After a day of stumbling and blind killing, he had made it out here. Even though the Last Chance Saloon sat in the middle of nowhere, it was only a matter of time before they found him. And killed him.
As his finger continued to tap repeatedly against his glass, Roote heard a squeak on the porch somewhere behind him. His finger froze.
Cocking an ear, he listened intently.
Footfalls. More than one set. Someone sneaking in.
They'd found him. Quicker than he'd expected. Hunching further, he resumed his tapping.
The louvered saloon doors creaked open a moment later. The soft footsteps grew louder as the men behind him walked carefully across the floor. Not one word. Just steady, certain footfalls.
They had made him. Not only that, their guns were most likely drawn. Hunched over the bar, Roote smiled at the thought.
The men had gotten only halfway across the floor before they stopped suddenly.
"My God," gasped a voice.
Roote cleared a wad of phlegmy dust from his throat. "I see you've met Tommy." He didn't turn. He just continued to tap relentlessly at the rim of his glass.
The two MPs had paused near the dusty tables arranged around the bar floor.
Corporal Fisher glanced at his partner. Hamill was staring, horrified, into the dancing dust.
A charred corpse had been propped up in a chair in the shadow of one of the thick wooden support columns.
There was no hair. Only a few black remnants of clothing remained. His eyes had exploded, cooking like eggs in the sockets. Lips shriveled away, exposing skeletal rows of teeth. The man's lower fillings were clearly visible through the strands of grisly black that had been his cheeks.
"This guy looks like he's been cooked," Hamill hissed. His voice sounded sick.
"He was the bartender here," Roote explained from the bar. "Think he might've owned the place, too." Roote tipped his head pensively. "Never did get 'round to askin' him. Too late now, I suppose."
The two MPs steeled themselves. They left the body, stepping over to Elizu Roote.
He matched the description they'd been given. Thin, just under six feet tall. Ghostly pale skin. Hair blond enough to be almost white. The kid was a freaking albino. With a nod, they confirmed it was the man whose photograph they had been given. They hadn't been told his name.
"Get up," Fisher commanded.
Roote continued tapping. "No."
That was enough for Corporal Hamill. "Let's go," he ordered bluntly, grabbing Roote under the armpit.
Corporal Fisher followed his partner's lead. They yanked Roote to his feet. The private's bar stool clattered over. Corporal Hamill immediately began patting down his clothes for weapons. "How'd you escape from the stockade?" asked the MP as he worked.
"That what they told you?" Roote smiled. He held up his arms halfway, allowing the man to pat his shirt.
"He's clean," Hamill told his partner.
Roote was blinking lazily, weaving in his slightly drunken haze as the men spoke. He didn't lower his arms. "Don't matter that I escaped," he drawled. "Nothin' to escape to."
"Should we cuff him?" Hamill asked.
"Hell yeah."
The handcuffs were brought out. As Fisher flipped one bracelet open, he noticed something clutched in Roote's hand. The cuffs were instantly dropped. Fisher's gun flew up once more.
"Open your hands," the MP ordered.
"I don't think you really want me to," Roote confided.
"Open your hands!" Fisher commanded. By this point Hamill had raised his gun, as well. For safety's sake they'd moved a few feet away from the AWOL private.
Roote's giggle came out as a drunken snort. He held his hands up near his ears, elbows deeply bent. Until now, his fingertips had been pressed against his palms.
Slowly, with deliberate ceremony, Roote unfolded his fingers, exposing the rows of curved metal pads at the tips.
"What the hell are those?" Corporal Fisher asked, more of his partner than of Roote.
His question was answered in the most horrible way imaginable.
Ten tiny blue sparks appeared to ignite all at once on the tip of every one of Elizu Roote's pale fingers. It was as if some strange internal switch had been flicked.
As the men watched in growing concern, the sparks erupted into ten uneven lightning jolts. The surge of electricity hopped from Roote to the men, attracted to the nearest metallic source. In this case, their guns.
