08 Illusion (66 page)

Lemuel caved in Dane’s guts with his elbow and Dane fell backward, losing awareness, his vision darkening.

Moss was pounding keys, trying to cancel the timeline and normalize deflection. The Machine pushed back, canceling his commands, directing energy toward the timeline, increasing deflection.

He was arm-wrestling with the girl!

Clarence was cocky enough to turn his back. Dane landed a kick that bent Clarence’s knee and made him buckle, if just for an instant. In that instant he went for Lemuel again.

Lemuel pointed the gun at him.

In mind, spirit, memory, Mandy was running forever and ever … longing, reaching, looking up through drug-darkening eyes at a man and a woman in the window of that beautiful house … together … where she wanted to be … where she belonged …

As she fell into the grass …

As she fell toward the broken bricks and concrete …

She reached so hard a shudder went through the birds …

Through Dane.

Through the Machine.

And Dane was
somewhere else.
No Lemuel, no vacant lot, no noise, no pain … no body? He rode on waves of colors, fell into shadowy crevasses, passed through brightness, darkness, sounds from his memory he heard all at once, far away. He was floating, suspended …
in between
… .

A warning flashed on the monitor, catching Moss’s eye. Mandy’s collective mass now exceeded that of the Machine by 185 pounds.

“Yes!”
Moss exclaimed, getting everyone’s attention. He answered the question in their eyes. “She’s yanked Collins into her collective mass, trying to save him. She’s ruined the gravitational equivalency!”

“Meaning?” DuFresne demanded.

“Meaning no timeline trade today, folks! She’s just killed herself and her husband.” Moss leaned back, relieved. “Too bad Parmenter didn’t see that one coming—”

But then, at that instant, the Machine’s clock indicated 14:24:09, and Moss and everyone else saw the adjustment the Machine made—by prior programming.

Jerome Parmenter was no longer lying on the bed in the next room. With a flash he appeared in the Machine, sitting on the bench holding a box, and he was looking out through the glass with a strange, gotcha kind of smile.

The monitor proclaimed it: gravitational equivalence had been restored. The masses were balanced.

Lemuel spun, looked, pointed the gun in all directions as if he still had an enemy, but he didn’t. He looked up. Engulfed in an eerie, tea-stained atmosphere, Mandy and her doves hovered, wavering as if seen through heat waves, their sound slowed and muffled, the motion of the wings hardly discernible.

The Machine, with Parmenter inside, was distorting like rubber, bending, twisting, warping. The deep HUMMMM was shaking the floor.

Moss leaped from the console.
“Run! Get out! Get out!”

Mr. Stone and Mr. Mortimer just stood there. They’d never seen anything like it.

There was little about the collision Mandy could have remembered. She didn’t see the other car plowing through the intersection against the light. Her head hit the airbag before she had any awareness of an impact.

But she did remember entering the intersection.

The last thing the Machine’s monitor indicated was a unity of timelines.

And then the room filled with flames, flashing and flying about the room like spirits, converging in spirals on the Machine, enveloping the platform, the bench, the glass, the cables—as Parmenter sat inside and watched.

DuFresne made it out first. Moss and Carlson were blocked by the other men crowding the door. Carlson was in the doorway and Moss was only a few feet inside the room when the shock wave hit.

In the hospital lobby, the floor heaved and then dropped under Arnie’s feet, depositing him across a couch and in the lap of a gentleman fortunate enough not to be standing. Everyone else ended up on the floor. The magazines hopped off the coffee table, the phones and monitors flew off the reception desk, plants fell over, pictures came off the walls, and people screamed, covering their heads, covering each other, crawling for cover. The place was in chaos.

The television fell on its side but the picture still worked. Arnie stared at the screen, aghast. It was like seeing the space shuttle
Challenger
blow up all over again.

