2012 The War for Souls Page 6

  He flipped the switch, and the siren began as a low growl, quickly increased its volume, then filled the air with its wailing. Across the street, Sam Gossett came to the door in his pajama bottoms and yelled, “Is it for real?”

  “Holcomb and Dennis Farm just got it,” Bobby said. “It’s for real, all right.”

  The Wilsons and a family Martin didn’t know except to nod to arrived in SUVs and went hurrying into the church. They must have been sleeping in their clothes. As he passed, Timmy Wilson said, “They’re coming up Six Mile, slow and low.”

  His words made Martin feel literally sick. He telephoned Lindy. “Hi, hon, what’s your situation?”

  “We’re leaving the house.”

  “You need to hurry, Lindy, they’re over Six Mile Road.”

  “Oh, God, Martin.”

  According to Homeland Security, people alone did not survive, none of them, not ever. Groups supposedly had a better chance. They still got flyers dropped from time to time. He speculated that Bo Waldo might have something to do with that. There was a man who was not going to be beaten, unlike those two generals, who’d been edgy, bitchy thoroughbreds.

  “Lindy, cut across the Walker place to the highway.”

  “I’ll wreck their garden.”

  “Do it now!”

  She closed the phone—unless something else just happened. A wave of nausea almost made Martin gag.

  “You okay?” Bobby asked.

  “Lindy’s out there with the kids. Where’s Rose?”

  “Same thing, coming in fast as she can.”

  “But not down Six Mile Road.”

  “Goddamn, buddy, that’s right.”

  Bobby, who had been his friend since their boyhood in this community, met his eyes. Bobby had stayed, Martin had gone on to university. But he’d returned in the end, discovering after Berkeley and Stanford that one did not leave Kansas so easily.

  “I never thought this would come,” Bobby said as the two of them watched the sky and the people now hurrying into the church.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Bobby. Kansas is gone with the wind, I’m afraid.”

  “You think it’s gonna be all of us, Martin?”

  A wave of what could only be described as woe swept over Martin. He said, “The pamphlet says that more survive if we congregate.” It had been dropped by Homeland Security last week.

  “What I feel like doing is hiding. That’s what feels right.”

  “I would assume that we can’t hide.”

  The pamphlet, which had been dropped from a Goodyear blimp, of all things, was the only defense the government had offered. In fact, the most terrifying thing about the whole business was the silence from Washington and Topeka.

  George and Moira Fielding came huffing up, she in a slip and bra, he in baggy boxer shorts and flip-flops. “There’s screaming coming from down the end of Constitution,” he gasped.

  Serenity Lodge. Forty old folks. Martin looked at Bobby. “You want to go over there?” He thought to himself that Lindy and the kids must pass right in front of the place on their way in.

  “I’m needed here.”

  It wasn’t cowardice, it was simple truth.

  Across town, Martin could see the steeple of the First Church of Christ light up, and heard its bell join theirs. Saint Peter’s was invisible behind the huge oaks that stood along Evans behind Main, but he knew they’d be lit up, too. They didn’t have a working bell.

  Emma Heard got out of her car. “There was that light just like they say, it was horrible, horrible!”

  “You were at the home?”

  “I was in my office when—oh, Jesus, I tried to help them, they were all in their rooms—” She broke down in sobs and Martin looked off down Third, looking for some sign of Lindy’s blue Dodge truck.

  “Did you see any actual attacks?” Bobby asked.

  “When I ran out, I saw the light coming down on the building, out of one of those things, the disks. It looked like some kind of goop, a glowing membrane—really bright—like on Nightline that time, that video of it. I got the hell out of there, lemme tell you.” She lowered her eyes. “I saw it slide down in the windows, and I heard—I heard—oh, Bobby, the screaming.” She paused, then added in a tiny voice, “They’re all headed north now, every single one of them that can walk, and in their pajamas, poor things.”

