This was Brother Jedediah’s big moment.
“Tick-Tock.” His voice trembled. “The time has come for you all to take the medicine, Brothers and Sisters. Pastor Crane has asked me to tell you that he is with you at this time. He will take you to the Promised Land…” He swatted something away with his hand.
“Pastor Crane loves us all and will deliver us—” Something else landed on Jedediah’s face and this time it was not so easily dislodged.
A bee had woven its thorny legs into the hairs of his wispy moustache and was not about to move. Jedediah tried to continue. “As I speak, Pastor Crane is high up in this very building, negotiating with our new leaders…”
The rain began to fall more heavily, plastering the black strands of Jedediah’s hair to his head, and more bees landed on his face and started to sting. The little man yelped and his squeals were broadcast across the whole city. Bees were peeling away from the Flight Building in vast numbers; swooping down, they clung to his hair and clothes until he was completely covered in a thick writhing black carpet. The buzzing was so loud that it drowned out his screams, and more and more insects flew around him, engulfing him in a vicious, spinning vortex – a tornado of bees.
The crowd gasped; the noise of the swarm grew louder and angrier, the spinning faster, until finally Jedediah was lifted bodily into the air and carried higher and higher above the crowd.
Then the bees dropped him.
Jedediah slammed hard onto the street below. Triple Wheelers screamed at the sight of their leader’s second in command lying limp and broken on the pavement. A cloud of bees hovered around the body for a few seconds before darting into the crowds, stinging hands that were about to lift deadly medicine to lips. A column of bees, the size and volume of an express train, shot up Broadway, stinging and knocking vials of poison and bottles of pills from Triple Wheelers’ hands, before descending on Central Park.
It was then that everybody began to wake up…
Bob looked at his wife, who was about to feed Eden and Tammy a handful of pills. In his own hand, he was holding a small vial of liquid barbiturate. He was getting ready to swallow it when a bee stung him on the neck. Then another stung his hand. The sharp pain pulled him up short. A coolness crept across his hand and up his arm as the venom spread through his bloodstream, quick and effective like a drug.
“Ow!’ Barbra cried.
Bob saw that four or five bees had attached themselves to her hands and were stinging her, forcing her to drop the pills. Triple Wheelers yelled and squealed around them, and Bob suddenly saw the whole situation with a new clarity. The coolness in his veins spread to his brain and he dropped the vial on the ground and stamped it into the wet earth. Eden was crying; a bee had stung him on the arm. Bob picked his son up and kissed him while Tammy climbed to her feet and hugged her father tight, as if her life depended on it.
Which it did.
Bob ran around the neighbouring couples, slithering in the mud, shouting at them: “Drop the pills. Don’t take the medicine. It’s over…”
With the rain drumming down on the crowd, Bob quickly realized that the other families were doing the same thing he had done. Mothers who had dissolved pills into bottles of milk were looking quizzically at the poison they had been about to feed to their babies. It was as if the beestings had awakened them from the collective dream they had been moving through like zombies. People staggered around, slipping on the soaking grass, bleary eyed, as if recovering from a deep and troubled sleep.
The sky blackened further still. Bob grabbed his wife and held her tight. Her whole body was trembling and she was crying, her tears mingling with the pouring rain.
“What were we thinking, Bob?” she cried. “What were we thinking?”
“It’s over, honey,” Bob said. “Let’s go home.”
Four hundred and fifty metres above Broadway, in the Flight Building’s secret observatory, Rachel and Adam, along with their mother, Laura, Gabriel, Crane and Newman had watched the events unfolding below them on the screen. They had seen the swarm descend on the crowd of Triple Wheelers. The venom had woken Ezekiel Crane’s followers from their semi-trance and saved their lives.
Ralph Newman had moved to the window and stared out in wonder, seemingly oblivious to the others in the room with him once the heavens had opened. He still stood there, gazing at the darkening sky and the glittering web of orbs, which had begun to glow high in the distance above them, pulsing gently against the blackness.
