Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

“Device located and understood.” After that, no further reports. Probably, Mack the Cat was dead. Mack took the extreme chance, always.

They’d put Mack in the Acton Clinic last year because it had become clear that the group who, as children, had been taught Acton’s secrets by the son of his associate Bartholomew Light were assembling there.

A number of these children had been DNA profiled, and curious things were found, things that not even the most advanced genetics laboratories could decipher. Something—and it was extensive—had been added to their DNA. It was as if some sort of artificial evolution had been induced in them.

The redoubts around the world were full of members of important and very private societies, members of various fraternal orders and religious organizations, all of them devoted to the same thing: maintaining and increasing the wealth of those who had it and deserved it.

But not even the most secret of them was as well concealed as Acton’s group. They’d had their memories wiped, then experienced some kind of temporary psychotic induction process that was far in advance of any brainwashing technique ever developed. It had been this that had caused them to be so hard to find. Who would think to look among a bunch of psychotics? To all appearances, Mrs. Acton had left the estate to a favorite charity when she died, and it had used the money to found the clinic.

All very straightforward, and all a big, fat lie.

One of Mack’s messages from last week had said, “group leaders now present.”

So they were ready and whatever they were going to do, it was going to be going down pronto.

He tapped his driver’s shoulder. “Get under way.”

“Still fueling.”

They had to anticipate fuel needs carefully. If a vehicle were to stop running, it might never be able to be started again.

“Snap it up!”

“Yeah, okay.”

That sleazy response made his blood boil, but he sucked it in. The U.S. military had disintegrated. Who had ever imagined that regular soldiers like these would protect the redoubts effectively?

“We’re rolling,” his driver finally said as he increased power. Good. The sun was well up and that damn weird thing had set. What in God’s name was that? Nothing good, no question there.

The convoy moved on, turning onto a side road. To the north, he could see tall columns of smoke rising from Hagerstown. Here and there along the road were burned-out cars, stripped cars, some kind of a cattle truck with half-butchered carcasses and flies around it, and bodies, always bodies, bloating, hacked, shot, burned, you name it.

The United States was gone. Long gone. All countries were gone. That whole thing was over.

He drove on through the slow morning and afternoon, stopping far too frequently to clear the road, or, where that wasn’t possible, to do a slow workaround through the countryside.

At about two some asshole came running toward them with some kind of rifle in his hands. Before he could fire it, the general ordered him blown away. Then they moved on. The order of the day was, if it shows a gun it is hostile, and if it is hostile, kill it.

Here and there, you saw families on the road. Looked like Iraq during the invasion, or newsreel footage of World War II. Some of them even waved. Jerks. One time, incredibly, a Greyhound bus had passed going in the opposite direction. Now, that was amazing, but it was an old unit, looked like something from the sixties. No electronics, so all they needed was gas and they were in motion. There was a lot of gasoline around, too, if you could get to it. But pumps are electric and gas stations don’t have generators. A bus company, though, probably would have some way of pulling up its fuel in the event of a power failure.

He liked to think about stuff like this. Keeping the world working. But the GODDAMN WORLD WAS NOT WORKING, WAS IT? Goddamn them, fine! FINE! What if this happened: this thing kept up until all the human garbage, the ragheads, the Chinks, the spics, the Mexes, the blacks, you name it, all of that trash perished? A few good Americans and Englishmen and Germans, too, of course, couldn’t be helped. But ALL of that garbage—and then suddenly they opened the redoubts and here was a whole new world ready to start over again.

Except it wasn’t going to be like that, was it? It wasn’t going to be like that AT ALL.

Oh, he’d taken the fucking white powder gold. And he was a good man. Churchgoing. You had to be a good little boy, they said, to make that shit work. He’d goddamn well drunk it like a milkshake for days, and all he’d gotten out of it was bloody piss. Plus now there was this frigging black spot on his stomach that he could not get rid of. He tried scraping it, he’d even tried packing it in bleach. Would not go away. Cut at it with a razor. Whatever it was, the sucker went deep.

“General, we have an escort.”

“What the fuck?”

“There’s one’a them UFOs up there.”

What in hell was this? He’d seen video of these things. They were kidnapping people all over the world. Well, hell, he had damn few soldiers in this unit and probably half of them would take off the second the sun set, so he did not need this. He popped the overhead hatch and saw this big goddamn thing up there. Should he shoot it? No fuckin’ way, God only knew what kind of ordinance it had. These things had been around for years and nobody knew what they were. NASA maybe, the president maybe, but not this soldier. “Increase speed. Let’s see if we can get out from under this sucker.”

The radios didn’t work, so they used hand signals, and it was about a minute before a signal came back from the fuel truck. If they increased speed, they would need to load more diesel fuel before they reached Raleigh. “Maintain speed!” And, goddamn it, what next?

One radio that was functional was the single sideband unit that was used for contacting Mack. It was kept powered down except when in use, and so far it was fine. In fact, he could hear his communications officer sending a burst right now. He did that every fifteen minutes.

But then, a screech of brakes, the screaming of tires.

“What the hell?”

One of the Humvees veered off the road and went over on its side in a cloud of dust and a crash of a kind he hadn’t heard since Iraq—the sound of a whole lot of metal taking a hell of a beating.

A second later, a column of light as white as powder came down from the thing overhead, and two young soldiers floated out of the Humvee, their arms raised to the sky, and went up in it and were damn well gone. And so was the thing—whoosh, just like that. Steel-white sky, end of story.

He threw open the access hatch and ran to the Humvee. Nobody else had moved except one soldier, who had taken off across country and was going like hell. He was tempted to order the man shot, but that might bring outright rebellion, so he ignored the desertion.

When he looked inside the Humvee, he had a hell of a shock. What was in there was the driver, and he had literally ripped his own clothes off. His body was as red as a tomato and there was heat coming off it, a lot of heat. The eyes were open and staring and they were not glazed like the eyes of dead men, they were sharp with horror, like he was suffering somewhere deep inside himself. They were not dead eyes, and that was weird.

Whatever was happening to the guy, it was horrible and it just plain hit George Wylie right between the eyes. He was U.S. Army to the core, though, and the U.S. Army saved the lives of its soldiers. You got a man down, you did what was necessary to get all that training and that skill back to medical support. You did that. But here? “Hey, soldier, you hear me?”

Nothing.

Then he noticed on the kid’s bare chest and around his side, one of those damn spots, black and gleaming. So what in shit’s name was this stuff then, cancer caused by the fucked-up sun?