End Time (39 page)

God, don't say it, don't think it.
She began to pant, the ache in her belly getting worse. First thing, get rid of it somehow. If she didn't, the Ant Dancers would know everywhere she went, every place she slept, everything she did. The tiny rolling tadpole tattling on her every move, her body sending messages back to the Ant Colony. And inside her belly the glassy-eyed tadpole would be telling her what to say, what to do.

No, they couldn't know where she was going, not now, not ever again. Eleanor passed a blazing, enormous billboard off the side of the road. Two sign-hangers in white overalls standing on a scaffold were plastering the board with a new advertisement. The image showed a beanpole of a man in doctor's pastel blues, masked and capped and gowned for surgery, standing in front of a gleaming white hospital building.
ST. FRANCIS'—
That part wasn't pasted in yet.

The odd, gaunt man's rubber-gloved hand held up a shiny speculum in the billboard picture. And the caption read:
Don't take shortcuts. Take 15 Minutes to a Lifetime of Freedom. It's not a Choice; it's a Convenience. St. Francis' Teaching Hospital. Accepts ACA, Medicaid, and all Major Credit Cards.

No, no more hospitals, no hospitals. They'd just send her back to the Ant Colony. Eleanor put her foot on the gas. Up ahead the highway sign of a Dairy Queen flashed at her, and she pulled the car toward an exit. Ask for a plastic spoon in the drive-thru window.

The teeny-bopper drive-thru girl turned her nose up at Eleanor like testing bad lip gloss at a cosmetics counter. “Next window.” She shrugged. “They'll give you a spoon and napkins.”

Eleanor parked the car and looked around to make sure no one in the Dairy Queen parking lot noticed her. All Eleanor had to do was one little poke, one little poke up between her legs to miscarry and she'd bleed the tadpole right out. Could she do it? Could she? She didn't know. One little poke, one little—

Her hand trembled in front of her face; somehow she'd snapped off a bit of spoon. A fog closed in. She felt her mind blur, her brain going soft: sights, sounds, and memories slipping from her.
How she got here, why she was driving
. That's something they did back, back at that other place, the underground place with the glass walls. The ant place. They knew how to break your memory, make things move fast or slow and scramble things up.

When she finally texted Bhakti on the cell, all she could think of came out crazy:
They're watching. Always watching. And the ants go marching west to east. Hurrah.
Which made absolutely no sense.…

She'd drive to Connecticut. Get to Lauren's. Guy and Lauren, they'd know what to do. What the hell was this spoon for again? And why was it so bloody? Good thing she had plenty of napkins.

The gray road rolled underneath the car; the windshield wipers beat the rain away. She kept the radio off—no room in her brain for a Braincast. Morning passed to midday and midday to afternoon. The interstate swept her eastward, stopping only for self-service gas with a credit card she found in Mrs. Stanton's little silver purse, and back on the road. God, she hadn't been to Auntie Whitcomb's in years. Would she remember the way? Sheets of hail pelted the quiet streets of Fairfield. A family of deer galloped through the driving ice; the car fishtailed. Now which house? Oh, yes, there was the white picket fence—

*   *   *

Eleanor's hands gripped the windowsill in her pleasant Connecticut Valley Hospital room. At last she'd found the broken pieces of her past. She'd escaped from wicked men. Miscarried. No, self-aborted. Don't minimize. Don't make excuses. Her fingers left smudges on the window glass. She had made a little circle of dirt. There was something horribly appropriate in the smudged area of a circle. A circle filled in with slime and grunge—

Dirt R Squared.

Outside the gabled house night had fallen. Vaguely, she recalled the staff orderly, the nice Mr. Washington, politely knocking, opening her door and speaking to her while she nodded distractedly, working the smudge circle on the window. Not too odd for a madhouse; Mr. Washington was grateful Eleanor didn't throw tantrums.

In any case her room had been entered; a meal tray sat on the table under the TV. Along with a bottle of hand sanitizer and a few white cotton biofilter masks in a clear antiseptic pack. Also a printed note:
Watch for Hospital Updates Channel 98.

She looked under the Styrofoam cover. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, corn, and string beans. A brownie for dessert. Those were always pretty good. Napkins, plastic forks and spoons in sealed plastic. Salt and pepper packets. Channel 98 showed a simple announcement:

Due to an outbreak of staph infection, we ask all guests to please use the hand sanitizer and to wear the face masks when in contact with the hospital staff. Check back to Channel 98 for further information.

