Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (43 page)

“I know. Not a single tooth mark I’ve seen. But still … I promised Jack I’d keep you safe and—”

A low rumble filled the air and shivered through the ground.

Abe did a quick turn. “What?”

After fifteen to twenty seconds it faded away.

“That felt like an earthquake.”

Abe’s expression was grim. “Something worse, I fear.” He pointed to the rise on the far side of the house. “That way.”

They hurried past the house to a stony outcropping that overlooked the valley. Abe was panting by the time they reached the crest and got a look at the landscape spread out below.

“
Gevalt!
”

Gia felt her stomach knot when she saw the huge, circular opening in the floor of the valley.

“Oh, no.”

“Everywhere it’s happening. Only a matter of time before it happened here.” He glanced at Gia. “Still want to spend the night in the house?”

Gia didn’t answer. She turned and looked for Vicky. She wanted her close. Didn’t want her out of arm’s reach as long as they were topside.

The breeze didn’t seem so fresh, and the thought of another night in the bunker didn’t seem so bad.

Over the Pacific

Jack was glad he’d brought the shortwave along. With the way those low-frequency signals bounced off the ionosphere, he could talk to Gia from anywhere in the world. Which he’d just done and almost wished he hadn’t. A hole right under Abe’s nose … didn’t like that at all. At least everything was working in the bunker. They’d be safe from anything down there.

He tried to put it out of his mind by spending a few hours with Ba in an attempt to get to know him. Not easy. He did learn a few things about Sylvia Nash that cast her in a different light—about her dead husband, Greg—a Special Forces non-com who’d made it through the Gulf War in one piece only to go out one night for a pack of cigarettes and get killed by an armed robber when he stepped into the middle of a 7-Eleven heist.

He learned about Jeffy, the once autistic kid, and about the
Dat-tay-vao
that had inhabited Dr. Bulmer for a while, then left him a cripple, and now lay dormant in Jeffy, waiting. He learned about the powerful love between Sylvia and Doc Bulmer, how they were soul mates who locked horns and butted heads on a regular basis but whose karmas were so intertwined that one could not imagine life without the other.

A bit like Gia and me, Jack thought.

Jack learned all that, but he learned very little about Ba other than the fact that he grew up in a poor Vietnamese fishing village and was intensely devoted to Sylvia—referred to simply as “the Missus”—and how that devotion extended to anyone who mattered to her.

When Jack ran out of questions, they sat in silence, and Nick Quinn’s words to Alan Bulmer came back to him.
Only three of you will return.
He brushed them away. Nick may have had a run-in with Rasalom’s essence down in that hole, but he’d yet to prove that he had any powers of prediction. He talked in riddles anyway.

He noticed the plane banking to its left, so he headed up front to see what was going on. He found Frank chicken-necking to his iPod. The volume was so high Jack could recognize “Statesboro Blues” from where he stood. He sniffed the air. No trace of herbal-smelling smoke.

When he tapped Frank on the shoulder the headphones came off.

“Are we there yet?”

“You sound like my sister’s kids. Yeah, we’re there. Past it, in fact. Got to come around to make our approach from the west.”

Jack strapped himself in the copilot’s seat and peered out the window. The vog was gone. The air was clear all the way to the pristine blue of the Pacific below, but still no direct sunlight. Off the upturned tip of the right wing an irregular patch of lush green, spiked with mountains and rimmed with white sand and surf, floated amid the blue.

“Maui?” Jack said.

Frank shook his head. “Oahu. Pearl Harbor’s down there in that notch. Hang on. We’re coming around toward Maui now.” A moment later the plane leveled off and three islands swung into view. “There. That’s Molokai on the left, Lanai on the right, and Maui dead ahead.”

Jack had been studying the maps Glaeken had given him. Molokai looked okay, and the resort hotels along Maui’s Ka’anapali Bay seemed intact but looked deserted. Inland, the tops of the western mountains were tucked away within a wreath of rain clouds.

