End Time (72 page)

Once to get rid of the Webster enhancement, and once more for Mrs. Quaid trapped in her body. The three-fingered mutant in the dingy lab coat lay slumped against the wall. Poor Mrs. Quaid looked peaceful for once, her eyes shut, her infant asleep on her chest. Relief had finally arrived, and Mrs. Quaid seemed grateful; but as for the others, the other women and their infants … The gun lay helplessly in her lap.

She glanced up to the glass wall. Bhakti stared at her from the other side. He put his hand up to the transparency and mouthed the words, “I love you, Eleanor.” And she started to choke on tears, burbling and sobbing, just glad to see him but crushed at her own weakness.

“I can't do it, Bhakti. I can't do it. I thought I could, but I can't do the others; they just look too real. I think that was the point. Make them look like us and nobody would want to hurt them. Like killing puppies or kittens,” she despaired. “I'm sorry, Bhakti.”

His voice penetrated the glass. “It's all right, Eleanor,” he reassured her. “I'll take care of it soon. I'm almost there.”

*   *   *

The survivors of the Pi R Squared complex emerged from the rusty side door of the Whiteside Meatpacking Plant and into the parking lot under orange glowing floodlights. Overhead more snow danced out of a gray sky, and jet engines whined, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away.… Billy Shadow and Cheryl and Beatrice waded into the snow. Three- and four-foot drifts sloughed up against the fencing and buried a few parked cars. The approaching dawn lit the slowly swirling mass of clouds in the eye of the storm.

The two escape pods from the Gulfstream jet had landed close to where programmed, on a postage stamp–sized drop zone beside an abandoned factory in the middle of nowhere. However, the two rescue cylinders had come to completely different ends. One landed intact, its emergency beacon/locator strobe flashing blue-red, its long delicate parasail wings bringing it gently home. The wasp-nosed missile sat on the snow like a winterized dragonfly, bristling with pitot tubes, the lifeboat body-hatch open to the sky.

The other silver cylinder hadn't been so lucky. The second escape pod skimmed in over the factory roof, buffeted by crosswinds, and clipped a smokestack; you could see the wing embedded in the brick of the stack tower where it had torn clean off the lifeboat. The needle-nosed craft had dropped like a broken toy Concorde airliner. The shiny tube had crushed several vehicles, finally skewering a parked car. The silver skin of the craft seemed burnt, the stainless-steel cylinder scorched, a telltale rainbow hue as though superheated from within.

The Chen girl and Little Maria had climbed out of their undamaged pod and stood beside the burned lifeboat looking down into the crashed craft's cushioned interior. The fur trim on the girls' parka hoods fluttered around their faces. The three survivors who came out of the complex struggled across the parking lot and stood silently in a rough semicircle without so much as saying hello. The searchers for Lila Chen and Little Maria had finally found their girls. Finally.

The snow began to whip again as the eye of the storm started to close.

For long moments, everyone silently stared at the destroyed craft. Mostly everything had been burned to cinders: the foam crash couches, the crash belts, very little left. The interior burned clean except for the remains of the two occupants: Kid's fire-washed bones and those of the Pied Piper, all their flesh consumed.

The young man's skeleton lay on top, dismembered. His bones actually blown apart, but with nowhere to go they lay about the interior of the capsule in essentially correct order. Kid's white skeletal hands encircled Mr. P.'s bird-like neck and had snapped it in two.

The remains of the Pied Piper were another matter altogether. What lay in the scorched interior no longer looked like a man. More like the bones of an ancient flying reptile with a long name, out of the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods—millions and millions of years ago. The sharp snapping beak; the backward pointing skull crest; a flying creature as bizarre as any that ever flew.

The slender skeletal bird body lay in the incinerated crash couch, most of its bones intact, with the exception of its tapered wings. Only the faintest mark of folded quills, the curved struts, remained; fire so intense it burned the thinner bones, leaving a white powdery line on the capsule's interior.

Quietly it dawned on everyone that once upon a time Mr. P. had lived in the skin of a lizard, a flying reptile. As he fought for life, he had returned to one of his earlier life-forms. If the capsule had broken open, way up in the air, he'd have been able to fly.

