Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

So, okay, here we go. He wanted crazy, he was going to get crazy.

She backed up, then took in a deep breath and screamed her lungs out.

And—wow, that was something! Her heart was hammering, her body flushing with adrenaline. She did it again, then threw herself against the door.

The padding absorbed the blow without the slightest effect, which was genuinely disturbing and isolating, and made it quite easy to scream more, so she screamed and screamed and screamed, and roamed the cell, hurling herself against the walls, against the door, dropping to the floor and rolling and screaming, and screaming and screaming and screaming. But, then again, that’s what a padded cell is for.

She stopped. This was all well and good. She was putting on what must be a convincing performance. But she was also here for serious reasons. She needed to get the arc furnace running. There was a lot of gold to make and only a little from Guatemala to start the process, far less than she had expected to find. And there was the matter of the painting. It would be a meticulous, difficult process, enormously intimidating, and all of it needing to be done on a very tight and very precise schedule.

The whole world had arrived at the border of an unknown country, a rare shadow land that few men ever enter and fewer recall. Already, they were advanced into it, for the death of Aubrey Denman, an incalculable disaster, had not been predicted in any of the writings of Herbert Acton.

This was because he had not foreseen it. Her father had told the class, “There is a period at the end of a cycle of time that we call its omega point, where life itself enters the unknown. An omega point is a dark labyrinth from which only the few will escape.” He had smiled then, this gentle and compassionate man, a smile filled with hope and pain. “Be among the few,” he had said.

She rattled the door again, and this time it was no game. “Let me out,” she shouted. But there was only silence in reply.

This time, when she screamed, it was no act, and she screamed and screamed and screamed.

The staff is alerting me about poor Caroline again and again, but I sense that she’s taking advantage of the situation to do a little playacting, and I keep thinking that I need to let her do that. Somebody needs to be convinced, I feel sure. But I don’t want her to pretend so well that I have to put her in a jacket or shock her.

Caroline is brilliant. But how did she get here through all that mayhem on the outside? Was she helped, perhaps, by the resources of the Seven Families?

I wish that I could have proof that she is the real Caroline Light.

I have about convinced myself to take the risk of opening up to her. Despite the fact that I don’t have any recollection of her, I am tremendously drawn to her, and perhaps that is a sort of memory. If we were children when we last met, she would look entirely different, would she not?

After she drank the sedative, I held her in my arms and she felt as light as air, her body slack with sleep, her sangfroid gone. Her vulnerability broke my heart even as it filled it.

Glen turned up nothing unusual in her belongings. Her driver’s license seems genuine, for example, but what does that mean?

If she’s the real person and she isn’t in amnesia, I need her desperately.

Last night, there were monstrous, flaring, leaping auroras. Today, half the face of the sun is covered with gigantic sunspots.

The Internet, TV, and all telephone systems have more or less failed. Even the patient families we have relied on for food deliveries are not supplying us at this time, and we cannot reach them to find out what’s happening.

What happens when we eat our last food and burn our last fuel? And when the solar flares get worse, then what? What I need to know is how we survive.

At least Katie Starnes is becoming more at ease around me. She isn’t a problem like Caroline, and I would really welcome some development in our friendship. Just friends, though, sexual friends like we had in med school. No commitments, and I don’t think she’s looking in that direction, either. I hope not, at any rate, because this is no time to involve oneself in hopes for the future.

What’s my next step? Where do I turn? I don’t have a religion, not even some childhood thing to fall back on. My parents were scientists and atheists, just as I am. But right now, there are only three words that come to mind, that haunt me, that never leave my thoughts for long: God help us.

Again Mack heard them, pulsating out of the dark, long cries of human anguish. He could open neither his window nor his door, and he wasn’t absolutely sure that they were coming from inside the facility. With all the mayhem these days, they could be from the distant streets.

As scream after scream pealed out—but so faint, why did they use all this soundproofing?—his whole body was set to vibrating.

He pressed his intercom button.

“Yes, Mack?”

“Somebody’s upset.”

“It’s the new intake. She’s struggling again. We’re calling one of the residents for her.”

He threw himself on his bed. Damn, what did this mean? He would have sworn she was an actress, no more crazy than he was. But this was one hell of an act, damn her eyes.

He did not want to sweat over some worthless loony, he wanted to sleep. But there would be no sleep, they doled out their goddamn pills nowadays like they were gold fucking bars. Worse. Everybody around here was crawling in gold bars, but they damn well were begging for Lunesta. Damn fucking cheap bureaucrats.

“What’s her name?”

“You can ask her when she’s in the population.”

“Sweet Caroline, I already got that much. Also, the fact that she’s a bitch. That came through loud and clear.” After tonight’s transmission, General Wylie had come back inside of a minute. “Get me the name.”

At this point in time, any new arrival was important.

“She might be a bitch, but she’s suffering now, Mack.”

“Caroline… who?”

“Ask her!”

Well, the hell with it, the screaming had stopped, and thank you, God. He turned out his light—and, damn, the flickering out there was incredible. He went to his wire-enforced window. The sky was a flaring, jumping curtain of multicolored light.

He was not making the kind of progress that was needed. They should have put a whole team in here. He hated to admit it, but that was the truth of it. Too late now.

In Mexico City, in the embassy’s garden, he had watched the gods dancing in the night sky, watched Tezcatlipoca shift from man to jaguar to serpent, taunting and raging at his brother Quetzalcoatl. In Egypt, Quetzalcoatl was Osiris, the god of resurrection, and Tezcatlipoca was his brother Set, who cut him into small pieces. The Bible called them Cain and Abel. In Judea, the light and dark brothers had been Jesus and Judas.

He identified with Tezcatlipoca, El Gato, the night cat roaming and changing, the shadow cat. That’s where his nickname came from. Doing his work, he moved like a cat.

But just as he had planned to begin exploring patient and personnel files, he had suddenly been deprived of his ability to leave his room at night.

They’d found out that he’d been off the premises the night Dr. Ullman was killed. Well, yes.

Now this new director and patient turn up just when it was expected that the Acton group would be putting their leadership in place—and here he was, locked up like a monkey in a GODDAMN ZOO!

He twisted on the bed, as uncomfortable as a man in a rack. And that thought took his mind back down a path it loved to go and hated to go, the torture path.