Triskellion 3: The Gathering (34 page)

Gabriel waited. “Have you finished?”

Crane nodded and lowered his head as though waiting to be given an order, to receive his instructions.

“You are as deluded as your half-brother,” Gabriel said, pointing at Ralph Newman. “You have nothing. You offer nothing. If things are going to change – and they will – it can only happen when those who think as you do are gone for ever. And how ever many people you think you have brainwashed into following you, I guarantee not many of them will shed a tear for you when you are gone.” He dropped a hand onto Adam’s shoulder. “And Adam was right. I
should
have killed you when I had the chance.”

A growl rose up from Crane’s throat and there was something murderous in his eyes – and even with Gabriel in such an aggressive mood, Rachel was suddenly afraid for their safety.

“I’m very sorry you feel that way.” Crane’s voice was frighteningly calm. “You have badly underestimated me. I will show you what it means to be loved…”

Holding up one hand, he reached across with his other and pressed a button on his brightly coloured wristwatch. A high-pitched alarm sounded. It was followed by the noise of other alarms – many thousands of them – which rose up from the streets seventy storeys below.

“No!” Gabriel said.

Rachel saw the look of horror on his face and realized that something terrible was happening.

Crane nodded. “I will show you just how much I am
loved
.”

B
arbra Anderson unfolded the tablecloth and sat Eden and Tammy down on the grass. The earth seemed to tremble beneath them.

They had not made it to the Flight Building. The crowds had been too dense and the children had been in danger of getting trampled, so they had stayed in Central Park.

Bob Anderson stood near by. He had been watching Pastor Crane’s balloon journey on the big screens and had seen the gathering at the foot of the tower. There had been singing and banner-waving when the balloon had landed on the helipad high up on the glass building. He had felt a pang of regret that he wasn’t with the rest of them, especially when the swarm of bees had appeared, darkening the sky and covering the building like it was a gigantic hive.

It had been a truly apocalyptic vision. A thing of biblical proportions, Bob had thought. The pastor had long promised such events, and now he was sending them the signal that meant they were to make the ultimate sacrifice. Bob had hoped things would turn out differently, but if the pastor told them to do it, then it must be the right thing to do.

The sky was rolling now and darkening with purple and black clouds ready to burst, until all at once a warm rain began spitting down on everyone. With their damp clothes sticking to their bodies, a strange silence fell across the whole park.

Bob looked again at the flashing red light on his Triple Wheeler’s watch, listened to the piercing
beep-beep
of the alarm and knew that the time had come.

He sat down on the grass and hugged his children.

“What’s happening, Daddy?” Eden asked.

“Nothing to be scared of, big fella.”

“Are we going to die?” Tammy asked.

“Don’t be crazy, honey.” Bob squeezed her tight. “Pastor Crane wouldn’t let us die. We’re going to be reborn.”

Barbra kissed and hugged her children. She then chastely kissed Bob on the lips and smiled at him. She opened the red lunch box on the cloth in front of her and took out the bottles. Then, along with thousands of other families gathered in the park around them, she began counting out the pills.

On the screens above, Brother Jedediah’s huge, nervous and sweaty face appeared. He was speaking from a balcony a few floors up on the Flight Building, the Triple Wheel cameras trained on him. All around him the building was blackened by the swarm and the whole skyscraper vibrated with the collective buzzing of a billion bees.

This was Brother Jedediah’s big moment.

“Tick-Tock.” His voice trembled. “The time has come for you all to take the medicine, Brothers and Sisters. Pastor Crane has asked me to tell you that he is with you at this time. He will take you to the Promised Land…” He swatted something away with his hand.

“Pastor Crane loves us all and will deliver us—” Something else landed on Jedediah’s face and this time it was not so easily dislodged.

A bee had woven its thorny legs into the hairs of his wispy moustache and was not about to move. Jedediah tried to continue. “As I speak, Pastor Crane is high up in this very building, negotiating with our new leaders…”

The rain began to fall more heavily, plastering the black strands of Jedediah’s hair to his head, and more bees landed on his face and started to sting. The little man yelped and his squeals were broadcast across the whole city. Bees were peeling away from the Flight Building in vast numbers; swooping down, they clung to his hair and clothes until he was completely covered in a thick writhing black carpet. The buzzing was so loud that it drowned out his screams, and more and more insects flew around him, engulfing him in a vicious, spinning vortex – a tornado of bees.

The crowd gasped; the noise of the swarm grew louder and angrier, the spinning faster, until finally Jedediah was lifted bodily into the air and carried higher and higher above the crowd.

Then the bees dropped him.

Jedediah slammed hard onto the street below. Triple Wheelers screamed at the sight of their leader’s second in command lying limp and broken on the pavement. A cloud of bees hovered around the body for a few seconds before darting into the crowds, stinging hands that were about to lift deadly medicine to lips. A column of bees, the size and volume of an express train, shot up Broadway, stinging and knocking vials of poison and bottles of pills from Triple Wheelers’ hands, before descending on Central Park.

It was then that everybody began to wake up…

Bob looked at his wife, who was about to feed Eden and Tammy a handful of pills. In his own hand, he was holding a small vial of liquid barbiturate. He was getting ready to swallow it when a bee stung him on the neck. Then another stung his hand. The sharp pain pulled him up short. A coolness crept across his hand and up his arm as the venom spread through his bloodstream, quick and effective like a drug.

