Dragon Tears (40 page)

It was as if everything in the world had suddenly died, from the wind to all of humanity, leaving a planetwide cemetery where grass and flowers and trees and mourners were made from the same granite as the tombstones.

At times in recent years, she had considered chucking police work and moving to some cheap shack on the edge of the Mojave, as far away from people as she could get. She lived so Spartanly that she had substantial savings; living as a desert rat, she could make the money last a long time. The barren, peopleless expanses of sand and scrub and rock were immensely appealing when compared to modern civilization.

But the Pause was far different from the peace of a sun-baked desert landscape, where life was still a part of the natural order and where civilization, sick as it was, still existed somewhere over the horizon. After only about ten non-minutes of silence and stillness as deep as death, Connie longed for the flamboyant folly of the human circus. The species was too fond of lying, cheating, envy, ignorance, self-pity, self-righteousness, and utopian visions that always led to mass murder—but until and if it destroyed itself, it harbored the potential to become nobler, to take responsibility for its actions, to live and let live, and to earn the stewardship of the earth.

Hope. For the first time in her life, Connie Gulliver had begun to believe that hope, in itself, was a reason to live and to tolerate civilization as it was.

But Ticktock, as long as he lived, was the end of hope.

“I hate this son of a bitch like I’ve never hated anyone,” she said. “I want to get him. I want to waste him so bad I can hardly stand it.”

“To get him, first we have to stay alive,” Harry reminded her.

“Let’s go.”

Initially, staying on the move in that motionless world seemed to be the wisest thing they could do. If Ticktock was faithful to his promise, using only his eyes and ears and wits to track them, their safety increased in direct proportion to the amount of distance they put between him and them.

As Harry ran with Connie from one lonely street to another, he suspected there was a better than even chance that the psycho would keep his word, stalking them only by ordinary means and releasing them unharmed from the Pause if he could not catch them in one hour of real time. The bastard was, after all, demonstrably immature in spite of his incredible power, a child playing a game, and sometimes children took games more seriously than real life.

Of course, when he released them, it would still be twenty-nine minutes past one in the morning when clocks finally started ticking again. Dawn remained five hours away. And while Ticktock might play this particular game-within-a-game strictly according to the rules he had outlined, he would still intend to kill them by dawn. Surviving the Pause would only win them the slim chance to find him and destroy him once time started up again.

And even if Ticktock broke his promise, using some sixth sense to track them, it was smart to keep moving. Perhaps he had pinned psychic tags on them, as Harry had speculated earlier; in which case, if he
did
cheat, he could find them regardless of where they went. By remaining on the move, at least they were safe unless and until he could catch them or get ahead by anticipating their next turn.

From street to alley to street, across yards and between silent houses they ran, clambering over fences, through a school playground, footfalls vaguely metallic, where every shadow seemed as permanent as iron, where neon lights burned steadier than any Harry had ever seen before and painted eternal rainbows on the pavement, past a man in a tweed coat walking his Scottie dog and both of them as motionless as bronze figures.

They sprinted along a narrow stream bed where runoff from the storm earlier in the day was time-frozen but not at all like ice: clearer than ice, black with reflections of the night and marked by pure silver highlights instead of frost-white crystallization. The surface was not flat, either, like a frozen winter creek, but rippled and runneled and spiraled by turbulence. Where the stream splashed over rocks in its course, the air was hung with unmoving sprays of glittering water resembling elaborate sculptures made from glass shards and beads.

Though staying on the move was desirable, continued flight soon became impractical. They were already tired and stiff with pain when they began their run; each additional exertion took a geometrically greater toll from them.

Although they seemed to move as easily in this petrified world as in the one to which they were accustomed, Harry noticed that they did not create a wind of their own when they ran. The air parted around them like butter around a knife, but no turbulence arose from their passage, which indicated that the air was objectively denser than it appeared subjectively. Their speed might be considerably less than it appeared to them, in which case movement required more effort than they perceived.

