2012 (8 page)

Martin scoured the street for Lindy’s Dodge. He put in a call to her, but could not get a signal.

“We need to get out of the street,” Bobby cried. “Everybody, run, run NOW!”

Despite his lack of religious belief, Martin found himself begging God in his heart to bring his family to him safely. He breathed the words in and out, in and out: God, please, God, please, and tried to send some sort of protection to his beloved and their kids, his striving preteen boy and his darling little girl.

The object slid over Rite Way Drugs, then backed off to the Target end of town.

Then Lindy was there, getting out of the car with Winnie and Trevor-and the disk was there, too, sliding back across the sky as if it was on a tabletop.

“For God’s sake, RUN,” Martin screamed at them. “Shoot at the goddamn thing, Tom, shoot at it!”

The rifle cracked, cracked again-and the thing slid away into the darkness. Bullets were rumored to slow them down, but not for long.

Lindy and the kids came toward Martin as if in a slow motion nightmare, like ballet dancers executing a pas de deux, like a little boat drifting in a calm.

The thing reappeared, speeding into view at rooftop level. Electric fire crackled along its edge, spitting sparks into the air. The Palens raced into the church, and Martin realized that his family was not going to make it. He ran toward them, his blood pumping, his legs going fast but not fast enough, as the thing dipped low over Main Street not a hundred yards behind them, and began moving forward. It was about to hit them with the light, he knew it.

“Run, Lindy!”

Whereupon Lindy, God love her, turned and shouldered her bird gun and let go four blasts of buckshot.

The thing seemed unaffected-bullets delayed them slightly, but buckshot apparently not at all.

The kids reached him. “Get in the church!” he shouted to them, pushing them toward the lighted door. Lindy, he saw, had returned to the car for a backpack of provisions.

The bell tolled, the siren moaned, and the congregation sang in ragged chorus, “…he’ll take and shield thee; thou wilt find a solace there.”

Bobby yelled, “MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!”

Lindy came out of the car. She seemed to be under water, she was moving so slow. And then Martin saw why: she was falling, she’d tripped. He ran toward her.

Reg Todd called, “We’re closing the doors!” Winnie and Trevor realized what was happening and began to shout, “Mom! Dad!”

“Martin, it’s right over you, it’s starting to glow!” Bobby pulled out his service revolver and fired at it. The street around Martin began to turn red. Still he ran toward Lindy, he could not conceive of abandoning her.

Her skin was red in the red light from above. He threw an arm around her and began pulling her forward. As they got to the church steps, she gained her footing and began to help him. As she fell into the foyer, Maggie Hastert came to her rescue, and the two women staggered into the last pew as Bobby and Martin slammed the doors.

“Mom,” Trevor shouted.

“Mommy!” Winnie shrilled, the littlest finally realizing that something was not right in her world.

“Momma is all right,” Lindy managed to gasp.

“You’re crying,” Trevor said.

“We’re all crying, Trevor,” Martin said.

“Are we supposed to be crying?” Winnie asked.

Martin moved into the pew with Lindy, with their kids clinging to them, and the Hasterts made room for them. Given that Rose had arrived with their kids, Bobby and his family were okay, too-for the moment.

Reg Todd went into the pulpit. Martin liked him, had hunted with him when they were boys. “Everybody’s praying now, all over the world, calling on the power of God to defend the soul. There is wisdom for us in the Bible, the book of the soul written by God, written for this time when we are discovering our souls because we are losing them. So you listen now. If the light comes-“

There was a scream. Everybody looked around, but it had come from outside, from above the building. It was repeated, and children all over the small nave began screaming, too, and Peg Tarr cried out, and Bobby tried to calm her down and she shook him off. “It’s my husband,” she screamed, “I know it’s him, I can feel it!” She backed away from her neighbor, pushing into Doctor Willerson. “Where’s the Air Force? Where are the planes?” she bellowed. He shrank away from her, fumbling as his glasses flew from his face. “The planes,” she screamed, “the planes!” She grabbed his shoulders and yanked at him so hard she ripped his coat, and he reached back and slugged her, which snapped her head to the side and made spit fly, and made a sound like an exploding lightbulb.

