The Omega Point

by Whitley Strieber

  “What you made in that furnace is amateur chemistry. You can’t inject somebody with amateur chemistry.”

  “It isn’t amateur,” Caroline said, “and it isn’t chemistry.” She gestured toward the glyphs above the door. “It induces the union of those two principles and results in an extension of consciousness beyond space and time.”

  “Look, I’m a doctor and I can only say that ingesting a heavy metal is bad, but taking one in an injection is going to be catastrophic.”

  “You’re in amnesia—”

  “I’ve remembered everything, Caroline! The class, all of it. So I don’t need this—this attack. I do not need it.” Again he looked toward the desk. The gun was in there.

  “David, your amnesia is emotional. What the gold will do is open a door in you that’s locked tight right now. The door to the heart.”

  “The heart has no place in this.”

  “David, the heart is everything! Without love to sustain us, we cannot make the journey.”

  “Look, folks, you need to face something, all of you. We aren’t going to be making any journeys through time. Herbert Acton was incredibly accomplished, but he was also deluded. You can see into time. But actual, physical movement? Forget it.”

  He saw Glen’s eyes flicker toward Sam, who came forward and was suddenly behind him with Beverly. Once again, David started to turn toward them, but this expert restrained him by immobilizing his arms just above the elbows.

  Sam said, “Sorry, boss.”

  Glen said, “Either this happens with a struggle or without a struggle, it’s your choice.”

  Part of him considered the provable skills of Herbert Acton and part of him the arrogance of these people—but then Bev removed the sheath from the needle and all of him felt anger.

  “How dare you,” he shouted, and he kicked at them.

  “Hold him,” Caroline said. “We need the neck!”

  “Jesus God, NO!” But they swarmed him and immobilized him with their bodies. “Don’t do this, this is insane!”

  They forced him to the floor, they held his head so that he could not move it. He felt Bev swabbing the left side of his neck just above the carotid.

  “Okay,” she said, “you’ll feel this one, hon.”

  The needle was fire and he bellowed; he twisted and writhed and tried to move his head enough to dislodge it but he could not dislodge it, and he felt the substance running like lava through the vein.

  Then it hit his brain in an explosion of darting sparks, each of which seemed filled with information, and in the next instant he saw beyond words, beyond thought, beyond language itself, into the pure, wordless mathematics of hyperspace.

  Which he understood—and with it, also understood more of himself than ever before, that they were, in one sense, right about him, that he contained an enormous past stretching across eons among the living and eons among the dead. He saw, also, that a living man and a dead man are simply two aspects of one creature. The living form moves through life in an active state; a dead man is the same creature in its contemplative form, looking at what has been done, and in so doing seeing the truth of the self.

  There came next a burst of pure physicality—bodily sensation in its purest form, the agony of pleasure and the agony of pain mixed together.

  “Oh, God, God, I’m . . . I think I’m having a stroke. You’re giving me a stroke!”

  “No,” Caroline said. Her hand on his forehead was cool and firm, and the tears in her eyes gleamed.

  Then something happened that he had not expected and could not expect. The rich, vivid sensation of his body seemed to concentrate until it was a single, burning point—and then his head, for want of a better word to explain total annihilation, exploded.

  He had no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, no sensation of the world around him.

  He thought, They killed me. They’re all crazy and they killed me. This was a blood sacrifice.

  But the black that had enveloped him was not like the abyss he had glimpsed earlier. This darkness was vividly alive, and also changing, and it changed by degrees through all the colors that were on the Tiffany lamp, until it was a radiance, and suddenly he was no longer in a void, but back in his office.

  He saw also within him another being who was not him but who occupied a place in hyperspace that was at once everywhere and was deeply, profoundly specific. He saw that this being, who had been called Osiris, who had been called Christ, who had been called Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, who had been called so many different names, was right here, right now, and he understood why the preflood ritual that was now known as communion, the sharing of the flesh, had been preserved, because to accept Him into your body was to accept Him into your soul.

  He was looking up into a face. He reached up, and Caroline smiled, and kissed the tips of his fingers.

  Around him was his class, his deep friends, his companions in the Great Work.

  “I remember,” he said, his voice faint. He tried again, attempting to speak more strongly. “I remember. I remember how I love you.”

  At first, he’d been afraid and embarrassed.

  Dad had driven him into a world of Lamborghinis and Bentleys in an ’88 Chevy Caprice. He had not understood then what he understood now, that he had been chosen not because his grandfather had happened to own a certain piece of land, but because he was, himself, exactly right for the role he was to perform.

  “Mr. Acton didn’t only see the future,” he said, his voice faint. “We weren’t chosen because of our lives, but because of our past lives. Nothing was an accident.”

  He had been a general, an admiral, he had led men and nations, and was an ancient being full of wisdom, and he could perform the role being offered to him. In fact, he was the only one who could do it, the good leader.

  “I saw you,” he said to Caroline, “you . . .” She’d been perhaps ten, he twelve, but she had shone like a child made of sunlight.

