“Sound booth.”
(Check.)
“Lights.”
(Check.)
“Fire teams.”
(Check.)
And so on. Guilder, listening vaguely, shook out his robed arms like a boxer preparing to step into the ring. He had always wondered about this gesture, which seemed like empty showmanship. Now he understood the sense of it.
“Good to go when you are,” Suresh said.
So: the moment at last. What a shock the crowd was in for. Guilder slid his glasses onto his face and took a last, long breath.
“All right, everyone,” he said. “Let’s look alive. It’s game time.”
He stepped forward, into the light.
64
“Dani, wake up.”
The voice was familiar. The voice belonged to someone she knew. It drifted toward her from high above, saying this curious, half-remembered name.
“Dani, you have to open your eyes. I need you to try.”
Sara sensed her mind emerging, her body taking shape around her. She felt suddenly cold. Her throat was tight and dry, sweet-tasting. She was supposed to open her eyes—that’s what the voice was telling her—but her lids felt like they weighed a thousand pounds apiece.
“I’m going to give you something.”
Was the voice Lila’s? Sara felt a prick in her arm. Nothing. Then:
Oh!
She bolted upright, violently curling forward at the waist, her heart thudding against her rib cage. Air rushed to her lungs, expelled by a dry cough that screeched across the parched lining of her throat.
Lila pressed a cup to her lips, bracing the back of Sara’s head with her palm. “Drink.”
Sara tasted water, cold water. The images around her began to coalesce. Her heart was still racing like a bird’s. Bits of pain, real and remembered, jabbed at her extremities. Her head felt like it was only vaguely related to the rest of her.
“You’re all right,” said Lila. “Don’t worry. I’m a doctor.”
Lila was a doctor?
“We need to be quick. I know it won’t be easy, but can you stand?”
Sara didn’t think she could, but Lila made her try. She swung her legs to the side of the gurney, Lila helping her by the elbow. Below the hem of Sara’s gown, white bandages encircled her upper thighs. More bandages dressed her lower arms. All of this had happened without her being aware of it.
“What did they do to me?”
“It’s the marrow they take. They start with the hips. That’s the pain you feel.”
Sara eased her feet to the floor. Only then did it occur to her that Lila’s presence was an aberration—that she was freeing her.
“Why do you have a gun, Lila?”
Gone was the frail, uncertain woman Sara had come to know. Her face radiated urgency. “Come.”
Sara saw the first body when they stepped into the hall: a man in a lab coat lying face-down on the floor, his arms and legs splayed in the random arrangement of swift death. The top of his skull had been blasted off, its contents splashed over the wall. Two more lay nearby, one shot in the chest, the other through the throat—though the second man wasn’t dead. He was sitting upright against the wall, his hands encircling his neck, his chest moving in shallow jerks. It was Dr. Verlyn. Through the hole in his neck, his rapid breathing made a clicking sound. His lips wordlessly working, he looked at Sara with pleading eyes.
Lila was tugging her by the arm. “We need to hurry.”
She didn’t have to say it again. More bodies—the splashes of blood and startled postures and expressions of surprise in unseeing eyes—flowed past. It was a massacre. Was it possible that Lila had done this? They came to the end of the hall, where the heavy steel door stood open. A col lay beside it, shot in the head.
“Get her out of the building,” Lila commanded. “It’s the last thing I’ll ask of you. Do whatever you have to.”
Sara understood that she was speaking of Kate. “Lila, what are you doing?”
“What should have been done long ago.” A look of peace had come into her face; her eyes glowed with warmth. “It will all be over soon, Dani.”
Sara hesitated. “My name’s not Dani.”
“I thought perhaps it wasn’t. Tell me.”
“It’s Sara.”
Lila nodded slowly, as if agreeing that this was the right name for her to have. She took Sara’s hand.
“You will be a good mother to her, Sara,” she said, and squeezed. “I know it. Now run.”
