Destination Unknown

by K. A. Applegate

  He tried, but gave up quickly. He was tired. Weary. Draining the consciousness from his father had taken enormous energy. Big Bill was a forceful man, he had a great will, and that had made it harder. Billy doubted he could have done it if Big Bill had not been so weakened. And of course he never would have but for his fathers agony.

  The pain had been a blinding glow, a green light enveloping Big Bill. As the pain surged, the light shaded toward deep purple, shattered into a rainbow of lurid green and luxuriant purple and night black.

  It was a strobe in Billys brain, insistent, the rhythm irregular, but stronger and stronger, firing his own nerve endings.

  Big Bill had taken him from the orphanage and given him a decent life. He and his wife had given Billy love. Billy owed his father an easy death. He knew how to do it, though it meant spending the energy he had been hoarding.

  Do you want to die? he had asked his father silently.

  But Big Bill never heard or understood the question. He, like everyone but Billy, was a spark, electric, so fast, too fast to hear his sons slow voice in his head.

  So Billy reached into his brain and found the answer himself. It wasnt hard. He had long ago learned to fire the neurons of another brain. He had long ago come to understand the architecture of the creased gray matter, the billion billion switches within, the ghosts of memory and ideas.

  Yes, Big Bills brain wanted to say. Yes, let me die.

  It was like sucking a milk shake through a straw. Big Bill fought for life though he longed for death. Life and mind were separate, and life fought to persist, no matter how much logic argued for surrender.

  In the end, though, Big Bill was too weakened by pain, by loss, and by fear. Billy had been able to give him peace.

  Billy could feel the fear around him. Some of it was fear of him. When he let himself go, when he released, he could open himself to the minds that hovered like bright fireflies, like candlelit jack-o-lanterns floating in the night.

  The words in their heads were too quick, but Billy could read the deeper meanings, he could sense the emotions, the basic truths. So much grief, so much fear, so much guilt.

  So much they didnt understand.

  But then, there was still so much Billy didnt understand, either.

  Who are you? What do you want with us? Billy asked, and he reached out, searching for the answer, feeling in the dark for synapses, trying to illuminate the architecture of a mind unlike any he had yet encountered.

  The mind was out there, but beyond Billys reach.

  And not that mind alone. There were others.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN YOU DONT LIKE THE WAY THINGS ARE, YOU CAN GO, TOO.

  They kept moving through the night. 2Face kept Edward close to her. He was a decent-enough kid, and she felt Jobs had placed the burden for his well-being on her.

  In any case, it compensated somewhat for her fall from authority.

  She fretted as she saw the faint lights of Jobss group falling farther and farther behind. Jobs at least was a potential friend, her only potential friend aside, of course, from her father. Now here she was under the thumb of Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake and Yago.

  Daniel Burroway was more a pouter than a fighter, 2Face thought. He would make sniping remarks, but after one particularly vehement dispute, Wylson had dismissed him curtly with the remark that he was an academic, a book-jockey. This is the real world, not a seminar.

  Since then Burroway had done little but stew silently as they walked along through the darkened landscape.

  Wylson had absorbed the shrink, T.R., into her coterie and Yago had begun to draw D-Caf to him: a toady for the toady-in-chief. 2Face imagined that D-Caf, shunned by everyone else, was glad for any acceptance.

  Wylson had dictated the gathering of wood for new torches, the assembling of any sharp stick or edged rock for weapons. She had directed that the line of march stay beside the river. They were wise policies, 2Face couldnt argue with that.

  But she did object to leaving Jobss group behind. At a rest stop, as everyone drank deeply, she approached Wylson.

  Ms. Lefkowitz-Blake? Its been hours now. If Jobs and Ms. Gonzalez or any of them had been infected by the worms, surely theyd show signs by now. Wed be hearing yelling or screams or something.

  Thats not necessarily true, Wylson answered. Parasites can lie dormant. She turned away.

  Your own daughter is with them, 2Face pressed.

  T.R. intervened. What youre feeling is healthy. You want to unite everyone, and thats very understandable. Besides, those are your friends, no?

