The Chinese kid, the lab assistant, launched himself at her, grabbing her arm and shoulder, pulling her back. Her head snapped around, teeth flashing.
Grigor stretched out a useless hand: “She has AIDS!”
The Chinese boy recoiled from that snarling, biting mouth. Pami lunged again for the table, but this time she’d pushed her body too far. Her torso arched, her bones jutted out against her clothes, and her mouth stretched wide as she curved impossibly backward. She managed one short scream, blocked by a gush of blood, and dropped to the floor, a thrown-away rag. A red halo of corrupt blood circled her head.
X
HAAA HA HA HA HA!
HA HAAAAAAAAAA! Oh, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Come into my arms! Come into my arms! Come into my arms! I have saved you, my darlings, come into my arms, let us dance!
How we’ll dance.
45
They walked through the parkland, silent at first, separate at first, just happening to walk more or less together in the same direction. They went for five minutes up the long gradual slope, past ornamental shrubs, specimen trees, small neat groves. A slight breeze rustled through leaves and pine needles above their heads. Birdsong established territory, called like to like, praised insects and worms.
They reached the top of a long ridge, and started down the other side, just as gradual, just as neatly cared for. After a minute, Maria Elena stopped and looked back and said, “You can’t see it any more.”
Frank turned and it was true; the slope blocked all view of the plant. “Good,” he said. “Ugly thing anyway.”
Turning in a slow circle, Maria Elena said, “You can’t see anything from here, except that radio tower. Nothing else human. No buildings, nothing.”
“Pretty good,” Frank agreed. The air smelled sweet, like fresh corn you bring home from a farmstand.
“It’s like the beginning of the world,” Maria Elena said.
Suddenly remembering, Frank said, “Listen, Maria, it’ll be the end of the world for us if we don’t get to that fence pretty soon.”
“Yes, of course.”
She reached out her hand, and he took it, and they started walking again, picking up the pace. Soon, Maria Elena began to sing, in a clear strong voice, to the rhythm of their walking, the melody rising up into the trees, spreading out over the shaggy park all around them.
“Nice,” Frank said, as she smiled at him and went on singing. He didn’t understand the words, they were in some foreign language, but he understood the song.
Ahead, the fence.
Andy Harbinger
The car was not there when Frank and Maria Elena reached the county road. My powers had been removed from me by then. But I’d already distracted the national guardsmen, so they made their escape anyway, in the five hours before Grigor collapsed in the control section and Philpott phoned for assistance.
Frank’s and Maria Elena’s fingerprints were not found among those brought up by the police technicians in the control section and the lab. The various witnesses’ descriptions of the two missing terrorists were so confused, with so many uncertainties and contradictions, as to be useless. When Kwan died in the hospital the day after the siege ended, and Grigor followed two days later, neither having given a statement, the last link to the missing terrorists was broken.
At home in Stockbridge, once she and Frank had made their way there, Maria Elena found on her answering machine a message from the local police. Fearing the worst, and with Frank already packing, she telephoned and was told that her husband, John, had been fatally shot two days before by a distraught woman named Kate Monroe, with whom he had apparently at one time had a relationship, but which he had recently ended. (I didn’t do that; it was Kate’s idea.) John’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy paid double indemnity; not the five-mil hit, but enough to keep Frank out of trouble.
Frank did spend one long frustrating day trying to find Mary Ann Kelleny’s business card, which seemed to have disappeared from his wallet. (While he was talking to her on the phone, in fact.) Then he tried to find a lawyer named Mary Ann Kelleny through Omaha directory assistance. Then he gave it up. (You must understand, by then I had neither the time nor the inclination to try to cover my tracks. I simply had to get the job undone, and fast.)
Susan and I hurtle through our days. It doesn’t seem to her that time literally flies, but I know it does.
Ah, but how I’m enjoying this brief life! And how bittersweet that paradox: the more you enjoy it, the faster it’s gone.
I don’t know what’s happening otherwise; I mean with His plan. I might as well have always been human; except for the trailing tendrils of my scheme as it unraveled, I have no access at all, no link to that other sphere except my memories.
I wonder sometimes if my defection might have piqued His interest, might have made Him a little less bored with this particular Lego set, so that He will decide to keep it around a little longer. If not, there is undoubtedly another of my former fellows afoot in the land right now, gathering his people, planning his strategy. One chosen more carefully, one less sentimental and susceptible than I.
Is that messenger, that effectuator, unlikely to find another group who can stand in for us all — us all! — and who can be brought to believe that the end of everyone is the best solution to their own problems? Are there no disaffected people in this world!
And will the new holy one not find another catalyst, something perhaps to reduce the globe not to a ball bearing but to a burned-out clinker, endlessly revolving around the sun? Are there not yet great destructive forces to be found?
I don’t know. I cannot say for sure what will happen, or what might happen, or when. I only know this: He doesn’t give up easily.