“
Pteranodon longiceps,
” Beatrice murmured. The others stared at her, questions in their eyes. Big Bea shrugged. “I almost became a paleontologist. He's a male. Young. You can tell by the crest—it's not really long or tubular yet, but getting there. He's from the late Cretaceous period. Like a hundred million years ago. Fairly recent in dinosaur time.”

“As God made him,” Billy said.

The wind picked up and stiffened while the five people stood around the broken glider, each of them wondering how it had all come down to this. A burnt husk of an escape pod, a broken skeleton of a young man, and the flame-whitened remains of a long-extinct flying lizard …

In the mass of swirling gray clouds above their heads, they all heard the whine of the Gulfstream jet as it flew slowly through the sky. It passed over the factory, the sound fading, and then grew again as it slowly circled back overhead. Looking for a place to land? The five glanced at the iron sky, the whine of the jet fading once more. Lots of luck.

Maria shivered and pulled her hood closer over her face. “Did you kill all the krill and the grubs and the Daddy Long Leggers?”

“What about the women from Van Horn?” Lila persisted.

Nobody knew exactly what to say, having come all this way, only to admit the complex had beaten them. No, and they hadn't eliminated all the Rolpens or Daddy Long Legs. Webster wasn't the only hybrid; many more fled like frightened deer, vanishing into the metal labyrinth of the facility. As for the segmented Rolpen worms, they squashed as many as they could, but stepped over and under hundreds more crawling up the walls or across the ceilings—while Webster's mutated siblings loped away down the halls. What about the women from Van Horn abandoned to Eleanor? Two bullets spent; and it was anyone's guess where the bullets went.

They even discovered the function of those holes in the ceiling, but it made no difference. Not fire control, but a web of polyethylene piping connected to tanks of hydrofluoric acid; an automatic system capable of spraying everything with a fine, corrosive mist.

Living things absorbing the mist through the skin or exoskeleton liquefied from the inside out. And when the acid came in contact with metal—metal hallways, metal doors—it released hydrogen gas. Turning the whole complex into a fuel air bomb; a single spark from a wall switch or a thermostat and the facility would go up like the Hindenburg.

A brilliant self-destruct fail-safe. The only catch—the operating system had been permanently disabled. The professor had no intention of letting his creations turn into protein napalm and had sealed off the large acid tanks. Yes, the complex had beaten them through and through.

More snow began to fall over the Whiteside parking lot, and the jet whistle cut through the wind. Cheryl looked down at the canister of ashes she held in her arms; Rachel stood next to her now, bare legs calf-deep, her hospital gown flapping. Her bestest ghostie spoke urgently in her ear, “Cheryl, we have to go,” Rachel warned. “Don't wait here!”

But Cheryl seemed frozen in place. Mesmerized, eyes turned inward. The Piper wasn't through with her yet, even though they'd never met face to face. The father of lies reached into her mind from beyond death, and now Cheryl could actually see him taunting her from beneath his human skin—paralyzing her with the worst he could dredge up, the worst of her past:

Back to old Poughkeepsie; Cheryl stood in her parents' grimy apartment in her plaid Catholic school skirt. Fourteen years old? Fifteen? Oh, yeah, this was why she fled all the way to California. California wasn't far enough. The moon wasn't far enough. Stepdaddy Ronald, out of work again, sat in the beaten armchair in front of the blurry TV. His white gut and hairy belly button smiled at her from under his T-shirt. He waved her over. “C'mere Cherry darling. Let Ronny show you how much he loves you. Hey, where you going? Hey, don't you give me that sassy look!”

Rachel hissed into her face, “Don't listen to him!”

Cheryl snapped to the present; the cold ran through her. Not summer in Poughkeepsie, winter in a Midwest parking lot. In the few moments Mr. P.'s forked tongue whispered in her ears, she'd pried the cover from Janet's ashes and poked her fingers through the plastic liner, into the whitish dust. The gray Nambe metal cover lay at her feet. Horrified, she snatched it off the snow and crammed it back in place, a plume of Janet's ashes flying into the wind.

Rachel's were eyes anxious and urgent:
“We have to go now, Cheryl
—
get everyone to go
,
just get out
.” The whine of the jet engines crossed over their heads. Close enough to make the fillings in your teeth vibrate. The jet was too damn close.

