Nightworld ac-6

by F. Paul Wilson

  "I'm not Hawaiian."

  He tightened his grip on her waist. "As long as you're with me, you are."

  Somehow, his arm around her was not as comforting as she would have wished. They watched the airport in silence for a while longer, then Moki released her and leaned on the railing, staring out at the valley, the sky.

  "Something's going to happen soon. Do you feel it?"

  Kolabati nodded. "Yes. I've felt it for days."

  "Something wonderful."

  "Wonderful?" She stared at him. Could he mean it? She'd been plagued by an almost overwhelming sense of dread since the tradewinds had reversed themselves. "No. Not wonderful at all. Something terrible."

  His grin became fierce. "Terrible for other people, maybe. But wonderful for us. You wait and see."

  Kolabati didn't know what to make of Moki lately. His behavior had remained slightly bizarre since Wednesday when the gash on his hand had healed so quickly. At least once a day he'd cut himself to see if the healing power was still with him. Each day he healed more quickly than the day before. And with each healing the wild light in his eyes had grown.

  As the daylight began to fade, Kolabati turned toward the door, but Moki grabbed her arm.

  "Wait. What is that?"

  He was staring east, toward Kahului and beyond. She followed his gaze and saw it. Something in the water. White water, bubbling, roiling. A gigantic disturbance. With foreboding rising, ballooning within her, Kolabati grabbed the binoculars from their hook and focused on the disturbance.

  At first all she saw was turbulent white water, giant chop, sloshing and swirling chaotically. But as she watched, the turbulence became ordered, took shape. The white water began to swirl in a uniform direction, counterclockwise, around a central point. She identified the center in time to see it sink below the surface and become a dark, spinning, sucking maw.

  "Moki, look!" She handed him the glasses.

  "I see!" he said, but took them anyway.

  She watched his expression as he adjusted the lenses. His smile grew.

  "A whirlpool! It's too close to shore to be from converging currents. It's got to be a crack in the ocean floor. No, wait!" He lowered the glasses and stared at her, his face flushed with excitement. "A hole! It has to be a hole in the ocean floor, just like the Central Park hole! We've got our own hole here!"

  Together they watched the whirlpool organize and expand, Moki with undisguised glee, Kolabati with growing, gnawing unease. The troubles from the outer world, from the mainland, were intruding on her paradise. That could only bring misfortune. They watched together until it was too dark to see any more, then they went inside and turned on the TV to see what the news had to say about it. The scientists all agreed—the ocean floor had opened in a fashion similar to the phenomenon in Manhattan's Central Park. Already the locals had a name for it: moana puka—ocean hole.

  Moki could barely contain his excitement. He wandered the great room, talking a blue streak, gesticulating wildly.

  "You know what's going to happen, Bati?" he said. "The water's going to be sucked down into whatever abyss those holes lead to, and it's going to keep on disappearing into nowhere. And eventually the ocean level is going to drop. And if it drops far enough, do you know what will happen?"

  Kolabati shook her head mutely. She had an inescapable feeling that she was witnessing the beginning of the end—of everything.

  "I'll tell you what's going to happen: Greater Maui will be reborn." He went to the doorway that opened onto the lanai and gestured into the darkness. "Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, even little Molokini—all of them were part of Maui before the Ice Age, connected to our island by valleys rather than cut off by channels of sea water. I see it happening, Bati. I see them all joined together again, reunited after ages of separation. A single island, as big as the Big Island. Maybe bigger. And I'll play a part in the future of Greater Maui."

  "What future?" Kolabati said, joining him at the door. "If the Pacific Ocean drops that far we'll be looking at the end of the world!"

  "No, Bati. Not the end. The beginning. The beginning of a new world."

  And then the sky caught fire. All around them, like a sustained flash of sheet lightning, the night ignited. At the far end of the island she saw the Lahaina coast and the Iao Valley of West Maui light up like day. The same with the island of Lanai across the channel. Then a blast of superheated air, choked with flaming debris, roared overhead and to the sides, withering west Maui, searing Lanai, yet she and Moki remained in cool shadow, shielded by the enormous bulk of Haleakala.

