“Are they—are they okay, George?”
He could feel George’s eyes on him. “Dunno. But my girl’s one of ’em. Wife’s out here.”
“And you’re sure they’re not—Trevor is definitely not here? You’re certain of it?”
“Not certain of anything in this world, bro, but I’ve been out here all day with my Molly, and I’ve seen Winnie and Lindy plenty, but not him, and I did see him—you know, after the church—and he was going out toward the Smokes with my daughter and some of the middle-schoolers. He wasn’t wandering, Martin.”
Martin turned around with the intention of going back to the house immediately—and it was then that he saw the thick column of light drop down like some kind of bright shroud on the cars of the followers.
“Oh my God,” he said.
George turned, too, and saw it. “God almighty.” He began to run, loping ahead to the wanderers, who continued on at their steady and oblivious pace. Martin’s first impulse was to follow him, but a golden shaft came down, razor-thin and quick, and George sparkled for a moment, and then dropped back, joining his pace to that of the other wanderers.
It had been that quick. Martin forced himself not to run, he forced himself to fall in with the wanderers, to pretend to be one of them. As he had on many a hike, he walked beside his wife. The screaming behind him told him that the light was doing all the followers. Their compassion and their love had been used to trap them.
Then he saw little Winnie fall and cry out, and his whole heart and soul longed to help his child, but he kept on walking.
The wanderers never slowed their pace, but every so often, he saw one or another of them fall down. The others simply walked over them.
It was a brutal—and brutally efficient—selection process, he thought. Only the strong would make it, and only the strong, obviously, would be wanted. Overhead, he once again heard the whoosh, whoosh of…something. Could it be that a big old barn owl was shadowing them? But the owl’s wing is silent.
Ahead and to his left there was leaping movement. A voice rose in a frantic salad of words, babbling and shrieking, then going silent. He looked neither left nor right, but kept on, leaving the struggle behind him. Soon the voice was silent, replaced by that odd, mechanical chuckling he’d heard in the woods around his house. Eventually, the sounds faded.
He was aware that Lindy was just beyond his touch, and that Winnie maybe had fallen aside. He forgot all his careful intellectualizations about God and prayed the Jesus Prayer over and over again, the prayer out of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which had been a favorite of Lindy’s. It was the repetitive prayer from The Way of the Pilgrim, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
As the stars wheeled in their generous majesty, Martin walked to the rhythm set by repetitions. From time to time the light dropped down on another follower it had discovered in the mass of wanderers, and ripped out a soul.
The rhythm made it easier for him, but by the time two hours had passed, he knew that he could not keep up with the pace of the wanderers much longer. He was contemplating this danger, letting the prayer drop into the back of his mind, when he heard a distant voice. It had an echoing, mechanical quality to it. He listened—and then, incredibly, saw its source. A police car stood on a roadside ahead, it’s light bar flashing. Beside it stood a state policeman with an electronic bullhorn. He raised it to his lips and blared, “You are trespassing on a wildlife preservation zone. You are required to leave this area immediately. Please come up to the roadway, ladies and gentlemen. You are trespassing—”
A tongue of light snicked down out of the clouds and there appeared around him the loveliest spreading glitter of little stars that Martin had ever seen. From this distance, you could see exactly how the light made the soul literally burst out of the body. He thought that a human soul was truly a universe all its own, as the stars that had been that man’s memories, dreams, and hopes flittered into oblivion. The trooper dropped his bullhorn and turned northwest.
Martin had reached a point of crisis. He had to stop. No choice. Already, he was visibly dropping back, he couldn’t help it. “Good-bye, Lindy,” he said in his heart, “good-bye my love, and good-bye Lindy’s soul, wherever you are, and god rest you, my baby Winnie, my poor little girl never even had a life.” Then he let himself fall forward like an exhausted wanderer. He did not close his eyes, but rather continued staring straight down at the ground.