“Get out of here!”
Rachel cried.

“We have to get out of here!” Cheryl shouted to the rest.

How far was the bus?

The snow clung around their calves and knees, turning the slipping and sliding trudge down the switchback slopes into an eternity. They slogged down one length of road, then made the turn, falling, getting up, and doing it again. The snow came down so hard you could barely see twenty feet ahead. Beatrice slid to her knees half a dozen times on the way down. She suppressed the urge to curse, instead whispering
thank you, thank you,
every time Cheryl got her on her feet again.

So where was the bus?

The yellow Blue Bird with the big red cowcatcher plow wasn't where they had left it.

But big tire marks showed where the old bus had slid backward down a length of switchback; its rear wedged against an embankment, at the hairpin turn. Nose and plow positioned to skid down to the bottom. They all clamored to get inside, bunching up at the door. As they clambered aboard, the bus slid on its own again a few more feet. Bea, with her bum leg, stumbled, blocking the entrance. Cheryl pushed her through.

Jet engines roared overhead, ear-splitting, head-crushing loud. The turbines reached screaming decibels. A shuddering crash echoed out of the gray swirling sky. The Gulfstream jet had finally reached its mark, crash landing in the abandoned Whiteside Meatpacking Plant, burying itself in the complex below. Cheryl turned from the bus door; the others plastered their faces to the window.

Fierce red-and-yellow firelight leapt into the sky. The snow itself seemed to pause, inhale, a great gasp, a moment's pause. Then an even greater roar—

The aircraft found the hydrofluoric acid tanks and lots of hydrogen gas.

The ground shuddered as the underground complex began to implode. Eleanor didn't have to kill green-eyed babies after all. Everyone in the bus pressed their faces to the glass; now each one of them got the strong impression of an underground inferno, as if they had X-ray vision. Metal-walled tunnels bent in the fantastic heat, plastic keyboards and monitors erupting in flame, the recycling area with its huge processing machines breaking apart, the meat seam slithering and writhing as the Rolpens burned.

Finally, the lonely impression of the professor's lean, precise face; the man stared out from his operation console with a look of mild surprise. The bulletproof glass melted; his sunglasses caught on fire, but he was too confused even to scream.

A wave of heat blossomed every direction. On the switchback slope a great billowing blister of searing air surged toward the bus. The snow on the vehicle's metal roof began to melt, and then the roadway slush. Cheryl stood in the open passenger-well door and wiped her eyes. Her eyelashes were singed, the fur on her trimmed hood shriveled. She tasted a strong bitter taste on her tongue. Like alum, only worse, and in a flash, Cheryl knew—
she knew
before anyone else. Some of that hydrofluoric acid from the tanks within the complex had reached out and touched her.

Just a lick, just enough.

She said nothing. Instead, she gripped the hand railings and backed inside. Cheryl spat onto her sleeve and wiped her mouth. Blood. Billy hit the accelerator, turned the engine over, and the bus roared to life.

*   *   *

Billy and Big Bea's faces looked stricken; not something a sick person ever wants to see. “Don't worry, it's not contagious,” Cheryl told them. They had left the burning ruin behind. At an abandoned Mobil station, they pulled over to recuperate.

Along the exterior of the Blue Bird, a waft of acid discharge had blistered one side of the curved metal skin. No one else had been affected, only Cheryl. Almost too much to bear as everyone in the bus wanted to “be there” for her; the two grim adult faces, the two grim younger ones, the concern, the tears, but there was no overcoming the fact that Cheryl had reached the end.

Now Cheryl just wanted to crawl off by herself.

Beatrice found a couple of chairs in a corner of the Mobil station convenience store and sat with Cheryl for a while. Neither woman wanted to think how it would go. The acid absorbed through Cheryl's face didn't feel like much at first; but pretty soon the flesh and bone would start to dissolve. Beatrice's pained eyes floated in and out of view.

“Are you sure you don't want to sit in the bus with us? Billy's got a shot for the pain in his first-aid kit.”

“Give me one now. I'm starting to hurt.” Cheryl paused. She coughed, and a thread of blood came up her mouth. Her face was blistered. “You make another syringe with whatever you need to finish it off. And you give it to me, Beatrice. Only you, Bea.”