Marion screamed, and he felt sick as he realized she was cut. Then the pain came in his head too, and something warm began to drip down his scalp. She started to sob. Beneath the covers, he reached over, touched her hand, just briefly. It was warm and wet. Then he opened his eyes and pushed back the pillow from his head. The entire length of the window had been blown out in the blast. Water was pouring down from a shattered pipe in the ceiling. The street was open to them, twenty-three floors below. But you could see it. He liked that idea. There was no fire. This was something they could survive. He put a hand to his head: blood, but not so much you had to worry.
In the corner, hovering two feet off the drowning carpet, the third sphere was almost motionless, hissing with a thin, constant noise. It looked pale, less active than the first two. And a little smaller. But it was alive — if that was the right word. And it was moving, very slowly, toward the bed.
'Sam,' Marion said from beneath the sheet. 'I'm bleeding. Bad.'
'Stick with it, love. And keep your head down.' He looked at the sphere and wished he could hate the thing. But it wasn't really alive, he knew that. And there was a simple way to deal with it.
Sam Jenkinson climbed out of the bed and sat down in the chair close to the window. To his amazement, his drink was still on the tiny side table, half-full. Hand shaking, he reached over, picked it up, and took a sip. It tasted fouclass="underline" warm and tainted somehow. The sphere had stopped moving toward the bed. It hovered between them indecisively.
'Now,' he said, looking at the thing, going paler by the second a few feet away in front of the shattered window, 'why don't you be a good little monster and go fuck off home?' It flickered, was almost white. For a fraction of a second he could see the side wall of the room through its glowing body.
'Sam?'
'Shut up, woman.'
The ball rolled slowly toward him, hissing softly. He watched it stop a foot away and he really could see right through it. The thing was dying. Outside the day seemed to be returning to normal. It looked like a ghost. Or a thin reflection of the moon in water, he thought. The sphere stopped hissing. Then moved so quickly, he thought for a moment it had disappeared completely. Something pale and ghostly seemed to be crawling inside his mouth, up through his nostrils, even through his eyes, his ears, and it wasn't entirely unpleasant. It was warm, it sang, and when it was in the place it sought it was impossible to think of anything at all, impossible to feel anything except this strange, fevered thrum of energy that seemed to run inside and outside of his body.
The room went silent. Marion Jenkinson poked her head above the sheet, starting to feel weak, somewhat sick too. She looked across at him and went silent. He looked like one of those old pictures of a saint, with a halo that wasn't quite a halo, more a gentle ball of light that hung around his entire head. He was screaming, but she couldn't hear the noise. It seemed to get sucked from the room before it could get to her.
She closed her eyes and rocked gently, backward and forward, on the bed, until something hot and powerful picked her up with the sound of an exploding melon, threw her backward against the wall, left her slumped and bleeding, yelling at nothing, not opening her eyes, not wanting to see, clutching at the sheets, fists opening and closing, refusing to think about what was happening, what was flying in the room (warm and wet, making a sound like churning water) around her.
She didn't know how long she stayed like that. When she opened her eyes, she was cold. This wetness that covered her was cold too. She rolled over on the bed and looked up. The painted ceiling stared back at her, laughing, a sea of staring eyes. It was red with flesh, so much that it was contoured, seemed organic, physical. And one new feature too. Embedded in the staring, manic images was a piece of Sam Jenkinson, a single staring eyeball, around it a ragged corona of tissue and nerves.
She coughed into the sheets, retched dry bile, and tried to believe this was all a dream.
CHAPTER 41
Holy Fire
An hour after the attack the smoke still hung over the city a couple of miles distant. It was an eerie sight. There was precious little consistency in any of the reports they had. In some places it had started fires. In others it had passed over buildings, even through buildings, people too, with no ill effects whatsoever. And sometimes the results had been simply devastating. The tower of the Stratosphere was now nothing but a burned-out shell. In the old downtown, the huge, block-long electronic visual display canopy that had brought visitors back to Fremont Street seemed to have attracted the full force of the attack. It had been torn apart in a rain of fire that the crowds underneath had thought was all part of the show, until the metal began to rain down in a molten flood on their heads and the street turned into a river of flame.
In some cases the floating spheres of energy had invaded people directly and then simply exploded. The casualty list was something the emergency services couldn't even begin to guess at. Every man and woman at Nellis had been brought in to help with the rescue operation. The storm had lasted more than an hour, and Helen Wagner watched every agonizing minute in horror from the airfield, which was entirely untouched. The range war with the Delta Force crew, who drove over from McCarran to make contact when it became apparent that radio comm was down, was soon forgotten.
They teamed up with the Air Force people and tacitly acknowledged that if some lead on the Children were to emerge, then HRT would be the ones to follow up on it. There was too much work on the ground for them to think of anything else. She watched with quiet admiration the grim-faced, deliberate way they went about the job.
In a small office next to the main Nellis control tower Larry Wolfit was working away at the keyboard on his notebook computer. He wore a fresh checked shirt and jeans, big mountain boots sticking out from under the desk.
'You have a line out on that yet, Larry?' she asked. Barnside and Levine were somewhere else, outdoors, talking to the HRT people, she guessed. It felt more comfortable without them hanging around. Wolfit seemed to have spent the entire time since his arrival with his head deep inside the computer, hunting for clues.
'One just came through,' Wolfit replied laconically. 'Slow and very noisy but I can get something. After a fashion.' Wolfit looked different outside the controlled, cloistered confines of S&T somehow. He was more at home out here, close to the wilderness.
'Good. So tell me what caused all this.'
He screwed up his nose at the screen. 'Ball lightning, probably.'
'Which is?' She watched him struggle with the answer.
'Lot of arguments about that. Not conventional lightning, that's for sure. This is a real rarity in normal circumstances, though its existence is pretty well documented. The favoured theory right now is some internally powered electromagnetic phenomenon. Maybe a microwave radiation field contained inside a spherical shell of plasma. Or very high density plasma exhibiting quantum mechanical properties.'
She folded her arms and looked out the window. 'You mean we don't know?'
'What ball lightning is? No. But at least people do generally accept it exists nowadays. Some think it could explain a couple of other awkward phenomena. Spontaneous combustion. Instant conflagration with no sign of the fire that caused it. Makes a lot of sense. Real Old Testament stuff too. This is holy fire. You could use it for a million explanations out there. The burning bush, who knows? The Children promised us a message from heaven. They surely delivered that.'