2012 (11 page)

He left the office without making another appointment. What was the point? The good doctor didn’t believe a word he said. Hell, he didn’t believe a word he said.

Driving back in the Jeepazine, he made a decision. He would change it. He’d simply go back and alter the text. Because if he changed it, maybe he would also change events. No more ruined Winters family, no more ruined world.

He drove faster, and faster still, thinking only of his computer, of the urgent need return to his writing-which was returning to him and fast, roaring into his head like some kind of a dam-break flood blasting down the stream behind his house, a flood of words-

-and then there were lights, bright, back windshield.

Damn, he did not need another ticket, he was gonna need to take a damn compulsory driving course, which would take hours and piss him off in a mighty way.

“Hey, there, Matt, I’m sorry, I guess I was a little fast, there.”

“Wiley, you were doing a hundred and eleven.”

“Oh, that is bad.”

“Well, you know, I don’t usually stop town people. But-“

“How’s Beka?”

“Aw, shut up.”

“Uh, I could buy you a box of Partagas? Or just hand over the fifteen hundred bucks they cost? Cash, now?”

“I’ll take money and smokes. But I’m still gonna have to write this up.”

“Aw, fuck, Matt. Damnit, fuck.”

“Why were you going so fast? I mean, damn.”

“What can I tell you? I’m crazy.”

Matt wrote the ticket and handed it in for Wiley to sign. “This is gonna four-point you, but this is town, you’re in town, and we just-a hundred and eleven is not good, Wiley, I’m sorry.”

Four points added to the eight he already had would mean not only compulsory driver’s ed, but also a court appearance.

“I’m gonna call George Piccolo and tell him you harassed me.”

“You do that and I’ll beat your ass, boy.”

When they were kids, Matt had always won. He was heavier, he was faster, but Wiley was capable of getting more pissed off, as he did now. “Gimme the goddamn ticket, and for the love of God don’t tell Brooke or I’ll get my ass whupped, serious.”

“Well, you might like that.”

“Tell you what, I’m gonna drive home at thirty miles an hour and then I’m goin’ back to the cave for a smoke. I’ll call you on your cell to share my enjoyment with you.”

“Smoke my cigars, you’re gonna eat the butts. Remember that, because I get off duty in an hour and I will check.”

Hiding the ticket carefully, he drove on. He’d find a way to hide the fat check to the county in Quicken. Somehow or other.

Once back in his office, he pulled out the bottle of Woodford Reserve he kept in his bottom-drawer liquor stash and sipped at it.

What seemed like the next moment, voices caused him to come awake. Had he been sleeping? What had just happened? For a disoriented moment, he had the horrifying sense that he’d crossed into the parallel universe. But then the voices resolved into familiar ones. Brooke was coming in from the garage with the kids. She’d brought them home from school.

He looked at his watch in stunned amazement. It was four-thirty and the sun was on its way down. He’d been sitting here all day. Writing? He had no idea.

He listened to Brooke, to Kelsey’s high voice full of excitement about a snake in show and tell, to Nick’s thumping tread on the back stairs.

Then silence fell, and what he listened to now was the silence. Soon, the words came again, the words-whispering, shouting, demanding, from the other universe.

It was Martin, and he was talking to himself, and Wiley knew why. The poor guy had stayed here at the house, and was trying to force himself not to follow his family, and was agonized about that.

Martin was crying out, Martin was more desperate than any human being Wylie had ever known.

FIVE

DECEMBER 3 

THE BUNKER

AND NOW, SUDDENLY, WYLIE WAS looking at trees. At grass. He knew that he was far from Harrow, Kansas.

He wanted to return to Martin. He could feel the poor guy’s mind just racing for solutions, could feel his hunger to give up and blow his poor damn brains out, and his agony that he could not because those he loved could not.

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and saw that he was in a dark meadow in a pine woods. There were vents low to the ground, humming softly. Two deer, their ears turning this way and that, ventured out from the shadows.

Then he thought maybe he knew what this was. Martin had followed his family after all. He would have loaded his car up with food and water and set out through the woods and across the fields of his beloved Kansas, and that’s where this was.

