2012 (23 page)

It was miserable here now, though, soaking, the rain pounding down, wind roaring. A storm like this could easily bring a tornado, too.

Then she seemed to drop down, as if into a hole. When he followed her, he discovered a tiny glade, and in it a camouflaged tent. He recognized it. They’d been on sale at Hiram’s Sporting Goods. She darted in. He approached more warily. Close to it, he could hear drums in the sound of the rain. Then the flap opened and she gestured frantically. He went in.

The first thing he noticed was that the drumming was much louder, the second that the air was stifling. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the space was filled with children and young people, perhaps twenty in all. He knew at once that these were the kids who had disappeared when their parents and siblings had become wanderers.

He looked from face to face, seeking recognition, not willing to taste again of his hope.

When he did not see Trevor, he swayed, staring, helpless to either stand or sit. He had reached the end of his tether, he was going to collapse.

Unable to defend himself from his own tears, he dropped to his knees and covered his face, and fought to keep his tears silent.

A hand came onto his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” And the tears became a helpless, humiliating flood.

“Dad?”

He’d heard the word, but-

“Dad?”

He raised his face and saw standing before him somebody he did not recognize.

“Dad, I’m Trevor.”

Then he did-behind the dirt, behind the dark cast of his eyes, behind the wild hair and the muddy camouflage suit, he knew that it was his son.

Trevor had changed fantastically. He was not a boy, not at all. His expression contained an adult’s knowledge of the world-that and more-and the change had been so abrupt and so total that in just these few days he had become unrecognizable to his own father.

The heart, though, the heart sees, and Martin’s heart saw his son before him. He opened his arms and Trevor came to him, and he closed them around his son’s narrow body. His heart and mind may have grown, but this was still the same boy, fragile, almost, but with the long legs and big shoulders that said that he would soon grow much taller.

“Trevor,” he managed to rasp. “Trevor.”

Trevor pushed gently at him but he clung more tightly. He could never let him go, not ever, he could not do that again. “Dad-um-” He managed to look up into his father’s eyes. “Dad, nobody else here has any parents left.”

For a moment, Martin didn’t understand. Then he did. He was the only parent who was not wandering. He looked out across the expectant faces, the eyes that he was realizing all had the same strange shadow in them, some of them touched now by tears, others wide with sorrow, others resigned.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m George,” one of the older boys replied. “Glad to meet you.” George held out his hand, shook formally. Others followed, most of them teens, some as young as ten. There were twenty-two of them, two more boys than girls. Each in turn introduced himself. It was so formal. Oddly formal. But there was no precedent for such a meeting, was there?

Through all of this, the drumming did not stop.

Trevor glanced away from him, then murmured, “It drowns out the sound of the night riders, so the little ones won’t get scared.”

Just hearing his son’s voice, Martin felt another wave of joy.

“Dad!”

“He can’t help it,” a little girl said.

“Can you hear me thinking, kids? Is that it?”

“We sort of pick up thoughts, but it’s not like you’d imagine, Dad. People don’t think alike and thought patterns are even more different than faces. You can’t figure out what somebody else is thinking unless they know how to organize their thoughts to communicate, and we’re still learning. But they can all feel your feelings, and you’re…it’s embarrassing me, Dad.”

“I can read thought,” George said. “I’m getting kind of okay.” He looked quickly at Martin. “Not you, sir! I’d never do that.”

“I better not catch you in my mind,” a girl warned him.

“Oh, I’m not, Sylvie! I’m not!”

“Of course you are. Anyway, we have no trouble reading you morons, any girl can do it, you don’t need to have gotten zapped. You’re transparent from birth, gentlemen.” She leaned her head against George’s shoulder. George crossed his legs.

“What’s this getting zapped?” Martin asked.

Silence fell. “Dad, we want you to try.”

“Try what?”

“Don’t ask him, Trev, he has to!”

“Shut up!”

“What’s going on here?”

“Dad, you remember the night when it happened?”

“How could I ever forget it?”

