, actually going inside his body where his organs were sloshing and his blood was surging. He went directly into the brain, but even that didn’t help. He could perceive the gray matter like a pulsating, sparking fog all around him, but he couldn’t do anything to affect thought from in here, either.
The Hummer went roaring toward the gateway. Al saw the diamond-shaped crystalline object much more clearly than he’d been able to in life, and saw it expand smoothly, almost obediently, to accommodate the Hummer. So it was going to go through, they were going to be in it, and they were going to be drowned.
He saw black water, roiling, churning, and in it what looked like people, swimming hard. Then the Hummer hit with a huge splash, and the gateway closed and was gone.
He was moving fast, and sailed right across the stream and into the woods beyond. But he was still in this universe.
He rushed back across the river, looked for the gateway, could not find it. But he didn’t belong here, this wasn’t right.
He rushed up and down the river bank, trying to find a flicker of the gateway.
Even when he’d seen the president die and known—known—that Samson had somehow done it, he had not acted. Instead, he’d gone to Cheyenne Mountain to take a new job, because he’d wanted the promotion.
What had he been thinking? How could he have so blinded himself?
In this state, he was finding that he was becoming naked to himself, seeing past the self-deception that had defined his life.
He was seeing how loveless, how empty it had been. A useless, silly journey, his wife dead early and no further attempt to find love, and love all that mattered.
In this state, he was revealed to himself, and he saw clearly that his willful blindness had led to a great catastrophe, and there was no way for him to justify himself.
He found himself back a very long time ago, sitting on the side porch at home on a night in July, with music drifting across the evening air. He saw a girl he had known then, a girl called Nellie, who had been full of love for him.
Had he let himself accept her, had he chosen the humble life that being with her offered, he would be soaring now, flying above all these cares instead of sinking into this pit of regret.
He wasn’t just sinking into despair, either, he was becoming involved with the actual ground. He was sinking into the earth itself. Above him, he could sense realms past imagining, where things like the walls between universes had no meaning and time itself was only a memory.
He was falling, but he wanted to rise.
He had to rise, it was heaven, he was seeing heaven and he had to rise!
Then he thought of the souls Samson had trapped. They belonged there, they were part of heaven, but they had literally been stolen from God to be bought and sold, their memories and emotions stripped from them like ripe fruit and consumed into the darkness of demon hearts.
It was the greatest of all evils, to kidnap the good into hell, but that’s what they were doing—or rather, trying.
He would fight. He would do battle with Samson.
But he was already lower, sinking into the grass, and below him he could see black halls and hear desolate cries.
He strove, he struggled, he fought. Above him, love and forgiveness shimmered, above him freedom beckoned. He tasted the greatest agony there is, that of being unable to rise to heaven.
But then, he thought, perhaps he could save himself. There was something he could do, perhaps. One thing. Wouldn’t work, probably. But he could try.
AS SOON AS MARTIN AND Trevor had left, Wylie had found himself able to write again. He and Brooke read over what he had just completed.
“Did they drown?” she asked.
“God forbid. The key thing here is that Al North knows something that can help them but his soul is here, still on this side, so if he thinks about it clearly enough, I’m going to pick up on it, I think.”
She sat reading the screen, scrolling, then reading more. “Is he…what’s happening to him? What’s he sinking into?”
“My best guess is the core of the planet. Maybe the way you live makes your soul weigh more or less. If you weigh too much—have too little love and too much greed, essentially—you sink. And then I guess you just stay there, trapped. Cooking, given that the core is hot.”
“But the universe has an end. What then?”
“I think the evil are forgotten.”
“But we need him. We need him now!”
Outside, dawn was breaking. The last phoebes were calling, the last tanagers chirping. Winter, such as it was, would drive them south any day now. They were very late to leave this year. But there was not much winter now, so they would return by February.
She came closer to him. He closed the laptop.
“Nick?” she called softly.
No answer.
“Kelsey?”
Silence.
But then she moved away. “I can feel him. He’s not going down. He’s here.”
“The world is full of watchers. We’re all on stage all the time.”
“I want privacy.”
These past days had isolated them from each other. But he had learned something from what he was seeing of Al North’s miserable afterlife. Love is the great treasure, it is what we come here to feel, and every bit of it that can be taken must be taken, because it isn’t like the other acts of life. Most everything is forgotten in death. The names, the facts, the achievements, the failures, all are left behind. But love is not left behind. Jacob’s Ladder has another name in heaven. It is Love.
She folded her arms, their signal that it wasn’t the right moment. “I feel too exposed,” she said.
“We are but players,” he said.
