"Just do it!"

More shots filled the room and people slammed against walls, flying into pieces as they did so. Modern high-velocity expanding rounds don't just injure people, they tear bodies apart.

Patients and staff scattered, running for the doors on both ends of the room. Mack noticed that the cla.s.s-so very disciplined-had followed David's instructions and returned in a group to the temporary safety of the upper floor.

"Go out the back," he told Caroline and David. "It's our only chance!"

He had them now, he sure as h.e.l.l did.

But David hesitated, so Mack gave him a slap to the side of the head-not hard, but hard enough to startle him.

"Sorry, Doc, but get moving! Right now!"

They scrambled toward the back doors.

Once they were outside, Mack told them, "We need to find a vehicle that works, otherwise we die here, now."

"We can't leave. We can't abandon the mission!"

"David, I'm on your side, so you listen to me. If you die, you abandon your mission. If you live, you still have a chance to come back here when it's safe and complete it. So do this do this!"

That seemed to reach him, and he began to follow Mack, and Caroline followed him. In the rear, Katie did a sort of guard action, not that Mack thought for a moment that she would be particularly effective.

Out in the grounds, dawn was just breaking across a running firefight between the security guards in their camouflage and the townspeople. The locals had some decent weapons now, too, not just deer rifles and shotguns. He heard the rasping whisper of an Uzi and saw one of the security guys turn to red haze.

"There's a lot of ordnance flying around," Mack said, "heads down."

Behind them, gla.s.s shattered upstairs and the body of Claire Michaels. .h.i.t the ground, bounced once in a bed of blooming flowers, and was still.

"Claire!" David howled, rushing to her.

Mack grabbed him. "She's past help, but you're not. If I have to knock you cold and drag you, I'm saving you, Doc. You gotta understand that."

Ahead, the parking lot was jammed with derelict security vehicles, their electronics long since killed.

"We can't escape," Caroline said. "It's impossible."

"We have to," Mack replied, "because if we stay here, we are dead. No question. We get the h.e.l.l out, lives are saved, and your thing that is so important to you-that is saved."

There was a voice raised, echoing across the broad lawn they were crossing, and then another, this one excited. Shots rang out-pistol, .22-caliber.

"Stop," the first man shouted. The other, right behind him, cried excitedly, "What is that? What've you got?"

Mack aimed, braced on his elbow, and squeezed off two rounds, dropping both men. Immediately, more townspeople came out of the house. They were cursing with rage, and letting loose a fusillade of bullets in their direction. No discipline but too many bullets to risk crossing the field of fire.

No choice now, they had to head for the garage.

"Move it! Fast!"

David and Caroline carried the portal.

Then Mack saw two more men coming from around the front of the house. They were not in a hurry. One of them raised a Benelli Riot Gun and blew away a security guard.

"Those two are trained," Mack said. "They know how to kill and we need to be out of their line of fire right now."

Moving among the disabled vehicles in the new parking lot, Mack led them toward the old garage. He knew this place as well as he knew every other corner of the Acton estate, and he knew that there were older vehicles in here, vehicles without sensitive electronics.

The garage was brick, built in the same grand style as the house, an incongruous place to store dusty trucks. The side door, as he knew, wasn't locked.

Taking no chances, he sent Katie in first. When n.o.body blew her head off, he followed with Caroline and David. Inside, the cars and trucks loomed, a silent row of angles and shadowy bulk. There were a couple of pickups, a Buick Roadmaster, a black Cadillac from half a century ago, a Chrysler convertible from even earlier, and a mid-seventies Pontiac.

Mack had previously identified the pickups with their simple mechanicals and magnetos as good bets. On his way back in from his visit to the town, he'd fueled one of them up and made sure its battery worked. He led them to it and opened the door.

"They went in there," a voice said from outside. Then the other: "They showin' any iron?" Then silence.

Mack whispered, "We have one chance. We start this and we blast out through the garage door. That's our chance."

David said, "We can't leave, the gate's closed."

"The power failed. Therefore, it opened automatically. That's the way it works." Mack replied.

"You certainly know a lot about this place," Caroline said.

