The Grays

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-FIVE-THOUSAND MILES OVERHEAD, an event that would have riveted the attention of every man, woman, and child on Earth—had they known—was taking place. A large and complex satellite, totally black but visible in the brutal light of the sun, was approached by a small, egg-shaped object. This object shone silver, but it was not what it appeared to be at all, a small spacecraft. It shimmered as it approached the satellite, changing into another, much more complex shape. This swung around the satellite and fitted itself neatly over the end that pointed toward Earth.

Inside the satellite, relays sparked, and on its surface tiny rocket nozzles spat bursts of flame. The orientation of the satellite turned away from the snowy center of the United States and toward the line where the land ended, and the coastal waters of the Atlantic began. Then they turned it farther, out over the Atlantic, far from where it could do any harm.

The object released from the satellite became an oval once again, and darted away.

LEWIS CREW BREATHED HARDER THAN he would like, a lot harder. Earth’s air had just a half percentage point less oxygen than home, but that difference had a definite effect. Also, his lungs were not accustomed to the pollution here, and they had been deteriorating for years. Now they boiled and bubbled when he ran. He knew that Wilkes had come in here within the past half hour, the kids in the Mountain had called him and confirmed that. Wilkes’s car had been identified as a rented Volvo early this morning, and located via satellite ten minutes later. Since that moment, his every move had been tracked.

But why in the world was the man in a grain elevator? Crew had tried to understand but he did not understand, and that frightened him badly. He stood gasping, watching Wilkes climbing down a catwalk from far above.

Still trying to catch his breath, Crew squatted, tightening the muscles in his legs and back, concentrating his energy into his solar plexus—then let go, springing up, the wind rushing past his face, leaping at Wilkes.

He grabbed the catwalk, felt it shake, heard it clatter. Wilkes stared from the far end, wary, ready…

And then he shook the catwalk violently. A wave came down it, causing it to collapse under Crew’s feet. He tumbled through the air and hit on his back. The catwalk wouldn’t have collapsed like that unless Wilkes had done something to it. It had been a booby-trap and Crew had fallen for it. Wilkes jumped lightly down.

They had been sixty feet apart, one as ready as the other. Now they were thirty feet apart and Crew was on his back, struggling to catch the wind that had been knocked out of him.

Wilkes straddled him. Crew thrust himself to one side and rolled out from under his feet. Wilkes stumbled and shook his head—and moved off, disappearing into the murk of dust that filled the huge chamber.

Crew peered after him. This was a catastrophe. He prepared to be shot. He had lost. He took the warrior’s posture, legs apart, ready. He peered into the dust, tried to listen over the maddening clatter of the conveyor.

Strangely, Wilkes didn’t shoot. But why not? He was alone here. Had Mike not realized that?

“Okay, men,” Crew said just loudly enough so that he would be sure that Wilkes heard him. “If I go down, fire into the flash.”

To his left were the four huge storage vats, each fifty feet high with a diameter of thirty feet. To his right and soaring overhead was the elevator itself, an enormous contraption of pulleys and chains driving the bucket conveyor, which rose to a height of about seventy feet, and could be directed into each of the storage vats. Farther off in that direction was a locked office that contained the elevator’s controls. The conveyor was running. Why was not clear.

Slowly, Crew began turning around. If Wilkes didn’t act, he would head for the door he had come in. The dust would conceal him, too. He was fast, he might make it.

He went deeper into the way of the warrior, gathering his energy along his spine. He had a small pistol in his side pocket, but the grain elevator had been a clever choice, given that he couldn’t see four feet in front of him.

Mike must realize that the longer he delayed, the greater Crew’s chance of escaping.

Then he saw him, and not two yards away. Wilkes’s eyes were baleful, sparkling, rock steady.

Crew leaped at him, extending a powerful punch as he did so. Mike took it in the face and lurched back. But he righted himself, and before Crew realized what was happening, Wilkes’s hands slid around his neck. His fingers felt like steel cables, crushing into his neck, making his head pound, pinching off his breath. He sucked as much air as he could manage, and then his windpipe was closed. Wilkes must have seen him gasping. He had targeted this weakness.

Crew got an arm free from beneath Wilkes’s weight, reached up, and tore at his ear. For a moment, nothing happened. With all the strength he possessed, he pulled harder. Wilkes growled through his bared teeth. His head twisted to one side, slowly, slowly. Then, suddenly, Crew could not breathe. He saw blackness coming around the edges of his eyes, deep, warm blackness.

Eight thousand miles away in Cairo, the pyramids lay beneath a night sky choked with smog. Around them, the city roared, an onrushing cataract of light and noise. A furtive jackal that haunted the edge of a nearby slum raised its head, cocked its ears, and whined. Dogs in the flat houses that hugged the pyramid compound began to pace. An old man who had been tending a smoky kerosene heater paused, looked up, then got a ladder and climbed up to his roof.

Crew drew up both his legs, and kicked Wilkes so hard that he flew into the air. He hit hard but rolled, moving with distressing agility. Crew fought for breath, managed to pull himself to his feet. His throat was partly crushed. He cut off the pain as best he could, concentrating his attention in his crashing heart, willing it to beat strong and steady. He waited, watching for movement in the dust, insisting to himself that he would not die here.

After a time, he began to hope that the silence he was listening to was the silence of death. Had he won? He watched a last shaft of sunlight creeping across the part of the floor he could see, sunlight that rendered the wheat dust golden. The smell of this place, the dry, faintly sweet odor of grain, reminded him of home.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on getting strong enough to get out of here. Only after some moments did he become aware that there was breathing that had not been there a moment before, and that it was very close.

Wilkes hammered him in the face so hard that Crew saw an explosion of lights, immediately followed by a curious sort of darkness. He tried to raise his right arm but it would not come up.

Fingers explored around his neck again, this time with tremendous speed and power. With a shuddering crackle, his windpipe was collapsed.

In Cairo now, feral dogs howled, jackals yapped and paced, and the old man in his white soutane and fez crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture that would have been familiar to the pharaohs, and bowed his head toward the Great Pyramid.

Closer to the structure, a guard looked up from his charcoal brazier and frowned. He called to his companion. Both turned toward the pyramid. They saw, along its vast side, a spatter of pure white sparks. Coming as if from the throat of the Earth itself, a vibrating hum shivered the two men from within.

They ran.

Crew was dead. He was still moving, but nothing would enable him to breathe again. Mike watched him, smiling with an artist’s gentle amazement at his completed work.

Crew’s air hunger increased. His thoughts were distant and unreal. The anguish of suffocation made him frantic, made his sphincters release, and he shat and pissed himself, and rolled in agony on the floor.

Mike positioned himself and kicked Crew so hard that his head, flying back, caused his neck to snap. He looked down at the sprawled body, then pushed at it with his foot to confirm the obvious.

He went to the door, opened it, and took two small bottles out of his trousers. One was cracked and oozing. Carefully, he collected the thick liquid in the palm of his hand. He poured the dark purple contents of the other bottle onto the floor, making a tiny hill of the crystals. Then he poured the glycerin from his palm over the potassium permangenate. He stepped out through the door and was gone.

As he sailed the ancient lays of the Earth, Crew felt absolutely nothing. Objectively, he knew that he was dead, but this had lost its importance.

In Cairo, the pyramid flickered with blue light. People came out onto the roofs of houses, stopped their cars in the streets, stared at the midnight spectacle. Dogs barked wildly, jackals sang, tourist camels boomed, and horses tossed their scruffy manes.

Crew knew he had reached the place of ascension, he felt it as a warmth caressing him. All pain fell away and all memory of pain.

A tourist who had bribed the guards to let him spend the night in the king’s chamber leaped out of the sarcophagus as it filled with blistering incandescence.

The old man on his roof moved round and round in an ecstasy of graceful concentration, dancing a dance that had been handed down across the generations, not among the Arab invaders of Egypt, but in the secret Sufi ways that were drawn from the old religion, the hidden science that had last sent souls across the chasm of space when Akhenaten and Nefertiti had gone home.

A light so great that it dimmed the glare of Cairo itself then filled the air. The very stones of the pyramid glowed as if on fire from the inside.

People screamed, dogs howled, the jackals writhed in agony.

Then, darkness.

All returned to normal. The old man bowed again toward the pyramid. Smiling a toothless smile, he went back down to tend his broken heater.

An image formed in Crew’s memory, of the scents and lights and caresses of home. He turned his face heavenward, following the golden thread of love more and more swiftly. Soon he saw a gentle rain of stars, and knew that this was the passing void of heaven itself. For a few timeless moments, he traveled the perfect physics that was long ago devised for the journey of souls.

Then he saw the wheeling immensity of the galaxy, a crystal conflagration of stars in blue, white, red, yellow, green, large and small, spread across the silence.

Below him came the gigantic horizon of a planet, as he sailed out of darkness into the sunlit side. Now he saw broad lands, farms in silver morning.

He let the weight of his love draw him downward. Soon he could make out individual farmsteads, their thatched roofs clustered together beneath ancient trees. Then he could see, far away, the White City shimmering on the horizon, and carts in the roads going toward it laden and returning empty. Dropping closer, he could hear the great auris singing as they passed one another on the road, and their drovers humming the tunes that gentled their raucous dispositions.

He came to his own farm, saw it spread below him, its fields rich with bowing wheat. The love he felt was so great that it made him glow, and he heard voices rise below. They could see him coming, a shaft of light dropping down out of the sky. He heard his sons’ shrill voices and his wife’s cries of alarm and joy.

Then he was over the cool room, set partly in the earth, where his return would take place. He dropped down though the roof, which felt like a sort of smoke of straw. Below him now was a body on a stone table. It was his own body, indistinguishable from the one the humans called “Crew.” It was naked, this body, lovingly groomed.

The next thing he knew, he was looking out of its blinking eyes. The room was lit by flickering candlelight. He inhaled. Perfect air, clear, faintly scented with the odor of his wife. He lay naked on the familiar stone table. His wife, looking tired in her sweated muslin work clothes, gazed down at him.

She bent to him, then, and kissed him long, and he was home.

TWENTY-NINE

A FLASH FILLED THE AIR, as if a gigantic flashbulb had gone off in the sky. Conner began to count, “One, two, three, four—”

“What the hell?”

“Shh! Six, seven—”

A long roar rolled in, full of thuds deeper than thunder.

Conner looked from Dan to his mother. “The grain elevator just exploded,” he said. It had to be that, unless somebody had dropped a very large bomb on little Wilton, Kentucky. Nothing else in town was big enough.

The phone rang. Conner snatched it up. “Hey, Paulie! I know. Okay!” He pointed out the kitchen window. Katelyn saw a great mushroom of smoke rising in the direction of Wilton.

Within a couple of minutes, a horn started honking out front. “It’s the Warners,” Conner yelled. As he stopped at the hall closet to get his jacket, Dan grabbed the video camera.

Katelyn did not want to be trapped in a car with the Warners. She went out behind Dan and Conner. “We’ll take our car,” she called. But Conner jumped into the Warners’ backseat with Paulie and they were off. She and Dan went into the garage and got in their car.

“Thank you,” he said. “I consider that a rescue.”

“What in hell happened in town, and how do we know it’s the grain elevator? What if it’s terrorists?”

“In Wilton, Kentucky? Anyway, Conner’s always right.”

He stepped on the accelerator, seeking to stay close to the Warners’ speeding van.

MIKE WILKES WAS JUST STARTING his car when the blast took place. There was a gigantic roar and a flash like a sheet of silver-white filling the whole world. Frantically, he switched on the ignition. The car was already in motion when a large piece of the elevator’s tin roof struck it, smashing the windshield and caving in the roof to the point that Mike was lucky even to get the door open. As he crawled out of the ruined car, a segment of conveyer buckets slammed into the snow a foot away. He slid under the car, then, and waited while debris rained down.

