End Time (51 page)

The large SUV pulled up in a spit of gravel and halted; the window powered down. A very familiar face stared out at her through the light mesh of a bug hat. Oh my God,
Lauren!
Her sister struggled out the car door, gushing, “Eleanor! Eleanor, we were so worried.”

They hugged, sister holding sister, one still gripping the pink plastic bottle. Eleanor looked curiously down at her hand. Oh yes, Mr. Washington's Pepto-Bismol. “This is for a friend,” she tried to explain. Then managed, “Lauren darling, I think you can take off that silly hat. We don't have mosquitoes here. Not many, anyway. They spray. And it was kind of cold last night.”

Eleanor caught a glint of something terrible in her sister's eyes—a weight of pain and suffering, some terrible thing she kept inside. However, before Eleanor could say anything, the other cars arrived, crunching gravel as they halted; the engines died. One by one, the drivers and passengers got out of their cars, and Eleanor felt an incredible sense of déjà vu. Of course Bhakti had been mentioning all these people in texts, spastic e-mails, or disconnected phone calls for thousands of miles and weeks on the road.

First out of the white minivan came a handsome Native American, his smooth black hair combed back, a lean and haunted face like a movie-star Indian. One Who Has Seen Much. That had to be William Howahkan, Billy Shadow. Bhakti was always talking about how much he admired Billy's clear and open mind, a mixture of the sensible and stoic. The man who kept the Zero Degree freezer tote with the burnt ear.
Good God,
Eleanor wondered.
Did he still have it?

Next, a large woman got out of the neon purple Gran Torino. Beatrice the roadhouse saloonkeeper, the gang's most recent addition to their rolling rescue squad—Webster's Big Sis. Big Bea was something out of
Road Warrior
: a Kevlar vest, ammo pouches, and a shoulder holster with a gun in it. The big woman unclipped her rig and laid it on the hood of the muscle car, sighing, free of its weight.

“Isn't that Big Bea?” Eleanor asked her sister. Then a much more familiar figure got out of the yellow SUV. That had to be Cheryl Gibson, Bhakti's companion since the fortune-teller, from the beginning almost. Eleanor felt like she'd known the woman Bhakti called “Shiva princess” all her life. She ran to Cheryl with a smile. The lady cop's eyes welled with tears, she was so glad and speechless to finally meet the woman she knew so much about. Eleanor's eyes welled up too; she could feel a big gusher coming on when she saw Cheryl clutched something in her arms—a metal urn. Janet's ashes. Janet, her Janet, in a metal urn.

Oh God.
Janet.

Then it swept over Eleanor—everything since the first day of her Braincast madness. She never went to find her baby, not once, letting Bhakti do it all.

Instead, letting the Light Tesla take her places and show her things at the Ant Colony—even though she knew from the very second her daughter didn't come home Janet was gone for good. And for a brief moment Eleanor was back in their Van Horn house staring out the plate-glass window while the Chen house burned down and Bhakti came and went and came and went, driving across the desert like a madman. Had there been no other way? No
other
way? And only when she got half sane in this crazy place did she think,
I got better when Janet vanished
. How horrible for a mother to think that, even though she could walk. I gave birth to her and my leg died; Janet went away and my leg came back.
How horrible to think that.

And now this lady cop stood before her with Janet in a metal urn. Her baby in a metal container clutched in another woman's arms … Cheryl slowly approached Eleanor, holding out Janet's ashes and saying again, “I'm glad you're still walking. That's good.”

And it almost made sense when Eleanor said, “One of the bugs bit me, and I can walk.” She took the urn with Janet's ashes and cradled it gently in her arms.

But then it struck her all at once. Who didn't get out of a car. Who was missing.

Eleanor's eyes flitted from one figure to the next. A huge lump growing in her throat, she still blindly expected him to appear; to get out of a car and stride across the fallen leaves, arms outstretched, looking like he hadn't trimmed his beard all summer, his whiskers coming to a funny point; putting his arms around her, telling her he loved her, that he'd always love her. And Eleanor could stroke his face, holding a tuft of beard and tugging it gently. Telling him,
I should trim this. Do you want me to?

But all she could stammer was:

“Where's Bhakti?”

