The drone above the trees grew louder, then fell away. Why didn't the damned things come down? Maybe they couldn't. Or something worse was happening, something they couldn't anticipate.
The droning ceased altogether.
She looked up, but could see only leaves dappled by faded sunlight. Where they broke, there were patches of deepest blue. In some of them stars floated free.
From below came the sound of a horn honking. It honked and honked, and she began to want to know what was happening. She couldn't climb, but others might be able to. Ellen was lithe. "Can you go up a tree and tell me what you see?"
Ellen looked up doubtfully. "I never climbed one of those things in my life."
"I can do it," Chris said.
"No!" His mother grabbed him to her. "Ellen, you try."
They hoisted her into the lower limbs of a maple. With surprising speed she climbed hand over hand into the distant top. Her body grew tiny in the vault of the forest, and finally she was so high that she could see beyond the roof of leaves.
A few moments later and she was dropping down with an agility born of great fear. "It's the Gidumals," she said. "They're in their car and those bugs are swarming over it. Millions of them!"
Far, far away there were high screams. Maya and Sanghvi were being absorbed. Loi could hardly bear to imagine that excellent man being transformed. How could his humanity ever be destroyed? He was too good a man to become anything less. What was going on that the demons were taking good people? Where was the justice?
"Let's go," Loi said. Soon they were climbing again and her breath grew hot as it raced in and out. Her lungs were screaming for more air, the baby within her was jumping. "Your womb is like glass..."
Sanghvi. What would she do without him?
She went on, the screams of the Gidumals ringing in her ears and her soul.
As they struggled upward the boys sobbed with effort, their parents urging them on. Then Nancy had to pick up Joey. Chris began to drop back.
Bob suddenly stopped. "We've had it!"
The others caught up with him, gathered around.
"This isn't you talking, Bob," Loi said.
"My kids are exhausted."
"They have to keep on."
"You're right," Bob said. "I'm sorry." He took Joey from his mother. "Come on, big guy."
"So we go." Loi waved them on. "Go." She took Chris's hand. "You can make it with me. I have special strength for both of us."
They walked up and up, and she suffered greatly from her weight. The flat muscles of her underbelly began to ache, and a sour, dry taste filled her mouth. Even holding hands with Chris seemed a great effort. "You thirsty, Chris?"
"Yeah."
"Me too."
Very slowly the woods thinned, became brighter. Then they abruptly gave way.
They broke out onto the top of the ridge, where there were only pitch pines and scrub, and long, wind-polished stones.
From here they could see across Oscola toward the north, and back south toward Ludlum.
Above them larks spun in the slow air, their wings flashing in the last sun, their voices whistling shrill excitement. Loi staggered, Brian caught her around the waist, Bob gently tried to take her gun.
"I'll shoot!"
"All right! Jesus! Brian, all of a sudden she hates me!"
"I hate what is in you."
"There's nothing except me!"
"Yes, what's in my husband?" Nancy asked. "What do you hate, Loi?"
Loi spoke as reasonably as she could. "I think you know very well that the demons are within you, that they are trying to use you."
He laughed a little, a miserable, unconvincing sound.
A moment later the whole group was assembled on the spine of the mountain. It was Father Palmer who first looked to the north and noticed Towayda. He fell to his knees, awed and terrified all at once, whimpering.
The whole sky flickered with purple light.
It infected them with a frenetic sort of elation, like some drug. The two boys groaned and danced from foot to foot. Loi sensed movement inside her. "He kicks hard, Brian."
So at last it was finished, hell had come to the surface of the earth. She took a long, studied breath, observed one of the small secret silences that she used to restore her inner self. "Husband, we must not wait here a moment."
"We can't get away from that," Bob said.
"In our army the defeatist was shot."
"Oh, come on! That's the most ridiculous thing she's said yet! Brian, can't you shut her up?"
"Loi—"
"He was the one who said to stay for rescue. But there was no rescue. Now he says it's all hopeless. That is also a lie." She slapped her belly through her sweat-soaked shirt. "I will live!"
