2012 (30 page)

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.

NINETEEN

DECEMBER 20 

GATEWAYS

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.”