"Tell her I'll be there soon as I can."
"No, Tyler… Tyler, there are some troublesome things happening at the ranch. You can't just walk in here."
Troublesome things? "I thought a new world was being born."
"Born in blood," Simon said.
THE MORNING AND THE EVENING
I came up toward the low ridge overlooking the Condon ranch and parked out of sight of the house. When I switched off the headlights I was able to see the predawn glow in the eastern sky, the new stars washed out by an ominous brightening.
That's when I started to shake.
I couldn't control it. I opened the door and fell out of the car and picked myself up by force of will. The land was rising out of the dark like a lost continent, brown hills, neglected pastureland returned to desert, the long shallow slope down to the distant farmhouse. Mesquite and ocotillo trembled in the wind. I trembled, too. This was fear: not the pinched intellectual uneasiness we had all lived with since the beginning of the Spin but visceral panic, fear like a disease of the muscles and the bowels. End of term on Death Row. Graduation day. Tumbrels and gallows approaching from the east.
I wondered if Diane was this frightened. I wondered if I could comfort her. If there was any consolation left in me.
The wind gusted again, washing sand and dust down the dry ridge road. Maybe the wind was the first harbinger of the bloated sun, a wind from the hot side of the world.
I crouched where I hoped I couldn't be seen and, still trembling, managed to peck out Simon's number on the keypad of the phone.
He picked up after a few rings. I pressed the receiver into my ear to block the sound of the wind.
"You shouldn't be doing this," he said.
"Am I interrupting the Rapture?"
"I can't talk."
"Where is she, Simon? What part of the house?"
"Where are you?"
"Just up the hill." The sky was brighter now, brighter by the second, a bruised purple on the western horizon. I could see the farmhouse clearly. It hadn't changed much in the few years since I'd visited. The outlying barn looked a little spruced up, as if it had been whitewashed and repaired.
Far more disturbingly, a trench had been dug parallel to the barn and covered in mounded earth.
A recently installed sewer line, maybe. Or septic tank. Or mass grave.
"I'm coming to see her," I said.
"That's just not possible."
"I'm assuming she's in the house. One of the upper-floor bedrooms. Is that correct?"
"Even if you see her—"
"Tell her I'm coming, Simon."
Down below, I saw a figure moving between the house and the barn. Not Simon. Not Aaron Sorley, unless Brother Aaron had lost about a hundred pounds. Probably Pastor Dan Condon. He was carrying a bucket of water in each hand. He looked like he was in a hurry. Something was happening in the barn.
"You're risking your life here," Simon said.
I laughed. I couldn't help it.
Then I said, "Are you in the barn or the house? Condon's in the barn, right? How about Sorley and Mclsaac? How do I get past them?"
I felt a pressure like a warm hand on the back of my neck and turned.
The pressure was sunlight. The rim of the sun had crossed the horizon. My car, the fence, the rocks, the scraggy line of ocotillo all cast long violet shadows.
"Tyler? Tyler, there is no way past. You have to—"
But Simon's voice was drowned in a burst of static. The full light of the sun must have reached the aerostat that was relaying the call, washing out the signal. I hit redial instinctively, but the phone was useless.
I crouched there until the sun was three quarters up, glancing at it and glancing away, as mesmerized as I was frightened. The disc was huge and ruddy orange. Sunspots crawled over it like festering sores. Now and again, gouts of dust rose from the surrounding desert to obscure it.
Then I stood up. Dead already, perhaps. Perhaps fatally irradiated without even knowing it. The heat was bearable, at least so far, but bad things might be happening on the cellular level, X-rays needling through the air like invisible bullets. So I stood up and began to walk down the pressed-earth road toward the farmhouse in plain sight, unarmed. Unarmed and unmolested at least until I had nearly reached the wooden porch, until Brother Sorley, all three hundred pounds of him, came hurtling through the screen door and levered the butt of a rifle against the side of my head.
* * * * *
Brother Sorley didn't kill me, possibly because he didn't want to meet the Rapture with blood on his hands. Instead he tossed me into an empty upstairs bedroom and locked the door.
A couple of hours passed before I could sit up without provoking waves of nausea.
When the vertigo finally eased I went to the window and raised the yellow paper blind. From this angle the sun was behind the house, the land and the barn washed in a fierce orange glare. The air was already brutally hot, but at least nothing was burning. A barn cat, oblivious to the conflagration in the sky, lapped stagnant water from a shady ditch. I guessed the cat might live to see sunset. So might I.
I tried to lift the ancient window frame—not that I could exactly leap down from here—but it was worse than locked; the sashes had been cut, the counterweights immobilized, the frame painted in place years ago.
There was no furniture in the room apart from the bed, no tool but the useless phone in my pocket.
The single door was a slab of solid wood and I doubted I had the strength to break it down. Diane might be only yards away, a single wall separating us. But there was no way to know that and no way to find out.
Even trying to think coherently about any of this provoked a deep, nauseating pain where the butt of the rifle had bloodied my head. I had to lie down again.
* * * * *
By midafternoon the wind had stilled. When I staggered back to the window I could see the edge of the solar disc above the house and the barn, so large it seemed to be perpetually falling, almost near enough to touch.
The temperature in the upstairs bedroom had climbed steadily since morning. I had no way of measuring it, but I would have guessed at least an even hundred Fahrenheit and rising. Hot but not enough to kill, at least not at once, not immediately. I wished I had Jason here to explain that to me, the thermodynamics of global extinction. Maybe he could have drawn a chart, established where the trend lines converged on lethality.
Heat haze quavered up from the baked ground.
Dan Condon crossed to the barn and back a couple more times. He was easy to recognize in the sharp intensity of the orange daylight, something nineteenth-century about him, his squared beard and pocked, ugly face: Lincoln in blue jeans, long-legged, purposeful. He didn't look up even when I hammered on the glass.
Then I tapped the joining walls, thinking Diane might tap back. But there was no answer.
Then I was dizzy again, and I fell back on the bed, the air in the closed room sweltering, sweat drenching the bedclothes.
I slept, or lost consciousness.
* * * * *
Woke up thinking the room was on fire, but it was only the combination of stagnant heat and an impossibly gaudy sunset.
Went to the window again.
The sun had crossed the western horizon and was sinking with visible speed. High, tenuous clouds arched across the darkening sky, scraps of moisture drawn up from an already parched land. I saw that someone had rolled my car down the hill and parked it just left of the barn. And taken the keys, no doubt. Not that there was enough gas in the car to render it useful.
But I had lived through the day. I thought: We lived through the day. Both of us. Diane and I. And no doubt millions more. So this was the slow version of the apocalypse. It would kill us by cooking us a degree at a time; or, failing that, by gutting the terrestrial ecosystem.
The swollen sun finally disappeared. The air seemed instantly ten degrees cooler.
A few scattered stars showed through the gauzy clouds.
I hadn't eaten, and I was painfully thirsty. Maybe it was Gondon's plan to leave me here to die of dehydration… or maybe he had simply forgotten about me. I couldn't even begin to imagine how Pastor Dan was framing these events in his mind, whether he felt vindicated or terrified or some combination of both.