tightly.
'We'll be okay,' she said. 'God told me so.'
Isaac said to Dipes, 'What did God tell you?'
'God's not talking to me,' Dipes said.
Starlene tried one more time, asking God for strength if it be His will, and the voice came to her from the rear of the cell. She turned to the dark corners and saw the Miracle Woman, ethereal, whole, smiling.
'I, too, prayed to God,' the Miracle Woman said. 'Every night. Even after the doctors gave me injections and I was out of my mind.'
'You died here, didn't you? In Wendover?' she said aloud, even though the Miracle Woman's words came into her head without the benefit of sound.
'Who are you talking to?' Isaac said. 'One of your ghosts?'
The Miracle Woman grew more solid, radiant. Clothed in what looked to be a gown of sheer silver.
Isaac gasped. 'I see her.'
'Have a little faith, Isaac,' the Miracle Woman said. 'Miracles happen every day.'
'Are… are you an angel?' Dipes asked.
She smiled. 'Whatever you believe. Someday you'll understand, but not too soon, I hope.'
'You're here to help us,' Starlene said.
'I'm here to help us,' she said, her voice hollow yet soothing. 'The ones who have been disturbed from our rest.'
'What do we do now?' Starlene said.
The Miracle Woman smiled again, her eyes kind, suffused with a strange light that reminded Starlene of a candle behind smoked glass. 'Look inside. Then you'll know. And, Edmund, the answer is at your fingertips.'
The Miracle Woman faded back into darkness.
'A lot of help that was,' Isaac said. 'Like some sappy line from Touched by an Angel, where your problems get solved just in time for the commercial break. And nobody's hair even gets messed up.'
Starlene looked out the cell door at Mills feverishly working the computer keyboard, punching in commands. The chaotic wisps of spirits swirled around him, a maelstrom of scattered soul-threads. Kracowski, his lower lip swollen and his scalp bleeding, crawled to McDonald. The utility lights above the holding tanks pulsed unevenly, as if the drain on the electrical grid was threatening a meltdown.
Then Dipes said, 'Hey, look what I found,' and pressed something into her hand.
A pistol.
FORTY-EIGHT
'You little shit, you never did appreciate what I gave you,' Dad said.
Freeman shivered, and the deadscape beyond the bridge became more tempting than ever. He could drown in that lightlessness and not care. He could face dying, he didn't mind going into the dark, as long as he was with Vicky. But not with Dad hanging around smart or crazy enough to split himself, keep one half back mere in the real world and the other here in the deadscape.
'So you think you're going to take this little sack of vomit with you?' Dad triptrapped them both. He turned toward Vicky, his soul sharp around the edges, his form ten feet tall, his fingers ready to rip into anything that smacked of unity.
'Leave her alone,' Freeman triptrapped.
'Ah, finally growing some balls, Trooper? You were so easy to control, you pathetic little puke. I tried it on other people, even your mother, but nobody rolled over like you did. You opened up your mind and invited me in, dared me to play with it.'
'That was a long time ago. I was just a little boy. How could I know what was going on?'
Dad's laughter tore across the deadscape, making the darkness rattle, pulling the cloak of eternal night closer around them. 'Still trying to blame others, huh, Freeman? All your miserable life, you've been telling yourself it's not your fault. Well, Shit for Brains, it is your fault.'
Dad turned back to Vicky, and the force of his triptrap seared through both of them. 'So he finally told you, didn't he, lard-ass? It's all true, except for that part where he said I was the one who made him do it. Truth is, you always wanted to kill her, didn't you, Freeman? It was your idea, and you built this little fantasy where I was the one who made you do it. You can't out-shrink me, can you, Trooper?'
Freeman wished he could slip back into his flesh and suffer some ordinary pain. He didn't want to die like this, with the guilt pressing on him, a blame that would follow him beyond death forever.
Vicky's thoughts swept into him, crowding Dad's. 'Hang on, Freeman. Whatever happened it's over now.'
'Over?' Dad triptrapped a psychic tornado. 'It's only beginning. Mind control doesn't have to end just because your heart stops. Thanks to Kracowski, I can mess with you for the rest of eternity.'
In a flash, Freeman saw a vision of what Dad had in store, a timeless future where Dad raped Vicky and made Freeman watch, where he shoved doughnuts into her mouth, where Dad brought Mom back to life so Freeman could kill her over and over again, where the insane dead people threw their tortured thoughts into Freeman's head where all the pain of all the souls in the world could be his. A hell in his head.
The vision fell away and he was back on the bridge, Vicky receding on the far end, the bridge flickering and fading beneath them, Dad's dark soul swelling, merging with the greater blackness beyond joining the deadscape, becoming it, taking on a power that surrounded everything, that built a universe where there was no room for light or peace.
The edges of the deadscape quivered, monsters moaned from their hidden holes, ghosts whispered sorrows, despair rained in gray and washed the bridge away. The darkness ate at Freeman, nibbled him with its teeth, and he was tired, ready to surrender, because Dad was right.
It was his fault. And he deserved every kind of punishment that Dad could dream up.
As he closed the eyes of his soul, a bolt of lightning juiced through him, an electroshock of energy.
'We can beat him,' Vicky said, flooding his head, filling him up. 'Together.'
Filling him up and up and up.
FORTY-NINE
Starlene pressed her damp palm around the gun. Was this the answer to her prayer? A sign from God?
God didn't send you anything you couldn't handle.
What could she do? There didn't appear to be a safety switch. She knew how to point and pull the trigger, but could she actually shoot another human being?
'I see another future,' Dipes said.
'Great,' Isaac said. 'Please tell me in this one we all live happily ever after, even the Jews.'
'That never happens in any future.'
'Well, how about this? Starlene makes like one of Charlie's Angels and blows away the bad guys.'
'Sort of. Except, we better get out of the basement.'
'Because it's going to collapse, right?'
'No. Because it's all going to be a deadscape.'
Starlene said, 'You guys head for the stairs. I'll be right behind you. I have to do something first.'
Isaac grabbed Dipes's hand and Starlene pushed the two of them into the corridor. The basement was a crazed kaleidoscope of lights and noise. She waited until she saw the stairwell door swing closed, then slipped to the opening of the main area, where the lights strobed and the machinery whined. She peered down the corridor and saw Kracowski slumped to the floor, holding his head in his hands. McDonald lay inert by the cell where Vicky and Freeman were locked away. The large curved panels, like something off a space station, shook with whatever
