77 Shadow Street

33

Here and There

Tom Tran

In Tom’s life, long before this transformation of the Pendleton, there had been moments when events occurred of such grotesque nature that they seemed to distort the very fabric of reality, and in the wake of those events, the laws of nature seemed to become elastic for a while.

The thousands of bodies in the mass grave outside Nha Trang had been an outrage so profound that for a while after he and his father walked the rim of that horror, the world was literally not the same. The jungle through which they fled seemed familiar but changed: the palms appeared deformed, with spiky rather than feathery fronds; eucalyptuses were too dark in color, almost black, and smelled like gasoline; the schefflera that usually bore dull red flowers now were bedecked by blood-red blooms so bright that they seemed artificial; the gum trees and the many ferns, the datura and the waratah, the philodendrons and the cissus weren’t as they always had been before, different in ways that were sometimes obvious but were at other times difficult to define, altered and strange and alien. They spent two days in that wilderness, walking fourteen of every twenty-four hours, when they should have gotten to their destination in eight hours at the most. They were not lost, not wandering in a delirium, so it seemed to both of them that set distances suddenly became elastic, the world more vast and unwelcoming than before.

A similar thing had happened in the inadequate boat in which he and his father eventually put to sea with fifty other refugees. After being set upon by Thai pirates, after thirty of their own people were slaughtered and the pirates took enough losses to retreat, with the decks awash in blood, time seemed to be distorted on the South China Sea, each period of daylight lasting but a few hours, the nights impossibly long and all the stars out of their usual positions in the heavens. Tom knew that anyone not there would insist it had been delirium, but those who endured were certain that it was something more mysterious.

And now, in this changed Pendleton, he and Bailey Hawks moved along corridors that they could swear expanded ahead of them and prowled room after ruined room in apartments and public spaces that he did not remember previously having so many chambers. They were never lost but several times disoriented, gripped by the feeling that this building was far different from the Pendleton of their time not just because of its miserable condition but also for other reasons that eluded them.

They found ever stranger formations of fungi and other growths, heard movement in the walls, and felt the oppressive presence of the hidden ruler of this Pendleton. It must have had some telepathic power, for Tom could feel it curling through his mind like tendrils of cold mist, and Bailey described it as a someone-walking-on-my-grave feeling. What it conveyed to them by this intrusion was its contempt, its unalloyed hatred.

The longer they searched, the more certain Tom became that they would die here, and soon. Yet the attack did not come.

Although he thought they had not finished searching elsewhere, and although he could not recall how they had returned to the north wing on the second floor, which they had searched before, Tom kept moving as they stepped out of 2-D, the Tullis apartment, and turned right. At the end of the hallway, a young man whom Tom had never seen before appeared out of the open door to 2-F and motioned for them to join him.

“Witness,” Bailey Hawks said.

Winny

Under the circumstances, taking time out to think might be a good idea, but only if you were smart enough to scheme up a great strategy. Tucked in among the skeletons, swaddled in the odorous deathbed clothes, Winny brooded hard about what would be the best course of action for him and Iris, but the only thing he could think to do was stay right where they were, pretending to be dead until either they were found by their mothers or they actually were dead.

For a while he had felt amazingly good about himself, scared shitless but forging forward, but now he was crashing back from a hero-in-the-making to the usual skinny Winny. Strategizing meant having a serious internal conversation, and to his great dismay he discovered that, under pressure, he did not even know what to say to himself. He could almost hear his father telling him that he’d have been better prepared for this emergency if he hadn’t read so damn many books, if he had learned Tae Kwon Do and how to play a manly musical instrument, if he had spent a summer or two wrestling alligators and had worked at growing some hair on his chest. Winny didn’t yet have a single hair on his chest, and now he probably never would.

Poor Iris. She had worked up all her courage and had done the thing hardest for her to do, only to commit herself to the dork of the year, the decade, the century. She probably thought he was Clark Kent, when in fact if he was any comic-book hero, he was SpongeBob SquarePants. Since he was a bust with strategy, he tried to think of the words with which to break the bad news to her.

