Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (31 page)

But she
would
win, that I was sure. We had seconds at the most.

I scrambled across the floor to Sam, dragged him to his feet, then staggered toward the Amazons. Oxana was on her hands and knees trying to get Halyna up, but one look told me that it was too late. Halyna was pin-cushioned with pointy shards of glass, many in her chest and throat, and had lost so much blood that it spread for several feet around her.

“It's no use,” I said, dragging at Oxana, but she fought me.

“Halya!” she screamed, a heart-piercing sound.

We had no time. I put my fingers to Halyna's throat where the pulse should have been, but it was only for Oxana's benefit. “She's gone. I'm sorry, but we have to get out of here.” I grabbed Oxana again, held her tight. “Come on!”

She wasn't crying, but her face was lost, just lost. “No. Not go. Only with her!”

It was pointless—I could tell Halyna was already dead—but I knew it would be impossible to get Oxana moving without bringing her friend's body. The burning smell was getting stronger. I scooped and levered up Halyna's limp weight, then slung it over my shoulder.

“Where?” Sam asked. He looked as bad as the women, bloodied and ghostlike with dust.

“The door down in the office. The door to the Third Way.”

He shook his head. “She can follow us!”

“She can follow us anywhere else just as fast, but that door will get us out of here quicker. Come on!”

Stumbling through the shambles of smashed exhibits, skidding on broken glass, we waded past the seething, burning, bruise-colored swamp that was Anaita swarmed by bugbears. Something as bright as the flame of a welder's torch was burning inside the mass, and I could tell things were going to get ugly in this particular vicinity real soon.

Halyna's limp weight almost tipped me over going down the stairs, but I made it somehow. Sam was standing in front of the marble rectangle, the God Glove on his hand. He said, as if to nobody, “You realize if she's locked it somehow, we're fucked.”

There was nothing to say to that. We were already fucked so many ways they could have dedicated an entire revision of the Kama Sutra just to us.

As Sam gestured, the line down the middle of the marble rectangle glowed, but only for a moment, a seam of pure white radiance. Then it was gone, as was the wall and everything else, replaced by what I can only describe as a froth of bubbling light. Sam shoved Oxana through, then followed her. I took a deep breath, clutched Halyna's body close to my chest, and leaped after them.

 • • • 

Grass. That was the first thing I noticed as I fell forward, grass beneath my feet, then I tumbled, and it was against my chest, my head, all of me, even up my nose in spiky, tickling profusion. When I stopped rolling, I dragged myself to my knees. I seemed to have lost Halyna's body on the way through, but in the first moments that absence barely registered because of what was all around me.

One of the strange things about being me is the way “beautiful” and “horrible” keep squishing into each other. Only seconds beyond what had seemed like certain destruction, we had landed in paradise.

We were in a forest glade, but what was around us was as far beyond the usual state park picnic area as Heaven was beyond Hoboken. The vegetation was so vividly green it seemed to have been freshly painted. There was never a sky so blue, so triumphantly skylike, and even the gray mountains I glimpsed through the trees seemed to have been constructed specifically to give people a reason to use the word “majestic.” Some extremely eccentric gardener might have watered everything with pure psilocybin, just to grow these beautiful, heartbreakingly realistic hallucinations. But they weren't hallucinations. This was real.

I would have happily stood there for hours, drinking it all in. But I had just realized there were only two of us in this magic place. Only Sam and me.

“This way,” my buddy said. “Hurry. We've got to get rest of the Third Way people moving, get them hidden. Who knows what she's going to do now we got her really mad?”

Even in the middle of all this perfection, I was suddenly empty and hopeless. “They're gone. The Amazons, Sam. They didn't come through.”

He stared at me, then slowly turned and looked all around. “Shit. They're not angels. Of course, they couldn't pass through to Kainos.”

“But other souls came here, all your volunteers . . .”

“Souls. Not bodies.”

“But Halyna . . . she was dead, Sam.”

“Then her soul's somewhere else. Being judged.” He started through the trees. “It's shitty luck, but now we have to save the ones we can, the rest of the souls here.”

“No, Sam. I can't just leave them.”

