Why are we here? they asked. Where are we going? And they laughed at the incomprehensibility of their own answers as they grabbed their loved ones so they were not lost in the raging mob moving toward the shore.
We’re here for the ferry! Which ferry? Any ferry—and in Crete there were many to choose from. Come, one, come, all! Today all ferries are free, and when the ferries are packed to an inch of sinking, there are fishing boats and sailboats and barges. Today everyone is welcome.
They could not know that their bodies and their wills were under siege by one girl who had forced a powerful syntaxis upon her two comrades in chains. It was this link between the three of them that allowed her to create this moving wall of leverage, every bit as devastating as the tidal wave that had wiped out the Minoans. Although the skies above churned with resistance, it made no difference. Not even the heavens could escape.
When every last ferry, boat, and barge had set sail, thousands were still left on the shore. Those thousands now pushed eastward along the shoreline like a swarm of locusts, plundering every town in their path for anything that would float so they could join the growing fleet that swept east across the coastline.
By the time the call came to the city of Rethimno that evening, Hania was empty save for the stray dogs wandering in and out of abandoned restaurants. By midnight, when the call reached further east, to Heraklion, Rethimno was burning, with no one left to put out the fire. And by the next morning, when the odd armada was complete, it sailed due north across the Aegean from Heraklion, it contained more than half the population of Crete. Nearly three hundred thousand were jammed into every floating vessel the island had.
Bit by bit as the fleet sailed north, the impulse lifted from the land, leaving thousands left behind to mourn—not for the loss of so many sons and daughters of Crete, but for themselves, and the fact that they had been too crippled, too infirm, or just too slow to be a part of this great rapture that was surely headed for some kind of glory somewhere across the Aegean, at a place just off the horizon.
WINSTON WONDERED WHY HIS life suddenly seemed to revolve around airports—and each time he found himself in one, he couldn’t help but notice how much worse things were. These terminals had become a yardstick for him to measure the state of the world.
Athens-Ben Epps Airport was in a state of complete disarray.
“Things will fall apart,” Dillon had promised. Here, as in the airports in the United States, squatters had taken up residence in the hallways. The stench of urine permeated every corner of every gate. Travelers who still had enough sanity and sense of direction only kept it by turning a blind eye to the chaos around them, pretending that it was normal, or that it didn’t exist. That it was somebody else’s problem.
When they had landed, Winston had caught sight of a burned-out wreck of a plane abandoned on a taxiway. No one had bothered to remove it. The edge of the tarmac was crowded with derelict planes—so many it was almost impossible to maneuver. Airlines that had shut down; jets without enough fuel to go anywhere else. This great European hub had become an airplane graveyard. A flood of arrivals, but fewer and fewer departures. “The planes just keep coming in, but there’s not enough jet fuel left to get them out,” Dillon explained. “Airports in this part of the world are seeing more arrivals than they ever did, because of what’s going to happen here.”
“Because of what’s going to happen here?” Winston asked. “How the hell does anyone know what’s going to happen here?”
“Foreshocks,” said Dillon. “Intuition. People feel their attention drawn to a place and they don’t know why. Pretty soon people start to feel the need to come. To see the ruins, they’ll think. To walk on the Acropolis, but that’s just their mind trying to make sense of a feeling they can’t understand.”
The Athens airport, notorious for slipshod security, for some mystical reason had chosen this, the twilight of time, to detain all suspicious-looking persons. Of course, these days everybody was suspicious-looking so they had a wealth to choose from. On the morning of Tuesday, December sixth, they chose Winston and Dillon. Had Winston any sense of humor about it, he might have laughed. To think they had survived and triumphed over all they had, only to be harassed by yet another cast of rent-a-cops. The fact was, Athens Airport had become a hot spot of activity, intrigue, and violence over the past few months, and so, naturally, two teens arriving in a corporate jet was bound to catch someone’s attention. Security collared them immediately, shunting them to a 10x10 windowless room with bad fluorescent lighting that flickered like a disco strobe.
The walls were peeling institutional green that clashed with the faded maroon linoleum floor that peeled up in the corners. Two guards stood by the door like fixtures, theoretically waiting for someone to come and interrogate Winston and Dillon. The one to the left had given Dillon a black eye, smashing Dillon as soon as they got here. He claimed that Dillon had resisted arrest, but the truth was he hit him because he was American.
Winston watched the floor for a few minutes, waiting for it to renew like everything always did in Dillon’s presence. It took him a moment to realize that Dillon’s field was so well contained that the room remained unchanged. Containing themselves was, Winston realized, like holding one’s breath. Saving his own powers for a better purpose was both exhausting and invigorating at once, and just when he thought he couldn’t hold it in anymore there always came that second wind, like a burst of adrenaline giving him the strength to pull back, suck in, and keep his own skin the boundary between himself and the world.
“You’re so calm,” Winston commented. “Like you expected this.”
“I didn’t expect it,” he said, “but I understand the pattern. It doesn’t surprise me, that’s all.”
“You have a plan for us getting out?”
“My plan is to watch and listen,” Dillon said.
