Ghostlands

FIFTY-SIX

Jeff Arcott was dead, to begin with.

But Theo Siegel didn’t have time to ruminate on that, or agonize over it, or ponder the fact that no one would ever call him Theodore again.

Or even wonder if the life choices he’d made that had led to the inevitable moment of bashing in Jeff’s head with a steel pipe had been better, say, than going to vocational school or joining a cycle gang or simply running away to become a snake handler when he was ten.

Because although Jeff-or rather, the tragic, mangled, power-riddled vessel that had been Jeff-was no longer a threat to Melissa or Theo or anyone, the dark sensibility at the heart of the Source very much was.

At this given moment, It was summoning back every bit of the sickly, glowing energy It had disgorged out of the Spirit Radio onto the pavements and streetlamps and upright brick structures of Atherton, drawing it surging and splashing back the way it had come, like a tidal wave receding into the sea….

And drawing Melissa Wade with it.

Jeff Arcott had tried to whisper something in his last living moments, as Theo had crouched horrified over him.

But before Theo could discern what that might be, he’d heard Melissa’s wailing cry on the wind and spun to see her blown whirling away like a paper doll on the wind, engulfed in lambent dark energy.

She was twenty, forty, seventy yards from him now, blasting toward the ruined shell of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building and the portal within.

“Melissa!” he cried, and vaulted after her on thick powerful legs, through the churning emerald-topaz radiance that could buffet him and prick him like a thousand needle-hot wasp stings, but couldn’t possibly stop him.

Legs pounding, leaping over great swaths of concrete, Theo drove forward, cutting down the distance. He sensed dimly about him that, as it retreated, the luminance left behind only arid stone and dead foliage, leeching out every last ounce of life force, stealing it away for other, urgent use.

But not Melissa; it had taken everything else, had ravaged and perverted Atherton, corrupted and destroyed Jeff-

But it wouldn’t have her.

He could see the twisted skeleton of the physics building ahead of them now. What shone out from the interior of the building was not light but a kind of luminous darkness, a viscous black of such intensity that it made Theo want to shut his eyes.

Instead, he let out a savage cry and gave a last Olympian leap high into the air, reaching out with great wiry arms….

He struck Melissa midair, seized her by her frail midsection, held hard to her; close now, he caught the scent of her sweat and her Changing, pure and bitter, like some exotic herb.

But the compacted weight of him was not sufficient to bring the two of them down; they were still driving through the air, the momentum of his leap speeding them even more rapidly toward the inhaling maw.

Ahead of them, scant feet from the physics building, he caught sight of a splintered power pole, frantically stretched a long gray arm toward its gem-encrusted crossbeam. His fingers wrapped tightly around it, and the force of the wave carrying him pulled him horizontal as it tried to tear him away from the pole. But he held fast to it, and to Melissa, until his fingers on the faceted stones and rough wood were bloody, until his bones wanted to crack.

He howled his rage and his pain against the Storm.

He was still howling when the roof of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building came apart in an explosion of beams and tiles and rebar, plywood and brick and drywall. Pieces of it fell about the two of them like hail-some pieces big enough to crush them, though they were spared. Oddly, there wasn’t much sound. Only the soft initial thrump, and the pattering sound of debris raining down on Philosopher’s Walk.

The building was gone, and with it the light-darkness that had shone coldly out of it, and all evidence that the Spirit Radio had ever been conceived, built or activated.

Except for the two of them, clinging trembling to each other atop a power pole, Atherton was silent and dead and dark.