parallel worlds, because all three of them had evolved Lysol spray. Then she lifted a thick, black cable that was coiled on the floor at the head of the operating table, and pushed it deep down Al’s disinfected gullet.
“This soul’s been cut the way you want it cut, right, General Samson?” the doctor asked.
“I approved your pattern.”
“Because with all these shittily completed new connections, once the soul goes in, the only way you’re gonna get it out again is by tearing this body to pieces.”
“Am I going to want to do that, Mazle?”
“It’s been debrided of every thread suggesting independence.”
“And the brain?” Samson asked.
“Its memories have been erased back to two days before it entered Cheyenne Mountain,” Mazle replied.
One of the soultechs held the tube, which was about four feet across at its top, tapering to a diameter of perhaps nine inches at its base. Another inserted the cable into the socket.
“How old is that equipment, Mazle?”
“My dad’s company buried it in the Egyptian desert, at a place called Dendera.”
“When?”
“Eight thousand years ago.”
“What cheap bastards you people are. What if the humans had found it?”
“Not too likely.”
“Still, eight thousand years, and we have to rely on it. That’s criminal irresponsibility, in my opinion.”
“The objective is to create wealth for garbage like you to enjoy, General, not spend it on extravagant equipment we can do without. And I can’t help it if my family has been running a successful enterprise for twenty generations and you’re a propertyless consumer.”
The body began heaving. “Don’t lose this, Mazle.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Doctor?”
“Normal,” he snapped.
“Fill it,” she said to her soultechs.
One of them began raising the impedance in the tube until the soul was a purple spark dancing on the end of the filament.
The body heaved again, then again.
“You’re sure these seizures aren’t a problem?” Mazle asked the doctor.
“You can’t expect this to work like modern equipment.”
Samson snorted derisively, but made no comment.
Slowly, the color of the filament went from purple to violet, then to white. The body’s eyes flickered open, the chest gave a great, oily heave. The muscles rippled, the skin flushed, and there came from the gaping mouth a noise, earsplitting, like a hiss of gas escaping a broken pipe. A scream, Samson realized. That had been a scream.
And then Mazle said, “Look.”
The tube that had contained the soul was as black as a shroud. Al North’s eyes were open, though, wide open.
General North was crying.
FIFTEEN
DECEMBER 19, PREDAWN
THE STALKER
THEY’D MADE A SORT OF evil Golem, a monster that would be incapable of disobeying its orders. But it was more than that. Wylie saw the idea behind it. They had used the eyes and lips and tongue and the other parts they had managed to cut out of poor John Nunnally from down the road, and grafted them into the body of Al North. Because the result was mixed of flesh from the two earths, they probably hoped that it could move more freely in our world, and get around the fact that, because we ignored them, they could not enter freely here.
Unlike the outrider and the wanderers from the other earth, it would be able to enter this world fully.
So far, the only person who had managed that, seemingly without any restriction, was Trevor. But now there would be another, and this one would come with blood in his eye, a monster in the truest definition of the word.
Wylie wanted to stop writing, he wanted to warn his family, but his fingers moved relentlessly on, taking him where they chose to take him, on a journey he could not stop and could not control.
He was aware that dawn was coming, but he could not stop, he could not speak. He couldn’t even turn away from the keyboard. Nick slept in the easy chair that stood in the corner. Brooke, he thought, was in their bedroom.
The problem was that this monster was intended to cross the gateway and come up that hill and come to this house and kill them all, and now they were asleep and they were not reading and so they could not see this warning, and as hard as he tried, he could not call out to them, and he knew that time was of the essence.
Then he was swept away, far away, to the last place he cared to go, almost as if some larger force was at work, a silent wizard controlling the whole horrible catastrophe.
Here, he saw dark, complicated heaps up and down sidewalks, bits and tatters of paper and clothing and all manner of debris blowing in a north wind, and there was a smell, thick, sweet, that he recognized as the odor of many dead.
He was in New York, the New York of the two-moon earth, and these were people who had leaped from their apartments up and down Fifth Avenue, and there were more of them, Wylie was sure, on every single street everywhere in the city.
Detail struck him—an Armani purse lying open on the sidewalk, a doorman who had shot himself at his post, his brains hardened on the wall behind him, his kind old face crossed by a path of busy ants, a bicycle lying neatly against a lamppost.
He moved with a dreamer’s gliding ease but the horrible precision of reality, into a side street. Here was a little restaurant called Henri’s, all of its sidewalk tables bare, a full bottle of Cliquot champagne standing on a waiter’s station beside a copy of the Times for the day New York got hit, December 6. Headline: BIZARRE TRAGEDIES SHOCK WORLD.
There was a flag snapping before a brownstone, and he could see that it was an art gallery, but he didn’t go in, not in this storm-tossed, broken morning.
He fought to stop his hands, to pull away from the laptop. He could feel Al North standing, moving on wobbling legs, coughing, gasping, staggering, see him held up by sleek, creamy Mazle and black, gleaming Samson with their lithe bodies and long claws and their cruel reptile faces.
New York gave way to the ocean, big green waves involved with complicated little waves, and off through the bounding whitecaps the heeling dark shape of a great liner. She wallowed in the storm, and as he drew closer he saw that her bows were well down, and every time a wave struck her streaming flank, a great spray of water shot up, pushed across her by the driving wind like her own private rainstorm.
The people had disappeared from the deck like so much sea foam, but he was not long there, he was inside in the great sweep of a restaurant with chairs waltzing to the roll of the ship. But there were also others there, men in tuxedos, women in long dresses standing at the tall windows of what he supposed was the main restaurant. What was so appalling was that they had been made wanderers here, and had simply starved to death. He could see trenches in the carpeting under their feet. They had continued to walk after hitting the wall. He could see their sunken, gray faces.
I have to get home! Somebody help me!
And then he was on a twisting street, there were pushcarts everywhere, little motor bikes, signs in an unknown language and dogs barking and monkeys chattering in the blaze of day. But the streets were empty, and not only that, water was coming, and the buildings were heaving like women beneath the plunging weight of the
