2012 (14 page)

He never passed Dennis Farm, but he’d been looking for it. Never saw a trace of it, must have been too far east of it, he figured.

He walked for half an hour, finally crossing the last field and climbing a final fence. Then he was in a backyard. He went down the driveway beside the house and into the dead-empty streets. A flicker of curtain in this house or that was the only indication of life here.

He was passing the bank when a familiar car pulled alongside him.

“Bobby!”

Bobby just looked up at him. His eyes were strange, and for a moment Martin had a horrible thought. “Bobby?”

“Yeah?”

“Your family okay?”

He stopped his car.

Jesus, his family had gotten it in the night. “Oh, buddy, did you lose ‘em?”

He shook his head.

“Bobby, what’s the matter?”

He held out a flyer. Martin took it. He was astonished to find himself staring at his own face. “This man is wanted dead. Name: Martin Trevor Winters. Last seen in the area of Lautner County, Kansas. This man is extremely dangerous, and carries a bounty of ten million dollars, upon satisfactory proof of death being provided.”

Martin looked at Bobby, met his eyes, saw them flicker away. His face said it clearly: this was not a joke. “Homeland Security dropped them about half an hour ago.”

“But I-there must be some mistake!”

“Buddy, you know I love you. But I got this job, here, and half the town, they are looking for your blood.”

“But what did I do? Why has this happened?”

“It doesn’t say what you did, but we all know you were over there in Egypt when the pyramid went, and it must have something to do with that, which is why I’m arresting you, buddy.”

“Bobby?”

“I’m not gonna read you your rights. Because it’s a patriot arrest, you don’t have any rights.”

“Bobby, hey!”

But Bobby cuffed him and took him off to the sheriff’s substation, and put him in the one cell, which had been cleaned of file boxes for the occasion. He drove through town telling them that Martin had been caught, and they had to meet at First Christ to vote on what to do with him.

SEVEN

DECEMBER 4 

THE TRAP

WILEY STARED AT THE WORDS on his computer screen. This damn nightmare was way out of control.

He’d come back from the shrink determined to just erase the whole thing, but he hadn’t done it, and now look what had happened, it had gotten so much worse so fast. Winnie was probably dead and Trevor-God knew what had happened to him, and look at poor Martin. He was going to be killed by his friends.

But it wasn’t only what was happening to this one little family, it was the whole vast scope of the thing, an entire world being destroyed.

That bastard Samson was part of it. Al North was right, he was a traitor. But the fool hadn’t shot him. Stupid fool. Nice guys sure as hell finish last, General North.

Wylie had CNN on continuously now, waiting for any sign of anything odd happening at any sacred site in his own world.

So far, this dear old place was quiet. But would it be forever? They knew we were here, or we wouldn’t see UFOs. They just needed one more little push, he suspected, and they’d be in. Let NASA announce that UFOs were real. Let the Air Force admit that it couldn’t explain some sighting or other-and bang, here come the lenses, dark goddamn things blowing the same fourteen sacred sites to hell here as they did in the two-moon world.

When he wasn’t writing, he did research and he thought. He thought about the number fourteen. It was the Osiris number, the Jesus number, the resurrection number. Seven was a complete octave and a complete life. Fourteen was a life and a life beyond. It was the number of the goal of man, which was the projection of human consciousness into eternity. Osiris had been cut into fourteen pieces. The passion of Christ had fourteen stations.

Destroy the man, build the man.

Might that be true, also, of whole worlds?

He sighed, blew air out. Was he tired? He was beyond tired. More exhausted than he’d thought it was possible to be.

He did not think he could imagine what the suffering going on Martin’s world was like. By now, every single human being on the planet who was not himself a wanderer had lost at least one loved one. The sheer scale of it was beyond imagination. Appalling.

What could he write about it? That it brought tears to his eyes, made his mouth dry, made his stomach fill with fire?

Describing this was beyond even a great novelist’s skill, and certainly beyond his.