  Then she noticed Martin. She came close to him. At forty, she was still beautiful. She’d been his older woman when he was fourteen and she twenty. They had cuddled and touched, and he’d learned mysteries from her that still inspired the deep, deep joy he took in women. In Lindy, now, only her.

  She clutched at his shirt. He took her by the shoulders and turned her toward the church. “Go inside, do it now.” She walked away with a curious, gliding motion. Martin watched her. “You sure she’s not…affected?”

  “Nah, that’s just shock,” Bobby said. “Right outta the book.”

  “Jesus will help us,” Mrs. Oates said as she came up the walk. “Never you mind, Jesus will help us.” She went past them, unseeing, glassy-eyed with terror.

  “The Lord sure hasn’t been helping us much lately,” Bobby said, but softly, as if it was a kind of dirty secret—or, what he was more likely to think, a blasphemy.

  As a scientist, Martin had grown past his childhood piety. Nowadays, while he wasn’t against religion, he just didn’t see the mechanism of the spiritual.

  Bobby and Rose brought their kids here to Methodist every week. Martin and Lindy had chosen not to visit the burden of organized religion on Winnie and Trevor. Trevor had been delighted at not having to join the acolytes of the Anglican Communion in America. He’d dreaded Latin.

  People everywhere were taking the horrific business that was unfolding in the world to mean that the soul was real. No less a luminary than the physicist Sir Roger Penfold had called it “the profound organ” because of the way it appeared to control memory and emotion. Given that it consisted exclusively of electrons, the belief that it was immortal had turned out to be entirely correct. Energy is indeed immortal. But could it be conscious in its own right outside of the body, or remain a coherent structure after death? Martin didn’t understand how that could be, and he doubted that anybody else did, either.

  He did understand the extraordinary irony that the attack on the soul was what had led to its discovery. The scientific community’s soul blindness had only been lifted when the human soul began to be taken, and we could see, hear, and feel the consequences.

  To Martin, as a scientist, this did not mean that the gods were therefore real. But the average person had taken proof of the soul to mean that his particular gods, also, existed. So churches and temples across the world were jammed day and night with people pleading for help from their deities.

  Martin viewed things differently. He was fascinated that this plasma could be drawn out of a human body, as shocked as everybody else at the changes that resulted. But as far as it being the ka of the Egyptians, the jiva of the Hindus, the hun of the Chinese—any of those concepts—the folkloric soul—well, that remained unproven. It was simply an organ of a type they had not previously recognized, with a profound function, most certainly—in fact, a function that explained why we were different from animals, because of the way it preserved memories and delivered them to the brain for processing. But it had not confirmed the reality of the gods, at least not for this intellectual, nor was it clear that it survived in any coherent way after death.

  Clearly, though, the removal of the soul was hell on the organism, and it was hell here in Kansas tonight, and maybe across the entire country, but before communications had failed, the real hell had been unfolding in the jam-packed, exposed third world, with swarms of the disks gushing each night like vast formations of locusts out of the fourteen great, black lenses that ringed the world, and people by the millions being torn apart in this strange new way night after hellish night.

  He pulled his worn copy of the Homeland Security
pamphlet from his pocket. “Approach damaged individuals with extreme caution. Their state is unknown and, while generally passive, they can be unexpectedly violent.”

  Martin had seen some of the people who’d been disensouled, as the media had called it when the media still existed, a cluster of six of them ragged on the roadside, stragglers up all this way from the Garland, Texas attack that, for America, had signaled the beginning of the nightmare. They’d been walking in a rough line. They were filthy and stinking, sewer drinkers, carrion eaters, muttering and growling to each other as they shuffled aimlessly along, aware, perhaps, of some loss, but no longer understanding what it was.

  He had stopped his car because he hadn’t been able to resist at least observing them from a little closer, despite the Homeland Security warnings. They hadn’t seemed dangerous at all. Far from it. Up close, they were more like migrating elk or something.

  He’d spoken to them. Nothing. There had been two men, three women, some children, one on the back of one of the men, the others hand in hand with their mothers. He’d walked beside them, touched a woman’s shoulder, and asked her, “Could you tell me your name?”

