"I get the uncomfortable feeling you're hiding something from me." Ironhorse frowned but motioned them toward a large army-green van parked just beyond the personnel carrier. "If it was just the radiation," he said, "I could probably fit you into protective gear and send you in for a look. But whoever overran this installation did a very professional job of mining the area. You'll have to be satisfied with our remotes." He slid open the side panel of the van.
"I'm surprised he didn't send us out there, then," Harrison muttered in Suzanne's ear. She didn't react, but Ironhorse, who caught it, smiled sourly and thrust out his hand as Harrison moved to step up into the van.
"The tape first, Dr. Blackwood."
Harrison returned the wry smile, fished the tape from his pocket, and dropped it into Ironhorse's waiting palm. The colonel moved aside and let him pass.
Inside, a bank of video monitors lined the opposite
wall of the van. Two technicians sitting with their backs to harrison and the others manned the control panels. Upon realizing that Ironhorse had entered, they struggled to rise.
"At ease," Ironhorse said abruptly. The two techs sank back down. The colonel removed his sunglasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket; his eyes were dark, almost black, and so coldly intimidating that Harrison decided he liked him better with the sunglasses on.
Harrison found it easiest to focus on one of the monitors at a time. The images were unprofessional, fuzzy, made by the hand-held cameras they'd seen wandering inside the installation. This particular soldier was aiming his camera at the bombed-out barracks. Harrison saw a jagged, blackened ceiling beam lying across a mangled government-issue cot, its mattress torn and blood-spattered.
He looked away quickly at a different monitor. Better. The camera was panning over a boring stretch of dirt that looked as if a gang of motorcyclists had roared through it, maybe popped a few wheelies. Another soldier wearing the white radiation gear wandered through the shot briefly.
A third monitor showed a puzzling scene: steel drums stacked only on the top tier of a wooden flat. "Strange," Harrison whispered to himself.
The camera pulled back; in the background, some barrels—older, rusting—lay on their sides. Something about the sight didn't seem right, compelled him to take a step closer, for a better look, but then the
camera moved on abruptly to a view of what appeared to be a stack of bodies, draped discreetly with black garbage-bag plastic.
"Back up!" Harrison shouted at the monitor. The guy couldn't hear him, of course, but he was standing close enough to one of the techs to grab his mike and find the off-on switch.
"Hey!" the technician exclaimed, but Harrison scarcely heard him.
"Back up, soldier," he barked into the mike, "and focus on those overturned barrels!"
Ironhorse was at his side instantly, and grabbed his wrist, then slowly peeled the mike from his fingers. "That's it, Doctor. You've seen enough."
Harrison ignored him; his gaze was fastened on the monitor as the camera obeyed and slowly panned back to the new barrels . . . and then the older rusty ones. "Tell him to zoom in," Harrison ordered the tech. "Tell him!"
Ironhorse nodded at the tech, who leaned over his reappropriated mike. "Camera three—zoom in."
"What is it?" Suzanne's voice in his ear, but he couldn't answer just yet. An alarm had sounded somewhere deep in his memory, triggered somehow by the sight of the overturned barrels. He struggled to piece it together.
The camera zoomed in—on the new barrels. "Not those!" Harrison shouted. "Lower! On the ground."
The technician said something unintelligible into the mike; the image tilted, the focus adjusted and
settled on the overturned barrel, classified i951 -1953, it said along its side. And us govt property; hazardous; do not remove.
Classified 1951-1953.
Harrison shivered and broke into a sweat. He had seen those markings before . . .
Twenty-one years ago, when Clayton had first brought out the files. Harrison closed his eyes and saw the photograph in Clayton's trembling hand.
Here. Clayton handed him the picture. Those are the barrels the government stuffed the remains into. They all bear the same distinctive markings.
classified 1951-1953 .. -
Hundreds of thousands of them, Clayton had said, his voice flat and bitter. Hidden away in military installations and other secret locations all over the country, some of them only a few hundred miles from here, in Jericho Valley . . .
Jericho Valley. No wonder it had sounded familiar. Harrison opened his eyes and stared at the monitor.
