End Time (66 page)

*   *   *

Dinner ended in a mess of plates, glasses, and silverware in the sink.

No one felt like doing the dishes.

Cheryl and Beatrice climbed upstairs, slowly, step by step. The lady cop kept an eye on her friend's game leg, letting her lean on her. Big Bea's short gray hair smelled faintly of coconut pomade, reminding Cheryl of the stuff she used to put on her kinks as a kid, mango hair gel. When exactly had Beatrice
become
Cheryl's friend? Somewhere between shooting a cannibal and falling down; then helped her to her feet with a look of thanks.
Thanks
. Making it okay between them. Now okay for Beatrice to cling to Cheryl, sharing the younger woman's strength like it might rub off.

They must have picked Kay's room, the lady who died in the parlor. A half-dozen puzzle boxes were stacked like big tomes on the shelf. Not just M. C. Escher either. Cheryl examined an eye-dazzler of Bruegel's
The Tower of Babel.
“I used to love puzzles as a kid. Now, life is perplexing enough.”

Like every room in the place, this one was video-monitored too. The camera didn't
whirr,
but the red light came on. They were being watched. Neither woman cared. Cheryl smiled and just shook her head. Beatrice sat on the bed, took off the brace, and sighed with relief. She flopped on her side without bothering to cover herself. “I think I have to pee. Maybe I'll pee right here,” she mumbled. “If I stop breathing in the middle of the night do not resuscitate.…” After a moment the large woman began to snore gently into the pillow.

Rachel appeared from nowhere and followed Cheryl to the bathroom. “I'm jealous,” she whispered. Ah, so ghostie girlie had finally deigned to grace them with her immortal presence. “Where the hell have you been?” Cheryl hissed angrily.

“Traipsing around after Bhakti,” Rachel answered calmly. “That man is
really not happy
. If he's a bad boy now, he could change his eternal fate. Know what I mean? It's everything I can do to keep him on the Up escalator.”

Cheryl was taken aback. “You mean you can affect your fate even after—” She halted. “I thought when you died that's when you started paying for everything.”

“Only the really bad ones. Everyone else gets a few more chances.”

*   *   *

Billy took the first room he found and lay on the bed in the dark. Man, he'd seen some messed up things in his life, but Mr. Washington's last walk to the maple tree with a Jesus statue in his pants—

A figure stood in his open bedroom doorway. Mr. Washington tugged his bathrobe around his shoulders but didn't looked angry, just tired, lonely, and cold. “You could have stopped me,” the figure said. “Why didn't you?”

Did they let Mr. Washington die? A hard question.

Billy didn't know the answer. Maybe they had.

He sat up and brushed the sleep from his eyes. He'd been dreaming.

No Mr. Washington, just a shadow, a trick of the light.

Billy walked cautiously across the dark room and checked the corners just to be sure. No, no Mr. Washington. The camera light in this room blinked on too, following him on his little walkabout. Billy glanced at the nosy thing.

“We'll see you tomorrow, bright and early,” Billy told it.

*   *   *

Guy took the mousy spinster's room and wished he hadn't. The place was infused with air freshener the lung-cougher seemed to use on everything—a cloying scent that reminded him of lavender hospitality soap. The only good thing about this room, the video camera was dead as a doornail. Outside, a landscape light shone up a tree trunk, the branches throwing shadows onto the ceiling, stick fingers groping in the wind. He couldn't get Mr. Washington out of his mind either, walking over to the trees, falling under the claws of—

Guy tried to squelch the vision, bundled a quilt behind him, and spooned into Corky and Peaches, who had wedged themselves onto the bed, all eight paws in the air. Most times a dog whiffed sleepily and Guy would be sawing along too, but tonight was different. The snow brushing the windowpanes made the long-fingered shadows snatch at the ceiling. Manic hands come to claim him. Hands that never gave up.

*   *   *

Lauren and Eleanor took first watch with Alice in the empty parlor. The women needed only to shout to rouse the house. The two sisters dimmed the lamplights as the snow flew past the windows gathering thickly beyond the eaves of the porch. When the wind sighed around the dark corners of the roof, a nameless chill seeped into Lauren's bones.

