2012 (19 page)

“You say he was a person? Like us kinda person?”

“He looked like a kid. Nick’s age, twelve, thirteen.”

“So it was a townie? Or someone looking for Nick? Some friend of his, maybe.”

“No. This kid, he steps back, he looks at the house, he peers in windows.”

None of the town kids would do that. There were only maybe a hundred twelve-year-olds in the whole community, and Wylie knew them all. “No kid from around here, then,” he said.

“Absolutely not. He looked-I don’t know, Wylie, but the word is confused. Looking and looking at that house. Like he was trying to figure something out and couldn’t.”

“He couldn’t’ve been trying to get in. The place is unlocked until late. He could’ve just walked in.”

“He went in and went into your office and came out. Then he went down toward the Saunders. So I followed him. I’m right behind him. I thought he was some kid from town, was my impression. But when he walks up to the river bank, he did not cross the stream. He disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Swear to God.”

“Why didn’t you come into the house?”

“You guys were doin’ a screamer.”

“But he disappeared? I mean, in what sense?”

“He took three or four steps into those little rapids. The shallow place where it’s easy to cross. Right in the middle of it, he just simply was gone. Gone, Wylie.”

Dear heaven, it had been Trevor. He’d crossed the boundary between the worlds and he probably didn’t realize it. He’d been going home, but come here instead.

For a long time, Wylie had entertained the notion that the weir-cats people saw around here-the black panthers you saw back in the woods every once in a while-were from a parallel universe. They were animals that had evolved an ability to pass between the worlds as a defense mechanism.

There’d been a book called The Hunt for the Skinwalker, written about a ranch in Utah where scientists had documented the movement of such animals-not between this earth and Martin’s world, but yet another parallel universe, one in which creatures from our ice age still roamed freely.

Wylie’s mind wanted to race, but he didn’t know where it should go.

Silence fell between them. Wylie’s thoughts turned to the poor mutilated guy. What was that about? Something they were doing in their effort to enter this world. No question, but what was it?

They’d cut the guy up-therefore, had taken parts of him.

He shuddered. He had a feeling, if he waited, he was going to find all this out, and it wasn’t going to be good, not at all.

The storm, when it came, brought long, heavy gusts of wind, and the police radio began to burp trailer calls, as they were known. As everybody in Tornado Alley knows, trailers actually attract twisters, which was why the Kan-Sas Trailer Park had been the only thing destroyed by that tornado back in September.

“I know something’s wrong,” Matt said at last. “I just don’t want it to be this-oh, crap, Wiley, this weirdness that seems to follow you everywhere you go. I never told you this, but when we were kids-eleven, twelve, about-I was out on my bike late. I used to like to ride past Sue Wolff’s house and hope I’d see her on the porch and we’d get to talking or I’d get up the courage to ring the bell or whatever, and I turned onto Winkler, and there is this goddamn huge light over your house.”

“Jesus.”

“I thought the place was on fire. But then I felt the thing, Wiley. I felt it looking back at me. And, you know, it did not want me there.”

“When was this?”

“Summer of, uh, eighty-eight, I guess.”

“No, what time?”

“Oh, late. Coulda been after midnight, even. ‘Cause I couldn’t risk her actually seeing me, of course. Not fat me, mooning after a cheerleader and all.”

They arrived at Wylie’s place. As he got out of the car, he saw that Matt had tears on his face. He said nothing about them, only thanked him for the ride and watched him leave.

Storm or no storm, he clambered down to the Saunders, moving among the heaving trees.

The little stream flowed normally. Some rain along its path somewhere had sped it up a bit, but that was the only thing in the slightest out of the ordinary.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Nick!”

“I saw you coming down here.”

“Yeah, I-“

“The kid is from the other world.”

He was absolutely so stunned that he couldn’t talk.

“I’ve read your book, Dad, and I know it’s real.”

Nick was a private sort of a kid. Smart, as his grades revealed, but not by nature very social. Wylie and he had a good relationship, though.

“You’ve been reading my book?”

