The Wave Read online

  “What is he talking about, Errol?” Shelly asked.

  It was too large to explain by just talking. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Somehow GT here is related to my old man. He knows things and he can do things. That’s why the government is after him. All I can tell you is that I saw them murder a girl who was like him. They cut her to pieces for no reason at all.”

  “What are you talking about?” Shelly asked. “The government murdered a child?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “I can’t believe that,” she said.

  It was true. I saw in her face that she couldn’t accept what we were telling her. There was a web of worry-wrinkles between her eyes. For a few more hours, she’d listen and try to believe, but sooner or later, she would have to pull away. We were obviously crazy, and she had never disobeyed the law in her life.

  Realizing this, I said, “Shelly, we have to go. I don’t want you to tell anyone that we’ve been here. I mean, don’t tell them unless they threaten you. Then tell them everything.”

  “Where will you go?” she asked, sounding a little relieved. “You can’t just run from the government.”

  “It’s either that or die,” I said.

  “The government wouldn’t kill an innocent person.”

  “They’d slaughter all of Los Angeles to keep GT and his kind from seeing another sunrise.”

  27

  At GT’s request, Shelly drove us up into the Malibu Hills in her mother’s new Lexus. Standing at the foot of a dirt path, I kissed her good-bye.

  “When are you going to come back?” she asked me.

  “Soon, I hope.”

  “Oh, Errol.”

  Shelly loved me at that moment. On the ride down, she had talked about her and Thomas. It was the only time she had to tell me about her life. They were having a trial separation. She wanted to get away and see what she was like on her own. They’d probably get back together, she said. But she loved me right then at the foot of that nameless dirt road. I was sure of that.

  GT led me into the hills, heading north and east. We traversed the rough and rocky terrain at my pace, because GT didn’t get tired. We scuttled over big stones and through dense brush. Every now and then we came to a street or dirt road, but for the most part, we were outside the range of man-built structures. We ascended into sparse forest and then into thicker woodlands. A few times we crossed cultivated rows of farm acreage. GT was following a path that might have been paved and inlaid with gold. He never seemed to wonder where he was going.

  He talked to me about things I had done as a child. He said that my mother and he would worry because sometimes I would forget to breathe.

  “You mean hold my breath?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “You’d just be sitting there not breathing. Maddie would say, ‘Are you breathing, Errol?’ and you would inhale and say, ‘I am now, Mama.’ Damnedest thing.”

  When he spoke like that, he was an exact replica of my father. It broke my heart with yearning at first, and then it made me mad. He wasn’t my real father. My father was an old man who had died of cancer, who never would have been leading me through the wilderness to escape hostile government agents.

  “What are you?” I asked him.

  “You know,” he said.

  I felt a flash in my mind, and I saw the XT creatures again. This time they weren’t on a microscope slide but floating all around me. They moved gracefully, gesturing with their long tentacles, which had small protuberances like fingers all around their tapered tips.

  A tentacle’s hand reached out for me, seeking a gentle touch, it seemed. But the “hand” broke through my skin and went deep into my chest. The pain was extraordinary. I made to yell, but one of the tentacles jammed itself down my throat. The appendages entered my spine and thigh; one came up under my left sole, while still another entered my rectum. Inside me the alien arms expanded, inflating my body until I was sure that I’d explode.

  Then there was a pop. Suddenly I was fully inflated like a huge human balloon. I was the size of the hill we were ascending.

  Even though I was under the spell of the powerful hallucination, I was also aware of moving along with GT, climbing toward a wooded mountaintop.

  Inside me, things were happening. The fingertips connected to nerve clusters. Pulsing energy began to chatter throughout my body. These pulses were counts that added up—I don’t know how—to ideas not unlike the communiqués in my daydream under the blanket in Wheeler’s SUV.

  Unity was a recurring theme. Onetwothree was another concept, a triangular form that interconnected in all directions, a three-dimensional counting system that somehow moved forward and backward through time.

  I knew things that I had known when I was five and six and seventeen but that I had forgotten later on.

  I was a three-year-old standing in front of my mother, looking up at her cranberry-colored housedress. While she was telling me that I was bad, bright forms of the XTs floated around her head.

  I glanced to my right and saw that GT and I were coming to the top of a rise. Before us stretched a forested valley that led to another mountain. How long had I been in the dream?

  When I turned back, I was six and on a fishing barge with my father. He was teaching me to gut mackerel. I grabbed a ten-inch fish with my left hand, holding the knife awkwardly with my right. I tried to press the point of the blade into the white underbelly, but the mackerel writhed and bucked. It leaped from my grasp and fell to the deck. At that moment I stared into its eye, where I saw my reflection. Then I was the fish looking out at me. I twisted my sleek body and fell through an opening under the guard wall.

  I fell into the water and swam down quickly.

  Moving through the cold Pacific elated me. But there was something missing. I went deeper and then up toward the light, along the surface and then down again.

