The Heavens Rise

monster out of—”

“I was not trying to make a monster. I was trying to make her.”

“Millie. Your wife . . .”

“They’re memories. They look like nightmares. But they are memories. Living memories. They are fusions of human form and memory and I thought if the process could be refined, we could . . .” His breath left him and he licked his lips desperately, which seemed to bring no moisture to them at all. “Our test subjects were abducted and confined and interrogated; of course they gave birth to monsters. And Millie had suffered the worst trauma of her entire life that night, of course she gave birth to a monster. But what if, what if it could be done another way? What if what appeared to be the great and terrible limitation of Nikki’s power could be used to unleash true magic on the world, instead of living hell?”

“You were trying to bring back the dead.”

“I was trying to give life and form to a memory,” Noah said. He pointed to the photographs at their feet. “That woman, she’s the mother who molested one of our subjects when he was five years old. That dog, that’s the pit bull that attacked our other subject when he was fourteen, the one he could never get out of his head. And my wife . . . my wife ended up merged with the snake Marshall Ferriot put in our car. Memories, all of them. Every experiment, every last one. So I picked the man whose memories of my wife were as full of love and longing as mine, and I brought him to a place where she would rise to the surface of his consciousness. And then I reached into his soul. If that qualifies me as bringing back the dead, then so be it. Then that’s what I was trying to do.”

“And you failed,” Ben whispered.

Noah’s face wrinkled, and after a few seconds, what Ben thought was a sneer turned into the threat of a sob. He pulled his shirt up over his chest and the wounds Ben saw there were as fearsome-looking as the carcass swinging by chains a few feet away. He’d seen photos of great white shark attacks that looked similar, but the worst parts were the bands of blue and dark green on the perimeter of the giant bite mark that covered half of his chest, his entire side and the lower part of his back. They weren’t bruising; they were signs of infection which would explain the weakness and the shivering Noah was suffering from on top of everything else.

“There’s no way that thing could—”

“Oh, no. This, this lovely creature was my third attempt. The first was decidedly more reptilian in nature, as you can see from my wounds.”

“Your third attempt at . . . what? Millie?”

“No. I’d given up by then. I was trying to turn him back. But he didn’t make it.”

“You’re dying, aren’t you?”

Noah let his shirt slide back down over his injuries, and when he turned to face Ben, his eyes were glassy with barely contained tears. “I’m done. There’s a difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re all dying. Every last one of us. Me? I’m actually ready to be dead. And that’s fitting, isn’t it? I’ve been legally dead for years.” Noah closed the distance between, and in the bright glare of the fluorescent lights, Ben could see for the first time how sallow the man’s features were. His lips were so dry they looked ready to slough from his face. “I don’t expect you not to judge me. Or not to hate me, even. But whatever choice you make, know this, little Ben Broyard. I am your prologue. And so is Nikki. She used to think we’d hand over everything to you once the time came, or if we were ever discovered or found out. All she wanted you to do was tell our story. But I’ve been watching you, Ben, and I can see now you have the power to continue it. And I’m going to let you. On one condition.”

Noah paused, and despite his stern and aggressive tone of voice, one of the tears he’d tried to contain slipped down his cheek. “You must do what she failed to do, what she lacked the courage to do. You must stop Marshall Ferriot.”

•   •   •

A choice, this last thought was still filtering through his consciousness when Ben opened his eyes and found himself staring down at cloudy, mustard-colored water. After a few seconds, like the pixels of an old Magic Eye, the tumbles of flesh-colored particles, many of them flocking together in pulsating clumps, seemed to resolve, and he realized he was standing on the service walkway above a large aquarium tank, another exhibit in the ruined zoo Noah Delongpre had taken as refuge.

There was a service walkway that made a U along the tank’s sides and back. Off to his left was a floor that sloped abruptly, probably the ceiling over the walkway tourists had once filed through to get a look through the tank’s glass.

Noah had driven Ben to the walkway’s far end, and was standing between him and the service door on the opposite side of the tank.

“Why give me the choice?” Ben called out to him.

“Because you won’t put it to good use if I force it on you.”

And then the door opened on the other side of the tank, and she was there. She was taller, her hair thicker and darker than it had ever been in her youth, no longer the honey shade it had been when he’d used to run a brush through it late at night as she dozed off in his lap. And her face was longer and more angular and there was a hardness to her slanted cat-eyes that hadn’t been there before. And when she saw him standing just steps from the tank and the surging, tumbling infestation laced through its cloudy water, her lips parted but no sound came out that he could hear. Indeed, what he heard instead was a shuffling sound, and when he looked to Noah, he saw that the man had taken out a small gun and placed the barrel against his right temple, while balancing his other hand on his cane.

“That’s the other thing, Ben,” Noah called out. “The other limitation. You can only drive one person at a time. So sometimes, you have to make choices. Hard choices.”

Nikki shook her head back and forth, but her expression was one of mild, mature disapproval.

“Enough,” she said quietly.

“Of what, dear?” Noah asked his daughter. Then, to Ben, he said, “She can’t decide, you see. Which one of us to stop, that is. And the risks of driving either one of us are already so great to begin with—”

“Enough, Dad. Please.”

Still pressing the gun to his own head, Noah looked into Ben’s eyes. What he was searching for in them, Ben couldn’t be exactly sure.

Was it some roiling evidence of Ben’s constant desire, there since the first day he could remember, to be a bigger and more physically powerful man than he would ever be? Was it some evidence of the lifelong terror he’d felt most of his life, always fearing some form of attack on his very being, fearing that his only real defense—his sharp tongue—would offer no protection against pipes and bottles and guns? Or was it Ben’s ceaseless desire to change the very flow of the world around him, to alter the course of rivers so that they flowed toward the sunlight of truth? Was it the memories of those ruined and shamed women, clinging to the rafters of their flooded homes in the Lower Ninth Ward or cowering in their attics, terrified to let the floodwaters touch them again, even as Ben and Marissa had goaded them on—Come on, girl. Come to the boat. It’s okay. Were Ben’s lips moving as he remembered those awful scenes, as he thought to himself how the water beneath him now was as clouded and menacing and dark as the water that had blanketed his city that week?

What was her name? he thought. The one who was too afraid, the one who never swam for the boat. The one who stayed behind because she thought the water would go down soon and she could just walk out of her house as if the levees had never failed. The one who died of dehydration. If only I could have made her swim . . .

 . . . I could make them swim.

He realized he’d said these words aloud only when he felt the breath of them move across his lips. Then Noah Delongpre smiled, and nodded slightly.

“And now it begins,” Noah said.

The gunshot knocked him backward, the blood spray painting the wall behind him a split second later, and then Nikki was screaming and racing down the walkway. And Ben felt as if he were floating up and out of his skin and bone. But there was no darkness, no sense of missing time, no sense of having his soul pulled from him by a force he could barely comprehend. All he saw was Noah Delongpre’s final, barely perceptible nod. Then the water