Light is beginning. The time is at hand. Robert looks at Pea, and he laughs, astonished. And she laughs back, astonished too. He watches her hair bounce on her back while they duck giggling through the alleyways, in search of what and where they do not yet know.
The voice speaks then, freezing the smile on Robert’s face, clouding his heart. It speaks in his mind, clear and cold like a steel cage lowering.
BRING HER TO ME.
BRING HER TO ME.
BRING HER TO ME.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Winters is the winner of the Edgar Award for his novel
The Last Policeman
, which was also an Amazon.com Best Book of 2012. Other works of fiction include the middle-grade novel
The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman
, an Edgar Award nominee; its sequel,
The Mystery of the Missing Everything
; the psychological thriller
Bedbugs
; and two parody novels,
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
(a
New York Times
best-seller), and
Android Karenina
. Ben has also written extensively for the stage and is a past fellow of the Dramatists Guild. His journalism has appeared in
Slate, The Nation, The Chicago Reader
, and many other publications. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, and at BenHWinters.com.
Hugh Howey — IN THE AIR
Gears whir; an escapement lets loose; wound springs explode a fraction of an inch, and a second hand lurches forward and slams to a stop. All these small violences erupt on John’s wrist as the world counts down its final moments, one second at a time.
Less than five minutes. Just a few minutes more, and they would’ve made it to the exit. They would’ve been on back roads all the way to the cabin. John stares at the dwindling time and silently curses the fender bender in Nebraska that set them back. He curses himself for not leaving yesterday or in the middle of the night. But so much to do. The world was about to end. There was so much to do.
His wife Barbara whispers a question, but she has become background noise—much like the unseen interstate traffic whooshing by up the embankment. Huddled on the armrest between them, their nine-year-old daughter Emily wants to know why they’re pulled off the road, says she doesn’t need to pee. A tractor trailer zooms past, air brakes rattling like a machine gun, a warning for everyone to keep their heads down.
John turns in the driver’s seat to survey the embankment. He has pulled off Interstate 80 and down the shoulder, but it doesn’t feel far enough. There aren’t any trees to hide behind. He tries to imagine what’s coming but can’t. He can’t allow himself to believe it. And yet here he is, cranking up the Explorer, ignoring the pleas from the fucking auto-drive to take over and manually steering down the grass toward the concrete piling of a large billboard. The sign high above promises cheap gas and cigarettes. Five minutes. Five minutes, and they’d have made it to the exit. So close.
“Honey, what’s going on?”
A glance at his wife. Emily clutches his shoulder as he hits a bump. He waited too long to tell them. It’s one of those lies that dragged out and became heavier and heavier the farther he carried it. A tractor-pull lie. And now his wheels are spinning and spitting dirt and the seconds are ticking down.
He pulls the Explorer around the billboard and backs up until the bumper meets the concrete piling. Killing the ignition silences the annoying beeps from the auto-drive, the seatbelt sensors, the GPS warning that they’re off the road. The world settles into a brief silence. All the violence is invisible, on a molecular level, the slamming of tiny gears and second hands in whirring watches and little machines swimming in bloodstreams.
“Something very bad is about to happen,” John finally says. He turns to his wife, but it is the sight of his daughter that blurs his vision. Emily will be immune, he tells himself. The three of them will be immune. He has to believe this if he allows himself to believe the rest, if he allows himself to believe that it’s coming. There is no time left for believing otherwise. A year of doubt, and here he is, that skeptic in the trenches who discovers his faith right as the mortars whistle down.
“You’re scaring me,” Barbara says.
“Is this where we’re camping?” Emily asks, peering through the windshield and biting her lip in disappointment. The back of the Explorer is stuffed with enough gear to camp out for a month. As if that would be long enough.
John glances at his watch. Not long. Not long. He turns again and checks the interstate. It’s hot and stuffy in the Explorer. Opening the sunroof, he looks for the words stuck deep in his throat. “I need you to get in the back,” he tells Emily. “You need to put your seatbelt on, okay? And hold Mr. Bunny tight to your chest. Can you do that for me?”
His voice is shaky. John has seen war and murder. He has participated in plenty of both. But nothing can steel a mind for this. He releases the sunroof button and wipes his eyes. Overhead, the contrail of a passenger jet cuts the square of open blue in half. John shudders to think of what will become of that. There must be tens of thousands of people in the air. Millions of other people driving. Not that it matters. An indiscriminate end is rapidly approaching. All those invisible machines in bloodstreams, counting down the seconds.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” he tells his wife. He turns to her, sees the worry in her furrowed brow, and realizes that she is ready for any betrayal. She is ready to hear him say that he is married to another woman. That he is gay. That he murdered a prostitute and her body is curled up where the spare tire used to be. That he has been betting on sports, and the reason for the camping gear is that the bank has taken away their home. Barbara is ready for anything. John wishes any of these trivialities were true.
“I didn’t tell you before now because… because I didn’t believe it.” He is stammering. He can debrief the president of the United States without missing a beat, but not this. In the backseat, Emily whispers something to Mr. Bunny. John swallows and continues: “I’ve been a part of something—” He shakes his head. “Something worse than usual. And now… that something is about to—” He glances at his watch. It’s too late. She’ll never get to hear it from him, not when it mattered, not before it was too late. She will have to watch.
He reaches over his shoulder and grabs his seatbelt. Buckles up. Glancing up at the passing jet, John says a prayer for those people up in the air. He is thankful that they’ll be dead before they strike the earth. On the dashboard, there is a book with
The Order
embossed on the cover. In the reflection of the windshield, it looks vaguely like the word
redo
. If only.
“What have you done?” Barbara asks, and there’s a deadness in her voice, a hollow. As if she knows the scope of the horrible things he could do.
John focuses on his watch. The second hand twitches, and the anointed hour strikes. He and his family should be outside Atlanta with the others, not on the side of the road in Iowa. They should be crowding underground with everyone else, the selected few, the survivors. But here they are, on the side of the road, cowering behind a billboard blinking with cheap gas prices, bracing for the end of the world.
For a long while, nothing happens.
Traffic whizzes by unseen; the contrail overhead grows longer; his wife waits for an answer.