forward, but also to get smaller and smaller, until finally he just disappeared.
Silence. Nobody moved. “Jesus…” the general whispered.
Then he seemed to climb out of something, and there he stood as clear as day in the grass on the other side, facing away from them. He bent down on one knee and ran his hands through the grass. Then he stood up and raised his eyes to what looked like a summer sky, floated with soft white clouds. Mike could practically hear the birds singing.
“Timmy,” Mike shouted.
“Shut the fuck up!” The general removed the gun from Mike’s neck and stepped closer to the portal. “Can you hear me?”
Timmy came close to the portal. Inclining his head to one side, he peered back at them. Could he see in this direction?
“Come back, Timmy,” Del shouted. “Come on back, man!”
“Stuff it, soldier!”
“Yessir. But, Sir—”
Timmy held out a hand. He flattened it against his side of the portal—and instantly pulled it away.
Then Timmy was looking past the portal, seemingly into the sky above his side of it, or maybe at the portal itself, it was hard to be certain.
His face changed, moving into a wide-eyed expression of disbelief, then amazement.
He turned and went the other way, disappearing in among the trees of the orchard.
“Get outta there,” he said.
“Where’s my brother?”
“Eating goddamn apples, looks like to me.”
“He was running. Something was wrong.”
“Yeah, what’s wrong is he’s a fucking dumbass not to come back.”
General Wylie stepped into the portal, using exactly the same decisive motion that Tim had used. Except… he stopped. For a moment, there was silence. This was followed by a stifled cry that quickly became a howl of agony as flames burst through the fabric of his uniform, accompanied by a sound as if of frying bacon.
“Help him,” Colonel Manders shouted, shielding his eyes as he tried to get near the general, who was flopping like a fish, his body enveloped in flames.
Then, just as the others had done, he fell backward off the portal and lay kicking and spinning on the ground in burned agony.
Aside from the colonel, Mike and Del were the only members of the unit near the portal—alive, at least. Most of the ones who hadn’t gone up into that machine or been killed like the general was being killed, had deserted by now. Maybe someone was still hanging in a Humvee here and there, but nobody who was willing to come anywhere near the portal.
Overhead, another meteor roared past, a thick streak of light accompanied by an ominous rumble. Somewhere below the southern horizon, it exploded in a flash.
“Fuck this,” the colonel muttered. He swung into a Humvee, started it, and went back down the road, heading out toward the interstate and the Blue Ridge.
Mike and Del watched him go.
“Well, shit,” Del said into the silence that had enveloped the convoy. “Anybody home? HELLO?”
Mike went to the portal.
“Timmy,” he shouted into it. “Timmy!”
What was in there that had so upset him? Timothy Pelton did not scare easily, and Mike was in a position to know that. Even as kids, Tim had always been the bold one, the first one up the tree, the first one to ride the Top Thrill Dragster in Cedar Point, the first one to ask a girl out, the first one in to save Momma that time they had the fire.
Mike slumped. He felt Del’s arm come over his shoulder.
“Del, I feel like he’s on the other side of the moon. Farther.”
“What the hell is this thing?”
“Some kinda classified stuff, has to be.”
“They ain’t got no problems over there,” Del said, “ ’cept them crab apples don’t look real worth eating.”
“He’s not eating crab apples! He run scared, man.” A sudden burst of pure hate overcame Mike, and he kicked the blackened rubble of the general hard a few times. “Fuckin’ bastard! BASTARD!”
“Hey. HEY!” Del pulled him away. “That ain’t gonna do nothin’. That guy was headed for a court-martial, anyhow, the way he’s killing people. I mean, I saw about five murder ones go down here today.”
“Time of war.” He went close to the portal. “Timmy! TIMMY, damn your eyes, come back here!”
Then he saw, across a far hill, a small dot in motion. For some moments, he watched it as it moved steadily up the grassy hillside. Del also watched.
At some length, he said, “Could be him.”
“Or some caveman who ate him. We gotta find out how this thing works.”
Del went to a Humvee and opened the door. Inside was Ken Freitag, a gun in his mouth and the back of his head spread across the cab.
“Occupied,” Del muttered.
He went to the next one down the line and got in. There was a click, then the engine started. Hardened military electronics were not so quick to fry, fortunately, but there was going to be more than one vehicle in this convoy that wasn’t gonna move. “Got forty miles left in this,” Del said.
Without speaking—they didn’t need to bother, the three of them always understood one another’s thinking —Mike picked up the portal and slid it into the back of the Humvee, where it fit nicely… or had it gotten smaller when Mike tried to put it in?
Everybody knew the way the image in it changed as you moved it, and Mike didn’t want to lose the spot where Timmy had gone in.
“We get this thing working right, we need to bring it back right here,” he said.
“It’s a countryside over there. If we get through safely, we’re gonna find him sooner or later. Looks like southern Ohio, matter of fact.”
“Southern Ohio is God’s country.”
“So is the rest of the world.”
They were silent for a moment, each contemplating in his own way the enormity of what was happening.
“Why don’t we just go in now?”
“You think we should?”
They both looked at it, then at each other. At last Mike said, “I think we need to find out more about it.”
“I hear you,” Del said. He pulled the Humvee out of the line and proceeded toward the town square. Plasmas so intense that they outshone the dismal sun now flashed across the sky without ceasing. Instead of the empty streets that had followed the passage of the penitents, they soon found that Raleigh was crowded with people who were pushing and pulling anything they could that was on wheels, trying to take supplies with them as they headed west toward the interstate. It looked like something out of a World War II movie.
People stared hard at the Humvee as it trundled east. They’d been shot at one too many times when trying to approach the convoy. They gave the soldiers their distance.
Up and down the street, buildings were burning. Molten insulation was dripping off overhead wires. “Spontaneous electrical fires,” Del said. “Must be a whole lot of solar juice in the air to cause this.”
Mike knew that the sun’s energy would concentrate in wires if it became intense enough. There were weapons that could do that, too.
Up and down Main Street, the same street lamps from which the victims of the penitents were hanging were now exploding, sending sparks down into panicky crowds of refugees. Sheets of fire flared along electric lines, and columns of smoke rushed up from the roofs of buildings.