Of course those words wouldn’t come to him either, and as he struggled to find them, bits of luminous fungi drifted down in front of him, past his one uncovered eye, like flakes of yellow snow, which seemed fitting. When the second flurry of fungi glowed past him, he belatedly realized what they signified.

He told himself, Don’t look up, as if what was about to happen could occur only if he were dreaming this entire trip to the future. If he dreamed that the flakes of glowing fungi never drifted past him, then he and Iris would be safe. If he dreamed all of them back to the good old Pendleton of their time, then they would suddenly be there, and the worst thing he would have to worry about was his dad showing up with a gift of a punching bag and boxing gloves.

In dreams, when you told yourself, Don’t look up, you always looked up anyway, sooner or later, and it was the same in real life. Winny tilted his head back, the stinking cloth falling away from his face, gazed up past the grinning skull of the skeleton that slumped against him, into the fierce eyes of the bullet-headed beast, which hung upside down on the wall, its face no more than two feet from his, its gray lips skinned back from its rows of sharp gray teeth.

Bailey Hawks

When he followed Witness into Apartment 2-F, it was almost as if Bailey had stepped back through time to the Pendleton of 2011. The apartment was furnished as it had been then, everything as he remembered it, from the furniture to the walls of books on arcane scientific subjects, to the lighted aquarium. The only differences were the dirty windowpanes and the absence of fish in the big glass tank. All the electric lights worked, and no luminous fungi intruded here.

“What is this place?” Bailey asked, but thought he knew.

Witness said, “A shrine. And you might call me the caretaker.”

Tom Tran stood marveling, as if this was not just the home of Kirby Ignis but as if seeing it in this future Pendleton was either magic or a miracle.

“Witness to what?” Bailey asked.

“To the history of the world now lost,” Witness said, “and most especially to the origins of the One.”

“You’re apart from it,” Bailey remembered. “It allows that.”

“I was born in 1996. And in my twenties I became one of the first to benefit from full-spectrum BioMEMS, not just respirocytes and other physical enhancements, but also brain augmentation. That’s why I have the capacity to hold the entire history of the world in my memory. I do not age. I do not sicken. I can be killed only with the most extreme act of violence because … I repair.”

“Immortality.”

“Virtually.”

“The essential dream of humanity, the long-desired blessing.”

“Yes.”

Staring at Witness, Bailey could see the melancholy in his eyes and could almost feel it radiating from him. “Immortal … and alone.”

“Yes.”

Tom Tran said, “The last man on Earth.”

“Technically, I’m posthuman. Hybrid. A man augmented with billions of nanomachines.”

From elsewhere in the apartment, someone called out, “Do I hear Bailey Hawks?”

Winny

Fixed to the wall above Winny, the creature hissed, and from between the halves of its sharp smile came a glistening gray tubular tongue. Winny didn’t know the purpose of that tube, but he knew the purpose of those wicked teeth, and he had no doubt that the bite would be less terrible than what the tongue would do to him, maybe act like a vacuum and suck the flesh right off his bones, leaving him as picked clean as the skeleton beside him.

Paralyzed with terror, he felt even smaller than usual. He knew that he needed to do the hardest thing, never the easiest. But his philosophy failed him now because it seemed that the hardest thing he could do was die, and he was going to die whether he fought back or tried to flee. He couldn’t battle anything this big, this strong, and he couldn’t outrun it, either. He had only two options: a quick or a quicker death.

Iris must have raised her head, too, must have seen the thing above them on the wall. Her hand relented, she stopped trying to crush his knuckles, and she plucked urgently at his sweaty fingers, his wrist, his arm, as though she thought he must have fallen asleep and needed to be awakened to defend them.

She said something then that made no sense: “ ‘We’re going to the meadow now to dry ourselves off in the sun.’ ”

Listening to her trembling voice, Winny was reminded that Iris was not the plucky heroine of the adventure story he had been casting in his head. She was a girl apart and always would be, dealt a far worse hand in life than he had been. Being skinny and shy and never knowing what to say to people and having a father who was almost as fictitious as Santa Claus—all of that was nothing, nothing compared to autism. If she could dare to take his hand, could dare to keep silent in this hiding place of bones and rotting gravecloth, in spite of all the fears and irritations with which she was plagued, then he, for God’s sake, could do something more than die quick or quicker.

