Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

He went deeper, and as he did the heat rose and he writhed and fought, hammering his fists and kicking, reduced to the frenzy of a panicked child.

Cries came around him, and he could see forms embedded in the walls now, bright, blazing human shapes, and they were all crying out their innocence, but they were not innocent, he could hear it in their tone, a despairing cacophony that bore within it the discordant note of the lie.

A new pain joined the fire, a very definite pain in his right wrist.

And there was somebody yelling, and again and again he was hammering his wrist against the edge of the bedside table, and the exquisite old lamp was bouncing.

Gasping, he wallowed in the sheets, then held his wrist. Jesus God in heaven, had he broken it? No, just the skin, but he had hammered the devil out of it.

“What happened…”

The room was normal, everything quiet. His clock said six forty-five. “Katie?”

His bed was empty. She was gone, and he had to ask himself if she had ever been there.

He knew this imagery, of course. The Christian heaven and hell. So he’d dreamed it, that’s all that had happened, and no matter how vivid, it had been, in the end, just a dream. A symptom of stress, perhaps, but not the psychotic break he had feared.

A sudden voice from the little sitting room beside his bedroom startled him. Male, but who was it? Nobody on staff sounded like that. He threw open the door.

“Excuse me—”

He recognized the voice of The Today Show ’s Craig Harding. They were in the window at Rockefeller Center, and people were looking in on them. So the solar storm, also, must have passed and the satellites had switched on again, and the world had resumed. As he dressed, he listened hungrily to the news, which was basically about all the disruptions. But they were disruptions, not the end of the world.

He allowed himself to hope that Mrs. Denman’s white paper had been wrong.

In his luxurious marble shower, he imagined that the foaming body shampoo was washing off the madness of the night. For sure. If the solar storm was gone, life would return to normal very quickly now.

By the time he was striding down to the staff dining room for breakfast, he had put his dream aside.

As he descended the stairs, Glen MacNamara stood waiting for him.

“We have a patient missing.”

He absorbed this.

“Sam Taylor lost Mack.”

“When?”

He paused. “Yesterday afternoon.”

“ What? Why wasn’t I informed, Glen?”

“Nobody was informed. Sam was knocked out.”

“But Mack’s on lockdown! Surely the staff noticed this when he didn’t turn up at lights out.”

“Sam asked for time while he looked for him.”

“All night?”

“He let me know about ten.”

“Glen, it’s seven o’clock in the morning and the director of this institution is just finding this out?”

“Doctor, I didn’t see the need to wake you up. What could you do? This is my issue.”

David was about to really get into Glen MacNamara, but the truth was that he was right. He couldn’t have done anything to help.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Could Mack pose a danger to us?”

“It would be damn surprising if we ever saw or heard anything about him again. If you want me to guess, I’d say he won’t last a week out there. It’s hell, Doc. I’m telling you, from the smoke columns I see and all the infrastructure problems, folks are tearing each other apart.” He gestured toward the dining room. “Toast, bacon, coffee, and Gatorade. In here, everybody’s outraged. Out there, it would be a feast.”

They went in together. As he crossed to the buffet, Katie came close to him, discreetly touching his hand.

“At least that scumbag is gone,” she said quietly. “Nobody cared for him.” She brightened. “And anyway, the cable’s back and the sun looks better, and I’ve got a feeling we’re getting past this thing.”

Mrs. Denman’s paper had warned that the solar system was headed much deeper into the supernova’s debris field. Much deeper.

The truth insinuated itself into his mind. They had not come to the edge of the storm at all.

This was the eye.

Caroline woke up on her first morning in the general patient population in a state of intense unease. She didn’t actually wake up, because she hadn’t slept. She’d lain there with her eyes closed, worrying, primarily about David. She had a letter for him written by Herbert Acton, but it was not to be handed to him until he remembered his past, and to her that meant remembering their time together, their shared innocent life.

Herbert Acton had warned about this period right at the omega point, that it was too unsure for him to see into it clearly, so his instructions about these final days were vague.

Beyond the borders of history, which is where mankind was now, nothing was certain, and as the evil came to understand their fate, their efforts to escape it were going to make them incredibly dangerous. Many of them would actually want all of mankind to be destroyed, if they were destroyed.

David had remembered a lot, she could sense that. But if he did not remember her, he was not on mission, and time had run out.

Intending to confront him late last night, she had gone to his bedroom. She had hoped to feed him some of the potent white powder gold they had created in the arc furnace, and see if that helped.

Oddly, the door had been unlocked. When she slipped inside, she had discovered why: Katrina Starnes had come in before her, and was sharing his bed. Carelessly—or perhaps out of an unconscious desire to broadcast her conquest—she had failed to pull the door closed.

She had never been warned about him falling in love with anybody else, and she was appalled and deeply saddened.

She had stood there, her face flaming with embarrassment, her heart wretched, her mind at a loss as to what to do now. They were too involved with each other to notice her, and she had quietly retreated.

When she’d returned to her room, all she could do was cry into her pillow.

The first thing she’d done waking up this morning was to arrange an appointment with him. “We’ll need to squeeze you in,” Katie had said in concealing, velvet tones, “but I think I can get you fifteen minutes.”

Katie was no fool. She sensed a rival, and no way was Caroline getting any more of his time than that.

Well, Katie was going to be hurt and there was nothing Caroline could do about it. She’d been hurt herself last night, hurt terribly, watching them in their pleasure.

She had been assured by her father that David would remember everything the moment he laid eyes on her. If there were any gaps, she could show him his trigger, which was an image of Quetzalcoatl.

Neither thing had worked, and she was no longer able to contact her father for further advice, not unless the phones returned, which they had not. So she waited now, sitting with her hands folded, watching Katrina bring David his morning coffee.

As Katie crossed the room, her body spoke to Caroline of its conquest. And by the way she laid the cup near his hand, with a too-furtive glance toward his lower extremities, she knew that she was remembering him in his passion.

She fought back her anger and jealousy, but Katie sensed her feelings and her eyes darted at her, and there was between them a moment of daggers. Then Katie went flouncing out, her cheeks brushed with rose… and Caroline was horrified to glimpse, just above the edge of the young woman’s neckline, a telltale shadowy darkness from a mark concealed below.

Katie was judged! Caroline felt actually queasy—physically ill. This was the first person she’d seen with a mark, but there were going to be a lot of them, she knew that.