Fourteen. He kept going back to it. The fourteen sacred places were there to enable us to recover the knowledge that made man immortal. Giza, Tassili, Ollantaytambo, all the way around to Easter Island, Sukothai, Persepolis and Petra-to enable us to recover the knowledge, and also to protect us from our ignorance.

In Martin’s world, they had failed. Too late-just. He had been close, but not close enough, not in time. That was why Samson was after him. The knowledge he possessed was still dangerous.

It was evening now, on this earth, on Martin’s earth, presumably on all the earths in all the universes that filled the unimaginable firmament-including the world of the reptilians.

He’d never seen it. Glimpsed it, perhaps, down in the draw that night-felt the delicate hands of the monsters, felt them raping him.

He thought he knew why it had been done. They needed a communicator to spread belief in them. Problem was, they chose the wrong guy. They needed a Nobel prize winner or a great political leader, not a horror novelist.

Too bad, suckas!

Voices shrill with excitement reassured him that all was still well, at least in his neck of the woods. Nick and Kelsey were playing normally outside. Brooke was downstairs making one of her stunning pot roasts.

The kids sounded very happy together, and that was not always the case. Even though she was eight and he thirteen, there was still plenty of sibling rivalry to cut through.

In another year, Nick probably wouldn’t be willing to run around like that with his little sister, but he was having old-fashioned childhood fun now, oblivious for once to the fact that he would soon, at thirteen, no longer be a child.

It was a dark afternoon, with some heavy fall weather on its way in from the northwest. Typical Kansas, a little late for the season was all. He glanced at his weather radio. The light glowed green, meaning that it was on and hadn’t picked up any alerts.

Still, blue flickering came from the sky, and thunder rolled in from far away. The storms were still the other side of Holcomb, maybe fifty miles out. Probably they’d arrive during the night.

He didn’t like storms. He feared that the disks might come, might be hiding in them.

But no, the lenses were the anchors. Hooks in the gills of the fish, as it were. And there were no lenses here. He kept telling himself that.

Then he would think, what if there were just one or two? Tassili was in the middle of the desert. Nazca was isolated; so were a number of the other sites. Most of them. They had been created so long ago that they were all centered on a north pole from God only knew how far back in the past.

He wanted a drink so badly that he dared not open the liquor drawer. No way.

He stared at his words on the screen. Lindy and Winnie destroyed, Trevor gone, Martin about to be locked up…which he could still see taking place. Even though he had stopped writing, the story still unfolded in the bright hell of his mind. In it, Martin was watching his old friend lock the cell door, and Bobby had tears in his eyes as he did it.

No, this was too much, this had to go, and now was the time.

He selected the chapter and erased it-and wow, there were some blood, sweat, and tears down the drain. So okay, that was done and it should be done. He’d rewrite it with a more bearable scenario.

The blank page confronted him, and he told himself that he actually preferred blank pages.

Bullshit, this was awful, killing his work like this. But he had to, he could not see his people suffer this much.

So he started a new chapter. Then he stopped. He didn’t feel like just plunging into it like this, and he was sick of using the laptop, which he closed. Writing on the computer was an addiction, and he already had too damn many of those, drinking the way he did and sneaking cigars, and wanting to do a lot more than that.

He put his beloved old Corona back in her place of honor. Now, this was a writer’s tool. She clattered like an old freight train, churning out the words, engraving every mistake in stone. Everything he had done-everything real-had been done on this fine old typewriter. Early days, he would lie in bed writing through the night on yellow pads, then transcribe them onto her in the morning. Civilized way to work.

As he rolled in a sheet of paper, he noticed that the laptop hadn’t gone off as he closed it. A defect due to the short, no doubt.

Intending to shut it down manually, he opened the clamshell.

There were words. He scrolled down. It was all there, right up to-here. He typed. These words appeared on the page. He erased them. As he did so, they reappeared. He did it faster, but the faster he worked, the faster they came back.

Okay, this appeared to be insanity at work here. This could not be. He erased the chapter again.

The process sort of made the words bounce, then they were back. He erased it again, then yet again and again, until erasure did nothing at all. Not even a flicker.

