As a glare brighter by far than the sun flooded down from the object now speeding overhead, David tried to speak in the man's ear, but he pulled away and ran. David knew that he must look mad, covered as he was by dust.

Still, there was no choice now, no time to waste, so he ran to a cowering family, the children so panicked that they were beyond control, the mother screaming, the father trying to shield them from the thing pa.s.sing overhead. He picked up a girl of perhaps ten.

"Come on," he said, "come with me."

"What's that thing?" the father shouted.

What did he mean, the thing in the sky or the portal? No time to find out. David grabbed him by the collar. "Come on, follow me!"

As he went toward the portal with the screaming girl trying to pull away from him, he felt once again heat from above, but also saw that the light was getting less bright. The gigantic meteor was not going to strike here, it was going farther south. But he couldn't think about that now. He had reached the portal where Caroline stood with her arms outspread, calling to the crowd, telling them they could go through, in a voice that was lost in the roar of voices and the wind that had followed the meteor, and was now shaking the few trees left standing, and drawing dust up like a ma.s.sive cloud of roiling smoke from the ruins of the mansion.

And now, as suddenly as it had come, the great light was gone, disappearing beneath the southern horizon, which glowed briefly with white light, and then was once again dark.

Mike said, "It hit in the ocean."

"I know it." And they both also knew exactly what, therefore, would be coming. The elevation here was six hundred feet, which would not be nearly enough.

"What's in there?" the father asked him.

"A new world," David said, and did the only thing left for him to do, which was that he thrust the screaming, writhing little girl through the portal.

"Jesus G.o.d," the father cried, and the mother and younger brother both screamed in terror as they saw the girl inside the portal. She turned and put her hands to her head as if she was going to pull her hair out, and her face twisted into a scream that they could see but not hear. She came to the portal and threw herself against it, pressing herself and clawing at it, her face grotesque. From this side, she looked as if she was pressing herself against gla.s.s, and David understood for the first time that there was no return, and he remembered what had happened to Katrina's arm when she had tried to pull it out.

"Do not stop, do NOT try to come back," he shouted to the people crowding toward the glory of it, a sparkling dawn, enormous across the whole expanse of the lawn, concealing behind it the ruins of the house.

He took the father by the hand and said to him, "You need to help your daughter," and the father took his wife's arm and she held her son, and the three of them stepped through. A big old springer spaniel with gray dewlaps barked twice after they had gone, and jumped through behind them.

So far, none of these people showed the slightest sign of the mark, but G.o.d help any that did, should they try to go through.

Dawn was gold and clear in the east of the portal, and the family, now hand in hand, walked a short distance. The father bent down to feel the gra.s.s beneath their feet, then turned and spread his arms wide.

Along the southern horizon in this world, though, there had appeared a shimmering line, and David thought he knew what it was, and Mike certainly knew. "We just got a few minutes," he said.

Inside the portal, David saw other people appearing, coming from other directions, and realized for the first time that this place was indeed not the only one where the portal was present. Just as they had been promised that it would in the cla.s.s, it had appeared all over the world.

"Your father was right," he told Caroline. "It's holographic."

David thought, at this point, that he understood the mechanics of judgment. Over the many lifetimes that come and go during a great earthly cycle, we are born and born again, making choices as we go along, each time locked in physical bodies that remember little of the soul's past and its aims, where we enact lives that either add to the weight of the soul or reduce it. Evil makes it heavy, good makes it light, and the vast number of people die, each life, a little lighter than before.

Then, as the cycle's end approaches, the chance to be reborn anew ceases. The changes become permanent and most people are harvested to higher life. Some, who have ruined themselves, sink away, and a few remain to take the wisdom of the last cycle forward into the next.

"We got maybe ten minutes, man!" Mike said.

So David believed he understood these sacred mechanics, which was lovely, but this was no time to stand watching the spectacle and indulging his inner professor.

He raised his voice. "Get moving, everybody! Everybody! NOW! NOW!"

People stirred but were still unwilling.

"They're scared," Caroline said. "They still don't understand."

"There's no time left!" He knew that this scene was being repeated all over the world, and many would fall by the wayside, and also that this was intended, that it fit the gigantic plan of life, and for just an instant he sensed the presence of the mind that had conceived the universe ... and felt as if he was in the presence of a child.

Caroline stepped to the center of the portal. "We can go through," she shouted. "Look, we can all do this!" But then she was absorbed in the milling, panicky crowd.

"Caroline!" He waded after her.

Ahead, he saw her hair, then he saw a tall, ghostly figure come to her, and she was lifted by her hair, her face distended with pain, her eyes bulging.

Against her throat, Mack held a jagged blade that had been broken off an electric hedge clipper.

26.

THE LAST BREATH.

Across the world, as the gigantic event reached its climax, all the treasures and wonders of history were being swept away. Some of the boulders that had broken off the moon were the size of islands, and they had begun striking Earth mercilessly. Those that hit the oceans generated waves unlike any that had been seen even during the climax of the Ice Age, black mountains of water that were now sweeping away whole nations.

