Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

It hits Pea like a wash of cool water: the absence of euphemism.

Dead

.

They won’t be

dead

, they will have

gone through

. They will be on the other side.

Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll just be dead.

Oh God

, thinks Pea,

where is your voice?

Oh God, guide me

.

“Why would you want to stay in this world?” she asks Robert quietly. “This world has collapsed. This world is broken.”

“Pah,” says Robert. “It’s collapsed because everybody stopped taking care of it. It collapsed because everybody’s been sitting around waiting to eat poison for twenty-four years.”

Pea stands there in the tense silence while time ticks by, and she feels thrilled and overwhelmed, disoriented and excited. She has thought these things before, in the dark spaces that in other people’s minds are filled by God’s word. The buildings, those remaining, tilting toward each other in the marshes like old dominoes. The broken elevators. The aluminum fixtures that used to be steel. Everybody just waiting. The world slowly running down.

Pea feels a butterfly fluttering around in the cold chamber of her chest. Its wings brush against the bars. She whispers to Robert.

“You don’t hear Him either.”

“Oh, I hear Him,” he says. He doesn’t look like a fat nervous kid anymore, not at all, not to Pea. “I hear Him. I just think He’s full of shit.”

• • • •

Dawn is approaching and Marie St. Clair has finished her appointed rounds. Everybody in these three buildings knows. Everybody is ready. Everybody has been ready for years.

GO HOME NOW AND WAIT.

She tightens her sash around her chest, her heart beating faster and faster as the sunrise approaches.

GO AND BE GLAD.

There is no question in her mind. That is perhaps the greatest thing, that is what makes her happy. No doubt and no question, no trouble and no worry, she simply knows what will happen next. The truth. The uncomplicated truth.

• • • •

BRING HER TO ME.

“More.”

BRING HER TO ME.

“I need to know more. Please. Please. I need to know more.”

Kenneth stands at the foot of the stairs in a furor of indecision. God will only say what He has said, what He keeps on saying, and His brevity is a kind of absence, the cruelest imaginable absence.

Does it mean what his wife insists, that they must allow the child to die, like everyone, and that she will be brought through? Or does it mean, as Kenneth fears, that if he trusts God he must trust Him like Abraham. He must trust Him all the way: Report his own daughter’s deafness, her defect, and abandon her. Allow her to be left behind so the process is not ruined for all the rest.

BRING HER TO ME.

He knows what is right. Time is running out.

Kenneth takes one deep breath and flings himself up the creaking stairs, three big steps at a time, as if over hurdles, as if slowing would make him stop—no, not

as if

, for he knows that indeed slowing down

will

make him stop. Kenneth hurls himself up the stairs and grabs the door handle of Pea’s room and throws it open, and he meets his wife coming out of their daughter’s room.

Annabel stares wildly at him. She is panting and shivering, and in her hand is the electric slicer, and it is on, humming, with red blood all along its vibrating edges.

I am too late

, Kenneth thinks.

Too late too late

.

Annabel stares, the electric knife dancing in her palm, and at last her lips open and she says “Where is she? What have you done with her? Where

is

she?”

BRING HER TO ME, says the voice in Kenneth’s mind, and he can see it in the frozen mad look on her face, that she is hearing the same thing—the same, the same, the same—BRING HER TO ME.

He rushes past her. They search the room. They lift the mattress and throw it aside. They toss open the dresser drawers and paw wildly through. They crowbar open the closet and find it empty. They feel the heat of time, of the morning sun growing closer, of the dawn of the new and final day.

Kenneth and Annabel rush to the window and they look out and see nothing and then they keep looking and Annabel sees it first and then Kenneth does, too, or he thinks he does: two distant shadows, moving swiftly and getting smaller. Two shadows running so close beside each other they were almost one, slipping together into the narrow space between two towers, swallowed up by the buildings and disappearing into darkness.

• • • •

Robert laughs as they run. He finds, indeed, that he cannot stop laughing. Pea is running beside him, and they are not holding hands, but every once in a while his right hand jostles against her left, and that mere touch, skin against skin, sends electric shivers coursing through his body. It isn’t just that she’s a girl, not just that it’s Pea—it’s… it’s all of it, all of this wild chaotic joy. The jolt of triumph and liberation, the thrill of rebellion, the sheer power of life continuing on! In the morning will be the feast, the feast for everyone but them!

