The Omega Point

by Whitley Strieber

  Then he was inside one of these things, surrounded by columns of light that he somehow knew were living beings, ascended to great heights of the heart, and filled with love so intense that it seemed to thrust him back into early childhood, and he saw his mother and father on the beach at Cape May, Dad calling out, Mother lying with cucumber slices on her eyes, Jack the terrier barking, a tiny girl singing general praises of the day.

  They were angels, a fact which he seemed instinctively to know, and he felt absolutely naked in their light. They were so deeply right and so deeply true that he cried out, or imagined that he did, for they also radiated a sense of joy and purity that was without the slightest question the most glorious, the most innocent, and the yet the most awesome emotion he had ever known.

  He felt also, though, a certain sadness and he lunged at it in his soul and demanded that it leave him but it did not leave him, far from it, for the next thing he knew he was in darkness absolute, crushed by waves of sick terror. The most glorious of all dreams had turned in an instant into the black and formless mother of all nightmares.

  He was moving past stone, down some sort of deep fissure. There came a sensation of heat. Soon, the rock around them was glowing and the heat had become a horrible pain, more like being sanded than burned, but it was hideous. Again and again he threw himself against the walls, back and forth, back and forth, but there was no escape.

  Objectively, he knew how serious a seamless, absolute break with reality like this was. Stress induced, yes, so vivid it was the next thing to psychosis.

  He went deeper, and as he did the heat rose and he writhed and fought, hammering his fists and kicking, reduced to the frenzy of a panicked child.

  Cries came around him, and he could see forms embedded in the walls now, bright, blazing human shapes, and they were all crying out their innocence, but they were not innocent, he could hear it in their tone, a despairing cacophony that bore within it the discordant note of the lie.

  A new pain joined the fire, a very definite pain in his right wrist.

  And there was somebody yelling, and again and again he was hammering his wrist against the edge of the bedside table, and the exquisite old lamp was bouncing.

  Gasping, he wallowed in the sheets, then held his wrist. Jesus God in heaven, had he broken it? No, just the skin, but he had hammered the devil out of it.

  “What happened . . .”

  The room was normal, everything quiet. His clock said six forty-five. “Katie?”

  His bed was empty. She was gone, and he had to ask himself if she had ever been there.

  He knew this imagery, of course. The Christian heaven and hell. So he’d dreamed it, that’s all that had happened, and no matter how vivid, it had been, in the end, just a dream. A symptom of stress, perhaps, but not the psychotic break he had feared.

  A sudden voice from the little sitting room beside his bedroom startled him. Male, but who was it? Nobody on staff sounded like that. He threw open the door.

  “Excuse me—”

  He recognized the voice of The Today Show’s Craig Harding. They were in the window at Rockefeller Center, and people were looking in on them. So the solar storm, also, must have passed and the satellites had switched on again, and the world had resumed. As he dressed, he listened hungrily to the news, which was basically about all the disruptions. But they were disruptions, not the end of the world.

  He allowed himself to hope that Mrs. Denman’s white paper had been wrong.

  In his luxurious marble shower, he imagined that the foaming body shampoo was washing off the madness of the night. For sure. If the solar storm was gone, life would return to normal very quickly now.

  By the time he was striding down to the staff dining room for breakfast, he had put his dream aside.

  As he descended the stairs, Glen MacNamara stood waiting for him.

  “We have a patient missing.”

  He absorbed this.

  “Sam Taylor lost Mack.”

  “When?”

  He paused. “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “What? Why wasn’t I informed, Glen?”

  “Nobody was informed. Sam was knocked out.”

  “But Mack’s on lockdown! Surely the staff noticed this when he didn’t turn up at lights out.”

  “Sam asked for time while he looked for him.”

  “All night?”

  “He let me know about ten.”

  “Glen, it’s seven o’clock in the morning and the director of this institution is just finding this out?”

  “Doctor, I didn’t see the need to wake you up. What could you do? This is my issue.”

  David was about to really get into Glen MacNamara, but the truth was that he was right. He couldn’t have done anything to help.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Could Mack pose a danger to us?”

  “It would be damn surprising if we ever saw or heard anything about him again. If you want me to guess, I’d say he won’t last a week out there. It’s hell, Doc. I’m telling you, from the smoke columns I see and all the infrastructure problems, folks are tearing each other apart.” He gestured toward the dining room. “Toast, bacon, coffee, and Gatorade. In here, everybody’s outraged. Out there, it would be a feast.”

  They went in together. As he crossed to the buffet, Katie came close to him, discreetly touching his hand.

  “At least that scumbag is gone,” she said quietly. “Nobody cared for him.” She brightened. “And anyway, the cable’s back and the sun looks better, and I’ve got a feeling we’re getting past this thing.”

  Mrs. Denman’s paper had warned that the solar system was headed much deeper into the supernova’s debris field. Much deeper.

  The truth insinuated itself into his mind. They had not come to the edge of the storm at all.

  This was the eye.

