End Time (33 page)

Eleanor's eyes blinked, and she returned to her pleasant sanitarium room.

The Light Guardian was back hovering outside the window. It wanted her to look at the laptop once more. She turned to the laptop screen, trying to understand:

A new video feed was coming through the machine, not a live stream but recorded in the last month. She should have been able to tell exactly when by the date in the upper corner, but the image was blurred. Mid-May? About the time she and the ladies from Van Horn arrived … A wide-angle shot onto a wall of glass built directly into the side of a tunnel, a kind of den.

A maternity ward. One word was stenciled onto the wall of glass in large red letters. For a second she thought it read
ANT COLONY
. She looked closer at the laptop screen—no, the word was
ANTENATAL.
Eleanor knew what that meant. Prenatal.

The video feed showed a row of clean modern hospital beds, women lying on them, medical monitors blinking and tubes leading to and from other machines. It felt vaguely reminiscent, as if she'd been there once. But she didn't see herself or any of the Van Horn sisters. But then she knew. She'd been there. They'd tried to do something to her.

The video stream was showing something odd. So not everything went according to plan. For one thing, she'd escaped; that couldn't have been part of the plan. And others had arrived by mistake, like the crouching woman in the tunnel, wearing the dirty hospital gown. Yet another such woman was staggering along the front of the glass wall, holding on to it for support, dazed and confused.

This new one tripped along on high heels, one broken; she was tarted up, as though for an evening out on the town, but her hair was a shrieking mess, lumped and clotted with dirt. Her mascara ran like clown tears down her cheeks. She held on to the glass for support, mumbling and talking half to herself. You could hear it clear enough on the feed:

“They've made a mistake. A terrible mistake. I'm not supposed to be here.” She paused. “Why did they bring me? Oh, yes, the invitation. But it wasn't meant for me. It was misdelivered and I only read it by accident, or did I listen—?”

The distraught woman left off blabbing when she caught sight of the security video monitor watching everything. She tried to pull herself together, pushing aside her blond hair. Then attempted to stand up straight on her busted pumps, addressing whoever was watching:

“My name is Broderick Fallows. I'm not supposed to be here. They've made a mistake. There's a premiere back in Los Angeles at Mann's Chinese theater of the picture I directed, Part Three of
Zyklon-B
,
Inexplicable
—
everyone's heard of it, and later in the week the studio is supposed to release part two on DVD, and later a boxed set. I think I'm supposed to be on cable tonight. And I have to arrive an hour ahead of time for makeup.”

The confused woman's voice faded as the video monitor made no reply. Then she tried again, imploring: “I think I'm lost. Can you tell me which way is Los Angeles? Is this the right way?” She stumbled back against the glass.

“Hello? Did you hear me? Hello?”

The video feed began to break up; the last thing Eleanor saw was the ghostly bodies of two men in lab coats approaching the wall of glass. The faulty transmission seemed to make them dance, an ant dance—jerking toward the distraught woman with outstretched hands. And she seemed mildly relieved to see them.

“Are you from the studio?”

*   *   *

Lauren Poole lay in bed with Guy, the peaceful sounds of nighttime rain going down the gutters of the house. The dogs had come upstairs and were nestled in their plush doggy couches. Lauren never spared any expense when it came to canine comfort, and Guy would often kid her about it. “Those two gangsters have better mattresses than us!” Even as Lauren lay under the covers while her husband softly snored and the dogs stretched or sighed, she knew she was asleep. Dreaming.

She rose from the bed in her nightgown to find her robe, which always hung on the bedpost. But as she stood, the room went through a subtle change. The bedroom had reverted to the “old house” she and Guy had seen that day. Auntie Whitcomb's great-great grandmother sat at the writing table again. A single candle burned in a pewter candle holder. The woman cupped her hand around the flame and blew it out.

Night engulfed them, but it wasn't raining anymore, and bright moonlight cascaded through the open windows. The scent of candle wax smoke filled the bedroom, and Lauren could see quite clearly.

