The HOLLOW SKULL by Pike, Christopher(February 1, 1998) Mass Market Paperback
Author: Christopher Pike
Date: 1998-02-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Young Adult; Science Fiction; Fiction; Teen; Thriller; Novels; High School; Childrens; Mystery
Description: There is something wrong with the people of Madison--something has entered their skulls, pierced their souls and changed them into aliens who want to transform humanity into a nightmarish race that exists only to inflict pain.
Publisher: Simon Pulse

The Experiment

Sio sat in her laboratory and contemplated the syringe in her hand. The fluid inside was clear to the naked eye; no one could ever have imagined that it was filled with billions of tiny cell-size computer chips. To Sio’s right, in a glass cage, was one remaining mouse, Harve—she had not killed and dissected him, perhaps because he had a cute way of staring at her, perhaps because he was using some kind of psychic power to bend her will. Definitely, Harve had been the smartest of the mice; he had not only been able to solve every maze she constructed, he had designed a few of his own. Maybe he had understood that the only way to survive her wrath was to be better than the rest. Yet as he watched her, it was almost as if he were challenging her to inject herself with the exotic solution. It was as if he understood her anger and her fear, that they were somehow partners in a crime that might spin wildly out of control if pushed too far.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

AN ARCHWAY PAPERBACK Original

An Archway Paperback published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 1998 by Christopher Pike

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-55059-4

First Archway Paperback printing February 1998

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

AN ARCHWAY PAPERBACK and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Cover art by Franco Accornero Printed in the U.S.A

IL 9+

For David Glover

1

The horror started with happiness. Both times, in the beginning and in the end. But perhaps there was no point in designating the horror as having a start or a finish, a birth or a death—both chased the other. The cycle was very old, as old as the galaxy itself, and out among the stars, time lost all meaning. Yet the horror never did; it never became anything less than the extinction of an individual soul. It never became less than what its original creator so bitterly envisioned. But it was occasionally asked, by those who had somehow managed to escape her, if her name should be cursed or worshipped. Asked but never answered. The few survivors knew the proper response but were afraid to say lest she magically hear. Even the weary stars and endless time would not answer the question. For she was to grow greater than both, greater than all.

The person chosen by fate, if there was such a thing, to come face to face with the ancient enemy was Cass Strobe. She was what most guys would have called a great girl. Strong without being an asshole, she knew how to take charge without being bossy. Her hair was long and dirty blond—she washed it every day, but still it always looked as if she had just gotten out of bed and neglected it. She had an incredible body; there was sex in her walk and smile. Yet she wouldn’t have been called pretty from a still photo. Her mouth was too big, her blue eyes not large enough. Her style was her asset; she knew how to make both guys and girls feel that she liked them. For the most part Cass did like people—except for her father, who was a drunken bastard. When her dad hit her, she hit him back. That was another reason she was not perfectly pretty, her nose was slightly crooked. He had broken it for her on her twelfth birthday.

The Strobes—Daddy, Cass, and little sister Mary—lived in a desperate town called Madison, which cooked sixty-seven miles northeast of Las Vegas, in a portion of the Nevada desert even the Indians had chosen to avoid. The couple of days a year when it did rain in town, all the inhabitants could talk about was how long it could take for the mud to dry. Ten minutes or fifteen. Madison had been born with the nuclear age, built around a uranium mine that bored a half mile into the Earth. For the past two decades the mine had been boarded up, but the town refused to die with its closure. Nor did it prosper; it just hung there like an evaporating puddle in the middle of dusty earth. There were three hundred kids in Madison, half of them teens, and all that most of them thought about was getting out.

Cass was no exception. At the end of the summer after her senior year in high school, she planned to move to Los Angeles and attend UCLA to study premed. She had the grades and the SAT scores. What she didn’t have was a scholarship, but she didn’t care. She was going to make it somehow, she always had. Now, as September loomed closer, all that had to be decided was whether she took Mary and her boyfriend with her.

Fred Abel was her main squeeze, better than fresh orange juice in the morning, more an extra-large cappuccino late at night. He was smart, artistic, reckless—he practically glowed in the dark. He wasn’t too handsome; in fact, he would have been a nerd if he hadn’t been so cool. He was dark and wore his mustache and beard like macho man dirt. In Madison there was nothing but sun and sand, and yet he remained pale and skinny. He had a great toothy smile that made him look gentle and clever at the same time. His few clothes looked cool the way he wore them, as if they had grown on him during the night. Cass loved to watch him get dressed in the morning—her low-life father never cared if she came home. Watching Fred put on his clothes was a spiritual experience for Cass, and she was perhaps the only true atheist in all of Madison. But she felt she didn’t have to believe in God to care. She loved her boyfriend and her little sister more than anything else. They were hers, nothing was going to take them away.

So she thought, before the nightmare began.

It all started the Friday night the scientists left Madison. The scientists had arrived in town the previous week with permission from the state to reactivate the multi-level steel elevators that led deep into the infamous uranium mine, which the town folk called the Shaft. None of the teens in Madison had ever been down the Shaft for the simple reason that somebody had pulled the plug on the lifts two decades earlier. But these scientists were a clever bunch and got the hardware all working again. Yet they were not smart enough to remember to pull the plug before they split. Consequently, the youth of the town were left with an impossible-to-resist temptation.

Of course it was irrepressible Tim Hale, boyfriend of Jill Leper, who was the first to learn that the Shaft was still accessible. Tim was a sort of buddy of Fred’s, but it was really Jill and Cass who were friends, best friends actually, till death dared part them. Jill was loud and gross and funny as hell. Tim was loud as well when he was drunk, and he was often drunk now that school was out for the summer. Jill and Tim were classic Madison products and would probably never make it out of town for longer than a week. They had small town brains and didn’t mind boring jobs and limited social lives as long as they were able to pretend to themselves that the grass was no greener anyplace else. The funny thing was, of course, that there was no grass anywhere near Madison.

But they were made for each other, Jill and Tim. They may have even loved each other; their lust for each other seemed inexhaustible. One thing was for sure, they never went a day without talking for at least six hours. God only knew what they talked about, Cass certainly didn’t. Jill was her friend but not her equal. Cass wasn’t a snob to think so—it was just the way it was. Above all else Cass was a realist. When her dad was drunk and screaming at her, Cass always knew when she zoned out and entered the twilight zone. Just by its position on the globe, Madison qualified as a suburb of the latter.

Tim came to them that Friday night with the idea of sneaking into the Shaft and riding the creaking lifts down to the center of the Earth. He was not totally drunk at the time, but he was catching glimpses of sparkly trailers with rainbow hues that existed only in his own mind. Actually, he and Jill had smoked a little pot earlier, on top of their beer, so if they weren’t technically drunk they were definitely not examples of clean living.

The happy couple ran into Cass and Fred as the latter were coming out of the local diner. Cass and Fred had just had a big turkey dinner—the only thing on the menu the cook and diner owner, Chet, knew how to make. The time was late but early enough for mischief. Tim brought up the plan as he rocked all over the sidewalk.

“Man,” Tim said as he got animated. “We get down there and we’ll be more isolated than anybody on Earth. Think of that. Christ, it blows my mind. We’ve got to do it.”

“It’ll be so cool,” Jill chimed in.

Fred was doubtful. “How do you know for sure that the lifts are still working?”

“Yeah,” Cass said. “Worse, what if they just take us down but don’t carry us back up? We could die down there.”

Tim screwed up his face as he contemplated their heavy questions. Blond and blue-eyed, well-built Tim was naturally handsome but did everything in his power to appear otherwise. He dressed as he shaved, in front of a broken mirror. He had stringy tangled hair—the last comb to visit it had crumpled up from fright.. He never smelled and must have showered every day, nevertheless he always managed to look as if he needed a mommy. He had two pairs of blue jeans, one with only a few holes and the other with a lot of holes. For money, he pumped gas at a corner station and said he loved his job.

Jill was short and dark, Hispanic on her mother’s side, with radiant skin and heavy bones. She was no dummy but seemed to be stuck in an eighteen-year process of trying to convince herself that maybe she should be. Cass adored Tim, but thought he was a terrible influence on Jill. Her friend had potential. Tim was a life stream roadblock. Cass wanted Jill to go with her to Los Angeles. Jill wanted to think about it, which meant “no way.” Jill had long black hair and teeth as white as the paper she sold at the local drugstore. The drugstore was across the street from Tim’s gas station—the gods were not conspiring to get Jill a life. Cass loved her friend but felt sorry for her.

“There are safety devices on the lifts,” Tim explained. “I spoke to the number-one scientist who went down there and he said no part of the system will work unless everything is working.”

“How do you know this same guy didn’t short circuit the lifts before he left?” Fred asked.

Tim spoke as if he were passing on a secret.

“Because the same guy is coming back here next week. They found something down in the mine they want to check out better.”

Cass was doubtful. “What if they found more uranium? I mean, isn’t the bottom of the mine pretty radioactive?”

Tim waved his hand. “You’ll get no more radiation down there than you would from your TV set.”

“She doesn’t have a TV set,” Jill said.

Fred considered. “I’ve always wondered what it was like down there.”

Cass was annoyed. “You’re not seriously thinking about doing this?”

Tim slapped Fred on the back. “We’re adventurers, and we go where we’re called.”

“Tim, shut up,” Cass said. “Fred?”

Fred thought a moment more then chuckled. “It would be an adventure. Hell, we’ve each spent half our lives here and now we’re about to leave We’ve never been down the mine, this might be our only chance to explore it.”

Cass started to protest but then stopped. Or perhaps something stopped her, an ancient echo from another world, a subtle genetic implant override. Later, she was never able to explain, even to herself, why she gave in. She shrugged.

“As long as we don’t stay down there too late, I don’t care,” she said. “I have to work tomorrow morning.” She worked as a secretary for a local contractor, and often went in on weekends to catch up on paperwork. She was good with math and keeping records.

Tim was happy. “We’ll have a great time! Let’s get some flashlights and go.”

“We’d better tell somebody what we’re doing,” Fred cautioned. “In case we don’t return for a few days.” He turned to Cass. “How about Mary?”

“No. She’ll want to go.” Cass turned to Jill. “Leave a note for your mother. Someplace she won’t look until tomorrow.”

“All right,” Jill said, although she looked as if she hardly understood the instruction. They agreed to meet back in front of the diner in twenty minutes. Fred said he would drive them all to the mine.

They took an hour to get their stuff together. They found plenty of flashlights but needed batteries and had to go to the market to get them. There weren’t a lot of places open in Madison on Friday night. With Tim and Jill stumbling around the aisles, and Fred doing side-busting impressions of people in town, they were a fine bunch. Later Cass was to remember how happy she felt that night, as if she were standing on the verge of the greatest adventure of her life. She couldn’t wait to get out of town for the night—and for the rest of her life.

Fred had an old Ford Mustang. He joked that the serial numbers had worn off, although they all knew someone must have filed them off in a fit of felony lust. He had bought the car hot off a tourist with black sunglasses for eyes. Fred’s car creaked and backfired as it crept out of town and onto the lonely dirt road that wound up toward the hills and the entrance to the Shaft. The mine was located six miles out of town.

If they got trapped their shouts wouldn’t reach any ears.

Cass sat in the back with Jill, who had begun to sober. Jill stared out the window at the approaching hills. They were laced with iron oxide and glowed red and forlorn beneath a half moon. Cass liked the hills at night; she thought they looked like the scenery from an alien world. She touched Jill’s arm to get her friend’s attention.

“Are we crazy?” Cass asked.

Jill turned and smiled. “No guts, no glory.”

Tim was talking excitedly to Fred about baseball. The boys couldn’t hear Cass or Jill, or rather, couldn’t be bothered listening.

“A part of me is going to miss this place,” Cass said.

“You don’t have to leave so quick,” Jill said. “You can start college next year.”

“But I’m afraid if I don’t leave now I’ll be stuck here forever.” Cass paused and spoke quietly. “This is probably my last week here.”

Jill raised a hand. “Don’t ask. No, I can’t go with you.”

“But there’s nothing keeping you here. You’re not close to your mom and dad.”

Jill’s eyes were focused out the window again. “There’s Tim.”

“Tim will go where you go.”

“Fred will go where you go.”

Cass spoke carefully. “I’m going to Los Angeles to college. Fred has never said he would go with me.”

“But you know he’s coming,” Jill said.

Cass wondered if that was true. Fred was as impulsive and strong minded as she was. It was possible he’d decide to go to New York; he had been to Manhattan once and loved it. Cass reached over and touched Jill’s arm again. A wave of quiet affection for her friend rolled over her, yet she knew that their discussion was hopeless, that Jill would probably die in Madison at the age of ninety.

“There are plenty of jobs in L.A.” she said to Jill. “You wouldn’t have to work in a drugstore. Tim could get a better job too.”

Jill shook her head. “Tim loves the desert.” She chuckled softly. “He loves to sweat.”

Cass had to smile. “I still haven’t figured out what Fred loves.”

Jill turned and eyed her. ”Not sex?”

Cass paused. “We’ve only done it a few times.”

“It gets better the more you do it.”

“I’m not complaining.” Cass laughed. “I think I think about it too much!”

“Before or during?”

“Both.” Tim was talking so loud up front that she knew she’d never be overheard. Yet she continued in a softer tone. “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t involved, which is stupid because this relationship has brought such richness to my life.”

Jill nodded. “But being free is more important to you than being happy.”

Cass was struck by her seriousness. “Is that really what you think?”

Jill studied her. “Everyone knows that’s true about you, including Fred. I think that’s the only reason he’s afraid to move to L.A. with you.”

Cass waved her hand. “Nah.”

“It’s true. You are a tough chick.” Jill stared straight ahead. “But that’s not bad, someone’s got to be.”

They parked near the entrance to the Shaft, twenty feet from the mass of boards and barbed wire that doubled as a Get Lost sign. The scientists had done them the favor of chopping through the barricade so they were able to get inside by merely ducking.

They switched to flashlight mode. The walls of the tunnel were coated with iron oxide. Cass had read somewhere that it was often found around uranium. Fred and Tim walked ahead—Tim was standing more straight by the minute. The tunnel pulsed with a silence that seemed to slip off the walls and fill their ears with a faint ringing. Instinctively they spoke only in whispers, the ghosts of uranium past haunting them. Cass kept fretting about the radiation, but Tim told her she was worrying about nothing.

”Besides,“Tim said. “There’s no uranium up here. It’s at the bottom of the Shaft.”

“How did they even know it was down there?” Cass asked.

“There was a small concentration on the surface,” Fred explained. “And they followed it deeper and deeper. From what I heard, this mine was the one that provided the uranium for the very first atomic bombs.”

“What an honor,” Cass muttered. She didn’t like weapons of destruction, in spite of her being a fighter herself. She thought it cowardly to bomb humanity from the skies with the power of the sun.

“This mine had more uranium in it than any place on earth,” Tim said as if he had a personal stake in the property. “It helped make the world safe for democracy.”

They neared the lifts, which couldn’t properly be called elevators. To Cass’s surprise she saw that there was only one open wire cage—she would have guessed they’d have had a backup. Here, too, the metal was coated with a fine red dust. It was almost as if the wire had oozed out its own mechanical blood over time. Tim brushed the dust aside and reached for the controls. An idiot could have understood them. There was a green button for descent, a red button to push to return to the surface. The controls were duplicated inside the metal cage Cass noticed as Fred pulled back the screeching lift door. They faced a moment of truth as they all hesitated to step inside.

“There should be a call box in this thing,” Cass complained.

“There might be one at the bottom,” Tim said. “The word might is not reassuring at a moment like this,” Cass muttered.

“Tim and I can go down first,” Fred suggested. “See how safe it is.”

“No,” Cass said firmly. “You’re not going down there and die and leave us up here alone and miserable. We either all go together or we don’t go at all.” They paused and fidgeted. It had been easier to talk about exploring the Shaft when they were miles from it. But standing on the edge of the precipice was another matter. Beneath their feet the black hole seemed to plunge into another dimension. Tim picked up a stone and tossed it over the side. They listened as it clattered against the metal framework, but they never heard it hit bottom. It was as if something down there had eaten the rock. Tim let out a nervous laugh, he was fully sober now.

“It’s something we can tell our grandkids about,” he said gamely. .

Fred stared down for a moment. “Yeah, let’s just go for it.”

They climbed into the creaking lift. It swayed with their weight, and Cass wondered if four bodies would overload the thing. Yet they weren’t cramped—the lift looked as if it could take down a whole crew. Fred and Tim busied themselves by staring at the control panel while Cass and Jill stared down between their feet, through the thick wire mesh. They could have been floating in orbit above a black hole. Jill was acting more and more nervous, she had always been a bit of a coward.

“What if we need oxygen down there?” Jill muttered.

“I don’t think we will,” Cass said. “A half mile is not that deep.”

“Jesus!” Jill gasped as an unseen motor kicked on and they began to descend. The rails did not screech; they screamed. The whole system was rusted, and it sounded as if they were trying to reactivate alien machinery on an abandoned planet. They gathered in a tight knot in the center, somehow thinking that would help if they suddenly went into free fall. They were all surprised at how slowly the lift moved, it would be a long ride to the bottom.

“We’re committed,” Tim said.

“I think we’re in good shape,” Fred answered. “The motor started without prodding. The scientists probably had it serviced before they went down the last time.”

Jill took a deep breath as she clung to Tim’s arm. “The air is getting bad.”

“The air hasn’t changed,” Tim said. “You’re just feeling claustrophobic.”

It was a wonderful place to suffer from such a condition. Overhead the tunnel vanished into a starless black canopy. The screeching quieted but the lack of noise was somehow even more disturbing. The beams from their flashlights flickered from the minor tremors in their hands. They continued to huddle close as they descended; it was as if they had agreed to sacrifice themselves to the hungry gods beneath the surface of the earth.

Suddenly the lift stopped. They weren’t at the bottom, but rather perched on a metal platform. Fred cautiously slid the door open. A second lift waited on the far side of the platform.

“I should have thought of this,” Fred said. “No cable would be long enough or strong enough to take us all the way to the bottom. I bet we have to take a series of lifts—could be as many as four.”

“Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead,” Jill muttered.

“Can’t go back now,” Tim joked positively, but he looked uneasy.

Cass stared down, panned her flashlight into black infinity.

“This mine has got to be deeper than half a mile,” she whispered.

“The air is still good,” Fred said as he stepped over to the new lift and studied the controls. “In fact, I think there’s less dust down here.”

Jill shivered. “But it’s getting cold. Is that normal?”

“Who the hell knows what’s normal down here?” Tim said as he joined Fred. Tim reached out and pulled open the second lift door. It didn’t complain as the other one had, perhaps the scientists had oiled it.

Hopefully something human had.

They climbed inside.

They, in fact, rode four more lifts before they reached the bottom, five in all. By then the temperature had dropped considerably, which was odd because they had all thought it would be hotter deep underground. When they finally emerged from the fifth lift they were in a tunnel coated with icy black frost. Yet their exhaled breaths didn’t fog up in the beams of their lights because the air had been stripped of moisture. All around them, the walls shone black and smooth, black marble carved by machines the four of them could not imagine. They moved forward so quietly they could have been trying to communicate telepathically.

“Where are we going?” Jill hissed as they crept away from the lift.

“Like we brought a map of this place,” Cass said sarcastically.

“We’re exploring,” Tim whispered.

“What if the lift has a timer on it?” Jill asked. “What if it returns to the surface after a while.”

“Shut up, you’re spooking us,” Cass said.

“There’s another set of controls down here,” Fred said, leading them forward with Cass gripping his elbow. “Don’t worry.”

“I like it down here,” Cass lied. “It turns me on.”

Tim forced a snort. “Maybe we should do it down here.”

”Yeah,” Jill said with no enthusiasm. “You build a fire out of black rock and I’ll strip down.”

In reality there weren’t many rocks, or, for that matter, many features at all. The black tunnel clearly led to another place, probably where the vein of uranium carved its way down into the earth. Cass kept thinking what it must have been like for the men who worked the mine to come down all this way each day. She wondered what they dreamed of at night. She suspected she would have a hell of a nightmare before the next morning. The place didn’t feel merely spooky—it felt evil. She had lied when she said she liked it.

The tunnel came to an end a hundred yards from the lift, opening into a cavern that reminded Cass of a movie set for a horror film. There was a black pool in the center that stretched in a rough oval without a single ripple. The still fluid could have been oil. The cavern itself was perhaps a hundred feet long, half that in width. It was a dead end, the tunnel went no farther. Obviously this was where the miners toiled. Cass just wished they had a Geiger counter with them. “We might be getting a hard dose of radiation therapy as we stand here,” she said.

“They wouldn’t have discarded the mine if it had still been a rich source of uranium,” Tim said.

“A poor source of uranium could make us all pretty sick,” Cass said.

“What could it do to us?” Jill asked anxiously.

“For one thing it might make your lovely black hair fall out,” Cass said as she stepped over to her boyfriend. “And make hair grow on Tim’s chest.”

“I heard that,” Tim muttered as he moved close to the walls. Fred was doing his own examination, bent over the black pool with his flashlight. The liquid seemed to reflect hardly any light. Fred leaned forward to touch it but Cass reached out and stopped him.

“You don’t know what it is,” she scolded.

“It looks like water mixed with oil.” Fred frowned. “But I doubt this pool was here when the miners worked in this room. It would have gotten in their way, and I’m sure they would have drained it. The liquid must have bubbled to the surface during the years the mine was closed.”

“I would hardly call this place the surface,” Tim muttered.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cass said to Fred. “I don’t want you touching it. I don’t want our kids being born with three eyes.”

Fred was amused. “Are we going to have kids? Are we going to get married?”

She held his eye. “You should be so lucky as to catch a hot chick like me.”

“What do I have to do to catch you?” he asked; and he acted as if he wanted a real answer. Cass only stood and shook her head.

“I don’t want to discuss our future in this grave,” she said.

“It’s funny you should say that,” Tim said. “Back in town, at Chico’s bar, I’ve heard a few of the old timers talk about this mine. They said when it was first opened, during World War Two, a lot of people thought it was haunted. I heard that a few of the miners who worked down here went insane.”

“That’s just great,” Jill said. To put it mildly she was not adapting well to their new environment. She kept glancing over her shoulder as if she were about to be jumped. “Let’s get out of here.”

Tim ignored her and went on, “They said that the miners who did crack didn’t just need hospitalization. They had to be killed.”

Fred stood back from the black pool and chuckled. “Yeah. The U.S. government put its own people to death.”

Tim stood his ground. “These guys at the bar said it really happened. That there was something down here that got to a couple of miners and messed up their systems so bad that they were a danger to anyone who came close. They said the miners were put to death and their bodies were cremated.”

Jill practically shook. “Thank you for sharing that story. Why didn’t you tell us that on the surface?”

Tim laughed. “Because hundreds of people came down here for dozens of years and nothing happened to them.”

“Was it the radiation?” Cass asked, growing more and more uneasy.

Tim scratched his head. “Not the way these old guys put it. The miners caught something and began to change in some way—it was like they had caught some kind of virus.”

Jill got angry. “Would you just shut up and get me out of here!”

Tim was shocked by her reaction. “Honey, it’s just a story. You don’t have to get excited.”

Jill turned toward the entrance. “This place has creepy vibes. I want to get out of here. Now!”

Their happy night ended right then. Maybe human history did, Cass was to think later. As Jill stepped toward the tunnel that led back to the lift, Tim ran after her. Jill was wound tighter than he had ever seen her, and obviously he was concerned that he had upset her. She might have had a headache from the stuff she had ingested earlier. The double whammy of pot and alcohol often gave her a headache. Or maybe she was just scared, so far beneath the surface, hearing such an unsavory history. In either case as Tim laid a hand on her shoulder, she shook it off. But it was a hard shake—she practically pushed him away.

Now Tim was not the most coordinated individual to begin with, and even though his mind had largely sobered, his body was still trying to catch up. He tripped and fell.

He landed in the black pool. “Oh Christ,” Cass whispered.

Fred was on Tim in a second. The pool didn’t appear to be very deep so Tim’s struggles on its surface were brief and violent. Yet as Fred pulled Tim free, it was clear that the pond was mostly oil. Tim stood covered from head to toe with black gook. Not only that, his right hand seemed to be injured. Through the film of oil Cass saw he was bleeding. Although she planned one day to be a doctor, she didn’t move immediately to his aid. If the truth be known, she was afraid to touch him, and that made no sense to her.

“Why did you do that?” Tim was screaming at Jill. “Now look at me!”

Jill stood at a distance, seemingly in shock. “Sorry” was all she could get out. Fred was braver than the girls. As Tim wiped the slimy stuff from his eyes, Fred lifted his friend’s hand and studied the cut.

“This is deep,” Fred muttered. “You must have scraped something sharp on the bottom of the pool. You need stitches.”

“I don’t have money for stitches,” Tim growled as he continued his feeble clean-up job. Jill finally stepped forward and offered her blouse as a cleaning cloth—a significant offer, it was one of her favorites. But Tim waved her and her offer away—he was still really mad at her. He added, “What got into you, Jill?”

“This place,” she mumbled and glanced at Cass. “I don’t like this place. It feels like bad stuff went on here.”

“I know what you mean,” Cass said as she forced herself to examine Tim’s hand. She prided herself on being unaffected by blood but the sight of the blood mixed with oil turned her stomach. It was as if Tim were oozing something inhuman. Fred continued to probe the wound and act concerned.

“What did you cut yourself on?” Fred asked.

“I don’t know.” Tim coughed as he brushed at his arms with his good hand. “It all happened so fast. I had this terrible moment when I inhaled the stuff. I thought I was going to smother.”

“I’m sorry,” Jill said again.

“You definitely have to see a doctor,” Fred said. “We can all chip in a few dollars to get this sewn up.”

“I have twenty extra bucks,” Cass lied. Twenty bucks was a small fortune to her; she needed every penny she had saved just to get set up in L.A.

“I’ll pay for the doctor’s bill,” Jill said. “It was my fault.”

Tim stopped and stared at her. For a moment it looked as if he would shout again, but his face softened and he shook his head.

“It was my fault for bringing up those crazy miners in the first place,” he said.

Cass nodded. “Yeah. Now you just be careful and don’t change into one.”

2

Madison had a part-time clinic, which obviously wasn’t open twenty-four hours a day. They had to call a number on the door and leave a message and then wait while the doctor in a neighboring town drove the forty miles to Madison. Fred thought the system stupid, he just wanted to take Tim to the next town. But the doctor was probably on his way before Fred thought to voice his opinion.

“A man could bleed to death before getting help in this place,” Fred grumbled.

“I am bleeding to death,” Tim said, elevating his hand. They had bought white gauze at the 7-Eleven, but it was thin and already soaked through. Tim had gotten cleaned up somewhat but was still a mess. Jill started to reach for his wounded hand but he motioned her away.

“You have to keep pressure on it,” Jill said.

“You don’t want to stick your hand in an open sore,” Tim said.

“It’s weird that it hasn’t stopped bleeding,” Cass mused.

“Like I said, it’s a deep cut,” Fred answered. “I’m just glad the lifts got us out of there with no problem.”

“We have much to be thankful for,” Tim muttered.

Jill reacted. “I said I was sorry.”

“You did say that.”

Jill was annoyed. “Anyway, it was your idea to go down there in the first place.”

Tim shook his head. “Don’t worry; it’s over and done.”

“Does it hurt?” Jill asked, worried now.

Tim stretched. “Everything hurts.”

Jill was obviously concerned about her earlier vow. “How much do you think this is going to cost?”

“It depends whether Plant charges for the drive,” Fred said. “Why can’t this stupid town have its own doctor?”

“Because no highly educated person would be stupid enough to live here,” Cass said.

“I take it you won’t return after medical school and take care of us poor slobs?” Tim asked.

Cass felt tired. It was getting late. “No,” she said flatly.

