The Point
Page 1
The Point is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Penguin Random House LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Dixon, John, author.
Title: The point / John Dixon.
Description: New York: Del Rey, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018009536| ISBN 9781101967560 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101967546 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychic ability—Fiction. | Soldiers—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Military. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3604.I948 P65 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009536
randomhousebooks.com
Title-page and chapter-opener art: iStockphoto/Adelevin
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design: David G. Stevenson
Cover illustration: © Tommy Arnold
v5.3_r1.2
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By John Dixon
About the Author
“YOU CAME HERE AS CHILDREN,” keynote speaker Senator Wesley Ditko said, “but you leave here as men and women.”
Mid-May was typically beautiful in the Philadelphia suburbs, but today the sun beat down mercilessly on the 411 graduating seniors seated before the stage. Their suffering families sagged along open bleachers.
Master Sergeant Charles Winter, U.S. Army, retired, gray-haired and bespectacled, sat ramrod straight on the top bleacher, watching the proceedings with a stony face that betrayed neither pride nor impatience.
Mrs. Winter, resplendent in a bright yellow dress, moved incessantly, fanning herself with the graduation program. She shifted in her seat and whispered to her son.
Sergeant Daniel Winter, U.S. Marine Corps, sat as straight as his father but failed to replicate the man’s stoicism. He beamed, proud and relieved. His kid sister actually was going to graduate after all.
“A plane in its hangar is safe,” Senator Ditko said, and smiled down at the fidgeting seniors, pausing to make eye contact with the valedictorian: his daughter. “But planes aren’t meant to sit in hangars. Ladies and gentlemen, you are clear for takeoff. Spread your wings and fly!”
Principal Santana returned to the microphone, her face shining with perspiration, and began calling students onstage. Douglas Abbey stumbled coming up the stairs but caught himself and gave the crowd a big grin before shaking the principal’s hand and accepting his diploma.
One by one, students crossed the stage. Whatever each had been—athlete or scholar, geek or dullard, stud or square—it was over now. He or she had run the gauntlet, surviving the thirteen years of institutionalized insanity that constitute the American public school experience.
Mrs. Winter fanned her face, which grew redder with each passing minute.
Principal Santana called, “Demarcus Winslow.”
Mrs. Winter tucked the makeshift fan into her purse and grabbed the hands of her husband and son. “Here we go.”
This was it.
After all these years, all these worries—troubles at school and problems with police and endless emergency room visits in which nurses cooed over her pretty daughter, the girl with a wild streak, a daredevil who seemed to have broken every bone in her body—her baby finally was graduating.
Wild but sweet, her Scarlett. Always sweet and loving, full of kindness.
Mrs. Winter loved her husband and son, but they were cold and self-reliant, as her own father had been. Not Scarlett. Scarlett was her heart, her only warmth in the Winter household.
The long suffering was finally over. At last, a new beginning.
Principal Santana called, “Scarlett Winter.”
Mrs. Winter laughed and leaned forward, her vision blurry with tears of joy.
There was a brief pause.
From the student seating, choppy bursts of laughter rattled like sporadic gunfire.
“Scarlett Winter?” Principal Santana repeated.
No one stood. No one climbed the stairs. No one crossed the stage.
More laughter rippled through the crowd, and for a frantic second Mrs. Winter feared she might join in with a peal of hysterical laughter.
Principal Santana cleared her throat. “Jeffrey Wood.”
A blond-haired boy whooped loudly, charged up the stairs, and Frisbeed his mortarboard into the applauding crowd.
Mrs. Winter dropped her face into her hands and sobbed.
Master Sergeant Winter, his mouth a grim slash across his sunburned face, stood and nodded to his son. Together they took Mrs. Winter’s arms and helped her to her feet. If not overtly sympathetic, the men were inarguably gentle and protective. Fiercely so, even.
As the family made its slow descent, people turned to watch wi
th sympathy, amusement, or horror. Master Sergeant Winter stared straight ahead, betraying nothing.