  "Shiva!" she cried in the Bengali dialect of her childhood. "What are you doing?"

  And then came the sound. The floor shook and seemed to fall away beneath her as the night exploded with a rumbling, booming, deep-throated roar that shuddered through her flesh and shook every cell of her body, rattled the very core of her being.

  As she tumbled to the floor she heard Moki's voice faintly above the din.

  "Earthquake!"

  He crawled to where she lay and rolled on top of her, using his body to shield her from the shelves and lamps and sculptures crashing down about them.

  It went on forever. Kolabati didn't know how the house's cantilever supports managed to hold. Any moment now they were going to give way and send the house tumbling down the slope. Only once before in her life—when Jack had borrowed her necklace for a number of hours and all of her nearly 150 years had begun to assert their weight upon her—had Kolabati felt so close to death.

  The earth tremors and shudders persisted but became quieter, muffled. Moki lifted himself off her and Kolabati struggled to her feet.

  "Peheaoe?"

  "All right…I think," she said, not bothering to reply in Hawaiian.

  They clung to each other like sailors on a heaving deck. Kolabati looked around. The great room was in a shambles. His sculptures lay all about in pieces, their carved wood cracked and splintered, their lava bases shattered.

  "Oh, Moki. Your work!"

  "The sculptures don't matter." he said, clutching her tight against him. "They're the past. I would have had to smash them myself. Don't you see, Bati? This is it! The new beginning I told you about. It's here!"

  He drew her to the trembling lanai where they leaned over the railing and stared up at the dark mass of Haleakala, toward her summit, rimmed now with fiery light.

  "Look, Bati!" he said, pointing up the slope. "Haleakala is alive! After hundreds of years of dormancy, she's come back to life! For me! For us!"

  Kolabati pulled away from him and fled back inside. She flipped one light switch after another but the room remained dark. She picked her way through the debris to the television but could not get it to work. The electricity was gone.

  "Bati!" Moki called. "Hele mai. Stand with me and watch Haleakala. The House of the Sun has rekindled her fires. She's calling us home!"

  Kolabati stood amid the shambles of their home—their life—and knew that her time of peace was at an end, that things would never be the same. She was afraid.

  "That wasn't just Haleakala erupting, Moki," she said, her voice trembling like the floor beneath her. "Something else happened. Something far more violent and cataclysmic than an old volcano coming to life."

  It's the end of the world, she thought. She could feel it in her bones and in the way the ancient necklace pulsed against her skin. The air about her screamed with tortured atman, released in sudden, violent death.

  Haleakala had awakened, but what else had happened?

  The pain is gone. Only the ecstasy remains now. And it grows. The night things run rampant in the dark sectors above. Rasalom senses the delirium of fear and pain and grief and misery they leave in their wake.

  And then there was the convulsion of death and horror when the Pacific volcanoes roared back to life. The surge was almost unbearable.

  As a result, the pace of the Change has picked up. He is so much larger now, and his granite womb has grown to accommodate him. The c
hips of sloughed stone have disappeared down the hole that has opened in the bottom of the chamber. Like the other holes that have opened around this globe, it, too, is bottomless. But it leads to a different place. A place of icy flame. Even now, a faint glow creeps up from the depths.

  And the Change…his limbs have thickened, hardened to a stony consistency. His head has drawn into his trunk, concentrating his essence in a soft, bulbous core, a fleshy center in the hub of a four-spoked wheel.

  He spreads his intangible feeders further and further afield, seeking more nourishment. He can never get enough.

  SUNDAY

  1 • SUNDAY IN NEW YORK

  WCBS-TV

  Good morning. This is a special edition of Sunday Morning. The sun rose late at 7:10 a.m. this morning and found not only a devastated New York City, but the entire world reeling from the events of last night…

  MANHATTAN

  What a night.

  Jack stood yawning in the chilly dawn outside Gia's townhouse. He shivered and tugged the zipper on his windbreaker a little higher.

