Cole and Linda, though anxious to reunite with Emily and Iain, spent as much time as they dared looking for her mother, fueled by the faint hope that, despite Rice’s assurances, she’d been locked away somewhere in the labyrinthine underground facility that sprawled beneath the nation’s capital. A soldier escorted them to the medical wing on the human side, but none of the doctors or nurses there would admit to knowing a thing, even face to face with their President. Linda believed them, but she and Cole kept looking anyways. She knew now how thoroughly information could be compartmentalized, how completely something could be hidden right under one’s nose. The doctors’ denials were not enough to extinguish her hope.
Mary stayed in Rice’s office with Alice, doing what she could to soothe the tiny being now curled in her arms. A quick breakfast had restored some of Alice’s energy, but the constant pain and pressure of Mork’s psychic alarm assaulted them both, driving them to distraction. Linda had encouraged them to head topside right away but Alice had refused, insisting without explanation that her presence was still required. Mary would not leave without the child. And a part of her would not have traded this moment for anything; it was the first time Alice had ever let Mary hold her.
Within fifteen minutes the facility was almost deserted. It was then that Rice remembered Bob, her body still lying on her bed, surrounded by Alice’s homemade, lacework Faraday shield and its menacing protective device. “We have to get her out of here,” said Rice, when he and Obie stepped into Bob’s room. He looked frantic with concern. “But she’s rigged to blow.”
They phoned Mary and asked her to bring Alice. The two arrived at Bob’s door, just as Cole and Linda came running up, to find Obie squatting next to Bob’s bed, tracing the device’s multi-colored wires with a careful finger. Alice cut to the chase. “It is a deception, sir,” she said. “Intended to thwart Mr. Rice.” Understanding immediately, Obie reached out with a laugh, knocking the cage away with a flick of his wrist as Rice shouted a warning. The cage fell to pieces. Alice’s “explosive device” twinkled its tiny lights, but did not go off.
Rice sighed and joined in Obie’s laughter, shaking his head in admiration and wonder. “Ya got me, kid,” he said to Alice with a wink, reaching out to tousle the child’s hair. Then he knelt by Bob’s bed and took her hand gently in his own. “Wakey, wakey, Bob,” he said softly. “It’s time to blow this joint, darlin’. Before it blows us.”
The six of them watched and waited for a full minute, but Bob did not immediately reconstitute, as Rice had predicted. She remained in her comatose state. Rice sighed sadly and squeezed Bob’s hand.
A terrified soldier ran past the open door, then returned, incredulous. “Mr. Rice! You folks gotta move! Techs say she’s about to detonate! We may have only minutes!” His forehead was glistening with drops of fear.
Rice looked up at Obie and Linda, an expression of pleading in his eyes. “I’ve got a twelve-footer stashed in the back, Carl,” he said. “Should fit through these halls. We can use that to fly her out of here.”
Carl agreed and Rice spoke to the soldier. “Tell the techs monitoring Mork to fly that wok back here, private. And then get your ass out of here.” Slouching with relief from being told what to do, the soldier took off down the hall.
Linda didn’t like it. “Bob’s as much a psychopath as Rice,” she explained. “I’m not keen on having her running loose. She could come back at any time.”
“The wok can restrain her, can it not?” asked Rice. “If we ask it to?”
Obie agreed that the wok could probably hold Bob, body and soul, were she to reconstitute. But Linda remained wary. She had little idea what the woks actually were, how they worked, or why they were still even there. And she was determined to solve her problems without the help of the Strangers. But then Alice spoke up.
“We do not have much time,” she said in a quavering voice, looking up at the adults who towered over her. “Mork is screaming! Can you not hear her?”
Linda sighed her frustration and gave her assent.
Rice helped Cole carry Bob to the wok, now hovering just outside her cell door. The hatch melted open as they approached. Obie stood with his gun at the ready. Rice and Cole slid Bob’s body into the low-ceilinged compartment. Cole stepped back to Linda’s side as Rice bent to straighten Bob’s legs. Mary retrieved Bob’s knitting basket and placed it beside Bob’s feet.
