"Are we still heading in the right direction, Vicky?!" I shouted as I turned my head forward and began to paddle furiously.
"That way a little, Mr. Mongo!" she shouted back, pointing a few more degrees to the right. "Please don't let him catch us! I'm scared!"
Me too. Escaping from Tanker Thompson had become a moot point. He was definitely going to catch us-or at least me; I was resigned to the fact that I was a dead man, even though I didn't much care for the idea. The only question that remained was whether I was going to be able to wreck the transmitter before Tanker Thompson wrecked me.
And I had to find a way to save Vicky Brown. The child Garth and I had pledged to help must not die.
"Vicky! Is there a way to get out of Eden on the other side?!"
"No, Mr. Mongo!"
Pull! Pull! Pull!
"How do you get out?!"
"There's a door back there behind the church! But it's locked to keep the demons out!"
Pull! Pull! Pull!
"Vicky!" Pull! Pull! "The moment we reach the shore, you must jump out and run away just as fast as you can! Don't look back! Just run! Run into the jungle and hide! Try to get as close to the wall as you can and curl up into a ball! Bombs are going to be falling on this place, but you'll be all right if you stay close to the wall! Then nice men will come and find you! Do you understand?!"
"What about my mommy and daddy?!"
I tried to think of something reassuring to say to the little girl, but I had no more lies left in me, and precious little wind. "I hope they'll be all right, too. By now, your mommy and daddy will be with the others."
"But they could be hurt by the bombs."
"I'm. . sorry, Vicky."
The girl began to cry, but I could think of nothing else to say. The fire that had started in my belly was now blazing in my arms and thighs, and I noted with alarm that it was burning away much of my remaining strength and resolve. There was a terrible temptation simply to stop paddling, lean forward, and wait for Tanker Thompson to come up and split my head open. I wondered if my heart would rupture when the fire in me reached it, but I tried to put that thought out of my mind.
Pull! Pull! Pull!
Pull! Pull! Pull!
There seemed no point in trying to see what progress I was making, and no point at all in looking behind, and so I screwed my eyes shut, sucked in a deep breath, then opened them to slits and concentrated only on trying to keep the kayak pointed in the right direction. The only point was somehow to keep going. I tried not to think of the pain and fire in me, and tried to find solace in the fact that Tanker Thompson, despite his seemingly superhuman endurance and tolerance for pain, also had to be hurting; if I could suddenly collapse with a heart attack, or simply run out of gas and pass out, then-damn it-so could he.
I hoped. I certainly had to admit that Tanker Thompson was the closest thing to a flesh and blood demon I had ever come across, a terrifying creature that kept popping up, back, from death by freezing, bludgeoning, and bullets like some malevolent jack-in-the-box from hell.
That's the kind of thinking an oxygen-starved brain will give you, I mused, and might have smiled if I'd had the energy.
In any case, I just didn't think Tanker Thompson was going to do me any favors by having a heart attack or passing out. Just as I was operating far over the edge, discovering reserves of energy and determination inside myself I wouldn't have imagined I had, because I was driven by the need to save one child in particular and millions of people in general, so, too, was Thompson operating far over his edge, driven by his equally fervent desire-implanted, he fully believed, by God-to see this child and those millions of people die.
Pull! Pull! Pull!
I knew I was now in danger of completely losing it; the fire in me had spread up to my neck, down to my toes, and my head felt like it was ready to explode. I was breathing in a series of small, tortured gasps, and my windpipe felt like it would seize up and close at any moment.
Pull! Pull! Pull!
Desperately, I tried to concentrate on images of scorched earth, flattened buildings, craters in the ground-and bodies; millions of bodies. That was what was going to happen if I couldn't reach and destroy the transmitter.
I wondered what time it was.
Pull! Pull. .
A universe of pain, a world without air, heart and lungs that felt ready to burst at any moment. I tried to recall what I was doing, why I was suffering, where I was going, and what it was I was supposed to do when I got there.
Pull. .