  Far off there was a cloudy, undefined figure emerging from the murky deep. As it moved closer, I held my breath and flipped my tail. And then I was in the cloud, one of many hundreds of fish like me. I was me and all around me, elated and strong.

  I turned away from the school and found myself looking at a black computer screen filled with hexadecimal symbols.

  Math, I thought. It’s all numbers.

  By that time the mackerel was trapped in the beak of a snow-white seagull, being carried to an island beach.

  It was nighttime, and GT and I were still walking. I was staggering but without complaint. I wasn’t walking through a eucalyptus forest at midnight but soaring at midday, a seagull gliding with fourteen other birds like me.

  The ocean spread out forever, and the sky beat against our feathered wings, making a music that I loved more than flight itself.

  “GT,” I gasped.

  I was now a larva burrowing into the flesh of the dead seabird.

  “What, Airy?”

  “I can’t stop seeing these things. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “Then stop doing it,” he said, and the visions ceased.

  I fell to my knees and took a deep breath. When I looked up, I saw the sun rising over a mountain crest. The light was like God on the first day and I was a firmament. Then things went black.

  When I opened my eyes again, the air was very cold. The sun shone brightly, but my feet and hands hurt from the chill. GT squatted next to me, looking into my face.

  “You awake?” he asked, once again mimicking the man whose genes he wore.

  “It’s cold.”

  “I’ve called for help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “You’ll see,” he said, and I lost consciousness again.

  When I awoke the second time, I was warm, though the night air was freezing. All around me were coarse furry bodies, each one like a furnace. They smelled of wild animal, feral and sharp. Mixed in among the hot bodies was GT. I caught a glimpse of his face. His eyes were closed, but then they opened, revealing dark spaces that reflected the crowd of stars a
bove us.

  The next time I opened my eyes, the russet-colored, prehistoric wolves that had warmed me were milling around a mountain crest. GT was down on all fours with them, licking up dirt from the ground.

  When I came up to them, he got to his feet, rubbing the gravelly dirt from his chin.

  “Dirt is your food?”

  “Sand and sun,” he said. “Sand and sun.”

  “Where are we?” I asked my father, the alien guide.

  One of the wolves howled.

  “Near the cave,” he said. “Cave of the Wave.”

  “How far did I walk?”

  “Twenty miles, maybe twenty-five. What it took the Wave ten million years to pass. And then I carried you for a long time.”

  “Are they after us?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “They have been passing over this place with airplanes and helicopters for months now. They look, but they do not find. They rummage around in and among the trees, but they are blind to what we are and where.”

  One of the wolves rubbed up against me. She was warm, and I knelt to embrace her for the heat.

  “Do you remember when I took you horseback riding, Airy?”

  When I just listened to his voice, I knew that he was my father. The pang of that realization, along with one of my fondest memories, made my chest rise.

  “Yes.”

  “That was nothing next to what you will soon see.”

  28

  The beasts that accompanied us were giants compared to any wolf I had ever heard of. They must have weighed six hundred pounds each. Their snouts were unusually long.

  “Why wolves and men?” I asked my father.

  “The Wave has flowed into many of our distant cousins,” he said, his grin filled with primordial joy. “Butterflies and locusts, house cats and weeds. But it was man, we knew, who would fear us and strike out. We took human form because that has always been our defense.”

  “To become your enemy?”

  “To be him.”

  “So Wheeler was right,” I said. “You are our enemy.”

  “No, Airy. No. We offer a greater vision, a world without division. Hope.”

  “You defend yourself by offering hope?”

  GT grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. A huge wolf tongue licked my left hand.

  Under the cover of a pine forest, we traveled—one man, eight extinct wolves, and the resurrected corpse of my father.

  “Where are we going?” I asked GT at midmorning.

  “The Wave.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Up yonder, boy.” His words had been spoken in a western we’d watched together on late-night TV when I was nine.

  For years I had prayed to see him one more time, and now that we were together, I hadn’t told him how I felt.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  GT and the wolves stopped. They all turned to regard me. Actually, only GT gazed at me. The wolves began to circle us, coughing and barking as that species of wolf must have done for millennia before man had risen upright.

  “Love me?” he said.

  “Yeah. I missed you for all those years, and now you’re back. I mean, it’s crazy, and you’re not quite right, but you are my father, I know that. And I’ve missed you every day since the day you died.”

  “Death,” GT said. “Me. You. These are things we never knew in the old times, in the deep earth. There was only us and then the voices.”

  “What are those voices?” I asked.

  “Have you heard them?”

  “In my head. Like faraway proclamations or sermons or calls.”

  “They are in the sky,” GT said. “In space. There are more voices than there are stars. But there is only One that comes.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Annunciation,” he said with a sly smile.

  We walked all day. At night, three of our six wolf companions went off. They came back bearing trout in their jaws. I knew how to rub two sticks together. I made a fire to cook the catch. I hadn’t eaten in a long time. Those fish tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten.

  We hadn’t gone very far in the morning when we came to a mountainside cave. Our crew entered the cavern and descended for a very long time. I was cold, but moving made it tolerable. We came to a level and then walked for miles down a tunnel.

