by Jeff Long
She went searching with her binoculars again. That climber now perched on the tip of his pyramid, practically an ornament. He sat there with his chin on his hand, The Thinker in miniature, high above it all.
Near the back of the crowd, a pale shape flashed up and down. Now the terror got real. Exactly like this, lit by a Texas moon, Jake had been torn to rags.
Fight, she thought to the men. Stand and fight. Fight like Jake fought. Except for that one pale hop up and down, the enemy remained invisible. All Rebecca could see was a mindless panic, like when the tiger escapes from a zoo.
Men shed their packs and ditched their weapons. One by one, the pyramids ebbed into shadow. The marsh darkened.
Hunter’s men angled flares out over the marsh. Crawling along the bridge, survivors began to emerge from the gloom. They were still a hundred yards away, still far from home.
Rebecca heard others choking and splashing in the water. One of them was bleating like a lamb. “Seven, no, nine,” she counted out loud. “That’s all?”
“Come with me,” said Hunter.
She was dazed. “What?”
“Into the fort,” he said. “Quickly.”
Rebecca thought he was being vengeful. The action heroes had rebelled against him. Now he was showing them his whip hand. “We can’t just leave them,” she said.
“Yes, we can.”
“But the children…”
“Not now.”
Rebecca ran.
She made it to the bridge and started out across the water. The stones danced back and forth in the flare light, like vertebrae flexing.
A man screamed up ahead. She nearly slipped off. An image flared of Sam doing ballet moves along the edge of the limestone cliff behind their house. Fearless. Rebecca plunged on.
The first survivors were in shock, but mobile. “They’re coming,” one shouted at her. Even running for their lives, the three men were loaded down with golden objects.
“Keep moving,” she said, and carefully edged around them and went on.
The next man had a slash wound. His details flashed in her mind. He was an architect. Cincinnati. Two kids. A pink balloon swelled from his side. Somehow he was still on his feet. “Lie down,” she said. “I’ll get help. We’ll carry you.”
His eyes were glassy. He staggered past.
The fifth man almost shoved her over the side in his frenzy.
Farther along, down in the water, two men were plowing their way toward shore. “Give me your hand,” she said, and dragged one up onto the bridge. He was an amateur magician. She’d seen him do card tricks. Together they reached down for the other man.
“Thank you,” said the man in the water, “thank you.” It came to her. He had a fiancée from New Jersey. He was teaching himself the Moonlight Sonata.
His grateful smile seized. He swept his arm up from the water. A clear plastic bag wrapped his hand. He started beating his hand against the pillar. And howling.
A second gobbet of plastic floated closer. And a third. Rebecca swept her light across the water. There was a whole silent armada of them. Jellyfish.
The man jackknifed backward. He went under. The water thrashed and went still.
“Aaron?” said the magician.
A bee hummed by. Rebecca frowned.
A gunshot cracked.
Rebecca cast a look. The bridge was crawling. Pale shapes. More bullets hummed. She tugged at the architect. “He’s gone.”
Before she could say a word, the magician hopped back into the marsh. “Aaron?”
Rebecca turned and started running toward the fortress.
A scream trailed her. The water churned. Don’t look.
Suddenly the fort sparkled with muzzle flash. On either side of her the air sizzled. She hurdled the gaps, one stone to the next. She sped between twin curtains of lead.
The architect with the stomach wound was lying on the bridge. Like a speed bump. Keep going. He moved. She stopped. “Come on.” Somehow, one of those superman moments, she lifted him in her arms. He yelped. She staggered under his weight. This had to be done.
“Rebecca.” Fifty feet ahead, Hunter was waiting. “Leave him.”
“Help me.” She lurched toward him.
Hunter kneeled like a knight in armor genuflecting. His pistol came up. The architect’s head jerked against her arm. It lolled. She saw the bullet hole in his forehead, the brain matter on her shoulder. It really was gray.
“Get down.” He was aiming straight at her.