Somewhere, sometime soon, something horrible was going to happen unless. .
Unless. .
"Mr. Mongo, wake up! Wake up!"
Oh-oh. I snapped awake to find myself slumped forward in the portal of the kayak. My hands were empty, the paddle having slipped from my fingers. I was wondering how long I'd been out, then realized that it could only have been seconds; I could see the paddle ten yards or so to my right, just beginning to float out of sight.
"Mr. Mongo-!"
I spun around and looked up just in time to see Tanker Thompson rear up in the prow of the rowboat, fire ax raised over his head. .
And then the prow of the kayak bumped the shore at the same time as the fire ax came swinging down, narrowly missing my head, crushing the stern of the kayak. I rolled to my left, out of the portal and into the water, put my feet down and touched bottom. I plucked Vicky out of the front portal, staggered up on the shore, and set her down.
A metal structure perhaps three feet high, enclosed in what looked like an inverted test tube with an enormous aerial atop it, rose out of the sand perhaps twenty yards up a slope, slightly to my left, clearly visible in the green light of the artificial world.
"Run, Vicky!" I shouted hoarsely as I struggled up the slope that suddenly seemed as steep as Mount Everest, feet plowing in the dirty sand. "Run!"
"Wo!" Tanker Thompson's deep voice, equally hoarse, boomed from behind me. "Don't you dare run away, Vicky! You belong to your parents and to God, not this man!"
To my horror, Vicky Brown, clearly terrified, suddenly stopped at the crest of the slope, beside the transmitter, and slowly turned back. Her small body was trembling all over.
I glanced over my shoulder, saw that Tanker Thompson was out of the water and onto the shore-but he was obviously hurting pretty good, too. Dragging his injured leg behind him, leaning on the fire ax, he lurched forward, then stumbled, did a pirouette, and fell on his face. I turned back to the child, struggled to yell, but could no longer make any sounds come out of my swollen throat. I mouthed the words.
Run! You'll be killed!
But the child remained frozen in place. In the ghostly light, her tiny body was framed by a soaring, greenish-black mass that almost seemed to be flowing behind her. What remained of the rain forest was clearly now nothing but melting biomass rotting and running down to accelerate the pollution of Eden.
Behind me, Tanker Thompson was using the handle of the fire ax to haul himself to his feet.
Once again able to suck air into my lungs after my brief rest stop, I resumed my labored struggle up the side of the slope. I reached the top, grabbed the revolver from the waistband of my jeans, and used the butt of the ruined weapon to smash the glass case over the transmitter. I tore wires from the terminals of the huge storage batteries powering it, then smashed the butt against the transmitter itself-once, twice, three times. The LED lights on a panel in front went out. I grabbed the antenna and snapped it off before slumping to the ground, quite thoroughly exhausted. I raised my head, still more than mildly curious to see what kind of progress Tanker Thompson was making.
I estimated that I had about six feet of life left-the distance between Thompson and his fire ax and me. And then even that was gone as he loomed over me, his earless, blood-covered skull appearing decidedly otherworldly as he stared down at me with his raisin eyes that now seemed virtually lifeless.
"… Over," I croaked. "It's over. Please. . please don't kil
l the girl."
"I won't kill her," Thompson mumbled through lips that I could now see were covered with froth. "She will go to God with her parents, as God wants her to."
"No … no sense. No. ."
He staggered slightly, then planted his feet wider apart and used both hands to lift the ax over his head. The ax head simply kept arcing backward as his hands released their grip on the handle. A bullet hole had appeared in his temple, just above a ragged piece of flesh that had once been his ear. Still, he didn't go down. Even with a bullet in his brain, he continued to stagger around like some grotesque chicken. He finally collapsed when a second shot rang out, and his right earhole widened.
I wearily turned my head to the right, the direction the shots had come from, to see who my savior might be, and was not at all surprised to see my brother, standing in a green-striped golf cart, slowly lowering his automatic to his side.
The meanest Santa's helper of all.