The two guards in the room with them didn’t speak English. As Greek was one of Winston’s many languages, he thought that by conversing with them in their native tongue it might make things go more smoothly. But a black kid who was an American, and flew in on a private jet of Israeli registry, became even more suspect when he started spouting perfect Greek.
Finally, the security chief who had been so good as to put them in this comfortable, well-appointed cubicle came back in, smoking a cigarette, which he held turned in, in a European way. He was gray with thinning hair. His lips were pursed in a perpetual smirk, earned through years of interrogation and professional disbelief.
“Don’t worry,” Dillon whispered to Winston. “Interrogation rooms are my specialty.”
Their interrogator dispensed quickly with any niceties.
“So your plane is owned by Tessitech, as you said.”
“Took you long enough to find out,” Winston said.
Dillon said nothing.
“Your pilot tells us you were coming from Poland.” His smirk broadened. “You must be rock stars on a world tour.” Winston so wanted to punch that smirk away.
“We’re meeting our parents here,” Dillon said. “For a vacation.”
“In a Tessitech jet?”
“My father,” Dillon said patiently, “is Vice-President of International Relations for Tessitech.” He nodded toward Winston. “And his mother heads the Greek office.” Then Dillon imitated the man’s smirk. “And they’re going to make sure you lose your job.” The security chief’s expression took a turn toward sour. He pulled out the fake ID he had confiscated from Winston. “You should know better than to fly without a passport, Mr. Stone,” he said, and turned to Dillon. “And you without any ID whatsoever.”
“Listen,” said Winston. “Our parents are waiting for us on Thira. Let us go and we won’t cause any trouble.”
“Thira,” said the officer. “A popular vacation spot these days. I’m glad to hear you call it by its traditional name. Most just call it Santorini.”
“What is it you want?” Dillon asked.
And the officer dropped
something on the table. “What I want,” he said, “is for you to explain this.” It was a plastic bag containing a sizable amount of white powder. Dillon saw it and snickered. Winston just let his jaw drop. “We found this in your jacket,” the officer said to Winston. “The inside pocket.”
“What kind of garbage is this?”
“The most severe kind,” the officer said. His smirk narrowing into a frown. “Do you know what the penalty is for bringing drugs into this country?” he asked. “It starts with twenty years in prison and goes up from there.”
And still Dillon snickered, but Winston was in no mood to laugh. “You planted that! What, did you see it in some old TV movie? What kind of morons are you?”
The officer snatched up the bag. “You two boys have yourself a problem. I suggest you think of how it might be resolved.” And he left the room, closing the door, leaving with them the mute, Greek guards.
When the door had shut and the silent guards resumed their Green Giant positions, Winston turned to Dillon. “Any more of this and I’m going to start siding with the vectors,” he said.
To which Dillon responded, “We’ll call our parents; they’ll bail us out.”
Winston looked at him about as dumbfounded as he had been when the bag of white powder had been dropped on the table before them.
“Run that one past me again?”
This time, Dillon stepped on Winston’s foot. Firm pressure on this toes—a signal—and spoke deliberately. “I said, our parents will bail us out.”
Winston looked at the silent guards; they didn’t appear to speak English, but that didn’t matter, did it? The room could have been wired. Hell, there was probably a hidden camera. They were left there to stew and give information.
“Our parents,” said Winston. “Yes, my mom will get us out of this. She’ll get us out easy,” and then he added, “I don’t know which is worse though, a Greek prison or facing your dad.”
Dillon laughed, a fake laugh, but real enough to anyone who might have been listening.
Winston laughed, too. “You do know what you’re doing?”
Dillon nodded, but Winston noticed that he wasn’t laughing anymore.
A few minutes later, their grand inquisitor came back in, conveniently porting a cell phone. “It’s an American custom to grant you one phone call, is it not?” he asked. “I think we can do that for you.”
“And what if we wanted to call the American Embassy?” Winston taunted.
“Very busy time of day there,” he answered suavely. “Best if you made a call of a more personal nature.”
Winston wondered if this corruption had always been here or whether this was nouveau sleaze brought on by these crumbling times. Things will fall apart.
Dillon took the phone and dialed something totally random. Then he turned and smiled at the big cop that had given him the black eye. Winston watched as Dillon released the tiniest faction of his immense power, which he had so successfully contained within himself since Birkenau. The puffiness around Dillon’s eye shrank and the motling faded until it was gone completely, all the while he was smiling at the green giant who suddenly didn’t seem so smug. Dillon then turned to the security chief.
“By the way,” Dillon said, “see that guard over there?”
“He wouldn’t have hit you if you didn’t resist arrest,” the inquisitor said, defensively.
“It’s not what he did to me that I’m worried about,” Dillon said, “it’s what he’s doing to you.” And Dillon leaned forward to the inquisitor, cutting the distance between them in half—and although they were still about two feet apart Winston could swear that in some way Dillon was closer; pressed against his face, deeper still, into the man’s brain.
“He’s been with your wife when you’ve been working late,” Dillon said casually.
His eyes were locked on Dillon’s now. He couldn’t move if he wanted to.
