The Omega Point

22. DEATH BEYOND THE END OF TIME

For a moment, their pursuers lost sight of them in the alley and David understood very clearly that these seconds were their last and only chance—whereupon they came up against a chain-link fence.

“David!”

He grabbed it and shook it with frustration—and then saw that it was loose along the bottom. “This way,” he said, lifting it, ignoring what the jagged metal was doing to his hands.

She went through and he followed, pulling it back into place behind him.

They found themselves in a yard with a greenhouse, with their pursuers close behind.

Almost certainly, it was going to be a trap, but their only hope of not being seen was to duck into the structure.

They found themselves in a steamy and exotic world of vivid yellow and blue and red orchids. They went deep among the vines and crouched there, hiding, barely breathing.

They did not hear Mack the Cat approaching, and David was almost ready to move to a broken window he had noticed when he suddenly realized that this master stalker was three feet away from them. From here, he could just see the side of Mack’s head, and his nostrils were dilating as he smelled the air, trying to catch a scent of his prey.

The humid air was heavy, though, and the way he moved his eyes, flicking them from place to place with the suddenness of the expert predator, David knew that he could not smell any faint perfume or sweat that would betray their presence.

He turned, and now he was so close that David could have reached out through the vines and touched the gun in his hand.

Absolute stillness. Absolute quiet. Except… what was that rustling? A glance at Caroline revealed that she was flushed with effort, both hands clapped over her face. Something in here had triggered an allergy and she was fighting a sneeze.

Mack sighed, then looked toward the door. He started out and David’s whole body shuddered with hope—but then he stopped. Slowly, the long, predatory face turned his way. He seemed to be looking directly into David’s eyes. But no, then he turned away again. When he moved, it was like watching a dancer, swift and lethal… but, in this case, making an error.

A moment later, low voices came from the front of the greenhouse. There was a curse, sharp, urgent, then the clatter of the door.

Caroline started to rise, but David gripped her arm and she froze. And saw what he saw—Mack, still right there, listening, sniffing the air, his eyes darting. And so he remained for long minutes, so still that he was almost impossible to see through the vines. And then there would be another dance step to another part of the greenhouse, and another long silence while he tested the space for presence.

Eventually, though, he was gone. They never saw him slip away, but his absence was signaled in a way that felt surprisingly like love: a cricket began chirping, and soon the greenhouse was splendid with their song.

Warily, David slipped out of the deep tangle and lifted his head above the edge of a broken window. His view was across a short lawn to a bobbing flower bed full of impatiens and petunias, and beyond it a cottage, and that, he thought, was where Mack might yet lurk.

Overhead, a meteor appeared, falling gracefully through the pink plasma that dominated the sky. The new star had set, and to the east, down low where the sky should be glowing pink with the blush of predawn, there lay instead a line of deep bloodred. David estimated that they would have about an hour of semidarkness before the sun rose once again.

It was during this brief night that he intended to make his move. His plan was to return to the Acton Clinic, hoping that the class would still be there, or enough of the class to still carry out some part of their mission.

Soft voices came to his attention. He looked up and down the lawn. Then he saw them, three men. One was dressed in ill-fitting military fatigues, the other two in sweatsuits. None of them were Mack, and that worried him. Their young faces were tight and their eyes were hunter-quick as they came into the yard. One of them went up to the back door of the house and tried it. He drew it open and looked back at his friends.

An instant later, he exploded—not as if he’d been blown up with a bomb, but as if he was literally ripping apart as he lurched backward. His head shot up and hit the doorjamb with a thick crunch, then came rolling through the air, hit in the petunias, and didn’t bounce. The face, expressionless, stared. Even as this was happening, a flash of black and steel appeared under the right arm, which flew up as if in surprise, then tumbled out into the grass. Slowly, the fingers closed.

The body buckled, and as it did, he could see a shadowy form just inside the house, wielding an axe.

Not Mack, though, not that humped figure.

Whoever was in there was long past rescue, hiding in psychotic rage and despair, in the state of savagery that would be emerging now in all the judged.

The survivors poured gunfire into the house, creating a cataract of noise and a fury of flashes.