“I can’t do it onstage! Anyway, I’m—oh, my mind is blown. Martin and Trevor, my dear God, what’s happening to them now?”
He took her in his arms. She lay against him, and it was good for a time, in the quiet.
Soon, though, he felt something other than the beat of her heart. He raised his head. “What is that?”
“Trembling. I think, uh…the fridge?”
But it got stronger. Things began to rattle.
“Dad!”
“All right, everybody stay calm,” he shouted.
In her room, Kelsey began crying.
“Hold on, Honey!”
He wasn’t going anywhere, the house was now shaking and shuddering so hard that he couldn’t take a step. There was a tremendous crash from downstairs. He thought that the chandelier in the dining room must have collapsed, or the gun cabinet gone over in the family room. “Try to get out,” he shouted. Behind him, Brooke vomited. He grabbed her and forced one foot in front of the other, dragging her toward the bedroom door and the stairs.
Nick appeared—incredibly, with Kelsey in his arms. The sight of them galvanized Brooke, who took her little girl, and they went lurching down the back stairs. The family room was in chaos. It had indeed been the guns.
Now windows began shattering, their glass exploding into the house. Nick got the back door open, and they struggled out onto the deck, which was soaked because the pool had heaved most of its water out and the rest was splashing crazily. The woods presented a chilling spectacle, with all the limbs swaying, and a continuous thunder of cracking trunks and the sighing rumble of falling trees.
They got to the middle of the backyard, well away from the house, well away from the woods. The quake had been going now for at least two minutes, maybe three, but it felt like years, it felt like forever. There was another crash from inside the house, and the lights in Nick’s room flickered. Wylie put his arm across his son’s shoulders. His bunk bed had just collapsed.
Just one sound, then—choking, astonished sobs. Brooke. Staring at her house in horrified amazement.
The quake had ended.
“This is Kansas,” she said, her voice an awed whisper.
“Bearish had a heart attack,” Kelsey announced. Then, her voice careful, “I’m quite concerned about him.”
Wylie was looking back into the woods, where he was seeing flickering. “I think we have a fire going back in there,” he said.
“Call the fire department,” Brooke responded as she headed toward the house.
He watched his family go in, heard Brooke scream her rage when she saw the mess, heard Kelsey start to cry, then Nick’s calmer voice giving instructions.
The flickering was along the draw that drifted south down from the ridge they were on. For their view, they had paid a price, because if there was ever a fire in that draw, it would be here in minutes. Knowing this, he had prepared himself with a portable water tank, which he kept in the garage. He’d tested it and it worked well, but it was not huge, so the key was to reach the fire early.
The tank was behind his car, wedged against the wall. Worse, the garage door was jammed. Fine, he was ready for that, too. He strode across the garage and got his axe, which was lying in a heap of other tools. When he’d bought this, he’d imagined that he would take out a few trees himself, thin his woods by the sweat of his brow.
Not.
He hefted it and smashed it into one of the doors. The mechanism shook, and Nick appeared. “What’re you doing?”
“I gotta get down to that fire.”
“Here—” He reached up and pulled a lever Wylie hadn’t even known was there. Then he lifted the door. The mechanism had been locked up because the power was out.
Nick began pulling the fire pump out.
“Look, you stay with the girls. I’ll go down.”
“Dad—”
“Nick, please. You have to. They need one of us.”
“What just happened, Dad? We don’t have earthquakes here.”
“I know it. Whatever it was, it’s got to do with that fire down there.”
Nick went in the house, reappeared immediately with the magnum. “Take this, Dad. I’ve got everything loaded up and we’re gonna be in the family room.”
Wylie took the magnum, stuffed it in his belt, and headed out to fight the fire. He loped down the rough little draw, the pumper bouncing along behind him on its two bicycle wheels. As he got closer, the glow became more distinct. Would fifty gallons of water be enough? And in any case, what was burning? The electrics came up the road on the other side of the ridge.
He pushed his way along a jumbled path, slowing down as he got closer to the glow. When he broke through into the clearing, he didn’t even bother to unhook the hose, let alone pump up the tank.
For a good half minute, he had to struggle to make sense of what he was seeing. It looked like a doorway into a little room. He walked closer, his feet crunching in the dry autumn grass.
It was a little room, he could see it clearly. But what the hell was it doing out here? It was like an opening into a tiny cottage, and he thought maybe he knew where the stories of the witch house in the forest came from.
It had come with the earthquake, this strange opening. Perhaps because of the quake. Or maybe its coming had caused the quake.
