Harbinger (23 page)

“It’s nice to be believed in,” I said.

“Yes, but remember there are many who don’t believe in you. They believe in Laird Ulin and the Command Authority. And they
will
turn you in. Happily.”

A swarm of children invaded the lobby, squealing and chasing through the crowd.

“God,” Delilah’s mother said. “I can’t wait till things return to normal and we can stuff these kids back in school. I guess they can’t all be little angels, like Alice.”

School
. A light bulb appeared over my head, for anyone who could see such things.

“Speaking of school,” I said, “Do you know where I can find the principal?”

“Gerry Rozsonits? I have no idea. He has living quarters attached to the school itself, of course. But I doubt if he’s there with no electricity. You’re not thinking Delilah’s with him?”

“Why not?”

She pushed the errant hair out of her face. “Gerry is a little extreme when it comes to my daughter.”

“Extreme in what way?”

“In unacceptable ways, Mr. Herrick. Delilah plays it down, but I know Gerry is obsessed with her. I’ve thought about bringing it up with the town council. It’s the kind of thing that can’t really be tolerated. It happens, of course. We’re all human on
Infinity
. At least in The County we are.”

“What could the Council do?”

“Encourage him to move to a different town, probably do a direct swap.”

“Suppose he didn’t want to move?”

“In an extreme case the Council could compel him to swap.”

“Tell me how to find the school,” I said.

She did. I thanked her and started to turn, and two guys grabbed me, one on each arm.

“Relax,” one of them said.

I did that. I let my body slump, totally nonresistant. It caught them off-guard and off-balance. Which is something good to take advantage of. I twisted loose of their equivocal grips, elbowed a solar-plexus here, stomped an instep there, and bolted for the door.

Dodging around the back streets of Bedford Falls, I made my way to the elementary school. It was a low-slung building, somewhat out of keeping with the ancient Americana ambience of the town in general.

As I regarded the structure from the playground a strange rippling sensation passed through my stomach. I felt light and dizzy momentarily, then it passed. Definitely George playing with The County’s gravity field. I hooked my arm around the monkey bars, anchoring myself, and waited to see what would happen. But there was nothing but the continual, gusty wind.

I walked toward the school. The windows were polarized to black. A kid’s backpack lay abandoned near the front entrance. I felt like I was being watched, and I very well might have been.

I tracked around the building and saw the principal’s residence, a kind of bungalow thing, with black windows, same as the school. I walked up to it and knocked on the door. No answer. I tried the knob, but it was locked.

“Gerry!”

Nothing.

But I knew he was in there. I could practically feel his vibe emanating out of the walls. And Delilah’s, too.

I made my way to the back of the residence and wasted time with another locked door, twisting the knob, pounding on it a little.

I kept scanning the sky for dropships.

Gerry’s electric cart was parked half in and half out of the driveway, suggesting a hasty maybe even panicked arrival. As I was looking at it, fat drops of rain began showering down, and I pulled my hood up.

It was a schizophrenic sky, dumping rain and splitting open with sun bursts at the same time. Clouds scudded like runaway galleons. Maybe Laird couldn’t launch any dropships, until the weather cleared. That was an optimistic thought, but transitory.

I needed to get into the bungalow and find out whether or not Delilah was there.

So I ran at the door and kicked it in.

I sprawled into the kitchen, and came up on my feet, and fell down again. My door-kicking right foot was now attached to a sprained ankle. Damn it.

Footsteps came pounding through the house.

I got up, despite the pain. Gerry appeared in the kitchen. He didn’t look happy. And he was armed.

“Get out!” His face was brick red.

“Where’s Delilah?”

He leveled the weapon at me.

“Get out,” he said, “or I’ll kill you.”

“
Kill
me? Have you ever killed anyone before, Gerry?”

“I’ll do it.”

“I doubt that.” I’m hell on bluffing. I didn’t know
what
he’d do. I was focused on Delilah and the time factor.

I stepped toward Gerry, and he backed up a step. The whole thing reminded me of a dance I’d once done with a potentially homicidal Christer back on Earth.

