Dante's Equation Part 28

He felt a surge of hate and it kept him warm, kept his legs sprinting despite the thick bandage on his thigh and the uncomfortable pull of his st.i.tches. Around him his agents fell behind, unable to match his muscles or his rage.

Jill spotted the others up ahead. Nate was pulling her on, relentlessly, and she wasn't arguing. She didn't have the breath. She couldn't run like this, was too out of shape and had been too ill too recently. Nate was clinging to her as mindlessly as a man clinging to a suitcase as he runs for a train, and she was getting fed up with it. Was he going to let her think for herself or what? What if the people chasing them were not the Mossad? What if they were DoD? Could she take that chance?

No. Not really. Up until this moment, she hadn't given her alleged abduction in Seattle much thought. But suddenly the idea that the men chasing them might not be American was pretty d.a.m.n terrifying. For all she knew, men like that might well torture and kill her to get the information. That kind of thing went on all the time in some parts of the world.

Up ahead was a small clearing where lights flickered in the trees. And there, in the glow of the moon, she could see Anatoli, Wyle, and Handalman waiting. She tried to let go of Nate's hand, but he gripped harder.

"What is this?" she asked, her words huffing between breaths. "Why have we stopped?"

Aharon wanted to know himself. He was itching to keep running, terrified of getting caught. Maybe it was the fear, but time had taken on a strange quality. The night felt dreamlike. As he had in Jerusalem, walking the streets, Aharon was more than capable of putting himself here in his ancestors' shoes. Only those shoes were not so old and they smelled of the ovens. Looking at Anatoli, Aharon could almost see the old man's face morph into his younger self, emaciated still, with a shaved head, prisoner's stripes, staring eyes. He could sense the presence of Kobinski.

Anatoli himself gave off this illusion of being back in time. He stood tensed; his eyes were mad. "This is the spot, Rebbe. Three hundred paces north, fifty south. This is it."

"What's he talking about?" Dr. Talcott leaned over to catch her breath.

Aharon felt a cold hand on his neck at Anatoli's words, as if the angel of death were touching him there. He could now see that the glints in the trees were long metallic strips nailed to the bark. Someone had marked this clearing-Anatoli, probably. And if Aharon was not very much mistaken he knew why it had been marked.

Aharon's feet felt pinned to the earth. He had stepped into someone else's nightmare. They were here, at the very spot where Kobinski and his group had made their last stand. And chasing them through the woods were men with guns, maybe dogs.

The blond goy, Wyle, was looking around the place wide-eyed and grinning, his hands out in front of him as if he were in a fun house. "Oh,man !" he breathed. So Wyle knew, too.

Dr. Talcott waved her hand at Anatoli. "h.e.l.lo? What is this place? Why have we stopped?"

"Shhhh!" The old man put a bony finger to his lips. "They'll hear you. Now everyone, we must pray! Fill your hearts with prayer, andyou have to mean it !"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it, we have to move!" Talcott looked at all of them as if to ask why they weren't doing something. "If we'regoing to run, then let's at least do it properly."

"Shhhht!" Aharon hissed. He'd heard something.

They all froze. There was the rustle of brush, just barely there. Someone wasright behind them .

Anatoli moved with a speed and ferocity that seemed beyond his years. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the ma.n.u.script from Aharon's hand and held it up maniacally.

"Is this what you want? It this what you all want?" he screamed.

As if in slow motion, Aharon saw the old man's arm come up, and then he threw the thing. It spun end over end in the air, its pages ruffling, straight into the heart of the cl.u.s.ter of trees, into the heart of those silver strips.

All Aharon could see was that bright white paper in the moonlight. All he could feel was the need in every part of himself to protect that sacred-and dangerous-knowledge, to keep it safe. The worry and fear of the past few months bore down on him at this one moment. Without a thought he found himself flying in the air, hand outstretched to catch the ma.n.u.script.