“Ow!’ Barbra cried.

Bob saw that four or five bees had attached themselves to her hands and were stinging her, forcing her to drop the pills. Triple Wheelers yelled and squealed around them, and Bob suddenly saw the whole situation with a new clarity. The coolness in his veins spread to his brain and he dropped the vial on the ground and stamped it into the wet earth. Eden was crying; a bee had stung him on the arm. Bob picked his son up and kissed him while Tammy climbed to her feet and hugged her father tight, as if her life depended on it.

Which it did.

Bob ran around the neighbouring couples, slithering in the mud, shouting at them: “Drop the pills. Don’t take the medicine. It’s over…”

With the rain drumming down on the crowd, Bob quickly realized that the other families were doing the same thing he had done. Mothers who had dissolved pills into bottles of milk were looking quizzically at the poison they had been about to feed to their babies. It was as if the beestings had awakened them from the collective dream they had been moving through like zombies. People staggered around, slipping on the soaking grass, bleary eyed, as if recovering from a deep and troubled sleep.

The sky blackened further still. Bob grabbed his wife and held her tight. Her whole body was trembling and she was crying, her tears mingling with the pouring rain.

“What were we thinking, Bob?” she cried. “What were we thinking?”

“It’s over, honey,” Bob said. “Let’s go home.”

F
our hundred and fifty metres above Broadway, in the Flight Building’s secret observatory, Rachel and Adam, along with their mother, Laura, Gabriel, Crane and Newman had watched the events unfolding below them on the screen. They had seen the swarm descend on the crowd of Triple Wheelers. The venom had woken Ezekiel Crane’s followers from their semi-trance and saved their lives.

Ralph Newman had moved to the window and stared out in wonder, seemingly oblivious to the others in the room with him once the heavens had opened. He still stood there, gazing at the darkening sky and the glittering web of orbs, which had begun to glow high in the distance above them, pulsing gently against the blackness.

“I didn’t know it would be this … beautiful,” he said.

Laura seized the chance to rush over and free Kate. She ripped away the tape from her mouth and helped her back to the other side of the room. Kate fell into the arms of Adam and Rachel.

“Mom. God… Mom…”

“I’m so sorry,” Kate said. She stared, her eyes filled with hatred, at the man she had once loved; the man who had fathered her children as though they were no more than laboratory specimens and had then hunted them down.

“It’s not your fault,” Adam said.

Rachel pressed her face into her mother’s neck. “How could anyone have known?”

Laura nodded, rubbing Kate’s arm: doing her best to comfort her. “How could anyone have even
imagined
…?”

Gabriel stepped to the windows to stand at Newman’s side. He looked out at the movement in the skies for a few seconds, then gestured down to the gun that was still in the director’s hand. “You can get rid of that now,” he said. “It won’t work any more.”

Newman glanced down at the gun as though he had forgotten it was there. He raised it casually, pointed it at Gabriel and pulled the trigger. There was an empty click. Newman tossed the gun down onto the floor, turned back to the window.

The orbs were getting bigger in the sky.

“What’s happening up there?” he asked. For the first time there was a nervousness in his voice.

“Don’t tell me you’re scared?” Gabriel said. “Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for?”

Newman looked at Gabriel, saw the smile. “What is it? Why are you smiling?”

“I was just thinking about all those you’ve killed. You and the superstitious idiots who came before you. All those who were burned or beaten to death on flat black rocks; the ones you cut open while they were still alive.”

Newman pressed his back against the window.

“They would have thought it was appropriate,” Gabriel continued, “the way you’re going to die…”

There was a sudden cry of pain from the other side of the room. Until now Ezekiel Crane had been watching transfixed as his plans had unravelled before his eyes. Moving closer to the huge screen, he cried out again, raising one hand and smearing blood down the glass while reaching out with the other to steady himself against the edge of Ralph Newman’s desk.

Trembling, his knuckles white, his face rigid with fury and confusion, he roared, “I
am
Ezekiel One!”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“I do not
need
the workers or the drones!” Spittle was flying from his lips. The skin looked like it was slipping on his face. “I will
still
rise up! I can
still
lead the new race when the time comes.”

“Your destiny
was
to be here. In the City of Glass,” Gabriel said, walking over to stand next to Rachel and Adam. “But you will not be
leading
anything.”

Crane made a lunge for Gabriel, but his shattered leg gave way beneath him, and he crumpled to the floor, screaming. In his pain, he was unaware that someone had emerged from the lift behind him. Seeing the looks of amazement from Kate, Rachel and Adam and hearing the gasp from Ralph Newman, he turned to find out who they were all staring at.

Commodore Wing looked at his son. “It would have been better,” he said, “if you
had
died…”

Crane climbed slowly back to his feet, never taking his eyes from the old man who limped past him to stand with Gabriel and the others: the daughter he had never been able to acknowledge properly and the grandchildren to whom he owed so much. He wanted more than anything to say sorry – to tell them he would do whatever he had to – but he was unable to find the words.

Rachel did not need to hear the words out loud. “It’s OK, Granddad,” she said.