by Alan Rodgers
Bill yawned, tried to pretend that he didn’t feel like he did. Looked out the window. Where were they, now? Over land, which meant they were well on their way. Mountainous land; dry, sharp hills pointed skyward toward them like a sea of knives. Had to be the Rockies. Where was it they were going? Kansas? Kansas was pretty far west. If they were lucky, they’d be there soon. And Bill could get out of this damn plane and get himself some privacy. Sort out all the nonsense running around inside his head.
He turned away from the window. Yawned again. Caught sight of the dead policeman, who was drooling again. Damn it, why didn’t somebody clean him up? How could they let him soil himself that way? His line of thinking got about that far before Bill remembered that there wasn’t any “they” aboard this plane. Just Bill and the woman and the boy and the cop. And, up in the cockpit, two pilots and a navigator. Of all those people, Bill was the only one you could say had a responsibility to look after the dead policeman. He was an enlisted man, after all. And if there was anybody who ought to be seeing after scut work, it was an enlisted man. The folk up front were officers, and anyhow they were busy. The boy and the woman were civilians. Or maybe the woman wasn’t; but if she belonged to any kind of outfit, it likely wasn’t the US Air Force.
All of which came down to the fact that Bill needed to get out of his seat and clean the cop. He unbuckled his seat belt, got up, walked back, got himself a couple paper towels from the john. Wet them in the sink so they’d clean the crusty-dry part of the drool off the cop’s chin. Went back to the cabin and spent the better part of five minutes cleaning solidified spittle off the policeman’s face.
They passed into a cloud bank just a little bit before Bill finished; by the time he was done the cabin was dusk-dark. Dark enough that he was half afraid he’d stumble over his own feet and break his neck when he went back toward the john to stuff the towels into the waste bin. Maybe he ought to go up front, Bill thought. Get one of those pilot-types to turn the lights up.
Yeah.
He dumped the paper towels, started back toward the cockpit — and the plane hit turbulence. And the floor started moving around underneath Bill’s feet. The heck with the lights and talking to the crew; it was time to get himself sat down. Time to put his seat belt on. Be glad that they were still in the air, and not plowing into some mountain in the middle of nowhere.
Then suddenly they were falling, and instead of jumping around underneath his feet, the floor wasn’t anywhere that Bill could find.
Oh shit.
And he knew that he was in some kind of trouble.
I’m going to break my effing neck, he thought. Any instant now his head would hit the ceiling, and his skull would bust wide open. Splat. Brains all over the place like shit in a pig pen. And in an hour or a day or a week Bill would come back to life a vegetable drooling braindead deadman like the cop.
Oh boy.
And he kept waiting to hit. The roof. The ceiling. The floor. Walls, anything. He didn’t hit any of them, because the damned plane was still falling, which meant that Real Soon Now they all would be hitting one of those damned mountains —
Which was when the law of gravity came back into effect. And Bill went down, hard, break-your-bones hard. Not toward the floor because he wasn’t over the floor any more. What Bill came down into, in fact, were the arms of the — of the woman. The oriental woman who he loved and didn’t know and if he knew her name damned if he could remember it.
Real embarrassing. Bill would like to broke his back on the armrest of her seat if she hadn’t caught him. God she was strong. Arms like a wrestler’s, even if they did look like a woman’s arms. What kind of a woman was she? Her strength confused Bill, and left him a little ill-at-ease. He hadn’t ever met a woman who looked like a woman and smelled like a woman and who was strong as an ox. Wasn’t at all sure he liked the idea.
She was looking into his eyes real intense now. Like she wanted to tear his clothes off and have her way with him. Which made Bill even more uncomfortable, for no reason that he understood. Surprised the hell out of him, too. Who ever heard of a man who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have his clothes took off by a woman who looked like this one did? Bill hadn’t, that was for sure. And here he was, being exactly that kind of man he’d never heard of.
“Uh,” he said. “Thanks for the save. Guess I owe you one.”
And as he spoke that something in her eyes changed again. Just like it had all those times before, but more so. And instead of looking hungry for him, she looked disgusted. Real sudden-like, as though it’d just come over her what exactly it was she was thinking. And she hissed, and she pushed him off of her, out into the aisle. Where Bill landed ungently on his rear.
“You,” she said. “Stay away from me. Keep your hands to yourself.”
Which left Bill at least as confused as the nonsense running around inside his own head. He shook his head — more to clear it than to tell her no. “Hold on a minute,” he said. “The only hands that did anything in the last five minutes are yours. You think I meant for this damn plane to send me flying into you? You can guess again about that, I’ll tell you. And it wasn’t me looking all cow-eyes into your face, no ma’am —”
There were other things he was going to say, too, but Bill never got the chance. About the time that woman heard the words cow-eyes she was rising up out of her seat like a raging bull. Before Bill even knew what was going on she was all over him, pounding his head into the floor again and again and shouting at him, only there wasn’t any way to tell what it was she was saying because of the sound of his own brains pounding on the rug. There was a measure of déjé vu in the sensation, only it wasn’t déjé vu because it hadn’t happened before, Bill only thought it was going to, back when he was all up in the air because the plane was falling.
