End Time (71 page)

“I want to go home. Take me home.”

Lauren shared a glance with her husband. How in hell were they going to do that? Guy was so sick he could barely move. There was three feet of snow in every direction. Would there even be any power back in Fairfield? At least here, they had some juice going, hot water, food, and medicine. Lauren really wanted to get out, go home—she really did—but there was no way either she or poor Guy shivering on the couch were going anywhere right now.

“As soon as we can,” Lauren said. “As soon as we can.”

 

43

Eye of the Storm

Mr. P. gazed out the window of the Gulfstream jet as it rose through a patch of open gray sky into a dark wintry dawn. The lights of LaGuardia airport retreated below. Parts of New York seemed blacked out, curious puzzle pieces dotted with building fires, while other parts were brightly lit, the houses of northern Queens, no rhyme or reason.

The plane climbed, hit a bump of air, but plowed through as the heavens opened. The gaunt man realized with a pang of bitterness that this was probably as close as he'd ever come to using his wings again, sitting in a flying metal tube. How barbaric.

Mr. P.'s head throbbed just like after he'd raptured those hicks in Nebraska; the gritty sparkles of light swam behind his closed eyes. His effort at weather control, clearing a hole in the clouds so the Gulfstream could take off, had taken him all night. Usually he could do it by staring at a television, just like when he rewrote rerun episodes or made a little snowstorm in Utah via the Weather Channel. But every minute he sat in the cabin of the jet seemed to weaken him, as if the Light Tesla and the specter of the angry Punjabi scientist were sapping his powers. And the outside world wasn't cooperating either. The jet's TV couldn't pick up any local weather, and radio signals crackled incoherently.

Finally, he used the lad's iPad to find a weather satellite beaming info down to all the flight controllers nodding over their screens at LaGuardia Tower. Slowly and steadily and with excruciating effort he cleared a hole through the clouds like the eye of a hurricane, large enough to get a jet off the ground.

And just in time, as the not-so-special locator guys had finally located a ground crew asleep in a warm corner of the airport, bribed them at gunpoint to gas up the plane and skim off the runway. Mr. P. waved a fond farewell through the airplane window to his useful idiots as the jet taxied off, leaving the soldiers on the snowy tarmac. No need to control them anymore; he could rest at last. The Gulfstream ascended to the heavens, the Piper's head throbbed, and blessed sleep took him away.

Kid stared at the Piper as the gaunt man began to snore.

Dead Bhakti kept watch too; the uninvited specter of the Punjabi scientist ran a hand gently through the gaunt man's hair with ghostly fingers. The Pied Piper stirred but did not wake, and Kid could feel the tall man's mind simmering away.

The Piper had so many evil things planned. Once in the underground labs they'd rip the girls apart molecule by molecule. Mixing cells and blood and sperm and eggs; enhancing certain chosen mantises from suckle-servants like Webster into a completely new human species—though not the kind who made for a better world. No. Rather creating a select few silver-haired floating-city dwellers and many, many slaves to service the lucky ones as they looked down from on high. While the women from Van Horn—Mrs. This and Mrs. That—and Mr. P.'s female children constantly produced offspring, bearing one perfect creature after another.

Lila, Maria, and the Van Horn women were to raise the enlightened. Masters of the Change who would command the legions of instant Rebreeders, the malformed Rolpens. Who in turn would dispose of every mistaken experiment, eat the meat seam clean, and crawl outside through the crack in the Recycling Cavern to fertilize the grass. Then all of Mr. P.'s brand-new little worthies would march out to repopulate the world, one by one and two by two.

Kid saw it all. For Lila Chen, endless motherhood as Mr. P.used her like a cow to breed a greater race. And if the Chen girl was going to be hooked to a birthing machine, Maria's future was even worse. Wire the child for sight and sound and touch; screw hundred-watt lightbulbs into her eyes and solder her finger bones to electrodes. Expose her brains in order to find that perfect strand of protein, the look-see molecules, and reproducing them in überangels, allowing the anointed to see the future so they would never fall again.

