Kirk nodded sheepishly, came back to her. “Thanks.”
Laura leaned across the desk, body English all business but her eyes alight. Saying This could be hot. Don’t fuck it up.
Kirk grabbed the paper, and their fingers touched. Again, the spark. God damn it to hell.
“Take the car,” she ordered. “And stay in radio contact.” He nodded yeah yeah yeah as he bolted up the stairs.
“KIRK!” she called out, just as he turned the corner. He screeed to a halt, looked back into the newsroom.
“Just the facts, okay? Get me something real.”
Kirk smiled and winked.
And then he was gone.
It was buzzing inside his head.
“No no no,” Hal railed at himself, as if the terms of his awareness were negotiable. As if he could persuade the chemicals to leave his brain. The buzz was a high distant whine in his inner ear, and it scared the living shit out of him. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know what it did.
But he had a real clear sense of where it came from.
Get away from the truck, boomed a voice in his skull. Good advice. Hal took it, managed three steps, and then doubled over: stumbling forward, tripping over a railroad tie. The momentum careened him toward the ledge at the edge of the bridge.
He caught himself, barely, stomach violently lurching as it whacked the ledge. His Mister Krispy Kreamy Kake sluiced semidigested from his nostrils and throat.
“Oh, God,” he gasped.
And stared down over the brink.
The creek was churning, dark and deep, bloated with rain and astonishing power as it overflowed its bounds, racing swollen and crazy-mad toward the river beyond. Watching it was like staring through a hurricane’s eye at the swirling earth below.
The storm had battered the brittle trees that lined the shore, left them raped and denuded; what branches remained knit together and rustled like ravaged leper limbs. Pockets of stormfall choked off sections of the creek: broken branches and whole uprooted trees, old tires, rusted machine parts, bottles and cans and runoff debris, all caught at loggerheads and pummeled by the current.
His eyes burned, a napalm pain that smeared the lenses of his vision. The murky greens and browns of the woods intensified, like someone had cranked the color controls on a cheap old TV set till the world pulsated with garish, oversaturated hues.
Hal thought he saw a glimmer of light stand out from the surface of the water, twitching and twinkling in a tangle of flotsam near the overflown bank. It flickered again, and he locked on it, pulled it as hard into focus as he could. It was disk-shaped, flat and shiny.
A shiny little disk.
On a tiny, pale wrist…
“Oh, fuck!” Officer Hal Thoman moaned, his gut churning more sewage back up his pipes. He’d forgotten completely about Bernie Kleigel and his pint-sized casualties of war.
But there they were, big as death.
It was the Hinds boys, after all.
Ralph and Jimmy J., aged eight and ten, were half-submerged, tangled together as if wadded and tossed there, impaled a dozen times over on the stray ends of the expanding trash pontoon.
Their eyes were open. Their mouths were open.
Wet things crawled around in the holes.
“Oh, Lord,” he gagged, and stumbled away, choking. One of their arms jutted out of the water, pale as a china ghost, snagged in wood and murk and mire. Jimmy J.’s Timex was the shiny thing that had snared his gaze. The hand it was strapped to pointed palm up, fingers curled delicately around empty space. It bobbed in the insistent current, as though waving for him to come on down.
Get off the bridge, his mind told him. Get off the goddamned bridge.
Hal wheeled, clamping down on the adrenaline surge before it could blossom into full-blown panic. He scuttled off the structure just as fast as his feet would carry him. His head cleared a little with each passing yard, until he was safe.
On the wrong side of the bridge.
Oh, smart, he thought. Now what? The bridge lay between him and the world. The truck owned the bridge. He remembered the handset, snatched it up. “Adam-sixty to County…”
A harsh bark of static clipped into his ear and he twitched: a sudden, involuntary seizure. “Come in, County…”
Nothing.
“God damn it!” he spat, whapping the box against the ledge. Out there in the hinterlands, dead spots were common: invisible pockets of interference, confluences of geography eclipsing transmission. It happened all the time. But it was still like having your lifeline cut, leaving you alone and vulnerable…
“I need some BACKUP!”