* * *

The crowds at the Orpheus were on their feet, their mood gone from awe and jubilation to wide-eyed, drop-jawed shock. First there was that wondrous sight, the magic flying carpet made entirely of white doves, and then … a flash, a fireball, and a sonic boom that shook the ground, rattled and echoed through the hotels, and hit the crowd hard enough to knock some of them over.

Even if Mr. Stone and Mr. Mortimer survived the blast that flattened them into the ground, they did not rise to flee before a shower of flaming metal, shards of glass, blazing lumps of plastic, and smoldering circuitry came down on them like a shower of meteors, burning, melting, blackening the ground, and spewing smoke.

Emile was spellbound, watching through binoculars. Like everything else this day, planning and expecting this were one thing; seeing it was far, far beyond that.

As the last burning shred of metal hit the ground, he got on his radio. “Dane? Dane, come in. Dane, do you read me?”

Nothing.

Dane awoke with a start, lying in bed in Preston’s home. Daylight streamed through the windows. What on earth?

With horror and disbelief he saw the time: 2:25—in the afternoon! How could he have overslept that long? Why didn’t anyone call him? Where was everybody?

And why was he lying in bed fully clothed, the keys to Preston’s car still in his pocket? He even had his shoes on.

Whatever happened at the hospital—earthquake, gas explosion, terrorist attack—everyone agreed it happened under the building. The fire department was on its way. Four security personnel streamed down the
NO ADMITTANCE
stairways to a locked door, used clearance badges to get through, and stepped cautiously into the hallway.

No smoke. No apparent damage.

The big double doors appeared intact.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“Okay,” said the chief of security, “heads up.” He went to the keypad.

For the other three, this was scary but tantalizing. Even though they had access to every other part of the building, none of them had ever been allowed down here.

The chief swiped his card through the slot, and the doors opened.

They hit the floor, arms covering their faces, sure they were goners …

… as hundreds of white doves exploded into the hallway, panicked and flapping, bouncing off the walls and ceiling, careening down the hallway.

Dane sat on the steps that led from the house into the garage, the keys to Preston’s Lexus in his hand. He distinctly remembered parking the car in this garage the night before, but now it wasn’t there. Stolen? Arnie took it? Preston came and got it?

Then … the next strange thing: he remembered getting up that morning, driving to the Orpheus, checking the pod, running through the routine with Mandy, deciding not to rehearse the hang glider.

So how did he get here?

Emile got a mike from the sound crew. “Thank you so much for being a part of our amazing show today with the one and only Mandy Whitacre! Please walk to the nearest exit and have a great day here in the Entertainment Capital of the World!”

He gave the mike back to the sound guy, put on a different hat and jacket than he’d been wearing, and slipped away through the crowd.

Vahidi was collaring anyone he could find. “Where is she? What happened? Where’s Downey?”

Everyone was still in shock, with no answers. He never found Seamus Downey. He never would.

Dane went back into the house, walking slowly, dazed by the memories spontaneously popping up and replaying in his brain. Mandy flying under all those birds. The volcano, and then there was a fight—

Ouch
! Somebody hit him while he was standing in the hallway. He looked around—
Oof!
Another blow, and it hurt. No one was there but he remembered:
Clarence! He beat the snot out of me!

Zap
! He went numb, then his feet hurt, his knees complained, he was out of breath …
Oh! That car almost ran over me!

By the time he got to the living room he’d suffered more pain and bruises and a blow to his stomach that put him on the floor. But he remembered where it all came from, right up to the point when Lemuel pointed a gun at him.

So this is what it’s like.
Mandy, you are one incredible trouper!

But what’s happened? What’d I miss?
As he lay on the floor dabbing blood from his mouth and thinking he might throw up, he recalled,
The TV stations were there!

He crawled to the entertainment center, grabbed the remote, and brought the big screen to life.

The cameras were focused on the nearly empty bleachers, the crowds milling around and leaving, the stage with the dead and silent volcano.

Kirschner and Rhodes were still there, talking it up.

