“It’s all about the rock. They think we’re going to become mutants,” Simone said. Then, slowly, dreamily, as if marveling at the craziness of the words she was uttering, Simone said, “They’re going to kill us. Dad? I think they’re going to kill us.”
CHAPTER 6
Inside the Kaleidoscope
MALIK WAS SCARED. Good and scared. He was in a place impossible for his mind to understand or explain. It was in some sense like being buried inside a fantastic junkyard. All around him were things that should have been connected, should have been part of some recognizable structure, but all rationality was subverted. He could make out lengths of structural steel, big I-beams, but they hung in midair, attached to nothing . . . unless he changed the angle of view, in which case, like glass beads in a kaleidoscope, objects moved, touched, intersected, or alternately separated, even disappeared entirely.
Who needs hallucinogens when you can travel in n-dimensional space?
Malik was fairly sure that everything around him was part of the casino or the people in the casino and hotel—at least he hoped so. But he caught glimpses of things that he could not rationalize as being any part of 3-D space: at certain angles he thought he saw a sort of faint web, like one of those orange plastic fences they put up around construction sites, but more pink than orange. He thought more than once that he saw a solid object become fluid. He saw tendrils, like a squid’s legs, dangling and withdrawn, curled up like a measuring tape only to disappear, so that he wasn’t at all sure they were real and not figments.
Malik knew that the apparent randomness of everything around him was a problem inside his own head. He was a man of three spatial dimensions, up and down, left and right, forward and back. He was now in four—well, who knew how many—dimensional space, a place where there was at least one more “direction” that was none of the usual three. His eyes were eyes evolved for three dimensions; his brain was a brain that could not really even picture extra dimensions. What he was seeing around him was his brain’s futile effort to make sense of what it could never hope to understand.
I’m an ant walking across a computer motherboard.
The worst came when he saw parts of himself seeming to stand apart. He saw inside his body, saw the burns, the exposed bone, saw through the superficial normality of the morph he was doomed to remain in. He saw his organs, his liver seething with blood. He saw his intestines slowly pulsating with chewed food, but at the same time saw startling glimpses of that very food in its original, intact form. A bagel. Fried eggs that were simultaneously in and out of their shells. He saw the inside of his own brain, a pink cauliflower in a bone cage. Tendrils of light seemed to reach out from his brain, twisting and poking, turning objects this way and that.
I’m seeing my own consciousness!
He cried out in shock when his own eyes floated before him, staring at him, meeting his own gaze before erupting like a stop-motion video of a flower blossoming. He peered closer and he saw his own iris contract, saw the thousands of muscle fibers straining and releasing.
It was literally sickening, and he might or might not have vomited; it was impossible to be sure.
I have no way out of here.
Panic swelled, and he could see it as a wave of swirling blue crystals that followed his arteries—arteries which, if he looked at them from the wrong angle, would separate, become sections of tubing, with blood seeming to cross from piece to piece.
Sensory overload.
He tried shutting his eyes again and even put his hands over his eyes, but even his hands were no more an impediment than a dirty windshield.
“Am I going to die here?” He spoke the words aloud, but the sound was distorted, alien, not human.
Why had he not snapped back to reality? Francis had moved him into this dimension, and he had assumed that only her power was keeping him here. But that wasn’t the way it was working. Her power was the ability to cross the line between there and here, and once he was across that dimensional line, he had no power to escape.
The amoeba he’d seen earlier, the amoeba that had panicked him, had not returned. But then again, he had not tried finding that . . . what to call it? Direction? If it was a direction, it was one that was neither up, down, left, or right.
Try again.
He focused his thoughts and actually saw a swirl of yellow paisley rise from a brain that had been exploded into separate gobbets of flesh awash in a pool of cerebral fluid.
There!
The instant he focused on the hole, an amoeba came rushing at him, and just like before wrapped itself around his head. But this time he did not panic, but tried to will himself toward that hole.
The amoeba evaporated, and Malik reassured himself that he had passed the defensive system. He felt himself moving toward the hole, which seemed to recede as he approached, growing ever so slightly larger, far too slowly, as if it was moving away almost as quickly as he advanced.
Suddenly there was another organism, a mass of organs and bits of bone, and things he did not even want to guess at. He stopped moving and began to pull back, but then, a slight shift of perspective, and he saw a face.
“Francis?”
Her answer was not a sound but a color. A color never represented in even the biggest Crayola box. He knew nevertheless that it was an affirmative.
She reached with a bony claw wreathed in pulsing veins. He held out his own hand, a hand as deconstructed as hers.
And all at once the two of them were back in the bedroom. In three-dimensional space.
For what felt like a very long time Malik just stood there trembling, breathing hard, looking at Francis. The rainbow effect in her eyes faded and disappeared. Solid objects were solid again, their insides hidden from view.
“Are you okay?” Francis asked, and Malik realized it was for the third time.
“I think so,” Malik said in a harsh whisper. Then, “Wow.”
“I’m really sorry I let go of you,” Francis said. “You must have been scared.”
“Scared? I was terrified,” Malik admitted. “It’s . . . I don’t even know how to make sense of it.”
