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.
The robots are quick and nimble, all but gliding across the open land at between fourteen and sixteen miles per hour. In the moonlight, their exquisitely engineered bodies are as silvery and seem almost as liquid as if they are shapes of coherent mercury.
Although the F-150 is capable of far greater speed than their quarry currently exhibit, Walter says, “Don’t lose them.”
“I won’t lose them,” Juan declares.
“They’re probably scouts.”
“Yeah. I’m hoping they’ll lead us to the ship.”
“Is that a good thing?” Walter wonders.
“Why wouldn’t it be a good thing?”
“What if the aliens are evil?”
“They aren’t evil.”
Walter says, “You would know—how?”
“I’m more with Spielberg than Ridley Scott.”
“So it’s an issue of faith with you.”
“No. Logic. The ETs in Alien were just bugs. They weren’t able to build robots, spaceships. ETs with spaceships are advanced beyond violence.”
At the top of a hill, the robots halt and turn and rear up on their hind legs, mantis-like in the headlights, and something about their posture suggests they might be equipped with weapons.
In the lightless attic with Nina and John to his left, sitting with his back to the wall, Michael Mace takes over control of Gog and Magog out there in the night, while he also enters the universal service network that all telecom companies share. He locates the provider of service to Juan Louis Gainza, who was earlier identified in the DMV files as the owner of the F-150.
Perhaps because she is sitting shoulder to shoulder against Michael, Nina senses him reacting to the crisis. “What’s wrong?” she whispers.
He murmurs, “Stay calm. I’ve got to make a call. I’ll explain later.”
Once he has Juan Gainza’s number, he is able to identify the maker of the phone in six seconds. Apple. He’s been there before. Easy to enter their system. From Apple’s ocean of data, he siphons the transponder code built into that particular iPhone. He departs Apple and trampolines from the internet to an orbiting navigation-service satellite from which he seeks the current location of the signal being emitted by Gainza’s phone. He finds it, funnels down the microwave linkage into that device, and switches it on. Mindful that Calaphas is searching the house below them, he keeps his voice as low as he can without whispering, while nonetheless sounding authoritative. “Juan Gainza, stop.”
Evidently, the trap ladder was retracted from above. Calaphas isn’t so foolish as to pull it down and use it. The noise will alert them. Mace will be in the most advantageous position he could find. Calaphas can’t climb a steep ladder quickly, with a rifle in both hands. No one can. Impossible. That’s Hollywood action. He isn’t John Wick or Jason Bourne or Harry Callahan. Neither were Keanu Reeves nor Matt Damon nor Clint Eastwood, not for real. The bennies have pumped him up. He’s wound so tight with rage that his ears are ringing. He feels the arteries throbbing in his neck. The taste of blood is in his mouth because he’s bitten his lip in frustration, such is his need for action. But when those in the attic sense that he’s nearing the top of the ladder, they’ll pin him with at least one beam of light. Probably two. Directed by the woman and the boy, maybe neither of them anywhere near Mace. If Calaphas is wearing the night-vision gear, he’ll be blinded by the amplified light. If he isn’t wearing the unit, he might not see where his primary target waits in the shadows. In either case, Mace won’t hesitate; he’ll go for a head shot.