 

27

The Good Humor Man

Jasper, at death's doorstep, was dying of the unlikely, the first case of insect-borne malaria in the continental United States since the 1940s. Would anyone notice? Probably not. The Sioux Falls Sanford Health Center was a madhouse of crazed men and women bouncing off the hospital walls: the sick, the hopeless, and those helpless to help them. In the last twenty-four hours hemorrhagic smallpox in South Dakota had jumped the military's cordon sanitaire, strangling the reservations.

Obviously, the wild red man had indulged his lust for freedom, selfishly spreading disease into the white man's world instead of dying quietly so no one would notice. In Sioux Falls at least, payback was a bitch. The Sanford Health Center battling the plague had all but lost the war.

Oozing, dripping, moaning patients from across the city were stacked on every available gurney and bed. Extra foam mattresses from a supply of backup bedding mandated by Homeland Security in the event of a blizzard lay on the hallway floors. Alas, when it came to weeping sores these foam pads became hemorrhagic incubators, like sponges sprouting mildew. Worse than useless. On his way upstairs Lattimore passed a dozen or so patients lying on the floor quietly leaking into the nasty things, others writhing like dogs chewing their sores.

He passed a young female nurse of about twenty, who seemed a lot smarter than her age, arguing with the attending physician, who seemed a lot dumber than his. The nurse had boxed the doctor into a corner and was trying to talk some sense into his thick skull. The attending physician was on the bad side of fifty; a man long ago given up on his faith in science, on his powers to cure, but still wanting to be seen to care.

Pinned to his lab coat a veritable rainbow of Awareness Ribbons, from the familiar red signifying AIDS Awareness, to pearl, to orange to yellow and blue and magenta and all the weird colors in between: burgundy, periwinkle, turquoise, teal—“awareness” of every condition from primary biliary cirrhosis to obsessive-compulsive disorder—just too many pinned on a single white lab coat to care about anybody in particular.

“I'm sorry, it's the protocol,” he feebly argued. “We have the protocols posted downstairs. In an emergency use the government foam mattresses. That's the protocol.”

Nonsense on stilts. “Just lay them on the floor; then we can mop up with disinfectant!” The young nurse waved her hands in his face, exasperated at this imbecile. “This is no good! Just look at them!”

But the best Doctor Awareness could manage was, “I'm sorry, that's just the rule,” refusing the sensible suggestion to get rid of the pest-house foam pads. Lattimore almost smacked some sense into the jerk, but stopped short when he caught the doctor's tie. A Felix the Cat tie. A white tie with Felix's black grinning catty face pulled up tight against the man's white shirt collar.

The attending physician reached into his lab coat, found an atomizer almost exactly like the one Security Chief Walter Nash used, stuck it up his nose, and inhaled. He snorted hard, snuffing up every particle, then looked at the empty vial with deep resentment. How dare the damn thing run out now?

Lattimore kept going.

His CTO sat up in bed when he came in. Jasper's eyes were extremely dark, his face extremely pale. Between bouts of chills and fever his voice came out in a whisper. “Sounds like a bloody riot downstairs.”

“Yeah.” Lattimore nodded. “Right out of Bedlam.”

“Hah,” Jasper croaked.

He slid his laptop toward the edge of the bed. “This is the latest. Nothing new from our satellite over Bermuda; the container ship
Anja
's still disappeared in a large fog bank. However, I bought some additional satellite time on your AmEx card and tasked it north of the Lower Forty-eight for a while. We got some serious frequency signatures in Alaska.”

“Lemme guess,” Lattimore said. “The antenna array in Gakona. The High Frequency Active Auroral Research guys, the lads from HAARP, are getting excited, tuning up their heavenly tuning forks. Funny how nobody in charge of tasking government satellites objected to Lattimore Aerospace spying on them on one of our leased satellites.”

“At a million dollars a minute the government could use the money you paid.” Jasper smiled, his lips cracked with fever. “Besides, maybe the NORAD tracking folks are too sick to care. Or asleep at the switch.” He swallowed. “Either way, wouldn't want
that getting around,
now would you?”

Clem Lattimore chuckled darkly.

“No way. I'd shoot first and ask questions later if anybody hinted at such a lie.”

