“Now what’s going to happen is I want you to come into the building. I am going to be standing aside. You will not see me. Then you will go where you’re directed.”
Del was shaking so much he looked drunk, and Mike was about to wet his pants. Maybe there was another Blue Ridge here, full of even more rich shitkickers, and they were gonna end up getting their asses tortured.
Then a match was struck ahead of them, and Mike saw that they were in a ruined hall that had once been really, really beautiful, with a sweeping staircase that led up to a mass of blackened beams where part of the roof had come in. Delicate fingers touched the match to a candle, and Mike saw a beautiful girl in the yellow light, with big eyes that looked him over dispassionately and frankly.
“Hello,” he said.
She turned and went through a dining room full of upended tables and toward a big black door. So this was it, the inner sanctum.
The windows were draped with blankets, and there were many candles. And, in their light, many faces.
Mike’s first thought was, These are civilians. His second was that they were hurt, some of them. Then that there were a whole lot of them, maybe over a hundred, and they had to be the quietest people he had ever seen in his life.
Then, from the back, the woman who had taken the portal came in. Del sucked an awed breath, and even in flickering candlelight, Mike could see why. There was just very little question—this was about the most beautiful woman in the world. She carried the portal, which was glowing softly with starlight from the other side, and put it on an easel.
Mike said, “Lady, my brother is in there. I want you folks—” He looked around the room, tried to smile, but his smile collapsed and he was all of a sudden not a soldier. That all just went out of him, all the hardness, the long, cold nights ducking Taliban mortar shells and hating the bastards, all of that and all the misery he had endured as a virtual slave guarding the Blue Ridge, and the terror of this day—all of it just melted away.
What was left was his truth—he was a scared nineteen-year-old boy in an impossible situation, who had lost his twin brother and with him half of his own soul. He let out a long sob, then choked it back.
A man came to him, a guy in his thirties, the kind of guy who was born to command. When the guy’s arm came around his shoulder, he wasn’t embarrassed, not even in front of all these people. He was just tired and scared and alone.
“Come on, you two, I want to introduce you to our head of security. There’s work for you here.”
The two young soldiers went with David Ford, watched by many eyes, and in the candlelight, there gleamed many tears. Before them, the portal, back where it belonged, glowed with soft and beautiful light.
From his careful place of hiding, Mack also saw this. As he calculated his odds, he fingered the safety on his gun. He was sick and his burn hurt like nothing else he had ever known, but mostly he was filled with a rage that was beyond any emotion he had ever felt, a great, fiery darkness that boiled up from the center of his soul, and would drive him, he knew, both to feats even beyond his own great skill, and to death if it was necessary to fulfill his aim, which had become very simple.
Alone, he could not get the portal to Blue Ridge, which meant that the people who deserved it were not going to get it.
So nobody else would, either.
24
THE MOON
As soon as he’d disarmed the two young soldiers and assured himself that they meant no harm, Glen had gone outside to run the perimeter. He’d lost six of his sixteen men, but that still left enough of a force to reestablish a presence on the walls. They were a lot better off with a deeper defense, even if it had some light spots.
It was as he was crossing the broad lawn that led to the front gate, which was stuck open and thus guarded now by three men, that he noticed the moon.
He stopped, then focused his full attention on it. Over millions upon millions of nights, the moon has risen in peaceful splendor. But there is a reason that her face is marked by craters so enormous that they define her very form. They are a reminder and a warning that what has happened in the past can happen again.
He decided that he needed David to see this, and returned to the rec area where the survivors were assembled.
David could see by Glen’s expression that something was very wrong.
“You need to come outside.”
“What’s the problem?”
He nodded toward the door, and David followed.
“My God,” David said as soon as he saw the moon.
“What do you think it means?”
The face of the moon was unrecognizable. That strange, shocked expression that had fascinated human beings from time immemorial was turned in a new direction.
“It’s in motion,” David said, “the moon is rotating.”
Del and Mike had followed them out.
“Does this mean the end of the world?” Del asked.
Hardly hearing him, David watched in awe as this enormous cosmic event continued to unfold. Another object appeared in the sky, this one perhaps a tenth the size of the moon itself. As it crossed the face, it became a black irregular shadow. Size was impossible to judge, of course, but it was easily visible, so it was huge.
Once it crossed the face, it was lost to view because it was too black to reflect sunlight.
David knew what it was. It was an immense mass of debris of some sort from the supernova. He said, “I think if it strikes the moon, we’re going to see gigantic boulders thrown off. Some will fall back, but some won’t and the ones that don’t are headed here.”
“Which means . . . what?”
“Mike, it means devastating earthquakes. Tidal waves. Maybe worse. Much worse.”
As Del backed away from him, David saw a trapped animal come into his eyes.
“You think you know it all but you don’t know a damn thing!”
David did not challenge him, what would be the point? His fear and his anger would mean nothing, not in the face of what was coming.
