Gatekeepers (22 page)

W
EDNESDAY, 6:08 P.M.

Jesse kept an eye on the portal door from the hallway. He kept the wheelchair's footrest just inside the antechamber to prevent the outer door from closing. After all these years, being here in the house he had built with his father and brother felt somehow
comfortable
. Not pleasing, but comfort-able, the way a surgeon must feel in an operating room. Or even a soldier on the battlefield. It was a place he knew well.

Here, and only here, his skills perfectly matched the challenges presented. As he had told the King children about themselves last night—prematurely, he'd realized later—he was
meant
to be here.

The lights in the hallway flickered. Jesse looked at the nearest wall light. It depicted a frowning sun face—a grinning quarter moon was poking its sharply pointed head into the sun's cheek. Light from the bulb behind the faces shone through the eyes and slits in the sun rays; it splashed up the wall to the ceiling. The light blinked out and returned a second later. The other lamps in the hall did the same.

The walls around him creaked, groaned.

Too soon
, Jesse thought.

He'd been sure Time would have allowed him to stay longer before it came to claim him.

A door near the end of the hall, several down from his, crashed open. Light radiated out of the antechamber. He knew it emanated from an open portal.

He wheeled the chair back, turned, and shot down the hall toward the landing.

No wind yet. Coming soon.

Should he try to write a note? No time. Besides, sending the Kings into that world had been his most important task. A peaceful world?
Ha!

Don't get worked up, old man
, he told himself.
Not over that.

He had shined a light on
that
dark charade.

You want to get worked up? Look behind you! Look at the portal, hungry to eat you!

He reached the landing and propelled himself out of the chair. He began crawling, moving quickly down the stairs. He tried to ignore the pain in his stomach and hips as he bounded down each step. He slowed . . . stopped.

Why no wind?

Didn't it know that if it wanted him, it had to come get him? He wasn't about to just waltz right into the portal of his own free will. He may be old, but he wasn't stupid.

A scream reached him: coming from the second floor, just below him. Beyond the collapsed walls.

Toria!

She was screaming over and over, as loud and insistent as a fire alarm.

It dawned on him.

Not me,
he thought.
Nana. Kimberly. It's coming for her.

She'd been lost in history for thirty years, thirty constant years. Of course Time thought she belonged back there.

He thumped down the remaining steps and dragged himself up onto the fallen walls. He pulled his body over the dust and debris.

Toria's screams continued.

“Nana!” the little girl yelled. “No, no, nooooo!”

Jesse reached the main hallway and turned the corner.

Banging, banging
punctuated Toria's screams like a pounding drum, trying to keep time with a manic trumpeter.

“I'm coming, girl!” Jesse yelled, but the words were no more than air coming out of his lungs. He had spent his breath on moving from the third floor to the second.

“No! Nana!”

Jesse reached the grand staircase and crawled past. Toria's room was the next one on the right. He was almost there.

He could hear Kimberly now, crying, groaning with effort. Not screaming, no—all of her energy was invested in fighting the pull.

Inside the bedroom, something crashed. Toria screamed again.

His arms were tiring. He reached out, hooked his fingers on the door frame, and pulled himself forward.

Something inside the room screeched like an angry hawk. A bare foot shot out of the bedroom and struck his face. He pulled his head back. Kimberly's feet kicked the floor in front of him. She gripped the bed's footboard, her body stretched from it to the door.

That
screech!
again, and he saw the bed tremble and scrape closer to the door. Kimberly's feet came farther into the hall. They smacked Jesse's face and shoulder. He rolled away, across the hall. He couldn't help her if he was knocked unconscious.

He pulled himself slightly past the door, then arced around, edging toward her at a less dangerous angle. “Hold on!” he said.

Toria knelt beside the bed, holding on to Nana's arms. She was crying, pulling in great gulps of air and screaming them out. Her face glistened with tears.

“Jesse! Help her!” Toria yelled. “Make it stop!”

Jesse grabbed Kimberly's feet and tried to push them back into the room.