She paused a moment, grabbed him by the collar. “You will not speak to me this way. Do you understand?”
And Bill was going to answer her, he really was. Only before he could talk she hit him again, even harder this time, the heel of her hand cracking into the place where his nose met his upper lip. And then there was blood all over the place, his blood coming out through his nose that was maybe broken. For a while that went on forever all he could do was lie on the floor of the plane gasping for air. With the woman straddled over him nothing but a presence weighing on his chest. Not even noticing the fact that she’d stopped hitting him.
Then, finally, the panic for air ebbed. And Bill opened his eyes, and saw her staring at him with her mouth hung wide in horror and denial.
“I’ve hurt you,” she said. Said it in a voice Bill would have used to tell a friend that his mother died.
“Sure did,” he said. “You got a tissue or something? Or maybe could you let me up to get a paper towel from the can?”
She pursed her lips. “I’ll get it.” And she was gone, and Bill could sit up again.
The boy had woke from his nap; he was staring at Bill now. “You okay, Corporal Bill? She wrassles pretty good, don’t she?”
“Uh,” Bill said. “I guess she does.”
Then she was back again, kneeling just above Bill, dabbing at his face with a damp paper towel.
“I’m sorry,” she said. And from the look on her face Bill thought that there were other things she wanted to say, too. Things she wanted to say that she couldn’t find the words for.
“It’s all right,” Bill told her. “I love you too.” Mostly he was being sarcastic when he said that, but the woman didn’t take it that way. For just a moment she looked shocked, violated by the suggestion.
And then she nodded.
“Yes,” the woman said. “It is unwise to hide from such a thing. Isn’t it?”
Took Bill half a minute to figure out what she meant by that. And when he finally did he wasn’t one bit less confused.
³ ³ ³
Chapter Forty-Four
> LAKE-OF-FIRE
It was dusk when George Stein woke again.
Outside, on the runway, a ground crew was fueling the first of the transport planes; nuclear missiles had been strapped and bolted onto the tops of all but the last three of them.
And there was nothing, not a single damned thing, that George or anyone else could or would do to stop them.
Not a thing.
Was Herman in the room? George couldn’t see him. His line of sight was limited by the angle at which he hung from the chains; if Herman were behind him, sitting or standing quietly, there’d be no way he could know for certain. If Herman wasn’t there, it was strange — he’d been with George continuously for two days, now. Or been there, at least, every moment that George was awake and alive. He craned his head back and to the side, to get a better view, and saw that the room was empty.
Knowing that Herman was nowhere nearby took a weight off George. He was feeling better, now — and not just because of Herman Bonner’s absence. His body was recovering, remaking itself. And if he still wished that he were dead, he felt an obligation to the world. And that obligation gave him reason to live.
Herman had said it, not long before George blacked out. George was the only one left. The only one who knew what Herman was doing, and knew to try to stop him. But how? The chains weren’t about to melt away of their own accord. Or crumble away from the hook that suspended him, and send George falling to the ground. He looked up at that hook. It was long, and sharp, and curved wickedly inward; even if he could manage to get himself rocking back and forth there was no way he’d be able to swing far enough forward to free himself. Could he try to grab hold of the chains, and climb them like a rope, hand over hand? He wasn’t sure. The chains had cut off the circulation to his hands — they felt cold and dead, too numb to lift anything at all, much less George’s entire weight.
He looked around, trying to see if there was anything nearby that would help, but there wasn’t. Herman had taken care to shove the couch away from him, and neither the television nor the chairs were close enough to be of any use.
No. The only thing to do was to try to climb the chains. George set his teeth, forced the fingers of his right hand to uncurl. And began to try to free himself.
³ ³ ³
CHEYENNE COUNTY
The creature began to wake only a moment before Christine heard the first scream from the graveyard.
Andy and the dog were playing in that graveyard.
Christine Gibson gasped, and turned to look to see what had happened to the child, and saw him standing between two tombstones in the dusklight, looking dumbfounded and a little afraid. The dog beside him, braced and barking at the air.
“You heard that?” he asked her. “It wasn’t me. I swear it wasn’t.” Looked around, as though making certain that there was no one else nearby who might overhear him. “Came from down there. Down there in the ground.”
And that was when Christine realized what she’d heard.
And shivered, shivered right down to the deepest place inside her.
“No,” she said, too quietly for the boy to hear. And if anyone had been there to ask her what it was she’d denied, she’d have been unable to answer.
She turned to look into the back seat, where the creature still weak and beaten lay with his eyes half open. His body was fine, now, she thought. He’d suffered so, died painfully again and again for so many hours that his spirit was all but gone.
He doesn’t have the heart to be alive any more, she thought. And she knew it was true, and knowing made her very, very sad.
That didn’t matter. She couldn’t let it matter. She put her hand on his wrist, and looked into those beautiful, tired eyes. “They need you,” she said. “I know who you are. What you are. I dreamed that I saw you . . . so many times before we found you on that train. You can tell them — things that I couldn’t make them understand, even if they heard me.”
