Maybe that’s why Alicia liked it as much as she did.
She found her gear where she’d left it hidden in the brush. A pike and cross. The RDF. Her bandoliers of blades. A change of clothes, a blanket, shoes. A hundred rounds of ammo but no gun to fire it. She’d left Sod’s knife behind, embedded in the left kidney of a man who had commanded her to stop, as if she might actually do this. Racing from the detention center, she hadn’t even known if it would be day or night. Time had been annihilated. The world she found was a changed place. No, that wasn’t right. The world was the same; it was she who had changed. She felt apart from everything, spectral, almost bodiless. Above her the winter stars shone hard and pure, like chips of ice. She needed shelter. She needed sleep. She needed to forget.
She took refuge in a shed that at one time might have contained chickens. Half the roof was gone; only the barest form remained: a single wall left standing, the little cages encrusted with fossilized droppings, a floor of hard-packed earth. She wrapped herself in the blanket, her broken body shaking with the cold. Louise, she thought, was it like this? Her mind tossed with memories, bright flashes of torment that split her thoughts like lightning. When would it stop, when would it stop.
It was still dark when she awoke, her mind climbing slowly to awareness. Something warm was brushing the back of her neck. She rolled and opened her eyes to discover an immense dark form looming above her.
My good boy, she thought, and then she said it: “My good, good boy.” Soldier dipped his face to hers, his great nostrils flaring, bathing her face with his breath. He licked her eyes and cheeks with his long tongue. It was a miracle. There was no other word. Someone had come. Someone had come, after all. Alicia had longed for this without knowing it, one soul to comfort her in this comfortless world.
Then, stepping improbably from the gloom, a figure, and a woman’s voice, strange and familiar at once:
“Alicia. Hello.”
The woman crouched before her, drawing down the hood of her long, wool coat. Her long black tresses tumbled free.
“It’s all right,” she said softly. “I’m here now.”
Amy? But it was not the Amy she knew.
This Amy was a woman.
A strong, beautiful woman with thick, dark hair and eyes like windowpanes lit from behind with golden light. The same face but different, deeper; the impression was one of completeness, a coming into the self. A face, thought Alicia, of wisdom. Her beauty was more than appearance, more than a collection of physical details; it came from the whole.
“I don’t … understand.”
“Shhhh.” She took Alicia’s hand. Her touch was firm but tender, like a mother’s, comforting her child. “Your friend. He showed us where you were. Such a handsome horse. What do you call him?”
Her mind felt heavy, benumbed. “Soldier.”
Amy cupped Alicia’s chin and lifted it slightly. “You’re hurt.”
How was this possible? How was anything possible? Beyond the shed Alicia saw a second figure, holding a pair of horses by the reins. A windblown swirl of white hair and a great pale beard masked his features. But it was the way he held himself, with a soldier’s bearing, that told Alicia who he was; that this man in the snow was Lucius Greer.
“What did they do to you?” Amy whispered. “Tell me.”
That was all it took. Her will collapsed, a wave of sorrow came undammed inside her. She did not speak so much as shudder the word: “Everything.”
And at long last, a great sob shook her—a howl of purest pain and grief cast skyward to the winter stars—and in Amy’s arms, Alicia began to weep.
Guilder. It’s time.
Guilder, rise.
But Guilder did not hear these words. Director Horace Guilder was asleep and dreaming—a terrible, oft-repeated dream in which he was in the convalescent center, smothering his father with a pillow. Contrary to history, this did not proceed without a struggle. His father thrashed and flailed, his hands clawing at the air, fighting to break free as he issued muffled cries for mercy. Only when his resistance ceased, and Guilder removed the pillow from his face, did Guilder see his error. It wasn’t his father he had killed, but Shawna. Oh, God, no! Then Shawna’s eyes popped open; she began to laugh. She laughed so hard that tears came to her eyes. Stop laughing! he yelled. Stop laughing at me! Guilder, she said, you’re so funny. You should see the look on your face. You and your crappy bracelet. Your mother was a whore. A whore a whore a whore …
Prepare the way, Guilder. Rise to meet them. The moment is at hand.