“I didn’t know it would be this … beautiful,” he said.
Laura seized the chance to rush over and free Kate. She ripped away the tape from her mouth and helped her back to the other side of the room. Kate fell into the arms of Adam and Rachel.
“Mom. God… Mom…”
“I’m so sorry,” Kate said. She stared, her eyes filled with hatred, at the man she had once loved; the man who had fathered her children as though they were no more than laboratory specimens and had then hunted them down.
“It’s not your fault,” Adam said.
Rachel pressed her face into her mother’s neck. “How could anyone have known?”
Laura nodded, rubbing Kate’s arm: doing her best to comfort her. “How could anyone have even imagined…?”
Gabriel stepped to the windows to stand at Newman’s side. He looked out at the movement in the skies for a few seconds, then gestured down to the gun that was still in the director’s hand. “You can get rid of that now,” he said. “It won’t work any more.”
Newman glanced down at the gun as though he had forgotten it was there. He raised it casually, pointed it at Gabriel and pulled the trigger. There was an empty click. Newman tossed the gun down onto the floor, turned back to the window.
The orbs were getting bigger in the sky.
“What’s happening up there?” he asked. For the first time there was a nervousness in his voice.
“Don’t tell me you’re scared?” Gabriel said. “Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for?”
Newman looked at Gabriel, saw the smile. “What is it? Why are you smiling?”
“I was just thinking about all those you’ve killed. You and the superstitious idiots who came before you. All those who were burned or beaten to death on flat black rocks; the ones you cut open while they were still alive.”
Newman pressed his back against the window.
“They would have thought it was appropriate,” Gabriel continued, “the way you’re going to die…”
There was a sudden cry of pain from the other side of the room. Until now Ezekiel Crane had been watching transfixed as his plans had unravelled before his eyes. Moving closer to the huge screen, he cried out again, raising one hand and smearing blood down the glass while reaching out with the other to steady himself against the edge of Ralph Newman’s desk.
Trembling, his knuckles white, his face rigid with fury and confusion, he roared, “I am Ezekiel One!”
“No,” Gabriel said.
“I do not need the workers or the drones!” Spittle was flying from his lips. The skin looked like it was slipping on his face. “I will still rise up! I can still lead the new race when the time comes.”
“Your destiny was to be here. In the City of Glass,” Gabriel said, walking over to stand next to Rachel and Adam. “But you will not be leading anything.”
Crane made a lunge for Gabriel, but his shattered leg gave way beneath him, and he crumpled to the floor, screaming. In his pain, he was unaware that someone had emerged from the lift behind him. Seeing the looks of amazement from Kate, Rachel and Adam and hearing the gasp from Ralph Newman, he turned to find out who they were all staring at.
Commodore Wing looked at his son. “It would have been better,” he said, “if you had died…”
Crane climbed slowly back to his feet, never taking his eyes from the old man who limped past him to stand with Gabriel and the others: the daughter he had never been able to acknowledge properly and the grandchildren to whom he owe
d so much. He wanted more than anything to say sorry – to tell them he would do whatever he had to – but he was unable to find the words.
Rachel did not need to hear the words out loud. “It’s OK, Granddad,” she said.
Wing smiled and turned back to his son. “When I found out you were still alive, I was … happy. I have spent the last two years not knowing; living like someone who can’t wake up from a nightmare. Now, though, seeing what you are…”
Crane’s laugh was cold and empty. “What I am? I am not the useless old man who can barely walk. I am the one who is about to be reborn. Remade…”
Wing gazed past the son who had become a monster at Ralph Newman. A monster of a different kind and the stepson he had not seen for more than forty years. “If I had known all those years ago at Alamogordo what the two of you would become,” he said, “I would have killed you myself. I would have driven you away from the base and left you in the desert to die.”
“Hindsight is wonderfully convenient, don’t you think?” Newman said.