It was about six feet high and three wide. From inside, there glowed hard light that came from a single bulb hanging down from the room’s ceiling. He went closer yet. He was now standing directly before the room. Another step, and he would be inside. On the right, he saw a rough table with a bowl on it. The bowl was filled with hot soup, he could see it steaming. To his left was a narrow bed covered by a gray, damp looking sheet. On the opposite wall there was a window, which was blocked by a thin drape. Beyond it, he detected movement, but could see no detail through the frayed cloth.
It seemed very sad, the little room. Somebody’s little hutch. But…where was it, exactly?
Experimentally, he pushed his hand in the doorway. There was a faint pop, nothing more. Immediately, though, his hand felt warm. It felt damp. Slowly, he moved it back and forth, and observed what was without question one of the most bizarre things he had ever seen. His hand moved more slowly than his wrist, meaning that, when his moving arm reached the center of the doorway, his hand was a good two feet behind it. There was no pain and there was no sense of detachment, but the hand simply did not appear to keep up with the arm.
He snatched his hand back.
Was he, perhaps, looking into a room in Abaddon?
If so, then this might be a major opportunity. There were controls in Abaddon that kept the fourteen huge lenses that were the main gateways open into the other human world. Tonight, the seraph would pour through them in their billions.
Disrupt those controls, and you would set the seraph back. The gateways, which would be wide open tonight, would begin to close. By the twenty-fifth they would be closed entirely, not to re-open again for all those thousands of years.
The secret of Christmas was that the birth of goodness came on the day that the door to evil was closed.
This was a gateway and that little room was in Abaddon. He knew where, of course. It was General Samson’s apartment.
The “earthquake” had been local. It had involved the opening of this gateway.
Should he go through? Dare he?
It must be a trap. A temptation.
Then he noticed that the glow was less. This very unusual gateway was closing.
It could be an opportunity.
It was here that the seraph had originally attacked him.
Except, no, there was something wrong with that picture. As soon as his memories flitted back to that night, he saw Brooke and Nick and Kelsey coming up from the draw with him. And everybody was happy. They were thrilled. He was thrilled.
What?
He’d been raped by seraph marauders in this draw, trying to claw their way into a human universe that had rejected them.
The glow was dropping fast.
He stepped up to the gateway. The room on the other side looked now more like a photograph than an actual opening.
He stepped forward—and found that the surface was now thick, that it felt like stepping into a molten wall. He pushed against it, pushed harder. It was like squeezing through a mass of rubber.
And then he was stumbling forward. He tried to check himself, but windmilled across and hit the far wall hard. He sank down, feeling as if all his blood had been drained right out of him.
Then the noise hit him. Coming from outside was the most ungodly screeching and roaring he had ever heard in his life. Machinery howled, voices squalled and screamed, high and rasping and utterly alien—but not the voices of animals, no. They were shouting back and forth in a complex language, oddly peppered with any number of human words, English included. Worse, they were close by. This was a ground floor apartment.
A greasy stink of sewage and boiled meat came from the bloodred soup. The fact that it was still steaming worried him, of course, because whoever’s dinner it was would be back for it at any moment. It must be Samson’s food, meaning that he was here.
Recalling the story of the Three Bears, and the little girl who had entered their woodland cabin and found their meal ready to eat, he thought that others had passed through gateways like this before. In fact, if you read it right, you could reconstruct the entire fairy-faith of northern Europe as a chronicle of contacts with Abaddon.
He could either leave here now and try to make his way to Government House, or he could lie in wait for that monster.
Maybe he should try to steal Samson’s car. But it had a soul, didn’t it, so maybe it wouldn’t be so willing to let itself be stolen.
The safest thing would be to lie in wait.
There weren’t many places to hide in the room—just a curtain that concealed a still toilet full of puke—yellow goop that was being swarmed by flies as fat as ticks and as red as a baboon’s ass. Or no, look at the things, they weren’t flies at all, they were tiny damn bats.
He could not hide in there. He could not be near that toilet, which had, among other things, part of a rotting seraph hand in it. He knew that they were cannibals, of course, he’d seen this place before, had heard Samson think to himself that the execution fiesta he’d witnessed from the bus would mean lots of soup.
So this was some of that soup. But where was Samson? It had to be getting cold, even in the jungle heat they had here. Maybe he’d been arrested. Could’ve happened in a heartbeat. Maybe he was being tortured to death right now by that sociopathic kid of Echidna’s.
The shrieking rose, and with it came thudding from above. There were crunching noises, more cries, then a sound outside the door of somebody running downstairs. The sobs were unmistakable. A short silence followed. Then, more slowly, a heavier tread. It moved past the door.
This was not good. If somebody came in here, they’d raise the alarm and—well, he dared not allow his imagination to go there.