Clinging to the wall with both its feet and one hand, the beast reached slowly toward Winny with its left arm. It pressed the tip of one long finger against the center of his forehead, above the bridge of his nose, kind of the way that a priest marked people on Ash Wednesday. Its finger was death-cold.

Iris was weak, and Winny wasn’t strong, but he was stronger than she was, and that meant he owed her a defense. His father was strong, really strong, and he got in bar fights and shoved people’s heads in toilets, but you didn’t always have to misuse strength. You could use strength, whatever little of it you might have, for the right thing, even if you knew there was no chance you would win the fight, even if you were doomed from the start, you could stand up and swing your skinny arms, because trying against the worst odds was what life was all about. And there he had found the harder thing he needed to do, the hardest thing of all hard things: do what was right even if there was no hope of success or expectation of reward.

Clutching Iris’s hand again, Winny pulled her away from the wall, scrambled with her from the bracketing skeletons, ran a few steps, kicking aside brass shell casings, and turned to confront the beast. It remained upon the wall, its head craned to one side, watching them with eyes as steady and icy and gray as tombstone granite.

Winny let go of the girl’s hand and pushed her behind him. He snatched up the old rifle with the fixed bayonet and held it in both hands, point thrust forward. He was like a rabbit threatening a wolf, and he felt fear—oh, yeah—but he did not feel either useless or stupid.

Bailey Hawks

In Kirby Ignis’s restored and spotless kitchen, Mickey Dime sat at the dinette, his hands folded on the table in front of him. His face had an odd childlike quality, and his mouth curved in a sweet, almost cherubic smile. To one side of him, out of easy reach, lay a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.

Dime nodded at Bailey and said, “Sheriff.” He nodded again at Tom Tran and at the one who called himself Witness. “Deputies. I wish to surrender myself and ask for a psychiatric evaluation.”

In this apartment, the sense of the One’s oppressive hatred relented, and Bailey’s mind was clearer than it had been in a while. Yet this development was no less strange than everything that had come before it.

Picking up Dime’s pistol, Bailey said, “I’m not a sheriff.”

“Sheriff, former military, whatever. I know you’re something. I’m insane, you see, but not disoriented. I’ve killed people. Now I just want to surrender and be committed to a sanatorium. I’ll be no burden to the state. I have resources. I just don’t want to have to think anymore. I’m not good at it.”

Bailey handed his Beretta to Tom Tran, who took it as if he knew how to use it well.

To Witness, Bailey said, “What is this?”

“I didn’t even realize he was here.”

Mickey Dime smiled and nodded. “I came of my own free will. I’m quite insane. I see things that can’t be there.”

Bailey ejected the magazine of the pistol that he confiscated, saw that it was fully loaded, and snapped it back into the weapon.

He looked at his wristwatch.

Winny

The beast came down from the wall, rose onto its feet, and stood among the skeletons, regarding Winny with what he at first thought must be amusement. But then he decided that this thing wasn’t capable of being amused, that it was either without emotions or fueled only by rage.

In the movies, this was where the star said something like, Go ahead, make my day, or maybe, Come on, asshole, Hell’s waiting for us. But Winny didn’t go for the cool quip because he wasn’t a star, he wasn’t a hero. That fantasy was far behind him now. All he wanted was to do the right thing here at the end, not any of the easy things he might have done, do the hard thing but not for the glory of it, because there wasn’t any glory in dying. Glory was for movie stars and country singers, and it wasn’t worth spit. He wanted only not to embarrass himself, not to cower, to be better than he had always thought he was.

“Iris!”

“Winny!”

He glanced back and saw Mrs. Sykes with a flashlight, his mom with a gun, and what a moment that was.

The creature hissed.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

If he was right about what this Gaea had contemplated and what decision she had reached when all of nature stopped out there, Kirby finally decided that he needed to see his rooms. Without explanation, he expressed his desire to go down to the second floor, insisting that Silas and Padmini should remain here in the Cupp apartment. But they would not let him leave without an armed escort; therefore, when he continued to be determined to go, they accompanied him.

