Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

He was looking up into a face. He reached up, and Caroline smiled, and kissed the tips of his fingers.

Around him was his class, his deep friends, his companions in the Great Work.

“I remember,” he said, his voice faint. He tried again, attempting to speak more strongly. “I remember. I remember how I love you.”

At first, he’d been afraid and embarrassed.

Dad had driven him into a world of Lamborghinis and Bentleys in an ’88 Chevy Caprice. He had not understood then what he understood now, that he had been chosen not because his grandfather had happened to own a certain piece of land, but because he was, himself, exactly right for the role he was to perform.

“Mr. Acton didn’t only see the future,” he said, his voice faint. “We weren’t chosen because of our lives, but because of our past lives. Nothing was an accident.”

He had been a general, an admiral, he had led men and nations, and was an ancient being full of wisdom, and he could perform the role being offered to him. In fact, he was the only one who could do it, the good leader.

“I saw you,” he said to Caroline, “you…” She’d been perhaps ten, he twelve, but she had shone like a child made of sunlight.

He remembered sitting side by side with her under the apple tree—for there was such a tree in the garden of every house of the Acton Group, including his own. The color of the apple blossom, he knew now, was a memory trigger. When that red blush came to the sky, it would be time.

The color of the new star was no longer frightening to him, for it was the color of the highest energy, and the auroras combined with it to make the sky the subtle pink of apple blossom.

He looked at Caroline again, and, softly, secretly, his heart opened—and he saw at once how necessary this had been. Without love, there was no reason to continue the species at all, and there was a great plan and there were rules, and without love they could not fly through time.

“I remember my promise to you, Caroline.”

She met his eyes with the warmest gaze he could ever remember, and at once for him everything changed. They had held innocent hands as kids, but there had been a deeper bond, the entwining love of souls that has carried humanity across so many perils and divides.

They came together and he enfolded her in his arms, and it felt good, it felt so very, very good.

An instant later, he broke away. In his new role, he had new responsibilities.

“The painting,” he said. “Who’s guarding it?”

Glen and Sam looked at each other.

“Nobody? Is it nobody ?”

“David, we didn’t think that—”

He didn’t listen to the rest, he didn’t need to. He was already running.

Please, God, that he not be too late.

“For God’s sake, Glen, she’s been dismembered! My dear God!” David felt as if he was watching himself from a distance as he stared down at the body of Marian Hunt. He knew that he was experiencing stress-induced dissociation, a symptom of shock. Claire Michaels, who had found her, sat slumped in a chair, her face in her hands.

If they had not needed to take the time to inject him, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.

Katrina said in a dull voice, “We need a blanket, David.”

“Yes, of course. We need, uh, a body bag—Glen?”

“I’ll get a couple of men to pull her out of here and clean up the blood. But we’ve got no communications, so this all has to be done with runners and my first priority is to locate and secure the person who did this, and I have to tell you that we’ve got perimeter issues. We had an incursion attempt earlier today, and there was one intruder injured.”

“Where is he? Is he being treated?”

“They carried him off. I’m hopeful that it taught them a lesson.” But then he stopped, listened.

David heard it, too, a chugging noise.

“What is it?”

Glen had gone pale.

“Automatic weapons fire,” he said. “South wall.”

“Ours?”

“That’s an older-model machine gun, probably a Browning. The townies are back and my guess is that somebody’s opened that back gate for them again.”

There followed a sharp, rushing whisper.

“That’s us. HK G40.”

Then three cracking booms, sounding like a small cannon.

“Forty-five automatic. Civilian again. I need to get down there.”

Cries echoed through the building. More chugging followed, and upstairs, glass breaking, followed by horrific screams.

“Somebody took a hit through the window,” Glen said. The initial fear in his voice had been suppressed. In its place now was professional calm.

“We need to get everybody to safety,” David said. “We need to bring the whole security team inside the building.”

“David, begging to differ, you are telling us to begin our defense by retreating to our place of last refuge.”

For a heartbreaking instant, David could see the boy in the man, the bright hope that had been there when they had been in class together. Glen was tired now, very tired. David’s heart went out to his friend.

Feet pounded on the stairs and a patient appeared, Tom Dryden. He was naked, his face tight, a grin that spoke agony. Without a word, he ran past them and into the recreation area. An instant later there was a wet thud, and he was slamming himself against the windows the same way Linda had slammed herself against the door. All across his back there was an area so black that it looked more like a great hole in him than any sort of sore.

Shouting that the great ships were gone, David ran to help him.

But he kept on, just as Linda had, smashing himself to pieces against the thick, relentlessly resistant glass.

“Stop! Take it easy!” David got to the door and threw it open. “Here, you can go!”

Still, Tom hurled himself against the window, which, David saw, was starting to develop long, ominous cracks. He really did not need a point of easy access, not with a firefight going on a few hundred yards away.

“You can go, Tom,” he shouted. But Tom didn’t want to leave by the door, or at all. He wanted to break himself against the window and the wall.

“Mr. Dryden,” a female voice called, sharp and high. It was Katie.

“Don’t get near him.”

“He’s like me.”

“What do you mean, Katie?”

Her eyes glittered like dark jewels, and he could see defiance in them. She held up her hair, and on her neck, spreading up from her back, was a gleaming spot of deepest blackness.

As a doctor, he might have thought melanoma, but not with borders that precise.

“On his back,” she said. “He’s dirty, they’re never going to come for him.” She laughed a little. “We’re rejects.”

Again Tom Dryden slammed himself against the window.

“We can’t let him just do that,” David said, attempting to pull him toward the door. As he did three more people appeared, all running to help, Amy Feiffer and Robert Noonan, both from the class, and Mack Graham. Robert was the youngest son of George Noonan of Web development fame.

The group of them manhandled Tom through the door and into the grounds. David hated to do it, but getting him out of here was better than having him slam himself to pieces.

As they returned, they shut and locked the door.

“How come you’re out, Mack?”

“Nurse Fleigler released me.”

“Yeah, well, okay, I can understand that.” Under these circumstances, nobody could be left in lockup. But with this man, it was tempting.

“What can we do to help?” Noonan asked.

Now there was a thunder of gunfire, and greenish-blue flashes stuttered in the violet of the new star.

Under this new light, all the colors were different. The grass was a washed out pinkish brown, the new leaves on the trees yellow instead of green, the trunks black. As it raced toward the firefight, a white SUV, one of the security vehicles, appeared bright pink. The perimeter wall, visible in the distance, had gone from gray to rose, its razor wire gleaming an odd pinkish red.