By the time he reached the outskirts of town it was full night, and now it could be seen that the odd color of the sky was centered on a faint thickening brightness low on the northeastern horizon. What was it? He knew little about astronomy, but it had the look of something that the world would come to wish had not appeared.
Most of the houses he passed were dark, but some contained faint, flickering glows of candlelight, and one or two the brighter light of oil lamps. He had no real plan, except to see what he could do to stir these people up against the clinic. They hated it, of course, but they needed leadership to go up there and cause mayhem.
As he drew closer to the town center, he was stopped by something he had not seen in many years, not since his days in Mexico, when drug cartels sometimes did it to terrify locals into serving them.
On a street lamp about halfway into the town, a man had been hung . . . and, he noted, hung badly. The body was covered with blood from the neck, because they’d hauled him up without tying his hands, leaving him to struggle with the knot while he choked. Ugly way to do it, probably because they were clueless about the process. Under the body, dogs snarled at one another as they licked the blood in the street.
A number of storefronts were burned out, and he could smell death in the air. More dogs could be heard in the darkness, and as he passed the ones beneath the hanged man, some of them gave him a predatory appraisal. Once a dog has tasted blood, it is dangerous, always. Not wanting to have to fight off the whole pack, he gave them a wide berth, and did not meet their eyes.
You could give a dog a heart attack by shattering its muzzle with the right kind of blow, but six or seven dogs would keep you damn busy, and you would absorb damage.
Ahead, there was a restaurant showing a flicker of candles in the front window. Inside, he could see the shadows of many people. Good, this was what he’d been looking for. Desperate people band together, at least when they still believe that they might have some way to save themselves. Only later, when they understand the hopelessness of their situation, do they turn on one another. In another couple of days that would happen here. In fact, he was probably lucky that it hadn’t already happened.
He went to the door and paused, evaluating the crowd. There were men, women, and children present, so this was probably some kind of survivorship gathering. Safe enough.
He stepped in. Voices rumbled around him, angry and desperate ones, and the children were crying, many of them. A few were playing.
“We’re real hungry, John,” a male voice said. “You gotta find a way.”
“We need to do some urban foraging,” the man in front, probably the mayor, said.
“We’ve scoured the town, goddamn it,” somebody shouted. Rage. Terror. They were just about to turn on one another.
Mack took a breath and raised his voice. “Excuse me.”
They froze like frightened mice, then turned all at once. Suspicion in the faces. Women swept their children behind them. He was acutely aware of the fact that the room was full of guns.
He held up his hands. “Hey, I’m unarmed.” He looked from face to face, smiling just enough but not too much. His next words were crucial, and he had thought about them carefully.
“I just escaped from the Acton Clinic.”
An immediate murmur, more suspicion in the faces. All expected. He was playing them.
“I’m not a crazy, okay!”
They quieted down a little.
“Let him talk,” the man at the front of the room said. He was pudgy, but his eyes were hollow. That was one famished fat man up there. He must be almost crazy with hunger, probably dropping ten pounds a day.
“I’m an assistant chef.”
A guy with a deer rifle said, “What do you mean, you escaped? Why does an assistant chef need to escape?”
“That goddamn place is a palace! There’s tons of food, tons of it. They’ve got enough to feed their damn psychos for a year. It’s enough to get this whole town through this thing—I mean, if there’s another side to it, God willing.” Then he stopped. Time to let it sink in. Time to let them chew.
“How much food exactly?” a woman asked.
“Try a hundred dressed hogs, forty beeves, maybe a quarter ton of prepared meats, not to mention a whole huge basement storage area full of canned goods for long-term use. That’s a damn Versailles palace up there on that hill, and they have no right to keep all that food just for a bunch of loonies. No right, not when good, normal people who are the backbone of the country need it! That’s why I escaped. I want to help people who need help . . . folks who’re healthy and normal.” He laughed, made it bitter. “That palace up there is full of people who this world doesn’t even need. But it needs you.” He pointed to a little girl peeking out from behind her mother’s dress. “It needs her.”
“They got more guns than we have, man.”
General assent.
“Yeah, I know. You’ve gone up there and taken a few shots, I know that, too.”
“I did that,” the same voice said. He stepped out of the crowd. He was a young guy, about thirty. He had a preteen boy in tow who looked as tough as he did. “I’m two tours in ’Stan. I was on rotation stateside when this thing started. And if we try on the Acton Clinic, I can tell you as a soldier that a lot of us are gonna get wasted.”
Mack let silence follow that statement. They needed to taste their fear, then be pulled out of it. “How long has it been since you folks got anything to eat?”
People looked around at each other. “Three days,” the man in the front said.
“Okay, I had three squares before I came out. I think it was the steak that made me make my move, eating it, knowing that at least some decent, normal folk down here could be eating what the crazies were gobbling. And the patients get a lot better than we do. It’s like a damn cruise ship up there.”
Another voice rose, this a kid of about fifteen. “Mister, they signal. They use SSB code bursts. I pick them up on my scanner. So they could signal for help.”