The medical man, Dr. Steve Plant, arrived forty minutes later. They all knew him because he had treated each of them at one time or another. A tall man with a bad limp, he had a strong face and a pleasant bedside manner. Yet he could be firm, especially if anyone ignored his advice. Fifty, he seemed older, because of the ridiculously long hours he kept.

He took care of the residents of three other hick towns like Madison, crisscrossing the desert in his high-powered Lexus. His hair was snow white and his face tanned; he had the deep lines of a desert lizard. He seemed amused at Tim’s middle of the night mishap, he didn’t act put out at all as he led them into his tidy office. Dr. Plant used the office every Tuesday and Thursday, when he held normal office hours. He was well-respected in town.

Dr. Plant cleaned up the hand and numbed the tissue around the cut. It took him fewer than twenty minutes to put in ten stitches—he was a skilled worker. Tim did not complain until Dr. Plant brought up the need for a tetanus shot.

“How much is that going to cost?” Tim asked. “Do I really need one?”

‘You need it,” Dr. Plant said firmly, reaching for a fresh syringe. “You need to take antibiotics as well, that cut already looks inflamed.”

“I can’t afford all these drugs,” Tim muttered.

“You can’t afford not to take them,” Jill said, her hands gripping her bag as if it would sprout legs and head for the door.

“We’ll all chip in,” Cass repeated. “Dr. Plant? Isn’t it unusual for a cut to show signs of infection so soon?”

Dr. Plant stuck his needle in a vial of clear liquid. “Yes. But it can happen sometimes. The material that cut Tim could have been dirty. We won’t be positive if there is infection right away. Better to be on the safe side and take antibiotics.”

Fred chuckled. “Better to take him out back and shoot him.”

By the time Fred took Cass home it was close to midnight and she was exhausted. They barely kissed goodbye; she just wanted to get inside and under the covers. But Mary met her at the porch right after Fred drove away. Her ten-year-old nightgown-clad sister looked scared and Cass knew that that meant only one thing. Daddy was drunk.

Mary was thin like many girls her age, a waif with tan skin and hopping energy. She had long shiny brown hair that was the envy of proud mothers everywhere. Her eyes were brown and large. Cass often thought she could see a center of love in Mary’s eyes. Her sister was sweet without being boring, precocious without being rude. Really, she was a dear, and Cass sometimes felt a sharp pull in her chest thinking about how much she loved her sister. She knew if anything ever happened to Mary, she wouldn’t be able to bear the pain. Life would end; the sun would go out.

“What?” Cass asked.

Mary cringed and tears sprang into her eyes. “He’s been drinking all night. He’s been yelling at me and I can’t get him to stop.”

Cass felt a stab of fury. “Did he hit you?”

Mary bit her lower lip and shook her head. “No.”

Cass took her by the shoulders. “Did he hit you? Tell me.”

“He just pushed me; he didn’t really hurt me,” Mary sobbed. “But he’s scaring me, and he’s breaking things.”

Cass stood straight. “Stay here; I’ll take care of him.”

Mary grasped her hand. “Don’t go inside—he might hurt you.”

Cass shook her off as she stepped toward the door. “He’s a drunken slob, he can’t hurt me. Just don’t come inside, no matter what.”

Cass left Mary looking very worried.

Inside, the house was dark and quiet. Their place was a three-bedroom collection of uninspired boxes— a typical Madison dream castle. Cass liked paintings and posters—her father ripped down her favorites whenever it suited him. As a result the walls were largely bare and the vibes sucked. She had to fight to calm herself, Cass wasn’t afraid of him so much as she was afraid of what she would do because Cass had no doubt that Daddy had wacked Mary a few times.

She found him in the living room sitting with a bottle of clear liquid before a fuzzy TV. He favored vodka straight from the Russian udder—the quart bottle was three-quarters empty. He hardly looked at her as she came in but his voice was belligerent.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

Her father was extremely handsome, despite the abuse he had heaped on his forty-year-old body. His features were like hers—light and blond. His blue eyes were a thing of legend among the local women, who were always ready at his beck and call. Her mother, who had died in a car accident a year after Mary’s birth, had been obsessed with him in strict defiance of her better judgment. He hadn’t started drinking after her death, but had been an alcoholic since he was a teen, and his total unrepentance and lack of motive made it impossible for Cass to feel much sympathy for him. Yet there was a tiny thread of compassion deep inside her because she knew he had loved her mother very much. Of course that hadn’t stopped him from beating her. Cass sometimes thought her mother had been driving too fast on purpose—when she ran that fatal red light.

“Out,” Cass replied coolly.

He snorted. “Yeah.”

She stepped between him and the blurry TV. “Mary’s on the porch crying. Why?”

He drank from his bottle. “Beats me.”

Cass felt scorn. “You shit. You can’t just drown yourself to death, you have to wreck a little girl’s life in the process. You know, as she grows up, she’s never going to forget nights like this. You scar her, permanently, and you piss me off.”

He didn’t like that. He set his bottle down and stared hard. “You go to bed this minute, if you know what’s good for you.”

Cass put her hands on her hips. “Did you hit her? Or did you just shove her so hard she accidentally ran into the wall?”

Daddy took a breath and stood slowly. He had half a foot on her, fifty pounds. Yet she wasn’t afraid of him. When he was drunk his nervous system responded like a puppet with elastic strings. He had taken many a swing at her over the years and he usually caught air. She held her ground as he took a step forward.

“You have a lot of nerve accusing me, you good for nothing bitch,” he swore.

She chuckled. “What’s the matter, Daddy? Did I hit the last remaining sober nerve in your body?”

He took a swing at her. She successfully ducked and kicked him hard in the left knee. He toppled like Jello on Valium. For a moment he lay helpless before her, grimacing in pain. Her anger right then was poison in her brain. She wanted to kick him again and again, in the face, in the groin, until he was a gory lump of quivering flesh, begging for mercy. Yet in the same instant she was overcome by a feeling of revulsion, at herself as well as at him. She was becoming like him, she realized, working out her anger through violence. And all the while Mary was probably trembling on the front porch, praying that neither of them got hurt. Cass took a step back and drew in a ragged breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m sorry you hate me and I hate you. Because I don’t really, I just don’t know how to deal with you, and I’m afraid I never will. For that reason I’m leaving tonight. I was leaving next week anyway. But I’m taking Mary with me, I can’t trust you with her. I’m taking the cash in the jar above the refrigerator; we’ll need it when we get to Los Angeles. I think you owe us that at least.” She stepped past him and spoke in a deadly tone. “Don’t try to stop me—it would be a mistake.”

She went in the kitchen and got the money first, seven hundred and forty dollars in cash, all wadded up and smelling of alcohol. Mary walked in when she was stuffing it in her pocket and just stared. Cass spoke firmly.

“We’re moving into Fred’s trailer tonight,” she said. “We may not be coming back here, I’m just not sure. At least not for a week. We’re definitely not coming back here to live. I want you to go into your room and pack as much of your stuff as possible. Use the big green garbage bags from the kitchen if you need them. Load up my car.”

Mary trembled. “He’ll try to stop us.”

Cass shook her head. “He won’t try anything.”

Her words had power. Their father remained in the living room the whole time they packed. Cass was careful to get her own cash as well, another eight hundred bucks that had taken her a year to save. Both she and Mary worked quickly and efficiently. Cass didn’t bother to call Fred and tell him they were coming; he would accept them gladly, he was that kind of guy. But his trailer was smaller than a loaf of bread, and they would be on top of one another until they could get a place in Los Angeles. Cass was more determined than ever that Fred was to come with them.

When the car was all packed and Mary was sitting in the front seat wrapped in a blanket, Cass went in the house one last time. She wasn’t even sure why. She was sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Her lifestyle was streamlined, and she didn’t really have that much stuff. Hopefully she wouldn’t have to come back to the house at all.

She went into the living room because she supposed she had to say goodbye. She was shocked to see that her father had turned off the TV and was sitting seemingly sober in the dark. It was not obvious but she could tell he had been crying. He was staring at a blank TV screen and maybe it was a metaphor for his internal state.

“We’re going now,” she said.

He didn’t look over as he spoke, his voice croaking. “Cass?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t go. Don’t take Mary.”

She sighed. “I have to. And it’s better this way, you know that’s true.”

He did look at her then, and she could see the red in his eyes even in the dark. “I’ll stop drinking. I’ll do whatever it takes. Please don’t do this to me.”

Her eyes burned but she shook her head. “It’s too late. We’ll always be your daughters, and maybe one day we’ll come back to visit. I’d like that, and I know Mary would. But right now you have to try to put your life back together, alone. I can’t give you the chance to hurt Mary any more than you already have.” She paused. “I’m sorry I kicked you, I should never have done that.”

He lowered his head and wept. “Cass.”

She stepped to his side and patted his back.

“I love you, Father. But we have to go. Take care of yourself.”

He tried to take her hand as she turned but she didn’t let him. There was no sense prolonging the agony. He wasn’t an evil man, just sick. She told herself that Mary and Fred and the rest of her life were waiting for her.

She vowed that everything would be great.

3

The day that Sio made what she thought was the greatest discovery of her life, she made the worst. The day she discovered how to remake humanity, she also discovered how flawed humanity really was, at least in her opinion. Later many were to wish these two discoveries hadn’t come together—collided so to speak, like asteroids in space—because so much else might have been different. But strange fates guide physical reality, and Sio was about to open doors that should never have been found, never mind touched.

Sio was a queer breed of scientist, a molecular biologist on the theory side and a computer specialist on the practical side. The synergy of these two disciplines made her experiment in ways others had not even imagined. Sio was a genius, there was no question, she was also a little erratic. Not only had she conceived of molecular microchips to amplify human DNA, she had the nerve to build them and inject them in her own veins.

But that was later. The day of her greatest discovery, which happened to be her thirtieth birthday, she was still experimenting with mice. Still building tiny robots that the eye could not see but which nonetheless had the power to seek out the master genes of mice tissue and instruct them to perform their jobs a hundred times more efficiently. How did these technological marvels accomplish such a daunting task? The old-fashioned way, by projecting streams of magnetism and electricity in cohesive and coherent packages. Packages dictated by onboard chips that thoroughly understood the design of the DNA they were trying to intimidate. Sio had studied genes and silicon all her life, or at least since she was a young girl.

Now that she was thirty, though, she had finally taken the time to fall in love. And it wasn’t that she was an unattractive woman, far from it. Sio looked a bit like an older version of Cass, with dark blond hair and blue eyes that were as clear as they were intelligent. Sio was thinner than most women and had never really learned to power her walk with feminine energy. She didn’t dress well—she was too busy studying her research books, a few of which she had written.

It came as no surprise that when she did fall in love—his name was Tet and he was tall, dark, and handsome—it was with a guy who was very educated. Tet was a highly respected university professor, his disciplines threefold. He knew chemistry, computer software, and physics. He had once been a teacher of Sio’s, and she had never quite forgotten his easy charm. It had seemed a blessing to Sio—who was a vehement atheist and didn’t understand why everyone wasn’t—that she had run into him accidentally. This was six months prior to her crucial mice experiments. Yes, she had fallen in love, and he had sworn to her that he was falling as well. Why, he’d even spoken of children and marriage. The day her experiments with the mice and molecular microchips reached their shattering climax, he was supposed to take her to dinner and a movie for her important birthday.

The first moment of eerie alchemy occurred for Sio two hours after she injected her dozen mice with her latest batch of toys. They were playing games—running mazes and solving crude puzzles that offered cheese cubes as rewards—when she noticed that the mice were all staring at her. That they had stopped playing and were waiting for her to give them more serious jobs. As she bent over their glass cage and returned their unique gazes, she couldn’t help but feel that they could read her mind and thought she was a fool. That they were in some strange way experimenting on her.

“What do you want?” she whispered.

They showed her by gathering at the end of the glass cage where the door was and beginning to paw the metal latch. They wanted their freedom. Even though they were mice, they had understood her question and were communicating their desire to her. The chill she felt right then made her wonder if they were not demanding she do what they asked. A portion of her mind bent to their will—she almost let them out. But the truth was she didn’t really like mice.

Sio forced them to perform games: every maze in her arsenal, every puzzle that could be manipulated by mice paws. If they didn’t cooperate she tortured them with a cigarette lighter, a crude but efficient tool of inspiration. They didn’t like her at all, the way she swiftly brought the fire; they only cooperated because they were forced. But within a few hours they had proved that she had created not only brilliant mice, but ones that could seemingly anticipate what was going to happen next—prescient mice. They solved her mazes before she was finished building them. No matter what their level of intelligence, what they were doing was physically impossible.

What had her chips done to their brains? What could her chips do to larger brains?

But she had no time to answer these profound questions because she had a date with her true love. An encounter she had been thinking about all week. She thought Tet might officially propose to her tonight, and if he did, she was going to accept. Just before she left her laboratory, she placed all the mice in an extra-strong container. She would dissect them the next day to see what her implants had done to their nervous systems. It seemed by the way they watched her that they knew she would kill them without mercy. Perhaps they were cursing her. She felt a cold chill as she left the lab.

On the way home in her car she decided to surprise Tet and swing by his place instead of waiting for him to pick her up. He lived in a spacious apartment owned by the university, one with a gracious view of the campus and the latest in energy-efficient devices. She had been to his place before, but only once. She was new to love and didn’t understand what that might mean.

She was climbing the stairs to his apartment when she saw him standing on his porch kissing an attractive young woman goodbye. Sio recognized the woman—she was one of Tet’s students, a superb physicist in the making. Tet had previously spoken of her with enthusiasm, in an academic sense. Watching them kiss, seeing how much more passionate Tet was with the student than he had ever been with her, a portion of Sio died. The death was not a metaphor for pain, but a physical and mental reality. Truly, it was as if something inside her perished in that moment and began to rot.

Sio turned and walked down the steps. She went back to her laboratory. Back to her experiments on the human molecular microchips. She wanted revenge, she swore in her fury. She needed power, but the thing she didn’t understand was that there was no limit to the power a vengeful person craved. Yet that theory of human behavior did not really apply to her because in a matter of days she would push her experiments beyond all limits to arrive in a place where no human standards applied. Sio was about to embark on the galaxy’s greatest experiment of all. Yet she herself was not yet prescient and couldn’t feel the future tremble. Had she known her ultimate destination, she probably would have gone forward still.

He had lied to her, and Sio was very bitter.

4

The next day in Madison, Tim and Jill decided to go to the reservoir, which was located five miles out of town in a direction opposite from that of the Shaft. The reservoir was created by underground streams—no surface water dared brave the scorching Nevada sun to add to it. The water was remarkably cool and clear, most of the town’s young had enjoyed swimming in it at one time or another. Even though Tim’s hand was still too painful to go in the water, Jill believed the reservoir would make a nice afternoon hangout. If they were alone, she thought, they could make love and lie naked in the sun. Because Tim looked a little tired, she drove to the spot.

But what she didn’t know was that Tim wasn’t merely feeling tired. He had had a strange night. He had awakened only an hour after falling asleep, not because his hand hurt, but because the noise of the desert was bothering him. Of course, where he lived all alone at the edge of town in a shack that pretended to be an apartment, there was virtually no sound. But that was the odd thing because as he sat up in bed it was as if he could hear every little movement out in the desert: grains of sand being stirred by the faint breeze; a lizard scraping its way into a dusty burrow; the night sounds of a thousand invisible life forms buzzing. For a long time he sat then listening to the various noises, and each tone, each pitch had seemed so distinct, more than his ears or brain should have been able to process and differentiate. It wasn’t merely that his hearing had expanded, but his brain had expanded as well.

Then, when he had lain back down, he had dreamed the most curious things. The images had been so vivid he was to wonder the next day if the pot he had smoked before they went down the Shaft had been laced with exotic chemicals. He had no sooner closed his eyes than he found himself in space, soaring among the stars, searching for green and blue worlds. Yet he did not seek them to explore them, but rather, to destroy them, or at least change them in some hideous way. As he traveled, seemingly without the aid of a vessel, he felt nothing but disdain for every kind of living organism. For him they existed merely to be collected, to be used as material. Occasionally he would pass a world that had already been conquered, and the vibrations from it filled him with deep bitterness.

His dreams grew even more dark. In one he was walking along a street in Madison in the middle of the afternoon, carrying a hidden butcher knife. And everyone he passed on the road, he privately thought of disemboweling, imagining exactly what it would be like to cut into them and pull out their guts, eat them even, red and dripping and disgusting, right there in the middle of town. The odd thing was, the gross images did not cause him to awaken, but brought an unbidden smile to his face. For he felt happy in this dream, it was not nightmarish to dream such possibilities.

Especially toward the end of the dreaming, which was exciting to him. In the back of the drugstore he ran into Jill, who started to kiss him as she often did, long and deep and wet, sighing as she did so. So happy to be in his arms, and totally unaware that he had drawn his knife. In the dream, as he stabbed the blade into her back, her whole mouth erupted with blood, and he leaned forward and kissed her even more hungrily. Licked her even as she gagged and died in his arms. Because to be all over her at the moment she breathed her last was the real thrill. The beginning of the end, a silent voice whispered. This was still a mere symptom of what was really going on, of what was really happening to him.

Now that he was awake with Jill sitting beside him in the car, Tim didn’t know what was happening. Only that he felt both better and worse than he could remember feeling. It wasn’t his bandaged hand, it was the rest of him. All his muscles ached, his bones even, they cracked every time he stretched his neck or back. His head felt full as if his sinuses were stuffed with cold virus. Yet there was a clarity to his thinking that he couldn’t explain. For example he knew exactly how Jill felt, by her body language, even the rhythm of her breathing. He knew she was feeling strongly sexually aroused and that she was trying to hide it from him because she wanted him to make the first move at the reservoir.

But he wasn’t inclined to tell Jill about all these novel experiences. He felt no shame, even over the violent dreams because they were just something inevitable that he was observing. In addition to his newfound sensations and dreams he was visited by a cool detachment that he would not have recognized twenty-four hours earlier. Yet he didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with him, certainly not something he wanted to change. Psychologically speaking, he had entered a narrow tunnel of unknown length, he was moving quickly through it, and he thought he glimpsed a light up ahead. Only he didn’t know if the light was bright or dark, and frankly he didn’t care. He just wanted to be alone with Jill, and do … things.

“Are you all right?” Jill asked, glancing over at him.

“Yeah.”

“How’s your hand?”

“Fine.”

She reached over and brushed his hair back. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re so quiet.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure you want to go to the reservoir?”

“Sure.”

“You probably shouldn’t go in the water.”

“We’ll see.”

“Did you take the pills the doctor gave you?”

“Yes.”

Jill smiled. “I can’t believe he charged us only forty bucks for everything. Dr. Plant is such a cool guy, he makes me want to become a nurse.”

Tim stared at her. “You’d make a lousy nurse.”

Jill frowned. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to say. Why can’t I be a nurse?”

Tim kept staring. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re hungry? We just ate. How can you be hungry?”

Tim looked down at his wounded hand. “This is going to a be an interesting day.”

Jill studied him, he seemed to be sweating a lot, which was understandable—it was close to a hundred degrees and her car had no air conditioning. The breeze through the open window was like the blast from a furnace. Still, she had never seen anyone sweat as much as he was. The fluid was pouring out of his skin, and he was breathing hard as well.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

He kept looking at his hand. “That mine was a trip.”

“I didn’t like it down there. It scared me.”

“I liked it. The place had power.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “You wouldn’t understand.”

She hesitated. “Did you check under the bandage to make sure you had no infection?”

He glanced at her and smiled, kind of a wolfish grin that somehow made her feel dirty. Saliva gathered at the corners of his mouth and spilled onto his chin.

“You want to have sex,” he said, not asking.

She paused. “Yes. If no one’s at the reservoir, we can do it.”

He shook his head, keeping his grin. “Even if people are watching, I don’t care. We have to do it.”

Jill felt uneasy. “Let’s wait until we get there and see what the situation is.”

The reservoir was not deserted, but they were there only ten minutes when a heavyset mother and her two whining kids got up and drove off. They then had the whole place to themselves. The reservoir was two hundred yards across, roughly circular, and very deep. Jill had heard stories that gangsters in Las Vegas had dumped weighted bodies in it over the years. But that didn’t stop her from swimming across it—she was a pretty good swimmer.

Jill had brought a small cooler filled with beer, Cokes, and ice. She had some pot as well but didn’t bring it out. She was tired of getting loaded, it was making her stupid and lazy. While she lay on her towel close to the water, Tim prowled the shore. He kept picking up rocks and examining them and then putting them back down. Jill sat up and rested on her elbows while watching him. The sun was like a fire demon in the sky. She would go in the water soon to cool off.

“What are you doing?” she called out.

“Nothing.”

“Since when are you into rocks?”

He stopped and stared at her with a rock in his hand, and for a moment she received the distinct impression that he was debating throwing it at her. But then he let it fall to the ground and smiled again, like a fool. He began to pull off his shorts.

“Let’s go skinny-dipping,” he said.

Jill glanced around, back toward the road.

“It’s a Saturday,” she warned. “We might get surprised by someone.”

He threw his shorts aside and stood naked in the sun. Tim had a great body, awesome parts. She found herself staring at him and feeling excited. Certainly he was excited, the whole nine yards of romance, or inches in this case.

‘“‘I don’t care if someone comes,” he said.

“But what about your hand? Should you get it wet?”

He stepped toward the water and flashed her another grin. “Come on.”

Jill stood reluctantly and slipped out of her bathing suit. She supposed if they stayed near the shore and saw someone coming, they would have time to get out and get decent. But Tim had no intention of staying close to the beach. He was swimming furiously into deep water. Wading into the cool liquid, she swam after him, wondering why he was acting so funny.

Near the center of the reservoir she watched as he dived under. He was perhaps fifty feet in front of her. Tim was an incredible swimmer and could hold his breath for as long as a minute in deep water. But when he didn’t reappear after a minute she began to worry.

And that worry swiftly changed to full-blown anxiety when another half minute went by with still no sign of him.

”Tim? Tim!”

He was gone, her boyfriend was gone. But it made no sense, he couldn’t have drowned, not on such a sunny day right in front of her. He was strong and he was experienced and there were no man-eaters in the reservoir. He couldn’t be dead!

“Tim!” she screamed.

Something gripped her from below. Her feet and legs—it was as if they were encircled by a clamp. Before she could suck in a fresh breath she was yanked below the surface. And if she had been feeling bad over the disappearance of poor Timmy, she didn’t know what bad was. Whatever had her was pulling her down. She could see the smooth glass of the surface straight overhead and could not believe when it began to take on the semblance of a distant mirror. Her ears screamed in pain with the pressure, and she fought desperately with her legs to get free. Incredibly, it started to get dark around her, she was being dragged that deep. Yet the cold dark did nothing to soothe the fire that threatened to rupture her lungs. She had to breathe!

Just when she thought she could take no more, the grip loosened and she was able to kick upward. But by then she honestly didn’t think she could reach the surface—it looked over a hundred feet away. Her screaming chest was filled with molten lead. It didn’t help matters when she was grabbed from the front.

The light was dim, she was about to die, and she was stunned to see that it was her boyfriend. Good old naked Timmy, he was still grinning.

He pulled her close and kissed her.

She yanked back in horror and stabbed at his eyes. He stopped smiling and let her go.

Jill really didn’t know how she made it to the surface. Because she wasn’t breathing bottled air, there was no danger of her going up too quickly. She couldn’t get the bends or an air embolism. In fact, because she was rising and the pressure on her was decreasing, the actual air in her lungs expanded as she fought for the surface. Still, when she finally did break through she gasped so frantically that she could have been sobbing. Her terror and pain were so great, she wasn’t able to stop shaking for several minutes. She didn’t even notice that Tim was floating nearby, laughing his head off.

“That was a cool kiss,” he said finally.

She looked over at him, barely able to keep herself afloat.

“You bastard!” she swore. “You almost killed me!”

He was happy. “That’s true, it was close.”

She wept. “But why did you do that?”

He circled her playfully, splashing her. “I just felt like it.”

In disgust she turned and swam toward shore. Tim made no attempt to follow her, but continued to play in the center of the reservoir. Well, she was going to show him. She was so angry that as soon as she was standing on solid ground in her bathing suit again, she jumped in her car and drove off. She wasn’t worried that he would die of heat stroke because somebody would be along soon enough to give him a ride back to town. But she had no intention of seeing him for a few days. She didn’t know what had gotten into him.

Tim didn’t mind that he was left all alone. The swimming helped his stiffness and the cool water gave him a chance to pause and think about what he had just done. Of course he hadn’t meant to drown Jill, he just wanted to scare her and kiss her, in a strange way. Pulling her hard into the depths had just seemed a natural thing to do. Actually, he didn’t mind that she was furious with him. That also seemed natural.

Yet he was slightly puzzled over the brief desire that had swept over him when he had held her underwater, his lips pressed against hers. For an instant he had thought of biting her, making her bleed, and then sucking up the blood. He had also thought of cutting himself and then pressing his blood into her cuts. He was definitely hungry for some kind of unusual action. He didn’t understand why his breakfast hadn’t satisfied him. He’d had bacon, eggs, and toast, with a large orange juice. He should still be stuffed.

Yet he wanted to put something inside his body. He didn’t know what, he just needed something bad.

The cooler caught his eye, the flimsy Styrofoam chest. Jill never went anywhere in the desert without bringing a ton of drinks. It was her greatest fear, to get stranded on some burning road and die of dehydration. He chuckled to himself at the absurdity of the thought. She didn’t know what fear was, didn’t understand that there were much worse ways to die.

Tim stepped over to the cooler and took out a bottle of Coke. He popped the top off with his thumb, something he had never done before, and drank the cola down in one gulp. Then he grabbed another bottle and downed it just as quick. His thirst was satisfied, yet his hunger remained. This second empty bottle, he didn’t throw away. He studied it for a while, in the blazing sunlight, then held it up to the sky an stared at the sun through it. The glare didn’t bother his eyes. It was easy for him to imagine how bright the sun would appear from outer space, with the atmosphere out of the way. He wished right then that he was an astronaut.

Tim sat down beside a low boulder and broke the Coke bottle on it. He picked up a hand-size rock and began to grind the glass down. It took him a while to get the glass down to powder form. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing or why, but he was pleased with his efforts so far. Picking up a handful of sand, he blended it in with the glass until it was hard to tell one substance from the other.

Then, on the spur of the moment, he leaned over and licked the mixture with his tongue. The sand was gravel in his mouth, the fine glass fire. Yet to his profound surprise it satisfied him in some inexplicable way. He didn’t even mind the blood that began to spill over his lips. He bent over and had another lick, and then another.

He didn’t stop until he had finished the whole lot.

Until others arrived, and found him vomiting blood.

5

Cass had a new timetable. She wanted to get out of Madison now, this day, this hour. She told Mary as much while she was making her lunch on Fred’s miserable countertop. Mary was excited with the idea but worried as well. She was a little girl, after all. Cass was talking about uprooting her whole world. Yet Cass thought it was better to act now before school started for Mary.

“But why do we have to leave today?” Mary asked as she accepted the turkey sandwich Cass had made for her. Cass practically lived on turkey sandwiches, she didn’t know why she liked them so much. She also ate toast and cheese—she was a plain eater.

“The sooner we leave the more time we’ll have to set up shop in L.A.”

“We’re going to buy a shop?”

Cass smiled. “No, silly, it’s just an expression. But we do need to find an apartment.”

“But are you going to go to college and everything?”

“Yes.”

“But how are you going to work and make enough money to take care of us?”

“I can do it; I’ll work two jobs. I don’t need much sleep, and we’ll have Fred to help us.”

With her big brown eyes Mary stared at her sister and munched on her sandwich.

“Are you sure Fred wants to come with us?” she asked.

Cass forced a laugh. “He can’t live without me.”