Light is beginning. The time is at hand. Robert looks at Pea, and he laughs, astonished. And she laughs back, astonished too. He watches her hair bounce on her back while they duck giggling through the alleyways, in search of what and where they do not yet know.

The voice speaks then, freezing the smile on Robert’s face, clouding his heart. It speaks in his mind, clear and cold like a steel cage lowering.

BRING HER TO ME.

BRING HER TO ME.

BRING HER TO ME.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Winters is the winner of the Edgar Award for his novel

The Last Policeman

, which was also an Amazon.com Best Book of 2012. Other works of fiction include the middle-grade novel

The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman

, an Edgar Award nominee; its sequel,

The Mystery of the Missing Everything

; the psychological thriller

Bedbugs

; and two parody novels,

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

(a

New York Times

best-seller), and

Android Karenina

. Ben has also written extensively for the stage and is a past fellow of the Dramatists Guild. His journalism has appeared in

Slate, The Nation, The Chicago Reader

, and many other publications. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, and at BenHWinters.com.

Hugh Howey – IN THE AIR

Gears whir; an escapement lets loose; wound springs explode a fraction of an inch, and a second hand lurches forward and slams to a stop. All these small violences erupt on John’s wrist as the world counts down its final moments, one second at a time.

Less than five minutes. Just a few minutes more, and they would’ve made it to the exit. They would’ve been on back roads all the way to the cabin. John stares at the dwindling time and silently curses the fender bender in Nebraska that set them back. He curses himself for not leaving yesterday or in the middle of the night. But so much to do. The world was about to end. There was so much to do.

His wife Barbara whispers a question, but she has become background noise—much like the unseen interstate traffic whooshing by up the embankment. Huddled on the armrest between them, their nine-year-old daughter Emily wants to know why they’re pulled off the road, says she doesn’t need to pee. A tractor trailer zooms past, air brakes rattling like a machine gun, a warning for everyone to keep their heads down.

John turns in the driver’s seat to survey the embankment. He has pulled off Interstate 80 and down the shoulder, but it doesn’t feel far enough. There aren’t any trees to hide behind. He tries to imagine what’s coming but can’t. He can’t allow himself to believe it. And yet here he is, cranking up the Explorer, ignoring the pleas from the fucking auto-drive to take over and manually steering down the grass toward the concrete piling of a large billboard. The sign high above promises cheap gas and cigarettes. Five minutes. Five minutes, and they’d have made it to the exit. So close.

“Honey, what’s going on?”

A glance at his wife. Emily clutches his shoulder as he hits a bump. He waited too long to tell them. It’s one of those lies that dragged out and became heavier and heavier the farther he carried it. A tractor-pull lie. And now his wheels are spinning and spitting dirt and the seconds are ticking down.

He pulls the Explorer around the billboard and backs up until the bumper meets the concrete piling. Killing the ignition silences the annoying beeps from the auto-drive, the seatbelt sensors, the GPS warning that they’re off the road. The world settles into a brief silence. All the violence is invisible, on a molecular level, the slamming of tiny gears and second hands in whirring watches and little machines swimming in bloodstreams.

“Something very bad is about to happen,” John finally says. He turns to his wife, but it is the sight of his daughter that blurs his vision. Emily will be immune, he tells himself. The three of them will be immune. He has to believe this if he allows himself to believe the rest, if he allows himself to believe that it’s coming. There is no time left for believing otherwise. A year of doubt, and here he is, that skeptic in the trenches who discovers his faith right as the mortars whistle down.

“You’re scaring me,” Barbara says.

“Is this where we’re camping?” Emily asks, peering through the windshield and biting her lip in disappointment. The back of the Explorer is stuffed with enough gear to camp out for a month. As if that would be long enough.

John glances at his watch. Not long. Not long. He turns again and checks the interstate. It’s hot and stuffy in the Explorer. Opening the sunroof, he looks for the words stuck deep in his throat. “I need you to get in the back,” he tells Emily. “You need to put your seatbelt on, okay? And hold Mr. Bunny tight to your chest. Can you do that for me?”

His voice is shaky. John has seen war and murder. He has participated in plenty of both. But nothing can steel a mind for this. He releases the sunroof button and wipes his eyes. Overhead, the contrail of a passenger jet cuts the square of open blue in half. John shudders to think of what will become of that. There must be tens of thousands of people in the air. Millions of other people driving. Not that it matters. An indiscriminate end is rapidly approaching. All those invisible machines in bloodstreams, counting down the seconds.