London and Rio and Tokyo and Amsterdam were among the first to disappear in the maelstrom. A boulder the size of Bermuda slammed into the central Ukraine, releasing the equivalent energy of a billion hydrogen bombs and instantly vaporizing every living thing from St. Petersburg to the Black Sea.

The shock waves of the meteor impacts were so great that they completely disintegrated cities from Casablanca to Paris, and the gigantic explosions they generated made millions instantly deaf.

Whole species of animals died in an instant, herds upon the prairies, fish in the sea, and the bodies of great schools drifted to the ocean floor where they would become fossils. In millions of years, very different hands would raise them as human hands had raised the mats of fish skeletons that had died exactly the same way in the Permian extinction over two hundred million years before.

There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.

Everyone who was not near a portal was afflicted with the stain, and they had come to understand their fate, and they cut themselves to pieces and burned themselves and ripped at themselves to remove the stain, but they could not remove the stain, and in their billions they lay writhing from their mutilations, or they ran in doomed streets, or tried to end their agony with suicide, only to discover that the death of the body was what sprung the trap. Their darkness also grew and grew, until they were reduced to a state that is darker than darkness itself, for this new skin reflected no light at all. They were shadow people now, sweeping through the streets in despairing packs, their cries like the wind wailing on a winter night.

A series of more than fifty objects struck the Pacific, including one that sent a tsunami slamming into the coasts of Washington and Oregon, drowning Vancouver and Seattle and Portland, inundating San Francisco, and sweeping across the entire Los Angeles basin with such energy that it gushed through the mountain pa.s.ses to the east, finally expending itself a hundred frothing, foaming miles into the high desert.

The people who had come to the Acton Clinic were streaming into the portal in a more orderly manner, as the members of the cla.s.s moved among them, urging them forward.

Mack had dragged Caroline into the leafy shambles of some trees, and David had gone with them.

"We're going through together," Mack said. "The three of us."

"Mack, it can't work." Mack's body was almost entirely a shadow now, as if he was becoming a living darkness.

"Then I rip her throat out."

Surely he could not be deceived another time. Surely he understood that the portal would not let him through.

David did the only thing he could, which was to lead Mack to the portal, which was now busy with people crossing, moving easily and quickly, ten and twenty at a time walking into what was becoming a great, wondering crowd on the other side.

There came a rumbling sound that quickly deepened, soon trembling the ground.

"Hurry," Mack said.

David pushed a pregnant mother through. Until every one of them was safe, he would not himself go through.

On the distance, the horizon began shimmering.

"Hurry, G.o.dd.a.m.n you!"

"Go without me," Caroline shouted against the rising thunder of the oncoming tsunami.

David pulled at people. "Everybody," he shouted, "GO GO GO!"

As he cried out, yet another enormous light appeared in the north, this time striking the ground below the horizon. Immediately a great, bright swarm of objects rose from where it had fallen-and David thought that this was ice dislodged from the polar cap just as it had been dislodged twelve thousand years ago by a strike on the Laurentian glacier. The icebergs would probably fall as far south now as they had then, when they had hit from the Carolinas to New Mexico, leaving, among other artifacts, the hundreds of thousands of craters of the Carolina Dells.

Finally, the last of the people were through, except for Mike and Del and Glen, who stood with him and with Caroline.

"So how do I do it?" Mack asked. Embracing Caroline tightly, he moved toward the portal. "If I burn, she burns," he cried against the enormous, echoing thunder of the onrushing water.

David did the only thing he could think of, he exploded into Mack's back, throwing himself against the larger man-and Del and Mike and Glen joined him, kicking him and shoving him-and then, suddenly, he was lighter and David saw, on the other side of the portal, that Caroline had come free and crossed.

Slowly Mack turned. He no longer had the blade. In fact, he no longer had the hand that had held it, but his open wrist did not pump blood. David could see in the eerie wells of his eyes the reason for this: Mack was dead. He was still moving and still thought himself alive, but this was not a living creature anymore, this dark, shifting form was a corpse.

The air began to scream and to suck them back, and even the edges of the portal trembled.

Glen turned and jumped through it, followed by Del and Mike, and Mack groaned to see them do it, and gargled deep rage in his throat, and if a corpse could utter a sound, this was what it would be like.

Mack's remaining hand grabbed David's throat-but David managed to twist away and half jump through the portal. Mack still held him, though, and began to pull him back, and he felt moving through the part of his body that was between the future and the past a churning coldness, as if the absolute waters of death were flooding into him.

Laughing now, Mack dragged at him, and the coldness turned to fire, and he knew that he was being sliced apart-but then felt hands grab the arm that was flailing on the far side of the portal, and felt himself being pulled.

Mack's eyes, a moment ago empty with death, now sparkled with hatred. Despite his injuries and the shadow that had enveloped him, he remained strong. In fact, his grip was like iron, and David thought, This is what a demon is. This is what a demon is. He struggled with all his might, but he could not overcome Mack's steel strength. He struggled with all his might, but he could not overcome Mack's steel strength.

