Evans,Linda - Far Edge of Darkness

Far Edge of Darkness

by Linda Evans

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-87735-6

Cover art by Ken Tunnell

First printing, August 1996

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press: Editorial Services, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

For Diana Hulsey, David Fletcher, and Dr. David C. Young for their

incalculable help with ancient Rome (Dr. Young's knowledge of Roman

circuses was priceless for this and previous novels); also for Dr. Lenny Land,

for her support and encouragement; for Alan Hagan and Sandon Flowers for

encouragement and willingness to share their libraries; and—as always—for

Bob and Susan, for putting up with everything.

Baen Books by Linda Evans

Sleipnir

Far Edge of Darkness

Time Scout (with Robert Asprin)

Wagers of Sin (with Robert Asprin)

Chapter One

Sibyl Johnson didn't own a rifle.

She wouldn't have known how to shoot one, if she had. And Tony Bartlett had vanished,

apparently right off the edge of the world.

None of which stopped Sibyl from wanting to center his face in the sights of an honest-to-

God, high-powered varmint gun. Sibyl had spent her formative years increasingly disgusted with

small-town drunken quarrels that led to knifings and shootings on Saturday nights. But if she ever

saw Tony Bartlett again . . .

She'd do a whole lot more than wish for a gun.

Sibyl banged a fist against the steering wheel. How could I have been so . . . so . . .

Stupid?

Blind?

Naïve?

Any number of scathing put-downs would be appropriate.

Another lightning strike jerked Sibyl back into the present reality of creaking VW Beetle and

steaming Florida heat. She tightened sweaty hands around the cracked plastic of the steering

wheel. Another searing flash momentarily erased everything beyond her car: the rutted dirt road,

the dust-white trees clinging to the hillside like forlorn mushrooms, the looming storm that had

boiled up out of a clear sky the way storms always did on summer afternoons.

An aftershock of thunder, shaking the very frame of her battered car, was louder than the

assorted groans, screeches, and bangs issuing from the rear of the decaying vehicle. "C'mon,

Nuggie, you can do it," she encouraged the faltering car.

Nuggie didn't want to climb the long, shallow grade. She was glad the old car was running at

all, given the repairs it needed. If she'd lived in mountainous country, like West Virginia or

Colorado, Nuggie would've gone to slag-heap heaven years ago—although things might have

turned out very differently, if she had lived somewhere else. Tony Bartlett would've picked a

different victim, for one thing.

Sibyl punched the gas pedal savagely. Lightning flared again, even closer. Thunder rattled

side windows in their loose frames. Sibyl winced and glanced through the driver's window, the

one that would roll neither up nor down all the way. The air trickling through was cooler than the

inside of her car, but not much. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck and prickled under her

bra strap. Hot as it was, it was little wonder the inevitable afternoon storm promised to be a dilly.

The hotter the day, the crazier the storm, that's what Granny Johnson had always said.

Industrial Light & Magic, Inc., would have been proud to claim this storm. Greasy black

clouds boiled across the sky, just clear of the treetops. Nonstop lightning—not bolts, but

fantastic, sky-arching pink columns—jabbed the blackness to strike beyond the hill crest.

Nuggie's headlights barely dented the gloom. Although it wasn't yet four in the afternoon, cattle

egrets had already started to roost. Their wings flashed white against the backdrop of black

clouds and dusty, cringing trees.

Sibyl Johnson had lived through a lot of Florida thunderstorms. But she'd never seen one like

this and she still hadn't hit the worst of it. She hadn't even hit the leading edge of rain yet.

Her car wheezed and lost acceleration. "C'mon, Nuggie," she muttered again as she

downshifted. Gears clashed and groaned somewhere in the VW's battered innards. The dying car

wouldn't survive the summer. She wasn't even certain it would survive the trip to campus. She

growled under her breath. Campus . . . Sibyl knew confronting those smug, lily-white fat cats

wouldn't do any good. It was just something she had to do, to retain what was left of her battered

self-respect. She would do it, get it over with, and leave the rest to fate.

Another sky-cracking column of lightning set roadside trees aflame, backlit with mad, pink

light. She gripped the steering wheel harder and tried to ignore a frosty prickle of fear, left over

from childhood tornadoes and the death of her parents. I am not afraid of thunderstorms. I am

not. Really, I'm not . . .

She tried to focus on practicalities to distract herself from unreasoning fear. Driving straight

into the storm like this, she didn't have much hope of avoiding the rain. Once it cut in . . .

Nuggie's tires were balder than her department chairman. Eight-year-old tires just wouldn't cope

with blinding rain on a washboarded dirt road. And there wasn't money—not now—to buy new

ones or fix the roof on the house, either. She savaged her lower lip and blinked rapidly.