He spun and came back to me. “One of them is dead, Bobby. You just said so.” He wasn't angry, just confused and hurting.

“That doesn't matter. You don't leave a soldier behind if you can help it. You know that. Can you open that passage again?”

Now he
was
angry. “You want to go back to that museum? To Anaita?”

“Just open the doorway or whatever it is. Oxana and Halyna have to be somewhere. Maybe I won't have to go all the way back. Maybe they're . . . in-between, somehow. I don't even know what that means, but I have to find them.”

He only thought about it for a second. “I can't come with you, Bobby. I owe it to the Kainos people to stay and help them.”

“I know. Just do it.”

“I can't just open it, or it'll dump you right back into the museum, so I'll try to open the far end somewhere else. But I've gotta warn you, I've never tried anything like that. And after everything today, I don't know if I've got the strength.” He lifted his hand, closed his eyes. A moment later a shaky vertical shimmer of light appeared beside me. “I don't know how long I can hold it, or exactly where it's going to take you. I'm hoping it doesn't just drop you into—”

“Don't say it. I'll find out in a minute, anyway.” I took a quick last sniff at the clean air of this brave new unfamiliar world. Why do I only get these fleeting glimpses of happiness, these moments, then they're ripped away again? “Hang in, Sam. We're not beaten yet.” But my buddy looked pretty damned beaten, and I had no doubt I did too. “Remember our motto—confusion to our enemies!”

Then I left paradise behind and climbed back into the light.

A
CTUALLY, I
still don't know why I didn't wind up back in Anaita's museum office, especially with Sam in the kind of condition he was in. Maybe there's more kindness to the universe than I ever guessed. Maybe instead of being one of the world's unluckiest angels, I've actually been a bit more fortunate than I realize sometimes. Whatever the case, Sam's God-Glove doorway didn't drop me into the middle of the Anaita-versus-jamblob death match, for which I can only be grateful. Extremely grateful.

 • • • 

Back in the way old days, when people believed (or wanted to believe) that the Sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, one of those old Greek guys proclaimed that the universe had built-in music, that the very existence of everything was underlined by cosmic sounds, and that even distances like the Earth to the Moon were measures of this “music of the spheres,” the
musica universalis
.

Later on, that kind of fell apart, especially when Galileo was all, “The Earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around,” and then the Vatican was all, “We're about to go seriously Inquisition on your ass if you don't shut up,” and Galileo was like, “Okay, you win,” but under his breath he was all, “But it still totally revolves around the sun. Dicks.”

Anyway, I give you this short history update to prepare you for what I heard when I stepped back into the door of light Sam opened, which was either the actual music of the spheres or an extremely convincing simulation.

I was surrounded by, or maybe engulfed in, what seemed not just white light, but different
kinds
of white light—not different colors, just different intensities. And as I tried to make sense of my surroundings, I heard something I'll never forget.

Now, mind you, I'm a guy who's heard the singing of the celestial choirs in Heaven, and screams wafting up from the deepest pits of Hell. I'm no rookie. But what I heard when I crossed back through, what surrounded me like the breathing of some immense creature the size of a galaxy, was unlike anything else I'd experienced. It was as different from any other sound I'd heard as day is different from night. It was deeper than the deepest rumble, but it had edges—harmonics, I guess a musician might say—that stretched beyond my ability to hear or even perceive, and yet somehow I could still feel them. I was in the heart of the greatest living thing that could ever be, as if I were only a cell in that body—no, as if I were a single electrical impulse in the endless nerves of the Highest, God Himself. The sound, the music, the vibration, whatever you call it, it was all around me and everywhere. I was nowhere at all, but I was also everywhere, and that was right where I needed to be.

This all washed across me in far less subjective time than it takes to describe, then my rational mind (no jokes, please) finally showed up, took my mental hand, and kindly led me back to current reality.

It was literally a sobering experience. The beautiful chaos hardened into something less diffuse, and the different tones of light resolved into a three-dimensional structure of sorts. I stood in an endless white corridor of glowing motes, like billions of tiny bubbles, but each one different, each one shining with its own tiny white fire, some brighter than others, but none of them dark. Everything around me, the floor, the ceiling, the walls, was made of these shining white cells, like the packing material out of the box the cosmos had been shipped in.

