“As a child,” Leigh Ann said, “you must have been a hyperactive handful.”
“My mother took refuge in yoga,” Ganesh said, “but my father resorted to Prozac.”
About twelve miles from Rustling Willows, Kenny piloted the Suburban around a curve and eased his foot off the accelerator when, through the screening rain, he saw the lights and vehicles ahead. Men in rain slickers. A roadblock. The two large trucks and three smaller vehicles appeared to be military ordnance.
Ganesh wasn’t surprised. “A perimeter has been established. They’ll be expecting this vehicle.”
As he brought the Suburban to a full stop, Kenny saw that those who manned the roadblock were armed with assault rifles.
Ganesh lowered the window in his door. As one of the guards peered in at them, Ganesh held up what was apparently a photo ID case that established his authority and security clearance. The guard merely said, “Sir,” and stepped back and waved them forward.
As Ganesh put his window up, he said, “So when this business is done and the world hasn’t ended, you’ll be staying at the ranch for forty-eight hours. Everyone will have to sit through a debriefing. We’re going to want a highly detailed account of all the events that led us here, for the historical record. I assure you it won’t be a hardship. Rustling Willows is a most comfortable retreat, and steps have been taken to provide culinary service that will make our time there a genuine celebration.”
Driving between the angled trucks that constricted traffic to one lane, continuing toward their destination, Kenny said, “If we do live through this—”
“When,” Ganesh corrected.
“—I’m not going to worry anymore about nuclear war or global warming or a total economic collapse. If a psychotic godlike alien fails to do us in, nothing will.”
Leigh Ann said, “When. When the psychotic godlike alien fails to do us in.”
84
Jimmy wet and chilled and so tired, out in the world alone. The storm and the night and the world all so big, and Jimmy so small.
With lights in windows where Jojo waited, Jimmy wasn’t afraid. Jojo would help him. When the Thing wasn’t in Jimmy, Jojo would like him again and he wouldn’t be alone.
The truck dark on the road was wrong. Jimmy felt the wrong of it and stopped and watched the truck, but it just waited there in the rain and dark. The truck didn’t do anything, but it was still wrong.
Jojo was near, getting closer, and Jimmy needed to go to her and tell her what he knew before it was Too Damn Late. So he stepped off the road and started around the truck.
There was no door where there should be a door, nobody inside where somebody should be, but then he found somebody on the hard road in front of the truck. A man sleeping on the hard road.
Jimmy stood watching the man sleep. Nothing happened. The man didn’t wake up.
Jimmy squatted in the dark to look closer. It was hard to see. But the man wasn’t sleeping. One of his eyes was open. The other eye was gone. The man was hurt. He was bad hurt.
The man didn’t look like other people. He looked like Jimmy but worse, the parts of his face not where face parts should be.
Jimmy never knew things suddenly. He took time to know things. But now he knew this suddenly: The man was gone to God, and the Thing did this to him.
The Thing was out of the lake and in the night.
Now Jimmy was afraid at last. Very afraid.
He looked toward the black lake. He looked toward the house. He looked back the way he came.
He looked up. The sky was big and dark and wet.
The light in the sky was far away now, and the rumble was far away. He heard something else in the sky. Or maybe he did. He wasn’t sure.
He moved around the hurt man and started toward the house where Jojo waited in the light.
PART 5
RESTORATION
By thousands of chance encounters and uncountable coincidences, people are drawn together to save a life, to save a nation, to save the world.
—Ganesh Patel
85
The night is a dreamscape in which the only light is where absolute darkness relents to mere darkness, and shapes are defined in shades of gray.
Having left the Land Rover deep in the orchard, Asher Optime has taken a position in the front row, under limbs hung with apples that won’t be ripe for another month or more. There is no point in crouching behind the tree, using it for cover. In the starless dark, further concealed by curtains of rain, dressed in black waterproof pants and a black slicker, he blends with the night as though he is Death itself in commodious robe and cowl. He faces the lake, which in this gloom appears to be a void, except where its lapping waters are suggested by their rhythmic movement along the pale shore. Beyond the lake rises the slope down which the bitch and the boy will make their way when they exit the woods at the end of the deer trail. Because of the grass, bleached by the summer sun, the land is marginally less dark than the lake; the fugitives will be revealed in their descent, though Asher needs to be vigilant.