The Omega Point

“You got that man’s name? ’Cause he damaged this bus. I gotta write that up and the company’s gonna want to go to the cops. Vandalism. They don’t like it.”

“Your company?”

“Maryland Trails Bus Lines,” the driver said, ignoring the passengers. “I been drivin’ their rigs for thirty years. Never got a citation, not one, not never.”

“It’s still operating?”

Again, he glanced at David. “What does it look like?”

A hand grabbed David’s shoulder. He turned to face a woman whose face had been made pink by too much exposure to the supernova core.

“You a doctor? My baby got fluid. You a doctor?” She held up a baby as bloated as a stuffed toy and gray with death.

Ethically, he could not deny his profession. But he’d barely touched pediatrics in medical school. He was not qualified to help.

“We thought it was God’s light, we slept him in it, my husband did. My husband was a fool.”

David did not know how to tell her that this was a sunburn of a new and terrible kind.

“I’m sorry for you,” he said.

“They nothin’ you can do?”

“That is not God’s light,” another passenger shouted. “You have laid your baby in Lucifer’s light.”

This lovely, ignorant young woman raised a long hand to her cheek, and with a gesture of surpassing grace, wiped away her tears.

“I’ll put him in the ground,” she said. “Very well. Thank you.”

She went swaying back to her seat, the other passengers looking straight ahead.

“We all told her,” a man said. “She’s got a dead baby.”

The bus’s brakes hissed and it lurched to a stop.

“Acton Clinic,” the driver intoned. “Acton!”

David and Caroline got off, stepping out into the dew of morning.

Above the sun, in the purity of the eastern sky, hung a full moon, its face the red of blood.

As he watched, he saw a brief flash on the lunar surface, then another and another.

The driver closed the door of the bus and pulled out. What would happen to it, and to the people aboard? Nothing good, that was certain.

The great iron gates of the Acton estate still stood open. At the end of the curving driveway, the building loomed, still and silent. He could see jagged edges in the line of the roof where the fire had burned through. The windows were dark.

“It’s destroyed,” Caroline said.

David did not reply. He could only think that, even if they did find the class, what would they do without the portal? He had been counting on finding the supplies here for Caroline to re-create it a third time, but that did not look possible now.

“Come on,” he said. They proceeded into the grounds, moving quickly but carefully.

As they drew closer to the house, he watched the door and the rows of broken windows for any suggestion of activity inside. They would have done well to look behind them, but they did not do that. Instead, they responded to the deep animal instincts that drive all men in times as terrible as these, and went toward the concealment that the house offered.

Thus they did not see who had dropped off the back of the bus as they had come through its door. Mack moved swiftly to the gate, then slipped into the grounds, then to the apple tree, now naked, where he had spent his afternoons.

He watched them enter the house through the sprung front door. He went closer, listening, and heard the scuffling of their clumsy movement through the ruins inside.

When he saw that they had gone through to the patient wing and all was quiet, he slipped into the house.

23. THE RISING OF THE SOULS

Mike and Tim Pelton and Delmar Twine were in terrible trouble because their general had gone crazy, and in just a minute, it was going to be Timmy’s turn to get himself burned alive in that damn mirror or whatever it was.

The three of them had been friends all of their lives, growing up on the same street in Sandusky, going to the same schools, finally joining the army together, all three intent on getting the education they could not otherwise afford. Mike and Tim were identical twins, and they had joined up on the condition that they would stay together.

But instead of the training they’d hoped to get, they’d come out the other end of boot camp as infantrymen, and spent two years in ’Stan. Then, as the U.S. withdrew from that country, they had been reassigned to General Wylie’s specialist brigade, guarding some sort of supersecret underground facility deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The guard unit hadn’t been allowed inside, but instead had been billeted in tents near the entrance. They’d seen the people coming, though, famous faces glimpsed as they got out of their vehicles and went through the thick steel doors into what appeared to be a luxurious interior. For weeks they’d come, the masters of the world— congressmen and senators, big-time preachers and Catholic hierarchy, TV personalities, movie stars, hundreds of them. Some of them had the black spot disease big-time, with the weird pigmentation almost covering their skin. Others, you couldn’t see if they had it or not.

Mike and Tim and Del didn’t have it, and they wouldn’t bunk with people who did. You didn’t want that, no way.

There were burned bodies all around the portal now, the remains of guys they’d worked with in the unit for the better part of a year. Behind them there was just Colonel Manders with his pistol, and at his feet the bodies of the seven men who had refused even to try.

Mike and Timmy and Del had talked about this thing. Whatever it was, it belonged to that man and woman who that CIA guy and the general had tried to kill.

The point was, those two people were the ones who knew how to make the sucker work right and stop burning guys. Everybody in the unit knew they were from the Acton Clinic, which was another secret installation of some kind.

“Okay, look,” the general said. “You—” He pointed at Timmy. “You just make one smooth, easy movement. The problem is, guys keep trying to pull back—”

Timmy vomited.

“Shit!” The general thrust his gun into Timmy’s face. “Do it!”

Timmy gagged and raised his hands flat against the sublime view of an orchard, its trees dripping with tiny, blushing red apples.

“Do it!”

And then the next thing Mike knew, the gun was in his face.

“Do it,” the general shouted at Timmy, “or I blow your fuckin’ brother’s fuckin’ brains out right now!”

Timmy went to the portal. He stood before it.

“I love you,” he said without turning around. The tears in his voice broke his brother’s heart. He was gonna burn, Timmy was gonna burn, and Mike and Del, they would be next. What a shitty goddamn way to go, how stupid was this?

“Sir,” Del said frantically, “we need to take this thing up to the clinic. That’s a secret installation! They know how it works, they can tell us.”

“Move!”

There was a click. The cold of the gun barrel nestled against Mike’s neck.

Suddenly Timmy just very smoothly stepped forward and went right into the thing. He seemed to walk