He looked down at the smashed grass that made up the floor of the tiny chamber. “Um, you’re easy, Dad. ’Cause I know you…”
George said, “It’s getting dark.”
Trevor looked at him sharply, shook his head.
“Trevor, no. NO!”
“What is this?”
Trevor threw his arms around him. “Dad, they want you to leave!”
“Leave? I can’t leave!”
A boy of perhaps ten or eleven produced a pistol. He handed it to one of the older kids. Martin saw that it was a .45 automatic. He didn’t exactly point it at Martin, so much as leave it visible.
Martin stared at it. He looked from the barrel to the young face. Those eyes again, all shadowy. These kids had changed. He gentled his voice. “Look, I need a break here.”
The boy thrust the gun toward him.
“Trevor! Trevor, tell them, I’m a good father, I’m—I’m—kids, listen. I’m needed. You need me. Yes. Oh, yes. I can be—can replace—replace…”
The boy racked the slide.
“You helped me, Pammy! Hey, you just helped me escape, now you want to do this? This is crazy!”
“Dad, if you don’t go—” Trevor pulled in his words. He was choking with tears, Martin could see it.
“Trevor, tell them, I can’t survive out there. Nobody can!”
The boy got to his feet. He had a dusting of beard, barely visible in the gathering dark. He held the gun in Martin’s face. “Doctor Winters,” he said quietly, “you get out of here.”
“Oh, God, listen, please—I’ve been running and running, I can’t run anymore. Trevor, please help me! Help your dad!”
Trevor looked at him out of his strange new eyes, and Martin saw the truth of it: the horror they had seen had made them monsters, all of them, and Trevor was a monster, too.
But then Trevor reached out a hand and touched his father’s cheek. It was not the gesture of a boy, but of a man of maturity. “Dad, it’s survival of the fittest. The reptilians are going to find you. You can’t hide from them, not anywhere, not like we can. If you stay here, you’ll lead them right to us.”
Martin backed away from the gun. “Get that thing out of my face!”
“Dad, you have to do this.” Trevor threw his arms around his father. Martin held him, felt his body shaking.
He looked to Pammy. “Why did you save me? How could you be so cruel?”
“She’s a damn asshole,” the boy with the gun spat.
“Ride the storm,” a voice said from the back. “Same as we did.”
“Doctor Winters—”
“Pammy, call me Martin, please.”
“Doctor Winters—”
She pulled back the flap of the tent. Outside, Martin saw rain sweeping in almost continuous lightning, and shadows in the nearby clearing that did not look like any shadows he cared to see. “This is crazy. I can’t.”
“Dad, do it!”
“Trev, no, absolutely not!”
His son was standing before him, looking up at him, his face stained with tears. “Get out,” he said. He turned to the boy with the gun. “Give it to me,” he said.
“Why?” the boy asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Because I’m the only one who can handle this!” He took the gun and held it to his father’s face. “Decide,” he said.
Martin looked straight down the barrel. He could see muscles working in Trevor’s hand, could see his finger tightening. “Trevor?”
Trevor screwed his eyes shut. “Now, Daddy!”
Martin tried to think—some argument, some appeal, but there were no more arguments, there were no more appeals. That weapon was going to go off in another second, and Trevor was going to have to spend the rest of his life an orphan like all these other orphans, but knowing, unlike them, that he had taken the life of his own father.
Martin raised his hand. “I’m going,” he said softly. “I’m going, son, and I want you to know that I don’t understand, but I don’t blame you.”
“Just go.”
“I know you have to look out for each other, that you can’t risk the group—”
“Damn you, GO!”
Trevor’s voice was not the same now. He’d been so gentle a boy that he couldn’t shoot a pheasant. Now here he was ready to kill his father, and his voice was low and hard, scorched with the pain of somebody who could.
Martin went out into the lightning.
THIRTEEN
DECEMBER 18, MIDNIGHT A FAMILY AFFAIR
WYLIE STOOD BY THE QUIET waters of the Saunders, trying to get the courage up to try and cross into the other world. If Trevor could come here, then surely he could go in the other direction, and that was urgently necessary, obviously.
He paced, he looked for some sign of the gateway. Martin was out there right now in those deadly woods, and somebody had to save the guy, and Wylie thought it might as well be him.
He could bring Martin across. If nobody over there wanted him, he could live here. Impractical though he was, professorial in a way that Wylie found infuriating, nevertheless the guy didn’t deserve this to happen. His own son, doing that to him? Good God.
Why would they save him, then just discard him? And how could Trevor—too gentle to hunt birds, for the love of Pete—ever be that hard on his dad?
Over there, it was storming. Over here, the sky was clear. The moon near the half rode high. It was close on to midnight, and from the house he could hear Brooke singing. She’d once had vocal ambitions, but life and children and a certain lack of volume had kept her away from an operatic career. Her voice was too delicate for the stage, but on a quiet night like this one, it was an angelic wonder.
He knew that she was sitting in a window looking at the moon, waiting for her man to return. She never protested his midnight walks, but they made her uneasy. It was as if her voice was meant as a kind of lifeline, reaching out to him in case he strayed too far from home.