“Mom was holding Winnie and I was standing beside them. You had your hand on my shoulder, you were squeezing so hard you nearly broke it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it was good. The light missed you. It hit Mom and sort of splashed on me. I went out of my body and up in the air. I saw you down there, I saw us all. Then I was out in the sky, up above the church. I saw Mom and Winnie, they were gold in the light-gold masses of sparks-and they were rising fast. But my shoulder hurt so much, I went back down.

“At first, I was in shock. I went to the back of the church with Mom. I saw you but you seemed far away. You were hollering at us. You-I never saw you like that, Dad. I felt so sorry for you. So sorry!”

“I want your mom back. I want my girl.”

Another boy shook his shoulder. “We’re gonna win, Doctor Winters.”

Martin recognized him as Joey Fielding, son of George and Moira, who ran Octagon Feed. “That doesn’t seem possible,” he replied, trying to keep his bitterness and his resignation out of his voice.

“Every one of us had the same thing happen. We were in pain when the light hit us, and it didn’t take all the layers. Who we were stayed with our bodies. What we lost were the lies, the hopes, most of our education, what we wanted, what we thought of ourselves, our hopes. We lost all the baggage.”

One of the little ones said, “We’re like, fresh. We’re new again, like we were-“

“Look at him, you’re scaring him,” a girl hissed.

“I’m not scared,” Martin said.

“Yes, you are. We’re weird and you’re scared!”

“He doesn’t scare easy,” Trevor snapped. “My dad has courage.”

“He’s gonna need it if we do this.”

Martin was aware that this conversation was happening on two levels, one he could hear and another that he couldn’t. “I think I need to know what’s going on.”

“What’s going on is we need you to try to become like us.”

How would he do that? It seemed like some sort of side effect of a failed attempt by the aliens to strip away a soul.

“That’s it,” Trevor said.

“I thought you couldn’t read minds.”

He looked down at the smashed grass that made up the floor of the tiny chamber. “Um, you’re easy, Dad. ‘Cause I know you…”

George said, “It’s getting dark.”

Trevor looked at him sharply, shook his head.

“Trevor, no. NO!”

“What is this?”

Trevor threw his arms around him. “Dad, they want you to leave!”

“Leave? I can’t leave!”

A boy of perhaps ten or eleven produced a pistol. He handed it to one of the older kids. Martin saw that it was a .45 automatic. He didn’t exactly point it at Martin, so much as leave it visible.

Martin stared at it. He looked from the barrel to the young face. Those eyes again, all shadowy. These kids had changed. He gentled his voice. “Look, I need a break here.”

The boy thrust the gun toward him.

“Trevor! Trevor, tell them, I’m a good father, I’m-I’m-kids, listen. I’m needed. You need me. Yes. Oh, yes. I can be-can replace-replace…”

The boy racked the slide.

“You helped me, Pammy! Hey, you just helped me escape, now you want to do this? This is crazy!”

“Dad, if you don’t go-” Trevor pulled in his words. He was choking with tears, Martin could see it.

“Trevor, tell them, I can’t survive out there. Nobody can!”

The boy got to his feet. He had a dusting of beard, barely visible in the gathering dark. He held the gun in Martin’s face. “Doctor Winters,” he said quietly, “you get out of here.”

“Oh, God, listen, please-I’ve been running and running, I can’t run anymore. Trevor, please help me! Help your dad!”

Trevor looked at him out of his strange new eyes, and Martin saw the truth of it: the horror they had seen had made them monsters, all of them, and Trevor was a monster, too.

But then Trevor reached out a hand and touched his father’s cheek. It was not the gesture of a boy, but of a man of maturity. “Dad, it’s survival of the fittest. The reptilians are going to find you. You can’t hide from them, not anywhere, not like we can. If you stay here, you’ll lead them right to us.”

Martin backed away from the gun. “Get that thing out of my face!”

“Dad, you have to do this.” Trevor threw his arms around his father. Martin held him, felt his body shaking.

He looked to Pammy. “Why did you save me? How could you be so cruel?”

“She’s a damn asshole,” the boy with the gun spat.

“Ride the storm,” a voice said from the back. “Same as we did.”

“Doctor Winters-“

“Pammy, call me Martin, please.”

