“JJ?”
The glowing alien head stopped halfway up the rungs of the tower, but only for a second before hurrying higher. Above JJ, above the antenna array at the very top, heaven churned and bloomed into a thundercloud of electrical purple. Steve could hear it brewing, an infinite in-suck of breath.
“JJ, stop!”
He ran to the base of the structure and grabbed the rungs. People began to emerge from the mountain dark. All the townspeople, the entire Pitchfork Mafia: Mary McPhail; Principal Warner; JJ’s friends, Mini Mark and the Dick.
Kelli Anderson.
Cathy from the diner.
Sheriff Perkins.
They gathered at the cyclone fence, encircling the entire complex, chanting, singing, holding their Tethers up like lighters.
Ignoring them, Steve began to climb. They couldn’t get in. The fence . . .
A sudden clatter and mechanical sound drew his attention to the gate of the complex. It was rolling open on its own, letting the mafia spill through to the tower.
Steve climbed faster.
A mass of people took to the rungs below him, scrambling over each other like ants. Some of them fell.
The tower swayed in a gust of wind, and Steve held tight. Except for the well-lit compound shrinking below him, except for the data center burning in the distance, save for the thunderhead above, Cracked Rock and Burnt Valley might as well have been a black hole. He could see nothing.
At the top, Steve pulled himself onto a small platform circling the tower not far below the antenna array. Through the open mesh flooring, he could see the expanding triangles of the tower supports telescoping away from him, and the gravel below.
“Son,” Steve said, taking a step toward JJ. He glanced down and could no longer see the tower legs at all, just a mass of people hanging on and climbing up toward them, grunting their chant as they came. Steve grabbed at the handrail as another gust of wind shook the tower.
Steve stepped closer, trying to think. “JJ, please—you need to call Sarah. I can’t. She’s one of the Twelve. She’s in trouble, we need to—”
JJ said, lowering his phone.
A wrinkled hand grabbed Steve’s arm from behind. Another hand, this one much younger, hooked its fingers into Steve’s mouth, pulling him back by the cheek.
He could see from twisting around who was holding him. Two women in black ceremonial robes: Mrs. Hayworth and Cathy from the diner. He tore free of them, but then more people, about four, all in robes, clambered up the ladder. Five more scrambled over the handrail.
Principal Warner.
JJ’s counselor, Mrs. Keeler.
All stretched into the same wicked smiley face.
Steve bucked and kicked and struggled against them, but they wrestled him into submission, eleven against one, their stretched Ebumnanyth faces leering, drooling, gibbering.
With a sound effect from his phone, JJ applauded.
A
The Eleven holding Steve, and all the people still clustered on the legs of the tower, laughed. Even the ones too far down to hear, the ones still standing on the ground, guffawed, as if, indeed, they had heard the joke.
“JJ!” Steve screamed, still wriggling in the grip of his neighbors, his colleagues, his enemy. “This connection! It’s a trick, it’s a trap—it’s evil! I’m your family! Me!”
JJ’s other voices filtered out, quieted down, leaving only one voice: Janice’s.
The giant, purple cloud above sprung a leak, exposing a veined, pulsating membrane gestating inside; sac yellow, veins blue. The sac bulged as something pushed against the fabric of space and time. JJ lifted his face to the rain, to receive some on his tongue.
The townspeople climbing the tower pushed the people above them out of the way, drinking from the sky too. The victims cried out in ecstasy to The Provider as they plummeted, until their bodies bounced off one of the tower’s legs and they were gone.
On the platform, the Twelve continued their chant, crying with joy as the thick, hot rain hit their eyes and plopped in their hair.
Steve couldn’t break away from the eleven pairs of hands. It was the parade all over again, his eyes pried open to watch.
All Steve could hear was the swirling clouds and the tick-tack-plop of rain. No voice from the other side of the line.
Something like the cables, the fat black cables, only lined with suckers, poked through the yellow membrane in the sky. They grabbed the sides of the rip and started prying open a hole, a rent in the air itself.
More of the syrupy fluids slopped through, threaded with the torn and veined membrane like a placenta. They glistened with hundreds of thousands of dead minnows.
The cables, the tentacles, were pulling something through. Steve could see it pressing against the sac, something huge to be born. A sound escaped from the growing rip, something like a high-pitched dial tone, harmonic and backed by an oceanic hiss.