A hush fell over the crowd as Guilder stepped onto the field, all seventy thousand faces swiveling to look at him. He stood still a moment, drinking in the stillness as his eyes traveled the grandstands. He would make a humble entrance, like a priest’s. Time seemed to stretch as he walked to the platform. Who knew it could take so long to cross fifty yards? The silence around him seemed to deepen with every step.
He arrived at the platform. He gazed out upon the crowd, first one side of the field, then the other. His hand slipped to his waist and located the toggle.
“All rise for the singing of the anthem.”
Nothing happened. Had he hit the right button? He glanced toward Suresh, who was standing on the sidelines, making a frantic rolling motion with his hand.
“I said, please rise.”
Begrudgingly, the crowd took to its feet. “Homeland, our Homeland,” Guilder began to sing, “we pledge our lives to thee …”
Our labors do we offer, without recompense or fee. Homeland, our Homeland, a nation rises here. Safety, hope, security, from sea to shining sea …
With a sinking feeling, Guilder realized that almost nobody else was singing. He heard a few isolated voices here and there—HR personnel and, of course, the staff, manfully croaking the words from the fifty-yard line—but this only heightened the impression that the crowd, basically, was on strike.
Homeland, our Homeland, of peace and plenty fair. The light of heaven shines upon your beauty rich and rare. One mind! One soul! Your love is all we see. Let all combine with heart and hand: one Homeland, strong and free!
The song didn’t end so much as turn a corner and fall down. Not a good sign at all. The first of several beads of sweat shot from his armpit to slither unimpeded down the length of his torso. Maybe he should have found somebody who could actually sing to warm up the crowd. Still, Guilder had a few things planned to engage the people fully in the evening’s transformational festivities. He cleared his throat, glanced toward Suresh once more, received the man’s approving nod, and spoke.
“I stand before you today on the eve of a new era—”
“Murderer!”
A buzz of voices shivered through the crowd. The shout had come from behind him, somewhere in the upper decks. Guilder spun around, blindly searching the sea of faces.
“Killer!”
The voice was a woman’s. Guilder saw her standing at the railing. She waved a fist madly in the air.
“You butcher!”
“Somebody arrest that woman!” Guilder barked into his microphone, too loudly.
A general catcalling erupted. Objects went sailing through the air, lobbing onto the field. The crowd was throwing the only thing it had. The crowd was throwing its shoes.
“Monster! Assassin! Torturer!”
Guilder was frozen. None of this was what he’d expected at all.
“Demon! Tyrant! Swine!”
“Devil! Satan! Fiend!”
If he didn’t do something fast, he’d lose them completely. He gave Suresh the signal; the switch was thrown. To an orchestrated explosion of colored light and smoke, the pickup carrying the woman in its bed bounded onto the field, the semi lumbering behind it. Simultaneously, the fire teams went racing around the edges of the field, igniting barrels of ethanol-soaked wood, making a flickering perimeter of flame. As the pickup halted at the platform, the semi turned in a wide circle and began to back up. The guards dropped the gate of the pickup, yanked the woman from the bed, and
flung her to the muddy ground at the base of the platform.
“Get up.”
The crowd was in an uproar—booing, whistling, hurling shoes like missiles.
“I said, get up.”
Guilder kicked her hard, in the ribs. When she made no cry he kicked her again, then hauled her to her feet and shoved his face so close to hers that the tips of their noses practically touched.
“You have no idea what you’re about to face.”
“Actually, I do. You could say we’re of a very long acquaintance.”
He didn’t know what to make of this curious claim, but he didn’t care. He signaled to the guards to take her away. The woman offered no resistance as they dragged her to the base of the armature and pressed her to her knees. There were streaks of mud on her cheeks, her tunic, in her hair. Under the blazing lights she seemed meager, almost doll-like, and yet Guilder could still discern the defiance in her eyes, an absolute refusal to be cowed. He hoped the virals would take their time, maybe bat her around a bit. The guards unlocked her shackles, then reattached her wrists to the chains that hung from the armature.
They began to winch her up.