But no, it was too quiet and too-well, the word was creepy. It had an evil feel to it. Nasty. The deer were uneasy, flipping their tails, their great eyes wary.

Night was falling here, the west was dense with clouds…and there was flickering in the clouds. A sign, he feared, of the disks.

Then he wasn’t in a meadow anymore, he was in a gray place that was softly rumbling. There were walls here, a long corridor lit by bulbs in wire cages.

Footsteps came, somebody moving fast, and a man in uniform wheeled around a corner. General Al North moved along the hallway in what appeared to be a military bunker of some sort. As the general came closer, Wylie could see that his fatigues were dirty, his face was sheened with sweat, his eyes, which had been gray and full of resolve in Washington, were now the flitting eyes of a rat.

So, he had survived the attack. Wiley had wondered about what had happened to these people. This was a huge thing, involving the whole world, and Washington had taken one of the early hits.

Al burst into Tom Samson’s office. “Does the president know about this?” he shouted, throwing a crumpled sheet of paper down on his superior officer’s desk.

“How dare you!”

“You’re telling them to congregate? To gather in groups? Are you insane?”

“God damn you.”

“Oh, shut up with your bluster, Tom. You’re in way over your head and you never should’ve been appointed and we both know it. But this-this isn’t just executive ineptitude. This is treason and I want an explanation that satisfies me, or I’m gonna arrest you, General.”

“You? You don’t have the authority.”

“This is war. We’re out of touch with higher authority.”

“The president of the United States is two offices away.”

“And I’m carryin’ and you’re not, and I’ll shoot you as soon as look at you unless you explain this goddamn thing. How many people have received this?”

“Pitifully few, given that I’m forced to deliver it with blimps, trucks, Cessnas, and word of mouth.”

“Let me go in another direction with this. We got a communication from Fort Riley about three hours ago, to the effect that a group of small towns northwest of Topeka took a terrific hit last night. They had your pamphlet. They congregated in their churches. And eight out of ten of these people are now wanderers. Thank you, Tom. I thank you for them, for their families, for the country. And what’s this Kansas deal? Why did you even leaflet these people? Did you somehow know that Lautner County was gonna take a hit?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh, no, you did. Because you singled it out. Two days ago, you directed a blimp run over the whole area.”

“Routine.”

“Really? Why not hit Topeka? Why not hit K.C.? But instead, you just go to this one little county. So I have to ask you, Tom, who’s side are you on?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Our chains of command are busted all to hell, Tom. We’re going down in damn flames, worldwide. Bases raided by the disks time and again, desertions by the tens of thousands-we’re done, man.”

“We have a weapon.”

“What? Stealth bombers? Nukes like the one that failed to do jack shit to the lens on Easter Island? Now, there was a good move. We nuke ‘em and as a result they pick up their pace a hundredfold. So I’m not so sure I even want to hear about this damn weapon.”

“You want to hear about it.”

He picked up the crumpled pamphlet. “I want to hear about this, Tom.”

“Aw, Christ. Has anybody ever actually told you what an extreme asshole you are?”

“Please,” Al said.

“You talk about failure of discipline-speaking of Kansas, you belong in Leavenworth.”

Should Al just draw the gun and shoot? How would the president react to that? “Tom, you should’ve told them to hide, seal themselves in spaces where no light can reach. Force the attack to be executed in detail. Takes more time that way, and we already know that they withdraw at dawn.”

“Fish school because mathematically the survival rate among large populations being attacked by predators is greater than that for isolated individuals. Same goes for herding animals. And under these circumstances, my friend, the same exact principle applies to us.”

“Let’s put it to the president.”

“The pamphlets are being distributed as fast as we can manage it, and that’s going to continue. Do you know why we were concerned about Lautner County?”

“No.”

“Your friend, the little man, the archaeologist-he’s there. And they want him dead, I can assure you.”

“They? I’m dealing with lenses that emit these bursts of disks every night that go out and wreak havoc. There is no ‘they.’”

“Somebody’s behind the lenses and behind the disks, never doubt it, and your man is a danger because he has the smarts and the knowledge of the deep past to maybe figure this out, and maybe-just maybe-to figure out a vulnerability. And they know it, and they are after that man.”