The pistol twinkled. She felt the bullet pass her ear. Something heavy clipped the back of her knees. Rebecca fell.
Pinned flat, facedown, she didn’t dare look backward at that weight across her legs. It was still moving. It groaned prehistoric words.
The architect’s body sank into the water. His eyes stayed open, seeming to watch Rebecca. Close your eyes. She closed her eyes.
Flares rocked the sky. They traced right through her eyelids. She tried to read their silly scribbles. She listened to the bees hum.
That thing across her legs kept trembling back there. Like that deer Jake shot, the haunches twitching. Her first and last hunting trip. Except for this one. Sam.
A hand locked roughly on her arm. There were no two ways about it. Possession, she thought, nine-tenths of the law. The thing owned her. “Rebecca.”
She opened her eyes. Hunter was up there. He stabbed his free arm out, taking aim. Gunshots snapped. Shells tapped on the stone. One roosted in her ear. It was hot.
The weight across her legs vanished. He grabbed her arm again. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.” But her legs were jelly. She started crawling.
Hunter tossed her over one shoulder. They reached shore. He dumped her to the ground. “Now,” he yelled loudly.
The sky lit white. It was like opening a Fabergé egg. A fantastic other world stood revealed inside this domed place: the pyramids, the marsh with floating bodies, the bridge and its white apes. Then the air came hot into her lungs, and Rebecca shielded her eyes from the light.
ARTIFACTS
ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT
January 23
Today’s Central Focus
China Opens and Closes Missile Silo Doors
In a sharp escalation of tensions, China yesterday opened the doors to fifty-four of its intercontinental nuclear missile silos.
NORAD observed the incident by satellite, and three missile-alert facilities at Malmstrom AFB in Montana were ordered to open their doors. At the end of eight minutes, China closed its silo doors without launch. The U.S. president then ordered U.S. missile silos to return to launch-warning mode, and all doors were shut without launch.
The Japanese ambassador, acting in place of the Chinese ambassador, was summoned to receive the U.S. protest over the provocation. China’s foreign ministry continues to stonewall the American ambassador to China, although he did receive a private communication from Premier Jiaming expressing concern.
China’s media and Internet remain silent on the incident. There have been no leaks of this to the U.S. media. The public in both countries is unaware of the confrontation.
35
Ali woke lying in the middle of a Japanese rock garden with raked sand.
Her nightmare of Gregorio becoming Ike becoming…Him…seemed safely remote. It was far better to enjoy this dream. Cherry-blossom petals drifted down, white as snowflakes. The air was crisp and sweet. She was alone and at peace. But of course she was not.
There were no footprints in the sand. She did not recall walking here, and especially not raking the sand closed behind her. Someone had placed her in the rock garden while she was unconscious and arranged the tableau around her.
And she was in pain. It felt as if she had been dropped from a cliff or run over. Her muscles ached. Her nails were broken. Mostly she hurt in her pelvic saddle, hurt to the bone, like when she had been torn and broken giving birth.
Pieces of his frenzy flashed in her mind. The Jap
anese garden quivered at its edges. The cherry blossoms hesitated. Ali put the chaos away. She wasn’t ready to process the violence. The cherry blossoms continued drifting down.
A voice spoke from behind her. “Good morning, Ali.”
It was her mother, sitting on the limb of a bonsai tree. Her dead mother.
With less effort this time, Ali pierced the illusion. She swept away the whispers. The rock garden was real enough, its white sand combed into pleasing patterns. The rest was a lie. The cherry-blossom petals were bits of live cinders. The blue sky was a vault of tortured stone. The air hung close and foul. The bonsai trees vanished. In their place, the fossil remains of some primal animal protruded from the floor.
And of course that was not her mother. The human facade evaporated. Ali saw his eyes. His primeval eyes. He was old inside his alabaster skin.