The cameraman waxed creative and pulled back, then zoomed in again, this time using a different angle.
The top of the barrel had been forced open from the inside. Dear God, the drum was empty . . .
Harrison's knees went weak; he clutched at the console to keep from falling, only vaguely aware of Suzanne's and the colonel's eyes on him. "Ask him" —he tried to speak louder, but his voice remained a hoarse whisper—"ask him if there are any more barrels like that."
"Camera three," the tech asked, "what's the count on barrels in this condition?"
The voice filtered through the console. "We've found six empties."
Harrison reached for the mike switch again, shouting as he suddenly found his voice. "Six empties—but how many old barrels with these markings? There should be hundreds! Thousands!"
"Only six old barrels with the 1953 stamp on them," the voice said.
Ironhorse firmly pulled Harrison's hand off the switch and replaced it with his own. "Soldier"—he leaned over the console—"how long until you've done an inventory check?"
"We're hours away, Colonel. This place has been a nuclear waste dump for nearly forty years."
"Oh, God," Harrison whispered, his gaze fixed on the monitor. "No . . ."
He closed his eyes and saw it all happening again. The sky, streaked with death rays and glowing dull orange-red from the fires that raged out of control, the air thick with smoke and screams of the fleeing. Those bodies not reduced to cinders by the rays lay crushed under debris or exposed where they were trampled to death by the terrified crowds.
He was not quite five years old, and had just seen his parents killed by the aliens' rays. The memory of it clutched at him full force, pulling him down into a dark vortex of panic.
Harrison, darling, get up . . .
He'd run screaming through the streets until his voice and legs gave out and he collapsed, sobbing, on the sidewalk. And now the nightmare was starting again. . . .
Harrison turned and ran out of the van.
"What's wrong with him?" Ironhorse asked. The gruffness was gone from his voice, and in its place was genuine puzzlement.
Suzanne was still gaping in the direction Harrison had fled. "I don't know," she answered slowly. Whatever he had seen had driven him berserk. She was shaken; she had judged him to be eccentric, perhaps slightly obsessed by the need to find the aliens who had killed his parents. Now she saw it was far worse than that. The man was in trouble, the man needed psychiatric help.
Suzanne turned back to stare with Ironhorse at the close-up of the open barrel. It was clear to her that the base had been attacked by terrorists who had stolen the nuclear waste for God knew what evil purpose, and that frightened her ... as much as Harrison's panic attack. Obviously, he had been counting on finding his aliens here and now could not accept the fact that his misguided search had failed.
"Excuse me," she said to Ironhorse, and went outside to look for Harrison.
She didn't have to look far. He was in the Bronco, slumped down in the passenger seat. She walked over and bent down to peer into the open window. He was hugging himself tightly; sweat trickled from his forehead, but she knew it had nothing to do with the heat. His lips were parted slightly as he stared straight ahead into the distance.
"Harrison ... are you okay?"
He wasn't. He jerked sharply at the sound of her voice and looked up at her.
His pale eyes were bright, wild. "We have to leave."
She stared at him, unable to think of an answer.
"Now, dammit!"
She withdrew from the window. Ironhorse stood at the van's entrance, watching. She could have gone back to him then and told him Blackwood was having a mental breakdown and she was afraid to get into the truck with him. Maybe the army would get her home.
Instead, she walked around to the driver's side, climbed in, and turned the ignition key.
They rode the entire seven hours in silence.
TEN
About thirty-five miles from anywhere, the tiny burg of Brewster sat just off exit 92, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The town consisted of one gas station, one Safeway, one electrical appliance store, Mae's Dress Shop, a Baptist bookstore, three churches, and four auto parts stores between there and Skylerville, the neighboring town with which Brewster shared one sheriff, his deputy, and their patrol car.
It was late afternoon, and the sun was just getting ready to slip below the horizon and take the heat with it. Inside the display window at Crutchins'Electronics, four nineteen-inch Sony color TV sets were all tuned to the same channel, a local independent station that aired mostly reruns. A rowdy group of teenagers, a couple of them with spiked technicolor hairdos, stared mesmerized at the pictures on the screens.
