End Time (56 page)

“Okay, first pump available, line two.”

At the pumps, Cheryl and Billy gave Bea a real long look, with a dose of respect. Nobody gets through that quick.

“Neat trick, Babe,” Billy remarked. “Reminds me of Army Intel. We flashed a lot of badges.” Beatrice didn't reply, just went about filling the Gran Torino. When Cheryl's turn came to gas up the Toyota truck, Bea was still within earshot.

“You're gonna have to explain that to me, Sister.”

Big Bea patted the ID case through her buttoned breast pocket.

“Am I, Gorgeous?”

They hit the road again. Last lap. The night deepened as they rode out of the anthracite hills into whatever was left of civilization. Not much to see on the interstate: lines of cars racing to get somewhere else. Smoke and the scent of smoke rose from every town they passed. The miles rolled by. Allentown. Elizabeth. They'd reached New Jersey.

Shortly after midnight they pulled over in the Meadowlands to look at the big-city lights of Manhattan; the air grew cold, and out of the sky a few flakes of snow came circling down, melting on the car hoods. The aurora borealis shimmered overhead, sheets of green and red flickering like a kind of warning, much too early in the year, and too far south. Heaven on fire.

The office towers of Lower Manhattan still shone into the night sky. So it wasn't total collapse, not yet anyway. Emergency vehicles at street level flashed their strobes off the metal-and-glass buildings. But the travelers were too distant to hear the sirens.

At least major sections of New York still had power, dots and dashes in every building like some kind of secret Morse code. But what was the message?
May Day, May Day
? Or
Keep Away, Keep Away?

 

30

The Ziggurat

From his wood-lined study in the ivory tower of the luxurious San Remo the Pied Piper was taking names and kicking ass on the
Twilight Zone
phone, prodding the weak-minded over the edge.

• A mother of three drove the wrong way onto the Tappan Zee Bridge into oncoming traffic, killing a mother of eight along with all her children. Another tragedy caused by cell phone distractions. And a bottle of vodka.

• In Miami, a bride gabbing with her six bridesmaids died in a gown store fire as a cigarette butt ignited a couch and the place went up like torched taffeta. The bride and her maidens had vowed to quit smoking together right after the fitting.

• In California, Mr. P. cajoled the noted cage fighter James Whye to rip out his training partner's beating heart, then cut out his buddy's tongue, peel the skin off his face, and gouge out an eyeball. Police found Whye watching
Deal or No Deal,
blood up the bungalow walls, sharing a beer with his training partner's headless corpse.

Not much in the grand scheme of things, but all these little calamities added to the frisson, the thrills of the day—and Mr. P. was nothing if not an artist. He could ruin greater swathes of the country in his sleep, but with a little bureaucratic mischief he made matters infinitely worse. Mr. P. stroked away at the undulating lava lamp as the glowing red wax rose and fell.

• An order to bulldoze 10,000 homes in Detroit suddenly read 30,000, and city bulldozers mistakenly wrecked good homes too.

• Four deepwater oil rigs off Galveston malfunctioned simultaneously, pouring gallons of crude into the Gulf. A billion fish and five billion shrimp died, not to mention all the manatees.

• In Minnesota, the Palisades Nuclear Plant on Prairie Island gushed an endless stream of radioactive water, poaching the Mississippi River from St. Paul to New Orleans.

However, these catastrophes were mere distractions compared to his coming assault. Up till now, the ebola leakage had been his most insidious achievement. It wasn't hard to serve up batch after batch from simmering third-world cook pots stewing bat and monkey meat. Then add to the steaming cauldron—bumbling bureaucrats, contradictory protocols, abandoning precaution, even common sense—and before you knew it hemorrhagic fever had jumped its hot zones, sputtering along like a ragged engine. No one was responsible and yet everyone was responsible. The marriage of anonymity and incompetence.

Matters had nearly reached the Point of No Return, but Mr. P. still weighed the fates of the Chen girl and the fortune-teller scamp. A Special Locator Team had traced the two to New York, but that didn't mean Piper would let anyone collect the girls. Alas, no one at Pi R Squared deserved unrestricted access to either female; the geeks at Pi R Squared couldn't be allowed to experiment all on their own. Providing Lila's living body to those termites for her miraculous genetic qualities and Maria's living brain for her nascent powers of insight wouldn't necessarily enhance the creation of their Celestials. Consider what the quacks did to Chargrove, one of their own: an exploding-brain, useless Model-A.

