2012 (37 page)

No, the chapel would be the key. If they went there, they would find the vulnerability that the seraph were trying to hide. “Thing is, the way they’ve scoured this part of Kansas, how interested they are in us-and we’re just a quiet little corner of the world, after all-I’d say that if the monument is right above the center of their repository, then that’s where we need to go to reach it. That’s got to be their weak point.”

The atmosphere in the tent became electric. “It’s not very far,” a voice said.

“We have to go in the physical,” George added, “or we won’t be able to do anything in the physical.”

From outside came the chuckling clatter of the jaws of outriders. The drummers started drumming.

“I’m going with you,” Trevor said softly.

Martin did not reply, not verbally. There would be no way to keep Trevor here. He stood up, and so did Trevor and so did Pam. But the others did not stand. He could sense something among them, a kind of mutual agreement, but it wasn’t clear exactly what was in their minds.

Mike stood. His girl cried out, but stifled her cry. She came to her feet and threw her arms around him. They stood like this, the young couple, and Martin saw that their hearts were married.

She stayed behind, though, surrounded by the little ones.

The woods were quiet now, the outriders having gone off when they failed to smell fear here. To the west, lightning flickered. Would the storms never end? No, not as long as the seraph tortured this poor earth, Martin knew. All of that seafloor that had risen would be gushing with methane from hydrates and billions of tons of dead marine life, and hydrogen sulfide and other gasses he couldn’t even name. In a matter of days, it would change the atmosphere, and the seraph would be able to breathe easily here, and all the humans and most of the animals and insects would die.

First moon now rode in the high sky, its light bright and bitter, and the night was so still that you could hear the whisper of grass when breezes touched it. It was a sound familiar in Kansas when the crops were high and the night wind ran in them, sighing and whispering.

“Stop,” Mike said softly.

Sensing trouble, Martin drew his prayer back into his mind.

Trevor pointed upward. For a moment, Martin saw only the sky. Then, against the moon, a flash of darkness, ugly and ribbed like the wing of a bat. Then he saw another and another, and as his eyes began to track the movement in the sky he understood that there was not one nighthawk circling up there, but dozens, no, hundreds, in a soaring column that seemed to go up forever.

Thousands in the moonlight.

Something slid into Trevor’s hand, and Martin knew what it was, that seraph gun, even more fearsome than Wylie and Nick’s arsenal.

“All right,” Mike said, “right now, you’re thinking away as usual, Doctor Winters, and the rest of us are absolutely not afraid. And the reason is, we’re doing what you keep thinking about doing. You have to use the prayer, Doctor Winters, you have to keep it in your head all the time-and now you’re about to think about the Valley of Death and comfort yourself with the psalm but please don’t even do that.”

He recalled Franny’s prayer, took it to his mind, and began repeating it. Of course, he was not even a believer. If anything, he was a Jeffersonian Christian, an admirer of the man but not a believer in the resurrection. And, in any case, Zooey had been right, had he not, that the prayer was itself a form of egotism?

He realized that Mike was looking at him. They were all looking at him.

-The fourteen parts of Osiris.

-The fourteen Stations of the Cross.

-The fourteen sacred sites.

-The fourteen black lenses.

“Do you understand now, Doctor Winters?”

He nodded, but he did not understand. The great magic number of the past was seven, the number of a completed octave and a completed life. So what was fourteen?

“The number of resurrection, the key to heaven,” Trevor said, “and it’s the resurrection energy that the seraph hate, because it’s what they can’t have. That’s why they steal souls, to find in their goodness a taste of heaven. That’s why they’re really here. It’s not for bodies and land, it’s for souls.”

They walked through the wrecked forest, past uprooted trees, through the yards of ruined houses, and he could see the white steeple of Third Street Methodist still standing. Also, they walked out from under the great column of nighthawks, which could not see them because they could not see any fear.

They reached Pam’s yard, and he saw that her house had been torn apart just as theirs had, by seraph who had not anticipated that some of their victims would gain power from the attack, and sought any crumb of information they might find about these dangerous little viral particles.