That brought an uneasy murmur. Of course, the kid was worrying about Mack’s own code bursts, but no way could he say that.
“Those are probably just signals to their rich families, arranging for more supplies. Now listen to me, I know the place from the inside out and I’ve got the kind of training you need for an op like this. Special Forces. Afghanistan. Pakistan.”
“Unit?” the guy with the rifle asked.
He’d done this sort of thing many times before, and it actually felt good to do it again. “Night Stalkers,” he replied easily. “160th SOAR.” One of the many answers he had to the many questions a CIA field officer gets about his identity. You always lie, even to your friends.
The guy started to be impressed, but then he asked another question. “How’d you end up in the kitchen?”
“Oh, I was on security, all right. But we got shoot-to-kill orders last week and I told Glen MacNamara that I could not do that.” He looked around the room. “You all know who Glen is?”
They knew. Like any town living beneath the walls of a castle, they were obsessed with what went on inside it. Except they did not know about this food, of course. Naturally not, because it didn’t exist. But their imaginations and their eagerness to hate the palace made them believe it in without question. In truth, the clinic was just about stripped of food like everyplace else—except, of course, for the redoubts. If he had wanted to be straight with them, he should tell them how to get to the Blue Ridge underground facility, but he had no intention of doing that. There, they would find food enough to carry this town for five years. Yeah, and give the food of the pure of blood to this gaggle of human trash? Not gonna happen. The pure of blood were the future of the world, or it had no future.
“What I need to do is for you folks to get me the building and ground plans for the clinic from the buildings department, then I can lay out a professional plan of attack for you.”
“Mister, they’ve got SOPMODs in there, I’ve
seen them. And bigger stuff. Lots of it. Plus those cannons that make you feel like you’re on fire. The best we can do are a couple of assault rifles and this kinda stuff.” He ported his deer rifle.
“Except you’re gonna have me in there, and you’re gonna have a Ranger plan.” He addressed them all. “I can’t tell you that nobody’s gonna go down, because that’s not gonna happen. There will be casualties. But you will win. That I can tell you, because that’s what’s gonna happen.”
And when they couldn’t find the food, they would first slaughter the bosses, and when they still couldn’t find it, they would fall victim to their own rage, and they would lay waste to the place.
They got the blueprints he needed, and together they laid out a good plan of attack, one that would actually work. “This gate,” he said at last, pointing to the disused back gate on the grounds plan, “will be unlocked. After your feint draws them to the front of the grounds—and they’ll all come running, they’re not that well trained—then you just send your main force right through that gate. You get inside the grounds, they are toast, people.”
They worked out a schedule, and at midnight, he began his journey back. Crazy ole Mack was just about done in, starving and filthy. Mack was sorry. Mack was coming home.
14
THE HAND OF DARKNESS
On the night side of the earth, most of the lights—the cities of New York and London and Paris—had gone dark, and the atmosphere glowed softly purple against the strangling void. The International Space Station swung through its orbit in darkness. Inside, the bodies of the crew floated, one or two hands fisted, most touching the air as if it was something miraculous, their fingers carefully extended. The bodies appeared old, the hair gray with frost from the suffocating carbon dioxide of their own breath, which is what had—mercifully and gently—killed them.
Along the face of the night far below moved the great, glowing objects, working faster now, sliding just a few hundred feet above the suffering land, seeking with probes beyond human knowing, signals from our souls.
They had an enormous task before them, because one of the most improbable truths about mankind is that the vast majority of people are good, and would not need to sink away into the long contemplation that draws the evil, ever so slowly, to face themselves.
Had we not been rendered soul blind by the catastrophe that destroyed our pre-Egyptian civilization, the coming of the great objects would not have been mysterious to us. But it was mysterious, it was very mysterious, and the immense, drifting shapes only added terror to terror, and people hid, and hid their children, and dared not look upon these machineries of rescue.
Aboard, this caused neither surprise nor concern. If you looked into the workings of these machines, you would find that they were old and worn, full of humble signs that they were somebody’s home.
In this immense universe of ours, worlds die every day, so the objects and their crews were always busy, flashing from one catastrophe to the next, harvesting the spiritual produce of planets in cataclysm with the industry and care of the good farmers that they were.
David had been watching these objects in his mind’s eye, when he heard screams.
They were not cries of madness but of pain—no, agony. Terrible human agony was involved.
“Katie,” he called as he went through the outer office, but she was already far along the hall. As he reached the top of the grand staircase, he saw her at the bottom, turning toward the back of the building and the patients’ activity area.
He slid along the broad mahogany planks of the priceless floor of the front hallway, his stomach churning and congealed. Was there fire down there, or somebody being torn apart by some escaped jacket case, or had one of the dociles suddenly gone berserk?
He went through the empty dining room with its splendid crystal and silver laid out already for tomorrow’s breakfast, and then to the steel door that led into the patient wing.
