Blue Noon (29 page)

Rex had watched her make the bomb, the terrifying smell of its contents almost panicking him. The soldered-shut paint can was stuffed full of gunpowder emptied from a dozen packages of M-8Os. Its purpose was simple: to create as loud a boom as possible. Dess had calculated that its shock wave would set off car alarms for miles in every direction, waking people up all over this side of town.

Of course, for that to work, they had to set it off in the next four minutes, before the long midnight fell.

“I’ll take it from here,” he said.

“No way. My toy.”

She lifted it with both hands and carefully carried it out into the rain. Still limping, Rex followed her to one corner of the roof, where a cell phone repeater sat, a five-foot-tall antenna that faced out toward the suburbs. Dess balanced the bomb atop it. She’d explained to Rex that it had to go up high so the roof wouldn’t muffle the shock wave before it could travel out across Bixby.

“Okay. Let me do this part,” he said.

Dess looked at the bomb for a long moment, then nodded. “Fine by me. But if that fuse starts to burn too fast, run like hell.” She paused. “You know what? Run like hell no matter what.” She stepped back.

Rex took a deep breath and pulled out his lighter. His foot was throbbing dully now, keeping time with his quickening heartbeat.

He reached down and lit the long, dangling fuse. It sputtered to life and began crawling slowly upward toward the paint can.

“Okay, let’s go,” Dess said.

He watched the fire climb for a long moment to be sure the rain wouldn’t put it out, finding himself fascinated by the shower of sparks that were carried off in a little trail by the wind.

“Rex!” she called from the other end of the roof. “Come on!”

Then thunder boomed overhead, and for a split second Rex thought the bomb had gone off. He stumbled backward onto his bad foot and, swearing at the pain, turned to limp after Dess. They huddled against the far side of the stairwell shed.

“Are you sure we’ll be okay back here?” he asked.

“According to my research, Rex, bombs can kill you in two ways. Stray bits of flying stuff, which this shed is solid enough to protect us from, and the shock wave. My little baby isn’t strong enough to crush our heads, but make sure you cover your ears unless you want to go deaf.” To reinforce this point, she placed her own palms flat against her head.

Rex checked his watch. Only a little more than one minute left.

Then a terrible thought occurred to him. They’d used the slowest-burning fuse they could find, three feet of it for the maximum amount of time. But kicking through the door had already put them behind schedule….

“How long did you say that fuse would take?” he asked.

“About two and a half minutes.”

“Good. There’s just about a minute to go before midnight.”

“Really?” She looked at Geostationary. “Sixty seconds? Crap, Rex, we took too long!”

“But the bomb will go off before midnight.”

Dess shook her head. “Shock waves travel at the speed of sound, Rex, which is
slow
—almost eight seconds to go one mile. The shock waves have to get out to the suburbs, and then car alarms have to go off long enough to wake people up. That’ll all take extra seconds we don’t have!”

Rex took a breath, then peeked around the corner of the shed.

About a third of the fuse had burned. Dess was right; he’d lit it too late.

After a second of panicked deliberation Rex swore loudly, then hobbled back toward the bomb, pulling out his lighter.

“Rex, what the hell are you doing?”

“Dealing with it!”

He stumbled up to the bomb just as the fuse reached the halfway mark. Thrusting his lighter out, he aimed its flame at a point only a few inches from the top of the can. The lighter sputtered out once, a direct hit from a big raindrop extinguishing it.

“Come
on
” he muttered, flicking it back to life.

“Get back here!” Dess cried.

Finally the flame caught. A foot-long section of fuse dropped to the roof, lit at both ends now. The shorter piece attached to the can sparked and hissed in the rain, then steadied and began to crawl its last few inches.

Rex didn’t stick around to watch. He spun on his left heel and ran back toward the stairwell shed, his hands already over his ears.

Just as he rounded the corner, his boot skidded on the rain-slick roof, sending him sprawling painfully to the tar. He crawled the last few feet and huddled beside Dess against the side of the shed, eyes closed and ears still covered.

