End Time (6 page)

Since Eleanor still helped Bhakti with his work, even his lab at the skeletal spaceport hangar was designed around her. And that went for the rest of his team. They'd make as much in a two-year contract as they had slaving away in their respective cubicles and workstations for a decade, no matter how prestigious. Cal-Tech, Hewlett Packard, Boeing, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems all lost personnel. Better health insurance, a free house, the work they loved—it was like joining the Manhattan Project, except this time they weren't going to blow people up by government dictate and live in a Quonset hut; they were going to
send
people up on the private dime.

Then bring 'em down again in one piece to brag all about it.

*   *   *

And Van Horn, Texas, turned out a whole lot better than first impressions. “
The Town So Healthy We Had to Shoot a Man to Start a Cemetery
.” Very small, yes, a few adobe mission-style buildings, the crossroads of West Texas, and tourists flocked through on their way to Carlsbad Caverns. The place was named after Jefferson Van Horne, a US Union Army major who discovered the nearby wells, allowing the place to fill bathtubs and irrigate crops—cotton, mostly. A stage stop on the San Diego–San Antonio Mail Route and later the Texas & Pacific Railroad.

They even had a modern ghost town south of nowhere—Lobo—that slowly died. Looking like something out of a US government atomic test site from the late 1940s, nearby Lobo sat in the dust while its nearby sister town thrived on tourists. Such were the inequities of location, water, fate, and chance, the ghost town of Lobo being where the wells finally ran dry.

While the town of Van Horn lost Major Van Horne's “
e
”; got a Diesel Fried Chicken restaurant in compensation, along with the occasional lost tourist from Carlsbad Caverns a mere 100 miles north; and a trip to the stars. Suborbital for now. That is, if Bhakti and Eleanor could make themselves a good Spaceskin.

*   *   *

The night Janet failed to return Bhakti knew something was wrong the moment he opened his eyes.

He'd been dreaming of India; he sometimes dreamt of his eastern homeland, but mostly it came on floated scents, of gardenias and cow dung on the humid air, chattering monkeys climbing on a garden wall, a peacock's forlorn cry outside his family's gated compound. The place was almost an estate: where his father's Bombay wealth insulated them all from the crowded, dusty, sweaty, struggling humanity on all sides.

And also allowed him to study, to go to university, to make something of himself, even come to America.

But this dream of India was different.

A northern desert town—Jaipur or Udaipur—a broad open square flanked by dry, flaking concrete buildings. The sun beat down like a white hot cap on his head. Here stood the ruins of a temple to forgotten gods. A ruin older than Shiva and Vishnu: a simple square pancake ziggurat, layer upon layer of a hundred steps rising to a narrow platform. He stood looking about him, at the thin blue dome of the sky, the surrounding buildings, their windows like black empty eyes.

Far below he spotted a youth, a cripple dressed in rags. He looked down at his own clothes, finery by all comparison, khaki pants, pressed shirt, polished loafers. The trappings of a prince. This was before his time in America, before he trimmed his beard, cut his hair, and left his crimson turban at home. Not that these symbols of his faith embarrassed him, not at all. Bhakti still kept his turban at home and wore it for special occasions, or when he went back to Bombay to visit the family; the hair and full beard would always grow back. No, he had abandoned these things for the demands of science: Turbans got in the way; long hair dropped onto laboratory tables; beards could catch on fire.

But in the dream of the ancient temple steps, he felt the crimson turban on his head and the thick beard even as he stared down at the cripple in the square. He realized with sudden certitude, this was a cripple from his childhood in the 1960s, when they still wore terrible rags. Now the outcasts and their pimps used cell phones and cut up territories like little gangsters. But back in his childhood the awful savagery and destitution made the gangster pimps take certain babies from their mothers, the lowest of the low. They'd break their bones at the joints when they were infants and never let them set correctly—to make them more pitiable, to make them better beggars.

And this youth was one of them.