“I read all your stuff.”

“And this kid? You’ve seen him?”

“Come over here, Dad.”

Nick led him a short distance away. They were right before the little rapids. Thunder rolled and wind gusted. Leaves raced past, yellow and red. It was quite amazingly beautiful, Wylie thought, but also completely normal.

“Watch,” Nick said. He picked up a river stone and sailed it out over the water, as if he was trying to skip it but coming in too high.

In its flight, the stone did a very strange thing. It sort of jumped. Not a lot, but it jumped in the air.

Nick tossed another one, and this time his aim must have been better, because the stone completely disappeared. Never hit the water. Was gone.

“My God, Son, when did you discover this?”

“He did it this afternoon.”

“He was here?”

“In your office, Dad. Dad, he’s all dirty and he looks really scared, and I think he’s Trevor. He started reading your book.”

The world heaved, and it wasn’t the storm. “Oh, my God,” Wylie said.

He turned and ran back to the house, Nick following.

“What’s going on,” Brooke yelled as they burst in, “don’t you two know it’s raining?”

“They can use it!” Wylie shouted as he dashed upstairs. “They can use the book!”

“Who? Nick, what’s going on?”

Nick hesitated on the stairs. “The closer we get to the twenty-first, the wider the gateways are opening, and there’s one down on the Saunders, right at the rapids. It’s between our world and Martin’s, and they’re using it. We think his son is. We think it’s Trevor. He tried to come home last night, and came through the gateway instead.”

Wylie said, “If they can read the book, honey, think how it can help them! We can let them know that Samson’s evil-“

“Dad-“

“-we can help them find the wanderers, maybe they can turn this thing around!”

“Dad, I think Trevor came here by accident. That’s why he was so confused and afraid. He thought he was going home. He couldn’t understand why all the furniture had changed, why there were strange people in the house, any of it. Then he stumbled on the book.”

“But he’ll be back. Of course.”

“We can’t know that, Dad.”

Wylie went into the office. Sat before the laptop. “There’s something larger at work, here. Whatever created that gateway. Whatever prevented me from destroying this incredibly precious book.”

“Um, Dad, that would be me and mom.”

“Excuse me?”

Nick nodded. “She has a USB drive she keeps in her pocket. She saves it on that.” He paused for a moment. “Don’t be mad at me, but I wrote the code that prevented you from erasing it.”

“You can program? I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a few lines of code.”

“We need to find Trevor. I need to write about him. Tell him where his dad is, give them a plan of action.”

“It’s better not to talk about this.” Brooke stood in the doorway. She had the drive in her hand.

“But you-we-“

She put her finger to her lips. “Don’t talk about it, either of you. Just let it lie.”

Kelsey came in. She came to her daddy, crawled into his lap.

Silence fell among them. Wylie understood that all was not as it seemed. In fact, nothing was as it seemed. “What’s going on?”

“Wylie…”

Kelsey stuck her face in his. She held him by the ears. “That’s what we don’t ever, never talk about, Daddy.” She shook her head. “Ever, never.” Then she gave him a wet kiss and ran off laughing down the hall.

Nick and Brooke gazed steadily at him. He thought again of poor Nunnally, and how very close to this house that attack had been.

The reptilians had reached Nunnally, and they could come here, too. Five years ago, they’d opened a gateway not far from this house. What would prevent them from following Trevor through the gateway on the river? “We could be in trouble, here,” Wylie said.

“You’ve got that right,” Brooke said.

“But I don’t know what to write about. I don’t know where to take it.”

Brooke said softly, “Trevor. Just think about Trevor.”

Wylie closed his eyes.

“Let yourself happen,” Nick said. “Just let it flow.”

He saw a face. White hair, gray eyes, all crag and grandeur. “Christ, I don’t need Al North!”

Then it came, a flood that blanked his mind, that broke his thought and his will and took him over completely.

Throwing back his head as if he had been slugged hard, he started to type. He watched his fingers fly across the keys. He stared, finally, at the words that were pouring out of him. “Al,” he whispered, “it’s you, it’s gonna be you.”

