2012 (7 page)

Immediately, he clambered down the four flights to the choir loft, glanced out across the dark church, and then went down the stairs to the entrance. Bobby had arrived and was going into the electrical closet as Martin reached the foot of the stairs. Bobby hit the power switches, lighting up the nave, then all the external lights.

Martin flipped open his cell phone and called the minister. “Reg, we could be getting hit tonight, looks like.”

“That can’t be true.”

“It looked like Holcomb was getting it a few minutes ago and now Bobby can’t raise them on the phone. Disks passed over Parker coming this way. We’re the only town in this direction for eighty miles, Reg.”

“I’m on my way.”

Martin stepped outside. “I called Dennis Farm,” Bobby said. “We-” His phone buzzed. He flipped it open, listened a moment, then closed it. “That was Larry Dennis screaming for help, they got Sally, the light’s coming down like rain-then the line-” He held out the silent cell phone.

In both of their minds was the same thought: it couldn’t be happening here, it was something you heard about, a big city thing, a European thing, a Chinese disaster.

“Wake ‘em up,” Bobby said, “we’re under attack.”

Martin went back into the church and started the bell. There was a whirring sound as it began ringing, its stately tones trembling off into the night. His finger hesitated over the siren. It hadn’t been sounded since September, when it had been turned on for the tornado that had taken out the Conagra silo and the Kan-San Trailer Park.

He flipped the switch, and the siren began as a low growl, quickly increased its volume, then filled the air with its wailing. Across the street, Sam Gossett came to the door in his pajama bottoms and yelled, “Is it for real?”

“Holcomb and Dennis Farm just got it,” Bobby said. “It’s for real, all right.”

The Wilsons and a family Martin didn’t know except to nod to arrived in SUVs and went hurrying into the church. They must have been sleeping in their clothes. As he passed, Timmy Wilson said, “They’re coming up Six Mile, slow and low.”

His words made Martin feel literally sick. He telephoned Lindy. “Hi, hon, what’s your situation?”

“We’re leaving the house.”

“You need to hurry, Lindy, they’re over Six Mile Road.”

“Oh, God, Martin.”

According to Homeland Security, people alone did not survive, none of them, not ever. Groups supposedly had a better chance. They still got flyers dropped from time to time. He speculated that Bo Waldo might have something to do with that. There was a man who was not going to be beaten, unlike those two generals, who’d been edgy, bitchy thoroughbreds.

“Lindy, cut across the Walker place to the highway.”

“I’ll wreck their garden.”

“Do it now!”

She closed the phone-unless something else just happened. A wave of nausea almost made Martin gag.

“You okay?” Bobby asked.

“Lindy’s out there with the kids. Where’s Rose?”

“Same thing, coming in fast as she can.”

“But not down Six Mile Road.”

“Goddamn, buddy, that’s right.”

Bobby, who had been his friend since their boyhood in this community, met his eyes. Bobby had stayed, Martin had gone on to university. But he’d returned in the end, discovering after Berkeley and Stanford that one did not leave Kansas so easily.

“I never thought this would come,” Bobby said as the two of them watched the sky and the people now hurrying into the church.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Bobby. Kansas is gone with the wind, I’m afraid.”

“You think it’s gonna be all of us, Martin?”

A wave of what could only be described as woe swept over Martin. He said, “The pamphlet says that more survive if we congregate.” It had been dropped by Homeland Security last week.

“What I feel like doing is hiding. That’s what feels right.”

“I would assume that we can’t hide.”

The pamphlet, which had been dropped from a Goodyear blimp, of all things, was the only defense the government had offered. In fact, the most terrifying thing about the whole business was the silence from Washington and Topeka.

George and Moira Fielding came huffing up, she in a slip and bra, he in baggy boxer shorts and flip-flops. “There’s screaming coming from down the end of Constitution,” he gasped.

Serenity Lodge. Forty old folks. Martin looked at Bobby. “You want to go over there?” He thought to himself that Lindy and the kids must pass right in front of the place on their way in.

“I’m needed here.”

It wasn’t cowardice, it was simple truth.