  12

  GOLIATH

  Caroline woke up on her first morning in the general patient population in a state of intense unease. She didn’t actually wake up, because she hadn’t slept. She’d lain there with her eyes closed, worrying, primarily about David. She had a letter for him written by Herbert Acton, but it was not to be handed to him until he remembered his past, and to her that meant remembering their time together, their shared innocent life.

  Herbert Acton had warned about this period right at the omega point, that it was too unsure for him to see into it clearly, so his instructions about these final days were vague.

  Beyond the borders of history, which is where mankind was now, nothing was certain, and as the evil came to understand their fate, their efforts to escape it were going to make them incredibly dangerous. Many of them would actually want all of mankind to be destroyed, if they were destroyed.

  David had remembered a lot, she could sense that. But if he did not remember her, he was not on mission, and time had run out.

  Intending to confront him late last night, she had gone to his bedroom. She had hoped to feed him some of the potent white powder gold they had created in the arc furnace, and see if that helped.

  Oddly, the door had been unlocked. When she slipped inside, she had discovered why: Katrina Starnes had come in before her, and was sharing his bed. Carelessly—or perhaps out of an unconscious desire to broadcast her conquest—she had failed to pull the door closed.

  She had never been warned about him falling in love with anybody else, and she was appalled and deeply saddened.

  She had stood there, her face flaming with embarrassment, her heart wretched, her mind at a loss as to what to do now. They were too involved with each other to notice her, and she had quietly retreated.

  When she’d returned to her room, all she could do was cry into her pillow.

  The first thing she’d done waking up this morning was to arrange an appointment with him. “We’ll need to squeeze you in,” Katie had said in concealing, velvet tones, “but I think I can get you fifteen minutes.”

  Katie was no fool. She sensed a rival, and no way was Caroline
getting any more of his time than that.

  Well, Katie was going to be hurt and there was nothing Caroline could do about it. She’d been hurt herself last night, hurt terribly, watching them in their pleasure.

  She had been assured by her father that David would remember everything the moment he laid eyes on her. If there were any gaps, she could show him his trigger, which was an image of Quetzalcoatl.

  Neither thing had worked, and she was no longer able to contact her father for further advice, not unless the phones returned, which they had not. So she waited now, sitting with her hands folded, watching Katrina bring David his morning coffee.

  As Katie crossed the room, her body spoke to Caroline of its conquest. And by the way she laid the cup near his hand, with a too-furtive glance toward his lower extremities, she knew that she was remembering him in his passion.

  She fought back her anger and jealousy, but Katie sensed her feelings and her eyes darted at her, and there was between them a moment of daggers. Then Katie went flouncing out, her cheeks brushed with rose . . . and Caroline was horrified to glimpse, just above the edge of the young woman’s neckline, a telltale shadowy darkness from a mark concealed below.

  Katie was judged! Caroline felt actually queasy—physically ill. This was the first person she’d seen with a mark, but there were going to be a lot of them, she knew that.

  At the omega point, bodies ceased to conceal souls, and some became like light and others like darkness and others—workers like her and the rest of the class—shouldered the burden of life and kept on.

  It was hard to be so evil that there could be no redemption, so what terrible things had Katie done? She looked like a sweet young nurse, the last person you’d expect to see in such a situation.

  She didn’t seem in the least uneasy, so maybe she hadn’t yet noticed the discoloration or didn’t understand it. But she would notice it, and come to understand it, and when she did, the evil that she was concealing was going to explode to the surface, because this woman could not be what she seemed. Hidden beneath that pretty surface, there lurked a monster.

  Then she was face-to-face with David.

  “Thank you for granting me my freedom,” she said to him, after Katie had gone. “How is Linda?”

  “She had a mild heart attack. She’ll be fine.”

  “Will she?”

  “You think not?”

  “I don’t think anything. I asked a question.”

  “Which had implications.”

  “I don’t do implications. I say what I mean.”

  He sipped the coffee. His prop, in lieu, she supposed, of a pipe.

  “David, do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Caroline Light.”

  “Why did I come here?”

  “The same reason people usually come to the hospital. You were suffering and you wanted relief.”

  “You know more than that. Do you know we were childhood sweethearts?”

  “I know about the class. I know who you are and I know about . . . something. The gold. Sort of. But I’m lost. And I don’t know you. You’re like a stranger who’s sharing a compartment on a train or something.”

  “I need you to wake up,” she said.

  He gestured with the coffee cup. “I’m wide awake.”

  “I’m going to say something,” she told him, “and you can take it however you’re going to take it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I dreamed you made love with Nurse Katie last night. I dreamed I watched you.”

  So much blood drained out of his face that he seemed to turn to wax.

  “You feel a need to tell me this?”

  She decided to force the matter even further.

  “I saw you tangled in blue sheets, in the light of a beautiful Tiffany lamp—so sexy, I didn’t know he did erotics—and, oh, God, I felt such incredible jealousy, because, David, you need to face the truth, and the truth is that even though we were children when we made our vows, they counted, and even though you don’t remember right now, last night you were cheating on me!”