When it finally stopped and Mike came out, he saw that the car was a complete wreck. Worse, he could hear sirens. He had to get away from here.

The elevator was burning furiously now, the fire heating his back even from this distance. At least he had accomplished his objective. In a little town like Wilton, a spectacle on this scale would draw everybody who could move, and especially the kids. As he had intended.

He loped in the direction of a line of abandoned stores across the street from the elevator, and ducked down an alley. As he did so, a small fire engine came up and stopped, its horn blaring, its siren whining. It stopped beside the Volvo. As the siren ground down, firemen jumped out and examined the car. An instant later they all looked up—directly toward Mike.

His tracks, of course, his damned tracks in the snow.

He turned and ran, ducking down an alley and out into a disused rail yard. A glance backward told him that the antenna still stood, taped as it was to the tank farthest from the collapsed roof of the elevator. The transmitter would be doing its work, now, and would continue until the tank itself disintegrated.

He threaded his way across frozen tracks. He could not escape, of course, not slowed by the snow and chased by men who were not injured.

It had been Crew in there, Crew! They would find the body. With arson and murder charges against him, the Trust would disappear from his life. Worse, nobody would know for certain if the kid had survived.

CHARLES GUNN’S PHONE RANG. HE picked it up, was told by a young voice that there had just been a major explosion in Wilton. He input his code into a satellite access node on his laptop and chose the correct satellite, then zoomed until he had a clear shot of the town from above.

There was smoke pouring out of a large building. He recognized three circular storage tanks. A grain elevator. He sat staring at it for some minutes.

What might it mean? Was Mike in trouble or was he succeeding? He was not reachable by phone, so there was no way to tell.

At that moment, his six-year-old daughter came in. “Mommy says to ask if you want coffee.”

He drew his little girl close to him. As he nuzzled her flaxen hair, he punched numbers into his phone. “Mr. President,” he said, “the time is now.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, sir, we needed it some time ago.”

“And it’s going to be a purely localized thing?”

“Oh, absolutely, sir. Minimal damage.”

“Thank you, Charles.” The president hung up.

Charles looked at the phone. What did this mean? He hadn’t cancelled the order, surely. No, he would have said something to that effect… wouldn’t he?

His daughter asked, “Was that the president?”

He kissed her.

“Mommy says you’re very important. Are you very important?”

“What’s important to me is being your daddy, punkin.” He lifted her into his lap. She gazed into his eyes.

She frowned. “Are you upset, Daddy?”

He hugged his little girl.

MIKE WILKES NOTED THAT FIREMEN were not only chasing him now, they were making radio calls, and he could hear a higher-pitched siren, then another. They were getting the police.

He’d run out of options. He pulled the plane’s remote out of his pocket and activated its GPS. He stopped long enough to input the code series that brought the plane to life. At each stage, he got a positive response. It was out there, thank God, and intact. Then the ETA came in: four minutes and twelve seconds before it could reach this location. Way too long, damnit!

LAUREN WAS FAIRLY SURE THAT she could sense Conner in her mind. What was amazing about this was that he was nowhere near this base, he couldn’t be. She’d been able to perceive Adam’s mind from no more than a few feet away. “I sense something,” she said to Rob. “The boy is… agitated.”

“He’s seen the explosion. How do you feel him?”

“It’s like remembering somebody in present tense, if that makes any sense.”

“Is he in jeopardy?”

“I’m not sure. He seems agitated.”

He called Crew’s cell phone again and again got his terse recorded message. Then he phoned Pete Simpson.

“We identified Wilkes’s car. We located him in the town. I told Lewis immediately. The Mountain says that Wilkes’s car hasn’t moved from behind the grain elevator.”

Rob thanked Pete and hung up. He gazed out the window. On the horizon, there was smoke. “Look, I’m going to go into town.”

“I’m going with you.”

“Not with Mike at large. I need to get this situation into focus for me first.”

She let him go.

BEYOND THE RAIL YARD MIKE could see the center of Wilton. Cars came this way, and twenty or thirty people hurried up the broad street that crossed the rail yard and went past the elevator. At least one or two of them were bound to be among his human bombs, and they were walking right into the range of the signal that would trigger them… as indeed, was the whole community.

His bait was working efficiently. There was now little question in his mind but that the child would die.

Outside, the crowd came closer to the burning structure. Nobody could see the antenna, let alone imagine that it was there, or how extraordinarily dangerous it was.

The streams from the firemen’s hoses made sleet, which slicked the ground. Sliding, Mike ran toward the crowd, picking out a woman who was hurrying along with her daughter.

“Hi there,” he said as he trotted up to them.

Her eyes widened as she looked at him. “He’s hurt,” the little girl said.

“Oh my God—here, I’ve got my cell.” She began to rummage in her purse. A police car roared around the corner and came straight toward them across the rail yard.

He grabbed her shoulder, drew his gun, and thrust it into her face. “Shut up,” he yelled. “Don’t move!” He glared down at the little girl. “You move and your mommie gets her head blown open.”

The little girl began making a shrill, desolate noise.

Two minutes and eight seconds before the TR would arrive. Getting aboard would be a near thing. He’d have to carry the kid.

“Take it easy,” one of the two cops approaching him called.

“Don’t move an inch! One inch and she’s fucking dead!”

The woman gobbled in her throat.

The cops froze.

The little girl screamed at the cops, “Help my mommy!”

They stayed like that, and a standoff was just what he needed.

Finally, a warning warble came from the plane’s remote. Mike was brushed with warm wash from its fans. There was no frost visible, because the dehumidifiers would be working to remove every trace of moisture from that exhaust.

With a swift and controlled motion, he reached around the mother and wove his fingers through the girl’s hair. She howled and kicked and turned red as he dragged her. The remote was chiming, two discordant notes. He thumbed the hatch control.

“Jesus Christ,” one of the cops yelled as the stair came down, apparently out of clear sky. But then, of course, with the eye drawn to it, they could see the plane, a faint outline, its lines visible where the camouflage worked imperfectly. It wasn’t designed to be invisible from this close, not if you were aware of its presence.

Dragging the little girl by the hair, with her mother walking along, her hands out, begging, her eyes wild, full of tears, he backed up to the ladder.

The child scrabbled at his hand in agony. An odor of urine rose from her twisting, struggling body.

All in one motion, he dropped the girl and climbed into the ship. He jammed at the remote, but not fast enough, he had a cop on the damn ladder. The man was looking up at him, trying to bring his gun to bear.

Mike fired directly into his face, which exploded like a smashed pumpkin when the jacketed magnum bullet blasted it. The body dropped away and the ladder came up as Mike slid to the cockpit and dropped into the seat.

He hammered buttons, preparing one of the twelve diversions the plane carried. It would eject in ten seconds. Outside, he heard a shot. The plane was not armored in any way and that would do damage, for certain. Immediately, he got an alarm on one of the sixteen exhaust fans. As Mike took the ship up two hundred feet at a sharp angle, the damaged fan shut down.

The diversion ejected. This was an extremely bright plasma, which would draw the eye of everybody in the area. Gunfire erupted as the cops, deceived into believing that the glaring orb was the ship, shot into it.

Resistant to the Earth’s natural electrical charge, the coherent plasma shot off into the sky faster than a bullet.

“Holy God,” a voice yelled.

“That was a Goddamn UFO!”

Every eye was scanning the sky in the direction the diversion had gone. Mike turned the ship and moved off, quietly working his way out of town.

THIRTY

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the building, where the main fire deployment was under way, the firemen continued unrolling and charging hose. A burning grain elevator wasn’t going to be extinguished. It was a matter of standing by, making certain it didn’t spread, and letting it burn itself out with as little damage to its surroundings as possible. So their main interest was the roof of Martin’s Feed Store nearby, and the John Deere tractor dealership across the street, not the elevator, which was sending flames at this point well over a hundred feet in the air.

“Captain, we gotta go in there,” one of the firemen said.

“Don’t do it, Harry, that’s an order. You’re gonna see the walls go any minute.” He grabbed his bullhorn. “Okay, folks, back it up! Get those cars outa there!”

CHARLES GUNN CALLED THE WHITE House. “Mr. President, I need that scalar pulse, sir. I don’t understand why it hasn’t gone in.”

“I don’t want to do it, Charles.”

Charles’s heart quietly skipped a beat. “Excuse me?”

“Charles, I’m not going to pull the trigger on Americans just on your say-so. It’s not enough, Charles.”

It was as if he was talking to a different man. “Mr. President, the whole future of mankind is riding on this.”

“You didn’t tell me the truth, Charles. I know the kind of damage this is going to cause, and I’m just not going to do it. How dare you lie to me like that.”

“Sir, I didn’t—”

“You lied and you were willing to destroy the lives of millions and wreck the country! You’re gonna have to find another solution, Charles, this one’s too expensive, and I have to tell you, I’ve got a problem—a major problem, Charles—with your even recommending such a course of action. You don’t walk in here and do a thing like this, ask me to wreck my country and try to trick me into doing it.”

Charles hung up the phone. He had to take a tremendous personal risk if he was going to cut false orders. There was plenty of precedent for it. Dean Bracewell had done it in back during the cold war when he’d moved elements of the Sixth Fleet from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea in violation of détente in order to pull an asset out of Roumania. The problem was, there was no real way to accomplish it without getting caught. Reagan had been furious at Bracewell, yelling at him, “The next time you try to start World War Three, mention it to me, first!”

Given the magnitude of what Charles was going to do, there would be more than a White House tantrum. At the least, he’d go to jail for life. Maybe he’d even suffer the death penalty.

So he’d get Henry Vorona to do it. It would be easier for him, anyway, given that he was active CIA. He’d tell Vorona that the president approved, but wanted the orders to flow this way.

Problem solved.

DRIVING TOWARD TOWN, KATELYN AND Dan had fallen into another silence. Despite Conner’s pleas, she was beginning to feel that Dan had just sort of slipped out of her soul. She should have found forgiveness for him, but she simply had not been able. Halfway to town, with the smoke now towering before them like a storm in the evening sky, Dan silently took her hand. She let him, but could not think why.

IN THE WARNERS’ CAR, CONNER tried to keep the thoughts of others out of his head, but it was hard. He kept feeling like somebody else, also. One moment he was himself, the next he seemed to have a huge, complicated memory of things that had never happened to him, of flying in the stars, of being hideously lonely, of something that was terribly, terribly wrong. Except one thing was not wrong: he remembered Amy who was sitting right beside him, as if he’d known her for a thousand years. He remembered her in life and between lives, in the green rambles of death, planning this life together.

He shuddered. How could he be thinking about things like this? He knew the secrets of the dead and the ages, knew them certainly. In a flash, he could see back huge distances in time, to bright inexplicable fortresses and death-serpents swarming ancient skies.

And he could see the people around him, really see them, and it was wonderful and terrible, it was very terrible, because their secrets were as much a part of him as were his own.

It was like spying on their souls, he decided, looking across the walls they had built around their soft central needs.

“That is so awesome,” Paulie said, looking at the rising smoke.

“Yeah,” Conner agreed. It was an act, though. To appear to be himself as he had been, he had to pretend.

His memories of last night were foggy but he knew that something very incredible had happened.

“Dad, can you step on it please?” Paulie asked.

“We gotta watch the snow.”

At least they weren’t all full of hate. They were thinking about the grain elevator. Mr. Warner was worried about not getting there in time for Paulie to take pictures. Mrs. Warner was making plans to keep the boys from going too close. She was telling herself that she’d yell at them if she had to. In Paulie’s mind there was nothing but smoke, fire, and eager excitement.