Across town, Martin could see the steeple of the First Church of Christ light up, and heard its bell join theirs. Saint Peter’s was invisible behind the huge oaks that stood along Evans behind Main, but he knew they’d be lit up, too. They didn’t have a working bell.

Emma Heard got out of her car. “There was that light just like they say, it was horrible, horrible!”

“You were at the home?”

“I was in my office when-oh, Jesus, I tried to help them, they were all in their rooms-” She broke down in sobs and Martin looked off down Third, looking for some sign of Lindy’s blue Dodge truck.

“Did you see any actual attacks?” Bobby asked.

“When I ran out, I saw the light coming down on the building, out of one of those things, the disks. It looked like some kind of goop, a glowing membrane-really bright-like on Nightline that time, that video of it. I got the hell out of there, lemme tell you.” She lowered her eyes. “I saw it slide down in the windows, and I heard-I heard-oh, Bobby, the screaming.” She paused, then added in a tiny voice, “They’re all headed north now, every single one of them that can walk, and in their pajamas, poor things.”

Then she noticed Martin. She came close to him. At forty, she was still beautiful. She’d been his older woman when he was fourteen and she twenty. They had cuddled and touched, and he’d learned mysteries from her that still inspired the deep, deep joy he took in women. In Lindy, now, only her.

She clutched at his shirt. He took her by the shoulders and turned her toward the church. “Go inside, do it now.” She walked away with a curious, gliding motion. Martin watched her. “You sure she’s not…affected?”

“Nah, that’s just shock,” Bobby said. “Right outta the book.”

“Jesus will help us,” Mrs. Oates said as she came up the walk. “Never you mind, Jesus will help us.” She went past them, unseeing, glassy-eyed with terror.

“The Lord sure hasn’t been helping us much lately,” Bobby said, but softly, as if it was a kind of dirty secret-or, what he was more likely to think, a blasphemy.

As a scientist, Martin had grown past his childhood piety. Nowadays, while he wasn’t against religion, he just didn’t see the mechanism of the spiritual.

Bobby and Rose brought their kids here to Methodist every week. Martin and Lindy had chosen not to visit the burden of organized religion on Winnie and Trevor. Trevor had been delighted at not having to join the acolytes of the Anglican Communion in America. He’d dreaded Latin.

People everywhere were taking the horrific business that was unfolding in the world to mean that the soul was real. No less a luminary than the physicist Sir Roger Penfold had called it “the profound organ” because of the way it appeared to control memory and emotion. Given that it consisted exclusively of electrons, the belief that it was immortal had turned out to be entirely correct. Energy is indeed immortal. But could it be conscious in its own right outside of the body, or remain a coherent structure after death? Martin didn’t understand how that could be, and he doubted that anybody else did, either.

He did understand the extraordinary irony that the attack on the soul was what had led to its discovery. The scientific community’s soul blindness had only been lifted when the human soul began to be taken, and we could see, hear, and feel the consequences.

To Martin, as a scientist, this did not mean that the gods were therefore real. But the average person had taken proof of the soul to mean that his particular gods, also, existed. So churches and temples across the world were jammed day and night with people pleading for help from their deities.

Martin viewed things differently. He was fascinated that this plasma could be drawn out of a human body, as shocked as everybody else at the changes that resulted. But as far as it being the ka of the Egyptians, the jiva of the Hindus, the hun of the Chinese-any of those concepts-the folkloric soul-well, that remained unproven. It was simply an organ of a type they had not previously recognized, with a profound function, most certainly-in fact, a function that explained why we were different from animals, because of the way it preserved memories and delivered them to the brain for processing. But it had not confirmed the reality of the gods, at least not for this intellectual, nor was it clear that it survived in any coherent way after death.

Clearly, though, the removal of the soul was hell on the organism, and it was hell here in Kansas tonight, and maybe across the entire country, but before communications had failed, the real hell had been unfolding in the jam-packed, exposed third world, with swarms of the disks gushing each night like vast formations of locusts out of the fourteen great, black lenses that ringed the world, and people by the millions being torn apart in this strange new way night after hellish night.

