He opened Zztz and dragged the entire 2012 file into it.
“Neutron bomb,” he muttered, setting Zztz to Defcon 12, its ultimate destruction level.
So, he’d write another novel, big deal. Late or not, he’d come up with something.
Even as he watched Zztz work, the file came back. He destroyed it again. It came back again.
There was no level in the program higher than Defcon 12. But there was one other way to go about this. He went into the DOS prompt and typed “erase *.*”
By the time he was back in Windows, it had all returned.
He stared at the screen. This was proof of something, because if you can’t make the erase function on your computer work, things are crazy.
“Brooke,” he called.
From their kitchen, “Yeah!”
“Could you come up to my office for a second. It’s important.”
“Wiley, I’ve got a million balls in the air.”
“Brooke, please!”
“In a minute!”
He found himself shaking, feeling the clammy coldness of fever or fear. Because this was proof, right here staring at him, that all these nightmares and all this craziness had something real about it. It was exactly as real as he had feared.
He jumped up and got out of the office like the place was on fire. He ran downstairs and threw his arms around Brooke. He kissed her forehead, her lips, her neck.
“Hey! I’m cuttin’ up a stew, here, fella.”
“Never leave me, for the love of God, never leave me!”
He took her in his arms, and this time he kissed her hard, pushing her head back, pulling her body to his until she was collapsed against him, her breasts compressed against his chest, their genitals pressing through their clothes.
When he let her go, her eyes were soft with pleasure. “We’re gonna have a long night, I hope.”
“I’m gonna break you in half, you gorgeous thing.” Then all of his fear surfaced, and he held onto her as he might to a life preserver in the wild ocean. “I love you with all my soul,” he whispered, his voice hushed in his truth.
Probably she didn’t quite understand what had inspired this, but she didn’t need to, the intensity and the honesty were there. She stroked his head, and her hand against his advancing baldness felt as soft as the wings of a butterfly. He remembered the yellow porch lights of his boyhood, and the moths there, their fluttering the only sound in the quiet of a summer night.
Thunder rumbled, long and low. It was accompanied by a distant flicker of lightning—and he reacted with a surge of terror so great that he all but pissed himself. He raced into the living room, cutting off lights as he went. The sky was alive with flickering.
He went out onto the porch, looked up into roiling high canyons of madly flickering clouds. And then at his kids running around in the eerie light.
“Kids, come inside, please.”
“Aw, Dad.”
“It’s lightning, it’s dangerous.”
They continued to play.
“What’s going on?” Brooke asked.
“Look at the sky!”
“Yeah, so what?”
“You don’t understand!”
“Honey, it’s miles away, you can hardly even hear it. Let them play.”
“No, please, for me. Because I’m so scared for them, Brooke. I am scared for my kids and you need to help me.”
“I think Crutchfield needs to help you.”
“Okay, look, if you would deign to come upstairs for just a few minutes, I can prove to you that something is wrong around here. Very wrong.”
She followed him.
“Okay, now. I erased Chapter 7 of my book just now. And it reappeared. Then I erased the entire book. And it reappeared.”
“You erased your book?”
“Absolutely. From the DOS prompt. Absolute erasure.”
“Goddamn it, we need that money.”
“We need—I don’t know what we need, here, exactly, but I do know that these people on the other side, they’re having a hell of a bad time, and if I can erase this and rewrite it, maybe things will get better for them, and maybe for us, too, because there is a nightmare over there, and it is about to invade us, too.”
She sat down at his desk. “Oh, this is nonsense. Here’s your book right here.”
“Erase it.”
“I will not!”
“Okay, then, watch this—” He moved in front of her—and she grabbed his wrist. Her grip was strong, shockingly so.
“You will not, Wiley Dale. You will finish this and turn it in or you will lose me and your children.”
“Excuse me?”
“How much self-indulgent bull crap can one woman take? Answer me that? Because I am personally at the end of my tether with you. I can’t handle this anymore. How dare you bring me up here and terrorize me playing games like this. We could lose everything! End up on the street! I’m sick of being the wife of the rich writer who is actually a poor bastard.”
“Never tell anybody I’m broke.”
“Then write a book that sells and you won’t be. Put food on the table, God damn you!”
She got up and stalked out. “Dinner in ten minutes,” she called over her shoulder.
“There’s obviously food on the table,” he muttered—but very softly. Then he went back to his desk, put the Corona aside, and opened the laptop. He began to type.
Outside, the electric sky flashed.
He worked steadily. Thunder began rolling, as the source of the lightning swept closer, rumbling across the gathering night. Outside, the kids, now wearing sheets, swooped in the dark.
It was as if death echoed in the thunder, for he knew that this same storm, across the divide between the worlds, brought with it the body thieves.
Downstairs, Brooke began singing, as she usually did after they’d fought, “Listen to the mockingbird sweetly singing, singing over her grave…”
She knew, that was why she was singing a death song like that. That was also why the kids were playing ghost, they knew in their secret hearts that their counterparts in the other universe had lost their souls.
