The judged were still moving and breathing, but they were already outside of life, in a state where no further change could take place. They just didn't know it yet.

She positioned her hand in his, so that her palm faced the portal and his hand enclosed hers. She had no idea what she was doing, she was just trying to make something up that he would believe.

"This is doing what?"

"Imprinting you," she said. "Then you can go through."

"What about my people?"

David said, "You imprint them. Do it the same way."

"Do you feel anything yet, Mack?"

"Yeah, actually, the same thing I felt before. Warmth."

"You tried this before?"

"It nearly burned me like it did her. Jesus!"

Caroline drew his hand away. "Okay, you're imprinted."

He addressed himself to David. "There's a general out there. I am going to imprint some of his men and send them through your portal. If all goes well, we will take it and put it to good use. But if not, you are going to experience h.e.l.l firsthand, both of you, until we are told the truth about how to make it work."

"I don't know what else to tell you," David said. "You just imprint and step through. That's all."

"You are a poor liar, David."

Outside, the snarling of the big vehicles was joined by a ferocious thunder of weapons.

"Those praying crazies," Mack said pleasantly. "He'll kill 'em all just to tidy the place up."

He picked up the portal and went to the door. He opened it. "I need a guard in here right now."

"Mack," came a gruff voice. "How the h.e.l.l are you?"

The door closed.

"Come on," David said softly.

As David led her toward the front of the restaurant, the kitchen door was opening again.

They went through into the wrecked dining room, with sunlight glaring in through the shattered windows, tables smashed, chairs upended, and a great splash of blood across one wall.

Behind them, they heard a curse. The young soldier sent to guard them had discovered that the room was empty.

"Quick!"

She followed David into the street. The door by which they'd entered the restaurant opened onto the alley beside it, but this one faced directly into the street where the convoy was parked. Closest was an enormous machine with a slanted front. It was bigger than a truck, emblazoned with three stars, flying a general's flag, and painted with a lurid image of skeletal Cimil, the Mayan G.o.d of the underworld. Atop the vehicle was a remote-controlled .50-caliber machine gun-which immediately moved toward David and Caroline.

"Down!"

But then it whirled, its motors screaming, spinning upward toward a huge silver object that was just appearing overhead.

Caroline felt washed by the sacredness that these silver objects seemed to carry with them like a sort of force field. The urge, when they were near, was to drop to your knees.

The heavily armed soldiers looked extremely uneasy, clutching their weapons, looking up. Around the convoy, in piles, sprawled, twisted, and b.l.o.o.d.y, were hundreds of bodies, the remains of the people who had been on their knees. Piled among the dead adults were their dead children.

There was a huge sound, a hissing thud, and light shone down from the silver device, flooding the convoy in powder white. A moment later, one of the soldiers cried out, leaped from his vehicle, and throwing off his helmet, began rising.

"Stop that man," General Wylie shouted. "Shoot him!"

The machine gun fired, bullets streaming toward the rising soldier ... and then sparks appeared in the light around him, a pattern that grew as the gun continued to fire.

"The bullets are stopping," Caroline said. She gripped David's hand as they both watched, awed by the magnificent and flawless display of technological power they were seeing.

Then the convoy command vehicle's hatch flew open and three young soldiers piled out, also throwing aside their helmets and leaping, then rising into the light. General Wylie emptied his pistol at them, but with the same lack of effect that the machine gunner had experienced.

"Launch grenades," the general roared, and another soldier pulled a bulky-looking item out of one of the vehicles, loaded it with a large projectile, and fired it upward.

With a clap of thunder and a burst of flame, it shot into the light and exploded-or started to. The projectile cracked apart in slow motion, the burning ga.s.ses and shrapnel oozing into a mushroom shape and stopping, the explosion frozen like a flower dotted with bits of steel. As if it was as light as the air itself, the frozen explosion drifted away on the breeze.

As this was happening, there came from the bodies all around the convoy a stirring and a groaning, and, at the same time, from the great machine above waves of what could only be described as directed emotion-waves of love, in fact, that made David and Caroline draw closer together, and made them both wish the same wish, that they, also, could join the mysteries unfolding above. Except ... they didn't, actually. They were workers and needed elsewhere, and-if they could only reach it-an important task was waiting for them.