Jill ran forward knowing that she had to get her hands on that sheaf of paper or die trying. She was so sudden and so ferocious that she pulled Nate, still gripping her hand, right along with her.

Calder had them in his sights. He could see them huddled together, arguing, in a small clearing. He had his gun drawn, but he realized, looking around, that his agents were not with him. They'd fallen behind. He cursed under his breath, was debating whether to step forward on his own, when the old man, a stumbling corpse practically, grabbed something from one of the others and threw it into the air. Calder saw Dr. Talcott run after it. She was heading for the trees! No f.u.c.kingway would he lose her again.

Calder came barreling out from his cover, gun c.o.c.ked and aimed in his outstretched arms. "Freeze!" he shouted. He was prepared to shoot. h.e.l.l, hewanted to shoot.

Just then there was a flash, like an explosion, only noiseless, like flashbulbs, only a million times brighter. Except the color was not just light but something that seemed to echo in his very cells, not a sound but penetrating deeper than any sound he'd ever heard. Calder squinted, cursed, tried to regain his view of the clearing.

In a halo of an afterglow-Calder wasn't sure if the glow was really there or if it was an aftereffect of the flash on his eyes-he saw that several people had disappeared, including Dr. Talcott.

Calder pushed past the old man. "Stop! Stop!" he shouted. He peered into the woods beyond, rubbing at his eyes, but he couldn't see anything thanks to that d.a.m.n flash, nothing but an eerie bluish glow.

And then there was another flash. This one seemed to come from inside him, as if the explosion originated in the center of his brain. Reality fell apart.

Denton stood to one side of the clearing, hands gripping his poor mistreated ribs, mouth hanging open.Bam! Bam, bam, bam! One by one the others had disappeared: the rabbi, Dr. Talcott, Nate, and then some lunatic police guy with a gun.

Anatoli sank to the ground, staring at the blank s.p.a.ce, mind fried. And the ma.n.u.script was gone.The ma.n.u.script was gone. From the woods came the sound of men approaching.

"Ah, h.e.l.l," Denton said.

He felt the strangest sensation, as if he were removed from the scene, observing his own decision-making process. Not that itwas a decision. No, it was nothing as deliberate as that. Even while part of him screamed that he was crazy, nutso, freakinginsane , excitement and a slick thrill of destiny, of fate, rocked him into action. It was like that dizzy compulsion some people got in high places. He wanted . . .

He wanted to jump. He giggled nervously.

He took a step, knees shaking, and another, and another, a weird joy bubbling up inside him. And then he was running and the light claimed him.

Book Two

On Jacob's Ladder

This world is like an antechamber before the World to Come. Prepare yourself in the antechamber before you enter the palace. . . . This good [the Future World] is not given as a reward, but as a direct result of a person's binding himself to good. A person attains that to which he binds himself.

-Sefer Yetzirah,presixth century, translation by Aryeh Kaplan, 1990

14.1. Sixty-Forty Denton Wyle

There was no time to be afraid. The pull was so inexorable, so much larger than himself. He was a bug perched on a freight train. There wasn't even a thought of resisting.

He must have shut his eyes. The ground, solid beneath his feet, came as a surprise to him; he hadn't realized it was gone until it was back. Bright sunlight was red against his eyelids, warm on his cheeks. His body felt strangely light. He wobbled, off-balance, put his arms out to steady himself, and opened his eyes.

He half sat, half fell down in surprise. He was in a jungle, a rain-forest eruption of vegetation. The green was so vivid and bright and obscene it hurt his eyes.

Denton was on the side of a slope. About a half mile away was a foaming waterfall that disappeared into the smothering verdure. And flowers! Christ-from where he sat alone he could see a hundred varieties, screaming with color, stinking with perfume. He couldtaste the breath in his mouth-warm and chewy and textured with scent. The world blurred dizzily. He flopped back on the carpeting of gra.s.ses and ferns, heart racing madly, and found himself looking up at a deep turquoise sky. Above his head a magenta phallic-shaped fruit dangled on a fuzzy-leafed tree.

