The Pitons, two dead volcanoes, rose up from the shore like a couple of overgrown pyramids. The smells of coconut oil and fried fish rolled down the beach, making his stomach growl. The water jumped and popped at the edge of the shore. Must be a minor quake somewhere. No one else seemed to notice. It was a sign—Ron was going to take it as a sign—that it was time to head back up to the hotel parking lot and drive the hell away from the strip of pure white sandy tourism before it snapped him up like a Venus fly trap.
He had passed the last of the palm-leaf shade shelters, ignored the bars, and started the long climb back up to the hotel and the public parking lot when he heard a long, low rumble. He glanced back over his shoulder.
It looked like a tiny island was floating toward the shore. Seaweed trailed off its wet sides. The top looked rusty, like it was made out of broken-up metal plates. Mammas and papas were hollering at their kids to come back in to shore, but it was as if everyone were frozen. The bathing beauties were only half-sitting up, barely starting to swing their long, brown legs off their lounge chairs. It seemed like it was going to take about a week for his right foot to hit the ground.
Feathery tufts rose out of the seaweed and folded smoothly upward.
The breeze shifted. The smell of fried fish and coconut oil was replaced with the smell of a garbage scow, the kind he remembered from New York City.
His foot landed with a sudden thud, making him bite his tongue.
The waves splashed, and the kids still in the water dropped, as if their legs had been cut out from under them, and flew backward through the water. Shallow vees spread out behind them, pointing directly to the floating island.
The sound of it caught up to him. A groaning like twisted metal. The crash of waves. Screaming. A couple of gunshots. The sound of his feet beating like a drum roll up the sidewalk, toward the parking lot. His heartbeat crashing like cymbals in his ears. Wood splintering. A bullhorn shouting something that echoed across the bay and bounced back twisted up on itself. The only word he picked out was Stop!
He didn’t.
The trees closed over the sidewalk and the sudden shade almost blinded him. He kept running. An old fogy like him still knew how to run when he had to. The sudden coolness of the sidewalk made him shiver. Or maybe it was the way the bullhorn cut out all of a sudden.
The sound of wind, of leaves brushing against each other. Breaking twigs. The sound like a storm rolling up the bay, a hurricane maybe.
Two security guards stood at the end of the parking lot behind a swinging steel gate, white shirts, ties, black berets, open mouths. They stared past him as he hopped the gate. Their walkie-talkies squawked at them to pick up, but they were frozen where they stood. Clearly not guys who had ever been in the military. They had revolvers at their sides but hadn’t even loosened the snaps on their holsters.
Ron had an image of grabbing one of their guns, whirling around, and shooting the shit out of whatever was coming up the hill behind him. Instead he kept running.
People were spilling out of the hotel now onto the sidewalks, employees in white polo tops as well as tourists. He only had a few seconds to get out before the parking lot jammed up with everybody trying to push ahead of everybody else. Luckily for him, his rental was out at the far end of the public lot, farthest to walk, fastest to exit. Same way he parked for gigs. Didn’t matter that he had to carry the equipment farther. Only mattered that he wasn’t boxed in.
Ron reached the ugly green Volvo he’d rented and jammed his hands in his pockets. Keys still there, thank God.
He forced his fingers to take out the right key and slide it smoothly into the keyhole. He popped the lock and opened the door, feeling the wave of heat blast at him from the car’s interior. He glanced back. Tourists were running for their cars. The locals were just running. They’d come in on busses, probably, and now had no way to get out. He slid onto the blistering hot seat, put his key into the ignition, and started it up. He nearly yelled in pain when his hands locked around the boiling steering wheel.
He backed out of his parking spot without looking in the rearview mirror. He accelerated too hard and hit another car with a crunch. Its alarm started going off. Not that anybody gave a shit at the moment.
The town’s emergency alarm starting howling. It was muffled by the car windows and the sound of the other alarm and the distance, but he could still pick out the deep, rushing howl that was sliding up the scale like a monstrous orchestra the size of Manhattan.
He hit the lock with his hand and put the car in first gear but didn’t pop the clutch. A guy waving both hands was running toward the front of his car. A big guy, trailing a couple of women. He had on a white polo with a name written on it. Other people were running toward the car, but they were tangled up in the tourists, who were milling around like sheep, demanding help, their cars lost.
Ron swore and hit the button to unlock the rental’s doors. The guy pulled open the back door, shoved the two women in, and got in the front. The man smelled like hot sweat. The women smelled like laundry soap.
More car alarms went off. A chorus of about a hundred voices screamed.
He glanced back in his rearview mirror.
The thing had already climbed up the hill and knocked down the steel gate. Correction, the things had rolled up the hill. Six metal islands that bulldozed trees, power lines, light poles, cars. Feathery palm trees whipped around, snatching up sunburnt white tourists and their kids. The security guards were gone, long gone.
“Drive, mon,” the guy in the front seat said. Not quite shouting. “We got to get these ladies out of here.”
Ron hit the button to lock the doors again and popped the clutch.
