Burning Midnight (25 page)

He felt the sting of a harvester's tentacle as it whipped around his knee and yanked. Sully dropped the ax as he hit the floor. He dug at the tiles, trying to pull away as the harvester dragged him toward its waiting mouth.

Hunter screamed his name as he grabbed for the edges of the thing's mouth, trying to find some weak spot he could pull or tear. Its mouth was slick, coated in slime; it squeezed the breath out of Sully, clamping down on his waist, then his chest as he kicked at its insides, trying to hurt it. There had to be some way to hurt it.

He could hear individual voices inside it now, crying for help, praying.

The mouth seemed like a cavern as it opened wide and snapped shut.

Sully was inside it, in darkness.

He shouted in disgust as a ring of muscle convulsed above his head and rippled downward, driving him deeper inside.

He struggled to get back up and out, fought the panic choking him as his feet touched something. He jerked them up instinctively before realizing it wasn't part of the harvester. It was a victim.

Fingers grasped his foot.

He wished it was Dom, but he knew Dom had been taken by a different harvester.

Sully clawed at the slick insides of the harvester, trying to reach the mouth. He felt the thing begin to rise, maybe heading to one of the moons to drop off its catch.

He tried not to imagine what might happen up there. Instead he focused on Hunter. Had a harvester gotten her?

He felt like he couldn't breathe, but that couldn't be right, because there were people in there with him who were still alive.

Was it Holliday? Had he been swallowed by the same harvester as Holliday?

For a moment Sully felt certain he had. Then he remembered Holliday had been taken by a Cranberry. This one was a Mustard. He'd been taken by a rarer harvester than Holliday, at least.

Sully cackled at the absurdity of the thought, when the harvester suddenly lurched.

Sully recognized the fluttering feeling in his gut as free fall just as the harvester hit the ground, knocking the wind out of him.

The harvester lay still as Sully gasped, drew in a tight squeal of air, then inhaled again, deeper.

Outside, Hunter called his name.

Sully clawed his way toward the mouth. He pushed his hand through the narrow slit. Blood lubricated the opening. He drove with his legs until he forced his face through, out into light and fresh air.

“Sully.”
Hunter knelt in front of the harvester, grasped his hand, and pulled, dragging him out, into her arms. “I didn't know which one you were in.”

“There are more people in there,” he managed to say as he clung to her.

Hunter pulled the harvester's dead mouth open wider. Reluctantly, Sully stuck his head back inside, reached out, and brushed a flailing hand. He grabbed hold of it and pulled.

A middle-aged woman came out. She rose to her hands and knees and vomited on the tiled floor.

Soon after, Sully gripped another hand, a teenage boy's.

The floor was littered with dead harvesters, draped across each other in a spiny rainbow of colors. Sully glanced around, seeking the one that had gotten Dom.

Instead, he spotted Dom himself, head down, hands on his knees, looking dazed.

“Dom.”

“Sully.”
Dom raised his head.

They came together in a hug, joined a moment later by Hunter.

“That was, by far, the worst three minutes of my life,” Dom said, still breathless.

“I feel like I just rose from the dead,” Sully said.

A rumbling outside shook the floor, rattled the walls. They headed for the windows.

The moons were bursting. There was no other way to describe it. To their left, a Lime moon was there one moment, nothing but an expanding circle of particles the next. In the distance, seven or eight candy-colored moons went off in quick succession.

Sully thought of all the people inside. So many people had died, all because he'd raised those spheres to Hunter's temples.

“Look at that.” Dom pointed straight up, through the glass ceiling. A Hot Pink moon was directly overhead, not a thousand feet up.

It exploded, bursting into hot-pink confetti.

Everyone broke into cheers.

“Bye-bye,” Dom said.

The hot-pink confetti fell. As it approached the roof it began to look less like confetti, more like solid debris. When it hit the roof, the glass would come crashing down and cut them to pieces.

Sully grabbed Hunter and Dom.
“Run.”
As they raced for the stairwell, he shouted,
“Look out!”
loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.

The ceiling shattered with a deafening crash as they pushed into the stairwell. They made room for a half-dozen others who ducked in as Hot Pink spheres rained down, hitting the tile floor and ricocheting madly.