"I know everything about this place." As he spoke, he watched David carefully. He had detected something there beyond the general level of mistrust of Mack Graham. Did David know anything more? Suspect it? Mack was watching.

"They came in this way," a male voice said.

Mack saw a shape appear at the door, so he got David and Caroline into the truck. There was room behind the seat for the portal.

"What about me?" Katie asked.

"Ride in the bed," Mack said.

"I will not."

He took Katie by the collar of her blouse and lifted her off the ground.

"You will. And you will provide covering fire or they will shoot our tires out, because these two know what they're doing. Do you understand me?"

The two shooters had opened the garage door and were moving carefully closer. Good soldiers don't hurry unless that's the only choice.

"Okay, folks," one of the men said. "We saw you come in here and we got the door covered. We want to see what you're carrying."

With an enormous rattling cough, the old truck's engine came to life. Mack jammed the gas to the floor and it shot forward, slamming into the garage door.

One of the men raised his rifle and fired across the line of vehicles, but the bullet hit a dust-covered Oldsmobile and went wild.

Mack backed up until the truck hit the back wall, then ground the gears into first.

"Is it fragile?" he shouted.

"Of course it's fragile!" Caroline responded.

On Mack's second try, the truck crashed through the door and out into the driveway.

Mack turned out into the grounds, avoiding the choke of vehicles in the drive and-he hoped-most of the marauders.

He drove down the driveway and through the gate into the outside world.

A view opened to the flaring dawn in the east, as to the north and west, the supernova set in purple haze. Mack headed toward Raleigh, from which he could see smoke rising. Was the convoy already there and raising a little h.e.l.l? Fine, he'd deliver the portal, and with it Caroline and David. Let Wylie join him in tearing the information out of them, he was good at it. And Katie, too. She was going to enjoy sweet revenge.

DAVID FORD'S JOURNAL: EIGHT I am writing this in my notebook as we drive toward Raleigh. There is little time, and I believe that this will be my last entry. After this, anything can happen. Herbert Acton offers no instructions for this period of extreme chaos.

In my last entry, I spoke briefly of the plan that I see, and with the appearance of the new star, its outlines are extremely clear. Also, it is already in our hands, in detail. The plan was expressed to a man half-mad with G.o.d, in a cave on the island of Patmos. The Book of Revelation was written in the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, about a year before the great fire that consumed Rome.

In all probability, the Romans were right to blame the Christians. On one level, John's book is a coded message about the destruction of what was then the great Babylon of the world, the center of sin and oppression, Rome.

On a deeper level, though, Revelation is a doc.u.ment of the lost science, which describes very precisely what will unfold as time ends.

We are most a.s.suredly being judged. Those who will not go forward are tainted with the mark of the beast; the elect are ascending. And the dead have indeed risen, in the sense that, statistically, there is a living body here on earth-or was, before this happened-for every single person who has ever lived in history. Reincarnation is real, and, as this disaster began, all human souls were in the physical state.

And now we see the final sign: "And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads."

Seven is the number of completion. A dragon may be a comet or star. In this case, it's the lowering monster that is bringing the destruction of the world.

I have written of the elect and the condemned. Now, I turn to the matter of us, those who are going in neither direction.

I will not write down what is to happen to us, for two reasons. First, nothing is certain. Second, in doing so I would, perhaps fatally, betray a great secret.

I do not believe that the man driving this vehicle has our best interests in mind. I believe he means to harm us.

I sit here, writing and waiting. It is my belief that Caroline and I and the portal-all three of us-have fallen into the hands of the enemy.

21.

REBELS.

The farther they got from the clinic, the more disturbed Caroline became about the fate of the rest of the cla.s.s. They were the core of the future, each one of them trained to carry out a fundamental task of governance. If all went well, there would be millions coming, and they would be urgently needed, every one of them.

Mack had been right, though. They could not stay where they were, and hiding the portal on the property-attempting to-was just too dangerous.

She just hoped that some of those carefully chosen people would be left. As David closed his little book and clutched her hand, she sensed that his thoughts were exactly the same.