Soon, the last of the wanderers had passed him by. He heard the intimate whistle of a night bird. Then something else—that chuckling again. It was close, and there was a lot of it. Now he thought it was like a flock of geese in flight, honking back and forth to one another as they ploughed the sky.
The aliens. That must be it. This sound represented the elusive aliens, coming along behind their human herd. Drovers. Cowboys.
Then something stepped on his back. It was heavy, and it had a sharpness that penetrated his jeans and entered his thigh. He had to force himself not to move as this sharpness very painfully twisted inside his flaring muscle.
Then it was gone, and he could just glimpse what looked like the leg of an insect touching the ground beside his face, then another, and then the chuckling had gone on ahead, and with it the faint whooshing and whistling in the sky.
Then he knew that there was light all around him. He felt the most incredible rage at his defeat, and then waited to feel the light, to know what it was like to lose your soul. Did you go with it, or stay in your body—or, as he thought—just disappear?
But then there was something in his ear. Snuffling. And an odor, a familiar one. He opened his eyes, turned his head, and found himself face to face with a very large skunk.
As the tail rose, he rolled, then jumped up and ran like hell, and the skunk ran, too, wobbling off into the light, which was not the light of death, but that of dawn.
He stood up in the sunlight. It was golden, low still on the horizon, but so pure that it must be as sacred as the old Egyptians had thought, and he turned toward it and knelt as he might to God.
Then he went back along the long series of low folds in the land, heading toward his truck, hoping to find Winnie’s body somewhere, a little snatch of clothes somewhere in the prairie.
But he found an adult instead, blood-soaked, dead. This was no fallen wanderer, this person had been done violence. He looked down. The school jacket, the smoothness of the backs of the hands—this was just a kid. He turned him over, and leaped back when he realized what he was seeing, and when he fully realized it, screamed.
Instantly, he stifled it. The light did not come during the day, apparently being rendered ineffective by the sun, but there had been other things out there and he wasn’t so sure that they were particularly nocturnal.
He thought that this pitiful ruin must have been a boy. He was, at most, fifteen or sixteen, and he had been horrifically mutilated. His lips were gone, his mouth open and his tongue removed. His eyes had been gouged out, and his lower body was bloody. Martin didn’t examine him too closely, but it looked as if he had been castrated, too.
He forced himself to open the shirt, to look for the familiar mole that would mean he had found his son.
The cool gray skin was unblemished.
Martin stood up and ran a short distance, then came back and picked the poor kid up, and carried him in his arms. He carried him across a field and into an empty farmyard, and put him down in a porch swing.
“Hey! Anybody home? Hey!”
Not a sound. He went inside and found eggs in the fridge, and cracked six of them raw into his mouth. He also ate cheese and crunched into a head of lettuce. He drank warm grapefruit juice that nearly made him puke.
Then he went on, walking until the sun was high and warm, and the gladness that it brings even to the most oppressed human heart made him close his eyes and lift his face to it. “Lucky old sun,” he said.
Whereupon he found his truck…which he had left running. He jumped in and pul
led the key out.
He’d damn well burned out all his gas, damned fool that he was. Fool!
Well, not quite all. There was a hairline between the edge of the gauge and the red line, so there was still a mile or so in it.
He walked back to the farm, but this was a hobby place, there was no gas tank here. Returning to the jeep, he got in and started it. He headed back toward Harrow, and had the town in sight when he ran out of gas.
He never passed Dennis Farm, but he’d been looking for it. Never saw a trace of it, must have been too far east of it, he figured.
He walked for half an hour, finally crossing the last field and climbing a final fence. Then he was in a backyard. He went down the driveway beside the house and into the dead-empty streets. A flicker of curtain in this house or that was the only indication of life here.
He was passing the bank when a familiar car pulled alongside him.
“Bobby!”
Bobby just looked up at him. His eyes were strange, and for a moment Martin had a horrible thought. “Bobby?”
