The Texan said, 'I agree, Lapeer. Pull back, seal hatches as you go. Haul ass out of there.'
Lapeer said, 'This is history.'
The Russian had more bad news: 'Airlock cameras gone blind. If visitors boarding, can't see what they look like.'
'We can hear noises in the airlock,' Lapeer reported.
The Texan said, 'Sonofabitch, Lapeer, the cameras inboard of the airlock just died, too. This sucks like a sump pump. We can't see you anymore, either.'
Startled if not alarmed, Lapeer spoke in rapid French, then reverted to English: 'Something impossible is happening here-'
Maybe it was Arturo who said, 'What the shit-?'
Lapeer said, '-not opening the inner airlock hatch, but just, just phasing through it-'
'Say what?'
'- materializing right out of the steel-'
The Russian said, 'Computer shows that hatch closed.'
Sudden overwhelming terror reduced Emily Lapeer to the urgent, tremulous petitions of a frightened child: 'Sainte Marie, mcre de Dieu, non, non, benie Marie, non, sauvez-moi!'
Down there in the reception chamber of the space station, inboard of the airlock, Arturo began to scream in wordless horror-then in agony.
'Mcre de Dieu, sauvez-moi! Benie Marie, non, non, NON-'
Abruptly, Emily Lapeer's desperate prayer gave way to screams that matched the intensity of Arturo's.
Although she and Neil might be safer if they kept moving, Molly could not drive. Her ability to focus was stolen from her not by fear but by empathy, by pity. She braked to a stop and sat shaking.
Neil at once reached out to her. Grateful that she was not alone, grateful beyond expression, Molly seized his hand and held it tightly.
High above Earth, from various chambers of the space station, the crew shouted to one another over the open intercom system. At times they spoke English, and at times they reverted to their native tongues, but no matter what language they spoke, their questions and pleas were the same:
What's happening? where are you? can you hear me? are you there? what are they? what're they doing? why, where, how? keep them out! brace the door! no! help me! somebody! help me, God, help me! God! please, God, NO!
Then only screaming.
Maybe because the screams were twice removed-transmitted from orbit, recorded on tape or disc, replayed by the radio station-Molly was aware of subtle nuances of terror and agony and dread that she would not have heard if she had been present at the slaughter itself. The cries were first shrill and piercing, sharp with disbelief and denial, then grew more hoarse and terrible, before finally becoming wet, raw, the essence of misery. These were the tortured shrieks and sobs of men and women being slowly torn limb from limb, eviscerated by a patient evil that wanted time to savor its work.
After the invaders had progressed chamber by chamber from one end of the space station to the other, after every luckless member of the crew had been reduced to the wretched squeals of animals in the dung-splattered vestibule of a slaughterhouse, the victims fell silent, one by one, until the voice of a single astronaut cried down from that highest throne of human technology. His cry came through vacuum and stratosphere, through the last good day on one side of the planet and through the beginning of the longest night, through the gathering storm that, at the time of his suffering, had not yet begun to drown the earth, and his wail of agony came as a warning to the world, a clarion bell and bell vesper that tolled the final hour.
His lonely voice rang out one last time.
Silence followed, reverberant with the memory of terror.
Listening, Molly had been able to breathe only in quick shallow shudders, and now she held her breath entirely, head cocked, ear bent closer to the radio.
Out of the dead space station came a new voice-deep, silken, strange-with all the riveting power of a Presence summoned by forbidden incantations to a candle-encircled pentagram drawn with lamb's blood. It spoke in a language that perhaps had never before been heard on Earth.
'Yimaman see noygel, see refacull, see nod a bah, see naytoss, retee fo sellos.'
In addition to a love of words and a passion for poetry, Molly possessed the ability to memorize verse with ease, as a piano prodigy can hear a song just once and thereafter play it note for note. Those alien words had a rhythm reminiscent of poetry, and when the inhuman voice on the radio repeated what it had said, she murmured along with it:
'Yimaman see noygel, see refacull, see nod a bah, see naytoss, retee fo sellos.'
Although she knew nothing of their meaning, she sensed arrogance in those words: arrogance sharp with a sense of triumph, bitterness, blackest hatred, and rage beyond the capacity of the darkest of human hearts, rage beyond all understanding.
'Yimaman see noygel? see refacull? see nod a bah? see naytoss? retee fo sellos,' Molly said once more, though this time she spoke alone.
On the radio, dead air gave way to the voice of the agitated newsman: 'War of the worlds, America. Fight back, fight hard. If you have guns, use 'em. If you don't have guns, get 'em. If anyone out there in the government can hear me, for God's sake break out the nukes. There can be no surrender-'
Neil switched off the radio.
Rain. Rain. Rain.
Dead astronauts above and the tempest below.
Four miles to town-if the town still existed.
If not the town, then how far to fellowship, how far to people gathered in mutual defense?
'God have mercy on us,' Neil said, for he had been schooled by Jesuits.
Letting off the brake, driving once more, Molly refrained from praying for mercy because her faith had been sullied by primitive superstition: She feared that perverse fate would deny her what she asked for, and give her only what she did not request.
Yet, as was her nature, she still had hope. Her heart clenched like a fist around a nugget of hope; and if not as much as a nugget, then at least a pebble; and if not a pebble, a grain. But around a single grain of sand, an oyster builds a pearl.
Rain. Rain. Rain.
15
THE SECOND ABANDONED VEHICLE, A LINCOLN NAVIGATOR, stood in the northbound lane, facing the Explorer as it traveled southbound. The engine was idling, as had been the case with the Infiniti, and none of the tires was flat, suggesting that the SUV had in no way failed its driver.
The headlights were doused, but the emergency flashers flung off rhythmic flares, with stroboscopic effect, so that the million tongues of rain appeared to stutter, stutter in their fall.
On the Infiniti, three of four doors had stood open, but in this case only one. The rear door on the driver's side admitted rain and offered a view of the backseat illuminated by the Lincoln's interior lights.
'Neil, my God.'
Molly braked, stopped, as Neil said, 'What?'
The smeared glass in her door, the blurring rain, and the metronomic dazzle of the flashers all combined to deceive the eye, yet Molly knew what she saw, and knew what she must do.
'There's a child,' she said, shifting the Explorer into park. 'A baby.'
'Where?'
'On the backseat of that Navigator,' she said, and threw open her door.
'Molly, wait!'
If the rain was toxic, she had been poisoned beyond the hope of antidote when they had fled Harry Corrigan's
