Double Dose, page 37
The bow of the boat was angling around in the breeze but the stern remained fixed in the air. Cries from the clansters in the runabout had reached the point of hysteria by now. What was their problem?
That was when he noticed thin, postage-size flakes of red and yellow drifting off Lucy’s back and flowing into the blackness of the sphere—her harem pants and T-shirt. Her back and buttocks were quickly exposed, and soon pieces of her flesh began floating into the opening.
He pointed a finger that shook like he had Parkinson’s. “Lucy! You’re flaking away! Dissolving!”
She was disappearing into the void, being absorbed. Tom had such mixed feelings. He’d wanted her gone from his life but not this way.
“Am I? I don’t feel anything.”
In no time she was half-gone and kept flaking away. But her expression remained serene.
“Lucy, my God!”
“I’m all right with whatever’s happening, Tommy. I’ve been wishing for this my entire life, it seems, and now that wish is coming true. I—” Her beatific smile died, turning to a frown. “Wait…”
“No, you wait! Think this over!”
The frown became an open-mouthed, horrified grimace. “It’s not empty!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Void! It’s full of hunger and-and-and malice and-and—” She grabbed the oar, clutching the blade with both hands. “It wants me, Tommy! Pull me back! I can’t go there! Pull me back!”
For a second Tom was tempted to push instead of pull. How long had he listened to her yammer on and on about the wonderful Void and her awful flesh-trap body? She’d dragged him down here to face his “irrelevance” and suddenly he was to be her savior? Fuck that.
But he didn’t have it in him. He couldn’t be the one to push her into that black hole. So, damn her, he pulled. But he had no weight here, no purchase. Gravity had been suspended and so was he. He released one hand from the oar and wrapped his fingers around the gunwale for anchorage. He pulled but the blackness wouldn’t let go. Aloof and relentless, it kept swallowing her, absorbing her, bit by bit—and in the process, pulling the boat and Tom closer and closer.
“Oh, Tommy, please don’t let go! Don’t let it have me!”
He wasn’t going to let go, but Lucy’s legs and torso had been swallowed. All that remained visible were the front of her head and her arms. Then her ears went away, leaving only her terrified face. Her mouth moved, forming a word with no sound. He could read her lips though…
“Tommyyyyyyyyyy!”
When her face disappeared her fingers spasmed, going rigidly straight as they released the oar.
And then Lucy was gone, gone like she’d never been. Tom screamed her name, shoved the oar through the shrinking blackness, and fought a crazy impulse to tie the anchor rope around his leg and go after her.
Daley
Daley ran toward the left flank of the—what had he called them?—porthors and straight toward the tower gate, hoping some would make a grab for her. That would break their ranks and maybe give Rhys a chance to make a run for it. And if they went for her, Daley was counting on Kendrick and his bat to go for them.
As she neared the pack, three of them broke away and grabbed for her. From behind her came a hoarse cry.
“Hands off, assholes!”
And then Kendrick was among them with his bat. As he sent one after another flying, Daley waved to Rhys as he struggled with the suddenly disorganized creatures.
“Get out of here!” she shouted. “It’s going to blow!”
She glanced toward the tower and froze as she saw Elis standing within the supports, aiming a pistol at her.
“I should have done this right at the start.”
Daley ducked as he fired but knew even as she moved that she was too late. But almost simultaneously she heard Kendrick’s aluminum bat conk! against a skull and a porthor was flung between her and the tower. The creature grimaced but made no sound as the bullet tore into its back and it fell against her, knocking her flat.
Suddenly Kendrick was rushing the tower.
“You shot the goddess! You shot the goddess!”
Elis’s eyes widened as he raised the pistol again and fired off another round. Kendrick bucked and half-turned, but kept coming. Elis shot again, and again Kendrick bucked and stumbled a little this time, but he wasn’t stopping. He ducked in under the supports and threw the bat at Elis who was backpedaling too furiously to get off another shot. Kendrick launched himself at the older man and the two of them went over the low wall around the shaft. Elis’s panicked cry echoed up and then stopped abruptly.