Julie watched the elevator open onto a cream-colored hallway with blue industrial carpet. A large decal on the wall depicted a gold five-pointed star with twined snakes behind it.
“Carpe astra,” Julie read the Latin at the bottom of the star. “Seize the stars. Just a tad arrogant.”
“The department is full of ex-military and ex-FBI agents,” Ms. Jance said, boosting the front wheels smoothly over the elevator lip. “There’s a certain arrogant, yet trite, sense of humor that’s become an institutional tradition. One learns almost not to see it.”
The hallway stopped abruptly at a set of glass doors and an unmanned security counter. The bright lobby lights turned the glass doors into mirrors, showing a thin old woman clutching a large purse. Julie combed her fingers through her untidy hair and watched her reflection do the same. When? When had she lost it? When she’d had the heart attack? When she thought she’d seen Pax’s body on the bed, like a statue? Before then? When?
Ever since she’d awakened she’d felt weak. Old.
Ms. Jance leaned past, holding a white plastic ID card attached to a taut black thread against the lock. The lock clacked inside the door, and the wheelchair swung in a circle as Ms. Jance backed it through. Julie clutched the arms of the wheelchair as they backed into a darkened hallway.
Ms. Jance swerved again and thumped backward through a door into a pitch-dark room.
“Where are we?”
Ms. Jance locked the brakes. The door closed, sealing them in. The lights flashed on, revealing peach-colored toilet stalls, two sinks, a hand drier.
“Now there’s a sight for sore eyes,” Julie said.
A few minutes later, Ms. Jance helped Julie back into the now-welcome wheelchair. Julie was shaky and weak from hunger. She’d also just taken a half-dozen overdue pills. Ms. Jance pulled the chair back into the dim hallway and pushed Julie forward. The hall ran on so far in front of them it disappeared into the shadows.
“You’ll need to brace yourself,” Ms. Jance said. “It won’t be a pretty sight, what we’re about to see.”
“I saw him,” Julie said. “Up. Walking around. Moving. Living.”
/> “Nevertheless,” Ms. Jance said. “I strongly advise you to gather your wits about you. When we get in, you may take my hand, if you like. If it helps.”
Take her hand, thought Julie. I’m not a child. I’m a doctor.
A set of gray double doors approached along the left, looming large. Above them was a darkened, red light bulb in a cage hanging from the ceiling. A warning light.
Ms. Jance slowed the chair until they stopped. Julie rapped her knuckles against the door as Ms. Jance held her ID to the lock. The door was steel.
Ms. Jance hauled on the handle of the door, and the edge of it clipped against the ends of Julie’s shoes. “I beg your pardon.” Ms. Jance pushed on the wheelchair arm, scooting Julie back an inch, and finished opening the door.
The small room on the other side was perfectly white and so brightly lit Julie had to blink several times until her eyes adjusted. The smell of lemon cleanser stung her lips and burned down her throat. White cabinets covered the walls; a stainless steel bench had been bolted to the floor.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to walk from here on in. There are plenty of seats, so you can rest often, but it’s stairs the rest of the way down.” Ms. Jance opened the nearest cabinet and pulled out a set of light-blue scrubs. “What size do you wear?”
“Small.”
Ms. Jance squatted and pulled a sealed set off a lower shelf and handed them to Julie. Quickly and without a trace of self-consciousness, Ms. Jance stripped out of her street clothes and shoes and left them in a plastic-lined basket in another cabinet. She was changed and had wrapped her hair up under a surgical cap and slipped booties over a pair of socks before Julie had finished unbuttoning her blouse. Julie looked down at her trembling hands, thinking, traitors.
Patiently, Ms. Jance helped Julie change the rest of her clothes. All too quickly, they were moving toward the door, Julie limping and leaning heavily against Ms. Jance’s smooth-skinned arm. Ms. Jance pushed opened the white, windowless door on the far side of the room.
Julie looked down into an operating theatre. A circle of seats ringed it, with row after row staring down on a half-circle of plexiglass panels surrounding a pair of surgical tables.
Julie went slowly and carefully down the slippery stairs, holding a rail with one hand and Ms. Jance with the other. Under the sheets were bodies—each with a pair of feet, the bulge of foreheads, shoulders. Both were small and frail-looking in the big theatre.
This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.
“Do you need to sit?”
She shook her head. Molded gray plastic chairs were bolted in rows around the room, with laminated wood desks in front of them, each one holding a microphone on a thin stalk. Three large, flat-panel screens hung over the operating theater, probably to show internal scope work. They were dark now. This room smelled of lemon cleanser, as well as rubbing alcohol and decay.
Ms. Jance helped Julie hobble to the lowest level, where a flimsy white plastic door was set in a fabric-covered panel beside the long row of plexiglass panels. When Ms. Jance opened the door, the whole row of panels shook.
Large lights and a camera on swivel arms hung over the beds. A computer terminal sat in one corner of the room, with a microphone taped to the side. A blood pressure cart had been shoved against the far wall, as had a large rolling cabinet. A steel sink stood beside it.
“Would you like to rest first?” Ms. Jance asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Let me know if you feel faint.”
