Hell on Earth (7 page)

“You make it sound like President of the United States,” I said.

He didn't seem to mind. “Might as well be,” he said, “under the circumstances. Who are you?”

We gave him name, rank, and serial number. Being a gentleman, I let Arlene go first. Then he asked the sixty-four-trillion-dollar question: “How is it you come to be here?”

Arlene laughed and let him have it: “Fly, here—that's his nickname—Fly and I single-handedly kicked the spit out of the entire Deimos division of the alien demons. They moved the Martian moon into orbit around Earth, but we cleaned their clocks.”

The leader of the Mormons said, “This is a time for mighty warriors. We have many prophecies to this effect. In the Book of Alma there is a verse that I find indispensable for morale:

“Behold, I am in my anger, and also my people; ye have sought to muder us, and we have only sought to defend ourselves.”

He smiled, pausing before continuing.

“But behold, if ye seek to destroy us more we will seek to destroy you; yea, and we will seek our land, the land of our first inheritance.”

“Those words were spoken by Moroni. We must gird our loins for battle against the ultimate enemy. At such times as this even women must be used in a manner unnatural to them. Do you know how much Delta-V is required to move a
moon,
even one as small as Deimos? Why should I believe you?”

I blinked, nonplussed by the change in subject. Glancing quickly at Arlene, I saw she was controlling her reaction to the “unnatural” crack, her face impassive.
Good girl!

“We, ah, fight the same enemy,” I said.

“This is what you purport. You also claim to have hopped out of orbit and landed on your feet. Pray that we may prove both to our satisfaction. Until such time, we must be careful. If what you say is true, you will be able to demonstrate this to us on a mission. Only then, if you earn our trust, will
you
”—he pointedly stared at me, ignoring Arlene—“be allowed access to our special wisdom. The audience is over, and good luck to you.”

I worried that Arlene might say something stupid
when I saw her mouth open and the danger sign of her eyebrows rising faster than any rocket. Hell, I was worried about myself. But we were ushered out of there without any disasters.

“As far as I'm concerned,” said Albert, leading us back to our room, accompained by Jerry, “you just flunked spy school.”

“Huh?”

“I don't imagine a spy would concoct so ridiculous a story and annoy the President so thoroughly.”

I said nothing; privately, I thought that was exactly what a spy might do. It worked, didn't it?

We felt tension leaking from the corridor, like air escaping from the dome on Deimos. At least the President was taking some kind of chance on us. He didn't realize how big a chance he'd taken talking that way to Arlene.

“We belong to the brotherhood of man,” Albert said. “If you think you have problems now, just wait until people begin believing your story. Then we'll start treating you like angels!”

I
guess they believed our story, somewhat at least. Fly and I were left alone at last when that rugged stalwart, Albert Whatever, scurried off on some errand.

Fly gestured me close. “We really should report in,” he whispered in my ear.

“Report in? To whom?” A good question. If the country were as devastated as we'd been led to believe, there wasn't much of a military command structure left to report to anybody.

If . . .
I saw at once where Fly was coming from.

“How much do we really know about these guys?” asked Fly, confirming my cognition. “Whose side are they on?”

“You'd have a hard time persuading me they're demon-lovers,” I said.

“All right . . . maybe. They're patriots. But are they
right?”

Wasn't much I could say to that. Fly had a point . . . as patriotic and pro-human as these Mormons might be, they still might be wrong about the extent of the collapse. “You're saying they could be deluded by their apocalyptic religion.”

He raised his brows. “Mormons aren't apocalyptic,
Arlene. I think you're confusing them with certain branches of Christianity. I'm only saying that they're pretty cut off from information . . . the whole government might look like it's collapsed from this viewpoint; but maybe if we contacted somebody somewhere else, in the Pentagon or at least an actual Marine Corps base, maybe we'd get a different picture.”

“All right. Who, then?”

“Chain of command, Arlene. Who do you think we should contact?”

I'm always forgetting about the omnipresent chain. Usually, all I see are enlisted guys like me, maybe one C.O.—Weems, in our case. I'm not used to thinking of the Great Chain of Being rising above my head all the way up to the C-in-C, the President of the United States. Guess that's why Fly makes the big bucks (heh) as a noncom, while I'm just a grunt.

“Um, Major Boyd, I guess. Or the great-grandboss, Colonel Karapetian.”

“Hm . . . I'm betting this is a bit above m'lord Boyd's head. I think we should take this up with God Himself: the colonel.”

“I agree completely. Got the phone number?”

“Yeah, well, that's the next problem. Surely in a facility this size, there has to be a radio room somewhere, wouldn't you think?”

We did a lot of thinking over the next hour; we also did a lot of quiet, careful questioning, staying away from those obviously “under arms,” questioning the less suspicious civilians instead. But what we mostly did was a lot of walking. My dogs were barking like Dobermans long before we found anything radio-roomlike.

The “compound” actually comprised a whole series of buildings, different clumps far away, and included a large portion of downtown Salt Lake City. There
were other buildings and residences all around, of course; SLC is big. Well not compared to my old hometown of L.A., of course, but you get the idea.

“The compound” might include two buildings and
not
include the building in between them; it wasn't defined geographically.

However, we quickly discovered we were restricted to a small, two-block radius surrounding the Tabernacle. An electrified fence cut that central core off from the rest of the facility (and the rest of the city); guards patrolled the fence like a military base; there were even suspicious pillboxes with tiny bits of what might have been the barrels of crew-served weapons poking out, and piles of camouflaged tarps that might conceal tanks or Bradleys. And the guards were as tight about controlling what
left
the core as they were about what entered.

I saw a lump that looked suspiciously like an M-2/A-2 tank, state of the art; I turned to point it out to Fly, but he was busy staring at the tall office building at our backs. “What's that up top of that skyscraper?” he asked.

“Skyscraper? You've lived in too many small towns, Fly-boy.”

“Yeah, yeah. What's up top there? That metal thing?”

“Um . . . a TV aerial.”

“Are you sure? Look again.”

I stared, squinting to clear up my mild astigmatism. “Huh, I see what you mean. It could be, but I'm not sure. You think it's a radio antenna, right?”

“I don't know what they're supposed to look like when they're stationary, only what they look like on the box we carry with us.”

“Well, you have an urgent appointment, Fly? Let's check it out.”

“Sure hope they have a working elevator,” he said,
surprising me; I thought after our experiences on Deimos, he'd never want to look at another lift again.

There was an armed guard at the front entrance of the building, which was a mere fifteen stories tall . . . hardly a “skyscraper.” The rear entrance was barricaded. The guard unshipped the Sig-Cow rifle he carried. “Ayren't you the two unbelievers who claim they stopped the aliens cold on Deimos?”

“That's we,” I said, “Unbelievers ‘R' Us.”

Fly hushed me. He always claims I make things worse in any confrontational situation, but I just don't see it.

“The President sent us on an inspection tour,” said Fly with the sort of easy, confident lying I admired so much but could never pull off. “Supposed to ‘familiarize' ourselves with your SOPs.” He rolled his eyes; you could hear the quotation marks around
familiarize.
“As if we haven't had enough military procedures for a lifetime!”

The guard shook his head, instantly sympathetic. “Ain't it the truth? Few weeks ago, you know what I was? I was a cook at the Elephant Grill, you know, up at Third? So what do they make me when the war breaks out? A sentry!”

“You know this building well?”

“Well, I should! My fiancée worked here. Before the war.”

“Look, can you come along with us, show us the place? I come from a small town, and we don't have buildings this size. You're not stuck as the only guard, are you?” There were no other guards in sight; I'm sure Fly noticed that as well as I.

“ 'Fraid so, Corporal.”

“Fly. Fly Taggart.”

“I'm afraid so, Fly. I can't leave. Look, you can't get lost. It's just a big, tall square. See the Tabernacle
there? Anytime you get lost, just walk to the windows and walk around until you see the Tabernacle. You can't miss it.”

“You sure it'll be okay?”

“You can't miss it. No problemo.”

“Look, if I get in trouble, is there a phone I can call down here on?”

“Sure, use the black phone near the elevator, the one with no buttons. Just pick it up; it'll ring here.”

“Thanks. This way? The elevators over here?”

The helpful sentry showed us how to get to the elevators. They were actually behind some partitions; we might not have found them . . . for several minutes.

We climbed aboard, and Fly said in a normal speaking voice, “Don't trust these elevators. May as well start at the top and walk down, floor by floor, familiarizing ourselves with the procedures. Then we can report back to the President and tell him where we'd do the most good.”

To me, he used hand signals:
Start top; find radio; broadcast report

The antenna was atop the roof, of course; but that didn't mean that's where hte radio room would be. We wandered around every floor, trying to look official. Early on, I found a clipboard hanging on a peg in the rooftop janitor's shed, where they kept all the window-washing stuff. Fly took the clipboard and made a point of officiously writing down reports on everybody in every office, with me trailing along behind looking like his assistant.

It worked; people tensed up, stopped talking, worked diligently, and not a one confronted us to ask us who the hell we were. It helped that Fly had been inventory control officer for a few months. He stirred them up and made them sweat.

Finally, twelve floors down from the top, we found the damned radio room. Two operators, both civilians. One had a pistol; we were unarmed, of course.

Fly strode in like Gunnery Sergeant Goforth on the inspection warpath. “On your feet,” he barked; the startled operators stared for a second, then leapt to their feet and stood at a bad imitation of attention. “Classified message traffic from the President,” he snarled. “Take a hike.”

“Sir, we're not supposed to—”

“Sir?
Do you see these?” He angrily pointed at his stripes. “Do I look like a God-damned pansy-waist gut-sucking ass-kissing four-eyed college-boy
officer
to you?”

“No sir! No—ah—”

Fly leaned close, playing drill instructor. “Try COR-POR-AL, boy. Next time you open that
hole
of yours, first word out better be
Corporal Taggart.”

“C-C-Corporal Taggart, sir! I mean, Corporal Taggart, we're not supposed to leave.”

“Did you hear what type of message traffic I said this was?”

“Classified? Sir—Corporal!—we're fully cleared for all levels of classification.”

“Do I know that, boy? You got some paper you can show me?”

“No, not on me.”

“Then take a hike, dickhead. Go back and get something from your C.O. We'll wait right here.”

The man dithered, looking back and forth at the door, the equipment, and his partner, a small, frail-looking man who pointedly looked away, saying
No, way, bud, this is your call.
“All right. You won't touch anything while I'm gone, will you?”

“Scout's honor,” sneered Fly. Was he ever a Boy Scout? I couldn't remember.

The man slid sideways past Fly and almost backed into me. I glared daggers at him and he split. After a couple of seconds Fly turned to the mousy companion. “What're
you
still doing here? Get after your partner!”

Meekly, the man turned and darted out of the room.

“Fly, what's going to happen when they get across the street and find out there's no message traffic from the President?”

“Well, we'd better hurry, A.S., so we're done before they get back!”

Fortunately, they'd left the equipment on, because I had no idea how to
turn
it on. It was some new, ultramodern civilian stuff I'd never seen before. I found a keypad next to a small LED display. At the moment, it showed the frequency for Guard channel, plus another freak above that.

I tapped at the keypad; they hadn't locked it out, thank God. I typed the freak for North Marine Corps Air Base, office of the SubCincMarsCom, Colonel George Karapetian. It was no great trick remembering it; I was the radioman for Major Boyd when we were stationed on Deimos on TDS to the Navy.

I wandered all over the band from one side to the other, looking for the carrier. Finally, I found it; it was weak and intermittent, as if the repeaters were blown and I was picking up the source itself. But I boosted the gain, and we were able to pick out the words from behind the snow.