Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [103]
It must’ve been a dream—a nightmare—that dropped into her mind during the brief period of unconsciousness: a nightmare of sounds . . .
The sounds were screams, screams of human slaughter en masse—indeed, screams from another world. A deafening waterfall of relentless human and unhuman agony as though millions of people in a thousand different cities were being butchered in place all at the same time, a sound, a living blare that raged and raged and raged through some incomprehensible rent in the sky . . .
Silence, then.
Though it seemed like hours, it was only a minute or two that passed before Dorris regained consciousness. Memories dripped slowly back into her awareness yet her daze kept them from making sense. She rolled over, tried to rise to hands and knees but then collapsed back down, heaving. She reeled as if seasick, and now, as she blinked back more and more consciousness, she noticed not only the dead-calm silence but also a deep earthy odor just short of a stench that now replaced the previous ozone smell. An odor like low, low tide . . .
Several more attempts proved to her that she couldn’t yet stand. But I can crawl, she thought, determined, and crawl she did, on her palms and knees, back down the dock.
That man, she kept thinking. The handicapped man. Was he still out on the lake when that awful sound had struck?
At the end of the dock, the wheelchair still sat, and so did the walkie-talkie. She reached for it, but then her hand fell away limp as she looked outward at the same time.
Dorris’s soul seemed to flatten like a ping-pong ball under a hammer blow . . .
She used a mooring post to steady herself as she slowly rose back to her feet. The low-tide odor hung everywhere, dense as steam. But that was not what made her eyes feel stripped of their lids. That was not what wiped her cognizance clean as chalk marks off slate.
It was the lake.
Dorris stood paralyzed, staring.
Lake Misquamicus was empty. What stretched all about her now was a shallow crater lined by glistening black silt, limp waterweeds, and scores of remnant fish flapping helpless in mud. Every single one of the lake’s six billion gallons was gone.
(III)
Gerold could not conceive of a way to assess what he’d experienced, save to say that it was not like waking up. He wasn’t even sure if he’d lost consciousness. I was in the boat, I was rowing back to the dock . . . Then—
There’d been an horrendous cracking noise, then a boom.
And now he was here.
Madness, he thought now. He was still in the boat, and when he looked over the side he saw that he was still on the lake, only the lake . . .
Madness, madness, madness . . .
The lake was somewhere else now.
One moment he’d been looking at the glittering twilight over Lake Misquamicus, but now he was looking at a sky the color of deoxygenated blood. And the sickle moon was now radiant black, not radiant white.
Screaming never occurred to him when he squinted out in every direction. The water in which the rowboat floated was surrounded by endless black walls pocked with towers like castle ramparts, and along those ramparts men, or things like men, prowled about. Men—soldiers—in strange, horned helmets, wielding pikes and swords. Larger figures could be seen interspersed, plodding, drab things with barely any faces . . .
What the fuck is this?
All at once, the horned soldiers on the ramparts began to cheer. Several more were lowering a boat into the water.
Gerold could do little more than stare out.
A drone invaded his ears; then he saw a line of liquid green light hovering toward him—
Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!
Now Gerold did scream.
The line of green light dilated to a wavering circle—a hole in the sky—and from that hole two hands that were clearly not human reached out, grabbed his arms, and pulled him in.
He was dropped into something like a black cave; then he sensed that the cave was moving off very quickly, soaring up into the alien