2012 (13 page)

He drove on, searching blindly, trying his best to stay on course.

It was some moments after he’d seen the glow on the horizon that he realized that it meant headlights in the distance. He stopped the jeep, got out, and clambered up on the roof. About two miles ahead, there was a slowly moving cluster of lights-the cars and trucks of followers. Couldn’t be from Holcomb, they had all been disensouled. So that had to be the Harrow contingent.

Lindy was out there somewhere, his Lindy and his Winnie and maybe Trevor. He looked up into the black sky and wondered if those were dead bodies out there, and if his family’s souls had gone somewhere better. Oh God, please help them. Help me help them, God. If only you’re there, we need you. We need you.

He got down and drove ahead, keeping his own lights off so he could see the caravan. He closed quickly. They weren’t going fast, obviously. Soon, he was in among them, about five vehicles. It had been more. The wanderers had lost many followers.

“Hey, bone collector,” a woman’s voice yelled.

“Helen!”

She leaned out the back of the Turpins’ mangled Buick. “Got supplies?”

“I got ‘em!”

“My Reg likes Oreos, you got Oreos?”

“I’ve got some Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie mix.”

“Well, hell, I’ll try it on ‘im. I think he sorta recognized John Twenty-four by the way, so I’m lookin’ for a comeback.”

“You folks seen Lindy?”

Another voice called, “Sure thing, Martin. We fed your family twice. Your girl’s happy when she gets soy milk.” That was right, oh God, that was Winnie’s favorite.

He scoured the backs that were visible in the car lights, but there were so many of them, it wasn’t a small crowd, it was enormous, it stretched on and on.

He stopped and got out. He grabbed soy milk and orange juice, they would need strength and fluids, they would be in shock and they’d been walking continuously now for close to twenty hours.

“Be careful, there,” a voice said as he sprinted among the vehicles, then out into the darker crowd of wanderers. “Winnie,” he called, “Soy milk, soy milk! Trevor Winters, Dad’s here, Dad’s got cranapple.”

Then he saw a back, familiar hair. He doubled his speed, pushing past people who were breathing hard, who were staggering. What was going to happen, would they be walked to death? Why not kill them outright and save everybody this terrible, terrible suffering?

“Lindy! LINDY!”

A head turned, and he found himself looking into the empty grin of Beryl Walsh, the local bank manager. He went on. “Lindy! Trevor! Winnie!”

There was her hair again, and this time he was sure. “Oh, Lindy, hey, hey, it’s me, babes, I’m gonna take you home, I’ve got the truck, I’m gonna take you guys home!”

He came up beside her, and it was definitely Lindy of the green eyes and the straight, proud nose, Lindy of the bobbing blond hair. “Oh baby, I got you. Thank the Lord.” He looked around. “Where are the kids? Winnie? Where’s Winnie?”

Not a glance, not a word. He sprinted in front of her, walked backward as he talked. “The kids, Lindy, where are the kids?”

She came straight on, her face expressionless. Unlike some of them, she didn’t even have a smile left in her. She strode like a Valkyrie, though, a powerful, healthy woman…whom, he thought, was going to make an excellent slave.

Would they be taken to another world, like the slavers took people from Africa? How similar that must have felt to this, to the people who watched the ships sail away. It had been history to him before, but those millions of lost families were now part of his heart.

And he thought, the Nephilim, those strange rapists mentioned in Genesis, called the fallen ones, they had enslaved us before biblical times, had they not? Enslaved us, and then gone. Mysteriously.

In recent years, as his data piled up, he had become more and more willing to entertain the notion that there might have been some sort of human-alien interaction in the distant past, which had led to the catastrophe of 12,000 B.C., when the makers of the great stone monuments had abruptly vanished.

Had it been a war? Had it been, perhaps, something like this? And therefore were these people going to some far place destined to suffer a fate that maybe not even God could know?

Then, a miracle. He saw Winnie. She was trundling along, she had a bit of a limp. He ran to her, swept her up in his arms, cried out, buried his face in her little-girl sweetness-and then realized that her legs were still moving. She was still walking, in fact, she hadn’t stopped walking even when she was picked up.

