End Time (35 page)

The Piper opened his eyes and scanned the dark limo. Then, to the uniformed driver up front, one of Kid's faceless posse of skycaps:

“Indianapolis Methodist,” he said. “And step on it.”

*   *   *

Cheryl and Bhakti helped Billy from the ground, their human warmth flowing into his limbs. “I can walk.” He hobbled with them to the Stuka Crew trailer. As he stomped along, the blood returned to his feet on shivery needles.

The first thing they noticed, the Stuka Crew was headless. A headless mannequin sat astride a Harley, two more headless dummies lay on the ground half crushed to powder. But the women were staked out against the silver trailer, spread-eagled and done ugly. Triple X-rated. Their jeans and vests torn in all the right places, their boobs destroyed, genitals mutilated. Mouths punched to mush, brutally punished. Lifeless white plaster. The husks of people sucked dry.

The three searchers stood silently. Dumbfounded. Lila Chen wasn't in the van, and nowhere nearby.

Cheryl clucked softly and chewed her lip; she looked at the triple-X bitches, feeling momentarily sorry for them. But then she remembered how Bhakti's sweet Janet looked chopped up in the orange Chevy and the pity went away.

The Punjabi scientist stood silently for a few heartbeats and then began to paw about the trailer. Banging inside, rattling chains with a frantic urgency. Finding nothing, he came outside again, dragging a hunk of dirty foam bedding. He stumbled into one bike and knocked it over, the mannequin rider breaking into a dozen pieces.

He'd held himself together for so long. Searching every stinking corner of the southwest, but too late for Janet and now too late for Lila. Bhakti held his head in his hands, and finally lost his mind.

Too late—oh Jesus Christ!

He kicked the foam padding on the ground, stomping around the silver trailer like a madman, tearing at his hair.

“Where is she? She was here! I know she was. I know it!”

He lunged to a female mannequin—shouting at it as though it could really answer.

“Where is she? Where?”

He slapped the naked dummy across her mashed face, making a piece of her foot drop off. “C'mon you! Tell me! Tell me!” Cheryl put her arms around this crazy man and held him as his soul died in public. Trying to get him to see:
Enough now.

Bhakti paused, his inner coil sprung. He looked at his hands, at the plaster dust, at the crumbled mannequin, and started to weep long and quiet tears, mumbling, “It's not fair.
Not fair.
She was
here
.”

While Cheryl whispered, “We'll find her, Bhakti. We'll find her.”

Billy Shadow watched his two companions, the sane and the broken. He jammed his hands in his pockets like he used to as a kid when he didn't know the answer to a question. So he stared at his feet, unsure what to do next. But he slowly realized he was seeing something on the ground, something very peculiar: Of course … the residual effects of his Skin Walking thing allowed him greater perception.

Two ant colonies were going to war. From each mound swarmed an army of ants. A horde of red ants streamed from one, and a great host of black ants from the other, marching out to battle, as if a terrible hand deep inside the earth were driving the ants to the surface in massed rage. The gaunt man in the limo flitted into Billy's mind. A creature who stirred nature's noisome, dirty creatures: ants, cockroaches, mosquitoes, rats, lice,
vermin of every kind
. Could the man really do that? Not the nice animals, the butterflies and bumblebees, but the ugly ones? Billy's head said yes.

Half the insects on Earth didn't even look like they belonged on this planet. Maybe the aliens were already here in the form of ugly bugs, just waiting for orders from a more intelligent life-form. And an advanced life-form like the ruthless Mr. Slim wouldn't disappoint them.

The confused melee roiled at his feet—two colonies, one red and one black, at death grips. Was this humanity's future? A final reckoning? If not today, the day after tomorrow or the day after that? Mankind tearing itself apart as only insects could, frantically, relentlessly—until no one was left alive.

Cannibal Ants.

Billy stared at Cheryl and Bhakti through Coke-bottle eyes. Their faces swam in and out of focus. He must have swooned again. He touched the side of his mouth, leaking spit, trying to say something. The words came slowly, distinctly, but through cold, numb lips.
One more thing he'd seen in delirium. Wave after wave of vicious gray hordes.