  He remembered sitting side by side with her under the apple tree—for there was such a tree in the garden of every house of the Acton Group, including his own. The color of the apple blossom, he knew now, was a memory trigger. When that red blush came to the sky, it would be time.

  The color of the new star was no longer frightening to him, for it was the color of the highest energy, and the auroras combined with it to make the sky the subtle pink of apple blossom.

  He looked at Caroline again, and, softly, secretly, his heart opened—and he saw at once how necessary this had been. Without love, there was no reason to continue the species at all, and there was a great plan and there were rules, and without love they could not fly through time.

  “I remember my promise to you, Caroline.”

  She met his eyes with the warmest gaze he could ever remember, and at once for him everything changed. They had held innocent hands as kids, but there had been a deeper bond, the entwining love of souls that has carried humanity across so many perils and divides.

  They came together and he enfolded her in his arms, and it felt good, it felt so very, very good.

  An instant later, he broke away. In his new role, he had new responsibilities.

  “The painting,” he said. “Who’s guarding it?”

  Glen and Sam looked at each other.

  “Nobody? Is it nobody?”

  “David, we didn’t think that—”

  He didn’t listen to the rest, he didn’t need to. He was already running.

  Please, God, that he not be too late.

  17

  THE TOWNSPEOPLE

  “For God’s sake, Glen, she’s been dismembered! My dear God!” David felt as if he was watching himself from a distance as he stared down at the body of Marian Hunt. He knew that he was experiencing stress-induced dissociation, a symptom of shock. Claire Michaels, who had found her, sat slumped in a chair, her face in her hands.

  If they had not needed to take the time to inject him, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.

 
Katrina said in a dull voice, “We need a blanket, David.”

  “Yes, of course. We need, uh, a body bag—Glen?”

  “I’ll get a couple of men to pull her out of here and clean up the blood. But we’ve got no communications, so this all has to be done with runners and my first priority is to locate and secure the person who did this, and I have to tell you that we’ve got perimeter issues. We had an incursion attempt earlier today, and there was one intruder injured.”

  “Where is he? Is he being treated?”

  “They carried him off. I’m hopeful that it taught them a lesson.” But then he stopped, listened.

  David heard it, too, a chugging noise.

  “What is it?”

  Glen had gone pale.

  “Automatic weapons fire,” he said. “South wall.”

  “Ours?”

  “That’s an older-model machine gun, probably a Browning. The townies are back and my guess is that somebody’s opened that back gate for them again.”

  There followed a sharp, rushing whisper.

  “That’s us. HK G40.”

  Then three cracking booms, sounding like a small cannon.

  “Forty-five automatic. Civilian again. I need to get down there.”

  Cries echoed through the building. More chugging followed, and upstairs, glass breaking, followed by horrific screams.

  “Somebody took a hit through the window,” Glen said. The initial fear in his voice had been suppressed. In its place now was professional calm.

  “We need to get everybody to safety,” David said. “We need to bring the whole security team inside the building.”

  “David, begging to differ, you are telling us to begin our defense by retreating to our place of last refuge.”

  For a heartbreaking instant, David could see the boy in the man, the bright hope that had been there when they had been in class together. Glen was tired now, very tired. David’s heart went out to his friend.

  Feet pounded on the stairs and a patient appeared, Tom Dryden. He was naked, his face tight, a grin that spoke agony. Without a word, he ran past them and into the recreation area. An instant later there was a wet thud, and he was slamming himself against the windows the same way Linda had slammed herself against the door. All across his back there was an area so black that it looked more like a great hole in him than any sort of sore.

  Shouting that the great ships were gone, David ran to help him.

  But he kept on, just as Linda had, smashing himself to pieces against the thick, relentlessly resistant glass.

  “Stop! Take it easy!” David got to the door and threw it open. “Here, you can go!”

  Still, Tom hurled himself against the window, which, David saw, was starting to develop long, ominous cracks. He really did not need a point of easy access, not with a firefight going on a few hundred yards away.

  “You can go, Tom,” he shouted. But Tom didn’t want to leave by the door, or at all. He wanted to break himself against the window and the wall.

  “Mr. Dryden,” a female voice called, sharp and high. It was Katie.

  “Don’t get near him.”

  “He’s like me.”

  “What do you mean, Katie?”

  Her eyes glittered like dark jewels, and he could see defiance in them. She held up her hair, and on her neck, spreading up from her back, was a gleaming spot of deepest blackness.

  As a doctor, he might have thought melanoma, but not with borders that precise.

  “On his back,” she said. “He’s dirty, they’re never going to come for him.” She laughed a little. “We’re rejects.”

  Again Tom Dryden slammed himself against the window.

  “We can’t let him just do that,” David said, attempting to pull him toward the door. As he did three more people appeared, all running to help, Amy Feiffer and Robert Noonan, both from the class, and Mack Graham. Robert was the youngest son of George Noonan of Web development fame.

  The group of them manhandled Tom through the door and into the grounds. David hated to do it, but getting him out of here was better than having him slam himself to pieces.

  As they returned, they shut and locked the door.

  “How come you’re out, Mack?”