It began to feel like the outside world no longer really existed—the mailbox empty, the curbside trash waiting for a pickup that would never come. Everyone turned into milk-carton kids.
Have you seen us?
When the gabbing, texting, Tweeting finally died a silence reigned over the world, an overwhelming solitude that no one had felt for over a century.

The only one who didn't seem affected was young Alice, but maybe because she wasn't from this time. No, Alice came from a time when it took three months to contact San Francisco, when whale-oil lamps burned at night, and the most faraway thing you ever heard was thunder in the distance. But the young lady was as human and frail as everyone else; not wanting to sleep upstairs alone, she curled up on the couch with her head in Lauren's lap.

After a seemingly endless spell of silence, Lauren finally asked that question she had been meaning to ask her sister: the question about Auntie Whitcomb.

“Eleanor,” she asked softly, “do you remember if it was Auntie Whitcomb or Great-Auntie Whitcomb who disappeared for a while and suddenly, unexpectedly, returned? Some sort of family scandal, wasn't it?”

Eleanor petted Janet's metallic urn as if reluctant to answer.

“You mean when Great-Auntie Whitcomb was kidnapped by elves?”

The statement hung in the air, an awkward thought. What do you say to that? Eleanor put aside the silver urn and picked up young Alice's Horse Friends diary. The young girl hadn't locked it. “Think she'll mind if we look?”

“It's okay,” a voice said from Lauren's lap.

The two women nearly jumped out of their skins. Young Alice scrunched up in the afghan and looked at the sisters with Bambi eyes.

“I drew them for you.”

“For us?”
Lauren asked.

Eleanor turned up the reading lamp by her elbow and opened the diary young Alice had worked on so diligently. She flipped to one page, then another, and another, becoming more and more anxious with each passing page. Eleanor shut the diary with shaking hands. “How do you know this?” she demanded. “Tell me how!”

Lauren feared her sister might do something to their young friend—a cold, brittle light burned in her sister's eyes—but suddenly Eleanor flopped back into her armchair, all the fire gone. Lauren picked the diary off the coffee table and looked for herself—

“God save us.”

The child's pictures told a strange and yet familiar story. The weird and incoherent tale Eleanor blurted about the Ant Colony, in one broken account or another, the drawings crude and yet expressive. First, a factory—the Whiteside sign under a row of dirty brick smokestacks. An old service door in the side of the building under the light of a naked bulb. All manner of repellent insects were scribbled over the pages, crawling down underground tunnels, on top of desks and chairs. The ants go marching one by one, Hurrah.

Maggots, grubs.

Rolpens. Rolpens had taken over the facility complex known as
π
r
2
.

“That's what I ripped out of me,” Eleanor choked. “That's what they're making—millions of them.”

“You can't let them breed,” Alice explained. “They're giving birth down there. You can't let them leave. And soon they'll be big enough to get out.”

 

39

The Last Mind Glide

The data on Jasper's laptop glided in and out of focus. Lattimore could not concentrate any longer; it had been a day since the preppy kid's call, since the youngsters in Room 3327 begged him to find some kind of killer malware to inject into that depraved government research lab. Lattimore had been working the problem, searching for a wormhole into the digital body of the Hillsboro facility to the exclusion of everything else.

So far, total failure.

He glanced at the time: 3:45 a.m. Perhaps he was not the man to breach the fortress of the Pi R Squared complex.

He considered going down to the subbasement one more time to employ the power towers. Maybe later. He noticed Mildred was up, sitting on the edge of his bed with the drink she'd poured from the decanter in the library. Odd time of night, but after age fifty nobody slept normal hours anymore. She rolled the liquor around in the glass but did not drink it. That should have been a tip-off.

Mildred licked her lips, breathed heavily, and looked nervously about. She got up off the bed, fluffed her hair, and made for the elevator.

“I'm going down to the café, Mr. Lattimore,” she said over her shoulder. “I think there's some produce I forgot to put away. I won't be long. Let me back up, all right?”