Sully spotted a guy running for Holliday's office. He must have realized what was happening too late. Spheres pelted his head and shoulders and he dropped. Sully turned away, not wanting to see.

They kept coming—a hard, thundering hot-pink rain, the spheres piling up, creating small hills as they carpeted the vast lobby. Sully watched, mesmerized. He imagined this happening all over the world.

It seemed to go on for a long time, but probably lasted only half a minute. When the last sphere finally dropped and clattered to a stop, there was silence.

Sully stepped into the lobby, picked up one of the spheres. It was nothing but a Hot Pink sphere, no different from the one he and Hunter had found in Doodletown. He marveled at the pink dunes. How many spheres were in this lobby alone? Tens of thousands, at least.

“I'm going to check on Mandy,” Dom said.

Sully nodded, feeling a pang of guilt that he'd completely forgotten about Mandy. He kept thinking of the dead man buried somewhere under the Hot Pinks. A lot of people must have suffered the same fate, although most people would have been hiding from the harvesters, safely indoors, unless they happened to have a glass roof.

He wondered what happened now. If Hunter hadn't burned the Golds, someone else would have. That was what you did with spheres. That's what everyone did. But he and Hunter were the ones who'd actually done it. Were they heroes for stopping the harvest, or criminals for setting it in motion? Sully imagined that would get sorted out soon enough. Right now he was just glad to be alive, glad Hunter and his friends were alive.

What about Holliday? Sully looked around. A dozen or more refugees from the harvesters were standing around the edges of the lobby, ankle-deep in Hot Pinks. There was no sign of Holliday.

He couldn't remember if he'd seen the Cranberry harvester leave Holliday's office.

“I'll be right back,” he told Hunter.

Walking on the spheres was a challenge; they were slick, and Sully was exhausted. He had to get down on hands and knees to cross a rolling dune, as spheres kicked out beneath his feet and rolled.

When he reached the mangled door, he gripped the frame and stepped through, leaving a smear of blood behind. His wounded hand was throbbing, but he was too preoccupied to numb it. Let it throb; it reminded him he was alive.

He found Holliday in the far corner of the office. There was a handgun lying a few feet from his body, a halo of blood blooming around his head. Holliday hadn't wanted the harvester to get him, so he'd saved the last bullet for himself.

Sully squeezed his eyes shut and turned away.

Across the Hudson, an avalanche of Sky Blue spheres blocked the winding highway that hugged the steep hills. Anyone who couldn't get to work could always pull over, burn a couple of Sky Blues, and better appreciate the humor of their situation. Maybe Sully should burn some Sky Blues; he thought he had a decent sense of humor, but who couldn't use a little more laughter in their life?

He wouldn't, though. He was through burning spheres after what had happened. It was hard for him to sort out his feelings about the spheres. The Midnight Blue had undone itself to save them all, and while Sully still struggled to think of a sphere's life the way he did a human life, what the Midnight Blue had done showed that they really did mean well, just like Hunter had said. They cared about their hosts. Maybe, in their own way, they even loved them.

It was interesting how, in the weeks after the parents exploded and the harvesters died, people were repulsed by the spheres lying all over. They didn't want to touch them, let alone burn them. Five months later, people were dipping their toes back into the water. It was hard to resist something that made you better than you were, with no effort on your part. People who'd burned spheres before the invasion seemed especially willing, because, what the hell, if the parents somehow figured out a way to return, they were already screwed. Why not be stronger, faster, smarter, and funnier until then?

Sully could see the logic in that, but the scars on his hands and feet were still red and angry, the memory of being inside that harvester still fresh. He imagined it always would be.

Could the parents come back with new harvesters, without someone burning the Midnight Blues and reopening the gate? Every day that went by, Sully breathed a little easier on that front. If they had another way of opening the gate, or some sort of back door, what were they waiting for?

Hunter reached over, took Sully's hand. Sully turned, and as he gazed into her eyes he felt a rush of pleasure, a moment of disbelief that she was here with him, that they were alive.

In the front seat, Mandy laughed. “They're making a movie about us.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dom said. “Who's playing me?”

