The Wave Page 13

  “I will help you,” I said.

  On what I believe was my third day in the cave, GT announced that he was going to leave for a while.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To complete the penultimate part of my mission,” he replied.

  “What’s that?”

  “They are stalking us,” he said. “One day they will find us. I must learn how to resist them.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t want him to leave. But there was no room for questions or debate. One moment he was hunkered down next to me, smiling by torchlight, and the next he was walking away down a dark tunnel.

  GT returned now and then, but never for very long. During these brief visits he would spend most of the time with one hand dipped into the stone tub that held the Wave.

  29

  I’m not certain how long I stayed in the cave of the Wave. There were no more revivals during that time. There were many strange things, however. Animals and birds came into the cave and communed with one another. There were about fifty men and women who had once lived but now were dead and resided permanently near the Tar of Life—the Wave. We talked together and laughed. When I was lonely, one of the women would sleep with me on the fur mat in the room where I had first met Veil.

  Veil and I spent a lot of time together. We talked about the threats that humanity presented.

  “We are not indethtructible,” Veil said to me one day. “We are durable but not invulnerable. Your friend the plathtic thurgeon could dethtroy uth if you do not make uth thafe.”

  “How can I do that if you can’t?” I asked.

  “Becauth you are what our enemy ith,” Veil replied. “We are only theeing without knowing.”

  I made a few friends while living down under the mountains. One such friend was Dick Ambler, a car salesman who had died seventeen years earlier. Unlike a great many of the humans that had been imbued with life, Dick was very lively, very much like a normal man. In his former life, he’d loved to tell funny stories, but since his revival, he didn’t understand the meanings of the jokes in his mind. Sometimes he’d sit and tell me one of these jokes and I would try to explain why it was funny. He never really understood, but we became close anyway.

  “How can the Wave be here and in Los Angeles at the same time?” I asked Dick one evening.

  “We had been rising for a very long time under the city you call Los Angeles,” he told me. “We sensed the music played by your DNA. But maybe three hundred years ago, we found a tunnel that led here. After discovering how dangerous men could be for us, the greater part of the Wave retreated to these caves, leaving only a few to reanimate the bodies.”

  I learned many things in the torchlight of that cave. At night, when I slept, I had visions of celestial beings communicating across the vastness of space. I could hear the vibrations of my own cells and read all species’ histories through the coiled patterns of genes.

  Once I put my hand into a bucket of black mud that Veil told me had all of the knowledge of the world inside it. At first it didn’t feel like anything, but after a while, the heat began to build. Just when it became almost unbearable, I felt a shunt into my brain and all human sensations were gone.

  I became an amorphous mass defined by ideas based on numbers rather than physical form or time. I could become a quartz melody or a woolly mammoth, but all of that was contained within a wider sense of being. Gravity and subatomic particles passed through me, massaged me. I encompassed even the shape of the universe.

  I had feelings, but these, I saw, were inconsequential. I witnessed human slaughters and depravities, passions and virtues. All of this came to nothing. All except the loneliness of life. The Wave was one with itself and everything that it touched. It was Buddha and the Ten Thousand Things.

  After only a few seconds with my hand in the bucket I collapsed.

  On one of his sporadic visits, GT told me how much my father had loved me.

  “When you were one and a half, you would come up on me on the couch,” he said, “and climb up in my lap. You didn’t talk very much, but you’d say, ‘Sup, sup,’ and then I’d say, ‘Mongo time,’ and you’d laugh and laugh. Nothing else made you laugh so much. You were my little boy, and I would have done anything for you.”

  “I found Bobby Bliss where you buried him,” I said.

  GT frowned. “Did your mother see him?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Very much,” he said. “She loved that man and I destroyed him. It was wrong of me. But I was so angry.”

  As he spoke, the anger he had felt rose up in me again. The rage ran down into my fingertips, which then clenched into fists.

  “I feel it,” I said. “But Wheeler told me that the first XTs to rise from the grave didn’t care about their relatives. Why do you care?”

  “We squandered much of our substance to find the right touch,” he said. “The first ones to rise, we pushed too hard, trying to make sure they did what we wanted them to. We learned after many costly mistakes that it didn’t take a gallon but only an ounce to allow the man to be.”

  “So that’s why some of the people revived by the Wave seem so distant?” I asked. “While others, like Dick Ambler, act more normal?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why should it matter how much you use?” I asked. “Since the cells that make up the Wave are almost immortal, they aren’t really squandered.”

  GT put his hands against his breast and said, “This part of the Wave cannot rise with Farsinger. Inside the body of man, we can only be man.”

  There was a deep sorrow in GT’s voice. He was dreaming of the universe but was kept from it by the sacrifice he’d made to reach up into the atmosphere. He had become alienated from a life-form that he’d shared for millions of years. His feeling of loss permeated my mind. He was like a man walled into a crypt, fully alive and aware, with no hope of deliverance.

  “But what about Veil?” I asked. “He was the first to rise. He seems to know what it means to be human.”