The boss glanced at the clock on Jasper's laptop again: 3:47 a.m.

“Sure,” Lattimore said. Mildred disappeared into the penthouse elevator.

Ten minutes later, when she hadn't returned from the Cosmos Café, he went down to look for her. Mildred had entered the refrigerated food locker, where she hovered over the body of Security Chief Nash. The cold body was now uncovered, shirt open; Mildred had taken a large meat cleaver to him, opened his chest with a Y incision like a coroner, and cleanly emptied the chest cavity and his intestines into a large plastic five-gallon bucket. She layered the empty chest cavity with extra-wide Saran Wrap.

As Lattimore quietly stared at her, Mildred began to repack Security Chief Nash's empty chest cavity with shrink-wrapped kilo bricks of Dalekto rainbow powder. The chest could manage about twenty of them. The Cosmos Café cashier had laid away an extra supply for a rainy day. She looked up, mildly startled.

“He was right. I had some. I had some all along.”

Mildred had been snorting Dalekto while she worked; she wiped a trace of rainbow dust from her upper lip, slightly ashamed. “I just couldn't sleep.”

“Sure,” Lattimore replied quietly. “Me, neither.”

“I won't let it interfere with whatever we have to do,” Mildred reassured him. She was trying. Hooked, lost, hands in a cadaver, but she was trying.

“I'm going down to the basement server farm for a while, Mildred,” Lattimore said as nonjudgmentally as possible. “Call me on Nash's radio if you need me. Think you can get upstairs okay? Got enough of that for tonight?”

Mildred wiped her forehead with the back of her arm; it was quite a struggle getting the wads of dope into Nash's chest. She looked at the sweat on her forearm from her forehead. It had a tinge of rainbow to it.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Lattimore. I think so.”

Lattimore left her and went downstairs.

The pod-bay blast door let him into the lead-lined subbasement.

He chose a metal chair to block the heavy barrier just in case it decided to close on its own or the power went. Backup generators were supposed to automatically come on, but why chance it? No point in getting trapped in the server farm with a hophead doing rainbow dust in the penthouse.

Sitting in front of the screens, Lattimore tasked Jasper's PC into the server farm. Now what?

The more he researched servo-corrupting software the more hopeless it became. You needed the manufacturer's digital certificates on doors and locks just to get the Pi R Squared computers to trust you. You needed the specs on the locking devices, keypad codes, every entrance and egress point, the air filtration systems.… You could do it, but someone would have to physically walk it inside to plug the malware into a terminal.

Use the electric bots to kill the worms.

A fortune-teller girl who'd channeled one of the Takers was asking him to do the impossible. The task became harder every time he grappled with it. Why set him about a hopeless task—what point in that? Maybe no one realized the task's impossibility, not even the one called the Light Tesla. Lattimore stared stupidly at the large flat-screens. The only way he'd ever gotten inside that bloody place was on a mind glide, and what of his other mind glides?

Lattimore did not know what to believe. Perhaps his visions were not meant to be understood.
That floating cities fought a war for mankind's genetic future, good angels nuking bad angels so mankind could reach for the stars
. Perhaps some questions were not meant to be answered.
The dark possibility his father might have tattooed blue numbers on his arm in order to escape punishment one such question.

Lattimore stopped mooning.

An image had come to Jasper's laptop and across the server screens. Lattimore's own personal past gazed out at him like some kind of time window. The multiple screens showed the tree house his father had built in the backyard, and the dappled yellow leaves of late autumn. As he peered closer it seemed like a living photograph, and Lattimore saw some movement in the tree house window. Young Clem stared out, youthful face golden from the yellow leaves, and the man staring back almost called out.

Is this how a person cracked up under stress?

You entered an old 1960s'
Outer Limits
episode?

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical.

A new image appeared. The living room inside his parent's house. His father sat in the armchair reading a book. His father stopped reading. He closed
Ship of Fools,
marking his place, and then stared out the window, sitting there calmly.