It had to be a dream. Had to be.

It wasn't a dream.

The vertigo was manageable, if he moved slowly. He got to his feet.

"h.e.l.lo!Dr. Talcott? Rabbi Handalman? Nate?" His cries were sucked up by the forest. "Molly?" he muttered.

He spent several minutes tromping around the slope but saw nothing, not a trace of an exit anywhere, no microscopic black holes, no shining gateways, and no evidence that any of the others had ever come this way. It was just him and the flowers and a few weird-a.s.s birds. Oh, yeah, and no way back.

Despite the heat he felt a chill and rubbed his arms. Okay. So perhaps jumping through the gateway had not been the most intelligent thing he'd ever done. Where was everyone? Why weren't they here?

What if they weren't here?At all? And where the heck washere ?

He sank down onto the gra.s.s, profoundly, devastatingly, afraid.

The sun rose and set three times. They were three of the longest days of Denton's life. He feared, yes, he really feared, that it was his fate to be stuck in this place, this Hawaiian Tropic ad on steroids, and to go stark, raving mad.

The dense, bright jungle seemed completely uninhabited-at least by anything that could talk back. There were plenty of small birds and mammals, some of them exceedingly bizarre. But he was no botanist, or whatever, and he didn't care about the wildlife as long as it couldn't hurt him-which, for all he knew, it could. The smallest thing could be deadly, so he avoided everything. The only thing he wanted to see was another human being, and he didn't. Nor did he see any indication that any had ever been here. There were no telephone poles, no soda cans, no paths, no roads. For Denton, who felt most comfortable in the heart of LA, it was profoundly unnerving.

And it was freakinghard . Until he'd found the riverbank, walking through the uncut jungle had been like wading through quicksand. He'd grown sticky from the effort of wrestling with greenery- sweaty and covered with sap. Vines clung to his legs like beseeching lovers. And he kept thinking, in his best bunny impersonation, that he could at any time be done in by a poisonous snake or spider or a man-eating plant or a huge sinkhole. All this mondo vegetation could hide just about anything.Anything.

Once he had heard something extremely large crashing around in the distance. Thank G.o.d it had been in the distance. He'd promptly gone the other way as fast and as quietly as he could, but his heart had pounded for a good three hours. He wished he hadn't seenJura.s.sic Park .

He knew, of course, that he was actuallyon another world . He had not stepped through time to some prehistoric version of Earth. The vegetation and even the color of the sky were too weird for it to be Earth. And he had certainly not been teleported to an other-dimensional spirit plane. It was far too corporeal and hot and gummy for that.

If he had any sense of adventure or any curiosity about his extraterrestrial journey, it was not making itself known. All he wanted-all that kept him going-was the idea, an obstinate hope, that hewould run into people. Any kind of people. He couldn't have justified this hope, didn't even try, just ignored any logic to the contrary. The truth was, he could eat fruit from a dozen trees and the water of the river had not yet made him sick. But even so, he would be dead in a couple of months and he knew it. Denton Wyle was not made to live without other people. This place was smothering and absorbing his very ident.i.ty into its dense silence, and soon he would not exist at all.

He found a riverbank by following the sound of water, and there he stayed. He had an easier time making his way along the relatively clear beaches-they were soil, not sand, and tuffed with mosses. He also moved easier on the second day, and way easier on the third, because his cuts and bruises were improving rapidly. He felt like he could walk for hours and hours, and that was good, because he had no reason to stop. He kept his mind from pressing the panic b.u.t.ton with show tunes, sung sotto voce to avoid attracting beasties.

On the third day the river widened and became tumescent. He followed it, the path growing more treacherous, until the water turned white and fell over a precipice. Looking down from the top of that

waterfall, Denton saw a valley below. And he cried.