“Rex, you moron!” Dess shouted. “You almost gave me a heart atta—”

The bomb exploded with a vast noise—a physical blow more than a sound, like a sack of potatoes hitting Rex in the chest. Even his closed eyelids felt the concussion, and a single, awesome flash of light shot through them.

For a moment all other noises disappeared, as if the bomb’s roar had sucked sound itself from the rest of the world. But slowly the murmur of the rain returned, and Rex dared to open his eyes.

He glanced at his watch: twenty seconds to midnight.

Rising to their feet, he and Dess peered around the corner. Nothing was left of the paint can, of course, and the cell phone antenna was a blackened wreckage, bent and twisted metal sticking out in all directions.

“Whoa, cool!” Dess said.

Rex limped after her to the edge of the roof, training his darkling hearing on the city below….

The sweet sound of car alarms rang out across Bixby, a hundred whoops and screams and buzzes all mingled in a great, untidy chorus. Rex imagined people turning over in their sleep, glaring accusingly at their alarm clocks and wondering what all the noise was about. Even the sleepiest would still be awake in ten seconds when midnight fell. Perfect timing.

Here in town they wouldn’t feel the blue time strike right away, of course: the rip still had to travel to downtown from Jenks. But for those the bomb had awakened—and all the others already up watching late-night TV or reading in bed—that delay would only seem like an instant. Suddenly at midnight the world would turn blue, everything flickering with the red tinge of the rip, TVs, radios, and car alarms all silenced at once.

Those who went out to investigate would find the dark moon risen overhead, the last few seconds of rain settling to earth. And soon they would see the fireworks display downtown, the only movement visible on the frozen horizon.

Hopefully many of them would start to make their way downtown then, searching for some kind of explanation. By that time Jonathan would be flying among them, telling everyone to get to this building as fast as possible. And as long as the midnighters’ defenses at Jenks had held off the main darkling force long enough, they’d have time to get here.

As he and Dess waited for the last few seconds of normal time to elapse, Rex took a deep breath. For the next twenty-five hours humanity would be a hunted species, dispossessed of all its clever toys and machines, toppled from the summit of the food chain. Those who understood that quickly enough would run and would live; those who refused to believe would perish.

In the darkling part of his mind, Rex thought for a moment that perhaps this wasn’t such a bad thing. Without predators to cull the herd, humanity had spread across the earth unchecked, crowding the planet beyond its resources, prideful and arrogant.

Maybe one night a year of being hunted would do them good.

He shook his head then, shivering in the cold rain. Darkling notions had teased his mind all week, but he knew he couldn’t let himself think that way—he had a job to do. The people of Bixby didn’t deserve to be slaughtered just because the world was overpopulated. No one did.

He listened to the car alarms and forced himself to hope that everyone down there was listening too.

Just before midnight fell, a peal of thunder started to roll, sounding directly over their heads. And then the earth shuddered, the blue time descending over everything, freezing the rain into a million hovering diamonds around him, cutting off the thunder, the car alarms, everything.

“Can you see it from here?” Dess asked.

Rex looked toward Jenks, and his seer’s vision picked out the slim red glimmer of the rip. It was starting to swell.

“Yep. The red time is on its way.”

“Good going on that fuse.” Dess breathed out a slow sigh. “Guess now we just sit back until the fireworks start.”

As per the plan, the other three midnighters were out in Jenks. Soon they would light the first fireworks display to forestall the main force of darklings. Once that was going strong and before the darklings started to flow around them and into town, Jonathan would fly Jessica and Melissa back here, where the five of them would make their stand.

At least, that was the way it was supposed to work.

“Whoa, Rex! Look at that!”

Dess was pointing back toward downtown. Rex turned, following her gaze to the Mobil Building, the tallest in Bixby. The neon winged horse at its summit hunkered just under the low ceiling of heavy clouds, strangely illuminated against their dark bulk.

Rex’s heart began to pound. “Oh my God.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“No, but I’ve always wanted to. Melissa and I have been looking for one of those since… forever.”