Jasper coughed and held his head, his face going green with pain. “Dammit!” he cried. The spasm passed. He paused, panting, his eyeballs rolling in and out of focus. “I don't think the hit squad from the Men in Black is going to beat my liver to it. If you could rustle me up an iced tea or nice tall Coke with lots of ice, that'd be great.”

He pushed the laptop another inch toward the edge of the bed.

“Take that with you,” Jasper said about the PC. “I don't want anybody finding it here thinking I know anything of consequence. Magnetize it if you have to.”

Lattimore sighed quietly; he snapped the thing closed, tucked it under his arm, and headed out on last requests. An iced tea or a nice Coke.

He need not have bothered.

There wasn't any iced tea anymore. No more Coca-Cola.

A run on the hospital's food services had looted the cafeteria clean. Seems like a lot of people wanted iced tea with Sweet'N Low at the end of the world. Could you blame them? When Clem Lattimore came back from his fruitless search, Jasper the living man was gone. The CTO had died with a frown of frustration on his forehead; alas, he'd failed to unravel even one little secret of the universe. Lattimore closed Jasper's eyes and tugged a length of bedsheet over the dead man's face.

As if to give the boss one last farewell, Jasper's arm slipped out from under the covers. Lattimore examined the wayward hand. The skin was still livid, red weals where a vise-grip had held him down. Both wrists. The extra pillow in the room on the chair showed a clear facial impression. Jasper's frown was from a smothered face.

The guys in suits and ties had paid poor Jasper a visit as the CTO lay in bed. Guys who'd never allow some tech-head to retask space hardware over classified tundra. Nobody gets to know stuff like that and live to talk about it. Lattimore's eyes flashed up and down the hospital hallway.

Empty. They'd come. They'd gone.

And still, no personal computer to show for all their effort, because the laptop tagged along on an errand for an iced tea or a nice Coke. The thought of operatives coming to tie up loose ends like Jasper made Clem's hands tremble. Would he have tried to stop them? A dagger of shame touched him. He'd never find out.

But it made him hesitate before trying to leave the place. Sure, he needed to get back to his own digs, batten down the hatches. But if he walked out now bold as brass he might as well run out the front entrance naked as a jaybird. Whoever got Jasper would get him for sure.

All his life he'd tried to protect against an accident, against disaster. Now of all things, he wished he had thought to install an electromagnetic pulse device in the lead-lined subbasement in the event he wanted to wipe his records clean. Nut-bag thinking.

EMP blast or no EMP blast, the storm troopers in suits and ties would come for him anyway. Right now getting back home was the problem—how the hell to get out of this charnel house?

Somebody'd be watching; maybe waiting in the hospital elevator ready to grab him when the doors opened. Forget the elevator; use the stairs. He found the emergency door, bumped through it, and headed down. One flight, then another. Bodies lay on the icky foam mattresses in the stairwells. He stepped over and around them, but missed, feeling the damp foam squish under his heel. At last, he reached the delivery bay at the rear of the hospital. Sick people lay on the concrete floor of the storage area, weakly groaning and reaching out for help.

Lattimore saw a new crop of doctors and nurses gliding between the rows of foam mattresses, coming to help the inflicted. Long, tall doctors and nurses in long white coats. Long white coats and long gray arms with three fingers; long arms and teardrop-shaped heads with black sunglasses. No, those weren't sunglasses; those were their big black eyes. Tiny mouths and no nostrils.
Hey, Clem, Is your dad My Favorite Martian?
Or are these the dudes who come from Uranus? The Grays from Lost Vegas.

“I hate hallucinations,” he said to nobody in particular as he slid toward a gritty corner of the delivery bay. Gingerly he let himself down by a huge unopened carton of prepackaged, empty plasma bags, where he wouldn't crack his head or smack the laptop. One of those funny light balls glided across the concrete floor. The Taker was getting ready to take him away.

“Oh, it's you again,” Lattimore remarked. “What the hell do you want this time?”

Then he thought better of being rude. If this was going to be a last request, might as well make it a nice place to go. “How about the Tea House of the Hidden Moon? Take me there, and I won't complain.” The globe of light hovered for a moment.