Those That Wake (21 page)

She did. They both did, and the realization was strangling them.

"They did it," Remak said. "They reverse-engineered the Global Dynamic."

"They did. They intensified the cycle. Hopelessness creates the need for the product, and the product creates more hopelessness. The supply
creates
the demand. An ultimate, endless profit loop. Except, when they grew the meme to its ultimate potential, they pushed it so hard that it evolved and mutated into a new form altogether.

"But, in the end, how could they hope to keep control of it? Even the smallest child can tell you: you can't control an idea. And even in this non-Darwinian evolution, only the strongest survive. Hopelessness is now the strongest, most powerful idea in existence. And it's alive."

Electronic silence stretched out. Perhaps the Librarian was trying to figure out a way to undo the meme for the millionth time.

"I found evidence of the earliest stages of Intellitech's experiments. I left, but continued to monitor them. Of course, it's grown far beyond Intellitech over the years. Consulting the cooperative's collected intelligence, I pieced together the disastrous 'success' of Intellitech's project and the 'escape' of the meme just within the last few years. I saw desolated response grow. The apparently random incidence of it—not just in the areas and groups it's associated with, but across
all
demographics—doubled within the first year. Then
tripled
from that number in the following year. And it's growing outward. The mass killings on the Mexican border, those suicide cults that swept through schools here and now into Canada and Western Europe; how much of that is just us and how much of it is something edging us toward a line, pushing us into darkness?

"I've watched the cooperative's efforts to investigate and curtail these outbreaks, but they only continued to increase. That was when I left and isolated myself. I've been watching us lose the battle ever since. I'm very sorry to say that you are far from the first cooperative field analyst who has stumbled onto something and disappeared. I see the reports come in and then suddenly stop, because the analyst in question is expunged, just as you have been. You're the first who's made it to me, Jon. But the world has been fighting for years what you've been running from for the last week.

"Hopelessness is now the only meme that is no longer a passenger in our minds. It can drive us. It is a race unto itself that has its own best interests at heart, and it is simply trying to execute its nature: propagate itself. It has done this so effectively, become such a dominant component in people's minds that, if everything you told me is true, it has become powerful enough to actually manifest itself physically."

The electronic silence returned, and Laura looked up at Remak, waiting for him to speak, to offer refutation. But when he spoke, his words rang helpless.

"How do you fight an idea that's already in you?" Remak said, and though it was barely more than a whisper, it echoed back from the darkness, a needless taunt.

"You can't, Jon," the Librarian said. "This meme has mutated into something new, just as sea life evolved into the bipedal forms that eventually became humans. And though it seems to have adopted some sort of a physical representation or location, it truly lives in our minds, in a mindscape, just as we live in the landscape. It moves from one mind to another with the same mechanics and ease with which we step from one room to another. If hopelessness can now control people's actions, memories, and perceptions, make them see different things from those actually before them or remember things that never happened..." There seemed to be no bearable conclusion to that thought.

"But it can't control
everyone, all
the time," Laura spoke up, refusing to let their chances simply fade into silence. "I mean, look at us. If it could drive everyone else, then all the people we've passed on the street in the last day could have gathered and killed us. It may have millions or billions of bodies—or doorways into people's minds, like you said—but it's still just one force."

"Its influence does not seem to be actively exerted all the time, that much is true." It was hard to tell through the frosty alteration whether the Librarian was being convinced of something or if he was just exploring this for their benefit. "But once it's in you, it's always there. Nascent, perhaps, but never absent. It may not always be driving, but it
is
always riding. And it takes so little for it to slide into the driver's seat."

"The hopelessness doesn't appear to be riding in you," Remak said.

"I saw it coming far enough in advance to limit my exposure," the Librarian said. "Hardly an option for everyone."

"But Mal and me? Jon and Mike?" Laura said desperately. "It hasn't been able to drive us, take control of us. If it could, why are our lives being stolen from us? The meme has to interact with people based on their psychological makeup, doesn't it? I mean, Remak was saying, some people commit suicide, others become like drones. Doesn't it make sense that somewhere along the spectrum, there are people who aren't affected at all?" Laura gained strength from the fact that they weren't interrupting to contradict her. "If it travels through our minds like we travel through rooms, can't a room be cut off by locked doors? What if there are people who can shut the door in their brains and lock out this thing completely? People who are basically immune to this meme?"

The last word echoed away, and there was a long expanse of silence. The electronic hush began to thrum in Laura's ears, and she wondered if the Librarian had abandoned the conversation. A chill struck her spine. What if the Librarian had actually
not
escaped at all by isolating himself? What if the meme was already in him, and that was why he denied that there was a way to fight it?

"Jon." The voice suddenly returned, and its sanitized tone had a different quality now, one of urgency. "There are people in the house, coming through the front and the back."

"Oh," Mike said, still at the window, "fuck me." He pulled his head back as though the window had given him a shock, and looked at Mal, who pushed past him to get a look.

A trail of cars had come from up the road. Pickup trucks, sedans, two-doors; old, beat-up models of every make that came out of Detroit made up the convoy, about seven or eight at first glance.

"I guess we should be grateful that crappy little town is too small to have its own sheriff," Mike said, not sounding particularly grateful.

"Go out and talk to them," Mal said.

"Screw you."

"Slow them down. They're not going to listen to me for a second. I'll go find the others."

The cars were pulling in, not bothering with the driveway, but simply tearing up patches of lawn and stopping midway to the house before they came to a sluing stop and disgorged the invaders. Men of every appearance began marching up toward the house in an amorphous group: well-dressed or in torn jeans and T-shirts, muscular and suntanned, potbellied, bespectacled, shaggy, and balding. They had clearly come together, but they were in no way of a type. Some were empty-handed, others carried bats, sticks, even a shotgun. A group of them had broken off, were heading around to the back of the house.