They reached the closer of the two bodies. It was smaller than the other, and Julie could see the small breasts poking up against the sheet.
The girl. I’ll start with the girl.
Julie flipped the cool, clean sheet back. The fabric was stiff and new. It wrinkled up and tried to slide off. Ms. Jance caught the sheet and pulled it back up until it was just covering the girl’s shoulder again.
Dark hair, upturned nose. Lips turned down in a look of permanent discontent. A smattering of dark-brown freckles on her cheeks—a zit buried in one eyebrow. The lights shone on her skin, which looked dry. She’d been washed but not autopsied. Not yet. She had slight flaking at the scalp and around her eyelashes. Something white crusted around her nostrils, as though she’d been huffing paint up them. Hmm… the flakes around her eyelashes weren’t dandruff, but more of the same flakes of silvery-white material. Her ears… it had been coming out of her ears, too, and wiped away.
“What was it?” Julie asked, her fingernail almost, but not quite, touching the girl’s earlobe, which was dented with an absent piercing. “Some kind of drug? Did she give it to him?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“Afterward, I will. When you’ve had a moment to rest. You’re not in the best condition to receive shocks faster than is necessary.”
Despite the drugs, Julie’s heart seemed to be shaking the bars of her chest. She had to see. Had to know.
“I could use some coffee,” she said, trying to chase the woman out of the room.
Ms. Jance’s lips twitched. “I could as well. We shall find some shortly.”
Julie jerked the sheet back over the girl’s head. “It’s her.”
Ms. Jance smoothed the sheet over the girl’s head and held out her arm. Julie waved at it. She was forty years old: not ancient. Forty. Not eighty. Not frail. Not old.
Julie turned to the other table, shuffling around the girl’s body. Her booties seemed to be conspiring to trip her. One second they were whispering smoothly over the linoleum, the next they’d bunch up and try to throw her. Hot bile built up in the back of her throat.
Ms. Jance followed closely, dragging the chair behind her.
Julie stopped in front of the other table. Pax’s table. Her breath came like she’d jogged up a flight of steps. She had to take better care of herself. Forty years old, and it felt like she was falling apart.
She raised her hand over the sheet. It wasn’t as smooth as the other one. It’d wrinkled into small, soft-edged triangles. It was softer, older. Had been washed a hundred times.
She pulled it back.
Pax.
Pax had stopped calling her name hours ago, not because he was hoarse, but because warning her that he was coming was worse than useless.
The Arctic was a frozen wasteland sparkling in the sun. The world was, to all appearances, at peace: solid, undifferentiated ice.
Inside him was a storm.
It said, Scarlett’s your best friend. The one who, unlike seven billion other people, bothered to show up. The only one who showed loyalty.
It said, Scarlett was never your friend. She was a pet that you gave little idea-toys to, to see how her pitiful little mind played with them.
It said, You knew she couldn’t control all that power. You slept with her. And then you blew her off to deal with it alone.
It said, You can’t even pretend to want to fix humanity anymore.
It said, That’s a lie. You want to fix humanity. You just don’t think you can.
It had been a long time since his feelings had been this out of control. The despair when he realized his father was never coming back—that was the only time it had ever been worse.
Something dark flashed underneath him.
Pax’s mass carried him across the ice for a few hundred more meters. The ice was broken here, more jagged. The ocean tides had shattered it almost as fast as it could refreeze. Even now the ice was creaking and groaning, exploding in sharp cracks, as tidal forces in the ocean below ripped it apart. Deep crevasses shifted and moaned, a thousand layers of built-up ice showing along their deep splits, each a subtle nuance of white.
He turned around, took a few running steps up a ramp of ice beside a bluish crevasse, and le
aped off.
All he’d put together for a plan was reasoning with Scarlett to let him put her inside a shield. Basically a prison. Scarlett wasn’t going to like it. His sleeping with Lana wasn’t going to help.
Terry probably could have resolved the whole situation in five minutes, but Terry either wasn’t paying attention or was up to something. Either way, he wasn’t to be trusted.
Pax stopped suddenly on top of a block of ice whose far edge dropped off into an appalling black lake of negative energy—negative energy shielded by a thin magnetic field. It was at least the size of a city block, shimmering with electromagnetic phenomena.
It might have been pretty if it weren’t so horrifying.
Akllana’chikni’pai stared across at the island in horror. The northern end was lush, green, and populated by the small, well-cultured resorts the wealthy used for their amusement. The southern end of the island was scarred by a wide trail of bare rock and gray dust leading from the shore. Smoke rose from a ruined village along its path, and the island wailed with the sound of emergency vehicles.
The monster had crawled up onto a shining, almost silver beach, eaten the small village next to it, and left behind nothing but stinking pits in the ground, stripped down to the rock, where underground storerooms had been. Then it had moved southward, climbing toward a pair of dead volcanoes that jutted upward along the coast like ancient temples.
Akllana’chikni’pai pulled in the energy of the sun and let it light up her body in bright flames. She followed the trail of stripped rock to the side of a volcano and landed near a crack in the side that looked like it had been dug with huge, flat-tipped claws.