The blood rushed to the commodore’s face and he raised his walking-stick.
“I may have cut those brake cables,” Newman said, “but it’s your fault my mother died.”
“Watch your mouth, boy—”
Newman smiled. “If you had not been cheating on her with that woman, it would never have happened.”
“None of this would be happening,” Crane said. He pointed at Rachel and Adam. “Those two would not exist.”
“Then I’m happy,” Commodore Wing said. He beamed at Rachel and Adam. “More than anything in the world, I’m glad of that. Glad of them…”
Looking down at Rachel and Adam, he did not see Crane launch himself across the room at them; the perfectly manicured fingernails clawed at the air and a cry of naked fury rose up as he lunged in desperation at eyes, throats, anything.
Wing did not see, but Gabriel did.
Crane froze mid leap and the cry died in his throat when flames bloomed suddenly at his chest. He gasped in horror at Gabriel, seeing the reflection of fire in the boy’s green eyes and the outstretched hand that had casually conjured it.
The fire spread quickly, catching easily in the synthetic fabric of Crane’s silver suit and licking down past his shattered knee and up towards his face.
He began to shriek and wheel around, only stopping when he was face to face with Ralph Newman. He held out his arms. His voice, taunting and mock-tender, was just audible above the crackle of the flames and the spit of burning flesh. “Come here, brother,” he said.
“No, for God’s sake…” Newman backed away, but there was nowhere for him to go and he was quickly gathered into the inferno, his own flesh blistering in the heat. They screamed in unison as Crane’s artificial hair and face were consumed by the flames engulfing them both.
The temperature in the room was soon as unbearable as the smell. Rachel couldn’t watch Crane and her father staggering around; she covered her ears to block out the noise of them bouncing off the glass walls. Adam and Laura looked away too.
“Please, someone stop this!” Kate shouted.
She was staring at Gabriel, but it was Commodore Wing who came forward. Moving as fast as he was able, he pushed and beat the human inferno with his outstretched walking-stick; pushing it back and hard against the window, which shattered into thousands of pieces. The sudden gust of wind that came through fanned the flames.
Their burning bodies entwined, the brothers rolled out onto the narrow walkway that supported the giant metal wings several storeys above the street. Ralph Newman thrashed and struggled to get to his feet, but the wind was high and strong and it blew him backwards until he was only centimetres from the edge. The soles of his shoes were melting and his legs gave way. Screaming, he slipped, grabbing on to Ezekiel Crane as he fell; he held on to Crane’s burning leg and tried to claw his way back onto the platform.
Commodore Wing crawled gingerly out onto the walkway, and was just in time to see the weight of Ralph Newman pull the man who was once Hilary Wing slowly towards the edge. Crane pawed desperately at the metal, searching for a hand-hold, and for one brief moment Gerald Wing saw the pleading in his son’s blue eyes. He saw something he recognized shining from the molten face. He saw the little boy who had cried by the lake.
“Hilary…” Wing yelled.
But the blackened fingers had lost their grip and the burning brothers fell together, their screams fading fast as the fireball span and tumbled towards the street below.
Wind howled around the skeletal steel framework that had held the glass of the observation tower in place and rain lashed through the void that was left. After what they had just witnessed, Kate was doing her best to comfort Rachel and Adam, who were in turn doing their best to comfort her.
A husband. A father. Gone…
Gerald Wing limped back across the room, horrified at his own actions, his hands held tightly to his head. Kate took his arm and pulled him towards her and the children. Suddenly, he looked very old.
“This is all my fault,” he groaned. “Hilary and Rudi. God, I’m so sorry…”
“No. It was always going to happen,” Gabriel said. “You know that.”
They all knew. This moment had been predicted thousands of years ago by a Traveller in a cave in Morocco whose paintings has spelled out their destiny.
