Part 34 (1/2)

As a glare brighter by far than the sun flooded down from the object now speeding overhead, David tried to speak in the man's ear, but he pulled away and ran. David knew that he must look mad, covered as he was by dust.

Still, there was no choice now, no time to waste, so he ran to a cowering family, the children so panicked that they were beyond control, the mother screaming, the father trying to s.h.i.+eld them from the thing pa.s.sing overhead. He picked up a girl of perhaps ten.

”Come on,” he said, ”come with me.”

”What's that thing?” the father shouted.

What did he mean, the thing in the sky or the portal? No time to find out. David grabbed him by the collar. ”Come on, follow me!”

As he went toward the portal with the screaming girl trying to pull away from him, he felt once again heat from above, but also saw that the light was getting less bright. The gigantic meteor was not going to strike here, it was going farther south. But he couldn't think about that now. He had reached the portal where Caroline stood with her arms outspread, calling to the crowd, telling them they could go through, in a voice that was lost in the roar of voices and the wind that had followed the meteor, and was now shaking the few trees left standing, and drawing dust up like a ma.s.sive cloud of roiling smoke from the ruins of the mansion.

And now, as suddenly as it had come, the great light was gone, disappearing beneath the southern horizon, which glowed briefly with white light, and then was once again dark.

Mike said, ”It hit in the ocean.”

”I know it.” And they both also knew exactly what, therefore, would be coming. The elevation here was six hundred feet, which would not be nearly enough.

”What's in there?” the father asked him.

”A new world,” David said, and did the only thing left for him to do, which was that he thrust the screaming, writhing little girl through the portal.

”Jesus G.o.d,” the father cried, and the mother and younger brother both screamed in terror as they saw the girl inside the portal. She turned and put her hands to her head as if she was going to pull her hair out, and her face twisted into a scream that they could see but not hear. She came to the portal and threw herself against it, pressing herself and clawing at it, her face grotesque. From this side, she looked as if she was pressing herself against gla.s.s, and David understood for the first time that there was no return, and he remembered what had happened to Katrina's arm when she had tried to pull it out.

”Do not stop, do NOT try to come back,” he shouted to the people crowding toward the glory of it, a sparkling dawn, enormous across the whole expanse of the lawn, concealing behind it the ruins of the house.

He took the father by the hand and said to him, ”You need to help your daughter,” and the father took his wife's arm and she held her son, and the three of them stepped through. A big old springer spaniel with gray dewlaps barked twice after they had gone, and jumped through behind them.

So far, none of these people showed the slightest sign of the mark, but G.o.d help any that did, should they try to go through.

Dawn was gold and clear in the east of the portal, and the family, now hand in hand, walked a short distance. The father bent down to feel the gra.s.s beneath their feet, then turned and spread his arms wide.

Along the southern horizon in this world, though, there had appeared a s.h.i.+mmering line, and David thought he knew what it was, and Mike certainly knew. ”We just got a few minutes,” he said.

Inside the portal, David saw other people appearing, coming from other directions, and realized for the first time that this place was indeed not the only one where the portal was present. Just as they had been promised that it would in the cla.s.s, it had appeared all over the world.

”Your father was right,” he told Caroline. ”It's holographic.”

David thought, at this point, that he understood the mechanics of judgment. Over the many lifetimes that come and go during a great earthly cycle, we are born and born again, making choices as we go along, each time locked in physical bodies that remember little of the soul's past and its aims, where we enact lives that either add to the weight of the soul or reduce it. Evil makes it heavy, good makes it light, and the vast number of people die, each life, a little lighter than before.

Then, as the cycle's end approaches, the chance to be reborn anew ceases. The changes become permanent and most people are harvested to higher life. Some, who have ruined themselves, sink away, and a few remain to take the wisdom of the last cycle forward into the next.

”We got maybe ten minutes, man!” Mike said.

So David believed he understood these sacred mechanics, which was lovely, but this was no time to stand watching the spectacle and indulging his inner professor.

He raised his voice. ”Get moving, everybody! Everybody! NOW! NOW!”

People stirred but were still unwilling.

”They're scared,” Caroline said. ”They still don't understand.”

”There's no time left!” He knew that this scene was being repeated all over the world, and many would fall by the wayside, and also that this was intended, that it fit the gigantic plan of life, and for just an instant he sensed the presence of the mind that had conceived the universe ... and felt as if he was in the presence of a child.

Caroline stepped to the center of the portal. ”We can go through,” she shouted. ”Look, we can all do this!” But then she was absorbed in the milling, panicky crowd.

”Caroline!” He waded after her.

Ahead, he saw her hair, then he saw a tall, ghostly figure come to her, and she was lifted by her hair, her face distended with pain, her eyes bulging.

Against her throat, Mack held a jagged blade that had been broken off an electric hedge clipper.

26.

THE LAST BREATH.

Across the world, as the gigantic event reached its climax, all the treasures and wonders of history were being swept away. Some of the boulders that had broken off the moon were the size of islands, and they had begun striking Earth mercilessly. Those that hit the oceans generated waves unlike any that had been seen even during the climax of the Ice Age, black mountains of water that were now sweeping away whole nations.

London and Rio and Tokyo and Amsterdam were among the first to disappear in the maelstrom. A boulder the size of Bermuda slammed into the central Ukraine, releasing the equivalent energy of a billion hydrogen bombs and instantly vaporizing every living thing from St. Petersburg to the Black Sea.

The shock waves of the meteor impacts were so great that they completely disintegrated cities from Casablanca to Paris, and the gigantic explosions they generated made millions instantly deaf.

Whole species of animals died in an instant, herds upon the prairies, fish in the sea, and the bodies of great schools drifted to the ocean floor where they would become fossils. In millions of years, very different hands would raise them as human hands had raised the mats of fish skeletons that had died exactly the same way in the Permian extinction over two hundred million years before.

There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.

Everyone who was not near a portal was afflicted with the stain, and they had come to understand their fate, and they cut themselves to pieces and burned themselves and ripped at themselves to remove the stain, but they could not remove the stain, and in their billions they lay writhing from their mutilations, or they ran in doomed streets, or tried to end their agony with suicide, only to discover that the death of the body was what sprung the trap. Their darkness also grew and grew, until they were reduced to a state that is darker than darkness itself, for this new skin reflected no light at all. They were shadow people now, sweeping through the streets in despairing packs, their cries like the wind wailing on a winter night.

A series of more than fifty objects struck the Pacific, including one that sent a tsunami slamming into the coasts of Was.h.i.+ngton and Oregon, drowning Vancouver and Seattle and Portland, inundating San Francisco, and sweeping across the entire Los Angeles basin with such energy that it gushed through the mountain pa.s.ses to the east, finally expending itself a hundred frothing, foaming miles into the high desert.

The people who had come to the Acton Clinic were streaming into the portal in a more orderly manner, as the members of the cla.s.s moved among them, urging them forward.

Mack had dragged Caroline into the leafy shambles of some trees, and David had gone with them.

”We're going through together,” Mack said. ”The three of us.”

”Mack, it can't work.” Mack's body was almost entirely a shadow now, as if he was becoming a living darkness.

”Then I rip her throat out.”

Surely he could not be deceived another time. Surely he understood that the portal would not let him through.

David did the only thing he could, which was to lead Mack to the portal, which was now busy with people crossing, moving easily and quickly, ten and twenty at a time walking into what was becoming a great, wondering crowd on the other side.

There came a rumbling sound that quickly deepened, soon trembling the ground.

”Hurry,” Mack said.