End Time by Keith Korman Read Free Book Online Page A

private dime.
    Then bring ’em down again in one piece to brag all about it.
    *   *   *
    And Van Horn, Texas, turned out a whole lot better than first impressions. “ The Town So Healthy We Had to Shoot a Man to Start a Cemetery .” Very small, yes, a few adobe mission-style buildings, the crossroads of West Texas, and tourists flocked through on their way to Carlsbad Caverns. The place was named after Jefferson Van Horne, a US Union Army major who discovered the nearby wells, allowing the place to fill bathtubs and irrigate crops—cotton, mostly. A stage stop on the San Diego–San Antonio Mail Route and later the Texas & Pacific Railroad.
    They even had a modern ghost town south of nowhere—Lobo—that slowly died. Looking like something out of a US government atomic test site from the late 1940s, nearby Lobo sat in the dust while its nearby sister town thrived on tourists. Such were the inequities of location, water, fate, and chance, the ghost town of Lobo being where the wells finally ran dry.
    While the town of Van Horn lost Major Van Horne’s “ e ”; got a Diesel Fried Chicken restaurant in compensation, along with the occasional lost tourist from Carlsbad Caverns a mere 100 miles north; and a trip to the stars. Suborbital for now. That is, if Bhakti and Eleanor could make themselves a good Spaceskin.
    *   *   *
    The night Janet failed to return Bhakti knew something was wrong the moment he opened his eyes.
    He’d been dreaming of India; he sometimes dreamt of his eastern homeland, but mostly it came on floated scents, of gardenias and cow dung on the humid air, chattering monkeys climbing on a garden wall, a peacock’s forlorn cry outside his family’s gated compound. The place was almost an estate: where his father’s Bombay wealth insulated them all from the crowded, dusty, sweaty, struggling humanity on all sides.
    And also allowed him to study, to go to university, to make something of himself, even come to America.
    But this dream of India was different.
    A northern desert town—Jaipur or Udaipur—a broad open square flanked by dry, flaking concrete buildings. The sun beat down like a white hot cap on his head. Here stood the ruins of a temple to forgotten gods. A ruin older than Shiva and Vishnu: a simple square pancake ziggurat, layer upon layer of a hundred steps rising to a narrow platform. He stood looking about him, at the thin blue dome of the sky, the surrounding buildings, their windows like black empty eyes.
    Far below he spotted a youth, a cripple dressed in rags. He looked down at his own clothes, finery by all comparison, khaki pants, pressed shirt, polished loafers. The trappings of a prince. This was before his time in America, before he trimmed his beard, cut his hair, and left his crimson turban at home. Not that these symbols of his faith embarrassed him, not at all. Bhakti still kept his turban at home and wore it for special occasions, or when he went back to Bombay to visit the family; the hair and full beard would always grow back. No, he had abandoned these things for the demands of science: Turbans got in the way; long hair dropped onto laboratory tables; beards could catch on fire.
    But in the dream of the ancient temple steps, he felt the crimson turban on his head and the thick beard even as he stared down at the cripple in the square. He realized with sudden certitude, this was a cripple from his childhood in the 1960s, when they still wore terrible rags. Now the outcasts and their pimps used cell phones and cut up territories like little gangsters. But back in his childhood the awful savagery and destitution made the gangster pimps take certain babies from their mothers, the lowest of the low. They’d break their bones at the joints when they were infants and never let them set correctly—to make them more pitiable, to make them better beggars.
    And this youth was one of