Lucifer's Lottery

six billion gallons of Bloodwater; and when, on his next stroke forward, he happened to glance up—

Several unhelmed Conscripts seemed . . . out of sorts.

Their hair was standing on end.

“For Satan’s sake, Favius! Swim faster! The Merge is about to take place, and if you’re in the water when that happens—”

Favius didn’t hear the rest. Just as his hand would grab hold of a ladder rung—

The ladder disappeared, and so did the retaining wall and the ramparts and the bloodred sky and the black sickle moon and everything else in the rest of Hell.

(II)

Dorris felt dizzy; she felt terrified. What was happening? When she’d first looked at herself in the bait-house mirror, her blazing white hair—feet long—stood on end and stuck out like an aura. Initially she’d thought she was being electrocuted but her rubber flip-flops stood on a perfectly dry wood-plank floor.

When she’d rushed outside, the dizziness—and her terror—quadrupled. That smell! Like an electric motor overrunning, and then the simple feel of the lake and its surroundings. Nothing looked wrong, but it all felt wrong. It reminded her of a bad trip way back in her acid days.

Oh, my God almighty, she groaned to herself. Her slim legs propelled her quickly to the end of the dock. A crisp, cloudless twilight pressed down, a slice of moon radiating. The immense lake sat still, rippleless—surreal in some distinctly unpleasant way. The sudden silence, too, struck her as unpleasant. Summer evenings on the lake brought an absolute ruckus of cricket choruses and night bird songs, but now?

Nothing but proverbial pin-drop silence.

Impossible, Dorris knew.

The wheelchair sitting at the dock-end reminded her of the day’s only rental customer. That young man who can’t walk . . . So she’d called him on the emergency walkie-talkie—she had to know if the lake’s abrupt strangeness was only in her mind—something she almost hoped was true—but his own observations confirmed her own.

What is going ON?

It had been over a half hour ago that she’d called him in. Had he had some medical problem? Surely his arms were strong enough to row the boat back in less time than that. She stood tense and straining on the dock, her eyes pressed into the binoculars, but even in the strong moonlight, she couldn’t see him.

Please, please, son! Get yer ass back here . . .

Was it the first true premonition of her life? As her stomach twitched, and that stiff, ozonelike smell sharpened, Dorris knew that something was going to happen.

When she scanned along the lake’s coast, she noticed that the usual folks that always fished at night were packing up and hightailing it out. Clearly, they sensed the same inexplicable thing that Dorris did, yet she couldn’t imagine what that thing was. Then—

There! she thought. Her implants jounced when she shot to her tiptoes; in the binoculars’ hourglass viewing field, she could make out the tiny form of the paralyzed man rowing through a pool of moonlight.

The loudest sound she’d ever heard erupted next, not an explosion, not the earsplitting sound that accompanied a massive lightning bolt, but something more like timber splitting or a colossal tree cracking as it was felled. The sound urged Dorris to scream louder than she ever had in her life but even that couldn’t be heard over the monstrous cracking . . .

Then came a single, concussive BOOM!

Had a bomb actually been dropped on the lake? The notion was absurd, but what else could it be? A terrorist attack? Here, of all places? Not that Dorris could think deductively at the moment; terror and confusion obfuscated all rational thought. In the vicious boom’s wake came some sort of displacement of air that slammed her in the stomach, lifted her out of her flip-flops, and flung her down the dock, screaming all the way. She landed hard on her back. All the wind blurted out of her lungs, and when the back of her head smacked the dock, she blacked out at once.

It must’ve been a dream—a nightmare—that dropped into her mind during the brief period of unconsciousness: a nightmare of sounds . . .

The sounds were screams, screams of human slaughter en masse—indeed, screams from another world. A deafening waterfall of relentless human and unhuman agony as though millions of people in a thousand different cities were being butchered in place all at the same time, a sound, a living blare that raged and raged and raged through some incomprehensible rent in the sky . . .

Silence, then.

Though it seemed like hours, it was only a minute or two that passed before Dorris regained consciousness. Memories dripped slowly back into her awareness yet her daze kept them from making sense. She rolled over, tried to rise to hands and knees but then collapsed back down, heaving. She reeled as if seasick, and now, as she blinked back more and more consciousness, she noticed not only the dead-calm silence but also a deep earthy odor just short of a stench that now replaced the previous ozone smell. An odor like low, low tide . . .

Several more attempts proved to her that she couldn’t yet stand. But I can crawl, she thought, determined, and crawl she did, on her palms and knees, back down the dock.

That man, she kept thinking. The handicapped man. Was he still out on the lake when that awful sound had struck?

At the end of the dock, the wheelchair still sat, and so did the walkie-talkie. She reached for it, but then her hand fell away limp as she looked outward at the same time.

Dorris’s soul seemed to flatten like a ping-pong ball under a hammer blow . . .

She used a mooring post to steady herself as she slowly rose back to her feet. The low-tide odor hung everywhere, dense as steam. But that was not what made her eyes feel stripped of their lids. That was not what wiped her cognizance clean as chalk marks off slate.

It was the lake.

Dorris stood paralyzed, staring.

Lake Misquamicus was empty. What stretched all about her now was a shallow crater lined by glistening black silt, limp waterweeds, and scores of remnant fish flapping helpless in mud. Every single one of the lake’s six billion gallons was gone.

(III)

Gerold could not conceive of a way to assess what he’d experienced, save to say that it was not like waking up. He wasn’t even sure if he’d lost consciousness. I was in the boat, I was rowing back to the dock . . . Then—

There’d been an horrendous cracking noise, then a boom.

And now he was here.

Madness, he thought now. He was still in the boat, and when he looked over the side he saw that he was still on the lake, only the lake . . .

Madness, madness, madness . . .

The lake was somewhere else now.

One moment he’d been looking at the glittering twilight over Lake Misquamicus, but now he was looking at a sky the color of deoxygenated blood. And the sickle moon was now radiant black, not radiant white.

Screaming never occurred to him when he squinted out in every direction. The water in which the rowboat floated was surrounded by endless black walls pocked with towers like castle ramparts, and along those ramparts men, or things like men, prowled about. Men—soldiers—in strange, horned helmets, wielding pikes and swords. Larger figures could be seen interspersed, plodding, drab things with barely any faces . . .

What the fuck is this?