Garth stuck the automatic into his back pocket, climbed out of the golf cart, and walked steadily but unhurriedly toward us. On his face, in his soft brown eyes, was an expression of incredible gentleness, and I could see tears running down his cheeks. He was looking at Vicky, and when I glanced into the face of the child standing beside me I saw that she was staring back at him with open joy, as if he were a favorite uncle she had known all her life. As he approached, she unhesitatingly ran to him, arms extended, and Garth swept her up in his arms and held her tight.
"It's all right now, Vicky," Garth murmured in her ear. "It's all right."
"Uh. . dear brother of mine?"
Slowly, one of Garth's hands came down and rested itself gently on my shoulder. "You do good work, Mongo," he said softly, in a voice choked with emotion.
"So do you," I replied, grabbing the hand and pulling myself to my feet. I was quite amazed that I was able to stand; I was still reflecting on my amazing recuperative powers when my legs gave out under me and I sat down hard on the sand. I stayed there, drawing my knees up and resting my forearms on them. "Do we have time to try to get her parents?"
Garth kissed Vicky on the forehead, then set her down. He glanced at his watch, then at me. "Yeah," he said, once more pulling me to my feet and holding me under the arm as he steered me toward the golf cart.
"Uh, how much time do we have?"
"Just about enough for a very quick chat with a bunch of fools."
17
I sat against the passenger's door of the golf cart, which was equipped with bicycle pedals, my arm wrapped tightly around Vicky as Garth, his powerful legs pumping furiously, guided the surprisingly speedy cart along a narrow pathway that circled the inner perimeter of the biosphere. To our left, the rotting biomass of Eden's rain forest resembled nothing so much as a giant bowl of green Jell-O that had been tipped over.
"They're planning to hold a Jim Jones-Guyana remembrance party back there," Garth said as he deftly steered the cart around something lumpy in the middle of the path. "They want to poison themselves."
"I know. What are they planning to use?"
"I got close enough to a bowl of the stuff to smell it, and it doesn't smell like Kool-Aid."
"It was Tanker Thompson's idea."
"Well, my guess is that they've mixed together gasoline, battery acid, and maybe a few other things to give it color. If they want to check out of this shithole by killing themselves, that stuff will certainly do the trick. But it's going to be ugly."
"Where are they?"
"They were gathering in the sanctuary of their church when I saw them; they've got the poison and a lot of paper cups up on the altar." Garth whipped the steering wheel to the right, and we sped along the path next to the concrete wall, toward the glow spilling out of the archway leading to the living quarters. "I snuck in through a back door. Incidentally, there's a door in the wall behind the church that looks like it must lead to the outside."
"It does. What time is it, Garth?"
"What difference does it make?" Garth replied evenly. "We have to go in this direction anyway."
"We're running a little late, aren't we?"
Garth looked over at me, laughed. "I love the way you put things. Actually, we're running a lot late."
"But-"
"Mr. Mongo," Vicky said, tugging at my sleeve, "will my mommy and daddy be all right?"
"We're on our way to get them now, Vicky."
Again, Garth glanced in my direction, frowned. "Jesus, Mongo, you look green."
"So do you; it must be the color of the month. At least I don't have to do the driving. How are your legs holding up?"
"Legs? What legs? You had to mention them, right? By the way, if my calculations are correct, that business back there puts me one up on you in the rescue department. You botched your chance in the Blaisdel Building."
"Bull-nonsense. That doesn't count as a rescue."
"It doesn't? I could have sworn I saw Thompson standing over you with an ax, and it looked to me like he was getting ready to split you right down the middle."
"I was just sitting down to get my second wind. But I won't deny that I was happy to see you; I could tell that you were all right, and it meant that I didn't have to rush back to rescue you after I took care of Tanker Thompson. How did you manage to get over there when you did?"