“I’m warning you,” he said.

“I know, I know.”

I took another step. The weapon was trembling in his hand. In the next moments he’d either kill me or start crying. I decided to help him make his decision.

I shuffled incrementally closer. He was backed up against the wall.

“You bastard,” he said.

“Come on, Gerry.”

Suddenly murder appeared in his eyes. Clear as a red light warning.

I struck out with a reverse kick, balancing on my good left foot and making contact with my gimpy right one. The weapon went flying, and a bolt of pain shot up my leg and started a campfire in my groin.

If Gerry had gone for the weapon right then he would have had me; I was doing a flamingo routine on my left foot, holding my right foot and injured ankle off the floor. But Gerry
didn’t
go for the weapon. He started to cry, and then he slid down to the floor, right hand cradled in his lap, left hand covering his face. I felt sorry for him, almost.

“Where is she?” I asked again.

“She’s sleeping,” he said, and that’s all I could get out of him. She was sleeping.

I went limping through the residence, calling Delilah’s name and receiving silence for an answer. After I checked every room, I began to wonder how whacked Gerry might be. Then I heard a muffled thump directly overhead.

The attic space.

I located a set of pull-down stairs in a back hallway and hauled them down. Someone moaned. I climbed the stairs with maddening slowness, hopping and balancing and hopping again.

Delilah was there.

Tied and gagged: portrait of Gerry’s heartfelt love and devotion. I untied her and held her while she cried, which didn’t go on for long.

“I guess he followed us into the forest then got lost when the sun went out. Later on he found me in the shelter. He kept saying he was going to take care of me and everything was going to be all right. This right after I started coming out of the drug. By then he already had me here. I was too weak to make much of a fuss. I thought he was being nice, or trying to be. Then I remembered things. I started asking him about Alice and you, and he said I didn’t understand. Understand
what?
I said. It’s just us now he told me. The two of us, the way it was meant to be. That’s when it really hit me. I told him to think again, and that was so dumb of me. I know it was dumb. I should have gone along with what he was saying. He would have calmed down eventually. Don’t you think he would have calmed down, Ellis?”

“Sure.”

“But I got scared,” Delilah said. “Can you believe I got scared of Gerry Rozonits? But there was something in his eyes. Or not in them. And all of a sudden I got so
scared
.”

The tears came again, welling up from some place deeper. Reaction tears of someone who had been in the grip of a primitive fear.

I gave her as much time as I thought we could afford, then I said, “We better get out of here, Delilah. They’ll be coming for me.”

I stood up awkwardly.

“What happened to your eye and your poor foot?” she asked.

“It’s my poor ankle, actually. And it was a couple of things. First I used it for a battering ram, then it didn’t hurt enough, so I used it to disarm Gerry. Now it hurts plenty. The eye’s a slightly longer story. Let’s save it.”

She helped me hobble downstairs. Gerry was gone, which I took for a good sign. However, the weapon was gone, too, which I took for a bad one.

We paused there at the entry to the kitchen, where I’d left Gerry. I had my left arm around Delilah’s shoulders, and she was supporting quite a bit of my weight. Wind blew through the broken back door. Rain pelted the window, which looked out on a scrap of lawn continually blooming and darkening with rapid shifts of sun and shadow. The rain spots on the floor where I’d kicked my way in gleamed like fish scales in the peekaboo sunshine.

“What’s the matter?” Delilah said.

“Gerry’s the matter,” I said.

There was a weird pressure in my ears. A handful of spaghetti worms squiggled queasily around in my stomach, and my eyes seemed to flip over like lead weights. For a moment, I’d blacked out. Then I felt light and drifty. Then, suddenly, my full body weight resumed, and Delilah and I shuffled off-balance.

She said, “What was
that
?”

“George,” I replied. “My virus. Ulin mutated it and now it’s out of control. What you just felt was, I think, the gravity field going wonky.”

“Dear God.”

“Yeah.”