  The waxen face slowly filled with the color of a deep flush. He blinked rapidly. He picked up his pencil and put it down. Then his chin lowered, his fingers stopped toying with the pencil and grasped it tightly. There was an odd sense that they were moving down a tunnel, racing away from each other. She feared that she had made a major mistake.

  He jumped to his feet, came out from behind the desk, and stood over her.

  She felt the menace in it. She said, “I’m sorry I slapped you.”

  “I am, too. It hurt.”

  “I’m a punisher. It’s a fault. But you’re hurting me, David, you’re hurting me terribly.”

  He loomed and she could feel him suppressing his own violence. Then he strode across the room and threw himself down in one of the sumptuous chairs that stood before the fireplace. He was muttering, and she could not hear the details.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, going toward him. “I’ve touched a nerve and I’m very sorry.”

  Slowly, his head turned toward her. His face was sunken and gray now, skeletal with fury.

  “Will you please tell me which member of my staff allowed you access to my bedroom?”

  “I—nobody. The door was unlocked.”

  “Damn you! Damn you!”

  She tried another sort of shock. “You have a mission, David. Face it! You have to lead us out of this mess.”

  As if the chair was burning him, he leaped up and strode away again. She realized that he knew. Inside himself, he knew it all. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember, but that he couldn’t face it.

  “Were you also out the first night you were here?”

  What should she say? One of their fellow classmates had released her from her looked room, and she had gone to fetch the tiny amount of ancient white powder gold she had brought with her. She had hidden it near the gate until she was sure she wasn’t walking into a trap. That gold was star stuff, what NASA had found when they went searching for stardust, and what was found in the crop circles of haunted England. Without a little of the ancient material, new material could not be made.

  He returned, a stalking lion. “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “David, the whole nature of reality is changing and there’s work to do. You have to accept this.”

  “And I suppose the ridiculous, bloodthirsty, mad Aztec gods are coming back, too, and we’re all going to be sacrificing children soon!”

  “The gods don’t exist.”

  He gestured toward the glyphs above the door. “A couple of days ago you sounded like an evangelist.”

  “The old gods are the mythologized principles of a lost science. As human knowledge declined after the last cataclysm, science became myth, and myth became religion. They ended up worshiping subtle principles as meaningless gods. That’s all religion is. Worship of the powers of a science that existed before Egypt.”

  He glared at her in silence.

  “David, you know this! We were taught it. We sat side by side.”

  He looked long at her. “Yes,” he said softly, “I know.” But he seemed to sink into himself, his face growing ugly—eyes bloodshot, cheeks seething purple, lips twisted back—a face savage with amazing depths of rage.

  “Now wait,” she said helplessly, “it’s all right.” How soft and full of grace that face had been when he was a boy of twelve. “Be as little children—”

  “I’m an adult!” Seeming to overcome something deep within himself, he pulled away from her and stalked off again. This was a cage and he was an animal.

  “David, all you have to do is embrace your role. Then you’ll see how important our love is.”

  “We were kids. The loves of childhood don’t survive.”

  “Our bond is essential to our mission, and it was meant to survive.”

  “Well, I’ve remembered a lot of things, but not that.”

  She came close, and he did not stop her. “Start again then.�
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  “Now? There’s no time. Not for feelings.”

  “All this pacing you’re doing—you’re trying to run away, but you can’t, David. There’s no place to go.”

  “There had better be, because we have very little food left and almost no fuel, and I don’t know how to save the situation.”

  She did something she had last done in the basement of this very house, when they were still just kids. She kissed him . . . but not with the gingerly innocence of those days, not this time.

  For a moment, they were frozen like that. And then, slowly, he pulled away from her. His face was popping sweat. She slipped close to him, and drew her arms around him. They became as still as statues, two people in the ancient, tentative posture of unfolding love.

  She lifted her face, and found him looking down at her, and felt the same delectable weakness go through her that she had known when they were innocent.

  “Let me show you something,” she said.

  For an instant he closed his eyes, and his face was as narrowed and sculptural as an old painting of a saint enduring martyrdom. When he opened them again, they were on her, boring into her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked vaguely, muttering as if in a dream.

  They lay on the floor, going down by mutual consent, saying nothing.

  Then, suddenly, his lust came and he tore at her clothes, his eyes wild, his body thrusting, she thought, uncontrollably. In another moment his pants were off and he was pushing, seeking, and she turned a little, opened her legs a little, and the shock of his entry into her was by a thousand light-years the most intense experience she had ever had in her life.

  He arched his back and cried out, his teeth bared, and then drew himself out and she tore at him, grabbing his thighs, and he entered her again, and this time it was more than sex, it was beyond all physical experience, it was the moment of death amplified to a great, roaring, abandoned surrender of body, mind, and soul.

  They lay, then, in soft grass, and from the billowing woods nearby there came birdsong.