so thin and cheap that it was not for a moment convincing.
"Father?" it said again, gazing at the stranger in the black ski suit.
"Father?"
Insistently, "Be at peace, Alfie."
The name
"Alfie" was so unsuited to the grotesque apparition still clutching
Marty that he suspected he was hallucinating the arrival of the two men.
The Other turned away from the flashlight beam and glared at Marty once
more. It seemed uncertain of what to do next.
Then it lowered its graveyard face to his, cocking its head as if with
curiosity. "My life? My life?"
Marty didn't know what it was asking him, and he was so weak from loss
of blood or shock or both that he could only push at it feebly with his
right hand. "Let me go."
"Need," it said. "Need, need, need, need, NEED, NEEEEEF,FEED.
" The voice spiraled into a shrill squeal. Its mouth cracked wide in a
humorless grin, and it struck at Marty's face.
A gunshot boomed, The Other's head jerked back, Marty sagged against the
parapet as the creature let go of him, and its scream of demonic fury
drew muffled cries of terror from Emily and Charlotte.
The Other clamped its skeletal hands to its shattered skull, as if
trying to hold itself together.
The flashlight beam wavered, found it.
The fissures in the bone healed, and the bullet hole began to close up,
forcing the lead slug out of the skull. But the cost of this miraculous
healing became obvious as The Other's skull began to change more
dramatically, growing smaller and narrower and more lupine, as if bone
was melting and reforming under the tight sheath of skin, borrowing mass
from one place to rebuild damage in another.
"Cannibalizing itself to close the wound," said the big man.
More ghostly wisps of vapor were rising from the creature, and it began
to tear at the clothes it wore as if it could not tolerate the heat.
The smaller man shot it again. In the face.
Still holding its head, The Other reeled across the bell-tower platform
and collided with the south parapet. It almost tipped over and out into
the void.
It crumpled to its knees, shedding its torn clothing as if the garments
were the tatters of a cocoon, squirming forth in a darker and utterly
inhuman form, twitching, jittering.
It was no longer shrieking or hissing. It sobbed. In spite of its
increasingly monstrous appearance, the sobbing rendered it less
threatening and even pitiable.
Relentless, the gunman stepped toward it and fired a third shot.
The sobbing chilled Marty, perhaps because there was some thing human
and pathetic about it. Too weak to stand, he slid down to the floor,
his back against the waist-high parapet, and had to look away from the
thrashing creature.
An eternity passed before The Other was entirely motionless and quiet.
Marty heard his daughters weeping.
Reluctantly he turned his eyes to the body which lay directly across the
platform from him and which was bathed in the mercilessly revealing beam
of the flashlight. The corpse was a puzzle of black bones and
glistening flesh, the greater part of its substance having been consumed
in its frantic attempts to heal itself and stay alive. The twisted and
jagged remains more resembled those of an alien life form than those of
a man.
Wind blew.
Snow fell.
A greater cold came down.
After a while, the man in the black ski suit turned away from the
remains and spoke to the bearish man. "A very bad boy indeed."
The larger man said nothing.
Marty wanted to ask who they were. His grip on consciousness was so
tenuous, however, that he thought the effort of speaking might cause him
to pass out.
To his partner, the smaller man said, "What'd you think of the church?
As weird as anything Kirk and the crew have turned up, isn't it? All
those obscenities Day-Gloing on the walls. It'll make our little
scenario all the more convincing, don't you think?"
Though he felt as lightheaded as if he had been drinking, and though he
was having difficulty keeping his thoughts focused, Marty now had
confirmed what he'd suspected when the two men first arrived, they were
not saviors, merely new executioners, and only marginally less
mysterious than The Other.
"You're going to do it?" the larger of the two asked.
"Too much trouble to haul them back to the cabin. You don't think this
weird church is an even better setting?"
"Drew," the big man said, "there are a number of things about you I
like."
The smaller man seemed confused. He wiped at the snow that the wind
stuck to his eyelashes. "What'd you say?"
"You're damned smart, even if you did go to Princeton and Harvard.
You've got a good sense of humor, you really do, you make me laugh, even
when it's at my expense. Hell, especially when it's at my expense."