I sat up, and in doing so I realized that I was wearing my Earth body, and that until I made it move again it had been lying in a crumpled heap. Also, close by me, somebody was crying.

I turned, the white scintillations around me smearing into streaks, and saw Oxana, just as I had last seen her, her face buried in Halyna's red hair. Halyna was just as pale and lifeless as she had been when I carried her in my arms.

“Oxana?”

She jumped, or at least she tried to, but the cellular glow around us was nothing so simple as a floor: when she moved she seemed to be swimming in something viscous, and a scatter of tiny lights drifted up around her like startled fish.

“Oh, what is . . . ?” In the midst of so much sparkling brightness, Oxana's eyes were muddy holes. “
Ja ne rozumiju
. Don't understand. You are alive, Bobby?” A tiny glint of hope crept into her stare, but when she looked down at Halyna's body, the glint died. “No. Not her, just you.” Tears filtered her eyes. “What is this? What place?”

“I'm not sure. I don't think either of us are supposed to be here—especially not you. But it's okay. I'm going to take you back.”

Her eyes got big. “Back where? Not there! Not where Halya . . .”

“No. God, no, not to the museum. We're going back to the apartment.” At least I hoped that was what Sam had managed to arrange, but I wasn't going to share my concerns with her unless I had to. She'd already suffered too much for my mistakes.

I stood, struggling with the strange surfaces, the oddly thick air. My feet sank into the cellular material of the tunnel, but the resistance was uneven. I couldn't even make any sense of what I was standing in, whether it was one big thing or a billion tiny things, but the white glow made everything feel relatively safe, if not exactly cheerful.

“No, Bobby. I don't want it.” Oxana, clearly driven past what any sane person should have to endure, slumped back down beside her friend's body. “I want to stay. With my Halya.”

“We can't. This place isn't meant for people—not living people, anyway.” Remembering what Sam had said, that only angels and souls could pass through, I wondered if we were inside some kind of lining for the universe we knew, a placental barrier to keep things out that should stay out and keep in that which was appropriate. Certainly the living, vibrating vastness of it felt more like some kind of organism than any artificial construction.

It took a while to convince Oxana. I was beginning to worry that Anaita herself might pass through this place on her way to Kainos, and when I told her that, Oxana finally got up onto her hands and knees and then onto her feet, shaky as a newborn foal. “Where we take her?” she asked.

It took me a moment to understand she was talking about her friend and lover, Halyna. “Nowhere,” I said. “I think we should leave her here.”

“No! Never!”

“Halyna's gone, Oxana, believe me. This isn't her, this isn't the woman you love—it's just a body. The reason I came back but she didn't is because she
died
. Now her soul has gone somewhere else. If anyone knows that, I do.”

A sudden, new worry struck me like cold water—what would happen when Halyna's soul was taken to Judgement? Like everyone else, she must have had a guardian angel. Now that she'd died, the authorities would know everything, including every crime of mine that Halyna had witnessed. And wouldn't they find out about Anaita, too? She was the cause of Halyna's death, after all. How could even Anaita interfere with such a basic function of the heavenly system?

As had been the case far too often lately, I could only shake my head. Too many questions that even an angel couldn't answer. “Come with me, Oxana,” I said. “After all we've been through, all my fuck-ups, I'm afraid you still have to trust me. This part of Halyna will stay here, maybe forever. I think somehow this is the body of the universe itself, or at least, as much as we can understand it. The most important part of her has moved on, Oxana, but her body will be safe here. It won't be any different than burying her in the earth, just . . . cleaner.”

“No!” Oxana would not look at me. “No. We don't go.” I was close to carrying her out by force when she added, “Give me small time. To say goodbye.”

She bent over Halyna's body and arranged the limbs, placing the young woman's pale, freckled hands on her chest, drawing her legs straight. She brushed a coil of glorious red hair back from the bruised face, stroking Halyna's skin, and murmuring to her in Ukrainian. At last she sat up.

“I wish she had weapon. We bury Scythian with weapon.”

“God will know she was a warrior,” I said. “I have no doubt about that.”

