CHAPTER 10
Most of the actors had made it through the crazy-maze that New York City had become seemingly overnight. Drivers had been instructed not to come into the city unless accompanied by at least two other passengers in an effort to avoid the hideous traffic delays. Buses and taxis were still running, but the subways and commuter trains had been shut down following several massive armed assaults on riders. Roving bands of “Wakers” had taken to looting public transportation robbing and, in several instances, killing commuters. The Mayor had made several emergency announcements, advising people to commute by car or stay home: Public transportation had been targeted and passengers were not safe.
But work was work. The city couldn't afford to slow down for long, and so, even under the extreme circumstances generated by the crisis, New Yorkers were beginning to adapt.
That morning, Alan Whitmore spent three hours sitting in one spot on the West Side Highway, trying to get into the city. The show was on for tonight. Unbelievably, dozens of people had called the theater, wondering if the performance was still scheduled. Management had instructed all operators to state confidently and unequivocally that yes; Alan Whitmore’s King Lear would go on. Nevertheless Alan fully expected a cancellation as the city fell deeper into chaos. But even Titus Horgan had phoned to say that he would be there, "with bells on and balls attached." And so Alan had gotten into his car two hours earlier than normal, and headed in.
When he finally arrived, angry, frustrated and frightened, to the theater, Horgan was onstage, his head wrapped in a white bandage. He was rehearsing the storm scene with Jeffrey Kalember who was playing The Fool.
Even in his present state of aggravation, Alan had to admit the old ham still had it.
“Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!”
Alan didn’t think he’d ever seen Horgan spout King Lear's famous monologue with such intensity. As he sat down to watch the rest of the scene, more of the actors and crew filed in behind him. Many of them stopped and watched as well.
When the scene was done, director, actors and crew all stood to applaud, their approbation filling the theater with ‘bravos.' Alan looked around him, sensing in the tone of almost frantic applause a sort of challenge, a defiant celebration in the face of onrushing catastrophe. And he applauded even louder.
But Horgan seemed mortified by all the attention. His eyes were bright with embarrassment, as if what had happened on stage had surprised even him. The actor almost sheepishly waved the applause away. But his gesture only incited those gathered in the theater to louder applause. Alan could see some among the crew wiping tears from straining, upturned faces.
As the thunderous ovation ended, Alan approached the stage.
“Well, Titus if you give ‘em even half of that tonight we’ll be good as gold."
Horgan stared at him curiously.
“Why wouldn’t I give them my all, Alan?” he said. “I mean... if you have some criticism of the work just be a man and spit it out.”
Alan stepped back a pace, shocked by Horgan’s sudden aggression.
“Titus, I only meant to say...”
But Horgan waved his hand, dismissing whatever Alan had been about to say. He tapped the side of his bandaged temple with his index finger.
“I know what you mean to say, my friend,” he said. “I know you very well.”
Horgan jumped stiffly down from the stage, his knees cracking as he landed. In two strides, he was suddenly very close to Alan, staring at him so intently that their noses nearly touched. In that moment Alan sensed Horgan’s anger, and a seething desperation, which seemed to shimmer in the older man’s bruised countenance, and suddenly, without knowing why, he was afraid. His fear made him angry, and Alan felt a powerful urge to wrap his hands around Horgan’s throat.
As if sensing Alan’s thoughts, the older man’s eyes widened. Horgan’s glare filled with menace as he began to snap his fingers repeatedly near Alan's temples.
“I know your type, my man,” Horgan said. “And I’ll be watching you. I… will be… watching… you.”
Snapping his fingers to a tune that only he could hear, Horgan turned and walked away. As he withdrew, Alan felt the seething connection sever. His sudden anger seemed to recede as Horgan left the auditorium.
“What the hell just happened here?”
It was the production manager, Purnell Ragdhi.
As the tall Pakistani approached, stress bent his handsome brown features into a frown. Alan scrubbed at his face with both hands and smiled, attempting to allay Purnell's concern.
Move on. Keep going forward.
"Creative differences," Alan said. "What's up?"
And Purnell, who’d worked with Alan since his revival of Say Goodnight Gracie at the Public five years earlier, knew enough to take the hint.
“You want the good news or the bad news?” he sighed, switching subjects.
Alan turned and looked up into Purnell’s brown eyes, some six inches above his own.
“The bad news first, please.”
The tension in the theater was as thick as molasses after Horgan’s outburst. Purnell grimaced, before turning to address the assembled crew and cast.
“Everyone, may I have your attention please?”