Then the scream outside repeated. It was a human sound, and involved such extraordinary anguish that everyone in the church screamed with it, a roaring agony that, in embracing it, only made it more terrible. Children collapsed, their mothers going down with them. Ron Biggs of Biggs John Deere, fourth generation in tractors, emptied his twelve-gauge into the ceiling, a Remington notched with the lives of forty-one bucks and happy days.

As bits of plaster and angels and clouds rained down, a hideous scraping sound slid along the shingles, ending with a thud in the side yard.

Silence, then, followed by little Kimberly Wilson singing: “A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go, heigh-ho the derry-o…” until her mother hushed her.

Total silence. This was not what they had been expecting. Now, a murmur among the congregation. Bobby looked to Martin. “Any idea?” Martin shook his head. This wasn’t supposed to involve people being dropped onto roofs, but that’s what it had sounded like. “Doctor,” Bobby said, “let’s you and I go out and take a look around.”

Rose said, “No!”

“Rose, I-“

“Bobby, no! You stay in here.”

There was a silent look between them. She knew Bobby’s duty, and finally turned away, her eyes swimming.

Bobby and Doctor Willerson crossed the room, went out the vestry door. The body-if that’s what it was-had fallen down that side of the church.

The congregation stood in silence, waiting, some bowed in prayer, other people simply staring.

When they returned a moment later, the doctor said into the silent, watching faces, “I believe it is Mayor Tarr. He’s dead from a fall. He had a rifle. I believe he was on the roof trying to defend us, and lost his footing.”

Peg fainted.

As Ginger Forester and her boyfriend, Lyndon Lynch, who had been sitting with her, moved to help, there came more screaming, fainter, but from many more throats.

One of the other groups was under attack. Bobby went to the main door, opened it for a moment, then returned. “It’s Saint Peter’s,” he announced.

Mal Holmes said, “This is insane! What are we doing just waiting like this. Tarr had a point, let’s go outside, let’s put up a fight. For God’s sake, let’s fight!”

“Our fight is in our prayers,” Reg shouted.

Mrs. James cried out loudly, then, and shook her fist, a gesture that must have been repeated billions upon billions of times on earth over these past terrible weeks.

“I want to read now,” Reg called out. “I have a text. And then we will pray. We will pray all night and the children can sleep in the pews.”

“No way am I going to sleep,” Trevor said.

“Me neither!” Winnie added.

“Okay, kids, hush,” Lindy whispered.

Winnie pulled on Martin’s pant leg. “I’m real thirsty,” she whispered.

“I’ve, uh-oh, it’s in the street,” Lindy said. “When that thing-“

“We have plenty,” Jim said, producing a bottle of Ayers water.

“This is from the Book of Isaiah,” Reg announced. “Listen to this. Isaiah fifty-five, you can turn to it in the pew Bibles, it’s page four hundred and thirty-five.” He read, “‘So shall you summon a nation you knew not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you, because of the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, who has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call him while he is near. Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked man his thoughts; let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.’”

At that moment, the lights went out. There was a roar from the whole congregation, ringing loud, shrill with terror.

“Let us pray,” Reg called into the din. “LET US PRAY!” Voices dropped, flashlights came on.

But there also came another light, crawling along the tops of the stained glass windows of the birth, youth, and ministry of Jesus that lined the west wall.

Martin watched, unable to turn away, transfixed with horrified fascination.

As the congregation realized that it was there, silence slowly fell. Became absolute. They watched it coming down, this most terrible weapon that had ever been in the world, and yet so strange, so unexpected.

As a scientist, Martin tried to use what skills of observation he could muster. It moved like a thick liquid, this light. We had slowed light down, stopped it, reversed it, but had never created anything like this.

When it began to come in, there was a sigh in the room, just the softest of sighs, no more, and a little girl’s voice piping, “Look at the pretty, Mommy, the pretty is on Jesus!”