The electricity surged through weapons and up arms, jolting hearts, firing up spinal cords, frying brain synapses. They were dead in an instant. Roote didn't stop.
Electricity continued to pour from him. The men cooked and smoked and finally dropped, their skin a leathery black. The power surged from the fingers of Elizu Roote until the MPs were fried beyond recognition.
Long before his internal supply was used up, Roote cut the power. Woozy, he fell back against the bar.
Sickly sweet smoke from burning flesh filled the stagnant air of the dusty saloon. It rose from the shriveled corpses, searing Roote's eyes.
He leaned, panting, for a long time.
Finally, he stooped over, righting his stool. Turning his back on the dead men, he took his place at the bar.
"Don't tussle with the monster," he murmured to the bodies of Corporals Fisher and Hamill: Pulling his empty glass toward him, Roote resumed his maddening, incessant tapping.
REMO FOUND that he didn't actually have to flap his arms out the window of the U.Sky flight, but the condition of the old DC-10 was such that he wouldn't have been surprised if he and the other passengers had been asked to.
The frills of the bargain airline's "no frills" policy apparently extended beyond the customary drinks, food and magazines to include carpeting, an intact fuselage, stewardesses and a pilot.
The last two items on the list were probably technically untrue. While boarding, Remo had seen two middle-aged women in hats who were with either the airline or the Salvation Army. But if they were stewardesses, he and the other passengers never found out. The women had made themselves scarce long before the plane had even left the runway.
As far as a pilot was concerned, Remo realized that there most likely was one. He merely had either an equilibrium or drinking problem. Remo was of the opinion that it was a combination of both.
When they finally landed in New Mexico, Remo was amazed that the rickety plane didn't erupt in flames and rattle apart as it bumped down the steaming runway of Alamogordo-White Sands Regional Airport.
As the engines chugged and smoked to silence, the uniformed dowagers reappeared in order to snarl at the passengers as they deplaned. Remo was the first off.
He followed the drably painted corridor from the plane to the main terminal building, taking an escalator down to the entry level. The automatic doors slid open at his approach, giving him his first full blast of New Mexico air.
It was hot in the precise way air should not be. Remo felt the heat permeate his cotton clothes as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. He glanced around for a taxi.
His search was interrupted by a young man in a bedraggled white T-shirt and calf-length short pants. Some sort of bizarre image adorned the filthy shirtfront. Though Remo couldn't quite make it out, it looked vaguely familiar.
"They're here!" the youth announced, jumping in front of Remo. He had a wild look in his dirtrimmed eyes.
"Bully for them," Remo said, looking past the man. What kind of airport didn't have cabs lined up waiting?
"They landed here years ago," the young man insisted. "Crashed." He pointed. "Out there. In the desert. The Army knows about it. Big government cover-up. The A-bomb tests they claim they had here? Part of the cover-up. They don't want the truth to get out."
"Of course not," Remo agreed.
He thought he spied a few cabs parked in the shade of the terminal's overhang. He began walking toward them. The young man dogged his steps.
"They've taken me up dozens of times," he insisted. "Ever since I
was a kid." All at once, he jammed a finger up his nose. "You know what's up here?" he asked.
"I have a sneaking suspicion," Remo replied.
"Microprobe," the young man intoned. "Miniaturized processor. Location coordinator. The works."
"What do you know," Remo said absently. "I was wrong."
They were cabs. The drivers were staying out of the oppressive heat. Remo couldn't blame them. He steered toward the parked cars.
"Are you a believer?" the young man enthused. He was used to having people either punching him or running away by this point. Since this new arrival had yet to deck him, he assumed him to be a fellow traveler.
Remo stopped dead. He looked down at the man's shirt, a sudden realization dawning on him. "That's one of those alien composites, isn't it?" he asked.
The picture on the T-shirt was as he had seen it on television, albeit a lot filthier. The head was like a grayish lightbulb. The mouth was a crushed O. Two lemon-shaped eyes stared out from the bulbous cranial section.