Car . . . house . . . career . . . Sibyl wanted to bawl like a baby. But with a gullywasher in the

making, she couldn't afford to cry about it now. So she pushed the Beetle as fast as she dared and

eyed the storm for tell-tale funnel shapes. She found herself muttering a snatch of music that

matched her mood. When would Rod Serling step out from wherever it was dead TV MCs went

and say something appropriate about the mess her life was in? Maybe he could tell her the last

three months had been a nothing more than a terrible delusion, caused by some foreign germ to

which she had no resistance.

Yeah, right. And Tony Bartlett really is the answer to your dreams.

Another column of nightmarish pink slammed into the crest of the hill. Sibyl jumped, so

badly the car swerved toward a ditch. Cattle egrets took wing in a blur of pink-edged white as she

dragged Nuggie back on course. The storm grew madder with each shaky breath. I'm not

panicked, I'm not . . . But with the whole sky on fire like the edge of a Tesla ball, she could

imagine driving over the top of this hill into anything at all: a black-sand beach beside an

ammonia sea, even a stampeding herd of tyrannosaurs.

Come to think of it, a T. rex might be useful. One little enough to fit in Wilkins' office. Yeah,

that'd be just about right.

Anger simmered to a boil again. Tony Bartlett's mocking grin floated in front of her eyes. She

dragged the back of one hand over her cheek and said an ugly word aloud. At least her

grandmother hadn't lived to see this. Had Sibyl not been Cora Johnson's granddaughter, the

shattering end of everything she had worked for might have destroyed her. Granny not only

would've understood, she probably would've been in Nuggie's passenger seat, ready, willing, and

able to do battle.

And Granny Johnson would've had that rifle, too—the one Sibyl had sold right after the

funeral so it wouldn't be in the house, the one she'd never understood the need for, propped so

sinisterly in her grandmother's bedroom corner next to the quilt stand. She growled aloud another

word which would've shocked her grandmother speechless. When Sibyl got to campus, there was

going to be a storm in the chairman's office, one to match the gullywasher brewing overhead, and

only an act of God would prevent it!

She gritted her teeth. I'd have saved myself a lot of grief if I'd lived up to my ancient

namesakes. Rome's famous sibyls, priestesses of the Magna Mater—the Phrygian Great Goddess

Cybele—had read portents that revealed the future.

"Some oracle I turned out to be." Sibyl wiped her cheek fiercely. "Displayed all the

clairvoyance of a rock, didn't we, Sib?"

She should've seen through all that flattering swill Bartlett had fed her. She was a good

student and motivated, but not brilliant—and overly eager. Her grip tightened down again on the

steering wheel. Bartlett had set her up like the pro he was. And she'd walked right into his arms.

Must be laughing himself sick, wherever he was by now. At the rate she was going, maybe life in

the T. Zone would be a change for the better.

"Enough! First, you confront those tenured fat cats. Then, if they're stubborn, find a lawyer

who works cheap and sue them."

Cora Johnson's granddaughter was not a quitter.

The car finally chugged the last few yards to the crest of the hill, slipping gears and wheezing

like a foundered racehorse. Sibyl took the VW out of gear to coast downhill in the vain hope her

transmission might last just a few hundred miles more. A brilliant flash lit the whole interior of

her car with a hellish pink glow. All she could see was after image. Sibyl swore, hastily shifting

into first gear—in case she had to do some quick maneuvering around a downed tree—then

tapped the brakes until she could see.

There was a hole in front of her.

Not in the road.

In the air.

Sibyl stood on the brakes. Nuggie groaned a protest and fishtailed on the dusty road. The car

lurched. She threw in the clutch to keep the engine running. Then she just stared, while the

bottom fell out of her viscera and tried to crawl back up the hill without her.

A ragged puncture of brilliant white light was opening out of thin air. It was so bright she

couldn't see anything: not through it, not around it, not beyond. Enormous columns of pink

lightning crashed on all sides, arcing outward to strike the road, the trees, the clouds—

"Oh, My God . . ."

It widened, a doorway into hell.

"Ohmighod . . ."

Her hand slipped on the gear shift. She fumbled with clutch and accelerator, hunted for

reverse by feel. Like a rabbit trapped in a glare of headlights, Sibyl couldn't look away. The

rupture splitting open in front of her gaped wider than her house. Where it touched the ground,

there wasn't any ground. Pink lightning sizzled out of it. The whole world sizzled, while Nuggie's

gears groaned and something inside the engine made a sickening, snapping sound. Sibyl jammed

the accelerator pedal against the floor.

Impossibly, the car lurched forward.

