by Dean Koontz
In dreams, when you told yourself, Don’t look up, you always looked up anyway, sooner or later, and it was the same in real life. Winny tilted his head back, the stinking cloth falling away from his face, gazed up past the grinning skull of the skeleton that slumped against him, into the fierce eyes of the bullet-headed beast, which hung upside down on the wall, its face no more than two feet from his, its gray lips skinned back from its rows of sharp gray teeth.
Bailey Hawks
When he followed Witness into Apartment 2-F, it was almost as if Bailey had stepped back through time to the Pendleton of 2011. The apartment was furnished as it had been then, everything as he remembered it, from the furniture to the walls of books on arcane scientific subjects, to the lighted aquarium. The only differences were the dirty windowpanes and the absence of fish in the big glass tank. All the electric lights worked, and no luminous fungi intruded here.
“What is this place?” Bailey asked, but thought he knew.
Witness said, “A shrine. And you might call me the caretaker.”
Tom Tran stood marveling, as if this was not just the home of Kirby Ignis but as if seeing it in this future Pendleton was either magic or a miracle.
“Witness to what?” Bailey asked.
“To the history of the world now lost,” Witness said, “and most especially to the origins of the One.”
“You’re apart from it,” Bailey remembered. “It allows that.”
“I was born in 1996. And in my twenties I became one of the first to benefit from full-spectrum BioMEMS, not just respirocytes and other physical enhancements, but also brain augmentation. That’s why I have the capacity to hold the entire history of the world in my memory. I do not age. I do not sicken. I can be killed only with the most extreme act of violence because … I repair.”
“Immortality.”
“Virtually.”
“The essential dream of humanity, the long-desired blessing.”
“Yes.”
Staring at Witness, Bailey could see the melancholy in his eyes and could almost feel it radiating from him. “Immortal … and alone.”
“Yes.”
Tom Tran said, “The last man on Earth.”
“Technically, I’m posthuman. Hybrid. A man augmented with billions of nanomachines.”
From elsewhere in the apartment, someone called out, “Do I hear Bailey Hawks?”
Winny
Fixed to the wall above Winny, the creature hissed, and from between the halves of its sharp smile came a glistening gray tubular tongue. Winny didn’t know the purpose of that tube, but he knew the purpose of those wicked teeth, and he had no doubt that the bite would be less terrible than what the tongue would do to him, maybe act like a vacuum and suck the flesh right off his bones, leaving him as picked clean as the skeleton beside him.
Paralyzed with terror, he felt even smaller than usual. He knew that he needed to do the hardest thing, never the easiest. But his philosophy failed him now because it seemed that the hardest thing he could do was die, and he was going to die whether he fought back or tried to flee. He couldn’t battle anything this big, this strong, and he couldn’t outrun it, either. He had only two options: a quick or a quicker death.
Iris must have raised her head, too, must have seen the thing above them on the wall. Her hand relented, she stopped trying to crush his knuckles, and she plucked urgently at his sweaty fingers, his wrist, his arm, as though she thought he must have fallen asleep and needed to be awakened to defend them.
She said something then that made no sense: “ ‘We’re going to the meadow now to dry ourselves off in the sun.’ ”
Listening to her trembling voice, Winny was reminded that Iris was not the plucky heroine of the adventure story he had been casting in his head. She was a girl apart and always would be, dealt a far worse hand in life than he had been. Being skinny and shy and never knowing what to say to people and having a father who was almost as fictitious as Santa Claus—all of that was nothing, nothing compared to autism. If she could dare to take his hand, could dare to keep silent in this hiding place of bones and rotting gravecloth, in spite of all the fears and irritations with which she was plagued, then he, for God’s sake, could do something more than die quick or quicker.
Clinging to the wall with both its feet and one hand, the beast reached slowly toward Winny with its left arm. It pressed the tip of one long finger against the center of his forehead, above the bridge of his nose, kind of the way that a priest marked people on Ash Wednesday. Its finger was death-cold.
Iris was weak, and Winny wasn’t strong, but he was stronger than she was, and that meant he owed her a defense. His father was strong, really strong, and he got in bar fights and shoved people’s heads in toilets, but you didn’t always have to misuse strength. You could use strength, whatever little of it you might have, for the right thing, even if you knew there was no chance you would win the fight, even if you were doomed from the start, you could stand up and swing your skinny arms, because trying against the worst odds was what life was all about. And there he had found the harder thing he needed to do, the hardest thing of all hard things: do what was right even if there was no hope of success or expectation of reward.
Clutching Iris’s hand again, Winny pulled her away from the wall, scrambled with her from the bracketing skeletons, ran a few steps, kicking aside brass shell casings, and turned to confront the beast. It remained upon the wall, its head craned to one side, watching them with eyes as steady and icy and gray as tombstone granite.
Winny let go of the girl’s hand and pushed her behind him. He snatched up the old rifle with the fixed bayonet and held it in both hands, point thrust forward. He was like a rabbit threatening a wolf, and he felt fear—oh, yeah—but he did not feel either useless or stupid.
