But then there was another cry, this one choked with horror, then dropping to wet gabble as one of the two remaining men looked down at the axe handle protruding from his stomach. Somehow, the defender of the house had survived their fusillade and once again used his ferocious weapon.
The last of the soldiers ran so frantically that he lost control of himself and fell in the driveway. Screaming again and again, he went off down the street, his cries echoing away into the distance.
"Let"s move," David said. There had been too much shooting here not to attract more of the soldiers.
"Not so fast."
Whirling, David saw Mack standing in the middle of the street.
"Quick," he said, and leaped a low rock wall, Caroline close behind.
They ran into a thin woods behind the house. David had no idea where they were or where they might be going, just that they had to get out of here.
He could hear Mack moving fast to close the distance.
Then the woods ended. They came out on a two-lane highway, one that he recognized immediately. It was Maryland 1440, the road that pa.s.sed the small private airfield that the clinic had used.
It was suicide to stay exposed like this, so they went to the far shoulder-and saw here a field just sprouting young shoots of some sort, the life of the past still unfolding. Beyond it, perhaps half a mile away, was the roofline of a condo complex-shelter, certainly, but they could not survive an attempt to cross that field.
For a few moments, David ran down the middle of the road, looking for something that would afford them more shelter than the field. All he found was a concrete bus stop plastered with Celebrex and McDonald"s ads. He drew Caroline to it and crouched beside her, shielding her with his body.
Not hurrying now-not needing to-Mack came toward them. As he walked, he moved first into the center of the highway, then angled to the far side. As David and Caroline tried to keep the bulk of the shelter in front of them, Mack tried to widen the angle.
"We can make a deal," he said. "I bring the portal and you take me through. That"s all I need now. Forget the rest of them."
Behind Mack, David saw an unlikely sight-headlights. A vehicle was coming. Mack kept moving closer to the two of them. Either he didn"t see it or he didn"t care. David watched, trying to see what it was, waiting for it to overtake Mack.
What the h.e.l.l was that thing? It was big, not a car or an SUV, or even a military vehicle, which had been David"s initial fear. A big truck, perhaps. No, he saw more lights. A marquee. But-holy G.o.d, it was a Greyhound bus. A bus bus?
Mack stepped easily aside as it pa.s.sed him, but David ran out into the middle of the road, waving his arms frantically. Caroline joined him.
On the marquee, David saw the word "Baltimore." Inside, there was a driver, there were pa.s.sengers, and it all looked astonishingly, impossibly normal.
Now the bus was a hundred feet from them. Fifty feet. They could see the face of the driver. Behind it, David was aware that Mack had started running.
The loud phew phew of its air brakes sounded. The driver leaned forward over his steering wheel. of its air brakes sounded. The driver leaned forward over his steering wheel. Phew. PHEW. Phew. PHEW.
It stood there, engine rattling. With a quiet hiss and a click, the door opened. He went around it-and saw Mack not fifty feet away, coming up beside the back of the bus. A huge knife brought from the kitchen left his hand like a lightning bolt.
As David and Caroline threw themselves onto the steps, it slammed into the door, embedding itself in the vinyl and insulation. They scrambled into the cabin, David shouting, "Close the door!"
The driver didn"t need to be told.
Outside, Mack commenced hammering on it with a fury unbound, the sound of his a.s.sault filling the bus, the power of it making the big vehicle shake like a leaf.
"Jesus!" the driver said.
"Get moving!"
He threw the bus into gear and pulled out onto the road. As they drew away from Mack, he emitted an inhuman roar of anger.
But now, very suddenly, David and Caroline were in a different world. Other pa.s.sengers filled the seats, people with bundles, people with kids. Some seats empty, most not.
"Hey," the driver called.
"Yes. Thank you."
"How far?"
"Excuse me?"
"This is a bus, buddy. You buy a ticket. That"s the way we do it."
"Oh, Baltimore. Baltimore ..." He gave the driver a twenty and got back a dollar and change. Stuffing the money in his pocket, looking down at his receipt, he almost wanted to cry.
How had they ever kept buses running? But of course, they were old vehicles, many of them forty and fifty years old. They didn"t contain the kind of electronics that would be fried. So, even this deep in death, life went on.
"Behind the white line," the driver said, "thank you."
They went down the aisle, finding seats across from an older woman, prim, her eyes keen with a light he hoped was not madness.
"May we sit here?"
"I don"t own it."
When they sat, David realized just how deeply, deeply tired he was. The star having set, it was full dark now, and the windows reflected the interior of the bus. Distantly, he could see blood in the east, getting brighter. The old woman saw it, too, and began to chew her gums.
"I will not taste of the bitter water," she said.
He knew the reference, of course, to the water ruined by the star Wormwood in Revelation.
It would happen that way, too. There would be deuterium in the debris of the supernova, and the water of the world would be absorbing it, turning it into heavy water. It wasn"t in itself radioactive, but when half the water content of a larger animal"s body was replaced with heavy water, the animal died. Or the man.
She said, "I am saved, hallelujah."
The bus would pa.s.s the Acton Clinic in a few minutes, and it was there that they must get off. David squeezed Caroline"s hand, then returned to the front.
"Do you know the Acton Clinic?" he asked the driver.
"Yeah, it"s a couple of miles on. I pa.s.s it four times a day."
"We want to get off there."
The driver glanced at him. "It"s been burning for hours."