He pulled his worn copy of the Homeland Security pamphlet from his pocket. “Approach damaged individuals with extreme caution. Their state is unknown and, while generally passive, they can be unexpectedly violent.”

Martin had seen some of the people who’d been disensouled, as the media had called it when the media still existed, a cluster of six of them ragged on the roadside, stragglers up all this way from the Garland, Texas attack that, for America, had signaled the beginning of the nightmare. They’d been walking in a rough line. They were filthy and stinking, sewer drinkers, carrion eaters, muttering and growling to each other as they shuffled aimlessly along, aware, perhaps, of some loss, but no longer understanding what it was.

He had stopped his car because he hadn’t been able to resist at least observing them from a little closer, despite the Homeland Security warnings. They hadn’t seemed dangerous at all. Far from it. Up close, they were more like migrating elk or something.

He’d spoken to them. Nothing. There had been two men, three women, some children, one on the back of one of the men, the others hand in hand with their mothers. He’d walked beside them, touched a woman’s shoulder, and asked her, “Could you tell me your name?”

She had turned to him, and what had happened was the most dreadful thing-she had smiled at him. But such a strange, strange smile. All wrong-so bright that it was empty. Not cruel at all, but relentlessly innocent, like the smiles of poor Jim Tom Stevens had been when they were kids. Jim Tom was retarded, though, and he had not had the feeling that these people had been made stupid.

No, it was much stranger than that. They had not lost their intelligence, but rather their information, and not how to count or how to read-oh, no, the information they had lost was much deeper. What they had lost was what distinguishes us from animals-the arrow of consciousness that points inward. They still knew and saw the world. The information that they had lost was that they were, and for this reason had ceased to be human. They had become brilliant animals.

For all of Jim Tom’s intellectual poverty, he was not this lost. He knew that he was. When you called his name, he did not simply come to a familiar sound as an animal might. He turned to you with an expression in his face-the fundamental human expression that says, This is me.

Martin had been reminded of a line of poetry, “With its whole gaze a creature looks out at the open…” and sees nothing of himself at all. Has no self.

They’d hurried off, moving in the general direction that all wanderers moved, at least around here, which was north-northwest.

He had sat on the terrace all afternoon watching the leaves run in the yard, and trying to make sense of what he had seen.

He had told Lindy that they had reminded him of Jim Tom, who had been so innocent that he would eat raw roadkill if he happened upon it hungry.

“If you taught them,” she had asked, “do you think they could learn?”

“How to drive a truck or something, sure. But not concepts. No.”

“Then they’ve been made stupid.”

“I didn’t get that impression.”

“What impression did you get, then?”

He’d considered his reply for some time. Finally, he said, “The difference between us and a brilliant animal is that the animal understands what is, but not what it means. I think they’d been returned to what we were before the discovery of our being made us human. They weren’t human, Lindy. They were just sort of…there.”

As a scientist specializing in the past, he was well aware that the human body and brain had evolved a hundred thousand years before civilization had appeared. We’d been brilliant animals for a long, long time, and in the dark back of his mind, he feared that whoever was here was not really destroying or capturing souls like people believed, not at all-it was much simpler: they were manufacturing slaves, and the reason the wanderers all went off in the same direction was that they weren’t wandering at all, they were moving to a collection point.

As far as the souls were concerned, pulling them out of the body was like letting the air out of a balloon. They became part of the general electromagnetic flux. In effect, they disintegrated.

People swarmed into the church now, in pajamas, in underwear, in whatever, coats thrown over shoulders, hats jammed onto heads. The one thing they all carried was a gun, many of them more than one. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, a few assault weapons. A formidable arsenal.

May Whitt got the organ started. It burbled for a moment, then blasted into a brave rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

A moment later a scream pealed in the street, the sound rising above the wail of the siren, the tolling of the bell, and the hymn. Ten-year-old Chrissie Palen pointed at the sky. At first Martin saw only first moon, pale and serene, speeding in ragged clouds. Then Tom Palen raised his 30-06 and fired, and Martin’s eyes followed the muzzle flash to a simple ovoid, dull orange against the sky, as motionless as if it was fixed to the ground.