“Did they get him?”

“Don’t know. The place is in chaos, communications are down.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“You still ready to shoot me?”

Al was silent.

“Then you start respecting my command. You salute me, and you call me sir.”

Al shook his head, laughing to himself.

“Do it now, goddamn you!”

The two men glared at each other. Al did not salute.

“I’m doing my job, Al. Best I can. Under the worst conditions any American general has ever experienced.”

Slowly, as if his arm itself was unwilling, Al raised his hand and saluted. “Yes, Sir,” he said.

“Okay, I have an appointment with the president. I want you in attendance, Al.”

That surprised him so much he almost gagged. He’d seen himself as being on the way to Diego Garcia for a tour managing the fuel dump. As if there still was a Diego Garcia, let alone a base, let alone fuel.

Face time with the president was a gift. Normally, he couldn’t go on his own unless called, and Wade was not in the mood for squash, although there was a good court down here, he’d looked it over when they first came in and this was all exciting and interesting, and they were gonna nuke those suckers to glowing dust balls and go back home in triumph.

As they went along the hall together, Tom put a hand on Al’s shoulder. “We’re not friends.”

“No.”

“But we need to put our personal battle on hold. We’ve got warfighting to do, and we are in trouble. You’re about to hear a report that is going to disturb you. Maybe also give you a ray of hope. But I want you to maintain strict military discipline in there. He will ask for your opinion. It will mirror mine.”

“Yes, Sir.” He realized that this was how it had to be. He just hoped to God that Tom was right. That business about congregating still sounded wrong. It sounded like intentional sabotage.

They went through the outer office. No pretty furniture here, this place was constructed for work and work only. If the president was here, a catastrophe was unfolding. Communications equipment dominated. Secret Service agents with machine guns lined the halls, young men with stricken eyes, all watching the generals pass. Angry, bitter eyes. Mostly, the families of these people lived in places like Arlington and Bethesda, and those communities had been worked for a full week, all of them, and the fleeing lines of cars had been worked out on the interstates.

Whoever was doing this knew exactly how to proceed. If you break the enemy’s organization, you neutralize his warfighting capacity even before he’s aimed a weapon. Of course, down here there was no question of the light being a threat, but this was obviously a special place.

There were numerous corporate and private bunkers as well, he knew, not to mention government facilities all over the planet, but with all satellites fried and most land-based switching stations so loaded with atmospherics that they’d shut down, there was little communication except by messenger-and they could only run during daylight hours.

They entered the presidential office, and Al was horrified at what he saw. The president looked like he’d lost fifty pounds. His eyes were dark, brooding shadows. Trapped, animal eyes.

He looked mean, in the same way a struggling cur looks mean when you’re trying to stuff it into a cage and be done with it.

He raised his head, and at once the misery in the face was replaced by a beggar’s grin. Now he was a used car salesman who’d spun his last lie. “Sorry,” he said, gesturing at papers on his desk. “Signing death warrants. Line of duty desertions, hundreds of them.”

“You’re ordering executions, sir?”

“Do me a favor, Al. Call me Jimmy. You guys. Should I, you think? Yeah, it’s total bullshit, isn’t it. They came from CIA, not DoD. There is no DoD, of course. And Bo Waldo’s gone. This shit’s from staffers.” He crumpled one up. “Kids like to kill.”

“They’re operating out of a unit in Maryland,” Tom said. “Above-ground, so it won’t matter much longer, be my guess-Jesus, what was that?”

The president looked up, they all looked up. There had been a sound coming out of the ceiling, a low noise, loud enough, though, to drown conversation.

“Call the contractor,” the president said, acid in his voice. “Try flushing my toilet sometime, you want a hell of a damned surprise.” He sighed. “I wish I knew where my wife and kids were. Do you fellas know where your families are?”

“I’ve been divorced, Jimmy-oh, long time,” Al said. Sissy had packed it in when they were still base bums, shuffling around the world. He’d never bothered to remarry. The air force was his wife, his kids, his mistress, all that and more. As far as his rocks were concerned, he got them off the way monks did.