David grabbed Caroline’s arm. “Come on,” he said

Together, they leaped through the glass wall of the greenhouse. As they dashed down the driveway, passing the two survivors just ten feet away, one of them shouted and wheeled his gun toward them, and David saw a red laser telltale bouncing on Caroline’s back, and the bullets passed so close they felt surges of air.

But then there was another cry, this one choked with horror, then dropping to wet gabble as one of the two remaining men looked down at the axe handle protruding from his stomach. Somehow, the defender of the house had survived their fusillade and once again used his ferocious weapon.

The last of the soldiers ran so frantically that he lost control of himself and fell in the driveway. Screaming again and again, he went off down the street, his cries echoing away into the distance.

“Let’s move,” David said. There had been too much shooting here not to attract more of the soldiers.

“Not so fast.”

Whirling, David saw Mack standing in the middle of the street.

“Quick,” he said, and leaped a low rock wall, Caroline close behind.

They ran into a thin woods behind the house. David had no idea where they were or where they might be going, just that they had to get out of here.

He could hear Mack moving fast to close the distance.

Then the woods ended. They came out on a two-lane highway, one that he recognized immediately. It was Maryland 1440, the road that passed the small private airfield that the clinic had used.

It was suicide to stay exposed like this, so they went to the far shoulder—and saw here a field just sprouting young shoots of some sort, the life of the past still unfolding. Beyond it, perhaps half a mile away, was the roofline of a condo complex—shelter, certainly, but they could not survive an attempt to cross that field.

For a few moments, David ran down the middle of the road, looking for something that would afford them more shelter than the field. All he found was a concrete bus stop plastered with Celebrex and McDonald’s ads. He drew Caroline to it and crouched beside her, shielding her with his body.

Not hurrying now—not needing to—Mack came toward them. As he walked, he moved first into the center of the highway, then angled to the far side. As David and Caroline tried to keep the bulk of the shelter in front of them, Mack tried to widen the angle.

“We can make a deal,” he said. “I bring the portal and you take me through. That’s all I need now. Forget the rest of them.”

Behind Mack, David saw an unlikely sight—headlights. A vehicle was coming. Mack kept moving closer to the two of them. Either he didn’t see it or he didn’t care. David watched, trying to see what it was, waiting for it to overtake Mack.

What the hell was that thing? It was big, not a car or an SUV, or even a military vehicle, which had been David’s initial fear. A big truck, perhaps. No, he saw more lights. A marquee. But—holy God, it was a Greyhound bus. A bus?

Mack stepped easily aside as it passed him, but David ran out into the middle of the road, waving his arms frantically. Caroline joined him.

On the marquee, David saw the word “Baltimore.” Inside, there was a driver, there were passengers, and it all looked astonishingly, impossibly normal.

Now the bus was a hundred feet from them. Fifty feet. They could see the face of the driver. Behind it, David was aware that Mack had started running.

The loud phew of its air brakes sounded. The driver leaned forward over his steering wheel. Phew. PHEW.

It stood there, engine rattling. With a quiet hiss and a click, the door opened. He went around it—and saw Mack not fifty feet away, coming up beside the back of the bus. A huge knife brought from the kitchen left his hand like a lightning bolt.

As David and Caroline threw themselves onto the steps, it slammed into the door, embedding itself in the vinyl and insulation. They scrambled into the cabin, David shouting, “Close the door!”

The driver didn’t need to be told.

Outside, Mack commenced hammering on it with a fury unbound, the sound of his assault filling the bus, the power of it making the big vehicle shake like a leaf.

“Jesus!” the driver said.

“Get moving!”

He threw the bus into gear and pulled out onto the road. As they drew away from Mack, he emitted an inhuman roar of anger.

But now, very suddenly, David and Caroline were in a different world. Other passengers filled the seats, people with bundles, people with kids. Some seats empty, most not.

“Hey,” the driver called.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“How far?”

“Excuse me?”

“This is a bus, buddy. You buy a ticket. That’s the way we do it.”

“Oh, Baltimore. Baltimore…” He gave the driver a twenty and got back a dollar and change. Stuffing the money in his pocket, looking down at his receipt, he almost wanted to cry.

How had they ever kept buses running? But of course, they were old vehicles, many of them forty and fifty years old. They didn’t contain the kind of electronics that would be fried. So, even this deep in death, life went on.

“Behind the white line,” the driver said, “thank you.”