Conner put his hands over his face and totally relaxed, blowing out a long breath. His bones seemed to tickle, and the feeling of the air on his skin changed. He had to learn to tune this stuff out. He’d messed up with Mom and Dad, shouting at them about their marriage secrets.

He could hear their inner voices especially well, Dad’s perfectly. He knew that this was because of Dad’s implant, and he felt a question now: somebody—was it called the collective?—was asking him if he wanted others implanted. They would implant anybody he wished, and he would be able to hear their thoughts perfectly, no matter where they were.

He shook it off. It hadn’t been a voice, but more thoughts entering his mind that were not his own, like smoke joining other smoke.

He tuned in to Dad by simply wanting to hear him. There came a tremendous burden of woe, a river of Mom’s face and her skin, long streams of memories, such happy memories, of walking down Oak Road in the summertime, of moments in bed that he modestly turned away from, of a train trip they must have taken before he was born… and then this sad, sad thing that had happened with Marcie Cotton—

—and he saw why: the grays had needed the family to stay here in Wilton, and they had made certain that Marcie would give Dad tenure. He saw the two of them whirling round and round in a dark place together, saw sparks of golden soul mingling, and understood what had happened.

It made him angry at the grays, because they had hurt Marcie and Mom and Dad just to get what they wanted. You better understand that I’m calling my own shots now, he said in his mind.

Instantly, there flashed before his eyes a vast wall of gray faces, eyes gleaming, arrayed in rows as far up and as far down as you could see.

He cried out in surprise.

“What’s the matter?” Paulie asked. “Scared?”

“Nah.”

As Mr. Warner, stuck behind a truck, slammed his hands against the steering wheel the color around him changed. The air flickered with red and then took on darkness, especially around his head. He hammered on the horn and flashed his lights.

“John!”

Purple light filled the car, gushing off both Paulie and Amy. Conner saw it coming out of himself, too, pulsing out of his chest with his heartbeat. He looked down at it and told it to go away, and as it did, so did the fear he had felt at Mr. Warner’s outburst.

“Sorry, sorry, folks. That guy was intentionally hassling me, he—Jeez, it’s Len Cavendish, too. He must have gone nuts. I hope he can still unstop sewers.”

Conner watched the familiar Cavendish Plumbing truck weave off down the road. Tim Cavendish had been in the passenger seat, and he had locked eyes with Conner, and Conner had heard a thought, kill, directed at him.

He shook his head, trying to shake away the feeling of it, and the memory it had evoked of the awful time in the playground at recess.

Since it was impossible to hear thoughts and see emotions, both of which he was doing, he decided that when he got home he would go online and learn everything he could about schizophrenia. If you’re schizophrenic, he thought to himself, you have to diagnose yourself and figure out a treatment protocol. If you need medical attention, you have to tell Mom and Dad.

He would start at the New England Journal of Medicine and read all the recent monographs on childhood schizophrenia. Then he would go into the neutraceuticals literature. If there was a cure or a useful treatment, he would find it.

As the sun dropped lower, the western sky turned dull orange behind the skeletons of trees.

A car coming toward them suddenly sped up and smashed into the rear of the car in front of it. As they went on down the road, Conner could see the two drivers get out and start fighting like maniacs. There was a lot of black haze around the cars, the evil smoke of their rage.

He had the strange, sickening feeling that it was somehow connected to him, as if the cars had been… after him. On their way to Oak Road.

That must be part of the schizophrenia, a paranoid aspect. There were drugs that controlled schizophrenia itself, but not paranoia. Paranoid-schizophrenia was still difficult to manage.

He had known for years that he might be susceptible to problems like this. He squirmed in his seat next to Paulie. He did not want to see his beautiful mind destroyed. He watched purple fear gushing out of his chest like a waterfall, and disappearing down through the floor of the car.

He decided that he was definitely going around the bend.

They got to the fire and Paulie practically threw him across the street getting out of the car. He was tremendously excited, racing toward a cluster of their friends, waving his new camera, and yelling.

Conner noticed more of the black haze, and saw that Will Heckle was as black as night. Was he coated with smoke or something?

Conner was afraid of Will. That was not right, that he would look like that. He stayed close to Paulie. “Awesome,” Paulie breathed, looking up at the massive structure with flames shooting out of it.

It was a marvelous fire, but Conner really did not like the way Will and now Steve Stacy and another of the older kids were looking at him. A lot of people sounded crazy, their thoughts roaring like a maddened troop of chimpanzees screaming at each other in the zoo. He began to look around for his parents, to cast for his dad’s thoughts in the screaming turmoil around him. Dad he said in his mind. But, of course, Dad couldn’t hear him, that was just the schizophrenia talking.

KATELYN HEARD A CRACKING SOUND a good deal louder than the fire. Then she saw, at the far end of the elevator, that somebody was down, and a cop, young Tory Wright, was standing over him. “That looks like Dr. Bendiner,” she said.

“It is Dr. Bendiner. I wonder what in the world—”

Tory Wright skullwhipped the old man with his nightstick, and Dr. Bendiner’s head flew from one side to the other with the blows.

“My God, he’s going to kill that old man!” Katelyn yelled. She started to run toward them. The rest of the crowd totally ignored what was happening. Then two townies started fighting, and a fireman suddenly threw down his hose and stalked away, leaving it spraying like some mad snake, the brass head a lethal projectile.

“What is going on here, Dan?”

“We’ve gotta get Conner.” He looked around, but it was hard to see through the icy haze being generated by the spraying hoses. “Conner!”

Katelyn saw Marcie about fifty feet away. She froze, not knowing if she should go to her or what she should do. Marcie looked at her. A slight smile trembled in her face, vulnerable, ashamed. She took a step forward.

Katelyn did the same.

“Katelyn, forgive me. I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it and I’m deeply ashamed, Katelyn.”

As the fire roared and the water thundered, the two women embraced.

“Something happened, Marcie,” Katelyn said

Sleet swept over them. “I know it, I had—oh, Katelyn, what’s going on? Something is not right!”

Without warning, the hose the fireman had abandoned seemed to rear up before them like a cobra. Katelyn leaped away, but it smashed into Marcie’s face and slammed her to the ground.

“My God, it hit her! Help her,” she screamed at the firemen. “Help her!”

Dan saw she was badly hurt and ran to her, and found her jaw shattered and blood bubbling out of her mouth, and her eyes filmed and uncomprehending. “Marcie,” he cried, going down to her. “Help me, this woman is dying! She’s dying!”

Katelyn saw a fireman staring… but not at Marcie. He looked off into the crowd, into the blowing ice haze. She looked around again for Conner, still did not see him. She ran to Dan. “Dan, we’ve got to help her!” But Dan heard something, he heard it in his left ear, as clearly as if a radio had been turned on there. It was Conner’s voice: Dad, I need you!

The implant—he realized that it was there for Conner, to help Conner. He went to his feet. “She’s beyond help. Katelyn, Conner is calling us, I can hear him, it’s the implant, Katelyn. We’ve got to find him!”

CONNER STOOD ABSOLUTELY STILL, STUNNED by what he was seeing. Kids, adults, a lot of people, were looking not at the fire but at him. They were stealthy but they were very definitely surrounding him. He could hear a sort of grumbling whisper, as if they had lost all humanity, and turned into snarling animals that had only one enemy on this earth…

This was not making sense. It had seemed sort of understandable at school, but not here. Nobody should care. They were here to see the fire of the century, not to go after some kid. Turning slowly round and round, he watched them. Any moment, one or another of them was going to jump him. Kill, he heard, once or twice, but most of the thought was more primitive than words, it was an incoherent snarling, and every time he moved, it rose, got more sinister… and they came closer.

AS CHARLES GUNN REACHED THE flight deck of TR-A4, the control surfaces flickered to life. Immediately, he turned on the plasma engine and watched the batteries charge. Because it was daylight, he’d need to use camouflage the whole way. He was going to Wilton himself. He wanted to be low and close, there just wasn’t any other way. Also, there was a possibility that he might be able to reach Mike using the ship’s super-secure sideband system that was capable of keeping TRs around the world in touch with each other, and was not accessible to outside tracking.

Henry was working on the scalar weapon orders. He’d probably be able to start pulsing in about an hour—unless, of course, the president, who was by no means stupid, had taken steps to close the many back doors into the Pentagon’s operations system.

“Charge,” the plane said in its soft female voice.

“Deploy shield.”

“Done.”

He hit the button on his throat intercom. “How do I look?”

“You’re ready to proceed, sir.”

“Open the doors.”

As he watched the monitor, the huge hangar doors opened. He would move out, then go straight up to minimize the number of people who would observe a very strange phenomenon—a gigantic triangular shadow, apparently cast by nothing. A close look would reveal the ship, but protocol required daylight takeoff to use full plasma and all fans to ascend to fourteen hundred feet immediately. At this altitude, the shadow would be too diffuse to be seen except from the air, and the air above Andrews was, because of this operation, at present entirely clear of aircraft.

“Sir,” came a voice in his earphone, “return to the hangar, please, sir.”

It was base ATC. What in the world were they doing interfering? “Excuse me?”

“We have new orders, sir. TRs are grounded effective immediately.”

The president had closed the operation down. Charles acted with characteristic speed and decision: he immediately took the TR up. Inside of thirty seconds, it was completely undetectable, not by radar, not visually, not in any way at all.

Incredibly, his cell phone rang. For a moment, he was furious. Voices inside the TR were damped, but if Andrews had deployed its sonic scanners, they might pick up that ring. He fought it out of his pocket and opened it.

“Charles, I’m being arrested,” Vorona’s voice said. “He’s pulling us in, all of us.”

Charles thought fast. Then he saw, instantly, just how to contain this. “Henry, stay calm. Do you have the scalar’s codes?”

“Yeah, but they’re busting in my door right now!”

“Give me the codes.”

“This isn’t a safe line, this is—”

“Do it!”

“Code of the day is B Bravo C Charlie Z Zero G Gremlin N, then one niner one in six three three eight nanosecond timed sequence.”

The line disconnected. Okay, his next act was to activate sideband. He had the TR moving away from Andrews at its top speed of 320 mph. “Mike?”

He waited. Nothing. He punched up the signal-seeking equipment. “This is TR-A4 for TR-A1. Mike?”

There was a carrier out there, but Mike wasn’t answering. Maybe he wasn’t aboard the TR.

Charles decided that he had to trust Mike to do his job. His first priority now was to save the Trust.

A TR was richly endowed with communications. In fact, an entire subset of controls for the scalar weapons would turn on as soon as it was fully deployed. This way, a TR could stand in close and watch the effect of scalar pulses that it was triggering, and make fine adjustments in their strength and angle while remaining entirely unaffected by the earthquakes they were causing on the ground just a few feet below.

Charles went into the plane’s operational manual and read as he flew, pressing buttons on a console.

Far overhead, rocket servos on the scalar weapon began once more to fire as his commands redeployed it. He had no idea that the grays had sabotaged its previous deployment, but this didn’t matter because it would seek to its new coordinates from wherever it happened to be. As he worked, its long, black snout swept back across the blue of the ocean, back to the land. It stopped, then, and with tiny bursts of the servos, began to move about as if it was hunting for something.

When a city appeared below it, the motion stopped.

On the TR, Charles watched a screen. He pressed buttons, and the image became clearer. He zoomed again, and the image was clearer still: he had pointed the scalar weapon directly at Washington, D.C.

He turned the plane on its axis and headed directly into the D.C. no-fly zone.

THIRTY-ONE

INSIDE THE GRAIN ELEVATOR, THREE figures, all dressed in silver protective gear with full hoods and gloves, moved carefully across the broad floor. Nobody on the outside was aware of the presence of Colonel Robert Langford and this specialized crew.