He decided this had been a fool’s errand. The soup was a trick. Samson was actually on the other side, and he was going to be menacing Brooke and Nick and Kelsey.
It was obvious, and what a damn fool he’d been.
He turned to go back through the gateway.
Except there was no gateway. For a moment, he simply stared at the blank wall.
The door clicked. He watched the crude wooden handle rise slowly. There was a flicker and a sputter, and he realized that the sharp light wasn’t even electric. It was carbide, a type of gas that had been used at home a hundred and fifty years ago.
They didn’t even have electricity.
The door swung open.
A gleaming creature stood there, shimmering purple-black. The vertical pupils in its eyes were bright red, the irises gold. It had in its hand a small disk with two barrels on the business end. Wylie knew what that was, and he decided not to show the magnum just now.
Slowly, carefully, he raised his hands.
The creature smiled a little, a tired smile. “I’ve been waiting for you,” it said in a rasping voice. Its English was good enough, but spoken with a curious singsong lilt that made Wylie think of the voice of a car.
Wylie had been outmaneuvered.
“Where’s Samson?”
“He is with your loved ones, Mr. Dale.”
Wylie knew what the phrase to die a thousand deaths really meant. In a situation like this, it was no cliché, but a dark expression of truth.
The creature made a very curious sound, a sort of smacking. It watched him with ghastly eagerness. He thought that they might be allergic to human dander, but they could eat human flesh, and this thing was hungry.
“At this time, come with me.”
What else was there to do? Wylie followed the creature down a steep, narrow staircase that reeked of something that had rotted dry. The walls were covered with graffiti-squiggles and lines that looked at first meaningless… and then didn’t.
They were drawings, all at child level, but done with the light and dark backward, like photographic negatives. For the most part, they were scenes of torture and murder and orgy. Some drawings showed male seraph with sticklike penises, others females with bared teeth guarding black eggs.
And as they came to the street, he saw some of them. One that looked up was the same color as Jennifer Mazle, creamy and pale, her scales glittering. Her eyes were the same as those of his captor. She gave Wylie a long, melting look as she slowly ran her tongue out and touched it with her fingers.
“A whore,” his guard said. Then some boys appeared, wearing hugely oversized T-shirts painted with images of crocodile-like creatures so perfectly rendered that they seemed about to leap off the cloth and into his face. Some of them. One had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite, an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.
They watched him with their brilliant, dead eyes, their heads moving with the clipped jerks of lizards. As he walked, he saw that the street was made of wood—in fact, of cut tree trunks fitted together with an Inca’s skill. Before them was a vehicle looking something like a horse-drawn hearse, but with a tiny barred window in the back instead of glass to reveal the coffin.
Standing in its equipage was a brown animal with fearsome, glaring eyes and purple drool dripping from its long, complex jaw. The jaw itself was metal, and appeared to be partially sprung, the way it dangled. The animal was smaller than a horse by half, but seemed made entirely of brown, wiry muscle, with the narrow, ever-twisting neck of a snake. When it saw them, it began to burp and stomp pointed, spikelike feet, which made it look as if it was dancing. Others just like it, pulling various wagons and carriages, moved up and down the street.
The door at the back of the wagon was open, and his captor made a brisk little gesture toward it and bowed. A twisted smile played on his almost lipless mouth, and his spiked teeth glittered in the brown light.
There was a hissing sound overhead, and he saw soaring past, a gorgeous green machine shaped like a horizontal teardrop with a gleaming windshield at the front of its perfectly streamlined shape. It was so different from the miserable mess in the street that it was hard to believe that it even belonged to the same world.
Then he got a terrific push, which caused him to bark his shins painfully against the edge of the wagon’s floor. He tried to turn toward his assailant, but a powerful blow brought whizzing confusion.
The door shut behind him with a dry clunk. For a moment, he could see nothing. As his eyes got used to the dimness, he examined the space he was in. It was like nothing so much as the interior of an old, zinc-lined ice chest. It was at most three feet high and five long. There were claw marks gouged in the roof and walls, and in the wooden floor, places—many of them—that had been gnawed.
He drew out the magnum, cradling it in his hand as he would the rarest diamond. This was hope.
He twisted himself around until he could see out one of the tiny, barred windows. They were not going up the great esplanade he had seen through Samson’s eyes, but along the city’s back streets. There were neon hieroglyphics everywhere, and flags overhead with more unreadable slogans on them. The place was ancient Egypt on steroids. Martin would have loved it, but he wasn’t the sucker on the spot, was he?