The heaps of dead began coming to their feet, their wounds disappearing, life returning to their bodies. For an instant, David found himself looking directly into the eyes of one of them, and in the instant that he was connected to this man, David relived his whole life, not in linear memory, but as a compressed, stunningly poignant, and fragile instant of pure emotion, and it was good, so good that it hurt and he sobbed aloud, unable to contain his emotion.

Beside him Caroline also sobbed, and the dead began to rise into what at first seemed to be a great, round opening in the bottom of the craft. But as his eyes followed them, he saw that this was not an opening in the ship, but in the universe itself, for its velvet, living darkness was spread with a spectacle of stars.

Around them, more and more of the slaughtered rose upward, disappearing into the star garden at the heart of the machine.

He saw, at the very top of this perfect sky, the constellation of the Pleiades, the Sailing Ones, so clear that the vivid colors of the stars was clearly visible, the magenta of Pleione and the faint red of its blazing hydrogen ring, the white of Alcyone, and the iridescent blue of Electra.

As he watched, the people ascended in increasing numbers, rising one after another, and he saw them go sailing upward, and transform as they did into bright points of light.

Then the last of them were swept up into the fountain of stars. As suddenly as it had opened, the gateway in the sky closed. He was left watching the leaping death of the auroras' return, and he bowed his head and fell to the ground crouching, and covered his face, so great was the pain of losing touch with that beauty.

"And so the dead rise," he said, "and now to follow there will be great earthquakes."

Caroline, weeping also, clutched at him, and their love-so essential to maintaining one's humanity in dark times-enabled them to help each other, and give one another the strength they needed to go on.

But the convoy remained in chaos, with men screaming and leaping on the vehicles, trying to somehow jump into the sky, tearing at one another, bellowing and cursing and fighting to get to a door that was already closed.

Mack and General Wylie strode among them, their pistols in their hands. When a soldier clambered onto a vehicle, Mack or the general would shoot him and he would lurch off, hitting the ground with a thud.

Taking advantage of the confusion, David pulled Caroline into a shattered drugstore, and they were going through to the rear when they both saw it at the same time-a flash of green in the street outside.

Two soldiers had come into view. Between them they held the portal, which now contained an image of a sweep of meadow that ended on a riverbank. Beyond this stretched an enormous view that faded into blue hills.

Corralled at gunpoint by Mack and the general, soldiers shuffled toward the portal. They were eager at first, looking at it in wonder.

Mack held the first man's hand against it until he s.n.a.t.c.hed it away, pulling at his tunic.

When the man hesitated, the general lifted his gun as casually as he might a spoonful of soup, and sent a bullet through his head.

"This f.u.c.ker works, at least," he said as the young solder dropped.

The next soldier stepped right into the portal.

Caroline gripped David's arm. On the neck of the man going through, they could see a telltale shadow.

Then this man also hesitated. His body jerked and he seemed to stop, his front half in the portal. Mack kicked him in the small of the back, shoving him forward.

For a moment, he seemed to go deeper.

"Jesus, it's working," Mack exclaimed. "We have got it, General!"

They were congratulating one another when the soldier, still only halfway through the portal, burst into flames. His writhing became frantic, his head jerking from side to side, his midriff lurching and squirming, and suddenly the man was out, falling back, hitting the ground as he was consumed, screaming in agony as the fire engulfed him.

In the air there was the same horrifying odor of cooked flesh and hair that had filled the kitchen when Katrina had burned.

General Wylie glared at Mack. David could see the veins standing out on his neck.

"You stupid a.s.shole! f.u.c.k you! f.u.c.k you!"

Mack stood at attention, taking it.

"Get those freaks," Wylie muttered. "I want them front and center."

"Get them," Mack snapped.

Soldiers looked at each other.

Mack pointed directly at the store-at them, at the precise spot they had imagined that they were hiding.

"DO IT NOW!" he roared.

Caroline and David ran for their lives.

The portal remained where they had left it.

22.

DEATH BEYOND THE END OF TIME.

For a moment, their pursuers lost sight of them in the alley and David understood very clearly that these seconds were their last and only chance-whereupon they came up against a chain-link fence.

"David!"