Dr. Simpson had phoned him while they were driving into town. “If he’s dead, you will need to collect tissue, Colonel Langford. I want cell-rich tissue. Do it the way the grays do, take the eyes, the lips, the genitals. We are going to need to build a clone of him.”

He’d wanted to ask why, but knew that he had no need to know, and therefore didn’t waste his breath. So what he had said was what duty demanded: “Yes, sir.”

“We’re looking at imminent structural failure, sir,” a voice crackled in Langford’s ears.

“I know it.” He lifted an electronic bullhorn to his lips. “LEWIS! LEWIS CREW!” His loss, in Rob’s opinion, would be greater than the loss of the gray that had departed the Indianapolis facility. Adam was so deceptive and complicated, there was no telling what anything they got from him really meant. But Lewis was as straight as they came, and he knew many secrets. Maybe his story about coming from another world was even true.

A rumble from above drew his attention. Like a gigantic missile, a flaming beam arched down and hit the floor in a shower of sparks. “Careful, guys,” Rob said, “we can’t afford any attrition, here.”

“I’ve got an organic mass.” Captain Forbes raised his viewer away from his face mask.

“Oxygen-level warning,” Airman Winkler announced, meaning that he had five minutes before compulsory withdrawal.

Langford moved through a forest of fallen, burning beams to reach Forbes. At his feet was a corpse. “Okay, let’s collect tissue and pull out.”

It was so badly burned that it looked more like a black log than a body.

“Holy moly, Colonel!”

“Take it easy! Gentlemen, let’s bag this.” It affected him deeply to see Lewis this burned. The poor guy was almost unrecognizable, but not completely. What a way to go, what a rotten death for that good man.

High above, a roar started.

“Move it! Now!”

PAULIE AND CONNER STOOD SIDE by side. Conner stayed close to the Warners, because they were not having these weird thoughts, not like the others, and they didn’t have shadows around them. They were shimmering with what he had come to see as normal colors of life.

The others came closer. He looked for his mom and dad, didn’t see them. The haze from the spray and the smoke was like a fog bank full of looming shadows, the roar of the fire and the rumble of hoses, and strange, echoing cries.

He dared not move, dared not call out. In his heart, though, he begged for his mom and dad, begged them to get him out of here.

Paulie and his family had no idea that anything was wrong. He innocently pointed his video camera at the burning elevator. Amy took pictures with her cell phone.

The whole wall of the building was now smoking. It shuddered and made a sighing sound.

“HE’S CALLING US,” DAN SAID. “I hear him clearly.”

“You can hear him? How can you hear him?”

“Katelyn, I told you, it’s the implant, and I’m sure that he’s in terrible trouble.”

“I can’t hear him! Why can’t I hear my child?”

“You don’t have an implant.”

“But that’s—”

“We’ll sort it out later.” He moved off, trying to see ahead through the smoke and haze and gathering dark. “Conner! Conner!”

CONNER DECIDED THAT, NO MATTER how it looked, half the town could not be coming after him. They didn’t even know him, most of them. So this was paranoia. He would not allow himself to react to a symptom as if it was real, he wasn’t that paranoid… yet.

Nearby, two people leaped into their cars and began driving this way.

Harley ushered the kids away. “They’re pulling out too fast in this ice,” he said.

Then one of them skidded into the other, and they both went spinning around, slamming into each other and bouncing off amid a flying shower of glass.

“DID YOU SEE THOSE CARS?” Dan yelled to Katelyn. “Conner! CONNER!”

They moved through the nightmare murk, both calling his name again and again.

As she walked beside him, struggling with him in this bizarre nightmare situation, she thought, If he has to, he will give his life for his family.

As if the sudden, deep love this realization made her feel had opened a door, she remembered being in a dark space, remembered it quite clearly. At her feet there was a round opening. Far below, she could see water in the moonlight. A boy was beside her, his dark hair scattered across his forehead. His eyes were scared, but he was so attractive that a shiver went through her when she saw him. She remembered reaching out to him, and in that instant knew it was Dan when they were children. She felt then the most exquisite, most deeply poignant sense of memory that she had ever known. Without being able to put it into words, but just feeling it, she saw the role she and Dan had to play in what she perceived as a plan of some sort that she could not even begin to understand, but that involved Conner.

“Dan, we have to find him!”

“I know it.” Then he pointed. “Katelyn, there!”

He was not thirty feet away, just visible through the swirling ice haze. And Kenneth Brearly, a Bell tenth grader, was standing in front of him pointing a pistol at him.

Conner disappeared behind a billowing mass of haze from one of the hoses. “Conner!” Katelyn bellowed, “Conner, run!”

DESPITE THE DANGER OF BEING seen by Wilkes or somebody under his orders, Lauren left the office and moved closer to the base perimeter. She had no car and dared not draw from the motor pool.

She had to get to Conner, she knew that, but how? It was miles to the town, there was no bus. She’d tried to call the cab company, but there hadn’t been any answer. Everybody was at the fire, no doubt.

That fire was bait, she was certain, set by Wilkes to draw the whole town. Conner was a twelve-year-old boy, he would be there. Mike would kill him and make it look like an accident.

She pulled out her cell phone and called Rob again. It was a futile gesture. She tried to somehow reach out to Conner, attempting to communicate with him via her mind.

Maybe he heard her and maybe he didn’t, but she certainly felt no response. She looked down the long road that led to the town, to the gigantic smoke cloud, magnificent in the fading sun.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN so long their memory of it was nothing but a few dim sparks, the Three Thieves felt love. They felt it fiercely, hanging over the burning building, for the child down there in the mist, who glowed gold in the dull, swirling crowd of other souls.

They saw, also, the antenna and the signals flaring off it, impacting the red flaring implants in the heads of people in the crowd. That antenna was connected to a transmitter, it must be, but the live voltage would be too low to make the wire visible to them. They hung far above, their small oval ship out of sight above the smoke, watching Conner. And they saw, suddenly, somebody with a gun.

Help me, they heard Conner’s mind saying.

They felt something strange within them, the beating of the heart. And they understood at last why Conner was calling for help, what all these strange signals meant: Wilkes had used a primitive form of mind control to turn dozens of people into assassins.

KENNETH WAS AN HONOR STUDENT, an Eagle Scout, and a very proud young citizen, and he was absolutely terrified at what he was doing. He remembered some kind of a nightmare with this strange, whispering man in his room and he had woken up crazy like this, and he knew it was crazy, but he could not stop himself, he’d been turned into a killing machine, and the worst of it was that he just needed to kill this geeky middle schooler and do it NOW!

He kept losing him in the haze, but just for a second or two, so he was getting closer fast; then he found a clear shot, he raised the pistol, he aimed—and, Jesus. What the hell was that? Or no, he hadn’t disappeared, he was still there. He was four feet away. He could not miss. He pressed the trigger, which did not go back. He stopped, cursed himself, thumbed the safety off, and raised the pistol again.

Conner looked into his eyes, down the barrel of the gun—and felt his body begin making tiny movements, very quick, tiny movements that seemed somehow linked to the kid’s vision.

Kenneth started to pull the trigger—and this time Conner cleanly and clearly disappeared right before his eyes. There was no obscuring haze. He was just gone.

Then he saw him again, flickering back into existence as he shook his own head, as if that had been enough to make him visible again. Now he would not miss.

Dan tackled him from behind and he went down without a sound. The pistol flew off into the murk, and the next thing Kenneth knew, the world was dark.

“Dan, don’t kill him!”

“He’s just knocked out. Where’s that pistol?”

“Oh, God, Dan, look!”

Linda Fells did not know why she had brought her dad’s deer gutter. She loathed the ugly, hooked knife, hated it when he brought home does to carve up. But now she had to use it, and she knew on who and even though she was screaming in revulsion and fear, she marched toward Conner Callaghan, raising it as she went.

She screamed and shook her head, trying to get rid of these thoughts, but the thoughts only got stronger and stronger.

Dan ran toward her with all his might, but he tripped on a hose and went sliding in the ice, screaming for Conner to watch out, that she was behind him. Katelyn howled, “Conner, Conner,” and struggled as if through mud, crossing the slick of ice, hoses, and fallen people that lay between them and their boy.

THE THREE THIEVES MOVED DOWN toward the roof of the grain elevator. They had to reach that antenna and the transmitter connected to it, but the collective was horrified to see that they could not reach it unless they descended into flames and certain death. But they couldn’t die, they mustn’t. No other triad was prepared to replace them. This had not been anticipated.

The One said, We have save him. The Two said, We have to save ourselves. The Three leaped out of the craft and dropped down through the air. As he fell, a great mass of fire enveloped him and the whole collective howled his pain and his loss. He saw fire all around him, a red haze. He felt his bones growing hot, felt essential processing systems in his body begin to boil.

He reached the lip of the great tank. The whole structure was unstable, he could feel it shaking, could see the flames licking at it. It would not last long, but even another moment was too much time. He ripped off the antenna, pulling it away from the concrete lip of the huge tank to which it had been affixed.

As he looked for the transmitter, a great tongue of fire enveloped him. His skin began to pop and shatter, his limbs to shake, then to gyrate wildly as millions of micromotors lost control of themselves. He broadcast, Alarm, alarm as he felt himself ceasing to function. He dropped the antenna, which went sailing off into the flames. His left eye exploded in a shower of sparks. He fell farther.

The One went after him, dropping also into the flames, attempting to save him, struggling against the fire. And he, too, caught fire. His head exploded in a flashing mass of sparks.

The antenna was gone, but not the transmitter. It remained taped to the lip of the tank, its red diode gleaming, still sending its signal—although weakened—to every one of Wilkes’s killers.

The Two took the craft up fast, faster than a bullet, all the way to the edge of space.

CONNER FELT THEM LEAVING HIM. Don’t go, his mind cried, don’t cut me off. But he was cut off, there was now no sense of the presence of the collective within him. He felt it as a silence at the center of his being. “Come back to me,” he screamed, but the Thieves could not hear him, not the dead, not the frightened, confused survivor far away.

DAN AND KATELYN REACHED CONNER at last.

“Mom, Dad, something’s wrong, we have to go!”

“Oh, Conner, dear God, Conner, I couldn’t find you!” Dan said. Katelyn threw her arms around him. “Let’s go home now,” she said. “Right now!”

“Hi, Mrs. Callaghan.”

Katelyn backed away from the girl. She knew what was in her hand, she had seen it.

“Stay right there,” she told her. “Don’t you come near him!”

The girl stepped closer. She was a pretty girl with a sweet, open smile. “There’s nothing wrong, Mrs. Callaghan.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“Why are you carrying that knife?”

The girl raised it and leaped straight past Katelyn. Conner stepped to one side and she slashed down where he had been standing. Snarling, she raised it again, looking around as if she couldn’t see him.

Katelyn grabbed her arm, then Dan leaped on her from behind and got the knife out of her hand. “Who are you? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

The girl crumpled, bursting into tears. Here and there other people, freed by the weakening signal, began screaming, holding their heads, throwing down weapons.

ON THE ROOF OF THE grain elevator, the metal skeletons of the two grays smoked and sparked in the licking flames. They moved, though, flickering and twitching, as if they wanted to stand. High above, the Two concentrated, his head down, his hands over his face.

One skeleton actually rose a few inches, stretched an arm toward the transmitter, trembled, and fell back. The bones fell into the the maelstrom. Now the other moved a little—its hand scraping along the lip of the tank, then touching the edge of the transmitter, the black claws scrabbling at its power switch—then falling to a jumble of gleaming metal bones and black claws. The tiny red diode on the transmitter remained lit.