“Yeah, it’s weird, huh?” Francis said.
“You have a gift for understatement. There are people who spend a lot of money on drugs and never see anything one-tenth as weird.”
“Did you find what you were after?”
Malik considered. “Maybe,” he allowed. “You know what didn’t happen? I did not feel the Dark Watchers. Just like you don’t. Whatever they are, the effect—the Watcher effect—is something in three dimensions that is gone or transformed in n-space.”
Francis nodded politely, but Malik was pretty sure that she was not interested in the physics of it all, let alone the metaphysics. To Francis, it was a trick she could do. It was a power. But she didn’t grasp just how great a power it was.
“They have defenses, those things, those amoeba-looking things,” Malik said. “But I think that’s sort of an automated system, and not very effective. I would guess they are system cleaners, subroutines designed to redirect any random bit of data that takes the wrong turn. But I’m not some random databit, I’m a whole system.”
“So, no more of that, huh?” Francis said, already losing interest and edging toward the door.
“Well, not today, anyway. It’s very . . . unsettling.”
But did he intend to go back to find out what was through that blank hole of nothingness? To seek out whoever was behind this deconstruction of reality? To confront whoever or whatever was screwing with the software of the universe to allow the growth of monsters and destroy human civilization?
Hell yes, I’m going back.
But he wisely said none of that, and instead said, “Shall we go find the others, see what they’re up to?”
CHAPTER 7
Malmedy in the Pine Barrens
“DAD. THEY’RE GOING to kill us.”
“Now you’re being paranoid,” Markovic said. “They’re probably goi
ng to put us in a hotel for the night.”
Simone hoped he was right. She tried to push away a growing panic as they were moved by rows to a side door and marched down a hallway. A National Guard private stood there handing out bottles of water and granola bars, smiling, looking normal and sympathetic. It should have calmed Simone’s nerves, but she kept hearing echoes of books she’d read, books about the Holocaust. The Nazis had lulled Jews into a false sense of security as they were sent to die in showers spewing nerve gas.
In the crush of bodies, she was separated from her father. As they reached cold night air, she was stopped from catching up to him and saw her father loaded onto a bus by armed men in black tactical gear bearing no identification patches or badges.
Simone looked desperately for an escape, but there was none. They were in an alleyway loading bay, soldiers to both sides. She in her turn was herded aboard a bus, a borrowed yellow bus with the words “New York School Bus Service” in blue script down the side.
Simone was seated with a woman who, like everyone on the bus, bore the telltale bloody bandages.
“I heard we’re going to a Motel 6.”
“Yeah? My dad seems to think they’ll take us to a suite at the Four Seasons.”
Peering ahead, Simone could see her father’s bus ahead of them, led through panic traffic by black SUVs with lights and sirens going.
They dipped down into the luridly lit Lincoln Tunnel, heading toward New Jersey, and Simone felt the anxiety on the bus grow. As the ride went on and on, complaints grew louder, and demands for a bathroom stop intensified.
They were far from the city now, far from any city. They had left the interstate, and pine trees crowded the road on both sides, interrupted by stretches of marsh.
“The Pine Barrens,” a voice whispered.
Then Simone saw the lead bus slow and turn onto a narrow, pockmarked and unpaved road that dived straight into the woods.
“They’re going to kill us,” Simone whispered. It might have been paranoia earlier, but now she could see it about to play out. It made sense to kill them all; that’s what she’d seen back at Carnegie Hall, that the cold logic of the situation would lead the government to snuff them out fast, before any of them could become a serious problem. Now it was no longer theoretical. There was no other explanation.
“They’re going to kill us!” Simone yelled, standing up. Her seat partner gaped at her in disbelief.
The armed guards—one at the front, one at the back—both bristled and brought their weapons to bear on her. For a moment Simone was too appalled to react: they were pointing guns at her. At her!
“Sit down, please,” the guard at the front said. “We’re just taking a bathroom stop at a park restroom facility.”
That calmed most, and Simone heard nervous relief laughter, but she felt in her bones that it was a lie. What was she going to do? What could she do?
She sat back down, hands twisting on her lap, and tried to hold her head still so as not to restart the headache that was receding at last, replaced on her list of physical woes by the fiery, insistent itching of her many puncture wounds.
Ahead the bus pulled into a clearing, silvery and vague in the faint starlight, eerily bright where the headlights illuminated grass and mud. There were some picnic tables that looked as if they’d never been used, and, sure enough, there was a wooden building marked with bathroom signs. Simone felt the collective sigh of those around her, saw their scornful looks at her, the girl who had panicked and started yelling about being killed, ha, ha, ha.
“Okay, we are taking a break,” the guard announced. “Everyone off, and line up. We’ll bring you up in groups of six to use the restroom.”
Simone, abashed but not reassured, filed off the bus with the others and headed toward the restrooms. But a man in black tactical gear with a balaclava covering his face held up a hand and pointed them to a space yards away. “Line up there. Three rows.”
Then Simone saw the camouflage-painted military truck parked beside the clearing, a dark green canvas cover over the back.
Simone tried to make her way to her father, but here there were still more men and women in black tactical gear holding assault rifles, insisting that everyone line up.
