The Big Dark Sky (94)
“Jesus, Ophelia.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right. It’s not just we have to take down Optime. It’s Dad . . . where he is. And the others there, whoever they are. They can’t be left like that, none of them. I’m so whacked I wasn’t thinking. We can’t take any chances. Okay, we’ll go around. We’ll stay on our feet. We’ll make it. Both of us.”
She hugged him. “My brother, myself.”
“My sister, myself.”
For as long as Ophelia had been wise enough to see the world as it really was, she’d been aware that it was sliding away from truth and light, sliding farther every year. But she would never give up and slide with it. Truth mattered, always striving for the light. As long as there were people like Colson, there was light in the world, a chance that the slide could be halted, even reversed.
83
The sky loomed black and the land lay black. When lightning clawed at the night, it seemed to Kenny Deetle that the darkness following it was deeper than the darkness before. In the headlights, the rain on the pavement sizzled and smoked as if it were acid.
Ganesh Patel had spoken of the Other and the potential events ahead of them this sodden night as though they were racing toward a great adventure, a Spielbergian encounter with wonder, but that was just Ganesh being Ganesh. If thrown out of an airplane without a parachute, as he plummeted, he would think of half a dozen ways he might survive; well before impact, he would have calculated which of the six miraculous saves was the odds-on favorite.
Less of an optimist than Ganesh, Kenny was instead focused on the revelation that the Other had killed people in imaginative ways. Considering that it had attempted to kill him and Leigh Ann, there was every reason to suppose that it would try to kill them again. Maybe it had already killed Wyatt Rider; Ganesh couldn’t reach the detective at Rustling Willows. Wherever the Other came from, it was not a planet with rivers of honey and chocolate-drop trees, where hovering hummingbirds used their beaks to tie ribbons in ladies’ hair every morning and mice dressed as footmen polished the silver. Inevitably, Kenny thought of his old friend, Max Gurn, who hacked the computer of a drug cartel and tried to hold their records for ransom, only to end up dismembered and packed in a metal trunk and sent to his mother in Topeka. Now he worried that, in taking the assignment from Wyatt, he had Gurnified himself.
“Previously,” Ganesh said, “once it ID’d you as an enemy, we would’ve put you in a sort of witness protection program, but that’s pointless at this juncture. No time for that. The remarkable series of synchronicities that have brought us to this moment suggest we’re approaching the resolution of contesting Jungian forces that will shape the future in a major way.” He raised both arms and shook his hands as if he might shout hallelujah, but instead he said with unmistakable delight, “Tonight, no place on Earth is more exciting to be than Rustling Willows Ranch. I am ready to levitate!”
“As a child,” Leigh Ann said, “you must have been a hyperactive handful.”
“My mother took refuge in yoga,” Ganesh said, “but my father resorted to Prozac.”
About twelve miles from Rustling Willows, Kenny piloted the Suburban around a curve and eased his foot off the accelerator when, through the screening rain, he saw the lights and vehicles ahead. Men in rain slickers. A roadblock. The two large trucks and three smaller vehicles appeared to be military ordnance.
Ganesh wasn’t surprised. “A perimeter has been established. They’ll be expecting this vehicle.”
As he brought the Suburban to a full stop, Kenny saw that those who manned the roadblock were armed with assault rifles.
Ganesh lowered the window in his door. As one of the guards peered in at them, Ganesh held up what was apparently a photo ID case that established his authority and security clearance. The guard merely said, “Sir,” and stepped back and waved them forward.
As Ganesh put his window up, he said, “So when this business is done and the world hasn’t ended, you’ll be staying at the ranch for forty-eight hours. Everyone will have to sit through a debriefing. We’re going to want a highly detailed account of all the events that led us here, for the historical record. I assure you it won’t be a hardship. Rustling Willows is a most comfortable retreat, and steps have been taken to provide culinary service that will make our time there a genuine celebration.”
Driving between the angled trucks that constricted traffic to one lane, continuing toward their destination, Kenny said, “If we do live through this—”
“When,” Ganesh corrected.
“—I’m not going to worry anymore about nuclear war or global warming or a total economic collapse. If a psychotic godlike alien fails to do us in, nothing will.”
Leigh Ann said, “When. When the psychotic godlike alien fails to do us in.”
84
Jimmy wet and chilled and so tired, out in the world alone. The storm and the night and the world all so big, and Jimmy so small.
With lights in windows where Jojo waited, Jimmy wasn’t afraid. Jojo would help him. When the Thing wasn’t in Jimmy, Jojo would like him again and he wouldn’t be alone.
The truck dark on the road was wrong. Jimmy felt the wrong of it and stopped and watched the truck, but it just waited there in the rain and dark. The truck didn’t do anything, but it was still wrong.