They went down the aisle, finding seats across from an older woman, prim, her eyes keen with a light he hoped was not madness.

“May we sit here?”

“I don’t own it.”

When they sat, David realized just how deeply, deeply tired he was. The star having set, it was full dark now, and the windows reflected the interior of the bus. Distantly, he could see blood in the east, getting brighter. The old woman saw it, too, and began to chew her gums.

“I will not taste of the bitter water,” she said.

He knew the reference, of course, to the water ruined by the star Wormwood in Revelation.

It would happen that way, too. There would be deuterium in the debris of the supernova, and the water of the world would be absorbing it, turning it into heavy water. It wasn’t in itself radioactive, but when half the water content of a larger animal’s body was replaced with heavy water, the animal died. Or the man.

She said, “I am saved, hallelujah.”

The bus would pass the Acton Clinic in a few minutes, and it was there that they must get off. David squeezed Caroline’s hand, then returned to the front.

“Do you know the Acton Clinic?” he asked the driver.

“Yeah, it’s a couple of miles on. I pass it four times a day.”

“We want to get off there.”

The driver glanced at him. “It’s been burning for hours.”

His heart heaved in his chest. He forced his voice to a calm he did not feel.

“You can make a stop, though?”

“Sure. But there ain’t no refund. No refund here.”

“Fair enough.”

“You got that man’s name? ’Cause he damaged this bus. I gotta write that up and the company’s gonna want to go to the cops. Vandalism. They don’t like it.”

“Your company?”

“Maryland Trails Bus Lines,” the driver said, ignoring the passengers. “I been drivin’ their rigs for thirty years. Never got a citation, not one, not never.”

“It’s still operating?”

Again, he glanced at David. “What does it look like?”

A hand grabbed David’s shoulder. He turned to face a woman whose face had been made pink by too much exposure to the supernova core.

“You a doctor? My baby got fluid. You a doctor?” She held up a baby as bloated as a stuffed toy and gray with death.

Ethically, he could not deny his profession. But he’d barely touched pediatrics in medical school. He was not qualified to help.

“We thought it was God’s light, we slept him in it, my husband did. My husband was a fool.”

David did not know how to tell her that this was a sunburn of a new and terrible kind.

“I’m sorry for you,” he said.

“They nothin’ you can do?”

“That is not God’s light,” another passenger shouted. “You have laid your baby in Lucifer’s light.”

This lovely, ignorant young woman raised a long hand to her cheek, and with a gesture of surpassing grace, wiped away her tears.

“I’ll put him in the ground,” she said. “Very well. Thank you.”

She went swaying back to her seat, the other passengers looking straight ahead.

“We all told her,” a man said. “She’s got a dead baby.”

The bus’s brakes hissed and it lurched to a stop.

“Acton Clinic,” the driver intoned. “Acton!”

David and Caroline got off, stepping out into the dew of morning.

Above the sun, in the purity of the eastern sky, hung a full moon, its face the red of blood.

As he watched, he saw a brief flash on the lunar surface, then another and another.

The driver closed the door of the bus and pulled out. What would happen to it, and to the people aboard? Nothing good, that was certain.

The great iron gates of the Acton estate still stood open. At the end of the curving driveway, the building loomed, still and silent. He could see jagged edges in the line of the roof where the fire had burned through. The windows were dark.

“It’s destroyed,” Caroline said.

David did not reply. He could only think that, even if they did find the class, what would they do without the portal? He had been counting on finding the supplies here for Caroline to re-create it a third time, but that did not look possible now.

“Come on,” he said. They proceeded into the grounds, moving quickly but carefully.

As they drew closer to the house, he watched the door and the rows of broken windows for any suggestion of activity inside. They would have done well to look behind them, but they did not do that. Instead, they responded to the deep animal instincts that drive all men in times as terrible as these, and went toward the concealment that the house offered.

Thus they did not see who had dropped off the back of the bus as they had come through its door. Mack moved swiftly to the gate, then slipped into the grounds, then to the apple tree, now naked, where he had spent his afternoons.

He watched them enter the house through the sprung front door. He went closer, listening, and heard the scuffling of their clumsy movement through the ruins inside.

When he saw that they had gone through to the patient wing and all was quiet, he slipped into the house.