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” he tells his wife. He turns to her, sees the worry in her furrowed brow, and realizes that she is ready for any betrayal. She is ready to hear him say that he is married to another woman. That he is gay. That he murdered a prostitute and her body is curled up where the spare tire used to be. That he has been betting on sports, and the reason for the camping gear is that the bank has taken away their home. Barbara is ready for anything. John wishes any of these trivialities were true.

“I didn’t tell you before now because… because I didn’t believe it.” He is stammering. He can debrief the president of the United States without missing a beat, but not this. In the backseat, Emily whispers something to Mr. Bunny. John swallows and continues: “I’ve been a part of something—” He shakes his head. “Something worse than usual. And now… that something is about to—” He glances at his watch. It’s too late. She’ll never get to hear it from him, not when it mattered, not before it was too late. She will have to watch.

He reaches over his shoulder and grabs his seatbelt. Buckles up. Glancing up at the passing jet, John says a prayer for those people up in the air. He is thankful that they’ll be dead before they strike the earth. On the dashboard, there is a book with

The Order

embossed on the cover. In the reflection of the windshield, it looks vaguely like the word

redo

. If only.

“What have you done?” Barbara asks, and there’s a deadness in her voice, a hollow. As if she knows the scope of the horrible things he could do.

John focuses on his watch. The second hand twitches, and the anointed hour strikes. He and his family should be outside Atlanta with the others, not on the side of the road in Iowa. They should be crowding underground with everyone else, the selected few, the survivors. But here they are, on the side of the road, cowering behind a billboard blinking with cheap gas prices, bracing for the end of the world.

For a long while, nothing happens.

Traffic whizzes by unseen; the contrail overhead grows longer; his wife waits for an answer.

The world is on autopilot, governed by the momentum of life, by humanity’s great machinations, by all those gears in motion, spinning and spinning.

Emily asks if they can go now. She says she needs to pee.

John laughs. Deep in his chest and with a flood of relief. He feels that cool wave of euphoria like a nearby zing telling him that a bullet has passed, that it missed. He was wrong.

They

were wrong. The book, Tracy, all the others. The national convention in Atlanta is nothing more than a convention, one party’s picking of a president, just what it was purported to be. There won’t be generations of survivors living underground. His government didn’t seed all of humanity with microscopic time bombs that will shut down their hosts at the appointed hour. John will now have to go camping with his family. And for weeks and weeks, Barbara will hound him over what this great secret was that made him pull off the interstate and act so strange—

A scream erupts from the backseat, shattering this eyeblink of relief, this last laugh. Ahead, a pickup truck has left the interstate at a sharp angle. A front tire bites the dirt and sends the truck flipping into the air. It goes into the frantic spins of a figure skater, doors flying open like graceful arms, bodies tumbling out lifeless, arms and legs spread, little black asterisks in the open air.

The truck hits in a shower of soil before lurching up again, dented and slower this time. There is motion in the rearview. A tractor trailer tumbles off the hardtop at ninety miles an hour. It is happening. It is really fucking happening. The end of the world.

John’s heart stops for a moment. His lungs constrict as if he has stepped naked into a cold shower. But this is only the shock of awareness. The invisible machines striking down the rest of humanity are not alive in him. He isn’t going to die, not in that precise moment, not at that anointed hour. His heart and lungs and body are inoculated.

Twelve billion others aren’t so lucky.

• • • •

__Two Days Before__

The ringtone is both melody and alarm. An old song, danced to in Milan, the composer unknown. It brings back the fragrance of her perfume and the guilt of a one-night stand.

John’s palms are sweaty as he swipes the phone and accepts the call. He needs to change that fucking ringtone. Tracy is nothing more than a colleague. Nothing more. But it could’ve been Pavlov or Skinner who composed that tune, the way it drives him crazy in reflex.

“Hello?” He smiles at Barbara, who is washing dishes, hands covered in suds. It’s Wednesday evening. Nothing unusual. Just a colleague calling after hours. Barbara turns and works the lipstick off the rim of a wine glass.

“Have you made up your mind?” Tracy asks. She sounds like a waitress who has returned to his table to find him staring dumbly at the menu, as if this should be simple, as if he should just have the daily special like she suggested half an hour ago.