  It's almost June, he thought. Isn't the weather supposed to be getting warmer?

  Across the East River the sun was rising red and quick over Queens. He thought he could almost see it moving. Around him, Sutton Square had never looked so bad. The little half block of townhouses hanging over the F.D.R. Drive had been spared Friday, but last night had more than made up for it. Shattered glass on the sidewalks, lacerated screens hanging from the windows.

  The chew wasps and the belly flies had been back, but other things—bigger, heavier things—had come as well. Luckily, the louvered wooden shutters flanking the windows of Gia's townhouse hadn't been merely ornamental. They were hung on real hinges and actually swung closed over the windows. The night had been long and tense, filled with hungry, predatory noises, but they'd passed it in safety.

  Other places hadn't been so lucky. Jack was wondering whether he should check out some of the neighboring townhouses to see if anybody needed help when he noticed something hanging over the arm of the street lamp on the corner. Something big and limp.

  He took a few steps toward it and stopped when he realized it was a corpse. Female, maybe, but so torn up and desiccated it was hard to tell.

  But how had it got there? Twenty feet up. Was there a hole creature flying about at night big enough to fly off with someone?

  It was getting worse faster than he'd thought.

  Jack checked the 9mm Llama in his shoulder holster and the extra clips in his pockets, then went back and checked Ralph. The Corvair's black canvas convertible top had been shredded during the night, the antenna scored with teeth marks and bent almost double; the paint on the hood had been bubbled off as if it had been splashed with acid, and the windshield was fouled with some putrid-smelling gunk that Jack wiped off with a rag from his trunk.

  "Eeeeuuuu! What happened to Ralph?"

  Jack turned and saw Vicky standing in the townhouse doorway, dressed in bib-front overalls, a flannel shirt, a jacket, and her green-and-white N.Y. Jets cap. With the little suitcase in her hand, she looked like a country cousin arriving in the big city for a visit. But her blue eyes were wide with shock as she stared at the ruined top of the car.

  "The things from the hole," Jack said, waving her forward to distract her from the corpse on the lamp post. "That's why I want you and your Mom to leave."

  "Mom still doesn't want to go."

  "I know that, Vicks." Jeez, do I know.

  Gia didn't want to leave the city, thought she and Vicky could weather the wolf just fine in their brick house here on Sutton Square. Jack wasn't having any of that. He was willing to let her have her way in most anything unless he thought she'd be in danger. He'd been relentless last night, wearing her down until she'd finally agreed to leave the city with Abe first thing this morning.

  "Is that why you and Mom were yelling last night?"

  "We weren't yelling. We just had a…difference of opinion."

  "Oh. I thought it was a fight."

  "Your mother and I? Disagree? Never! Now come on, Vicks. Let's get you settled in Ralph."

  As Vicky stepped down onto the sidewalk, Gia emerged behind her. She was dressed in jeans and a navy-blue V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck. Her eyes, the same shade of blue as Vicky's, went as wide as her daughter's when she saw the street. She ran her fingers through her short blonde hair.

  "Oh my!"

  "This is nothing," Jack said. "Wait'll you see the rest of the city."

  He put his right index finger to his lips and pointed to the body on the lamp post. Gia started and staggered back a step when she spotted it.

  "My God!"

  "Still think you'll be safe here?" Jack said.

  "We did okay last night."

  Stubborn to the end.

  "But it's going to get worse."

  "So you've said—a thousand times."

  "Two-thousand times. I get paid to know these things."

  "And you're sure Abe's place is better?"

  "Like a fortress."

  She shrugged resignedly. "All right. I'm packed. Like I promised. But I still think this trip is overkill."

  Jack ducked past her into the house to grab the suitcases before she changed her mind. He stowed some of the luggage in the front trunk and put the rest in the back seat with Vicky. Grumbling all the way, Gia reluctantly settled herself in the passenger seat. With the wind flapping through the shredded top, he zig-zagged down to 57th Street and started up the long incline toward Fifth Avenue.