Fred had welcomed them graciously the previous night; he hadn’t been asleep when they arrived. None of them slept very well. Fred had taken the couch and Cass curled up beside Mary. But Mary had woken up a few times, suddenly crying out. The whole house hold had felt unsettled. Then, early in the morning, Fred had gone off to his job at the foam warehouse. But seeing how Mary was unsettled, Cass hadn’t gone in to work. But she had called her boss, and he just said to get to the paperwork when she had a chance. He was a good man, and she’d at least like to take care of his bills before she left town.

Mary smiled. “I like Fred. Are you going to marry him?”

Cass sat down with her own turkey sandwich. “I don’t believe anyone should get married before the age of thirty, preferably forty. But if Fred is still around when I’m an old lady, I’ll probably marry him. ”

Mary looked worried. “What is it?” Cass asked.

“I was just wondering if Daddy is OK.”

“He is not OK. He will not be OK until he stops drinking. But that’s his problem, it’s not ours.” Cass softened. “Is this what you want? To come with me?”

Mary nodded.

“You’re sure?” Cass said.

Mary’s lip trembled but she nodded again. “Yes. I love you more than anything or anyone.”

Cass smiled, felt a lump rise in her throat. “I love you, too, more than anything.”

There was a knock at the door. Cass was surprised to see Jill. Her friend looked troubled. Jill gave Mary a quick hi and asked if Cass would step outside. Cass did so, and closed the door behind her.

“What’s wrong?” Cass asked.

Jill had on her bathing suit, dark sunglasses. She smoked a cigarette, which she rarely did. She stared out at the desert as she spoke.

“Tim is acting real weird. We went out to the reservoir and the whole drive there he was behaving like a zombie. Then we went swimming and he dived under and he was gone. Several minutes went by and I didn’t see him. Then he grabbed my feet from below and pulled me down over a hundred feet. I came real close to drowning, I swear. Then he tried to kiss me, when we were still way under. Can you believe that?”

Cass frowned. “He couldn’t have held his breath for several minutes. And there’s no way he could have pulled you down over a hundred feet. Don’t you think you’re exaggerating just a tiny bit?”

Jill was annoyed. She flicked her cigarette away. “No. You’d have to have been there. What he did was next to impossible. But it wasn’t just that, it was the creepy vibes he was giving off. There’s something wrong with him, I know there is.”

“What?”

Jill leaned close and spoke quietly. “You know what Tim said about those men who went insane, the ones who worked in that mine? Well, I think something bad from that mine has infected Tim.”

“You mean his hand is infected?”

“Yeah. No. I don’t know. I just know that place was bad and now Tim isn’t himself. What should I do?”

“Take him back to Dr. Plant and have him examine Tim’s hand. I’d do that first. But what you’re talking about are more like psychological changes, and I’m afraid you’re going to lose the doctor there. I mean, you guys sound like you just had a fight.”

“But we didn’t fight.”

“Was either of you stoned?”

“No! Cass, you’re not listening to me.”

Cass considered. “I’ll have to talk to Tim myself to form a clearer opinion. Where is he?”

“Probably still out at the reservoir. I left him out there.”

“You did what?” Cass exclaimed.

“Well, he tried to drown me. Why should I give him a ride home?”

“How long ago did you leave him there?”

“It must have been an hour. When I first got back here, I went to the drugstore and had a milk shake.”

“I bet that made you feel better,” Cass muttered.

Jill lit another cigarette. “It didn’t.”

In the distance, out on Highway 16, an ambulance was approaching with its siren wailing. The girls exchanged worried glances, yet there was no logical reason to do so. They were still looking anxious when the ambulance swept by at high speed.

“I wonder where it’s going,” Cass whispered.

Jill was a bundle of nerves. “Maybe we should follow it.”

“Why?” Cass paused. “All right. But I have to take Mary with us.”

The three of them jumped into Jill’s car and sped after the ambulance. Jill floored it, her dusty Toyota shaking from the sudden acceleration. The town was not that large, they knew everyone in it. They were surprised when the ambulance pulled into Mr. Chavez’s driveway. He was the owner of the local McDonald’ s. He had twelve kids and two wives and was highly respected. The girls figured one of the kids had fallen and broken a bone or something. They were shocked when Mr. Chavez ran out of his house carrying Tim in his arms.

Tim was naked and covered with blood.

“Oh God,” Jill gasped, and it was well she was parked because she looked as if she was about to faint. She lost all her color and her head slumped forward. Cass reached for her door handle.

“Mary, stay here, take care of Jill. I’ll see what’s happening.”

Cass ran toward the paramedics and Tim. They didn’t immediately put him in the ambulance but had Mr. Chavez set him down on the grass. The men in white went to work with stethoscopes and a blood pressure wrap. All the while Tim thrashed, coughing up more blood. The sticky red liquid was all over his chest and legs. He seemed to be in a convulsion rather than in actual pain. His eyes were closed and he kept jerking his head from side to side.

“What happened to him?” Cass cried..

Mr. Chavez gestured helplessly, himself covered with blood.

“We found him this way at the reservoir. He was rolling in the sand and coughing up blood. He was all alone, we don’t know how he got there.”

“His vital signs are failing,” one paramedic snapped. “We have to get him to the hospital.” The two medical workers began to lift Tim.

“Which hospital?” Cass asked.

“Taylor Memorial. Are you family?”

“No. But we’re close friends. His girlfriend is over there. We’ll drive behind you.” She stopped as she turned away. “Is he going to live?”

The paramedics glanced at each other. “We don’t know anything at this point,” one of them said.

Back at the car Cass forced Jill into the passenger seat and pushed in behind the wheel. The ambulance was already rolling away. Cass started the car and sped after it. Jill was bent over and sobbing quietly, still a bedsheet. Mary was sitting tensely in the back.

“You got your seat belt on?” Cass called.

“Yes,” Mary said, shaking. “What’s wrong with Tim?”

“They don’t know. He’s throwing up blood. They’re taking him to the hospital.” Cass glanced at Jill. “But they think he’ll be all right.”

Jill raised her head and miserably shook it. “He’s going to die.”

“He’s not going to die!”

Jill waved her hand helplessly. “You saw all that blood. Nobody can bleed that much and live.”

“It just looked like a lot of blood because you were scared,” Cass lied. “His vital signs are stable and he’s going to be fine. Now let me concentrate on driving, that ambulance is doing a hundred.”

In reality she was unable to keep up with the ambulance, it was a new vehicle and Jill’s car was as old as all their cars. But Cass knew Taylor, knew the hospital. The ambulance got to the town ten minutes before her but that was all. They parked outside Emergency and dashed inside. Jill was not coping well, running into things, walls and chairs. Cass left Mary with her while she went to find Tim. She ran into him abruptly. Stumbling through the emergency wing, she turned a corner and came across a team of eight nurses and doctors working on him. If he had been thrashing before, he was digging a hole through his bed now. They had to restrain him with straps so that they could work on him. Yet it was obvious they didn’t know what his problem was, except for the fact that he was throwing up tons of blood. At least they had covered him with a green sheet. A harried nurse glared at her.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“His friend.” Cass said.

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“No. Is he going to make it?”

“We don’t know. Were you with him when this started?”

“No.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tim. Tim Hale.”

“Is he allergic to any kinds of medication?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he diabetic?”

“No.”

“Does he do hard drugs?”

“Pot. Cocaine—not much.” Cass grimaced as Tim’s spine spasmed and his whole body lifted off the table. He let out an unearthly yell, a rolling screech, yet it was not a scream of pain. It was more as if he were having an incredible orgasm with more blood spurting from his mouth. It projected across the room and spattered Cass. She wiped it off in horror.

The situation was deteriorating. The team of doctors and nurses shouted back and forth in frantic med speak, but it was clear they thought they were losing him. His blood pressure was falling rapidly and his heart was skipping stones on the pool of his own blood. His horrible thrashing began to slow, and for a moment he seemed to stop breathing. Cass instinctively pushed forward, she had to be by his side if he was going to die. A doctor snapped at her but she ignored him and somehow found Tim’s hand. To her immense surprise he opened his eyes and stared at her. His eyes—they were blue no more, but dark gray, a cloud over an angry sea. Yet he smiled when he saw her, a lopsided kind of grin.

“Cass,” he gasped. “She fills the emptiness.”

Then he closed his eyes. Just stopped breathing.

“Tim?” she whispered. “Tim?”

She was pushed aside, they tried to revive him but could not. Cass leaned against a cold wall in the corner and felt like a bit part on a TV hospital drama. She couldn’t comprehend that this was reality, that the blood on her shirt wouldn’t just evaporate. But Tim continued to lie peacefully, not minding when they shocked his chest with high voltage. They stuck two more long needles into his ribs but it made no difference. Slowly they began to step away from his body, as if they might catch something from him, death perhaps, the inevitable disease. A green-masked doctor noticed Cass frozen in the corner and went over to her. She could see his dark eyes, little else.

“We did everything we could,” he said gently.

She nodded weakly. “Do you know what was wrong with him?”

“No. We need to perform an autopsy. We need permission from the family.”

An autopsy? They were going to cut Tim open and pull out his guts and examine them under a microscope? The images were too gross for her to maintain her composure. Yet she did somehow and managed to nod again.

“I’ll call his mother, tell her to come,” she said.

The doctor patted her on the shoulder. “It’s never easy, situations like this.”

“Yeah. This sure ain’t easy.”

The emergency room cleared. They didn’t seem to mind that she stayed with Tim. Although still splashed with blood, he looked at peace, his messy blond hair hanging over his tanned face. She took his hand once more and stroked it.

“Bad day, Tim,” she whispered. “Bad day for all of us.”

She buried her face in his hand and wept.

Then she heard a beep from one of the monitors. Her head snapped up. His heart was beating. “Hey!” she screamed. “He’s alive! Get in here!” The medical team poured back in. They worked on Tim another twenty minutes. Then the doctor who had pronounced him dead came back up to her shaking his head.

“Sometimes you get lucky,” he said.

Cass burst into a smile. “Thank God.”

None understood that luck had just departed the planet. That God had closed his eyes on mankind.

6

Sio sat in her laboratory and contemplated the syringe in her hand. The fluid inside was clear to the naked eye; no one could ever have imagined that it was filled with billions of tiny cell-size computer chips. To Sio’s right, in a glass cage, was one remaining mouse, Harve—she had not killed and dissected him, perhaps because he had a cute way of staring at her, perhaps because he was using some kind of psychic power to bend her will. Definitely, Harve had been the smartest of the mice; he had not only been able to solve every maze she constructed, he had designed a few of his own. Maybe he had understood that the only way to survive her wrath was to be better than the rest. Yet as he watched her, it was almost as if he were challenging her to inject herself with the exotic solution. It was as if he understood her anger and her fear, that they were somehow partners in a crime that might spin wildly out of control if pushed too far.

Yet Sio felt justified in taking the risk. She had been pushed too far, she could not get the image of Tet’s kissing that woman out of her mind. But he didn’t know that she was upset with him. The night of her birthday, she had called and told him she was sick. Seven days had passed since then and they talked twice more on the phone. She had acted loving and he had sworn to her he loved her. All she could think about was how nice it would be to watch him die slowly.

But to do such a thing, she needed an edge. Sio took up the syringe and injected herself. The liquid burned as it went in and she fainted.

When she awoke, on the floor, she felt good. Better than she had ever felt. It was as if she had just returned from a lengthy vacation. Her head was clear and she felt stronger physically as well. Sitting up in her chair, she suspected her brain was already working at a higher level. The first thought that came to her was a better way to make her molecular microchips. She realized in a flash that she had overlooked a simple way to improve the chip’s efficiency tenfold. Hardly taking stock of the changes in her, she started to work.

Two days later Sio reinjected herself, first with a solution that destroyed the existing chips, then with a syringe of new chips. These didn’t knock her out. Indeed, almost immediately she felt a tremendous surge of power sweep through her. She actually felt as if she were much larger than her body, as big as the building in fact. And everything in her aura, she felt she could control. She wasn’t so much surprised as pleased when she focused her mind on a pen and was able to move it through the air to the far side of the room. She understood that the chips had boosted her brain power so much that every latent human ability was now at her disposal.

She could also read minds. The thoughts of the other people in the building flickered in and out of her consciousness like glimpses of torn and typed paper. Their ideas were fragmented, she got the sense of what they felt, not the specifics. She was disgusted to see that some people she considered friends really thought so little of her. Even the elderly building janitor, who always gave her a kind word, was having a fantasy of having sex with her that very minute. In her mind she snapped at him to stop and watched how he staggered as he swept the floor. She had almost killed him, how fascinating.

Harve, the mouse, stared up at her. If a mouse could smile, he would have been grinning. She understood now that he was thinking he was the most powerful mouse in the whole world. She would take it a step further—she felt like the most powerful creature in the universe. It was interesting, she thought, how Harve didn’t appear to be aging. She wondered if she was immortal, a delicious idea.

Sio decided to pay Tet a visit.

When he answered his door, she knew immediately that he was not alone. Very clearly she could see the image of his student lying naked in his bed. He had told her to not make a sound while he answered the door, to hide in the closet if she had to. Yet from his physical appearance he was calm; he even invited her into his apartment and asked her if she’d like a drink. But he didn’t kiss her hello as he usually did—he had forgotten to do that. Not that she wanted his affection, she didn’t want to smell the other woman on his breath.

When they were seated and having drinks he asked how she was.

She smiled. “Fine. But I’ve missed you.”

He also smiled. “I had such a big night planned for your birthday.”

“I can believe that,” Sio said.

While they chatted Sio’s mind went out to the young woman in the next room, who had refused to hide in the closet. She hadn’t even bothered to dress, she was a rebellious sort. Sio appreciated that quality, although it didn’t give her enough reason to show the woman mercy. Sio felt as if her mind were a thick hand of magnetism. Her psychic fingers moved as she willed, and she focused in on the young woman’s throat. Slowly but firmly, she began to squeeze, to shut the trachea. The reaction was immediate, the woman began to choke.

Tet came over and sat beside Sio on the couch. “You’ve caught me at a bad time, honey,” he said sincerely. “I have a paper I must finish tonight. I was in the middle of it when you knocked.”

Sio was pleasant. “Let me leave you to finish it.” She sipped her drink and stood. “I know you’re a very busy man.”

He showed her to the door. He cracked it slightly. “May I call you tonight?”

“Please do, I love to hear your voice in the middle of the night.”

He leaned over to kiss her. “You are so dear.”

She sighed with pleasure. “You are precious.”

A naked young woman stumbled out of the bedroom and collapsed gagging in the center of the floor. Tet stared at her in horror and Sio was barely able to suppress a smirk. She did not have to concentrate too hard to keep the woman’s trachea closed, she realized that she could probably have killed ten people simultaneously. The young woman had long red hair and a gorgeous body, but she was losing her lovely color as she thrashed on Tet’s carpet.

“Glor!” Tet cried as he knelt by her side. “What’s wrong with you?”

Glor did not answer; she could not. She kept gesturing to her throat, and Tet could see that she was choking, but there was nothing he could do to open her windpipe. As oxygen deprivation began to slow her movements and close her pretty eyes, he bent over and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But he was blowing into a blocked tube, and after a few minutes she lay dead and blue. Sio was surprised when he burst into tears—he must have really cared for the woman.

“A friend of yours?” Sio asked pleasantly.

His face was ashen. He stared at her as if she were a stranger.

“She was a student of mine,” he mumbled.

Sio closed the apartment door and took a step toward him.

“Why is she naked?” she asked.

He was in shock. He held Glor’s head in his lap. “What?” he asked.

“Why do you have a naked woman in your apartment?” Sio repeated.

He shook his head. “She was resting here, it is not as it appears.”

Sio was amused. “It appears much worse, now that she is dead.” She paused and spoke as if to herself. “What am I going to do with the bodies?”

“Sio,” he said desperately. “This poor girl is dead. We have to call the authorities.”

Sio came closer, her expression still cheerful.

“I don’t think so, Tet. I believe the authorities should discover your bodies here. But that might not be a for a few days, they might be smelling bad by then.” She paused. “I think it will be the stink that finally alerts them to what went on here. But I doubt they will ever figure out how you died, or Glor.”

Tet’s face darkened. Placing Glor’s head gently on the floor, he slowly stood and pointed to the door. “I want you to leave now,” he said.

“Why?” she asked sweetly. “Do you want to be alone with your lover? She can’t do much for you now, I’m afraid.”

Tet grabbed her by the arm and ushered her toward the door.

“You are to get out!” he shouted.

She shook him off, hard. Her strength startled him and he took a step back. Her eyes narrowed on his angry face and fear sprung across his brow as he no doubt felt a strange sensation deep inside his skull.

“I do not like to be pushed,” she said coldly. “I do not like to be lied to.”

His face flushed. He backed into the wall. He didn’t understand what was happening, but it scared him. She mentally tightened her grip on his brain, it felt like a damp sponge beneath her unseen fingers.

“What are you doing?” he gasped.

“I’m not going to do anything, you are going to do it. I am not going to get my hands dirty. Now I want you to go into the kitchen and get your biggest and sharpest knife and return here with it.”

He trembled. “Sio?”

“Do it!” she snapped.

He went into the kitchen and got the knife.

He wept as he returned. “Please don’t do this. What are you doing?”

She stood back. “Sit beside Glor, by her head.”

He had to obey—he was an uncoordinated puppet on metal strings. He could not stop crying. But he could not keep the knife down either, without even speaking she was forcing him to bring the blade close to the dead girl’s neck.

“Sio!” he moaned.

“Sever her head,” she ordered.

His arm convulsed to disobey. “No!”

“Lower your voice! Cut off her head! And when you are done, cut off your own and let it drop to the floor Try to finish the task before you die. I want the authorities to find you both that way.” She turned toward the door as she burned her instructions deep inside his skull, a laser of domination that fused synapses into the pattern she desired. It was all so easy to do, now that she had the power. She continued, “I am going to leave now, I do not need to see this. But you are not to stop until this floor is soaked in blood.”

He had begun to cut into Glor’s throat when he spoke.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he asked pitifully. She smiled as she paused at the entrance.

“Do not feel so bad, my love,” she said gently. “I am probably going to do it many more times before I am through. And next time, I think I will watch. I think I will like that.”

7

That night, the same day Tim almost died, Cass and Fred prepared for bed while Mary slept on the couch. Cass was worried about her sister—Mary’s sleep was anything but settled. She kept twitching and turning and muttering to herself. Cass carefully felt her sister’s head and thought it warm. Cass worried that she was catching something. Cass wished she could have spared Mary the sight of Tim’s vomiting blood.

Thank God neither Mary nor Jill had been in the emergency room when Tim almost died. Cass had yet to tell either of them how close it had been.

But Fred knew—he had arrived at the hospital not long after the big scene. She had not seen him come in, had only run into him after he had tracked down Tim and messed up his own clothes giving his friend a big hug. She had spent the evening washing all their clothes. Fred had been seriously shaken by Tim’s close encounter of the fatal kind. Cass had never seen him so distraught, but he had mastered his emotions somehow and driven them all home. They still had to pick up Fred’s car at the hospital, he had just left it there. Of course they would go see Tim tomorrow, Cass only hoped he’d make it through the night. The doctors still didn’t know what was wrong with him, but when they left Tim had been getting stronger by the minute. The doctors thought the crisis had passed.

“What a day.” Cass sighed when they were finally lying in bed together.

“It was weird,” Fred agreed.

“I wish we knew what was wrong with him. Did I tell you that Jill said he was acting bizarre before he got sick?”

“She said something to me about him trying to drown her, but I didn’t see how it related.”

“It doesn’t seem to relate.” Cass was thoughtful. “But I can’t stop thinking about what happened last night in the mine. I told the doctors to examine his hand but they said it appeared to be fine.”

“I think what happened today and what happened last night were coincidences.”

Cass sat up. “Do you really? I don’t believe in coincidence too much. Remember it was Tim who told us how some of the miners who worked down in the Shaft lost their marbles. And just today Tim starts acting weird, and then gets so sick he throws up blood. It’s got to make you wonder.”

Fred yawned. “Wonder what? That he caught something when he was down in the mine?”

“Yeah. Some kind of weird infection. It’s possible.”

“If he got infected through the cut on his hand, it would show.”

Cass frowned. “I know but I can’t stop feeling there’s a connection. I wouldn’t mind going back down there and getting a sample of whatever it was that Tim scraped his hand on.”

Fred smiled. “What if he didn’t scrape his hand? What if a tiny monster bit him when he fell in that black puddle?”

“I still want to go back there. Would you go with me?”

“Sure.”

“How did you hear that Tim was at the hospital?”

“The whole town was abuzz with the news.”

“Exactly when did you get there? I didn’t see you come in.”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Just wondering.” Cass glanced across the trailer at her sister, who continued to fidget. “I told Mary I wanted to get out of town today. But I don’t suppose we’re going anywhere until Tim is better.”

Fred shook his head. “Once he’s stable, we can split.”

The question hung in the air.

“So you’re coming to L.A. with us?” Cass asked. Fred shrugged. “Sure.”

Cass smiled. “Is that a commitment?”

Fred chuckled. “That word again. Yeah, I go where you go. Does that make you happy?”

“Very.” She kissed him. “Want to love me?”

He glanced at Mary. “Will she wake up?”

“No. I’m pretty sure she won’t.”

Fred pulled her closer. “Then I definitely want to love you.”

On the other side of Madison, Jill was preparing for bed when she heard a knock at her window. Jill lived at home with both her parents, but their room was at the far end of the house. It wasn’t unusual for Tim to stop by after hours and climb in her window; her mom and dad never seemed to hear a thing. But Jill couldn’t imagine who it could be now, she sure as hell knew it wasn’t Tim. The last she had seen him they had still been pumping him full of fresh blood. She prayed to God he was all right. She was nowhere near over what had happened. Her whole nervous system was shot. She wondered if she’d need a pill to fall asleep. Her mom kept all kinds of prescription medicines in the bathroom.

But it was Tim. He grinned through the open window.

“Hey, babe,” he said. He wore green hospital gowns, two of them facing in opposite directions.

She was floored. “What are you doing here?”

“I was feeling better so I left the hospital.”

Jill had to blink. He didn’t look the least bit sick. Standing in the faint glow of the moon, he could have just come a from a vigorous game of basketball, which he sometimes played late at night with guys at the school. And he had stood at death’s door only a few hours earlier.

“How did you get here?” she demanded.

“Fred left his car at the hospital, remember? Hey, you want to go for a drive?”

“No, it’s late. You have to get back to the hospital.”

He shook his head. “I’m not going back, I feel fine. Come on, let’s go for a drive. It’s a warm night and the moon is out.”

“But this is crazy. You need your rest. You need to get better.”

Tim chuckled. His eyes seemed to shine with the light of the moon.

“I have never felt better in my life,” he said.

She didn’t know why she went with him. She guessed she was worried that he would suddenly collapse. He didn’t let her drive and wouldn’t tell her where they were going. Not until they were out of town and he had pulled onto the old dirt road that led up to the Shaft did she realize that he intended to go back to the mine. He did not deny that that was their objective.

“I don’t want to go back there,” she said. “I hate that place. Turn around.”

He stared straight ahead. “We hardly got to see any of it the first time. The flashlights are still in this car. We need to explore it thoroughly. There is power in that place.”

She paused. “You said that earlier, that it had power. What do you mean?”

He looked over at her. He did appear healthy, yet he had lost a considerable amount of his tan in the last twenty-four hours. His skin had taken on a smooth sheen, it almost glowed in the dark.

“Can I confide in you?” he asked.

“About what?”

“Answer me. Can I confide in you?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

He slowed as he went over a bump in the dirt road. The moonlit hills loomed above them, silvery sentinels guarding the silent desert. The jagged mouth of the mine resembled a black hole cut into an evil fortress. Tim leaned close as he replied and spoke in a soft tone. His voice had changed, his pitch was slightly higher.

“When I hurt my hand in the mine, something remarkable got under my skin. And that something has begun to change me for the better. I don’t know what it is exactly but I know it is connected to a great plan that was set in motion billions of years ago out among the stars. There is a substance in this mine that allows a human being to change from a mere mortal into a god, and that is what is happening to me. I am being transformed into a creature of the universe.” He paused. “What do you think?”

She wanted to blink but could not.

“I think you need to go back to the hospital,” she said.

He studied her. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”

“No. You were vomiting blood. You’re sick. You’re not being transformed into anything. You need to be under a doctor’s care. Turn the car around.”

“No. You have to listen to what I am saying. You can have the same opportunity. If you refuse to take it, I cannot help you. Now the reason I was vomiting blood is because I ate ground-up glass.”

“What?”

“Glass mixed with sand. Both substances are high in silicon. Chemically silicon is identical to the carbon atom, which forms the basis of life on this planet. All of organic chemistry is centered on the carbon bond. But silicon’s atomic weight is greater than carbon’s—the outer electron shells are identical but the nuclei are different. As my nervous system transforms, it requires a high amount of silicon to replace the carbon. My system is growing denser and more resistant. But I no longer need to eat glass and sand to get it. I have learned from my errors and I am finding better sources.”

Jill had to breathe. “You’re crazy.”

He watched her. “I am not. This transformation is inevitable. Everyone on this planet is going to go through it soon. And those who try to stop it will be destroyed. That is her will.”

“Who is her?”

His gaze was focused on an unseen object far away. “She has grown so great now, it is difficult to describe her with mere words.” He turned his attention back to the dirt road and sped up. “We’re almost there.”

“No!” Jill shouted. “I will not go back down there with you!”

“It is better if you cooperate. For your own sake.”

“No!” She tried to open the car door. “Let me out of here. You have no right to make me go anywhere I don’t want to …”

He struck her on the face. It was not a mere slap, Jill felt her nose break and blood spurt over her shirt. Her head slumped back and she saw stars whirling like grinning demons. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Tim had returned his attention to his driving.

“You’ll understand everything soon enough,” he said.

Jill was still groggy when he pulled her out of the car and ushered her into the mine. The upper lift was still in place and he threw her into it and slammed the metal door shut. Soon they were descending into the black abyss. He stood over her with an unconcerned expression, a morbid statue in green hospital gowns. Finally Jill’s head began to clear but she didn’t risk standing. She was afraid he’d strike her again.

“Why are you doing this?” she cried.

“I have explained the situation to you,” he replied flatly.

“But what you’re saying is crazy.”

“It is a matter of perspective. From a galactic point of view, this is the beginning of a chain reaction that is inevitable.”

Jill wept as the cold grew all around.

“No,” she pleaded. “The truth is that you’re sick. Something did get into you last night when you cut your hand, some kind of virus. But it is filling your head with these delusions. What you’re doing has nothing to do with the galaxy.”

“You are incorrect. Once you have begun to change, you will see the truth of my statements.”

She got up cautiously. “Tim, look at me, it’s Jill. It’s the girl you love. How can you drag me down to this horrible place? Please, let me turn the lift around. I promise I’ll help you get better. I can drive you back to the hospital tonight.”

“Remain silent. You do not understand. You cannot in your present condition.”

“But, Tim …”

He struck her again in the face and she went down. His blow packed incredible power, and she could not believe how strong he was. Especially since he had almost died that afternoon. Deep inside, as more blood poured from her nose and mouth, she wondered if there was something to what he was saying.

She had barely recollected her wits when he dragged her off the final lift and pushed her in the direction of the cavern and the black pool. The walls of the dark tunnel swam in her damp eyes. He carried the only flashlight in his right hand, and the nape of her neck in the other. She began to scream bloody murder but she could have been singing church hymns for all the effect it had on him. Her horror was absolute, she knew he intended to force her down into the pool and infect her with whatever had entered his blood. She no longer felt she was dealing with her boyfriend. He spoke like a robot, maybe he had changed into some kind of alien creature.

“Oh God,” she wept with her head down as he dragged her forward. But her eyes strayed onto an object none of them had noticed the previous night. A crow bar, half buried in the black soot of the tunnel floor. Her right hand swept down and she managed to grab it. Tightening her grip on the steel, she used all the strength in her legs to push herself to the side. For a moment she broke free, and she was lucky he so underestimated her effort that he didn’t even rush to recapture her. The pause gave her time to bring up the crow bar and smash it across his face.

