Immortality (40 page)

Ralph charged into the flock of birds, sending them into the air. There were so many, and they seemed to have become accustomed to dogs because they only flew off when he was within a couple of feet of each one. It was as if he were a tornado sending up a debris field of flying creatures. There was a queasy feeling beginning in Sarah’s stomach. The bird sounds were loud, but something beneath their sounds – or within them – terrified her. A fog was coming in off the ocean. She thought of the miniature voice-recorder and its message of doom. Remnants of that message were here now. The signs were faint, but she was certain bits of it were hidden within the cries of the gulls and the sounds of the waves. She looked around. Everything seemed normal, but the message was now stronger and seemed to be growing with the approaching fog.

Sarah felt cold and hugged herself. Her t-shirt flapped in the sea breeze. She realized she was holding her breath. She suspected what was coming and wondered if she’d driven here to meet it. A gull stumbled on take-off and then landed awkwardly. Ralph stopped motionless amid the flock of birds. They were no longer fleeing. He looked confused. His head was cocked to one side as if listening to something. Sarah’s heart was breaking. She could feel an invisible wave of death coming toward her from the ocean. The wave was building, tumbling, and would soon be crashing down on her. The wave reached shore. A startling cold rushed past and through her as the wave of death hit. The sensation was of ice crystals forming across her skin. She felt a terrible cold, but knew the air was tepid and not the source of her freezing.

Her brows wrinkled. She sensed there was another dimension to what was happening. She became aware of a subtle intelligence within the cold. Something was thinking inside it. An avalanche of strange thoughts tumbled into her. The language was unknown, unintelligible. She gasped and went to her knees as if driven down while staring into the face of God. She saw Kenny, her family, all gone in an instant like candles extinguished in a wind. Images came from nowhere. Bright and vivid with colors, scene after scene was seared into her memory. She was seeing through other people’s eyes, hearing with other people’s ears, perceiving other people’s thoughts. The vantage points changed rapidly from doorways to rooftops to windows. All the views contained different scenes of the same event. In the streets and buildings of New York City, men and women and children were dropping to the ground like discarded toys. Cars out-of-control were coming to rest in one colossal accident after another. A bus plowed through a corner newsstand, obliterating it and then hit the side of a building. The view jumped to inside a subway careening out of control through a tunnel. The view jumped to looking up at a helicopter spiraling down from the sky. The view jumped to a street corner where the dead and dying lay at her feet. Somehow, she understood that all these witnesses of the horrors were left unharmed by the scourge. They were all ‘passed over’ as if from the ancient Hebrew story of God’s wrath.

“Take me,” she moaned. “Please take me.”

She felt her body control was failing, paralyzed. Her lungs were empty. She knew another breath would never fill them. There was a pressure from the cold intelligence squeezing in on her from all sides. The thing was crushing her with the weight of its concentrated thoughts. She clamped her eyes shut to embrace her death and waited.

Another breath came and shouldn’t have, then another. Her eyes fluttered open. Light poured in as an ache in the sides of her head. She was still breathing. She had never stopped breathing. She began to realize those feelings of paralysis had not been hers, but someone else’s final moments. Hesitantly, she began to accept this entity had not come for her. On her knees, surrounded by the dying embers of so many souls, she wondered if this thing was God and began sobbing. The entity was something other than life, something ancient and aware, and dangerous. Within that vast mind were plans and deep memories. She could almost grasp the designs. Her eyes opened wider as if to see the ideas better, but she was unable to open her mind wide enough to drink them in. Amidst her failure to embrace the panorama, she managed to sense one thing: there was no emotion within this awesome power. The entity was a mind of all-encompassing, pure logic; and it did not care nor understand the pain it inflected.

Ralph yelped. The thread snapped. Sarah was back on the beach. She realized he’d been yelping for sometime. She looked toward him as the danger registered into a single thought. No, not him!