  “He has reincarnated himself many times,” GT said. “Again and again until he got it right.”

  “But why?”

  “He was the first,” GT said, as if this was an explanation.

  Together Dick Ambler and I helped Veil with grooming, to prepare him for the twenty-first century. There was water in the cave, so we washed him and cut his hair. We couldn’t do much about his clothes. The wolves brought animals for me to eat, and Veil made clothing from their pelts.

  I conversed with many of the risen dead in that cave. Most of them told stories about themselves in a removed manner, as if their previous lives had been fictions. They talked about loves they had felt and crimes they had committed.

  One white man named Brad Ferguson told me that he had raped and murdered a dozen black farm workers and Chicano migrants he’d lured to his farm by promising them work.

  “I killed them one after the other until one day a man named Pablo got away,” the ghoul said, looking into my eyes. “A week later, he came back with two friends and slaughtered me.”

  “Do you regret what you did?” I asked, more than a little afraid of the man.

  “I buried them in the basement of my house,” Ferguson said. “I brought them all back, and they are among us now.”

  “Where do the people you raise go when they leave here?” I asked Veil soon after that conversation.

  “They go out into the world looking for other depothith like ourth,” he said. “We wonder if we are the only one that hath thurvived.”

  “There were other Waves?”

  “Millionth of yearth ago,” he said. “We moved out from the thame great depothit. Maybe the otherth ended. Maybe they are thtill moving up.”

  Veil made me a backpack from the hide of a deer. We filled it with the black tar, which was the Wave in its purest form. After the liquid was poured, it became a gelatinous whole—a giant ebony hard-boiled egg that quivered and gleamed.

  “
Is this the full knowledge?” I asked the primordial man.

  “Yeth,” he responded. “A billion yearth of evoluthon. A billion yearth of counting up to thith moment. One full athpect of all that we’ve been through and all that we’ve become.”

  I looked upon the jellylike mass with a sense of awe that I had never known.

  I was tutored by the Wave during my sojourn in the cave. The few cells that connected my mind with the greater being had translated thousands of blueprints and histories, the evolution of life and the urge to grow. I often woke up exhausted from all the voices chattering in my head. Scuttling insects and great dinosaurs traveled in my mind, found their histories in me. I had come to see the sludge from the pit as God.

  I would have died to save this being from Wheeler.

  One day Veil and GT came to me. I hadn’t seen the simulacrum of my father for quite some time and I was happy at first and greeted him with a smile.

  “The wolves are dead,” GT said.

  “How?”

  “Wheeler has made a bullet that enters the body and spreads a poison. They die as animal life dies. They are no more.”

  We mourned the wolves’ passing. They had been the heart of the community we identified as home. Even though they’d had only the intelligence of beasts, they also had vibrated with the power and ambition and knowledge of the Wave.

  The Wave was beyond the human experience of living and dying. Each aspect of the Wave—be it a cell, a group of cells, or a great construct, like the one that lived in my backpack—was physically connected to every other aspect of the greater being. This oneness made for a mind that was all-enveloping. For over a billion years, the Wave had no natural enemies, no reason to hate or fear or fight. It lived on elements and minerals developed from its natural interaction with its rocky environs. Its hypersensitive cells spoke to advanced beings far beyond our small part of the universe.

  The sludge, the black tar that simmered and stank in the main cave, was far beyond human minds or human abilities.

  “What is the smallest possible unit of the Wave that still has all of its knowledge?” I asked GT.

  “About a pint,” he said. “We’re going to have you carry so much in case a part of us is destroyed along the way.”

  GT, Veil, and I went to the main cave. There GT dipped his hand into the tar. After a moment, the god began to tremble and then bubble. GT was also shaking. After a minute or two, he removed his hand.

  “What just happened?” I asked GT.

  There was a deep sadness in him.

  “My human side,” he said, “has taught the Wave to kill without mercy.”

  30

  “I think I can hear them,” I said.

  All around, humans and cougars, coyotes and bears that had been resurrected by the Wave were readying themselves for battle. They set up barricades. Resurrected humans called upon their memories and armed themselves with clubs and stones.

  I had seen the power of the Wave’s zombies manifested. They each had the strength of half a dozen men and could not be mortally wounded by normal methods. But if Wheeler had prepared a toxin that could kill our wolves, all of my friends might soon die.

  “I’ll stay and fight,” I told GT.

  “No,” Veil said. “You will be better out in the world. They may not find you ath eathily.”

  “But they suspect me already,” I said. “That’s why I had to run away.”

  “Let them tetht you,” Veil said. “They will find nothing.”

  Veil and GT guided me to a passageway that I’d never noticed before. We had already entered when I heard an explosion and then a scream.

  Katya—the granddaughter of Russian Jews, a woman who had made love to me almost every night for the past week—turned, revealing a deep gash in her chest. The edges of the wound began to dry and crack like baked mud. The cracks traveled Katya’s whole body; her face was frozen in a paroxysm of pain. Her body became desiccated, then she collapsed to the stone floor and disintegrated into a pile of multicolored dust. Wisps of dry smoke rose from the remains of my long-dead lover.