More of the tentacles lashed out and jabbed at the Twelve, plugging into the backs of their heads only to lift them up, so they were dangling there, speaking as one, the same robotic female voice, the same message.
Some kind of sea anemone, some kind of huge mouth ringed with feelers, pushed its way out of the rip.
“What’re you doing, no!” JJ screamed, speaking for real this time, not with his phone but his tongue, teeth, and throat. He jabbed a finger at Steve, at the townspeople spilling onto the platform all around him. “Them! The virgin and the sheep! They’re the covenant! You’re supposed to eat them, not us! Not the Twelve!”
The Provider didn’t listen, though, didn’t seem to care as it continued eating and pulling itself through. It had attached the tube of its body to a reef and a giant rock, which it wore
like a shell.
Atop the rock, an ancient temple crumbled brick by brick, its chambers collapsing, its stairs tumbling apart, spilling brine in rapids and floods. Mussels clung to the ruin and rock, and huge carven faces, like a smaller Rushmore, adorned the temple. The faces were Ebumnanyth, positioned roughly over the anemone mouth.
The last of the Eleven went screaming into the giant sphincter, which then puckered and sucked in on itself, retracting into the ruinous shell.
Steve, no longer detained, jumped at JJ. He swiped for the boy’s Tether, but JJ kicked him.
“We need to go!” Steve screamed. “We need to—”
Steve heard the tentacle before he saw it. Heard it whoosh through the air. He ducked. It rushed overhead, whipping and coiling around JJ’s middle and lifting him up.
“Dad!”
Steve leapt and grabbed JJ’s leg. His hands slipped down the boy’s pants, slimy with rain. He pulled off the right shoe and fell six feet to the platform, screaming for his son.
JJ screamed for him, too, but his voice was drowned out by a deafening crack, like the explosion at the data center. At first Steve thought, Yes! Someone had done it! Someone had found a way to blow this up too! But then he saw it.
Something black, something higher in the troposphere, some kind of triangle with a light at each of its points, broke the sound barrier as it shot down at the portal like the spearhead of God.
CHAPTER 59
Sarah looked forward, jumped over a downed telephone pole, and kept running, fixing her eyes on her new Tether.
She’d installed a game, the flying app, except this time she hadn’t picked an airliner out of her hangar. Onscreen, she could see the tower looming ahead of her from the cockpit of her B-2.
She had gotten the new Tether at the refugee camp, where they were handing out replacement phones, just like Aaron said. There hadn’t been many people left at the camp—they’d all been headed up the mountain. The support staff had been there to welcome her, though, and they’d gotten her hooked up with a new plan. They’d been nice, up until the second Sarah took flight from Malmstrom Air Base. That’s when they turned on her, when they heard her thoughts over the party line, what she planned to do.
Onscreen, Sarah’s bomber began to veer away from the tower. She was losing control. Just like that day, when her harmless little game ended up destroying an entire middle school—she was losing control.
She ducked through the boughs of an extant tree and flicked her thumb across her phone, trying to put the jet back on target.
Sarah looked ahead. A crack had cut across her path. She tried to stop, but the ground gave way beneath her and . . .
* * *
Steve fell to the metal grid of the platform as the stealth bomber veered away from the creature ripping out of its birth canal.
“J—!”
The jet jagged back toward the storm, slamming into The Provider and exploding, blowing the monstrosity back through the hole, which puckered and closed around it. It sealed in most of the explosion, bulging with it. The closing wound sheared off the bomber’s left wing, which shot down like a javelin, right through two of the tower’s three legs.
The rest of the bomber was gone.
Swallowed by the other world.
Severed tentacles; bricks from the temple; bits of rock and mussel rained down, followed by burning debris. From the jet. From the monster. Huge chunks crunched the antenna array, and smaller pieces hammered Steve’s back and legs. JJ fell next to him, partly on him. The tentacle, disembodied but still belted to the boy, tried to drag him off the platform as it fell.
“Dad?”
“JJ!”
Steve grabbed his son and held him. He latched onto the handrail as the tower began to groan and lean, and the tentacle gave one last pull, constricting in its death throes before letting go.
The townspeople started to climb down in an attempt to flee, but not all of them made it off. They went plummeting to the ground below, some of them landing on the utility boxes and brick buildings, others landing on the cyclone fence, their bodies all tangled up in the razors.
