Life on the Preservation, US Edition (21 page)

Linda looked up at her again. Kylie didn’t smile, or wave, or give a thumbs up. She turned away and vomited. Ray deserved it, and he was going to die pretty soon, anyway. But Kylie had just killed him to save a thing that wasn’t even human.

In the distance, the wind-up siren commenced its urgent wail. The P.O. calling them back to the
Carl Vinson
. Kylie lifted the trap-door and climbed back down to the diner.

Linda had found her way inside.

“I like it here,” the SAB mumbled. Ray Preston’s blood splattered her grimy waitress’s uniform. Wads of brain matter snagged in her wet straw hair. Linda’s head was a talking skull stretched over with drum-tight skin, a pair of big wet eyes slipping around in deep sockets. Kylie had murdered a man for this thing?

“I want to work here,” Linda said

“Knock yourself out,” Kylie said. She found another bar towel behind the counter and used it to dry her face and hair. Linda shuffled around the diner, bumping into tables and chairs, muttering. Kylie knew she should go to the alley and retrieve the gun from Ray’s dead fist but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She dropped the towel and looked at her hands. Wolcott’s blood smeared them. Sobs rose in her throat and she swallowed them back down and kept them there.

In the ladies’ room, Kylie squirted liquid soap into paper towels and scrubbed at her bloody hands. She could hear Linda blundering around. Kylie pulled the restroom door shut and locked it. She sat on the floor in the dark and prayed Jim wouldn’t find her. She had slept poorly the previous night. It was quiet in the rest room. She drifted.

S
HE CAME AWAKE
in the dark and was frightened. Groping for the exit, she found a counter and sink basin. “
Fuck
.” Ass to the sink, she put her arms out and walked straight to the door and out. Linda was gone. Kylie stepped around Wolcott’s body.

T
HE
G
OLDWING IDLED
in the street, gray clouds condensing from its tailpipes. A number of SAB bodies, heads blown and limbs twisted, lay around it. The rain had slacked off, though the sky remained turbulent. Father Jim was nowhere in sight. It had been hours and the Honda had idled away a good deal of fuel. Kylie mounted the bike and looked west, where Kitsap Way eventually connected to Highway 3, then she looked east, which would take her back to the
Carl Vinson.

Soon Kylie would fall ill, like all the others. Sooner than that, something else would probably get her, alone on the road to California. She hadn’t wanted to die crashing the
Penetrator
. But what if she didn’t have to? What if there was a chance, a
real
chance, that she could fly into a world that at least appeared the way it used to be, before The Judgment? Father Jim was an experienced jet pilot. With him at the controls it was possible. He would have gone to the wail of the siren, gone to the
Carl Vinson
. By now the P.O. and Vina would have filled him in.

Of course, he might attack her on sight. Try to cut her. But it was worth the chance. Anything was worth the chance.

She swung off the Goldwing and ran back inside the Red White and Blue Diner. Wolcott’s locator – the EM field detector – lay under a table near his body. She grabbed it and stuffed it in a deep pocket of her leather jacket. Like a good luck totem.

T
HE
P.O.
SAID
, “We got us a
real
pilot.”

“I know,” Kylie said. “It’s like a miracle, huh? Where’s Vina?”

“Croaked last night. That’s why I wound up the siren. You and Wolcott both gone, wanted to know if I was the last one standing. Instead of you guys, up walks this priest. Where’s Wolcott, anyway?”

“Same as Vina.”

“Fuck me,” the P.O. said

The
Penetrator’s
canopy was open and somebody was sitting in the pilot’s seat. The wind blew his wild gray hair around like the scraggly strands of an old mop. He went still when Kylie and the P.O. approached, then turned his head slowly. Kylie winced. It looked like a little volcano was growing out of the priest’s forehead. The bullet hole he kept gouging to keep it looking fresh was yellow and green, erupting with pus. “There’s my little co-pilot,” Father Jim said.

Kylie folded her arms, relieved and terrified. “Yep.”