Furthermore, the coffee, brandy, and hamburger that Harry had eaten churned sourly in his stomach. Acidic flares of indigestion burned through his chest.

More important, block by block as they fled through that town-size mausoleum, an inexplicable inversion of biological response increased their misery. Although such strenuous activity should have left them overheated, they
grew steadily colder. Harry couldn’t work up a sweat, not even an icy one. His toes and fingers felt as if he had slogged across an Alaskan glacier, not a southern California beach resort.

The night itself felt no colder than before the Pause. Indeed, perhaps not quite as cool, since the crisp breeze off the ocean had fallen into stillness with everything else. The cause of the queer internal chill was evidently something other than the air temperature, more mysterious and profound—and frightening.

It was as if the world around them, its abundant energy trapped in stasis, had become a black hole of sorts, relentlessly absorbing their energy, sucking it out of them, until degree by degree they would become as inanimate as everything else. He suspected it was imperative that they begin to conserve what resources they had left.

When it became incontrovertibly clear that they would have to stop and find a promising place to hide, they had left a residential neighborhood and entered the east end of a canyon with scrub-covered slopes. Along the three-lane service road, lit by rows of sodium-vapor arc lamps that transformed the night into a two-tone black and yellow canvas, the flat ground was occupied by semi-industrial businesses of the type that image-conscious towns like Laguna Beach carefully tucked away from primary tourist routes.

They were walking now, shivering. She was hugging herself. He turned up his collar and pulled the halves of his sportcoat tight together.

“How much of the hour has passed?” Connie asked.

“Damned if I know. I’ve lost all time sense.”

“Half an hour?”

“Maybe.”

“Longer?”

“Maybe.”

“Less?”

“Maybe.”

“Shit.”

“Maybe.”

To their right, in a sprawling recreational-vehicle storage yard behind heavy-duty chain-link fence crowned with razor wire, motor homes stood side by side in the gloom, like row after row of slumbering elephants.

“What’re all these cars?” Connie wondered.

They were parked on both sides of the road, half on the narrow shoulders and half on the pavement, squeezing the three-lane street to no more than two lanes. It was curious, because none of those businesses would have been open when the Pause hit. In fact, all of them were dark, and had closed up seven to eight hours earlier.

On their right, a landscape-maintenance company occupied a concrete-block building behind which a tree and shrub nursery was terraced halfway up the canyon wall.

Directly under one of the pole lamps, they came upon a car in which a young couple was necking. Her blouse was open, and his hand was inside, marble palm cupping marble breast. As far as Harry was concerned, their frozen expressions of ardent passion, tinted sodium-yellow and glimpsed through the car windows, was about as erotic as a couple of corpses tumbled together on a bed.

They passed two automobile-repair shops on opposite sides of the three-lane, each specializing in different foreign makes. The businesses fronted their own parts junkyards heaped with cannibalized vehicles and fenced with high chain-link.

Cars continued to line the street, blocking driveways to the businesses. A boy of about eighteen or nineteen, shirtless in jeans and Rockports, as thoroughly gripped by the Pause as everyone they had seen thus far, was sprawled across the hood of a black ‘86 Camaro, arms out to his sides and palms up, staring at the occluded sky as if there was something to see up there, a stupid expression of drugged-out bliss on his face.

“This is weird,” Connie said.

“Weird,” Harry agreed, flexing his hands to keep the knuckles from growing too stiff with the cold.

“But you know what?”

“Familiar somehow,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Along the final length of the three-lane blacktop, all of the businesses were warehouses. Some were built of concrete block covered with dust-caked stucco, stained with rust from water pouring off corrugated metal roofs during countless rainy seasons. Others were entirely of metal, like Quonset huts.

The parked cars grew more numerous in the final block of the street, which dead-ended in the crotch of the canyon. In some places they were doubled up, narrowing the road to one lane.

At the end of the street, the last of all the buildings was a large warehouse unidentified by any company name. It was one of the stucco-coated models with a corrugated steel roof. A giant
FOR RENT
banner was strung across the front, with a Realtor’s phone number.