The painted glass with the bearded figure on the cross, the rough rocks, and the praying virgin in her chipped blue glittered with new life as the light ran along them, seemed to pause as if it was looking out across the congregation, evaluating them, scanning them, tasting of them…and then it came on, glaring on their upturned faces.

“Dad, is this an alien being?” Trevor asked.

“It’s Lucifer,” Winnie said. “Be quiet or he’ll come after us.”

Some children began to cry, and a ripple of panic spread. Parents held them.

Martin saw immediately that the thing moved like something alive-and something that felt no need to be careful, not the way it came surging in the windows, filling the room with its slicing glare. He was fascinated by its motion, he couldn’t help himself. It was a little like the spread of a membrane, he thought. But then it came forward so quickly that there were shrieks of literal agony, the terror was so extreme.

Old Man Michaels dropped to the floor with a thud. He went gray, and Martin thought he’d probably died. A stench of urine and feces filled the air. Children broke away from their parents and began running toward the doors, in their terror imagining that they could escape. Mamie Leonard dashed after Kevin, but the boy reached the vestry door and threw it open.

Glare literally gushed in. The boy cried out and jumped back, but the light swept around him. Martin observed only a flicker, and the child went still, standing in the body of it, surrounded by it, his jaw agape. His mother raced to the far side of the nave, and stood there shrieking again and again, sorrowing cries that dominated the room.

Reg cried out, “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,’ says the Lord. ‘As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.’”

The light moved and expanded, crossing the sanctuary and flowing down into the nave. People got up on the pews to keep their feet out of it, but Martin knew it was useless, it would do its infamous bloom any second, and then, well he could not imagine it. He just could not.

There was no sign of any biological material. It was definitely a plasma, he could see that. But it had the stability of a highly organized membrane. He tried to think of any bas-relief, any wall painting, any sculpture anywhere in the world that reminded him of this, and could not.

This was new, he was pretty sure, to the experience of mankind.

“Pray now,” Reg said, “pray and hold the children and be ready with the guns.”

Martin put his arm around Trevor and Lindy picked up Winnie, and Martin felt the pistol in his pocket. He’d loaded it with hollow points. A shot to the head would destroy a child instantly, but Martin did not frankly know if he could do it. God willing, Homeland Security was right about the value of congregating and they would survive.

“Shoot it,” a voice said. “God help us, shoot it!”

“Don’t do that!” Bobby shouted. “That spreads it, we all know. That-“

They were suddenly surrounded by the strangest thing any of them had ever experienced, a flickering mass of colors that hurt and felt good against the skin at the same time…and felt like somebody was watching you, not with malice, but with a sort of evaluative skill that seemed almost…professional.

Martin thought, we are destroyed, a destroyed species. This is how we end, killed in a way we do not understand by something beyond our knowledge. And then also thought, But it’s the way cattle die every day, or used to.

He glimpsed a man, lean, dark hat over his eyes, face of a snake, sliding toward him. He shook the hallucination off. They’d all heard stories about this phenomenon, it was the mind trying to force the impossible into some form that it might be able to understand and thus to fight.

Now Trevor closed his eyes. “Dad, I’m seeing a sort of snake.” He opened them. “In my mind. Watching me in my mind.”

Children’s voices were raised, “There’s a cobra, Mommy, a dragon, Daddy, a python…” and he knew where the ancient tale of the snake originated. It was how the mind of man gave form to disincarnate evil.

There came a dull sound, like one of those deep thuds that never seem to find an explanation, that one sometimes hears back in the woods. But something had changed. Reg had changed. Where he had been in his pulpit with his Bible in his hand, wearing an old gray suit with no tie, now stood a man who appeared to be wearing the most intricately beautiful colored coat ever devised. But it was not cloth, the colors came from tiny, exquisitely detailed memories, each one full of life and motion, swarming around him like living jewels. He threw back his head and roared like a maddened gorilla.

A passage from the Bible occurred to Martin, the one about the coat of many colors. He understood the message: Joseph’s coat had been his soul. The old biblical authors, therefore, had known what souls looked like. They were seeing Reg’s soul being sucked from his body the way a monkey might suck the pulp from an orange.