First on all fours, then half standing, she scrambled in the direction of his cries. The oppressive weight of the strange intelligence was gone. Gulls were flying in the air like a swarm of gnats. Their cries were otherworldly. She couldn’t find Ralph amid the clutter of flapping wings. His yelps changed to drawn out howls. She stumbled and fell onto the sand but continued crawling. Her eyes were flooded with tears. The cloud of birds thinned enough so that she could see Ralph sitting on his haunches with his head raised. The howl coming from him sent a spike of ice deep into her chest. She tried to yell his name but remnants of the phantom paralysis restrained her.

“Ralph!” she croaked.

His head turned in her direction. He looked confused. She called him again. He leapt off toward her at full speed. He looked okay! Oh God, was he alright? As he got closer, what she saw in his eyes took her breath away. His stare contained a very human expression of fear. He came to her and started barking. He wanted her to do something. Make it stop? Run?

“It’s okay, sweetie.”

Streamers of grounded sea-fog drifted across the beach like windblown veils. Sarah looked at the flock of birds; many had already fled; another group took to the air. She watched as one trailed off from the fliers, lost speed, and then fell. The bird recovered before reaching the sand and flapped off in pursuit of its companions. Sarah looked down the beach to where the people had been barbecuing. They were still there. A few were looking toward her, probably at the commotion she and Ralph had caused. The children were still playing. To Sarah it was as if they were all ghosts in the fog.

A little girl with a pail was chasing a man. The girl fell. The man turned back to pick her up and then he collapsed. Sarah felt numb as more people started to drop. Some just went down as if they were marionettes with their strings cut, while others farther away from the center of the group seemed to die in stages as they ran to help their companions. They dropped to seated positions, then to their sides, and then finally they too were motionless.

The world grew silent as if all life had stopped. Sarah knew what was happening reached far beyond this beach and far beyond her visions of New York. Something all-powerful was swinging its scythe through the fields of humanity.

People were lying dead less than a hundred feet away. Sarah blinked as if, by that simple act, the illusion would revert to what she wanted it to be; yet it remained. Her face was damp with tears. She noticed blood on her fingers. She carefully opened her hand which still clasped the seashell. The shell had caused a serrated wound. She was surprised that she’d held on to it through the entire ordeal. She looked at the pattern of concentric circles in the shell. She looked at the sand, littered with victims. There was something connecting the two. She stood and walked toward the bodies. In this sprawl of death she saw evidence that the intelligence she’d sensed behind this plague was real. All the bodies lay within a large circle. The pattern was unnatural. She remembered people running in toward the center of the group and then dropping in mid-stride. She looked at those bodies and realized they had died immediately after crossing some invisible circular threshold which was now marked by the position of their bodies. She wondered if some would still be alive if they hadn’t immediately run to their companions.

From a nearby street came a crashing sound, followed by the noise of raining glass. A beachfront community was just beyond the dunes. Sarah didn’t turn in the direction of the noise. Instead, she looked at the dead and then out to sea. The fog was thinning where she stood, but the clouds were still thick out over the water. Sarah now understood that the malevolent force she had long sensed lurking in underground streams was in all the waters of the world. She was now aware of it everywhere and in everything living.

Sarah heard people crying from the direction of the streets. Ralph whined at her feet. She looked once more at the bodies lying in front of her and then glanced toward the dunes. She was an officer of the law and had taken an oath to serve and protect. She had shunned that obligation in New Jersey. Maybe this was her second chance? She trudged toward the dunes to see what needed to be done on the other side. Behind her, she left a trail of footprints in the sand.

The Dodge minivan started right up. Ed Devlin put it in drive. He was an average man, or at least that’s how he’d always been proud to think of himself. Average height, average weight, an average family of two kids and a dog. He worked at Northridge Avionics as a technician assembler of components that went into the advanced fighter jet program. He’d never quite understood exactly what he was building, but that had been okay. He worked inside a clean room. Everyone wore white jumpsuits and masks like a surgical team. The air in the room was as free of pollutants and dust as modern science could make it. The electronic things he built were so sensitive that a speck of dust in the wrong place would make them fail and take a multimillion-dollar jet along with it. Now, the job was gone. He had the plague to thank for that. His foot pushed down on the accelerator a little. The speedometer crept up to sixty-five. The road he was on was a two-lane county freeway that ran along a scenic part of the coast that his wife Katy always loved.