He grabbed it and shook it with frustration-and then saw that it was loose along the bottom. "This way," he said, lifting it, ignoring what the jagged metal was doing to his hands.

She went through and he followed, pulling it back into place behind him.

They found themselves in a yard with a greenhouse, with their pursuers close behind.

Almost certainly, it was going to be a trap, but their only hope of not being seen was to duck into the structure.

They found themselves in a steamy and exotic world of vivid yellow and blue and red orchids. They went deep among the vines and crouched there, hiding, barely breathing.

They did not hear Mack the Cat approaching, and David was almost ready to move to a broken window he had noticed when he suddenly realized that this master stalker was three feet away from them. From here, he could just see the side of Mack's head, and his nostrils were dilating as he smelled the air, trying to catch a scent of his prey.

The humid air was heavy, though, and the way he moved his eyes, flicking them from place to place with the suddenness of the expert predator, David knew that he could not smell any faint perfume or sweat that would betray their presence.

He turned, and now he was so close that David could have reached out through the vines and touched the gun in his hand.

Absolute stillness. Absolute quiet. Except ... what was that rustling? A glance at Caroline revealed that she was flushed with effort, both hands clapped over her face. Something in here had triggered an allergy and she was fighting a sneeze.

Mack sighed, then looked toward the door. He started out and David's whole body shuddered with hope-but then he stopped. Slowly, the long, predatory face turned his way. He seemed to be looking directly into David's eyes. But no, then he turned away again. When he moved, it was like watching a dancer, swift and lethal ... but, in this case, making an error.

A moment later, low voices came from the front of the greenhouse. There was a curse, sharp, urgent, then the clatter of the door.

Caroline started to rise, but David gripped her arm and she froze. And saw what he saw-Mack, still right there, listening, sniffing the air, his eyes darting. And so he remained for long minutes, so still that he was almost impossible to see through the vines. And then there would be another dance step to another part of the greenhouse, and another long silence while he tested the s.p.a.ce for presence.

Eventually, though, he was gone. They never saw him slip away, but his absence was signaled in a way that felt surprisingly like love: a cricket began chirping, and soon the greenhouse was splendid with their song.

Warily, David slipped out of the deep tangle and lifted his head above the edge of a broken window. His view was across a short lawn to a bobbing flower bed full of impatiens and petunias, and beyond it a cottage, and that, he thought, was where Mack might yet lurk.

Overhead, a meteor appeared, falling gracefully through the pink plasma that dominated the sky. The new star had set, and to the east, down low where the sky should be glowing pink with the blush of predawn, there lay instead a line of deep bloodred. David estimated that they would have about an hour of semidarkness before the sun rose once again.

It was during this brief night that he intended to make his move. His plan was to return to the Acton Clinic, hoping that the cla.s.s would still be there, or enough of the cla.s.s to still carry out some part of their mission.

Soft voices came to his attention. He looked up and down the lawn. Then he saw them, three men. One was dressed in ill-fitting military fatigues, the other two in sweatsuits. None of them were Mack, and that worried him. Their young faces were tight and their eyes were hunter-quick as they came into the yard. One of them went up to the back door of the house and tried it. He drew it open and looked back at his friends.

An instant later, he exploded-not as if he'd been blown up with a bomb, but as if he was literally ripping apart as he lurched backward. His head shot up and hit the doorjamb with a thick crunch, then came rolling through the air, hit in the petunias, and didn't bounce. The face, expressionless, stared. Even as this was happening, a flash of black and steel appeared under the right arm, which flew up as if in surprise, then tumbled out into the gra.s.s. Slowly, the fingers closed.

The body buckled, and as it did, he could see a shadowy form just inside the house, wielding an axe.

Not Mack, though, not that humped figure.

Whoever was in there was long past rescue, hiding in psychotic rage and despair, in the state of savagery that would be emerging now in all the judged.

The survivors poured gunfire into the house, creating a cataract of noise and a fury of flashes.

David grabbed Caroline's arm. "Come on," he said Together, they leaped through the gla.s.s wall of the greenhouse. As they dashed down the driveway, pa.s.sing the two survivors just ten feet away, one of them shouted and wheeled his gun toward them, and David saw a red laser telltale bouncing on Caroline's back, and the bullets pa.s.sed so close they felt surges of air.