It was then that Rice whirled about, punching Mary in the nose with an upward swipe of the heel of his hand. He turned to confront the others. On his face was a smile. In his hand was a small black cube.
Mary fell without a sound.
Linda gasped.
Alice disappeared.
Obie fired his gun.
18.11
Alice knelt in the utter blackness of Mork’s cell. WILL YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED? she asked.
WE HAVE NO TIME FOR THIS, answered Mork. The rock underneath was beginning to pulse.
WE HAVE TIME, said Alice.
AS YOU CHOOSE.
MAY YOU LEAVE WITH OUR THANKS AND BLESSINGS, said Alice, according to the old way.
MY LIFE HAS HAD MEANING, answered Mork in the traditional response.
YOU MUST SHARE IT WITH YOUR TRIBE, said Alice.
I HAVE LEARNED THAT LIFE IS A VESSEL FOR THE POSSIBLE, said Mork. I HAVE LEARNED THAT THE TRUE PLAN CANNOT BE THWARTED, THOUGH IT CAN BE DIVERTED FOR A TIME. I HAVE LEARNED THAT THE ONLY EXPECTATION WE SHOULD HOLD IS THE EXPECTATION TO BE SURPRISED.
I WILL TELL THE TRIBE, said Alice.
AND I SHALL GO TELL GOD, said Mork.
Alice rose. MAY YOU LEAVE WITH OUR THANKS AND BLESSINGS, she repeated.
NOW YOU MUST RUN, said Mork.
Alice ran.
The little human girl helped her along.
18.12
“You’re wearing a Sentry,” said Obie. He’d emptied his gun. The bullets had vanished. Rice’s hidden shield had swallowed them whole.
“You don’t think that little popgun of yours has been running the show here, do you Carl?” said Rice with a smirk.
“Why?” asked Linda. She gestured at Mary on the floor. Mary was not moving.
Rice glanced down for a second. “Why what, girlfriend?” he said. “Why did I kill Mary or why did I go along with you or why am I betraying you now?”
Linda nodded. “All of it,” she said.
“Because I could,” said Rice. “Because she pissed me off. Because it was fun. Because there’s no way in hell I want to live in this nature-boy tree-hugging world you seem bent on.” Rice twisted the black cube in his hand. “But mostly because I just can’t see myself playing Sonny to a Cher who’s stupid enough to think she can control me.”
Linda shrugged. “I had to try,” she said.
Rice smiled. “Of course you did, sweetheart. And that’s why I’m going to live to fight another day, and you’re going to die. Just like your mother.”
“What?” said Linda.
“I lied,” said Rice with a grin.
Cole stepped forward to stand in front of Linda. Rice laughed. “Twofer Tuesday,” he said. He drew his hand back to throw the cube.
A black ball the size of a grapefruit popped into existence near the wall opposite the wok and hovered motionless in the air. Its shiny blue-black surface cast a pallor that dimmed the air itself, dwarfing the menace of Rice’s rubix. Rice stamped a foot. “Godfuckit, Zach, it was your body on the highway, wasn’t it? This is none of your goddamned business!” he snarled.
The black ball upheld its perfect stillness as the universe revolved around it, a pushpin pressed into the drawing board of reality by God’s own thumb. All around them the carved rock began to quiver and quake. Rice glanced at the ceiling, then looked at the black ball and smiled. “Too late, dickhead,” he said. He threw the cube.
In that instant, Obie fully understood the dream that had first brought him to Linda in the Ottawa Lodge: a huge, square drain in the floor, like a black hole, and Linda was b
eing sucked into it. And he remembered Sina’s parting words: the age of separation is ended. There is a field…. With a deep breath, Obie launched himself at Rice, catching the rubix with his chest. His momentum carried him forward as the cube drew him in. He crashed into Rice with one final embrace, drawing his former teacher into the cube with him. In an instant both men were gone, lost in a black spiraling gasp. The cube maintained its trajectory toward Linda and Cole. The black ball flickered into place right in front of them, consuming the cube like the ocean consumes a raindrop. Then it, too, flickered out, vanishing too swiftly even for memories to follow it.
