Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Read online

  Humans is a jumbo sized fantasy thriller featuring angels, demons, all-too human humans, and nothing less than the complete destruction of planet Earth!

  The world stinks. God is fed up. He’s ready to take action.

  He’s done it once before, you know. Whipped up a big flood and wiped out the human race—-not to mention the lions and lambs and lobsters and cockroaches. But this time, He’s not preserving any samples. This time, it’s for keeps.

  One of His very best Angels has been given the contract. He’s sent to round up a disparate crew of human beings from every corner of the world—a Soviet joke-writer, a Kenyan prostitute, a Brazilian ex-superstar chanteuse, a Chinese student-dissident, and a career criminal from Omaha, among them—gently manipulate them into a rendezvous, and set the wheels rolling for them to bring about the End of the World as We Know It.

  Not an easy job, but you don’t get to be an Angel without learning a few dirty tricks.

  But—there’s Somebody who happens to like what the human race has been doing with the planet. And soon our Angel finds himself challenged by a very wily Demon—dispatched by the Arch-fiend himself—whose mission is to save the world.

  Deciding whom to root for is only one of the pleasures afforded by Donald E. Westlake’s brilliant new novel.

  NOVELS

  Humans · Sacred Monster · A Likely Story

  Kahawa · Brothers Keepers · I Gave at the Office

  Adios, Scheherazade · Up Your Banners

  COMIC CRIME NOVELS

  Trust Me on This · High Adventure

  Castle in the Air · Enough · Dancing Aztecs

  Two Much · Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

  Cops and Robbers · Somebody Owes Me Money

  Who Stole Sassi Manoon? · God Save the Mark

  The Spy in the Ointment · The Busy Body

  The Fugitive Pigeon

  THE DORTMUNDER SERIES

  Drowned Hopes · Good Behavior

  Why Me · Nobody’s Perfect

  Jimmy the Kid · Bank Shot · The Hot Rock

  CRIME NOVELS

  Pity Him Afterwards · Killy · 361

  Killing Time · The Mercenaries

  JUVENILE

  Philip

  WESTERN

  Gangway (with Brian Garfield)

  REPORTAGE

  Under an English Heaven

  SHORT STORIES

  Tomorrow’s Crimes · Levine

  The Curious Facts Preceeding My Execution and Other Fictions

  ANTHOLOGY

  Once Against the Law (edited by William Tenn)

  THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS

  New York · Tokyo · Sweden · Milan

  Published by Warner Books

  O A Time Warner Company

  Copyright © 1992 by Donald E. Westlake All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press books are published by

  Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Q A Time Warner Company

  The Mysterious Press name and logo are trademarks of Warner Books, Inc. Printed in the United States of America

  First printing: February 1992

  10 98765432 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Westlake, Donald E.

  Humans / Donald E. Westlake, p. cm.

  Title.

  PS3573.E9H78 1992 813'.54—dc20

  PROTEST

  The science in this novel is as accurate as I can make it.

  The theology in this novel is as biblically correct as I can make it.

  As for the rest, it is a novel. All the humans in it are of my invention.

  The angel... well... I believe I made him up.

  DEDICATION

  One day in 1986, in Taormina, Sicily, Evan Hunter told me I should think about doing a book in some way different from what I’d done before; larger in scope, perhaps, or new in approach, or unexpected in thematic material. If Evan hadn’t put that bee in my bonnet, this book would not exist.

  On a later day, in 1990, in New York City, I found that my voyage into this unknown had led to an apparent impasse; I could not for the life of me figure out how to go on. Several desperate phone calls later I met, via fax, a gentleman, scholar, physicist, and science-fiction writer in California named Robert Forward. We communicated over several days in a flurry of faxes, before he finally transmitted, “By George! I do believe he’s got it!” Without him, this book would never have been finished.

  On every day, in every way, everywhere, my wife, Abby Adams, makes it possible and keeps me from carelessness and error. Without her, this book would not be coherent.

  Evan, Bob, Abby: it’s your fault.

  And the Lord said, I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

  GENESIS 6:7

  Contents

  THESIS

  Ananayel

  1

  Ananayel

  2

  Ananayel

  3

  4

  Ananayel

  5

  Ananayel

  6

  Ananayel

  7

  Ananayel

  8

  Ananayel

  9

  10

  Ananayel

  11

  12

  X

  Ananayel

  13

  X

  ANTITHESIS

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Ananayel

  19

  Ananayel

  20

  Ananayel

  21

  Ananayel

  22

  Ananayel

  X

  23

  24

  25

  Ananayel

  26

  27

  X

  28

  29

  30

  Ananayel

  SYNTHESIS

  X

  31

  32

  Ananayel

  33

  Ananayel

  X

  34

  Ananayel

  35

  36

  37

  X

  Ananayel

  38

  39

  Ananayel

  40

  X

  41

  42

  Ananayel

  43

  44

  X

  45

  Andy Harbinger

  THESIS

  Ananayel

  I am, or was, or perhaps still am, an angel. God knows.

