Shuttered Sky

“We get to tear it open again.”

Lourdes knew if they succeeded, it would mean a slow and painful end to the human condition, as if afflicted by some terminal disease.

A disease, thought Lourdes, is that what these creatures are? She couldn’t shake the thought, and yet when she dug down to mine her feelings about it, she found she did not care. To her, the human race was already dead. In that, perhaps she was not all that different from these creatures of darkness posing as light—for if she was a luminous spirit, why did she feel so black at her core?

Up above a reconnaissance plane flew past, toward the three dead warships that had run aground ten miles up the coast.

“Tearing open the sky . . . ' Lourdes said. “I can’t wait.” Then she effortlessly gripped the hands of the pilot in the low-flying plane, forc­ing them forward, and she and Memo watched as the plane plunged into the sea.

32. Web Of Shadows

Michael and Tory’s flight to Sicily was a lesson in Eu­ropean geography. What Michael expected to be a brutally long flight aboard Tessic’s jet was a mere puddle jump. Two hours from Warsaw to Palermo and by late afternoon they were received at Tessic’s villa on the north shore of the Island.

“Is there a place where this guy doesn’t have a villa?” Michael had asked as the housekeeper walked him and Tory through, pointing out the many amenities. There was no fog here—and although a chill filled the air when they had arrived, it had become a sullen breeze. Now that the weather was permitting, the glass wall of the living room was slid open, leaving a vast Mediterranean view as their fourth wall, and the distant shore of Italy to mark the horizon.

Michael and Tory sat out on the verandah, taking a late lunch, feeling guilty about it—but not too guilty. This was, after all the first real reprieve they had—not just since being revived, but since the nightmare at Hoover Dam, and the heady hell of being addicted to their own power. “Who says we have to find Lourdes,” Michael said, devouring some delicious Italian dish he could not name. “Let’s just stay here, sponging off of Tessic, and watch the world end from our balcony.” He was only half kidding.

“Won’t work,” Tory told him. “World’s ending to the east; the balcony faces north.” Tory wasn’t eating. Instead she was still exam­ining the silverware, too embarrassed to complain to the help about the spots, but too obsessive to use them. Well, thought Michael, our experiences left us all with some quirks.

“Lourdes is on the island, east of here,” Tory told him. “Not all that far.”

Michael did not want to be reminded.

“She’s up to something horrible,” Tory went on. “I can feel her like a short circuit.”

Michael had to admit her presence did feel different. One of them, and yet not. Winston had warned them about her—that she was not the girl they remembered—that she had let herself become evil. He thought to when he had first met Lourdes. She had been a bitter outcast, so frighteningly obese, she inspired fear rather than sympathy. Hatred and anger were not new emotions to her—she had hated with a riveting, heart-stopping intensity even back then. She could have killed any number of classmates and teachers with the intensity of her hatred. But then, for a time, anger gave way to self-indulgence, as it had for all of them. What then of Lourdes’s self- indulgence? Had that matured into something worse? Had it fused with her anger into some­thing even more lethal than the gluttonous parasite that had once en­slaved her?

“They say she kills people,” said Tory. “Hundreds at a time. For pleasure.” She shivered at the thought. “I can’t imagine it.”

“Keep talking and you’ll ruin this wonderful warming trend.” And indeed, Michael could feel the temperature dropping. It wasn’t just the presence of Lourdes that bothered him—it was the Vectors. Every­thing inside him was screaming panic—but he was strong enough now to box those emotions. He’d be damned if he’d let them ruin his moderate mood. And so, when sunset came, he streaked the sky with wispy cirrus—a trick he had perfected back at San Simeon for his adoring throng a week—no—a year before. The swatches of clouds soaked in the colors of sunset, painting the whole sky in vivid oranges and blues, resolving to violet. When the spectacle was done, Tory led him to the bedroom for a syntaxis of two.

“We’ll set out to find her in the morning,” Tory said. “But we owe ourselves this one night.”

They lay down on the bed fully clothed at first. Michael had hoped that the right set of circumstances would ignite his scarred libido, but it wasn’t happening, and as she pressed against him, slipping her hand into his shirt to feel his heartbeat against her palm, he grew uneasy.

“I want to be with you,” she whispered to him, and although he felt his heart pouring out, the passion moved no lower.

“I can’t,” he told her, taking her hand from the lip of his jeans. “I used up all my lust a long time ago. Didn’t save anything for a rainy day . . . or a starry night.”

She giggled, as if she were drunk. Is she drunk on me? he thought.

“I still want to be with you,” she said.

“I don’t think you understand.”

“Yes, I do.” Then she undressed herself, and undressed him. He was glad it was dark, so she couldn’t see the humiliation in his face at his own flaccidness.

“I told you,” he said. “DOA.”

“And I told you, I don’t want it anyway.”

She moved her hand up his thigh, and although it brushed past his groin, it continued past, never her destination. She ran her hands across his chest, his neck and shoulders. She sifted her fingers through his dark hair, and in a moment his hands were on her as well. Like her, he found his hands had no destination; the path itself was the pleasure. It was as if she were teaching him how to touch a woman all over again—and he who had seduced more girls than he could count from the earliest days of his volcanic pubescence. Those were days of a dark fire— when he was enslaved by his own parasitic beast, feeding on a lust that consumed him, drove him. His whole being had wired itself to feed that lust, and everything he did and thought was filtered through the beast’s glowing turquoise eyes. When he had finally killed it, it exacted a heavy price. It stole from him not only his lust, but his passion, leaving him an emotional eunuch. Seventeen, and never to be a whole man.

But here he was, naked in Tory’s arms, and somehow she had found a way to turn his impotence into a virtue. Love without lust. She made his jaded spirit feel clean and pure.

She kept running her hands over him until there was not a spot on his body left untouched. Her touch coated him now like a second skin, and although he could still feel the looming threat of Lourdes and the Vectors, for this brief moment, they felt muted and distant.

“I love you,” he told her. He could not remember ever telling anyone that.

She kissed him and rested her head on his chest. “Hold me,” she whispered. “Hold me like you did when we died.”

He did, and this time he was determined not to let go.

* * *

The first indication that something was amiss was the state of traffic. The main Sicilian highway that lead east toward Taormina was flooded with traffic heading west. It seemed to Tory that she and Michael were the only ones going against the trend. Their driver stopped to ask what the trouble was, but everyone had a different story. Some said a battleship had run aground and was leaking radiation. Funny, because battleships were not nuclear powered. Another spoke of disease—smallpox, Ebola, and even a new invention; il Morte Aspettare—the standing death—something downright medieval for this new dark age. Yet another spoke of poisoned earth. She’s become poison. Isn’t that what Winston had said, Tory thought. Apparently the driver, who was on Tessic’s payroll, was not paid enough for this. He aban­doned the car and thumbed his way in the other direction, leaving Michael to take the wheel. The weather stayed clear, but the winds blew chilly.

“I’m not ashamed to tell you that I’m scared,” Tory said. Which was probably not what Michael wanted to