“She was. She shot the Persian bitch! She hurt her.”

“She did, and it saved my life, I think. All of our lives.” I kneeled down and touched the corpse's bruised, pale cheek. “Thank you, Halyna. God loves you. May your journey be a good one and may you find the reward you deserve.”

 • • • 

Oxana and I walked along the glimmering, soap-bubble corridor until the light closed behind us like a shining curtain, and we could no longer see Halyna's body. Oxana seemed nearly catatonic, but even for me it was like pacing through a dream. I wish I could explain that place better, but I've never experienced anything quite like it. I don't know if I will ever see it again, feel the musical air and the all-blanketing light (which tells you nothing about the weird physicality of the place) but I know I'll remember it until I finally stop thinking.

We had been walking awhile when I noticed everything around us was getting darker, as if twilight had begun to creep through the not-world. We seemed to be moving through a duller sort of light now, drab and colorless compared to what had surrounded us before. We continued on in silence through this dimming world, but it slowly became clear that the dimness was not uniform: patches of lesser light were followed by even darker stretches, then back to the dull twilight. Gradually these dim passages became alternating bands of dark and darker.

Some time later, we moved from a corridor striped with black and near-black into a few moments of total lightlessness. I felt Oxana's hand reach out and grasp mine, but I couldn't reassure her because I didn't know myself what was going on. Then a few seconds later, with little sense of transition, we were no longer inside something but outside, walking down a suburban street lined with trees and streetlights.

I had my phone in my pocket again. That and the street signs told me that we were back in San Judas in the early morning hours of the day after we'd broken into the museum, still a couple of hours before dawn at least. After everything else that had happened, clever, heroic, exhausted Sam had somehow managed to land us in the eastern part of the city, only a half a mile from home.

When we finally staggered into the apartment, and because I couldn't think of anything else to do for her, I made Oxana a cup of tea. A few minutes later she fell asleep sitting up on the couch, drink untouched. I took the teacup and dish off her lap, tilted her sideways and covered her with a blanket. Then I went back out.

It was a long walk to Stanford, but I needed to get the taxi back. Part way there I caught a bus full of the living dead you always see on buses before the sun comes up. I must have looked right at home. I'd washed myself and doctored my cuts and abrasions as well as I could, but I hadn't taken time to change clothes. My pants looked like I'd just been fired from Pit Bull Obedience School for incompetence, and I had a couple of weird, large, purple-black splotches on my shirt that would have stumped just about any forensic chemist you could find. Also, I felt dead inside. Empty like you can't even imagine.

I got off the bus on the Camino Real and climbed over the campus wall. I moved slowly and extremely furtively through the extensive wooded areas until I was close enough to the Elizabeth Atell Stanford Museum to get a good look.

No lights, no cop cars, in fact no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Which was good. Not that I was planning to go back in there, no fucking way. But if the crime had been discovered the cops would have locked down all the main gates by now and be checking anyone trying to leave.

The cab was still sitting in the auditorium parking lot, by sheer luck next to another couple of cars taking advantage of the lot on a weekend, which made mine less obvious. I drove back across the campus, neck-hairs standing up the whole way in anticipation of police lights in my rearview, but nothing happened, which probably meant the mess at the museum hadn't been discovered yet. The guard at the gate barely looked up, just thumbed the button to open the barrier, then I was through and back out onto the Camino Real. I stopped at a bakery to buy some stuff for breakfast, then ate half the pastries on the drive back to Caz's place, as if the bodily hunger of an exhausting, adrenalized night of horror and pain had lagged a little behind me but had just caught up.

Oxana was still asleep on the couch. I'd bought a bag of almond pastries that I knew she liked, and I left them for her on the coffee table, then took a fast shower and tumbled into bed.

Somewhere in the next few hours, the door to the bedroom opened. I came half-awake, the adrenaline flooding back, but it was only Oxana.

“I can come in?”

“Sure,” I said. I held up the blanket and let her crawl in beside me. I was more than slightly aware that she was wearing only a tank top and underpants, but I was too tired to care. She pushed up against me, and the trembling that ran through her from top to bottom was enough to tell me what was going on. I put my arm around her and let her get as close as she needed.