Brian embraced her, feeling her strength, drinking in her power.
"We go," she said. "You in front, Bob."
"No, I don't want to be in front anymore."
"Do it." If the demons attacked, let their own puppet be their first victim.
He stared her down, his expression complex with sadness and hurt, and something that could have been hatred, or perhaps an emotion very much more alien than that.
She did not waver.
The little group straggled off into the spreading dark, making their way down toward their beloved town.
Above them the larks circled, and to the west the sun set in an increasingly angry sky. Northward in the mountains another world was awakening, savage and cruel, struggling in its ugly purple light to be born.
Fifteen
1.
The little party from Queen's Road struggled down the mountain and into Oscola's familiar streets.
Chairs and tables from the Mills Café were strewn about in the street. Office furniture, paperbacks and bottles from the drugstore, dozens of boxes of disposable diapers, waterguns, baseball caps, lay in piles. The gas station's pumps had been bent on their foundations so that they stood at crazy angles. Handy's was split like a fish, its guts of magazines and cigars and candy spilled out before it. The Rexall sign, circa 1932, was smashed to bits in the gutter. Even the Village Green was ruined, its gazebo flattened to kindling, its huge shagbark hickories ripped asunder by fantastic and malevolent energy, split down their middles, left with their leaves slowly shriveling.
The destruction had been wanton and extremely violent, but also full of awful, cunning care. Chicken parts were rammed into coffeepots from the Mills, cigars jammed down the throats of dead kittens from the Pet Pantry, car seats lying on roofs, the front half of a large dog dangling from the shattered Citgo sign.
Forgetting their danger, the need to hurry, the little group halted on Main Street, staring in disbelief. Nancy West whispered again and again, "No, no, no." Her husband had assumed the stolid pose that he took at accident sites. Chris picked up an Uncle Scrooge comic book from the street, rolled it up, and put it in his hip pocket. Joey said, "Candy, Mommy," as he touched a Milky Way with his toe.
The destruction had been wrought with a tornado's monstrous attentiveness. A crate of hair dryers had been jammed through the wall of the Excelsior Tower, and they jutted out of the brick surface like some mad work of conceptual art. Ellen's papers and files blew about their feet, and she saw the body of her desk smashed into a counter full of black girdles with red accents from the Mode O'Day. The top of the desk lay on the street, its blotter still neatly in place. She walked closer and found a cabinet, its drawers thrown open and filled with something that looked like mucilage and smelled like wet human skin. She reached down, disgusted but wanting to reclaim her possessions.
Loi knocked her hand aside. "Don't touch it! Nobody touch anything! No telling about diseases."
They went up the middle of the street together, Bob and Brian behind Loi, Nancy and Ellen and the kids behind them. Father Palmer struggled along at the rear, his breath whistling through the twisted black stump that his nose had become.
Getting a heavy enough dose of the light, it seemed,
started changes that did not stop. His left eye was fiercely veined, filmed over by a dense, milky membrane. The skin of the left side of his face was now made up of even thicker tiles, like a turtle's back, and each was centered by a fat welt.
The priest's breath hissed, his tongue went around and around, patrolling the fissures that were turning his mouth into a hole.
Absent a mirror, he remained innocent of his true condition. Touch told him that something was very wrong, but he couldn't possibly have imagined just how awful it really was. Nobody could have; his disfigurement was so extreme that it was outside human experience.
A naturally cheerful man, he had even regained some of his good spirits. He'd decided that he had to keep up morale, so he sang as he walked, a catchy old Kingston Trio tune from back in the days when he had a guitar and something of a voice. "Back to back, belly to belly, well I don't give a damn 'cause I done that already." Again and again he bleated out the only verse that he remembered.
"For God's sake, stop him singing the Zombie Jamboree," Nancy West muttered as they passed the Citgo.
"Better be quiet, Father," Bob said.
"I'm sorry. I suppose the Kingston Trio's a little behind the times, isn't it?"