As he stepped across the threshold of 2-F and found that his apartment here, in this Pendleton, was much as it had been in his own time, preserved when all else in the building had been scoured away and allowed to decline into squalor, the awe that had earlier overtaken him now almost overwhelmed him, and his legs felt weak.

With Silas and Padmini trailing behind him, Kirby followed voices to the kitchen, where he found Dime sitting behind the table, Hawks to one side of it, Tom Tran by the refrigerator, and one of the best staff members of his institute, Jason Reinholt, standing by the sink.

“Jason? Why were you in the building when the leap occurred?”

“I wasn’t, Dr. Ignis. I came to the Pendleton years after that event, and I’ve been here now almost a decade and a half. Since after the first Pogrom to reduce the human burden on the planet, and before the second Pogrom, which wasn’t planned.”

Kirby stared at him, agape, for the first time in his life wanting not to comprehend, but unable to hold back understanding.

Winny

Iris shuffled away from Winny and to her mother’s side. He stood alone for a moment before backing slowly toward his mom, holding the rifle bayonet at the ready.

The creature came forward a few steps, but then halted again. It looked from one to the other of them, as if deciding in what order to kill them.

Mrs. Sykes said, “What the hell is that thing?”

Winny had no answer, but as it turned out, the monster spoke for itself, a single word: “Pogromite.”

Bailey Hawks

As Padmini and Silas entered the kitchen, Kirby Ignis said, “But Jason, after so many years, you look … so young.”

“I don’t use that name anymore. I’m just Witness. I’m young because I was among the first volunteers for full-spectrum BioMEMS enhancement. In fact, I was your first.”

Kirby put a hand to the young man’s face and said wonderingly, “So it worked. A kind of immortality.”

“It worked,” Witness confirmed.

Turning his hands palms-up, Kirby stared at them for a moment, as if they amazed him, as if they were quite apart from him and had done things he could scarcely imagine.

Returning his gaze to Witness, he said, “But this Gaea, this world consciousness, how did she—”

“It calls itself the One. The world is without gender now. The Pogrom was begun with the intention of reducing the human plague to a more manageable number … to be followed by the Fade when we would scrub away what infrastructure wasn’t needed for such a reduced population.”

“And me? Where am I in this future?”

“Dead. Converted by a Pogromite into another Pogromite. You lived out your final days as a programmed killing machine.”

Stepping farther into the room, addressing Kirby Ignis, Padmini Bahrati said, “You did this?”

Everyone but Mickey Dime, who lived in his own world now, stood hushed by astonishment for a long moment.

Then Ignis shook his head in denial. “No. I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t have. Not this.” He twitched with a sudden electrifying thought. To Witness, he said, “Norquist.”

The perpetually young man nodded. “Your theories, your life’s work—his applications.”

Ignis turned in place, surveying the faces aimed at him. “Von Norquist is a senior partner at the institute. A brilliant man. He has some controversial views … but not this extreme.”

To Bailey, Witness said, “The world was lucky for centuries. Scientists are rarely charismatic. But Norquist was both brilliant and exceptionally charismatic. He had the megalomania to make of his science a religion—and to persuade others like me, in our ignorance, to take up the cause.” To Ignis, he said, “He became more extreme.”

Winny

Winny didn’t think this creature could be easily stopped with bullets. He didn’t think the gun worried it.

Yet it didn’t rush them in a killing frenzy, and there must have been a good reason why it hesitated.

His mom had some faith in the pistol. She said, “Okay, everyone move nice and slow, everyone get behind me.” She sounded calm, as if she were just getting them all organized to go on an excursion to the museum. “You move toward the door, and I’ll move with you but keep it covered.”

“Don’t shoot it,” Winny warned. “I’m pretty sure shooting it will just piss it off.”

Before they could start to move, the beast sprang across the floor, not at them but around them, and stopped between them and the route out of the vault.