Bailey Hawks
In Kirby Ignis’s restored and spotless kitchen, Mickey Dime sat at the dinette, his hands folded on the table in front of him. His face had an odd childlike quality, and his mouth curved in a sweet, almost cherubic smile. To one side of him, out of easy reach, lay a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.
Dime nodded at Bailey and said, “Sheriff.” He nodded again at Tom Tran and at the one who called himself Witness. “Deputies. I wish to surrender myself and ask for a psychiatric evaluation.”
In this apartment, the sense of the One’s oppressive hatred relented, and Bailey’s mind was clearer than it had been in a while. Yet this development was no less strange than everything that had come before it.
Picking up Dime’s pistol, Bailey said, “I’m not a sheriff.”
“Sheriff, former military, whatever. I know you’re something. I’m insane, you see, but not disoriented. I’ve killed people. Now I just want to surrender and be committed to a sanatorium. I’ll be no burden to the state. I have resources. I just don’t want to have to think anymore. I’m not good at it.”
Bailey handed his Beretta to Tom Tran, who took it as if he knew how to use it well.
To Witness, Bailey said, “What is this?”
“I didn’t even realize he was here.”
Mickey Dime smiled and nodded. “I came of my own free will. I’m quite insane. I see things that can’t be there.”
Bailey ejected the magazine of the pistol that he confiscated, saw that it was fully loaded, and snapped it back into the weapon.
He looked at his wristwatch.
Winny
The beast came down from the wall, rose onto its feet, and stood among the skeletons, regarding Winny with what he at first thought must be amusement. But then he decided that this thing wasn’t capable of being amused, that it was either without emotions or fueled only by rage.
In the movies, this was where the star said something like, Go ahead, make my day, or maybe, Come on, asshole, Hell’s waiting for us. But Winny didn’t go for the cool quip because he wasn’t a star, he wasn’t a hero. That fantasy was far behind him now. All he wanted was to do the right thing here at the end, not any of the
easy things he might have done, do the hard thing but not for the glory of it, because there wasn’t any glory in dying. Glory was for movie stars and country singers, and it wasn’t worth spit. He wanted only not to embarrass himself, not to cower, to be better than he had always thought he was.
“Iris!”
“Winny!”
He glanced back and saw Mrs. Sykes with a flashlight, his mom with a gun, and what a moment that was.
The creature hissed.
Dr. Kirby Ignis
If he was right about what this Gaea had contemplated and what decision she had reached when all of nature stopped out there, Kirby finally decided that he needed to see his rooms. Without explanation, he expressed his desire to go down to the second floor, insisting that Silas and Padmini should remain here in the Cupp apartment. But they would not let him leave without an armed escort; therefore, when he continued to be determined to go, they accompanied him.
As he stepped across the threshold of 2-F and found that his apartment here, in this Pendleton, was much as it had been in his own time, preserved when all else in the building had been scoured away and allowed to decline into squalor, the awe that had earlier overtaken him now almost overwhelmed him, and his legs felt weak.
With Silas and Padmini trailing behind him, Kirby followed voices to the kitchen, where he found Dime sitting behind the table, Hawks to one side of it, Tom Tran by the refrigerator, and one of the best staff members of his institute, Jason Reinholt, standing by the sink.
“Jason? Why were you in the building when the leap occurred?”
“I wasn’t, Dr. Ignis. I came to the Pendleton years after that event, and I’ve been here now almost a decade and a half. Since after the first Pogrom to reduce the human burden on the planet, and before the second Pogrom, which wasn’t planned.”
Kirby stared at him, agape, for the first time in his life wanting not to comprehend, but unable to hold back understanding.
Winny
Iris shuffled away from Winny and to her mother’s side. He stood alone for a moment before backing slowly toward his mom, holding the rifle bayonet at the ready.
The creature came forward a few steps, but then halted again. It looked from one to the other of them, as if deciding in what order to kill them.
Mrs. Sykes said, “What the hell is that thing?”
Winny had no answer, but as it turned out, the monster spoke for itself, a single word: “Pogromite.”
Bailey Hawks
As Padmini and Silas entered the kitchen, Kirby Ignis said, “But Jason, after so many years, you look … so young.”
“I don’t use that name anymore. I’m just Witness. I’m young because I was among the first volunteers for full-spectrum BioMEMS enhancement. In fact, I was your first.”
Kirby put a hand to the young man’s face and said wonderingly, “So it worked. A kind of immortality.”
“It worked,” Witness confirmed.
Turning his hands palms-up, Kirby stared at them for a moment, as if they amazed him, as if they were quite apart from him and had done things he could scarcely imagine.
Returning his gaze to Witness, he said, “But this Gaea, this world consciousness, how did she—”
“It calls itself the One. The world is without gender now. The Pogrom was begun with the intention of reducing the human plague to a more manageable number … to be followed by the Fade when we would scrub away what infrastructure wasn’t needed for such a reduced population.”
“And me? Where am I in this future?”
“Dead. Converted by a Pogromite into another Pogromite. You lived out your final days as a programmed killing machine.”
Stepping farther into the room, addressing Kirby Ignis, Padmini Bahrati said, “You did this?”
Everyone but Mickey Dime, who lived in his own world now, stood hushed by astonishment for a long moment.