His heart heaved in his chest. He forced his voice to a calm he did not feel.
"You can make a stop, though?"
"Sure. But there ain"t no refund. No refund here."
"Fair enough."
"You got that man"s name? "Cause he damaged this bus. I gotta write that up and the company"s gonna want to go to the cops. Vandalism. They don"t like it."
"Your company?"
"Maryland Trails Bus Lines," the driver said, ignoring the pa.s.sengers. "I been drivin" their rigs for thirty years. Never got a citation, not one, not never."
"It"s still operating?"
Again, he glanced at David. "What does it look like?"
A hand grabbed David"s shoulder. He turned to face a woman whose face had been made pink by too much exposure to the supernova core.
"You a doctor? My baby got fluid. You a doctor?" She held up a baby as bloated as a stuffed toy and gray with death.
Ethically, he could not deny his profession. But he"d barely touched pediatrics in medical school. He was not qualified to help.
"We thought it was G.o.d"s light, we slept him in it, my husband did. My husband was a fool."
David did not know how to tell her that this was a sunburn of a new and terrible kind.
"I"m sorry for you," he said.
"They nothin" you can do?"
"That is not G.o.d"s light," another pa.s.senger shouted. "You have laid your baby in Lucifer"s light."
This lovely, ignorant young woman raised a long hand to her cheek, and with a gesture of surpa.s.sing grace, wiped away her tears.
"I"ll put him in the ground," she said. "Very well. Thank you."
She went swaying back to her seat, the other pa.s.sengers looking straight ahead.
"We all told her," a man said. "She"s got a dead baby."
The bus"s brakes hissed and it lurched to a stop.
"Acton Clinic," the driver intoned. "Acton!"
David and Caroline got off, stepping out into the dew of morning.
Above the sun, in the purity of the eastern sky, hung a full moon, its face the red of blood.
As he watched, he saw a brief flash on the lunar surface, then another and another.
The driver closed the door of the bus and pulled out. What would happen to it, and to the people aboard? Nothing good, that was certain.
The great iron gates of the Acton estate still stood open. At the end of the curving driveway, the building loomed, still and silent. He could see jagged edges in the line of the roof where the fire had burned through. The windows were dark.
"It"s destroyed," Caroline said.
David did not reply. He could only think that, even if they did find the cla.s.s, what would they do without the portal? He had been counting on finding the supplies here for Caroline to re-create it a third time, but that did not look possible now.
"Come on," he said. They proceeded into the grounds, moving quickly but carefully.
As they drew closer to the house, he watched the door and the rows of broken windows for any suggestion of activity inside. They would have done well to look behind them, but they did not do that. Instead, they responded to the deep animal instincts that drive all men in times as terrible as these, and went toward the concealment that the house offered.
Thus they did not see who had dropped off the back of the bus as they had come through its door. Mack moved swiftly to the gate, then slipped into the grounds, then to the apple tree, now naked, where he had spent his afternoons.
He watched them enter the house through the sprung front door. He went closer, listening, and heard the scuffling of their clumsy movement through the ruins inside.
When he saw that they had gone through to the patient wing and all was quiet, he slipped into the house.
23.
THE RISING OF THE SOULS.
Mike and Tim Pelton and Delmar Twine were in terrible trouble because their general had gone crazy, and in just a minute, it was going to be Timmy"s turn to get himself burned alive in that d.a.m.n mirror or whatever it was.
The three of them had been friends all of their lives, growing up on the same street in Sandusky, going to the same schools, finally joining the army together, all three intent on getting the education they could not otherwise afford. Mike and Tim were identical twins, and they had joined up on the condition that they would stay together.
But instead of the training they"d hoped to get, they"d come out the other end of boot camp as infantrymen, and spent two years in "Stan. Then, as the U.S. withdrew from that country, they had been rea.s.signed to General Wylie"s specialist brigade, guarding some sort of supersecret underground facility deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The guard unit hadn"t been allowed inside, but instead had been billeted in tents near the entrance. They"d seen the people coming, though, famous faces glimpsed as they got out of their vehicles and went through the thick steel doors into what appeared to be a luxurious interior. For weeks they"d come, the masters of the world-congressmen and senators, big-time preachers and Catholic hierarchy, TV personalities, movie stars, hundreds of them. Some of them had the black spot disease big-time, with the weird pigmentation almost covering their skin. Others, you couldn"t see if they had it or not.
Mike and Tim and Del didn"t have it, and they wouldn"t bunk with people who did. You didn"t want that, no way.
There were burned bodies all around the portal now, the remains of guys they"d worked with in the unit for the better part of a year. Behind them there was just Colonel Manders with his pistol, and at his feet the bodies of the seven men who had refused even to try.
Mike and Timmy and Del had talked about this thing. Whatever it was, it belonged to that man and woman who that CIA guy and the general had tried to kill.
The point was, those two people were the ones who knew how to make the sucker work right and stop burning guys. Everybody in the unit knew they were from the Acton Clinic, which was another secret installation of some kind.
"Okay, look," the general said. "You-" He pointed at Timmy. "You just make one smooth, easy movement. The problem is, guys keep trying to pull back-"
Timmy vomited.
"s.h.i.t!" The general thrust his gun into Timmy"s face. "Do it!"
Timmy gagged and raised his hands flat against the sublime view of an orchard, its trees dripping with tiny, blushing red apples.