The radio spat dead air and hiss.
“NOW, GODDAMMIT!”
Something cracked below him.
“Wah!” he cried out, startled. His right hand woke up on the butt of his gun, as if startled from a dream.
Down in the water, the dam was starting to break up.
“Fuck!” Hal gasped as he started down the rocky slope toward the creek. The current was pushing the creaking mass against the bridge, forcing a breach in the debris. The current picked up speed as it spilled through, sucking flotsam like stew through a straw.
Jesus, he thought. If they go through, we’ll have to drag the river to get ‘em back. The thought jacked up his nausea, sickened him deeper than the toxic fumes. He knew their parents well. He could see their anguished faces in his mind’s eye: a searing, near-precognitive flash of dread.
And he desperately wanted to get out of here, just get the fuck moving and never look back. But their bodies were close enough to snag. He was certain of it.
The fact left him no choice.
“This sucks,” he whispered as he made his way skittering down the moss-crusted rocks that sloped toward the creek. “This really sucks.”
Hal reached the edge of the water and stood in the shadow of Black Bridge, staring at the juncture of creek and pylon. The bank was swollen and slippery; the water there stygian, overripe with decay. Hal picked up a long, stout branch and steadied himself.
As he put the first foot in.
Cold flooded his shoe, glued his sock to his foot and his pants leg to his shin. “Oh man, this really, really sucks,” he muttered through clenched teeth, his personal mantra of discomfort and dread. He took another hesitant step forward, his other foot swallowed in icy darkness, and gauged the distance to the bodies. He guessed twenty feet, max.
Might as well be twenty miles, he thought. Or twenty thousand.
He took a third step.
His leg sank to midthigh.
“Whoa—SHIT!” he cried, desperately stabbing the branch down into the water for support. His left foot came up and found purchase high on a hard forty-five-degree angle. He weaved back and forth like a drunk walking a white line.
“Bad idea,” he croaked. “Bad fucking idea…”
In the water, something moved: a current within the current, a dense sinew of liquid moving against the pull of the stream. It brushed past him, eel-like, then abruptly circled back.
And slid thickly through the gap between his legs.
First-level panic set in, hard: a tidal wave descending, obliterating calm. He whinnied high in his throat and rethought his options: sphincter irising shut and putting in for a promotion, heart wrecking-ball slamming a hole in his chest.
Fuck this, he thought. Drag the goddam river. I’m getting out of here.
Hal turned to go.
He couldn’t.
“Shit!” he whined. His foot was stuck: the right one, mired to the ankle in muck. Silt sucked greedily at his shoe. Twigs and scuzzy bits of sludge clung to his legs like foam off pier pilings. He cried out, leaning hard on the branch, and probed around blindly with his left foot.
It came to rest on something flat and round. It felt solid, with that one taut inch of sheet-metal give. Like the hood of a car.
Or the top of a barrel…
Oh, God, he thought, and the panic overcame him. Oh, Go
d. Remembering the truck on the bridge. He wrenched his right ankle as he twisted and turned it, desperately trying to free himself, then screamed as he steadied his left foot against the drum head and pushed with all his might…
…and his right ankle popped like a firecracker as his left foot tore through the corroded skin of the barrel: jagged metal rim raking his flesh from calf to buttocks, encasing his entire left leg in steel and icy chemical anguish. He sunk to his belly, his gun belt submerged. The radio sparked and shorted out.
Hal shrieked, gripped the branch hard enough to peel bark, and twisted into an awkward side-stance, his left leg stuck out at a pelvis-cracking angle. His shoulders went back and submerged. He fought to keep his head above water, won a marginal victory but lost his hat in the process. It landed brim up in the water and floated like a little boat, spinning off and through the flume.
It was a comedy of errors, but nobody was laughing. Hal’s face held inches above the surface now, his body dragged down by the current and his so-called water-repellent jacket, which was violating all manufacturer’s warranties by becoming a leaden sponge. His right ankle throbbed insanely. His left leg burned as though dipped in a lye-and-acid stew.