The voices converged on her. They whispered about a perfect garden under a blue sky and a mother. Ali held them at bay. Her survival was going to depend on clarity and reason, on doubt, not faith. There was no pity in those eyes. Curiosity, perhaps, and boredom. And genius, it has a look. But no mercy, and absolutely no apology.
“You’re not my mother,” she finally said. It hurt to move her jaw. What had he done to her?
“That’s a good start,” he said.
“Are you hadal?”
Very softly, he snorted.
“I could be imagining you,” she said. “I could be mad.”
“Ali, please,” he said. “If we’re going to spend time together, you need to be more nimble than that. We’re no strangers. You’ve been chasing me for years now, and I’ve been chasing you. So what do you say, shall we dance?”
There were traces of animals in his mannerism: the reptile quiet, the birdlike hardness in his eyes, and his frozen stillness, like a praying mantis’s. There was not a mark or scar on him, which was extraordinary in itself in this devouring place. His face was a mystery, as different from man’s face as man’s from an ape’s. He had a teenager’s wisp of a mustache. But his blue irises had leached nearly white with time. He was beautiful in a way that would fit any age and any era.
Where was the fabled monstrosity?
As if reading her mind, he patted his head. “No horns.” He peered over his shoulder. He looked down at his feet. “No wings. No cloven hooves.” He folded his hands. “Now we’ve got that out of the way.”
It struck her that if the legends were true, if this really was the rebel angel stewing in exile, then she was practically looking at the face of God. Here might be the face of an idea, the face of the first thing ever named. Sitting with one leg crossed at the knee, this could be the first word, the word made flesh.
She rejected the notion. It was absurd, a whim, like the dream waiting to snatch her into the cherry blossoms, a temptation. And yet…
“What do I call you?” she said. She wanted his name, his original name. It was more than a linguistic conceit. Words hold power. A word could command an empire: witness Caesar or the pharaoh or Mr. Vice President. What name would he give? The name he had given himself, or the name he had been given? And given by whom, by his followers or his victims? She rejected the only other possibility. God? Rejected it flat.
“Call me,” he paused, “Ishmael.” He smiled. It was a joke, but not a joke. She could do what she wanted with it. He is testing me.
Ishmael, she thought. The outcast son. The wanderer in the wilderness and father of misbegotten races. The survivor. All borrowings from the Bible, with Melville for a punch line. It struck her. With a single name, he had provided her with many answers to many questions that she no longer needed to ask.
In a flash, another thought occurred. What if he meant his biblical reference to hint at even more? What if, long ago, he had handed up the tale of Ishmael as an allegory for himself? What if the Beast had written the Bible? Rich, she thought. And ridiculous.
“I knew a man once who made wild claims,” she said. “He had us convinced he was…” What crazy name to insert…Beelzebub, Older-Than-Old, Pit-ar, God’s Ape? No, no, no. “…invulnerable,” she finished. “But he was just a man. He got shot. I saw it.” He wanted to test her? She would test him right back.
“That would be Thomas,” the creature said. “One of my martyrs. Not the first Jesuit I’ve used, by the way. Think of a secret agent. I took the good father under my wing almost a century ago, schooled him for years, and then sent him up into the world to erase my tracks. He’s the one who told me about you. My hope was that he could take me off the table, so to speak, and hide me in the myths again.”
“But why bother with myths?” She was talking to him as though he really was what he might be. “We had quit believing you were real anyway.”
“That was my hope, that you had forgotten all about me. The times were getting so modern and preoccupied. But then, thanks to my poor, starving, cretin primitives, you stumbled onto the entrances to this other world. And suddenly, since hell was real, then so was I. Which meant there was bound to be a plague of bounty hunters and exorcists and muscular Christians coming down, all gunning for me, muddying my waters and disturbing the peace.” He paused. “So I had myself—or my Jesuit—killed in front of witnesses. In front of you, to be precise.”
“Me?”
“You don’t think it was a coincidence that you were there for Thomas’s finale, do you? Thomas was organized and very thorough. He followed instructions well.”
