End Time (67 page)

Expectant.

The light from the living room window changed from autumn gold to silver and then silvery blue. A shaft of brilliant light poured down on the sitting man. Mother came in from another room and stood by his father, putting her arm around his shoulder. The light embraced them, a living caress.

A few moments later the chair sat empty, his mother and father gone. So this was how it happened when young Clem came into the house to find them missing. Clem Lattimore suddenly realized this was no abduction, no local crop-circle episode, and not some hushed-up mission to secure downed UFOs in rural Bucks County. His parents had not returned psychotic or confused, but wonderstruck.

They'd gone up on a mind glide of their own.

What had they seen up there?

He remembered them as they came in from the rain, wet and naked. Sitting huddled on the couch with haunted eyes, a little distance apart. Mom and Pop had seen something incredible, and not cirrus clouds from the window of a flying doughnut. Their eyes had been opened.

What had the Takers shown them? What could his parents have seen?

Lattimore's mind whirled with possibilities, dwelling mostly on the Fate of Man and his troubled existence. Perhaps his parents had seen humanity's past and then its future. Its entire history from beginning to end.…

Perhaps they'd seen how the far-seeing Long Souls, the “benevolent” ones, had altered Man for the better, nurtured his nascent nobility, instilled compassion, mercy, courage, resolve—rejecting the dominance of the three-fingered Grays, rejecting the insect collective.

Perhaps they saw how the Long Souls helped the knuckle men evolve, allowed the species to refine itself so that their descendants might distinguish right from wrong and good from bad?

Perhaps his parents had been shown how the Progenitors of Man rejected selective breeding for the seemingly random forethought of infinite design. Worshipping free will, individuality, and a great voice from a burning incandescence:
I Am That I Am—

His parents' stunned faces reached out to Lattimore through time and space as his mother and father desperately tried to cope with what they saw. Out of the distant past, Clem quietly heard his father say, “Yes, I know. I know we have to call everyone. I'll do it in a minute.”

That meant the authorities, the friends and neighbors who had stepped in to help take care of Clem. Mom murmured a question like, “What are you going to say? What are you going to tell them?”

“I don't know what to say just yet,” Father replied quietly. “Maybe the truth.”

Then the long pause Clem remembered so well from his perch on the stairs. His father finally settled on no answer at all.

“No, I don't think they'll believe it. Would you?”

Clem Lattimore realized once and for all that his father had not faked
anythin
g in life; that some of the details of his own mind glides had been manipulated inside out. The Pied Piper floated into his mind wearing Bhakti's skin, grinning at Lattimore through the Punjabi scientist's eyes.
Glad we finally met.…

His parents' faces on the screens began to fade, and Lattimore felt his head nodding to the keys of Jasper's laptop. The Takers were going to take him one more time.
Fine, let's go somewhere nice.…
Alas, no luck.

The familiar landscape of the Alaskan plain stretched to the horizon.

Mountains in the distance, but not verdant green like before, or soaked under lashing rain—now all white. A white blanket covered everything from horizon to horizon under a fierce gray sky.

The prickly forest of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the HAARP radio antenna array, was nowhere to be seen. No antennae, no signals getting out. Soon winter's night would come, freezing this place in ice and snow till August.

The military's force multipliers had done their work too well, and now the storm was living on its own. Overhead, a huge coriolis of cloud twisted slowly toward the south. And Lattimore went to follow it, the mind glide letting him ride General Winter across the globe.

Deep snow stretched from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay.

The big storm reached as far south as Baja; while across the Atlantic in Europe and Eurasia masses of clouds buried everything from London to Moscow, and lesser storms spun off into the Indian Ocean. General Winter marched across the face of the world, and no one could stop him.

Across the planet, once-blessed lands lay in ruins, crops under snow or swept away by whirlwinds. Cities crumbled as tectonic plates shifted four feet here or eight feet there; fires burned out of control. And endless lines of people, refugees from the great urban centers, streamed from the chaos, a step ahead of galloping catastrophe. Everywhere Lattimore looked people were struggling or dying. Some begged a deaf god with both hands raised to the sky, while others ended their lives in despair.