Why squander his assets on clods in white coats unsupervised?

The two females' divine particles mixed with cosmic dust would be like spraying gasoline on a fire. In their haste to make a difference, to find a universal cure for the wandering sickness, the idiot savants at the Ant Colony would most likely turn Lila Chen and the little one into uncontrollable breeders of pestilence carried hither and yon by every creature in creation. Good plan, but they'd need direction.

The lava lamp began to simmer in anticipation. Not the first time in recorded history the Fallen—what legends called “fallen angels”—had interfered with the species, mating wantonly with the sons and daughters of men. Just look what had happened that time? War in heaven. Death below. Still, after a dozen generations or so, a Moses, a Buddha, or a Christ would come along to work a miracle, teaching a few lessons of life to the stubbornly ignorant. To draw the human animal back from the brink.
Not this time though
. Mr. P. was going to get it right, let the masses die in sin. Drain the well of souls.

Events had guaranteed that mass death was preordained, but ruinous extermination wasn't enough. The Pied Piper wanted more. Much more. There was a secret ingredient missing from this master plan.
Something better, more comprehensive, eternal …

The lava lamp under his hand bubbled under his thumb.…

*   *   *

The travelers drove north through the Meadowlands to the George Washington Bridge. More sense going that way than trying the tunnels into the city; no one wanted to be stuck underground. A unit of the Jersey National Guard and Fort Lee Police Department stopped them on the New Jersey side of the GWB at the toll plaza. The authorities had set up concrete barriers on the bridge, funneling vehicular traffic back to Manhattan, but the bridge lanes were curiously empty. A few hardy souls from Washington Heights walked out with backpacks and strollers, refugees too pathetic to drive away. They would find out soon enough every convenience store in Bergen County was picked clean.

The Guard commander stared at the three vehicles as if they were bananas; nobody'd crossed the bridge to the Big Apple in a week. One more flash of Beatrice's fancy identification and he shrugged his shoulders. “Don't come back this way. Use the Henry Hudson if it's open.”

About 1 a.m., the convoy parked bumper-to-bumper under the London plane trees across from the San Remo on Central Park West. From inside their cars they could see the situation for themselves. The whole city seemed to be crawling on its belly. No buses, no trains, a kind of quasi, citywide curfew. There were still a few yellow cabs around, and gypsy limos. Pedestrians caught outside scuttled along the buildings as though afraid of being noticed. Instead of parked cars lining every cross street, the spaces were empty. The yuppies and bobos, the brownstone elite of Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue, had already locked their townhouse doors and run home to mommy and daddy.

For those less upwardly mobile, the Dark Ages had arrived.

On their way in, the rescue posse saw how Consolidated Edison cut back juice to some neighborhoods but kept others lit, like the swank towers, putting a brave face on rolling blackouts. Who cared if half of the Bronx and Brooklyn burned candles? With the news media suffering a thrombosis, what point in keeping up appearances? To make matters more surreal, the radio stations played loops of Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass.

Inside the yellow 4Runner, Bhakti didn't even bother fiddling with the scan button; instead he gripped the dashboard with both hands as though bracing for impact. It struck Cheryl that since West Virginia her buddy had become steadily grimmer and more withdrawn. As though the closer they got to Lila Chen, the stronger her pull on him; seeing neither right nor left, just straight down a tunnel. And now, below the San Remo apartment building, Bhakti's eyes bored holes across the street into the stone façade. Cheryl swore she could almost hear him grinding his teeth.

“Do we know what floor they're on?” Bhakti asked, though he did not seem to care about an answer. A police cruiser roared downtown, lights flashing, without pausing for the vehicles idling in a No Parking zone. Instead, the patrol car ignored the strange convoy and sped on. Bhakti barely glanced at it.

“Where the hell is everybody?” Bhakti grumbled. So apparently the weird state of the city had penetrated his noggin.

