Here and there along the battle’s front line, enormous plumes of steam gushed up where the ocean quenched the mountain’s fire, and from behind the lines, on the mountain’s slopes, clouds of smoke arose.
The helicopter crossed the coastline and began moving up the flank of the mountain. Below, most of the terrain was barren lava without so much as an inch of topsoil covering it, though here and there a few scrubby bushes had gained a foothold. Almost everywhere Michael looked, steam or smoke belched forth from deep within the mountain’s bowels. The air reeked with the acrid smell of sulfur.
He sucked it deep into his lungs, feeling the warmth that spread through his body as he absorbed the fumes. “Where are we going?” he shouted.
“The pilot says there’s a clearing where he can set the chopper down,” Rob told them. “The idea’s to get you as close to these vents as possible.”
In the distance, and two hundred feet above them, flames rose out of a crater like a beacon. As the pilot guided the chopper higher, rising above the caldera, they saw for the first time its demonic contents. Lava boiled with the fury of hell, flames leaped across its surface, evil fountains of molten rock shot high into the air, some of them breaking apart to drop back into the churning cauldron, others exploding into brilliant bursts of sparkling embers that drifted on the wind before cooling to the point where their fiery glow died away.
The heat rose in waves, and above the gaping, hellish maw into which Michael was gazing, the air itself shimmered and danced. The flames took on a hypnotic quality that wrapped itself around Michael’s mind until he was staring at the spectacle with unblinking fascination.
Only when the helicopter began to drop down toward the ground, and the lip of the caldera once more hid its fires from his view, did Michael finally turn away to see where they were going. A minute later the helicopter settled into something that seemed to him like an oasis in the desert of fire and lava. Somehow, in the vagaries of its flow, the lava had left a clearing in which stood a grove of scraggly kiave trees. On the ground, miraculously, a thin covering of grass still survived.
Near the center of the clearing there was a fire pit, built of a circle of rocks very much like the one in the ravine where his mother had uncovered the skeleton.
Beyond the fire pit were the ruins of a hut, its walls also built of lava, its roof long since caved in.
The chopper settled onto the ground and the pilot cut the engine. As the roar died away and the great rotor slowed to a stop, an eerie silence fell over the four people inside.
“What is this place?” Michael finally asked.
“Used to be a campground,” the pilot explained. “This is all that’s left of it. It’s about the only place around here that’s still safe to land. Everywhere else, you don’t know what’s under you.”
Katharine, feeling oddly disoriented by the sudden quiet, looked uncertainly at Michael, as if perhaps his breathing might have been somehow dependent on the power of the helicopter’s engine. “Well?” she asked.
Pushing open the door, Michael scrambled out of the cabin and dropped to the ground, then turned and grinned at his mother. “I can breathe!” he yelled. “It worked! I can breathe!” Almost as quickly as his grin had come, though, it faded. His eyes flicked around the desolate landscape, taking in the darkness that was laced with patches of glowing fire and swirling smoke and fumes. “Is this the way it’s going to be from now on?” he asked, his voice quavering despite his effort to control it. “Is this where I’m going to have to live the rest of my life?”
Katharine’s eyes met Michael’s and she felt a terrible sense of dread come over her.
She had no answer for him.
CHAPTER 34
Katharine and Rob sat side by side, very close together, a few feet from the small campfire the helicopter pilot had built. The pilot himself was hunkered down opposite them, poking at the fire with a stick. He was a lanky man, tall and skinny, named Arnold Berman—“but everybody calls me Puna”—whom Katharine judged to be in his mid-twenties.
The wind had shifted, flushing some of the fumes from the small clearing, and Michael, his chest starting to hurt, had gone off in search of a fumarole, where the smoke and gases boiling up from deep beneath the crust of the earth would ease the pain in his lungs and give him the strength that oxygen no longer could. Katharine, terrified of losing sight of him even for a moment, wanted to go with him, but Rob stopped her.
“Let him be, Kath,” he’d said. “Whatever happens to him — however this turns out — he’s going to have to deal with it. And so are you and I.”
As exhausted mentally as she was physically, Katharine had reluctantly settled back, but ten minutes later she wished she hadn’t, for as the first flush of victory at having rescued Michael from Takeo Yoshihara’s estate began to fade, the full horror of her son’s condition set in. The alien landscape seemed to be closing in on her, with its perimeters oddly lit by tongues of flame that flicked up from the fire pits, while all around her there was a strange pulsating glow from the lava flows. When Puna had built the small fire, she’d been drawn to it less for its warmth than for its familiarity, and as the little fire seemed to hold the demons surrounding them at bay, she looked at the man who had flown them here, studying him for the first time.
His dirty-blond hair was long, and he wore the standard Maui uniform of shorts, T-shirt, and sandals. He looked far more like a beach bum than a helicopter pilot. “Is there any way I can ever thank you enough for what you did tonight?”
Puna shrugged. “Ken Richter was my best friend. We came to Maui together. If what Rob says is true, I wish I’d had a bomb to dump on that prick’s place after we picked you up.”
“It’s true,” Katharine sighed as Rob slipped his arm protectively around her. “It’s all true.” She pressed closer to Rob and looked into his face. “What are we going to do?”
“For the moment, all we can do is wait,” Rob told her. “But the way I figure it, as soon as it gets light, we should have some company.”
Katharine shuddered. “Yoshihara’s going to come after us, isn’t he?”
“Probably,” Rob agreed. “But if he thinks we’re going to be all by ourselves out here, he’s going to find out he’s wrong.” His arm tightened around her and his eyes rose to scan the sky. And there it was, right where Phil Howell had told him it would be. Glimmering in the blackness of a sky that had been washed all but bare of stars by the light of the fires burning around them, a single light hung far above them.
A light that would shine more brightly with each passing night, but then — in a week or perhaps a month — would disappear.
Disappear forever.
The nova.
“Look,” he said softly, guiding Katharine’s eyes to the brightening star. “That’s where it all came from.” Then, choosing his words very carefully, Rob began explaining to Katharine exactly what he and Phil Howell had discovered that night.
The first light of dawn was washing the blackness from the eastern horizon when the sound intruded on Katharine’s dream.
She was back in the Serinus laboratory on Takeo Yoshihara’s estate, but instead of rats, hamsters, monkeys, and chimpanzees, the cages each contained a little boy.
The rows of Plexiglas boxes seemed to stretch on forever, and each of the aisles opened into another, forming a labyrinth that went on into infinity. Katharine saw herself running through it, searching for Michael, but there were too many cages, too many children, and all of them were reaching out to her, begging her to help them.
She stopped finally, and opened one of the cages, but the moment she did, the child inside began to cough and choke, and when she picked up a little boy — a boy who looked exactly like Michael had when he was six — his coughing became convulsive.
And the child died in her arms.
She began running again, but now something was pursuing her, coming closer and closer, its sinister noise building to a crescendo.
Whup-whup-whup …