Then Ignis shook his head in denial. “No. I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t have. Not this.” He twitched with a sudden electrifying thought. To Witness, he said, “Norquist.”
The perpetually young man nodded. “Your theories, your life’s work—his applications.”
Ignis turned in place, surveying the faces aimed at him. “Von Norquist is a senior partner at the institute. A brilliant man. He has some controversial views … but not this extreme.”
To Bailey, Witness said, “The world was lucky for centuries. Scientists are rarely charismatic. But Norquist was both brilliant and exceptionally charismatic. He had the megalomania to make of his science a religion—and to persuade others like me, in our ignorance, to take up the cause.” To Ignis, he said, “He became more extreme.”
Winny
Winny didn’t think this creature could be easily stopped with bullets. He didn’t think the gun worried it.
Yet it didn’t rush them in a killing frenzy, and there must have been a good reason why it hesitated.
His mom had some faith in the pistol. She said, “Okay, everyone move nice and slow, everyone get behind me.” She sounded calm, as if she were just getting them all organized to go on an excursion to the museum. “You move toward the door, and I’ll move with you but keep it covered.”
“Don’t shoot it,” Winny warned. “I’m pretty sure shooting it will just piss it off.”
Before they could start to move, the beast sprang across the floor, not at them but around them, and stopped between them and the route out of the vault.
Bailey Hawks
Ignis turned to Bailey. “I’ll stop Von Norquist. I’ll stop him cold. I’ll push him out of the institute in such a way that he’ll not get work anywhere. He must have done this behind my back.”
“You knew everything,” Witness said. “At first you pretended not to see, not to understand where it was all leading. But when at last you saw what he intended, you approved by not disapproving.”
Shaking his head violently, refusing to accept what he’d been told, Ignis said, “No. No, it will be stopped. I won’t let it happen. I’ll start by closing our weapons division. I’ll cancel all of our contracts with the Department of Defense.”
“How far has your weapons division gone with this?” Tom Tran asked.
Acutely aware of the pistol in Tom’s hand, Ignis said, “It can be wound back. Everything that’s done can be wound back, undone.”
“That wasn’t exactly an answer,” Silas noted. “It wouldn’t please a prosecutor.”
“Unwind it all, not just the weapons division,” Tom said. “This entire institute of yours. Unwind it all.”
Ignis’s shock at his culpability was tempered now with a note of impatience. “There’s nothing wrong with the science. It’s only how the science was applied. You’ve got to make that distinction. The world doesn’t have to turn out this way just because of the science. We’ve been given this chance to set it right.”
No one replied to him.
Turning to Bailey, seeming to identify him as one who could be reasoned with, Ignis said, “Yes, this future is a catastrophe, but it does prove that the world can be dramatically changed. If it can be so totally changed for the worse, it can be totally changed for the better. It’s all in the application of the knowledge, it all depends on the technology developed from the science and with what wisdom it’s applied. We can make a perfect world.”
“The One suddenly stopped killing us,” Bailey said.
Ignis blinked. “What?”
“Maybe it stopped killing us because it decided that for you to go back to our time alone would bring too much attention to you, with all the rest of us missing. How would you explain it? So it stopped killing us to be sure that you’d go on with your work unhindered when you returned to your own time.”
Ignis shook his head. “It doesn’t rule me. It’s not my master. I’ll do what must be done when I get back.”
“ ‘What must be done,’ ” Bailey said. “Is that an interesting way to put it, Silas?”
“Deception cloaked in earnestness,” the a
ttorney said.
Ignis closed his eyes. His jaw muscles bulged as he clenched his teeth, and his tightly pressed lips were bloodless. He seemed to be either biting back anger or searching for the words to convince them that he was as benign as he appeared to be.
When Ignis’s stillness and silence seemed about to become his only answer to Silas’s charge of deception, Bailey said, “Exactly what is it you think ‘must be done,’ Kirby?”
Ignis opened his eyes. He shook his head as if resigned to—but saddened by—their suspicion. “I don’t have to subject myself to this.” He turned away from them and walked toward the door.
Leveling Mickey Dime’s pistol at the scientist’s back, Bailey said, “Stop right there.”
Ignis kept moving. “You don’t dare kill me.”
The ceiling creaked, and behind those panels of Sheetrock, something slithered.
Witness said, “The One is all around us.”
Ignis left the kitchen, crossed the dining room.
Bailey glanced at Padmini, Padmini looked at Tom, and Tom said, “Where’s he going? He’s up to something.”
Winny
The Pogromite stood between them and escape, watching them but apparently with no immediate aggressive intentions.
Then it lifted its ugly head high, as though listening to a voice that only it could hear. Its shining eyes became dull behind what seemed to be inner, semitransparent lids. The creature began to sway back and forth, as if to music. The beast was so lithe, Winny thought of a cobra charmed by a flute.
“It’s … gone away somewhere,” Mrs. Sykes whispered.
Winny’s mom said, “Stay together. Move around it. Quiet.”
Bailey Hawks
By the time Bailey reached the public hallway, Kirby Ignis was a third of the way to the north stairs. He wasn’t running, but he walked briskly, with apparent purpose.