Cheryl shrugged. “How the hell should I know? I grew up in Poughkeepsie. But this
does
look a lot like Omaha and Council Bluffs, doesn't it?”

“Taller buildings,” Bhakti replied; his eyes strayed up the stone face of the towering apartment house, almost as if counting floors. “There's still gotta be a lot of people here.”

Cheryl nodded her head. “Millions.”

Rachel's spirit gazed dismally out the backseat passenger window at the desolate streets. “I hate New York,” she murmured. “That's why I moved to LA.”

Rachel had barely finished her sentence when the rumble of heavy vehicles echoed off the buildings; you could see lights bouncing up and down inside Central Park. Heavy vehicles were coming out from under the tree cover. They rumbled onto the 77th Street access and turned the corner. First, an M1 battle tank, followed by a troop carrier and three Humvees. The tank took out a large stone entrance pillar to the park, then the suspended 77th Street intersection traffic light along with its wires and three red elms—leaving an enormous airy gap—and kept going.

The armored column homed in on the uptown tower of the San Remo.

The tank, the troop carrier, and the Humvees parked in a semicircle; a score of troops piled out of the carrier and set up a perimeter. Overhead the sound of rotor blades—
whop-whop-whop
—cascaded down the stone apartment buildings. Wind buffeted the street; loose newspaper and trash flew in every direction. At the 77th Street intersection, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter made a tight turn over the edge of Central Park and landed in the middle of the roadway amongst the tangle of stoplight cables. With the elm trees down, the rotor cleared the remaining street-lamps with a few yards to spare on every side, the blades slowly coming to a halt.

The message couldn't be clearer.

The Big
They
was here for a pickup.

The Special Locator Team had arrived.

The travelers in their three vehicles stared at the military guys. In ten seconds, the soldiers spread barbed-wire accordion barriers from corner to corner. The officer in charge directed his men to seal off the San Remo's main entrance. Then he sent a detachment around the corner of the building to secure the service door. Four troopers entered, securing the service elevator, the back stairs, and the service entrance to the apartment building. A special detachment in blue hazmat suits rolled four lozenge-shaped body transport containers to the San Remo's main entrance and halted in front of the ironwork doors awaiting orders.

Nobody in, nobody out.

A squad of three men boldly walked across Central Park West toward the idling cars, their intention clear:
No parking here. Move along.
Big Bea's harsh but soft voice came across the walkie-talkies in every vehicle.

“This is way too big for us,” she whispered. “We better shove off. Figure out another way to get those kids. Just hit the transmission button if you copy.”

In the white minivan, Billy hit the transmission bar. Roger Wilco. In the yellow Toyota 4Runner Cheryl did too. Click, crackle, and click. New plan: Shove off, regroup. Except Bhakti wasn't having any of it. Speaking softly but distinctly to his companion, he said, “
I want you to give Janet's ashes to Eleanor. Promise you'll do that for me.”
Before Cheryl could even say
“What?”
the Punjabi scientist groped out of the car as if he meant to enter the building across the street.

One of the soldiers said sternly, “Get back in the car, sir.”

Bhakti didn't pay attention. The Punjabi scientist stared up the face of the building, all the way up to the sixth floor, to a wide-open lit window, to the figure in the window, to the figure of a little girl. Bhakti had seen her before,
Oh yes,
picking the correct statue of a saint off a table of saints; in the company of a woman who knew the address of a coroner at 1104 North Mission Road, Los Angeles, California, and wouldn't take his money. Oh God, yes, he knew her.

“Maria!” he cried up to the window. “Maria, it's me!” His hands rose to the building, pleading with its stone face. “Get Lila! Where's Lila?”

One the soldiers approached closer, violence behind his voice. “Sir, get back in the vehicle please.”

The little girl in the sixth-floor window looked down. Little Maria's eyes and Bhakti's eyes made an electric connection. She raised her hand, silhouetted in the window, waving gently down into the street. Yes, she remembered Bhakti.

Another figure came to the window. A Chinese girl with shimmering black hair; she pushed it from her face and tucked it into a ponytail. Even six floors up, no one had to tell him—
he knew.
Bhakti frantically waved back. “Lila, it's me! Lila, I'm down here!”