Morgan put his hand on Lightholler’s shoulder and said, “Let’s scrounge up another cigarette and grab some shut-eye.”
Lightholler let himself be led back through the folds of the blanket. Morgan directed him towards the ladder but Lightholler, slipping out of his grip, drifted over to one of the walls and stared at the markings.
Morgan had been expecting this. “Captain?” he said. “John?”
But Lightholler just worked his way around the small chamber. His expression changed in the lantern’s ruby glow, adopting an intensity that was lent an edge of malice. He stopped for long moments before an illustration that depicted a flooded valley where a bird wheeled and soared above the waters. On its back, between vast wings, rode the figures of a multitude of indians. He grunted something between a chuckle and a sigh.
He’s just beheld a machine whose existence challenges every rational belief he’s ever held, Morgan thought. A dormant god that, when woken, was the threshold to anywhen.
The carapace screamed madness to the observer. Thrust a medicine man back to his myths in the search for vindication, until he scribed the answers on cavern walls. So who could blame a young woman—who’d just made the shaky transition from jailor to collaborator—for doubling over in pain? Or even a ship’s captain—who’d staked everything on a stranger’s promise, and found every fear and hope realised in a hole in the ground in the desert— for wandering aimlessly around a chamber staring at modern petroglyphs, reassessing all of his convictions?
“That’s a flood legend,” Lightholler muttered, pointing at the final sketch, articulating the conclusion of his tangled thoughts.
“It’s a prophecy, actually,” Morgan replied.
“Really?” It wasn’t the condescending tone he’d used earlier.
“The medicine man who began the ghost dance religion foretold of a great flood that would wipe the land clean of white settlers. But just before the deluge, gigantic thunderbirds would drop from the storm clouds to retrieve the worthy. When the waters finally receded, the indians would be returned and the lands restored as they were.”
Lightholler examined the image again, curiously.
Morgan continued, “It’s unusual to see a solitary thunderbird. They were usually depicted in flocks, often accompanied by lesser bird spirits like falcons or eagles.” He pointed to the massive outstretched pinions. “The beating of its wings was thought to bring the rolling thunder. The beak snapped lightning.”
Lightholler shook his head as if to clear away disturbing thoughts. He walked to the exit, grasped the ladder’s rungs, and began to climb. Morgan waited a few moments and steeled himself for the shooting pain in his leg, then followed.
Topside, Hayes and one of the technicians were still working on the elevator. As Morgan emerged, Hayes indicated Lightholler’s silhouette beyond the entrance. Morgan joined him.
“Okay,” Lightholler said, “here’s the thing I can’t get my head around.”
“What’s that?”
“The ghost dancers know, or at least they suspect, or believe, that Kennedy has the means of going back into the past. That he can in some way restore things. Right?”
“Those who know—Tecumseh and Hayes and some of the engineers— know exactly what he has in mind.”
“But why are they satisfied with that?” Lightholler asked. “If they want the land clear of white men, why help Kennedy go back to 1911? Why not take the machine for themselves? There’s enough of them. Go to 1492 and stop Columbus in his tracks; make a pit stop in South America and dump Cortez and his conquistadors in a shallow grave?” His voice held a mixture of mistrust and dread.
“I asked Tecumseh something like that myself, once,” Morgan replied. “He didn’t even bat an eyelid. He said, ‘Stop those fools and others would arrive in their place.’ Arm the indians with machine-guns to halt the Spanish muskets and all you do is replace the white authority with a native one that would be equally deplorable. He said, ‘Had the white man not come, what lessons would we have learned?’”
“He’d given it some thought then,” Lightholler said.
“Wouldn’t you?”
Lightholler nodded.
“Does his point of view surprise you?”
“It’s a little too noble for my tastes,” Lightholler said dryly.
“You really weren’t ready for this.”
“For an elite army of negro and indian fanatics? No. I was too busy dealing with Kennedy’s personal insanity.” He gave Morgan a gauging look.
“Well, I suggest that you put your thoughts of ‘noble savages’ aside,” Morgan said. “Try to dispel a lifetime of fear and platitudes.”
“They don’t scare me,” Lightholler said.
“I’d like to believe you, but we’re the odd ones out here. A few of the ghost dancers—Tecumseh in particular—seem able to sense, on some plane, an injury that’s been dealt by the carapace. An injury to the world, to existence itself, that requires healing. I figure that if they had a hell, it would be at the bottom of the Atlantic; and if they feared a devil, he would be white and look an awful lot like Doctor Wells. So whatever their long-term beliefs are, regarding the ghost dance and the restoration of their lands, their peoples, their immediate priority is still going to be to right Wells’ wrong.”
Lightholler shivered. “Makes you feel kind of insignificant, doesn’t it?”
Morgan heeled the butt of his cigarette. “Yeah, I’ve had the same feelings myself, on and off, ever since this whole thing started.” He tapped the cold sand over the smouldering ash. “I call it perspective.”
Lightholler laughed and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Back in the prefab they arranged two mattresses on the floor. Lightholler fashioned some pillows from rucksacks and linen he’d found in one of the open lockers. They lay staring at the ceiling.