He turned the radio off so that he could better listen to his own thoughts. He hated being average now. Average meant that his family had died. Average meant that his future was gone. Average meant that he had no hope of doing anything about it. His entire family had died together in their house while he tried to save them with first-aid he’d learned from television. Mouth to mouth resuscitation, chest massage, nothing had helped. If he’d only known more, he might have been able to save at least one of them. He felt drunk but had no alcohol in him. He knew from the doctors that were treating him, he was suffering from posttraumatic stress.

“
These symptoms are nothing to worry about,” the doc had said. “The feeling will wear off in a few weeks at the most. A lot of survivors have it to some degree.”

Ed made the turn a little sloppily and then realized his speed was nearing eighty miles per hour. He slowed back to sixty-five. His eyes watered as he thought about Katy dying in his arms. Why hadn’t he died with her? He rubbed his eyes with a coat sleeve. On the seat next to him was a copy of the local newspaper. On page three was a questionnaire from the Center for Disease Control and a follow up article. The CDC was looking for survivors like him. Sole family survivors were needed to help find out how to stop this plague. He wasn’t sure if he was going to volunteer. That’s why he’d gone for a drive. Often, driving helped him make up his mind.

He’d read the article several times and still couldn’t remember half of it, not that this was much of a surprise. His memory had become awful since the plague. Sometimes he forgot where he was going and would have to drive all the way home, only to remember and head back out again. The doc told him this sort of thing was to be expected until the emotional problems wore off.

Ed wondered what it would be like to face the images in his head without the numbing effects of posttraumatic stress. He thought about his children lying on the floor of their bedrooms and sobbed out loud. He wanted to hurt this thing that had taken his children. The blare of a horn jolted him to his senses in time to swerve back into his own lane. A car shot past in the opposite direction. His nose was running, giving him the sniffles. He experimented at closing his eyes while on a straight piece of the road. His heart pumped faster. The experience was scary and seductive. He opened his eyes. There was a powerful side to being stress-intoxicated and having no reason to live. He could do things he’d never dreamt of trying before. He pushed down on the accelerator. The speed went up to eighty, then ninety. He watched the entrance to an overpass growing in the windshield. He closed his eyes and put his life in the hands of God. If he survived it would be the CDC for him. If not, well then....

Sunrise was still an hour away. Estimates were that throughout the world millions had perished during those dark hours of the previous day. Artie leaned against the window frame, staring at the street while listening to the local news on the television. Fires were still burning in several parts of the city. The air had a bitter smell and taste. There were periods when it was difficult to breathe. He was waiting for Suzy to finish getting ready. As soon as the sun was up, they were leaving. Suzy was in the shower. She had decided to make the most of it since there was no guessing how long it would be until she got another chance. Artie was growing anxious but had no intention of rushing her. She’d shown more life this morning than in the last several days combined. He was willing to do whatever it took to keep her in this frame of mind. They were heading south and had plans of going through Arlington where Suzy’s parents lived. There had been no word from them, but Suzy’s hope was enough to sustain her. Artie turned up the volume on the television with the remote control.

A few minutes ago, the station had reported the Army was taking control of the streets, using armored vehicles. There was video of armored personnel carriers heading out of the Lincoln tunnel and down 42nd street. Artie had yet to see anything roll by his windows. All that was down there were bodies amid a twisted ruin of cars and riot debris. Occasionally, a body would move and then rise up to reveal itself as one of the party-goers sleeping off a hard night of fun. A pair of scientific experts were on the tube. Artie walked over to the couch and sat down.