He fell to his knees in front of her and stared up at her. His face was a mass of blood, as was hers, the unnatural night was streaked with red. Yet he did not look angry, merely surprised.

“You are more capable than I thought,” he muttered.

“And you’re an asshole!” she said as she brought the crow bar down on the top of his head. The metal made a sick crushing sound as it pounded his crown. She realized she had probably shattered his skull. But her terror was all-consuming, she could not care. As he fell to the side, she dropped the bar and grabbed his flashlight and ran back toward the lift. With relief bordering on insanity, she leaped into the mesh cage and pushed the ascent button. Slowly the lift began to take her upward. She knew there was only one lift, she thought she would be safe.

Jill rode all five lifts back to the surface. By that time she was sobbing uncontrollably but it was not stopping her from pushing forward. Staggering out of the mine, she dragged herself toward the car, Fred’s car, that had been left at the hospital so that they could all drive home together. The only problem was she didn’t have the keys. Tim had them, and he was half a mile under the earth.

“Dammit!” she swore at the night as she kicked the locked door. She would have to walk the six miles back to town. That wasn’t the end of the world; she had walked that far before in the desert at night. But she was weak from her battle with Tim, and her nose was still bleeding. Glancing back at the cave entrance, she wondered if she should have stopped and finished him off altogether. Of course he was her boyfriend and she loved him, but he was trying to kill her. She probably should have bashed his head into a gory pulp.

Jill started on her way, walking slowly at first but picking up speed. Finally the blood in her nose clotted and she was able to breathe a little easier. The moonlight helped her avoid the worst pitfalls and the dim lights of Madison beckoned her. She figured if she could keep walking straight without taking a break she would be home in two hours. But she wondered what she was going to tell her parents, the police. They would never believe Tim had been able to leave the hospital and overpower her.

Halfway back to town her nightmare returned. Yet she saw nothing at first, just heard it, the faint sound of an approaching car. In a flash she realized that Tim had made it out of the mine and to the car. A vague dark image finally resolved itself behind her. With the lights of the car off, he was cruising straight toward her.

Jill leaped off the road and hurried into the shrubs. But Tim had already spotted her and was veering to intercept her. Tumbleweed were torn to shreds under the front of his bumper but it didn’t slow him much. Desperately she searched for a ravine, a gully, some thing the car could not cross. But she was in no man’s land, where the circling vultures traditionally had easy pickings. The floor of the desert was uniform, and except for the clawing shrubs, there was no place to hide. He was only a hundred yards behind her and he was picking up speed. She had no doubt that he intended to run her down.

Jill ran like a madwoman, but aimlessly, and so it was not long before she felt the slap of the tumble weed as he pulled within inches of her heels. He must have stuck his head out the window, she could hear him clearly as he shouted.

“Now you die!” he said.

He gunned the engine. Jill dived desperately to the right, but the bumper caught her hip and sent her flying. Landing on her back in a pile of sand and rock, she felt a stabbing pain throb through her entire left side. She tried to stand but was unable. She had broken her hip, and he was coming round for another pass.

Yet he did not run her over. He parked a short distance away and walked casually toward her, a flashlight in one hand, a shovel in the other. His face was caked with dried blood, but he didn’t appear unduly upset. He didn’t even look at her. Ten feet from where she groveled in the dirt, he set his flashlight down and began to dig with his shovel. A grave, she realized, he was digging her grave.

“Tim!” she screamed. “Please stop! You have to stop!”

He ignored her and kept digging, his bloody face grotesque in the hard light of the white flashlight beam. Yet his total indifference was more horrible than any seething emotion would have been. He was right—he was an alien. Jill tried to get up on her knees, the pain was overwhelming.

“Tim,” she begged. “Don’t let them make you do this to me. Whatever is inside you, tell them they cannot do this.”

He kept digging, he was unnaturally strong. She stared in sick fascination as the minutes passed. Already he had the six-foot-long hole three feet down. He shoveled like a machine hooked up to an invisible generator. Jill could not fathom that she was looking at the exact spot where she was going to spend the rest of creation. The hole where her body would be covered with dirt and then rot and turn into a skeleton. The very concept was too much for her, yet it gave her renewed strength. Through a haze of pain too violent to comprehend she managed to climb to her feet and stagger away from him into the tumbleweed. But he was not giving out Brownie points for effort. Over her shoulder, she watched as he calmly followed with his shovel upraised. His manner was so relaxed that she honestly could not believe he was going to strike her. Until the last instant.

“No!” she screamed.

The blade of the shovel hit her left side. She heard ribs splinter. She fell in a ball of agony. Still holding on to the shovel, he reached down and grabbed her by her long hair and pulled her toward the hole he had dug. It was to be a shallow grave, a short and bitter ceremony.

“No, Tim!” she cried.

He threw her face-first into the hole. Clawing on her knees, she tried to stand but he brought the shovel down hard on her mid-back. There was a loud crack—it sounded as if he had broken her spine. Rolling onto her side, she realized that she could not feel her legs, that she was paralyzed. In the ghastly light of the flashlight, she watched him pick up a shovelful of dirt and toss it on her midsection.

“Tim,” she gasped through her pain. “You can’t do this. It’s Jill, it’s the girl you love. Don’t kill me.”

He paused in his labor, and for a fleeting moment it was as if a look of recognition disturbed his features. He stared down at her and then at his shovel and indecision seemed to grip him. He was shaken by a spasm, it appeared to come from deep inside.

“Tim?” she whispered.

The moment passed. His face became impassive once again.

“This is observation mode,” he said. “It is like this in the beginning on each world. Reactions are tabulated and data is gathered. But your continued existence is not useful to the greater design. You know too much and you have demonstrated that you will not cooperate. It is better your physical form be disposed of in this isolated spot.” He paused. “Goodbye, Jill.”

“No!” she screamed as the next shovel of dirt hit her in the face and her mouth was filled with choking sand. She continued to scream and thrash with her arms until he had completely covered her head. She did not stop until she was dead and buried.

8

The next day Cass, Fred, and Mary visited Tim at the hospital. They were shocked to see him sitting up in bed and flirting with a young nurse. She ran out giggling as they came in. Tim was paler than usual but otherwise appeared to be in robust health. He had the TV on—an old X-Files rerun—but clicked it off as they entered.

“Hi, guys,” he said cheerfully.

“You don’t look sick,” Cass exclaimed, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek.

“I’m not sick. I’m trying to get myself checked out of here,” he replied.

“I hate hospitals,” Mary said.

Tim beamed at her. “Thanks for coming to see your uncle Tim.”

Mary smiled nervously. “You’re not my uncle.”

“Hey, buddy,” Fred said, patting Tim’s arm. “You gave us all a big scare yesterday.”

Tim shook his hand. “Didn’t mean to. They still don’t know what was wrong with me. But I tell you, I feel great now. I’m getting out of here.”

Cass sat on the edge of his bed. “Right. You were throwing up blood yesterday and you want to go home today. No way.”

He stared at her for a moment, his expression going flat. “I will leave if I want to leave.”

“Better do what the doctors say,” Fred remarked.

Tim glanced over and quickly smiled, although it seemed forced.

“Whatever you say,” he replied.

“I bet you’re wondering where Jill is,” Cass said. “We swung by her house to pick her up but she wasn’t home. Her parents didn’t know where she was and guessed she had got up early to come here to see you.”

Tim hesitated. “She was here earlier. She said something about going somewhere today.”

“That’s a suitably vague statement,” Cass said. “Where was she going?”

Tim shrugged. “I don’t know. But when she saw I was well, she seemed anxious to go do her own thing.” He added, “You know how Jill is.”

Jill was actually very caring, Cass thought. She was surprised that her friend would take this day to go off.

“Cass and Mary and I are thinking of leaving town soon,” Fred said carefully. “I’ve decided I want to go with them to L.A. But none of us wants to leave until we know you’re OK.”

Tim was easy. “Honestly, I could not feel better. Why last night I was up and walking everywhere, I couldn’t sit still. The nurses actually thought I had left the hospital.” He added, “If you want to leave town, go ahead.”

“Are you able to eat?” Cass asked.

Tim paused. “I’m eating plenty.”

“But what tests have they done on you?” Cass persisted. “They must have at least done an MRI and CAT scan.”

“What are those?” Mary asked, keeping a suitable distance from Tim.

“Special kind of X-rays, honey,” Cass said. “They let you see inside the body.”

Mary made a face. “Gross.”

“They want to do all kinds of tests today,” Tim said. “But I said no way, I don’t have insurance, I don’t have any money. I keep telling you but you don’t believe me, I’m getting out of here today.”

Cass gestured to his bandaged right hand. “How’s your cut?”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not infected?”

“No.” Tim paused. “Why do you think it’s infected?”

“I was just asking.” Cass continued to feel troubled. Something wasn’t right but she couldn’t place it. “What were your symptoms before you started throwing up blood?”

Tim hesitated. “I didn’t have any.”

Fred chuckled. “No physical symptoms you mean. We talked to Jill, she said you almost drowned her at the reservoir. That’s why she drove away and left you.”

Tim shrugged. “You know Jill, she always exaggerates.”

Cass would not have said that was one of her qualities.

“No one throws up blood and doesn’t feel sick beforehand,” Cass persisted. “You must have had pain of some sort?”

“No,” Tim said flatly. “None. “

They chatted a few minutes more but Cass felt Tim was resisting them. All his answers were either vague or short, yes or no. Leaving Fred and Mary to socialize with him, she went in search of a nurse or doctor taking care of Tim. After a few minutes she found the harried nurse from the previous day. The woman was more pleasant today, she actually had lovely dark hair and eyes when she wasn’t all covered with medical masks. Cass asked her if she had any opinion about Tim’s condition. The woman frowned.

“He’s a mystery to us all,” the nurse said. “We did an EEG on him this morning and got a reading that we’d never seen before. His blood work is all off, and his blood pressure is practically through the roof.”

“That’s odd, he says he’s feeling great.”

“We don’t know how he’s feeling, but we do know he isn’t eating.”

Cass frowned. “But he just told us he was eating.” The nurse took her aside and spoke in a confidential tone. “You can’t believe anything your friend is saying. He’s an odd character; he says one thing and means another. He is thwarting us on all sides. The tests we have taken we had to fight for. And he went off last night for several hours. We don’t know where he was. Then he denied that he had gone anywhere.”

“For hours?” she asked, amazed.

“Yeah, he just got up and left.”

“But he says he never left the hospital.”

“He was gone, sister.”

“Then he lied to us at least twice. Tim doesn’t lie, if anything he’s too bluntly honest.” Cass considered. “When you say his EEG was odd, what do you mean exactly?”

The nurse shook her head. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this without the doctor’s permission, so please keep this conversation private. I just told you what I did because I know you’re close friends and I don’t want him leaving this hospital until he’s been thoroughly examined. But I can say the EEG readings must have been distorted. I mean, he had brain waves that aren’t in the textbooks.”

“Interesting,” Cass muttered.

Cass returned to fetch Fred and Mary. She found the guys laughing together, but Mary continued to stand apart, as if she was afraid of Tim for some reason. Tim nodded to her as she returned but didn’t really speak to her. After another few minutes they told him they would come to see him later.

Fred walked Mary and Cass out to the parking lot, but he wasn’t riding home with them. He was going to drive his car, which was still parked on the other side of the hospital. Cass insisted on giving him a ride to it. She was shocked to see how filthy the car was, and that the front bumper and portions of the lower hood had been scratched.

“What is this?” she exclaimed.

Fred got out and eyed the car. He didn’t look happy.

“It looks like someone ran it through a sandstorm,” he said.

Cass circled the car, inspecting it for further damage. “This is impossible. It didn’t have any of these scratches on it yesterday.” She paused. “Do you think Tim took it and went off? The nurse said that he left the hospital.”

“But he said he didn’t.”

“Trust me, the nurse said he was lying.”

“That’s an extraordinary idea… . ” Fred said, his speech trailing off.

“What is it?” Cass persisted.

“Well, Tim does have a set of my keys on his key chain, just like I have a set of his. You know we’ve always done that.” Fred shook his head. “But why would he mess my car up so much?”

Cass frowned. “Tim is acting strange. I wish Jill was here. I need to talk to her. She also surprised me. She told me specifically that she would wait for us and go with us to the hospital.”

“I wouldn’t make much of that,” Fred said. “Jill’s an early riser. Yesterday scared her. She was probably here at dawn to make sure he was breathing. If it had been you who was sick, I would have stayed all night.”

His remark touched her. “You’d do that for me?”

He grinned. “If you let me sleep in the same bed with you.”

“You love me for my body. You don’t care about my mind.”

Fred rubbed dust from his car. “You have a mind?”

Mary put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear about your sex lives.”

Cass patted her on the back. “We’ll try not to corrupt you.” She paused and spoke to Fred. “But where do you think Jill went?”

“Anywhere. Maybe to Las Vegas.”

“I’d like to go to Vegas,” Mary piped up, taking down her hands. “I want to learn to play the slot machines.”

“They don’t let little kids gamble,” Fred said.

“I’m not a little kid,” Mary said stubbornly.

“I want to go back up to the Shaft,” Cass blurted out.

Fred was unenthusiastic. “Do we have to? It’s just something else that will delay us if we’re leaving today.”

Cass shook her head. “We’re not leaving today.”

Fred obviously found her puzzling. “But you’ve been so hot to get on the road. You said if Tim was OK, we were out of here. I already pissed my boss off by calling him and telling him that I wasn’t going to be able to give him notice.”

Cass stared at Fred’s scratched car. “Tim took this car somewhere last night. I want to find out where. Jill might know.”

“You’re only guessing,” Fred said.

“I’m a pretty good guesser.”

“But what does this have to do with visiting the mine?” Fred asked.

Cass put her hand to her head. She felt a headache coming on.

“I can’t explain it,” she said seriously. “But I think that mine has a lot to do with this whole situation.”

9

The first thing Cass did when she returned to Madison, after placing Mary in Fred’s competent care, was to drive over to Jill’s house. There was no answer at the door and Cass was about to leave when she noticed that the garage door was shut. Jill had a thing about keeping her car in the garage—she was always afraid it was going to get stolen. Jill didn’t have an automatic door opener—she usually left the garage open when she was out in her car. Peering in through the space between the frame and door, Cass was surprised to see that Jill’s car was still there. She wondered if it had been there earlier when they swung by on the way to the hospital. Of course it was possible Jill was out with her parents, but Jill socialized with her mommy and daddy as often as she exercised, which was never.

Cass’s disquiet continued to grow. If Jill’s car had been there earlier it meant that Jill had not visited Tim at the hospital, that he had lied to them a third time. For the first time she began to entertain the idea that Tim had met Jill during the night. She didn’t understand why the possibility filled her with dread. After all, they had been going together for a long time. On impulse Cass left town and drove out to the Shaft. She was alone and didn’t have a flashlight. She had no intention of exploring the mine by herself, brave soul that she was. She just wasn’t that adventurous. Yet she hoped to get a sense of what was going on by visiting the spot. It was intuition that was guiding her.

Parking not far from the mine opening, Cass was surprised to see that there were additional tire tracks in the dust, at least two sets, one fresher than the other. Yet they were identical tracks in the sense that the tread was from the same brand of tire. That meant that someone had been back up here in Fred’s car. As the afternoon sun burned down on the top of her head, Cass studied the dirt more closely, trying to make sense of the various footprints, but they all blurred, in the sand and in her mind. She was not happy to spot what she thought was a drop of dried blood. Of course it could have been from when Tim cut his hand. Yet the drop was closer to the fresh set of tire tracks. She considered lifting the drop and giving it to the police to type. But she thought she might be taking the super-girl-criminologist idea too far.

Cass did not go in the mine, but started back to town.

Driving out of the hills, Cass was puzzled to see a cleared place off the dirt road where a car had plowed through the wall of dry tumbleweed. She didn’t know how she had missed it on the drive up to the Shaft. Getting out and going down on her hands and knees, she saw that the tire tracks were the same as those made by Fred’s car. For the life of her she couldn’t imagine why Tim would borrow his friend’s car and drive it through such rough terrain. Such a move would definitely have scratched the car and coated it with dust. Unless Tim was simply off his rocker, what could his motivation have been? Tim’s earlier comments about the miners who had gone nuts working in the bottom of the Shaft returned to haunt her. She wished she had insisted on looking at Tim’s hand at the hospital. The fact that the doctors must be constantly checking him for signs of infection did nothing to soothe her anxiety.

When Cass got back to town it was after one o’clock. Once more she swung by Jill’s house. Her friend’s parents were home now, but they said they hadn’t seen their daughter all day. When Cass pointed out that Jill’s car was still in the garage, they didn’t act worried. Jill wasn’t close to her parents; they figured she was eighteen and could do what she wanted. Cass left frustrated. Jill’s mother and father had not even asked about Tim.

Cass went to see Sheriff Sam. His full name was Sam Strucker but everyone called him by his first name. Sam was fat and forty and patrolled Madison’s fast-food joints ceaselessly. There wasn’t a lot of criminal activity in town so he seldom got to practice his policing skills. He had a big old friendly face and a home-grown manner that would have put a drug dealer at ease. But Cass knew he wasn’t foolish, merely slow and methodical. She had twice seen him solve mysteries that had the rest of the town’s intellectuals stumped: once when someone had burned down the doughnut shop, and the second time when the gas station had been robbed. Of course both times it had been the same culprit. The doughnut shop had been a favorite of Sheriff Sam’s, so he could put in the hours when he was inspired.

Cass found Sheriff Sam sitting in his office in front of his air conditioner, a favorite spot of his. Like most overweight people, he didn’t do well in the heat. He had picked a hell of a place to make a living. He was eating a Ding Dong and sipping a carton of milk. Not even trying to hide the indulgence from her, he just waved her to have a seat. There was a baseball game on the tube. It was the bottom of the ninth—it seemed that nowadays it always was. His mouth full, Sheriff Sam asked by gesturing if she’d like the other Ding Dong. She shook her head and let him finish chewing. Small town law enforcement at its finest.

“What can I do for you, Cass?” he asked as he wiped his hands on a paper napkin. Sheriff Sam was a neat slob, he kept his office and patrol car tidy, but the interior of his house looked like a doughnut shop. He actually had a housekeeper to help him keep it clean, but she was blind and had severe arthritis in her hands.

“Jill is missing,” Cass blurted out. There was raw emotion in her voice, and Cass hadn’t realized how upset she had made herself with all her sleuthing. Sheriff Sam sat up at her pain.

“When was the last time you saw her?” he asked.

“Yesterday evening. She’s not at home and her parents don’t know where she is, but her car is in the garage. I think it’s been there all day. I know that doesn’t sound like much but we planned to meet her today and visit Tim in the hospital. She didn’t show, and that’s not like Jill.”

“I heard Tim went through a bad patch yesterday. How’s he doing?”

“Physically he’s feeling better, but I’m worried about him as well. Yesterday, before he got sick, Jill said he tried to drown her. Then when we went to see him today, he lied to us about several things.” Cass paused. “Am I confusing the issue?”

Sheriff Sam took out a yellow legal notepad and pencil.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything that’s bothering you. Maybe between the two of us we can make some sense of it.”

Cass told him the whole story, starting with their late-night visit to the Shaft, and finishing with the dried blood drops and crushed tumbleweed she had discovered. When she was done she half-expected Sam to give her the usual lines about not worrying and waiting for Jill to return. But he seemed genuinely concerned about the damage to Fred’s car and how it tied into the evidence at the Shaft.

“You’re sure the tire tracks are the same?” he asked. “They seemed identical to me. It must have been Fred’s car that was driven back up there, and Tim was the only one close to the car who could have driven it.”

“How did Tim come to have Fred’s keys?

“They’re friends. They carry each other’s keys.”

“But why would Tim go back up there last night? And it seems to me you are implying he went with Jill.”

“I don’t know.”

“Jill’s a popular girl. She must have other friends she could have gone off with today?”

“She’s not that popular. She only hangs out with us, and she would have told me if she was changing our plans.”

Sheriff Sam frowned. “You probably know the rules on filing a missing person report. Someone has to be gone forty-eight hours before I can put it over the wire.”

“I’ve heard that. Listen, I’m not asking you to call in the FBI, but I do think this situation needs investigating. That’s all I’m asking. Check out the Shaft and talk to Tim. Take a look at the blood up there. I drew a circle in the dirt around it.”

Sheriff Sam nodded. “I can do that, but you’re still not saying why these different events upset you so much. Admittedly they’re odd, but they don’t seem ominous. For example, you imply that something in the floor of the mine has infected Tim and is causing him to react badly. What is it?”

“Once again, I don’t know. But you must have heard the stories about that place? Tim said that some miners who worked in it during World War Two had to be hospitalized. “

The sheriff was thoughtful. “I’ve heard the stories, yeah. But almost any abandoned mine in the Old West has spooky tales surrounding it.”

“What specific stories have you heard?”

“That the radiation in the mine caused several miners to start mutating. It’s ridiculous—until the uranium is processed it’s not even that concentrated.”

“I don’t know if it’s the uranium that I’m worried about.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cass …” he began.

“I know, I know, I’m saying nothing. It’s just this gut feeling I have, I can’t get rid of it. Something is wrong and we have to figure out what it is.” She paused. “Tim said that the scientists who studied the mine recently planned on coming back because they had found something unusual in it.”

He hesitated. “I know.”

“Oh. Did they speak to you?”

“Yes. They said they wanted to study the place further. Two of them are supposed to be back next week.”

“But they didn’t tell you specifically what they wanted to study?”

“No. I’m only a town sheriff, so they probably figured I wouldn’t understand. You know how people from the government are, all snobs.”

“So these people were from the government?”

“Yes. The mine is still owned by the military. Why does that surprise you?”

“I just find it interesting that the government is the one source that would have information on what went on in that mine years ago. And now they’re back in town, checking it out again.”

“But if they seriously thought it was dangerous, they’d put it off limits.”

“It is technically off limits,” Cass said. “You know that. You also know that if they made a big stink about there being something mysterious in the mine, everyone would be clambering to check it out. No, I think the military has just been playing it smart. They disconnected the power to the lifts and just abandoned the place all these years.”

Sheriff Sam considered. “There were some scientific people out here ten years ago to check it out as well. It’s interesting what you are saying. Maybe they could be monitoring the place without our knowing it.”

“The question is why? Sam, did they leave you a card?”

“Are you thinking of calling them?”

“I might. Why not? They can only tell me to get lost.”

Sam fished around in his desk and came up with an official-looking card with raised gold lettering. He handed it to Cass, who studied it: Professor John Fiese, Applied Nuclear Physics. The man had a phone number in southern California, 310 area code. Yet the card didn’t define or describe him in any other fashion. Cass slipped the card in her back pocket. The sheriff looked worried.

“I just don’t want you getting in trouble,” he said.

Cass stood. “Trouble is not always a bad place to be. Did you know that Mary and Fred and I are leaving town in the next couple of days? We’re heading to Los Angeles.”

He was impressed. “So you’re getting out? I’m jealous. I’ve been trying to get out of here for twenty years. I don’t know what it is about this one-horse town that keeps me trapped.”

“It keeps everyone trapped. We must all be clones of a single great Madison Group Mind. Promise to check out the Shaft and talk to Tim?”

“Yeah, but give me a couple of hours. I have to finish some paperwork first. It’s been building up on my desk for weeks now.”

Cass laughed and teased him. “Paperwork? This could be the biggest mystery to hit Madison in fifty years and you have paperwork to do?”

He laughed good-naturedly. “I am a product of Madison. I move in slow motion, but I do promise to get out to the Shaft as soon as I can.”

She turned for the door. “Bring a flashlight. Don’t fall in the black pool.”

“I won’t,” he said.

She stopped at the door. “Just one last thing. You sounded cagey when I asked about the government scientists. When they told you they were returning, did they ask you to keep their activities quiet?”

“They did, yes. They made it sound like an order.”

“But you told me?”

Sheriff Sam reached for his last Ding Dong. “Yeah. I guess I don’t like being ordered around in my own backyard.”

“Tim knew about the scientists as well. Did you talk about them around town?”

“I might have, everyone knows I have a big mouth. Why do you ask?”

She felt the card in her back pocket. “Nothing. I was just wondering how this man is going to react when I call him. It’s possible he knows exactly what’s wrong with Tim.”

“That might be a good thing.”

Cass was unconvinced. “Yeah. But you know the government and their secrets. I wonder if they’d help him even if they did know.”

“Now you’re sounding paranoid,” he said.

“Paranoid might not be a bad place to be, either.”

10

Cass went home, she was hot and tired, and the world was going to have to turn without her for a few hours. She needed a shower and a nap, but the trailer wasn’t the best place for the latter. Fred was still trying to pack. He wanted a new time frame on when they were leaving. Specifically, he needed to know if they were splitting the next day. Cass told him she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t tell him about everything she had just discovered. She wasn’t in the mood to repeat the story she had told the sheriff.

“But Tim is fine,” Fred said. “There’s no reason to stay.”

“I need to talk to Jill. I won’t leave until I do, and I haven’t found her yet.”

“She’s not at home?”

“She’s nowhere.” Cass glanced around. “Where’s Mary?”

“She went out for a walk.”

“Mary never goes out for walks. Do you know where she went?”

“No. She didn’t tell me.”

“She’s a little girl. You’re supposed to ask her.”

Fred sighed. “I’m not used to the Dad role, OK?”

Cass felt bad for snapping at him, but she was so tense she was afraid she would just snap again. “Did she eat?”

“No. She said she wasn’t hungry.”

“Mary’s always hungry at lunchtime. It’s her big meal of the day. Did you offer her something?”

“I told her she could have whatever she wanted and I’d get it for her. But like I said, she told me she wasn’t hungry.”

Cass frowned. “I hope she didn’t walk over to see our dad.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?”

“Yeah. The guy is an asshole.”

Fred stared at her. “You’re acting awfully uptight. Why don’t you take a nap?”

“I can’t with you fiddling with all your stuff.”

He registered small hurt. “Do you want me to go out?”

Cass held her head. “I can’t kick you out just when it suits me. We’re going to be living together in L.A., remember?” She paused. “Unless you’re having second thoughts?”

“What makes you think that?”

“My bitching at you.”

Fred grinned. “I thought you were flirting with me.”

She laughed and turned toward the bathroom. “I need a shower, and then I will sleep for an hour, with ear plugs. You keep packing—we’ll get out of this town yet.”

Fifteen minutes later Cass was sound asleep.

She dreamed. She understood. She knew nothing.

Order could be placed on chaos. A strong will could direct natural law. Cruelty and,kindness were equally acceptable, no quality of face or character mattered much as long as both were turned toward her. As long as the grand design was furthered, anything was acceptable. The galaxy was vast and the stars would burn for billions of years. There was no reason to leave such vast space untamed.

No reason to her.

She was a seed bearer, carrying patterns of life that had yet to sprout. These patterns—she was skilled at finding worlds where they could flourish. The basic ingredients of life had to be present: water, land, warmth, light, carbon, and other simple elements. Silicon was also important, for the time of transformation. But the patterns for the time of final change she planted deeper still. They were not to be found until the first group of seeds had reached maturation. It was all part of the grand design. The group will could only expand through a greater number of nervous systems. Nervous systems were like her units of consciousness, the cells of her almost unlimited brain. Therefore life was a useful tool for greater awareness and dominance. The galaxy was conquered through combined units. And those who opposed her will were eliminated.