“Let's get out of here. Right now. Before the rats come. The rats are coming.”

 

18

The First Rat

August limped into September, the week before Labor Day. So hot you could feel the pavement through the soles of your shoes. A Manhattan scorcher sweating you to the lapels before you walked three blocks; the first time all summer the mercury climbed into the 90s. Guy Poole entered the office tower refrigeration, limp as a noodle, and didn't stop sweating for twenty minutes. He looked dismally at the reflection of his two-year-old Brooks Brothers' suit in a glass-walled conference room on the thirtieth floor. Gumby in clothes.

“You can go in now, Mr. Poole.”

The advertising firm of Talent Associates, and senior partner Lorraine Talent, had called him back two and a half times. First, a chirpy lady from the human resources department, who informed him primly, “I love people. They're so interesting. Which is why I work in personnel.” For a moment Guy thought he was talking to a graduate from Up with People, the smiley-face inspirational organization. Their treacly song echoed in his head:
Up, Up with People, You meet them wherever you go!
Only a supreme act of will allowed Guy the presence of mind not to sing it out loud.

Next up the ladder, the head account executive, Eugene Skinson, a guy who could have been Guy's doppelgänger in every demographic and a perfect foil. The only difference between them: this fellow had one of those shaven-skull haircuts.

“I've heard on the grapevine that Ingelheim Pharma and WunderThink might be ripe for a move,” Guy informed him.

“Really?” Skinson quietly pursed his lip. Apparently, he hadn't heard. You got the feeling the VP was capable of rushing upstairs to tell the Big She—She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, Lorraine Talent—the very minute the interview concluded. But to Guy's quiet satisfaction, VP Skinson brought him into the fold a little:

“We're about to lose two accounts: our hunk of DirecTV, that's bread and butter, and the other, a small, breakout technology, Nanotec Microprocessors—
bad, bad, bad
. As you already know, industry ad buys have dried up since Christmas. I let go four execs pulling down 250K each and ten people out of Creative, who … I don't even know what they did for us. Now I'm working thirty-six hours a day and haven't slept in a week.”

VP Skinson leapt from behind his desk and strode to the door. “Let's go see Quiche Lorraine. Might as well shove your resume where it will do some good. If I don't see my wife this weekend, she's going to divorce me. Got any questions?”

Guy smiled at the
Quiche Lorraine
informality and dutifully followed the man. “No questions. I'll work for food.”

VP Skinson acknowledged with a dark chuckle. The elevator took them up to Lorraine Talent's office suite—the last surviving partner and grandchild to the original Barnabas Talent. Not much in the way of office frills: a few big wipe boards and multiple flat-screen televisions in a Spartan whitewashed, long, bare space. The lady was Prada-sharp with taut features and no wedding ring: a woman who lived for her job. Lots of those in the city. But at least the Big She had a sense of humor. She rose from a clean, spotless desk with her hand out as the two men crossed the parquet floor.

“Lorraine Talent. I gather VP Skinson already told you my nickname. He can't help himself. Apparently I'm my own brand of egg pie.” Guy Poole grinned a little and took her hand. Without inviting him to sit, the smart lady gave him the once-over, cocked her head, and said, “All right then. Thanks for coming in. We'll be in touch.”

*   *   *

Lauren had been watching their neighbor Mr. Fenniman on and off all day. First peering at him from the lantern windows by the front door, then peeling back the curtains by the front parlor windows, and then boldly out the Keeping Room window, which had no window treatments at all.

Ever since her dream of Guy in bed with yellow fever and driving a runaway horse-drawn hearse a sense of dread had grown on Lauren. The rainy summer seemed to have produced nothing but bugs: legions of ants crawling up from between the floorboards, silverfish in the drains, and fat cicadas clinging to the house. Lauren went about exterminating anything that crawled, flew, or spun webs. With the exception of pretty butterflies—who she let alone to flutter harmlessly about.

But she exterminated the rest with all manner of weapons at her disposal: vacuum, brooms, aerosol spray, until she became the Chairman Mao of her helpless backyard bug population—deciding who would live and who would die.

