Instinct (43 page)

“Those government guys descended on my house in droves. They didn’t manage to prevent anything.”

“Yeah, but I bet they didn’t see it the way I did. When I saw those symbols in that diary, I went back into time and saw that thing being defeated a million years ago. If I’d seen the whole picture instead of just part of it, maybe I’d know what to do,” Romie said.

“Or maybe you would have committed suicide,” Lisa said.

“I suppose that would be a solution as well,” Romie said. “Tell us about what happened at your house, Brad.”

Brad sighed. “I don’t know much. I was trapped inside. There were those plants, and the spinning rock. Something dug a hole under my garage. It think the rock was the center of the activity.”

“Maybe we should look for the rock and blow it up or something,” Lisa said.

“Well, we could,” Brad said. “Except the rock is probably in the middle of a bunch of killer vines, and if the thing could have been blown up, then don’t you think the government guys would have tried that? Isn’t that their first approach to everything?”

“Not everything,” Romie said. “They only blow things up when they don’t see a way to profit off of them.”

“Past tense,” Lisa said. “They’re all gone now. There’s no government to muck things up anymore.”

“And that’s what they were good at,” Romie said. “Mucking things up, I mean. So let’s not assume that blowing the thing up isn’t a good idea. The government guys who showed up at your house might have been incompetent, and they might have had ulterior motives.”

“There’s still the problem of getting close enough to the thing. If it’s in a patch of vines, you’re not going to get very close to it from the ground.”

“Maybe we could find an army base or something. Maybe we could get those rocket propelled grenades or whatever,” Lisa said.

“You’d need headphones, too,” Brad said. “That big ticking noise we heard will hypnotize you until the vines come. I think it’s a defense mechanism. It paralyzes you with sound somehow.”

“That’s easy,” Romie said. “We get headphones and heat. If the thing makes it snow, then maybe it hates heat. We just throw some gasoline bombs at it, and maybe that will stop it.”

“That sounds like a long shot,” Brad said. “I’ve survived the snow once, I can do it again. We should just concentrate on finding a place we can winterize. Shouldn’t be hard around here. We just need to stockpile water, food, and firewood.”

“We might as well go back to the farm if we want to do that,” Lisa said. “Those people were already making good progress on those fronts.”

“No,” Romie said. She slammed her hand down on the steering wheel. “We can’t sit back and wait. Who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t taken all those corpses up and fed them to the light? We might be dead now. How are we going to do that again if the ball of light comes back? We don’t have access to that many dead bodies anymore. What are we going to do? Are we going to feed it all the people who were living at the farm? Sacrifice all those people? For what? If we do that, then there’s nobody left to save the planet for.”

Lisa and Brad were silent as Romie’s words faded. The static from the radio once more filled the interior of the vehicle.

“And it might have worked to some extent, but it wasn’t exactly a permanent solution, was it? Here we are, facing the same thing,” Romie said.

Brad looked out his window into the night. He imagined what was lurking there, behind the back yards of the houses, in the forest that ran up the little hill. Somewhere there might be a trail that led to a patch of vines. Maybe in the center of that patch, he would find a big rock that was out of place. That would be slowly spinning, emitting a rumbling TOCK every few minutes that had the power to hypnotize. It was a crazy thought that made absolutely no sense. He had no business believing in such things, except for the fact that he had seen and heard them himself.

“Gasoline and headphones?” Brad asked. “Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

CHAPTER 33: ROAD

T
Y
WOULDN
’
T
TALK
. H
E
wouldn’t describe what he had seen, or how it might have influenced his new strong opinions on what direction they took. Ty simply stared out the windows and barked instructions.

“Left here,” he said.

Other times, he would just say a single word. “Right.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Slow down a little.”

Tim was so startled by the volume of words that he jerked the ambulance to a stop. Ty threw open the door and jumped from the vehicle. Tim watched him in the mirror. The giant man ran back to a landscaping truck and pulled two red gas cans from the trailer. He hoisted them and the returned to the drivers side where he unscrewed the cap on the ambulance’s fill pipe.
 

The needle on the gas gauge stirred for the first time in a while.

When Ty jumped back in, he seemed much more calm.

“We’re almost there, but we wouldn’t have made it.”

The sky was growing dark. Tim flipped on the headlights.

✪
 
✪
 
✪
 
✪
 
✪

Ty’s last instruction took them up a long drive. The driveway was lined with white fences and stately trees. It led up a hill to a pretty white farmhouse, revealed by the ambulance’s headlights as they approached.

“What is this place?” Jackson asked from over Tim’s shoulder. He was kneeling between the seats. Cedric was in back, curled up on the stretcher with Amy Lynne. Tim heard the dog’s tags jingle when Jackson spoke. The dog still didn’t trust Jackson.

“It’s where we’re supposed to be,” Ty said. “Don’t you feel it?”

“I guess,” Jackson said.