Bailey Hawks

Ignis turned to Bailey. “I’ll stop Von Norquist. I’ll stop him cold. I’ll push him out of the institute in such a way that he’ll not get work anywhere. He must have done this behind my back.”

“You knew everything,” Witness said. “At first you pretended not to see, not to understand where it was all leading. But when at last you saw what he intended, you approved by not disapproving.”

Shaking his head violently, refusing to accept what he’d been told, Ignis said, “No. No, it will be stopped. I won’t let it happen. I’ll start by closing our weapons division. I’ll cancel all of our contracts with the Department of Defense.”

“How far has your weapons division gone with this?” Tom Tran asked.

Acutely aware of the pistol in Tom’s hand, Ignis said, “It can be wound back. Everything that’s done can be wound back, undone.”

“That wasn’t exactly an answer,” Silas noted. “It wouldn’t please a prosecutor.”

“Unwind it all, not just the weapons division,” Tom said. “This entire institute of yours. Unwind it all.”

Ignis’s shock at his culpability was tempered now with a note of impatience. “There’s nothing wrong with the science. It’s only how the science was applied. You’ve got to make that distinction. The world doesn’t have to turn out this way just because of the science. We’ve been given this chance to set it right.”

No one replied to him.

Turning to Bailey, seeming to identify him as one who could be reasoned with, Ignis said, “Yes, this future is a catastrophe, but it does prove that the world can be dramatically changed. If it can be so totally changed for the worse, it can be totally changed for the better. It’s all in the application of the knowledge, it all depends on the technology developed from the science and with what wisdom it’s applied. We can make a perfect world.”

“The One suddenly stopped killing us,” Bailey said.

Ignis blinked. “What?”

“Maybe it stopped killing us because it decided that for you to go back to our time alone would bring too much attention to you, with all the rest of us missing. How would you explain it? So it stopped killing us to be sure that you’d go on with your work unhindered when you returned to your own time.”

Ignis shook his head. “It doesn’t rule me. It’s not my master. I’ll do what must be done when I get back.”

“ ‘What must be done,’ ” Bailey said. “Is that an interesting way to put it, Silas?”

“Deception cloaked in earnestness,” the attorney said.

Ignis closed his eyes. His jaw muscles bulged as he clenched his teeth, and his tightly pressed lips were bloodless. He seemed to be either biting back anger or searching for the words to convince them that he was as benign as he appeared to be.

When Ignis’s stillness and silence seemed about to become his only answer to Silas’s charge of deception, Bailey said, “Exactly what is it you think ‘must be done,’ Kirby?”

Ignis opened his eyes. He shook his head as if resigned to—but saddened by—their suspicion. “I don’t have to subject myself to this.” He turned away from them and walked toward the door.

Leveling Mickey Dime’s pistol at the scientist’s back, Bailey said, “Stop right there.”

Ignis kept moving. “You don’t dare kill me.”

The ceiling creaked, and behind those panels of Sheetrock, something slithered.

Witness said, “The One is all around us.”

Ignis left the kitchen, crossed the dining room.

Bailey glanced at Padmini, Padmini looked at Tom, and Tom said, “Where’s he going? He’s up to something.”

Winny

The Pogromite stood between them and escape, watching them but apparently with no immediate aggressive intentions.

Then it lifted its ugly head high, as though listening to a voice that only it could hear. Its shining eyes became dull behind what seemed to be inner, semitransparent lids. The creature began to sway back and forth, as if to music. The beast was so lithe, Winny thought of a cobra charmed by a flute.

“It’s … gone away somewhere,” Mrs. Sykes whispered.

Winny’s mom said, “Stay together. Move around it. Quiet.”

Bailey Hawks

By the time Bailey reached the public hallway, Kirby Ignis was a third of the way to the north stairs. He wasn’t running, but he walked briskly, with apparent purpose.

Beside Bailey, Padmini said, “Look up.”

The ceiling seemed to have turned soggy and soft, sagging under some moist weight, and every seam shed the concealing plaster, as if the big panels of Sheetrock were coming apart.