Dillon continued. “And you know what,” he said, “she does things with him that she would never do with you.”
The man’s cheek twitched. A strange whine came from the back of his throat like the death cry of a small animal. When he broke Dillon’s gaze Winston could see how the pupil of one eye had spread, voiding out the iris completely, and how the other pupil had collapsed to a pinpoint. All at once the light above stopped flickering and shone bright. The walls became a brighter green and the scuffed floor renewed. Then Dillon pulled his field back into himself once more, and he and Winston watched as the shattered security chief reached with a shaking hand for the gun beneath his jacket coat and turned to the green giant guard, who spoke no English and had no idea what was about to happen to him.
IN TWO MINUTES DILLON and Winston were hustling down the terminal building. The melee that had followed Dillon’s surgical strike had left not one, but two guards dead and their grand inquisitor putting the barrel of the gun in his own mouth, pulling the trigger over and over and over again, refusing to believe that he hadn’t left a single bullet for himself.
Winston had passed through the wake of Dillon’s destructive power before—but had never witnessed it firsthand until now. It was as horrible as his power of creation was beautiful. Now Dillon had drawn in and contained his power once more, just as Winston had, but it didn’t change what Dillon had unleashed in there.
“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” Winston asked after they disappeared into the milling mob of the failing airport.
“I did what was necessary.”
“You still didn’t answer my question.”
“Yesterday I told Tessic that we were weapons,” Dillon said. “I believe that’s true. We were put here to save the human race with the violence of our power. No, I don’t enjoy it, but I’ve come to accept it, and all that comes with it.”
They reached a baggage claim so stuffed with luggage the carousel flatly refused to turn. People had crawled into some of the larger luggage and made them into nests, their faces turned into a stranger’s clothes, their bodies curled up so tightly, as if they were trying to implode upon themselves. Things were falling apart at such an accelerated rate, there’d be no telling what this place—what any place—might be like tomorrow. Here before him minds were shattering before his eyes. Perhaps not with the detonating flash with which the security chief’s mind had shattered, but the end result was the same. The spirit of man was losing its integrity in the face of a coming “infection.” But was preventing that infection enough to justify what Dillon had done in there? Blowing out that man’s mind?
“Some things can never be justified,” Dillon told him, “but we have to do them anyway. In the past few years, I’ve managed to kill at least a thousand people—some of them intentionally. Does the fact that I brought back ten thousand stop me from being a mass murderer?” Dillon asked.
“Are you asking for forgiveness?”
“Not anymore. There was a time when all I wanted was to be forgiven, doing penance, longing for redemption. And then I wanted to be damned—because I was certain it was the only way to save the world. Now all I want is the one thing I can give everyone but myself.”
“And that is?”
“Completion.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s go to Thira, Winston. Let’s kill who we have to kill, resurrect who we have to resurrect to get there, and make our stand against the vectors. And then, win or lose, we can finally rest.”
THEY FOUND THE OWNER of an amphibian plane and although they had no money to speak of, they persuaded him to drop everything and fly them across the Aegean Sea. The only hazard Dillon and Winston could see was how clouded the man’s eyes were with tears as he took off. It was a small plane, a four-seater. Just enough room for Dillon, Winston, the man and his wife. His wife was thoroughly confused—too confused, really, to question much of anything—and with good reason. Until about a half hour before takeoff she had been dead. Dead for about fifteen years. She still wore the dress she had been buried in; a teal gown the man had bought her for the
ir tenth anniversary just weeks before she had died. He would have given his plane, his house, as many pounds of flesh as Dillon would have exacted, but all Dillon wanted was a ride.
Three hours later, Thira loomed in the distance, pushing up from the horizon’s edge like Atlantis rising. Its jagged, striated cliffs, tinged in maroon and violet, gave the eerie impression of the Grand Canyon submerged. So, I’m back in the Grand Canyon, Dillon thought. Half a world away, but he was still waging the same battle—only this time he understood what he was expected to do. Perhaps not how to do it, but that, he had to believe, would come.
The sun hung low this late afternoon, beneath troubled clouds, turning the jagged burnt purple of old lava into red flames, as if the island reflected the sulfuric fires of Hades itself.
“Beauteous, no?” asked the pilot. Perhaps under other circumstances it would have been beautiful, but not today.
As they neared the island, the air became rough, and Dillon chose not to give them a capsule of order in which to fly. Letting the slightest bit of his power escape now would signal the vectors that he was here. And besides, the roughness of the flight was a healthy dose of reality in an existence that had turned so surreal. Let me feel the reality of this place, he thought, Let me feel the harshness of what happened here before, and what is yet to come. Let it stir me into action; let it harden my resolve.
The clouds directly above the island were high, and broiled with internal lightning. They bubbled and bled like a living thing, and the small amphibious plane pitched with the tempestuous wind.
Michael’s wind, thought Dillon. He was somewhere nearby; this unsettled sky was his doing, and by the look of it, Michael wasn’t doing well. What did a sky like this betray of Michael’s feelings? Anger? Despondence?
Shattered Sky Page 42