  She had turned to him, and what had happened was the most dreadful thing—she had smiled at him. But such a strange, strange smile. All wrong—so bright that it was empty. Not cruel at all, but relentlessly innocent, like the smiles of poor Jim Tom Stevens had been when they were kids. Jim Tom was retarded, though, and he had not had the feeling that these people had been made stupid.

  No, it was much stranger than that. They had not lost their intelligence, but rather their information, and not how to count or how to read—oh, no, the information they had lost was much deeper. What they had lost was what distinguishes us from animals—the arrow of consciousness that points inward. They still knew and saw the world. The information that they had lost was that they were, and for this reason had ceased to be human. They had become brilliant animals.

  For all of Jim Tom’s intellectual poverty, he was not this lost. He knew that he was. When you called his name, he did not simply come to a familiar sound as an animal might. He turned to you with an expression in his face—the fundamental human expression that says, This is me.

  Martin had been reminded of a line of poetry, “With its whole gaze a creature looks out at the open…” and sees nothing of himself at all. Has no self.

  They’d hurried off, moving in the general direction that all wanderers moved, at least around here, which was north-northwest.

  He had sat on the terrace all afternoon watching the leaves run in the yard, and trying to make sense of what he had seen.

  He had told Lindy that they had reminded him of Jim Tom, who had been so innocent that he would eat raw roadkill if he happened upon it hungry.

  “If you taught them,” she had asked, “do you think they could learn?”

  “How to drive a truck or something, sure. But not concepts. No.”

  “Then they’ve been made stupid.”

  “I didn’t get that impression.”

  “What impression did you get, then?”

  He’d considered his reply for some time. Finally, he said, “The difference between us and a brilliant animal is that the animal understands what is, but not what it means. I think they’d been returned to what we were before the discovery of our being made us human. They weren’t human, Lindy. They were just sort of…there.”

  As a scientist specializing in the past, he was well aware that the human body and brain had evolved a hundred thousand years before civilization had appeared. We’d been brilliant animals for a long, long time, and in the dark back of his mind, he feared that whoever was here was not really destroying or capturing souls like people believed, not at all—it was much simpler: they were manufacturing slaves, and the reason the wanderers all went off in the same direction was that they weren’t wandering at all, they were moving to a collection point.

  As far as the souls were concerned, pulling them out of the body was like letting the air out of a balloon. They became part of the general electromagnetic flux. In effect, they disintegrated.

  People swarmed into the church now, in pajamas, in underwear, in whatever, coats thrown over shoulders, hats jammed onto heads. The one thing they all carried was a gun, many of them more than one. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, a few assault weapons. A formidable arsenal.

  May Whitt got the organ started. It burbled for a moment, then blasted into a brave rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

  A moment later a scream pealed in the street, the sound rising above the wail of the siren, the tolling of the bell, and the hymn. Ten-year-old Chrissie Palen pointed at the sky. At first Martin saw only first moon, pale and serene, speeding in ragged clouds. Then Tom Palen raised his 30-06 and fired, and Martin’s eyes followed the muzzle flash to a simple ovoid, dull orange against the sky, as motionless as if it was fixed to the ground.

  Martin scoured the street for Lindy’s Dodge. He put in a call to her, but could not get a signal.

  “We need to get out of the street,” Bobby cried. “Everybody, run, run NOW!”

  Despite his lack of religious belief, Martin found himself begging God in his heart to bring his family to him safely. He breathed the words in and out, in and out: God, please, God, please, and tried to send some sort of protection to his beloved and their kids, his striving preteen boy and his darling little girl.

  The object slid over Rite Way Drugs, then backed off to the Target end of town.

  Then Lindy was there, getting out of the car with Winnie and Trevor—and the disk was there, too, sliding back across the sky as if it was on a tabletop.

  “For God’s sake, RUN,” Martin screamed at them. “Shoot at the goddamn thing, Tom, shoot at it!”