The rock underfoot began to shudder and crack. Whatever it was Mork had unleashed, it was almost upon them.
18.13
Linda would never have believed that the wok could hold them all, but it did. They dragged Mary’s body in next to Bob’s, then crawled in themselves. The rock underfoot heaved and shook. The walls and ceilings were cracking, filling the air with dust. Small shards had begun to fall. At the last moment Alice appeared, her eyes hazy and harried, her face streaked with dust and fatigue. In the corridor behind her, a wall of nothingness rushed toward them like a colony of bats. Linda leapt out to help the child aboard, then ducked back inside as the nothingness struck, jerking in her legs as the hatch melted shut. The wok began to glow around them.
“You have any idea how to fly this thing?” asked Cole.
Linda reached out and grabbed his hand, then donned the metal helmet she found near Bob’s head. She took a deep breath and asked the ship to take them to the nearest hospital.
The ship did not seem to move. But of course it did just as she asked.
Chapter Nineteen
19.1
The wok landed on the helicopter pad on the roof of Truxton University Medical Center in Falls Church, Virginia. Mary was still alive. The door opened and Linda and Cole looked out to see a confused and very frightened looking orderly sneaking a cigarette.
“We need a stretcher!” shouted Linda. The young man scooted inside.
In less than a minute an emergency team with a gurney burst through the doors and approached the wok. Though obviously bewildered by the sight of their lost President emerging from some sort of strange spacecraft, they snapped into action when Linda shouted again. “We’ve got a severely injured woman in here!” she cried. “Get your asses in gear!”
They did. In short order Mary was transferred to the gurney and wheeled inside. One young resident, a tiny Indian woman with stunning eyes, lingered behind, unsure as to whether or not they should just leave this strange crew on their roof.
Linda smiled. “I must ask you a favor,” she said.
The woman nodded her head.
“I need for your people to not talk about this for a while. Until I can come back and speak with you. Can you make that happen for me?”
The woman nodded again. A slight smile came to her dazed face. “Glad to have you back, ma’am,” she said.
Linda took her hand. “Thank you.” She crawled back into the wok and the door re-formed behind her. The wok vanished into thin air.
19.2
The wok reappeared just inches above the small lawn next to the National Building Museum on 5th and G Streets. The door melted open and Cole climbed out to see Emily and Iain standing on the street corner nearby, staring off to the south and west. The National Academies building had collapsed entirely.
“Emily!” shouted Cole. “Iain!” The kids could not hear him over the blaring of sirens and the rumbling murmuring crying shouting gasping of the city and its people. He ran forward and came up behind them, grabbing them both in his arms. After a short and tearful reunion the three of them climbed back into the wok. It vanished once again.
19.3
The wok made one last appearance on the face of the planet that morning; it drifted slowly out of the sky over the paddock next to Cole’s home in Vermont. The family’s black Welsh pony, Fanny, snorted as the craft dropped into view, but did not retreat as it landed less than ten feet away. The door melted open. Out climbed Emily and Iain, with Cole and Linda right behind. Emily flung herself at the pony, burying her face in the horse’s soft mane. Iain walked up to pat Fanny’s nose.
Cole and Linda turned to see Alice kneeling beside her mother’s body. “May you leave with our thanks and blessings,” whispered the strange, tiny being. Then she stood and joined the others in the grass.
The wok rose into the air and tipped slightly toward the onlookers, as if to say goodbye. Then it lifted toward the sky as though grabbed by an unseen hand and was gone in an instant.
The weary travelers made their way back home.
19.4
Cole and his two older children left almost immediately to check on Grace and her grandfather. Linda stayed at the house, passing on the thirty-minute drive to the hospital in Waitsfield. It was way too early to show herself to the world. She had no idea whom to trust or what to say. She did not know if it was safe to reveal her whereabouts. And she was exhausted beyond all description. She gave the three her love and sent them on their way, then flopped back onto the sofa and turned on the television, which still sat on the end table where they’d left it. Alice crawled up beside her and Linda wrapped an arm around the girl’s tiny shoulders. Linda yawned deeply and Alice echoed her. They both desperately needed sleep. But first, they needed information.