“Supper’s ready,” Brooke yelled, “and you might think about coming down in a reasonable time for once, Wylie.”
He thought of Martin in his prison cell. Looked, in his mind’s eye, and saw him standing there, just standing in the steel and concrete chamber.
He knew that Martin could hear his friends, most of whom he had known all his life, in the next room—what was left of the town crowded into that small space—arguing about whether or not to kill him.
They didn’t care about the ten million bucks. What was that, anyway, at this point? But they had this warning from the authorities, and they still trusted their authorities.
“You idiots,” he yelled, “he knows something, that’s why General Samson wants him dead. The man knows!”
“Shut up and get down here, your supper’s getting cold!”
“Yessum!”
Texas Max, the local contrabandista, had gotten in some fine absinthe recently, which Wiley had bought, of course, and put in the back of his desk drawer after giving it a taste. Hideous stuff, but it did pack a pop. He got it out now, unscrewed the bottle, and chug-a-lugged.
Fuckaroo.
He went down to his dinner, and ate in silence.
“What’s that smell, daddy?”
“What smell?”
“Ew, Daddy’s been eating licorice.”
Brooke eyed him, but said nothing. In hope of disguising the smell, he gobbled pearl onions. He’d left the damn absinthe on his desk, too. He needed to get that back out of sight. In the past, there had been serious fights over his various excursions into the world of drugs. After discovering that there was not a single official opium den left on earth, he’d set one up in the garage. He’d needed to see what opium was actually like for a book. When she’d found him and Matt out there stupefied, and Matt still in his cop getup, she’d hit
the ceiling. And as far as his crack pipe was concerned, even he wasn’t crazy enough to try the stuff, but he had the pipe. Again, research. Like the dominatrix. It had taken some real fast talking when that damn Amazon had burst in on them one night demanding cash for pictures. But it hadn’t looked like him in the contraption, thank God.
Lila hadn’t fazed Brooke. “If you want to get into leather, I’m your girl,” she’d said. “But be careful, because once I start, I ain’t stoppin’.”
She was back in the kitchen starting in on his job, which was the washing up. Kelsey joined her, still in her ghost robe, and their voices as they worked together created in him a joy so gorgeous that he thought he might levitate. He loved this family of his so very, very much.
“Let me do that,” he said, getting up. He took the stew pot from her and set about scouring it. She was not a Teflon user, she preferred iron and copper—anything, in his opinion, that increased the workload of the cleanup crew.
So be it, though, she was one master cook, she could turn twelve carrots and a few pounds of beef into manna, as she just had.
As he worked, he did not see the face that appeared at the window so briefly, the dark mirrors of eyes, the terrible eyes. None of them saw it.
EIGHT
DECEMBER 6 IN THE DEEP OF A MAN
GENERAL AL NORTH WOKE UP to find that his head had been forced back and something was being shoved down his throat. It was a struggle just to draw breath.
Instinct made him try to scream, but he gagged against what tasted sour and cold, and must be metal. His eyes focused on the only thing he could see, which was a white film of some sort. He looked at it, trying to understand what it might be. It undulated slightly, perhaps being moved by a draft. And then he realized that it was a white sheet—that his own bedsheet was drawn over his face.
Every muscle in his body twisted and tightened, until he thought they were going to knot and pop like rubber bands. His lungs bubbled, he began to feel air hunger, and then was lost in a hell of gagging, as the thing in his throat was twisted round and round.
It got dark. There was no warning, no flicker of lights. It simply got dark. Al couldn’t tell if he’d been blinded or the lights had been turned out.
Then he saw a small red glow. He smelled tobacco smoke.
“Who are you?” he tried to ask around the thing in his throat. His voice was a pitiful, choked gabble.
Something brushed against his naked body, first on his face and neck and chest, then his shoulders, his arms, legs, genitals. A soft tickling, like the fingers of a mischievous woman. Then came the most exquisite sensation, an extraordinary, profound relief: the hard, pulsing thing was drawn out of his throat. He felt air roar in, heard gargling, then there came a sound, high, shattered—which stopped when he snapped his mouth closed, determined not to shriek like that, not a general in the United States Air Force.
In the thousand places on his body that the tickling was present, there began a stinging. This sensation deepened fast, and as it did, subtle fire seemed to race through his skin. He groaned, willing the raping fingers to quit, but they would not quit.
Voices murmured in an unknown language, a strangely soft tongue with a twanging music in it, full of lisps and peculiar whistling sounds mixed with ugly gutturals. It was complex with nuance, trembling with emotion, not human.
A face came into view, peering at him, waxy with makeup. The face was female, but the eyes—gold, oddly metallic—stared with a reptile’s empty fury. Implacable. He thought it must be a mask. Yes, plastic. Or no, it was pliant, it was alive, but once again there was a reptilian effect—a shimmering smoothness that suggested that it was composed not of skin, but scales, very delicate ones. The eyes began snapping back and forth like the weak eyes of an albino. They looked like actual metal, like gold teeth might look. They were sickening.
