Mack was right beside her now.
“That grass,” he said, “can you reach down and—”
Katie crouched, taking the portal with her.
“Sure—oh, I can feel it. It’s grass. Oh—God—” Smoke, fast and thick, began coming out from under her T-shirt.
She snatched her hand back, and blood came gushing out of the neatly sliced stump of her wrist. Flailing, she screamed, then flames shot out around her midriff, melting the shirt and causing her to twist and turn in agony, then to run to the far end of the long kitchen and smash into the wall.
All the while, Mack watched with the coldest eyes Caroline had ever seen. He did not try to help Katie at all, but kept his gun trained on the two of them.
Katie struggled in her death agonies, her pealing screams dropping to choked gargles as the room filled with a sickening stench of charred flesh and the overwhelming stink of burned hair.
The portal lay flat. Pressed into the grass on the other side of its surface was Katie’s hand and most of her forearm.
“What in hell happened to her?” Mack snarled.
“She was marked,” David said quietly.
Mack thrust the gun into his stomach.
“What is this about these marks?”
“You get them from the life you’ve lived. A life beyond redemption, and you—”
Mack slammed him with the pistol and sent him sprawling and spitting.
“All right, shut up with that bullshit! You listen to me, both of you, and listen close, or you will die slower and harder than you can imagine. That Humvee out there is a recce unit. Behind it is a strike force. They know what you have and these are your choices. Either tell us how to work this thing right now, or we will torture the life out of you until you do, then go to the clinic and waste whoever there is left to waste. Choose, children. Now.”
“Mack, listen to me,” Caroline said, putting all the urgency she could into her voice. “We can all go together. We can be friends. Partners!”
With a speed so sudden that it was in itself terrifying, Mack lunged at her and slammed her against the wall so hard she slumped, momentarily stunned. He shook her back to consciousness.
“I tried it before and it hurt so much I couldn’t do it. Then this woman—Goddamn! But this fucker works and there’s a secret to it, and you will tell me that secret.”
She remained silent. What else could she do? If he couldn’t get through, it was because he was judged.
“Okay, Doc David, then you tell me how it works.”
He had something in his free hand that was not a gun, then she heard her clothes ripping and felt coldness and tightness against her skin. It was a point, she knew, and a little more pressure and it would penetrate.
“I swear to you, I will take every inch of skin off her, every fucking inch, unless you tell me the truth.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” David said. “It’s a sort of filter, it only lets certain people through.”
“Then you’re gonna change it.”
“We can’t.”
The knife began sliding along her skin. She forced her pain to remain silent.
“You will hold her skin in your hands and she will still be alive, David. She will be in agony unlike any either of you have ever known. The only way you will be able to stop her pain will be to kill her with your own hands!”
“David—”
David turned on her. “Shut up!” Then, back to Mack. “Mack, we can change it. For you. You can go through.”
“Where? Where is that place? It sure as hell isn’t anywhere on this Earth.”
“It is, Mack. It’s on this Earth.”
“Where?”
“Mack, it’s right here. It’s where we’re standing right now. It’s what the Earth will become after . . . after what’s going to happen.”
“And what would that be?”
“The end of this cycle.”
“And the Earth is totally destroyed?”
“The cycle is over. Those of us who enter the new Earth start the new cycle there.”
Caroline felt the pressure of the knife lessen.
“And who decides?”
“We decide,” David said. “We can change the portal for you.”
He lifted it from the floor. Caroline wasn’t sure what he was doing, and remained silent. But one thing she did know. He could not change the portal in such a way that it would let someone with the mark through, because that mark identified them as being below the human level, lacking higher morality, compassion, and judgment. This is why it was called the mark of the beast. It meant, simply, that your life had left you more animal than human.
From outside, there came the snarling of big vehicles, then the squealing of brakes, followed by voices.
“That’s the general,” Mack said. “He’s seen the truck.”
“He knows about your truck? How?”
“We have communications. Just enough.”
David looked doubtful. “May I ask—”
“Just fix the damn portal. Do it now!”
Caroline realized that Mack did not know how General Wylie had found them. A lucky guess, perhaps.
David picked up the portal. “Caroline, we have to do this.”
There wasn’t a thing she could do to change it. All she could think was that he was buying time, so she took it from him. Up close like this, it was indistinguishable from a window. It was marvelous, just the most extraordinary thing she’d ever seen. But what would she do to make Mack think she’d changed it?
“It has to be tuned to the people who’re going to use it,” David said. “It works like a fingerprint reader. Let us—Caroline, print Mack to it.”
Dear God, he was going to trick Mack into doing the same thing that Katie had done.
She had no choice but to go along. “Give me your hand, Mack,” she said. Touching his damp skin was horrible. There was a sense of the corpse about it, not like the skin of a living person.
The judged were still moving and breathing, but they were already outside of life, in a state where no further change could take place. They just didn’t know it yet.
