Exodus 2022 (47 page)

Nothing.

Just the wind and rain. As before.

Then another far-off spasm of lightning revealed something new. Something that hadn’t been there before.

A boulder just beyond the opening of the tarp.

A rough, hulking mass about the size of a picnic table.

Dodd’s brain searched for possible explanations for the shape.

There were none.

There was another soft grunt, and Dodd saw two points of light glimmering in the gloom.

Eyes.

“What the fuck?”

Dodd slammed his heels into the dirt and threw himself back.

The “boulder” lunged—a single fluid motion—and Dodd screamed as huge white teeth locked on his right leg, on his calf muscle, and bit down with savage, crushing force.

Dodd screamed again and then he was flying out of the tent—jerked out by his leg and whipped through the air like a rag doll.

He twisted, shrieking in agony, digging for his gun.

He felt the flesh in his leg tear. Heard bones cracking. Tendons rupturing.

Lightning flashed again and the beast lunged for his chest, breaking half a dozen ribs as it landed on top of him.

A bear, Dodd realized, dazedly, as shock set in. A grizzly. He could see the massive hump on its back, muscles rippling as it slashed his chest with daggerlike claws.

Dodd was vaguely aware of more ribs snapping and of the beast’s jaws dripping—chunks of his own bloody flesh hanging from the canines.

Dodd’s eyes swam in their sockets and he fixed on the girl. Ella. She was standing over him now, buttoning her shirt, watching him, her expression flat. Emotionless.

Impossible.

Dodd knew he was in shock, and figured the girl hovering over him was an apparition. An illusion.

“Help me,” he said anyway.

The girl seemed not to hear. She cocked her head and vanished into the gloom.

THE TRUCK CRAWLED
through the darkness, through the surreal corridor of living things, headlights washing across the muddy, uneven ground.

The men gawked at the ruler-straight “road” before them and at the thousands of faces staring their way. Faces intent. Watchful. Uncertain. Eyes iridescent in the glow of the hi-beams.

The rain sputtered to a stop and the storm clouds over the corridor broke apart, disintegrating like bolts of moth-eaten fabric.

The truck rolled on, the sky burning with the white fire of a million stars, and all at once they could see an end to the strange road—an impassable barrier a few hundred yards ahead. The boulder.

From a mile-thick sheet of retreating glacial ice, the bus-sized stone had one day crashed and tumbled, ages and epochs past, coming to rest precisely in the middle of the mile-wide plain, just at the edge of the precipice, as if its resting place had been marked and chosen. Dark and imperturbable it lay before them now.

Watching from his place in the backseat, Joe had a vision of the frenzied stampedes that had long ago shaken the plain. In his mind’s eye he saw freight-car-sized buffalo thundering past, the herd breaking like river current as it approached the stone. He saw warriors leaping up, lunging forward, burying their own terror for the sake of the hunt, the tribe.

He wondered if the Earth remembered the stampedes. If the boulder remembered. If the events had somehow been burned into the ground so that rumors of those days reverberated still.

He thought so. And he guessed that the animals massed around them now could hear the rumors. Feel the power of the place.

As he watched the creatures watching them, he had an epiphany.

A shared dream
, he thought.

They’re experiencing a shared dream. Dreaming, with their eyes open, hearing something…a voice? Music? That we can’t hear.

The strange faces looking at them now—faces canine, ungulate, feline, ursine, and more—were dreaming, moving in a languid dance whose choreography had been set down before the beginning of time.

A dream. Yes.

He focused his mind, and thought he could almost make out the song they were hearing, faint and far away. Impossibly beautiful.

He listened longer, and thought maybe he understood. The song was a gentle summons. Sweet. Inviting. Impossible to resist. A refrain that had days ago begun and continued even now.

Listen children, the time has come. Prepare to leave.

Prepare to leave.

With joy they’d received the song, all of them. Heard it. felt it in their bones. Heeded its gentle call.

Now though, as the truck rolled forward, toward the stone, Joe sensed new emotions spreading across the plain, rippling out in waves, interfering with the sweet refrain.