“Doctor Winters-“

She pulled back the flap of the tent. Outside, Martin saw rain sweeping in almost continuous lightning, and shadows in the nearby clearing that did not look like any shadows he cared to see. “This is crazy. I can’t.”

“Dad, do it!”

“Trev, no, absolutely not!”

His son was standing before him, looking up at him, his face stained with tears. “Get out,” he said. He turned to the boy with the gun. “Give it to me,” he said.

“Why?” the boy asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Because I’m the only one who can handle this!” He took the gun and held it to his father’s face. “Decide,” he said.

Martin looked straight down the barrel. He could see muscles working in Trevor’s hand, could see his finger tightening. “Trevor?”

Trevor screwed his eyes shut. “Now, Daddy!”

Martin tried to think-some argument, some appeal, but there were no more arguments, there were no more appeals. That weapon was going to go off in another second, and Trevor was going to have to spend the rest of his life an orphan like all these other orphans, but knowing, unlike them, that he had taken the life of his own father.

Martin raised his hand. “I’m going,” he said softly. “I’m going, son, and I want you to know that I don’t understand, but I don’t blame you.”

“Just go.”

“I know you have to look out for each other, that you can’t risk the group-“

“Damn you, GO!”

Trevor’s voice was not the same now. He’d been so gentle a boy that he couldn’t shoot a pheasant. Now here he was ready to kill his father, and his voice was low and hard, scorched with the pain of somebody who could.

Martin went out into the lightning.

THIRTEEN

DECEMBER 18, 

MIDNIGHT A FAMILY AFFAIR

WYLIE STOOD BY THE QUIET waters of the Saunders, trying to get the courage up to try and cross into the other world. If Trevor could come here, then surely he could go in the other direction, and that was urgently necessary, obviously.

He paced, he looked for some sign of the gateway. Martin was out there right now in those deadly woods, and somebody had to save the guy, and Wylie thought it might as well be him.

He could bring Martin across. If nobody over there wanted him, he could live here. Impractical though he was, professorial in a way that Wylie found infuriating, nevertheless the guy didn’t deserve this to happen. His own son, doing that to him? Good God.

Why would they save him, then just discard him? And how could Trevor-too gentle to hunt birds, for the love of Pete-ever be that hard on his dad?

Over there, it was storming. Over here, the sky was clear. The moon near the half rode high. It was close on to midnight, and from the house he could hear Brooke singing. She’d once had vocal ambitions, but life and children and a certain lack of volume had kept her away from an operatic career. Her voice was too delicate for the stage, but on a quiet night like this one, it was an angelic wonder.

He knew that she was sitting in a window looking at the moon, waiting for her man to return. She never protested his midnight walks, but they made her uneasy. It was as if her voice was meant as a kind of lifeline, reaching out to him in case he strayed too far from home.

She sang an old lullaby, one that she had sung to Nick and still sang to Kelsey, a song from her deep past, his woman of the tribe of the Celts. It was called “Dereen Day,” the little song, and it floated across the softly muttering water like a breeze.

He tossed a stone into the moonlight, listened to it splash in the deeper river. Where was the gateway now? Did it open and close? According to some of the more outre stuff he’d been reading about 2012, there were gateways all over the world, especially at the points where what were called ley lines met. He was not sure what these lines were. Planet Energy Lines would probably be the simplest definition. New Age Bullshit Lines was another contender.

He stood just where he and Nick had been, and tossed another stone. It gleamed in the moonlight, then splashed gently down.

“Damn.”

He heard something, though. He listened. It was on the other side of the river. He’d never heard anything quite like it before.

He listened again.

What was that?

Then he knew, and his blood all but froze in his veins.

That slashing noise could only be an outrider, and it was actually in the gateway, hanging between the worlds.

He hadn’t brought a gun, he’d been afraid that shooting it in the other universe would bring on some sort of catastrophe. He’d read all he could about parallel worlds, but little was actually known, except that experiments showed that they were actual, physical places. There was no scientific speculation about what might be in them. He thought that he was the only person who had ever speculated that certain animals must be able to cross this divide, that they had evolved the ability as a threat avoidance mechanism.