The orbs of light in the sky had been coming closer and closer and were now beginning to circle the tower. They weaved in and out of its frame, creating a lattice of light that protected those inside from the wind and the rain and bathed them in a warm golden glow.
Gabriel looked around. Triumphant. “We made it.”
Adam straightened up. The tears he had shed for his father were drying on his face. “You always knew we would,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
“No. Even today, I thought I had failed, but you never failed me. And that’s what made it happen.”
They looked at the three Triskellions, pulsing with light and energy in Ralph Newman’s safe.
“But what has happened?” Rachel asked.
Gabriel stepped forward and took her in his arms. “It’s really what’s about to happen,” he said. And then he whispered something in her ear. Rachel pulled her head away so she was able to look into Gabriel’s eyes. He nodded, and then he took Rachel’s head between his hands and kissed her.
It was only a matter of seconds, but time – everything – seemed to stop, and Rachel could feel the new power surging through Gabriel’s body.
“I need your help with one more thing before I go,” he said, releasing her head. He took her and Adam by the hand and walked over to where the Triskellions glowed.
Kate Newman suddenly stepped in front of them, blocking Gabriel. She was crying. “Please don’t take them with you,” she pleaded. “They are all I have.”
“It’s OK,” Gabriel said. “They’re safe now. I’m not taking anyone.”
“Take me,” Laura said suddenly.
“You can’t,” Rachel said, shocked.
Kate and Adam looked equally horrified. They were both about to protest – but the expression on Laura’s face stopped them. She was excited, buzzing.
“I’ve dreamed about something like this my whole life,” she said. “I mean, digging up fossils is one thing, you know. But this…”
Kate Newman took her friend’s hand. “We’ll miss you.”
The twins stretched out their hands towards Laura. She nodded. She did not need their powers to know exactly what they were thinking.
“I want to come with you,” she said to Gabriel. “Wherever it is you’re going. There’s so much I want to know.”
“That’s your choice,” he said. “It’s not a decision I can make for you.”
He took one of the amulets from the safe and asked Rachel and Adam to do the same. Standing in the centre of the tower, Gabriel held his hand out, a Triskellion resting in one palm. Rachel placed the second Triskellion on top of it and Adam placed the thi
rd on top of that. Gabriel briefly pressed his other hand down on top of all three and they began to spin.
They span in opposite directions until they hovered above his palm, each of the nine blades shooting out beams of light that reached into the darkening sky, and then, like golden helicopters, the amulets swirled around the outside of the tower, creating triple wheels of light. The orbs that had been circling and weaving in the sky multiplied until they filled the tower, expanding and contracting.
Rachel could see the phosphorescent filaments inside begin to change. They transformed into faint images; transparent and ghostly, like X-rays.
Faces.
They circled Rachel and Adam, coming close to their heads, before spinning away again. Rachel was certain she saw the faces of Morag and Duncan; Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard; Inez and Carmen inside them. Smiling.
Twins. Friends who had helped them, then sacrificed themselves so that the journey could be completed. Rachel could hear their voices chattering and laughing in her mind.
Other shadowy faces were materializing within the orbs. Faces she did not recognize, but which she guessed from the almond eyes were other Travellers like Gabriel: knights, saints and shamans whose energy had remained on earth after their deaths.
The Triskellions had generated three wheels of light that now began to intersect like a gyroscope; in the centre, one of the orbs stretched and grew. It floated in front of Gabriel. Limbs appeared to be pushing out from the inside, expanding and reshaping whatever membrane, or energy, it was that held the orb together. Arms developed first, and then legs. A torso, a head, until a translucent figure stood in front of them shimmering and not quite solid, skin building up over its body in layers of light…
And then Rachel knew who it was.
She looked around at the astonished faces in the tower, hovering over her grandfather’s expression. He had dropped to his knees, and she realized that Gerald Wing also knew who it was; he had recognized the friend he had blown from the sky half a century before.
Triskellion 3: The Gathering Page 23