Behind Mack, though, he saw what appeared to be a great, dark cliff, and he knew that this was the wave, and it was here, now.

They were both swept up in it and smashed as if by the fist of a giant against the portal-and suddenly, there was silence.

David scrambled to his feet. The wave was. .h.i.tting, and he braced himself. He did not understand why this had happened to him. Was there some sort of mistake? He had not judged himself evil, had not marked himself ... for it is always a choice, to accept the mark of the beast. We are our own judges, but we always choose correctly.

David now found himself face-to-face with something that was no longer even a human form. Mack had disappeared entirely, into the deepest darkness he had ever seen or known possible, a darkness as deep as all the sins of the world, radiating evil like brutal heat. Embedded in it he could see the billions of faces of those who had lost their souls, the faces distended by what must have been truly terrible screams, but the screams were silent.

They seemed to be taken up, somehow, into the wave, but it wasn't affecting him, he was watching it as if through gla.s.s-and then he understood: he was looking back in time, back in time, through the portal. through the portal.

Then he was racing through the portal, and the old Earth, the ruined Earth, was becoming smaller and smaller, dwindling faster and faster, disappearing so totally that it was as if it had never been.

What had hit the portal was not only a gigantic tidal wave, it was also a wave in hypers.p.a.ce, capturing in its dark waters all who had made the commitment to evil. Him, it had simply pushed away-and through the portal.

And then he saw a face appear, much closer than the others, the eyes terrible in their desperation, the mouth distorted by great agony, the hands clawing through time, clawing and burning, and despite all his effort and the will of a demon, Mack the Cat became outlined with fire and then became fire, but still the face screamed, still the agony went on.

As David watched in sorrow and loathing, Mack transformed from the dark-cloaked figure he had been on the roof of the clinic into another person entirely, a man wearing the uniform of some sort of officer, black, the chest spread with medals. And then David saw the red armband with the black swastika, and then the body changed again, this time wearing the splendid suit of a wealthy nineteenth-century businessman, and then it wore the flowing robes of a cardinal, and then the changes flickered past so fast that it was impossible to see anything except that David knew that he was actually watching Mack's whole time on Earth move past, lifetime after lifetime of evil.

Seeing this caused stirrings of memory from his own long-past time, but the memories were not evil, they were haunting and wonderful and full of nostalgia, loves, and hard work; they were lives he would be proud to live again.

Mack was washed away into the blackness then, a spark instantly absorbed into what was at once a tidal wave containing a whole ocean, and a wave of purest evil.

The darkness itself began to recede, until there was nothing left of the past in the portal, which itself shuddered, then faded, and slipped into memory.

David found himself looking out across a broad meadow that ended in trees, and beyond the trees, the vine-choked pink debris of a city, its ruined towers glowing in the dawn.

The ruins were very, very old, and they looked dark and haunted with the terrors of the last cycle. But they must be filled with useful materials, even with shelter.

But where was everybody else? In fact, where was he?

"David?"

Her! He'd come through the portal backward, that was all, and he whirled around and there she stood, her body framed by the golden light of dawn, as the sun, now placid again, rose behind her.

All across the meadow, sitting silently and watching the new sun rise, were the people they had rescued, and more; in fact, there were thousands upon thousands in this verdant new world.

There was a man with her, and they were hand in hand, and a knife cut to the frightened heart of David's love.

"David, don't you remember your old teacher?" the man asked.

Flushed with relief, then with the joy of meeting again after all these years, he took the shoulders of Charles Light, looked into his eyes, and the happiness of those days came flooding back, and with it all the memories that had remained lost, not the important things, which he had already remembered, but the less important ones, the way the desks were arranged, how exciting it was to understand the marvels they were being taught. And, above all, he remembered Caroline.

They had not been lovers in any adult sense, but in an instant he recaptured all the innocent happiness he had known with her, and remembered the promises they had made.

She stood before him, her eyes cast down, the sunlight flaming in her hair, a picture of dizzying sensuality and innocence all mixed together, and in that moment he truly understood how perfectly the human spirit is paralleled by the personalities of the old G.o.ds, and he saw her as the Lady of the Starry Skirt, at once an earthy, sweaty, soft woman and a star keeper, her body belonging to youth and the promise of the womb, her soul to the heavens.

He could not speak. He was beyond speech.

She came into his arms, and when he embraced her, she felt as soft as a cloud. Her eyes regarded him, looking in amazement at his face, then fluttering closed in the cathedral of their kiss.

For a moment, the kiss was the center of the universe-and then there came a hand to his shoulder.

They slipped away from one another. Charles Light was smiling, but then his expression became more serious.

"We have to organize them," he said. "We have to get this thing rolling."

Arm in arm, he and Caroline headed back toward the great crowd, where children were now running and dogs cavorting, and people were relaying down to the nearby river to get water.

"There's a lot of work to do," David said.

"That's why we're here," a voice replied. It was Del, and he and Mike were arm in arm with a third soldier. They had found Tim.

Tim was appalled by the magnitude of the situation. All these people without food, without shelter.

"I don't know where to start!"