Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

This distant star—previously unknown to science—is, in reality, what controls life on earth. I know from modern paleoastronomy that light of this monster first washed the earth forty thousand years ago, leaving a huge swath of the planet, from Australia through southern and central Africa, empty of large, plains-dwelling animals. They died because they could not hide from the gamma rays. It came again during the end of the last Ice Age, and once again, the plains-dwelling animals, the mammoths, the mastodons, and so many others, were decimated.

So violet is the highest, and therefore also the most dangerous light, and as I sit here looking into my lamp, I ask for direction, but get only silence in reply, and darkness in my mind’s eye.

Purple is the light of evolution. But evolution also means death. Ask the dinosaurs—and ask, also, mankind. Are we destined to follow them into final species death?

We have reached the end of the game. The rules are cast aside, but still we play on, deep into the night.

And I am left with the question, What is my stone, what is my sling? How do I slay Goliath?

Mack had moved swiftly through the countryside, but thought better of entering Raleigh during the day. He needed to work fast, but he also had to stay alive, and that was going to take some care. For all of his skills, anyone with a good rifle and a good eye would be a danger to him. He wished that he could have brought the young guard’s rifle with him, but if it had been gone when he woke up, even though he would have had no memory of what had happened, he’d have known that something was wrong and raised the alarm.

Hiding in a barn, Mack hadn’t rested, he hadn’t been able to. When so many people were waiting on you and things were deteriorating this fast, the tension was appalling.

After the sun had at last set, he climbed down from the hayloft and surveyed the farm. It was as quiet as it had been when he’d come here. He needed food and, above all, water, so he decided to take a chance on the house.

He’d had a great deal of field training, so he knew how unsafe it was to expose yourself to dark windows, but it couldn’t be helped.

It was pointless to conceal himself, so he just strode forward.

When he returned to the Acton Clinic, all exhausted and apologetic, he would use the same technique. He would let them lock him in again. The window was hopeless, but there was an escape route through the air-conditioning ducts in his room, and one of his jobs in Raleigh was to go to the county building department and look at the plans of the patient wing. He had not killed yet, but when he got back there, he was going to do a good deal of that, and a good deal of information extraction.

By the time he reached the house, he knew that it was empty.

The fridge was warm, but there was a half-finished bottle of Coke inside, flat and hot. He drank it all. The water taps didn’t even drip when he turned on the faucets, so he got a pitcher out of the cabinet and banged through the house to the nearest bathroom. There was water in the toilet tank, which he pitchered out and drank. Down the hall, he saw a woman’s legs in the doorway of a bedroom. The rest of her was sprawled out of sight.

He left the house and found a pickup in the garage but its electronics were fried so he headed off down the road on foot. With the setting of the sun, the sky had turned an odd pinkish-purple color, something that was new. Pinkish purple, with long, shimmering sheets of green auroras cutting through it. Beautiful, indeed, and so could death be beautiful.

By the time he reached the outskirts of town it was full night, and now it could be seen that the odd color of the sky was centered on a faint thickening brightness low on the northeastern horizon. What was it? He knew little about astronomy, but it had the look of something that the world would come to wish had not appeared.

Most of the houses he passed were dark, but some contained faint, flickering glows of candlelight, and one or two the brighter light of oil lamps. He had no real plan, except to see what he could do to stir these people up against the clinic. They hated it, of course, but they needed leadership to go up there and cause mayhem.

As he drew closer to the town center, he was stopped by something he had not seen in many years, not since his days in Mexico, when drug cartels sometimes did it to terrify locals into serving them.

On a street lamp about halfway into the town, a man had been hung… and, he noted, hung badly. The body was covered with blood from the neck, because they’d hauled him up without tying his hands, leaving him to struggle with the knot while he choked. Ugly way to do it, probably because they were clueless about the process. Under the body, dogs snarled at one another as they licked the blood in the street.

A number of storefronts were burned out, and he could smell death in the air. More dogs could be heard in the darkness, and as he passed the ones beneath the hanged man, some of them gave him a predatory appraisal. Once a dog has tasted blood, it is dangerous, always. Not wanting to have to fight off the whole pack, he gave them a wide berth, and did not meet their eyes.

You could give a dog a heart attack by shattering its muzzle with the right kind of blow, but six or seven dogs would keep you damn busy, and you would absorb damage.

Ahead, there was a restaurant showing a flicker of candles in the front window. Inside, he could see the shadows of many people. Good, this was what he’d been looking for. Desperate people band together, at least when they still believe that they might have some way to save themselves. Only later, when they understand the hopelessness of their situation, do they turn on one another. In another couple of days that would happen here. In fact, he was probably lucky that it hadn’t already happened.

He went to the door and paused, evaluating the crowd. There were men, women, and children present, so this was probably some kind of survivorship gathering. Safe enough.

He stepped in. Voices rumbled around him, angry and desperate ones, and the children were crying, many of them. A few were playing.

“We’re real hungry, John,” a male voice said. “You gotta find a way.”

“We need to do some urban foraging,” the man in front, probably the mayor, said.

“We’ve scoured the town, goddamn it,” somebody shouted. Rage. Terror. They were just about to turn on one another.

Mack took a breath and raised his voice. “Excuse me.”

They froze like frightened mice, then turned all at once. Suspicion in the faces. Women swept their children behind them. He was acutely aware of the fact that the room was full of guns.

He held up his hands. “Hey, I’m unarmed.” He looked from face to face, smiling just enough but not too much. His next words were crucial, and he had thought about them carefully.

“I just escaped from the Acton Clinic.”

An immediate murmur, more suspicion in the faces. All expected. He was playing them.

“I’m not a crazy, okay!”

They quieted down a little.

“Let him talk,” the man at the front of the room said. He was pudgy, but his eyes were hollow. That was one famished fat man up there. He must be almost crazy with hunger, probably dropping ten pounds a day.

“I’m an assistant chef.”

A guy with a deer rifle said, “What do you mean, you escaped? Why does an assistant chef need to escape?”

“That goddamn place is a palace! There’s tons of food, tons of it. They’ve got enough to feed their damn psychos for a year. It’s enough to get this whole town through this thing—I mean, if there’s another side to it, God willing.” Then he stopped. Time to let it sink in. Time to let them chew.