  2Face suppressed a desire to tell the psychiatrist to take a jump. Shed had to talk to shrinks after she was burned. She had no respect for the profession. But this wasnt the time for antagonizing anyone. She said, I dont think we have the right to just kick people out of the group.

  Is it about rights? T.R. asked. He wore a pitying smile. Perhaps its more about an unresolved feeling of guilt? We call it survivor guilt. The feeling that one has sinned merely by the act of surviving when others have died.

  Im talking to Ms. Lefkowitz-Blake, 2Face grated.

  No youre not, Yago said flatly. Youre talking to air.

  D-Caf giggled, then stifled the sound with his hand, looked at Yago for approval, giggled again.

  Yago pushed past D-Caf and came right up to 2Face. And, by the way, I wouldnt push your luck, wax girl. You and the freak-show Madonna and Baby Yikes would maybe fit in better with Jobs and the Monkey boys crew, you know what Im saying? They already have that . . . that whatever he is, that Billy the Weird. You dont like the way things are, you can go, too. You can hook up with Jobss freak show.

  2Face fought to keep from showing the fear she suddenly felt. The threat was clear. Unmistakable. There were two classes of people: the normal and the not. And she was in the latter group.

  She faded back from the torches, back from the clique around Wylson. She looked for her father. He was slogging along, head down. He wouldnt understand. Would he?

  2Face stopped and turned to search the darkness for Jobss group: If she was going to be exiled, maybe it was better to go voluntarily. She didnt want to be driven out like a leper.

  She saw faint light, maybe the torches of the other group. Maybe not. A mile of darkness separated them. A mile of worms, maybe, and the alien Riders.

  Besides, Jobs had asked her to take care of Edward. Where was he, anyway? She had to do that. Had to live up to her responsibilities. She couldnt run away. Why should she?

  She touched her face. The burn had been horribly painful. The recovery had taken forever. But shed understood it as an atonement for her sin. And after a while shed come to see the disfigurement as a useful device for confronting, shocking, disturbing people.

  She had abandoned her birth name, Essence, and taken the name 2Face. She had chosen not to hide her face. She thought of herself as an anthropologist studying the strange, inconsistent, hypocritical reactions of the people she met. Here is ugliness, look at it. Let me see your reaction.

  But that was back in the world. That was back in a world where physical ugliness was all-but-erased by cosmetic surgery and DNA manipulation. Her split face, ugly and beautiful, had been a statement. And, she had always known, it was temporary once the healing was complete the surgeries would begin. Twenty-eight square inches of 2Faces own skin had already been grown in culture at the hospital, ready for transplantation.

  That world was gone. This was a simpler world. A more primitive world. Unique was no longer a virtue. Here people were powerless, and being powerless, were afraid.

  No. She was not going to be pushed out. She was Essence Hwang. She had a scar. But she was not a freak. Not like Tamara and the baby. They were freaks. If anyone was going to be exiled it would be them, not her.

  2Face threaded her way through the tired, footsore, hungry survivors in search of her father. He at least would stand by her. That was one. And Edward. Two. Who else?

  CHAPTER TWENTY THIS IS AN AWFUL LOT OF TROUBLE FOR OUR
ALIENS TO GO TO.

  The sun rose, small, distant, and weak. A winter sun. No longer a Bonnard sun.

  Jobs called a halt and laid Billy Weir down. He was getting mightily sick of carrying the boy. They had taken shifts, but there were only the three of them, MoSteel, his mother, and Jobs. Violet, with her hand still leaking blood, was in no condition to carry anything.

  They stood on a rise, not a hill so much as a low plateau overlooking a long, shallow valley. The river had slowed and now meandered toward a green, unhealthy-looking bay dotted with wooden ships that might almost have been the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria .

  There was a village directly ahead. Strange, ungainly buildings, some little more than rough lean-tos, others patched plaster houses with steep, dormered roofs. Jobs saw a brick bridge, arched, with a square tower. The perspective seemed odd; the relative sizes of buildings were wrong.