"What're you talking about?"
"But you're a crazy, sick son of a bitch," the big man said, raised his
own handgun, and shot his partner.
Drew, if that was his name, hit the tile floor as hard as if he had been
made of stone. He landed on his side, facing Marty. His mouth was
open, as were his eyes, though he had a blind man's gaze and seemed to
have nothing to say.
In the center of Drew's forehead was an ugly bullet hole. For as long
as he could hold fast to consciousness, Marty stared at the wound, but
it didn't appear to be healing.
Wind blew.
Snow fell.
A greater cold came down--along with a greater darkness.
Marty woke with his forehead pressed to cold glass. Heavy snow churned
against the other side of the pane.
They were parked next to service station pumps. Between the pumps and
through the falling snow, he saw a well-lighted convenience store with
large windows.
He rolled his head away from the glass and sat up straighter.
He was in the back seat of a truck-type station wagon, an Explorer or
Cherokee.
Behind the steering wheel sat the big man from the bell tower.
He was turned around in his seat, looking back. "How you doing?"
Marty tried to answer. His mouth was dry, his tongue stuck to his
palate, and his throat was sore. The croak that escaped him was not a
word.
"I think you'll be all right," the stranger said.
Marty's ski jacket was open, and he raised one trembling hand to his
left shoulder. Under the blood-damp wool sweater, he felt an odd bulky
mass.
"Field dressing," the man said. "Best I could do in a hurry. We get
out of these mountains, across the county line, I'll clean the wound and
rebandage it."
"Hurts."
"Don't doubt it."
Marty felt not merely weak but frail. He lived by words and never
failed to have the right ones when he needed them, so it was frustrating
to find himself with barely enough energy to speak.
"Paige?" he asked.
"In there with the kids," the stranger said, indicating the combination
&n
bsp; service station and convenience store. "Girls are using the bathroom.
Mrs. Stillwater's paying the cashier, getting some hot coffee. I just
filled the tank."
"You're . . .?"
"Clocker. Karl Clocker."
"Shot him."
"Sure did."
"Who . . . who . . . was he?"
"Drew Oslett. Bigger question is what was he?"
"Huh?"
Clocker smiled. "Born of man and woman, but he wasn't much more human
than poor Alfie. If there's an evil alien species out there somewhere,
marauding through the galaxy, they'll never mess with us if they know we
can produce specimens like Drew."
Clocker drove, and Charlotte occupied the front passenger seat. He
referred to her as
"First Officer Stillwater" and assigned her the duty of "handing the
captain his coffee when he needs another sip of it and, otherwise,
guarding against catastrophic spillage that might irreparably
contaminate the ship."
Charlotte was uncharacteristically restrained and unwilling to play.
Marty worried about what psychological scars their ordeal might have
left in hen-and what additional trouble and trauma might be ahead of
them.
In the back seat, Emily sat behind Karl Clocker, Marty behind Charlotte,
and Paige between them. Emily was not merely quiet but totally silent,
and Marty worried about her too.
Out of Mammoth Lakes on Route 203 and south on 395, progress was slow.
Two or three inches of snow were on the ground, and the blizzard was in
full howl.
Clocker and Paige drank coffee, and the girls had hot chocolate.
The aromas should have been appealing, but they increased Marty's
queasiness.
He was allowed apple juice. From the convenience store, Paige had
purchased a six-pack of juice in cans.
"It's the only thing you might be able to hold in your stomach," Clocker
said. "And even if it makes you gag, you've got to take as much of it
as you can because, with that wound, you're sure as hell dehydrating
dangerously."
Marty was so shaky that, even with his right hand, he couldn't hold the
juice without spilling it. Paige put a straw in it, held it for him,
and blotted his chin when he dribbled.
He felt helpless. He wondered if he was more seriously wounded than
they had told him or than they realized.
Intuitively, he sensed he was dying--but he didn't know if that was an
accurate perception or the curse of a writer's imagination.
The night was filled with white flakes, as if the day had not merely
faded but shattered into an infinitude of pieces that would drift down
forever through an unending darkness.