The eyes of the broad-shouldered Marine, however, burned with rage. Marching stiffly toward the parking lot, he growled, “Where the hell is Scarlett?”
STRETCHED OUT HIGH ATOP THE stone quarry cliff, loving the bright sunshine baking her bare skin, Scarlett grinned, naked save for bright blue knee socks, aviator shades, and perhaps too many scars for a girl of eighteen.
Nick, the cute, inked-up vegan she’d been hanging with lately, lay beside her. His blond dreads spilled over his tanned shoulders as he sat up and took a deep pull off the pipe.
Scarlett liked the way that sunlight twinkled on his nose ring and glistened along the light sheen of perspiration covering his lean body. They’d broken a sweat climbing the cliff and had kept it rolling with a spirited celebration at the top. Life was good.
Her phone vibrated, rattling on the rocky ground between their towels.
“Uh oh,” Nick said, smiling slyly.
Scarlett’s stomach lurched. Picturing her mother’s face, she felt a pang of guilt. She started to reach for the phone, but then she pictured her father’s face and…
Nick capped the bowl with the red Bic. “You going to answer it?”
She just stared, her hand hovering there. The phone stopped vibrating.
“Guess not,” Nick said, and handed her the pipe.
She sucked in a deep hit of Super Lemon Haze. It was good weed. A little tart, a little sweet, like smoking Lemonhead candy. “It’s my life, not theirs,” she said, holding the citrusy smoke. “I’m the one who has to live with my choices.”
Mom wanted her to go to college, which right now held about as much appeal as chugging a gallon of spoiled milk. She was tired of rules and homework and sitting around, listening to people talk.
Her father wanted her to go into the Army.
Screw that…
Scarlett had plans. She and Ginny were going to backpack in Europe. Sleep in youth hostels, drink good beer, see the sights—Paris, Madrid, Rome—and meet up with Ginny’s dad in Amsterdam. They’d sail to the Caribbean and check out the yacht culture, rich people partying 24/7 and swapping business cards.
She just had to break it to her parents.
She handed Nick the pipe. Then she picked up a rock and pitched it over the cliff and watched it tumble down, down, down and smack into the quarry pond a hundred feet below. Impact rings pulsed across the surface.
Nick took another hit and held the pipe out to her again.
She waved him off and leaned back. “I’m good.” High above, an airplane glinted in the sky. She imagined the people sitting up there, doing crosswords and playing solitaire at several hundred miles an hour.
She stood and pulled on her shorts and bikini top. She had to shake this mood. Here she was, free at last, but she felt like she was being smothered.
“Don’t let it get you down,” Nick said. “We’re celebrating, right?” He unzipped the backpack and pulled out a pair of Yuenglings beaded with condensation. Smiling over his shoulder—the one tattooed carpe diem—he said, “Wanna do it again?”
“No,” she said, stuffing her phone and sandals into her backpack.
“I have to do something,” she said. “I have to shake things up.”
“But we were—”
Scarlett didn’t stick around to hear the rest of it. She took three running steps and leaped into the void.
CLOSER, CLOSER, CLOSER…
Jagger opened his eyes. He lay in the gloom beneath a highway overpass. He heard the whoosh of cars driving overhead and smelled smoke and the savory aroma of campfire cooking.
He didn’t know where he was or how he had gotten here. He’d blacked out again.
He sat up, squinted.
Beyond the gloom, daylight illuminated a weedy slope clumped with sumac and strewn with highway litter. Nearer, half in light, half in shade, loomed a hulking bum holding a two-by-four, one end of which bristled with rusty nails, like one of the masus that the Hutus had favored during the Rwandan genocide.
Not that Jagger had been in Rwanda. That had been before his time. His time was now—and of course, his time was yet to come.
Closer, closer…
Fragmented memories returned to him, blurry and out of sequence: walking the highway, whistling, alone; the bright green quad of a college campus, two dozen crisp young hipsters gathered around, eyes gleaming; the hulking vagrant down on his knees, crying, begging forgiveness. Trying to make sense of these piecemeal flashes was like trying to reassemble a stained-glass window smashed into muddy ground.