A frozen bolt of lightning reached down from the cloud, its motionless fire forking into a hundred tendrils that caressed the metal framework of the neon horse. In Rex’s midnight vision the arrested lightning was mind-bogglingly complex, every inch of it divided into a million burning zigzags.

He remembered all the times he and Melissa had set off on their bicycles as kids, tunneling through the rain toward some frozen flicker of light on the horizon. They’d never made it before the secret hour finished, always having to plow back through the resumed storm empty-handed.

But they’d kept trying; one of the first fragments of lore Rex had discovered was all about frozen lightning, though it had never explained what you were supposed to do when you found it.

Still, there was something in his mind….

He felt the fissures that Madeleine had made, the still-tender wounds of her attack, begin to throb. He saw it now, thrown whole into his mind by the sight of the frozen lightning.
This
was the last remnant of what the darklings had hidden from him.

Rex blinked. “Oh, no.”

“What?”

He couldn’t answer, a shudder passing through him. Suddenly he knew what tonight was really all about and what had to happen before the rip reached downtown and set the lightning free again. He knew the instructions that the Grayfoots had never received before their halfling had died.

And finally he understood the real reason why the dark-lings were so afraid of Jessica—why they had always wanted her dead.

He looked out at Jenks; the glowing red of the rip was still moving toward them. “We can stop this.”

“What, Rex?”

“We need Jessica here.”

“But they haven’t even lit the—”

“Shhh.” Rex dropped to his knees and let his head fall into his hands. In planning tonight he’d put Melissa on the front line for two reasons. She could guide Jessica and Jonathan safely there and back, through cops or darkling invasions as needed. And Rex had also known that if anything went wrong, she could taste his thoughts for miles across the secret hour, just as she had when they were eight years old, when she’d made her way across Bixby wearing only pajamas covered in pictures of cowgirls.

Now he needed her to hear him again.

“Rex?” Dess said softly.

He waved her silent and focused himself, setting all of his will to the task of summoning his oldest friend.

Cowgirl… he thought.
I need you now.

Silence…

Midnight fell, extinguishing the mind noise of Jenks, turning the world blue and still and…
red.

Here in the center of the rip everything began to glimmer purple—red and blue mixing together, time arrested, yet… not. The rain pattered down for a few more seconds, then petered out; the rip hadn’t expanded enough to include the heavy clouds above their heads. Melissa wondered if when it reached them, the rain would start again.

Weather in the secret hour. Just when I thought I’d seen everything.

“Where is she?” Jessica asked.

Melissa closed her eyes, trying to ignore the flame-bringer’s coppery, panicked taste. She sent her mind across the rip, feeling it growing, stretching in the opposite directions toward downtown and the mountains. It was moving slowly now, but she could already feel its speed increasing.

No little sisters in it, though.

“Sorry, Jess. I can’t feel her.”

“Why not?”

“Your sister’s not inside the rip. Not yet, anyway. She must still be frozen, so I can’t taste her mind.”

“But Cassie’s house is right there!” Jessica pointed down at the double-wide at the edge of the tracks. The red-tinged boundary had already swallowed it.

“Yep. And I can taste her grandma in there, still sleeping,” Melissa said. “But nobody else is home.”

Jessica’s face twisted into an expression of fury, her mind all fiery peppers and burned toast.

“That little creep snuck out!” she cried.

Melissa raised an eyebrow, suddenly relieved she didn’t have an older sister of her own. Madeleine’s interfering had included making sure that none of her pet midnighters in Bixby had siblings—and this was why.

“Calm down, Jess,” Jonathan said. “She can’t be too far away. Once the rip reaches her, we’ll deal with it.”

Jessica looked at Melissa. “And you’re sure you’ll recognize her mind?”

“I know Cassie’s taste. They’ll be together, won’t they?”

“What if they aren’t?”

Melissa sighed. “I have an idea what your sister tastes like, okay? I’ve been to your house at midnight.”

Jessica stared back, her fury twisting into new shapes as she realized what Melissa was admitting. “Damn you!” she said, and turned and stalked away.

“I never touched the shrimp,” Melissa said to Flyboy. “Just the parents.”