Worry.

Tension.

Discord.

With a shudder, he realized that the source of their worry was something in the truck.

Someone. 

Joe sensed the entire host pivoting reluctantly. Turning together, like a single organism. Turning toward the truck. Coming around to face the source of this new unease.

Kehler spoke from the backseat. Gestured at the granite behemoth before them. “That what we’re making for, Collins? That rock?”

Collins eased the big truck on and responded without turning. “Not sure we have much choice.” He nodded toward the wall of animals lining the road. Laughed humorlessly. “Not a lot of room to maneuver.” He glanced at Beck, seated next to him. “Boss?”

Beck stared straight ahead. Said nothing.

The truck rolled on, drawing closer to the stone.

“Boss?” Collins said again.

Beck gave no reply, just stared, as if in a trance.

Collins made eye contact with Ring in the rearview mirror. Ring caught the look and said, “The stone is our goal. Park in front of it and we’ll look for a way up. Ferry the gear to the top and use it as a platform.”

Collins nodded and drove on.

Inside Beck’s head, a storm raged.

For the moment, the old Beck was at the helm, running the show, taking stock of his own condition.

It was not a pretty picture.

The drugs Heintzel had given him had all but worn off and he felt now weaker than he ever had. Weak. Withered. Profoundly fatigued. The antithesis of the robust, vibrant, powerful man he had always been.

The truck rumbled to a stop before the boulder—the gray, lichen-flecked stone rising over them like a castle wall—and Collins killed the engine and turned out the lights.

He sat there with the windows down, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The aroma of the rain-drenched prairie mixed with the smell of thousands upon thousands of wild animals had by now so thoroughly permeated their senses they could no longer smell anything.

The engine
tick-ticked
its way to silence, and now Collins could hear the wind caressing the stone, water dripping from cracks and crevices on the boulder’s granite face, and the murmur of the host massed around them: heavy hoofs shifting uneasily on muddy ground, low snuffles and grunts, breathy
woofs
and guttural, reverberating growls.

Kehler racked the slide on his handgun and whispered to Ring. “What if they charge when we step outside?”

“They won’t.

Kehler glared at him in the darkness. “Guarantee that?”

“No, but it’s a reasonable assumption. The animals around us are in a sort of stasis at the moment. Waiting for the leader. For the cue to move on. The next phase to begin. They’re not following normal behavior patterns.”

“No shit?” said Kehler.

Collins chuckled softly in the driver’s seat.

“No shit, Ring,” Kehler repeated. “I had no idea. I thought they always did this.”

Ring said nothing.

Collins flicked on a headlamp and aimed it at the boulder. Found the zigzag crack in the stone he’d noticed driving up. The fissure ran from the base of the boulder to the top, and there were natural hand- and footholds here and there, worn into the rock, so that it appeared climbing would be a simple matter.

Under the watchful gaze of thousands of eyes, the men quickly, quietly, off-loaded bags of gear by the light of their headlamps.

Collins scrambled to the top of the boulder first, followed by Ring, wearing a backpack filled with his computer equipment.

Collins eased himself back down and helped Kehler drag Joe toward the crack in the stone.

“Climb,” Collins commanded, and Joe lifted his foot to the first rain-slick foothold, shocked by the weakness in his legs.

“Climb,” Collins repeated. “We’ll push.”

Collins and Kehler hefted Joe as far up the fissure as they could, and then Collins pushed on the heels of Joe’s boots, boosting him skyward. “Ring,” Collins grunted. “Take his hand. Pull him up.”

Ring lugged Joe onto the flat top of the massive stone—perhaps fifteen feet above the prairie, and Joe collapsed into a heap on the cold, wet granite.

Collins dropped back to the ground, where he and Kehler collected the remaining bags of gear. The light from their lamps washing randomly over the surrounding host.

“Collins. Look.”

Collins lifted his head, followed Kehler’s gaze and shivered at what he saw.