As the invaded clinic disappeared behind them, though, she had to ask herself another question: had Mack captured them or rescued them? He was a subtle, skilled man, and she feared that this might go in a bad direction. She did not know exactly what he understood about the portal. He had watched her creating it, though, and had seen it in its finished state. He could not fail to recognize what it was.

It had come out of her mind and her hands, and existed at the vanishing edge between thought and reality. As she had painted it and the gold had done its work on her mind and body, she had remembered the lessons she'd taken about it in the cla.s.s. She remembered being taught to paint, remembered the special state of surrender that allowed the colors to flow, and a new reality to emerge out of the art in her hands and the science in her mind. But the most critical part of the creation of the portal, the mixing of the colors, had been done by Susan Denman. Should they need to do this again-if by some miracle there was time-Susan would be needed.

But they were all needed.

The science that enabled the creation of the portal was not like modern science. It taught that reality is not the hard, immutable, inevitable structure that appears all around us, but rather an idea that only seems impossible to change. Brute force-the lumberman's axe, the builder's tractor-appears to be the only way, but it is not the only way. When science and art come into harmony, miracles become ordinary.

No miracles in the here and now, though. She sat jammed in beside David, with Mack driving and Katrina Starnes crouching in the truck bed.

She looked over at Mack, trying to see in his face some hint of his intentions. His eyes were as dark and dangerous as gun barrels.

"Where are we going?"

He didn't answer.

As they pa.s.sed through the outskirts of Raleigh, the emptiness told her that the citizens who weren't attacking the clinic had probably left or been killed.

Here and there, untended wrecks lay abandoned in the road, and bodies in them and beside them. By the time they had reached the courthouse square at the center of the town, she had counted forty of them, most of them apparently the victims of gunshots.

They went around the courthouse square, turning, then turning again, until they were on the opposite side and once again facing out of town.

Finally, Mack stopped the truck with a scream of dry, old brakes. The three of them stared out the windshield, stunned silent by what they saw. From the bed behind them, Katie stifled a scream.

On the lampposts along the street, stretching at least a quarter of a mile to the entrance to the interstate, there were bodies hanging. Closest, a man dangled with his pants around his ankles. On the next lamppost, a state policeman in uniform hung slumped and still, his wide-brimmed trooper's hat on the ground beneath him. On the next one was a woman wrapped in so much duct tape that she looked like a coc.o.o.n.

There were easily two dozen of them, stretching off into the distance.

But they were not the reason that Mack had stopped. She saw that he was indifferent to these bodies. Who knew why they had been hanged or who had done it? Perhaps they were a sacrifice to the old G.o.ds, or perhaps they'd violated some sort of jerkwater martial law that the locals had declared. Maybe they had refused to partic.i.p.ate in the attack on the clinic.

In any case, it was all pointless. That final sign had sealed the matter, had it not?

Mack had stopped because of a great horde of people coming toward them, people filling the street and the sidewalk on both sides, inching toward them on their knees, their faces twisted with agony. They were singing tattered hymns. She heard s.n.a.t.c.hes of "Amazing Grace," "How Great Thou Art," "What a Friend We Have In Jesus."

Running up and down among them were frantic children, their shrill voices adding an anarchic note of panic to the howled songs. The people closest were sliding slowly, their knees shredded to the exposed bone.

She thought, then, that the people who had been hanged were probably human sacrifices, and, since that had not worked, they were now torturing themselves to death in an effort to induce G.o.d-or maybe the old G.o.ds-to save them.

This was the fundamental error of history being acted out in these desperate streets. The G.o.ds to whom they offered sacrifice did not exist and never had existed, and cosmic disaster was not the fault of man and never would be. Earth's history was not about G.o.ds at all, but rather a very large-scale scientific program that was aimed at creating a harvest of souls. Who the designers were, Caroline did not know, but she believed in their work with all her being, for vast numbers of the good were being freed every day, every hour, and taking the human experience up into a higher level of reality.

The end of the world wasn't a disaster at all. It was a huge, resounding, amazing success.

Mack sat staring at the crowd. His profile was granite. He had taken on the stillness of determination, and Caroline knew that he was about to drive right through them.

She said, "Mack, don't."