Kid saw his own future as well. Mr. P. would forgive him every trespass and betrayal; Kid would become exalted again, the man's right hand. He would learn all about molecular-genetic engineering, ovarian implantation, and artificial insemination. Unlike that amateur scientist Webster Chargrove, PhD, Kid's brain would not explode but respond to the off-world Wild 3 glycine by geometrically enhancing neural synapse density. Instead of an estimated hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses, the young man's brain would grow a trillion neurons and a quadrillion synapses, putting him far above any creature that ever crawled the earth. Kid would oversee the manufacture and care of a new generation of Celestials. Even learn the secret of growing wings so he could fly with Mr. P. to the floating silver city they would build together, any time he wished. As if dreaming the same delicious dream the gaunt man smiled in his sleep.…

Kid reclined in the jet's plush banquette. He'd seen all these tricks before. An angelic Michael Jackson standing at his apartment door back on Avenue A. Lobster and cognac, the national sport of Turkey. No more Room Time.

Fuggedaboutit. No more lies; take nothing from that man anymore. Kid gazed calmly at the two girls, the older and the younger, who had held his hand, who had brought him back from devil worship and love of a false idol.

“Leave it to me,” he told them softly. He knew what he would do. He donned the poker face one more time. Kid's voice clanked into the gaunt man's head.

“Hey, we're over Ohio, but the Columbus Tower isn't answering. Hillsboro in five minutes.”

The Pied Piper rubbed his eyes. Silently, he unfolded off the banquette and went forward to the cockpit. As he approached, the cockpit door swung back and forth, an empty, lonely movement.

“Oh, Stewardish,” the Piper called, and stuck his head into the cockpit. No one replied, but the pilot's seat wasn't empty, just unoccupied. The drunken airline pilot, who wanted out of New York, had finally been called to the good lord's bosom. Mr. P. nodded in approval as the Gulfstream's trim flaps and fly-by-wire autopilot kept them stable; the dead man's hands frozen at the wheel gently steered on puppet strings.

“Thanks for flying Piper Airways.”

His eye caught the Bhakti ghost glowering at him from a bank of blinking lights.

“You can stay with him if you want. Or come with us. I don't care. But when I'm done down below, I think I'm going to turn your immortal spirit into a hemorrhoid on a rat's anus for a few thousand years. Whattaya say?”

The ghost said nothing.

“Fine. Stay here,” the gaunt man grunted.

Back in the cabin the Kid had opened the hatches to the two Lattimore Aerospace escape pods in the belly of the jet. Mr. P. grinned as if to give himself a gold star for leasing this model Gulfstream, the one with the lifeboats. The EZ-access panels to each cocoon stood open like the open petals of a plastic flower; within the capsules plush couches with padded leg cushions and full-body crash belts waited for their occupants.

The pods' Vision III Topography screen showed their present course and designated landing site from glide path to touchdown. Ground zero, the factory parking lot blinked
Whiteside, longitude-latitude
. A wide red touch panel on the screen read
SEAL AND RELEASE
. All you had to do was push the button, the escape capsule would seal the double hatch and then drop from under the jet. Ten minutes later, you'd be on the ground.

Lila looked doubtfully down into the tight, double-berth tube. Little Maria cowered in the older girl's arms; both reluctant to slide into the lifeboat. Or maybe just reluctant to leave Kid behind. He tried to reassure them.

“It's all right. It's preset. We're going to the same place.” Lila's eyes looked darkly at him, doubt and suspicion. “This is the best way. Honest. I'll see you in a little while.”

The two girls slid into their cushioned pod; the crash-couch material automatically cleaved to them like living gel. Lila looked back up the hatch, her dark eyes even darker now. She touched the red touch panel to seal and release.

“See you.”

Kid nodded as the inner and outer hatches slid shut. The jet jumped a tad as it discharged the tube, but then automatically righted itself. Mr. P. came down the aisle and slung himself into the other escape capsule.

“Just you and me?”

“Girls with girls and boys with boys,” the Kid answered. “Better open up another eye of the storm, Daddy-O, and make it snappy. This crate isn't going to fly forever.”

The Gulfstream jet lurched as the second lifeboat fell away.