  It was bad, but not as bad as yesterday. Early Sunday morning is about the only time midtown Manhattan can be called silent, but there were even fewer cars on the streets than usual. And most of those were either police cars or emergency vehicles of one sort or another. All the streets were littered with sparkling glass fragments. Here and there along the way he spotted an occasional shrunken husk that had once been a human body. One or two dangled from high places, as if they'd been dropped or thrown there after being sucked dry. Jack kept glancing back at Vicky but she was slumped down in the back seat, engrossed in one of her Nancy Drew books, oblivious to her surroundings.

  Good. He kept an eye on Gia, as well, watching her expression grow tighter, her face grow paler with each passing block. By Madison Avenue she was ashen. As he pulled to a stop at a red light, Gia looked at him with eyes even wider than before. Her voice was barely audible.

  "Jack…I'm…what…?"

  She closed her mouth and stared ahead in silence.

  Jack said nothing, but he was sure he wouldn't have any more resistance to the idea of getting out of town.

  From the right came a sudden explosion of glass as a display case crashed through a corner jewelry store's only unbroken window.

  A guy with glazed eyes and lank, oily brown hair, sporting a stained tee-shirt and torn jeans, followed it through the hole, laughing as he landed and rolled on the pavement. He was white but he had on enough gold chains and necklaces to qualify as a Mr. T runner-up. His fingers were stacked with so many rings he couldn't bend them. Another guy, heavier but dressed identically and sporting an equal amount of gold, made a more traditional exit through the door. They gave each other a metallic high five. Then they spotted the Corvair.

  "Hey, man!" the first once said, smiling as he approached the car. "It's a ride!"

  The heavier one followed him. "Yeah! Want some gold? We'll give you some gold for a ride downtown. We got plenty!"

  Jack couldn't help laughing.

  "Yeah, right. And like maybe I'll let you hold my wallet while I drive you around."

  As the looters' disarming grins twisted into rage, he gunned the Corvair and pulled away through the red light. The thin one began running after them, screaming. For an uneasy moment Jack thought the guy might catch them. The Corvair was loaded down, its old engine was small, and it did not exactly leap up the slight incline toward Fifth Avenue. But it turned out to be just fast enough to leave a stoned looter b
ehind.

  Trouble was, Vicky was now sitting up and alert to her surroundings. After watching the looter through the scarred plastic of the rear window, she leaned forward between the bucket seats.

  "Why didn't you give that man a ride, Jack?"

  "Because he's one of the bad guys, Vicks. What's called a looter."

  "But he just wanted a ride."

  "I don't think so, Vicks. You know those silverfish we find crawling in the bathroom every so often?"

  Vicky made a face. "Yuck."

  "Yeah, well, looters are lower than silverfish. When the good folks are occupied fighting fires or helping earthquake victims or storm victims, looters sneak in and carry off anything that's not nailed down. Those guys didn't want a ride; they wanted Ralph."

  "That's not fair!"

  "Fair's not a word they care about, Vicks."

  "Look!" she said, pointing to her left as they crossed Fifth Avenue. "More looters!"

  She was right. Knots of people were jumping in and out of the broken windows all along Fifth, scampering off through the dim dawn light with jewelry, leather, anything they could carry. Someone had pulled a panel truck up on the sidewalk in front of Bergdorf's and was loading it with dresses. As Jack was pulling away, he saw a bearded, professorial type step through the open space that had once been the big front window of the Doubleday shop balancing a two-foot stack of books against the front of his tweed jacket.

  "Everybody's getting into the act," he said. "Where the hell are the police?"

  "It's anarchy, Jack," Gia said and he could hear the fear vibrating in her voice.

  "Not yet. We've still got a police force—somewhere, I think—and we've still got electricity for lights, and we've still got gas to run the police cars. When the sun's all the way up these cockroaches will crawl back under the floorboards."

  "But what happens when the gas and electricity go?" she said, reaching over and clutching Vicky's hand.

  "Then they'll own the streets. That's when we'll see real anarchy."