Casting desperately about, he peered back and saw the grouping of glowing, diseased structures on North Campus, the physics and other natural science buildings, all engulfed, devoured, transformed.
All save one; although its base was roiling and shimmering with the Source corruption, its domed crown was unsullied, intact. Almost as though the Mind behind the invasion was deliberately keeping it separate, as-what?
A holding place, a nest…
Theo knew where Melissa was.
Hundreds of yards off, impossibly away, across the undulating sea of devil light.
Just then, the gleaming blue tendrils surged up and grabbed him. He cried out, it stung hot like burning cold ice, shooting all the way up his arm into his cheekbones and the sockets of his eyes. He pulled free and scampered away from it, scurried up into the canopy of the lone, untouched tree standing sentinel at the peak of the rise.
Aw man, this is just not my day, Theo thought, and barked out a frenzied laugh as it occurred to him how much he looked like a newspaper cartoon at that moment.
He quieted abruptly as he heard the sound of metal creaking and distorting. From on high in the damp gleaming, he could see the sculptures, Rodin’s Walking Man and Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and that funky thing with arms like a windmill, all suffused, inundated with hell-light, coming to life and crunching toward him, with a racket like a demolition derby.
They smashed into the tree, battered it, leaving smears of patinaed bronze on its bark, brought it thundering down. Theo flailed through the air, landing square in the midst of the energy pool. He felt it course over him, submerge him.
The pain was like a swarm of wasps adhering to him. But even so, it wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. For one thing, it wasn’t devouring or absorbing him, somehow wasn’t able to get inside him (although he could dimly sense voices in his head trying to-well, the best description would be mind-fuck him, mess with his thoughts, get an upper hand on his will; but it wasn’t happening, it felt more like a customer in a restaurant shouting for some attention while being roundly ignored).
It can hurt me, but it can’t kill me, he thought, and it gave him an odd, giddy confidence. And he knew something else, too, although he couldn’t have said how-that the part of him it could hurt was the part that was still human, that had not completely changed.
The realization was momentary, fleeting-just before the huge bulk of metal surged up and encased him.
He recognized the piece, could put a name to it, thanks to the modern-art-appreciation class he’d taken to fulfill his breadth requirements, so he would have what the administration deemed a fully rounded education.
This is fucking ridiculous, he thought as the Henry Moore squeezed the life out of him.
With a rush of adrenaline, he felt the inhuman strength pervade him again, pushed with all his might against the crushing, indifferent bronze. He felt it begin to give way.
Shimmying and grunting, he pulled himself clear of the mass of metal, fell and gained his footing and ran through the living light as it whipped at him and stabbed deep with glowing barbs like Portuguese man-of-wars. The pain was screeching at him, filling his universe. Strobing black flashes filled his vision. He knew any moment he’d pass out, and then it would be adios, amigo.
Theo tripped and sat down hard, gasping as the light overwhelmed him. The world fading out and retreating on him, he felt the last reserves of his strength dissipate, eddy out into the larger, glowing sea.
Suddenly, he felt a strong hand grab him by the scruff of the neck and yank him roughly to his feet.
“Jesus, boy, whatcha doin’? Waitin’ for a streetcar?”
The other figure got a firmer grip on him, around the waist with one long, wiry arm, and then leapt almost straight up, grabbing hold of a ledge on an untouched building with his free hand (Theo knew it to be the Aaron Copland Music Building). He dragged Theo along the precipice, then pulled him into an open window.
The room was pretty dark, but Theo found it was getting easier and easier for him to see in almost no light. There were a number of folks there, and he recognized them all-Krystee Cott, Rafe Dahlquist, Al Watt, almost everyone who had been in the plasma lab; relief flooded him at the thought they’d all gotten away.
Except Jeff…
“Christ, son. You look like shit.”
He turned and saw that the speaker was the one who had hauled him up here and saved his bacon. Brian Forbes, the grunter who had joined Cal Griffin’s band of strays in the blood-drenched snows outside the Gateway Mall, gaped at Theo with enormous eyes the color of albino cave fish.
“Yeah, well, you aren’t exactly an American Beauty yourself,” Theo retorted. Then, abashed, he added, “Thanks.”
Forbes shrugged, and nodded.
Theo recalled how the other had moved through the stinging light, seemingly unharmed.
“That energy crap,” Theo ventured, inclining his head toward the open window and the campus beyond, “Did it hurt you to move through it?”
“A little, not much,” Forbes replied. “Gets kinda noisy in your head, but hey, I’ve hadda screen out crazy bad noise my whole life. I’m from Detroit!”
So I’m right about it, Theo thought. The less human he became, the weaker grip it would have on him.
Krystee Cott stepped up to Theo. He saw she had three rifles strapped across her back, along with ammo belts. “We’ve got the horses saddled and waiting on Coulter Street. We’re getting out of here, away from town, while we still can. Then we’ll regroup and formulate a response.”
What kind of response? We got our asses kicked. Thanks to that dragon, the one who had arrived on metal rails and departed on the storm.
Theo gazed out the window, at the dome that rose above the sea of infection, that gleamed pure in the moonlight.
“I can’t come with you,” he said to the others.
He climbed back out the window, and was lost to the night.
FORTY-SEVEN
Stumbling down the mountainside, bitter with the cost of their survival, the winter wind stinging their eyes to slits and icing their lashes, they might all have appeared blind ones to a passing observer, although only one of them truly was.
Do you think there’s forgiveness in this world, Mr. Griffin, or just atonement? Mama Diamond had asked Cal on the moonlit roof of the dormitory back in Atherton.
From the safe distance Mama Diamond’s act of courage had bought them in their confrontation with the butchered, reanimated buffalo, Cal had seen the merciless black shape wrapped in storm cloud swoop out of the darkling sky to seize her up and carry her off into the gale.
Whatever that dark messenger had been, there was no telling where Mama Diamond might be now. Still alive? Cal could only hope. Lost, certainly, to the Storm. Would she forgive him, wherever she was? Could he ever atone for bringing her here?
Or any of those that had followed him: Magritte, Mike Olifiers…
Goldie.
Enid Blindman had been a Pied Piper to lead others to sanctuary, Cal reflected. But what had he led them to? He looked over at his sister, the glowing halo of her floating, changed self casting illumination on the night-dark path ahead.
He knew there was no point in flagellating himself. He had done what he’d had to, as had the rest of them. The world turned every moment, it hurtled through space; stillness was no more than an illusion, a cunning self-deception. Every action, even inaction-especially inaction-was a choice. And the assumption that one held responsibility for all the wild vagaries of the universe was simply arrogance.