His rags hung on him like the wrappings of a starving monk streaked with dirt, wooden crutches. He limped. Putting one foot on the temple step, then a crutch, then another foot, then the crutch. Slowly climbing. His ankle had separated at the joint, so his twisted foot shifted up the calf, held together by a thick wad of flesh. Stump and climb, crutch and struggle—the youthful beggar toiled up the temple steps one at a time, closer and closer. Now Bhakti saw the clay bowl in his hand with a few miserable coins. And the youth's voice came up to greet him: “Rupee, rupee?”

At the high platform there was nowhere for Bhakti Singh to go, nowhere to flee. He stood, frozen—petrified as this twisted creature painfully crawled to his perch. He could see the youth's flesh-attached foot and ankle now so clearly, the little coins in the bowl, the boy's eye. “Rupee?”

*   *   *

And awoke with a shout: “Here!” Clawing the sheets; he grabbed his wallet off the nightstand, looking to pay the boy something. Anything. Sweat poured off his chest, the scent of dust and dirty rags still in his nostrils. No coins, no boy—just a dream, the fear showing him how western he'd become, how American. Had he grown soft inside? No, just sensitive; the comforts of American life had a way of doing that.

The space beside him was empty, rumpled. Eleanor? Had she gotten up and gone for a drink of water or to the bathroom without asking for help? No … her water glass was still on the end table and her braces by the headboard.

The luminous clock face by the bed read 3 a.m.

And somehow in a blinding second he knew Janet hadn't come home yet.

“Eleanor?”

The darkness of the bedroom seemed to cloak him.

The TV quietly droned on—it might have been an infomercial for six-pack abs or colon detox, no way to tell. But the flickering image arrested him; Bhakti stopped and stared at the TV for a moment, but the advertisement confounded reason, hawking abject lunacy instead.

The huckster was a lanky man, in black tie and tails, looking like a carny show magician; the set showed an open window and beyond that, a New York City skyline. The bony fellow ostentatiously took a live wriggling lobster out of his top hat, showed it around, and then unceremoniously flung it out the open window behind him. Some woman off-screen screamed as the lobster struck the pavement—while the ticker-crawl at the bottom of the screen proclaimed,
No Money Down! For an Unlimited Time Only! Buy! Buy! Buy!

Too absurd. Never mind.

The bathroom light out, with just the illuminated switch glowing on the switch plate. No, she wasn't there.

He found his robe on the bedpost and slipped it on; then crept from the bedroom. Eleanor stood at the plate-glass window looking into their front lawn and the houses on the subdivision. The white Western-style streetlights of their little spot of heaven in civilization shone across her body.

She was standing.

Standing without braces or the chair. Just staring out into the street. Eleanor pulled the drawstring, closing the curtains, but continued to stare blankly at the fabric.

“She's not home,” Eleanor said to the curtained window. “Janet's not home. Go to the sheriff now.”

Bhakti swallowed his surprise at her standing there. Eleanor hadn't stood on her own in twenty years.

“Stop staring at me and just do it. Go right now.”

*   *   *

First to their neighbor's right across the street, the Chen's—Amy and Wen Chen had followed them from NASA. Janet and the Chen's daughter, Lila, friends for years; the girls did everything together. Wen met him at his own front door, dressed—Bhakti could see Amy down the hall, her eyes bright with fear. Wen's tough, round face was set and grim. One look and neither man had much to say.

Wen, sharp and to the point as always: “We'll take my car.”

First to the sheriff's office at the courthouse.

Closed, naturally, but there was one light coming from an office down the hall. Bhakti and Chen banged on the courthouse door. For a few moments nothing. They banged again. Then from inside a door opened, throwing down a bar of light, and the dark figure of a man tromped out into the hall rubbing his eyes. Deputy Jimmy, who had no doubt been sleeping—with his feet on the desk, the radio humming softly. The police scanner and dispatch radio lit but silent. From dead snore to roused in all of three knocks. Now rubbing his face and peering through the glass front doors.

“Mr. Chen, Mr. Singh—what's the trouble, fellas? Why didn't you call?”

Deputy Jimmy sat and listened. The two girls went to a music festival near El Paso—our side of the border—earlier in the evening. They were supposed to be home by 2 a.m., understandable—the long drive. They'd never been late before. Neither girl was answering her cell phone. And that
never
happened. There was something wrong.