All around them, people stopped. In their bruised gazes, Alan read the free-floating anxiety that disaster survivors share when told to “brace yourself.”
“The good news is that we will have an audience tonight. In the face of societal collapse, never underestimate the power of denial.”
The company applauded and catcalled.
Despite himself, Alan smiled. A lump rose in the back of his throat. They were all struggling to get through the madness outside in the best way they could. For these people, like so many others in New York, work was a welcome distraction.
And so they would play before an audience of brave souls tonight. Quietly, Alan applauded every one of them. Purnell spoke up again.
“The bad news is that only thirty people have called to confirm reservations.”
More cheers.
Purnell frowned like the only kid who didn’t get the joke, while everyone around him howled.
The show would go on as planned.
*****
CHAPTER 11
Gloria Dawn was burning.
The time has come, the Voice said. Hurry child. They’re coming…
The ones that she had been warned about were nearly here. Her time was running out. She’d spent the last few days waiting for guidance, fearing and hoping that the Voice had lied to her, deceived her, and abandoned her. Then, this morning, the Voice had returned. It had remained with her for the rest of the day, comforting her, instructing her, strengthening her for what she would have to do. She had haunted the outskirts of Bottoms for two months waiting for a sign.
Now, her need mounting, the Voice informed Gloria Dawn that the time had come. In that same moment, she also understood that she was that she was going to die today, here in this little cell, that there would be peace and an end to a lifetime’s worth of heartbreak.
But she was to be tasked first.
The Voice expressed its regret. But it assured her that soon she would be allowed to rest. Her suffering would soon be allowed to end.
When Gloria Dawn sensed Billy Wilcox enter the station, her loins were stabbed with a brilliant, searing flame. It was as if she had been electrified, that burning energy passing into her from the Voice itself, then out again, to find a like response in the body and mind of the man who would destroy her.
In a voice that was startlingly clear, Gloria Dawn began to sing.
*
Billy Wilcox had forgotten his own name. He no longer knew nor cared about his life outside of this room, this moment in time. Totally enraptured by the sound that issued from cell Number 3, Billy walked as if in a dream, into the lock-up.
As he entered, Gloria Dawn turned to him and sang.
“In the Night, I lose my way. Lost, alone
Within you, I drift upon your sea.
I give this blood, a fever of kisses, to
Bring you home to me.”
At the sound of her voice, desire, a lightning bolt from a clear sky, galvanized Billy, expanding, bursting within Billy’s nervous system. Suddenly, as if for the first time, he could see every detail of her face, her body, as she stripped off her filthy clothes.
He met her gaze through the bars of her cell. And a silent explosion bore the last remnants of his consciousness away like flotsam tossed about on the surface of a clamorous, blood- colored sea. Gloria Dawn opened her arms to him even as he opened the cell door.
Billy Wilcox walked into her waiting embrace.
*****
INTERLUDE
“Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;”
-Sonnet Number XIV.
At first the effects of the Red Wake swept the more heavily populated urban centers. Cities planet-wide shook beneath its creeping influence. But soon enough, the violence spilled over into suburban and rural areas.
In much of Europe, violent protests and ethnic tensions now erupted, spreading out from their original parameters to engulf the entire continent. South America began to fracture beneath a devastating hurricane of bloody revolutions, coup de TAS and desperate attempts by provisional governments to maintain control of the maddened, rioting crowds.
And in North America...the Red Wake was King.
The humans below were too preoccupied by the chaos to notice that the Object that had so fascinated the world for six months had vanished. Nor did they note the black clouds that had begun to cluster over much of the Northern Hemisphere, a thunderous gathering that now released something far more lethal than rain, as all over the hemisphere black iron pellets began to fall upon the cities and towns of Earth.
And buried deeply within the very fabric of the universe, like a serpent hidden in high grass, the architects of this chaos now approached.
*****
CHAPTER 12
(From Dr. Sarah Maxwell’s dissertation; On Human/ Yloi Interaction In the Post Invasion Era.)
- University for the New Republic, circa 2075.
“One of the many ironies surrounding the events leading up to the first incursion was this; the alien artifact known to us as the “Herald,” was both a living organism and a technological construct. It was forged in the fires of a technology that had been spawned uncounted eons before life appeared here on Earth.
“More akin to a sentient idea than a bomb or a missile, and with devastating swiftness, it brutally brought our civilization to a halt. It was an idea. One that was created, maintained and transmitted across vast gulfs of time and space.