She remembered. Waking in the dark, in the close-press of wood and rotted velvet that was her coffin. Unable to move, to breathe, to think —
For her, at least, the grave had been so shallow. She felt cold and afraid inside when she thought of what it would have been like to be trapped under six heavy feet of earth. . . .
“Help them understand that it’s all right, that they’re alive and fine and that nothing will happen to them, just as long as they stay calm. All they have to do is press their way out, press out and dig up through the soil. And soon enough they’ll be free.”
It wasn’t true, of course. There wasn’t any way to be free of that deep a grave soon enough. But the screams from the graveyard were spreading from one to another like an infection. If they panicked it’d be worse, much worse. She knew because for just a moment before the soil above her had finally opened away into daylight, she’d felt that panic. And she couldn’t bear to hear it coming from the throats of others.
She was out of the car, now, outside and on her feet and opening the door beside the creature. Taking his hand, helping him out of the back seat — with only half his cooperation — leading him to the graveyard.
“Make them calm,” she said. She could hear panic in her own voice as she spoke. “Please make them calm.”
The creature nodded, looking down at the dry grassy soil. Uneven ground, where Christine could pick out the shapes of coffins where the dirt had settled around them.
And he knelt, set his hands on the ground. Still and quiet for so long that the boy and the dog both stood still to watch and Christine almost began to lose heart, lose hope —
Then the screams began to quiet. Slowly. And all at once they faded, and the only sound was a small child buried somewhere in the earth and crying.
“We need to help them out,” she said. Looked around, fretting. So many graves.
The boy groaned. “How we going to do that?” he asked. “We haven’t got any shovel. I can tell you there ain’t one in that trunk. What you want to do, scrape them all open with our fingernails?”
She didn’t have an answer.
“All of those people in the graveyard back in Brooklyn got out pretty good on their own. Probably easier to push your way out of the dirt than it is to dig your way into it.” Scratched his head. “Course, none of them started screaming, either. What do you think started that here? Pretty strange, if you’re asking me.”
She wasn’t sure what to say or think; she could feel the panic easing, but it was still in her blood.
“You okay? You don’t look so good, you know.” He waited for her to respond, but before she could find the words the boy was talking again, about another subject entirely. “Maybe it’s him that set them off.” He nodded toward the creature again. “All sick like he was, and hurting so. Kind of like how when one person starts pushing in the subway all the rest of them get crazy, too? You know what I mean?”
Christine didn’t know. The fact was that all the experience she had of subways had come in the last week — they were something that had happened to the world in the time that she’d been gone from it. She found them strange, and incredible, and more than a little frightening. If the boy wanted to use them to prove his point, it’d end up lost on her. Christine didn’t say any of that; she wasn’t comfortable admitting her ignorance. Instead, she nodded.
“That’s exactly what it is, I bet you.” He walked over to where the creature still knelt on the ground. Set his hand on the creature’s shoulder in a way that was somehow almost fatherly — Christine had calmed enough that the sight was almost comical. The creature looked up from the ground, into the boy’s eyes. “You’ve got to calm yourself,” Andy said. “Make yourself stop hurting. You’re scaring people — almost like they can feel it, too. Huh?”
Yes. The creature nodded.
A few feet away — not far from where the creature knelt — the soil was stirring as the first of the graveyard’
s dead began to rise up out of the earth.
³ ³ ³
OUTSIDE THE GATES OF LAKE-OF-FIRE
“I need a cigarette,” Ron said. “Damn it do I need a cigarette.”
Luke didn’t pay him any mind. He was too busy staring at the tall, tall chain-link fence — the one with three feet of razor wire on top of it. Trying, Ron guessed, to figure out how they were going to get over it.
Ron didn’t like it one bit.
Come on, he thought. There had to be some sort of an alarm on that fence. No matter how high it was — no matter what kind of meanness they put on top of it — this far in the middle of nowhere no fence could be secure without someone standing guard in front of it. Unless it had one hell of an alarm system. Forget spies and saboteurs — they’d have teenagers sneaking around here on weekend nights, cutting the chain-link with tin snips and necking beside the silos.
And if there was an alarm, it wasn’t likely they’d get a hundred yards inside the base before there were soldiers — or whatever they were — all over them.
And what was the point of that?
No point at all. No point that Ron could see.
There Luke was, staring at the hyperthyroid chain-link fence, transfixed as though it were the Oracle at Delphi. Half a dozen times since they’d started away from the wreck of the old Dodge, Ron had spoken to him. And near as he could tell Luke hadn’t heard a word he’d said, not even once.
So now what? Any moment now Luke was going to come up with a stupid and dangerous idea for getting past that fence. Something that’d get them into shit deep enough for swimming in. And Ron would have to follow him. He’d come far enough along already that he had an obligation to see this through to its . . . conclusion? End? Whatever was coming. Ron wasn’t in the grip of a vision the way Luke so obviously was. His gut still knew that they were heading toward something with finality. Death, or maybe real rebirth. It was best to stay with Luke, and be what use he could. Important things were on the verge of happening. If he had a contribution to make, Ron thought, he wanted to make it.