At that moment, the grain elevator collapsed, leaving only the three enormous tanks standing. The light on the transmitter flickered, went out—but then came on again, glowing steadily. Huge pieces of concrete began falling off the tank.

INSIDE, ROB AND HIS TEAM threw themselves into the cellar where the elevator’s motors were housed. A massive tongue of fire roared at them from above, coming through the hatchway like a living, questing monster, grasping for their lives. The space was long, the far end collapsed and burning. The floor above them groaned, ready to buckle. He thought he had perhaps twenty seconds to get these men out of here.

THE CALLAGHANS BEGAN MOVING AWAY from the debris, Katelyn and Dan shielding their son as best they could.

As they headed for their car, Jimbo Kelton came over to them. He was smiling.

“Hey, Jimbo,” Dan said, “watch our backs, we—”

Jimbo lifted his arms over his head and brought a rock down on Conner.

Conner ducked, but not fast enough to avoid getting hit in the shoulder. A stab of pain went through him and he cried out.

Jimbo raised the rock again. Then another rock hit Conner in the neck and bounced off. It had been thrown by Mrs. Kelton, and she and Jimbo were both gathering more projectiles, fragments of lumber, of tin—anything to throw at him. Their faces were gray, their eyes watery and crazy.

As a third rock hit Conner, he ran toward the car. Now Terry Kelton tackled him and tried to drag him down, but he pushed him off. Catching up with him, Katelyn grabbed his jacket and dragged him toward the car as Dan fought off the Keltons, screaming and kicking, backing toward the car.

“Dan, John has a rifle!” Katelyn shouted as she and Conner reached the car. “Run!”

Conner jumped into the back of the car and crouched down on the floor. His head and his back throbbed where he’d been hit. Katelyn and Dan got in and slammed the front doors. As they pulled out, a rock hit the back window, transforming it into a haze of cracks.

“What in damn hell is the matter?” Dan yelled.

“Look, please, I’m sorry, I know I did something, and I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t do a damn thing, son.”

As they drove away, Conner came up from the floor. He sat hunched against the door, staring out the window at the bizarre scene, which faded quickly into the gathering winter evening.

They went toward Oak Road, turning up Wilton, taking the lonely way.

“This is a mistake,” Conner said.

“What do you mean?” Dan asked.

“The lonely way.”

THIRTY-TWO

LAUREN WAS ALMOST INSANE WITH worry and fear when at last a two-car convoy appeared at the main gate. Rob’s car was in front, a Cherokee behind full of specialists in fire control gear.

As he pulled up, he opened his window. “We’re not out of the woods, and I need you right now.”

She ran around and got in the car. The Cherokee headed off into the base.

“Why in hell didn’t you call me? My God, I almost lost my mind.”

“You had orders, Colonel.”

“Orders? Dear God, the military mind is—oh, forget it. What’s our situation?”

“Crew is dead and Wilkes is at large. He may have made an escape in a stolen TR.”

“What’s a TR?”

“Classified vehicle,” he replied tightly.

“He killed Lewis Crew?”

“Details later, we’ve got a hell of a situation back there. I don’t know exactly what else he’s done, but we’ve got to get that kid to safety or we’re gonna have another dead body on our hands right away.”

At that moment, the base siren sounded and the guards began closing the gates. Rob turned the car around and headed back toward town.

“What in the world is going on?”

“It seems that Wilton is rioting.”

“You’re kidding.”

“They’re killing each other.”

She closed her eyes, playing move after move, and came to a conclusion: “Wilkes couldn’t identify exactly which child, so he did something that would turn the whole place violent, in hopes that all the children would be killed.”

“One possibility. Another is that he did identify him but was scared to take direct action because of the grays, and is using this as a diversion.”

“But the family—they’re miles out of town.”

“They came to the fire, I know that, I identified the car. They are not there at this time, however.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Yeah, we’re in trouble.”

“And you’re certain about Mr. Crew?”

“He’s in a bag on his way to Wright-Pat.”

“Was he really from another world? Is that true?”

He glanced at her. “You might as well accept that there is no final truth in this thing. Not ever. This reality, more than any other, changes depending on the way you look at it. As far as I know, the man could be from Chicago or Denver or anywhere. But he was a good man and a useful man, which is the bottom line on Lewis damn Crew.”

Rob stopped the car. They had come around the curve in the highway which opened onto Main Street. Smoke rose from at least four different fires. A man shot a rifle from the roof of a store. Groups of people ran through the streets, most of them armed with hunting rifles. Sirens howled, and, as they watched, a garbage truck backed at full speed into the front of the First Church of Christ. Its steeple, bells pealing, tumbled over the truck and into the street.

Rob flipped open his cell phone, speed-dialed a number. “The situation in the town is deteriorating fast. You’d better get the governor on the horn, General, because the place is gone. He needs the National Guard out here, the state cops won’t be enough.”

A Buick packed with kids snarled toward them, its tires leaving smoke in the street.

Rob turned the wheel full right and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. A second later, the Buick passed behind them and raged on, swerving to snap fireplugs. Screaming laughter could be heard, full of terror.

Rob pulled over to the side of the road. “We can’t drive through that.”

“No.”

“We’re going to have to cross the town by helicopter, locate the child on the other side. And I think we need to just move him. Get him out of here.”

“What about Mike? What about the group? Won’t they keep trying?”

Rob looked at her for a long moment. “I never said this would be easy.”

DAN DROVE HARD, TRYING TO get back to Oak Road before the craziness spread there if it was going to. He would defend his family with his pistol until they could leave this place. For the Callaghans, Wilton and Bell College were history, and to hell with his precious tenure. Bell would probably fall apart now anyway. Who would send their children to a place like this?

“Conner,” Katelyn said, “do you have any idea what’s happened to these people?”

Dan thought it was a fair question to ask this child who had changed so much. You could see it in his face, a new steadiness in his eyes.

“It has to do with me.”

At that moment there was a snap and the car shook.

“What was that?”

Conner knew that it was a bullet, he’d felt the hate of the person who’d fired the gun. He pressed himself down below the level of the windows.

“Conner?”

“It hit the left fender just above the tire.”

“What did?” Mom asked.

“A bullet.”

Dan increased their speed. “Conner,” Katelyn screamed, “why?”

That wasn’t the right question, he knew. They needed a different energy to survive this. Fear would not save them.

He needed the Three Thieves. Now that they were gone, he saw how they’d been his link to the collective, and how important the collective would be to him in the future. He also saw how they helped him now, watching over him, doing the small, essential things that had saved him.

Giving their lives for him.

There was a bang in the front, and the car swerved over to the side of the road. Dan tried to keep it going, but it slurried all over the place.

“That’s a shot-out tire,” Conner said.

“I know it,” Dan snapped.

Mom turned around, and he had never seen her look like that. Her eyes were like shattered glass.

Mom and Dad were panicked. He had to get away from them, he could not let the bad decisions they were going to make kill him.

“Stop the car, Dad.”

“I can’t do that, my God we’re being fired on!”

Conner breathed hard, bit his lips to keep the sobs in, then opened the door and threw himself out into a snowbank. He rolled like you’re supposed to, and proceeded to hit Mr. Niederdorfer’s fence so hard he saw stars. He heard the car growling, and as he got up he saw it skidding around in the snowy road, its right front tire now also in shreds.

A whisper flashed past his face, followed by an echoing crack. Far down the road, he could see a car with somebody standing on it. That person had a rifle, and he was lifting it to aim again.

He needed to get to the trees on the Niederdorfer land. He hopped the fence and trudged off in snow up to his waist.

Mom burst out of the car. “No, come back! Conner, no!” She leaped the fence, surged ahead like some kind of raging lioness. Then Dan came plunging through the snow behind her. He closed the distance even faster than she did.

“You’ve got to get back in the car! In the car, Conner, it’s our only hope.”

“Trust me,” he said, reaching for her hand. He looked to his father. “Trust me, Dad.”

Then he heard somebody else coming fast, their breath whistling.

A glance over his shoulder revealed Jimbo Kelton surging through the snow with superhuman power. In his right hand was a big axe.

Conner ran. He could only hope his parents would do the same. There were thousands of acres of forest out here that would significantly improve the odds. Staying with a disabled car was obviously not the best move.

Then the trees were around Conner and he could dart and twist and turn and get through them fast. But Jimbo was bigger and faster, and Conner knew that it would not be long before he caught up.

He got to a clear space and ran for all he was worth, then veered off, trying as much as possible to avoid dislodging snow from the branches of the pines all around him, and stepping in places where the snow on the ground was lightest.

LAUREN SAT BEHIND ROB AND the pilot as the chopper moved quickly over the mad town. There was a sharp snap, then a ping, then another.

“Incoming,” the pilot said.

“Bastards,” Rob muttered.

A vibration started. “Sir, I took rotor damage off that rifle fire,” the pilot said into the intercom.

“Keep it in the air.”

“Sir, I need to return to base immediately.”

“Keep it in the air!”

“I’ll go down, sir!”

“Even if you end up crashing this thing, you have to get me where I’m going.”

“This is my bird sir, and I’ve got to return to base!”

“Captain, our lives are not as important as this mission. None of us.”

“Sir—”

“This is the single most important thing this Air Force has ever done! We cannot, I repeat, cannot fail! We must put at least one effective on the ground in the right place and nothing else matters, do you understand!”

“Yes, sir! Losing altitude, sir!”

“Down there,” Lauren shouted over the roar of the chopper.

He saw it, an elderly blue car smashed into a fence by the roadside, and the trenches of runners leading off toward the woods. Three trenches, the one in the middle smaller. From another direction there came a fourth trench.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Rob said.

“The family’s being stalked.”

“Exactly. One—no four. Four other tracks.” He pointed, and Lauren saw them, too, four distinct lines in the snow, all coming from the direction of a station wagon parked about a quarter of a mile behind the Callaghans’ vehicle.

“Sir, I am losing control of this bird!”

FIGHTING HIS OWN CONTROLS, MIKE Wilkes managed to move the TR over Wilton Road. At this point, it was the only route to Oak Road, because County Road Four forked off from here. If the Callaghans made it out of the maelstrom in town, he was going to have to take the boy out personally, and damn the consequences. The problem was the TR. It was leaking gas, losing lift. At some point, the computer would conclude that it was going to crash. It had a self-destruct mode that would vaporize it in seconds, and anybody inside as well. In the operational models, there was an elaborate escape mechanism that could fly the pilot hundreds of miles to safety, but it was not present in this stolen prototype.

Then he had seen two cars coming. The one in the rear was the Keltons’ wagon. Ahead of it had been the Callaghans.

When the Keltons had fired on them, he had experienced a surge of relief. This might yet work, and work well… or so he had thought.

Now, he wasn’t so sure. He slid slowly over the woods, looking down, unable to determine the exact situation.

There was a distant roar as the last of the elevator tanks collapsed like great, drunken giants, leaving a pall of white dust on the golden western horizon.

So the transmitter was done, now. How much longer would his assassins last? Maybe as much as an hour, some of them, but most would revert to normal almost immediately. The nice ones.

He unbuttoned his holster and dropped the ship to ground level. He moved slowly past the Callaghans’ car, making certain that it was absolutely disabled. As he was ascending again, he noticed that the Keltons’ wagon was occupied. Their dog was in the back, barking to be let out. The animal would not revert. Unlike a human being, it would remain savage for the rest of its life.

He climbed down onto the road and opened the wagon’s rear door. He didn’t need to break the glass, nobody had thought to lock this car.

The animal snarled at him, then began to come forward. Quickly, he returned to the TR, and turned toward the forest. Alarms were tinkling in the cockpit.

He would stalk Conner and watch, and if the Keltons failed, he’d go in for the kill.