Nancy peered up at the flashing sky and the tumbling angry clouds. "I hate you," she shouted. "I hate you!"
"Mommy, Mommy," Joey shrilled.
"How can you be so noisy?" Loi could walk through dry leaves in total silence. These people couldn't be quiet on a flat street, with all their stomping and roaring.
Father Palmer went to Nancy. "The Lord is here," he rasped, attempting to whisper. "The Lord is with us and helping us right now."
Nancy turned bitterly away from him, her face reflecting disgust.
Loi worried that his infection might penetrate very deep. Was his soul being transformed along with his body? She watched him as he humped along leaking fluids, and thought he might bear more scrutiny than Bob did.
How quick her mind was to recapture the habits of that time long ago. She would have thought she had forgotten the sense of careful suspicion instilled in her by Wonmin Kyo, the stern, genial shadow who had been the political officer in her cadre. The men had mostly been entirely indifferent to her, hardly even aware of her existence. He had taught her to listen and report back.
Loi kept on walking, observing and assessing. Even as she scanned windows and roof lines, she evaluated the actions of each member of the group, especially those under suspicion.
"We've got to keep moving," she said. "There's no time for crying about this now." She'd seen villages a thousand years old burned to ashes. People made a mistake being upset by ruins. The first thing was to stay alive, then find a place to start over.
Nobody heard her. Nancy was having hysterics because Father Palmer had embraced her, in a misguided effort at comfort. They were preoccupied with trying to calm her down, and to make the old priest understand why he couldn't. His face grinned hideously, and Loi noticed a net of veins growing across his teeth, which now looked yellow and soft, like big pieces of chewing gum. Only shooting it to pieces had killed the living head of the poor Rysdale boy. She wondered when they would have to begin on the priest.
"Listen to me," she said. Nancy was still sobbing, and now Ellen was having trouble, too, crouching before the remains of her office desk, running her hands over it.
Loi raised her pistol and fired into the air.
The report froze them. "All right," she said into the stunned silence. "No need for me to be quiet, you're all so noisy." She tucked the pistol back into her belt. "Now we go."
They followed her up Main, toward the darkened bulk of Fisk's Garage. "Get food," she said as they passed the devastated ruin of the Indian Market grocery. "But be careful. Nothing with any strange substances on it." The glue-like material was everywhere in and around the store, dripping from tumbled counters, off ruined crates of melons, thickest around burst cans.
A slick of melted frozen food covered the floor, making it treacherous to walk without slipping in melted spinach soufflé and breaded veal cutlet dinners. The fresh-vegetable bins had been upended, as if something had looked behind them for people. The meat locker was wide open, its door pushed up through the ceiling into the second floor, where Caroline Chipman had her art gallery. Like the rest of the food, the meat was ripped up and damaged, but not eaten.
Fisk's Garage was devastated. It was getting dark and they had no flashlights, so they had to pick their way carefully among the glass shards and twisted ruins of yard tractors and all-terrain vehicles to get in.
Gas tanks had been pulled off, axles bent, tires torn to bits. The cylinders and spark plugs from engines that had been ripped open littered the floor around the remains of the vehicles.
"Let's look in the back," Loi said in a brisk voice. "Come on, there's no time to lose."
"No!" Bob was in front of her, barring the door.
She took out her pistol. I will do it if I have to, she thought, although it made her sick at heart.
They faced one another. "Loi, I have this very strong feeling that we shouldn't go in there."
"If we don't find transportation, we're going to get caught, Bob."
"There's something in there!"
Chris ran to his father. He looked from Loi's face to the barrel of her gun, holding his dad around the waist. She felt tears come to the corners of her eyes. "Resolution is the soldier's credo," they had taught her.
"You have to let her through," Ellen said.
"We'll all be killed if we open that door." Bob was sweating. In the gloomy half light, Loi could see that his eyes were glassy with fear.
"I am going to step forward and open the door," Loi said.
Bob gathered up his wife and sons.