She sang an old lullaby, one that she had sung to Nick and still sang to Kelsey, a song from her deep past, his woman of the tribe of the Celts. It was called “Dereen Day,” the little song, and it floated across the softly muttering water like a breeze.
He tossed a stone into the moonlight, listened to it splash in the deeper river. Where was the gateway now? Did it open and close? According to some of the more outre stuff he’d been reading about 2012, there were gateways all over the world, especially at the points where what were called ley lines met. He was not sure what these lines were. Planet Energy Lines would probably be the simplest definition. New Age Bullshit Lines was another contender.
He stood just where he and Nick had been, and tossed another stone. It gleamed in the moonlight, then splashed gently down.
“Damn.”
He heard something, though. He listened. It was on the other side of the river. He’d never heard anything quite like it before.
He listened again.
What was that?
Then he knew, and his blood all but froze in his veins.
That slashing noise could only be an outrider, and it was actually in the gateway, hanging between the worlds.
He hadn’t brought a gun, he’d been afraid that shooting it in the other universe would bring on some sort of catastrophe. He’d read all he could about parallel worlds, but little was actually known, except that experiments showed that they were actual, physical places. There was no scientific speculation about what might be in them. He thought that he was the only person who had ever speculated that certain animals must be able to cross this divide, that they had evolved the ability as a threat avoidance mechanism.
Had to be true. He’d seen a weir cat himself, and not far from here, when he was a kid. Damn big, damn black, and damn scary. Then gone—poof—right before his eyes.
The slashing sound grew louder. Came toward him.
Brooke stopped singing. Her voice floated across the night. “Wylie?”
Jesus, he needed to get back to the house, h
e needed to get his hands on a gun. Nick had been right to get them ready. That was a smart kid there. He had foresight.
The slashing was now right in front of him—but he couldn’t see it. It was loud, it was deafening—and then he could feel tickling, then pricking against his face, his neck. Crying out, he lurched back.
He fell against what felt like iron bars. Where he touched them, they became visible, and he saw that they were not bars, but the legs of what the kids called an outrider. And now the slashing sound was overhead. He was under the damn thing!
He rolled. The slashing came down toward him. He lashed out at it, kicking furiously toward the sound. Where his foot struck, he saw a section of the creature—a gleaming abdomen striped yellow, then a complicated eye, then a hooked claw on the joint of a leg.
Screaming now, he rolled.
There was a pneumatic, liquid hissing and boiling yellow sludge sprayed the ground around him. A stinger the size of his arm slashed his jacket and was gone.
But it was coming back, he could hear the mechanical slashing of the jaws, but more he could feel the thing probing with its legs, and he knew that the next time it attacked, that stinger would impale him.
A roar, huge, echoing off into the woods.
Silence.
Nothing there. Nothing at all.
“Dad?”
“Nick!”
His son scrambled down the hill that dropped to the riverbank. He carried his 10-gauge. He wore pajama bottoms and one house shoe. Behind him came Brooke. “Wylie! Nick! What’s happening?”
The moon sailed in splendor, the night birds called, the sacred peace of the Kansas night enclosed them, and the sweet little river rolled on.
Nick threw his arms around his father as Brooke came running up, seeking with her hands, almost hitting him, enraged with fear, then choking back sobs, then holding both of her men.
“An outrider,” Nick said. “I heard it and I saw it attacking Dad. Sort of.”
Brooke nodded.
“Martin’s in trouble,” Wylie said.
“We know,” Brooke responded.
“We just read it, Dad.”
“I was trying to get to him. To cross over.”
Faintly, from the house, they all heard Kelsey’s voice call out, “Is anybody home?”
“We’re coming, Baby,” Wylie called, and they all trooped back to the house, where she waited at the kitchen door, her hands on her hips.
She hugged her brother. “Thank you for saving our daddy.” Then she went into her mother’s arms.
Wylie was not too surprised at what his family knew. Kelsey was eight and an excellent reader. She was probably reading the book in everybody else’s downtime.
Brooke put on water for coffee. “I think we need to tell Matt,” she said. “We need some support out here.”
“Fighting them is acknowledging them. Believing in them. And the more we do that, the stronger the link to their reality becomes. So getting a posse out here might not be such a good idea.”
Brooke poured water into the coffee maker. “Then we need to not try to use that gateway at all.”
“She’s right, Dad,” Nick said.
“But Martin—he’s dying out there. Right now.”
Nick gave him a long, searching look.
“What?”
“Dad, just let it happen. You’re fighting and we can’t fight. We have to just write and hope they find it, and hope that it helps them. If one of us takes so much as a single step into that world—”
Kelsey’s eyes were wide, and Nick dropped it.
Brooke poured three mugs of coffee and sat down. Kelsey came into her lap.
“Nick, should you—this late?”
Nick gave him another of those searching looks. “You don’t remember?”
“He doesn’t,” Kelsey said. “He can’t.”
“Remember what? What am I missing?”
So softly that it was almost inaudible, Nick said, “I’m the guardian, Mom is the facilitator, you’re the scribe.” He glanced toward Kelsey, whose eyes were heavy. “She’s the sentinel.” He raised his eyebrows. “Remember?”