Pam broke into a run, and disappeared into the house. Martin saw in his mind’s eye a flashing image of a car key, but knew that her heart was taking her to her old room, and the rooms of those she loved, and he saw her looking at the melted, deranged ruin of her home and knew that she was feeling the same horror that he had, the same anguish at seeing something so much a part of herself made so ugly.

Nobody spoke, nobody needed to, they could hear her rage in their minds, even Martin could hear it, and a moment later could also hear the increasing roar of wings, and the forlorn, eager cries that grew louder as the nighthawks, seeing her terror like a bright star in a void, found them again.

From the house, then, silence. She’d become aware of what her emotions were doing.

Nobody moved. Not a hundred feet overhead, the creatures swarmed. And from the dark woods all around now came the chuckling of outriders. They had begun marching this way, working their steel fangs.

The truck stood in the drive, but when they drew near it, they found that it was peppered with tiny craters. Farther down the driveway were heaps of something-the remains of people, there was no way to tell.

As they got into the double cab, Pam tried the key. “We need a miracle, thanks,” she muttered.

The truck’s engine growled.

There was a huge crash and the ceiling was crushed enough to knock Martin’s head forward-which was fortunate, because enormous claws came ripping through the metal, ripping and clutching.

“Keep down, Dad!”

The engine ground again. “Come on,” Pam said.

It was a double cab, and Trevor and Mike had gotten in the back. Trevor came forward between the seats as more of the huge nighthawks landed around them, their great heads thrusting, their beaks, lined with narrow teeth, opening wide when they bellowed, then snapping closed with a lethal crack.

More landed, and more, until Martin could smell their breath, a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and rotting meat that made your throat burn.

Then one of the heads thrust forward and crashed through the windshield, and the teeth slashed toward Martin. From between the seats, Trevor fired the disk-shaped weapon.

There was no report. The head simply flew apart, the upper and lower halves of the beak whirling against the opposite doors, the eyes exploding into a dust of glass and gelatin, and the tongue fluttering in the ruined face as the creature shot backward and ended up squalling on its back in the driveway, its fifty-foot wings flapping furiously, hammering the ground so hard that the truck rocked with every great convulsion.

With a thunder of howls, the rest of them took off, rising as mayflies do from a spring brook, but monstrous.

“Thank you, God,” Pam said as the truck finally started. She put it into drive and accelerated toward the street, driving over the creature, which snapped and crackled and squalled beneath the bouncing vehicle.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

They went down to Harrow in the ravaged truck, and changed there to another one-Bobby’s police car, which stood open on Main and School. The keys were still in the ignition, and it had a quarter tank of gas. Also, between the front seats, a sawed-off shotgun. They got in, Martin behind the wheel.

They rode in silence down an empty Highway 36, passing an occasional motionless car, but otherwise meeting not the slightest sign of life. “That’s a terrible weapon,” Martin said to Trevor.

“It’s nearly empty,” Trevor replied.

“The light is coming,” Mike said. “We need to hurry.”

Martin scanned the sky, looking for some sign of an orange disk. He saw nothing, but he stepped on the gas, driving the police interceptor up to a hundred and twenty, then a hundred and thirty. Bobby kept the thing in good shape.

“Take a right,” Mike said.

“I thought it was in Smith Center.”

“The monument’s on 191.”

Martin turned north on 281. The fields were fallow, the country totally empty.

“Left,” Mike said.

Another mile and Martin saw the little monument just off the road. A short distance from it was a small building.

“Okay,” Mike said, “you got it. Now what?”

They got out. Martin carried the shotgun.

Mike took it. “That’s an eight-shot semi,” he said, “not seven.”

“It’s loaded?”

“I know that.”

Martin went to the chapel, a white portable building, its siding weathered. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open. Inside were a few pews, a table, and a cross on the wall behind it. He noticed that this was not an ordinary Christian cross. Christ lay upon it, but the four limbs of the cross were of equal length. He wondered who might have done that in rural Kansas, made it into such a very ancient symbol, for the solar cross marked the solstices and the equinoxes, and related to the greatest depths of human memory and knowledge, from the time when we did not think like we do now, but made wonders in the world because we were surrendered to God, and thus acting on exquisite instinct, not plodding thought.