She positioned her hand in his, so that her palm faced the portal and his hand enclosed hers. She had no idea what she was doing, she was just trying to make something up that he would believe.
“This is doing what?”
“Imprinting you,” she said. “Then you can go through.”
“What about my people?”
David said, “You imprint them. Do it the same way.”
“Do you feel anything yet, Mack?”
“Yeah, actually, the same thing I felt before. Warmth.”
“You tried this before?”
“It nearly burned me like it did her. Jesus!”
Caroline drew his hand away. “Okay, you’re imprinted.”
He addressed himself to David. “There’s a general out there. I am going to imprint some of his men and send them through your portal. If all goes well, we will take it and put it to good use. But if not, you are going to experience hell firsthand, both of you, until we are told the truth about how to make it work.”
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” David said. “You just imprint and step through. That’s all.”
“You are a poor liar, David.”
Outside, the snarling of the big vehicles was joined by a ferocious thunder of weapons.
“Those praying crazies,” Mack said pleasantly. “He’ll kill ’em all just to tidy the place up.”
He picked up the portal and went to the door. He opened it. “I need a guard in here right now.”
“Mack,” came a gruff voice. “How the hell are you?”
The door closed.
“Come on,” David said softly.
As David led her toward the front of the restaurant, the kitchen door was opening again.
They went through into the wrecked dining room, with sunlight glaring in through the shattered windows, tables smash
ed, chairs upended, and a great splash of blood across one wall.
Behind them, they heard a curse. The young soldier sent to guard them had discovered that the room was empty.
“Quick!”
She followed David into the street. The door by which they’d entered the restaurant opened onto the alley beside it, but this one faced directly into the street where the convoy was parked. Closest was an enormous machine with a slanted front. It was bigger than a truck, emblazoned with three stars, flying a general’s flag, and painted with a lurid image of skeletal Cimil, the Mayan god of the underworld. Atop the vehicle was a remote-controlled .50-caliber machine gun—which immediately moved toward David and Caroline.
“Down!”
But then it whirled, its motors screaming, spinning upward toward a huge silver object that was just appearing overhead.
Caroline felt washed by the sacredness that these silver objects seemed to carry with them like a sort of force field. The urge, when they were near, was to drop to your knees.
The heavily armed soldiers looked extremely uneasy, clutching their weapons, looking up. Around the convoy, in piles, sprawled, twisted, and bloody, were hundreds of bodies, the remains of the people who had been on their knees. Piled among the dead adults were their dead children.
There was a huge sound, a hissing thud, and light shone down from the silver device, flooding the convoy in powder white. A moment later, one of the soldiers cried out, leaped from his vehicle, and throwing off his helmet, began rising.
“Stop that man,” General Wylie shouted. “Shoot him!”
The machine gun fired, bullets streaming toward the rising soldier . . . and then sparks appeared in the light around him, a pattern that grew as the gun continued to fire.
“The bullets are stopping,” Caroline said. She gripped David’s hand as they both watched, awed by the magnificent and flawless display of technological power they were seeing.
Then the convoy command vehicle’s hatch flew open and three young soldiers piled out, also throwing aside their helmets and leaping, then rising into the light. General Wylie emptied his pistol at them, but with the same lack of effect that the machine gunner had experienced.
“Launch grenades,” the general roared, and another soldier pulled a bulky-looking item out of one of the vehicles, loaded it with a large projectile, and fired it upward.
With a clap of thunder and a burst of flame, it shot into the light and exploded—or started to. The projectile cracked apart in slow motion, the burning gasses and shrapnel oozing into a mushroom shape and stopping, the explosion frozen like a flower dotted with bits of steel. As if it was as light as the air itself, the frozen explosion drifted away on the breeze.
As this was happening, there came from the bodies all around the convoy a stirring and a groaning, and, at the same time, from the great machine above waves of what could only be described as directed emotion—waves of love, in fact, that made David and Caroline draw closer together, and made them both wish the same wish, that they, also, could join the mysteries unfolding above. Except . . . they didn’t, actually. They were workers and needed elsewhere, and—if they could only reach it—an important task was waiting for them.
The heaps of dead began coming to their feet, their wounds disappearing, life returning to their bodies. For an instant, David found himself looking directly into the eyes of one of them, and in the instant that he was connected to this man, David relived his whole life, not in linear memory, but as a compressed, stunningly poignant, and fragile instant of pure emotion, and it was good, so good that it hurt and he sobbed aloud, unable to contain his emotion.
Beside him Caroline also sobbed, and the dead began to rise into what at first seemed to be a great, round opening in the bottom of the craft. But as his eyes followed them, he saw that this was not an opening in the ship, but in the universe itself, for its velvet, living darkness was spread with a spectacle of stars.
Around them, more and more of the slaughtered rose upward, disappearing into the star garden at the heart of the machine.
