Gwendy’s Final Task

“The only one that matters.” The blond man reaches over and places a hand on Winston’s knee. Winston shudders in pleasure. He may be gay after all—at least in this man’s presence. “Gwendolyn Peterson has what we need to destroy the Tower. You must find it and bring it to us. Because of your enormous wealth and political connections, you are uniquely fitted for this task.”

“You’re insane.” The roar of the ocean swells inside Winston’s head.

“Close your eyes,” Bobby commands.

Winston is helpless not to obey. It’s like being hypnotized. He feels the kiss of a cool breeze upon his face and smells a tinge of salt in the air as soon as his eyes are shut. And then he can taste it on his tongue—the ocean! The sound of crashing waves grows louder, only now it’s not just inside his head; it’s everywhere. A bird cries out somewhere above him—a gull of some kind—and a chorus of birds answer it.

“Now open them.”

Gareth Winston opens his eyes and he’s no longer sitting in the green Chrysler behind an abandoned St. Louis warehouse. Instead, he’s sitting beside the blond man in a meadow of wind-swept grass. He stands up and looks down at a churning sea of emerald water. Hundreds of feet below, white-tipped waves crash upon an endless shoreline of jagged rock and sand. The sky above them is streaked with purple and yellow, and there are birds—hundreds of them!—floating on the wind. The sun rising over the watery horizon is a deep crimson.

This is real, he thinks. My God, this is real.

“What have you done to me?”

“Turn around, Mr. Winston.”

He does. Slowly. Like moving in a dream, but this is no dream.

The man points off to the west at a distant city that stretches as far as Winston’s eyes can see. The early morning sunlight glints off the windows of scores of tall buildings. A complex spiderweb of roadways and bridges weave their way amongst the shimmering metropolis. It’s too far away for Winston to determine the type of vehicles that are currently traveling those roads, but there are many of them. In the sky above the city, there’s nary a hint of smog or pollution.

“How big is it?” Winston asks in dazed awe.

“Bigger than New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined. And still growing. Surrounded by nearly fifty thousand acres of virgin woodland.”

Winston whistles appreciatively.

“There are another two dozen cities just like it scattered throughout the world I’m offering you.”