In places yet to be snowed under, along the mighty rivers—the Mississippi, the Nile, the Yangtze—hordes of dead locusts, beetles, and especially mosquitoes covered the water like pond scum. The flying insects fell like volcanic ash, clogging tributaries and deltas, while legions and legions of birds came to feed on their carcasses. The birds died too after gorging themselves, and covered the ground.

At last, the Takers dropped him where there was no snow: Florida, but as cold a day as ever recorded. A harsh wind whipped the dune grass, over patches of cracked and partially frozen sand. Lattimore stood on the shore of a sandy beach on the shore of the Atlantic, and being a rocketeer the man knew his exact position on the global grid and the significance of this parcel of beachfront real estate.

The ground zero of Florida's Space Coast, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge: half a mile north of the Cape Canaveral Air Force station and a couple of thousand feet south of the JFK Space Center's launching pads A and B and their towering gantries.

Lattimore looked inland from the beach. A huge wave must have swept up from the Atlantic Ocean, pushing sand and dune grass back from the shore, and a large container ship with it. The ship had landed in a lake of brackish water, salt marsh, and mangrove swamp called the Devil's Elbow—part of the wide wetlands that surrounded the space facilities. The immense vessel lay on its side in the semifrozen muck, broken in half, disgorging its cargo of containers onto the grassy tidal flats.

The container ship
Anja
had finally reappeared.

When Lattimore looked closer at the beached ship he saw container after container spilled out onto the marshy ground, a hundred hues of blue metal and red metal, orange, yellow, and purple—as though an enormous ship piñata had emptied its guts from its split hull. Footsteps pockmarked the mudflats, traipsing off across the dunes; apparently some of the crew had survived the wreck and walked away.

But one container stood out among the riotous colors.

A silver tractor-trailer shipping container. The Tea House of the Hidden Moon.

The plain stainless-steel container with
L
1/5 etched on its side lay farthest out from the ship, landing on an apron of marshy grass. As Lattimore drew closer for a better look, the curious designation etched on the metal morphed as it had before, deep in the ship's hold,
L
1/5 changing to the simpler
L
2.

L
1/5 or
L
2?

Make up your mind!

The swing doors of the container had broken open, releasing the contents of the Tea House onto the ground. Lattimore looked in dismay at what had once been that bit of heaven on Earth. The rice paper windows, the tile roof, the fire pit stones, and chuckling stream thrown pell-mell like the scattered pieces of a child's dollhouse onto the mud. Two koi fish lay frozen on the ground, the little Japanese bridge shattered. The red miniature maples and the bulrushes were torn apart as though a whirlwind had blasted them out of the box. The Tea House of the Hidden Moon a total ruin.

Lattimore's heart sank in despair at this perfect shadow box coming to such a bad end. A refuge no more, this tiny bit of heaven gone with everything else.

Then a curious thing caught his eye. Two rabbits bunny-hopped from within the silver box and sat for a moment, looking out on the marsh. They twitched their noses at the big wide world, looked at Lattimore with pink eyes, dismissed him, and hopped off into the marshy muck. Then two butterflies danced about the spears of elephant grass, got caught up in the wind, and vanished from sight. A bluebird appeared on the roof of the container, ruffled its feathers, and chirped once.

Back on the ground the rabbits had vanished. Their bunny paws left tracks on softer patches of mud and stretched across the flats. That's when Lattimore noticed more rabbit tracks going this way and that. Even bird footprints. Apparently quite a number of critters had come out of the Tea House.

The tracks seemed to march off across Merritt Island toward the marshy lagoon surrounding the NASA space center. And that sparked a queer bit of knowledge about this place, an arcane factoid. This lagoon system linked to estuaries and thence to the Intracoastal Waterway, dozens of inlets with names like Ponce de Leon and Mosquito—a winding ribbon of water that stretched from Key West to Boston and connected every major river in the United States east of the Mississippi.