It was the picture drawn by many who claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
The young man beamed proudly. Perfect white teeth that must have set his parents back tens of thousands of dollars gleamed in the desert sunlight. If those same parents knew what their offspring was up to right now, they were probably burying their heads in the backyard in shame.
"Have you had an otherworldly experience, too?" the youth asked earnestly.
Remo placed a paternal hand on the young man's shoulder. "Kid, let me tell you something that I hope will change your life." As he spoke, he kept his voice perfectly level. "There are no such things as aliens. There are no alien visitations. There are no spaceships. Get used to it. We're alone."
The kid backed away from Remo's hand, shocked.
"They got to you!" he gasped.
Without another word, Remo resumed walking.
He ducked under the overhang, pulling open the door of the nearest cab.
"You're from the government!" the young man accused. He shouted from the sidewalk a few yards behind Remo. "I bet you're part of the conspiracy!" He turned to a female passerby. "He's part of the conspiracy!" he yelled to the startled woman.
"Kid, you don't know how true that is." Remo nodded. He slammed the door as the taxi pulled away from the curb.
HE WOULD ADMIT they had made a huge miscalculation.
Huge? No. Wouldn't fly. Ass-is-grass time if he came clean on the magnitude of the screw-up. Better scratch that.
In the private sanctuary of his battlefield command nucleus, General Delbert Chesterfield crossed out the simple four-letter word. It was not the first such blot.
Chesterfield frowned deeply. What had begun as a clean white sheet of paper was now a hodgepodge of thick black graphite marks.
Huge ...not huge...
Minor? Certainly not. He doubted even he could get away with that.
No, don't characterize it by its greater dimensions. And anyway, anyone looking at it would know it was huge and not small. Couch it in mathematical terms. That usually worked to confuse the less focused of his superiors.
"Arithmetic."
The word flowed off the end of his pencil as if drawn unbeckoned from deep in his subconscious. Yes, that would work. He smiled, growing more excited as he stared down at the single word.
Yes. Absolutely. Arithmetic. He made an extra little graphite loop around the ten magic letters. An arithmetic miscalculation.
The general frowned once more.
Could it even be characterized as a miscalculation?
Softer terminology. That's what was required here.
Put retrospective in there somewhere. After all, everything looked better in hindsight.
It was nearly 11:00 a.m.-a full three hours since the latest batch of Fort Joy MPs had gone missing-by the time Chesterfield settled on the proper terminology.
"An arithmetic retrospective postcircumstantial error. "
He crossed out error and replaced it with event. Whipping the paper off his desk, he examined the words in the bright sunlight that flowed in through his closed office window. He liked what he saw.
"Damn good bit of soldiering. Damn good," he boasted to the empty room.
In the wide, dusty courtyard beyond the window, the flurry of activity that had been going on for the past three days continued unabated. Chesterfield hadn't seen that many soldiers preparing for battle since the Gulf War.
Of course, his own physical self had not actually personally participated in the Mother of All Battles, it being stateside at the time. But he had watched Dan Rather's coverage almost every night. On his twenty-seven-inch screen, it looked like there were a lot of soldiers in that war. He found as he peered through the open blinds of his office window that, in real life and without the limitations of his TV screen, fewer soldiers looked like even more.
There were men marching. Sergeants barking orders. Jeeps tearing this way and that, sending up awesome plumes of desert dust in their wakes. To Chesterfield, it looked for all the world like a real goddamn army.
Even though he understood the concept of mob mentality, he could easily have been whipped into the kind of military fervor that had taken hold of his men if only he didn't know the reason behind all the action.
But he knew all too well. And it'd be the end of his whole damn career if anyone else found out. Chesterfield tore his eyes away from his troops, settling back on the paper in his big hand. Now that he had the proper tenninology, the rest would flow like crap through a goose. He placed the paper to one side of his desk.
Gathering up his swagger stick, General Chesterfield marched out of his office, past his aide's desk and out into the unforgiving New Mexico sunlight.