Loi threw the door open.
Father Palmer cried out, "Glory to God!"
There stood four beautiful Suzuki ATVs in picture-perfect condition, smelling faintly of gas and new paint, gleaming.
For a moment they were brightly illuminated by a distant flash of lightning, then long thunder rolled back and forth between the mountains.
Behind her she heard sobbing. She turned to see Bob sinking to the floor, his shoulders heaving. He looked up at her. "You oughta shoot me," he said miserably. "My God, I'm possessed."
"From now on, no matter what you think is right, you trust me."
"I'm going to do everything I can to be loyal to all of us. You're my people. But I have these... feelings that make me want to do different."
"Never trust yourself. Never!" She sighed. Maybe he would be all right and maybe he wouldn't. She hoped for the best. For the moment, she saw another problem. "Where are the keys to these things?"
"We can hot-wire 'em in a second," Chris announced, marching up to the closest one. In moments he had them running.
"Where did you learn that?" Nancy asked him.
"I forget."
As Ellen tried the seat on one of the vehicles, Brian and Bob raised the door to the street. Although they were designed for only one rider, each must somehow take two.
"Just one damn minute, you people!"
They all turned. Standing in the shadows of the glassed-in office was the figure of Henry Fisk. He strode to the middle of the room. His scruffy jacket and John Deere cap made him look inoffensive, but he was carrying a weapon that Loi recognized instantly: an AK-47. She became very still.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"Hi, Henry," Brian said mildly. "Just lookin' over some of your machines."
"The hell! You're stealin' 'em."
So deep she felt more than heard it, Loi became aware of the sound of an engine coming in from the outside, loud enough to rise above the steady idling of the ATVs. It was heavy equipment. "We have to leave."
"You sure are right about that, China girl." Fisk turned to Brian. "Get your ass out of my sight. And take Shanghai Lil here with you."
"Take it easy, Henry," Bob said. "You calm down or I'll have to
put you under arrest."
"You? You escaped from the psycho ward down at Ludlum Community. They're looking for you from here to Buffalo!"
"They might have been. Not anymore. You know what's happening around here, Henry, as well as we do."
"No, that was a dream, that there. I thought it was real, I sure did. But it was a dream. I mean, Allies lying on the back porch with a bicycle pump sticking out of the side of her head. That's not real, that's a nightmare! And Junie and Charlie, they—they—oh, shit, Brian, tell me it's a damn nightmare!"
"It's real, Henry. Look at the priest."
Fisk glanced at Father Palmer, then lowered his head. Loi knew how a man feels at such a moment of realization. She laid her hand on the butt of her pistol. He might well put down his weapon. Or he might shoot everybody in sight.
Outside, the engine note was now distinct. It was more than one machine, many more. "We can't get away," Fisk moaned. His head remained down, but his assault rifle was still pointing straight at them.
"We must try to, Henry!" He didn't respond. Loi took a step toward him.
"Don't you move, slant-eyes!"
Bob realized that Fisk was capable of killing her without a second thought. She was nothing to him, just a Chink. But not Bob West. Fisk would hesitate to shoot a man he'd known all of his life, a respected member of the community. Bob stepped in front of Loi. "You put that thing down, Henry. And stop calling her names."
"Bob, I'm warning you."
"Give me the gun, Henry."
"Fuck you!"
"Henry—" Bob took another step.
The AK-47 clicked nastily. Bob could see a vein pulsing in Fisk's neck. He was about to shoot. Another second and they were all going to be dead. He spoke quickly. "You remember that yard tractor I bought from you last summer, the Toro? It's running damn good, Henry." He took another step closer.
The building shook a little. Dust filtered down from the ceiling. That meant only one thing: action in the ground underneath. "Henry, we have to hurry!"
"That was nothing! It was nothing!"
"Was Allie nothing? Is Father Palmer nothing? It's all real, Henry. Give me the gun."
Fisk hesitated. Bob approached him. "Hand it over, Henry."
The Forbidden Zone Page 24