The bed screeched across the floor. It slammed into the open door and stopped.

Kimberly's legs snapped away from Jesse. They bent around the edge of the door frame, toward the smaller hallway and the stairs leading to the third floor. They shook and twisted as though someone were tugging on them.

Jesse threw his arms around her thighs and squeezed. He heard a
crack!
Another. He prayed it wasn't Kimberly's bones giving out under the intense pressure pulling at her.

Crack! Crack!—
and the footboard broke apart.

The woman shot out of the room, banged against the door frame, and turned toward the short hallway. Her body bumped over Jesse's head and kept moving. She was completely out of the room now and sliding along the floor on her stomach.

He lunged for her, seizing first one wrist, then the other. She stared at Jesse, her eyes huge and wet. Her hair whipped around like fire in a strong wind.

She said, “I don't want to go back!”

“I got you,” he said.

She continued to slide, and Jesse went with her.

Toria bounded out of her room and jumped over him. She flopped on top of her grandmother, hugging her from behind.

“Toria, let go!” Jesse yelled. “Toria! If she goes, you'll go with her!”

Kimberly's eyes grew even wider. “No!” she said. “Toria, get off! Let me go!”

“I won't!” the little girl screamed. “I won't!”

They slid closer to the railing that overlooked the foyer. Jesse thought he could grab a spindle—that might work . . . for a while. As they passed, he released her right wrist and reached for the banister.

His left shoulder flared in white-hot pain. A muscular hand was squeezing his shoulder. He could not see them, but he knew long nails had pierced his flesh. Blood soaked the material of his shirt.

He gritted his teeth, telling his hand to keep its grip on Kimberly's wrist. But the pain was too great and the wind too strong.

She broke free and sailed away, sliding on the floor, taking Toria with her.

“Toria, let go!” Jesse yelled.

Kimberly and Toria reached the end of the hallway and zipped around the corner. He heard their progression toward the portal: thumping over the fallen walls;
bam-bam-bamming
up the stairs.

Toria screamed, then Jesse heard no more.

He grabbed the hand on his shoulder. It was hard as a statue's. The knuckles, the veins, the thick welt of scar tissue.

He rolled over, and the hand pulled away.

A man stood beside him, engulfed by shadows; Jesse saw only long, unruly hair, the hem of a black slicker. A soft patter, like raindrops, drew Jesse's eyes to the floor beside him. A small pool of blood grew bigger as drops fell from the man's fingers. The man leaned closer, and his thin, muscular face dipped into the light.

Jesse's heart clattered against his breastbone. He wheezed in a breath. He said, “
Dagan!
I should have known.”

“They call me Taksidian now, old man.” His voice was hard and dry, like bones rattling together. He looked up the hall in one direction, then back the other way.

Jesse saw the linen closet door standing open.

The man he had known as Dagan sighed. He said, “You should have stayed away, Jesse.”

He reached down with both hands, and Jesse's world went black.

CHAPTER

fifty

“Wait up,” David said.

Dad stopped to rest twenty yards from the top of the big hill. He turned around and scanned the valley below them.

“God's country,” he said.

David glanced over his shoulder. Tall green grass flowed like waves down to the woods they had traversed. A meadow of yellow and purple flowers fanned out from the other side of the trees, like glitter. A hill similar to the one on which they stood rose up on the other side of the meadow, forming a vista worthy of a postcard. The valley sloped to the river far below.

Dad pointed in that direction. “That's where Xander and I threw rocks into the river. And those trees on the other side of the meadow? That's where I carved Bob.”

Xander reached David. He put a hand on David's shoulder and leaned over, breathing hard. He said, “It's steeper than it looks.”

“You're more of a wimp than you look,” David said.

Xander shoved him. David stumbled back and plopped down. He hopped up and scurried toward his brother, intent on sending him rolling down the hill.

“Boys,” Dad said. “Not now.”

Keal stepped up to them. “Whew,” he said, stretching his limbs.

Dad turned and started climbing. David raced to catch up. Behind him, Xander groaned.