As the figure moved in and out of view, black, curly hair bobbed prettily. It was a woman, he was sure, and she’d just had her hair done.
He did not want to die like this, in ignorant agony, like some lab animal being dissected alive on behalf of an experiment that it could never hope to understand.
He tried to speak, but nothing came out but puffs of air. Then he felt something against his head—spikes. They seemed to drive into his skull. The golden eyes fluttered and darted, the voices pattered on, rapid-fire. He felt, then, something entering his rectum, more as if it was crawling into him than being thrust in.
She said something—“Waluthota.” Said it again, louder. Speaking to him.
“I can’t—”
The thing was pushed back into his mouth, down his throat, he could feel it in his stomach, could feel it meeting the thing that had been sent up his colon, and now there was a sizzling sound and a taste like burnt bacon, and smoke came out of the sides of his mouth. It didn’t hurt, but he thought they must be killing him and he struggled, thrusting himself up, trying to somehow expel either of the things that were doing their work inside him.
Laughter came, high, quick, unmistakable for what it was.
And then there was something—yes, plans. He saw plans. Now they came into clearer focus: pages and pages of reports, of e-mails, of orders. I’m downloading, he thought. He was seeing every report he’d read over the years, every plan he’d examined, every specification he’d approved.
He thought they were looking for something in his mind, but he could not follow the pattern of the search. He’d overseen a lot of construction in his career, most of it innocuous, but not all, and they were soon in his memories of work done at the Cheyenne Mountain facility, and that was very secret.
Stifling heat was what woke him, a great wave of sweating misery drawing him out of what felt like death itself, a sleep so deep that it had no door.
What had just happened?
He crouched in the humming silence, feeling the pressure of the air-conditioning against his back. Then he stood up, went into the head, and stared at himself in the mirror. Hollow-eyed, haunted man.
His mouth tasted of something toasted and sour. Burnt vomit.
He opened the medicine cabinet and found some mouthwash, swilled it, and spit it—and watched in loathing as hundreds of writhing black threads went swarming down the drain. He spit again, a mass of them, ferociously alive, squirming and struggling, making a sound like spaghetti being poured from a pot.
He cried out—and then saw that the sink was clean and the mouthwash still in the cabinet. He was dreaming, that was what was going on here. He started to feel relief—but then noticed that his billet was thick with tobacco smoke, and he did not smoke, he loathed smoking.
He sat down on the side of his bed. The smoke seemed real, but maybe it wasn’t, maybe he was still in the nightmare. Or maybe somebody nearby was smoking, and the odor was being carried into his room. It was possible, of course. In just the short time they’d been in occupation, it had become obvious that the place had been constructed out of cut corners.
The smell was fading and he was beginning to feel a little better. He tried to think back on what just happened, and see if there had been some pattern in what had been looked at in his mind.
When he tried to inventory the flashes of memory, though, he found something odd. They really were not very important, just the debris of his years as a military executive. Of course, some of them were secret, such as the floor plan of the Cheyenne Mountain facility, but they were easily obtainable without revealing to a senior officer like him that they were of interest.
What was odd was the curious feeling that it was something other than the information that was important. He looked down at his own hands—craggy now, once as soft as a surgeon’s. He’d never flown in combat, but he’d read that great aces like Albert Ball and Bubi Hart-mann had such hands.
Hands reveal people, he’d always thought that, and he wondered now why this thought was even passing through his mind. But as soon as he did ask himself the question, he knew.
He almost cried out, th
en he felt a gnarled agony in his gut and understood that his soul had not been stolen from him, but rather that it had been raped.
And he knew that his loves and his secrets had been turned inside out, that his most private places had been seen, that what he was had been violated.
It wasn’t a nightmare. They’d been here, and they hadn’t been looking at floor plans. They’d made a map of his naked soul. His lips twisted, he sucked breath, forced back the screams. This was violation at its deepest, its most profound, violation of the secrets of the sandbox and the playground and the blushing first love, of the sweaty experiments, the discovery of girls and the long descent of his wife, and his losses, so precious to him, mocked and tossed aside by snake-faced monsters.
He had been evaluated and measured by somebody so darkly evil that their most neutral touch was a corrosive horror.
He thought, It’s a negative civilization, a whole world ancient in its days, that has become corruption.
And it had work for him to do.
NINE
DECEMBER 8 HUNTER’S NIGHT
WHEN MARTIN HEARD BELLS, HE leaped off the cot in horror, thinking that the disks had come again. It took another moment for him to become aware that sunlight was slanting in the barred window of the little cell. Despite everything, he had been asleep.
The bells were being rung over at Third Street Methodist, bells that Martin had been responsible for ringing just a few nights ago. And now here he was in this hideous situation, and with no idea why this had happened to him. Somebody in the government had done this, but who? And why ever would anybody consider an archaeologist dangerous?
He had thought all night about it, reviewing his published work, his experiences in the pyramid and in the White House, and he had reached the tentative conclusion that there must be something in his knowledge of the past that made him potentially dangerous. So dangerous that, even when their world was collapsing around their ears, they would still reach out for him.