  I am certainly very different from what I once was. And yet I am, I think, still me. On the other hand, my life is no longer angelic, that’s true enough.

  What was I before, when I was all and simply angel? How to describe that existence? It was, I think, like that fleeting part of your human condition when, waking earlier than necessary in the morning, you feel a long flow of weightlessness and selflessness, your bed has become a great soft balloon with you a part of it, and you float through the middle of the air in a vast shadowy domed auditorium. That feeling holds you for a few seconds only, and then all the weight of time and personality returns, you cease to be merely a floating fragment of thinking matter, you become yourself again, and your day begins.

  For my kind, the kind I once was, that suspended oneness in the middle of the vasty space is the natural condition. Until, at great intervals, He calls. He has a task.

  And so He called me: “Ananayel.”

  I mus
t go back to who and what I was at that instant, at the very start. I must track the change that took place in me as I set about performing the task He had given me. In that first instant, I was only what I always had been: a faithful servant.

  * * *

  And so He called me. “Ananayel.” And I roused myself, coiling like smoke as it passes through an open window, recalling myself to myself, flowing together into selfness and awareness and the fact of Ananayel, who answered, “I am here, Lord.”

  And so was He, of course. He is omnipresent, among His qualities. But He was not there, if you understand me. I did not face Him direcdy. To do so, I understand, is to be seared into oblivion and a whole new beginning. The truth of His beauty and power is more than a mortal can stand to gaze full upon, and angels too are mortal, thought not at all as ephemeral as men.

  We are all of us parts of God, parts of His dream, His desire, but none of us know any more than our own role in His plan; if indeed He has a plan, and is not merely moved this way and that by cosmic Whim, as sometimes seems the case. And so I, a tendril in God’s imaginings, had to be informed by another entity, as insubstantial as myself, just what my task was to be.

  “A messenger.”

  Ah. I had never been a messenger, a bringer of annunciations, the word from The Word Itself. It was said to be an exciting and even joyous experience, that one, for all concerned. It was said the look in the eyes of a human who knows himself—or herself, yes, yes, I know—to be in the presence of an angel is a look to be treasured always. (How they love us, as naturally and instinctively as they love their own newborn.) And now I was to be among the blessed few Blessed who would have received that look.

  “And an affector.”

  Rarer still! An angel who alters the human story, the progression of human events! An angel who crumbles a fortification, diverts a river, lights a torch to safety or defeat! To take part (That is the one great thing we angels miss, when we are roused to awareness. We have no history of our own, no desires, no triumphs. No disasters either, of course, which is the trade-off. But even a weeping human, gnashing its teeth, can sometimes seem more real than we.)

  ccWhat do you know of America?”

  Nothing. Never heard of it.

  I was shown the land of the Iroquois, who would let the river carry them down to where the water turned to salt, just before the mighty sea, where their nets could bring in fish that never ventured upstream.

  “It’s been a while since you looked.”

  I have been elsewhere, and nowhere, floating at times among other stars. Because He has, you know, other ant farms than this, other dollhouses than Earth, other pets than these. So now I look, and much has changed where that river meets the sea. The Indians and their canoes are gone. A mighty city sprawls around the harbor, noxious and colorful, teeming and keening. It must be twenty times the size of Rome!

  “One hundred times, if you mean the Rome of the Republic. They have been fruitful. They have multiplied. There are now five billion of the damn things.”

  All in that city?

  “Not quite. But that is where you are to begin.”

  What do they call it?

  “New York.”

  What was Old York?

  “Irrelevant. It is in New York that you will begin to announce, and to affect.”

  Pleasure and anticipation fill me and I drift: higher, expanding. What am I to do? What is the current state of God’s plan?

  “He’s tired of them. They’re too many, too grubby, too willful. They are too prone to error by half.”

  And my Task?

  “To announce, and to affect, the end of their World.”

  1

  Susan Carrigan floated in the great soft cloud of bed, not asleep and not awake, not thinking, only feeling. She hung in the suspended moment, aware and not aware, and then the radio beside her bed exploded into noise: “I can’t get no—no no no!”

  “Shit,” she muttered, suddenly assaulted by sensation. Her mouth tasted like green mold. Her ears hurt. Her back hurt. Her bladder hurt. Her right hand, too long beneath the pillow beneath her head, had fallen asleep and now was tingling and smarting its way back into existence.

  And Barrfs gone!

  She rolled over onto her back, glaring leftward at the other pillow, undented and white. The son of a bitch, the son of a bitch, the prick with ears. Gone.