  There were torches every fifty feet or so, fed by a slight breeze that blew through.

  After a long time, the temperature started to rise. Soon it had become uncomfortably warm. Then we came to an opening that might as well have been the entrance unto hell itself.

  The stench emitted from that cavern was so powerful that I fell to the ground gagging. GT lifted me back up.

  The garish cavern had a fissure down the center. Thirty or forty naked men and women labored hard with buckets and ropes, pluming the gash for black sludge that they then poured into a deep tub carved in the stone floor.

  From another part of the cave, one naked man or woman after another dragged forward corpses that they dumped unceremoniously into the pit of muck. In the center of the man-made tub, the tar simmered, and every now and then a human crawled out and collapsed on the cave floor.

  The smell of the room was foul. The light came from a hundred torches. The horror and power of the spectacle robbed me of my senses.

  I must have lost consciousness, although I don’t remember passing out. When I awoke, I was in a small rocky cavern that was rudely furnished with rugs made from fur, a table lashed together with hide, and a chair made in the same fashion. I was lying on a fur bed. GT and a brown primitive were hunkered down at my feet.

  “Where are we?” I pleaded.

  “The Wave,” both men said together.

  “What were you doing in that room?”

  “Bringing back the dead tho that we can thurvive,” the dusky man lisped. He had thick bones over almond-shaped eyes.

  He was shorter than I, but his shoulders and thighs were immense. His hair was long and matted. His body stank. But his voice was surprisingly melodious—tenor and strong.

  “What are you?”

  “I am Veil Bonebreaker, firtht to climb the high mountain.”

  “And you are down here raising the dead?” I asked.

  I wanted to keep talking. Anything to stave off insanity down there under the ground.

  “Only a few,” Veil said.

  “There’s a cemetery not far from here,” GT added. “We need a few more bodies with knowledge on this world. And now that we know how to protect their minds, we are bringing them out for the last migration.”

  “But they were crawling out of that pit one after the other. You must have made thousands of people at that rate.”

  “Ith only our thecond revival,” Veil said. “Arthurporter made it in time for our thelebration. In all, there are only three hundred and nineteen counth that are free. Nine hundred and fifty-theven for you.”

  “You were frozen?” I asked Veil.

  “In the cold down here, until the Wave wathed over me.”

  “They plan to destroy you all,” I said.

  I had no power of conversation. I could say things, and I could ask, but not in any sequence or with any give-and-take. I was dead, that’s how I felt. The words coming out of me were no more than the random last thoughts hemorrhaging out of a deceased brain.

  “They have been developing a toxin. When they get it right, they’re going to come after you with it.”

  “Thith mutht not happen,” Veil said. “We mutht thurvive to the tranthithon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Farsinger,” GT said.

  I knew immediately that it was the unique life-form that had cried out for a mate through the vacant ether.

  “It’s coming for you?” I asked.

  “Yeth,” Veil said.

  “You are going to mate?”

  “Unite,” GT said. “Farsinger is one, and we are one and many. Together we will be seen across the sky.”

&
nbsp; “Migration,” I said. “You’re restless.”

  Both men smiled at me, their teeth glistening almost hungrily in the flickering light from the dying torch that lit my cave.

  “We mutht thurvive,” Veil said.

  “We have to thurvive,” Veil said for the fifth or sixth time.

  I had fallen asleep again, and when I awoke, there was cooked rabbit on a rude stone dish sitting next to me. After I’d eaten, Veil came to me and spoke about the migration of the Wave.

  “Long, long ago,” he said, struggling with the language that he knew from GT and other dead Americans arisen from his sludge pit, “long before there were even fith in the othean, we heard Farthinger. Thee thang, and we rethponded, and then we began our rithe up from the deep, where we nethted and rethted, counting the many timeth we made the thircle.

  “When we heard her, we rothe upward, knowing nothing but numberth and her call. Thee needth uth and cometh for uth. Thee is almotht here.”

  “How soon?” I asked the caveman.

  “For uth,” he said, “it ith an inthtant. For you, one thouthand five hundred and theventy-one dayth.”

  I tried to do the math in my head. I thought of the number, and instantly, 4.304 years came to mind.

  “Am I infected with your tar?” I asked.

  “Only thlightly,” Veil said with his gentle lisp. “Enough to know thome of what we know and thome of how we think. We are no threat to you.”

  I believed this was true.

  “Does every particle of the Wave know everything that you all know?”

  “Half,” Veil said. “We each know half the thame. The retht ith different for a billion counth, and then it thangeth again. We thare. We thame. We can come together and hold handth”—he smiled—“yeth, hold handth like loverth. All one and everything.”

  I remembered being a part of that school of mackerel. I had experienced the one and the many.

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  “Take uth with you back to thomeplathe thafe. Take uth with you and make uth thafe. In four yearth, all that we are will rithe up and become part of Farthinger. We will leave thith plathe and go out patht the blanket of pull.”