T
HE
P.O.
HELPED
strap Kylie into her seat behind Father Jim in the narrow cockpit. He cinched the harness tight, almost too tight for her to breathe. Kylie grunted. “Sorry,” the P.O. said. “Between the catapult and the thrust, you go from zero to a hundred seventy knots in two seconds. See this?” He pointed at a red handle between Kylie’s legs. “That ejects you, seat and all. Keep your hand off it unless the plane’s crashing. It probably will, so you better know what to do.” He delivered a brief lecture on parachuting from a high performance jet aircraft.

“It sounds scary.”

“Roger that.” The P.O. patted the top of Kylie’s helmet. “So long, kid.” Like he was already talking to a corpse.

“Bye.” Kylie had to pee.

“Good luck to you, Father.” The P.O. shook Jim’s hand. “You’re going to need it.”

“Ye of little faith,” Father Jim said.

“Faith’s got nothing to do with it.”

“I’m ready,” Kylie said. “Let’s go before I chicken out.”

After the P.O. closed the canopy, Jim said, “Just like old times.”

“Are we going to crash?”

“If the Lord so wills it.”

“Jim? It’s not about God or anything. That guy Wolcott told me everybody gets sick. I will, too, if the plane doesn’t crash. It’s just because I’m young. But I’ll get it, like everybody else.”

“I have to concentrate now, Kylie.”

“What I’m saying, it’s not God’s Judgment and it’s not me holding anybody back. You can see that, right?” With the canopy closed Kylie could smell Father’s Jim’s infection. It made her want to gag.

“Your cleansing is only postponed, either in this world or the next. God put me in this place to fly one last mission. I knew it as soon as the P.O. laid out the situation. There are no coincidences. We blow the Dome, end that abomination. But afterwards you and I have business. Verily, and He called His lambs home. No more talking now.”

Jim reached forward, knuckled over a toggle and thumbed a button. The engine ignited with a primal roar. The airplane shuddered. A Heads-Up display winked on in front of the priest. Kylie stared through the top of the canopy at the sky. Lightning flickered inside purple-gray mountains of cloud. She was going to die. Kylie put her hand over the red handle between her legs.

The engine ran up to a piercing scream. The
Penetrator
vibrated and strained. Jim moved the ailerons up and down, swung the rudder, testing control surfaces just as he had taught Kylie to do in the Cessna 150 trainer.

“Hang on,” he said.

Kylie tensed her body. There was nothing to hang on
to
. Jim throttled up. Kylie couldn’t believe they weren’t moving yet. Steam vented from the catapult below the deck and blew past the canopy. Suddenly they blasted forward, the force of acceleration pinning Kylie like a piston slammed into her chest. The deck fell away and the
Penetrator
yawed dangerously. The starboard wing dipped, inches from cartwheeling them into a fireball. Jim corrected the slip. The
Penetrator
angled away over black shallows, lost altitude, then nosed up, gained stability and sped into the wild sky.

The blasted lands dropped beneath them. The
Penetrator
roared through cloud canyons aflicker with electrical bursts.

The great Dome over Seattle dominated the horizon. It reached thousands of feet into the sky and appeared to be made of green glass – if glass could be in constant, seething motion. The city skyline wavered like a heat mirage. Despite her fear, Kylie gaped, awestruck.

Jim pulled the
Penetrator
into a steep bank. The wings leveled and they gained distance from the Dome, getting a run at it. The
Carl Vinson
passed beneath them like a great gray tombstone tumbled in black water. A brilliant shimmer occurred above them, different than the lightning. A blinding pinwheel swept out of the muscular cloud mass. Jim banked the jet again, shrieking into a turn so steep and tight Kylie thought the wings would rip away. Again they leveled off. Afterburners mule-kicked them straight at the green Dome. The plane shuddered with unbridled acceleration.

Pinwheel light strobed into the cockpit, played over Kylie’s hands and thighs. She squirmed and gritted her teeth, as if someone were touching her. The pinwheel light retreated when the interior of the cockpit turned green. Kylie looked up in time to see the wall an instant before they struck it.

PART TWO

“To remember and to wake up are absolutely interchangeable.”

