Seeing this, a teenage girl detached from the line and approached the spot where the dog had vanished. I moved in to intercept her. She got there first.
“What do you think is down there?’ she murmured as she stared into the unrelieved abyss, Gothic eyes blank.
“Nothing,” I said firmly, reaching out with care.
“Nothing,” she said dreamily. “Sounds like a better deal.”
I snatched at her too late. She simply stepped in and virtually winked out of existence. Above, one of the evil low-lying clouds pulsated briefly. It had done that when the dog disappeared too. Something in me shuddered in sympathy.
Some members of the procession saw this. They broke away from the others. Into the patch they leaped, lemmings on two legs. Into the void they vanished.
A booming voice lifted. “Humans! Escape into the void! Escape and you will not be consumed. Escape into death! There is freedom in death. And from the new masters of Earth!” It was a centaur.
A surge of humanity responded to that hellish promise. They stampeded for the blackness. Some were trampled. Others stumbled over them to seek dark oblivion. Soon, the greater portion of them were gone. Utterly gone. I felt a coldness in my soul.
Above, the clouds pulsated wildly, as if laughing uproariously in delight.
Recoiling, I put distance between me and the patch of voidy non-matter. As I ran, the glowing eyes of the centaur tracked me. They burned a weird pumpkin orange, like a seared jack o’lantern.
“Beware the voids!” he called after me, as if to taunt my flight. “Voids become vortices. Vortices become vornados. And vornados — ” He began laughing raucously. His laughter boomed and cannonaded like thunder.
The rest was lost to hearing.
I reached a hill and found shelter among the dying trees. They drooped, blackened leaves wilting, as if in despair.
As I watched the ragged line of humankind close up and reform itself to trudge on toward an unknowable destination, like some segmented worm, the great black void that lay upon the field began to swell. It spun. Black as it was, I could sense this inner churning. No sound came forth. But the void rose up and began to wheel and lift ponderously, growing in size as it reared to life.
It became a vortex. And as the vortex found coherence, it elongated, became towering, mighty,
The vornado twisted and spun on its ever-changing ropy funnel, got itself organized, and moved for the line of humans with deliberate intent.
“Alive! It’s alive in some way!” I cried.
The vorando sought the last stragglers and ingested them, lunging after the rest. The screaming that followed was wild, but brief. The line broke, scattered, but the vornado moved about, with unerring instinct and consumed them all.
None were flung about or ejected by its centrifugal force, nor wasted.
When the last of the fleeing ones was gone, the vornado spun and searched in forlorn disappointment. Finally it sensed the laughing centaur.
It bore down on him too. His laugher chopped off. He turned to flee, urging himself along on his semi- fleshy pedestal. But it was designed for non-matter. The pad dragged on earthly grass, retarding him.
The centaur screamed until the last possible moment of life. After he was gulped up and digested, his scream seemed to linger, and the vornado gobbled up the echoes in a final voracious effort.
Then, howling with hunger, it moved along the road in search of new prey.
Above, the clouds danced with an unholy bluish-gray light.
Somewhere in the deep of the night, I came upon a man in black. He was fiftyish, with a deeply- lined face and gray stubble hair, charred eyes set in bony craters like spent meteorites.
I did not recognize him for what he really was.
“Can you show me the way to the plant?” I asked.
“Have people lost their faith so much that they seek hell itself?” he countered.
Then I noticed his soiled collar and crucifix.
“Sorry, Father. I’m with the government.”
The priest spat. “And you’re here to help, I suppose?”
“That’s classified.”
I noticed his crucifix. The broken hands and feet of Christ were present, still nailed to the cross, but the body had been forcibly wrenched off.
“Where’s Jesus?” I asked.
He lifted a gnarled hickory cane in my face. “Where’s Jesus, you say? That’s the question of the hour. Of the century! Isn’t it?” His voice rose in righteous indignation.
“All my life I preached the lesson of the cross. Now the world is tumbling into the abyss, and where is our Lord? The greatest battle between good and evil in human history and Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found!”
I could see he had a point. But I said nothing. He charged on.
“If this is the Day of Judgment, where is our Savior. Late? Overdue? Perhaps he’s busy on some other planet saving the sinful souls of lizard men. Do you think it likely? How else to explain his absence? For if the Second Coming is tomorrow, he’s a bit bloody late, isn’t he? Can he put back the entire world? Can he restore sanity? Has the Rapture been postponed? Or rescheduled like a damned pink tea?”
“I don’t have answers for you, Father,” I said gently.
“The world of our fathers is no more. It was all for nothing. Nothing, I tell you. Nothing! A sham. Not just the Holy Church. But the Jews and the Muslims and the Hindus. They too followed a lie. A damned lie!”
“Father,” I said carefully, “we still have our souls.”
“Yes! Our immortal souls. Death is our only hope now. One solitary means of escape from this earthly torment. Jesus has turned slacker. We must take salvation into our own hands. Look!” He took two long needles from his tunic. “Do you see these?”
“I do.”
“All my life I have railed against the mortal sin of abortion. But now I perform them. And do you know why?”
“It’s better not to bring children into the world as it now is,” I replied.
“Far, far better!” he thundered. And he broke like a rainstorm, weeping uncontrollably, his dark threadbare shoulders wracking with unleashed sobs.
“Direct me to the plant, Father.”
He croaked the words out. I had no words of comfort for him. He was a broken priest, but yet also a driven man. Something was about to snap in him and only death would cure it.
“Go with God, Father,” I said.
After I had moved on, he seized control of himself and cried out, “Heed me! Trust not the Lord! Look to Satan himself for succor! Lucifer was at least once an angel! But these hellish things, they — ”
I walked away from his retching anguish. I was a lapsed Catholic. I had long ago put all belief systems behind me. I had been out in the matrix of all creation. I knew what the real score was. God was more of a hologram than a unitary being. But human consciousness was inextinguishable. There was no death, only transition to other realities. This hard-won knowledge kept me sane through all the horrific earth changes. Detachment became my baseline emotion. What was the worst that could happen to me? Death was inevitable, Old Ones or no Old Ones. If in the end the universe were devoured by the eternally-beating nuclear chaos called Azathoth, there were other universes, adjacent dimensions in which my immortal soul might dwell.
It was a strange unanchored courage, but I had learned it in the matrix. Thus fortified, I prepared to brave the locus of local activity that should explain the One Ones’ fell objectives.
The factory sat in a dell or hollow not far from the corpse-choked James River.
It looked like a coal plant, but smelled like a crematorium. The flaring smokestacks reminded me of that