CONNER, DARTING THROUGH THE WOODS, heard a helicopter. Then a shot clipped a tree beside his head. He threw himself down as another three bullets hit all around him. Jimbo, about a hundred yards away roared, “Way to go Dad, I’ve got him now!”

Very suddenly he was swooped down on and arms went around him. “Mom!”

As Katelyn’s arms closed around him from behind, she cried out with joy.

“Mom, no! Mom, we have to keep on!”

“Honey, it’s the Keltons, it’s our friends, honey.”

Then Dad was there and he was not confused at all. He scooped Conner up and ran like hell.

But a shot crackled and Conner felt his dad’s whole body lurch. With a gasp, Dad went down. Conner disentangled himself, but not before Jimbo arrived, his face purple, the axe flashing. Light the color of pus flowed out of his eyes.

“Get back in the woods,” Dad said.

Jimbo hurled the axe, which slammed into a tree, its handle ringing from the vibration of the blow. Then Conner heard the helicopter again, this time very loud. He looked up.

INSIDE THE CHOPPER, LAUREN REALIZED that it was counterrotating. She knew that this was the worst possible thing it could do short of losing its blades and falling like a rock. The forest whirled, then she was thrown against the window and almost out the open door. The world was racing now and she could hear Rob howling in rage as the pilot made the engine shriek, and the trees came closer and closer. She watched, mesmerized, until finally they were sweeping past twenty feet below, all immaculate with snow.

In herself she became quiet. She was not afraid. She thought, It’s a perfect world, and peace overcame her.

“Go! Go! GO!”

“What?”

“Jump, woman! Jump or burn!”

There was fire all over the place. Where had that come from? Then she knew that the chopper had hit the trees and she’d been stunned. The pilot cried out and began to struggle, and was enveloped in flames.

She leaped out into a frigid cacophony of snapping pine boughs and sighing snow, snow that took her into itself like a freezing womb. In summer, the fall would have killed her, but she went down now in a curtain of snow, and struck the ground almost silently.

She got to her feet, looked around. “Rob?”

Then she saw him. He was bleeding from his back and both arms and his hair was burned off, but he went charging off anyway. She started to follow him—and then saw out of the corner of her eye a blue flicker as small as the flutter of a bird’s wing. It was not spring, there were no birds.

It was a child’s blue car coat, over there through the trees. “Rob, this way!”

Lauren ran out into a small clearing, and there before her was a tableau, for the instant frozen as if by the cold: a boy kneeling in the snow, his face flushed, pleading silently toward a much larger boy, who stood with froth on his mouth like a mad dog. In his hand was an axe.

A man lay in the snow, the red of blood around him. Dan.

Lauren ran toward them.

THE AXE CAME DOWN, CAME with blinding speed, like the striking head of a snake.

Katelyn saw Dan grab the handle of the axe in both hands, and in doing so give Conner time to get to his feet and stagger toward the deeper woods. Jimbo roared with frustration as he took off after him.

She ran to Dan, knelt over him. His eyes met hers. “Help him,” he said, “help our son.”

She looked toward the woods, got up, and ran on.

Rob struggled frantically for his gun, and Lauren saw that he was fighting an arm so broken it was almost snake-like. His lips twisted, his face went ashen, but he used it anyway, getting to the weapon, dragging it out of the holster.

“Your left hand,” she screamed. “Rob, your left hand!”

He raised it past his body so she could see the useless hunk of meat that dripped there. She saw his chest heaving, saw a froth of bile appear between his lips, but saw him still struggling, still trying to raise that pistol.

WHEN MIKE SAW ROB APPEAR at the edge of the clearing where this thing was coming to climax, he pulled the TR back quickly. Rob was familiar with the TR and he just might spot it despite all the optical camouflage. As he maneuvered the craft, a soft female voice began a countdown. “Alert. Destruct in thirty seconds. Alert. Destruct in twenty-nine seconds…”

Mike hammered at the controls, increased the velocity of the plasma, the speed of the fans, and brought the lift level inching back up. “Countdown ends.” For a moment, he sat absolutely still, hardly breathing, but the countdown did not resume.

He activated the secure communications system. It didn’t matter much if the Air Force found him now. They were going to be too late, and he needed to let Charles know the situation. “This is TR-A1, I am going to burp coordinates.”

“Negative that.”

“Charles! Can you reach me?”

“Three hours.”

“I’ve got progressive damage. This thing is going in sooner than that.”

“Do you have the kid?”

“Just about.”

“Mike, the president’s arresting the Trust. Until further notice, consider yourself a fugitive.”

What in hell had happened? The president couldn’t arrest the Trust, could he? Mike wasn’t sure, but he was sure that he had a battle to fight, so he forced the issue out of his mind and instead concentrated on working the TR closer to the boy. He took out his pistol.

CHARLES GUNN, STILL OVER WASHINGTON, did not like that “just about.” To him, that meant that the child was not secure, and if that was true, he might never be secure. Charles must not end up in the situation that had destroyed der Wolf in the forties—a two-front war. For the Trust, one front would be this monster of a child, using his powers of mind to stay ahead of them and undermine their plans. The other front would be the president and his powers of arrest.

He had hesitated to do what he now knew he must. He’d hidden the TR by hanging in a wooded draw in Rock Creek Park. He rose up to the level of Glover Bridge and headed down Embassy Row. He cleared his vision. It was as if the plane around him had disappeared, except for the three control panels and his immediate seating area. He moved low over the buildings, stopping above the Prince Mansion. Just a few voices. Very well, the president was in the White House.

As he aimed the TR down Massachusetts Avenue, he opened a small cover under his right hand, revealing a black button. He adjusted his altitude, then activated listening devices. Much clearer voices filled the small area, a press officer on the telephone, two Secret Service agents chatting about their house cats, the First Lady discussing colors with her dressmaker.

Finally, he heard the president’s voice in the Oval Office talking to somebody through an interpreter.

He pressed the button. He held it down.

THE WHITE HOUSE KITCHEN WAS organized pandemonium. Last night had been the Thai prime minister. Tonight, it was the sultan of Qatar, the second state dinner in a row. The pastry chef was the first to notice something awry: a meringue was shaking wildly. Then he realized that he was shaking, too.

In the press room above, Press Secretary Roger Armes said, “We appear to be—” as ceiling tiles began to come down. Then the lights went out, immediately replaced by emergency lighting. Voices rose, shouts and screams, and some of them terrible screams.

In the Vermeil Room, the portraits of all seven first ladies fell at once. A moment later, the ceiling followed. In the Oval Office, the president, his chief of staff, and two, then three, then four Secret Service agents were thrown with ferocious energy to the floor along with the elaborately robed sultan and his translator. The Resolute Desk, made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute and used by such presidents as FDR, Kennedy, and Reagan, now crashed with a crackling thud into the floor. A moment later, the walls came in, and the whole contents of the office thundered through into the Blue Room below.

From thirty feet away, Charles watched the carnage, directing pulse after pulse toward the building. The private apartments on the roof shuddered and caved in, then the whole West Wing sank away into a cloud of dust.

Charles traveled over the mess, heading for the Mall. He moved just inches above the Reflecting Pool, aiming toward the Washington Monument.

High above, the long snout of the scalar weapon now glowed bright red. Every time Charles pressed the button in the TR down below, the red fluttered brilliant white, and a ball of light shot toward the Earth.

Tourists screamed and ran across the Mall as the worst earthquake to strike the area since the Mississippi embayment in 1811 rumbled and rattled. The Washington Monument swayed, its sheer marble facing dancing with cracks. Inside, more tourists scrambled down the stairs.

The monument came down almost gracefully, sinking into its own base as it disintegrated. Marble is a soft stone, and does not stand up well under stress.

Charles circled the collapsing monument, then moved toward the Capitol. Far overhead, the scalar weapon’s servos emitted flashes as it made fine adjustments.

Congress was in session when the balconies swayed like hammocks and crashed down into the house chamber. Fortunately for all except the observers, few representatives were actually in attendance.

The Senate was not so lucky. A ceremony honoring a retiring senator was under way, and three-quarters of the senators were present when the chandeliers began to fall, exploding into the chamber with horrendous loss of life.

The quake, finally finding a fault line, spread through the area. The tunnel to the Senate Office Building caved in. Then the Anacostia Bridge fell. Everywhere, people strove to keep their feet, tried desperately to avoid falling monuments and falling ceilings.

Charles continued his mad ballet, paying special attention now to the Pentagon. Inside, people held onto their desks or clung to doors and walls, but the tough old structure would not come down.

Finally, Charles took his finger off the button. At monitoring stations around the world, the pens of seismographs returned to normal. But the record was clear: an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale had struck Washington, D.C. Strangely, the epicenter was located very close to the surface, rather than the three to ten miles beneath it that was normal. Stranger still, no fault line was known that could account for the highly localized event, which had been centered, for all practical purposes, on the White House. And yet it appeared to be entirely natural.

Henry Vorona, who had been in a car on the Anacostia Bridge when it collapsed, drowned with the two men who had arrested him. He died furious at Charles and at life, but also relieved, because he knew that the Trust would now certainly survive.

The president died, too, crushed beneath the desk he had so proudly accepted as his own, never dreaming that he would come to his end behind it—or rather, under it.

Charles grabbed altitude and headed off west-northwest as a flight of F-16s scrambled from Andrews screamed past him, their engine noise practically blowing out his ears.

“Mike, are you still up?”

“Just about on the deck.”

“What’s the status of the kid?”

“Unknown.”

“Goddamn you.”

TERRY AND JOHN KELTON CAME out of the woods, both with high-powered rifles. As they strode past Dan, Terry knelt and fired into the trees.

Lauren leaped through the snow—which here had drifted as high as her chest—leaped and struggled in a slow-motion nightmare, feeling the cold of it sear her in places where she had never been cold. She clawed on anyway, because she knew without fully understanding that this was one of those tiny, secret moments on which a whole future turns.

She saw John laugh and stride forward so powerfully that the snow seemed to part for him like the Red Sea, as if he was helped in some way by the purity of evil itself.

“Rob,” Lauren screamed. “Rob, shoot!”

Rob struggled to raise his gun, his whole body shaking with the effort.

Three of the Keltons zeroed in on Conner. Lauren saw that they were converging with a fourth, a boy of about fifteen. She recognized him from that last session with Adam: he had the hair, the face, the build of the image of the boy that Adam had put in her mind and that she had described so carefully to Mike.

“Oh, Mike, you are good at what you do.” He had turned the grays’ own decoy into one of Conner’s assassins.

She broke free of the drift and ran hard, but all the hunters except the fifteen-year-old were too far ahead of her. “Rob,” she shouted in his direction, “Rob, stop them!”

Rob stood as still as if he had frozen, and Lauren feared for a moment that he had done just that, but that limp, flopping arm still came up, still carried the heavy pistol. He grimaced in agony, his face now lined with bars of frozen blood.

She watched the shattered arm rise impossibly higher and higher, the gun wavering in it. Then she launched herself in a final burst and took down Jimbo. He exhaled with a whoosh and fell, and she grabbed his shoulders and kept smashing his head into the ground as hard as she could, so hard that it soon packed the layer of snow beneath it and began to make thudding sounds, and his eyes began to roll.

Rob raised the gun higher. Higher. And kept raising it up right past the hunters. “ROB! ROB, WAKE UP!”

Rob’s face worked, his eyes rolling. She looked up to where the gun pointed and cried out, astonished, a red-hot knife of terror stabbing her heart as she saw just a few feet overhead, a gigantic shimmering triangle that looked so much like the sky above that she hadn’t noticed it before.