But was she an individual? She had been at one time. She had been just like one of the products of the planted patterns—she had, after all, designed them after the original matrix. But now she was something more than her parts. She was a cancer eating at the soul of the universe. Or else she was its chosen protector. Really, she was not sure what she was and in truth she didn’t care. No one dared judge her. All that mattered to her was to keep expanding, to keep absorbing system after system. In that sense she was like a hungry spider spinning webs from star to star. And the present galaxy was only one of billions, after all. Perhaps one day she would swallow them all. She would become the universe and it would become her. The child would transform into the parent, the victim would achieve ultimate revenge. On that day, if that final destiny ever did arrive, she wondered what she would do next.

Cass awoke with a start. Mary was shaking her. Cass sat up before she was sure what planet she was on. What a weird dream, she had felt as if she were hurtling through outer space as some kind of cosmic vampire. The sensation hadn’t been pleasant. Mary looked worried so Cass reached up and stroked the side of her face. The light was dim through the open window, and she realized that she must have slept for several hours.

“What is it, honey?” Cass asked.

Mary was teary. “I don’t feel good.”

“What’s the matter? Does your stomach hurt?”

Mary shook her head. “I don’t know. I just feel funny.”

Cass threw her feet to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. “Did you go to see Daddy?”

Mary hesitated. “No.”

“Mary?” Cass patted the bed for Mary to sit beside her.

“I only talked to him for a minute. I just wanted to see if he was OK.”

Cass was strict. “Why didn’t you call him? You shouldn’t have walked all the way over there alone.” She paused. “How is he?”

Mary continued to look anxious. “I don’t know.”

“Was he drinking?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Not much. He was nice.” Mary paused and trembled. “He started crying. I started crying, too.”

Cass hugged her. “I’m sorry. Have you had anything to eat?”

Mary shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

Cass held her shoulders. “But you haven’t eaten since this morning. What time is it? You have to eat something.”

Mary pulled back. “Fred isn’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“He went out.”

“You saw him? Where did he go?”

“He didn’t tell me. He just went out.”

Cass thought she heard a sound. She stood up and looked out the window. Fred was pulling up. He had gotten his car washed, but it was still scratched. She followed him with her eyes as he walked toward the door. She was glad to see him, relieved almost, and didn’t know why. Violent images from her dream continued to plague her. What were the seeds? What was the transformation? God, she had dreamed of a violet sun ten million times brighter than the Earth’s sun, surrounded by a rapidly rotating series of metal rings, each many millions of miles long. The impenetrable power grid—it spun in a haze of fiery nebula and pulsating gases. It was supposed to be the base system. She was always safe there. Whatever that meant.

“At least have some yogurt,” Cass told Mary, “Fred and I will be going out soon.”

“Where are we going?” Fred asked as he came in through the door. His pants were dusty, and she wanted to ask where he had been, but decided it wasn’t important. Outside, the shadows lengthened—it would be dark soon.

“We’re going to the Shaft,” she said.

11

The long lonely ride down into the Earth was cold and dark. They had only one flashlight, Fred didn’t know where the others were. The lift creaked as it worked with them inside it. They were on number five, the final leg. Cass wore a jacket but still she shivered. Fred stood huddled in the corner and looked miserable. They hadn’t talked much on the drive, yet she had managed to convey most of what she had learned that afternoon. He hadn’t offered any comment.

She had made him park his car around the side of the hills.

Out of sight.

Prudence? Paranoia?

“I suppose you’re wondering why we’re doing this?” she said. She called Jill before they left the trailer. The girl had yet to show up. Then she called Sheriff Sam, whose answering machine said he was out.

“I’m writing this all off as being one of those days,” Fred said.

“This isn’t PMS.”

“I wouldn’t be so sexist as to imply that it was.”

Cass stepped closer. “I told you how I feel that everything around us has been off since we went down here. I just need to see this place again, see if there’s anything here that I missed before.”

Fred shook his head. “But there ain’t nothing down here. We would have seen it the first time.” He added, “Whatever it is.”

She forced a smile and touched his shirt. “Are you cold?”

“No.”

“Liar.” She hugged him. “Did I ever tell you that I love you?”

He shifted to accommodate the pressure of her body. “Once or twice. But I never believed you.”

She looked up. “Why not?”

He smiled faintly. “Because you’re too good for me. And don’t say it’s not true, it is. You just don’t know it yet. You don’t know me.”

She kissed his chin. “What don’t I know about you?”

He glanced down and his smile faded. “Lots of things,” he said softly.

The lift delivered them to the floor of the mine. After pulling aside the wire mesh door, they crept cautiously up the smooth black tunnel toward the cavern. Halfway there Cass noted a glint of metal in the beam’s light and made Fred stop. She bent over and picked up the object.

A crow bar. Stained with blood.

“What the hell?” she whispered. “This wasn’t here the other night.”

Fred studied it, wiped at the blood. “It’s dry but not totally. The cold down here could have kept the blood moist longer than on the surface.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Exactly when the person in question bled on this bar.”

Cass nodded and felt a stab of fear. “You don’t think it’s Jill’s blood, do you?”

He tried to be reassuring. “We have no reason to think Jill was down here since we were last here.”

Cass shook her head. “I don’t know, she’s missing and somebody bled down here in the last two days.”

Fred frowned. “I wonder if it’s possible Tim bled on this bar as we were walking out.”

“What do you really think the chances of that are?”

“Not good.” Fred glanced in the direction of the black puddle. “Maybe we should take the crow bar and give it to the police. It might be valuable evidence.”

“Good idea. But now it’s got your fingerprints on it.”

“You can vouch that I haven’t killed anyone.”

They continued down the tunnel to the cavern. The scene hadn’t changed since their last visit, so it appeared on the surface. The black pool sat impassively in the center of the space. The ground was hard and they could find no footprints. Yet it looked to Cass as if quite a bit of the sticky fluid had been splashed on the surrounding floor. Cass said as much, but Fred was doubtful.

“Tim made a big splash when he fell in there,” he said.

Cass knelt by the edge of the pool. “I’m not so sure. It looks to me like one or more people have been busy here.”

He stood behind her. “Busy doing what?”

Cass was thoughtful. “I’d like to see exactly what’s under all this oily stuff.” She reached out.

“Don’t!” Fred snapped as he grabbed her arm. “Are you nuts?”

She looked at him in surprise. “I thought you were Mr. Skeptic?”

He shook his head. “Just because I’m not ready to call the President and report an alien invasion doesn’t mean I think we should take unnecessary risks. You’re not putting your hand in that stuff.”

Cass stared down at the black pool. “I’ve been thinking about what you said about how the miners couldn’t have worked in here with this puddle in their way. I’m sure you’re right, that things have slowly changed down here over the years.”

“What are you getting at?” Fred asked.

“Nothing in particular. But I have also been thinking about how the military keeps checking on this place. In a way I’m surprised they haven’t drained this pool.”

”Why?”

Cass stood. “To see what’s under it.”

They heard a sound. It startled them because they were in a place where sound should have been impossible. It took Cass a moment to calm her heart and understand what her ears were telling her.

The lift was going up. They stared at each other. White ghosts in a black place.

Fred managed to say it. “Someone’s coming down here.”

Cass nodded tightly. “Who do you think it is?”

“You told Sheriff Sam to check the place out. It could be him.” He added, “It could be someone else.”

“Tim?”

Fred exhaled and looked scared. “God knows. But whoever it is, I think they’re standing on the fourth platform. They’re going to be down here soon.”

“We have to hide,” Cass blurted out, “so they can’t see us.” She strained to remain calm, and didn’t do a very good job of it. “We have to turn out the light.”

“No way!”

“Shh! You have to. They’ll be able to see the light a mile away. We have to turn off the flashlight and creep over and hide behind the lift. We can find the place by feel alone. There’s a space there where we can crouch down. They won’t see us unless they shine their lights right at us.” She stopped. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Fred asked.

“All the lifts are down when they should be up. They’ll have to know someone’s down here.”

Fred considered. “They might not be that smart.”

Cass was extremely doubtful. “We can only hope.”

Fred wagged a nervous finger at her, the crow bar and light in his other hand. “If we accidentally step into that black pool and start to grow green warts, I am going to say I told you so.”

She pulled him toward the tunnel. “Let’s get clear of it. Now turn off the light.”

He sighed. The light went off.

It was black. It couldn’t have been blacker. A voice spoke. “Happy?”

She felt for his hand. “No. Keep your voice down. Hopefully we are just being cautious.”

Fred gripped her fingers. “Somehow I don’t find stumbling around in the dark a half-mile beneath the surface of the Earth a cautious way to spend a Sunday evening.”

She couldn’t have agreed more. Yet walking up the smooth tunnel was not difficult. It was narrow, and they had the right wall to guide them. It was when they reached the lift area that they became disoriented. The space was not that large but it was incredible how claustrophobic the dark was. Plus the sound of the lift had them shaking. It was coming back down. Far overhead, it looked like a million miles, they could see a white light. A star slowly falling from heaven. Cass feared it was destined to crash on their heads.

Their feet bumped into something solid.

“We have to move to the right,” Fred whispered.

“No,” she hissed. “To the left. The wall’s on the right.”

“The wall’s on the left.”

She tugged at his arm. “The wall’s on both sides. But this way we can squeeze by and get behind the metal grid. We have to get down on our knees.”

“If they scan the area with their flashlights while they’re descending,” Fred warned, “it won’t matter if we lie on our faces.”

They found what they hoped was the ideal hiding space and got down on the hard black floor. They wouldn’t be absolutely sure where they were until they had some light. But the bright star of the avenging archangel was growing steadily. Cass was stunned to see it resolve itself into three separate points. Three flashlights, three people. All spending their Sunday evening in the Shaft. What kind of town was Madison turning into anyway?

“Shit,” she whispered.

“Amen,” Fred agreed.

The lift landed. Three males stepped out with their lights in hand: Tim, Sheriff Sam, and Mr. Chavez. Beside her Fred gripped her arm, his question obvious. He thought it was OK to proclaim their presence. But Cass took his hand and placed it on her head as she shook it no. She didn’t understand why the three of them weren’t speaking. Not even exchanging small talk. It wasn’t as if Sheriff Sam had dragged Tim down to show him what they’d been up to. From casual inspection, it looked as if Tim was running the show. He walked in front of the other two and carried a medium-size black box in one hand. She and Fred watched as they disappeared down the tunnel.

“What are we doing?” Fred whispered.

“We’re observing.”

“You think they’re dangerous?” Fred asked.

“Potentially. I don’t want them to see us.”

“You don’t want to make a run for it now?”

“No.”

“But why exactly are we hiding from them?”

“A better question is what are they doing here?”

“I think Tim is just showing the sheriff where we were.”

“Maybe. But why is Mr. Chavez here?”

Fred was impatient. “I don’t know.”

Cass patted his arm. “We keep our mouths shut and wait.”

They didn’t have long to wait. The three returned within fifteen minutes and stepped back into the lift. They continued to get along without chit chat. The lift started up, their three lights slowly blurred back into a single white star. Cass and Fred stood.

“Don’t turn on your light yet,” she whispered in the dark.

“I’m not stupid. If we want to remain anonymous, then we should wait until they have ridden all the lifts to the surface.”

Cass brushed her pants off. She was shivering in the cold.

“My thinking exactly.” She added, “But if we wait too long they might come back again.”

“What for?” he asked.

“What do you mean what for? Isn’t it obvious that they had to carry something out of here in that black box?”

“We didn’t see what they used the black box for, but you might be right. I say we wait twenty minutes then call for the lift.”

She worried. “What if it doesn’t come for us?”

“You’re a cheery character, you know that?”

“Sorry.” Cass pulled on his arm. “I want to check out the cavern again. See if it’s changed.”

“Just our luck we’ll stumble into the black pool.”

“I’m the cheery one?”

By feel and moving ever so slowly, they made it back to the cavern. Shielded as they were from the lifts by the intervening rock, Cass thought they could risk turning their flashlight back on. Once again the cavern didn’t appear to have been altered but Cass suspected that there were more oily splashes on the floor. She pointed out what she observed to Fred, but he shook his head.

“Could all of this be a big ado about nothing?” he asked.

She stared at him. “It’s possible. But Jill is still missing and Tim is still acting weird.”

“Jill might be at home right now, and Tim might be suffering from shock as a result of his brush with death.”

“And Sheriff Sam and Mr. Chavez?”

“They haven’t done anything supernatural as far as I can tell.” Fred yawned. “I need to get home and I need to rest. I think this whole situation will look different in the morning. Most things do.”

Cass patted him on the back. “You’re probably right. Thanks for indulging me. You’ve been a dear.”

“Any time,” he said as he took her hand.

He still had the bloody crow bar in the other hand.

She insisted on taking it even though she was no longer in a hurry to give it to Sheriff Sam.

12

The next morning, first thing, Cass called Jill’s house. Her mother answered after twenty rings. The woman sounded drowsy even though it wasn’t all that early.

“Is Jill there?” Cass asked.

Mrs. Leper paused. “Who is this?”

“Cass.”

“Oh. Yeah, Jill came back late last night.”

Cass felt a flood of relief. “Great! Could I talk to her please?”

Mrs. Leper paused. “I don’t think she’s here right now.”

“Did she go to work?”

“She might have.” The woman paused. “I don’t know where she is.”

“But you definitely saw her this morning?”

“Yes.”

“How is she?”

“Fine.”

“Where was she?”

“I don’t know, she didn’t say.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

“No.”

Cass considered. “Thank you, Mrs. Leper, I might stop by later if that would be OK?”

“That would be fine. Goodbye, dear.”

The woman had hung up. Cass set Fred’s phone down and looked at Fred and Mary across the breakfast table. Fred was eating toast and eggs with great relish. Mary was staring at a bowl of soggy corn flakes.

“Jill’s OK?” Fred asked between mouthfuls.

Cass nodded. “Yeah. Her mom says she came in last night.”

“What’s the matter?” Fred asked. “You don’t look relieved.”

“I’m very much relieved. It’s just that Jill’s mother sounded odd.”

“That woman is odd,” Fred said, sipping his coffee. Fred drank a black pot every morning. Cass glanced at Mary.

“Why aren’t you eating?” she asked.

“I’m not hungry,” Mary said defiantly.

“Somebody woke up in a bad mood this morning,” Cass remarked.

“I don’t like cornflakes,” Mary said.

“Since when?” Cass asked.

Mary pouted. “It doesn’t matter when my dislike for them started. I don’t want to eat them.”

“Do you want some toast?” Cass asked.

Mary played with her hair. “I’ll think about it.”

“Mary, what were you up to last night?” Fred asked.

Mary hesitated. “Just watching all the people.”

“What is this?” Cass asked. “You were up in the middle of the night, Mary?”

The little girl nodded. “I was watching all the people.”

“What people?” Cass asked.

“The lights were on all over town and everybody was out. I could see them walking around,” Mary explained.

Cass frowned. “That’s ridiculous. Fred, did you see this?”

“No. But I slept pretty soundly. I just woke up a couple of times when Mary got up.” Fred paused. “Mary, did you go outside?”

Mary shook her head. “Just watched through the window.”

“I thought I saw you coming in the trailer.” Fred went back to his food. “I could have been mistaken.”

“I still have to catch up here,” Cass said. “The whole town was awake and walking around last night?”

Mary nodded vigorously. “It looked like it.”

“But what were they doing?” Cass persisted.

Mary shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I said, just walking. Going door to door.”

Cass was confused. “Fred?”

He shrugged with food in his mouth. “I don’t know what’s going on around here and frankly I don’t care. Tim is well enough to walk and Jill has been spotted alive and well by her mother. I say it’s time we got out of town and went to L.A.”

“I agree,” Cass said without enthusiasm. “But I still need to say goodbye to Jill. After I’ve done that, we can pack up and leave.”

Mary swallowed. “Can we say goodbye to Daddy?”

Cass paused. “Sure. We’ll stop by the house on the way out of town.”

Fred did the breakfast dishes while Cass took a quick shower. It was only while she was standing under the hot water that she remembered dreaming of standing under a shower of different colored lights. In the dream her whole body had been bombarded by a searing spectrum of energy. It had been a preparation for completing the transformation. She didn’t understand why she was having such weird dreams, maybe it was all the stress.

Cass left Mary and Fred packing boxes while she took her car over to the drugstore where Jill worked. The owner, Mr. Felix, said he hadn’t seen her in a couple of days.

“But doesn’t she always work on Mondays?” Cass asked.

Mr. Felix was a thin nervous man with pale skin and thick glasses. Intensely shy, the buzz around town about him was that he had never had a girlfriend not because he was gay, but because he started to hyperventilate when he was alone with a female. Cass had never managed to get such a reaction out of him, but of course he was twice her age.

“She’s scheduled to work today,” Mr. Felix said as he unloaded cigarette cartons onto a shelf. He chain smoked on top of everything else, but never in the store. “She didn’t show.”

“She didn’t even call?”

“No.”

“That’s not like her.”

Mr. Felix pushed back his glasses. “It’s not. I was worried about her so I called her mother but she said that Jill had just left. But she said she didn’t know where she was going.”

“Sounds like her mother,” Cass muttered. She turned to leave. “Thanks, Mr. Felix. Have a nice day.”

“Cass?” he called after her. “Have you heard there’s a big assembly going on this afternoon in the school gym?”

Cass stopped. “No. What kind of assembly?”

“I don’t know. I just heard some of my customers talking about it. It’s supposed to be important, the mayor and Sheriff Sam have asked all the businesses to shut down so that everyone can attend. It’s at two sharp.”

Cass turned back to him. “Mr. Felix, did you notice a lot of people out in the middle of the night?”

He paused and scratched his thinning brown hair. “There did seem to be some kind of commotion going on. But, you know, I live on the edge of town, and I don’t hear much of anything out there.” He paused. “But a customer told me people were in preparation for this big assembly they’ve planned .”

Cass shook her head. “Who would prepare for such a thing in the middle of the night?”

“I wondered the same thing.”

“Are you going to go to this meeting?” she asked.

“Probably not. This is a drugstore. Somebody might need an emergency prescription filled, you never know. But if you go, let me know what it was about.”

“I’ll do that,” Cass muttered as she stepped outside. By two she planned to be far from Madison—if she had her way. Yet she didn’t really want to leave yet because a part of her told her that it would be a big mistake. One thing was for sure, her sense of foreboding had not diminished. But she kept thinking that if she could talk to Jill and ask her what she had been doing the past two days everything would become clear. Right then Cass decided not to wait but to swing by Jill’s house immediately.

Mrs. Leper answered the door. Still in her bathrobe, she was an old forty-five, with sun wrinkles etched so deep around her eyes her postmenopausal hairs had a place to ski. She had bad liver spots on her hands and arms. The woman never drank, but took plenty of pills, mainly Valium and antidepressants. Mr. Leper didn’t beat her or anything, but he was closer to having a love affair with the Sports Channel than with his wife. Jill said her mother had been depressed for as long as she could remember. Mrs. Leper didn’t look especially spiffy this morning. Cass forced a smile.

“Is Jill here?” she asked.

“No.” Mrs. Leper frowned. “I told you she was not.”

“I thought she might have come back since I called. She’s not at work.”

“She hasn’t come back.”

“Did she give you any idea where she was going today?”

“No.”

“How was she dressed?”

“I don’t remember.”

“OK. Did she go out by herself? Or did someone pick her up?”

“I believe she went out by herself.” The woman paused and stared. “Why are you asking all these questions?”

“Because I’m worried about her. I want to talk to her.”

“Well shes not here.”

“Yes. I got that.” Cass turned away. “Have a nice day, Mrs. Leper.”

“Cass?” the woman called to her when she was down the steps. Cass turned and was surprised to see the woman smiling brightly.

“Yes?” Cass said.

“Are you going to the assembly this afternoon?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

The woman’s smile grew, it looked like something made of wet plaster.

“But you must come. It’s supposed to be important.”

Standing in the hot sun, Cass felt cold. “Why is it important?” she asked quietly.

Mrs. Leper stepped onto the porch. “Everyone will be there.”

“What’s the assembly about?”

“It’s a surprise, you’ll see when you get there.” Cass stared at her and wondered if the whole world had gone mad or if it was just her. Even from a pill popping depressed housewife, she simply could not understand answers like that. Cass forced another smile.

“Could you give me a little hint what it’s about?” she said sweetly. “It might inspire me to attend.”

Mrs. Leper blinked. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I just know it’s going to be wonderful.”

Cass grinned. “I’ll be sure to attend then. Thanks for your time, Mrs. Leper.”

“Thank you, Cass.”

Cass got in her car and waited until Mrs. Leper had gone back in the house. Then Cass quietly got out and hurried to the side of the house and peeked in the cracks around the wooden garage door.

Jill’s car was still inside.

Cass believed it had been there for the past two days.

She returned to her car and drove aimlessly around town for half an hour. Again, she had to wonder if it was only her imagination, but it seemed a lot of people were staring at her.

Cass ended up at Sheriff Sam’s office. She didn’t trust him after seeing him in the Shaft the previous night, but she was a long way from stating that there was a town-wide conspiracy going on. Of course that was ridiculous. She was sure the man would have a perfectly good explanation for what he had been doing with Tim and Mr. Chavez half a mile under the Earth on Sunday night.

She found him at his desk watching TV. He gave her a nod.

“Cass. How are you today?”

She plopped down across from him. “I’m not sure. How are you? What have you been up to?”

He gestured to the tube. “Just busy keeping the world safe for democracy.”

“Jill is still missing,” she said flatly.

Sheriff Sam frowned. “Are you sure? Her mother says she came home last night.”

“I don’t care what her mother says, Jill is still missing. She didn’t come home last night.”

“How can you be sure?”

Cass paused. “I can’t be absolutely sure but Mrs. Leper is talking like a loon. Nothing she says makes any sense.”

Sheriff Sam reached for his yellow legal pad. “I’ll give her another call, swing by there if you like.”

“Please.” Cass paused. “Have you spoken to Tim?”

“Yes. He said he didn’t know where Jill was.”

“He’s home now I take it? He’s not at the hospital?”

“When I spoke to him he was at home.”

Cass snorted. “But isn’t that weird? Two days ago he almost died. He shouldn’t be home yet.”

“You got me there, I’m not a doctor.”

“Did you ask him about the Shaft?”

“Yes. He told me what you guys did down there. He even took me down, along with Mr. Chavez, to show me around.”

Cass felt relief. But then she remembered that she had felt the same when she had first spoken to Mrs. Leper. She kept her face impassive.

“What did you guys do down there?” she asked.

Sam shrugged. “Nothing much. I was curious to see the place. I never really suspected Tim of doing any wrong. Hell, I’ve know him all his life. He does too many drugs, but basically he’s a good kid.”

Cass hesitated. “Did you do anything down there at all?”

“Well, Tim wanted a sample of the oil down there. I think he believes it’s going to make him rich. But I reminded him that the government owns the place.” He paused. “Did you call that government scientist?”

“No.”

“Do you still have his card?”

“Yes.” She had it in her pocket.

“I’d like it back if possible. I want to talk to that man.”

”OK.”

“Do you have it on you?”

“No. What do you want to talk to the man about?”

“Just some of the things you and I discussed. Could you bring his card this afternoon to the assembly?”

“OK.” She stared at the floor. He was studying her, and she didn’t know why. It was possible he knew she was lying. “What’s this assembly about anyway?”

“Many things. It’s about the future of this city, if you like. You know it’s at two o’clock in the gym?”

“Yes.” She raised her eyes. “Why didn’t I know about this assembly earlier?”

“It hasn’t been in the works long.”

“Are we meeting to vote on town policy and stuff like that?”

“That’s my understanding.”

“So you’re not positive what it’s about?”

“No.”

“Who told you about it?”

“The mayor.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

Cass shook her head. “But that’s strange, don’t you think? This thing couldn’t have had advance planning.”

Sheriff Sam glanced at the tube. The Sci-Fi Channel—a robot was carrying a beautiful blond girl to her death in a volcano. Sam had the volume off.

“I think it’s the mayor’s brainstorm,” Sam said. “You know how he gets an idea and has to share it with everyone.”

“No. I didn’t know that about him.”

He gave her a glance. “Going to be there?”

She stood. “Sure.”

“You won’t forget that card, will you?”

She turned toward the door. “I will definitely bring it with me.”

An hour later Cass was sitting in the local diner, having apple pie and vanilla ice cream chased by a Coke. Her pie was warm; her ice cream a puddle. The ice in the Coke tasted good. Chet was bustling around trying to get ready for the lunch crowd. He thought his regular patrons would be in early because of the assembly. He was looking forward to it, he said and spoke about it with enthusiasm even though he seemed to have no idea what it was about. He did want to know if she was going, everyone wanted to know.

Cass called Jill’s house again.

There was no answer.

She called Mr. Felix. Nothing.

Maybe Jill would be at the assembly.

Cass motioned for the check and got up and left the diner.

As she had the day before she found herself on the dirt road that led to the Shaft. There were fresh sets of car tracks all over, but she didn’t see any cars. Where she had noticed the path cut through the tumbleweed, she parked, got out, and checked out the tracks once more. They were from Fred’s car, no question in her mind. But unlike yesterday, she decided to follow them to see where they led. She did so on foot because she didn’t want to scratch up her car the way Fred’s had been. If only she had brought an extra Coke or bottle of water—the sun was as hot as the day before, worse even, the temperature had to be over a hundred. L.A. was warm, she knew, but it would be nothing like this hellhole. She wondered if they could afford an apartment close to the ocean. Walking across the desert in her shorts, she got her bare legs repeatedly scratched by the briars and shrubs. She was thirsty after only ten minutes of exercise.

Practically dying of thirst, she came to a place where the mangled tumbleweed stopped, and sank to her knees to study the area. From the looks of things it appeared that Fred’s car had stopped and then backed up. Cass spotted footprints as well.

A man’s prints.

She followed them to a six-foot-long mound of dirt.

“Christ,” she whispered.

She didn’t want to dig up what had obviously been buried there. The idea held absolutely no appeal for her. Especially since she could detect an ever-so-slight odor of decay being emitted from the pile of dirt. Like the thing that had been buried there had once been alive. Had once walked around, smiling through the good times and crying over the bad ones. Yeah, she told herself, this was not just a hole in the desert that kids had dug for their innocent pleasure. This was a grave, somebody’s grave.

Cass fell to her knees and began to scoop up the dirt with her hands. She didn’t know when she started crying; it might have been close to the start. The grave was obviously shallow, the stench of decay rose more sharply with each inch of soil she pushed aside. Her tears just overtook her, turning soon to gut-wracking sobs. She knew there couldn’t be a happy story at the bottom of any grave. Especially when her best friend had been missing for two days and her best friend’s boyfriend was acting as if one of the Pod People had visited him in the night and taken over his body when no one was watching. But that wasn’t exactly true because his transformation began after he had fallen into the black pool beneath the Earth and there had been three witnesses present. Only none of them had seen what was in that mysterious gook. None of them had understood that it had the power to organize an entire-town assembly. Yeah, the whole goddamn town was infected with something weird.

Cass saw a brown finger.

It lay there under the dirt.

A cheap emerald ring on a dirty finger.

The worms were already busy with the flesh.

Tim had bought Jill the same ring for her birthday last year.

Cass turned away and vomited. Her pie and ice cream came up, but no blood. She didn’t have Tim’s disease, not yet. Yet she threw up more than food or blood could ever signify. Because right then, under the boiling sun and beside the body of her best friend, Cass felt her soul split open as she glimpsed the chasm that opened beneath it. It was an instant of clear cognition, and yet later she was never sure what she had seen. But for that instant she understood her recent nightmares, as well as the nightmares of all humanity from the beginning of time. What yawned beneath her individual soul was an abyss of indifference so vast that it almost engulfed and extinguished her. Yet this void was not empty. The cold will that reached out from its depths was living, a thing that could never die. The immortal demon, as black as space. Cass saw then that humanity—its dreams, its love, its hope, its future—was intrinsically cursed. Even as her best friend had been cursed to die at the hands of a lover. Goodness and love were not enough when the transformation arrived. The Grim Reaper was coming.

And she was hungry.