Security lights shone down the face of the structure, across metal roll-up doors large enough to admit big tractor-and-trailer rigs. At the southwest corner of the building was a smaller, man-size door at which stood two tough-looking guys in their early twenties, steroid-assisted physiques bulked up beyond what weight-lifting and diet alone could achieve.

“Couple of bouncers,” Connie said as they approached the Pause-frozen men.

Suddenly the scene made sense to Harry. “It’s a rave.”

“On a weekday?”

“Must be someone’s special party, birthday or something.”

Imported from England a few years ago, the rave phenomenon appealed to teenagers and those in their early twenties who wanted to party nonstop until dawn, beyond the eye of all authorities.

“Smart place to hide?” Connie wondered.

“As smart as any, I guess, and smarter than some.”

Rave promoters rented warehouses and industrial buildings
for a night or two, moving the event from one spot to another to avoid police detection. Locations of upcoming raves were advertised in underground newspapers and in fliers handed out at record stores, nightclubs, and schools, all written in the code of the subculture, using phrases like “The Mickey Mouse X-press,” “American X-press,” “Double-Hit Mickey,” “Get X-rayed,” “Dental Surgery Explained,” and “Free Balloons for the Kiddies.” Mickey Mouse and X were nicknames for a potent drug more commonly known as Ecstasy, while references to dentistry and balloons meant that nitrous oxide—or laughing gas—would be for sale.

Avoidance of police detection was essential. The theme of every illegal rave party—as opposed to tamer imitations in the legitimate rave nightclubs—was sex, drugs, and anarchy.

Harry and Connie walked past the bouncers, through the door, and into the heart of chaos, but a chaos to which the Pause had brought a tenuous and artificial order.

The cavernous room was lit by half a dozen red and green lasers, perhaps a dozen yellow and red spots, and strobes, all of which had been blinking and sweeping over the crowd until the Pause stilled them. Now lances of colorful, fixed light found some partiers and left others in shadows.

Four or five hundred people, mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, but some as young as fifteen, were frozen in either the act of dancing or just hanging out. Because the disc jockeys at raves invariably played highly energized techno dance music with a rapidly pounding bass that could shake walls, many of the young celebrants had been Paused in bizarre poses of flailing and gyrating abandon, bodies contorted, hair flying. The men and boys were for the most part dressed in jeans or chinos with flannel shirts and baseball caps worn backward, or with preppy sportcoats over T-shirts, though some were decked out all in black. The girls and young women wore a wider variety of clothes, but every outfit was provocative—tight,
short, low-cut, translucent, revealing; raves were, after all, celebrations of the carnal. The silence of graves had replaced the booming music, as well as the screams and shouts of the partiers; the eerie light combined with the stillness to impart an anti-erotic cadaverous quality to the exposed curves of calves, thighs, and breasts.

As he and Connie moved through the crowd, Harry noticed that the dancers’ faces were stretched in grotesque expressions which probably had conveyed excitement and hopped-up gaiety when they were animated. In freeze-frame, however, they were eerily transformed into masks of rage, hatred, and agony.

In the fiery glow produced by the lasers and spots, and by the psychedelic images that film projectors beamed onto two huge walls, it was easy to imagine that this was no party, after all, but a diorama of Hell, with the damned writhing in pain and wailing for release from their excruciating torment.

By seining out the rave’s noise and movement, the Pause might have captured the truth of the event in its net. Perhaps the ugly secret, beneath the flash and thunder, was that these revelers, in their obsessive search for sensation, were not truly having fun on any fundamental level, but were suffering private miseries from which they frantically sought relief that eluded them.

Harry led Connie out of the dancers into the spectators who were gathered around the perimeter of the enormous vaulted chamber. A few had been caught by the Pause in small groups, in the midst of shouted conversations and exaggerated laughter, faces strained and muscles corded in their necks as they had struggled to compete with the thunderous music.