With Xeera and Konar by his side, Xashron stepped
up silently behind them. In thirty-five years, it seemed, the humans had made few real advances in their technology; clearly, they were still far too primitive to be a threat. Even so, Xashron was faintly amused by the drama unfolding on the television screens. It was a crude representation of a space battle between the Earthlings and some unseen enemy; the humans, vain creatures that they were, showed themselves winning the confrontation. Xashron smiled thinly at the irony of it.
On the screen, the interior of the Earth ship shuddered; consoles rained sparks. One of the actors fell, and another actor rushed to kneel over him. The camera closed in on the kneeling man's grim face.
"He's dead, Jim," one of the boys said in a shrill falsetto that was in perfect sync with the actor, who silently mouthed his line. The group laughed and nudged each other; as they did, one of them caught sight of Xashron. Soon the whole group was staring.
Someone imitated a chimpanzee, another made jungle-bird calls; a third giggled. Xashron and his soldiers shifted their attention from the television sets to the punks. The giggler fell silent. Slowly, silently, the teenagers moved on.
It was time for Xashron and the others to leave as well. The Advocate had come up with a suggestion that was actually intelligent, which indicated to Xashron that it was Xana's doing. These host bodies were deteriorating far too quickly, causing almost as much alarm as it would for them to use their natural form; apparently, their cellular structure made it impossible for them to tolerate large doses of radiation. Therefore, the Advocacy decreed, it was necessary to obtain medical information on caring for the human bodies. The method of doing so had been left to Xashron's discretion.
In the meantime, Xana and the others had work of their own.
Waller's Amoco lay south of Exit 92 outside the little desert town. It was twilight and the heat was fading; old Doc Waller was just getting ready to lock up the office when he spied Orel Ralston weaving down the road.
"Doc!" Orel spotted him and waved wildly. The action knocked him off balance, and he reacted by staggering off to one side. He had just left Nelda's Tavern a half mile down the road and was drunk as a skunk.
Doc gave up and slipped his key back into his pocket without locking the office door. Orel was running early this evening. Usually he didn't reach this particular level of intoxication until well after nightfall, after Doc had left the station, at which point Orel would stumble from Nelda's down to the Amoco and climb into one of the cars left overnight for maintenance, where he'd sleep off his drunk and leave the next morning by seven-thirty, before Doc and the customers started showing up.
Doc didn't mind, really. So long as Orel was gone before the customers got there, and didn't piss or upchuck in any of the cars, it was no problem. Doc had made it plenty clear that the night Orel puked in a customer's car would be his last.
"Doc," Orel panted, arriving at last, and grasped the old man's upper arms. Orel was a short, weasel-faced little guy, with a round nose and shiny eyes the color of the American flag—red, white, and blue— and he smelled worse than a wet dog. His overalls and the holey white T-shirt he wore beneath them were filthy, as was the greasy red-brown hair he brushed forward in an attempt to hide a receding hairline. "Doc, how are you?" His breath was sour from beer.
"You're early tonight, Orel." Doc pried Orel's dirty hands loose and put an arm under his shoulders to prop him up. "C'mon over this way. I got a nice '79 Ford LTD with some real cushy seats."
Orel balked. "Don't wanna sleep," he slurred. "Ain't tired. How 'bout you bringing us a coupla beers?"
He was referring to the cooler Doe kept hidden behind the counter in the office. Doc kept it stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon in the can, or Coors, if it was on special that week at the Brewster Safeway. Sometimes, when things got too slow, Doc would pop open a can for himself and sometimes, if he was feeling especially generous, for the part-time mechanic, Luis Ortega. 'Course, he never dreamed of doing it when there were customers around.
"Cooler's empty," Doc lied, though he knew there were a couple of Pabsts still left in the melted ice. "C'mon, Orel, let's check out that LTD."