“I’m sorry, you’re breaking up,” John lies. He steps out onto the porch and lets the screen door slam shut behind him. Strolling toward the garden, he startles the birds from the low feeder. The neighbor’s cat glares at him for ruining dinner before slinking away. “That’s better,” he says, glancing back toward the house.

“Have you made up your mind?” Tracy asks again. She is asking the impossible. Upstairs on John’s dresser, there is a book with instructions on what to do when the world comes to an end. John has spent the past year reading that book from cover to cover. Several times, in fact. The book is full of impossible things. Unbelievable things. No one who reads these things would believe them, not unless they’d seen the impossible before.

Ah, but Tracy has. She believes. And like a chance encounter in Milan—skin touching skin and sparking a great mistake—her brush with this leather book has spun John’s life out of control. Whether the book proves false or not, it has already gotten him deeper than he would have liked.

“Our plane leaves tomorrow,” he says. “For Atlanta.” Technically, this is true. That plane will leave. John has learned from the best how to lie without lying.

A deep pull of air on the other end of the line. John can picture Tracy’s lips, can see her elegant neck, can imagine her perfectly, can almost taste the salt on her skin. He needs to change that goddamn ringtone.

“We can guarantee your safety,” Tracy says.

John laughs.

“Listen to me. I’m serious. We know what they put in you. Come to Colorado—”

“You mean New Moscow?”

“That’s not funny.”

“How well do you know these people?” John fights to keep his voice under control. He has looked into the group Tracy is working with. Some of them hold distinguished positions on agency watch lists, including a doctor who poses an actionable threat. John tells himself it won’t matter, that they are too late to stop anything. And he believes this.

“I’ve known Professor Karpov for years,” Tracy insists. “He believes me. He believes you. We’re going to survive this thanks to you. And so I would damn well appreciate you being here.”

“And my family?”

Tracy hesitates. “Of course. Them too. Tell me you’ll be here, John. Hell, forget the tickets I sent and go to the airport right now. Buy new tickets. Don’t wait until tomorrow.”

John thinks of the two sets of tickets in the book upstairs. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “And tell Barbara what?”

There’s a deep breath, a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.

“Lie to her. You’re good at that.”

• • • •

The tractor trailer fills the rearview mirror. A bright silver grille looms large, tufts of grass spitting up from the great tires, furrows of soil loosened by yesterday’s rain. Time seems to slow. The grille turns as if suddenly uninterested in the Explorer, and the long trailer behind the cab slews to the side, jackknifing. John yells for his family to hold on; he braces for impact. Ahead of him, several other cars are tumbling off the road.

The eighteen wheeler growls as it passes by. Its trailer misses the concrete pillar and catches the bumper of the Explorer. The world jerks violently. John’s head bounces off his headrest as the Explorer is slammed aside like a geek shouldered by a jock in a hallway.

Mr. Bunny hits the dash. There’s a yelp from Barbara and a screech from Emily. Ahead of them, the trailer flips and begins a catastrophic roll, the thin metal shell of the trailer tearing like tissue, countless brown packages catapulting into the air and spilling across the embankment.

Time speeds back up, and John can hear tires squealing, cars braking hard on the interstate, a noise like a flock of birds. It sounds like things are alive out there—still responding to the world—but John knows it’s just automated safety features in action. It’s the newer cars protecting themselves from the older cars. It’s the world slamming to a stop like the second hand inside a watch.

Tracy had told him once that he would last five minutes out here on his own. Turning to check on his wife, John sees a van barreling through the grass toward her side of the car. He yells at Barbara and Emily to move, to get out,

get out

. Fighting for his seatbelt, he wonders if Tracy was wrong, if she had overestimated him.

Five minutes seems like an impossibly long time to live.

• • • •

__The Day Before__

John likes to tell himself he’s a hero. No, it isn’t that he likes the telling, he just needs to hear it. He stands in front of the mirror as he has every morning of his adult life, and he whispers the words to himself:

“I am a hero.”

There is no conviction. Conviction must be doled out at birth in some limited supply, because it has drained away from him over the years. Or perhaps the conviction was in his fatigues, which he no longer wears. Perhaps it was the pats on the back he used to get in the airport from complete strangers, the applause as the gate attendant allowed him and a few others to board first. Maybe that’s where the conviction came from, because he hasn’t felt it in a long while.

