the sky closed. He was left watching the leaping death of the auroras’ return, and he bowed his head and fell to the ground crouching, and covered his face, so great was the pain of losing touch with that beauty.
“And so the dead rise,” he said, “and now to follow there will be great earthquakes.”
Caroline, weeping also, clutched at him, and their love—so essential to maintaining one’s humanity in dark times—enabled them to help each other, and give one another the strength they needed to go on.
But the convoy remained in chaos, with men screaming and leaping on the vehicles, trying to somehow jump into the sky, tearing at one another, bellowing and cursing and fighting to get to a door that was already closed.
Mack and General Wylie strode among them, their pistols in their hands. When a soldier clambered onto a vehicle, Mack or the general would shoot him and he would lurch off, hitting the ground with a thud.
Taking advantage of the confusion, David pulled Caroline into a shattered drugstore, and they were going through to the rear when they both saw it at the same time—a flash of green in the street outside.
Two soldiers had come into view. Between them they held the portal, which now contained an image of a sweep of meadow that ended on a riverbank. Beyond this stretched an enormous view that faded into blue hills.
Corralled at gunpoint by Mack and the general, soldiers shuffled toward the portal. They were eager at first, looking at it in wonder.
Mack held the first man’s hand against it until he snatched it away, pulling at his tunic.
When the man hesitated, the general lifted his gun as casually as he might a spoonful of soup, and sent a bullet through his head.
“This fucker works, at least,” he said as the young solder dropped.
The next soldier stepped right into the portal.
Caroline gripped David’s arm. On the neck of the man going through, they could see a telltale shadow.
Then this man also hesitated. His body jerked and he seemed to stop, his front half in the portal. Mack kicked him in the small of the back, shoving him forward.
For a moment, he seemed to go deeper.
“Jesus, it’s working,” Mack exclaimed. “We have got it, General!”
They were congratulating one another when the soldier, still only halfway through the portal, burst into flames. His writhing became frantic, his head jerking from side to side, his midriff lurching and squirming, and suddenly the man was out, falling back, hitting the ground as he was consumed, screaming in agony as the fire engulfed him.
In the air there was the same horrifying odor of cooked flesh and hair that had filled the kitchen when Katrina had burned.
General Wylie glared at Mack. David could see the veins standing out on his neck.
“You stupid asshole! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Mack stood at attention, taking it.
“Get those freaks,” Wylie muttered. “I want them front and center.”
“Get them,” Mack snapped.
Soldiers looked at each other.
Mack pointed directly at the store—at them, at the precise spot they had imagined that they were hiding.
“DO IT NOW!” he roared.
Caroline and David ran for their lives.
The portal remained where they had left it.
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