The brilliant rupture swooped hungrily toward her, vast as the surface of the sun. Sibyl

screamed and fought the gear shift. It was frozen in place, solid as a mountain. Lightning caught

the VW and danced over the hood, spraying pink hell across the windshield.

Then blinding white light swallowed Nuggie whole.

Sibyl threw her arms across her face and screamed again, high, ragged. The brilliance was so

intense it burned. A flash of disorienting nausea tore through her, along with the sensation of

falling forever. The last thing she remembered was the vile smell of vomit.

Logan didn't outrun the storm.

Not that he really tried. He was enjoying the view across the lake and the clean, green scent

of the wind far too much to seek shelter. He'd sat here since early morning, knitting more of that

hideous sweater he'd begun several months ago, just to keep his restless hands occupied. While

he knitted, Logan watched tall, ungainly wading birds stalk fish for their dinner—and 'gators

stalk birds for theirs. So far the 'gators had gone hungry. Logan's belly rumbled in hollow

sympathy.

All through the day a steady parade of college kids, outrageous in pink jeans and orange hair,

had hiked down from main campus. Most ignored him, much as they might have ignored a lizard

sunning on a log. That was all right. He ignored them, too. Others, though . . .

Logan glanced up as a foursome made their noisy approach down the wooded path to the

observation deck where he sat. Nice-looking kids. Or they might have been, if their clothes hadn't

been artistically ripped to shreds, their hair chopped off apparently by machetes, and their faces

painted with inch-thick purple and orange makeup.

At least, the girls' were, if he was interpreting the bulges correctly. There wasn't much

evidence on which to base a determination, since all four wore at least some makeup, a number of

massive, unmatched earrings, and clothes loose enough to disguise even the most tell-tale

anatomy. The cloying scent of clove cigarettes filled the air. The cloying sameness of their

"rebellious look" blurred them into a whole generation with the same face, the same hair and

clothes.

Had Logan's "Me-Generation" of Jim Morrison, LSD, and 'Nam Babies been just as

indistinguishable?

"I can't believe he said that, I mean, everybody knows to activate a crystal you've got to bury

it under an oak tree, not a stupid pine—"

"Syn, Jez, get a look at the crackerman!"

The girls (he assumed) obediently swiveled their heads to stare at Logan. One of them flipped

ash from her cigarette in Logan's general direction. "You'd think the hospital wouldn't let those

creeps out without an armed guard. I mean, Jeezus, they're all crazy, what are they doing running

around loose?"

"They can't even dress themselves right! And they shuffle around and stare and drool on

themselves every time a girl walks by." The other girl shuddered delicately. Her earrings jangled.

"God, one of them's going to pull a real crazy one of these days and kill another bunch of

people. Let's get out of here."

They went. He listened as they disappeared back toward the road, still arguing the merits of

keeping the "Ward Two" residents locked up. He sighed. He couldn't blame them, really, for

being scared, not after the campus murders. Then he tightened his lips. Logan held no illusions,

not about himself, at any rate. He knew perfectly well what that foursome saw when they looked

at him.

He found, to his surprise, that he didn't really mind.

At first he was wryly amused. Logan Pfeiffer McKee overlooking an insult? Then, gradually,

he felt a little lonelier. An osprey sailed out across the water. It dove, struck at a fish and missed,

and lifted slowly into the air again. He watched until it disappeared into the woodline across the

lake, then shook himself.

Logan couldn't hide from the truth, any more than he could hide from the plastic band on his

wrist. He had become one of those grey old men in shabby clothes, the ones kids made fun of and

parents watched with wary distrust. He felt old for the first time in his life. Somehow, he couldn't

muster enough social consciousness to cut his greying hair or shave his scraggly cinnamon-and-

salt beard every day, or even replace the twenty-year-old, olive-drab military "blouse" (aka,

British Commando jacket), his t-shirt with time-worn holes through the soft cotton, and much-

patched jeans that were his most comfortable clothes. A little hot, true, but he'd been trapped in

hotter.

Much hotter. Logan shivered at memories crowding the forefront of his mind like teenagers

trying to get seats at a rock concert. Facing the truth was bad enough. Even worse was the cold

realization he had no one to jolly him out of his mood.

Growing old in a loony bin didn't do much for a man's self-esteem.

Hell, there were a lot of people who would have denied him even this one-day pass, after . . .

Logan shied away from those memories. What people thought or didn't think about him was

no longer his concern. Legally he had been relieved of any further need to worry about such

things. So he wouldn't. He glanced down and found he'd clenched his fingers into white-knuckled

fists. He swore softly, then deliberately uncurled his fingers one by one until his hands lay still

and dead on the rough wooden bench next to the "commando" jacket he'd shed earlier.