What did Eleanor know about staph infections? The bacterium entered through cuts on the body; but the variety of symptoms was legion. If you were prone to bronchitis, it hit the lungs, if you were prone to skin infections—and so on. And staph was a hardy, nasty bugger. Suddenly brownies didn't sound so good, never mind the sweaty slab of meat loaf.

Another bout of coughing from the mousy librarian next door bled through the wall. Then silence. Quietly, faint moans and soft sobbing came from distant corners of the gabled house. In a precious moment of lucidity, Eleanor wrote a mass e-mail on her laptop to Bhakti, Guy, and Lauren and cc'd Lattimore Aerospace in Sioux Falls. God, what wild things would Boss Clem think about her just wandering off? Nothing good, to be sure.

I want to leave now. Just please come and get me. Somebody, please.

But the second she clicked Send, Yahoo bonked her right back.

E-mail service temporarily out of service. Please check back later.

 

21

Ship of Foos

The Cosmos Café, the Lattimore company cafeteria, occupied part of the ground floor near the reception and the elevators. Clem Lattimore poured a couple of black coffees into quilted paper thermal cups and shuffled half a dozen doughnuts onto his tray. He paid Mildred, the dowdy cashier, and asked after her husband, who had recently retired from Lattimore Aerospace.

“How's your dear Paul?”

Mildred made change and sighed. “His rheumatism is acting up, Clem. We're thinking about going to an arthritis specialist in Chicago. A sports medicine guy.”

Lattimore nodded sympathetically. “Tell him we miss him.”

Two clerks from accounting looked up from lunch, offering him a seat at their table, but Lattimore shook his head thanks, but no thanks. The company cafeteria struck him a little thin for middle of the week: empty seats, bare tables, and hardly any noise. Maybe it was the run-up to Labor Day. The official end of summer. It sure felt like the official end of something.

Two levels down, Lattimore entered the lead-lined subbasement bearing coffee and half a dozen doughnuts. His chief technology officer had been hard at it for weeks, looking for a firewall breach or a virus. Going home at eleven or midnight only to change clothes and sleep.

August had flown by without a peep, and so far they'd struck out. Maybe there wasn't a breach to find. Worse still, Jasper seemed to be spending as much time reading bizarre news items about classified conspiracies as searching for a crack in the operating system. Jasper glanced at the java and dunkers and back to his flat-screens, now using all six for weirdo “gubiment” ops. If Lattimore's tech specialist misplaced any more of his marbles he'd be going quackety-quack, don't talk back. The CTO tickled a few keys.

“Have a look at this.”

“Tell me you found the server breach. Tell me we know whether the Van Horn lab has been compromised.”

A satellite image taken by the company's Lodestar satellite, a search-and-rescue hybrid with military applications on lease to the United States Navy, flashed onto the screens: one of those high-resolution pictures from a couple of miles up, the designation USN, latitude and longitude, date and time. A very pretty picture of the Atlantic Ocean—pale blue water surrounding beach break and palm trees.

Clem could pick out the island of Nassau in the Bahamas off the Florida Coast, the thin strip of Coral Sands, and the spear point of a ship, a container vessel heading north. The Navy kept track of a lot of ships.

The image flickered, a few minutes of time-lapse photography. Then the ship vanished. The screen picture jumped back and forth: Ship, no ship. Ship, no ship. Lattimore carefully measured his words, trying to suppress total incredulity:

“You're showing me some ship disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle?”

Jasper grabbed a doughnut and inhaled it in three bites. “Those pictures are from an hour ago. The cargo vessel is the Norwegian container ship
Anja,
en route from the Port of Rio to the Port of Miami. The Navy picked up a peculiar heat bloom of some kind in the cargo area, and not the power plant. That set off warning bells.”

Lattimore saw a tiny white-hot lozenge in the middle of the ship before the vessel vanished again.

“Now they may have misplaced it. I mean the ship's not there anymore. My guess, its vanishing act is due to a software glitch and not a Klingon cloaking device. But I sure wouldn't want to be the naval commander of Key West today.”