Daley jumped to her feet as the porthors froze and Rhys said, “Dad?”
He started toward the tower but Daley grabbed his arm. “We’ve got to get out of here now!”
“But my father—”
“Is a goner and you will be too—we’ll both be if we don’t leave now! I may be just a lying con artist who can’t be trusted, but you’d better listen to me this once. Out of here now or you’re dead. NOW!”
Another look toward the tower, then, “Shit! Okay!”
They raced to the Highlander and jumped in.
“Don’t even turn around,” Daley cried. “Just put it in reverse and back up. The thing’s gonna blow!”
“Blow?” he said, but started the engine and hung over the back of his seat at he reversed down the path. “How’s it gonna blow?”
“Jason’s sending a monster surge to—oh, God!”
The electric bolts brightened and multiplied and swelled as the copper fittings on the cupola began to glow white hot.
“Move-it-move-it-move-it!” she screamed.
The giant bolts lanced into the ground all around the tower, and seemed especially drawn to the two cars parked before it. The Land Rover and pickup rattled and shook with the impacts and even glowed a little before they exploded.
And then the entire tower ignited like a match head and flared with intolerable brightness. The heat blistered the paint on the Highlander’s hood and washed through the windshield.
Rhys took his foot off the gas and stared. He spoke one barely audible word.
“Dad?”
Tom
He stood there screaming his sister’s name, praying to whatever power that controlled these things that the aperture would spit her out and they could laugh about how even the Void couldn’t tolerate her for very long. But the opening remained empty.
Finally he quieted and waited, ignoring the cries of We-told-you-so and We-warned-you from the runabout. Fuck ’em. He’d wait right here for her to come back.
As he drifted he spotted her note where he’d dropped it by his feet. He unfolded it. She had written him a letter. On her computer, of course. In a handwriting font, no less.
Tommy…
I was never right for this world. In the Void I can leave this rotting meat sack and return to pure being. I’m so tired of this flesh. Exhausted. Remember the last line from A Tale of Two Cities? “It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
This fleshy life is nothing—all nothing. I’ve faced my irrelevancy, Tommy. My life has always been a sort of void, so I’m not really losing anything. I’m going home. I’d be happy about this if I knew how to be happy but I don’t, so you’ll have to be happy for me, okay?
I know I’ve been a drag on you. I know I’ve been a terrible burden, and you’ve been a better brother than I’ve been a sister. I’m sorry to leave you here to face your irrelevance alone, but miss me just a little, okay, Tommy? Just a smidge?
Your sister,
Lucy
Yeah, she really signed it, Your sister, Lucy. Like he had another sister or might think it was from someone else. So typical. Typical, too, how she could never bring herself to say this out loud. But he had to admit he was touched. Even a little choked up, to tell the truth. This was a side of her he hadn’t known existed.
Poor Lucy.
He stared at that goddamn flat spherical hole hanging in the air—and noticed irregularities along its edge, a shimmer and ripple along its surface, areas of which arched out in offshoots of blackness, like coronal mass ejections on the sun.
What was happening to it? Some sort of inner disturbance?
The clansters in the runabout were making concerned noises now. They’d opened the passage. Maybe they were having trouble sustaining it.
And now wild convulsions wracked the flat sphere’s surface, expanding it briefly into a bizarre, tortured shape before it winked out.
That was what it did—winked out. No noise, no blinding flash. One second it hung in the air, and then, in the space of an eye blink, it vanished, taking with it all hope of seeing Lucy again.
The stern slammed back into the water with a bang and a splash. Gravity had reasserted itself. And now, with the aperture gone, the surface of the water began to ripple with deeper activity as tentacles started to break the surface, cautiously, as if testing the air.
Total panic among the clansters as tentacles darted toward them. One wrapped around the neck of the guy at the helm and pulled him overboard.