It didn’t make a bit of sense, any of it.
Nick stared into his coffee. “Our sentinel woke me up when she heard the outrider. If she hadn’t, you’d be dead now.”
He owed them his life. The bond that he felt with his family at this moment was the strongest thing he had ever known, the biggest emotion he had ever had. “Thank you,” he said.
Then he heard from upstairs, low voices.
Kelsey had closed her eyes now, and Brooke began singing “Dereen Day” again, her own voice as soft as a breeze, too soft to drown out the conversation Wylie was hearing.
He looked toward the dark stairs, then toward Nick—who jumped up and ran upstairs.
“Nick!” Wylie followed. Brooke only glanced at them, then continued singing.
Nick stood in front of Wylie’s office, his shotgun ported in his arms.
Wylie had known that there wouldn’t be anybody there. He went into the office. The voices were louder here, more distinct.
But nothing was breaking through, not here, not this far from a gateway.
“It’s my story,” he said to Nick. “My story’s calling me.”
FOURTEEN
DECEMBER 18, LATE THE MONSTER
WYLIE SAW REPTILIANS, GORGEOUS LIKE snakes are gorgeous, their scales shimmering in a bright room with white tile walls, fluorescent tubes lining the ceiling, a metal autopsy table.
Where was it?
Then he knew, and he wrote: The entrance to their lair is in Cheyenne Mountain, but the place itself is right here, right beneath us. It has to do with the mass of the planet and the power coursing through its veins, which are the ley lines, and the great confluence of lines in this place.
Twelve miles from this house lay the geographical center of the continental United States. In the other human world, their base was beneath it. And in this world, if there was anywhere that they could break through, it would be in this area, where the veil between universes was thinnest.
Wylie’s hands flew. He hardly noticed that Nick and Brooke stood behind him, with Kelsey asleep in her mother’s arms.
The little team rode thus deep into the night, on the tide of Wylie’s words.
He watched his own hands, then watched the screen as the words appeared:
General Samson injected himself, sucked air through his teeth as the familiar agony spread up his arm, then burned through his chest, then invaded his face and head, his whole body. It was a hateful, miserable thing to have to do every day.
Today, he did not expect to expose himself to the human earth’s atmosphere, but he was doing it under an order that he could quote precisely: “You will maintain a physical state that allows you free movement in existing planetary conditions at all times.” There was nothing about not being prepared for a day because he didn’t expect to be in their raw damn air.
“Time?” he barked as he entered the abattoir. His feet squished in blood. The place stank of raw human meat.
“01044,” Captain Mazle replied.
Lying before them on a steel table was a body. Samson looked down at it dispassionately. General Al North, big deal. He’d despised the eager creature with its idealism and its pathetically uninformed mind.
He looked at the mouth, noted the drying along the raw line where the lips had been removed and the clotted blood in both eye sockets.
“Mazle!”
“Yessir!”
He gestured. “If you fail—”
“We won’t fail.”
“It’s you, Captain. You. You will fail or you won’t.”
“Don’t threaten me, General.”
She came from a powerful family. He didn’t like it, but he must not forget it. “I’m doing nothing of the kind.”
“You’d like to, though. Anyway, I’ve already told my father what a complete piece of shit you are.”
He tried not to take her threat to heart. Her father could order death to a man in Samson’s position. “Captain, I’m sorry if you don’t like my style.”
“Your style? You have all the charm of a skerix, and you smell a lot worse.”
“It’s the anitallergens, as I’m sure you are aware. Please be reminded that my responsibilities leave me no choice.” He gestured toward General North’s ravaged body. “If we’re going to get this thing through that gateway, we have no time, so let’s get started, Captain, if you don’t mind.”
“You’d be delighted if I failed, General, of course. But I’m not going to fail.”
“This whole operation is in danger of failing, and if it does, not even your father will be able to save you. We still don’t have enough slaves and we can’t get the personnel in to control the ones we do have because the lenses are old and barely functional. We’re losing 20,000 humans a minute and we need another billion in four days.”
“Well, that’s not my issue, General. My issue is this little writer sitting in the other human earth—you know, the one you people haven’t been able to enter usefully for the past fifty goddamn years!” She strode over and slapped the chest of the inert human. “If we don’t succeed in this, we will both stand before Echidna herself. You and me, General Samson, and not all the power of Abaddon will save us.”
She crossed the room, moving toward a male who stood in silence, waiting. “Doctor,” she said to him, “it’s time for you to do your duty. Assuming that you can.”
The doctor gleamed in the light, his scales tiny and creamy. She didn’t know his name, but his appearance confirmed his class. She would be polite to him. He’d no doubt paid a lot for this job, in hope of sharing in the spoils of earth.
However, the doctor didn’t do anything.
“Let’s get moving, okay?”
Samson chuckled. “The loyal retainer. Your personnel are as promising as your plans.”
“I need more power,” the doctor said. “Forty thousand volts at least.”
“Do it with twenty.”
“Captain—”
“You do it, all you have to do is use care instead of brute force to cover your incompetence. So do it with twenty or you’re going on punishment report. I’m sick of your excuses.”