No, indeed, and the fear had a funny quality to it. The fear had to do with more of the knowledge he had gained. He had a soul. These people could take out your soul and put it in a damn glass tube. They could remove your memories and graft them into their own souls—eat them, as it were. They could use you for crap like running a car, and God only knew what else. In this place, the phrase the soul in the machine had a ghastly new meaning.
They went around the corner—the animal was not fast—and began to pass what appeared to be a restaurant. Behind the lighted windows, he could see gleaming red walls and a gold ceiling. Balls of light floating in midair provided illumination. Sitting in large chairs were seraphs in beautiful, shimmering suits, tight against their bodies.
Then he got what could probably and with accuracy be called the surprise of his life: there were human beings in there, too. As they trundled slowly past, he strained to see more. There was a man in a fur jacket and a white ermine fedora, not recognizable to him but obviously some kind of entertainer, maybe a rapper or rock star, there were women in silks and furs. Other men wore tuxedos, some business suits, others caftans and gallabias. Then he saw a cardinal, distinguished by the red zuchetto on his head and the red-trimmed black cassock.
On the tables before them were golden dishes beautifully decorated with garlands of greenery and white flowers. Heaped on them were roasted body parts, both seraph and human. The diners were eating busily.
Then it was gone, replaced by more of the endless gray city and its hurrying, oblivious hordes of seraph.
A stunned Wylie Dale sank down to the floor. For a time he lay there listening to the creak of the axles, feeling the steady swaying of the wagon. His blank mind held an image of that cardinal. Of the men in tuxedos, the women in evening gowns.
Who in the name of all that was holy WERE THEY?
Rich, to be sure, compared to the starved horde that crowded these streets. Human beings, movers and shakers all, living large in hell.
Or was that the whole answer? The seraph were chameleons. So maybe these weren’t human beings at all, but seraph spending time at home. Two-moon earth must have been plagued by them. It had totally ignored air pollution, and global warming was running wild there, even worse than at home.
Shape-shifted seraph had probably been running the place for centuries. They were the cardinals, the big personalities, the ministers and the kings. Like Samson. He’d ended up in control of the United States itself, and he was a shape-shifted repitilian seraph maintaining himself on drugs.
He wondered, Who in his own world might be a seraph in disguise? Who sought the ruin of souls? Who encouraged greed? Who lived by the lie that pollution didn’t matter?
Who, indeed?
He realized that he was not far from insanity, here. His mind just wanted to go inside itself. Walk in the green fields of dream, smell the flowers, above all shut this horrible world out, scrub his brain free of all knowledge of it and memory of it.
Every trembling cell of his body, every instinct that he had, every drop of his blood said the same thing: You are not supposed to know this, you are not supposed to be here, and you cannot get away, and to keep their secret, they are going to kill not just your body but your immortal soul.
But now that he had fallen into the trap, he must not freeze, he had to do everything possible to turn their trick back on them. He had to try.
Oh God, he prayed, what is the universe? How does it really work? Above all, how can I save this situation? A memory came to him of Martin and his ceaseless prayer, and he began to pray that way, also. He prayed to the healing hand that had raised Osiris after his brother had cut him to pieces, and Jesus after his passion had ended. The unseen one who bound the good by the cords of love.
They were arriving somewhere, the wagon turning, stopping. He looked out first one window and then the other, but saw only skeletal trees, huge once, no doubt rich with leaves and life, now gray and dead, clawing at the brown sky. “Mr. Dale, if you don’t mind?”
As Wylie came down, the creature added, “I was wondering if you’d autograph Alien Days for me?”
For the love of Pete, it had a paperback of the damn book and a pen in its clawed hand. Too stunned to do anything else, he took the book. Opened it to the title page. “Do you want me to personalize it?”
“Oh, hey, yeah. Make that out to me.”
Confused, he looked up, to find himself staring into a very human, and very familiar face—Senator Louis Bowles, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, senior senator from Utah.
Senator Bowles smiled, then shuddered and shifted back into a long-faced vampiric horror, its scales glistening, its eyes glaring with evil energy.
He finished the inscription—to Senator Bowles… and as he did so, saw the hand that was doing the writing, and then also the hand that was holding the book. He saw long, thin fingers of the palest tan, ending in black claws, neatly manicured.
He saw the wrists where they were visible outside the sleeves of his jacket. Narrow, scaled, shimmering with the gemstone sheen of snake-skin. He looked at the hand that held his Mont Blanc, turned it over, watching the light play on the scales. Then he raised his fingers to his cheek, and felt beneath their tips the delicate shudder of more scales.
He hadn’t come to an alien earth at all.
He was a shape-shifter himself.
He had come home.