  Not that she wanted him back. Let him marry his fucking CD player, he had all the maturity of a retarded chimpanzee, she was better off* without him. It was just that, every morning, it came as a surprise all over again that he was really gone. They’d been together almost eight months, after all, and apart now only six days. Seven days? No, six.

  The radio kept on complaining: “Oh, I’m in with some girl—”

  “And fuck you, too,” she said, rising up, slapping her hand onto the button, cutting it off in mid-squawk. The movement agitated her bladder. She was awake. Hello, Tuesday, I must be Susan. And this 14 by 23-foot space (plus kitchenette and john), with windows viewing ailanthus trees and the dark brick backs of buildings on West 19th Street, must be all mine.

  Did it seem larger since Barry*d gone? There was a hole now in the industrial shelving where all his vast holdings in Darth Vader stereo equipment had once stood, and some welcome space in the closets and the medicine cabinet, but not a lot. Your footprints don’t go very deep, pal, Susan thought, angrily pleased at the idea of his insubstantiality, and she got out of bed, a lithe naked girl of twenty-seven who had started worrying recently—unnecessarily—about whether or not her breasts had begun to sag. Her hair, medium long and set for ease of maintenance as much as for good looks, was the precise shade of Clairol blond to complement her not-too-pale skin tones and not-too-dark blue-gray eyes. She was lucky in her nose, and she knew it; it was precisely the nose that girls had in mind when they made the appointment with the plastic surgeon, but never seemed to get, and Susan had been born with it. Otherwise, she found her mouth a problem—a tiny bit too sluttish? or not sluttish enough?—her elbows a problem—ugly! —and her weight a chronic threat.

  Seated on the toilet, she remembered again her childhood fear that something would come out of the bowl beneath her, something horrible with claws, and perform unspeakable acts before she could escape. She hadn’t thought of that terror since she was maybe eight; was it really some psychological horseshit rising up against her, out of the bowl, as a result of Barry’s departure, leaving her nethers alone and unprotected? “Gimme a break,” she told herself, but when had that ever happened? Minds go their own way, regardless.

  Showering, she thought about AIDS. She had a remote cousin in AIDS research at NYU Medical Center—Chuck Woodbury, his name was—and to listen to his party chitchat at family reunions for fifteen minutes was enough to turn you off humans forever. And that’s the problem. A few years ago, a Barry comes, a Barry goes, and good riddance. But not today.

  No, not today. All of a sudden, you go to bed with a guy, you’re going to bed with everybody he went to bed with the last five years, and everybody they went to bed with, and there’s this massive cat’s cradle out there, this Mobius strip of a daisy chain, and unless you’ve fallen in with a horny group of Baptist picnicgoers the odds are getting better every day that somewhere in that humid grid there’s the ding, and all the lines turn red. Wanna climb aboard, honey? No, thanks, I’ll wait for the next virgin. If there’s any more on this route.

  Putting on her Reeboks—her grown-up shoes were in her bottom drawer in the bank—she suddenly realized this was the fourth consecutive day she’d forgotten to jog before her shower. All those years of conditioning, going down the tube. Because of Barry? Ridiculous. And if true, even more ridiculous. I’ll leave myself a note, she thought, so I won’t forget tomorrow. Scotch-tape it to the hot water faucet in the shower.

  At least she was still walking. Downstairs, she strode west across 19th Street to Seventh Avenue and then headed uptown, the city screaming and shrieking all a
round her in its usual fashion. Joggers thudded by, to remind her of her dereliction. Macho meatheads driving down the avenue gave that double honk as they went by, that whadayasayhoney honk that didn’t mean a thing but bravado, because even they weren’t so dumb as to think girls who looked like her hung out with guys who drove trucks. It was May and cool but clear, with an undercoating of white in the high blue sky. Susan moved uptown at a steady pace, hardly thinking about Barry at all.

  The coffee shop where she usually stopped on the way to work was at the corner of 38th Street. She almost passed it by this morning, to punish herself for not jogging, but decided that would be stupid. She’d just be cross and nasty in the bank if she didn’t have her regular coffee and orange juice and English muffin. So she went in and sat at the counter, and the waitress said, “Hi, hon.” She was a stout black woman who looked as though she ought to be motherly but was not. Hi, hon was as far as it went. Three years Susan had been having breakfast here, midway between home and the job at the bank on West 57th Street, and she still didn’t know the waitress’s name. Nor did the waitress show any interest in her name.

  “My aching feet!” said a raggedy old bag lady, huge and shapeless, gray-skinned and gray-haired, as she settled onto the stool immediately to Susan’s right, though two-thirds of the stools in the place were empty. Not a penny from me, Susan said fiercely in her mind, and concentrated on the waitress, coming this way with her coffee. The orange juice would be next, and the English muffin last. The waitress plunked down the cup, turned away, and the bag lady said, “Marie, I’d just like a nice glass of tomato juice.”