With every foot of her ascent, the roars of the crowd intensified. In protest? Anticipation? The pure emotional thrill of watching a person ripped apart? They hated him, Guilder understood that, but they were part of this thing now; their dark energy had joined to the night’s transformative power.
The woman came to a rest high in the air, her arms held from her sides, her body swaying.
“Last words?”
She thought a moment. “Goodbye?”
Guilder laughed. “That’s the spirit.”
“I meant that the other way around.”
Guilder had heard enough. He turned toward the rear of the semi. Two cols in heavy pads were posted by the doors. Suresh was watching him intently from the sidelines; Guilder caught his eye and nodded.
Hey, Lila, he thought, you delusional has-been, get a load of this.
And suddenly there was silence. A great freezing of all movement as the stadium was dipped in darkness.
A burst of blue.
The time to move had arrived. Greer and Lore burst from their hiding place and charged up the stairs. A single col was standing guard at the door to the control room. Greer got there first.
“What the fuck?” The guard noticed the knives. “Whoa,” he said.
Greer gripped him by the ears—conveniently oversized, jutting from the sides of his head like a pair of handles—and rammed his own forehead into the man’s skull. Down he went, felled like a tree.
They flew through the door. Again, just one man awaited, a redeye. Wearing chunky earphones with a microphone, he was seated before a panel of lights and switches. A wall of windows looked down on the field, bathed in blue. The earphones were a plus; their entry had gone unnoticed. The tacit understanding between Greer and Lore said that it was now her turn.
The redeye lifted his face. “Hey, you’re not supposed to be here.”
“True,” said Lore, who slipped behind him, placed her left hand on his forehead, and drew her knife across his throat, cutting it like paper.
The doors of the semi swung open.
They emerged in magnificence, like kings. Their movements were stately, deliberate; they showed no haste, only the pure self-possession of their kind. No one could mistake what they were. They towered. They occupied space with a glorious immensity of height and breadth. They had fed on the blood of generations, inflating their persons to colossi. Even Carter, with his modest dimensions, seemed, in the company of his brethren, to partake of their magnificence. At the wondrous sight of them, the crowd made a collective inhalation of breath. Screams would follow, of this fact Guilder had no doubt, but in the moment of the eleven virals’ emergence, a deep, anticipatory quiet reigned. The mighty beings stepped forward in rich display. Their backs were erect, their powerful claws articulating like immense devices of pain. They had the aspect of giants. They were legend made flesh, the great bestriders of the earth. The guards raced for the sidelines, to live another day, though Guilder paid this no notice. His mind was full of glory.
My brothers, Guilder thought, I offer you this token, this foretaste. This tender morsel, this beginning. My brothers, come forward and together we will rule the Earth.
Nina’s team of assassins tore up the stairs. They surfaced at field level in a dugout situated just below the bleachers where the senior staff members were seated. Once Eustace began his run they would spring onto the field, turn to face their enemies, and unleash the contents of their short-barreled automatics.
But now, crouched in the final moments of their concealment, they, like everyone in the crowd, experienced an emotion that was one part terror, one part wonder, one part something else that lacked any point of reference in their lives. Peter was simultaneously attempting to process three competing visual facts. The last of the Twelve were before him, mere yards away; Amy, suspended in chains, was the bait that had drawn them forth; Amy was not Amy but a grown woman. Greer and Alicia had tried to prepare him, but no words could have readied him for this reality.
Where was Eustace?
Then Peter saw him. He was standing at the rail in the end zone—just another flatlander, dragooned into the role of witness. The eleven virals stood before Guilder like a platoon of soldiers awaiting orders. Goddamnit, Peter thought, you’re too far apart. Get closer to each other, you bastards.
Guilder raised his arms.
Lila, alone. The Dome was silent, like a great animal holding its breath. This place, she thought. This tabernacle of pain. How could such a place be allowed to exist on the earth?