The long-dead woman rose from the boxy writing desk and crossed to the bed. A man lay there, breathing heavily. Wracked with fever, he moaned a little. Great-great Auntie Whitcomb drew a chair next to the bed and swept away the muslin hangings. She took a bowl of water from where it sat on the floor and set it on her lap; dipped a facecloth in the water and wrung it out. She reached to the man's fevered brow, pressing the cloth to his forehead, sucking up the heat, and going back to the cool bowl of water again.

But what dismayed Lauren this time was the identity of the man in the bed. Not the sailor they spied fresh back from Norfolk bringing pineapples—no. Guy lay in the bed, just as he did every night. Guy had the fever; Guy was sick. The cool facecloth went back and back again, but to no avail. Guy moaned weakly and twitched, feebly brushing the invisible cobwebs of disease from his face. A sickly, sallow yellow face. Guy was dying.

Lauren looked down at herself, at what she was wearing. Not her nightgown, not her robe—but old-fashioned mourning clothes. A plain cotton black dress with a hoop at her ankles and belled sleeves at her wrists, simple pleating—a crisp, starched cloth that rustled when she touched it. An unforgiving sound.

She crept away from the head of the bed, from the vision of Guy, and clutched the curtains by the dormer window. Down below in the street, a horse-drawn hearse waited in front of their door. The horses snorted and wagged their heads.

In a dream jump Lauren found herself standing in front of the black wooden hearse. She looked inside the etched glass windows, to see the body or the coffin. But the hearse was empty. Empty. No one there.

A great sense of relief flooded through her, and she began to breathe again.

And up on the spring seat there was no driver, no coachman. The hearse was waiting, waiting for her to take the reins. Now she was up in the leather padded driver's seat. She swept aside the hoop skirt to sit more comfortably, grabbed both reins off the guardrail, and released the brake.

The reins snapped, a cracking sound.

The horses lunged forward.

The cobblestone street clattered under the wheels of the rig as she passed house after house.

House after house with an X on the door.

House after house boarded up, abandoned. House after empty house. And the sound of thundering hooves rose, echoing into the night.

 

PART TWO

Yellow Jack

“Die trying” is the proudest human thing.

—Robert Heinlein,
Have Space Suit—Will Travel

 

17

Tribulation

It may have been raining in Connecticut while Lauren dreamt of driving a hearse past doors marked
X,
but fifteen hundred miles across country there was no rain over Nebraska. Luminous, blue velvet clouds sailed a vast Midwestern sky. Cheryl rode the Harley along Interstate 80 for the sheer solitude. Behind her, Bhakti stolidly drove the yellow Toyota 4Runner, pulling the empty motorcycle trailer; and finally Billy Shadow in the white Dodge rental van brought up the rear.

“We can catch up with them at their next whistle stop,” Billy had said back in Salt Lake. Famous last words. They left the diner, got in their vehicles, and promptly lost any trace of the Stuka Crew. The pursuit from Utah took them weeks, the end of July devouring a hunk of August, zigzagging across the Wyoming-Colorado state line off Interstate 80, stopping in every hick town as they rumbled along.

The medicine show always seemed a day ahead, vanishing over the horizon or sidetracked off the main roads. Cheryl, Bhakti, and Billy caught up with the show a couple of times, but never saw any sign of bikers fitting the description of swastika rejects. So they kept circling around Interstate 80 in the hopes of spotting weirdos hanging by a silver van in some strip mall parking lot or saloon.

Now under the velvet clouds of a Midwestern night, the white lines on the interstate rolled under their wheels like an endless conveyor belt. They had the asphalt to themselves; no cars or trucks on the interstate for the last twenty miles. Nothing coming, nothing going, nothing but their headlights lanced into the dark.

Until they saw the cow.

A young cow had wandered up the road embankment and paused in the middle of the eastbound lanes to chew her cud. Cheryl almost missed seeing the animal entirely. The cow was a Belted Galloway: black chest, black rear, with the wide white stripe in the middle, completely camouflaged on a black roadway with white lines dashing past your eyes. White/Black, White/Black, Dash-Dash—
Yee Gads, a COW!

The Harley's taillight brakes flashed red; the vehicles screeched to a halt all over the roadway, their engines idling in the dark night. Ms. Cow stared calmly at them for a few moments, finally finished her cud, ambled across the median, and vanished into the dark countryside.