“Yeah?”
“Your family okay?”
He stopped his car.
Jesus, his family had gotten it in the night. “Oh, buddy, did you lose ’em?”
He shook his head.
“Bobby, what’s the matter?”
He held out a flyer. Martin took it. He was astonished to find himself staring at his own face. “This man is wanted dead. Name: Martin Trevor Winters. Last seen in the area of Lautner County, Kansas. This man is extremely dangerous, and carries a bounty of ten million dollars, upon satisfactory proof of death being provided.”
Martin looked at Bobby, met his eyes, saw them flicker away. His face said it clearly: this was not a joke. “Homeland Security dropped them about half an hour ago.”
“But I—there must be some mistake!”
“Buddy, you know I love you. But I got this job, here, and half the town, they are looking for your blood.”
“But what did I do? Why has this happened?”
“It doesn’t say what you did, but we all know you were over there in Egypt when the pyramid went, and it must have something to do with that, which is why I’m arresting you, buddy.”
“Bobby?”
“I’m not gonna read you your rights. Because it’s a patriot arrest, you don’t have any rights.”
“Bobby, hey!”
But Bobby cuffed him and took him off to the sheriff’s substation, and put him in the one cell, which had been cleaned of file boxes for the occasion. He drove through town telling them that Martin had been caught, and they had to meet at First Christ to vote on what to do with him.
SEVEN
DECEMBER 4 THE TRAP
WILEY STARED AT THE WORDS on his computer screen. This damn nightmare was way out of control.
He’d come back from the shrink determined to just erase the whole thing, but he hadn’t done it, and now look what had happened, it had gotten so much worse so fast. Winnie was probably dead and Trevor—God knew what had happened to him, and look at poor Martin. He was going to be killed by his friends.
But it wasn’t only what was happening to this one little family, it was the whole vast scope of the thing, an entire world being destroyed.
That bastard Samson was part of it. Al North was right, he was a traitor. But the fool hadn’t shot him. Stupid fool. Nice guys sure as hell finish last, General North.
Wylie had CNN on continuously now, waiting for any sign of anything odd happening at any sacred site in his own world.
So far, this dear old place was quiet. But would it be forever? They knew we were here, or we wouldn’t see UFOs. They just needed one more little push, he suspected, and they’d be in. Let NASA announce that UFOs were real. Let the Air Force admit that it couldn’t explain some sighting or other—and bang, here come the lenses, dark goddamn things blowing the same fourteen sacred sites to hell here as they did in the two-moon world.
When he wasn’t writing, he did research and he thought. He thought about the number fourteen. It was the Osiris number, the Jesus number, the resurrection number. Seven was a complete octave and a complete life. Fourteen was a life and a life beyond. It was the number of the goal of man, which was the projection of human consciousness into eternity. Osiris had been cut into fourteen pieces. The passion of Christ had fourteen stations.
Destroy the man, build the man.
Might that be true, also, of whole worlds?
He sighed, blew air out. Was he tired? He was beyond tired. More exhausted than he’d thought it was possible to be.
He did not think he could imagine what the suffering going on Martin’s world was like. By now, every single human being on the planet who was not himself a wanderer had lost at least one loved one. The sheer scale of it was beyond imagination. Appalling.
What could he write about it? That it brought tears to his eyes, made his mouth dry, made his stomach fill with fire?
Describing this was beyond even a great novelist’s skill, and certainly beyond his.
Fourteen. He kept going back to it. The fourteen sacred places were there to enable us to recover the knowledge that made man immortal. Giza, Tassili, Ollantaytambo, all the way around to Easter Island, Sukothai, Persepolis and Petra—to enable us to recover the knowledge, and also to protect us from our ignorance.
In Martin’s world, they had failed. Too late—just. He had been close, but not close enough, not in time. That was why Samson was after him. The knowledge he possessed was still dangerous.
It was evening now, on this earth, on Martin’s earth, presumably on all the earths in all the universes that filled the unimaginable firmament—including the world of the reptilians.
He’d never seen it. Glimpsed it, perhaps, down in the draw that night—felt the delicate hands of the monsters, felt them raping him.
He thought he knew why it had been done. They needed a communicator to spread belief in them. Problem was, they chose the wrong guy. They needed a Nobel prize winner or a great political leader, not a horror novelist.
Too bad, suckas!
Voices shrill with excitement reassured him that all was still well, at least in his neck of the woods. Nick and Kelsey were playing normally outside. Brooke was downstairs making one of her stunning pot roasts.
The kids sounded very happy together, and that was not always the case. Even though she was eight and he thirteen, there was still plenty of sibling rivalry to cut through.
In another year, Nick probably wouldn’t be willing to run around like that with his little sister, but he was having old-fashioned childhood fun now, oblivious for once to the fact that he would soon, at thirteen, no longer be a child.
It was a dark afternoon, with some heavy fall weather on its way in from the northwest. Typical Kansas, a little late for the season was all. He glanced at his weather radio. The light glowed green, meaning that it was on and hadn’t picked up any alerts.
Still, blue flickering came from the sky, and thunder rolled in from far away. The storms were still the other side of Holcomb, maybe fifty miles out. Probably they’d arrive during the night.
He didn’t like storms. He feared that the disks might come, might be hiding in them.
But no, the lenses were the anchors. Hooks in the gills of the fish, as it were. And there were no lenses here. He kept telling himself that.
Then he would think, what if there were just one or two? Tassili was in the middle of the desert. Nazca was isolated; so were a number of the other sites. Most of them. They had been created so long ago that they were all centered on a north pole from God only knew how far back in the past.
He wanted a drink so badly that he dared not open the liquor drawer. No way.
He stared at his words on the screen. Lindy and Winnie destroyed, Trevor gone, Martin about to be locked up…which he could still see taking place. Even though he had stopped writing, the story still unfolded in the bright hell of his mind. In it, Martin was watching his old frien
d lock the cell door, and Bobby had tears in his eyes as he did it.
No, this was too much, this had to go, and now was the time.
He selected the chapter and erased it—and wow, there were some blood, sweat, and tears down the drain. So okay, that was done and it should be done. He’d rewrite it with a more bearable scenario.
The blank page confronted him, and he told himself that he actually preferred blank pages.
Bullshit, this was awful, killing his work like this. But he had to, he could not see his people suffer this much.
So he started a new chapter. Then he stopped. He didn’t feel like just plunging into it like this, and he was sick of using the laptop, which he closed. Writing on the computer was an addiction, and he already had too damn many of those, drinking the way he did and sneaking cigars, and wanting to do a lot more than that.
He put his beloved old Corona back in her place of honor. Now, this was a writer’s tool. She clattered like an old freight train, churning out the words, engraving every mistake in stone. Everything he had done—everything real—had been done on this fine old typewriter. Early days, he would lie in bed writing through the night on yellow pads, then transcribe them onto her in the morning. Civilized way to work.
As he rolled in a sheet of paper, he noticed that the laptop hadn’t gone off as he closed it. A defect due to the short, no doubt.
Intending to shut it down manually, he opened the clamshell.
There were words. He scrolled down. It was all there, right up to—here. He typed. These words appeared on the page. He erased them. As he did so, they reappeared. He did it faster, but the faster he worked, the faster they came back.
Okay, this appeared to be insanity at work here. This could not be. He erased the chapter again.
The process sort of made the words bounce, then they were back. He erased it again, then yet again and again, until erasure did nothing at all. Not even a flicker.
All right, this was crazy. This was not a possible thing.
He closed 2012. Time to go nuclear. On his computer, he had a program called Zztz, which would destroy any file completely. It used the same sophisticated techniques approved by the Defense Department for the destruction of classified files.