Tom spied Lucy’s katana lying near the stern and tried using it. He managed to chop a few tentacles, but they became increasingly aggressive and he didn’t have her skills, so he started the boat moving.
The clansters weren’t so lucky. They had no defenses and the tentacles were all over them. Tom didn’t know how to help them and wasn’t all that sure he wanted to. One by one, they were all pulled overboard and dragged below the surface.
He kept up his speed and cruised in circles, never moving too far from where the opening had appeared, but it never returned.
Water still gushed from the fault, roiling the surface in steady waves that rocked the aluminum hull. The tentacled things were becoming bolder by the minute. He couldn’t stay, couldn’t outfight them, but he could outrun them. He felt guilty about leaving…as if he were abandoning Lucy. But she was beyond his reach now—beyond anyone’s.
Some of the things followed him a ways toward Salton City but couldn’t keep up when he maxed the throttle.
What had happened? He’d brought Lucy here on the premise that everything she’d read in those scrolls was a fantasy, and that they’d get nothing out of the journey beyond an interesting day trip. But turned out the clan had indeed opened some sort of interdimensional passage. But then what? Hadn’t they been able to sustain it? He wasn’t complaining. An influx of interdimensional beings wouldn’t be good for anyone. He couldn’t help remembering how the natives had North America all to themselves before the white man came. Now look at them.
The Visitors’ arrival had been cancelled—good.
Lucy was gone—bad. Very bad.
But what of Lucy? Did she no longer exist? Or had she found that state of non-corporeal being she’d longed for? Tom hoped for the latter.
But whatever her state, he was headed back to an empty house—assuming it was still standing. Their folks had built it to earthquake codes and it sat a good two hundred miles from the quake’s epicenter down near the Mexico border.
He was free and Lucy would never tie him down again. But that big house was going to feel strange now. They saw each other only at meals—their usually silent meals—but the rest of the time, even though she tucked herself away in her upstairs hidey-hole, he’d known she was there, and that had made the house seem less empty.
Tom had dreamed of life without her—craved it—but he never imagined she’d leave such a…void.
Daley
Daley and Rhys stood as close as the heat from the smoking remnant of the tower would allow. The copper cupola had melted, leaving the canted tower with a flat top.
Looks like a burnt matchstick.
(“If not for the steel shaft running up its center, it surely would have collapsed.”)
The Pendry Land Rover and Kendrick’s pickup lay in smoldering pieces around them.
Daley said, “I’m sorry about your dad,” though she really wasn’t. The bastard had shot at her—might have killed her if that porthor hadn’t got in the way. But, at this moment, it seemed like the thing to say.
“Yeah,” Rhys said, his expression stony as he stared at the tower. “I don’t know what to feel. If this were a week ago, I’m pretty sure I’d be devastated. But now…after what he’s done…the death and destruction…” He turned to Daley. “Did he really hire Kendrick to kill you?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“But Kendrick was here protecting you.”
“Long story.”
“Well, they’re both gone now and you’re still here. What goes around…”
“So it seems.”
The porthors or whatever they were called were gone too. Back into the sand, she guessed.
Rhys sighed. “No one will be able to retrieve those bodies for a while yet, and I’ve got to go break the news to my mother and brother.”
Daley didn’t envy him that. She knew nothing about the mother but she’d sensed Cadoc had only contempt for his father.
“Can you drop me at my place?”
“Absolutely. It’ll give us a chance to talk. And we do need to talk.”
I don’t want to talk to him, Pard. I heard enough of his talk on Tuesday. I’m done talking to this man.
(“I understand. But it’s a long walk.”)
And then she heard the rumble of a Harley hog. Juana was coming down the road.
(“Cavalry to the rescue!”)
“Thanks anyway,” she told Rhys. “Juana will give me a ride.”
“But we need to talk.”
She turned to him, trying to keep her tone level. “You need to talk to your family and I need to talk to Juana. Karma was her nephew.”