Jagger rolled with it. He understood everything that he needed to understand for now, such as the fact that the gigantic hobo had stood watch over him all night.
Downslope, near the dirt road at the bottom of the gully, dozens of bums and madmen gathered around campfires, waiting. He saw others arriving, looking this way, craning their necks, and receiving pamphlets. He remembered preaching beneath a full moon and understood that his congregation had doubled, possibly tripled, during his slumber.
The dreams had been strong. Sadie’s voice echoed in his ears. The sense of her driving this way on the open road lingered like a taste.
Yes.
Despite his recent blackouts and Penny’s meltdown and the colossal mess in Atlanta, everything finally was coming together.
The big bum turned, six and a half feet of flat-out crazy, dressed—despite the sweltering heat—in a badly soiled Army cold-weather field jacket. The man’s grizzled beard was streaked in grease and dark matter, blood or tobacco juice. With his bushy hair pulled back in a warrior’s ponytail and bound by a filthy red-white-and-blue Budweiser headband, he looked like a backwoods hobo-demon long on the road but now returning, the worst nightmare of the Wall Street 1 percent coming at last for his share of the American dream.
But he isn’t their worst nightmare, Jagger thought. I am.
Seeing Jagger smile, the giant bum smiled, too. His wolfish teeth were yellow and spotted with rot. His eyes gleamed.
Jagger could feel adoration and loyalty coming off the man in waves.
“He is risen!” the man called downhill, his voice husky with emotion.
Jagger rose and dusted himself off. He slipped into his well-worn combat boots and lifted his rucksack from the ground.
More memories arrived, increasing in clarity.
Before coming here to this hobo jungle, he’d spent the evening twenty miles away at Rutherford University, spreading the good word to moneyed young scholars there.
A very different good word than he’d spread here, of course.
And a much different good word than he’d be spreading tomorrow evening.
Everything drawing together. The dawn of a new world. Not so much a birthing as a manifestation.
Bums hobbled timidly up the trail, murmuring quietly, gentle as sheep.
He wondered what their eager eyes saw. Each would see someone different, of course, but how different? How significantly did their fears and desperation shape his vision?
He approached the hulking man and asked, “What is your name, my son?”
“Ezzard,” the man whispered.
“Excellent,” Jagger said. He placed a hand on the giant’s shoulder and turned him gently to face the crowd. “This is my high priest, Ezzard. You will listen to him until my return.”
He set the rucksack on the ground and undid the clasps and opened it and pulled out the remaining stacks of bundled hundred-dollar bills. These he offered to Ezzard, who laid his weapon on the ground and accepted the teetering pile of cash with his massive filthy hands.
“Feed these people,” Jagger said. “Heal these people.”
Ezzard nodded his shaggy head. One glistening tear rolled down his creased and weather-bea
ten face and disappeared into the forest of his graying beard. “I will.”
Jagger stared into the man’s eyes. “I know you will, Ezzard,” he said. “You understand what to do with the rest, yes?”
Ezzard nodded enthusiastically.
Jagger patted his shoulder gently. “I will speak to you in dreams, my son, and you will prophesy to my people, the People of the Road, the People of the Underpass, the Shadow People, whom society has exiled…until we return on the Day of Reckoning.”
He raised his voice, addressing the zealots. “You are my people.”
“Yes!” a bald man with a scabbed forehead shouted, and the others nodded enthusiastically. A crooked old woman in a ragged dress offered a surreal curtsy.
“You are no longer alone, no longer forsaken. Every day, our numbers grow. You will go forth on roads and rails and spread my word to those you recognize as our people.”
“Yes!”
“Yes, we will!”
Jagger nodded back at them. “Dark days are coming, my children.”
“Signs and wonders!”
“Yes,” Jagger said. “You will know me by these signs and wonders, but until our time arrives, you will endure great tribulation. Do not lose faith. These sufferings will cleanse you, preparing you for my return, and this is my promise to you. Every persecution you suffer in my name will multiply your reward upon my return.” He raised a fist overhead and extended his four fingers, leaving only the thumb tucked.