“Line up! Line up!” an authoritative voice shouted. They did. They lined up. Three rows of about thirty people per row.
And that’s when the canvas cover of the army truck was raised.
Simone stared at the perforated black tube of a machine gun’s barrel.
“No!” she screamed. “No! No!”
The machine gun opened fire, spitting tracer rounds that flew like rocket-powered fireflies in the darkness.
Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap!
Screams. Screams from everywhere, including from Simone’s own throat.
Simone turned and ran in blind panic—no reasoning, no plan, just run from the machine gun! Run! Something punched her hard in the back and she fell on her face, hands sinking into soft, wet soil. She heard her own voice whimpering. She tasted mud.
The machine gun roared on, relentless, the well-oiled steel parts pushing rounds out of the belt, striking the percussion caps, exploding the gunpowder, propelling the thumbtip-sized slugs down the rifle barrel, then kicking out the used brass casing and pushing the next round into place, many times each second. Tracer rounds flitted inches above her back, so close she could feel the breeze.
Screams of terror came from all sides, screams and cries and pitiful demands to know, “Why? Why?” and the grunts of those who were beyond words and would soon be beyond all pain.
The machine gun stopped, and the still-living who could move ran or crawled. But now the black-clad guards, faces behind balaclavas, began shooting, a higher-pitched sound of assault rifles. Simone raised her head and saw a child shot in the back. His mother screamed and crawled to him and was shot in the neck.
A man fell on Simone, a big man, his weight so still, so inert she knew he must be dead. She felt his blood trickling down on the back of her neck. She smelled the stink of his voided bowels.
The machine gun, reloaded, started up again, sweeping the field, punching holes into the still-living and the already-dead. Simone felt the impact as bullets struck the dead man over her. Bullets that would have struck her, would have torn holes through her, but for the shelter the dead man provided.
Her terrified, panicky brain told her she was wounded, too, that the sudden blow to her back, the blow that had knocked her down, had come from the machine gun. But she felt no pain and suspected she’d simply been knocked down by another victim. Some person whose name she would never know had taken the bullet with her name on it.
The machine gun stopped again. Sudden silence. Then the sound of a woman weeping and seconds later a cry for mercy and two rounds of assault rifle fire and the cry stopped abruptly. Simone opened one eye narrowly, a sideways view that revealed men in black walking like wraiths through the steam rising from bloody corpses, shooting everyone, living or dead, two rounds in the head.
Bang! Bang!
If she waited, she would die.
She tried to move, but the dead man’s weight was too great to free herself from. She had a sudden flash of the last Lord of the Rings movie, of King Théoden lying broken on the battlefield, trapped beneath his dead horse, saying, My body is broken.
Bang! Bang!
Helpless. She was helpless, and for a moment despair offered her an easy way out. Simply wait for death. Just lie there beneath a dead man and wait for the bang . . . bang. She would only hear the first shot. Maybe not even that. And all the fear and fury would be gone.
But despair had not won out yet; rather, the temptation of surrender poured fuel on the fire of her anger. How dare they do this? How dare they simply murder people this way? Her father might already be dead. Why? It wasn’t her fault or her father’s or the fault of any of these people, these poor, massacred people.
She struggled again to free herself and this time drew the att
ention of a man in black, who looked at her from a hundred feet away and said, “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll get to you.”
Nonchalant. Like mass murder was a daily affair for him. Like her life was nothing.
She felt a sick, acid bile in her throat, felt her whole body tingling, still racked by pain, but this was something else, something different. Rage filled her, rage and impotence, a burning sense of injustice and of her own weakness.
Then the dead man rolled aside.
He had rolled aside because suddenly Simone was on her hands and knees and had shrugged him off. Impossible just seconds earlier; the man weighed twice what she did. Impossible!
The man in black who’d noticed her yelled over his shoulder, “Live one here!” He came striding toward her, fast, weapon at his shoulder, leveled on her.
At nearly point-blank range, he fired!
Simone saw him fire. Saw the muzzle flash. Heard the loud popping noises.
Saw it and heard it . . . from about fifty feet in the air.
“Shit!” the killer yelled, and raised his weapon to aim up at her. He fired and missed again, because now Simone was higher still, and moving through the air with no more difficulty than a trout in a mountain stream.
Tracer bullets from a half dozen guns chased her through the sky, like something from an old World War II movie where she was the brave fighter pilot. She was not fast enough to outrun bullets, but she was too fast for them to be able to keep sight of her in the deepening darkness.
The army truck switched on a small spotlight. Its beam swept around the sky, searching, but too slowly, like someone trying to spear a cockroach with a chopstick—it followed her but had no chance of catching up and keeping her illuminated.
Simone found she had only to think of moving, and she did. No time yet to ask what had happened to her, and no need to ask how: even in her frazzled, freaked-out state, she knew it was the rock. Dozens of particles no bigger than a grain of sand had pierced her. Had they been larger they might still have been moving at twenty-eight thousand miles an hour and blown right through her, like gamma rays, but small particles traveling through air are slowed by friction. So the rock had not simply blown through her; it had stayed within her. Like buckshot.
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