Tom Tran stepped out of Ignis’s apartment, keeping Bailey’s Beretta on Mickey Dime. The killer’s dreamy smile was as unfaltering as if his lips had been sewn into their arc.

Silas followed, too, but Witness remained behind.

“Come on,” Bailey said, and led them after the scientist.

There didn’t seem to be anything Ignis could do to put them in greater danger. And Bailey couldn’t imagine where the man thought he might flee to escape his responsibility when the transition reversed. But Ignis’s purposefulness suggested that he had a destination and a plan, which couldn’t be good for the rest of them.

The ceiling groaned behind them and softened ahead. Dry-wall nails squealed as they pulled slowly out of the overhead joists, and from that lumber came a worrisome cracking as if it must be under enormous, rapidly increasing stress. To the left and right, electric receptacles and the junction boxes in which they were seated blew out of the walls, trailing green and black and white wires, and something pale squirmed at the resultant rectangular holes, as if eager to get out of the wall and into the hallway.

Ignis disappeared through the stairwell door, but Bailey and Padmini were close on his tail now, Silas and Tom and Mickey not far behind. Ignis went down, moving faster than in the hallway, taking the steps two at a time, breathing rapidly, a thin rhythmic bleat of anxiety escaping him. They passed the ground floor. Bailey remembered Witness warning him that inside the house, the One was strongest in the elevator shafts and the basement.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

The survival of the One—its very creation—depended on Kirby making it back to 2011 alive, and his survival seemed to be assured only if he made the return journey alone. Bailey Hawks wasn’t to be relied upon. He was quick to make black-and-white moral judgments, giving little or no consideration to shades of gray. Silas Kinsley’s courtroom experience had given him a good ear for evasion, and he would keep confirming Hawks’s intuition. Having been to war and having survived, Hawks knew how to take action on those judgments and would not dither. He was the worst kind of man to have as an enemy.

The One had spoken to Kirby back there in his kitchen. Spoke to him from inside his head, not in words so much as images from which he made inferences. Down, it said. Basement, pool room, it said by showing him those places. He had no friends here anymore, not among his own kind, and he could trust only the One, the One and the house that it haunted in its myriad forms.

Bailey Hawks

When Bailey rushed out of the stairwell into the basement corridor, the door to the lap pool was just falling shut. Padmini and Silas moved past him, toward that room, but he put one hand on her shoulder, halting her and the attorney.

“Doorways are always bad,” he said, as Tom arrived with Mickey Dime. “And the pool, the way it is now … it’s a trap. We’ve been lured and herded here.”

The canyon that was now the swimming pool, a thousand fathoms deep or deeper, and everything else that might now lie beneath the Pendleton could have been excavated and constructed by nanomachines eating their way through bedrock. But whatever the origins of those deep redoubts, they seemed to bring together the future evil of the One with the evil that predated time, stories of which had been passed down through the history of humanity by word of mouth, by cave paintings, and eventually by the written word. Here all the millennia of earthly evil were condensed into one moment, and this house that was a bridge over a fault in space-time was also a temple to the forces that had so long sought the destruction of all things.

“He’s in there?” Tom asked. “And we’re not going after him? Then what are we going to do?”

The ceiling creaked. Crumbles of luminous fungi snowed down around them. The few operative overhead lights dimmed, brightened, dimmed. As upstairs, receptacles and junction boxes blew out of the walls, and pale forms slithered-pressed against those holes in the Sheetrock. From the elevator shaft came the sound of a car ascending from a great depth. They were being herded again, encouraged toward the lap-pool door.

“Wait,” Bailey insisted.

To their right, halfway along the corridor, Twyla and Sparkle came out of the HVAC vault, the children with them.

Bailey glanced at his watch. “Wait. Wait.”

From inside, the lap-pool door was torn open, wrenched off its hinges, and thrown aside.