The gun blasted and Rob hissed through bared teeth in his agony as the kick flashed torment down his arm. With his mangled left hand he shoveled snow against his face to force consciousness back, and fired into the thing overhead again and again.

“Alert. Auto destruct in ten seconds. Nine. Eight—”

As Mike twisted the controls, the TR wheeled away from the clearing, its huge wing skimming the treetops, leaving behind billows of snow.

“Five. Four.”

He slid down to the hatch. The treetops were five feet below him.

He leaped. As he did, he felt a fierce blast of heat from the dying TR. He crashed down among the wide pine branches and landed hard in a billow of snow. He checked himself, got to his feet—and realized that his ankle was broken.

Rob Langford stood not ten feet away. Mike’s pistol was gone, but he began to hobble toward Langford anyway.

“Rob, you’ve got to help me.”

“I can’t do that, Mike.”

“Rob, you don’t want the whole human race loaded with chains. You’re too good a man to want a thing like that.”

“They’re not loading us with chains, Mike, they’re giving us wings.”

“How the hell would you know?”

As Rob stood staring at him out of filmed eyes, Mike dragged himself closer.

He watched as if in a balletic nightmare as Rob’s pistol slowly rose from his side, clutched in a hand that looked like gnawed meat, and braced by a burned claw.

The pistol came to bear. He saw Langford’s teeth grinding, his eyes squinting with effort. He was almost on him now, just a couple more feet.

But the hammer went back, and he knew he had lost.

THIRTY-THREE

THE GUN WENT CLICK. AGAIN, click. Langford dropped it into the snow and Mike reached him, shoved him back, and pounded him in the face with all his might. But Langford was also a powerful, resourceful man, and he fought back, finally hurtling Mike off him with his feet, sending him sprawling in the snow.

Mike tried to get up. He pushed at the ground and struggled with all his strength to raise himself but he could not. More than just an ankle was broken, he knew that from the blood frothing his lips.

Then a fist came down, and the lights went out.

Somehow, Rob got to his feet. Somehow, he moved toward the clearing. He hoped that Wilkes would be out, at least for a couple of minutes. But he knew the colonel. The colonel was one to be reckoned with.

Screaming in agony, he forced his mangled hand into his pocket. As he got a fresh clip into his pistol, he gagged, bent double, and retched from the agony of using the hand.

Step by agonized step, he moved toward the tableau in the clearing. His uniform hung in tatters, blood gushed down his right arm and left a frozen trail in the snow. Now the gun came back up, this time pointing toward John Kelton.

John raised his rifle but he was not a military man and Rob got off the first round, which sent him flying back thirty feet into the trees. It hadn’t been a fatal shot, Rob saw, as John clutched a bleeding shoulder.

Snow cascaded down around Terry, who cried out when he saw his dad go down. Mrs. Kelton came rushing through the woods screaming.

Good, Rob thought, they were distracted. He prepared to shoot them both the moment he had clear lines of fire.

Dan lay in the sanctity of his wounds, looking into the peace of the darkening sky. He remembered Katelyn on the catwalk in the secret world of their childhood, when the grays had stitched their lives together. He remembered her thin summer nightgown, and that face, Katelyn in the summer of her girlhood, became what he would take with him if now was when he traveled on.

Lauren got off the inert form of the Kelton boy she had taken down. In that moment, Rob appeared. He looked through his one unswollen eye. Like a stone, the pistol dropped from his hand. His head lolled to his chest. “The others are coming,” he slurred. “Got to stop them, Lauren.”

As he toppled forward, Lauren shouted, “Somebody help him!” But there was nobody to do that. Rob was so caked with frozen blood he looked like he was wearing the uniform of a butcher.

She went down to him and embraced him, telling him that she would save him. She ripped off her own parka and put it under his head. He smiled a little. “You’re gonna freeze your ass,” he said. Then his eyes closed in the way people’s eyes close when they are dying and she cried out again, “Help us, somebody help us!”

Suddenly, the eyes opened. They bored into hers. “You’ve got work to do, soldier.”

Crying, begging God for his life, she picked up his pistol and ran to her duty in the woods.

It was dark and silent in among the trees. She peered ahead. Every time she moved, snow came in cascades off the pines. But the movement of others was easy to follow, because their passing had done the same thing.

She listened.

At that moment, a shocking and, she thought, totally inappropriate thing happened. She was plunged back into her babyhood, and was walking again for the first time.

That was Adam’s signature!

But Adam was dead, so—

She saw movement in the woods—a shadow back among the branches that had a great, soft eye like a deer.

At that instant, Conner, who was running blindly, saw Lauren’s face in his mind just as clearly as if she’d been on a TV screen five feet in front of him. Her eyes were full of a very special sort of light, pure blue as the sky, tinged at the edges with a million other colors, the richest, most beautiful light he had ever seen.

She saw him, also, in that moment, as if at the end of a tunnel of light that wound through the trees.

She struggled forward in a haze of cascading snow and whipping branches, and the light gleamed on the snow, elusive, disappearing at moments, then coming again.

Before she could reach Conner, though, a figure was there. The older of the two teens. He had a rifle and he was pointing it. Then Conner came into view. The kid turned toward him.

Lauren raised Rob’s pistol and in one motion fired, and the shooter flew into the snow and lay still. Then she moved toward Conner.

He turned toward her, looked from her face to the pistol—and literally disappeared before her eyes.

She still saw him, but only in her mind’s eye, standing there staring fixedly at her. Like Adam had done, exactly like Adam!

She went down on one knee, put the pistol in the snow, and said, “Conner, Conner, I won’t hurt you.” She projected an image of herself hugging him. Instantly, an image came back into her head from Conner, of him begging silently with his hands. I won’t hurt you, she said in her mind, in exactly the same way she had talked to Adam.

There was a flash of movement before her, then another, this one more clear. Then he was standing there again. She threw her arms around him and lifted him to her. Her mind and his mind seemed to swirl together, and it was sheer pleasure and joy, like counting every number to the highest number, and knowing that there would be ever more perfect numbers ahead.

Katelyn came out of the woods.

As Conner went to his mother, Lauren asked him, “Where are the other shooters? Can you tell?”

“Close your eyes,” he said.

She saw an image of a man lying at the bottom of a ravine with his shoulder bleeding, a woman bending over him. They were huddled together, obviously desperate, trying to keep warm. John and Mrs. Kelton had given up the fight and moved to safety.

Conner asked Lauren, “What’s happening?”

“It’s going to end, honey. Very soon, it’s going to end.”

His face turned red, he grabbed her shoulders. “What is it? Why do they hate me?”

“Conner, it’s going to end, it has to end.”

He pushed back from her, his eyes rolling back into his head. “Dad needs us.”

They began running, then, all three of them coming out of the shock of the moment, realizing that lives still depended on them.

They found both Rob and Dan, and Terry Kelton nearby huddled in the snow. As it turned out, Lauren had missed and he wasn’t even wounded, just in shock. His eyes were glazed with fear and he kept shaking his head. “What—what,” he whispered, “what?”

He’d come out of it, whatever Mike had done to him, whatever evil, evil thing.

Dan was still alive and conscious, and as they lifted him Conner took off his own jacket and tucked it around his father.

Lauren hurried to Rob. The moment she looked at him, she began to weep. She reached out and touched his graying face. The eyes stared, the lips lay open as if amazed by a death that had been, also, a discovery. With trembling fingers, she closed the eyes. Then she doubled over, gasped, and began to grieve.

Conner came. “He’s not dead,” he said, as if that was the strangest idea in the world. He laid a hand on his forehead, and Rob’s eyes flickered open. “See?”

Rob gazed up at her, silent. She looked to him, then to Conner, then back to Rob.

“Help us,” Conner said. Katelyn was trying to get Dan to his feet.

“Let me look,” Lauren said. She’d had standard survival and first-aid training, and she saw that he had a bullet-pierced shoulder. The bones were intact. The shoulder, while dislocated, had not been shattered by the bullet. There was blood, though, a lot of it. “You need a hospital,” she said. “Right now.”

On the way to the car, she saw more movement in the woods beside them. She whirled—but there was nothing there. To her horror, she realized that she had left the pistol behind. That had been stupid but it was also a warning that she was in shock. She had be careful, now, force herself to stay rational for them all. Survival, always, was in the details.

The movement came again.

Dan saw it, too. “A deer,” he gasped.

“Conner?” she asked.

He waved her to silence.

They continued to the car, the five of them, following the tracks that had been laid in madness and terror. Dan cried out in pain, but they managed to help him across the Niederdorfer’s fence.

Once on the other side, he leaned on it. “Give me a second… a second…”

“We need an ambulance,” Katelyn said.

Lauren opened her cell phone. Fortunately, they were close enough to the town for a signal. She called Alfred, got through to Rob’s adjutant, and reported Rob as severely wounded and the pilot as a KIA to a very saddened young man. Then she arranged for air evac. Because of the trouble in the town, it might be delayed, but there was nothing more they could do.

The Air Force would come and gather its dead pilot and take him home in a box, where he would lie in honored earth and the memories of those who loved him. But maybe Rob would live to fight another fight.

Are you gonna marry him?

She actually laughed a little. “If I can.”

Katelyn gave her a questioning look.

“Terry,” Conner said, “your mom and dad are okay.” He looked at Lauren. “There’s another one out there.”

“I know, Rob.”

“No, alive. Near Rob. He’s crawling. He’s trying to get to me.”

“Can he, Conner?”

Conner shook his head.

“What are you talking about?” Dan asked

“Nothing,” Conner said quickly.

Lauren heard in her mind, Don’t tell them I can hear their thoughts.

No, Conner, I won’t.

Dan touched the implant in his ear. It almost seemed as if he had heard Conner talking again, his voice curiously gentled, coming from the center of his own head. He would have to understand this, but not now. Now he had to save his family. He leaned on Katelyn as they walked, and she whispered, “I love you, Dan, I’ve remembered it all, and I love you.”

He turned to her. As much as he hurt, those words filled him with a torrent of swirling, strengthening relief. He raised his arms and held her, felt her against him and felt in his depths the love that defined his soul, for his Katelyn.

She raised her face to his and kissed him, and the kiss seemed to give him new life—until a wrong movement sent a firebrand of agony through his shoulder.

Tears in his eyes, he managed a smile as he went toward the car. “The spare,” he said. “I’ll change the tire.”

“We’ll change it,” Lauren said.

The light was almost gone, now, but they weren’t but two hundred feet away from the car.

“We’ll drive straight out the Wilton Road,” Katelyn said, “and take you to the hospital in Berryville. Unless this insanity is all over the place? Is it, Lauren, do you know?”

“Hold it.” Lauren could not believe what she was seeing. “Don’t move.”

An enormous dog had jumped onto the roof of the Callaghans’ car.

THIRTY-FOUR

THE DOG STARED STRAIGHT AT Conner, a long string of drool sliding out of its panting jaws.

“Jesus,” Dan said.

“That’s Manrico,” Katelyn said. “That’s the Keltons’ dog.”

“Conner, what’s happening?” Lauren asked.

Conner took a step back.

The dog jumped off the roof, came toward him.

“Don’t look in his eyes,” Conner said.

Manrico started toward them.

As he had with the people who had gotten like this, Conner tried to send Manrico calming thoughts, but the dog kept leaping through the snow, coming right toward him.

At that moment, a deer—a graceful, careful doe—came out of the woods. Her appearance was so unexpected, her form so exquisite, that even the onrushing Manrico paused and turned.

She had great, soft eyes and long lashes, and a face like a deep song. She walked forward, her narrow legs pushing aside snow that gleamed gold in the sun’s long, final rays. Then she sounded, the vaporous whistling that signals alarm in that peaceable race.

Manrico’s ears pointed toward her. She came closer, her delicate nose questing in the air, her eyes as calm and dark as midnight lakes.