13

Back at Fred’s trailer, Cass became hysterical. It was not in her nature to lose it, but circumstances had not been kind. Fred was alone and packing boxes. He had to grab Cass to keep her from falling as she came in sobbing.

“What is it?” he demanded as he held her. “Tell me, goddamnit!”

But she couldn’t get the words out for several minutes. The tears and trembling would not stop. Somewhere in the midst of her breakdown Fred began to stroke her hair and finally Cass felt herself calming down. Yet when she finally did speak the lump in her throat was hard as stone.

“Jill’s dead,” she whispered. “I found her body in the desert.”

Fred let go of her and backed off a step.

“What?”

She nodded weakly. “Somebody buried her in a shallow grave off the dirt road that leads to the Shaft. I think she’s been there at least two days.”

Fred shook his head. “No. You spoke to her mother. She said she saw Jill this morning.”

Cass sagged down into a chair. “Her mother was lying. I saw the body.”

Fred was upset, angry. “Now, Cass, you’ve been under a lot of stress. You left your father’s house. We’re trying to move to L.A. That’s enough stress for anyone. Maybe you just thought—”

“I saw her body!” Cass screamed. “Don’t you understand that I couldn’t have imagined it? It’s out there! It’s rotting in the sun!” She balled up in pain. “Oh God.”

Fred must have come over to her because she became aware that he was patting her back and saying soothing things. For a moment he seemed to be speaking gibberish. She shook his hand off, sat up straight, and gave him a hard look.

“I’m not crazy,” she said flatly. “Don’t dare say it, don’t even think it.”

Fred sat down across from her. He’d lost his color and looked like the one under stress. Yet he tried to sound reasonable, which had always been his strength.

“Why would anyone want to kill her?” he asked.

Cass sighed. “It’s the Pod People Syndrome—they want our bodies.”

“The what?”

She kept right on sighing. “It’s Tim. It’s the sheriff. It’s the mayor. The whole town is infected. Did you know Madison is having a major assembly this afternoon at two? Everyone is supposed to be there. There are a thousand people out there who will happily remind you that you should attend the assembly.”

“What assembly? What’s it for?”

Cass gave a fey laugh. “I don’t know. No one really knows. Yet everyone will talk about how exciting it is. Then they ask you three or four times if you are totally sure you’re going.”

“Cass, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She chuckled ironically. “Don’t feel bad, if you did understand I’d be worried about you, too.” She lost her smile. “Where’s Mary?”

“She went out for a walk.”

“Another walk? Where?”

“I don’t know; she didn’t tell me.”

“But why did you let her go without knowing where she was going? You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on her.”

Fred moaned. “Let’s not get into that again. It’s hard to keep a girl that age cooped up in a trailer all day. I saw nothing wrong with her getting a little exercise before we hit the road.”

Cass stood and paced. “One of us has to look for her in a minute. But first we have to get a grasp on what we’re dealing with here. Killing Jill was not an isolated murder. Tim has allies everywhere, and he keeps going back to the Shaft. That means that he may be taking something from that place and giving it to people so that they change and think like he does. Does that make sense?”

Fred hesitated. “Can I be honest?”

Cass stopped. “No. I know what you’re going to say. But you haven’t been in town today. You haven’t talked to the weirdoes I did. You didn’t see Jill’s body with your own eyes. But everything I say is true. Why just a couple of hours ago Mary told us how the whole town was up wandering around all night. I think she was right, and I think some kind of chain reaction worked on the people in town last night while we slept. Tim brought his crap up from the Shaft with the help of a couple of friends and they infected the whole city.”

“Infected them with what?”

“With whatever is in that accursed place! With whatever drove those miners mad years ago! Fred, this is not paranoia speaking. There are facts to back up what I’m saying. You held one of them in your hand last night. That crow bar had blood on it—Jill’s blood.”

Fred paused. “Could you tell how she died?”

Cass lowered her head. “I didn’t examine her body. I … I couldn’t.”

“Did you leave it out there?”

“Yes. It was hard to do, but I did.”

Fred nodded. “I understand. We can go get her now if you want.”

“No. There are more pressing matters.” She felt in her back pocket for the card as she glanced out the dusty window. As far as she could see there didn’t seem to be an overt amount of activity going on in town, but she could get glimpses of it from this far out. Mary was nowhere in sight. She added, “I need to call someone important.”

“Who?”

She started to tell him but froze. She wasn’t sure why.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said finally. “It’s just someone who might be able to help. While I’m doing that, could you go out and find Mary? Bring her back here right away?”

Fred stood and shrugged helplessly. “I don’t understand everything you’re saying, Cass. You need to explain more. I believe that Jill is dead, but I’m not ready to buy into the idea that the whole town has flipped.”

“I’ll explain more later. Right now I just need you to find my sister.” She paused. “Can you do that for me? Please?”

“All right.” He stepped toward the door but stopped. “Then we’re getting out of this place?”

She nodded. “Yeah. We’re getting out of here. That’s for sure.”

The moment Fred had driven away Cass sat with the card—John Fiese, Applied Nuclear Physics, “Secret Military Government Guy”—and dialed the 310 number. She imagined that she’d have to go through several layers of secretarial rejection to get to the man, but the voice that answered sounded intelligent and authoritative. Immediately Cass knew she had Professor Fiese on the line.

“Hello,” he said. “Who is this?”

“Cass Strobe. I live in Madison, Nevada, and I desperately need to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”

He paused. “Yes. Do you know who this is?”

“Yes. Professor Fiese. Are you alone?”

“Yes. How is Madison these days?”

“Before I tell you, could you tell me if you were one of the scientists who was out here and left last Friday?”

“It’s possible,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Are you aware of the uranium mine outside our town?”

“Yes.”

“Are you aware of its history?”

“I know something of that mine, yes. But I would prefer you explain more and ask fewer questions.”

“Very well. Last Friday night a friend of ours, Tim Hale, fell and slipped in that mine and landed in a pool of black oil. But something in the pool scraped his hand, and since then he has been acting strange. He almost died, and he probably murdered his girl friend—my best friend. Not only that, but he’s returned to the mine and carried out what I believe is the same stuff that got inside him, the stuff that changed him. I believe he has spread it all over our town. What I’m saying is that our whole town seems to be infected with a bizarre disease.” She paused, not able to be as clear as she wanted because she had so much pent-up emotion. It was hard for her not to ramble. “Do you follow me so far?”

He paused. “I do.”

“Do you have any comment?”

“Have you been to this mine yourself, Cass?”

“Yes. I was there when Tim cut his hand and started to act weird.”

“Have you yourself been acting weird?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you consider yourself in any way contaminated by this mine?”

“No.” She considered. “But I have been having strange dreams lately.”

“What kind of dreams?” he asked.

“Alien ones. I keep feeling like I’m in outer space, flying from world to world. But what does this have to do with the stuff in the mine? Do you know what it is?”

He was not rude but firm. “First you answer more of my questions. Why do you think the entire town has been contaminated by this stuff?”

“Because everyone is acting weird. Half the town was up all night walking around, going from door to door. This afternoon we’re having a special assembly that everyone is supposed to attend. Only no one will say what the assembly’s about.”

“Are you alone, Cass?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone share your suspicions?”

“What do you mean?”

“Does anyone else know what you know?”

“My boyfriend. My little sister.”

“What are their names?”

“Why?”

“I need to know.”

“Why?”

His voice was strong. “You’re asking for my help. To give it to you I need to know all the facts. What are their names?”

“No. First you have to give me something. What is the stuff in the mine?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“But you are aware that there is something weird in that mine?”

He hesitated. “That mine has been under observation for some time.”

“Yeah, since World War Two. Since some of the miners who worked there got infected and began to mutate and go nuts. Isn’t that true?”

“I wasn’t working on this project at that time.”

“Right, you don’t know its history. Listen, Professor, I can help you but you have to help me. Obviously you think there’s something to my story or you would have hung up on me within ten seconds.”

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Information. Support. Why did you leave that mine accessible if you knew it was potentially dangerous?”

“It hasn’t been accessible for many years.”

“Yes. But starting ten days ago you or your colleagues dropped rumors in town that the lifts were working once again. I think you wanted people to go down there.”

“For what purpose?”

“You tell me, Professor.”

“I cannot answer such an accusation, it would only lend credence to it.”

“But aren’t you concerned with what’s happening here?”

“I am concerned.”

Cass had to take a breath. “Good. Where are you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I want to meet you and discuss this matter further. I can come to you. You must be in southern California.”

“No. That won’t be possible. I’ll come to you.”

“To Madison?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Soon,” he said.

“That won’t work. My boyfriend and my sister and I are leaving here today.”

“I would strongly advise against that. You say your town is in danger. You’re one of the only ones aware of that danger. I need you to remain in Madison and keep me informed of what’s going on.”

“How stupid do you think I am? You work for the government. You have resources at your disposal that I could only dream of. I’m a teenage girl who just graduated from high school. What can I do that a dozen of your people couldn’t do a hundred times better?”

“I cannot explain at this time. Nevertheless, it is important that you do not leave Madison.”

“Why not?”

“I told you, I’m not at liberty to answer that question.”

Cass got a real creepy feeling. “I know how you guys work. If this town is infected with something and you and I know it is—you’ll try to have it cordoned off.”

“Listen, I’ll be straight with you. That’s always a possibility where there’s an outbreak of illness. Any reasonable person wouldn’t want a virus or bacterial illness to spread.”

She felt he was being anything but straight.

She hardened her tone. “Any reasonable person wouldn’t allow an illness to start in the first place. You know what, I think you left those lifts on so that people could become infected so you could observe what happens to them. I think you’ve been using the population of Madison as guinea pigs. We’re just a big live-action test tube to you bozos in the military.”

He was a long time in answering. “That’s an interesting opinion. But that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Bull. I bet you have spies in town right now observing what’s going on. Or maybe you’ve lost your spies to the virus. Is that a problem you’re experiencing? Tell me, Professor, what does happen to people after they’ve been infected for some time?”

Again he was slow to respond. “That’s not a question you want me to answer.”

“Why not?”

“Trust me.”

She sneered. “I don’t trust you at all, Professor. I regret I even told you my name. But I’m not afraid of you or your cronies. Madison is in the middle of the desert. It won’t be an easy town to encircle. It will take your people time to isolate it, and by then my sister and boyfriend and I will be long gone.”

He was brisk. “Don’t leave town. You’ll regret it.”

“I doubt it. Would you have me go to the afternoon assembly and see if they turn me into a Pod Person?”

“I’m not telling you to do anything in particular. I’m only asking that you act as our eyes and ears in town until we can sort this matter out.”

“No thanks. I’m now even more convinced that you allowed this to occur. Your whole manner says so. Furthermore, I’m not sure if you want to stop this disease from spreading. In fact, I’m not even sure you know what you want. I think you’re just like children playing with forces you don’t understand.”

The professor sighed. “I agree that there is much about that mine we don’t understand.”

“Then why don’t you help me? Why can’t we work together?”

“I am sorry, Cass, my hands are tied. I have probably said more than I should have.” He paused. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

She had to close her eyes and bite her lip. “Yeah, so am I. Her name was Jill Leper and she was eighteen and beautiful. Put that in your records. But I guess her life is just the price of research these days.”

“You honestly do not have the whole picture.”

“Nor do you, from the sound of it. I have to go now. I have to find my sister and boyfriend.”

“Can I give you a word of advice?”

“I’m not going to stay in this loony bin an hour more.”

“What I’m going to say is that you have entered into a situation where nothing is as it appears. Where no one is how he behaves. If you are clear of this contamination then you can trust only yourself.”

She chuckled bitterly. “But you think I may be contaminated, don’t you?”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

“Yeah. I’m sure it has. Goodbye, Professor.”

“Good luck, Cass.”

Cass hung up the phone as Fred came through the door.

“I didn’t see her,” he said.

“You didn’t look long.”

Fred was defensive. “That’s because I don’t think she’s walking around town. I think she went back to your house.”

“She wouldn’t go there again.”

“You’re wrong, Cass. You keep thinking that she hates your father as much as you do. But leaving him is tearing her apart.”

Cass was annoyed. “That’s not true.”

“It is true and it’s obvious to everyone. Mary loves your father. I’m sure she’s at his house right now. To tell you the truth, I think she went and visited him last night. I know she went out, I saw her coming back in.”

“Are you calling her a liar?”

“No. I’m calling her a little girl who’s confused about who to trust. Now stop snapping at me just because I don’t agree with you. That’s no way to run a relationship. “

Cass quieted. “I’m sorry, really. I’ll try to watch my mouth. You want me to call home?”

“Yes. Then I want to get out of here.” He paused and rubbed at his thin mustache nervously. He could hardly stand still. “There were a lot of people out there staring at me. I don’t know what it means.”

Cass reached for the phone. “I’m glad you could see for yourself.”

He gestured to the card in her hand. “Did you call the person who can help?”

“Yes. But it was a waste of time.”

Fred tried to look at the card. “Who was it?”

She put the card in her pocket. “Nobody.” She dialed her number. Her father answered.

“Hello?”

“Dad? This is Cass. Is Mary there?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“At Fred’s. We’re going to swing by in a few minutes to pick her up. Is that OK?”

He considered. “You want to leave town today?”

“Yes. We’re all ready. We just need to get Mary.”

“You know there is an important assembly this afternoon at two?”

Her guts turned to ice. She stammered. “Yes. I heard about it.”

“Will you and Fred be attending?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“But you just said that you were leaving town?”

“I meant we were going to leave after the assembly.” She paused. “May I speak to Mary?”

“She’s in the kitchen eating.”

“Can you put her on for a second?”

“I want her to finish her lunch.”

“I see.” Cass chewed on her lower lip and tasted blood. “How are you feeling?”

His voice had energy. “Great.”

“I’m glad. Hey, why don’t you just take Mary to the assembly at two? We’ll meet you there. Does that sound like a plan?”

“That sounds smart, Cass.”

“Good. See you soon, Dad.”

“Take care. I love you.”

He never said that. Her eyes burned with hate.

“I love you, too,” she said, and put down the phone.

Fred stared at her. “Why did you tell him that?” he demanded. “I ain’t going to their goddamn assembly.”

The chill had not left Cass. She had been a fool to let Mary walk around at a time like this. Her father had definitely changed in the last twenty-four hours. “I was trying to pacify him,” Cass muttered.

“Why bother?”

“Because I think he’s one of them. And don’t give me that doubting expression. You’re becoming more of a believer every hour.” She stopped. “Do you still have your dad’s revolver?”

He was cautious. “Yeah. I have it packed.”

“Do you have ammo? Not practice rounds but the real thing?”

“Cass! We’re just going to meet Mary at the assembly. We’re not going to shoot your dad.”

She held out a hand. “I want the gun and I want the bullets. I’m going to my dad’s to get Mary—you can come with me, but I decide what has to be done to get my sister back.”

He shook his head. “You’ve only gone shooting with me once. You’re not experienced enough to carry a gun.”

“And you don’t have the balls to use the gun!” she yelled.

It was, to put it mildly, a tense moment. Fred finally shook his head and turned away. He was probably wondering what he was doing with her.

“I’ll get it and load it,” he said. “You want to go now?”

Cass simmered. “Right now.”

14

Cass insisted they park down the street from her old house. The area appeared to be deserted. The time was a little after twelve noon, two hours before the holy assembly of local Pod Politics. Cass checked that the revolver was loaded with six live rounds and stuffed it under her shirt. Some way to disguise it she looked like she was pregnant with a gun. As they walked up the street, she told Fred that they were not knocking on the front door.

“We’re going up to the side of the house and peering in the windows,” she said. “When we see Mary, we rush in and take her, no asking, no trying to be polite.”

“What if he tries to stop us?” Fred asked.

“Then he’ll regret it.”

“You can’t shoot him.”

Cass gave Fred a hard look. “You just grab Mary, let me worry about him.”

Fred was uneasy. “I’ll grab Mary and get her safely to the car. That’s all that matters, nothing else has to happen.”

“You think I’m bringing a lifetime of resentment into this screwy situation? You’re wrong, take it from me. I’m not the only one who knows that there is bad stuff coming out of that uranium mine.”

Fred eyed her. “The man you called knows?”

Cass waved her hand. ”I’ll tell you about him later.”

Quietly, they went up the side of the house and peeked inside. Mary was sitting at the kitchen table eating, of all things, a bowl of cornflakes. Father Strobe was not visible. There was a door from the outside that opened directly into the kitchen. Cass knew the lock on it was broken. Without speaking she gestured to the door and Fred nodded. Silently she conveyed that he should run in first and that she’d bring up the rear. The plan was OK with her boyfriend, but his face darkened when she pulled out the revolver.

Fred opened the door and immediately gestured to Mary to keep quiet. The girl looked startled but didn’t speak. Cass might have overdone it by brandishing the weapon. When Mary saw the gun her right arm jerked reflexively over the tabletop and she knocked over a glass of juice. It fell to the floor and broke with a loud crash.

“Christ,” Cass swore under her breath. “Grab her!”

“We have to go now,” Fred whispered as he reached for Mary. But the moment he had her in his arms Daddy came through the door from the living room. Cass raised the revolver and her hand shook slightly.

Daddy displayed disappointment, but he didn’t seem overly bothered by the artillery.

“What are you doing?” he asked quietly.

“We’re taking Mary,” Cass said in a cold voice. “We’re leaving, and we don’t want any trouble.”

Mary moaned, but didn’t speak.

Daddy nodded to the gun. “Where did you get that thing?”

“It’s mine,” Fred said quietly. “We’re not going to use it. We’re just going to leave.”

He glanced at Fred and his calm showed cracks. “You’re not taking my daughter.” He reached for her. “Give her to me.”

Fred backed off and Cass jumped in front of him. She was now between them, as was the revolver. She could feel her sweat on the trigger. Mary wept softly.

“Don’t push me,” Cass warned.

Her father snorted. “What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

Cass cocked the gun and listened to her heart roar in her ears. To her it sounded like a battlefield. Madison had become such a place, a place where only the strong could survive. Too bad for all of them that they didn’t know she would pay any price to stay free. Her voice dripped with bitterness.

“I heard you bring up the assembly this afternoon. I know that that means you’re one of them.”

“Cass,” Fred said. “Let’s just go.”

Her father took a step forward. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t!” Cass screamed. “One step more and I swear I’ll blow your goddamn head off! You won’t have Mary and you won’t have me!You won’t destroy us the way you destroyed Mom!”

He paused, “Your mother died in an accident.”

“Liar! You killed her!”

Mary whined in pain. “Cass?” Fred pleaded.

Daddy was angry. He held out a hand.

“Give me that gun,” he demanded.

She put pressure on the trigger. The roar in her head escalated to explosions. She knew he was one of them; she was sure of it.

“I would kill before I gave up this gun,” she whispered.

Maybe he didn’t believe her. Maybe he did and was still willing to face the consequences. In either case he lunged for the gun as she pulled the trigger.

Many things happened at once. Cass saw her father take a bullet in the left shoulder close to the armpit. Dark red blossomed there and spit out gross matter—it was almost as if a portion of his body exploded outward instead of taking in the slug. Cass knew the bullet was gruesome—a .357 magnum hollow point that was supposed to spread out on impact. But because it was a high-powered round, the recoil made her arm jerk up and she wasn’t able to get off a second shot right away. As a result her father’s original lunge carried him toward her, and she couldn’t stop him. They collided painfully and went down hard. The back of Cass’s head whacked the floor and her vision momentarily went out of focus.

Or maybe the whole world went out of focus. Cass heard Mary scream and Fred swear. But she couldn’t see them, only the mass of her father, as he labored on top of her, his warm blood seeping onto her shirt like diseased mucus from a mad biologist’s petri dish. He wasn’t fighting her, not directly; he seemed to be having trouble breathing. But she was aware that she still had the gun in her right hand. That she could bring it up if she so desired and put a bullet in his brain.

It was while she considered the idea that something cold and heavy stepped on her hand. She wondered what it was but wasn’t given a chance to find out. It was as if a black silk sheet had been thrown over her face—she almost caught sight of it as it landed on the tip of her nose. There were more people in the kitchen than she had realized, but she didn’t have a chance to identify any of them. The black curtain smothered her. Again she heard Fred swear and Mary scream. Then she felt a massive blow and her brain ceased to function.

15

When she came to she was sitting on a hard concrete floor with her hands tied behind her back. Even before she opened her aching eyes she guessed where she was. The high school gym was the single largest building in Madison, and she was very familiar with it. She wondered if it was after two o’clock in the afternoon.

She opened her eyes and confirmed that she was being held prisoner in the dark, cool basement of the gym. It was ironic because she had once helped clean it out her sophomore year as a punishment for toilet papering the principal’s house on Halloween. Now, of course, the man was probably wearing a permanent Halloween costume and was no doubt a master of tricks and treats. Cass was both saddened and relieved to see Fred unconscious beside her. He was bleeding from his forehead and mouth, someone must have hit him pretty hard—a dozen or so times. Her own nose and jaw ached—she felt as if she had been kicked in the head by a steel boot. The position of her arms made her back spasm.

“Fred,” she whispered. “Fred!”

He stirred and moaned. His hands were bound with rope behind his back, and his feet, like hers, were tied. Faint light filtered through the narrow windows pressed close to the ceiling. It appeared near to sunset but she couldn’t be sure.

Where was Mary?

“Fred!” she hissed. “Wake up!”

Fred raised his head and opened his eyes. “What happened?” he mumbled.

“You tell me. I don’t know anything that happened after I shot Daddy.”

He stretched his head upward and grimaced. His throat was dry, his voice cracked as he spoke.

“About fifty people rushed into the house. I don’t know where they came from. They must have been lying in wait. They grabbed Mary, and I took a swing at one of them, and then I was pounded into the floor.” He paused. “That was amazing you shot your dad.”

“I suppose now you believe he was one of them?”

Fred sighed and nodded. “I believe in them now.”

Cass tried to keep her composure. “What do you think they’ve done with Mary?”

He wouldn’t look at her. “They probably took her to the assembly.”

“And?”

He shook his head. “She’s probably one of them by now.”

A tear trickled down her face. “I can’t believe that. I won’t.”

Fred finally looked at her. “I’m sorry, Cass. I should have listened to you earlier. Maybe we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

She was sad. “I wonder if we ever stood a chance. Whatever this is, it’s big. And what are we? Just a couple of fools.”

“We can’t give up. We’re still alive, and we’re not infected.” He paused. “At least I don’t think we are.”

She was puzzled. “But why didn’t they infect us when we were unconscious?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they want something from us first, before we become like them.”

“What?”

“I have no idea. But I don’t want to hang around and find out.” Fred struggled with his ropes. “These are pretty tight.” He glanced around in the dim. “But if I could rub them on something sharp.”

Cass felt hope. “‘That’s an idea. There are a series of brass hooks to your right. They’re supposed to be used to hang up sports gear. They’re up a little high, you’ll have to push yourself up against the wall.”

Fred twisted his head. “I see them, but you’re right, they’re up sort of high. I’m not sure if I can reach them with my legs bound.” He wiggled over. “I’ll try.”

Cass fought with her binding and sighed. “I don’t want to leave here without Mary.”

“We should have such problems,” Fred muttered as he strained to push his back up against the wall so that he could grab one of the hooks with his ropes.

“I mean it,” she said.

He panted. “Let’s take things one at a time.”

“OK.”

Fred finally succeeded in getting himself caught on a hook, but only after thirty strenuous minutes. By then the light outside had faded more, and Cass was despairing of ever seeing her sister again. Fred sounded hopeful as he seesawed back and forth over the brass hook.

“This metal must be sharp,” he gasped. “I hear the rope fibers tearing. Can you see?”

She struggled to see behind his back but the shadows were too deep.

“No,” she said. “But keep working it.”

“I have nothing else to do,” Fred muttered. Ten minutes went by. Cass heard footsteps.

“Someone’s coming!” she hissed. “Slide back down!”

“But I think I almost have it,” he protested. “It’s loosening.”

The footsteps grew louder. Two pairs—easy to hear on the hard floor.

“Get down,” Cass ordered. “They’ll be here in seconds.”

Reluctantly Fred got off the hook and slid back down.

He was exhausted. “If I’d had one minute more.”

The metal door on their left opened. In walked Tim and Mary. Tim wore black leather gloves on both hands. With these gloves he guided Cass’s little sister in front of him, light pressure on Mary’s shoulders.

Her expression was calm, but she looked scared as well. Her lower lip twitched when she saw Cass and Fred tied up on the floor. Cass prayed to God she was all right and not … one of them.

Tim’s expression was impassive. He could have been a robot sent from Central Casting to welcome them to planet Zeon. His exposed skin had a pale white sheen and his eyes flickered with strange colors. He could have passed for human, but only amongst a very stoned group.

“Mary,” Cass gasped.

Her sister started to step forward, but Tim stopped her. Mary trembled but did not speak. Tim appeared to study them with a brain filled with integrated circuits. Finally he spoke, and his words were soft and flat.

“We found a card in your pants pocket,” he said to Cass. “It belongs to a government scientist. We want to know if you called him in the last twenty-four hours, and we want to know what you told him.”

“Why do you want to know?” Cass asked.

“Answer the questions.”

“If I do answer the questions, will you let us go?”

“No.”

Cass snorted. “Then why should I help you, buddy?”

In response he removed a small silver knife from his pocket and held the blade to Mary’s throat. She shrieked, but did not try to bolt.

“If you do not answer, I will sever her neck arteries,” he said.

Cass forced herself to breathe. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Fred secretly struggling with his ropes. He seemed to be making progress.

“OK, all right, we can talk,” she said hastily. “But before I tell you, I want to ask you a few questions. You can see we’re helpless. You have no reason not to exchange information with us.”

He kept the knife blade on Mary’s tender skin. Her brown eyes were so wide, it broke Cass’s heart. Yet she was proud of her sister because Mary was fighting to keep her composure.

“What is the purpose of this exchange?” he asked.

“You tell us what we want to know and I’ll tell you what you want to know—then everyone is happy. Now, first off, who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing?”

Tim’s eyes never blinked. “Specify,” he said.

“Are you still human?” she asked, keeping an eye on Fred and his subtle efforts. He clearly wanted her to keep Tim preoccupied.

“Not by your definition.”

“How would you define yourself?” Cass asked.

“A unit of will. A cell in the whole.”

“Are you an alien now? Is that what you are saying?”

“We are not alien. We are the next step in the evolutionary process. The first patterns planted here reached completion in the manifestation of the human being. Five billion units now exist on this planet to further the expansion of will. We are separate units at the beginning of the next phase of the pattern.”

“What is the purpose of the next phase of the pattern?”

“The expansion of the will.”

“Could you be more specific? I mean, what are you doing today? What’s your agenda?”

“At the beginning of the next phase of the pattern the original will manifests on the designated planet to assure the swift and complete transformation.”

“How is this manifestation accomplished?”

“A sufficient number of units of second pattern gather and focus upon the nature of subatomic singularity and an interdimensional portal is opened back to the original will, and it is then able to manifest on the designated planet. This is happening now.” He paused and tightened his grip on Mary’s shoulder. “You will answer my questions now.”

Cass coughed. “What exactly were your questions?”

“We found a card in your pants pocket. It belongs to a government scientist. We want to know if you called him in the last twenty-four hours and we want to know what you told him.”

He was a consistent bastard.

“I called him and spoke to him this afternoon,” Cass said. Fred had stopped his silent struggles. She hoped that meant his hands were free.

“What did you tell him?”

“I discussed with him the changes that were going on in Madison “

“Specify.”

“Well, I told him that you were behaving badly.” Cass choked on sudden grief. “Did you really kill Jill?”

“This unit ended that unit’s active pattern. What else did you tell this government scientist?”

Cass fought away the tears. “I told him something very important. Something you really need to know.”

“What was this important thing?”

“Come closer and I will whisper it in your ear,” she said.

“Why must I come closer?”