He saw, at the very top of this perfect sky, the constellation of the Pleiades, the Sailing Ones, so clear that the vivid colors of the stars was clearly visible, the magenta of Pleione and the faint red of its blazing hydrogen ring, the white of Alcyone, and the iridescent blue of Electra.
As he watched, the people ascended in increasing numbers, rising one after another, and he saw them go sailing upward, and transform as they did into bright points of light.
Then the last of them were swept up into the fountain of stars. As suddenly as it had opened, the gateway in the sky closed. He was left watching the leaping death of the auroras’ return, and he bowed his head and fell to the ground crouching, and covered his face, so great was the pain of losing touch with that beauty.
“And so the dead rise,” he said, “and now to follow there will be great earthquakes.”
Caroline, weeping also, clutched at him, and their love—so essential to maintaining one’s humanity in dark times—enabled them to help each other, and give one another the strength they needed to go on.
But the convoy remained in chaos, with men screaming and leaping on the vehicles, trying to somehow jump into the sky, tearing at one another, bellowing and cursing and fighting to get to a door that was already closed.
Mack and General Wylie strode among them, their pistols in their hands. When a soldier clambered onto a vehicle, Mack or the general would shoot him and he would lurch off, hitting the ground with a thud.
Taking advantage of the confusion, David pulled Caroline into a shattered drugstore, and they were going through to the rear when they both saw it at the same time—a flash of green in the street outside.
Two soldiers had come into view. Between them they held the portal, which now contained an image of a sweep of meadow that ended on a riverbank. Beyond this stretched an enormous view that faded into blue hills.
Corralled at gunpoint by Mack and the general, soldiers shuffled toward the portal. They were eager at first, looking at it in wonder.
Mack held the first man’s hand against it until he snatched it away, pulling at his tunic.
When the man hesitated, the general lifted his gun as casually as he might a spoonful of soup, and sent a bullet through his head.
“This fucker works, at least,” he said as the young solder dropped.
The next soldier stepped right into the portal.
Caroline gripped David’s arm. On the neck of the man going through, they could see a telltale shadow.
Then this man also hesitated. His body jerked and he seemed to stop, his front half in the portal. Mack kicked him in the small of the back, shoving him forward.
For a moment, he seemed to go deeper.
“Jesus, it’s working,” Mack exclaimed. “We have got it, General!”
They were congratulating one another when the soldier, still only halfway through the portal, burst into flames. His writhing became frantic, his head jerking from side to side, his midriff lurching and squirming, and suddenly the man was out, falling back, hitting the ground as he was consumed, screaming in agony as the fire engulfed him.
In the air there was the same horrifying odor of cooked flesh and hair that had filled the kitchen when Katrina had burned.
General Wylie glared at Mack. David could see the veins standing out on his neck.
“You stupid asshole! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Mack stood at attention, taking it.
“Get those freaks,” Wylie muttered. “I want them front and center.”
“Get them,” Mack snapped.
Soldiers looked at each other.
Mack pointed directly at the store—at them, at the precise spot they had imagined that they were hiding.
“DO IT NOW!” he roared.
Caroline and David ran for their lives.
The portal remained where they had left it.
22
DEATH BEYOND THE END OF TIME
For a moment, their pursuers lost sight of them in the alley and David understood very clearly that these seconds were their last and only chance—whereupon they came up against a chain-link fence.
“David!”
He grabbed it and shook it with frustration—and then saw that it was loose along the bottom. “This way,” he said, lifting it, ignoring what the jagged metal was doing to his hands.
She went through and he followed, pulling it back into place behind him.
They found themselves in a yard with a greenhouse, with their pursuers close behind.
Almost certainly, it was going to be a trap, but their only hope of not being seen was to duck into the structure.
They found themselves in a steamy and exotic world of vivid yellow and blue and red orchids. They went deep among the vines and crouched there, hiding, barely breathing.
They did not hear Mack the Cat approaching, and David was almost ready to move to a broken window he had noticed when he suddenly realized that this master stalker was three feet away from them. From here, he could just see the side of Mack’s head, and his nostrils were dilating as he smelled the air, trying to catch a scent of his prey.
The humid air was heavy, though, and the way he moved his eyes, flicking them from place to place with the suddenness of the expert predator, David knew that he could not smell any faint perfume or sweat that would betray their presence.
He turned, and now he was so close that David could have reached out through the vines and touched the gun in his hand.
Absolute stillness. Absolute quiet. Except . . . what was that rustling? A glance at Caroline revealed that she was flushed with effort, both hands clapped over her face. Something in here had triggered an allergy and she was fighting a sneeze.
Mack sighed, then looked toward the door. He started out and David’s whole body shuddered with hope—but then he stopped. Slowly, the long, predatory face turned his way. He seemed to be looking directly into David’s eyes. But no, then he turned away again. When he moved, it was like watching a dancer, swift and lethal . . . but, in this case, making an error.
A moment later, low voices came from the front of the greenhouse. There was a curse, sharp, urgent, then the clatter of the door.
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