The Two felt sure that the dog could be drawn away, now that the transmitter was no longer broadcasting its order to kill. He did not understand that the animal’s savagery would not end. While he knew he could not control the dog’s mind, he could distract it the way he was doing, by appearing to be a succulent deer. He went closer, projecting every single detail of a female deer that he could recall.

Conner’s voice said, Be careful.

The Two went closer yet.

“Is that really a deer?” Lauren asked.

“Of course it is,” Terry said.

Conner took Lauren’s hand.

The deer came closer. Manrico looked from her back to Conner. He growled softly, a deadly sound. The deer sounded again, then began limping as a mother deer will when her fawn is threatened.

She was close now, just beyond the fence. Manrico’s haunches stiffened, his ears pricked forward, he whined a little. She sounded again and limped, lurching in the snow. That did it: he leaped the fence, barking and howling as he reached her and tore into her throat.

She screamed, then, and suddenly she was not a deer at all, she was a gray and in terrible trouble, being torn apart by the maddened dog. It leaped away from Manrico, one arm dangling, its head wobbling horribly.

Conner screamed and ran for the fence, but Lauren tackled him. “No!”

Sparks like fluid began spewing out of the gray. As the dog screamed and twisted against itself, the gray whirled faster and faster, until it became a dervish of sparks and flying fire.

Then it was gone, nothing left but a melted area of snow, some smoking earth, and the seared body of Manrico.

“Get in the car!” Lauren shouted.

They did, but they could go nowhere. “We have to change that tire,” Lauren said from the backseat, where she’d gotten in with Conner. “You three stay here, I’ll do it.”

“I’ll help,” Conner said.

“No,” Lauren said.

“I’ll help!”

Lauren responded: No, it’s too dangerous.

Why are you so good at this?

I’ve been in training for years to be your teacher.

He looked up at her and frowned. “I find teachers extremely boring.”

I won’t be.

Mike was still out there somewhere, maybe incapacitated but maybe not. She could not expose Conner to the long, clear sightlines that led back to that concealing wood.

Overhead, a dark helicopter appeared, a red cross on its belly. Katelyn and Lauren got out and waved and shouted, but it set down behind the trees, in the clearing where Rob and dead Jimbo Kelton lay.

Terry Kelton, who had refused to get in the car, began to cry, standing on the roadside, holding his head in agony.

Another car appeared, coming from town.

“Careful,” Katelyn said.

“Conner,” Lauren whispered. “Can you tell?”

“How can he possibly tell?” Katelyn snapped.

Conner closed his eyes and found that he could go racing down the snowy road and look into the car. It’s Paulie. They’re okay.

Thank God.

The grays made me like this?

Yes, they did.

It’s never gonna end, is it?

She smiled at him. “Do you want it to?”

He met her eyes, and she found it hard, very hard to look at him. She missed Adam.

Conner suddenly got out of the car.

“Conner!”

“It’s okay, Lauren.”

The Warners pulled up behind them.

Conner started to walk toward their minivan.

“No,” Lauren said, coming up to him, putting her hand on his shoulder. “No.”

“Listen,” he said, “it’s okay. They’re not—not affected.” He whispered to her. “Let me go.”

She released him.

He got into the van.

“You missed it, didn’t you?” Paulie asked.

“I got a picture on my phone.”

“Mom! Dad! I told you and told you, they missed the riot!” He regarded Conner, his face alight. “There was a whole huge riot in the town and the National Guard’s there in Humvees, and it’s gonna be on the network news. It was totally incredible, and you missed it, lil’ fella. Momma had to take you home.”

Katelyn leaned in the window. “Dan needs a hospital, we’ve got to take him to Berryville right now.”

FAR ABOVE, A SMALL SILVER dot glittered in the rising light of evening. The worn space inside the little craft where the Three Thieves had lived through so many long ages now was empty. The iron bedsteads where Katelyn and Dan had had their souls mingled, where Marcie had been laid, and Conner, and so many thousands of others over the centuries, stood still and silent.

As if it was alive—which it might be—the little vehicle turned round and round, looking for some place to go. The collective, at a loss, tried to understand how to replace the last triad. But who could do the work of another without training? Their minds were not flexible enough.

There was no place for the little machine, nobody to replace its triad. It hung there, left empty in the sky.

CONNER SAT QUIETLY BETWEEN PAULIE and Amy in the van’s third row of seats. In front of them, Mom and Lauren helped his dad.

He could feel his dad suffering, could hear whispers of fear coming from the implant that connected the two of them, but he intended to be very, very careful in listening to what it broadcast, to use it only if it was absolutely necessary. He wanted his dad’s love, not his fear.

As he listened to the humming of the tires and the soft voices of the adults, and Terry’s miserable sobs, he kept feeling an absence in him, and the more he felt it, the more he came to understand that it was the absence of the collective. For a little while, being part of it had felt like a kind of music in him, and he knew that he could conduct that music, could make it bright and great and true.

One day, perhaps, he would be strong enough to reach the collective on his own, to join it to his mind. Until he could, though, he would be in the most profound sense blind.

He needed the Three Thieves, they were woven into his being, part of him. Without them, he could feel the vague, distant presence of the collective calling to him, Conner, Conner, but he could not answer, not without the mind of the Three Thieves to amplify and relay his response.

Conner swept out of his body and through the snowy woods, following a glowing silver wire that connected him to a burned place near the Niederdorfer’s fence, where lay a pitiful little mess of rags and sticks and empty black eyes.

Wake up, he said in the secret air of the mind, come back to me.

There was stirring in the snow, but only a little, for the damage the Two had endured was very great.

A sentence came to Conner, Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken… and he knew that it was the love written in the bible, a secret code for those who know.

“Behold,” he murmured, “he comes leaping on the mountains…”

And in the field, broken flesh fluttered in the night wind.

In the seat in front of him, Terry Kelton sobbed, his head hanging low on his chest.

Conner thought, I can help him. He did not know how it was or why it was that he could leave his body so easily. He knew all about out-of-body travel, of course, he’d experimented with it, as he had with remote viewing and all such things, because he understood the physics of superposition, and how it was that the electrons in the brain, during meditation, would become ambiguous, no longer in any one place, and you could use that to prowl in hidden pathways.

He slipped upward and outward, and saw, in his mind’s eye, four Air Force guys with two aluminum gurneys in the snow. He looked at the faces of the victims, and saw that John and Mrs. Kelton were alive. “Your mom and dad made it,” he told Terry. “You lost your brother and Manrico.”

Terry turned around. “How do you—”

Conner met his eyes. Your soul knows, he said inside himself. Terry blinked, then looked away and was silent for a time. Finally, a whisper: “Thanks for telling me.”

Conner had work to do. He brought to mind the Three Thieves as they had appeared last night, dumpy and scared, hiding behind the trees and terrified of making a mistake. He imagined them bobbing along in the night the way they had, so upset about scaring him, so unable to understand how not to.

I need you, he said in his mind.

His thought was met by silence.

They pulled into the Berryville Hospital emergency room. Medical personnel in green oversuits ran up, their portable stretcher rattling on the concrete driveway.

The Air Force helicopter roared into view, dropping down onto the hospital’s rooftop helipad.

Can you see who’s in it? Lauren asked in his head.

Conner went out of his body again, traveling up to the ceiling… and found that he could go through it… he saw up the legs of people, then went higher, up through the next ceiling. He was on the roof now, and he could see the Keltons lying strapped to their stretchers.

There was another man there, Lauren’s friend, the handsome officer with the mangled hand and the burns.

Then they brought out a fourth man. He had a narrow, careful face and rusty gray hair. He was in agony, his teeth bared, his head turning from side to side as he forced himself not to scream.

He raced back into his body. “It’s him,” he said, “he’s up there.”

“Who?” Lauren asked.

Conner knew what she wanted to know. Your friend.

Lauren burst into tears.

“Conner, what’s the matter with her?” Amy asked.

He shook his head. How could he explain?

“Conner,” Lauren whispered. Then, between their minds, You healed him, didn’t you?

I don’t know.

Amy’s hand slipped toward his—hesitant, trembling a little. He took it. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against his shoulder.

Paulie shook his head. “My sis is a piece of work, buddy.”

They sat side by side on blue plastic seats in the emergency waiting room. She smiled a little, and he saw one of the silver threads running between the two of them. He looked down at it where it disappeared under his shirt. With his free hand, he tried to touch it, but his hand went through it.

He met her eyes, and saw there a sparkle of love and hope. She closed them, and he saw her face change. She threw back her head and laughed, and he put his arm around her.

“Oh, boy,” Paulie said.

“Shut up, little boy,” Amy snapped. She kissed Conner on the cheek and giggled.

Mom and a doctor came out of a double door across the room. The doctor said, “Your dad’s going to be fine.”

Terry went to his feet. Behind the doctor, his parents had also come out. He ran to them, and the family embraced.

Mom sat down beside Conner, and put her arm around him. As he felt the comfort of the two women, his eyes closed.

“He sure goes to sleep fast,” Amy said.

“He’s your little boyfriend,” Paulie said.

“He’s been through a lot,” Katelyn responded, “he’s real tired.”

Behind them, a group of uniformed Air Force personnel ran into the emergency room.

“Who are they?” Paulie asked.

As they hurried through the double doors into the emergency room proper, Lauren saw Rob on his stretcher. Uttering a little cry, she went running to him. She held his face in her hands. He opened his eyes. A weak smile came. “You’re a hell of a sight,” he said, his voice a bare whisper.

She tried to smile. “Is that good or bad?”

“Good, lady. Real good.”

She kissed him then.

“Sir?”

Rob turned his head away from her. “Yes, Major?”

“We’re detailed to detain Colonel Wilkes.”

Lauren said, “Was he in the evac?”

“Yeah,” Rob said faintly. “Oh, yeah.”

AT THAT MOMENT, CHARLES GUNN was half pulling, half carrying Mike down a hallway. He heard voices behind them and went faster, pushing through an alarmed exit door, setting off a steady beeping behind them.

Charles’s TR was there, its hatch glowing with amber light from within. Otherwise it was invisible.

He helped Mike up the ladder, then drew it in behind them. The Air Force officers swarmed out of the hospital exit and began fighting to get into the TR. Charles mercilessly shot one of them, and they all fell back. Leaving Mike in the access tunnel, he slid into the cockpit and hit the stick, causing the fans to whine for a moment as they revved.

Below him, the officers were drawing their guns. He knew how vulnerable the TR was to gunfire, and twisted the flight controls, slamming the power switches all the way down as he did so. The world outside whirled wildly and critical maneuver alarms sounded.

But the hospital spun away below, and the shots that were being fired did no damage. He headed the nose of the craft toward the dark, and was off into the night.

SLEEPING BETWEEN AMY AND HIS mom, Conner dreamed of when the bluets would rise out of the ground along the roadsides and the warblers would come back to Kentucky, and he saw his own backyard going green again, and his dad filling the pool with the garden hose. He dreamed then of the days of summer peace. He woke up a little and murmured, “We’re going to be free, all of us.”

“We are free,” Amy said. “Sort of. Aren’t we?”

“Sort of,” he said. “But there’s a lot more to come.”

But in his heart, he despaired, calling, Come back to me.

Silence continued to be the only response.

“Look here, Conner Callaghan, if you’re gonna be my boyfriend, you have to pretend not to be totally geeky. Can you do that?”

He smiled a little. “I’ll give it a shot.” His eyes fluttered closed and he tried again to find the mind of the collective.

The snow, dark now, slowly covered the body of the Two, and in the ashes of the grain elevator, the curious metal bones of his brothers, also, were dusted with it, deep in the black ruins.