Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [102]
“Faster!” Buyoux shouted. “The pumps have been turned off, which can only mean the Reservoir is filled!”
Filled? Favius continued de-energized strokes toward the ladder. The silence stifled him, but now he thought he smelled something very sudden and not characteristic of the heinous Reservoir and its six billion gallons of Bloodwater; and when, on his next stroke forward, he happened to glance up—
Several unhelmed Conscripts seemed . . . out of sorts.
Their hair was standing on end.
“For Satan’s sake, Favius! Swim faster! The Merge is about to take place, and if you’re in the water when that happens—”
Favius didn’t hear the rest. Just as his hand would grab hold of a ladder rung—
The ladder disappeared, and so did the retaining wall and the ramparts and the bloodred sky and the black sickle moon and everything else in the rest of Hell.
(II)
Dorris felt dizzy; she felt terrified. What was happening? When she’d first looked at herself in the bait-house mirror, her blazing white hair—feet long—stood on end and stuck out like an aura. Initially she’d thought she was being electrocuted but her rubber flip-flops stood on a perfectly dry wood-plank floor.
When she’d rushed outside, the dizziness—and her terror—quadrupled. That smell! Like an electric motor overrunning, and then the simple feel of the lake and its surroundings. Nothing looked wrong, but it all felt wrong. It reminded her of a bad trip way back in her acid days.
Oh, my God almighty, she groaned to herself. Her slim legs propelled her quickly to the end of the dock. A crisp, cloudless twilight pressed down, a slice of moon radiating. The immense lake sat still, rippleless—surreal in some distinctly unpleasant way. The sudden silence, too, struck her as unpleasant. Summer evenings on the lake brought an absolute ruckus of cricket choruses and night bird songs, but now?
Nothing but proverbial pin-drop silence.
Impossible, Dorris knew.
The wheelchair sitting at the dock-end reminded her of the day’s only rental customer. That young man who can’t walk . . . So she’d called him on the emergency walkie-talkie—she had to know if the lake’s abrupt strangeness was only in her mind—something she almost hoped was true—but his own observations confirmed her own.
What is going ON?
It had been over a half hour ago that she’d called him in. Had he had some medical problem? Surely his arms were strong enough to row the boat back in less time than that. She stood tense and straining on the dock, her eyes pressed into the binoculars, but even in the strong moonlight, she couldn’t see him.
Please, please, son! Get yer ass back here . . .
Was it the first true premonition of her life? As her stomach twitched, and that stiff, ozonelike smell sharpened, Dorris knew that something was going to happen.
When she scanned along the lake’s coast, she noticed that the usual folks that always fished at night were packing up and hightailing it out. Clearly, they sensed the same inexplicable thing that Dorris did, yet she couldn’t imagine what that thing was. Then—
There! she thought. Her implants jounced when she shot to her tiptoes; in the binoculars’ hourglass viewing field, she could make out the tiny form of the paralyzed man rowing through a pool of moonlight.
The loudest sound she’d ever heard erupted next, not an explosion, not the earsplitting sound that accompanied a massive lightning bolt, but something more like timber splitting or a colossal tree cracking as it was felled. The sound urged Dorris to scream louder than she ever had in her life but even that couldn’t be heard over the monstrous cracking . . .
Then came a single, concussive BOOM!
Had a bomb actually been dropped on the lake? The notion was absurd, but what else could it be? A terrorist attack? Here, of all places? Not that Dorris could think deductively at the moment; terror and confusion obfuscated all rational thought. In the vicious boom’s wake came some sort of displacement of air that slammed her in the stomach, lifted her out of her flip-flops, and flung her down the dock, screaming all the