Mr. Chen was getting more and more irritated. He'd shoved over his wallet photos, slightly out of date, given a detailed description—height, weight, hair color, name, Social Security number. Bhakti too. Angry now, Chen was losing control. “I've given you everything here, why can't we—what do you call it, put out an Amber alert?”

Deputy Jimmy wasn't such a bad man, as lawmen went—but now tried to explain, the excuses ringing hollow in the concrete Sheriff's Office. “I'm sorry, Mr. Chen, Mr. Singh—the children have to be seventeen or younger. Neither girl is. And we have to know they've actually been abducted. And we don't know that for sure yet. There may be another explan—”

“We
know,
” both men said at once.

Didn't matter. What was worse; three days were required to elapse before Janet and Lila could be registered as missing persons. Still, as a matter of procedure, smart thinking, and an effort to mollify the fathers, Deputy Jimmy promised to notify the Texas Rangers, the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department halfway to El Paso, and every church or mission they could find in the county phone book. In this empty part of the world, not that many.

And naturally if the girls phoned home they could use the cell phone service provider to trace the location. Provided there was an emergency. In a flash of foresight, Bhakti showed Chen his BlackBerry. “This has a recording feature somewhere. I'll have to look up how to activate it.” Chen nodded silently, good idea.

That's when things got really ugly.

Bhakti returned home to find Eleanor still standing by the window, staring at the closed curtains.

She didn't have to ask him. “Well?” It was as though she already knew.

Without speaking to her he went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. Somehow Bhakti didn't want to do it in the kitchen in front of her. It seemed somehow irresolute, weak. And for the life of him he couldn't fathom why something as simple as that would feel that way.

The tap from the bathroom sink was warm, as always. Water was always warm in this part of the world. Funny, just like home too, India. Water always warm. That's when he noticed the graffiti. At some point during the night Eleanor had scrawled some lines on the bathroom wall in lipstick. A little ditty right by the toilet, frat rat stuff, as if in the time it took to sit down and then find her legs she had somehow lost her mind:

Here I sit, Muscles Flexin'

Giving Birth to another Texan.

Crazy talk.

That's when his BlackBerry rang; and things spiraled down.

The caller ID read
JANET
. At first Bhakti breathed a deep sigh of relief, a whoosh of sweat flushing his system of fear. But something about Eleanor standing in front of the curtains made him pause, even as he answered the call.

“Janet!”

Treacly sounds trickled out; he raised the volume, some sort of kiddies' song:
Felix the Cat, the funderful, funderful cat!
The cloying verse repeated again. “Janet!” No Janet. Just the idiotic verses. Eleanor's voice came at him from the window.

“She's not there.”

Bhakti ignored his wife; rushing out the door, he met Wen Chen in the street between their houses. Chen's iPhone was blatting the same ditty. His oriental eyes were wide and round. “We've got a signal, we can locate them!” Chen cried.

But in a bitter crack of his mind Bhakti felt the hollow pit at the bottom of his stomach open like an abyss.

They were grasping at straws.

*   *   *

The two men roared off down Interstate 10, followed by Deputy Jimmy. A Texas Highway Patrol Ford Interceptor, bubble lights blazing, hooked up with them ten miles west of Van Horn, then took the lead.

They'd traced two cell phones about forty miles farther west around the border town of Sierra Blanca. Bhakti sat in the passenger's seat watching Chen—driving crash-dummy, expressionless, hands gripping the wheel, eyes dead ahead. Neither man talked. Bhakti cupped his BlackBerry in his hand, still connected. The kiddies' tune continued to whimper from the device, the charge bars shrinking from three to two to one. Only moments to go before the thing died. He had forgotten to bring the charge cable from his own car. Even though he hated the sugary tune the humming unit was a connection, a slim thread to Janet. And he clutched the thing, hoping against hope a human voice would come through. When the device finally lost all its juice, he let it quietly die.

Only thing Chen said to him the whole drive, “I didn't want Lila to go. Amy didn't like it either, but we thought it was okay because you didn't seem worried.” Bhakti didn't reply. What was there to say? I'm your boss? You trusted me? I'm sorry you feel that way? Nothing good to say.