  Within the village, people, all in costume, or what seemed costume to a modern eye. Men wore tunics and feathered caps, some wore crimson tights and brocaded jackets. The women wore white linen head wraps and voluminous peasant dresses and aprons.

  There were pigs running in the dirt street, gaunt dogs, and chickens.

  The people were busily engaged in a series of odd activities. One man in a close-fitting felt cap was facedown on a wooden table, stretching his arms to the left and right. Another man wearing only one shoe appeared to be trying to crawl through a sort of transparent globe. A man was shearing a sheep while beside him a man tried to shear a pig. A man armed with a curved knife was slamming his head against a brick wall.

  It was ritualized, unnatural, not for a moment to be confused with anything real. The people were identifiably human, but behaving more like automatons. A man waded into the river waving a large fan and with his mouth open as if he was shouting. But no sound came forth. Another was perched on a steep roof and shot a crossbow at what looked like a tumbling stack of pies.

  This unsettling, strange tableau extended into the distance, melding into a less-detailed vision of a crowded city. But dominating it all, overwhelming all with its sheer size was a massive building. It was round, built like a wedding cake but one that might have been carved out of a single mountain of yellowed rock. It was seven layers of arches, each set back from the lower one, so that the whole thing might in time have risen to a point.

  But the structure was imperfect, asymmetrical. The top few layers of this stone cake had been slashed and within the gash, a sort of tower-within-a-tower, more arches, more layers.

  Jobs turned to Violet. She held her disfigured hand up at shoulder level, trying to help the blood to clot. She was an incongrous sight in her tattered feminine finery, stained with blood. Her hair, once piled high, hung down unevenly, a fallen soufflé. She was dirty, like all of them, in pain, hungry, scared. And yet, Jobs thought, she had a determined dignity that he admired. And the truth was, her knowledge of art was proving at least as useful as his own technological facility.

  Violet stared at the scene, awed, rapt, eyes shining. I know this, she said. Ive seen this!

  MoSteel was salivating. I see piggies down there. Where there are piggies there is bacon. And chickens. That means eggs. I am seeing bacon and eggs. I am seeing about a dozen eggs and maybe a pound of bacon, all hot, all hot from the pan.

  Jobs was hungry, too. But to him the tableau was just creepy, impossible, absurd. Unnatural. Talk to us, Miss Blake, Jobs said.

  Im trying to remember, she said. She frowned and shook her head. I forget what its called. The style, I mean.

  I dont care, MoSteel said. Question is: Are we going to get us some bacon and eggs?

  Its like a video loop, Jobs said. Each of those people keeps doing the same thing over again.

  Miss Blake nodded. Its an allegory, or a series of allegories. Its the kind of thing that would have meant more to a person of that era. Each of those people is demonstrating a fable or a saying of some sort. I dont recall the specifics. And of course theres the Tower of Babel, thats obvious.

  Jobs blinked. He was exceedingly tired and maybe stupid. The what?

  The Tower of Babel. You know, Old Testament? Man builds a tower to reach up to heaven?

  Jobs is a heathen, MoSteel explained. If it isnt from either a technical manual or a poetry book, my boy here dont know it.

  Olga Gonzalez said, Theyre cooking fish. See? Not in the tower, down in the village.

  The Tower of Babel? Jobs repeated.

  There has to be food, thats the point, MoSteel said.

  Brueghel! Violet Blake exclaimed suddenly.

  A bagel?

  Its a Brueghel. Fifteen hundred something. Sixteenth century, anyway, Violet said. Look at the detail.

  Can we eat the pigs and the fish? MoSteel wondered.

  Where are the others? Where is the main group? Olga wondered. I wonder if . . . oh, look. There they are.

  Jobs followed the direction of her gaze. Perhaps half a mile away, a small, vulnerable-looking knot of people in shabby modern dress stood gaping down at the same scene from a different angle. They were closer to the river, just at the edge of the village.

  This is an awful lot of trouble for our aliens to go to, Jobs said. I mean, did they do this with the whole planet? This all extends out to the horizon. He glanced at Billy Weir. He had formed the suspicion, the hope maybe, that Billy Weir had some profound knowledge he simply couldnt share with them. Certainly he possessed some sort of incredible power.

