“Bobby!”
Bobby just looked up at him. His eyes were strange, and for a moment Martin had a horrible thought. “Bobby?”
“Yeah?”
“Your family okay?”
He stopped his car.
Jesus, his family had gotten it in the night. “Oh, buddy, did you lose ’em?”
He shook his head.
“Bobby, what’s the matter?”
He held out a flyer. Martin took it. He was astonished to find himself staring at his own face. “This man is wanted dead. Name: Martin Trevor Winters. Last seen in the area of Lautner County, Kansas. This man is extremely dangerous, and carries a bounty of ten million dollars, upon satisfactory proof of death being provided.”
Martin looked at Bobby, met his eyes, saw them flicker away. His face said it clearly: this was not a joke. “Homeland Security dropped them about half an hour ago.”
“But I—there must be some mistake!”
“Buddy, you know I love you. But I got this job, here, and half the town, they are looking for your blood.”
“But what did I do? Why has this happened?”
“It doesn’t say what you did, but we all know you were over there in Egypt when the pyramid went, and it must have something to do with that, which is why I’m arresting you, buddy.”
“Bobby?”
“I’m not gonna read you your rights. Because it’s a patriot arrest, you don’t have any rights.”
“Bobby, hey!”
But Bobby cuffed him and took him off to the sheriff’s substation, and put him in the one cell, which had been cleaned of file boxes for the occasion. He drove through town telling them that Martin had been caught, and they had to meet at First Christ to vote on what to do with him.
SEVEN
DECEMBER 4
THE TRAP
WILEY STARED AT THE WORDS on his computer screen. This damn nightmare was way out of control.
He’d come back from the shrink determined to just erase the whole thing, but he hadn’t done it, and now look what had happened, it had gotten so much worse so fast. Winnie was probably dead and Trevor—God knew what had happened to him, and look at poor Martin. He was going to be killed by his friends.
But it wasn’t only what was happening to this one little family, it was the whole vast scope of the thing, an entire world being destroyed.
That bastard Samson was part of it. Al North was right, he was a traitor. But the fool hadn’t shot him. Stupid fool. Nice guys sure as hell finish last, General North.
Wylie had CNN on continuously now, waiting for any sign of anything odd happening at any sacred site in his own world.
So far, this dear old place was quiet. But would it be forever? They knew we were here, or we wouldn’t see UFOs. They just needed one more little push, he suspected, and they’d be in. Let NASA announce that UFOs were real. Let the Air Force admit that it couldn’t explain some sighting or other—and bang, here come the lenses, dark goddamn things blowing the same fourteen sacred sites to hell here as they did in the two-moon world.
When he wasn’t writing, he did research and he thought. He thought about the number fourteen. It was the Osiris number, the Jesus number, the resurrection number. Seven was a complete octave and a complete life. Fourteen was a life and a life beyond. It was the number of the goal of man, which was the projection of human consciousness into eternity. Osiris had been cut into fourteen pieces. The passion of Christ had fourteen stations.
Destroy the man, build the man.
Might that be true, also, of whole worlds?
He sighed, blew air out. Was he tired? He was beyond tired. More exhausted than he’d thought it was possible to be.
He did not think he could imagine what the suffering going on Martin’s world was like. By now, every single human being on the planet who was not himself a wanderer had lost at least one loved one. The sheer scale of it was beyond imagination. Appalling.
What could he write about it? That it brought tears to his eyes, made his mouth dry, made his stomach fill with fire?
Describing this was beyond even a great novelist’s skill, and certainly beyond his.
Fourteen. He kept going back to it. The fourteen sacred places were there to enable us to recover the knowledge that made man immortal. Giza, Tassili, Ollantaytambo, all the way around to Easter Island, Sukothai, Persepolis and Petra—to enable us to recover the knowledge, and also to protect us from our ignorance.
In Martin’s world, they had failed. Too late—just. He had been close, but not close enough, not in time. That was why Samson was after him. The knowledge he possessed was still dangerous.
It was evening now, on this earth, on Martin’s earth, presumably on all the earths in all the universes that filled the unimaginable firmament—including the world of the reptilians.
He’d never seen it. Glimpsed it, perhaps, down in the draw that night-felt the delicate hands of the monsters, felt them raping him.
He thought he knew why it had been done. They needed a communicator to spread belief in them. Problem was, they chose the wrong guy. They needed a Nobel prize winner or a great political leader, not a horror novelist.
Too bad, suckas!
Voices shrill with excitement reassured him that all was still well, at least in his neck of the woods. Nick and Kelsey were playing normally outside. Brooke was downstairs making one of her stunning pot roasts.
The kids sounded very happy together, and that was not always the case. Even though she was eight and he thirteen, there was still plenty of sibling rivalry to cut through.
In another year, Nick probably wouldn’t be willing to run around like that with his little sister, but he was having old-fashioned childhood fun now, oblivious for once to the fact that he would soon, at thirteen, no longer be a child.
It was a dark afternoon, with some heavy fall weather on its way in from the northwest. Typical Kansas, a little late for the season was all. He glanced at his weather radio. The light glowed green, meaning that it was on and hadn’t picked up any alerts.
Still, blue flickering came from the sky, and thunder rolled in from far away. The storms were still the other side of Holcomb, maybe fifty miles out. Probably they’d arrive during the night.
He didn’t like storms. He feared that the disks might come, might be hiding in them.
But no, the lenses were the anchors. Hooks in the gills of the fish, as it were. And there were no lenses here. He kept telling himself that.
Then he would think, what if there were just one or two? Tassili was in the middle of the desert. Nazca was isolated; so were a number of the other sites. Most of them. They had been created so long ago that they were all centered on a north pole from God only knew how far back in the past.
He wanted a drink so badly that he dared not open the liquor drawer. No way.
He stared at his words on the screen. Lindy and Winnie destroyed, Trevor gone, Martin about to be locked up…which he could still see taking place. Even though he had stopped writing, the story still unfolded in the bright hell of his mind. In it, Martin was watching his old friend lock the cell door, and Bobby had tears in his eyes as he did it.
No, this was too much, this had to go, and now was the time.