The news from Washington D.C. was shocking. Vast areas of the city had fallen in on themselves, as if enormous quantities of sand, silt, gravel, clay, and rock had simply vanished, creating a giant sinkhole that had tried to swallow the nation’s capitol in a single gulp. Major damage extended from the Potomac on the west to 8th St NW on the east, from the Tidal Basin on the south to K St NW on the north.
The National Mall was now laced with a network of canyons, as were major portions of George Washington University. The Lincoln Memorial had mostly disappeared into the Earth, save for Honest Abe’s head, which had rolled out like a bocce ball onto a small section of untouched lawn. The Washington Monument had fallen and shattered, it’s tip pointing accusingly at the White House. The White House, with no means of evasion, had collapsed in on itself like an apprehended felon, leaving a pile of jumbled excuses. The Capitol Building, sited outside the primary zone of destruction, had been swallowed up as well, its dome sitting lopsidedly on a pile of rubble like a scoop of ice cream spilled from a cone. The Statue of Freedom pointed toward the sky at an awkward angle, trying to shift the blame. It was as if someone had planned a controlled demolition of Washington D.C. that would take out the heart of the U.S. government while leaving the rest of the city as untouched as they could. It was stunning.
Linda and Alice stared at the images. One aerial shot struck them in particular, as the harsh morning sun, having burned through the haze, put the damage into stark relief. They looked at each other with wide eyes. Both knew what that spidery network of sinkholes and chasms and gullies indicated. They knew what had been hidden directly underneath. They knew what those images meant: the human-alien facility, “the Rock,” had been taken completely away.
There were surprisingly few casualties given the extent of the damage: many injuries but only a dozen or so dead. As the story unfolded through the morning, it got stranger and stranger. There had been hundreds of reports of UFO activity in the skies over D.C. before and during the “event.” There were reports of people being lifted up out of their chairs or their cars, of people being “magically protected” from harm as buildings fell all around them. There were reports of an exceedingly high degree of absenteeism, as people called in sick or otherwise just didn’t show up to their jobs. And it turned out that there had been multiple-car pile-ups on virtually every major artery into the city, backing up traffic for miles and preventing huge numbers of people from making it to work. Reporters told lurid tales of miraculous coincidences and amazing escapes. The public ate it up.
Yet there had been casualties: deaths and injuries, traumas and loss.
And there were many people now being reported as missing. It would be a long time before they would know the full extent of it. Linda frowned, thinking again of the high costs the aliens could demand. The aliens. The gods. God. The Universe. There was simply too much that lay beyond her comprehension. She sighed deeply, vowing to simply witness without judgment. At least for now.
Equally stunning was the news from around the globe. What had happened in D.C. had happened elsewhere. There was similar, extensive damage reported in Ottawa, Riyadh, Moscow, Tokyo, Reykjavik, Canberra, and Berlin, with less widespread damage to Brussels, Santiago, Beijing, Khartoum, Oslo, Baghdad, Port-au-Prince, Capetown and the Vatican. In each location the pattern repeated: government-related buildings, monuments, and structures had fallen into sinkholes and chasms. Apparently the People and their Plan had extended far beyond the United States and Canada.
As the morning wore on, reports filtered in from other areas. From the deserts of New Mexico and Australia to the base of Mt. Shasta in California, from the Antarctic icecap to the hot tropical forests of the Amazon basin, new canyons and chasms and rifts had opened up around the planet, just as they had in D.C. Some of them were small, the size of a single car or house; others were almost as vast and complex in structure as what was becoming known as “the Washington sinkhole.” There was even a report from the observatory on Mauna Kea of a new crater on the moon. Everywhere the same pattern seemed to prevail: few casualties and a great many UFO reports. The Internet went wild. When a local station ran an interview with an older woman who claimed to have seen the missing President in a UFO on the ground in D.C. shortly after the chaos began, all hell broke loose in the blogosphere.
All of the Above Page 47