Outside, we climbed into the electric cart. Delilah took the driver’s seat. She started the motor and swung us out from behind the residence and rolled us at a sedate fifteen kilometers per hour across the playground. We were approaching the swings and monkey bars and stuff when there was a crackling sound followed instantly by a
FAAARUMPH!
and the cart bucked us out of our seats and flipped over on its side, burning.

I looked frantically for Delilah, saw her, and crawled over. She had a cut on her forehead that looked bad enough for stitches, but she got right up on her feet and appeared otherwise unhurt. I struggled up, too, using the monkey bars.

Gerry stalked toward us, leveling the weapon.

“She doesn’t want you!” he shouted. “She doesn’t want you!”

I tried to shove Delilah away from me but she wouldn’t budge.

“He won’t shoot me,” she said, and wrapped her arms protectively around me.

“He just
did
shoot you,” I pointed out.

Then the queasy-wormy sensation was back in my guts, only ten times worse. Sweat popped out all over my body. My vision blurred, cleared.

Gerry wavered, then fired, and a very strange thing occurred. The discharge burst into the ground a little in front of him, and he went tumbling into the sky, end-for-end, tumbling up and away into a wild sky of broken black clouds and shimmering rainbows.

Turn the wheel. I’ll stand over here and watch
. Time is a process, brutal, relentless, etc. Blah.

Delilah’s face was deeply etched by pain and age. Her hair was short, iron gray, and the texture of straw. She lay unconscious on our bed, dying, gradually. Alice and I stood over her and conversed in low voices.

“I think it’s foolish,” she said. Alice had grown into a beautiful, strong and tirelessly upright woman of middle years. Unlike her mother, she didn’t have a romantic bone in her body. Above all else, Alice was
practical
.

“Your mother always wanted it back,” I said, “and I’m going to get it for her.”

We were talking about the white gold wedding band on a chain which I had presented to Delilah forty years ago. The same ring I had first presented to Nichole several lifetimes previous. Delilah had accidentally left it behind when we evacuated The County. She had realized almost immediately that it was missing. But at that point there had been no going back for bobbles; the calamity in The County had been well underway.

“Mom needs you here,” Alice pointed out.

“I know that. I’ll only be gone a couple of hours. Alice, this is my last chance to get that ring for her. I want her to have it in her hand. I want her to know I got it for
her
.

“It’s more important for you to be here when—” She looked down at her mother.

“When what?”

She looked up again into my face. “When she passes.”

“There’s plenty of time,” I said.

“No,” she said. “There isn’t.”

She was right. And that was why I had to go.

Accessing The County level was easy. Basically open a hatch and vomit. The gravity well was fucked up beyond redemption. At least George hadn’t infected the middle decks where we now lived. What had occurred on the Command Level was anyone’s guess. The overhead was sealed tight. No communication. No egress. It had been that way for decades.

Alice and her husband Josh saw me to the emergency access tube. Josh was tall, blonde and capable. He was also a fair poet. Every once in a while he let me have a peek in his red-covered composition book, a precious thing he’d made himself.

“Dad,” Alice said, “please don’t go.”

“I could go with you,” Josh suggested. “It would be safer. I’ve always wanted to go back down and  . . . see how things are.”

“Thanks, but I’ll go alone.”

“Well.” He shook my hand. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

Alice hugged me, which felt nice. We held on tight for a long while, then I broke the embrace and picked up my backpack.

“Honey, I have to hurry for Mom.”

“Take this.” She pressed a com button into my hand.

“You know it won’t work,” I said. “No one’s ever been able to send a signal out of The County since the Calamity.”

“Take it anyway, just in case.”

They stood back while I cranked the hatch aside. Invisible waves undulated up the tube. It gave me a queasy feeling even to stand next to the opening. I checked the straps on my back pack, pulled the flashlight out of its loop.

“See you soon,” I said. Then I turned, bent at the waist, and went head-first into the tube.

Hoping for whatever brief effect, I’d taken a kind of super-Dramamine, but I still threw up when the gravity fluctuations wobbled through my guts. At first I dropped pretty fast, then it was like plunging into warm water, and I drifted downward, nearly weightless.