He jolted awake.
Our moment, Guilder. The birth of the next new world.
The information hit his brain like voltage. He bolted upright in his vast bed, its preposterous acreage of pillows and blankets and sheets, realizing, with faint embarrassment, that he’d fallen asleep with his clothes on. And why, he thought absurdly, did he need, of all things, a canopy bed? A bed so huge it made him feel like a doll? But he shook the question away. They were coming! They were here! He swiveled his feet to the floor and jammed them into the leather lace-ups that he had, apparently, possessed the energy to remove before passing out with exhaustion. Ramming his shirttail into his pants, he dashed to the door and down the hall.
“Suresh!”
The sound of his pounding caromed down the empty hallway.
“Suresh, wake up!”
The door to Suresh’s quarters opened to reveal his new chief of staff’s sleepy, bronze-colored face. He was wearing a puffy white bathrobe and slippers, blinking like a bear exiting its cave.
“Cripes, Horace, you don’t have to yell.” He yawned into his fist. “What time is it?”
“Who cares what time it is? They’re here.”
Suresh startled. “Right now, you mean?”
Rise up and meet them, Guilder. Bring them home.
“Don’t just stand there, get dressed.”
“Right, okay. I’m on it.”
“Move, goddamnit!”
Guilder returned to his apartment and stepped into the bathroom. Should he shave? Wash his face at least? Why was he thinking like this, like a boy on prom night? He ran a damp hand through his hair and brushed his teeth, trying to calm himself. Was this what passed for toothpaste around this place? This awful-tasting gritty goo? For the love of God, why, in ninety-seven years, had they never managed to come up with a decent toothpaste?
He removed a fresh suit from the wardrobe. The blue tie, the red, the green and yellow stripes: he didn’t know. He was suddenly so nervous his fingers could barely manage the knot. And hungry. A stone of cold emptiness sat in his gut. A visit with his old friend Grey would have been just the ticket to settle his nerves, but he should have thought of that earlier.
Standing before the mirror, he took a steadying breath. Easy, Guilder, easy. You know what to do. It’s just another day at the office. It can’t be any worse than a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, can it?
In point of fact, it could. But there was no use in dwelling on the prospect.
By the time he reached the lobby, Suresh was waiting with Guilder’s driver. “The trucks are on their way,” Suresh said as Guilder drew on his gloves. “You want a full detail to escort you?”
Guilder declined; he would go on his own. Best to keep things simple. The two men shook hands.
“Good luck,” said Suresh.
As the car glided down the hill, Guilder’s anxiety began to lessen. He was moving into the moment now. At the river they turned north and headed toward the Project. Its dark shape heaved from the earth like a headstone, a square of deeper blackness against the night sky. The portal was open, waiting.
They didn’t stop but turned east on the service road. At one time it had been used to move equipment to the site: the quarried blocks of stone, the twirling cement mixers from the concrete plant, the flatbeds with their stacked girders of harvested steel. Now it would carry an altogether different delivery. They passed through the auxiliary gate. Five more minut
es and they drew up to where the two semis were waiting in a field of frozen corn stubble.
Guilder told the driver to go. The semis’ cabs were empty; their drivers, too, had departed. Guilder pressed his ear to the side of one of the trucks. He heard muffled murmurings inside, interspersed with a female sound of frightened weeping.
The voice in his head was silent. A profound stillness encased him like the anticipatory stillness before a storm. They would be coming from the west. He waited.
Then:
The first one appeared, then another and another, eleven points of glowing phosphorescence spaced at equal intervals on the horizon. The gaps between them narrowed as they neared, like the lights of a giant aircraft approaching.
Come to me, Guilder thought. Come to me.
Details began to emerge. Not so much to emerge as to enlarge. One was smaller than the rest—that would be Carter, of course, he thought; the unknowable, anomalous Anthony Carter—but the others took his breath away. In their powerful forms and graceful movements and absolute mastery of themselves they seemed to shrink the space around them, to bend dimensions, to rewrite the course of time. They flowed toward him like a glowing river, bathing him in the light of their majestic horror.
