The Omega Point

6. THE SOUND OF BLOOD

Again Mack heard them, pulsating out of the dark, long cries of human anguish. He could open neither his window nor his door, and he wasn’t absolutely sure that they were coming from inside the facility. With all the mayhem these days, they could be from the distant streets.

As scream after scream pealed out—but so faint, why did they use all this soundproofing?—his whole body was set to vibrating.

He pressed his intercom button.

“Yes, Mack?”

“Somebody’s upset.”

“It’s the new intake. She’s struggling again. We’re calling one of the residents for her.”

He threw himself on his bed. Damn, what did this mean? He would have sworn she was an actress, no more crazy than he was. But this was one hell of an act, damn her eyes.

He did not want to sweat over some worthless loony, he wanted to sleep. But there would be no sleep, they doled out their goddamn pills nowadays like they were gold fucking bars. Worse. Everybody around here was crawling in gold bars, but they damn well were begging for Lunesta. Damn fucking cheap bureaucrats.

“What’s her name?”

“You can ask her when she’s in the population.”

“Sweet Caroline, I already got that much. Also, the fact that she’s a bitch. That came through loud and clear.” After tonight’s transmission, General Wylie had come back inside of a minute. “Get me the name.”

At this point in time, any new arrival was important.

“She might be a bitch, but she’s suffering now, Mack.”

“Caroline… who?”

“Ask her!”

Well, the hell with it, the screaming had stopped, and thank you, God. He turned out his light—and, damn, the flickering out there was incredible. He went to his wire-enforced window. The sky was a flaring, jumping curtain of multicolored light.

He was not making the kind of progress that was needed. They should have put a whole team in here. He hated to admit it, but that was the truth of it. Too late now.

In Mexico City, in the embassy’s garden, he had watched the gods dancing in the night sky, watched Tezcatlipoca shift from man to jaguar to serpent, taunting and raging at his brother Quetzalcoatl. In Egypt, Quetzalcoatl was Osiris, the god of resurrection, and Tezcatlipoca was his brother Set, who cut him into small pieces. The Bible called them Cain and Abel. In Judea, the light and dark brothers had been Jesus and Judas.

He identified with Tezcatlipoca, El Gato, the night cat roaming and changing, the shadow cat. That’s where his nickname came from. Doing his work, he moved like a cat.

But just as he had planned to begin exploring patient and personnel files, he had suddenly been deprived of his ability to leave his room at night.

They’d found out that he’d been off the premises the night Dr. Ullman was killed. Well, yes.

Now this new director and patient turn up just when it was expected that the Acton group would be putting their leadership in place—and here he was, locked up like a monkey in a GODDAMN ZOO!

He twisted on the bed, as uncomfortable as a man in a rack. And that thought took his mind back down a path it loved to go and hated to go, the torture path.

You look down at the guy in straps and you know that he belongs to you. You lay the cloth over his face, adjusting it a little, drawing out the suspense. He turns his head and Billie Fisk gets it between her sweet knees and holds it steady for you. Then you get the pitcher, you fill it in the sink, you hear the echoing drip of the water on the tiles as you carry it brimming over to the guy’s gurney-bound body. It’s not a torture chamber or something, it’s a men’s room with a DO NOT DISTURB sign from some hotel on the door. Embassy basement, where else were they gonna go? Their work was illegal on Mexican soil.

Then you ask your question and you do not wait for the bullshit answer, you start your pour. The body of Ramos curves on the board. Stomach sucks in. Legs pulse. Dick comes up. Feet hammer. Pour and pour. Neck goes from red to purple.

You run out of water. As you are refilling, you ask your question again. This time, he kind of starts in, but you don’t listen. You and Billie will work him for an hour, doing maybe twenty pours. When his dick comes up this time, you dig your heel into it. You slip and practically fall on your ass. Billie laughs.

Somebody somewhere reviews the video feed, looking for clues in the body language, piecing together bits of words, all of that, working up a report for whoever.

Drug interdiction, that was the mission.

Thing is, why? Why are drugs even illegal? They’re good, they do a search-and-destroy operation on the weak.

Never mind, you did your work and now you are here playing crazy, and, you gotta admit, it’s just a little too easy to act that way.