Lattimore felt sure there was a greater significance to this that he didn't quite grasp, feeling himself on the cusp of understanding. In all these frozen flats there was something eternally hopeful about the tracks in the snow, across the icy swamp. The contents of the Tea House emptied on the ground, life returning after hibernation. Wild and untamed
life,
set free to roam the world, making its irrevocable impact on whatever it touched. A Noah's Ark moment.

The bluebird chirped one more time, dipped off the steel container.

The bird swooped over the marsh grass.

Lattimore pulled his head off the workstation desk, things much clearer now. He wasn't the savior of the big world, great protector against all that was bad. The struggle wasn't down here searching for computer worms to kill a sicko government breeding program. There were matters much closer to home to deal with. He'd left Mildred alone far too long.

In the few minutes he'd been away she could've been overdosing, naked in a bathtub with rainbow dust rimed around her nostrils—no, he'd never forgive himself. The last mind glide message was very simple. Take care of what you can, and let the big bad world take care of itself.

 

40

Granny Sparrow

You can't let them breed.

You can't let them leave.

Everyone from the bedrooms upstairs had come down to the parlor at the sound of agitated voices. The crude pictures of the factory, the grubs, and the “Rolpens” in young Alice's diary got passed around from woman to woman, then man to man. First Cheryl looked at the pictures, passed the diary to Beatrice, who passed it to Guy, and finally to Billy.

Their faces growing darker as they touched the ugly pages.

Eleanor's mind slowly smoldered.… Husband gone, daughter gone. No Bhakti, no Janet, not even her friends, Kay or Mr. Washington. Eleanor's last connection to this broken world was her sister Lauren. So
now
what?

Go back to Fairfield crammed in the SUV with two dogs and their
Alice in Wonderland
girl? Drive back to Texas? Clean out the refrigerator, change the bedsheets, wipe the lipstick graffiti from the bathroom wall?

What then?

Turn on the TV and crawl into bed? To do
what
exactly? Get up in the morning? Look up and down the gentrified ticky-tacky street in the Van Horn subdivision, knowing her friends and neighbors were never coming back? Dutifully pick up where she'd left off at the frozen smoke lab?

The
π
r
2
complex floated to the troubled surface of her mind: the overgrown fenced parking lot, the battered metal door under the bare lightbulb, the dirty tunnel descending to the glass-enclosed workstations and operating theater. Her mind's eye glided by the trimester rooms with their huge sucking fans, to the recycling section, the final black tunnel, all the way out the slimy crack in the earth.

She knew the way in; she knew the way out.

Those government insects had lured the innocent victims from Van Horn—Mrs. Biedermeier, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Perkins, Mrs. Quaid—impregnated them and then watched them die of one grotesque disease or another—orange mold, neuralgia, paralysis.

Time to exterminate the red ants. Every damn one.

For a second she paused. What did she know about extermination? Enough. Put gasoline in a jar and throw it. Eleanor glanced around the room at her companions and spoke with great gravity.

“The ants go marching one by one. Hurrah. Hurrah.”

One look at Eleanor and the unspoken powwow that goes on between females came together, like fingers closing on a mental fist. Nobody needed a vote. The women in the gabled house knew exactly what to do. Drive hell for leather to Hillsboro, go down the hole, burn the place down, kill every damn Rolpen and every creep in a lab coat they could lay their hands on. When Eleanor saw the reckoning in their eyes, she nodded her head.

“We're doing the ant dance now.”

Except for Lauren.

She wasn't about to leave young Alice; while Guy had no intention of leaving his two ladies alone, not with hungry inmates lurking on the grounds. Not to mention he was sick. Guy had managed to pick up a wicked cold, laced with bronchitis. It came on fast and hard in the few hours he slept, and by dawn, the grippe owned him body and soul. He sat on the couch shivering and sweating and shivering again with Mr. Washington's afghan around his shoulders.

Cheryl put the stethoscope away and dug into the found medical bag to see what she could do to fix him up. Too late for a flu vaccination, but she gave him one anyway, and a big shot of antibiotics. She also shook some pill bottles in his face—a week's worth of penicillin for the bronchitis and Theraflu for the cough.