Come to me, he thought. Come to me. Come to me.
The moment of their arrival possessed a feeling of absolute completeness. A baptism. The closing covers of a book. A long dive into blue water and the instant of entry, the world wiped away. They stood before him, great and terrible. He drank the majestic, terrifying images of their memories as if dipped into a pool of purest madness. A weeping girl on a dirty mattress. A shopkeeper, hands raised, and the bony press of a gun’s muzzle at the vertical crease between his eyebrows. A sensation of utter drunkenness, and a boy on his bicycle glimpsed through a windshield, and the thud of contact followed by a sharp jolt as his little body passed beneath the vehicle’s wheels. A delicious feeling of sex, and a woman’s eyes expanded to impossible wideness as the cord tightened around her neck. A chorus of terror, depravity, black evil.
I am Morrison-Chávez-Baffes-Turrell-Winston-Sosa-Echols-Lambright-Martínez-Reinhardt-Carter.
Guilder unlatched the cargo door of the first truck. The prisoners tried to run, of course. Guilder had ordered no shackles; he wanted nothing to constrict them. Most made it only a few steps. The few that got farther experienced, perhaps, a fleeting hope of salvation. Their pointless flight was part of the rapture. The moment unfolded in great splashes of blood and abruptly severed screams and living tissue torn asunder, and in the silence that followed Guilder stepped to the rear of the second truck and opened its door in welcome.
“Welcome, my friends. You are home at last. We will see to your every need.”
58
Vale was gone, which could mean only one thing. Sara’s turn would come next.
Jenny had disappeared as well. Two days after the bombing in the stadium, a new girl had taken her place. Was she with them? No, Sara would have detected it. A message under the plate, an exchange of reassuring glances. Something. But the girl—pale, nervous, whose name Sara didn’t know and was never to learn—came and went in silence.
Lila had taken to her bed. All day long and into the night she tossed and turned. She roused only to bathe but shooed Sara’s offers of help away. Her voice was drained; even speaking seemed to require all her energy. “Leave me be,” she said.
Sara was alone, cut off. The system was collapsing.
She passed the days with Kate, but this time together felt different, final. The child could sense it too, as children did. What was the source of their powers of perception? Everything was colored by a mood of pointlessness. They played the usual games, not caring who won. Sara read the usual stories, but the child listened only vaguely. Nothing helped. The end of their time was approaching. The days were long and then too short. At night they slept together on the sofa, melded as one. The soft warmth of the girl’s body was torment. Sara lay awake for hours listening to her quiet breathing, drinking in her scent. What are you dreaming? she wondered. Are you dreaming of goodbye, as I am? Will we see each other again? Is there such a place? Holding Kate close, she remembered Nina’s words. We’ll get her out. Otherwise she has no chance. My child, thought Sara, I will do what I must to save you. I will go when asked. It’s the only thing I have.
On the third morning, Sara took Kate outside. The cold was biting, but she welcomed it. She pushed Kate on the swing for a time, then rode the teeter-totter with her. Kate had said nothing about Lila since the night Guilder had beaten her. Whatever cord had connected them had been severed. When the cold grew too fierce, they headed back inside. Just as they reached the door, Kate stopped.
“Somebody gave this to me,” she said, and showed Sara. In her hand was a pink plastic egg.
“Who did?”
“I don’t know. She was over there.”
Sara followed the girl’s gesture across the courtyard. There was no one. Kate shrugged. “She was there a second ago.”
For just a few minutes, not more than five, Sara had let Kate wander off by herself.
“She told me to give it to you,” Kate said, and held the egg out to her.
The woman had to be Nina, of course. Sara tucked the egg into the pocket of her robe. Her body felt numb. When Jenny had disappeared, she had allowed herself the faint hope that this burden would pass from her. How foolish she’d been.