She started screaming again, and that was it, she reminded him of too damn much. “Fuck this, will you shut her up! Shut her UP!”

“Dr. Claire is with her.”

Claire Michaels, that floppy little puppy of a shrink. “She’s useless! Get Hunt, get Ford! But shut her up, please.”

Was this woman actually one of their leaders, or had her appearance at this time been chance?

Hell, that screaming was loud—and maybe it was there to cover some other sound that he might hear, like the hiss of the arc furnace they had in the art room. It was disguised as a pottery kiln but there were elements in there that could generate truly extraordinary temperatures.

But for what purpose?

It had to be involved with time, and the CIA’s Acton Working Group had determined that Herbert Acton, like certain ancient Egyptians and ancient Maya, had definitely been able to somehow see forward in time. This explained his flawless investments, which statistics could not. As one of the statisticians who had examined them put it, “there isn’t enough chance in all the universe to account for this. He wasn’t lucky, he was informed.”

In other words, he’d been able to see forward in time. This also explained things like the accuracy of the Mayan calendar. It hadn’t been constructed forward to December 21, 2012, it had been written backward from that date because they had seen forward first, then built their exquisite calendar from the top down, as it were.

Seeing didn’t make a difference now, though. The only thing that would matter to anybody right now was physical movement through time.

So that’s what this place had to be about.

If this Caroline was indeed one of their leaders, she had some damned important secrets, there was no question about that.

His mission was quite clear, and he didn’t need General Wylie screaming down the horn at him to tell him that he needed to confirm her identity and then obtain her secrets by whatever means presented itself. No legalities, that was over and done with.

He had his problem, though, which was his night confinement and his daytime minder.

For the thousandth time, he considered his window. The upper sash, he could get that down a bit, maybe even work his way out. Problem was, there was nowhere to go from the sill. No, the ductwork was his only option. But he needed a blueprint. You couldn’t go wandering off through the air-conditioning system of a building this size. You’d be heard. You’d get trapped.

There was a faint beep from his desk. Damn, he was shut down for the night, and here was Wylie back again.

He went for his radio, but he never got to it, because the next moment something completely extraordinary happened. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been expecting it. He had. Expecting any damn thing.

What this consisted of was, in quick succession, three flashes that must have been a million times brighter than the sun, flashes that filled not only the eyes but the entire head, as if they had entered every orifice and pore on his body, and penetrated right down to the marrow.

One second, he was going for the radio, and the next the flashes hit. They caused an immediate, powerful, and startling hallucination, a form in plumage, grimacing, its face draped in golden chain mail, skulls strung around its neck, its long, black nails slicing toward him, sparking in the air.

In his surprise, he cried out, he pressed himself against the wall beside the bed.

That had been a damned hallucination of his own adopted god, Tezcatlipoca. But as his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light, he realized that it was still here, it was real, he could even hear the clatter of its bejeweled robe and the swish of its plumed headdress as it darted its face toward him with the horrible precision of a snapping vulture.

In another instant, though, his revulsion passed. It was as if a fire came into his body, lighting up the cells, causing his spirit to dance within him, and it was a dark and bloody dance.

With understanding, the apparition faded. He had seen a reflection of his own soul in a very special light, and boy, had he felt it. The energy of the damn god of death had come into him. That had been powerful.

His radio beeped again. Goddamn them! He turned off his light and opened the drawer. His little Sony was a masterpiece of clandestine technology, its additional circuits smaller than grains of rice. On the surface, it was an ordinary multiband portable. But it also contained this other component, a high-energy single-sideband transceiver and very careful shielding so that it would not be fried by solar electromagnetic energy.

The small display quickly flashed the decoded message. “General warning. General warning to all stations. Atomic clocks have stopped worldwide. Repeat. Atomic clocks have stopped.”

Physicists had theorized that such a thing might happen, as the world came to the end of the cycle.

They had gone past the frontier of reality. And at that very moment, the people who ran this place had started something new, some device that emitted light that drove you to face the truth of your soul.

And here was Mack the Cat, trapped in his damn room.

The end of time had arrived and what did he have to do? He had to goddamn well wait!