“Oh, God,” she moaned. “I can hear you breathing. For the love of God, please answer me.”
Something was happening to him, something strange. Like the woman’s sightless eyes were a mirror, and what he saw in them was himself—not the monster they’d made him into but the man he used to be. As if he were waking up and remembering who he was. He tried to answer. I’m here, he wanted to say. You’re not alone. I’m sorry about what I done. But his mouth would not make words. The flames were spreading, the cabin filling with smoke.
“Oh God, I’m burning, please, oh God, oh God…”
The woman was reaching for him. Not for him, he realized. To him. Something was clutched in her hand. A hard spasm shook her; she had begun to choke on the blood that was pouring from her mouth. Her fingers opened and the object fell to the ground.
It was a pacifier.
The baby was in the backseat, still strapped in its carrier upside down. Any second the car was going to blow. Carter dropped to the ground and slithered through the back window. The baby was awake and crying now. The carrier would never fit—he’d have to take the baby out of it. He released the buckle, guided the child’s shoulders through the straps, and just like that the soft crying weight of a baby filled his arms. A little girl, wearing pink pajamas. Holding her tight to his chest, Carter wriggled free of the car and began to run.
But that was all he remembered. The story ended there. He never did know what became of that baby girl. For Anthony Carter, Twelfth of Twelve, made it all of three steps before the flames found what they were looking for, the gas in the tank ignited, and that car was blown to smithereens.
—
He never took another one.
Oh, he ate. Rats, possums, raccoons. Now and again a dog, which he always felt sorry about. But it wasn’t long before the world went quiet, and there weren’t so many people around to tempt him, and then one day after more time had passed, he realized there weren’t any people at all.
He’d closed himself to Zero, too—closed it to all of them. Carter wanted no part in what they were about. He built a wall in his mind, Zero and the others on one side and him on the other; and though the wall was thin and Carter could hear them if he chose to, he never sent anything back.
It was a lonely time.
He watched his city drown. He’d made a place for himself in that building, One Allen Center, on account of it was high and at night he could stand on the rooftop, among the stars, and feel close to them for company. Year by year the waters rose around the bases of the buildings, and then one night a great wind came barreling down. Carter had been through a hurricane or two in his day, but this wasn’t like any storm he’d ever seen. It set the skyscraper swaying like a drunk. Walls were cracking, windows popping from their frames, everything was in an uproar. He wondered if the end of the world was coming, if God had just grown sick and tired of it all. As the waters rose and the building rocked and the heavens howled, he took to praying, telling God to take him if that’s what he wanted, saying he was sorry over and over about the things he’d done, and if there was a better place to go to, he knew he didn’t deserve it any but hoped he’d get a chance to see it, assuming God could forgive him, which Carter didn’t think he could.
Then he heard a sound. A terrifying, heart-rending, inhuman sound, as if the gates of hell had opened and released a million screaming souls into the whirlwind. From out of the blackness a great dark shape emerged. It grew and grew and then the lightning flashed and Carter saw what it was, though he could not believe it. A ship. In downtown Houston. She was headed straight for him, her great keel dragging along the street, bearing down upon the towers of the Allen Center like God’s own bowling ball and the buildings were the pins.
Carter dropped to the floor and covered his head, bracing for the impact.
Nothing happened. Suddenly, everything went quiet; even the wind had stopped. He wondered how this could be so, the sky so furious one minute and still the next. He rose and peered out the window. Above him, the clouds had opened like a porthole. The eye, Carter thought, that’s what this was; he was in the eye of the storm. He looked down. The ship had come to rest against the side of the tower, parked like a cab at the curb.
He climbed down the face of the building. How much time he had before the storm returned, Carter couldn’t say. All he knew was that the ship being there felt like a message. At length he found himself in the bowels of the vessel, its maze of passages and pipes. Yet he did not feel lost; it was as if an unseen influence was guiding his every action. Oily seawater sloshed around his feet. He chose a direction, then another, drawn by this mysterious presence. A door appeared at the end of the corridor—heavy steel, like the door of a bank vault. T1, it was marked: Tank No. 1.