Mal was about to grab Mike and fling him out the door, but as his sight fixed on the first of the invaders, he saw something that tightened his jaw and sent an angry buzzing through his brain.

It was in their entire faces, an attitude, really, but it collected around the eyes in a particular way. They had the eyes of the gang standing in front of Tommy's door that first night, the eyes of Brath just as he shot Isabel. Eyes that were lifeless and dull.

The sight sent a jolt up his body that straightened him out like a board.

"What?" Mike demanded, trying to force his way in to get a look out the window again. "What?"

The invaders were just a few feet from the door.

"Their eyes," Mal said. "This thing is inside them. It saw us at the gas station, or when we passed through Pope Springs."

Mike stared back at him.

"Get in the corner," Mal said.

"What?"

"Get in the corner." Mal's voice was suddenly quiet and even, loaded with something that belied his outward calm. Mike ran to the corner beneath the stairway and pressed himself into it.

Mal stood at the wall immediately behind the door, so that when it opened, he would be hidden behind it.

"There are people coming!" he heard Mike yell, for the benefit of the electronic voice. But Mal knew that he was, as always, alone.

Something slammed against the door, one, two, three times, and Mal braced.
Just like in my dream,
he thought.
It's trying to get in.

There was a crack, and the door swung open straight at him. Mal's foot came up and kicked the door back hard. It caromed from the sole of his boot and smashed back into something that let out a yelp of pain. There were sounds of movement, stumbling, then two came in at once, one with a bat, the other empty-handed.

Mal had leaped before the door, and he caught the armed one flat in the face with a powerful cross. Beneath the dead eyes, the nose flattened, squirting red, and the man flailed back and fell. Mal slipped the second man's attack and came back up with two uppercuts to his ample gut. All his air coughed out of him, and he staggered off to the side.

Two more were already in, and two more were coming behind them, fanning out to surround Mal. Mal snapped out a short, quick jab and followed with a powerful curving hook, connecting with both and sending one invader to the floor. The other, however, landed a clumsy backhand full of knuckles across Mal's turned cheek. Mal came back with a flurry of jabs that took the man out of the fight, his face red and distorted.

But the other two had him, one at each arm, grappling madly, as the rest came flooding in, four more in all, their faces eerie for their empty expressions atop the violent, scrambling bodies.

Mal stomped down on an instep and felt bone crack as the man at his right toppled. But one of the newcomers got a shot into Mal's stomach, a hard fist slapping into layers of muscle. Then a stick came down on Mal's head, and he felt warm blood crawling through his hair. Through swimming vision, Mal saw the stick come up again. This time, he punched up as it swung down, his fist connecting with the wrist of the man wielding it, breaking it at the joint with a sharp snap that Mal felt through his knuckles. The stick spiraled through the air and away and the man leaped back, grabbing his wrist.

Four left.

Remak moved. He got to the door and pulled Brath's slim black automatic out. Laura stared at him in shock.

"What room are you in?" he said to the darkness. "I can get you out of here and take you somewhere safe."

"I'm not in the house, Jon," the voice said. "I'm not even in the state. Get yourselves out. They're coming up the back staircase now. Your friends are holding others at the front door." The lock on the door clicked open.

"Come on," Remak said, his voice harsher without rising at all, his hand out to Laura. She jerked into motion, as though having been held back by an invisible barrier. He grabbed her hand, threw the door open, and ran out with her in tow.

Laura screamed. There were men appearing at the back end of the hall, and even from this distance, she saw the haunting emptiness in their eyes, the void that had been in her parents' eyes the last time she saw them. The first of the men, solidly built, wearing jeans and a plaid hunting shirt, was leveling a shotgun at them.

Remak let go of her hand and grabbed the door he had flung open. Just as the hall boomed with the discharge of the shotgun, he swung the door between them and the men. The sound of metal shot thunking into the wood and striking the metal it was reinforced with carried through the door, and immediately Remak pushed it open again and snapped off a single hissing shot from the hip.

The hunter thrashed, his gun tumbling from his hands, and was flung back as though a rope attached to his back had suddenly pulled taut. He knocked over the man immediately behind him, and the approaching faces retreated behind the door.

Immediately, Laura went into a sprint back down the hall, toward Mal.

"Come on," she said.

"Go, Laura. I'll hold them here," Remak said, pulling the door back for protection.

She skidded to a stop. Leave him here? They needed to—

"
Go.
"

She did, hurling herself toward the door they'd first come through and, as it clicked open before her, throwing herself through it. She was on the balcony, looking down into the foyer.

Bodies were strewn around the front door, either still or writhing on the floor, favoring an injured part. Mal was surrounded by four men, one holding tightly to his arm, the others firing attack after attack at him. Mal slipped, parried, took a blow to his chest. One of the men had a short metal pipe and swung it, only to have Mal's fist come down like a hammer and deflect the pipe into his thigh instead, where it landed with a meaty thwack that made Laura wince and Mal grunt hard.

She started down the stairs and saw, from beneath the steps, Mike come running out, snatch up a wooden stick on the floor, and lay awkwardly but fiercely into the head of the man with the pipe. The man turned just in time to catch another blow across the face that cracked the stick in two and sent him to the floor, inert.

Mike staggered back, his eyes wide, thunderstruck at the loss of his weapon. Mal had taken advantage of the opportunity to grab the neck of the man holding his left arm and swing his head hard into the face of one of the two others. The skulls met with a shocking sound that made Laura want to vomit, and Mal finished by plunging his fist into the face of the man he held by the throat. Both men went down, the second only after Mal released him.

She saw something in Mal that she had thought absent, despite his history, a steady, controlled fire lighting his features. Now she realized it had always been present, only contained. There was a whirlwind in Mal, and it had burst out of him.