The uproar was coming, as he had anticipated, from the activity area, which was filled with a white, chalky light unlike any he had ever seen before. Was it radiation from the sun? But why only these windows? So, no.
Katie stood in the doorway, and David stopped beside her. For the first moment, a scene of true terror often makes no sense to the eyes, and that was the case here. What David saw were crowding black silhouettes, all pressed up against the barred armor-glass windows that, at better times, let sunlight flood this space. Then he realized that they were patients, all peering out the windows.
In among the figures was somebody moving quickly, racing back and forth and screaming, and then he saw her run like a mad thing through the parted crowd and leap at least six feet into the air, hurling herself against the outside doors with a horrible crunch.
“Let me through,” he shouted as he went toward her. Katie remained standing, transfixed.
As the crowd parted, David saw two injured people on the floor, Sam Taylor and Beverly Cross. Sam cradled his right arm. Beverly looked up from a swollen face as he passed.
“Careful, David,” she said, “she’s real bad.”
It was Linda Fairbrother.
Caroline was near her. “She’s breaking herself to pieces. David, help her!”
She leaped at the door again, then bounced back and hit the floor with a sickening slap and lay still, a lovely woman covered with bruises, her nose a mass of purple flesh, one eye swollen closed, in the glaring white ocean of the light that shone through the windows and the glass of the door.
“Linda,” he said, kneeling beside her shattered body, “Linda, I am here to help you. I can help you.”
“Let her out,” Caroline cried.
From outside, there rose another sound, low at first, then gaining strength, finally becoming the enormous howl of what must be the largest siren in the history of the world.
As it grew louder, Linda’s body stiffened. Then her good eye swam to the front and stared up into the light.
“David, get back!” Caroline drew him away from Linda.
As if being drawn by some sort of invisible rope, she rose up, knocking him aside in the process. Then she ran toward the door, gathering speed fast. He leaped at her, felt his head and shoulders connect with her body, noted the rigor of extreme panic, then felt himself thrown aside like a rag.
While he tumbled helplessly against Caroline, Linda slammed against the door, hammering it with her hands and shrieking, then leaping against it again and again, so fast that the sound of her body hitting the thick glass was like a series of cannon blasts.
Dear heaven, he had never seen a symptom like this, never in his life.
“Hurry,” Caroline snapped.
If she was going to survive, he saw that he had to open the doors, but if he did, other patients would certainly go out into that light and God only knew what it was.
“All right,” he shouted, “everybody across the room. Staff, help me here—get them back—all of you, get back, give her space.”
Caroline made a gesture, and everybody moved back. David made note of this. Even the staff were watching her for instructions.
Linda leaped up and began slamming against the door again, jumping four or five feet into the air each time.
“Do it, David! Let her out!”
A haze of blood appeared around her, and as the air filled with the smell of it, he went close, shielding himself as best he could, and finally managed to swipe the fingerprint reader.
It didn’t work.
“Keys, my God, I need keys!”
Again Linda hit the door, again and again. Caroline and Linda’s desperate, tear-streaked lover, Tom Dryden, tried to control her.
“Glen! Glen MacNamara, I need keys!” David looked desperately around the room. “Get Glen, somebody!”
The siren came again, rising, wailing, a soul-whipping sound that turned Linda into a human piston, driving her again and again and again into the thick, unyielding door.
“Doctor,” Tom shouted, “sedate her
! Get a damn shot in her!”
Then Glen was pushing through the crowd, his dirty white shirt soaked with sweat. “I was afraid we’d lose that damn locking system,” he said as he thrust a key into the door and threw it open at last.
Linda went racing out, her body lurching from broken bones, her face now a purple blotch, unrecognizable. Tom followed her into the light, laughing and eager, and both seemed almost to be dancing, their anguish transformed in an instant to lilting joy.
David followed them, and when the light struck him he was suffused with an exquisite sensation, at once physical and emotional, a surging shiver of delight that was coupled to poignant nostalgia, and he thought, This is how we’re meant to feel, this is the aim of life.
He saw in the light a ladder hanging down—and it was old, with bent rungs, but made of silver metal that gave off a gorgeous glow.
He remembered his grandfather’s friend’s description of the thing that Father Heim had seen at Fátima, and knew that, even then, they had been preparing.
Linda dragged herself, a white mass of bone protruding from her left leg, her fingers crazy from breaks, her breath coming in warbling sighs as she sucked air past swollen lips and broken teeth. Tom assisted her, an arm around her waist.
“You look to the injured in there, David,” Caroline said. “We’ve got this under control.”
As Linda was flooded by the light and her body became white with it, she began to reflect its whiteness. He saw her bones melt back into her skin and her face grow normal again—but then more, it was a shining face, full of the joy and energy of some higher world, and David had the sense that he was in the presence of a great and dignified being that was returning home.
Before his eyes, this ordinary, humble patient was transfigured into a being of grandeur, naked in her physical perfection, ascending in the healing flood of light.
An obscure sort of sorrow flickered in his heart then. Caroline’s hand slipped into his, and he knew that she had the same question, Why not me?
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