“HELP!” he yowled. “HEEEELP!”
His cries were lost before they left his mouth, no match for the sound of the dam. Water pounded through the center arch now, at a terrifying rate; the whole mass was gradually pulling in on itself, like a big wet black hole. Jimmy J. slid under the surface: his Timex still ticking, his body sucked into the slipstream and gone.
The debris to Hal’s side free-floated around him, queueing up for the slide. Little Ralph’s arm reemerged from the water, not ten feet away, looking more and more like a wax mannequin left too long in a window display.
The arm sank again, came up a little closer.
The fingers moved.
Hal screeched, an airless squeak of disbelief. The hand sank again. He turned toward the bank, and the ragged metal collar sliced the moist flesh of his inner thigh like a ripsaw.
Hal saw the water go instantly dark, felt the hot spritz of leaking fluid that fed it. The scream came a moment later, on the heels of the pain.
The dark cloud spread.
The little hand came up in the midst of it, wet and red and way too close.
“OH GOD, PLEASE!” he burbled, faltering. He thrust upward, struggling, and a thick plume bubbled up beneath the surface like an underwater fountain.
Like peeing in the tub, he thought. Oh God…
The current battered and squeezed and drained him, swallowing his life as he merged with the flow. Tiny fish-things nipped at the flesh exposed beneath the surface: nursing at his open wounds, breathing in his blood.
The dead boy’s body was very close. He felt it catch against him, cold bloated little limbs that danced in the slipstream. A face rose up from the shadows: its eyes half-open and milky, its tongue coyly protrusive.
Hal screeched and thrashed, his spray-blind and ebbing gaze cast desperately toward the heavens.
And that was when he saw the man, staring down from the bridge above.
Bazooka Joe, he thought insanely. He looks like Bazooka Joe.
The man stood, blackly silhouetted against the ugly sky. His leather jacket was mud-caked and clotted, like the mass of black hair hanging like moss over his forehead, obscuring his eyes.
A filthy red kerchief was pulled up over his jaw.
Hal tried to bellow for help, just as Ralph’s clammy hand flapped across his forehead, traced clumsily down his features. His eyes slammed shut in horror as the fingertips groped past his lids, hanging just a second too long before dragging down to lock on his lower lip.
But the current was too strong, the flesh too weak; and as his lip tore loose, spritzing, and peeled down to his chin, he let out the final scream of his life.
Helplessly staring up at the man on the bridge.
Who’d decided to help him, after all.
He had picked up a barrel from off of the tracks, hoisted it high above his head. He let loose with it now, aiming straight for Hal’s face, as if he were throwing a rope.
It seemed to take forever to get there. End over end, growing larger and larger, a spinning black mote that engulfed Hal’s sight in the second before it demolished his forehead, gray matter exploding in brainpan shrapnel, a wet crashing end to the light.
Leaving open the top of his head.
For the new mind—the Overmind—to make itself at home.
It was just a matter of moments before the dam broke fully. And the next world, alive and unbound, spilled free.
CHAPTER TEN
Something was wrong with the reactor.
Fred Jenkel scratched his head and studied the meter, one of a multitude that monitored virtually every aspect of the plant’s operation. Sometimes it seemed like the only moving parts of the plant that didn’t have a needle stuck to them were the human ones, though Jenkel was sure Westinghouse was working on it.
Situated on the rocky banks of the Susquehanna in Delta Township, some twenty-two miles southeast of the city, the Wolf’s Head Nuclear Generating Station was one of the few plants completed in the post-TMI/Chernobyl industry slump. It had been in operation for four years with no trouble at all, feeding the ever-increasing appetite for power in the great Valley metro region.
Jenkel leaned back in his chair, absently fingering his bald spot. He was a big man, with a big beaky nose and the jowly, pleasant face of a favorite uncle, and was fresh back from vacation-fishing in the Poconos. He’d caught three trout and an acute case of sunburn, and his roasted pate stood out from the white of his shirt like the bulb of an overheated thermometer. He crinkled his brow in speculation.