Over the chittering of the tire chains and the grumble of the engine, as
they descended from the Sierras in a train of cars behind a snowplow and
cinder truck, Clocker told them about the Network.
It was an alliance of powerful people in government, business,
law-enforcement, and the media, who were brought together by a shared
perception that traditional Western democracy was an inefficient and
inevitably catastrophic system by which to order society.
They were convinced that the vast majority of citizens were self
indulgent, sensation-seeking, void of spiritual values, greedy, lazy,
envious, racist, and woefully ignorant on virtually all issues of
importance.
"They believe," Clocker said, "that recorded history proves the masses
have always been irresponsible and civilization has progressed only by
luck and by the diligent efforts of a few visionaries."
"Do they think this idea's new?" Paige asked scornfully. "Have they
heard of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung?"
"What they think's new," Clocker said, "is that we've reached an age
when the technological underpinnings of society are so complex and so
vulnerable because of this complexity that civilization--in fact, the
planet itself--can't survive if government makes decisions based on the
whims and selfish motivations of the masses that pull the levers in the
voting booths."
"Crap," Paige said.
Marty would have seconded her opinion if he'd felt strong enough to join
the discussion. But he had only enough energy to suck at the apple
juice and swallow it.
"What they're really about," Clocker said, "is brute power. The only
thing new about them, regardless of what they think, is they're working
together from different extremes of the political spectrum.
The people who want to ban Huckleber y Finn from libraries and the
people who want to ban books by Anne Rice may seem to be motivated by
different concerns but they're spiritual brothers and sisters."
"Sure," Paige said. "They share the same motivation--the desire not
merely to control what other people do but what they think."
"The most radical environmentalists, those who want to reduce the
population of the world by extreme measures within a decade or two,
because they think the planet's ecology is in danger, are in some ways
simpatico with the people who'd like to reduce the world's population
drastically just because they feel there are too many black and brown
people in it."
Pie said, "An oranization of such extremes can't hold together
"I agree," Clocker said. "But if they want power badly enough, total
power, they might work together long enough to seize it.
Then, when they're in control, they'll turn their guns on each other and
catch the rest of us in the cross-fire."
"How big an organization are we talking about?" she asked.
After a hesitation, Clocker said, "Big."
Marty sucked on the straw, exceedingly grateful for the level of
civilization that allowed for the sophisticated integration of farming,
food-processing, packaging, marketing, and distribution of a product as
self-indulgent as cool, sweet apple juice.
"The Network directors feel modern technology embodies a threat to
humanity," Clocker explained, switching the pounding windshield wipers
to a slower speed, "but they aren't against employing the cutting edge
of that technology in the pursuit of power."
The development of a completely controllable force of clones to serve as
the singularly obedient police and soldiers of the next millennium was
only one of a multitude of research programs intended to help bring on
the new world, though it was one of the first to bear fruit.
Alfie.
The first individual of the first--or Alpha--generation of operable
clones.
Because society was riddled with incorrect thinkers in positions of
authority, the first clones were to be employed to assassinate leaders
in business, government, media, and education who were too retrograde in
their attitudes to be persuaded of the need for change.
The clone was not a real person but more or less a machine made of
flesh, therefore, it was an ideal assassin. It had no awareness of who
had created and instructed it, so it couldn't betray its handlers or
expose the conspiracy it served.
Clocker downshifted as the train of vehicles slowed on a parti
cularly
snowswept incline.
He said, "Because it isn't burdened by religion, philosophy, any system
of beliefs, a family, or a past, there isn't much danger that a clone
assassin will begin to doubt the morality of the atrocities it commits,
develop a conscience, or show any trace of free will that might
interfere with its performance of its assignments."
"But something sure went wrong with Alfie," Paige said.
"Yeah. And we'll never know exactly what."
Why did it look like me? Marty wanted to ask, but instead his head
lolled onto Paige's shoulder and he lost consciousness.
A hall of mirrors in a carnival funhouse. Frantically seeking a way
out.
Reflections gazing back at him with anger, envy, hatred, failing to
mimic his own expressions and movements, stepping out of one
looking-glass after another, pursuing him, an ever-growing army of