Silas Kinsley

Out of the doorway came two of the creatures that Witness had called Pogromites, wet from the pool, but they were smaller than the others, the size of children. One shot directly toward Silas, faster than a cat, climbed his right leg, claws scrabbling at his raincoat, teeth snapping, its gargoyle eyes fixed on his eyes as though the black-hole gravity of those big pupils would pull him into oblivion. He struck at it with one fist, its teeth missed his hand, snagged in his coat cuff, he staggered backward, Padmini stepped in, the sleeve ripped, the thing shook the scrap of fabric out of its mouth, it swung its head toward Padmini and snapped at her, biting down not on her hand but on the barrel of the pistol, and she blew its crawling gray brains across the hallway floor.

The second small Pogromite launched at Bailey. He backed rapidly away at first sight, firing four rounds point-blank, scrambling its face, punching out the back of its skull. It collapsed at his feet, mostly brainless but spasming, snapping at his shoes. He kicked it aside, swung toward the pool-room door, and a third beast appeared, bigger than the others.

Something had seemed familiar about the first two, and now Silas knew why. As the Pogromite that had been formed out of the substance of Sally Hollander had vaguely resembled her, so this creature bore a subtle resemblance to Margaret Pendleton, the wife of Andrew, who with her daughter and son had gone missing in 1897. Silas had seen photographs of the woman and her children—and these were the things that they had become. This Pogromite was the size of Padmini, whom it at once attacked.

Twyla Trahern

The sudden eruption of the creatures from the lap-pool doorway distracted Twyla for an instant, and in that moment the Pogromite from the HVAC vault burst through the doorway behind her. So fast, so strong, it swept her aside with one arm, knocked her off her feet, and the gun flew from her hand. She landed on her left hip, pain shot the length of that leg. Sparkle screamed, Iris screamed. Twyla rolled over, sat up, saw the gray beast in the yellow gloom tear the rifle with the fixed bayonet out of Winny’s hands and toss it away. Pogromite. It called itself a Pogromite. She scrambled toward the pistol, something treacherous underfoot, oily fragments of glowing fungi that had fallen from the ceiling, as slick as ice. The Pogromite seized Winny by his arms, lifted him high, as though making an offering of him to some god of blood, and abruptly the Pendleton roared with psychotic voices, a psychic wave of hatred slammed over Twyla as she snatched up the pistol, convulsing her with its power, yellow light seemed to flare within her head, so that reflexively she fired the pistol, bullet-shattered bits of concrete prickling her face—

Tom Tran

With one six-fingered hand, almost quicker than the eye, the thing seized Padmini by the throat, and with the other hand, it encircled her, pulling her against it. Her gun was trapped between them, she squeezed off two shots into its abdomen, but it was more machine than flesh, only head shots—taking out the logic circuits—would stop it. The Pogromite snapped at her face as it dragged her backward, and she twisted her head away, avoiding one bite, then a second.

When the creature dragged her across the threshold into the lap-pool room, Tom followed close, the Beretta in a two-hand grip, hoping for a clear shot at the thing’s hateful face, afraid to fire because of the way Padmini whipped her head side to side as she desperately tried to avoid being bitten. Dr. Ignis was standing to one side, his face twisted in a lunatic expression that was half terror and half triumph. Operating strictly on instinct, Tom shot Ignis in the right shoulder, and the many voices of the One exploded from every wall, from out of the pool, shrieking in rage. To protect Ignis, the Pogromite threw Padmini aside and sprang at Tom. Although not fully automatic, the pistol would fire as rapidly as he could squeeze the trigger, and the creature’s face was nearly dissolved when it crashed into him and knocked him off his feet.

Twyla Trahern

—Winny lifted over the Pogromite’s head, the sweet lamb to the high altar, but then brought down face-to-face, and the gray priest hissing in consecration of the sacrifice, baring its teeth for the mortal bite, with Sparkle in the quick of it and plunging the bayonet into the small of the beast’s back to no effect. Twyla fast, no music in her now, only a shrill discordant cry of rage and terror and all-shattering love, the pistol bucking in her hands once, twice, and again. Gray teeth to the smooth cheek—but then the head bursting, the Pogromite falling, Winny dropping, Winny unbitten, Winny with gray nanocomputers crawling across his face.

Bailey Hawks

Shaken, Padmini came through the lap-pool door into the hallway.