Mandy scrolled down. “They haven't cast any of us yet.”

Dom pulled into the Bear Mountain lot, parked right around the same spot Sully had parked the last time he'd been there. The black SUV containing their Secret Service contingent had parked about ten spaces away.

As he hopped out, Sully grabbed the plastic sack of Subway sandwiches they'd picked up. Hunter got Mandy's crutches out of the back as Dom helped her out of the car.

“Hopefully, whoever plays you won't scream like a mama's boy when the harvester eats his head,” Sully said.

“I didn't
scream.
I shouted. There's a difference.”

Sully heard hushed voices behind them; he could hear every word without straining.

“That's not her. That's makeup.” Over the past few months it had become the thing among school-age girls to color their skin gold.

“I'm telling you, that's
them.
There's
Cucuzza.
”

Dom turned at the sound of his name, smiled, and waved.

“We have to make sure this doesn't go to our heads.” Mandy was scooting along briskly. She'd gotten her cast off last week; the steel rod in her femur would be with her forever. “I hate self-important celebrities. I don't want to end up becoming one.”

“I do,” Dom said, laughing. “I want to become a self-important jerk.”

“Can we have your autographs?” shouted one of the kids following them, as if on cue.

They stopped and waited for two young girls and a mom to catch up.

“I'll get two of the eight-by-tens from the car,” Dom said. He was beaming. He loved this.

“He'd play himself in the movie, if they'd let him,” Sully said.

“There's gonna be a movie?” one of the girls asked.

Sully was still surprised that everyone so easily overlooked the part about them starting the whole mess in the first place, instead focusing on how they saved the world. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, all called burning the Midnight Blues “inevitable.” That four seventeen-year-olds had figured out how to stop the invasion once it was set into motion was, in the words of the
New York Times,
“astonishing.” In a speech watched by pretty much everyone, the president called it “an act of bravery that will never be forgotten, so long as humans walk the earth.”

Sully was just glad it was over.

Dom returned with the photos. When Hunter passed them to him, Sully signed as neatly as his crappy handwriting would allow, thinking about that day not long ago—yet also a thousand years ago—when he'd worried he would always be remembered as the kid who lost the Cherry Red. If he'd only known.

As the family went on their way, Sully put his arm around Hunter, and they headed toward the lake. It was a beautiful fall day, perfect for a picnic.

Hunter laughed.

“What?” Sully asked.

“There's a Plum, hidden right over there.” She pointed in the direction of the Bear Mountain lodge. “If we'd stayed longer that day we came here hunting, we could have found a rarity six as well.”

“They're all rarity one now,” Sully said.

He wasn't sure if that was good or bad. After what had happened, a lot of people had decided it was bad and wanted the spheres hauled away and dumped deep in the ocean, or buried like nuclear waste. That would be some project, because there were billions of them.

On the plus side, there were no more brag buttons. Anyone who wanted to be a little taller, more athletic, or better-looking could just pick up a couple of spheres, if they were willing to take the chance.

My agent, Seth Fishman, played an especially huge role in this book, guiding me into the realm of young adult fiction and providing copious feedback as I wrote. Sincere thanks, my friend.

I'm grateful to Ian Creasey, whose feedback on the first draft of this novel transformed it, as his critiques often do, and to James Pugh, who was always there with solutions when I got stuck. His ability to generate brilliant ideas in a matter of seconds leaves me dumbfounded.

Special thanks to my niece, Sarah Berghela, who was my coolness consultant. She helped make sure my characters spoke and acted like modern seventeen-year-olds. I now know that high fives are no longer cool.

Thanks to fellow writer Tina Connolly, who posted some kind and very timely words on the Codex Writers Group website that gave me the idea to write a novel based on a short story I'd all but forgotten about.

Sincere thanks to Sheila Williams, who bought “Midnight Blue,” the short story that was the genesis of
Burning Midnight,
for
Asimov's Science Fiction
.

Many, many thanks to Kate Sullivan, my editor at Delacorte Press, for believing in this novel, and for her incredibly insightful feedback and guidance.

Finally, love and gratitude to my wife, Alison Scott, for her support, especially during the times I struggled with doubts as I wrote this one.