THE EXEGESIS OF PHILIP K. DICK

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

T
HEY TUNNELED THROUGH
a green syrup world that muffled all sound. Kylie tried to say something to Father Jim but didn’t seem to have sufficient air in her lungs to produce words. Outside the
Penetrator’s
canopy, embedded like insects in amber, planes, cars, buses, boats, animals and people tumbled past into the jet’s wake. None of this had been visible from outside the Dome. Kylie craned her neck, trying to see it all. They passed alongside a ferry half the length of a football field, the name
Elwha
plainly visible on her bow. The boat heeled over – and appeared to
shrink
. Kylie rubbed her eyes in disbelief. As they left the ferry behind, it was no larger than her thumb.

The syrupy green gloom was growing lighter.

Something drew up alongside the jet, something moving against the tide – something tunneling. It was the pinwheel light that had chased after them outside the Dome. Its shape was clearly discernible now: a ball maybe twenty-five feet in diameter, with other, much smaller, balls orbiting this nucleolus in sharp geometrically precise patterns. It reminded Kylie of Discovery Channel animations of atoms.

The atom ship drew in closer. A node appeared on the side of the sphere, elongated, aiming straight at them.
They’re going to shoot,
Kylie thought.
They’re going to shoot us.

The world grew lighter and lighter until the
Penetrator
punched through into a cloud-blown sky. The sudden shift in light dazzled Kylie. The jet shot forward with greater acceleration even than the catapult launch off the deck of the
Carl Vinson
. It crushed Kylie into her seat. The engine scream ripped into her eardrums.

F
ATHER
J
IM STRUGGLED
to control the aircraft, afraid they would overshoot the city and plunge back into the Dome. Airspeed pegged at three hundred knots. He cut the thrust, dropped flaps, fought the stick. Something struck the aft section. A tremendous jolt rocked the plane. Buzzers and alarms sounded. The jet began to veer. Jim pushed on rudder pedals that offered no resistance – the linkages severed. The artificial horizon rocked wildly and the compass rolled like a roulette wheel. He craned his head around. The whole tail section was engulfed in a burning red glow that moved rapidly toward the cockpit, devouring metal.

I
AN STARED AT
his coffee – his third refill, this one gone cold. Espresso machines hissed like steam engines through the babble of conversation around him, while memories separated through the sieve of his compromised consciousness.

The roar of a jet engine jarred him out of himself. It sounded dangerously low and...
off
, like there was something wrong with it.

Ian followed about half the Seattle’s Best customers into Post Alley and caught a glimpse of a military jet, wings rocking erratically, the tail section glowing bright red and trailing smoke as the jet hurtled east.

It’s from outside
, Ian thought, briefly grasping the significance, before the whole idea of outside and inside slipped down a memory drain, along with everything else he had been fighting to recover. Now fear eclipsed the struggle. He felt alien among all these
people
milling around him – these imposters. Ian started walking fast, and then he was running for his bike, fleeing toward the only safe place he could think of.

T
HE JET ENGINE
roar backed off and the flaps dropped. The sudden drag threw Kylie against her restraints. Then something struck the
Penetrator
from behind. The airframe shuddered violently. Jim craned his head around, and she saw fear on his face. She turned to see what he was seeing. The tail was
melting
. The
Penetrator
nosed up steeply, gained a little altitude, then seemed to hang suspended. The stall alarm trumped all the other alarms already going off.

Kylie yanked the red ejection handle.

Explosive bolts blew the hatch. Wind roared into her face. She launched out of the cockpit at tremendous acceleration. It was so loud Kylie couldn’t even hear herself scream. The P.O. had explained this part to her, but she was too rattled and everything was happening too fast. The little rocket motor attached to her chair cut out almost immediately, and the chair dropped away with her stomach, even as the drogue chute deployed. Her teeth snapped together when the harness, too big for her little body, jerked painfully into her armpits, and she swung helplessly up.

The
Penetrator
, more than half engulfed in the melting red glow, and with Father Jim still strapped in the pilot’s seat, stalled, rolled over, and plunged through scudding clouds, By the time it hit Lake Washington it was a streaking meteor, not even recognizable as an airplane. On impact it made a big white splash and was gone. Steam rose from the water and boats began to converge on the spot.

Kylie drifted beneath a desert-camo nylon umbrella. It was suddenly quiet, almost serene. She looked around for the atom ship, thought she saw a flicker of pinwheel light on the periphery of her vision, but as much as she turned her head she couldn’t quite catch up to it. Like the atom ship was
there
and
not
there at the same time, racing away at tremendous speed.