The object reappeared, dark again as it crossed the moon’s face. With deceptive slowness, it arced downward. On the moon’s surface, then, there was a flicker of light. A moment later dust rose in a cloud so huge that it could be seen clearly as a haze spreading across the whole face, making it go out of focus.
Then a rain of gleaming specks emerged from this haze, some of them big enough that they could be seen to be tumbling, others nothing more than additions to a star field made faint behind the endless auroras and sick, purple-pink light.
David knew that these were actually huge stones, and that they would reach Earth in the next few days. But even before then—long before then—others were going to strike, and that could start happening at any moment.
“We got a problem,” Glen said. He wasn’t looking at the moon, and David followed his eyes toward the distant front gate.
“This is just the beginning,” David said.
“I can’t stop them this time, David.”
“We can dust ’em,” Mike said. “Give us back our guns.”
“No,” David said. “You need to let this happen. Just be sure they’re orderly, because there’re going to be more.”
The people began to hesitate, then to cluster in uneasy groups, when guards on the perimeter showed themselves.
“Go in and retrieve your weapons,” Glen told the two soldiers.
David saw men, women, and children, he saw dogs on leads, cats in carriers, people hauling suitcases and straining under heavy backpacks.
As people flooded into the compound, it became possible to observe great, long columns of them stretching off along the road as far as could be seen.
Glen called to his men, “Pull it in, stay in front of them!”
As the guards on the gate began backing up, the others came in off the walls.
Del fired his gun into the air.
“NO!” David said. “Not that.”
A woman tried to settle
a barking dog, but other than that, there was silence from the whole enormous and swelling mass.
A man came forward, his hands in the air, a white handkerchief in one fist. “Please,” he said, “let our children come with you.”
“They know about the portal,” David said.
“How?” Mike asked.
“A lot more people are going to know about it. It’s going to be seen all over the world by the ones who need to see it.”
“Seen? How?”
“As time passes, it becomes more . . . I guess the best word is ‘focused.’ And the more focused it is, the more people see it.”
Mike shook his head.
“It’s hyperdimensional. It’s outside of space-time as we know it. What’s happening is that it’s growing in hyperspace, like a gigantic crystal made of time. Does that make sense to you?”
“No, Sir, it does not. But I assume it means that a whole lot of people are going to go through it.”
David drew on his now clear memories of what he’d learned in the class. “Around a million worldwide,” he said. He called to the crowd, “You’re welcome on the grounds. But the building is off limits, do not attempt to enter the building.”
To emphasize this, the security guards moved toward them in a line, arms linked. The crowd spread into the broad front garden, but there were still many more coming.
“Man, look at the moon,” Mike said. “Look at it!”
The orb was dark red from dust, and the familiar face was now gone.
What had been the dark side was now facing earth.
“Man, that sucker could be about to come out of its orbit,” Mike said. “If it hits us, we’re done.”
The last time the moon had rotated was four hundred and fifty million years ago, before even single-celled life-forms trembled in the waters. It had been struck, then, by an even larger asteroid—actually a small planet—and a huge piece of it had crashed to earth. The crater it had left remained the largest landform on earth. It is called the Pacific Ocean.
Now the whole crowd was watching, and people were coming out of the house, all looking up at the greatest cosmic spectacle that any man had ever witnessed.
From within the mass of them, there arose a female voice, clear in the cathedral silence of the moment.
“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ ” And although her tone was filled with fear and even the ragged edge of desperation, a chorus took up the lines, until by the time the final verse was uttered, it was a solemn chant, clear and determined, from many thousands of throats.
In the silence that followed, they watched as bright sparks flickered in waves across the new face of the moon.
“Jesus, it’s the fishing tackle lady,” Del said. He went into the crowd to the woman who had spoken out.
David saw that she and her husband and kids carried an extraordinary variety of angling equipment, and he thought that it might prove very useful if where they were going was as undeveloped as it appeared. So far, no matter what direction he had pointed the portal in, he hadn’t seen a sign of any sort of structure. He feared that a great many people were going to be thrown into a very primitive environment, and that was going to be a very hard situation for them to face, especially after the hellish conditions they were enduring here.
“It’s beautiful,” a voice said from behind them. David did not need to turn to know that Caroline was there. Suddenly and with great intensity, he remembered her body close to his, and her gentle, insistent ways.
“David,” she said, “I’m having a problem with the portal. It’s flickering. It looks like it’s failing somehow.”
Terror like lightning shot through him. He looked out at the crowd. “Don’t tell them,” he said, and followed her back into the building.
25
THE OMEGA POINT
Looking at it on its easel, David could see at once how it was changing. There was something dim and grainy about it now. He touched it. “It looks like a painting again,” he said.
The class was clustered around it. As it turned out, they had survived the worst of the assault by hiding in the attic and ductwork of the patient wing. They had been clever about hiding, and only two lives had been lost.
