After Death(90)
On this occasion, when Walter spots something unusual moving through the grass and scrub, Juan switches on the two motorized spotlights fixed to the vehicle’s roof rack, and he directs one toward the bogey.
“You see this?” Juan asks.
“Alien robots,” Walter says.
Juan says, “Might be Earthmade.”
“You see them sold at Costco?”
“So then . . . do what?”
Walter says, “Burglars are burglars.”
“This planet’s our home, not theirs,” Juan agrees.
The robots veer away from the road.
“Hold on,” Juan says, and he wheels off the pavement in pursuit of the invaders.
EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE
Through the cameras of Gog and Magog, Michael Mace sees the license-plate number of the Ford F-150. He knows where to find what he requires, and he is so familiar with the California DMV system that he doesn’t need to imagine himself in a Bentley, driving the infinitely layered highways of the internet until he arrives at his destination. He slips into the DMV data pool and, in seven seconds, has the names of the owners of the pickup truck—Juan and Angela Gainza. He expects that the manufacturer’s records—where he has been before and to which he now returns—will yield the signifying number of the transponder in the pickup. But the vehicle doesn’t have a navigation system, a feature that the buyer didn’t want. Consequently, Michael can’t slide down a microwave signal that doesn’t exist, can’t enter the F-150 and affect its operation.
Bennies. Bennies from Heaven. His heart is racing, his muscles taut with power, such power, reflexes quick and quicker, a rampant beast that will not be denied. Excited, eager, enraged, leading with the rifle. The clatter that attracts him lasts only a few seconds, but Calaphas surges up the stairs, across vaguely defined green treads and black risers, into the second-floor hallway, just as the noise ends. Even here aboveground, every room is a cold-holding room or an embalming chamber. The not-yet dead are the soon-to-be dead. His prey are armed, but also blind. He blinded them. Three blind mice. The windows up here admit murky moonlight, a considerable assistance to Calaphas as his night-vision gear greatly amplifies every lumen, but the moon is of no help to the mice, the soon-to-be dead. They can shoot toward whatever noise he makes, but he will see them before they can accurately fix the location of the sound, and he’ll cut the legs out from under them with an extended burst of fire. When they’re down, screaming, their flesh torn and bones shattered, in too much pain to hold fast to their guns, he’ll be all over them, hammering them with the buttstock of his weapon, finally making the encounter intensely personal by ripping with his knife. When the screaming stops and a hush returns, Durand will be alone here with the quiet and respected guests, as so often he has been in the past. Alone with them even before the embalming occurs. Before they’re groomed for burial. Before the cosmetician arrives to restore to their faces the illusion of mere sleep. Then he will kiss them, one by one, and like Britta Holdstrom, each will fail to wake. Because Gifford no longer exists to mock his younger brother, the game will end at last, end in Durand’s triumph. He will be elevated out of this simulation into the higher realm of the gamemakers.
All that remains to be done is find the room to which they have retreated. That will involve little risk if he plays this by his own rules rather than by those the ISA trainers teach. With his spare magazines, he has more than enough ammunition to pump a few rounds through each door and dodge aside to see whether the response is a scream or return fire, or silence.
Even as he is about to begin, however, his attention is drawn to a mysterious, oscillating object in the stillness of the hall. A slender green something terminating in a larger green form. Swinging side to side like a clock pendulum. Counting down to the end of the game. As he approaches the article, the width of its arc diminishes. There is not even the faintest draft. Some past action has set this thing in motion. The clattering noise that occurred a few seconds ago and drew him here. The object is a rope that’s threaded through and knotted to a ball. Like a locket dangling on a chain from the hand of a hypnotist, it invites a mesmerizing fascination. He takes the ball in hand and squeezes it. Rubber. He can barely make out the lines in the ceiling drywall that describe the size and shape of the attic trapdoor.
Sometimes, for a part of their community-watch tour, Juan and Walter switch on the radio and listen to a popular talk show that features discussions of out-of-body experiences, visitors from other dimensions, shadow people, spontaneous human combustion, incredible disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle and elsewhere, ghosts, time travelers, predictions of psychics and prophets, end-of-the-world scenarios, and space aliens. With one exception, they don’t believe in any of those things. They listen to the program mainly for the amusement value. The one exception is space aliens.
Neither Juan nor Walter has been abducted by ETs and taken aboard a mother ship. They have never seen one of those hairless huge-eyed spatula-fingered Grays described by so many abductees. They have witnessed no strange, unexplainable objects in the sky. Throughout their childhood and adolescence, TV series such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, as well as scores of movies like Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pretty much programmed them to believe wholeheartedly in extraterrestrials. This vaguely embarrasses them, for they had been clear-eyed businessmen during their long careers. However, they are agreed that it’s better to be UFO believers than to have been indoctrinated instead with any of the venomous ideas with which various politicians have poisoned the minds of once happy people that previously had been capable of reason. Here, now, suddenly, in the presence of alien machines, all embarrassment is burned away by the thrill of first contact, wonder, mystery, and a measured fear of the unknown.