“Hold on!” Steve said, locking his feet into the bars of the handrail. He hazarded a peek into the sky. For a second the sac bloomed with its internal fireball over the valley like some snapdragon, purple yet blinding blue and red at the heart.
* * *
The townspeople scattered from the tower, running back through the gate. The sound in their ears, the voice that had been guiding them, crackled and squealed like a fax line before finally falling silent. The light in the people’s headsets blinked off.
They dug the earwigs out and threw them down along with their Tethers, and as they did, the party line went silent. Clive realized he was Clive again, and Hank from Hank’s Hardware clutched at his aching heart.
They all looked at the storm withering shut above the world, and then . . .
* * *
JJ woke up as well. He sat with his dad, curled around the handrail as all the surviving townspeople gawked at the tower.
“We need to climb!” Steve said. “Can you climb down?”
JJ grabbed his dad and clung to him, nodding, sobbing into his father’s chest the words Steve had said to him before, that he was sorry, so sorry, please forgive him.
CHAPTER 60
Sarah’s eyes fluttered open to total darkness. She lay in water, could feel it trembling around her, could hear it dripping somewhere in the cave.
Her Tether provided the only light, shimmering beneath the streams. Coins glimmered beneath the surface, collected in deposits like silt, deltas, and alluvial fans, washed down here from who knows where. Huge cables snaked through it into the dark. The walls of the crack were veined with quartz and gold.
Sarah coughed and sputtered as the groundwater tried to pour into her mouth. She tried to move, but spluttered and cried out. Her bones. In her back, in her side. They ground together like a bag of loose gravel. She struggled to keep her head at the surface.
All around her, the cables began to move, retreating into the darkness to wherever they came from, their long, dragging movements causing the loose change to glitter and sing. It piled up beneath Sarah, a pile of pennies and dimes, lifting her out of the water on a bed of treasure.
With one last seismic shift, the cables were gone. Sarah lay there, whimpering at the sharp jabs of pain in her chest and in her legs, the dull throbbing of her head. Her insides felt sloppy, sodden, hot but cooling quickly, almost freezing.
Her eyes fluttered shut and she could see things, blurry-blue glowing things shifting down a long barrel or scope.
Her eyes snapped open when she heard a bark.
“Barks—?” she began, but she couldn’t talk. Her lungs were heavy, as if she were drowning, even though she wasn’t. She did manage to lift her head.
Barksdale, shimmering in the light of the Tether like a mirage, trotted up the pile of coins and stood above her. In this lighting, he was the same blurry-blue as the glow behind her eyes. He licked her face. It felt less like a tongue and more like a tear running down her cheek.
With a grunt and a whine, Barksdale curled up beside her. Sarah could almost feel the weight of him, could almost smell him, even though, when she reached for his wet fur, her hand went right through him and flopped onto the glistening change.
“Oh, Barks,” she said. She felt a vibration in her leg and idly reached for it, thinking it was her mother’s phone—except it wasn’t in that pocket, it was in the other one. Sarah waved it away. She didn’t e
ven have the energy to cough up blood.
“Good b . . .”
Underwater, Sarah’s Tether clicked off. The light shimmered in a ripple, leaving one last blurry-blue on her eyes before the dark. It was waving.
* * *
Steve and JJ ran from the leaning tower, away from the black wing stabbed into the ground. They collapsed outside the cyclone fence, in the rocks and the grass with all the other townspeople atop Cracked Rock.
Mary McPhail grabbed Steve and hugged him, and he hugged her back, and then she reached out and pulled JJ in, too. Everyone was crying and holding hands and watching the tower burn and fall with a great twisting of metal.
In his jacket, Steve’s phone rang. He pulled it out and checked the caller ID.
He flipped open the clamshell. “Sarah, hello?”
White silence. The kind from a long-distance call.
And then . . .
“Hello, Daddy.”
“Oh my God, where are you?”
“Are you coming?” she asked.
“Yes, yes. Tell me where you’re at!”
“I want to go home, Daddy. I’m going home.”
Steve nodded. “Okay. You wait for us there, all right?”
“All right,” Sarah said. She really did sound like her mom.
“And no more Tethers!” Steve said. “Or you’re grounded!”
JJ erupted into laughter and sobs, a warm shuddering bundle against Steve’s side. Steve sobbed and laughed too, surprised. For the first time in five years, smiling at his son, warming palms with Mary McPhail and listening to everyone cry with joy and sorrow, the grief of losing Janice was gone.
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