But still the dread grew on her, and no amount of dead ants or gassed wasps alleviated her noxious moods. The cause? Who the hell knew? Nothing she could put her finger on, but when she saw Mr. Fenniman taping up his traditional two-story American Colonial something clicked.

At first she didn't quite get it: old Fenniman climbing the ladder, then moving window to window. And she occasionally heard him mutter a curse as the ungainly aluminum ladder clanked onto the wrong spot or he tramped his flower beds. A score of his precious tiger lilies died that day. What was so important that the flowers had to lay down their lives?

Old Mr. Fenniman was not the type to ask for help; a widower for ten years now, a flinty old Yankee, a true do-it-yourselfer—always telling Guy the right way to clean a gummed-up chainsaw or tune up a two-stroke engine. “He sharpens his own lawn mower blades,” Guy once told her, rather impressed. And now, Lauren watched the old coot tape up his house.

Mr. Fenniman had precut window-sized rectangles of thick translucent plastic and sealed the windows from the outside with strips of black duct tape along the seams. Plastic sheeting and black tape—talk about an eyesore. The town was going to have something to say about that. You couldn't just turn Mr. Blanding's Dream House into a hazmat government containment area. At one point a couple of neighborhood kids paused from skateboarding to watch the silly old man. But that didn't seem to faze Fenniman one bit; he climbed the ladder, ripped the duct tape, and pressed it into place. Up the ladder and down: tape, tape, tape.

But now it clicked inside Lauren. She knew what the dream meant: Guy dying in bed, and her driving the hearse like a madwoman out of town. A warning:
Don't get sick; drive death from your door
. Now she knew what she wanted to do. First things first, she had to keep them both safe, seal the house. They were going to need it for a while. Downstairs, somewhere in the cellar, Guy kept a big roll of plastic by his painting things. And duct tape too. Lots of duct tape.

If Fenniman could do it outside, she'd do it inside.

The town wouldn't even know.

*   *   *

The 2:07 Metro-North train to Fairfield was less crowded than that Friday at the beginning of this clammy summer. No goofball clowns in Green Goblin bicycle togs, no grumpy salary men dying from life. Labor Day had started early for those who could afford to escape the city for their country estates, so the train car was nearly empty.

Except for the running brats.

An extremely self-absorbed Mamaroneck mommy babbled on her Bluetooth, oblivious to her four-year-olds running wild in the aisles, playing Aliens. The two ratkins wore bug-eyed gray alien masks, which didn't prevent them from shrieking up the coach's metal interior and firing noisy plastic laser-blaster guns in every direction. After a mere ten seconds the alien bratlings made Guy want to kill them very slowly and in public in front of their Mamaroneck mother.

The inconclusive interview in Quiche Lorraine's office made him feel like he'd missed the brass ring. But maybe the most disturbing element of the day had nothing to do with a capricious Quiche Lorraine or ungovernable children, but with the Tri-State Area's little biological mysteries. As the wild aliens ran up and down the aisles, Guy Poole spied an urban casualty by the grungy metal foot of one of the blue leather coach seats. A large gray rat lay inches from the center aisle, dead as a doorstop. A dead rat under the seat nobody noticed.

What did Guy know about rats? Not that much. They were hardy buggers; they could eat just about anything, climb walls, live for years, and breed like … well, rats.

Suddenly intrigued, Guy busied himself with a net search if only to ignore those whooping aliens. He found a brief article from the
NY Post
headlined “Rat Patrol.” Concerned citizens were battling rats in their neighborhood; the rats were winning. But fear not, the city's Pest Control Services Division was counting whiskers:
In December 2007, the Health Department started a new program using an inspectional process called “Rat Indexing” to proactively identify the presence of rats in neighborhoods
. But a paragraph later the Health Department seemed to contradict itself, a spokeswoman saying, “We don't do rat tail counts.”

“It's all crap,” Guy muttered. Nobody had a clue how many rats lived in the city. City Hall couldn't even count the people who lied to the census workers. Like they were gonna count rats? Fuggedaboutit.

He vaguely remembered a line from Camus'
The Plague—
the first rat coming out to die. A dozen clicks later he found it:
“Dr. Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing.”