All right, this was crazy. This was not a possible thing.

He closed 2012. Time to go nuclear. On his computer, he had a program called Zztz, which would destroy any file completely. It used the same sophisticated techniques approved by the Defense Department for the destruction of classified files.

He opened Zztz and dragged the entire 2012 file into it.

“Neutron bomb,” he muttered, setting Zztz to Defcon 12, its ultimate destruction level.

So, he’d write another novel, big deal. Late or not, he’d come up with something.

Even as he watched Zztz work, the file came back. He destroyed it again. It came back again.

There was no level in the program higher than Defcon 12. But there was one other way to go about this. He went into the DOS prompt and typed “erase
.
”

By the time he was back in Windows, it had all returned.

He stared at the screen. This was proof of something, because if you can’t make the erase function on your computer work, things are crazy.

“Brooke,” he called.

From their kitchen, “Yeah!”

“Could you come up to my office for a second. It’s important.”

“Wiley, I’ve got a million balls in the air.”

“Brooke, please!”

“In a minute!”

He found himself shaking, feeling the clammy coldness of fever or fear. Because this was proof, right here staring at him, that all these nightmares and all this craziness had something real about it. It was exactly as real as he had feared.

He jumped up and got out of the office like the place was on fire. He ran downstairs and threw his arms around Brooke. He kissed her forehead, her lips, her neck.

“Hey! I’m cuttin’ up a stew, here, fella.”

“Never leave me, for the love of God, never leave me!”

He took her in his arms, and this time he kissed her hard, pushing her head back, pulling her body to his until she was collapsed against him, her breasts compressed against his chest, their genitals pressing through their clothes.

When he let her go, her eyes were soft with pleasure. “We’re gonna have a long night, I hope.”

“I’m gonna break you in half, you gorgeous thing.” Then all of his fear surfaced, and he held onto her as he might to a life preserver in the wild ocean. “I love you with all my soul,” he whispered, his voice hushed in his truth.

Probably she didn’t quite understand what had inspired this, but she didn’t need to, the intensity and the honesty were there. She stroked his head, and her hand against his advancing baldness felt as soft as the wings of a butterfly. He remembered the yellow porch lights of his boyhood, and the moths there, their fluttering the only sound in the quiet of a summer night.

Thunder rumbled, long and low. It was accompanied by a distant flicker of lightning-and he reacted with a surge of terror so great that he all but pissed himself. He raced into the living room, cutting off lights as he went. The sky was alive with flickering.

He went out onto the porch, looked up into roiling high canyons of madly flickering clouds. And then at his kids running around in the eerie light.

“Kids, come inside, please.”

“Aw, Dad.”

“It’s lightning, it’s dangerous.”

They continued to play.

“What’s going on?” Brooke asked.

“Look at the sky!”

“Yeah, so what?”

“You don’t understand!”

“Honey, it’s miles away, you can hardly even hear it. Let them play.”

“No, please, for me. Because I’m so scared for them, Brooke. I am scared for my kids and you need to help me.”

“I think Crutchfield needs to help you.”

“Okay, look, if you would deign to come upstairs for just a few minutes, I can prove to you that something is wrong around here. Very wrong.”

She followed him.

“Okay, now. I erased Chapter 7 of my book just now. And it reappeared. Then I erased the entire book. And it reappeared.”

“You erased your book?”

“Absolutely. From the DOS prompt. Absolute erasure.”

“Goddamn it, we need that money.”

“We need-I don’t know what we need, here, exactly, but I do know that these people on the other side, they’re having a hell of a bad time, and if I can erase this and rewrite it, maybe things will get better for them, and maybe for us, too, because there is a nightmare over there, and it is about to invade us, too.”

She sat down at his desk. “Oh, this is nonsense. Here’s your book right here.”

“Erase it.”

“I will not!”

“Okay, then, watch this-” He moved in front of her-and she grabbed his wrist. Her grip was strong, shockingly so.

“You will not, Wiley Dale. You will finish this and turn it in or you will lose me and your children.”