Chapter 16
Rhineland’s staff set up a tent in the center of the quad, a grassy expanse crisscrossed by sidewalks and flanked by dorms and libraries.
Lyle and Heather, both looking sleep-deprived, led me into the bustle of the tent.
At least fifteen people were inside the small enclosure.
It was full of humming pieces of computer equipment.
Power cables as thick as my forearm led out from the tent, back across the quad, and into one of the nearby buildings.
Displays, like higher-resolution versions of the images produced by the bracelets, danced and shimmered above solid gray boxes.
In the center of the tent was a small clearing, into which an array of complicated and intimidating devices pointed.
“That’s where you’ll jump,” Lyle said.
I nodded. My headache was there, pounding away.
I was as tired as Lyle and Heather looked.
We’d stayed up late, talking, often led in conversation by Heather.
She refused to go to bed and leave me alone with Lyle despite my repeated attempts to telepathically encourage her to do so.
They stayed up even after saying good night to me.
It was hard for me not to feel that they had stayed up to talk about me.
Talk about things I couldn’t handle. Like I was the child and they the parents.
It was foolish, and unlikely, but I felt it anyway.
I wore one of Lyle’s jackets. It was a warm September now, but I’d be jumping into early March, which even in California could get chilly, especially at six in the morning, despite climate change.
Rhineland, peering at a monitor, noticed us standing near the entrance of the tent. He waved us over, brusque and all business. “Glad to see you, Scott, Lyle, Heather. Everything is set up. Lyle, can you check over your instruments?”
“Of course.” Lyle gave my shoulder a squeeze and moved toward a bank of blinking equipment, glancing pointedly at Heather. She stayed next to me, hovering nearby, and I was distantly appreciative of her protectiveness. She barely knew me, but here she was, for me—for Lyle.
“How are you feeling, Scott?” Rhineland asked.
“All right.”
“You look tired.”
I shrugged.
“From what I understand, at five fifty-two you will vanish from our sight. The projected leap for this occurrence, assuming the previous pattern holds true, is twenty-two years and five months into what is currently our future.” Rhineland, apparently able to dissociate from the fact that he’d be in his eighties by that time, motioned to the equipment around them.
“We’ve begged, borrowed, and cajoled all the best monitoring equipment from across the university.
We even got some loaners from Stanford. If there is anything within our capability to detect, we’ll detect it. ”
It was an oddly framed statement, like something a lawyer would say. I waited, feeling Heather’s attention shift back and forth between me and Rhineland.
“Okay,” Rhineland said. “I’m going to wrap up the preparations. If you want some coffee, or something to eat, there’s a table over there with drinks and doughnuts.” Rhineland swept off. I didn’t touch the food. I’d eaten in the early-morning darkness with Lyle and Heather.
Less than an hour later, I stood on the grass in the clearing in the center of the tent, sweating even in Lyle’s lighter coat, the headache worsening behind my eyes. Lyle and Heather stood outside the circle of equipment, watching me with furrowed brows, their hands clasped together.
“I love you,” I said to Lyle, looking him straight in the eye. “And I’m proud of you.”
He swallowed, and even in the dim light I could see his eyes were wet. I was leaving him, again. “I love you, too, Dad,” he said. “I always will.”
I was watching his eyes when the world
slipped
and I staggered as the ground dropped a half inch under my feet. I felt the temperature drop. The tent was gone, and the sky above the quad was dark, barely starting to brighten in the west.
I heard a collective sigh, the sound of a hundred or more people letting out long-held breaths.
I looked up. The quad was lit by large, flat-panel, portable lights on long metal stalks.
They aimed diffuse white light in my direction.
I was surrounded by hundreds of people spread across the quad, all facing me, all sitting on the cold grass.
Upturned faces and wide eyes stared at me as ripples of movement, gasps, and murmurs traveled through the crowd.
“It’s true,” someone whispered.
“He’s here. He’s actually here,” someone else said from behind me.
“I didn’t—I didn’t really believe—” a third person stammered off to my right.
Details coalesced one at a time. The clothes they wore in the early March morning came in all varieties, some truly strange and revealing, especially given the temperature.