Slowly Logan emptied his mind. He watched the lake and the birds and the sky. The sweep of

dark water beyond his bench reflected dark clouds scudding in low above the treetops from the

west. Massive arches of lightning discharged through the clouds every few seconds. He smiled to

himself, a bitter, wistful little smile, as the lake changed hue from sunny blue to algae green to

slate and finally to the murky black of the lowering storm. A snowy egret launched itself from the

shallows and flew off into the rising wind, its wings flashing starkly white against sky and water.

Farther away, a flock of little cattle egrets or maybe white ibis settled earthward to escape the

rising storm.

He drew a deep breath that smelled of dark water and rustling cattails and the thick,

unmistakable scent of alligators and slowly allowed the furrows in his brow to smooth out. Dr.

Brandon would lecture him on responsibility when he showed up soaking wet—Logan snorted

wryly at the very idea—but he didn't consider moving from his seat. The wind was sharp and

cool against his face, refreshing after the steaming heat of afternoon. The black lake began to

froth as wind tore miniature whitecaps from its surface. Lightning blazed in the seething clouds,

crackled through the wind like some living thing seeking its mate in the ground.

Logan breathed in the storm smell through dilated nostrils, through the very pores of his skin.

Even plate glass windows closed a man in, if they were never opened to the sweet, living air.

He winced, inwardly, where no one could see. The temptation to start walking and never go

back hurt him worse than any gunshots ever had. He shut his eyes, then sat listening to the

storm's whistling, moaning descent. It came shrieking across the lake, driving a wall of water

before it. Logan could hear the rain smash down into the black lake long before the first drops

touched his skin. Lightning flashed starkly against the backs of his eyelids, blazing pink through

the blood vessels in the thin membranes. A bull 'gator grunted in the reeds nearby.

Logan sighed as the rain burst over the observation platform. The deluge soaked him to the

skin in a matter of seconds. Toadstranglers, he'd called them when he was a kid, these afternoon

storms that swept across the land, sheeting down to flood the wet, low lands and fountain up

through storm drains too choked with runoff to hold the excess. Wistfully, he wondered if bass

still lurked in the deep, hidden holes along the Suwannee and Santa Fe, back under the

overhanging cypresses. It had been too many years since he'd haunted those banks, cane pole in

hand, his old reliable .22 propped nearby in case he surprised a water moccasin.

Reluctantly Logan opened his eyes. Hair streamed wetly into his face. He pushed it back onto

his forehead. The very thought of going back left him physically ill. But lightning could be

dangerous, out in the open like this. Well, he could always wander over to the state museum or

take shelter at the student union. He didn't have to go back just yet. Slowly Logan hauled himself

to his feet.

His leg felt stiffer than usual. He winced when his weight came down on it. Probably the rain

and a whole day spent sitting in one place. God, he was getting old. Logan favored the old injury

slightly as he reached for his rip-stop nylon satchel and the much-tattered jacket that had gone

everywhere he had over the past couple of decades. That jacket had seen more combat than most

soldiers saw in a lifetime. Like his leg, it was the worse for wear. He shrugged it on over his wet

t-shirt and hoisted the pack onto one shoulder. Then, watching his footing, Logan started back

along the winding path that led to the bus stop.

He didn't get far.

The dirt track was a slippery river of mud, made even slicker by last year's pine straw and

decaying leaves. He was moving cautiously, head bent against the solid wall of water beating

down on him, when the world erupted into a pink hell. Logan jerked his head upward. Great,

sizzling fingers of lightning stabbed into an ancient, towering magnolia along the edge of the

path. Gigawatts of electricity poured earthward like some demonic waterfall. Brilliance burned

his eyes. Instinctively—uselessly—he threw up a shielding arm.

The tree's crown exploded forty feet above his head, then deadly rivers of raw lightning

branched and slammed into the ground on all sides of him, trapping him inside a cage of crawling

pink hellfire. Searing blue afterimages left him half blind. Logan felt a tremendous overpressure

as thunder bruised his chest, bloodied his ears. He saw the tree begin its long, toppling crash to

the ground, tried to hurl himself out of the way . . .

His bad leg twisted. He lurched sideways. Then started down, directly beneath the smashing

weight of the tree. Time crawled like cold syrup and held him motionless. He could do nothing

but watch the tree kill him. Logan felt the sizzling electric tingle of lightning as it crackled

around him again. Blinding light shut out the image of the rushing tree trunk—

Then he was falling, faster than the magnolia. Faster than the rain. His stomach tried to meet

his lungs, as though he'd stepped into an empty elevator shaft. Logan yelled and twisted in

Evans, Linda - Far Edge of Darkness

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