“I’m a hero,” he used to whisper to himself, the words fogging the plexiglass mask of his clean-room suit, a letter laced with ricin tucked into an envelope and carefully sealed with a wet sponge. The address on the envelope is for an imam causing trouble in Istanbul—but maybe it kills an assistant instead of this imam. Maybe it kills his wife. Or a curious child. “I’m a hero,” he whispers, fumbling in that bulky suit, his empty mantra evaporating from his visor.

“I’m a hero,” he used to think to himself as he spotted for his sniper. Calling out the klicks to target and the wind, making sure his shooter adjusts for humidity and altitude, he then watches what the bullet does. He tells himself this is necessary as a body sags to the earth. He pats a young man on the shoulder, pounding some of his conviction into another.

In the field, the lies come easy. Lying in bed the next week, at home, listening to his wife breathe, it’s hard to imagine that he’s the same person. That he helped kill a man. A woman. A family in a black car among a line of black cars. Sometimes the wrong person, the wrong car. These are things he keeps from his wife, and so the details do not seem to live with them. They belong to another. They are a man in Milan with a beautiful woman swinging in the mesmerizing light. They are two people kissing against a door, a room key dropped, happy throats laughing.

John peers at himself in the present, standing in the bathroom, full of wrinkles and regrets. He returns to the bedroom and finds Barbara packing her bags. One of her nice dresses lies flat on the bed, a necklace arranged on top—like a glamorous woman has just vanished. He steels himself to tell her, to tell her that she won’t need that dress. This will lead to questions. It will lead to a speech that he has rehearsed ten thousand times, but never once out loud. For one more long minute, as he delays and says nothing, he can feel that they will go to Atlanta and he will do as he has been told. For one more minute, the cabin by the lake is no more than an ache, a dirty thought, a crazy dream. Tracy in Colorado has been forgotten. She may as well be in Milan. John thinks suddenly of other empty dresses. He comes close to confessing in that moment, comes close to telling his wife the truth.

There are so many truths to tell.

“Remember that time we had Emily treated for her lungs?” he wants to say. “Remember how the three of us sat in that medical chamber and held her hand and asked her to be brave? Because it was so tight in there, and Emily hates to be cooped up? Well, they were doing something to all three of us. Tiny machines were being let into our bloodstream to kill all the other machines in there. Good machines to kill the bad machines. That’s what they were doing.

“We are all ticking time bombs,” he would tell her, was about to tell her. “Every human alive is a ticking time bomb. Because this is the future of war, and the first person to act wins the whole game. And that’s us. That’s me. Killing like a bastard from a distance. Doing what they tell me. A payload is a payload. Invisible bullets all heading toward their targets, and none will miss. Everyone is going to die.

“But not us,” he will say, because by now Barbara is always crying. That’s how he pictures her, every time he rehearses this. She is cunning enough to understand at once that what he says is true. She is never shouting or slapping him, just crying out of sympathy for the soon-to-be dead. “Not us,” he promises. “We are all taken care of. I took care of us, just like I always take care of us. We will live underground for the rest of our lives. You and Emily will go to sleep for a long time. We’ll have to hold her hand, because it’ll be an even smaller chamber that they put her in, but it’ll all go by in a flash. Daddy will have to work with all the other daddies. But we’ll be okay in the end. We’ll all be okay in the end.”

This is the final lie. This is the reason he never can tell her, won’t tell her even now, will lie and say they’re going camping instead, that she needs to pack something more comfortable. It is always here in his rehearsal that he chokes up and tells her what can never be true: “We’ll be okay in the end.”

And this is when he imagines Barbara nodding and wiping her eyes and pretending to believe him, because she always was the brave one.

• • • •

John can see two figures in the van, their bodies slumped outward against the doors, looking like they’d fallen asleep. The van veers toward the Explorer. Emily is already scrambling between the seats to get in his lap as John fumbles with his seatbelt. Barbara has her door open. The van fills the frame. His wife is out and rolling as John kicks open his door. Mere seconds pass from the time the van leaves the interstate to him and Emily diving into the grass. Scrambling and crawling, a bang like lightning cracking down around them, the van and the Explorer tumbling like two wrestling bears.

John holds Emily and looks for Barbara. There. Hands clasped on the back of her head, looking up at the Explorer, camping gear tumbling out through busted glass and scattering. There’s a screech and the sound of another wreck up on the highway before the world falls eerily silent. John listens for more danger heading their way. All he can hear is Emily panting. He can feel his daughter’s breath against his neck.