Morgan glanced at his watch from time to time. The minutes crept past midnight with reluctance.
The occasional volley of gunfire, the odd crump of light artillery, broke up the silence.
Lightholler asked, “How the hell does he expect us to rest?”
Morgan formulated a reply but it was hard to put the words together. His thoughts were a jumble, notions jostled for attention. Hardas pressed his consciousness, sweet-talking him with offers of sudden bright bursts of bravery that all ended, cold and still, on the Parzifal’s shattered deck. He finally opened his mouth to speak and found Lightholler asleep.
He picked up an old magazine and lay on his side, squinting to read the print in the half light. The text blurred, each ponderous word slipping in and out of focus. There was a photograph of a woman. Blonde, pale, frosty. Teutonic chic. Come to Berlin, she said. You’ll never want to leave.
He only meant to rest his eyes for a moment. To let closed lids soothe chaotic thoughts; after all, the major might return any time now. Sleep had been a dull weight nudging at his brain for long days on end; so when the magazine slid to the floor it took him with the subtlety and breadth of nightfall. It was like opening a door.
IX
April 29, 2012
Red Rock, Nevada
Kennedy brought Patricia to his quarters, a sparsely appointed collection of rooms for which he’d rarely found use.
Fatigue had overtaken her. First contact with the carapace had left her barely conscious. He coaxed her towards the shower and sorted through his belongings for a fresh set of clothes. He grabbed some fresh shirts, socks and a pair of boxer shorts from his wardrobe and laid them out by the shower recess.
He’d given her kitbag a cursory run-through at Morning Star, retrieving his Mauser and her Dillinger but leaving her notes untouched. As if to say, nothing you discovered could possibly interest me now. Nothing you imagined verges on the truth.
He examined them now.
There was an assortment of punch cards, useless without an ENIAC. There was an Atlas print-out with nine international listings for Morning Star. There were photographs: graphic f
orensic shots from the Queens Midtown Tunnel and Osakatown. The crimes that had been laid at his doorstep. She really should have known better.
A separate folder contained the names of trainees, allegedly associated with Camelot’s third camp. The accusation she’d thrown in his face back in the prison cell. She’d scrawled a series of notations along the margins. There were additional scraps, copied from financial transactions and police charge sheets. The name Webster, underlined, had been etched deeper into the paper by someone else’s hand.
Pieced together, they suggested a scheme designed to poison the tip of Camelot’s blade. To set bloodier and more definitive endpoints for the project’s completion and mire Kennedy in the grisly aftermath, when governments, both North and South, might be scrambling for a scapegoat. He read on, tracing her leaps of faith and intuition, from faked serial numbers on his pistol to a document implicating Webster in the abortive election campaign of ’98.
It was an impressive body of work.
He had to admire the crude simplicity of Webster’s snare. Spanning the rapidly hatched frame-up to the carefully crafted insertion of a third source of trainees, his vision had sustained what appeared to be almost a decade and a half of ill-masked hatred. Longer, if you went back to Mazatlan.
For want of an eye...
Kennedy wondered at his own detachment and replaced the papers.
She emerged from the recess wearing a T-shirt and the boxers. She held the elastic of the shorts bunched in a fist at her side, hitching them to her waist. The shorts ended midway down her thigh, where a purple discoloration marred the pale alabaster of her skin. Her hair, damp and tangled, framed her face. The scar was a vivid weal across her cheek.
“You might want to put another shirt on. It gets cold out here.”
She nodded. Her eyes flicked across to her files.
“How did you find me?” he said. “How did you know to look in Morning Star?”
“Something you used to say, every once in a while, pointed me in the right direction.”
“Uh-huh.” He watched her move across the room.
She thumbed through the pages of her notes before replacing them on the bed. “I worked so hard to catch you, Joseph. I wanted to find you first. Find you alive. Bring you in.”
“You did find me first,” he offered.
“All I managed to do was ensure that you ended up exactly where you wanted to be.”
He took a step towards her. She turned to face him with her hands on her hips.
“What does that tell you?” he asked.
“That you have more luck than brains, and all of it’s bad.”
“Maybe it says that I couldn’t have done this without you.”
“You’ve caused enough mayhem without my help, Joseph.” Her tone was indecipherable.
“I’m saying, maybe it’s supposed to be this way.”
“And I’m thinking you’ve spent too much time with your ghost dancers. Don’t you dare try to reckon me into this madness of yours. I’ll be no part of it.”
He gave her a questioning look.
“For God’s sake, Joseph, do you know what you’ve got down there in that cavern?”
“I know better than anyone else. I think.”
“Well, I don’t think so.” She frowned. “If you had any real understanding, you’d have destroyed the thing the moment you found it.”
He held back his reply. She needed rest, not goading. She needed to stop talking and get some sleep. But she wasn’t finished.
“Joseph...” Her look was almost imploring. “Can’t you see what’s been happening here?”
He listened to her words with a slender notion of dread. She was about to say something extremely important. How could he possibly know that? Somehow his time away from the carapace had left him unprepared for this: the unpleasant sense of premonition associated with exposure to the machine.