Rows of soldiers were being marched by a drill instructor past Chesterfield's HQ. The general nodded his approval as the men-some seemingly barely out of diapers-trudged in lockstep past their commanding officer.
Chesterfield towered over all the men. He was a huge bear who looked as if he could squash a man with a single press of one large thumb.
As the last rows of soldiers were marching by, the general noticed something beyond them. It was coming toward him from the main gate in a cloud of dust.
Squinting at the intruder, Chesterfield swept his riding crop out from under his great arm. He slapped it to the chest of the nearest soldier in the last row of marchers.
The man stopped dead in his tracks. As if he'd walked into a solid wall.
"Soldier, what the hell is that?" Chesterfield boomed. He swung the swagger stick out like a pointer.
The baby-faced recruit seemed terrified to be addressed by ironbutt Chesterfield. The leather riding crop was directly beneath his nose. He followed it to the end, peering off in the direction of the main gate. He immediately saw what had caught the base commander's eye.
"Taxi, sir!" the soldier yelled.
Chesterfield frowned deeply. A great mass of skin gathered at his fleshy jowls. "Join your unit," he said.
"Thank you, sir!" the soldier shouted. After exchanging salutes, the recruit ran to catch up with the last row of men.
The general watched as the taxi approached. Outwardly he displayed mild suspicion. Inwardly, it was a whole other story. His apprehension level was great as the cab slowed to a stop several feet from his highly polished boots.
As a lone man got out of the back, the general's apprehension faded. The suspicious expression turned to one of disgust.
Typical civilian. The guy wore a pair of tan pants and a white T-shirt. Though thin, he seemed to be in pretty good physical shape. Still, Chesterfield could tell that the guy wouldn't last a single day in the United States Army.
He tried to give the new arrival a condescending glare. Trouble was, the fellow was looking at the general as if he were the one that should be condescended to.
"How's it hanging, Eisenhower?" Remo commented, after sizing up the military man. Not waiting for a reply, he turned his attention to the cabdriver.
"This is a United States military base," Chesterfield's booming voice announced as Remo dug through his pockets.
"I didn't think it was the Alamogordo Y," Remo replied blandly. He handed a few bills over to the cabbie. "Thanks," he said, smacking the roof. The taxi drove off in a cloud of dust.
As the cab headed down the road to the main gate, Remo turned back to the general. He had taken only two steps before Chesterfield propped his walking stick against Remo's chest.
"Hold it right there, civilian," Chesterfield commanded.
"The name is Remo. And before this conversation ends with that cane sticking out of your ass, I was sent here from Washington."
Shocked, Chesterfield quickly removed the riding crop.
"Washington?" the general asked, feigning surprise. He pulled himself up to his full height. He towered over Remo like a small mountain. "What's this all about?"
Remo sighed. "Serial killer. Burned corpses. Army soldier." Even as Chesterfield's jowly mouth opened to deny the last accusation, Remo cut in. "Don't bother," he said. "I asked in Alamogordo. He's one of yours."
Chesterfield was already doing some rapid calculations in his head. He didn't want to admit to anything that could come back to bite him later on. After weighing the options for a split second, he decided that there probably wasn't much harm admitting that Elizu Roote was from his base.
The general nodded crisply. "He's one of my boys." He quickly added, "That is to say, one of the Army's boys. They just send me the crates. I don't know how many rotten apples are sitting in them."
"So there is only one man."
"One United States Army soldier, yes," Chesterfield replied haughtily.
"General Chesterfield!" The excited voice came from near one of the single-story barracks-type command structures.
They turned to see a lieutenant, who appeared to be too young for a razor, running across the dusty yard. He barely avoided bumping into dozens of men in his haste to cross over to Chesterfield.
"We think we've got him, General," panted the excited lieutenant as he reached Chesterfield. He nodded crisply to Remo. "One of the MP units failed to report in. Chopper spotted their jeep at a saloon beyond the forest."
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