“Those people,” Barbara says, getting up. John hurries to his feet and helps her. Barbara has grass stains on both knees, is looking toward the van and the wreckage of the tractor trailer, obviously wants to assist them. A form slumps out of the van’s passenger window. Barbara fumbles her phone from her pocket and starts dialing a number, probably 911.

“No one will answer,” John says.

His wife looks at him blankly.

“They’re gone,” he says, avoiding the word

dead

for Emily’s sake. Above him, a contrail lengthens merrily.

“There was a wreck—” His wife points her phone up the embankment toward the hidden hardtop and the now-silent traffic. John steadies her, but he can feel her tugging him up the slope, eager to help those in need.

“They’re all gone,” he says. “Everyone. Everyone we knew. Everyone is gone.”

Barbara looks at him. Emily stares up at him. Wide eyes everywhere. “You knew…” his wife whispers, piecing together the sudden stop on the shoulder of the road and what happened after. “How did you know—?”

John is thinking about the Explorer. Their car is totaled. He’ll have to get another. There’s a vast selection nearby. “Wait here,” he says. He hopes everything he packed can be salvaged. As he heads up the embankment, Barbara moves to come with him.

“Keep Emily down here,” he tells her, and Barbara gradually understands. Emily doesn’t need to see what lies up there on the interstate. As John trudges up the slick grass, he wonders how he expects his daughter to avoid seeing it, avoid seeing the world he helped to make.

• • • •

__One Year Before__

Smoke curls from Tracy’s cigarette as she paces the hotel room in Milan. John lies naked on top of the twisted sheets. The rush of hormones and the buzz of alcohol have passed, leaving him flushed with guilt and acutely aware of what he has done.

“You should move to Italy,” Tracy says. She touches the holstered gun on the dresser but does not pick it up. Inhaling, she allows the smoke to drift off her tongue.

“You know I can’t,” John says. “Even if it weren’t for my family… I have—”

“Work,” Tracy interrupts. She waves her hand as if work were an inconsequential thing harped on by some inferior race. Even when the two of them had worked down the hall from each other in the Pentagon, neither had known what the other did. The confusion had only thickened since, but along with it the professional courtesy not to ask. John feels they both want to know, but tearing clothes off bodies is simpler than exposing hidden lives.

“I do sometimes think about running away from it all,” John admits. He considers the project taking most of his time of late, a plan he can only glimpse from the edges, piecing together the odd tasks required of him, similar to how he susses out political intrigue by whom he is hired to remove and who is left alone.

“So why don’t you?” Tracy asks.

John nearly blurts out the truth:

Because there won’t be anywhere left to run

. Instead, he tells a different truth: “I guess I’m scared.”

Tracy laughs as if it’s a joke. She taps her cigarette and spills ash onto the carpet, opens one of the dresser drawers and runs her fingers across John’s clothes. Before he can say something, she has opened the next drawer to discover the book.

“A Bible,” she says, sounding surprised.

John doesn’t correct her. He slides from the bed and approaches her from behind in order to get the book. Tracy glances at him in the mirror and blocks him, presses back against him, her bare skin cool against his. John can feel his hormones surge and his resistance flag. He forgets the book, even as Tracy begins flipping through it. She was always curious. It was trouble for them both.

“Looks more interesting than a Bible,” she mutters, the cigarette bouncing between her lips. John holds her hips and presses himself against her. She complies by pressing back. “What is this?” she asks.

“It’s a book about the end of the world,” John says, kissing her neck. This is the same thing he told Barbara. John has come to think of the book as one of those paintings that blurs the closer you get to it. It is safe by being unbelievable. The hidden key to understanding it—knowing who wrote it—was all that needed keeping safe.

Pages are flipped, which fans smoke above their heads.

“A different Bible, then,” Tracy says.

“A different Bible,” John agrees.

After a few more pages, the cigarette is crushed out. Tracy pulls him back to the bed. Afterward, John sleeps and dreams a strange dream. He is laying Barbara into a crypt deep beneath the soil. There is a smaller coffin there. Emily is already buried, and it is a lie that they’ll ever be unearthed. It is a lie that they’ll be brought back to life. That’s just to get him to go along. John will live on for hundreds of years, every day a torment of being without them, knowing that they are just as dead as the others.