No more coffee and dunkers for Jasper. Starting immediately, a diet of steamed broccoli and brown rice. Or a nice turkey sandwich full of sleepy mayonnaise.

“Jasper, I want you to knock off for a while, come upstairs and get some real food.”

But the fellow wasn't listening. “Yeah sure. In a bit.” Jasper clicked a few more keys, then suddenly turned from the bank of screens and asked out of nowhere:

“Didn't you tell me once your dad saw Foo Fighters during the war?”

What the hell had gotten into this guy?

Lattimore held the tray from the cafeteria with a dismal expression on his face.

“Foo Fighters,” he repeated grudgingly.

“Yeah. Y'know, they were—” Jasper tried to explain.

Lattimore almost lost his cool. “I know what they were.”

Foo Fighters?
Mysterious lights that played tag with bomber crews and fighter squadrons over Germany and the South Pacific. Picked up on radar, documented in after-action reports—lights that zigzagged around the planes like fireflies at night. You couldn't catch 'em and you couldn't shoot 'em down. Nazi miracle weapons? Nah, they never shot back. Not to mention, the Japs and Krauts saw 'em too, thinking, Ah
-so,
Ach
tung
! Yankee ingenuity.

Allied Airmen chose the name from the
Smokey Stover
comics, from Smokey the Fireman's zany two-wheeled fire truck, the Foo Mobile. Foo Fighters.

But there was a kind of odd connection. Foos, and those who acted like them. Lattimore remembered two books sitting on the arm of his father's club chair—two copies of the same book. Katherine Anne Porter's
Ship of Fools,
a hardcover in English, and a well-thumbed German paperback. Little Clem could tell his father considered this a special book, important enough to keep by his elbow in both his mother tongue and his adopted one.

Not until years later when Lattimore read the novel for himself did he understand why Father kept it around. A ship of overweening bourgeois passengers sailing to Germany in 1931, the frivolous international smart set, delusional Deutschland
Volk,
pompous charlatans each returning to the fatherland. But
not one of them
truly grasped the real destination of their voyage—the end of the world. The novel reflected his father's own delusion: that his hard-won scientific skills could protect him. Instead of a Ship of Fools, Pop's political naïveté landed him in Ship of Foos—Mittelbau Dora—with a slide rule and V-2 specifications. What he liked to call his “Master's degree from Speer University.”

Maybe Clem could make his CTO understand.

“You're getting your stories mixed up,” Lattimore told Jasper. “That's not exactly what I said. My dad worked as forced labor for Von Braun, fed better because Pop was a physicist and did mathematical calculations—
rocketry not flying saucers
.”

“But didn't your folks get abduct—”

Clem Lattimore almost lost his temper again, but held his tongue.

He really didn't want to spook this pony, a fellow now perfectly capable of hitting a few clicks and frying the works. Silently Lattimore turned from the obsessed man and took the cafeteria tray with him. “Don't go anywhere,” Lattimore suggested. “I'm getting us some real food.” He'd come back quietly with security.

Out in the hall he swiped a key card for the elevator, stepped inside, and breathed a sigh of relief. The car rose upward, then bumped to a halt. He pressed the intercom on the indicator panel for the Security office: “This is Clem. I'd like two officers to meet me—”

A tinny, unintelligible squawk came out of the speaker. The overhead lights flickered, then suddenly died. Lattimore stood in the dark, stalled between floors.

The emergency lighting struggled to come on, the bulb filaments tiny red threads.

He pressed the first floor button, but nothing happened. He tried the large red alarm button—again, nothing. His head began to feel a little faint, and Lattimore gently slid to the floor, sensibly laying the cafeteria tray, the doughnuts, and coffee aside before he spilled them. The emergency lighting in the corner of the elevator glowed in such a captivating way, as though inviting Lattimore somewhere special. But where?

“Are we going on a trip to Antarctica again?” he asked the empty elevator.

*   *   *

Soft and fragrant air caressed Lattimore's face: an ocean fog smelling of salt and seawater. He weakly stood with his back to a metal wall—no, a bulkhead on the walkway of a very large container ship. Beyond the rail the ocean stretched for about thirty yards before vanishing into gray mist. The ship's engines were at full stop. Water lapped softly against the ship's hull, magnified in the deep hush. The vessel gently rolled in a silent sea.