Midnight

Sam kept telling himself that the fallen creatures were phantoms, that no such things could have actually come into existence, either by the application of the highest of high technology or by sorcery. He expected them to vanish every time a shroud of fog briefly obscured them, but when the fog moved off again, they were still huddled on the pavement, sidewalks, and lawns.

Immersed in all that horror and ugliness, he could not believe that he had been so foolish as to pass years of precious life in gloom, unwilling to see the beauty of the world. He'd been a singular fool. When the dawn came he would never thereafter fail to look upon a flower and appreciate the wonder of it, the beauty that was beyond man's abilities of creation.

'Tell me now?' Tessa asked as they pulled within a block of Harry's redwood house.

'Tell you what?'

'What you saw. Your near-death experience. What did you see on the Other Side that scared you so?'

He laughed shakily. 'I was an idiot.'

'Probably,' she said. 'Tell me and let me judge.'

'Well, I can't tell you exactly. It was more an understanding than a seeing, a spiritual rather than visual perception.'

'So what did you understand?'

'That we go on from this world,' he said. 'That there's either life for us on another plane, one life after another on an endless series of planes … or that we live again on this plane, reincarnate. I'm not sure which, but I felt it deeply, knew it when I reached the end of that tunnel and saw the light, that brilliant light.'

She glanced at him. 'And that's what terrified you?'

'Yes.'

'That we live again?'

'Yes. Because I found life so bleak, you see, just a series of tragedies, just pain. I'd lost the ability to appreciate the beauty of life, the joy, so I didn't want to die and have to start in all over again, not any sooner than absolutely necessary. At least in this life I'd become hardened, inured to the pain, which gave me an advantage over starting out as a child again in some new incarnation.'

'So your fourth reason for living wasn't technically a fear of death,' she said.

'I guess not.'

'It was a fear of having to live again.'

'Yes.'

'And now?'

He thought a moment. Chrissie stirred in his lap. He stroked her damp hair. At last he said, 'Now, I'm eager to live again.'

35

Harry heard noises downstairs — the elevator, then someone in the third-floor bedroom. He tensed, figuring two miracles were one too many to hope for, but then he heard Sam calling to him from the bottom of the ladder.

'Here, Sam! Safe! I'm okay.'

A moment later Sam climbed into the attic.

'Tessa? Chrissie?' Harry asked anxiously.

'They're downstairs. They're both all right.'

'Thank God.' Harry let out a long breath, as if it had been pent up in him for hours. 'Look at these brutes, Sam.'

'Rather not.'

'Maybe Chrissie was right about alien invaders after all.'

'Something stranger,' Sam said.

'What?' Harry said as Sam knelt beside him and gingerly pushed Worthy's mutated body off his legs.

'Damned if I know,' Sam said. 'Not even sure I want to know.'

'We're entering an age when we make our own reality, aren't we? Science is giving us that ability, bit by bit. Used to be only madmen could do that.'

Sam said nothing.

Harry said, 'Maybe making our own reality isn't wise. Maybe the natural order is the best one.'

'Maybe. On the other hand, the natural order could do with some perfecting here and there. I guess we've got to try. We just have to hope to God that the men who do the tinkering aren't like Shaddack. You okay, Harry?'

'Pretty good, thanks.' He smiled. 'Except, of course, I'm still a cripple. See this hulking thing that was Worthy? He was leaning in to rip my throat out, I had no more bullets, he had his claws at my neck, and then he just fell dead, bang. Is that a miracle or what?'

'Been a miracle all over town,' Sam said. 'They all seemed to have died when Shaddack died … linked somehow. Come on, let's get you down from here, out of this mess.'

'They killed Moose, Sam.'

'The hell they did. Who do you think Chrissie and Tessa are fussing over downstairs?'

Harry was stunned. 'But I heard—'

'Looks like maybe somebody kicked him in the head. He's got this bloody, skinned-up spot along one side of his skull. Might've been knocked unconscious, but he doesn't seem to've suffered a concussion.'

36

Chrissie rode in the back of the van with Harry and Moose, with Harry's good arm around her and Moose's head in her lap. Slowly she began to feel better. She was not herself, no, and maybe she never would feel like her old self again, but she was better.

They went to the park at the head of Ocean Avenue, at the east end of town. Tessa drove right up over the curb, bouncing them around, and parked on the grass.

Sam opened the rear doors of the van so Chrissie and Harry could sit side by side in their blankets and watch him and Tessa at work.

Braver than Chrissie would have been, Sam went into the nearby residential areas, stepping over and around the dead things, and jump-started cars that were parked along the streets. One by one, he and Tessa drove them into the park and arranged them in a huge ring, with the engines running and the headlights pointing in toward the middle of the circle.

Sam said that people would be coming in helicopters, even in the fog, and that the circle of light would mark a proper landing pad for them. With twenty cars, their headlights all blazing on high beam, the inside of that ring was as bright as noon.

Chrissie liked the brightness.

Even before the landing pad was fully outlined, a few people began to appear in the streets, live people, and not weird looking at all, without fangs and stingers and claws, standing fully erect — altogether normal, judging by appearances. Of course, Chrissie had learned that you could never confidently judge anyone by appearances because they could be anything inside; they could be something inside that would astonish even the editors of the National Enquirer. You couldn't even be sure of your own parents.

But she couldn't think about that.

She didn't dare think about what had happened to her folks. She knew that what little hope she still held for their salvation was probably false hope, but she wanted to hold on to it for just a while longer, anyway.