“Two thousand people are going to die here tonight if we don’t do something. I’m pretty confused about the rest of this business but that much I can grasp with no trouble at all.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “Just keep your arm around me so I don’t crack my head open if I faint.”
It was ironic, Ralph thought. They now had the faces and bodies of people in the early years of a vigorous middle age, but they shuffled across the parking lot like a pair of old-timers whose muscles have turned to string and whose bones have turned to glass. He could hear Lois’s breathing, rapid and labored, like the breathing of a woman who has just sustained some serious injury.
“I’ll take you back if you want,” Ralph said, and he meant it. He would take her back to the parking lot, he would take her to the orange bus-stop bench he could see from here. And when the bus came, getting on and going back to Harris Avenue would be the simplest thing in the world.
He could feel the killer aura which surrounded this place pressing in on him, trying to smother him like a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and he found himself remembering something McGovern had said about May Locher’s emphysema-that it was one of those diseases that keep on giving. And now he supposed he had a pretty good idea of how May Locher had felt during her last few years. It didn’t matter how hard he sucked at the black air or how deep he dragged it down; it did not satisfy. His heart and head went on pounding, making him feel as if he were suffering the worst hangover of his life.
He was opening his mouth to repeat that he’d take her back when she spoke up, talking in little out-of-breath gasps. “I guess I can make it… but I hope… it won’t take long. Ralph, how come we can feel something this bad even without being able to see the colors? Why can’t they?” She pointed at the media people milling around the Civic Center, “Are we Short-Timers that insensitive? I hate to think that.”
He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know, but he thought that perhaps the news crews, video technicians, and security guards clustered around the doors and beneath the spray-painted banner hanging from the canopy did feel something. He saw lots of hands holding styrofoam cups of coffee, but he didn’t see anyone actually drinking the stuff. There was a box of doughnuts sitting on the hood of a station wagon, but the only one which had been taken off had been laid aside on a napkin with just a single bite gone. Ralph i-an his eye over two dozen faces without seeing a single smile. The newspeople were going about their work-setting camera angles, marking locations from which the talking heads would do their standups, laying down coaxial cable and duct-taping it to the cement-but they were doing it without the sort of excitement which Ralph would have expected to accompany a story as big as this one was turning out to be.
Connie Chung walked out from beneath the canopy with a bearded, handsome cameraman-MICHAEL ROSENBERG the tag on his CBS jacket said-and then raised her small hands in a framing gesture, showing him how she wanted him to shoot the bedsheet banner hanging down from the canopy.
Rosenberg nodded. Chung’s face was pale and solemn, and at one point during her conversation with the bearded cameraman, Ralph saw her pause and raise a hand uncertainly to her temple, as if she had lost her train of thought or perhaps felt faint.
There seemed to be an underlying similarity to all the expressions he saw-a common chord-and he thought he knew what it was: they were all suffering from what had been called melancholia when he was a kid, and melancholia was just a fancy word for the blues.
Ralph found himself remembering times in his life when he’d hit the emotional equivalent of a cold spot while swimming or clear air turbulence while flying. You’d be cruising along through your day-sometimes feeling great, sometimes just feeling okay, but getting along and getting it done… and then, for no apparent reason at all, you’d go down in flames and crash. A sense of What the how the use would slide over you-unconnected to any real event in your life at that moment but incredibly powerful all the same-and you felt like simply creeping back to bed and pulling the covers up Over your head.
Maybe this is what causes feelings like that, he thought.
Maybe it’s running into something like this-some hig mess of death or sorrow waiting to happen, spread out like a banquet tent made of cobwebs and tears instead of canvas and rope. We don’t see it, not down on our Short-Time level, but we feel it. Oh yes, we feel it. And now…
Now it was trying to suck them dry. Maybe they weren’t vampires, as they both had feared, but this thing was. The deathbag had a sluggish, half-sentient life, and it would suck them dry if it could. if they let it.
Lois stumbled against him and Ralph had all he could do to keep them both from sprawling to the pavement. Then she lifted her head (Slowly, as if her hair had been dipped in cement), curled a hand around her mouth, and inhaled sharply-At the same time she flickered a little. Under other circumstances, Ralph might have dismissed that flicker as a momentary glitch in his own eyes, but not now. She had slid up. just a little. just enough to feed.
He hadn’t seen Lois dip into the waitress’s aura, but this time everything happened in front of him. The auras of the newspeople were like small but brightly colored Japanese lanterns glowing bravely in a vast, gloomy cavern. Now a tight beam of violet light speared out from one of them-from Michael Rosenberg, Connie Chung’s bearded cameraman, in fact. It divided in two an inch or so in front of Lois’s face. The upper branch divided in two again and slipped into her nostrils; the lower branch went between her parted lips and into her mouth. He could see it glowing faintly behind her cheeks, lighting her from the inside as a candle lights a jack-o’-lantern.
Her grip on him loosened, and suddenly the leaning pressure of her weight was gone. A moment later the violet beam of light disappeared.
She looked around at him. Color-not a lot, but somewas returning to her leaden cheeks.
“That’s better-a lot better. Now you, Ralph!”
He was reluctant-it still felt like stealing-but it had to be done if he didn’t want to simply collapse right here; he could almost feel the last of Nirvana Boy’s borrowed energy running out through his pores. He curled his hand around his mouth now as he had in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot that morning and turned slightly to his left, seeking a target. Connie Chung had backed several steps closer to them; she was still looking up at the bedsheet banner hanging from the canopy and talking to Rosenberg (who seemed none the worse for wear as a result of Lois’s borrowing) about it. With no further thought, Ralph inhaled sharply through the curled tube of his fingers.
Chung’s aura was the same lovely shade of wedding-gown ivory as those which had surrounded Helen and Nat on the day they’d come to his apartment with Gretchen Tillbury. Instead of a ray of light, something like a long, straight ribbon shot from Chung’s aura.
Ralph felt strength begin to fill him almost at once, banishing the aching weariness in his joints and muscles. And he could think clearly again, as if a big cloud of sludge had just been washed out of his brain.
Connie Chung broke off, looked up at the sky for a moment, then began to talk to the cameraman again. Ralph glanced around and saw Lois looking at him anxiously. “Any better?” she whispered.
“All kinds,” he said, “but it’s still like being zipped up in a body-bag.”
“I think-” Lois began, and then her eyes fixed on something to the left of the Civic Center doors. She screamed and shrank back against Ralph, her eyes so wide it seemed they must tumble from their sockets.
He followed her gaze and felt his breath stop in his throat.