Tim didn’t feel it. In a world that was empty, this place looked especially abandoned. His eyes began to pick out the details that his subconscious had already processed. The gates to the pastures were open and untethered. They swung loose like the front door of the house. The grass was trampled. A few tractors were left out on the lawn instead of tucked away from the elements. He saw trash and clothes scattered in a patch of yard between two barns.

Tim put the vehicle in park, but he didn’t shut off the engine.

“I don’t like the looks of this place,” Tim said.
 

“This is where we’re supposed to be,” Ty said again. He was out the door and walking across the driveway before Tim replied.

Tim got out and left his door open so Cedric could join him. The dog was right behind him.

Ty was walking straight for the front door of the house. Tim walked over to one of wooden fence gates. A patch of mud just outside the gate was dotted with hoof prints. Cedric sniffed around in the mud. In the periphery of the glow from the headlights, Tim saw a pile of fresh horse manure in the pasture. Cedric made his way towards the pile.
 

“Don’t do that, Cedric,” Tim said. “Who knows if they’re sick or something.”

The dog looked over at Tim for a second before he gave in and came towards him.

A sound drew their attention. It was Ty. Even though it was wide open, he was reaching through the doorway and knocking on the front door.
 

“Come on,” Tim said to Cedric. He walked up to the house as Ty was slipping inside. “Ty? Hey, Ty, wait up.”

Ty was climbing the staircase to the second floor as Tim reached the door. He was about to go inside when the headlights and engine of the ambulance shut off. Tim waited on the porch. As his eyes adjusted to the starlight, he saw Jackson helping Amy Lynne from the back of the ambulance. They shared a flashlight. Jackson propped her up and helped her walk towards the house.

Ty didn’t take long on the second floor. He came back down the steps with his big feet almost sideways on the treads.
 

“Nobody here,” Ty said.

“Where do you think they went?” Jackson asked.

“Who?” Amy Lynne asked. “Who did you think we were going to find here?”

“I don’t know,” Ty said. “Other people who had the same idea about this place, I suppose.”

Ty came out on the front porch.
 

“So what do we do? Try to find where they all went?” Tim asked.

“This is the right place,” Ty said. “I say we stay here and see if anyone comes back.”

CHAPTER 34: FARM

“T
HIS
WOULD
BE
A
lot easier if we had the key to this code,” Robby said. On the desk in front of him, he had a dozen documents arranged side by side.

“If I had the code, do you think I’d still be here?” Hampton asked. “But I believe that the encoded documents are simply the analysis of the other research. We have the original research in plain text, so you need to draw your own conclusions.”

“That may or may not be true,” Robby said. He stood up and pointed at the cork board. “Do you see this article? It’s quoted here in this encoded document, but so are at least five or six other documents. Where’s that research? It’s not in any of the relevant files that I can find.”

“You’re crazy,” Hampton said. “If you don’t know the code, then how do you know that article is quoted.”

“You can tell,” Robby said.
 

Hampton took the document from him and held it up next to the article on the cork board. He shook his head. “No, I can’t.”

“Trust me, then,” Robby said. “It’s a quote.”

“Then use it as your Rosetta Stone. Use it as your key to unlock the rest of the document.”

“I can’t. I need more examples. That’s why I’m looking for the source articles. Is this all there is? Are there any more cabinets of documents in this place?”

“Not that I know of,” Hampton said. “This place is big, but I’ve been in every inch of it at one time or another. There were other centers in the world though. The primary research was down in Puebla in Mexico.”

“Probably take too long to get there,” Robby said, slumping back in his chair.

“Ten hours by jet, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near the place. The Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant would have gone critical, let’s see, about five months ago. That whole region will be uninhabitable for the next million years or so. Imagine Chernobyl time a thousand.”
 

“I wondered about the nuclear plants,” Robby said.

“We’re safe enough here. I’d stay out of Asia and most of Europe though,” Hampton said. “Assuming they still exist. You might as well put California on that list. Only a few plants, but if there’s an earthquake…”

“Did any of the researchers study the symbols?” Robby asked.

“Symbols?”

“There were some written in blood on the wall of a house near mine. I found a transcription of some in a diary in Vermont. They seem to trigger some kind of memories.”

Hampton shook his head. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Robby interlaced his fingers on his chest. After a minute, he sat up and rearranged the documents on the desk. “If this is all the documentation you have, then what steps are you following? You’re carrying out the plan that the researchers invented, right? Where’s that plan?”

Hampton tapped the side of his head. “It’s all up here.”

“They’ve got all these hardcopies of documents, and the most important part is committed to memory?”

“Can’t be intercepted if it’s not written down.”

“Intercepted by whom? Do you think that planet-sized aliens care about the plans of men?”

“They should. Besides, why take the chance?”

“I’d be less worried about that, and more worried that you only have one-hundred and fifty people. That’s not nearly enough biomass to turn back the embryo.”

Hampton didn’t respond. Robby studied his face to try to discern whether his comment had hit home. He thought it did. He thought that if he hadn’t been right, Hampton would have come back with a comment of his own.

A buzzer went off. Hampton reached forward and hit a button to silence the alarm.