“Stay down, Luke!” Tim shouted when the boy began to squirm beneath him. “Stay down!”
Bullets punched through the Suburban’s rear windows. Shards of glass fell on Tim’s back. Blood was running down the rear of the driver’s seat. Even with the steady hum that seemed to be coming from everywhere, Tim could hear the slugs passing just above him, each one making a low zzzz sound.
There was the sping-spang of bullets punching through metal. The Suburban’s hood popped up. Tim found himself thinking of the final scene in some old gangster movie, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow doing a death-dance as bullets ripped into their car and into them. Whatever Luke’s plan had been, it had gone disastrously wrong. Mrs. Sigsby was dead; he could see her blood spattered on the remains of the windshield. They would be next.
Then, screams from ahead and shouts from the right. Two more bullets came through the right side of the Suburban, one of them actually twitching the collar of Tim’s shirt. They were the last two. Now what he heard was a vast, grinding roar.
“Let me up!” Luke gasped. “I can’t breathe!”
Tim got off the boy and peered between the front seats. He was aware that his head might be blown off at any second, but he had to see. Luke got up beside him. Tim started to tell the boy to get back down, but the words died in his throat.
This can’t be real, he thought. It can’t be.
But it was.
23
Avery and the others stood in a circle around the big phone. It was hard to see because of the Stasi Lights, so bright and so beautiful.
The sparkler, Avery thought. Now we make the sparkler.
It coalesced from the lights, ten feet high and spitting brilliance in every direction. The sparkler wavered back and forth at first, then the group mind took firmer control. It swung against the phone’s gigantic receiver and knocked it from its gigantic base. The dumbbell-shape landed askew against the jungle gym. Voices in different languages spilled from the mouthpiece, all asking the same questions: Hello, do you hear me? Hello, are you there?
YES, the children of the Institute answered, and in one voice. YES, WE HEAR YOU! DO IT NOW!
A circle of children in Spain’s Sierra Nevada National Park heard. A circle of Bosnian children imprisoned in the Dinaric Alps heard. On Pampus, an island guarding the entrance to Amsterdam’s harbor, a circle of Dutch children heard. A circle of German children heard in the mountainous forests of Bavaria.
In Pietrapertosa, Italy.
In Namwon, South Korea.
Ten kilometers outside the Siberian ghost town of Chersky.
They heard, they answered, they became one.
24
Kalisha and the others reached the locked door between them and Front Half. They could hear the gunfire clearly now, because the hum had abruptly stopped, as if somewhere a plug had been pulled.
Oh, it’s still there, Kalisha thought. It’s just not for us anymore.
A groaning began in the walls, an almost human sound, and then the steel door between the access tunnel and Front Half’s F-Level blew outward, smashing Rosalind Dawson before it and killing her instantly. The door landed beyond the elevator, twisted out of shape where its heavy hinges had been. Above, the wire mesh guarding the overhead fluorescent tubes was rippling, casting crazy underwater shadows.
The groaning grew louder, coming from everywhere. It was as if the building were trying to tear itself apart. In the Suburban, Tim had thought of Bonnie and Clyde; Kalisha thought of the Poe story about the House of Usher.
Come on, she thought at the others. Fast!
They ran past the torn door with the torn woman lying beneath it in a spreading pool of blood.
George: What about the elevator? It’s back there!
Nicky: Are you crazy? I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m not getting in any goddam elevator.
Helen: Is it an earthquake?
“No,” Kalisha said.
Mindquake. I don’t know how—
“. . . how they’re doing it, but that’s what . . .” She took a breath and tasted something acrid. It made her cough. “That’s what it is.”
Helen: Something’s wrong with the air.
Nicky said, “I think it’s some kind of poison.” Those fuckers, they never stop.
Kalisha shoved open the door marked STAIRS and they began to climb, all of them coughing now. Between D- and C-Level, the stairs began to shake beneath them. Cracks zig-zagged down the walls. The fluorescents went out and the emergency lights came on, casting a flat yellow glow. Kalisha stopped, bent over, dry-retched, then started up