  The rifle cracked, cracked again—and the thing slid away into the darkness. Bullets were rumored to slow them down, but not for long.

  Lindy and the kids came toward Martin as if in a slow motion nightmare, like ballet dancers executing a pas de deux, like a little boat drifting in a calm.

  The thing reappeared, speeding into view at rooftop level. Electric fire crackled along its edge, spitting sparks into the air. The Palens raced into the church, and Martin realized that his family was not going to make it. He ran toward them, his blood pumping, his legs going fast but not fast enough, as the thing dipped low over Main Street not a hundred yards behind them, and began moving forward. It was about to hit them with the light, he knew it.

  “Run, Lindy!”

  Whereupon Lindy, God love her, turned and shouldered her bird gun and let go four blasts of buckshot.

  The thing seemed unaffected—bullets delayed them slightly, but buckshot apparently not at all.

  The kids reached him. “Get in the church!” he shouted to them, pushing them toward the lighted door. Lindy, he saw, had returned to the car for a backpack of provisions.

  The bell tolled, the siren moaned, and the congregation sang in ragged chorus, “…he’ll take and shield thee; thou wilt find a solace there.”

  Bobby yelled, “MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!”

  Lindy came out of the car. She seemed to be under water, she was moving so slow. And then Martin saw why: she was falling, she’d tripped. He ran toward her.

  Reg Todd called, “We’re closing the doors!” Winnie and Trevor realized what was happening and began to shout, “Mom! Dad!”

  “Martin, it’s right over you, it’s starting to glow!” Bobby pulled out his service revolver and fired at it. The street around Martin began to turn red. Still he ran toward Lindy, he could not conceive of abandoning her.

  Her skin was red in the red light from above. He threw an arm around her and began pulling her forward. As they got to the church steps, she gained her footing and began to help him. As she fell into the foyer, Maggie Hastert came to her rescue, and the two women staggered into the last pew as Bobby and Martin slammed the doors.

  “Mom,” Trevor shouted.

  “Mommy!” Winnie
shrilled, the littlest finally realizing that something was not right in her world.

  “Momma is all right,” Lindy managed to gasp.

  “You’re crying,” Trevor said.

  “We’re all crying, Trevor,” Martin said.

  “Are we supposed to be crying?” Winnie asked.

  Martin moved into the pew with Lindy, with their kids clinging to them, and the Hasterts made room for them. Given that Rose had arrived with their kids, Bobby and his family were okay, too—for the moment.

  Reg Todd went into the pulpit. Martin liked him, had hunted with him when they were boys. “Everybody’s praying now, all over the world, calling on the power of God to defend the soul. There is wisdom for us in the Bible, the book of the soul written by God, written for this time when we are discovering our souls because we are losing them. So you listen now. If the light comes—”

  There was a scream. Everybody looked around, but it had come from outside, from above the building. It was repeated, and children all over the small nave began screaming, too, and Peg Tarr cried out, and Bobby tried to calm her down and she shook him off. “It’s my husband,” she screamed, “I know it’s him, I can feel it!” She backed away from her neighbor, pushing into Doctor Willerson. “Where’s the Air Force? Where are the planes?” she bellowed. He shrank away from her, fumbling as his glasses flew from his face. “The planes,” she screamed, “the planes!” She grabbed his shoulders and yanked at him so hard she ripped his coat, and he reached back and slugged her, which snapped her head to the side and made spit fly, and made a sound like an exploding lightbulb.

  Then the scream outside repeated. It was a human sound, and involved such extraordinary anguish that everyone in the church screamed with it, a roaring agony that, in embracing it, only made it more terrible. Children collapsed, their mothers going down with them. Ron Biggs of Biggs John Deere, fourth generation in tractors, emptied his twelve-gauge into the ceiling, a Remington notched with the lives of forty-one bucks and happy days.

  As bits of plaster and angels and clouds rained down, a hideous scraping sound slid along the shingles, ending with a thud in the side yard.