Many of their faces bore multicolored and glittering tattoos.
Some tattoos were self-illuminating. A woman near me had bright green cat’s eyes. Bizarre contact lenses. I hoped.
Farther out, others stood behind the seated crowd. These were older and dressed more conservatively, in suits and dark solid colors. They frowned in my direction.
“Say something,” a young man to my right said.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
There was commotion behind me.
“Let me through,” a man shouted. A tall, thin man with graying hair and glasses pushed his way through the ring of people. “Dad!”
“Lyle?” It was little more than a surprised croak.
“Dad! We need to get you out of here.” He made it through the suits, even with a couple grabbing at him, but the seated individuals started to mutter and shake their heads and rise, drawing themselves up from the grass.
“He must speak!” someone said. “We’ve waited so long. We must hear his voice!”
“The prophet must speak,” someone else shouted.
“He’s no goddamned prophet,” a third shouted.
The crowd growled, low and angry.
“Prophet?” I asked, but no one seemed to hear me.
“Did you not see?” someone else yelled. “He appeared, exactly as was foretold. We must hear what he has to say.”
“You will not take him!”
“We have waited! This is the sign!”
“Get off me, you crazy assholes.” This shout came from outside the main ring.
“This is it, the moment!”
The crowd surged, everyone yelling and shoving.
The first punch came moments later, and with startling speed, the crowd descended into a chaotic mob.
People screamed and shouted and shoved at one another.
Whatever linked them before, whatever united mentality that led them to sit quietly and wait for my appearance, disappeared.
I was buffeted by bodies, slammed awkwardly from one to another as my little clearing vanished.
“The prophet—find the prophet,” someone screamed.
“Get the fuck off—”
“The sign! The sign! Armageddon is come, out from the gates will spill forth—”
“Crazy lunatics—”
“We must hear him—”
A young woman darted in front of me, her nose bloody, the tattoos on her face intricate swirls of blue and purple and red, the purple parts glowing.
She was maybe eighteen, nineteen years old.
She launched herself at me. I threw up my hands, she knocked my arms aside with shocking strength and slammed her lips against mine, pressing her entire body against me.
Her legs, bare despite the chill air, wrapped around mine.
Her tongue slid against my lips and clenched teeth, and I felt the blood, running from her nose, smear across my cheek.
The weight of her almost toppled me. I would have fallen if the mob hadn’t been so tightly pressed against my back.
As I staggered, her lips slipped off mine, and her mouth came across my face to my ear, spreading more blood.
“I want to have your child,” she said. “I want to fuck the prophet and give birth to the next messiah.”
I jerked my head back and shoved her off with both hands. She fell, one leg folding awkwardly beneath her, and someone toppled backward over her. I heard her leg snap, the sound as distinct and loud as a piece of celery breaking.
She howled.
I reeled backward. I ran into another group of young people struggling with one another, wrestling, throwing punches, and shouting with no apparent purpose or reason.
An elbow caught me across the chin and snapped my head around, the world sluicing into horizontal lines of color and sound.
I’d never been hit in the face before. It was a shocking and oddly hollow sensation, like the elbow had dented my jaw.
Just as I righted myself, a man in a greenish smock and built like a linebacker slugged me in the stomach with a meaty fist. The air exploded from my lungs, and I doubled over.
He barely glanced at me, already turning to throw another punch at someone else.
A body thumped against me from behind and sent me sprawling onto the wet grass.
I curled up with my arms around my head as people stepped on, fell over, and kicked me.
“Dad!” Lyle’s voice, barely audible above the screaming around me.
Then there was a flash, followed by a concussive thump I felt in my chest. The shouting around me stopped, replaced by what sounded like a dozen bags of heavy sand thudding to the ground.
Arms or legs fell limply against me. Someone grabbed my arms. “Dad, come on.”
I looked through the crack between my forearms and saw Lyle’s face—older, lined and hardened with age and worry, but still Lyle. I grabbed his hand, and he pulled me to my feet.
“The police will be here any second,” he said, his face inches from mine, his eyes wide behind thin glasses. “We need to be somewhere else.”