The Big Dark Sky (95)

Jojo was near, getting closer, and Jimmy needed to go to her and tell her what he knew before it was Too Damn Late. So he stepped off the road and started around the truck.

There was no door where there should be a door, nobody inside where somebody should be, but then he found somebody on the hard road in front of the truck. A man sleeping on the hard road.

Jimmy stood watching the man sleep. Nothing happened. The man didn’t wake up.

Jimmy squatted in the dark to look closer. It was hard to see. But the man wasn’t sleeping. One of his eyes was open. The other eye was gone. The man was hurt. He was bad hurt.

The man didn’t look like other people. He looked like Jimmy but worse, the parts of his face not where face parts should be.

Jimmy never knew things suddenly. He took time to know things. But now he knew this suddenly: The man was gone to God, and the Thing did this to him.

The Thing was out of the lake and in the night.

Now Jimmy was afraid at last. Very afraid.

He looked toward the black lake. He looked toward the house. He looked back the way he came.

He looked up. The sky was big and dark and wet.

The light in the sky was far away now, and the rumble was far away. He heard something else in the sky. Or maybe he did. He wasn’t sure.

He moved around the hurt man and started toward the house where Jojo waited in the light.





PART 5

RESTORATION





By thousands of chance encounters and uncountable coincidences, people are drawn together to save a life, to save a nation, to save the world.

—Ganesh Patel





85


The night is a dreamscape in which the only light is where absolute darkness relents to mere darkness, and shapes are defined in shades of gray.

Having left the Land Rover deep in the orchard, Asher Optime has taken a position in the front row, under limbs hung with apples that won’t be ripe for another month or more. There is no point in crouching behind the tree, using it for cover. In the starless dark, further concealed by curtains of rain, dressed in black waterproof pants and a black slicker, he blends with the night as though he is Death itself in commodious robe and cowl. He faces the lake, which in this gloom appears to be a void, except where its lapping waters are suggested by their rhythmic movement along the pale shore. Beyond the lake rises the slope down which the bitch and the boy will make their way when they exit the woods at the end of the deer trail. Because of the grass, bleached by the summer sun, the land is marginally less dark than the lake; the fugitives will be revealed in their descent, though Asher needs to be vigilant.

With vision limited, his other senses are more acute. The night smells of ozone lingering from the lightning that moved off to the east, ozone and wet tree bark and the sodden earth under the grass. The rain has many voices: hissing through a canopy of tender leaves; rattling off limbs, like the seeds in dozens of maracas; pattering softly in the grass . . .

A new smell and strange sound come to him simultaneously: a faint, bitter aroma similar to vinegar and a barely audible purring. The scent is constant, but when he slips off his hood, the better to hear, the sound fades. No, that’s not quite correct. If he actively listens for it, the purr seems to be less a noise than a pressure that he feels in his ears, as if he’s a diver under several fathoms of water; breathing becomes marginally more difficult, and he feels a weight over his heart, as if he were lying down with a heavy book on his chest.

He is overcome by the peculiar conviction that an object of considerable weight is hovering above the apple trees. He tilts his head back, peers up. Even if something is up there—which it isn’t, because what could it be?—he can’t see it through the branches. However, the sensation doesn’t relent, and he decides to get up and move between trees, where maybe he’ll be able to see something—

—and then a presence speaks to him, not out of the wind and rain, but within his head. It is not a loud voice, but one of great power and authority, that of his father, Turner Optime, cardiologist and surgeon. “Your hour has arrived. All that you have envisioned will soon come to pass. Your noble sacrifice, the forsaking of your own seed and the family you might have brought forth, now bears the very fruit for which you rightly yearn—the eradication of your kind from the Earth.” Asher understands this is not really his father. A power unknown chooses to speak to him in the voice of Turner Optime, to make the intrusion less disturbing, to soothe him through this revelation. “There are fearsome new weapons on platforms in space, intended for the defense of one nation against another, but I will turn each system against the nation that made it and against all others. Furthermore, they believe their nuclear missiles can’t be hacked and launched because there’s no internet connection, but I will send them flying, thousands all at once. Earth will recover in a few centuries, but not one human being will exist to resuscitate the species, for I will hunt the last of them to extinction.” The certainty with which this speaker speaks is thrilling. This is how Moses might have felt when he heard the voice of God. Of course, Asher, forever freed from ignorance by a series of wise mentors, knows that Moses was nothing but a mythological figure and God doesn’t exist, but the analogy is nonetheless apt. He tries to respond to the presence that has come upon him, tries to get to his feet, but he has no control of his body. This might frighten him under other circumstances, but the voice reassures him, calms him. “Be still, my son. Be still and listen. Be still and learn. Be still and know.”