End Time (32 page)

The screen tag under the reporter read
STEVE HORSTMEYER—CHIEF METEOROLOGIST, FOX 19 CINCINNATI.
The heavy weather had brought him out of the studio, and he pulled up his hood, looking slightly amused. The audio came through crackly, but Eleanor could get the gist of it.

“
They say time heals all wounds and rain washes the world clean of its sins. But not today in Hillsboro. Recent heavy rains which have kept everyone indoors for weeks seem to have exposed something somebody wished stayed hidden. A mudslide on a slope a few hundred yards from the rear of the old Whiteside Meatpacking Plant revealed a pile of rotting meat. An estimated forty tons of meat.”

The report cut to a shot of the mudslide hill; across the face of the cleaved slope an ugly eruption seemed to be flowing out of the soft dirt like slow-moving lava: meat of all kinds and description, chopped, limbs, bones, guts bursting out of the cliff face as if from an angry wound. The report came back to Steve Horstmeyer, his face lashed with rain.

“Normally with the gates closed and no road access, nobody would notice it out here, but with the sheer volume of waste product, people downwind—well how do I put this politely?—they noticed the smell.”

The woodpeckers outside Eleanor's window went
peck-peck-peck,
then suddenly stopped. The birds' dark silhouettes froze to the tree, dead still. That's when Eleanor noticed the floating light. It seemed to come from a copse of woods at the far end of the hospital grounds, zigzag around the tree, and then hover twenty feet outside her window. An amber glowing ball of light.

Kay's light people? It didn't look like a person.

Did it actually speak to Kay? An illumination of few words? It felt part friend, part guardian. Did it want to speak now—?

A few cogent ideas entered Eleanor's mind—ideas that went into her head like a touch of voltage, a pleasant tingling.
Once I walked among men; once I had a name.…
Eleanor felt the name on the tip of her tongue, a very familiar name. A reassuring name.

Tesla.

The name stirred up lectures on electromechanical engineering in grad school, and long spells in the MIT library: wireless energy transmission, longitudinal waves, resonant frequency, weird science. Tesla the nut job:
They called me mad at the University, but I'll show them.…
The Light was Tesla, come to explain something to her. How could that be? Was she crazy again? Urging her to look away from the window, go to the laptop.

At first a single image filled the screen:
π
r
2
.

The symbol faded, replaced by a live stream.

A video report was in progress of a lecture or a briefing. A middle-aged balding man with a halo of white hair was presenting scientific findings to an audience in a small, darkened amphitheater. The audience, composed of civilians and military types, was very attentive.

The lecturer wore a white lab coat; his dry, clean-shaven face lit from underneath, gave him that mad professor shadow. The face reminded her of Sam Jaffe in one of those old movies, the High Lama in
Lost Horizon
: except this man was more remote, more cerebral, and much less humane. Completely self-absorbed in his lecture, he held a laser pointer that danced about a large light screen behind him. The light screen showed a satellite image of the Van Horn subdivision where Eleanor used to live. His voice bleated softly:

“The initial test of the Braincast system with the Van Horn control group concluded, despite unforeseen outside factors. We tapped eight women, but due to outside interference only five subjects responded to the stimuli.” Eleanor stared at the screen, confused. Then it dawned on her.
She
was one of the subjects, while the outside factor interfering was the gang that abducted Lila Chen—and Janet. If Lila hadn't been kidnapped, there would have been three more women coming along: Mrs. Chen, her daughter, and Janet. Eight instead of five.

The professor explained more: “But once the stimulant was introduced to the remaining subjects, respond they did. One of our more flippant designers has dubbed the process
Dog Whistle
—for obvious reasons. We call and they listen.” Eleanor started to understand; the man in the white lab coat was explaining how the women had been lured away.

“What makes it most effective is the targeted delivery system via our enhanced Skeeterbug. An innocuous insect bite allows us to pick who we want, and the Braincast system allows us to direct them where to go.”

The light screen showed a complex internal/external diagram of a mosquito labeled
SKTR-13
, its tiny brain pulsing with energy. The screen shifted, showing the scrolling database of the Social Security System, the nine-digit numbers morphing to names and addresses of people, then morphing to something called the DNA National Database, then to the actual double helix of a DNA strand, finally superimposed over an animation of the human body. A tiny mosquito zeroed in on the human figure.

So that's how they got to them all, Eleanor realized. Sure, just about everyone in the Van Horn subdivision, even the children, their DNA was on file someplace, with some institution. So this group of scientists had access to their DNA too. But Lila Chen and Janet had gone to a music festival and weren't at home when the Skeeters, the enhanced mosquitoes, chose to zero in. If they'd stayed home they'd have been bitten and lured off like the other women. But who was doing all this?

The lean, precise face of the professor in the lab coat explained more:

“Never random as in nature, our new airborne friend allows the Braincast system deep discretion to pick and choose. With targeted delivery, we can introduce combined food-trail pheromones and sex-trail pheromones to the olfactory membranes by the simple process of injection, and thence directly to the brain.” The screen showed a large biological diagram:

Eleanor's biochemistry was a little rusty, but that image was the correct compound, all right. Cyclic adenosine monophosphate. A protein that when stimulated provided a direct pathway to the brain. A gatekeeper that opened in the presence of other cyclic nucleotides. Once open, you could phone in anything you wanted: Hunger. Thirst. Happiness. Sadness. Rage. Joy. All the primal drives, ready to be tapped and manipulated. In a critical leap, Eleanor grasped the implication. The only question remaining was what exactly you wanted your subjects to do.