  Soldiers filled the room, carrying gaily colored red and yellow plastic rifles. They were shooting at the XTs without restraint. No one was asked if they wanted to surrender. The attack was meant to be a slaughter.

  One of the soldiers pointed toward us. Veil grabbed my arm. “We mutht go,” he said.

  I wanted to turn away, but could not.

  The soldiers took aim on our position. I stood in front so as to take the first shots and keep my father and my forefather alive.

  But then a huge gout of tar shot up from the Wave pit. It stuck to the ceiling and then sent out a dozen tentacles to pierce the bodies of the invaders.

  Thousands of gallons of the tar rose up out of the pit and flowed down the way that the soldiers came.

  “Run!” GT shouted.

  I turned and ran with all my might.

  I was able to keep up the pace for a half hour or so. Then I had to slow down. Veil slung me over his shoulder and continued running with no noticeable effect on his speed.

  Down the long hall, we heard the sounds of humans screaming. Some were XTs and others not. At one point there was a powerful explosion. Maybe five seconds after that, I felt a pain go through my brain like an intense web of red-hot fibers. I yelled and hit the ground. It was death in my head, the death of the oldest, most intelligent species on the planet. The Wave had been blown out of its hole with Wheeler’s toxin. We were dying by uncountable trillions because of men and their fear of being less.

  I awoke in darkness. I felt around until I found GT and Veil. They were unconscious, too. My connection to the Wave was small, and I still felt the pain of its passing. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Veil and GT had died from the trauma of losing their whole race.

  After a while Veil came to.

  “Do you thtill have the thack, Errolporter?” he asked me right off.

  “Yes.”

  “Doeth it thtill live?”

  We opened the fur pack together. The gleaming egg still shone and throbbed.

  GT was up soon after Veil, and we continued our quick pace along the maze of underground tunnels. After many hours, we advanced toward a light. The sun was shining somewhere. I could smell the ocean. We hadn’t spoken in all that time. The sorrow we felt was overwhelming. The oldest being in the world, maybe the oldest creature in the whole universe, had been slaughtered by a fearful beauty doctor.

  I made up my mind to kill David Wheeler if ever I got the chance.

  We left the cave on a mountainside that overlooked the calm Pacific. There was a beach a few hundred feet below but no people or boats or planes that I could see.

  Veil took the backpack, and we scaled down the ridge. It was midday, and the air was cool. We made it to the beach in less than half an hour and almost immediately started marching north.

  “Where are we going?” I asked my ancestors.

  “To a city, Airy,” GT said. “A place where we can hide our heritage and wait for Farsinger to come.”

  “How can that matter now? They murdered the Wave.”

  “No,” Veil said. “We are alive in thith pouch. All we ever were and all we have known ith in there. You are in there, Errolporter. Everything ith.”

  A shot rang out, and Veil screamed in pain. There was a wound on his calf. He fell to the ground and ripped off the leg at the knee with a sickening sound of rending flesh and cracking bone. He was trying to pull out the wounded limb before the toxin traveled to the rest of his body.

  At least six more shots rang out. I dove for the underbrush while GT dragged Veil behind me. Because of his superior strength, GT was able to climb higher into the shrubbery. After a few moments, we heard the fast and hard footsteps of soldiers. I could see them from my hiding place. In full fighting uniform, each one carried the bright yellow and red plastic rifles used to kill XTs.

  Suddenly, a dozen feet above me, GT leaped up and threw two stones, one with
each hand. These missiles struck two of the three soldier-boys in the head. I ran out with a stone in my hand and tackled the third soldier, whose attention had been diverted by the death of his friends. Once he was down, I began hitting him with the stone. He was dead long before I tired of striking him.

  I had crushed his temples, but his face was still recognizable. It was Jerome, Krista’s guard and lover. I vomited on his chest and then dragged myself away.

  GT and I hid the bodies while Veil sat guard from higher up in the shrubbery. His leg had stopped bleeding but he was still feeling pain from the wound. We suspected that the toxin had made its way past the knee before his self-amputation.

  We climbed up into the hills, using the cover of the coastal forest to hide from our pursuers. GT supported Veil by the shoulder while we made our way northward. We traveled through the night and into the next day. It was during our flight that I realized I had become stronger, hardier. I wasn’t tired in the least.

  Late the next morning, we came to the outskirts of a mountain resort community.

  We stole into an empty home in the hills. There was a car in the driveway and a key hanging from a bulletin board in the kitchen.

  We also raided the closets for clean clothes that would make us less suspicious. I took a shower and shaved. So did GT. But Veil was in too much pain to do anything.

  For hours we drove the back roads, hoping that Wheeler and his killers weren’t waiting for us behind barricades.

  31

  Late that afternoon we were just south of San Francisco. By that time Veil’s leg had disintegrated up to the hip socket.

  “You will have to bury me,” he said.