Tom Tran followed her, gripping Kirby Ignis by one arm, pressing the muzzle of the pistol against his throat.

“Stalemate,” Bailey shouted.

Recognizing that it might never come to exist if Ignis died, the shrieking legions of the One grew quieter, though the voices were no less enraged.

Clutching his shoulder wound with his left hand, Kirby Ignis looked surprised, which didn’t speak well for him, that he could be surprised by anything after seeing the One and the world that his institute had furthered. He didn’t expect the wound because in spite of his expressed regret and the acknowledgment that such a future must never come to pass, he still did not truly see himself at fault. He was aghast at the dire unintended consequences, but incapable of admitting to any responsibility for what had happened.

Within the walls, legions continued to protest, all expressing the same wordless outrage in the same voice, the latest version of the faceless mobs of history. The One seemed to be arguing with itself, deciding on its next move.

“Bailey, you’re making a terrible mistake,” Ignis said. “My work, our work at the institute, can relieve all human suffering. The world can be made right.”

Bailey thought of how often they looked like what they were not. The men around Hitler could have been your sweet-faced uncle, your chubby-cheeked cousin, your grandfather with his pipe and slippers and easy smile. At times in his life, Albert Speer somewhat resembled Gregory Peck, the actor with the perfect looks for righteous roles. Roosevelt called Stalin “Uncle Joe.” Uncle Joe and Uncle Ho Chi Minh. When he smiled, Pol Pot, of the Cambodian killing fields, might have been the nice man behind the counter at your dry-cleaning shop.

As the voices in the walls seethed, Ignis appealed to Padmini Bahrati. “With nanomachines to edit the DNA of the fetus in the womb, no child will ever be born with disabilities.”

“Or perhaps no child will ever be born,” she said.

“No, no. Listen. Listen to me. Nanobot microbivores swimming in the bloodstream could download instructions for recognizing any virus or bacteria and wipe out any disease hundreds of times faster than antibiotics.”

Entering from the stairwell, Witness said, “There is no disease in this future.”

Ignis said, “Forget about this future. This was never intended.”

Urging everyone to join forces with Sparkle and Twyla at the midpoint of the corridor, Bailey glanced back at Witness, who chose not to accompany them, and asked, “What year is this, anyway?”

“Not as far from your time as you think. This is 2049.”

Smiling, shaking his head, Mickey Dime said, “I didn’t hear that. I don’t want to think about that. It makes no sense.”

With a ding, the elevator arrived at the basement from realms below.

Sparkle Sykes

She wiped frantically at the sludge on Winny’s face, afraid that the horde would dissolve his flesh, and suddenly Iris was there and engaged, finding the courage to endure contact with another, wiping tenderly at Winny’s left ear, at his neck. The nanothings tingled over Sparkle’s hands, like thousands of swarming ants, but they didn’t bite or sting, and Winny’s face remained unscathed. As she wiped her hands vigorously on her clothes, the horde already seemed to be moving more sluggishly across her skin.

Bailey Hawks

As everyone came together in the middle of the hallway, finishing plaster cracked and fell from overhead and drywall screws popped loose. A slab of Sheetrock swung down like a big trapdoor, fanning Bailey with powdered gypsum and nearly knocking Tom Tran to his knees. Overhead, seething between the ceiling joists, death-loving life in pale profusion squirmed and thrashed and reached down for them.

Jamming the muzzle harder into Ignis’s throat, Tom Tran shouted, “I’ll kill him!”

The One seemed to have decided it must risk its creator’s life, because out of the blue light of the elevator surged a furious swarm of hideous manifestations, animal-plant-machine entities at the sight of which his eyes rebelled and his heart shrank, a hobgoblin horde that might have been the denizens of the nightmares that demons dreamed when they slept in Hell. This pack would have torn them to pieces if sudden sheets of blue light had not shimmered up the walls. The transition reversed, the roar of bedlam voices abruptly silenced, rust and ruin vanished, as did the dead Pogromites and those borne by the elevator. And here were the surviving neighbors, here where the future had not yet happened, here in the still point of ever-turning time, where all was possible and nothing was yet lost.

Home.