But as Frank banked southward, Jack found the old whaling town of Lahaina in ruins—everything burned, blackened, flattened. To their right the whole southern flank of Lanai was scorched and smoking. And then Jack’s stomach lurched, not so much from the movement of the plane as from what he saw ahead of them. He felt as if he’d been thrown into any one of a dozen prehistoric island movies of the
Lost Continent
/
Land That Time Forgot
type.

Maui looked swaybacked from here, as green as Oahu but with mountains at each end and a broad flat valley between. But the big mountain that took up most of the eastern end, Haleakala, was belching fire and pouring gray-black smoke. The old volcano’s sides, however—at least from Jack’s vantage—were still lush and green.

And somewhere on the slope of that chimney flue to hell dwelt Kolabati with her necklaces.

Jack studied the scene, wondering what the hell he’d got himself into. Maui looked so fragile, like it could blow any minute. Just like Hawaii on its far side.

“Can we swing around the island? Like to get the lay of the land before we touch down.”

“I dunno, Jack. Gettin’ late. And we’d have to fly low to see anything. Air currents could be tricky on the far side. I mean, with the wide temperature variants between the ocean and the lava and the vog, we could hit some weird thermals. I don’t like to do that when I’m straight.”

“Okay,” Jack said casually. “If you don’t think you can hack it, I’ll find somebody at the airport to take me up after we land.”

Frank grinned. “You’re a rotten, despicable, evil dude, Jack, and I hate you very, very much. May your karma turn black and fall into the void. Hang on.”

Frank swung the jet out and banked around the western flank of the reactivated Haleakala toward the south end of the island. The scenery changed abruptly from lush green to scorched black, as if a giant flamethrower had been played over the terrain. The eastern slope was a scene from Dante’s
Inferno.
Molten lava streamed down the broken-out side of the cone, cooling black crusts surfing the faces of crimson flame-waves, throwing up immense clouds of salty steam as they wiped out in the sea.

Frank skirted the turbulent clouds for a few miles. On the right lay the immense bubbling, boiling cauldron of ocean where the Big Island of Hawaii had once stood, the main source of the lid of vog that covered much of the Eastern Pacific.

Frank turned to Jack. “You sure you want to go all the way around?”

Jack nodded. “All the way.”

“Okay. Strap in and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He banked and gunned the jet into the roiling steam. Water sluiced off the windshields like rain as updrafts and downdrafts and mini-vortices buffeted the craft, but Frank guided her through with a clenched jaw and steely-eyed determination. When they broke free into the light again, he relaxed his grip on the controls and half-turned to Jack.

“Aw
right!
Far freaking out! Let’s try that again. Maybe we can— Jesus H. Christ!”

Jack had already seen it. His stomach was fluttering in awe. The news reports had mentioned it and he’d seen photos, but nothing had prepared him for the reality of it.

A whirlpool. A maelstrom. A swirling, pinwheeling, ten-mile-wide mass of water spread out below him like the planet’s navel. Its perimeter moved slowly where it edged into Kahului Bay, but quickly picked up speed as the water progressed inexorably toward the whirling center where it funneled down into a black hole somewhere far below in the ocean floor.

Both Jack and Frank stared dumbly through their windows on the first two passes, then Jack began noticing details.

“Frank!” Jack said, staring down on the third pass. “It looks like—”

He grabbed the binocs from the clamp in the ceiling panel and focused in on the colorful specs he’d spotted below, riding the rim of the maelstrom, then darting in toward its swirling heart and out again.

“What’s doing?”

“Windsurfers! There’s a bunch of nuts down there windsurfing along the edge of the whirlpool!”

“That’s Ho’okipa Bay, windsurfing capital of the world. Those dudes live for that shit. I know where they’re comin’ from. So do you, I reckon.”

“Yeah, I can dig it,” Jack said, nodding slowly. Jeez, he was starting to sound like Frank. “But one little slip and you’re gone.”