Inside the empty cabin, the grim ghost of the Punjabi scientist stared at the recently deceased pilot sitting in the cockpit. A large blood vessel in the man's head burst somewhere over western Pennsylvania; he'd seen a flash of light and then nothing else. And since the plane was on autopilot, nobody in the cabin had noticed. Not even him.

“Hey! Wake up!” Bhakti said. “I know you're in there somewhere.” His ghostly hand slapped the dead man's face, leaving barely a ripple of wind; but the man stirred.

“C'mon! Stop fooling around.”

The pilot grunted and opened his eyes. Extremely sober now, he glanced at the Sikh gentleman staring at him—a man with several large gunshot wounds to the chest. The pilot blinked his eyes.

“That's right,” Bhakti told him. “You've had a stroke. You're talking to another dead man. Now listen carefully. You're on your way to the big airline in the sky. They're going to offer you a contract to fly with the fleet—but while we have these few moments together, there's something you have to do for me. Now don't argue. It's not going to hurt—”

The pilot didn't argue. He looked down to his hands, clasping the steering yoke. One hand regrasped the yoke, then two. Dead man flying.

“Okay,” the pilot replied. “Where to?”

*   *   *

The escape pod's porthole by Lila's head showed next to nothing. Dark gray mist, clouds; a razor-thin line of red dawn so distant it hardly counted. The escape capsule felt like a falling stone; her heart leapt into her throat and her ears clogged; her head stuffed with cotton. They were falling, all right—angels without wings. More interesting to her was the Vision III Topography screen over their heads; the land below, like Google Earth, zoomed closer and closer.

At about 20,000 feet Lila could pick out roads and streets; the Vision III system gave the landscape below a white sheen, miles and miles of snow, but you could still see lines of trees demarking fields, the dots of farmhouses and silos. A square spider's web of gray buildings grew closer; the words
HILLSBORO, OH
appeared over a section of the ground below. A quadrant of the growing picture started to flash
WHITESIDE MEAT-PACKING PLANT: PARKING LOT.

The snow-covered trees below began looking larger. Altitude: 13,000 to 12,000 feet. The flight display flashed again:
DROGUE PARACHUTES DEPLOYED. EXPECT JOLT.

The parachutes blossomed; the cords snapped taut. Heavy crosswinds buffeted the craft and rocked the two girls inside their cushioned tube. On the vision screen the ground approached in that dreamy way between hovering and sliding. The escape capsule caught an updraft and the altitude counter rose several hundred feet, then returned to a jumpy, chaotic descent. This kept up for some while, threatening to blow them past the touchdown point—until they shot into the bull's-eye of Mr. P.'s calm weather hole. Down to 5000 feet, the parachutes cut loose. The Vision screen flashed
GLIDE PATH MODE,
and they fell through the eye of the storm.

Out the tiny viewing port, they saw the escape vehicle's long glider wings deploy, their delicate airfoil ailerons compensating and correcting the tumult around them. The craft began large descending circles. A long slow corkscrew plotted to drop them according to plan. Lila felt a wave of nausea in the confined space, and tried not to retch. Maria's pale face looked back with alarmed eyes.

“Kid's right behind us,” Maria gasped heavily. “Mr. P. is changing form, shape after shape, but Kid won't let him go. Kid has him by the tail. Now he's got him by the throat—”

 

44

The Reckoning

Eleanor sat on the bed, useless legs dangling, gun in her lap. The Webster drone quietly attended to his charges, oblivious to everything else. Eleanor glanced coolly through the glass, but Cheryl was unable to meet the woman's eye. The others turned from the transparent wall, helpless; nothing they could do for their friend now except leave.

Had they come all this way for nothing?

They shared a creeping sense of failure, deflated, all the fight knocked out of them. Maybe it was the endless road trip, the slog up the hill, then down into this evil place.… Sure, they'd go kill as many of the Rolpens as they could, but who knows how many were left? Would the three-fingered professor in his Hollywood shades even care?

Cheryl clutched Janet's canister close, turned away, and retreated after the others. Cheryl's only thought was to obey a mother's last wish to keep her daughter's ashes safe. A dozen yards up the ant tunnel, they all heard a pistol shot down below. Then a second shot echoed off the stone walls. No one paused or turned back.

Eleanor looked at the smoking gun in her hand.

She'd only fired it twice.