Cheryl, Bhakti, and Billy shared a long silent glance, all of them digesting the unspoken reality that wandering cows were not a normal state of affairs, even in farm country. But the realization got worse as they rolled on.

The lights of Lexington sent a glow into the night, but they saw no movement, no headlights or taillights, as if the whole town had come to a standstill. As they rounded the cloverleaf and headed south on Route 283, there were other strange signs: two cars had rolled off the curve of the exit ramp. A sedan and a pickup truck, both skidded off the road, crunched into the guardrail. The convoy slowly passed the empty cars. No drivers, no passengers. Where the hell had all the people gone?

Cheryl, Bhakti, and Billy pulled into the parking lot of the Dawson County Fairgrounds. Dr. Ponkus and his Medicine Show had put down stakes. The fairground parking lot was full of cars, and lit up by floodlights on high poles—but again, the place seemed awful quiet. Generally there'd be people coming and going, but there was none of that.

Instead the searchers saw a couple of cars conked out in the midst of pulling into a parking space, a couple of stalled fender benders with dented bumpers. And once again the cars were empty.

Cheryl got off the cycle, slid her helmet onto the handlebars, and rubbed her thighs. She could see the garish lights of the carnival, the Ferris wheel paused in its revolutions, but no sound of people, no rumble of voices. A kind of expectant silence. The two men waited for her some ways ahead, just standing in front of the Medicine Show ticket booth.

The painted sign of Dr. Ponkus grinned down at them: an unshaven huckster in battered beaver top hat, a genuine American quacksalver, sharp as a rusty fishhook and as unreliable as a two-bit pocket watch. The painted Dr. Ponkus offered a brown laudanum bottle with the caption “
We Cures What Ails Yah!”

The ticket seller stared down too, but there was absolutely no point in paying the man. This time, what stared back at them was a department store mannequin dressed up as a ticket seller: loud shirt, porkpie hat, his plaster fingers on a roll of tickets and some bills sitting in the change well.

“I guess our money's no good here,” Billy remarked dryly.

Bhakti, holding his wallet, sheepishly stuck it back in his pants.

As the three walked into the Medicine Show the silence welled up from a thousand plaster throats; a thousand painted eyes stared blankly at them. Was this somebody's idea of an elaborate practical joke? A maze of concessions spread over the fairgrounds with stuff like General Custer's Golden Custard and Minnie Ha-Ha's Buttered Corn. The scent of cotton candy floated across the fairgrounds.

But nobody was selling.

Cowgirl Jill at the shooting gallery held up a Kewpie doll; a fat lady strained a basket of fried dough from a bubbling tub of oil—mannequins posed like real people caught in mid-act. Petrified plaster statues everywhere: families with little kids holding on to floating balloons; guys and dolls, the guys in their better muscle shirts, the girls in their Daisy Dukes.

Bhakti dipped his finger into the tall frosted cup of a large mannequin: a Norwegian squarehead, pale blond hair, with a beer-muscle. His red T-shirt was emblazoned with the biohazard symbol and caption
Caution: Fart Loading.
Yep, lime fizz. The Punjab scientist sucked his finger.

“Bhakti!” Cheryl hissed at him. “Cut that out!”

Cautious as mice, the three searchers crept their way around the frozen throngs, trying not to knock anyone over.

“Where'd all the real people go?” Cheryl wondered out loud. “If it wasn't for these dummies—this is like the Rapture. Y'know—gone up to meet Little Baby Jesus at the end times.”

She suddenly stopped, afraid she was talking nonsense. But after chasing a young lady, a total stranger, halfway across America on a song and a prayer, was the idea of the Rapture any more unlikely than that? Was this the Second Coming, or the Already Arrived? In all honesty, she didn't know the answer.

The whole thing seemed just so spooky, and as far as Billy was concerned, much worse than the empty subdivision back in Van Horn, Texas. Back there the dead quiet felt like a schoolroom in summertime—but here, here it felt like there were still people hovering around, maybe trapped inside the plaster bodies.

Quietly, a bit of Scripture popped into his head, proving he hadn't been totally asleep on those cold winter Sundays on the rez. That bit from Matthew, which suddenly came out of his mouth: