Costume Not Included (34 page)

  He was still staring at his phone. Now he dialed dispatch. "It's Denby," he said. "What's all the rumpus?"

  He recognized the voice of the normally imperturbable sergeant who answered. Denby had never before heard the man sound rattled. "End of the world, captain," was all he said, then the line went dead.

  Something had happened. Denby looked at the newspaper beneath the remains of his sandwich. He'd glanced at a front-page headline about a prophet claiming to be Jesus who had caused some Sunday talk-show bloviator to throw a fit on the air. Now he looked at the weather report to see if heavy rain was expected in the hilly country in which the city's river had its wellsprings. He saw nothing.

  His uniform was in a locker at Police Central. He left money beside the crust of his sandwich and stepped outside. A cab was idling at the curb, the driver sipping coffee from a paper cup. Denby opened the rear door, showed his badge to the pair of eyes that went to the rear-view mirror and said, "Police Central, emergency."

  The cabbie said something the captain didn't catch, but that was probably the direct opposite of an enthusiastic cheer, and put the car into gear, still sipping on his coffee.

  "You hear this?" he said, his head indicating the dashboard radio.

  It was two male voices, talking fast, stepping on each other's words. "Turn it up," Denby said.

  It was something to do with the stock market, he gathered after a few seconds listening to the panicky gabble. Maybe another one of those glitches that happened when computers were programmed to buy or sell if they noted particular changes in the ebb and flow of the market. Whatever the cause, the Dow Jones Index had apparently dropped two thousand points in twenty minutes and the plunge hadn't hit bottom yet. If anything, the gabblers were telling each other, not to mention the many thousands of others listening in, the sell-off was accelerating.

  "End of the fucking world," said the cabbie. "Who needs a stock market now?" He took another sip, looked at the cup with distaste, and dumped its contents out his window.

  A squad car, its blues and twos going full-tilt, sped past them, took a corner on two wheels, and disappeared in the direction of Civic Plaza. Denby said, "Change of plan. Follow that guy. And move it."

  The driver killed the radio and hit the gas, and then the horn as they rounded the corner, scattering pedestrians. Less than two minutes later, they pulled up behind the police car, a block-and-a-half from the big city square. That was as close as either vehicle was going to get; the street was jammed with stopped vehicles, some of them driverless, abandoned. A few others still had people in them, including members of that hopeful tribe who believe that, when all else fails, blowing a horn might somehow achieve a useful result.

  Denby got out of the cab. The cabbie turned to look out through the rear window. There were already three cars in line behind him, two of them belonging to horn-believers. Denby showed the drivers his badge and said, "Shut up," then listened. He could hear crowd noises up ahead, and what sounded like singing. He went toward it.

  Civic Plaza was already half-filled and the empty half would not remain that way for long. People were coming from every street that fed into the great open space, mostly downtown office workers, but Denby saw shoppers and teenagers and the social detritus that lived on the streets after everybody else went home for the night. They were moving toward the east end of the plaza, to where the broad steps leading up to the pillars of the Justice Center were thronged by what looked to be a mass choir – no, the captain thought, several different choirs, elbowing each other for space – all singing, swaying, and hand-clapping their way through some old-timey hymn.

  Above and behind the singers, someone had erected a giant screen, the kind they used at music festivals and political conventions. Denby recalled seeing a bulletin that said Civic Plaza would be the venue for an open-air concert some evening this week. But this wasn't it. This was noon and somebody must have decided to put the screen to another use: right now it was showing a news channel.

  The policeman pushed his way through the crowd. Despite the massed singers' energy, this didn't feel like a religious celebration. The people standing in the plaza mostly weren't clapping or singing along. The deeper Denby pushed into them, the more he smelled a combined odor of the sweat of many – and not the good sweat of heat and muscular motion; the policeman recognized the smell of fear.

  He moved around a portly executive in a business suit, putting his hand on the man's upper arm to ease by. The fat man jerked and spun toward him, his face pale and sheened in greasy sweat, his eyes too wide. "Police," Denby said, showing his gold badge.

  Neither the word nor the shield had the desired effect. The man struck out at the captain, the swipe more like an ineffectual spasm than a coordinated strike, and Denby fended him off and kept moving. He kept looking up at the steps and the screen, expecting to see someone who had the look of being in charge – maybe some preacher – but no one came forward to still the choirs and take the crowd in hand.

  A man next to him swore bitterly. The captain looked his way, saw that he was another downtown business type. He had buds in his ear, the wires leading to a device in his pocket. Now he put a finger to one of the buds, the better to hear over the singing.

  Denby caught the man's eye. "What is it?" he said.

  The eyes that met his were frightened. "The Dow just fell through five thousand." The ashen face twitched. "It's all over."

  A sound went through the crowd, like the growling sigh of a wounded bear. The singing trailed off as the members of the big choir turned to look at the huge screen. Denby followed their gaze and saw the image of a swarthy, bearded man touching the hand of an overfed man whose face he recognized without knowing the name. Then the porker began to run in place, his head bent impossibly backwards.

  When the first thing climbed out of the man's grossly distorted mouth, the crowd made the wounded-bear noise again. When the second monster emerged, the policeman heard shouts and whimpers. From somewhere behind him came high-pitched, hysterical laughter, abruptly choked off.

  But now a hush fell over the thousands of people. The screen showed a closed door. Denby recognized it. And he recognized the man who came out into a strobing, flickering glare of lights. He watched Billy Lee Hardacre hold up a laptop and say something about a prophet posting a message on the internet.

  Then the image changed. The bearded man, relaxed in a chair, was saying, "These are the end times. The kingdom is at hand. Make yourselves ready. Turn away from the world. Turn to the Lord and to each other. And do not be afraid. All shall be made new."

  Then it was back to Hardacre, who said, "It couldn't be more simple. These are the end times."

  "The end of the world?" said someone off screen. Then the image cut to a studio somewhere, with anxious men and women grouped around a table, monitors in the background, laptops in front of them. A hard-faced woman looked up into the camera and said, "The Pope has scheduled a statement for" – she looked at her watch – "about an hour from now. We're told the President will address the nation from the Rose Garden in a few minutes."

  She rubbed her forehead. "Meanwhile, the man who calls himself Jesus of Nazareth has dropped out of sight, apparently leaving it to television preacher Billy Lee Hardacre to be his spokesperson. But the Reverend Hardacre has had precious little to say."

  She looked to the man on her right. "Roy, what's happening elsewhere?"

  The newsman's face, normally full of wry humor, was stark. "The Pentagon has put all branches of the military on full war alert," he said. "The Director of Homeland Security is reported to have told the President that he should invoke his emergency powers and place the country under martial law."

  The man ran a hand over his face. "Meanwhile, there are reports of rioting and looting in several cities. A gunman is reported to have opened fire at a shopping center in Kansas City. In Tucson, several men in Kevlar helmets and body armor have sealed off a block in the downtown business district. They have commandeered a truck and are apparently emptying the vaults of a large bank."

  He looked at the woman and said, "Back to you, Jane."

  She was staring at something on her laptop. Now she looked up, as if seeing her surroundings for the first time. She unclipped a lapel mike from the front of her blouse, ripped away a flat black box that had been taped to the back of her skirt and dropped it on the table. "The hell with this," she said, getting up. "I've got kids."

  At the top of the Justice Center's steps a balding, stocky man with a bullhorn pushed his way through the rearmost members of the choirs. "Repent!" he cried, his amplified voice echoing off the glass walls of the City Hall. "Repent or burn forever in–"

  Somebody knocked the bullhorn away from his lips. The man struck back and the one who had silenced him grabbed him by the front of his suit jacket. They wrestled and fell, rolling down the steps, knocking over choristers who weren't able to get out of the way.

  "Jesus," said Denby. He tried to push his way toward the fight, but someone tripped him and he half-fell against a woman in a flowered dress. She screamed as he clutched at her to keep himself upright.

  "Get off her!" said a man who could have been her husband; the ages matched. He seized Denby's collar and tried to drag him away. The captain reached for his badge, but somebody's elbow knocked it to the ground.

  "I'm a cop!" he told the man who had hold of his jacket.

  "Who gives a shit!" said the man, delivering a glancing punch that made Denby's ear feel like it had been partly torn off. "It's all over now!"

  Denby had a 9mm pistol under his arm and a canister of pepper spray in his jacket pocket. He went for the latter and in a moment his attacker was reeling back, hands to his tear-stained face.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," said an amplified voice, "the President of the United States."

  The crowd made its wounded sound again. Even the sobbing man was trying to see the big screen. The President looked grim. "My fellow Americans," he said, "the thing I most want to say to you today is what another president once said to the American people in another time of trouble: we have nothing to fear but fear itself."

  He paused for a moment, turning to each of the cameras aimed at him. "There is no cause for alarm. America is not under attack. No natural disaster has struck. There has apparently been another computer malfunction in the stock market, but the economy remains sound.

  "I am asking you, as your President, to remain calm. Do your jobs, or go to your homes. Stay off the streets and allow the authorities to maintain control.

  "We will get through this. It is not, I repeat, not the end of the world."

  "Oh, yes it is," said a fervent voice nearby. "Mine eyes have seen the glory!"

  "Shut up!" said another voice and Denby heard sounds of a scuffle, a little knot of violence pulsing through the crowd. But it was moving away from him.

  The restless mob seemed to be pulsing, the people moving in on each other, then edging away. Space opened around Denby and he saw a glint of gold out of the corner of his eye: his badge. He stooped and recovered it.

  The once-wry reporter was back on the screen, his face haggard. "Have we got it?" he was saying to someone off camera. "No, not that one, the other one."

  A man standing near Denby, looking up at the screen, said, "This can't be happening."

  A woman on the man's other side said, "It
is
happening. It's
on TV!
"

  The captain realized there was nothing he could do here. His instinct, his impulse to get to where the trouble was, had let him down. He turned and pushed his way toward the rear of the mob, holding up his badge as if it might make a difference. And maybe it did. In a couple of minutes he found the going easier, the people not so closely packed, until all at once he was out of the crowd. He was on the west side of the plaza, near a fountain that spurted water in several streams out of a complicated structure of bronze struts and plates. It supposedly represented the city's pioneers.

  He sat on the fountain's edge and scooped water to wash the sweat from his face. Across the plaza, over the heads of the throng, he could see images flashing in rapid succession across the big screen: police behind riot shields beating back a stone-throwing mob; cars overturned and on fire: someone smashing a newspaper sales box through a plate glass window, then jumping through the jagged gap; a helicopter's view of city streets packed with people, flowing like ants.

  All at once, Denby knew. This was what the time traveler had come back to prevent: the collapse of civilization, the end of order. And he knew that Hardacre was central to it. That's why the preacher had been slipped the unreadable book and sold the line that his weird son-in-law was a prophet – as some kind of distraction that would prevent him from doing whatever he'd done to bring this about. But it hadn't worked – at least not yet.

  Chaos was breaking out. The authorities were urging calm – nothing to fear but fear itself – but if that didn't work, Denby knew what would come next. Homeland Security had been briefing senior police officers for years. Next would come men in black uniforms with automatic weapons, backed up by special forces troops in armored personnel carriers and helicopter gunships. If necessary, behind them would come tanks.

  Denby sat beside the fountain and saw it all in his mind's eye.
The way the world ends
, he remembered from somewhere,
not with a bang but a whimper
. From anarchy in the streets the road led to the future wasteland he had been shown. He knew what he had to do: find the time traveler and help him make this stop.