a figment of Kevin's imagination and be blotted out forever.
Josh screamed a single thought as he fell into Kevin's mind. 'Break!' he cried to the glasses, praying that, for once, his wish would be stronger than Kevin's.
And then, a moment later, Josh Wilson ceased to exist.
Deep in his mind, Kevin felt Josh's wish ringing in his head. Then he felt the moment when Josh was gone, and the agony was too much to bear.
'Stop!' Kevin wailed, just as the glasses split in half and blew off his face. The force of the explosion threw him to the ground.
His head was spinning as if he had just leapt from the Vomit Wheel at the amusement park. Everything was peaceful and calm. No wind, no sound. Nothing.
When he dared to open his eyes, he knew the glasses were truly gone from his face, for everything was fuzzy and out of focus.
What Kevin could see of the town below was not a pretty sight. It was still there, but it looked distorted, as if it had been squeezed through a fun-house mirror. It was not daytime, nor nighttime, but both at once. Through dense clouds of many colors, Kevin swore he made out not one but three different sources of light, as if the sun had multiplied itself.
And nothing was moving.
As once before, the silence that filled the air around him was unnatural.
'Josh?' he called, hoping beyond hope that he would be there. He wasn't.
Fragments of the shattered glasses were strewn everywhere, the powerful lenses useless at last. Kevin listened for a sound, any sound that would break the stillness, but there was nothing.
And then it occurred to him what his last command to the glasses had been.
Just before the glasses had exploded from his face, Kevin had yelled,
Everything, that is, except for Kevin Midas.
16
9:42
Nothing moved.
Leaves and bits of paper that had been spinning in the wind now hung in the air, and gravity was too lazy to pull them down. They stirred slightly as Kevin brushed past, but otherwise they had no more reason to move than all those clocks frozen at forty-two minutes past the hour.
The air was scentless and flavorless as Kevin toured his neighborhood. The people he came across were fixed in their places like mannequins, with eyes open but unseeing, hearts frozen between beats.
All this belonged to Kevin now: a kingdom stretching out in all directions, with no one to threaten Kevin's dominion. Yet as he strolled through the wealthiest mansions in town, he knew there was nothing to be found here that he really wanted. It had been that way ever since his first experiments with the glasses. It seemed the more he had, the more he felt was missing, and now that he had everything, he felt as if he had nothing. An overwhelming sense of emptiness cried out from inside him.
The sickness had already begun to come on—that sickness of
By the time he reached his house, it was already turning him inside out. His head pounded like never before, his temperature was climbing, his teeth already ached from chattering, and if anything had been in his stomach, it wouldn't have stayed there very long. Kevin lay down upon his bed, and as he did, a vision came to him like a mirage in a parched desert.
They had exploded, but the pieces were already drawing themselves together on the top of that hill—for they could be disabled, but never, never destroyed. Even as he thought it, Kevin knew it to be true.
But Kevin clamped down his chattering teeth and uttered a single word to his empty room.
'No!' he said.
He would honor Josh's memory. He would resist the powerful pull.
This time he would suffer through whatever awaited him here at the end of time, and he would face it without the glasses.
Kevin closed his eyes and lay like that, in the midst of the sickness, barely able to think or move, until, in the timeless silence, he heard someone knocking on a door.
Kevin thought it was some sort of hallucination. His droopy eyelids lifted part way, and he waited until he heard it again.
Kevin hauled himself out of his bed and into the hallway of many doors.
It came from the second door to the right—a heavy whitewashed oak door that rattled each time it was rapped upon.
Kevin had sparked out quite a few entrances to many places, and he had no idea where this particular door led.
If Kevin was the last soul on earth, then who was knocking on the door? The terror of the thought did battle with Kevin's curiosity.
His curiosity won. Kevin grabbed the brass knob and turned until the mechanism clicked.
A breeze pushed its way through as the door opened, smelling sweetly of spring grass and trees. A man stood at the threshold. He was lean and good-looking, with a face not unlike Kevin's father's, only younger—he was twenty-three or twenty-four at the most. He wore a bathrobe.
Kevin thought he knew who this was, although he never expected Him to look like this. Under normal circumstances, Kevin would have felt awe and amazement—but then, under normal circumstances, he wouldn't have come face to face with God in a bathrobe. Now, as things stood, Kevin was simply too sick and too exhausted to feel anything at all.
The visitor at his threshold, on the other hand, seemed awed enough for both of them. He looked around at the walls and at the hole where the bathroom had been with childlike wonder. 'Wow,' he said.
'I'm sorry,' said Kevin. 'I'm sorry I screwed up so bad.'
'You look like crap,' said his guest. 'You should be in bed.' Then he took Kevin in his arms and brought him back to his bedroom, where he laid Kevin down and covered him with a blanket. The man introduced himself as 'Brian,' and said he had come a long way. 'I'm sorry,' croaked Kevin again.
'Save it,' said Brian. He went to wet a towel and then used it to blot Kevin's head. 'You'll be sick for a