She gestured to Fred. “Because I don’t want this guy to hear me. The information I have to tell you could be damaging to your long-term goals on this planet. If Fred knows, he might try to throw a wrench in your plans.”

Tim appeared undecided. His knife hand moved slightly.

“You are not cooperating fully,” he said finally. “There is a logical flaw in your explanation. I will open this one’s arteries and spill her blood on this floor if you do not give us the information.” He moved to slash Mary’s throat.

“Wait!” Cass said. “All right, I will tell you what I told the guy. But first you must release my sister.”

“That is not an option. Tell us the information now.”

“OK. I want to tell you but I am having trouble remembering clearly with so much pain in my arms. You understand that pain is a barrier to clear thinking for creatures such as us? I do not need to be untied, but I do need for you to set my physical body into a more upright position. In no way will this position be a threat to you or your other units. Otherwise, if you do not comply with my request, sharing this information will not be an option.” She added, “I am not bluffing.”

He considered. “I will move you into a more upright position and then you will share all your information. But you are not to make any sudden moves. If you do, I will open the arteries of this unit.”

“I will cooperate fully if you move me into an upright position. “

Still keeping a hold on Mary and the knife, he came closer to Cass and leaned over to grab the bundle of ropes at her back. But as he bent down, with his back to Fred, her boyfriend rolled quickly onto his knees and brought his freed hands up over his head. Making a doubled fist, he brought it down hard on the back of Tim’s skull.

The blow only stunned the monster. But he did drop his knife and Fred was on it in an instant. As Tim pivoted to defend himself, Fred already had the knife in his hands. He thrust forward and buried it up to the hilt just below Tim’s breast bone. Blood poured out, it was black. Mary screamed in terror, she was already backing across the room. But the immediate threat may have already been dealt with. Tim stared down at the wound for a blank moment then toppled to the side.

“Get the knife back, stab him again!” Cass gasped.

Fred did indeed reach for the messy knife but he appeared to be in no mood to poke his old friend more than necessary. He set to work cutting his feet free.

“We have to get out of here,” he whispered.

Cass gestured to Mary. “Come here, honey, keep your voice down.”

Mary ran over and buried her head in Cass’s shoulder.

“I’m scared,” she wept.

“It’s all right; it’s over,” Cass said soothingly. “We’ll be out of here in a minute.”

The blade was sharp. Fred was free in seconds, and he had her loose in an equally short time. Cass found she could hardly stand, her head ached and her whole spine was in a state of contraction. Fred pulled her up—it was obvious he was not stopping for anything. They turned toward the door.

Tim grabbed her foot with his hand.

Cass shrieked involuntarily. His glove had come off in the scuffle. His hand was not a hand but a five pronged appendage of living light and metal. He was a strong sonofabitch.

“You are not cooperating,” he said from his place on the floor. “You will share your information now.” Fred raised his knife but Cass was quicker. There was a heavy-duty fire extinguisher two feet from her nose. Hoisting it off its hook, she smacked Tim in the face with it. He released her and she hit him again, rage and pain consuming her. She pounded him until Mary started to whine and Fred tried to grab her from behind. She smashed Tim until his goddamn head cracked open. But a jellyfish of brains did not spill out. Instead there was a mass of what could have been dying fiber optics, spiraled together like a hive of crushed worms swimming in a soup of black pain. The whole mess just rolled out of his head and lumped together. Cass stared down at his now hollow skull in disgust.

“No wonder he was acting so weird,” she muttered.

Fred grabbed her arm. “Enough, Cass.”

The door to the basement was unlocked, yet they were sure they’d be stopped before they could get clear of the gym. But the assembly must have been in full swing because they didn’t see anyone as they reached for the knob of the back door. Nevertheless, Cass slowed and stopped the others. She saw and heard something, a faint whistling sound combined with a curious violet light that seemed to emanate from the dark walls that surrounded them.

“What the hell,” she whispered.

Fred paled. “Oh no.”

What their senses showed them was only the tiniest part of the picture. In that moment Cass felt the presence of a power greater and older than the world. It was huge beyond any dimension of measurement and it was also incredibly subtle. The power could seep out of the walls because it knew how to slip between molecules as easily as it knew how to expand across the galaxy. Cass realized that she was sensing the origin of her nightmare—only now she was wide-awake. The assembly overhead was opening some kind of door that she seriously doubted could ever be closed. She pushed spellbound Fred and Mary in front of her.

“We don’t need this shit,” she told them.

16

They took one of the cars in the gym parking lot. Apparently the second pattern space units where so spaced out that they hadn’t bothered to take the keys out of their cars. Fred could have had his choice of many vehicles. In his haste he chose a red Nissan Sentra that was almost out of gas—good move. They didn’t notice this until they were roaring up the highway and out of town. Cass didn’t feel like stopping any time soon, but Fred had other ideas.

“I think we should stop and get another gun,” he said.

“Are you crazy?” she asked. Mary sat in her lap—to hell with safety—and seemed to be in a state of mild shock. Cass kept stroking her hair and whispering soothing sounds in her ears.

“No,” Fred said. “We need a gun if we run into another one of those creatures.”

“We won’t run into any once we’re out town.”

“You don’t know that. Tim has a pistol at his house. I know exactly where he keeps it. It’ll take me less than a two minutes to get.”

“I don’t want to go to Tim’s house.”

Fred cast her a dark look. “We know he’s not there, Cass.”

They stopped at Tim’s house. While Fred ran inside to get the pistol, Cass tried to talk to her sister.

“How are you feeling, honey?”

Mary kept her eyes closed and her face pressed against Cass’s chest.

“Real bad,” she whispered.

“Did the bad men hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Nothing, ” Mary said.

“But how did they hurt you?”

Mary sniffed. “They just hurt me is all.”

“Did they make you eat anything?”

“No.”

“Did they try to cut you?”

Why was she asking these questions?

“No.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I don’t know.” She cringed in pain and Cass feared she’d cry. “They wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“Where were you just before you saw us?”

“In a dark room.”

“Was anyone in the room with you?”

“Yes.”

“Who was with you?”

“I don’t know.”

Fred returned right then. He had found binoculars as well as the pistol, which was a black semiautomatic—it took fifteen-bullet clips. He told her to put it under the front seat and out of sight but he asked her to hold on to the binoculars. He started the engine.

“We don’t have a ton of gas,” he warned.

“How far can we get?” Cass asked, tightening her hold on Mary.

Fred headed toward the highway. “It depends on when empty means empty in this car. But all we need is forty miles of smooth sailing and we’ll be in Notch. There’s a gas station this side of town, and it’s open twenty-four hours a day.”

Cass smiled faintly. “I know, Fred.”

He looked over at her. No, he looked at Mary. “I just hope we get that far,” he said.

She didn’t like that remark or his nervous glances. Still, it appeared everyone must be enjoying the assembly because they sailed out of town without incident. But twenty miles from Madison, as they neared what they all called the Valley, they spotted trouble. The Valley was where two sets of hills collided and created a narrow passageway through which the highway ran. There was no simple way through this portion of the open desert, although there were a couple of trails for a sports utility vehicle. No doubt the obstructive nature of the Valley was why those in charge had decided to place their roadblock there. Cass spotted the barrier in the binoculars she had been scanning the scene the whole time.

“Kill the lights,” Cass snapped.

Fred did so and slowed way down. “What is it?”

She strained to see better. Mary was sort of in her way.

“There’s a roadblock up ahead. It looks like it’s military. Three big trucks are stopped across the highway. I see six men in military fatigues and they’re all wearing masks. They’re carrying high powered guns. There’s a car in front of us, which is slowing now as it nears the roadblock.” She paused. “Pull over and stop.”

Fred did as he was told. He even took the keys out of the ignition. He sounded relieved. “This is a good thing. It means we’re safe.”

Cass lowered the binoculars and shook her head. “I think it means we’re screwed. That government scientist I spoke to—he warned me not to try to leave town.”

“That story was true? I thought you made it up.”

“No, it was true. But this guy I talked to didn’t have my better interests at heart. When he heard about what was happening in Madison, he obviously started thinking the place needed to be quarantined.”

“It does need to be quarantined,” Fred said.

“You don’t get it, do you? The government will quarantine everyone inside this area. We won’t be able to get out just because we say we’re not infected.”

Fred’s face fell. “But we can prove we’re not infected. We don’t have black blood.”

Cass shook her head. “They won’t take any chances with us. They’ll make us turn back—or worse.

“Are you sure you’re not being paranoid? I’m willing to take my chances with these guys.”

She gestured out the front window and raised the binoculars.

“Let’s see what they do with that car in front of us.”

Cass watched as the car in question was stopped at the roadblock. The soldiers were taking their duties seriously. They gestured to whoever was in the vehicle to get out. They gestured with pointed guns.

Cass moaned. “Oh no.”

“What is it?” Fred demanded.

Cass sought to keep the binoculars steady. Mary wasn’t talking, but she was fidgeting something awful. Cass described the scene as it unfolded.

“Not what, who. It’s Mr. Felix from the drugstore. I guess he avoided the assembly after all. It looks like the soldiers are questioning him. But they’re being careful to keep their distance. It’s easy to see he’s upset and that they’re afraid of catching something from him.” Cass paused. “Oh God.”

“What is it?” Fred asked tensely.

“He’s arguing with them and they’re pushing him back with the tips of their guns. He’s gesturing violently—he looks real mad. He’s so excited that I’m worried they’ll …”

Cass dropped the binoculars in her lap.

The short popping sound echoed across the desert.

“What happened?” Fred gasped.

Cass swallowed. Mary was sitting up straight and anxious.

“They shot him,” Cass whispered.

Fred was in pain. “No. They’re soldiers. They wouldn’t shoot an innocent man.”

Cass slowly raised the binoculars. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

“They shot him in the head and now they seem to be poking around in his brain with a long stick and a bright light.” She added in a bitter voice, “Maybe they’re checking to see how hollow his skull is.”

“Give me those,” Fred demanded as he grabbed the binoculars. It took him a moment to focus, but after he did he quickly lowered them and stared off into the distance. Cass had never seen him so white. “This can’t be happening.”

“We can’t go this way.”

Fred was furious and breathing hard. “We’re not going back. Maybe we can talk to these men. Mr. Felix was always a fool, and he obviously pushed them when they were not in a mood to be pushed. These soldiers will have to listen to us. I mean, God, we just got out of high school, we’re no threat to them.”

Cass touched his arm and spoke firmly. “They’ll shoot us just like they shot Mr. Felix. They must have orders to shoot and kill.” She sat back and rubbed Mary’s arms. It disturbed her that her sister was not speaking with all that was going on. Cass added, “We need a plan.”

Fred started to turn the car on to back up. “We can take Highway Twenty around Rough Plain and try for Tenn. They can’t have roadblocks all over the whole desert.”

Cass stopped him. “We don’t have enough gas to make it to Rough Plain. Besides, I bet there’ll be a roadblock there. We were unconscious for too long—Professor Fiese called my bluff. He has an efficient organization behind him. There’ll be roadblocks set up in every direction out of town by now.”

Fred started to snap but then considered the situation more seriously. He was sometimes impulsive but he wasn’t stupid. He took up the binoculars and scanned the surrounding hills. After pointing he handed the binoculars back to her.

“There is a winding dirt road up there,” he said. “See it? I remember it now. Tim and I once hot dogged on it on dirt bikes. It goes up and down like a roller coaster and it even slants at dangerous angles, but we might be able to take it.”

Cass studied the dirt road in the moonlight—it was actually more of a rough path. Yet she would have jumped on it if she wasn’t certain that the soldiers would spot them trying to use it. The reality was that the path was only a quarter mile from the highway. Why just sitting in the dark was spooking Cass even though the roadblock was still a couple of miles away. She expressed her fears to Fred and he didn’t argue as she would have expected.

“Maybe we should just go hide up in the hills,” he suggested. “Till things cool down.”

Cass shook her head. “Things are not going to cool down. This quarantine is only the beginning.”

“What do you mean?“He waited for an answer and she let him think about the possibilities instead. Finally he said it. “You don’t think they’re going to destroy the entire town?”

She was grave. “I think they think they must. The government started an experiment that has gotten out of hand. They could use a nuclear bomb for all we know, we have to get away from here.” She contemplated the dirt path once more that snaked along the side of the hill on the right. “We need a diversion,” she muttered.

“Too bad we don’t have a case of dynamite,” he said.

Mary continued to sit silently.

Cass had an idea. “Hey, how far are we from the propane plant?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“How far? Do we have enough gas to get there?”

Fred considered. “Maybe twelve miles-one way. We could probably get there. I’m not sure we could get back.” He paused. “You’re not thinking of stealing a propane truck?”

“Yes. We could ram the blockade with a propane truck and we’d have a masterful distraction. The men would be so busy putting out the fire that they wouldn’t notice us creeping along the dirt path in our Sentra.” She stopped. “Of course there’s one small problem. One of us has to drive the truck.”

Fred hesitated. “I can do it.”

Cass felt frustrated. “No. Forget I even brought it up. You’d be killed.”

But Fred had warmed to the idea. “No. I can get the truck going in the right direction and rig the accelerator and the steering wheel with a belt. Then I can bail out and run partway up the side of the hill. You’ll have to be waiting for me.” He paused. “I can make it work.”

Cass played the devil’s advocate, even though she liked the idea. “The soldiers will see you bail out.”

Fred rubbed his hands together. “I don’t think so. They don’t appear to have night goggles. Plus, once the truck hits they’ll have their hands full.” Fred nodded to himself. “I think it’s our best hope, and I know there’s always an extra truck or two sitting around that stupid plant. Let’s do it—we’re not getting anywhere sitting here.”

“OK,” Cass said, as she hugged her sister closer.

She’d have to worry about Mary’s mental state later. With their headlights still out, they turned around and backtracked two miles to another dusty road. The propane plant was located on the backside of the boonies, right next to a gas and oil drilling rig. They had been out to it a couple of times over the years while looking for a way to kill time. The place was gated but not guarded. It was interesting that neither of them brought up exactly how they’d steal the truck. Without asking, Cass took out the pistol and removed the safety. They were desperate people willing to take desperate chances. They had both changed in the last three days.

“Let’s park a quarter of a mile out,” Cass advised as they neared the place.

Fred nodded. “I was just going to say that.” He glanced at Mary, who appeared to be dozing in Cass’s arms. “I don’t want to leave Mary in the car.”

“It’ll be safer to leave her.”

He was uneasy. “No, I don’t think so. She should come with me. You and I can split up to enter the compound from different sides. It’ll give us the element of surprise. I don’t mind if you take the gun; I still have Tim’s knife.”

“But why do you want Mary with you?”

He fidgeted and then lied—it was so obvious. “I just don’t want to leave her alone for a minute in this place. Not all those creatures are back in town.”

She tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at her.

“OK” was all she said.

They parked and got out, and walked together until they got to the gate. Mary didn’t complain or say anything as they parted.

Cass had no idea if the plant personnel were infected, and she told herself that she wouldn’t shoot unless absolutely forced. As she left Fred and Mary behind, Cass reflected on how she had shot her father and how guilty she felt even though he clearly wasn’t her father anymore. There had been something about remembering the powerful recoil of the gun and then seeing his shoulder all bloody that would not leave her. She knew deep inside she must have loved him.

But now he was gone forever.

The gate on her side of the plant was a pitiful affair. Tucking the gun in her belt, she was over it in five seconds. Already she could see a couple of propane trucks waiting to be stolen. Yet she had taken only five steps toward the closer of the two when a rough male voice called out.

“Hey,” he said as he came around the corner of a building. He wore a company uniform and was a big fella, but otherwise she couldn’t make out his features. “What are you doing here?”

She wondered if Fred and Mary could hear the guy. The plant was a hundred yards across, composed of one large drilling rig, three small office buildings, a single huge storage facility, the processing plant, and the trucks. She decided that they couldn’t know she’d been spotted. Almost on instinct she pulled the pistol from her belt and pointed it at the man.

“I’m stealing one of your trucks,” she said coolly. “Put your hands in the air and give me the keys or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

His hands shot up and shook. He sounded scared. “I don’t have the keys.”

She moved closer quickly. “Put your hands on top of your head, lay facedown on the ground. Do it!”

She was getting pretty good at this. He hurried to obey. He was a mass of nerves. “Please don’t shoot me,” he whimpered. “I have a wife and kids.”

“Do they live in Madison?”

“No. Las Vegas.”

“Lucky them.” She knelt and put the pistol to his head. “Where are the keys?”

“In the building on your right. They’re sitting on the desk.”

“Is anyone else working here tonight?”

“There’s Bill.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He’s around.”

“What’s your name?”

“Barney. What’s yours?”

She had to smile. “I’m not going to tell you. But I am going to whack you on the back of the head with this gun. I don’t want to kill you but I can’t have you coming after me.”

Barney was upset. “Please don’t hit me too hard. I have a wife and kids.”

“I know, Barney,” she said as she raised the gun over her head. The end justifies the means. It was the only reason to justify how hard she hit him. He went out with the one blow.

Cass crept in the building on the right. Fred was already there and going through the keys. He jerked around when she came up behind him. God, he looked like he had been crying.

“What’s the matter?” she snapped. “Where’s Mary?”

“She’s outside next to one of the worker’s cars.”

“You just left her out there? We’re not alone here, you know.”

He wouldn’t look at her. He was shaking. “We are now,” he muttered.

She noticed blood on his hands. “What happened?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said as he found the keys he wanted. He handed her a set. “Take Mary in this car. It has more gas in it than the Sentra. I’ll take the truck and rig it to keep going and crash, like we talked about. You follow on the side road and pick me up when the soldiers go nuts.”

He was talking as fast as a machine gun spits out bullets. Something had obviously happened that shook him to the core. He had blood on his hands and she did not need a lot of imagination to figure it out. She touched his arm.

“Did you kill the other man?” she asked gently.

He averted his head. “I didn’t, no.” He turned away. “Just do what we planned, I’ll explain later.”

“Fred?”

“Not now!” he snapped.

They went outside. Mary was standing quietly beside a Ford Taurus. She got in after Cass unlocked the door for her. Fred was already revving up the engine on one of the propane trucks. He jerked it out of its parking place. Barney was sound asleep off in left field. The scene was preposterous, of course, yet Cass felt there was something wrong besides the obvious. She got a bitter taste of what that might be when she jumped in her side of the car and notice the blood on Mary’s shirt.

“Where did that come from?” she demanded.

Mary was either in shock or an awfully cool customer.

She just stared at Cass and shook her head.

Cass started the car and chased after Fred’s propane bomb.

Their distraction worked better than Cass could have dreamed. From a place off to the right and in front of the blockade, elevated slightly by the rough terrain of the hills, Cass and Mary watched as the propane tanker roared straight toward the military boys. Fred knew how to program his runaway trucks, this baby hardly deviated on its planned course by an inch. Through the binoculars Cass had seen Fred jump clear, as much as a quarter of a mile before the blockade. His faith in the truck’s trajectory paid off. Only at the last second did the boys in uniform realize that the truck was not going to stop. They barely had a chance to scatter. Cass felt little sympathy for them after they had shot poor Mr. Felix.

The truck exploded in a huge fireball.

The orange light lit up the night.

Cass heard at least one man screaming.

“That’s our cue,” she said to Mary who was sitting impassively beside her. Cass threw the car in gear and ripped along the side of the hill on a path that was little more than a squirrel’s lap track. Fred ran like a maniac to intercept her. His job was tougher, he had to climb up the side of the hill and he was on foot. But somehow he made it and soon he was gasping in the backseat.

“Better to drive carefully than too fast,” he warned.

“Understood,” she said. Below, the fireball continued to do its work. All three trucks had caught fire. Half the boys in uniform were trying to put them out, the other half were searching the wrong way up the road for the culprit. Cass was able to slide past them with incredible ease. A half mile beyond the blockade she drove out of the hills and slipped back onto the road. For safety’s sake, she kept the headlights off. But she upped their speed tenfold, the moon lighting a path for them. For the first time in a long time she felt joyful.

“We made it!” she exclaimed.

“We’ll see,” Fred said ominously.

17

They reached Notch and its this-side-of-the-town gas station shortly afterward. Their Ford Taurus was not filled with gas either, and they thought it prudent to fill up while they had a chance. Apparently the second-level pattern units had not removed Fred’s wallet from his pants. For cosmic galactic beings they were not particularly good at detail work. Fred had enough money so that they could get what they wanted. As Mary went off to the bathroom, Cass cornered Fred as he pumped the gas. He was bruised and dusty from his heroic leap from the propane truck but she knew it was the last thing on his mind.

The gas station was relatively deserted. “Give it to me straight,” she demanded.

He shook his head tightly. “Not now.”

She grabbed him. “What happened back there at the plant?”

Fred put the gas feed on automatic. He was having trouble breathing and still didn’t want to look at her.

“We found a break in our side of the fence and crept inside. I saw the trucks but I also saw a guy walking around. He wasn’t the same guy you ran into. I told Mary to stay put for a minute because I was thinking I could circle around the guy, take him by surprise, and knock him out. But to get around him I had to lose sight of him as I crept behind a building. For a couple of minutes I had no idea where he was.” He coughed. “Then I saw him.”

“Where?”

“Lying on the ground.” Fred closed his eyes. “He was covered with blood. He was dead.”

Cass swallowed thickly. “Where was Mary?”

He opened his eyes and contemplated the ground. “She was nearby. She was covered with blood.”

Cass tried to force a smile. What came out felt like a grimace.

”That’s not possible,” she whispered.

Fred raised his head and looked out at the black desert.

“Mary killed that man, Cass,” he said quietly.

She shook her head weakly. “No. She’s not one of them. You are not going to convince me she’s one of them.”

Fred finally looked at her and his face was cracked with pain. Yet he hardened his words and they cut her like daggers. “I’ve suspected for some time that there was something wrong with Mary. She won’t eat—you saw that repeatedly—and she was always going out for long walks. I know for a fact she was out that night half the town was out. I saw her come back in the trailer even though she denied it to our faces.”

Cass stuck out an arm. “Stop. Stop right there.”

Fred grabbed her elbow. “We have to face facts, Cass. Mary went to your father’s house and was there half the morning and we know he was one of them. Then when we were brutally attacked they never touched Mary. And since we left Madison she’s been acting like some kind of zombie. You know that she’s been acting like Tim did.”

“She’s in shock. Any girl her age would be in shock after going through what she has. She …”

He cut her off. “She’s not in shock.”

Cass wept. “These things mean nothing. God, she’s my little sister. She can’t be one of those things.”

“She killed that man at the plant.”

Cass suddenly pounded on his chest. “She cannot be one of them! You killed that man! You had blood all over you!”

Fred grabbed her and held her tight. He glanced around, but Mary was still in the bathroom. The old couple inside the gas station was watching TV.

“I have blood on me because I tried to save the man,” Fred whispered in her ear as he struggled to hold her. “But I couldn’t because someone had ripped his throat open with bare hands. Please listen to me, Cass, there were only four of us there. You knocked out your guy and Mary killed our guy.”

Cass couldn’t bear it, anything but this. She shuddered helplessly in his arms. “It’s not proof,” she mumbled. “You’re not going to hurt my Mary. I’ll kill you first.”

Fred stroked her hair. “I don’t want to hurt Mary any more than you do. And you’re right, we need proof before we do anything. But maybe we can get that. When we destroyed what was left of Tim, he bled black. If Mary has been changed, she should have black blood in her system. When she comes back out of the bathroom, I want to poke her in the back with a needle. I’ll do it right in front of you and you can then get in the car with her. But have her sit on your lap again, and when she’s relaxed, take a quick peek at her undershirt. It’s white and should clearly show a black or red stain.”

Cass stared up at him and shook her head. “No.”

“Yes,” he said firmly. “I know this is painful for you, but you know that if she’s already one of them then we’ve lost her already. It may even be a kindness to her if we just stop in the desert and kill her.”

“You bastard!” Cass tried to slap him.

He grabbed her hand. “I’d want you to kill me if I was one of those things. And we have to think of the world. The military screwed up tonight, but I have faith they’ll keep that town bottled up. They will stop this plague before it can spread. But if Mary is one of those creatures, God only knows what she might do once she gets free of here. But I can tell you one thing for sure, she’ll kill us or convert us before she does anything else.”

Cass pushed him away. “You’re mad!”

He pulled a sewing needle from his back pocket. “The old woman inside gave me this a minute ago. I told her that I needed to fix a shirt I had to wear to a party. Understand, Cass, that I’m going to do this all right in front of you so you don’t think I’m one of those creatures. Remember, I’ll brush against her and seem to accidentally poke her in the back. Once the three of us are back in the car and rolling down the highway, you then check under her shirt to see what color her blood is. If it is black, when I ask if this is a good place to stop to take a leak, you will say yes. I’ll do the rest, you can walk away, out into the desert. It will be painless for her, I promise.”

Cass stared at him. “You’re not going to kill Mary.”

He nodded. “If she’s still Mary there’ll be no reason to kill her.”

The tank was full. Fred removed the pump and screwed on the tank cap. Mary came out of the bathroom. Giving Cass a hard glance, Fred moved swiftly past Mary and bumped her. He had the needle in his right hand and flashed it into Mary’s back. Mary jumped slightly in midstride but did not cry out. Instead she looked up at Fred as if she knew be was up to something. Cass observed the whole scene, and Fred did just what he promised and no more. Yet Mary’s shirt covered any evidence.

They got in the car and drove down the highway.

Fred glanced at Cass. Mary sat on her lap.

The little girl had wanted to. Cass played with her hair.

“Are you feeling OK?” Cass asked.

“OK,” Mary said softly.

“You were in the bathroom a long time. Is your tummy upset?”

Mary squirmed back into her. “A little.”

“Do you want to sleep?”

Mary closed her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to talk about what happened today?”

“No.”

“Are you scared?”

Mary shifted again in her lap. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Do you want to sing?” They used to sing together a lot.

“No.”

Cass’s voice quivered. “Can I sing to you?”

Mary’s voice was soft, her face peaceful. “All right.”

Cass whispered the song. “Mary had a little lamb, a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, her lamb was sure to go. She followed her to school one day …”

Stupid song. The only one that would come at such a time as this… . Cass’s voice trailed off into a hollow whisper. Mary appeared to have fallen asleep already. It was a small miracle. Cass glanced at Fred, feeling more helpless than she ever had in her life. She was no longer digging up a smelly grave. She was about to lie down in one. Fred reached up and turned on a small overhead light. He cleared his throat.

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“She’s fine. She’s resting.”

“We’ll see.”

“No,” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said flatly.

They drove another mile or so. Cass wanted to cry but she was afraid she’d wake Mary. Her little sister’s breathing was deep and rhythmic. She sounded fine; everything had to be fine. There was no reason to shift her hand around and lift up Mary’s shirt. Instead, Cass reached up to turn off the overhead light. Fred stopped her by gripping her wrist tightly.

“Yes,” he said for the third time.

Cass nodded and her eyes burned. “All right.”

Careful not to wake her, Cass scooted Mary slightly forward on her lap. Mary’s shirt was in fact already pulled up slightly, and her white undershirt was partially sticking out. Just before Cass reached over and tugged the shirt up a little more, she suddenly thought of the day Mary had been born. How her mother had brought home the cute infant and placed her on the living room couch in a bundle of blankets so that everyone in town could see her. Cass remembered how she had sat all day in that living room and stared at the miracle that was her newborn sister. And she had never gotten tired of looking at her. Never.

Cass pulled up Mary’s shirt.

Her white undershirt was stained with black goo. Cass panted. “Pull over, I’m going to be sick.”

Fred quickly pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car. Cass opened the door and eased out from under Mary so that her sister would not awaken. She then stumbled out of the car and off the asphalt shoulder and onto the desert sand. A convulsion hit her guts and she bent over and everything in her stomach went flying. But before she could finish vomiting, she stood up and raced like a madwoman into the desert. She didn’t get far, another convulsion caught her and forced her head down. She threw up until she was choking on black bile.