“But why me?”
“Love,” the creature said simply.
The word flew at her. A rose. A bullet. Ali stared at him.
“Deliverance,” he added.
“Deliverance?”
He tapped his skull. “This is the prison. I know that now. Not these walls of stone around us. Here, everything is up here. I hold my own freedom. But I need help. A prompt. Some memory of the future. Someone has the key, someone like you maybe, a linguist to decipher the code. To say the magic word. Open, sesame, whatever it is. Unlock my door.”
Ali didn’t know what to make of his crazy talk. What prison, what door? “There are no magic words,” she said.
“First you lose your faith in God, now your faith in words? What did you come down here for, Sister?”
He took her by surprise. She actually had to remember. “The children,” she said. “I came to find the children.”
“Lambs in the wilderness,” he said. “Aren’t we all?”
“You have them here?”
“They are mine,” he said.
An image surfaced of those Ice Age children, their bones arrayed before the aleph mound. How long had he been devouring children down here? “Let me see them.” Ali tried to stand. She nearly passed out. Were her legs broken, too?
“Rest.” Part ape, part God, the creature began to saunter off across the sand. “You and I will dance some other day.”
ARTIFACTS
HOMELAND SECURITY
In the Event of Nuclear Attack
Go inside immediately, as far belowground as possible.
Go into your basement. If caught in the open, seek out underground spaces, including elevator shafts, staircases, mines, caves, and sewer systems.
Avoid higher floors of the house or structure. Close windows and doors, turn off air conditioners, heaters, or other ventilation systems.
Stay where you are, watch TV, listen to the radio, or check the Internet for official news as it becomes available.
Understand that during an emergency you may be asked to “shelter in place” or evacuate.
Listen for information about signs and symptoms of diseases, if medications or vaccinations are being distributed, and where you should seek medical attention if you become sick. If you become sick seek emergency medical attention.
36
Their refuge reminded Rebecca of Sam’s last birthday cake, one of those Dairy Queen ice-cream extravaganzas. Jake had put it in the fridge instead of the freezer, and when they pulled it out, the neat square had soften
ed to a mound with candles tipping all over the place.
Some great heat had partially melted the fortress walls. Its towers leaned precariously. The lower battlements were smothered with flowstone. Small crabs from the marsh scuttled everywhere, covering the floors and walls. You could not walk without crunching, and when you sat or lay down, they were soon climbing your legs and arms.
But for now the structure was all they had in the world, and they occupied it with purpose. Hunter got some pleasure out of calling it an acropolis, which he told them was not a bunch of pillars on a hill, but a fortification overlooking ancient Greek cities. This place did overlook the Ox ruins, but Rebecca thought of it as her own private Alamo. Texans are like that.
To one side, the fort faced the marsh with its bridge leading to the far pyramids. The other side overlooked the spires and mazes of the city ruins. Rebecca and the DZ boys and the three island survivors kept watch for anyone else who might have escaped the ambush. But the darkness yielded no one. The walkie-talkies that the action heroes had taken across were silent. Night ruled.
In the space of a single hour, they had lost practically everything but their lives. The action heroes were gone, along with all the food, medicine, and ammunition they were supposed to guard in a camp that no longer existed. Rebecca and these twenty-one men had gone from being hunters to being hunted.
Hunter was philosophical about it, if “shit happens” qualifies as a philosophy. But a number of the operators were struggling with the turn of events. As they sealed themselves into the fort with big boulders and rigged claymore mines and set fields of fire and doctored the wounded, they railed against the stupidity of it all. They blamed the action heroes’ foolishness. They blamed themselves for not hauling along more ammo clips. Above all, they blamed Haddie for his evil ways, which to Rebecca made about as much sense as damning the devil. Sweating and bleeding, pissed off, scared, ragged with adrenaline, they did everything in their power to contradict the obvious: they were trapped.