“Yeah, but what a way to go!” Frank said dreamily. “If I’ve gotta go, I want it to be right here, strapped into my jet. Stoked to the eyeballs and Mach one straight down into the earth so’s after we hit, me and the plane are so tangled and twisted up they can’t tell Frank Ashe from Frank Ashe’s plane and so they bury us together. Or better yet, straight down into one of those holes until I run into something or run out of fuel. Whatta trip that’d be! Might even try that one straight. Whatcha think?”

“Drop me off first. I think it’s time to land.”

Frank grinned. “Aw. And just when we was startin’ to have some fun!”

He radioed down to Kahului airport for clearance; they told him the winds were out of the west and that they’d cleaned off the runway. All was clear and he’d better land fast because once it was dark, the hangars would be locked and wouldn’t be opened for anyone.

“‘Cleaned off the runway’?” Frank said to Jack as he started his approach. “What’s that mean?”

They found out after they landed and opened the hatches. From off to the east came a dull roar, the low, gurgling rumble of uncountable tons of water being sucked down through the ocean depths. Looming behind them, Haleakala smoked and thundered. The steady breeze was warm and wet, and it stank.

“Sheesh!” Jack said as he stepped down onto the tarmac.

The ripe, putrid odor clogged his nose and throat. He shifted the strap of his duffel bag on his shoulder and glanced around at the deserted runways and empty buildings, searching for the source.

Frank made a face. “What
is
that, man?”

“Dead fish,” said Ba, debarking behind him. “I know that smell from village where I grew.”

“You get used to the
pilau
after a while,” said the tractor driver who’d come out to tow their jet into a nearby hangar.

“Don’t tell me Hawaii always smells like this.”

“Hell, no. Didn’t they tell you? It’s been raining fish the past two nights.”

“Fish?”

“Yeah. You name it: ahi, squid, crabs, blues, mahi-mahi, everything. Even a few dolphin. Raining out of the sky. And first thing every morning I’ve got to go out with the plow and clear them off the runways. Don’t know why I bother. Nobody’s flying much these days since all the tourists upped and went home.”

“But raining fish?”

“It’s the
puka moana
—the whirlpool. It backs up at night.”

With that he jumped on his tractor and started towing the jet toward the hangar, leaving Jack wondering how a whirlpool could back up. It wasn’t as if it were a toilet. Or was it?

Frank led them toward the terminal building.

“Let’s see what we can do about getting you guys a car.”

The main terminal building looked like an Atlantean relic raised from the sea. Its windows and skylights were smashed, rotting fish and seaweed draped its roof and walls. Inside was worse.

“Shee-it!” Frank said, waving his hand before his face. “Smells like a fish market that’s run out of ice.”

They trooped through the gloomy, deserted building, looking for someone, anyone. Finally they ran across a dark, middle-aged fat guy squeezing into a wrinkled sports jacket as he hurried toward them down a ramp. His badge read “Fred” and he looked part Hawaiian.

Jack waved him down. “Where are the car rentals?”

“There ain’t. All closed up. Nobody to rent to.”

“We need a car.”

“You’re outta luck, I’m afraid.”

Jack looked at Ba. “Looks like we’ll have to wait till morning, Ba. What do you say?”

Ba shook his head. “Too long away from the Missus.”

Jack nodded. He knew Ba was feeling the time pressure as much as he; maybe more. He grabbed the guy’s arm as he tried to squeeze by.

“You don’t understand, Fred. We
really
need a car.”

Fred tried to pull away but Jack tightened his grip on his flabby upper arm. Ba stepped closer and looked down at him.

“I can’t help you, Mister,” Fred said, wincing. “Now let me go. It’ll be getting dark in half an hour. I’ve got to get home.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “But we’re new around here and you’re not. And since you seem to be the
only
one around here, we’ve elected you to find us a car. And if you can’t help us out, we’ll be forced to take yours. We’ll pay you a generous rental price before we take it, but we
will
take it. So where do they keep the cars around here?”