“Who is she?” Pam asked.

For a moment, Martin was confused. Then he saw her, too, a shadow standing in the corner of the chapel, so still that she at first appeared to be little more than a thickening of the dark. But he could see her eyes there in the corner of the room, her gleaming eyes, and her slimness.

Jennifer Mazle sprang at him. One second, he was wondering if the figure was even alive, the next he had been slammed to the floor.

Her hands came around his throat, closed. His head felt as if it was going to explode. At that same moment thick light surged in the windows and the door with the force of a tidal wave, causing the glass to shatter and the door to slam all the way across the chapel, where it hit the wall and dropped the cross to the floor.

Martin looked directly into Mazle’s face, into eyes that bulged until the contact lenses popped out, revealing the reptile eyes of the seraph. In the light that was all around them, he could see the kids moving with method and direction, and could hear the whispering of their minds.

Mike pulled Mazle’s head back. Her mouth opened and her long, black tongue came out as she screamed. Trevor thrust the shotgun into her mouth and pulled the trigger, and her lithe body shot backward in a shower of green blood. The head burst.

“But the light!”

“Don’t think, Martin!” Pam yelled.

“Just let yourself happen, Dad!”

As he took his attention away from his mind and into his body, he felt his soul return also, and knew that the light had been taking him so stealthily that he hadn’t even realized it.

Then Pam marched into the corner where Mazle had been standing and simply disappeared.

For a moment, Martin thought she’d gone through a concealed gateway, but when he heard echoing footsteps, he understood. Cunning doors like this were seen in some Egyptian temples he’d worked on, but especially in Peru, where there were many of them in old Cuzco, doors that to this day only the Inca knew. But to find one here in Kansas-well, he would have been surprised once.

Concentrating on his breath, on the way his body felt as he moved, leaving his thoughts and his fears behind, he found that he could move through the light easily and without danger. The kids weren’t even concerned by it.

He crossed the ruined chapel with the others, walking straight into the corner, feeling it give way, seeing the darkness, then finding his footing on steep black steps.

They had defeated the light, and if only mankind had recognized his own soul before it was too late, the whole world would have been able to do the same thing. But the seraph had infiltrated us with the lie that we were a body only, that there was no soul that was admissible to understanding and to science, and that science itself was a strange exploration having nothing to do with the kingdom of God, when, in fact, there was no real science that did not address heaven and satori.

As they went down, the air changed, growing thicker and warmer, beginning to smell stifling. This was the air of Abaddon, air as it would be everywhere in this world of theirs very soon. It was heavier, their air, and would be filling low places first.

He was last in line, going down the iron steps. Faint light came from below. From above, now only darkness.

They went down for a long time, and Martin remembered the part of Wylie’s book about Al’s descent. He had been taken miles into the earth.

As the light from below got brighter, it took on a blue cast, and the narrow shaft they were descending became more distinct. “It’s our guide,” Mike said.

Martin knew that the blue light of souls was also the color of good worlds, and that Abaddon was brown, but the human earths were palest blue, the color of their waters and their skies, and the glow of their dead.

“Are we sure?” Martin asked. They were a good two hundred steps down, and he was beginning to feel a distinct sense of claustrophobia in the narrow space. He forced himself not to think of the depth or the closeness. He’d found reading Wylie’s description of Al’s descent beneath Cheyenne Mountain to be almost unendurable, so vivid was the sense of being enclosed in rock, and he could never forget the feeling he’d had here earlier.

“Oh, my God.”

It was Pam, calling up from below. “What?”

He reached the bottom of the steps. At first, he was only aware of color-gold, green, red, tan. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Then he could. “This is the most extraordinary room in the world.” He’d seen it before, of course, but not in the body, not with all the vividness of his living eyes.