“… and we’re still trying to find out exactly what happened. This, pardon me, but this does not look like part of the act, Mark.”

“No, Steve, it sure doesn’t. There’s damage, fire, no sign of Mandy Whitacre the magician.”

A remote, handheld camera was circling the burning wreckage. Fire trucks and firemen were there, hoses dousing the flames.

Kirschner went on, “You all saw it, that incredible flight of thousands—it had to be thousands—”

“Oh, at least,” said Rhodes.

“Thousands of doves and Mandy Whitacre suspended, flying beneath them, and now … we can only guess that this wreckage is all that’s left of the secret mechanism by which that illusion was accomplished.”

“And something went terribly wrong.”

“But we don’t know what, and it could be some time before we do know.”

The two announcers kept talking away, describing what was plainly visible on the screen and telling everyone they didn’t know anything.

Then Kirschner interrupted himself. “And as we look across the—Oh, my God!” Pause, some mike noise. “You won’t believe this. We’ve just been informed there’s been a major explosion at the Clark County Medical Center. Fire crews are on the site now, and … hang on to your hats: there are … thousands of
doves
in the building!”

It hurt to run again, but Preston also had his Jeep Wrangler in the garage, and Dane had the key.

He parked and limped from three blocks away, past curious onlookers, police cars with lights flashing and radios squawking, fire trucks standing by with nothing much to do and, as he came within a block of the hospital, doves, more doves, and all the more doves the closer he got, as thick as soapsuds in the trees, on the sidewalks, on the overhead wires, on the street signs, fence railings, everywhere. The firemen and police were working around them, wading through them, with no apparent plan as yet what to do with them all. News crews were arriving, cameramen were leaping from their vans. Hospital personnel in uniforms, coveralls, candy striper outfits, even scrubs, stood around, ambled around, clustered in little groups to watch and guess what had happened. Some played with the birds, all of which were notably tame around people.

Police were stretching out their yellow tape, but Dane went to some candy stripers and let his bruises and bleeding speak for him. The candy stripers helped him along, slipping through the barrier and directing him to one of the hastily set up first aid stations. From there he directed himself into the milling crowds, scanning, jumping to see over heads, picking up information from conversations on every side.

There had been no major damage—things were knocked over, spilled, and broken, but nothing a mop or broom couldn’t handle. There was no fire, no loss of electrical power, the patients were all safe and were not going to be evacuated. The birds were the biggest problem as far as anyone could see.

The going story was that something had happened in the basement. The rumors included a gas explosion, a mental patient with a bomb, a terrorist with a bomb, a boiler explosion, a localized earthquake, a faulty foundation, and a sinkhole. No one knew for sure because the basement levels were restricted, only people with the right clearance could go down there, and those people weren’t saying anything.

Of course, the main question spreading all over the campus was the birds and how they got there. The name “Mandy Whitacre” and the words “Grand Illusion” were popping up.

The main door was open. Orderlies and janitorial staff were herding and shooing doves out the door with brooms.

“Dane!” a voice whispered behind him. A hand on his shoulder jerked him around. It was Arnie, wearing a jogging outfit and a billed cap. He immediately took off the cap and jammed it down on Dane’s head, the bill so low it blocked Dane’s eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“I woke up back in my bed in Preston’s house, back where I was at six this morning.”

“Don’t look around, just walk! This way!”

“It had to be Parmenter. He must have known I was going to get pulled into Mandy’s collective mass. He had the Machine spit me out someplace safe—more than nine hours ago.”

“No, I mean, what are you doing
here
? Are you crazy?”

“Have you found her?”

Arnie walked him under the ribbon and toward the trees on the edge of the visitor parking. “Oh, yeah, right, we had a lovely reunion in the lobby while all hell was breaking loose. You kidding? The place is nuts right now. They’ve blocked off the basement, all the doors, everything.”

“We’ve got to find her.”