“Think back to when you were first given the journal,” she urged. “To when you found the machine. Camelot was in development and you were the project’s golden boy. You had a three-year mandate to reunite the states.
“Don’t look so goddamned stunned, Joseph, I was given complete access to all your files. Three nations looked to you as the redeemer. And now, barely two years on, they curse you. Your director slaps together a frame-up, wants you dead. You’re an enemy of the German and Japanese empires. And right in the middle of established peace talks, we’re all plunged into ... into this.”
“You’re not thinking straight,” he said.
“Don’t give me that. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” She grasped his shoulders, sat him down on the bed, and stood before him. “The world you saw in the future is the world you made, Joseph.”
“That’s not true, Patricia.”
“And what’s worse,” she said, ignoring his defence, “the absolute, total fucking horror of it all, is that you’ve known it the whole damn time.”
“That’s not true.”
She sat down next to him and spoke softly. “You’ve known it the whole time, Joseph. What else would have driven you all those months and all those miles?”
He felt unwell; a sickness that had coiled latent in his heart now seeped through every vessel, coursed through artery and vein. “I’m not responsible for all this,” he said. “I want to stop all this.”
“You have to stop it. You’ve left yourself no choice.”
He nodded—mostly to himself—and asked the question that had preyed on his mind since Morning Star. “Will you come with me?”
“I don’t know.”
X
Tecumseh’s going to tell me that the radio’s working.
More and more, Kennedy was becoming convinced that control of events was illusory, self-mastery an exertion, and free will just a poor and dirty joke.
He despised himself for asking Patricia to accompany him on his journey. After she’d drifted off to sleep, he wandered the compound in a dream, his steps strangely sluggish, his mind struggling for the password at each sentry’s challenge.
He’s going to say that the Japanese are coming from the west and the north.
He’s going to apologise.
He found the medicine man at the western watchtower. The tag was a misnomer. A culvert, burrowed into the western face of a low-lying ridge, sufficed for the observation post. Tecumseh sat alone, poring over a series of maps. He managed a grin at Kennedy’s entrance.
“Hey, Major, we got a radio working. There’s a lot of interference out there, though. Hayes is trying to put together a picture for us.”
“What have you got so far?”
“Mixed tidings. Shine was picked up and brought to Alpha late yesterday.”
Kennedy smiled. “Is he okay?”
“Some of our crew managed to leave the camp before the atomics went off. He was with them, but there’s been no radio contact—not even smoke signals—since then.”
“How many got away?”
“Near fifteen-hundred.”
Shine played it by the book. Yet instructed to make his way to the ranch, he’d somehow managed to end up at Alpha.
“We need him. We need those men.”
“I’ve sent ten runners south.” He read the need on Kennedy’s face and added, “It was all I could spare.”
“I’m going to assume that was the good news. What do we know about the blast?”
“It was a jap strat, somewhere out west.”
“What was the target?”
“No target, at least not as far as we can tell.”
Kennedy stared.
“The whole strat detonated. Somewhere out over the Mojave. No one’s sure if it was deliberate or not. And no one can tell where it was supposed to be headed.”
“That bullshit didn’t wash with Berlin. Why should it be any more convincing now?”
“Before it went up, it was hit by a wave of Confederate scouts, early last night. Latest intel’s talking about an accidental trigg
er.”
Kennedy gave it some thought. “They might have intended to blanket the ionosphere. Damage communications, radar, transportation.”
“Don’t think so, Major. Hayes figures there’s two jap divisions due west of us, and a third further off to the north. That blast would have given them a world of hurt too.”
“Any friendlies in the region?”
“The odd long-range patrol, a couple of regiments of Rangers by the state border, and that column of German tanks north of Vegas. Nothing particularly close by.”
“Are the German tanks workable?”
Tecumseh scanned a report. “Maybe thirty per cent.”
“Tell me more about those jap divisions.”
“If they’re the same guys that crossed the Demilitarised Zone two days ago, they’re the 2nd Imperial Tank Army. We’re looking at one armoured and one mechanised division, plus a regiment of Union artillery. Last word had them steering north of us, but their main body’s about twenty miles out... and mobile.”
“Union troops?”
“I’m as surprised as you are to see them out here.”
“They were probably holding them back in reserve. If the pulse hit the japs’ own artillery, they’re stuck with the Yankees. But why here?” Kennedy added, muttering. “And why now?”
“I reckon we might’ve aroused their interest, creating that corridor from Alamo. We’ve also been operating some hit and runs on any patrols that wandered too close to home.”
“So they could still pass us by.”
“They just might.” Tecumseh shifted uneasily.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m sorry, chief. I’m thinking that maybe one of my Braves suffered too much from pride, and talked when he should have walked. I worry that someone might have given our legends too much credit, and been a little too vocal about it.”
“No one knows what we have here,” Kennedy said.
“Maybe... or maybe someone suspects that we have something worth hiding, worth protecting. The path through Red Rock is as good a road as any into Texas.”
Kennedy checked his Einstein. A fine crack now cut across its face. Dawn was six hours away. Another eight hours, nine to be safe, might see them through.
The Company of the Dead Page 50