“Some of Dr. Robert Sandoval’s early theories about the Herald would later prove remarkably accurate. But even he could not have guessed the true nature of its creators.
“The Asa were among the first races in the multiverse to come to sentience in the wake of Creation. Their world had been formed some few million years after the Advent, the explosion of matter that replaced the matter of the previous Universe.
It was a beautiful green-red world, only slightly larger than the Earth, which in some respects it resembled. Over the millennia, many species crawled forth from seas the color of blood to populate the planet.
But one aquatic creature never ventured onto the green surface of Firstworld, a telepathic, light-bearing, large predator similar to Archituthis, the giant squid of Earth. It would become the scourge of the planet’s seas. As the predator gained dominance of it’s environment, after eons of evolving toward the summit of the oceanic food chain, its species reached an evolutionary impasse. Without the transition onto the surface undergone by other species, there was no great impetus to drive the evolutionary process further. The mighty, luminous predator race began to die out.
Then, long before the Sol System had coalesced around its sun, a cosmic event occurred which would alter Firstworld, and the universe forever. A massive comet, thirty kilometers wide, was captured by the green/red world’s gravity. The comet fell, smashing into Firstworld with devastating force.
The crimson seas answered the comet’s call to destruction by bursting their natural boundaries and flooding the land. Rampant volcanic activity triggered planet wide eruptions. The planet’s triple silver suns were shrouded by a cloud of volcanic ash thrown high above the planet’s surface, plunging the world into an age of ice and darkness.
Mass extinctions followed, as nearly every species native to the emerald world perished. But the Asa, as they had come to know themselves, were able to protect their dwindling numbers from the comet’s impact and the devastation that blasted the rest of the planet.
Employing some dim precognitive trait, the Asa sensed the coming of the comet. They knew that death would follow in its wake. And so they hid themselves deep within the caves at the bottom of the sea.
In the darkness and cold, the Asa found sustenance, feeding upon the organisms that inhabited the area around the volcanic vents on the ocean floor. Their highly adaptive capabilities allowed them to survive when most other species passed into extinction.
For nearly five thousand turnings of their planet about its primary sun did the Asa hide in the black depths of the churning, frozen seas. Many of them died as time and tide passed. For even their amazingly adaptive forms were hard pressed by the conditions at the sea bottom. For generations, the Asa hovered nearer to the darkness.
But those Asa that did survive grew strong. They mated, formed powerful communities in the ocean’s abysses. And their offspring, when they were able to produce again, were stronger than their forefathers had been.
So the Asa endured. As the centuries stretched into millennia, the Asa thrived and grew yet stronger. And after a time, when the Asa finally deemed it safe to return to the upper waters, their race was greatly transformed.
Forced to evolve in absolute darkness for generations, the Asa had become greatly sensitive to their surroundings. No prey could hide from a hunter that could hear the terrified beating of its heart. No camouflage was sufficient to deceive a predator that could detect the very thoughts of its prey.
Generations of breeding the strong to the strong, under extremely hostile conditions, had made the Asa race wholly superior to its ancestors. The great weight of the sea had made them even stronger, suppler than they had been. They moved through the upper waters with speed and power that nothing in the ocean could equal. But the greatest changes had occurred within the minds of the Asa.
Their latent telepathy had been amplified tremendously. And a host of other mental abilities had been born in the darkness of the caves. The comet’s impact had wrecked great changes in the world above. But it had worked greater changes upon the Asa.
Soon they were the masters of the oceans. And later, having nearly exhausted the waters of Firstworld, the Asa turned their senses to the lands beyond the seas.
New territories, new prey, impelled the Asa up, further and further out of the depths, finding new prey and new territories as they rose.
The Great Ascent lasted only a fraction of the length of their self- imposed exile. For now the Asa, driven by the power of their minds, and by their lust for conquest, adapted with astonishing speed as they rose through the darkness toward the silver lights of the three moons. Finally, they broke the surface and looked upon the shore.
Curious, and driven to expand into ever-new territories, the Asa claimed the land of the Firstworld. Within one generation of leaving the ocean’s depths, the preternaturally adaptive Asa had become a successful, highly feared, land- going species.
The instinct for survival would reconfigure the Asa into the mightiest of Firstworld’s denizens. The flames of domination burned brightly within the very soul of the Asa. Evolution and circumstance had bequeathed to them the power to bear that flame out of the darkness of the seas and into the light of the planet’s triple suns.
In time, that power would grow monstrous, carrying the Asa even further.”
(End of Transcript)
To Be Continued...