“Let’s keep this a secret—would that be okay?”
“She said the same thing.” Then, her face brightening, Kate asked, “Is it a secret message?”
Sara did her best to smile. “That’s it exactly.”
She didn’t open the egg right away; she was afraid to. When they returned to the dark apartment, they found Lila lighting the candelabras with a long match. Her face was drained of color, her hair brittle and askew. She called them over to the sofa and held out a book.
“Would you read to me?”
Little Women: Sara opened the cover to a puff of dust from its yellowed pages.
“I haven’t heard this one in ages,” Lila sighed.
Sara was made to read for hours. Part of her mind registered the story as interesting, but the rest was in a fog. The language was difficult, and she often lost her place. Kate’s attention waned; eventually she fell asleep. It seemed entirely possible that Lila was going to make Sara read the entire book.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Sara said finally. “I’ll be right back.”
Before Lila could say anything, she stepped briskly to the lavatory and closed the door. She pulled up her robe and sat on the toilet and withdrew the egg from her pocket. Her heart was beating wildly. A flicker of hesitation; then she opened it and unfolded the paper.
The package is in the garden shed at the edge of the courtyard. Look beneath the floorboards to the left of the door. The target is the senior staff meeting in the conference room, tomorrow 1130 hrs. Take the central elevator to the fourth floor, then the first hallway on the right. The last door on the left is the conference room. Tell the guard that Guilder sent for you. Sergio lives.
She had returned the paper to the egg when there came an urgent rapping on the door. “Dani! I need you!”
“Just a second!”
The handle jiggled. Had she locked it?
“I have the key, Dani! Please, open the door!”
Sara lurched off the toilet, sending the egg skittering across the floor. Shit! The key was turning in the lock. She had just enough time to shove the egg into the bottom drawer of the vanity before turning to see Lila standing in the open doorway.
“All done,” she said. She heaved a smile onto her face. “What do you need, Lila?”
The woman’s face blanched with confusion. “I don’t know. I thought you’d gone somewhere. You scared me.”
“Well, I did. I went to the bathroom.”
“I didn’t hear the toilet flush.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Sara turned and pulled th
e chain. “That was rude of me.”
For a moment Lila said nothing. She seemed completely disconnected from reality.
“Could you do something for me? A favor.”
Sara nodded.
“I would like some … chocolate.”
“Chocolate.” What was chocolate? “Where would I get that?”
Lila stared incredulously. “The kitchen, of course.”
“Right. I guess that was obvious.” Maybe someone in the kitchen would know what Lila was talking about. Sara didn’t think it would be a good idea to come back empty-handed. “I’ll go right away.”
Lila’s face relaxed. “Anything would be fine. Even a cup of cocoa.” Her eyes unfocused; she gave a little sigh. “I always loved a cup of cocoa on a winter afternoon.”
Sara stepped from the apartment. How much had Lila seen? Why hadn’t Sara thought to flush the note down the toilet? Had she closed the drawer? She replayed the moment in the mind; yes, she had. There was no reason for Lila to go looking there, though to be safe, Sara would have to retrieve it before the serving girl returned.
The kitchen was located on the far side of the building; she’d have to cross the atrium, which was always full of cols. Still riding a wave of adrenaline, she aimed her eyes at the floor and made her way down the hall.
As she entered the lobby she became aware of a commotion. An attendant was being escorted by two guards, her pitiful cries amplified by the room’s expansive acoustics.
“Don’t! Please, I’m begging you! I’ll do better! Don’t take me to the basement!”
The woman was Karen Molyneau.
“Sara! Help me!”
Sara halted in her tracks. How could Karen see her face? And then she realized that she’d made the one fatal error, the one thing she could never forget to do. She’d neglected to pull down her veil.
“Sara, please!”
“Stop.”
The command had come from a third man. As he stepped forward, Sara recognized him immediately. The round belly, the fogged glasses riding the tip of his nose, the winglike eyebrows. The third man was Dr. Verlyn.
The Twelve Page 57