Pointing her back toward the car, he put her down. She took a few steps, then, as if she was controlled by some sort of inner gyroscope, she turned abruptly and continued on with the others. He hurried along beside her. “I’ve got some soy milk for you, honey,” he said. He fumbled in his pocket for a box of it and held it out to her. She took it and drank it down. “Thank you, baby,” he found himself saying, “thank you.” Then he cried out, “Trevor! Trevor Winters! Dad’s here, I’ve got cranapple. Dad has cranapple.” His throat constricted and he had to stop. He controlled his emotions, fought them back, and kept on. “Trevor Winters, Trevor Winters.”

He moved back and forth in the crowd, and suddenly there was a light in his eyes. “Martin! Hey, buddy!”

“Uh-you’re-“

“George Matthews, I’m that damn plumber.”

“Oh, George, for the love a-yeah!”

“You’re looking for Trevor?”

“Yeah, actually. I got Winnie to drink some soy milk.”

“That ain’t Winnie anymore, and Trevor’s not here.”

“Not here?”

“Nah, Trevor’s not wandering.”

He grabbed the man’s shoulder. “George! George, are you sure!”

“There’s something else going on. There’s kids gone.”

“Are they-are they okay, George?”

He could feel George’s eyes on him. “Dunno. But my girl’s one of ‘em. Wife’s out here.”

“And you’re sure they’re not-Trevor is definitely not here? You’re certain of it?”

“Not certain of anything in this world, bro, but I’ve been out here all day with my Molly, and I’ve seen Winnie and Lindy plenty, but not him, and I did see him-you know, after the church-and he was going out toward the Smokes with my daughter and some of the middle-schoolers. He wasn’t wandering, Martin.”

Martin turned around with the intention of going back to the house immediately-and it was then that he saw the thick column of light drop down like some kind of bright shroud on the cars of the followers.

“Oh my God,” he said.

George turned, too, and saw it. “God almighty.” He began to run, loping ahead to the wanderers, who continued on at their steady and oblivious pace. Martin’s first impulse was to follow him, but a golden shaft came down, razor-thin and quick, and George sparkled for a moment, and then dropped back, joining his pace to that of the other wanderers.

It had been that quick. Martin forced himself not to run, he forced himself to fall in with the wanderers, to pretend to be one of them. As he had on many a hike, he walked beside his wife. The screaming behind him told him that the light was doing all the followers. Their compassion and their love had been used to trap them.

Then he saw little Winnie fall and cry out, and his whole heart and soul longed to help his child, but he kept on walking.

The wanderers never slowed their pace, but every so often, he saw one or another of them fall down. The others simply walked over them.

It was a brutal-and brutally efficient-selection process, he thought. Only the strong would make it, and only the strong, obviously, would be wanted. Overhead, he once again heard the whoosh, whoosh of…something. Could it be that a big old barn owl was shadowing them? But the owl’s wing is silent.

Ahead and to his left there was leaping movement. A voice rose in a frantic salad of words, babbling and shrieking, then going silent. He looked neither left nor right, but kept on, leaving the struggle behind him. Soon the voice was silent, replaced by that odd, mechanical chuckling he’d heard in the woods around his house. Eventually, the sounds faded.

He was aware that Lindy was just beyond his touch, and that Winnie maybe had fallen aside. He forgot all his careful intellectualizations about God and prayed the Jesus Prayer over and over again, the prayer out of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which had been a favorite of Lindy’s. It was the repetitive prayer from The Way of the Pilgrim, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

As the stars wheeled in their generous majesty, Martin walked to the rhythm set by repetitions. From time to time the light dropped down on another follower it had discovered in the mass of wanderers, and ripped out a soul.

The rhythm made it easier for him, but by the time two hours had passed, he knew that he could not keep up with the pace of the wanderers much longer. He was contemplating this danger, letting the prayer drop into the back of his mind, when he heard a distant voice. It had an echoing, mechanical quality to it. He listened-and then, incredibly, saw its source. A police car stood on a roadside ahead, it’s light bar flashing. Beside it stood a state policeman with an electronic bullhorn. He raised it to his lips and blared, “You are trespassing on a wildlife preservation zone. You are required to leave this area immediately. Please come up to the roadway, ladies and gentlemen. You are trespassing-“

A tongue of light snicked down out of the clouds and there appeared around him the loveliest spreading glitter of little stars that Martin had ever seen. From this distance, you could see exactly how the light made the soul literally burst out of the body. He thought that a human soul was truly a universe all its own, as the stars that had been that man’s memories, dreams, and hopes flittered into oblivion. The trooper dropped his bullhorn and turned northwest.