The vista was mind-blowing. Directly below, the river continued its wide course, splitting a world of green lushness in two like a peach. In the distance were purple phantoms that might be mountains. In the foreground was a swath of lower hills, plateaus, and valleys that ran perpendicular to the cliff. And the sky was deep aqua far above and pink at the seams. The light made the world look translucent.

But Denton had seen awesome scenery for three days now, and he'd just as soon chuck it all for a day at Disneyland. What moved him to tears wa.s.smoke . Below the cliff was a horseshoe-shaped gorge in among the lower hills. It was almost perfectly round-a valley bordered by the high salmon-colored walls of a plateau. At the back of the gorge was another waterfall, sparkling like crystal in the light. And that smaller tributary, which ran to meet the river that Denton had been following, came from the narrow, open end of the horseshoe so that the valley formed a protected little sphere of jungle with the river flowing from it like a tail.

And there were a dozen or so small trails of smoke rising up from the middle of it.People.

By the time Denton reached the horseshoe gorge it was almost dark. The sunsets went on forever here, and Denton had made his way, with the speed of a desperate man, through turquoise, pink, orange, red, and purple light, respectively. Finally, with the world around him fading like a bruised grape, he stumbled upon the opening.

There was no mistaking it. It was as remarkable close-up as it had been from afar. The walls of the plateau were steep enough to escape all but the most incessant forms of life-some lichen and a few scraggly climbers. Their salmon color towered over the sea of green. The walls here were shaped like the ends of pichers, rounded to points. The entire opening to the gorge was only about a hundred feet across, half of that taken up by the river that flowed out of the valley like a snake leaving its hole.

It was very pretty. Denton paused for breath, leaning one hand against a tree. He was charmed by the sight, charmed by the happy thought that people would, indeed, pick such a place to live. If there was a creature with a brain in its freaking head anywhere on this entire planet, in fact, this is the spot it would choose to nest. And as he looked around, he found further proof. There was a clearing here, an areadeliberately cleared of vegetation. Trees had been cut down, long ago, so that only a half-dozen or so large specimens remained upright, almost like totem poles, in the middle of the clearing.

Definitely man-made. Denton straightened up and took a step back to appreciate it, his heart swelling with relief so strong it hurt. He wanted this to work out so badly!

But then, in that fading purple light, he saw something odd about the trees. They looked . . . scarred, their bark all torn up. And even while he was thinking that, he noticed that his hand, the hand that had been leaning on the tree, felt a little odd. Sticky. Even stickier than usual.

He lifted it close to his face and in the fading light sawblood .

Denton screamed. It was a short, intense little burst, coming from the gut. It had no sooner come out than he clamped his lips shut. Announcing his presence was the last thing he should do. All the headhunters, the nasty cannibals out there in the forest, were even now p.r.i.c.king up their ears and heading this way. His eyes darted left and right in a panic.

Too late. Maybe it was his imagination-he didn't stay long enough to find out-but he could have sworn he heard movement behind him, back the way he'd come. Denton ran into the gorge.

He crashed along, his fear making him clumsy. There was a path here, and he followed it with feet that kept tripping over each other in their panic. But after a short while, his ears and eyes on constant alert, over the dimming light, over the sounds of his own breath, he slowed and became aware of where he was.

He was on apath . Oh, there were definitely people. This was not a path made by animals heading to the river to drink. Huh-uh. This was a virtual road through the jungle. He paused, trying to hear if he was being followed, jogged ahead, paused.

The path was about four feet wide. Overhead, the grape sky had faded to indigo and the stars were coming out, though they were not as crisp and bright as they would be later. The path looked quaint in this light, homey even, like something out of a summer camp he had once been to or seen on TV. He heard nothing around him.

Maybe he was being an idiot. Maybe the torn-up bark on those trees was completely natural, just the way the trees grew, like hairless dogs or any of the zillions of other weird species he'd seen on this planet so far. Or maybe the bark was shredded from some anteaterlike mammal that tunneled for insects. Maybe the "blood" on his hand-he looked at it again in the twilight-was just sap. Maybehe was a sap, panicking over nothing. Had he seen body parts? Severed heads hanging from the trees? No. He'd seen some frayed bark and some sticky dark stuff. Heck, with this light, it could be maple syrup.

