21. REBELS
The farther they got from the clinic, the more disturbed Caroline became about the fate of the rest of the class. They were the core of the future, each one of them trained to carry out a fundamental task of governance. If all went well, there would be millions coming, and they would be urgently needed, every one of them.
Mack had been right, though. They could not stay where they were, and hiding the portal on the property— attempting to—was just too dangerous.
She just hoped that some of those carefully chosen people would be left. As David closed his little book and clutched her hand, she sensed that his thoughts were exactly the same.
As the invaded clinic disappeared behind them, though, she had to ask herself another question: had Mack captured them or rescued them? He was a subtle, skilled man, and she feared that this might go in a bad direction. She did not know exactly what he understood about the portal. He had watched her creating it, though, and had seen it in its finished state. He could not fail to recognize what it was.
It had come out of her mind and her hands, and existed at the vanishing edge between thought and reality. As she had painted it and the gold had done its work on her mind and body, she had remembered the lessons she’d taken about it in the class. She remembered being taught to paint, remembered the special state of surrender that allowed the colors to flow, and a new reality to emerge out of the art in her hands and the science in her mind. But the most critical part of the creation of the portal, the mixing of the colors, had been done by Susan Denman. Should they need to do this again—if by some miracle there was time—Susan would be needed.
But they were all needed.
The science that enabled the creation of the portal was not like modern science. It taught that reality is not the hard, immutable, inevitable structure that appears all around us, but rather an idea that only seems impossible to change. Brute force—the lumberman’s axe, the builder’s tractor—appears to be the only way, but it is not the only way. When science and art come into harmony, miracles become ordinary.
No miracles in the here and now, though. She sat jammed in beside David, with Mack driving and Katrina Starnes crouching in the truck bed.
She looked over at Mack, trying to see in his face some hint of his intentions. His eyes were as dark and dangerous as gun barrels.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer.
As they passed through the outskirts of Raleigh, the emptiness told her that the citizens who weren’t attacking the clinic had probably left or been killed.
Here and there, untended wrecks lay abandoned in the road, and bodies in them and beside them. By the time they had reached the courthouse square at the center of the town, she had counted forty of them, most of them apparently the victims of gunshots.
They went around the courthouse square, turning, then turning again, until they were on the opposite side and once again facing out of town.
Finally, Mack stopped the truck with a scream of dry, old brakes. The three of them stared out the windshield, stunned silent by what they saw. From the bed behind them, Katie stifled a scream.
On the lampposts along the street, stretching at least a quarter of a mile to the entrance to the interstate, there were bodies hanging. Closest, a man dangled with his pants around his ankles. On the next lamppost, a state policeman in uniform hung slumped and still, his wide-brimmed trooper’s hat on the ground beneath him. On the next one was a woman wrapped in so much duct tape that she looked like a cocoon.
There were easily two dozen of them, stretching off into the distance.
But they were not the reason that Mack had stopped. She saw that he was indifferent to these bodies. Who knew why they had been hanged or who had done it? Perhaps they were a sacrifice to the old gods, or perhaps they’d violated some sort of jerkwater martial law that the locals had declared. Maybe they had refused to participate in the attack on the clinic.
In any case, it was all pointless. That final sign had sealed the matter, had it not?
Mack had stopped because of a great horde of people coming toward them, people filling the street and the sidewalk on both sides, inching toward them on their knees, their faces twisted with agony. They were singing tattered hymns. She heard snatches of “Amazing Grace,” “How Great Thou Art,” “What a Friend We Have In Jesus.”
Running up and down among them were frantic children, their shrill voices adding an anarchic note of panic to the howled songs. The people closest were sliding slowly, their knees shredded to the exposed bone.
She thought, then, that the people who had been hanged were probably human sacrifices, and, since that had not worked, they were now torturing themselves to death in an effort to induce God—or maybe the old gods—to save them.
This was the fundamental error of history being acted out in these desperate streets. The gods to whom they offered sacrifice did not exist and never had existed, and cosmic disaster was not the fault of man and never would be. Earth’s history was not about gods at all, but rather a very large-scale scientific program that was aimed at creating a harvest of souls. Who the designers were, Caroline did not know, but she believed in their work with all her being, for vast numbers of the good were being freed every day, every hour, and taking the human experience up into a higher level of reality.
The end of the world wasn’t a disaster at all. It was a huge, resounding, amazing success.
Mack sat staring at the crowd. His profile was granite. He had taken on the stillness of determination, and Caroline knew that he was about to drive right through them.
She said, “Mack, don’t.”
There were hundreds of them, it seemed, maybe thousands, filling the street, the sidewalk, and the side streets feeding into this one.
“This is human behavior we do not understand,” David said. “This is beyond what is known about stress response.”
Mack gunned the motor, and Caroline writhed in her seat.
But David, who was closest to the door, jumped out.
“You can’t do this,” he said.
The leading edge of the penitents or whatever they were had now reached the truck’s front bumper.
David faced them. “Wake up, wake up, all of you!”
He went to one of them, a man with the bones of his knees visible as he dragged himself along. He leaned into the man’s face, calling on him to stop. Robotically, he continued on.
Mack said to Caroline, “Stay here.” He also got out of the truck. “We have to keep moving, David, we can’t stay here!” Then Katrina came up to them. Her—or rather, David’s—gun was at the ready.
Caroline had had enough. Why would Mack, if he had good intentions, ever give a gun to somebody as obviously murderous as Katie? And why go so far from the clinic, and why even enter the town? No, this was all wrong, all of it.
The crowd had surrounded the truck, men, women, and children moving past them with the indifference of a flooding river. Mack was in front, struggling to push people aside.
Katie saw that he was having trouble and fired into the air.
He turned. “Help me,” he shouted.
She went toward him, firing a second time, this time into the face of a woman, who pitched back amid her screaming children.
Caroline saw their chance. “This isn’t right,” she said to David.
“I know it.”
They got out of the truck. David reached in for the portal.
“Stop!”
Mack was blasting through the crowd toward them.
“David, run!”
“The portal!”