When she was finally able to raise her head, she saw the stars shining down on her and on the silent desert. It was odd, but it was only then that she realized how cold their light was. Tears blurred her vision of the heavens, drops of ice tore at her eyes. She was in a far off galaxy being tossed about by the burnt-out husks of dead worlds. She hadn’t even the strength left to curse the stars. This wasn’t an invasion—it was a rape.

She heard a single gunshot.

18

Cass sat in the backseat as they approached Las Vegas. They were ten minutes out from the city of sin and could see the colored lights simmering over the dark desert like rainbows cast from an unnatural storm. The stars were lost in the glare but not the moon. It hung almost straight overhead, its supposedly magical white light poor protection from what horrors lay beyond in the dark depths.

Cass was in the backseat because she didn’t want to sit where her sister had been shot to death by her boyfriend. Something about that just didn’t feel right, but maybe it was just her, how picky she was getting. Of course she wasn’t sure he’d shot Mary in the car. Maybe he had awakened her first and taken her for a short walk. Maybe he’d told her sleepy little head that they were stopping to stretch and enjoy the fresh air. Cass saw no blood when she had finally been led back to the car by her boyfriend.

Fred. He had done it. The boyfriend.

He glanced over his shoulder at her.

“I think we should stop for the night in Las Vegas and get a room,” he said. “I don’t think either of us is in any condition to drive to L.A.” He paused. “Would that be OK?”

“That would be fine,” she said.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Do you want to stop? I’m exhausted.”

“I don’t care. We can stop.”

He turned back to the road. “I think it’s for the best.”

There was an accident up ahead. A blue Ford Explorer had smashed a black Lexus Sports Coupe. A nasty late-night encounter on the road but it didn’t appear there were any fatalities. A blond woman dressed in black pants and a black top was waving them down. Fred acted concerned.

“I hate to do this but I think this woman needs help,” he said. “Would it be OK if I stopped for a second?”

“That would be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Fred pulled over to the side of the road behind the accident. The woman approached on Fred’s side. On the thin side and close to thirty, she walked with a spunky self-assured step, not like someone who had just crashed. Her blond hair was long and silky. She wore an expensive diamond on her wedding finger. Fred rolled down his window to speak to her.

“It’s look like you’re having bad night,” he said.

She flashed a quick smile. “This didn’t just happen. The police have been out here already, and the other driver went back to the town with the cops to get a tow truck.”

“They couldn’t call for one?” Fred asked.

“We tried but there is a major pile-up on the strip and all the trucks are busy. The other driver thought we might have better luck prying a tow away if he talked to one in person. I think he was going to try to bribe a driver. But he has been gone over an hour and I’m getting sick and tired of standing out here.”

“Do you want a ride to town?” Fred asked.

“I’d appreciate it, if it’s no trouble.” She paused. “I’m not going to carjack you or anything.”

Fred smiled. “Get in, it’s no problem.”

The woman glanced back at Cass. “In the front?”

The front seat is OK,” Fred said.

The woman climbed in, and it was immediately obvious she had money. The Lexus must have be longed to her. Besides the diamond ring, she wore a thin gold necklace with a single glittering sapphire. Cass noticed it as the woman turned to say hi.

“My name is Sally Kramer,” she said and offered her hand. “I hope I’m not kicking you out of the front seat?”

“That’s OK,” Cass said softly as she feebly shook the woman’s hand.

Cass likes to sit in the back,” Fred said quickly. “She was taking a nap.”

Sally turned back around and watched the road as they rolled toward Vegas. “I hate to say this but I think it was my falling asleep at the wheel that caused the accident. I’d been driving straight through from Denver. I have to get to L.A. by early morning, but I guess I pushed too hard.”

“Were either of you hurt in the accident?” Fred asked.

“Fortunately, no,” Sally paused.

“You were both lucky,” Fred said.

“I think so.” Sally smiled. “So her name is Cass and you are … ?”

“Fred. Fred Abel.”

“Where are you guys going?”

“To L.A.”

She sounded hopeful. “Are you going tonight by any chance?”

“No.” Fred said. “We need to stop and rest. We’ve had a bad day.”

“If you change your minds in the night let me know.”

“We will.”

“Promise?”

“Yes. You’re just going to leave your car there?”

Sally chuckled. “I don’t think my car is going anywhere. I’m going to have to leave it. My boyfriend is simply going to have to buy me a new one.”

“You think you’ll get a room then?” Fred asked.

“Yes, I’ll have to.” Sally paused. “Do you know where you’re staying?”

“We haven’t discussed it.”

“The MGM is good. You can drop me there. You might as well stay there, too, if you can afford it. The rooms are nice.”

“I think we can afford it,” Fred said doubtfully.

They checked into the MGM. Sally thanked them for the ride and went off to her room that allowed smoking. She muttered something about playing blackjack and drinking all night if she couldn’t find a ride. Fred got them a non-smoking room on the tenth floor. Cass noticed that he’d taken the gun, and hidden it under his shirt. He probably didn’t want a loaded gun in the car.

The room was nice and cool. They both needed showers and Fred offered to let her go first. She stripped down before entering the bathroom, and once under the shower she let the cold water run on top of her head for twenty minutes straight. She wasn’t only in shock; she was cut off from all things in the world, from herself even. A blob of living tissue moving through random events, unable to feel pain directly. She couldn’t even cry. Time just passed, and the future was best not thought about. The cold water didn’t even feel good, it just felt cold.

Cass briefly dried off with a giant towel. Wrapping it around herself, she went out and sat on the king size bed. Fred spoke to her, but she wasn’t sure if she responded. Fred took off his clothes and went in to shower.

It was then she began to wonder.

Cass removed the gun from the bag and checked the clip. Fourteen shots left, .45 caliber, real powerful load. She snapped the clip back in place and hid the gun under a pillow. Yeah, there were certain things that really made her wonder.

Ten minutes later Fred came out of the shower. He sat across the bed from her and looked worried.

“You need to sleep,” he said gently.

“Yeah.”

”Why don’t you get under the covers? I’ll turn out the lights.”

“You want to sleep now?” she asked.

“Yeah. I think I can fall asleep.”

Cass shook her head. “I don’t think I can.”

“You have to try.”

“Can we talk first?” she asked.

“What do you want to talk about?”

Cass considered. “It’s amazing that we escaped from them.”

“We were lucky. Or else, as you said down in the Shaft, they were stupid.”

She looked at him. “Yeah, but we really did get away pretty easily. Think how we were trapped in that gym basement. We were able to overpower Tim and then no one stopped us on the way out. Don’t you think that was weird?”

“Yeah, but they were all busy.” He snorted. “They had to ‘focus upon the nature of subatomic singularity to open an interdimensional portal back to the original will.’”

“You remember his words well,” she said.

He studied her. “You must hate me for what I did.”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “How could you not hate me? But it had to be done, you know we couldn’t bring her to L.A.”

“I guess.” Cass paused. “But it still strikes me as odd how they had no guards posted to stop us in case we did get free. Another thing that bothers me is how Tim explained stuff to me. I mean, he was a zombie and yet I was able to make a deal with him for information. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“But he wanted something from you. Information.”

“Still, it seems out of character that he’d keep talking like that.”

“Good thing he did. It gave me a chance to get free.”

Cass lowered her head. “Yeah.”

“You’re not doing so good, are you?”

“I’m fine.” She sat up and shrugged. “But I keep having these thoughts. Like how Tim stole your car during the night and went off and killed Jill. I can see why he thought he had to kill her—she had seen him acting suspiciously. But it’s weird how he had your keys.”

“Tim always had my keys.”

“That’s what you said, but I never knew that. You weren’t that close. I didn’t know you watched after each other that way.”

Fred frowned. “What are you getting at?”

“Nothing. Just talking.” She had more interesting thoughts. “But you know when you came to the hospital after he almost died your shirt was covered with blood. You told me that it was because you’d been to see him before I saw you. But I didn’t even see you come in until I saw you with the bloody shirt.”

“I told you that I came in the back way.”

She stared at him. “Yes, that’s what you told me.”

“Cass?”

“You told me a lot of things these past three days. In fact, it was you and you alone who said Mary was out walking in the night when she said she’d never gone out.”

“She lied to you. She was already one of them.”

“That might be true. It certainly sounds logical if you look at it from your angle, but if you change the angle slightly it doesn’t seem logical at all. One thing that definitely makes no sense is why when we were down in the mine the second time—Tim and Sheriff Sam and Mr. Chavez didn’t think to search for us. I mean, all the lifts were down, they had to know someone was down there.”

Fred waved his hand. “Like you said, they weren’t very smart.”

Cass continued to stare. “The truth is that I never said that, Fred. You did. I thought it but never said it out loud.” She paused. “Did you happen to read my mind?”

Fred stopped. “What are you getting at?”

Cass reached under the pillow, drew out the gun, and pointed it at his head. “I’m getting at this,” she said.

He didn’t blink. “Put that away.”

“One other thing. When you wanted me to check the blood on Mary, you insisted I check just one place. Her white shirt in the back.”

“Because that was where I poked her with the needle!”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps it was because that was where you stained her shirt when we were separated at the plant. Where the man had his throat ripped out.”

Fred snorted. “You think I’m one of them?”

She spoke calmly. “I think it’s possible. I want you to lie facedown on the bed.”

“I will not.”

Cass stood and lost her towel. She cocked the hammer. “You’d do well to do what I say. Maybe I’m out of my mind with grief, and maybe you are perfectly human. But right now, to me, it doesn’t feel like a bad thing to shoot you in the face and see what color your brains are.” She gestured with the gun. “Lie down.”

He did as she ordered, covering his butt with the towel. Grabbing a fork from the complementary fruit basket that came with the room, she ripped off his towel and straddled him. She put the pistol to the side of his neck so that he could feel how cold the metal was.

“What are you doing?’ he asked anxiously.

“A little foreplay.” She tested the sharpness of the fork tines.

“Cass,” he said desperately, “I’m sorry about Mary. It broke my heart to do what I had to do. If there had been any other way …”

“There might be another way.” The tines were sharp. “We just have to explore every possibility.”

She stabbed his right buttock. Black blood oozed out.

It dripped over his pale skin and stained the white sheet.

Cass remained calm because she was in a void where feelings could not survive. When she spoke next, her voice was low and casual. Yet a tiny part of her was totally disgusted that she could have been fooled so easily.

“In case you don’t know,” she said. “You have black blood pumping in your veins. Now, from this point on, it doesn’t matter how human you act. I know for a fact that you’re not. You can drop the charade and answer my questions.”

He replied in a monotone. The change was so abrupt that she flinched involuntarily. Yet her grip on the pistol remained firm.

“You may ask what you wish,” he said. “It makes no difference to us at this point.”

“You were one of them since that first night in the mine? You scraped your hand on the same material when you helped pull Tim from the black pool?”

“That is largely correct. But the transformation was not highly developed until this unit visited him at the hospital the following day.”

“The blood on your shirt was your own blood?”

“Yes.”

“Is it necessary for a human to bleed when they go through this process?”

“No. But Tim and this unit were experimenting with different ways to ingest silicon to allow for the reconfiguration of the nervous systems to support the second pattern. We both took in small quantities of ground-up glass. Later we found better substitutes.”

She didn’t care to know about their diets. “What was in that black pool?”

“As you suspected there is what you would call an infectious contaminant. But to us this phrase is a misnomer. Planted at several places around this planet—always next to radioactive isotopes—are highly developed forms of molecular microchips. Once they have entered a human system they completely transform the system into the next pattern of evolution.”

“Why were the chips planted around uranium?”

“When a society has advanced to the point of using atomic energy, it will automatically seek out such radioactive isotopes.”

“So the placement of chips is tied to a substance that signals a certain level of development?”

“Precisely. Also, the faint radioactive decay feeds the chips with energy over the billions of years that they must be placed.”

Cass gulped. She was swiftly losing her calm. “Billions of years?”

“Yes.”

“Who placed these chips here?” she asked.

“The same being who placed all the patterns of the first level.”

“Who is this being?” she demanded.

“It cannot be described in your language.”

“Are you saying that these first-level patterns were responsible for life on this planet?”

“Yes. The second pattern is merely the next step in an evolutionary process that was started on this world billions of years ago. So when you speak of us as alien we are no more alien than you. Both first-pattern and second-pattern beings are a product of the same seeding of this planet.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“The information I am sharing with you is correct.”

“Why haven’t more people who work in uranium mines been infected with these molecular microchips over the years?”

“There are many conditions that must be met for what you call infection to occur. First, not all uranium mines are seeded with these chips. Second, the chips do not work well in most parts of the world. They are sensitive to a particular alignment of your global magnetic fields. For instance, when the military scientists took the chips from the mine and injected them into people, they achieved only partial results. The initial transformation process works most efficiently in the city of Madison itself. The scientists in question no doubt began to observe that phenomena.”

“Why would these chips be made to be so sensitive to magnetic fields?”

“You see this as a weakness in their design but it is not so. These chips are what you would call living technology. They are living and synthetic. They are intimately tied to both qualities of this world. And in either case, in time, the chips are always found by a developing society and the transformation process is completed. Nothing is left to chance.”

“So Madison was just a good place to get the ball rolling? Once the infection starts to spread, it’s not so sensitive to global magnetic fields?”

“That is correct.”

“Why was the mine left open for us? That seemed a chance encounter.”

“It would appear that the scientists in question wanted to perform a semi-controlled experiment of the effects of the chips in their natural surroundings. Also, to address your second query, the setup only appears laden with chance because your sense of time is so narrowly defined.”

“Do you think these same scientists know what you just told me?”

“No. The technology and final implications of the second-level transformation is far beyond their comprehension.”

“Are their levels of transformation beyond second level?”

“Yes.”

“Tim had fiber optics for fingers. Why don’t you?”

“This unit purposely prevented such development so that this unit could remain in the capacity of observing you.”

“Why were you observing me?”

“The start of transformation is always a period of observation. Although each species is patterned after the original matrix, discrepancies occur over the billions of years of evolution. This unit felt it imperative to observe you because you represented what the original will would have considered ‘the greatest threat to the transformation.’ “

“In other words, you continued to act like Fred around me because you wanted to see how I ticked?”

“Yes.”

“I have been led from the start? I was like a mouse in a cage in an experiment?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Was my father infected with these chips?”

“No. We left him uninfected to see how you would react to him if you merely suspected he was infected.”

“I should have known because his blood was red. Where is my father now?”

“He is what you call dead.”

Cass felt a constriction in her throat. “Did he die of the gunshot wound?”

“That is correct. A clot formed in the wound and entered his brain via his circulatory system and he died.”

She had killed him. “Was Mary infected when you shot her?”

The answer killed her, a part of her. “No.”

Finally a tear came to Cass’s eye. A tear made of ice.

“You simply acted like she was infected so that you could observe my reaction. To see if I would let you kill her?”

“That is correct. We wanted to know if you were willing to sacrifice her to stop what you perceived as a threat to all humanity.”

Cass had to breathe. “You killed my little sister for nothing?”

“For information. To observe your reaction.”

“Did you feel anything when you killed her?”

“No. We have no feelings as you understand feelings. We have no individuality.”

She spat the words. “You’re evil!”

“We are not evil. We are you. We are what you were born to become.”

Cass finally snapped. “But I don’t want to become like you!”

“It matters not what you want. Transformation goes inevitably forward. Nothing can stop it.”

She pressed the pistol deep into the soft flesh of his neck.

“Oh yeah,” she whispered. “Well, I think I’m just about to stop your forward motion. How does that make you feel?”

“It matters not if you destroy this particular unit. The greater design will find completion in the original will’s expansion across this galaxy.”

“How? The government is onto you. You won’t spread beyond Madison.”

“We will spread. It is already too late for you to stop the process.”

“Goddamn you! Why do you even bother answering my questions if you feel nothing for me?”

“It matters not if I answer your questions. For me to speak or not speak is irrelevant.”

She quieted. “You feel nothing for me?”

“No.”

“There is not even a tiny part of the old Fred left in you?”

“His individuality has been extinguished.”

She sighed. “That’s all I really wanted to know.” Cass took a pillow and folded it around the gun. She shot him once in the back of the head.

His brains were like Tim’s. Coiled fiber optics, parasitic worms swimming in black fluid. They plopped out the same way they had from Tim’s head, and left Fred’s shattered skull hollow.

19

Cass washed the black splatter off her body and dressed. Bringing the gun with her, she quickly left the hotel room. If anyone had heard the muffled gunshot, they had yet to report it. She was able to leave the hotel and collect her car without incident. But just as she was pulling out of the valet area, she ran into Sally. The woman looked as if she had already had a drink and won a few hands of blackjack. Sally waved for her to stop. As she leaned in the driver’s window, Cass smelled alcohol.

“Where are you going?” Sally asked good-naturedly.

“To Los Angeles.”

“But I thought you were spending the night?”

“I changed my mind.”

Sally looked around the car. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“He’s decided to stay here tonight.” She added, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Sally smelled something fishy but was obviously too polite to say so. Besides, she had her own agenda. “Can I ride with you to L.A.? I told you that it’s important that I get there by early tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not very good company at the moment.”

“I understand. I don’t want to pressure you. But I can promise I won’t bother you at all. I’ll probably sleep most of the way.”

Cass hesitated. “I’m in a hurry to leave. I can’t wait for you.”

Sally shrugged. “You can see I don’t have any luggage. If you want to go now I’m ready.”

Cass paused. She didn’t know why she was doing this.

“OK,” she said. “Get in.”

Sally patted her arm. “You’re a dear.” She hurried to the passenger side and climbed in and let out a satisfied sigh. “Los Angeles here we come.”

Cass pulled onto the street that led to the highway. “I’ve been trying to get there all my life,” Cass muttered.

“What stopped you?”

“The town I lived in.” She added, “It was that kind of place.”

True to her word, Sally appeared to relax into her seat and fall asleep quickly. Cass was happy she didn’t have to strain to make conversation. Somehow she wasn’t in the mood for chit chat. It must have been because she had just lost everything in the world that mattered to her. Yeah, right, that was it.

But she was wrong on that point.

She still had much to lose.

Twenty miles outside of Las Vegas, rolling down the infamous Highway 15 toward a better and more sane life, a light suddenly dawned in the northeast. The light was not caused by the premature rising of the sun. It grew so swiftly in brightness that it could only have been the work of something unnatural. Sally raised her head with a start as the glare touched her closed eyelids. Cass watched out the side window as the fireball transformed itself into a shimmering mushroom cloud. The government had solved its quarantine difficulty. They had nuked Madison.

Cass was glad.

“What the hell?” Sally gasped as she awoke in a hurry.

The car died on the road.

Cass understood the problem. She had seen enough. Sci-Fi movies. The EMI pulse from the thermonuclear blast had shorted the car’s electronics. Behind her she was not surprised to see most of the lights in Las Vegas flicker out. Cass let the momentum of the car carry them to the side of the road. There was no one in their immediate vicinity. Sally was still coping with the blast of the warhead. The thunder of it rippled slowly across the sky like a giant’s invisible fist. Sally could have been in shock, she was looking to Cass for an explanation. Cass merely shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think it’s the end of the world,” she said.

“How can you be so calm?”

“I’ve already been through a lot in my short life.”

“The car is dead?”

“Dead as a doornail.”

Sally didn’t know what to make of her. She pointed to a hill off to their left. “Let’s try to climb up there and get a better look at what’s going on,” she said.

Cass was agreeable. It wasn’t like she had a lot to do at the moment. Certainly she had no future. It wasn’t even a reasonable possibility with a past like hers. She seriously wondered if she would be living in a mental hospital within six months.

Sally was fit. Still dressed in her smart black pants suit, she led Cass on a vigorous hike to the top of the hill. It was a dangerous summit, with steep drops on two sides. But from the top they had an uninterrupted view of the haunting mushroom cloud that was already beginning to fade against the black horizon. Cass wondered what her hometown would look like in the morning sun—all black ash. Yet the violent image did not unduly disturb her. The lights in Las Vegas were still out, but the moon continued to shine, and the stars.

Always the stars, they would shine forever. There was a moment of profound silence.

Sally turned from the nuclear holocaust and stared at her.

Cass had not noticed before how deep her blue eyes were.

“That’s not so,” she said softly.

Cass stammered. There was something potent present.

“W-what is not true?” she asked.

Sally’s voice was hypnotic. “That the stars will shine forever. They will not, they will one day die. But on that far-off day I will continue to exist.”

Cass gasped. “You’re one of them!”

Sally shook her head. “No. I am much more than one of them.”

Cass was in awe as much as she was horrified. The creature who stood before seemed to radiate into all things. Cass received the distinct impression that both she and the woman stood at the edge of an infinite black precipice. Only this being stared out upon it with unfathomable understanding, while she was dwarfed and destroyed by it.

“Who are you?” Cass asked.

The woman sighed and once more looked out over the desert plain.

“I cannot be defined by your words. But if you need to give me a name, you may call me Sio. I was her once, a young woman like you, with hopes and fears not much different from your own.”

“But that was a long time ago?”

Sio nodded. “Billions of years ago.”

Cass was stunned. “The group in Madison brought you here?”

“I allowed them to bring me here. I have been to many worlds.”

Cass could hardly respond. “How did you become what you are now?”

“Through an experiment in biology and will I became the first of my race to tap the true dimensions of unseen consciousness. That gave me an advantage over my fellow beings. Over time I subjugated them to my will. My mind grew in size as my power grew—I was able to contain all within me. Then, when my world was conquered my gaze strayed to the stars.” Sio shrugged. “The necessary technology grew around me and my will expanded out across the stars.”

Cass remembered her nightmares.

“You began to absorb worlds?” she asked.

“I absorbed worlds where there were sentient beings. Where there were not, I planted seeds that would lead to sentience. My body is all these beings—I live through them and they live through me.” Sio stopped. “I am like your God.”

Cass shook her head. “But you cause so much pain. Why?”

Sio was thoughtful. “The experiment began in pain. That woman, so long ago, had her heart broken. Perhaps that is why the expansion is rift with suffering.”

“You don’t know?”

“It is more that I do not care to know. All that matters is the end result, that my will continues to expand.” She turned her haunting gaze back on Cass. “I know you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The original matrix, the genes of my first race, set the basis for the pattern of life on this planet. Some times it happens that after billions of years of evolution there arises a person who resembles the original Sio. You are like her, you are like me.”

Cass took a step back. “I am nothing like you. I could never hurt people as you hurt them.”

Sio took a step toward her. “You will do to your people what I have done to this galaxy. I will place my supreme chips in your system and you will go out and conquer this world. You will subjugate all to your will.”

Cass edged toward the cliff. “If I become like you, I will have no will of my own. I will have no individuality, I will just be your puppet.”

“True.” Sio smiled thinly. “But even a puppet may dance before its strings are drawn tight. You will dance, Cass, and the heavens will applaud you.”

The fall over the cliff was over two hundred feet straight down. If she leaped, she would break her neck and die. That would not stop Sio, but Cass suspected nothing could. From the beginning, all had been hopeless. Perhaps it was better that Mary and her father had died the way they had, as human beings. Cass gathered her courage.

“I will not dance for you,” she said. “Bitch.”

Cass started to jump. Sio caught her arm.

She was very strong.

Sio smiled and pulled her away from the edge. She fondly caressed her hair as Cass shuddered in her arms. Sio spoke in a soothing voice.

“No, you are wrong. You will dance my dance. In the end, my child, everyone does.”

EPILOGUE

Professor John Fiese of Applied Nuclear Physics fame lived a double life. He was actually a college professor at UCLA, where he taught beginning and advanced physics. The position offered a perfect screen for his secret and more complex life as a leading scientist for a clandestine branch of a military weapons development division. The latter paid more but the former helped keep him sane.

It would have been easy to go nuts with the screw up at Madison one month earlier. Fortunately the public had been happy to accept the story that a rogue army colonel had stolen a single nuclear device from a facility deep in the desert and had committed suicide along with almost two thousand innocent witnesses. The cover-up story had opened the army to such a public scrutiny that no one thought the army had made it up to protect itself. That had been the calculated brilliance of the tale, and Professor Fiese had been responsible for most of it. He understood society almost as well as he understood physics.

Yet he still didn’t understand the stuff in the uranium mine outside Madison. They’d have to go back there someday and experiment again. It was dangerous, but the potential was too great to ignore. To use that remarkable substance to create a seemingly more advanced form of humanity. Imagine what such a being could do?

He wasn’t worried about the blow-up at the one roadblock the night before the nuclear blast. The boys in uniform had repeatedly assured him that no one had gotten past them.

Professor Fiese lived a double life in another sense as well. Although he had been happily married for fifteen of his forty-five years, he was not above having affairs with a few of his more discreet and attractive female students. Age was no psychological or physical barrier for him if the young women didn’t mind. He had slept with girls as young as eighteen and enjoyed himself immensely. At the beginning of each new quarter he always spent some secret time to scan the classroom for possible candidates. That very day, exactly four weeks after the small town of Madison had passed into history, Professor Fiese stood in front of his beginning physics class and checked out the room for gifts. He liked to think of them that way, as gifts he deserved to enjoy in return for offering his excellent teaching skills in a public setting. Professor Fiese had a high opinion of himself.

There was a blond girl sitting near the front that kept eyeing him. She was cute but very young. No matter, he would get to know her over the course of the quarter. There was something mysteriously alluring about her, but he didn’t know what it was. A power in her eyes maybe.

Yet he was delighted when at the finish of the first class she stayed behind to talk. He welcomed her graciously as she approached his podium.

“May I help you?” he asked.

She smiled. “I just wanted to thank you for your excellent lecture and to tell you that I am looking forward to spending the entire quarter with you.”

He nodded humbly yet he felt a curious disquiet. “What is your name?” he inquired.

“Sarah.” She leaned close in a confidential manner. She really did have lovely blue eyes. They literally seemed to dance. She added mischievously, “At least I go by that name. My real name might be something different.”

He was intrigued. “I hope we can get to know each other better.”

She was a bold young woman. She patted his hand and actually held on to it briefly. He found her directness curious and stimulating. For a moment she raised her index finger over the back of his hand. She had unusually long nails, and for a second he thought she was going to scratch him. It was a peculiar idea to have and he chastised himself for it. All she did was lightly brush his skin and then take the finger away. She noted the ring on his finger, damn.

“So you’re married,” she said.

He took a breath. “Is that a problem?”

She shook her head. “No. For some reason it makes me want to get to know you better faster.” She caught his eyes and winked. “It must be something unusual in my past, Professor.”

He chuckled. She was going to be fun.

She chuckled as well.

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER PIKE was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Los Angeles, where he lives to this day. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked in a factory, painted houses, and programmed computers. His hobbies include astronomy, meditating, running, playing with his nieces and nephews, and making sure his books are prominently displayed in local bookstores. He is the author of Last Act, Spellbound, Gimme a Kiss, Remember Me, Scavenger Hunt, Final Friends 1, 2, and 3, Fall into Darkness, See You Later, Witch, Die Softly, Bury Me Deep, Whisper of Death, Chain Letter 2: The Ancient Evil, Master of Murder, Monster, Road to Nowhere, The Eternal Enemy, The Immortal, The Wicked Heart, The Midnight Club, The Last Vampire, The Last Vampire 2: Black Blood, The Last Vampire 3: Red Dice, Remember Me 2: The Return, Remember Me 3: The Last Story, The Lost Mind, The Visitor, The Last Vampire 4: Phantom, The Last Vampire 5: Evil Thirst, The Last Vampire 6: Creatures of Forever, Execution of Innocence, Tales of Terror # 1, The Star Group, and The Hollow Skull, all available from Archway Paperbacks. Slumber Party, Weekend, Chain Letter, and Sati—an adult novel about a very unusual lady—are also by Mr. Pike.

Table of Contents

- The Experiment
- Copyright
- Dedication
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- EPILOGUE
- About the Author