"While I was in the church, I debated whether or not to jump somebody and try to get the information we needed, but they all stayed together. I'd determined that the transmitter wasn't there, and I figured that my best move was to go back to the cottage and work with you to get the information out of one of Vicky's parents." He took one hand off the steering wheel to rub his thighs, which had to be beginning to cramp, then reached out and pressed my shoulder. "The bottom line was that if we were going to die, I wanted us to be together. I hadn't seen Thompson inside the church, and that made me uneasy. I wanted to make sure you were all right."
"Thanks, Garth," I said seriously. "I may give you rescue credit after all."
"Anyway, I was on my way back to the cottage when I caught sight of Thompson lurching up the road with that ax. I had a pretty good idea who he was chasing, so I took off after him. I was looking to get a good shot at him, but he had too much of a lead. By the time I caught up, you were all out paddling on that oversize cesspool. I couldn't fire at him without risk of hitting you or Vicky, and I didn't want to waste any bullets. I'd seen some of these golf carts back by the church, so I ran back and got this. By the time I made it back to the water, you were out of sight. But I knew you had to be trying to make it to the other side, so I just pedaled around on this path." He paused and, despite the pain evident in his body and his shortness of breath, chuckled. "If I'd known you were just sitting there resting, I wouldn't have been so quick on the trigger; I'd have just stood there and waited for you to stick that ax up his-''
"We have young ears among us, brother."
"— nose."
At the arched entranceway to the living quarters, Garth turned sharply and headed straight down the center of the road toward the swastika-crowned church at the end.
"Hold it!" I said as we came abreast of the Browns' cottage. "Vicky's parents may have stayed in their cottage; we have to check."
Garth braked to a halt, then grabbed the back of my shirt just as I'd been about to topple out of the cart onto my face. "You stay here," he said curtly. "I'm still a paler green than you are."
Garth got out of the cart, paused for a few seconds to catch his breath and knead the muscles in his legs, then hurried into the cottage. I held Vicky very close, waited. He reappeared a few moments later, hurried back to the cart. There was a strange expression on his face.
"They're gone?" I asked.
Garth nodded absently, got back into the cart, and resumed his pedaling.
"What's the matter?"
His reply was to show me the watch on his left wrist. He had reset it to local time.
It read 12:07.
"Maybe it's wrong," I continued tightly.
Garth shook his head. "It's not wrong; I checked the time when we were up in the plane."
"As much as Lippitt cares for us, I can't believe that he'd take a chance with the lives of millions of people and risk a world war just to spare the Fredericksons. And he's had plenty of time; even if his people somehow missed the Eastern Time deadline, they couldn't have missed this one. And he can't know that I managed to smash the transmitter."
"I agree."
"Then why the hell are we still alive? Where are the bombs?"
"I don't know," Garth said as he braked to a halt in front of the church. He quickly got out, pointed to a path leading around behind the church. "Get Vicky out of here. That path leads right to the door that will let you out of here."
But the child was having none of it. "I want my mommy and daddy!" she cried as she struggled out of my grasp, jumped over the side of the cart, and hurried after Garth.
I caught up with her on the steps, swept her up in my arms. I walked through the open door into the sanctuary, stopped beside my brother, and almost cried out. I quickly reached up and pushed Vicky's face into my shoulder, shielding her eyes from the horror.
There were upwards of three dozen people in the sanctuary, the population of Eden. Twenty of them were still on their feet, all dressed in white terry-cloth robes, lined up in the center aisle before their altar of death on which had been placed the large bowl of poison and a stack of paper cups.
The rest were dead or dying. Hector Velazian was crumpled in a heap at the foot of the altar, his once-handsome Latin features now almost unrecognizable in a face knotted in horrible agony. The ex-major league ballplayer's head lay in a pool of vomit. Billy Dale Rokan, the other ex-ballplayer who had served on Nuvironment's security staff, had lifted a cup to his lips, but was apparently having second thoughts as he gazed in horror at his dying friend.
Whatever Tanker Thompson had mixed into the brew was obviously doing the trick-perhaps too well; a number of the others were looking at one another uncertainly, while a few were exhorting the man at the head of the line to get on with it and drink up. Vicky's parents were standing just behind Rokan.
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