The road they’d traveled, from the sage-covered bench to the boulder, had vanished. The animals had filled it in, erasing it completely. Now there was just a narrow envelope of space around the truck.

Two more quick trips and all of the gear was on top of the boulder—everything except the cage, which they left in the back of the truck.

Collins leaned through the driver’s-side window. “Boss?”

Beck was still in the passenger seat. Still belted in. Still staring zombielike through the windshield.

Collins and Kehler exchanged looks.

“Boss,” Collins repeated. “Ring says we need to be on top of the stone—that it’s a good lookout. Come on. You can climb up between me and Kehler. Use our light.”

Beck nodded absently, like he’d barely heard, unclipped his seatbelt, exited the truck, and followed Collins to the fissure. He climbed, robotically, without assistance. Reached the top of the stone, turned a full circle and sat down.

They arranged themselves amid the piled gear—Beck and his men—beneath stars glittering like shards of blue ice in a black ocean. Constellations wheeled big and bright beyond the cliff, so that it looked as if one could run, leap from the edge, and fall directly into another galaxy.

Lightning still pulsed, periodically, silently, beyond a far mountain range, brightening the horizon like a war in a neighboring country.

Beck sat hunched and suffering on the stone, fighting the creature in his head. He was in profound physical pain now and moaned and rocked back and forth on his heels, clutching his scalp and hair like a madman.

Beck’s men stared at him, and they weren’t the only ones. The murmur of the vast host faded to silence, so that it felt as if the entire multitude was holding its breath, watching, waiting to see what would happen next.

“No,” Beck hissed. “No.”

 The Thing was slinking forward now, grinning, gloating, ready to claim his broken mind and body for its own, once and for all.

Beck recoiled at the beast’s approach.

Raw, weak, and violated he felt, yet possessed also with a keen understanding that he had not known for days. The truth revealed before him now appeared so obvious that he could not imagine how he’d missed it.

Started on
Marauder
.
On the weather deck. After the fight with Ellis.

The Thing had been there that day—just a shadow then, a phantom skulking around the bulwarks, watching, weighing its options, deciding it liked what it saw.

Like a virus, it had somehow infiltrated his body. His consciousness, settling in gradually, slowly, so as not to damage its host.

On Beck’s own aggressive nature and violent tendencies the Thing had played, driving him to explore the phenomenon in the deep. To push ahead regardless of cost or consequence.

Tricked.

Duped.

The Beast’s agenda, he saw now, was far different from his own. Always had been.

It used me. Made me act the way I did.

Used me.

The fact of it enraged him.

Beck whispered defiantly to his nameless, invisible foe. “Won’t work. I’ve been fighting my whole life. Have the best training in the world. I’m disciplined. Battle-hardened. I’m tired and worn down, maybe so, but I am not defeated and not about to give up. So get the fuck out of my head!”

He screamed and pushed against the Beast with all his might, his body contorting and convulsing across the stone.

After twenty or so seconds he crumpled, gasping, onto his side, all eyes staring at him in the dark.

Beck’s mind went quiet. Numb. And for a long while he felt nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Then, tentative relief. Relief, followed by swelling, surging joy.

“It’s gone!” he whispered. “Gone.”

He sat up slowly, smiling. Exhausted and weak, but free.

Free!

The Thing was gone. The parasite—the entity that had caused him so much suffering—had been banished.

He closed his eyes and celebrated the feeling of peace.

Too soon.

The Thing leapt forward from its hiding place and smashed through Sheldon Beck’s last defenses like a battering ram, overwhelming his nervous system and seizing control of his brain and body once and for all.

Beck screamed—a long, shrill, agony-filled wail that made his men quiver in their boots.

And then the organism that had always been Sheldon Beck got to its feet and stood, gazing into the darkness.

Joe watched Beck struggle and writhe and cry out, and he felt a change in the air—a fleeting, electric tremor—as if the prairie were a magnetic field and the polarity had in an instant swapped positions. Negative to positive. Positive to negative.

Joe rolled over so that he was facing the vast assemblage of animals and felt their sudden despair.