He lowered his hand and saw the girl.

She was in the trees, sitting on a limb that was level with his chest, watching him. Her legs were folded in a deep squat, her slender hands lightly holding the branch. She might have looked like a wild animal in that pose, if her face were not so wise, if she were not so stunning.

She wa.s.stunning . His breath left him. He stared. She seemed just as alarmed as he was, for she stared back.

She was, hands down, the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, as exotic and exquisite as this whole place. Her hair was long, long as her hips, and the soft texture of spun silk. Its color, in this dark light, glowed white, though his mind corrected this estimate to a very light blond. More important, she washuman . And not only human butwoman . And not only woman but a swimsuit edition centerfold. He literally shook with joy. Because up until that moment, despite not allowing himself a thought to the contrary, he hadn't really been sure he would find anyone here at all.

And yet . . . as he continued to stare, his eye began to discern the hundred little disparities that his mind had at first glossed over. There andthere and that and . . . Christ.

She was female all right, at least he thought so, and certainly gorgeous. But she was not human.

Her torso was long and so narrow it looked like stretched taffy. The center of her-with a navel like a dimple-was no wider than his hand. Her hips, covered by a little skirt, were bowl-shaped and wide. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, if she had any, were covered by her hair. She was probably no taller than he, but even on the branch she gave the impression of freakish height. She was all attenuation. Her limbs were unnaturally slender. Her knees were bent deeply; her toesgripped the branch. Her thighs were as long as his arm.

And her face. . . . it was flat and sharply boned. The nose ridge was only slightly raised from her cheeks, the nostrils peaked and flared with alarm. Her eyes were extremely large and slanted upward, her chin delicate and pointed. She reminded him of . . . what? An ethnic and very thin model, vaguely Asian except for her coloring, or . . . yes, drawings he'd seen of fairies.

"Wow." He released a shaky sigh.

Her head snapped to the side as if she heard something; then she melted away before his eyes. She jumped gracefully from her branch to a neighboring one, fading back into the trees.

"Wait! Don't leave!" he called out.

And that was when he realized that he was surrounded.

He must have been more mesmerized by the girl than he'd realized. A crowd was standing around him and he hadn't even heard them coming. His fear returned, more from the sheer unexpectedness of it than anything else. He gave off a brief cry and stood trapped-heart pounding, mouth dry.

His bruises might have faded, but his skittishness from the beating had not.

There were at least thirty of the creatures around him-males, females, and even children. They were quiet, all staring at him with expressions of what he hoped was more perplexity than homicidal rage.

They didn't look like headhunters. They didn't look mean and nasty. But there were still thirty of them and he could be wrong.

They were the same species as the girl, of course. And now that he saw them in all shapes and sizes it was obvious how very unhuman they were. They were tall, a foot or so taller than him on average, and very thin. Even the grown males had tiny waists and boyishly narrow chests and arms. Their faces were all flat, with noses that were mere b.u.mps-and-nostrils. Their eyes were oversize and almond-shaped. Their fingers and toes had a little of the gecko about them. Their hair was long and wild and fair, even the males, and their clothing skimpy and brightly dyed.

And yet they were a good-looking people. Perhaps none of the females in this group were as hot as the one in the tree, but they weren't bad, either. The whole group looked young and healthy and clean, which was a good thing. And they were wearing clothes, which was a plus. They were not wearinga lot of clothes, which was even better. Both males and females wore flappy little skirts and fabric arm- and leg bands like bracelets around their arms and legs. And yes, he could see now that they had b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The females had, if he was not mistaken, four of them.

One of the males broke the silence by reaching out a hand and poking Denton in the chest, as if to see how solid he was. It hurt.

"Hey!" Denton's heart picked up speed again. "I mean, uh, hi. Nice to meet you."