Outside, the thunder rumbled and sheets of hail came bouncing down, and the trees moaned. Inside, Wiley’s helpless shouts at a man who could not hear him echoed through the house, in the dark of the storm.

Brooke got water for him, and tended him as she always did, while he worked.

Nick went downstairs and saw to the guns.

ELEVEN

DECEMBER 11 

MOUNTAIN OF LIES

THE DEEPER INTO CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN Al went, the better he felt. This mission mattered, it was progress, and it might yet bring them a win. He’d had a hell of a time getting out here, but he’d made it at last. The problem hadn’t been finding a jet that worked or even a crew. It had been gathering enough fuel.

But this place, this was the Air Force as it ought to be. These people didn’t feel a constant sense of threat, and you could hear the difference in the firmness of a step, or an easy ripple of laughter in the canteen. Morale here was very far from the redoubt in West Virginia, where the whole dismal picture was on everybody’s mind all the time. These people were winners. They were used to victory. They had no idea they were on the damn Titanic, and he tried to project confidence he did not feel. Nothing must disturb morale like this.

A young captain led him down into the test area. She looked maybe thirty, she was clean and well groomed, she smiled and she moved along ahead of him, her static-free shoes whispering against the pavement.

It was in this test bed that human beings would, today for the first time, remove a living soul from the body that contained it. Once the soul was extracted, they would find its frequency and destroy it. This would be the first such execution. The prisoner was a monster, presumably from the Federal ADX in Florence, Colorado, and after this death, not even what of him that had been eternal would remain.

This might have extended benefits, because if reincarnation was real, it would mean that this horrible soul would never return to life. Maybe the reason that crime was always with us was that the souls of criminals returned just like everybody else, and were criminals again. Maybe, if the war was won, we could learn to pick and choose who would survive in eternity and who would not.

But this was only one aspect of the experiment. Of greater importance was understanding just how souls and bodies connected, so that some defense against the light could be devised. The disks were methodically following the night around the world, striking the entire planet all the time, and so far no attack, not with hydrogen bombs, not with neutron bombs, not with any form of conventional weapon, had affected them.

The British and French had concentrated on the most isolated lenses, exploding nuclear ordnance over them, in the ground near them, pulsing them with electromagnetic waves, even firing artillery shells into them.

The U.S. had concentrated on the one on Easter Island, going back again and again and with full imperial approval, but with equally dismal results.

A unit of Marines had deployed around the lens and opened fire when the disks came out, but they were themselves made of light and ordnance simply passed through them.

Now, however, all that was ended. Communications had been jammed, planetwide. Satellites were dark, broadcast transmitters had been disrupted by artificially induced changes in the earth’s ionosphere, and landlines by powerful electromagnetic pulses being continuously emitted from deep space. The objects responsible ringed the planet, fourteen of them, each one twenty-two thousand miles above one of the lenses. Even though they weren’t in precise geostationary orbit, astronomers using old-fashioned backyard telescopes, which were the only ones that still worked, said that they showed no sign of moving off course. Military communications had been reduced to single sideband radio-sometimes-and a couple of fiber-optic networks that had pulse-hardened switching stations that so far were impervious to the electromagnetic energy being beamed from above.

The beautiful young captain paused before a steel door, input a number code. The door slid open.

Beyond it was a tunnel with a pronounced downward slope. At the head stood a small stainless steel car. It was mounted on a black strip that descended, it seemed, into oblivion.

“This is the railhead,” she said as she got into the car.

It looked like an amusement park ride, he thought, but when she closed the door, the seal seemed very tight. He found himself looking out a small windshield at a concrete tunnel with conduit running along its ceiling.

She pressed a button, and the car began moving with startling silence and smoothness.

“What propulsion?”

“Maglev.”

He’d never seen any of this before, but just the scope of it all, riding this silent, efficient little train deeper and deeper, made him dare to consider again the possibility of victory.

“We’ve reached cruising speed, Sir.”

“Which is?”