“But you know, I must be going,” said Leonard Thrope, and got to his feet.
Trip. He felt as though he had been clubbed: his ears rang and there was a sharp knocking in his skull, his own tiny voice saying, no no no. Leonard shook his hair back from his face. He pulled his trousers tight about his waist and zipped them, eyes still fixed on Trip. A shining seam spilled down one pant leg; absently Leonard rubbed until it disappeared into cracked black leather. “Experimentum crucis,” he said. He dropped his cigarette, left it burning as he stooped and swung a camera bag over his shoulder. He started across the room, stopped beside one of the technicians and picked up a computer disc. He pocketed it, then took another object, a flattened silvery cube slightly smaller than the computer disc: the IT recording.
“I’ll send someone for my things.” This to the technicians, who nodded as he strode toward the door. “Oh, and Trip—”
His gaze flitted across the boy’s face. Leonard smiled, not unkindly. “It’s been a slice. Believe me—this thing is going to make you.” The ruby placebit winked as he turned and left, the door shutting softly behind him.
For a moment Trip just stood there, hands hanging limply at his sides. Dimly he could hear the soft whir and tick of computer equipment, one technician asking his colleague a question. Someone had switched on a halogen lamp, so that dust motes ignited in a vivid parody of the IZE’s light show. Bright jots swirled, congealed into the mask of a grinning blue-eyed demon, blond hair aflame. Its mouth opened, showing a slit of scarlet and pearl, as Trip’s own reedy tenor pronounced,
“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
Trip turned, stumbled for the door, and fled down the deserted corridor.
He did not return to the hostel. That door was closed to him forever as surely as if John Drinkwater had slammed it in his face. He staggered through the lobby, empty save for a few students huddled with their palmtops beneath a window. They looked up as Trip hurried past.
“Kata tataki,” one student murmured. A tap on the shoulder: that is, bad news.
“No—katoshil,” another said—death from overwork—and they all laughed.
Outside the streets were empty, the sky a raging glory of green-shot violet. Frigid wind tore at Trip, but it wasn’t until he had gone a good five or six blocks that he remembered he had left his pea coat at the studio. The realization was almost a relief, the way terrible news is a relief—your mother is dead, your father is dead, and now you are going to freeze to death. He lurched down an alley where a fine sifting of snow covered leaves and broken glass. He walked and walked and walked, until the city fell behind him, its bonfires and makeshift generators spun from old cars and photovoltaic cells, its windows aglow with candlelight and the sound of voices falling into the street like hail. He walked until he was breathless with cold; until the sky curdled into dawn, milky yellow streaked with lavender and green, and the distant roar of the city’s single electric train echoed from Back Bay; until the last small stars trickled into the pulsing core of gold and emerald that was the sun. He walked until he could walk no more; for two days, with a ride now and then from someone in an electric car or eighteen-wheeler racing toward the Canadian border. He walked and sometimes he slept, and sometimes even ate, food from a kindly woman who said he reminded him of her daughter and bread scavenged from a Dumpster in Kittery. He walked until his feet bled inside his old Converse sneakers, until the rusted bridge that spanned the bay between Lockport and Moody’s Island appeared before him, until he reached the ruins of his grandmother’s Half-Moon trailer off Slab City Road. He walked until he reached Hell Head, and then he lay down to die.
CHAPTER SIX
The Golden Family
Jack started taking the Fusax. After all, he’d spent the last twenty-five years jumping off bridges because Leonard Thrope told him to: why stop now? He had nothing to lose except his life, and that was pretty much in hock to the virus anyway. So he took the dropper from one of Emma’s vials of organic skullcap, sterilized it in boiling water, and proceeded to play home pharmacy. He had no way of knowing what the proper dosage would be, and no way of getting in touch with the mysterious Dr. Hanada to ask. But if this bottle was all there was, Jack figured he’d better make it last.
The bottle was difficult to open. The wax had hardened, and he had to chip at it with a nutpick, then prise free the lead seal. Whatever was inside had a faint, alcoholic smell, like one of Emma’s tinctures. A slightly grassy odor. Jack sniffed it curiously—he had thought it would smell bad, but the scent was pleasantly innocuous. He glanced at the glass of water he’d set on his nightstand. He’d planned on putting the Fusax in there and sipping it slowly and mindfully, the way Emma told him herbal remedies should be ingested. Instead he took the dropper and squeezed a few drops of the fluid beneath his tongue.
He felt a slight burning from the volatile spirits, again not unpleasant. That was all. He sat on the edge of his bed for a full hour, watching the hands of the old captain’s clock sweep from 5:00 A.M. to 6:00. Nothing happened. This was mostly a relief; Jack’s previous experiences with putting things Leonard gave him into his mouth had been unfortunate. But he felt disappointed, too—which was absurd, even the most miraculous of cures wouldn’t work within the first hour. Finally, when he could hear his grandmother and Mrs. Iverson moving around downstairs, he found a tiny cork to replace the lead stopper and put the vial into the drawer alongside his other medication. Then he got dressed and went down for breakfast.
March trudged into April and the wettest spring on record. At first the rain was almost welcome. Although the storms couldn’t hide the glimmering completely, the clouds did mute the spectral disturbances, so that some days, for an hour or even an entire afternoon, you could almost forget the shattered sky was there.
In the west, heavy weather took a more bizarre turn. An unrelenting series of fronts hung above the plains and farmlands, a squall line that stretched from Texas north to the Dakotas. Storms broke constantly, but in the phenomenon known as virga, the rain evaporated before it hit the ground. Immense scythes of lightning raked sky and drought-ridden prairie, starting fires that burned until there was nothing left for them to feed upon. In the wake of the thunderstorms, mesocyclones spawned scud clouds and funnel clouds and tornadoes, land spouts, and, upon the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, waterspouts that swallowed pleasure boats and freight barges. Some of the tornadoes were tracked spinning clockwise, all but unheard of in the northern hemisphere. As the deadly fronts moved east and the twisters collapsed, they left mounds of debris, the remains of houses and livestock, planted fields and shopping malls. In Kansas a church filled with refugees was flattened, killing more than three hundred people. Afterward the church marquee was photographed in the branches of a scrub oak tree seven miles away.
Across North America crops failed. In the cities, the first soft footsteps of famine could be heard. There were rumors of cultists who claimed to see a shimmering green brilliance hanging about the bodies of those who would die within twenty-four hours.