“Before we moved, I thought we should wait for dawn over there,” Caroline said. “I didn’t expect this.”
David did not say that he thought that Caroline had made a mistake. How could anybody be blamed for anything now?
He addressed the group. “We need to start getting people through. We need to do it right now.”
Nobody moved.
George Noonan said, “All those people, one by one? Through this?” He shook his head.
“I don’t see how we can help them,” Aaron added. “Not with such a small opening.”
“I think we have to,” a voice replied. It was Peggy Turnbull, who had been a tomboy in the days of their class, interested only in hunting and horses. In recent years, she had become a poet. Her false psychosis had been depression. He regarded her narrow face, pale in the candlelight. How long would this delicate creature survive in the wilderness that they would soon be entering?
At that moment, there was light so bright that it glared in through the blankets that had been hung over the windows, and from outside there came a howling uproar of terror.
There followed a clap of thunder so enormous that it shattered the few remaining windows.
“Bolide,” Mike said. “Big one. Hit just below the horizon, so better hold on.”
The world began shaking.
He grabbed David. “If we can go through that thing, we need to do it!”
The shaking got rapidly worse. Caroline and others staggered, then she fell to her knees. As David went to her, there arose from outside a clamor of shouts, followed by the chatter of an automatic weapon.
“NO!” David shouted, but his cry was lost in the thunder of the earthquake, as the whole patient wing trembled and cracks raced up the walls. Still, though, the earthquake increased, and David threw his body over Caroline, and could practically feel the ceiling above them getting ready to give way.
“We have to get it outside,” she shouted above the din of crackling plaster and collapsing window frames.
Again light, so intense this time that heat came with it, searing, burning, their exposed skin.
The air was sucked out of David’s lungs, and he thought that he must die.
“It’s coming down,” a voice cried, and then Glen and Mike were there, and everyone was running for the doors. Glen helped them up, and Caroline took the portal.
As they went toward the door that led into the side garden, the wall collapsed before them.
“The front,” George Noonan shouted. “It’s our only chance.”
They picked their way through the rubble of the front of the house, moving in a fog of dust almost too thick to navigate at all, but then there were lights ahead, bobbing closer. There came a girl of perhaps twenty, her tired face full of sadness. David remembered her from the bus, and thought, She has lost her future, that’s what a child is.
An agony deeper than blood filled him, because he thought not only of her and the others outside, but all the millions who were suffering this without even the slight hope of survival represented by something like the portal.
“Help us,” the girl said, reaching out and taking David’s hand. “I buried my baby just a while ago. But I want to live. I want to live for him.”
In his heart, David felt that the baby had ascended, but he would explain it to the mother later. He found himself being led onto the front porch with its now teetering colonnade. Behind him, Caroline brought the portal and the class came with her, struggling, covered with dust, some of them nursing injuries. But nobody was screaming, and the house still stood, and the quake was subsiding into a series of more and more distant shudders, and thuds as if a giant was walking off into the forest behind the house.
Caro
line raised the portal up before the crowd. “If we stay calm,” she shouted, “if we get in line and take our time—”
Susan Denman said, “Isn’t it holographic? I remember your dad taught us that it would be.”
“I know what he said, but look at it! We need to deal with what we have.”
“But this is all wrong, then! We didn’t give our lives to save a couple of hundred people. This is supposed to be about millions!”
Had they been lied to? Were they, in fact, the most elite of the elite?
She returned to the crowd. “Let’s start now, and nobody rush forward. Just take it easy—”
Without warning, a shock passed through the earth with such force that it hurled people flat, causing the whole crowd to drop in a confusion of possessions, pets, and terrified, screaming children.
The power of it caused trees to leap out of the ground as if they were being fired from buried cannons, and the Acton mansion itself, as strongly built as it was, shuddered and kept shuddering.
People were unable to stay on their feet, and David was no exception. Struggling, falling, clawing the heaving earth, it was like being in a nightmare where you ran but went nowhere.
“Get away from it,” he cried—but then Caroline pointed, and he looked up to the great roof and saw a figure there, a man with a rifle. “Glen,” he shouted, “get that man to come down off there!”
“He’s not one of mine, David!”
But David didn’t need to be told. He had recognized Mack the Cat. Despite the gigantic shaking, Mack remained absolutely still and steady as he raised the rifle and fired down, at first, David thought, at him and Caroline. But he was not shooting at them, he was shooting at the portal, and David understood instantly that he cared only for one thing now: if he couldn’t use it, nobody would.
It took all of his effort and all of his strength, but he managed to get to his feet and to stagger along the heaving ground and throw himself onto it, pressing it against the earth beneath him. The front of it was to the ground, and the back still seemed like nothing more than canvas stretched on a frame. But then he saw a bullet hole in it, and something like starlight leaking out onto the backing, as if the tear was oozing the blood of time.
The Omega Point Page 26