The professor's soft voice confirmed as much:

“The refinement of chemosensory proteins allows us almost infinite combinations of stimuli and response. In our test control group we settled on one of the most primitive and powerful instincts—reproduction.”

And that's why the women had to pick up and go. No choice. A Dog Whistle. Come and breed, bitch. A question from the audience, from a young man with sandy hair, a sort of unruly mop:

“How did you handle those who remained behind, the families, the husbands?”

Eleanor nodded to herself. Good question. What the hell do you do with people still at home in the subdivision? How do you keep them from running around like chickens with their heads cut off? Or maybe that's what you wanted them to do.

The man with the white halo of hair over his balding head brushed aside the question with a wave of his hand. “We introduced another manipulator into all the males and all the preadolescent females, producing general ennui, an indifference to local conditions and events. Most simply wandered off into the desert. We needn't worry about them.”

But the young sandy-haired questioner wasn't satisfied and persisted: “With two exceptions, no?”

Eleanor knew those two exceptions, Wen Chen and her own Bhakti. The professor sighed. “Correct. Neither male was present at the time of inoculation. One committed suicide; the other”—he paused, checked his notes—“is on a hopeless search for the dead man's daughter. A young lady he will never find. Can we continue?”

Back to business. “As for our subjects—we added psychological reinforcement tapping into common childhood experiences delivered in the usual manner.”

The light screen showed a pleasant kindergarten classroom, tiny desks; enthusiastic kid artwork festooned the walls. The teacher was leading the cheerful children in a song; faintly you could hear the tune and the words, their voices chirping in unison,
Your foot bone connected from your toe bone, I hear the word of the Lord!
The light screen image flitted to TVs in living rooms, car radios, cell phone ring tones—all blatting away the same thing. The image shifted to piles of junk mail on doorsteps and TV ads for calcium treatments, Boniva, foot treatments, glucosamine chondroitin supplements, hip transplants, a panoply of health medicine—the kind you see from every supermarket checkout stand. Every day in every way a product or service pounded home the message
Your toe bone connected to your foot bone.

God, Eleanor realized—the message stroked you from every angle. Take a tune from childhood that was naturally reinforced in everyday life, from cradle to grave on every container and platform imaginable. No wonder the song was in their heads. The Professor agreed:

“So who can resist? We call and they listen. The group abandons home and hearth, husband and children, traveling over twelve hundred miles at our invitation. North by northeast. And never for one second knows why. Just that they must. And we're not even sure our scheduled program of periodic task reinforcement was actually necessary, though our field team applied it at every rest stop opportunity.”

Field teams watched the women on the road, reinforcing their “toe bones” when necessary, say at motel rest stops. The light screen showed the familiar red banner running underneath—
This is a test of the Emergency Braincast System—
and the faint three-beat tone.
…
Faintly, “Dem Bones” played underneath like an earworm, and she'd never even noticed.

The streaming feed into the laptop died. Eleanor stared out the window again, but the light guardian called Tesla had vanished, leaving behind no trace. Alas, and to her dismay, the little dancing men and the marching red ants were still moving along the upper border of the walls. And she remembered more now, more from her trip to that horrid place that she called the Ant Colony—

*   *   *

How long ago? A month, at least. Six weeks? Eleanor couldn't tell; fragments of her memory came in bits and pieces.…

The women's cars ascended a series of switchbacks; then through an open chain-link gate in the late afternoon. The surrounding fence was overgrown with weeds; vines snaked up to coils of rusty razor wire. The compound lights perched on stanchions should have been lit under the dark rainy sky, but only one or two were working, the rest smashed. The cars rolled over the flat edge of a large dented metal sign,
WHITES-
something, but the sign was too battered to make out clearly.

At the edge of the parking lot Eleanor saw the gritty, smudged smokestacks of a factory, the top floor of the main brick building dotted with empty, shattered windows.… Faded sign lettering over the top lintels said
WHITESIDE MEATPACKING.

Her memory ebbed, then flowed back like a tide. The vision jumped. Eleanor found herself following the others through an open side door to the abandoned factory, then tramping down a steep flight of metal stairs. Next, she was walking along a dingy underground tunnel, the walls damp and greasy to the touch.

A line of bracketed lights attached to the stone roof passed endlessly overhead, every other bulb burned out, so the passage went light/dark, dark/light. The other women of her troop marched in a gradual descent: Mrs. Biedermeier first, one hand on her fanny pack, then Mrs. Stanton still clutching the gold cross on the chain around her neck, the mousy Mrs. Perkins next, turning her head this way and that to get a better look at their surroundings and, finally, the widow Mrs. Quaid, her silvered hair blanching each time a bracketed light passed slowly above them. Eleanor, last in line.

She recalled a sense of fierce urgency, smoldering away inside. The desire to keep walking, to soldier on.

The tunnel branched off into multiple passages, some as forks, some descending, some rising, even crossroads. But the women needed no guide; they knew where they were going. They paused only once and very briefly when they stumbled upon another woman. She wore a dirty hospital gown and sat in the gap of a dark opening. Shaved head, pale unwashed face—she hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth, mumbling to herself.

A pack of cautious rats scuttled behind the woman huddled in the tunnel, but paused as if unsure whether to proceed or flee. Eleanor's neighbors kept walking by; there was nothing in this that concerned them. The barest glance and they marched on. The only sounds coming down the long tunnel were the soft scuttling rats and the faint echo of a song: “
Dem bones, dem bones…”