Orel yielded and wobbled along with Doc's help over to the four-door LTD. It was unlocked, of course; in forty years, Doc had never locked a car or truck on his property, and none of them had ever been stolen or vandalized. The LTD was white with a black vinyl top that was starting to peel away from the metal in a couple of places; otherwise, it looked pretty good for a '79, though Doc couldn't say the same for the transmission.
Doc opened the heavy rear door—Lord, they didn't make 'em like this anymore; now they had those little tinfoil Japanese cars that crumpled if you looked cross-eyed at 'em—and eased Orel inside.
Orel curled up on the rear seat—real leather, nice and cushy—with a contented sigh. Doc had parked it in the shade and kept the windows cracked so the air inside would be fresh and not too hot. Luis had given him a hard time about it that morning, but Doc felt sorry for old Orel.
Orel's seventeen-year-old daughter Sally had died of leukemia four years ago, and afterward, Orel's wife, Minnie, had gone off the deep end. They said she was still in some kind of mental hospital off in Riverside or somewhere, but Orel wouldn't talk about it anymore. A lot of kids had died of leukemia around here, and the old folks of one kind or another of cancer— enough to make folks suspicious. AH that nuclear testing back in the fifties, everyone said, and when that group of families decided to sue the U.S. government, people in Brewster talked of joining the suit, or starting their own. Of course, after those folks lost the case, people here gave up talking about it.
Doc's own wife, Lucy, had died of breast cancer twelve years before, when she was only fifty-one and he was fifty-eight. Since then he'd just been marking time, minding the station and having an occasional beer when the waiting got to weigh heavy on him. Just his damn luck he turned out to be long-lived. Without Lucy, life seemed flat and dry and endless, like the desert.
He made sure Orel was clear of the door, then closed it and headed back to the office to lock up. He'd just turned the key in the lock when he heard the tractor-trailer rumbling down the exit ramp.
"Shit," Doc sighed, but he opened the door, switched on the lights, then walked around the counter to switch on the diesel pump. Business wasn't so good that he could afford to turn down big rigs like the one pulling into the station. Shiny and new it was, not a scratch on it. No writing on the sign, neither, and when Doc saw the guy in the white coverall climb out and start pumping diesel into one of the tanks, he became a tad suspicious. A worker at one of them nuclear dump places,
for sure; he bet if somebody took a Geiger counter and aimed it at that rig, the needle would go clear off the scale. Doc hated those places, and the people from them who stopped by; in the back of his mind he blamed them for Lucy's death.
Still, business was business. Doc walked out of the office and ambled on over to the island. The guy in the coverall had his back to him and didn't notice him.
"Whyn'cha let me do that, fella?" Doc inquired cheerfully as soon as he was in earshot. "This here's a full-service station."
Without turning around, the man shook his head very slowly.
"Have it your way," Doc replied pleasantly. "Where ya headed?"
The man still didn't speak, but inclined his head back toward Route 15, going east.
Luis came in four mornings a week, and was gone after lunch; the rest of the time Doc spent pretty much by himself, especially the evenings at home, which sometimes got rough. He enjoyed talking with his customers every chance he got—felt it was his right. He refused to be discouraged into silence. "I see. Where ya comin' from?"
The man nodded west.
"Talkative, ain't ya?" Doc said, a little disgusted. "Here, I'll finish that up." He crossed over the island and reached out for the nozzle. Startled, the man turned toward him. Doc caught a whiff of something rotten.
"Jesus H. Christ on a raft," he whispered, feeling a sudden strange tingle of fear. The man's face was deathly pale, a sick, graying color, and there was a huge oozing sore on his cheek that for some reason made him think of Lucy. Cancer, Doc thought, horrified; the poor fool's face was eaten away by it. And such a young man too.
"Son," he said kindly, "you best start being a heap more careful standin' out in the sun like this without no hat."
As he spoke, two others—a man and a woman— stepped down out of the cab. As they moved closer, Doc was struck by that same cloying, sickly sweet smell of vomit and decay and things too abominable to mention. There was puke down the front of their white coveralls, he realized, and dark streaks down the legs that he didn't even want to guess at. Their
J.M. Dillard - War of Worlds: The Resurrection Page 11