  “Nurse Fleigler released me.”

  “Yeah, well, okay, I can understand that.” Under these circumstances, nobody could be left in lockup. But with this man, it was tempting.

  “What can we do to help?” Noonan asked.

  Now there was a thunder of gunfire, and greenish-blue flashes stuttered in the violet of the new star.

  Under this new light, all the colors were different. The grass was a washed out pinkish brown, the new leaves on the trees yellow instead of green, the trunks black. As it raced toward the firefight, a white SUV, one of the security vehicles, appeared bright pink. The perimeter wall, visible in the distance, had gone from gray to rose, its razor wire gleaming an odd pinkish red.

  Dryden stood where Linda had stood, his face raised, screaming rage at the sky.

  David heard a cry from inside, and he recognized the voice instantly, and he forgot everything, and ran back in.

  Caroline stood before her empty easel, her face in her hands. The easel itself was just a frame with tatters of canvas around the edges.

  In the way that people sharing a tragedy will, Mack laid an arm on her shoulder. She shrugged him off, but he persisted, and finally she leaned against him and sobbed.

  “There are more materials,” Susan Denman said.

  “Where are they?” Mack asked. “I’ll help you.”

  “Caroline,” Susan said, “why don’t we go to the supply room together, you can pick out what you need.”

  When Mack started to follow, David called him back.

  “Mack, I want you to remain in sight of staff at all times.”

  “Of course.”

  He was suspicious of Mack. Of course, there was no proof of anything, but when you added this patient up, you got a sum that was wrong.

  Looking out across the bizarrely colored landscape, David knew that this new light would affect the human brain profoundly. Serotonin, dopamine—all the neurotransmitters—were light dependent, and this radically different wavelength—violet—would have the effect of intensifying and changing not only colors, but also the mind and heart. Colors you could see, but what it might be doing to brain chemistry he could scarcely imagine.

  Again there were shots, but this time they were so close that David instinctively ducked. Mack hurried back to the door, and David followed.

  “Katie,” he called behind him, “get the patients upstairs, keep them away from the windows.”

  As Mack opened the door, David saw movement around the side of the house, and a figure backed into view. He was concentrated on whatever scene was unfolding before him. In his hands there was some sort of a gun, David did not know what sort. But a big one, certainly, oily black and complicated. David’s own gun, the little Beretta he’d been issued by Glen, was in his pocket, but he dared not bring it out in the face of that monster.

  The gun fired again, and this time the sound drew people out of the recreation area—and he saw that the patients—the real ones—had not gone upstairs at all, but were, in their panic, coming outside and straight into danger, with members of his class trying and failing to control them.

  “No,” he shouted, “get back!”

  On hearing the voice behind him, the figure turned around, and David saw that this was a boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen, a towhead with darting, frightened eyes made red by the new light.

  As he aimed the weapon, David threw himself against the wall. An instant later the heat of bullets seared past his face, and he saw the child’s thin frame hopping from the recoil.

  Silence followed, then a single, ripping shriek. Turning toward it, David saw that a crowd of patients that had come out the door had been torn to pieces by the bullets.

  Many lay screaming, holding themselves, crying and gagging. One m
an capered wildly, blood as dark as a beet spraying out of his neck. Another bubbled foam from his chest, his hands fluttering around the wound, his eyes darting like the eyes of a trapped animal. Others were still, one of them kneeling and praying with his hands folded, gazing up toward the glow of the star.

  The boy came a few hesitant steps closer. His face was a child’s, but it contained the cruel shadows of fear and desperation.

  Quickly, the boy raised his gun to his shoulder, a snapping, oddly military gesture. Pink fire burst from the barrel and the praying man came sailing backward, his arms thrusting out, hands spread.

  Suddenly, there was movement beside David. The light was so bizarre that it was difficult to see some things, such as a fast-moving figure, but as she ran past him, he saw that it was Caroline and she was going to the boy.

  “No!”

  The boy kept the weapon raised, his face intent.

  “Caroline, we need you!”

  David ran, trying to put himself between her and the child, but she was well ahead of him.

  Then she was standing before the child.

  “Don’t,” she said to him.

  “Mom got shot. You gonna help her, lady?”

  “I can help her.”

  “She’s dead.” The voice was stark and cold. “What’s wrong with the sun?”

  “That’s not the sun. It’s a different star.”

  “It ain’t the sun?”

  “It’s dangerous. You need to be inside.”

  David tried again. “Caroline, we can’t afford to lose you.”

  The boy said, “I want a bowl of soup.”

  “You can have a bowl of soup.”

  “Caroline, get back. Let me do this.”

  “Get out of here, David. Son, come here.”

  “Fuck, no.” The boy’s hand moved and the rifle clicked.

  Caroline took a step toward him.

  David could smell the stark odor of cordite still coming from the rifle.

  “Caroline, please!”

  “Come here,” she said, opening her arms.

  The boy pushed the rifle into her face. David was behind her. He could not save her now.

  “Son, no. No, please,” he said, but his fear reduced it to a dry, barely audible murmur.