  Unless that had all been a dream. Jobs could no longer be sure. He was exhausted.

  You slept for five-hundred years and youre tired? he muttered under his breath.

  I guess we had better see if we can find food down there, Olga said.

  Jobs had opened his mouth to agree when it happened.

  A beam of brilliant green light, no more than two inches in diameter, blazed from the village. It drew a line at an angle to the ground. It seemed to originate from the small, crenelated tower at the end of the bridge.

  Laser, Jobs said. He frowned.

  The tower blew apart.

  Bricks flew everywhere. The half-dozen peasants closest to the tower were thrown through the air, tumbling, landing in the river, on the roof of a house, smashing into walls.

  What was that? Violet cried.

  With a shocking concussion, far larger than the first, the village exploded upward.

  It was like a bomb going off. Buildings were flattened. Livestock was tossed carelessly, twirling.

  The concussion was a hot wind in their faces, an oven blast.

  Look out! Olga cried.

  Twenty feet behind where they stood, a second beam of green light shone straight up out of the ground.

  The first laser had been followed by two explosions.

  Run! Jobs yelled.

  They bolted, racing away from the beam, racing the only direction open: downhill toward the village.

  The first, smaller explosion caught them, ruffled their hair, and rang bells in their ears.

  The second explosion hit Jobs like a mules kick in the back.

  He flew forward, landed on his face, rolled in the sparse grass, rolled down the slope.

  Violet Blake landed almost on top of him.

  Jobs wiped dirt from his eyes and blinked. He was deaf to everything but a roaring sound in his ears. His head throbbed. He felt a sharp pain in his back.

  All at once a hurricane was blowing. Olga Gonzalez was just standing up and the wind picked her up like she was an empty paper cup. The wind rolled her across the ground, faster and faster toward the ruined village.

  Jobs snatched at grass, at rocks, roots, anything, but the wind had him, too. He was sliding backward, clawing, unable to hold on.

  The wind got beneath him, lifted him up. He somersaulted backward and for a moment was airborne, flying.

  He bellowed and flailed and slammed hard into a ruined brick wall down in the village.

  Couldnt breathe, air sucked out of his lungs, grabbing at the
bricks but they were coming free, each one he grabbed, falling, slipping. Then, a solid purchase.

  He hugged the half wall and dug his fingernails into the mortar. He could see right into the village from here, right into all that was left of it.

  He stared in horror as the wind picked up pigs and sheep, wood and stone, men and women, and sucked them all down into a ragged hole in the ground.

  It was a whirlwind. A tornado. Irresistible. Where was Mo? Where were Violet and Olga and Billy?

  He had caught a hallucinatory flash of MoSteel running at mad speed, running with the hurricane at his back, propelling him. Then, nothing.

  Jobs felt his lungs gasping, drawing futilely on thin air. He could not fill his lungs. No air.

  No air!

  He crept up the wall, climbed on battered knees and bloody hands, gasping for breath, up till he could look down in the crater left by the explosion. Already he suspected, already his brain was putting it together.

  The crater was a hole, fifty feet across, a ragged, gaping gash.

  And in the hole, down through the hole in the ground, Jobs saw stars. Black space and the bright pinpoints of stars.

  Not a planet, Jobs whispered. A ship!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THAT WAS ENOUGH OF A RUSH.

  MoSteel saw his mother lifted by the wind and hurled with shocking force toward the hole.

  He jumped up to grab her but the wind hit him like a train. He did a Road Runner, milling his legs as fast as he could, but it was the wind that was in charge. His feet barely touched the ground, sufficed only to keep him more or less upright.

  It was, a corner of his mind thought, a very woolly ride.

  He flew-ran down the hill, into the village, unstoppable, unable to offer any resistence.

  He flashed on Jobs, saw a blur that might have been Violet Blake, blew past, wind rushing in his ears. If he hit anything at this speed hed crush the last of his natural bones.