Martin had reached a point of crisis. He had to stop. No choice. Already, he was visibly dropping back, he couldn’t help it. “Good-bye, Lindy,” he said in his heart, “good-bye my love, and good-bye Lindy’s soul, wherever you are, and god rest you, my baby Winnie, my poor little girl never even had a life.” Then he let himself fall forward like an exhausted wanderer. He did not close his eyes, but rather continued staring straight down at the ground.

Soon, the last of the wanderers had passed him by. He heard the intimate whistle of a night bird. Then something else-that chuckling again. It was close, and there was a lot of it. Now he thought it was like a flock of geese in flight, honking back and forth to one another as they ploughed the sky.

The aliens. That must be it. This sound represented the elusive aliens, coming along behind their human herd. Drovers. Cowboys.

Then something stepped on his back. It was heavy, and it had a sharpness that penetrated his jeans and entered his thigh. He had to force himself not to move as this sharpness very painfully twisted inside his flaring muscle.

Then it was gone, and he could just glimpse what looked like the leg of an insect touching the ground beside his face, then another, and then the chuckling had gone on ahead, and with it the faint whooshing and whistling in the sky.

Then he knew that there was light all around him. He felt the most incredible rage at his defeat, and then waited to feel the light, to know what it was like to lose your soul. Did you go with it, or stay in your body-or, as he thought-just disappear?

But then there was something in his ear. Snuffling. And an odor, a familiar one. He opened his eyes, turned his head, and found himself face to face with a very large skunk.

As the tail rose, he rolled, then jumped up and ran like hell, and the skunk ran, too, wobbling off into the light, which was not the light of death, but that of dawn.

He stood up in the sunlight. It was golden, low still on the horizon, but so pure that it must be as sacred as the old Egyptians had thought, and he turned toward it and knelt as he might to God.

Then he went back along the long series of low folds in the land, heading toward his truck, hoping to find Winnie’s body somewhere, a little snatch of clothes somewhere in the prairie.

But he found an adult instead, blood-soaked, dead. This was no fallen wanderer, this person had been done violence. He looked down. The school jacket, the smoothness of the backs of the hands-this was just a kid. He turned him over, and leaped back when he realized what he was seeing, and when he fully realized it, screamed.

Instantly, he stifled it. The light did not come during the day, apparently being rendered ineffective by the sun, but there had been other things out there and he wasn’t so sure that they were particularly nocturnal.

He thought that this pitiful ruin must have been a boy. He was, at most, fifteen or sixteen, and he had been horrifically mutilated. His lips were gone, his mouth open and his tongue removed. His eyes had been gouged out, and his lower body was bloody. Martin didn’t examine him too closely, but it looked as if he had been castrated, too.

He forced himself to open the shirt, to look for the familiar mole that would mean he had found his son.

The cool gray skin was unblemished.

Martin stood up and ran a short distance, then came back and picked the poor kid up, and carried him in his arms. He carried him across a field and into an empty farmyard, and put him down in a porch swing.

“Hey! Anybody home? Hey!”

Not a sound. He went inside and found eggs in the fridge, and cracked six of them raw into his mouth. He also ate cheese and crunched into a head of lettuce. He drank warm grapefruit juice that nearly made him puke.

Then he went on, walking until the sun was high and warm, and the gladness that it brings even to the most oppressed human heart made him close his eyes and lift his face to it. “Lucky old sun,” he said.

Whereupon he found his truck…which he had left running. He jumped in and pulled the key out.

He’d damn well burned out all his gas, damned fool that he was. Fool!

Well, not quite all. There was a hairline between the edge of the gauge and the red line, so there was still a mile or so in it.

He walked back to the farm, but this was a hobby place, there was no gas tank here. Returning to the jeep, he got in and started it. He headed back toward Harrow, and had the town in sight when he ran out of gas.