He blinked. “He was? I had no idea. Yeah, of course. Go ahead. We’ll catch up later.”
“Yeah.”
Don’t hold your breath.
Rhys was gone by the time Juana had parked and kickstanded her bike.
“I’ve got bad news,” Daley said as she approached. “About Karma—Jeff.”
She stared a moment at the charred remnant of the tower, then back to Daley. “Gone?”
She nodded. “He was protecting me. Took a couple of bullets for me, then took Elis Pendry with him.”
“A good death, then?”
“Yeah. A good death.”
They stood in silence for a moment, then Juana said, “I’ll take you home.”
But where was home anymore?
On the road to town they passed the wind farm where not one turbine remained standing—which gave Daley a thought.
“Make a stop at the Tadhak compound first, okay?”
They roared through the deserted and devastated town to the meringue walls of the compound. The front gate stood open. Daley hopped off and found the inner gate open as well. Beyond it lay nothing but an empty courtyard. The interior had probably always been empty. The Tadhaks had deactivated their long door after they’d all returned to Colorado. To do what? Commit mass suicide? She’d probably never know.
Back down the street to the crushed Healerina. Looking at the wreckage gave her a twinge of regret, but no big deal. That phase of her life was over.
The remains of her apartment sat almost at ground level, the interior a shambles but intact enough to allow her to fill her duffel with toiletries and a couple of changes of clothes. She grabbed her laptop and her cash candle and took inordinate pleasure in the recovery of her battered Dodgers cap before rejoining Juana outside.
“Do you have a place to sleep?” Juana said.
Daley shook her head. “I may drive back to LA.”
Juana frowned. “Now? After the day you’ve had? Stay at Jeffrey’s.”
That did not sound like a plan…
“Oh, I don’t know about that…”
“He’d want you to. I’d stay with you but I’ve got to help out at the reservation. Lots of damage there.”
Someone had cleared a path from the rear area to the street—Kendrick? Daley and her Subaru followed Juana down to Kendrick’s double-wide. It had survived the quakes mostly intact, though one end had slipped off a crumbled support, leaving it on an angle.
It felt weird stepping into a dead man’s home, especially one with a tilted floor. Roomy, though. Forty feet long and twenty feet wide, with two bedrooms. And the electricity still worked. The trailer park had been supplied by the Tadaks so she supposed the monster batteries were still online. The first thing she did was open all the windows. She closed them again after Juana left, and threw the bolt on the front door.
“Okay, Pard,” she said. “Just one night. I don’t see me sleeping too well here.”
From his position on the La-Z-Boy, Pard morphed into Jason Statham again. (“I’ll stand guard.”)
“As if. I don’t need a guard as much as I need a shower—good, long, hot one. But forget it. I’d feel totally creepy getting naked in Karma Kendrick’s digs.”
She decided to head for LA in the morning and shower in her North Hollywood place. She did change out of her black Curandera outfit though.
Her phone didn’t work. Doubtful that a single cell tower in the valley remained upright. As for food, nothing in the cabinets but some stale Fritos and a fresh tube of plain Pringles; the fridge was empty except for half a six of Bud. Though she’d have preferred something other than beer, she settled down in front of the TV with her dinner of Pringles and brewskis and turned it on. The trailer park had its own dish that apparently still worked.
The big news was that the seawater gushing from the Gulf of California into the Imperial Valley and been blocked and the flow stopped. Two MOABs had been deployed, straddling the channel and collapsing it at the Baja-Sonoma line south of the devastated desert town of El Indiviso. The Mexican government was all sorts of outraged by the dropping of bombs on Mexican soil, but the US President didn’t seem to care. He hadn’t been about to let Calexico and El Centro and “America’s Salad Bowl” be flooded with seawater.
The other big story was that the horrors had disappeared. All its victims had experienced spontaneous cures somewhere around four thirty that afternoon.
“Jason’s power surge must have worked,” Daley said.