David reached the top first. He felt his eyes stretch wide. Dad rose up behind him and gasped.

They stood on the ridge of a hill that immediately plunged into another vast valley. Directly below them, piled up against the hill and stretching out from it for half a mile, were chunks and slabs of broken concrete. They ranged in size from small boulders to pieces that could have once been the sides of whole office buildings. Rebar jutted from the edges like severed arteries. Scattered among the concrete were clumps of metal. David recognized a demolished car and a nearly flattened dumpster. Tires were strewn everywhere. Except for an absence of paper trash, it looked like a thousand-acre dump.

Deeper into the valley, the debris assumed familiar shapes: a roadway, a bridge, the square top of a building. All of it flowed toward a centerpiece of destruction in the distance . . . the remnants of a great city. The skeletal frames of broken sky-scrapers rose up from collapsed ruins, like the popsicle-stick buildings David used to make and then demolish. Smaller buildings dotted the surrounding land like an angry rash.

Vegetation had staked a new claim on the valley. Forests of trees and lush bushes streamed like water through the streets and boulevards, tall grass covered sidewalks and plazas, moss and vines climbed the buildings. It sapped all color but its own from the landscape: everything was shaded in hues of green.

And black, David realized. Many of the remaining structures were charred. The only exceptions were a smattering of elevated freeway sections that glistened white in the sun like the bones of long-dead animals.

Beyond it all, a gray mist did not quite mask an endless body of water: an ocean or sea.

Keal reached the ridge and collapsed onto his knees.

Xander rose up and brought his hand to his mouth. After a long while, he said, “Dad . . . it's Los Angeles.”

David's heart skipped a beat.

Dad nodded slowly.

“I don't understand,” David said. But he could see that Xander was right. He could see what was left of the U.S. Bank Tower. And the Capitol Records Building. Half of it, anyway. He'd spent his whole life in this valley, traveled its streets, attended its schools, played with children who'd once lived there. It was like standing at the casket of a dear friend.

“We did this, Dae,” Dad said. “Mankind. We wiped ourselves out.”

“But . . .” David couldn't get his head around it. “When?”

“Sometime in the future,” Dad said. “That's what Jesse was trying to tell me. We‘ve never found a portal that leads to the future because
there is no future
. Just this one.”

”No future,” Xander repeated numbly.

“Do you think the whole world's like this?” David said. “Gone like this?”

“Has to be,” Xander said. “Else they'd have rebuilt it, wouldn't they? Wouldn't they have rebuilt the city, Dad?”

“I don't know, Xander.”

A sound drew their attention to Keal. His face was buried in his hands. His shoulders rose and fell.

“What do you think happened?” David asked.

“War, probably,” Dad said. “By the look of the buildings.”

“But when?” David said again.
The future
wasn't enough of an answer.

“Jesse said it's the culmination of Taksidian's work,” Dad said. “So I guess during his lifetime.”

“That soon?” David whispered.

They stood, letting the seconds become minutes.

Keal sniffed. He wiped his face and got to his feet. “Ain't right,” he said.

“Isn't there anything we can do?” David said. His voice had taken on a raspy tone. His throat and mouth felt dry as dust.

Dad put his arm around David's shoulder. “I don't know, Dae.”

Xander picked up a rock. Grunting in anger or frustration, he hurled it out over the descending hillside. It dropped into the trash dump, clattering between concrete and metal. Just as the sound of the rock stopped, a howl rose up from the valley, close.

David said, “What was—”

A mournful wail bellowed from somewhere else.

“Hey,” Keal said. “Something's moving down there.”

Xander stepped forward to look. “An animal.” He didn't sound so sure.

More noises kicked up: howls, screams, yips. Something clanged.

Keal's hand went to the gun in his waistband.

At first it looked to David like the shadows were shifting. Then, from a broken concrete pipe, crawled a creature. It was fish-belly white with bone-thin arms and legs. A large head on a spindly neck, flanked by narrow shoulders. A pelt of shaggy hair clung to its skull. It rose and stood erect.