Every day Nick was more and more himself. His fingers were emerging from the chocolate. Spots of white appeared on his shirt. Bit by bit, Nick was coming back from the brown. With it, however, came a sense of responsibility, and the kind of heartache he felt upon seeing Charlie go. It was almost easier being the simpleminded ogre, who understood little and had no depth to his emotions.
Since Nick had been given the cryptic message-if it was even a message at all-it left him as the new unofficial leader of the group. It had been a long time since Nick had been in a position of leadership.
“The king thinks the gods will direct him to Mary Hightower,” Jix said. “Which I might believe if the gods had actually spoken to him, but they didn’t.” He glanced over to Mikey, who got defensive.
“What are you looking at me for? I got him to go to war with my sister, didn’t I? Isn’t that what we were trying to do?”
“We need to figure out what Charlie was trying to say,” Nick reminded them.
“Why?” said Johnnie. “Why bother? I say we stay here after the freakin’ blimp leaves, and eat all the food king ‘Yakin’ Kook Moon’ leaves behind!”
“No, Nick is right,” said Jix. “We can’t just ignore it. If it came from the light, then it’s a message from the gods.”
“You mean God!” said Johnnie. “I might not remember my life, but I do know I went to Sunday school, so I know there ain’t a whole bunch of ‘gods,’ there’s only one, unless you mean the holy Trinity, which is kinda like one divided into three-and hey-I’ll bet that’s what Charlie meant. He saw the Holy Trinity when he looked into the light!”
Nick shook his head. “He couldn’t have seen anything yet-the tunnel’s like an air lock. By the time you see what’s there, it’s too late to tell anyone.”
“So the gods must mean something else,” said Jix.
“God, not gods!” insisted Johnnie.
Nick threw up his hands. “God, gods, or whatever,” said Nick. “Right now, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Jesus, or Kukulcan, or a dancing bear at the end of the tunnel. What matters is that we have a clue, and we have to figure it out.”
“Why?” Johnnie asked again. “Why does God-excuse me, I mean ‘the Light of Universal Whatever’-why does it just give us a freakin’ impossible clue? Why can’t it just tell us what we’re supposed to do?”
“Because,” said Mikey, “the Dancing Bear wants us to suffer.”
But Jix had a different opinion on the matter. “I think the Universe wants only to point us in a direction, not tell us what to do. If it tells us, then we’re not really choosing. It only means something if we choose it.”
“Yeah, but if we’re supposed to save the stinkin’ world, why make it so hard?” said Johnnie. “In fact, why make us do it at all? If ‘the light’ is all-powerful, then ‘the light’ oughta save the world itself, and leave us alone.”
“Maybe it doesn’t want to save the world,” said Nick.
Mikey laughed bitterly. “If that’s what you think, then why are you even here? You should join my sister; you’re in love with her anyway.”
“Just hear me out,” said Nick. “Mary wants to destroy the living world. We want to save it. The ‘Universal Whatever’ is willing to accept either outcome, so it makes the odds fifty-fifty.”
“ ‘Fifty-fifty’?” said Mikey. “If you ask me, Mary’s got the advantage right now.”
“So if you were the light at the end of the tunnel, how would you even out the odds?” Nick asked.
“I’d tell the losing side to get a clue!”
“Or,” said Nick, “you’d give them a clue…”
Nick’s thought left everyone speechless. Suddenly the temple around them began to actually feel like a temple, and although none of them worshipped at the same altar, there was a sudden singularity of purpose that bound them.
… Fat Alamo, the Trinity, Ground Zero…
“It’s places we’ve been,” said Mikey. “It has to be. Ground Zero is what the living call the place where Mary used to live. You know-the towers that gave her her name. And Jix was at the Alamo, right?
“So maybe we’re supposed to go back to those places,” offered Nick.
Johnnie pointed an oversize finger at Mikey. “I ain’t going back nowhere unless it’s where I started. And anyway, it don’t explain the Trinity.”
Jix scratched his whiskers and gave it more thought. “ Alamo is Spanish for a kind of tree…”
“So we’re looking for a fat tree?” asked Mikey.
“Perhaps.” Jix went over to one of the guards “?Donde hay un alamo gordo?”
The guard shrugged. “Los alamos son todos delgados.”
Suddenly something caught in Nick’s mind with such force, he thought his brain might be ecto-ripped right out of his head. “What did you just say?”
“I just asked him if he knows where-”
But Nick cut Jix off. “Los Alamos… Alamogordo! My God, I know what it means. I know exactly what it means!” They all looked at him, waiting, and Nick tried to keep his voice steady. “There’s this town in New Mexico called Alamogordo. It’s kind of famous if you’re a geek, and I think I was one, when I was alive. The thing is, Alamogordo has its own ‘ground zero.’ I imagine it would be like a giant deadspot-perfectly round.”
“Charlie and I saw that!” said Johnnie-O. “We passed right over it. It was weird-full of static and stuff.”
“That’s only two out of three,” Jix pointed out. “It doesn’t explain ‘the Trinity.’”
“Not THE Trinity-just ‘Trinity,’” Nick explained. “That’s the name of the site!”
“You figured it out!” said Mikey, slapping him on the back. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”
Nick swallowed nervously. “Trinity was a military test site.” And as he thought about it, all his remaining chocolate began to harden and crack like fused desert sand. “Mary’s going to the place where they tested the first atomic bomb.”
In her book My Struggle: The Quest for a Perfect World, Mary Hightower writes, “Destiny is the sum of the choices that God knows we’ll make.”
For once, Allie the Outcast doesn’t disagree, but she adds, “Not even Einstein can do that kind of math.”
PART SEVEN
Journada de Muerto
E=MC2
T here are about three hundred billion stars to a galaxy, and more than eighty billion galaxies in the known universe. That means that if only one in a million planets can support life, and one in a million of those actually has life, and one in a million of those planets has intelligent life… then there are at least one and a half million civilizations out there.
Of course, chances are they’ll never find one another, being so spread out in time and space. Yet all of these civilized worlds have distinct similarities when it comes to the works and wisdom of the living, namely, the “befores” and “afters” that define every intelligent world: before and after the harnessing of fire before and after written language before and after the smelting of iron
But above and beyond all of these is the single most important milestone of all: before and after a world discovers the ability to lower the number of life-sustaining planets by one.
On July 16, 1945, the human race reached the single most important man-made moment in its history. In the Jornada de Muerto -“Journey of Death”-desert, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, mankind discovered the power to end all life on earth. Until that moment, it had only been an idea, a mathematical calculation in the minds of geniuses who could theorize a step beyond the average individual. But on that fateful day, the smartest minds in the world, funded by the wealthiest nation in the world, toward the end of the most devastating war the world had ever known, turned theory into reality.