The gun was empty; she placed it on the floor and darted back down the hall. Behind each door lay a person on a slab, their life force slowly draining away. There was no time to save them, that was Lila’s one regret, but at least she could release them from their torment.
Room by room she traveled, unsealing the doors with the ring of keys she’d taken from the guard. A few words of benediction for each trapped soul within; then she opened the valves on the ether tanks. A cloying sweetness filled the air. Her movements began to feel sluggish; she would have to work quickly. Leaving the doors open behind herself, she made her way down the corridor. The warning signs were posted at regular intervals on the walls of the hallway: ETHER PRESENT. NO OPEN FLAMES.
She came to the final door. She tried one key and then another and another, her fingers heavy and imprecise, the gas already inside her. The serrations bit and held.
Lila’s heart shattered at the sight of him. They had chained him to the floor. He lay in naked degradation, suspended eternally at the precipice of death. Monsters! How could she have let this scene of anguish pass? How could she have waited a hundred years to alleviate his pain?
“Lawrence, what have they done to you?”
She hurled herself to her knees beside him. His eyes were open, but his stare seemed to pass through her to another world. She smoothed his wrinkled cheeks, his shriveled brow. She dipped her head to his, their foreheads touching as she stroked his face. “Lawrence,” she whispered, over and over, “my Lawrence.”
His lips at last formed words: “Save… me.”
“Of course I will, my darling.” The tears were pouring forth, a torrent. The gas was in the hall. From the pocket of her gown, Lila removed the box of matches. “We will save each other.”
High above the field, Greer and Lore were also waiting for the eleven virals to move.
“Goddamnit,” Greer said, the binoculars pressed to his eyes, “why aren’t they doing anything?”
Guilder’s hands were still raised. What was happening? He dropped them to his sides and lifted them again, waving with agitation. Still no response.
“Motherfucker!”
Lore’s hand was poised on the switch. Her voice was frantic. “What should I do? What should I do?”
“I don’t know!”
Th
en Greer saw movement on the field. A figure was racing from the end zone: Eustace.
“Do it! Turn on the lights!”
Even then, it was too late.
Sara, running: she tore across the atrium—was that gunfire outside?—and down the hall to Lila’s apartment, rocketing through the door.
“Kate!”
The child was asleep in her bed. As Sara scooped her up, her eyes fluttered open. “Mummy?”
“I’m here. Baby, I’m here.”
Now she was sure of it: there was shooting outside. (Though she could not be aware of this, this was the moment when her brother, Michael, rushing up the stairs, took a bullet to his right thigh, a pain he found oddly unimportant, so fueled was he by a rush of pure adrenaline. Hollis hadn’t lied: once things got rolling, shooting somebody wasn’t hard at all, and he picked off two more guards before his leg folded beneath him, the gun slipped from his hand—the thing was empty anyway—and his vision lit with stars.) Down the hall Sara dashed, carrying her child. My child, my child. They would live or they would die, but whichever it was they would do it together; never would they part again.
She hit the atrium at a sprint just as a man came blasting through the front doors. There was blood on his shirt; he was holding a gun. His bearded face was lit with a look of wild determination. Sara stopped in her tracks.
Hollis?
From her position high above the ground, Amy took in the whole of the scene. The crowd of thousands in its wild uproar; Guilder, his arms irrelevantly raised; the emergence of Nina’s team from the dugout, and the subsequent unleashing of their firepower upon the rows of suited men, who screamed and dove for cover and sometimes did nothing at all, sitting with uncomprehending composure as their bodies were splashed with rosy arcs of death; Alicia appearing on the field, weapon drawn, ready to charge; Eustace streaming toward them from the end zone, the bomb clutched to his chest, and behind him the col who dropped to one knee, raised his rifle, and took him in its sights; the spurt of blood, and Eustace spinning and tumbling, the bomb squirting away. These events moved around her like planets in their orbits, a whirling cosmos of activity, yet their presence touched her only in passing, brushing her senses like a breeze. She stood at the center, she and her kinsmen, and it was there, on that stage, that all would be decided.
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