He’d noticed the flux in the neutron population twenty minutes ago, almost by accident. It was a marginal increase in temperature and power, well within the plus-or-minus parameters the reactor coolant routinely generated. He’d caught it during a casual spot-check, duly noted the reading, then set about leveling it by releasing a stream of borated water into the closed-loop system that covered the core.
The boron did its molecular duty, moderating the fission process, slowing the reactor. In his duties as the nuclear half of the day shift’s Reactor Operator Team, Jenkel had performed the process countless times before. Borate the coolant, keep watch as the power rolls off and the temperature drops. It was like fine-tuning the fission process, and it always worked like a charm.
But now the temperature was up again. Odd.
Jenkel turned to his younger, less experienced other half, whose duties minding the turbines and steam generators consisted at the moment of reading Dave Barry’s column in the Sunday News and snickering at every other paragraph. Once a pressurized water reactor was up they could practically go home and let the reactor run itself, or so the training said. Normally, it was utterly, absolutely true. But it was a homily that carried its own disclaimer, a caveat like a void if removed tag.
Unless something goes wrong…
“Hah!” Bob Henkel laughed out loud, a sharp bark that stood out in the quietly humming control room. “Man, this guy cracks me up.” He chortled out loud. “He says we should convert the federal deficit to voltage, right? And then run it through electrodes attached to the genitals of every member in Congress…”
“Hey, Bob,” Jenkel said, interrupting. “Check this out.”
Henkel looked up, blue eyes watery with mirth. He was twenty-nine, bean-pole thin, and the physical opposite of Jenkel. Except for the nose: broad and downward sloping, it was so close to Jenkel’s that they could have been pressed from the same Play-Doh Monster Schnozz kit. Add that to their names, and the jokes were inevitable.
Henkel got up from his chair, sauntered over. “What’s up, boss?” he said.
“The reactor load, for one thing,” Jenkel answered. “Check out the core.” Motioning to the meter with his chin.
“The neutron count is way up.” Henkel assessed the situation and
shrugged. “So borate the water,” he offered.
“Already did,” Jenkel said. “Now it’s back up again.”
Henkel considered the problem, as well as the older man’s tone of voice, which was more curious than concerned. He knew as well as Jenkel that they were constantly making up and letting down water for the core vessel, filtering out particulates or ions and then restoring it to the loop. Henkel wondered offhand if this was some kind of test, an impromptu spot-quiz by ol’ Dead Fred to goose an otherwise slow shift.
“Uhmm,” he pondered, “add NutraSweet?”
Jenkel looked at him; he was not smiling. Maybe this was serious, after all. “Go get Sykes,” Jenkel said. “Tell him we might have a problem.”
His eyes leveled with Henkel’s and the younger man’s smile evaporated. Bob turned and quick-walked over to the open door of the super’s office. “Uh, Mr. Sykes…” he began.
But Fred Jenkel was no longer listening. His ears were tuned to another sound, a subsonic drone that he felt more than heard, coming from a humming structure less than a hundred yards away. From his radiation-shielded, hermetically sealed vantage point, it might as well have been on the moon.
He watched the meter’s needle rise up and level off, only to scoot up a moment later. Rise…flutter. Rise…flutter.
“It’s nothing,” he told himself, denying memory and intuition and experience. “Nothing at all.”
Jenkel watched. All the while thinking, The reactor could practically run itself.
Rise…
Unless something went wrong…
PART THREE
CHAPTER ELEVEN
More than anything, Gwen Taylor loved the act of creation.
She stood before her almost completed work-in-progress, dressed in sweats and a paint-spattered shirt stolen from Gary. Blue and yellow mixed with a bit of white on the sheet of heavy glass that served as her palette. The colors swirled together, three melding to one, making teal.
She wet her brush, scooped up some of the paint, and held it aloft. “Okay, Your Highness,” she said, scrutinizing her target. “Here comes greatness.”
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