Swan Song (9 page)

“I thought you said your boys helped you dig the basement out.”

“My boys did, yeah. The underground boys. They said they’d made me a real good place to live in. See, they come here all the time and stock up, ’cause I’m the closest store.”

Josh couldn’t make sense of what the old man was talking about. He tried once more: “Come here from where?”

“Underground,” PawPaw replied.

Josh shook his head. The old man was nuts. “Listen, could you take a look at my radiator now?”

“I reckon so. One minute, and we’ll go see what she wrote.” PawPaw went behind the counter, rang up Darleen’s gas purchase and gave her change from the twenty. Swan started coming up the basement steps. Josh braced himself for the stunning heat and went outside, walking toward his still-steaming Bonneville.

He had almost reached it when he felt the earth shake beneath his feet.

He stopped in his tracks. What was that? he wondered. An earthquake? Yeah, that would just about put the capper on the day!

The sun was brutal. The cloud of locusts was gone. Across the road, the huge cornfield was as still as a painting. The only sounds were the hissing of steam and the steady tick… tick… tick of the Pontiac’s fried engine.

Squinting in the harsh glare, Josh looked up at the sky. It was white and featureless, like a clouded mirror. His heart was beating harder. The screen door slammed behind him, and he jumped. Darleen and Swan had come out and were walking toward the Camaro. Suddenly Swan stopped, too, but Darleen walked on a few more paces before she realized the child was not beside her. “Come on! Let’s get on the road, hon!”

Swan’s gaze was directed at the sky. It’s so quiet, she thought. So quiet. The heavy air almost pressed her to her knees, and she was having trouble drawing a breath. All day long she’d noted huge flocks of birds in flight, horses running skittishly around their pastures and dogs baying at the sky. She sensed something about to happen-something very bad, just as she had last night when she’d seen the fireflies. But the feeling had gotten stronger all morning, ever since they’d left the motel outside Wichita, and now it made goose bumps break out on her arms and legs. She sensed danger in the air, danger in the earth, danger everywhere.

“Swan!” Darleen’s voice was both irritated and nervous. “Come on, now!”

The little girl stared into the brown cornfields that stretched to the horizon. Yes, she thought. And danger there, too. Especially there.

The blood pounded in her veins, and an urge to cry almost overcame her. “Danger,” she whispered. “Danger… in the corn…”

The ground shook again beneath Josh’s feet, and he thought he heard a deep grinding growl like heavy machinery coming to life. Darleen shouted, “Swan! Come on!”

What the hell…? Josh thought.

And then there came a piercing, whining noise that grew louder and louder, and Josh put his hands to his ears and wondered if he was going to live to see his paycheck.

“God A’mighty!” PawPaw shouted, standing in the doorway.

A column of dirt shot up about four hundred yards into the cornfield to the northwest, and hundreds of cornstalks burst into flame. A spear of fire emerged, made a noise like bacon sizzling in a skillet as it sped upward several hundred feet, then arced dramatically to a northwesterly course and vanished in the haze. Another burning spear burst from the ground a half mile or so away, and this one followed the first. Further away, two more shot upward and climbed out of sight within two seconds; then the burning spears were coming up all over the cornfield, the nearest about three hundred yards away and the most distant fiery dots five or six miles across the fields. Geysers of dirt exploded as the things rose with incredible speed, their flaming trails leaving blue afterimages on Josh’s retinas. The corn was on fire, and the hot wind of the burning spears fanned the flames toward PawPaw’s place.

Waves of sickening heat washed over Josh, Darleen and Swan. Darleen was still screaming for Swan to get to the car. The child watched in horrified awe as dozens of burning spears continued to explode from the cornfield. The earth shuddered with shock waves under Josh’s feet. His senses reeling, he realized that the burning spears were missiles, roaring from their hidden silos in a Kansas cornfield in the middle of nowhere.

The underground boys, Josh thought-and he suddenly knew what PawPaw Briggs had meant.

PawPaw’s place stood on the edge of a camouflaged missile base, and the “underground boys” were the Air Force technicians who were now sitting in their bunkers and pressing the buttons.

“God A’mighty!” PawPaw shouted, his voice lost in the roar. “Look at ’em fly!”

Still the missiles were bursting from the cornfield, each one following the other into the northwest and vanishing in the rippling air. Russia, Josh thought. Oh, my God Jesus-they’re heading for Russia!

All the newscasts he’d heard and stories he’d read in the past few months came back to him, and in that awful instant he knew World War III had begun.

The swirling, scorched air was full of fiery corn, raining down on the road and on the roof of PawPaw’s place. The green canvas awning was smoking, and the canvas of the Conestoga wagon was already aflame. A storm of burning corn was advancing across the ravaged field, and as the shock waves collided in fifty-mile-an-hour winds the flames merged into a solid, rolling wall of fire twenty feet high.

“Come on!” Darleen shrieked, grabbing Swan up in her arms. The child’s blue eyes were wide and staring, hypnotized by the spectacle of fire. Darleen started running for her car with Swan in her arms, and as a shock wave knocked her flat the first red tendrils of flame began to reach toward the gas pumps.

Josh knew the fire was about to jump the road. The pumps were going to blow. And then he was back on the football field before a roaring Sunday afternoon crowd, and he was running for the downed woman and child like a human tank as the stadium clock ticked the seconds off. A shock wave hit him, threw him off balance, and burning corn swept over him; but then he was scooping the woman up with one thick arm around her waist. She clung to the child, whose face had frozen with terror. “Lemme go!” Darleen shrieked, but Josh whirled around and sprinted for the screen door, where PawPaw stood watching the flight of the burning spears in open-mouthed wonder.

Josh had almost reached it when there was an incandescent flash like a hundred million high-wattage bulbs going off at the same instant. Josh was looking away from the field, but he saw his shadow projected onto PawPaw Briggs-and in the space of a millisecond he saw PawPaw’s eyeballs burst into blue flame. The old man screamed, clawed at his face and fell backward into the screen door, tearing it off its hinges. “Oh God, oh Jesus, oh God!” Darleen was babbling. The child was silent.

The light got brighter still, and Josh felt a wash of heat on his back-gentle at first, like the sun on a nice summer day. But then the heat increased to the level of an oven, and before Josh could reach the door he heard the skin on his back and shoulders sizzling. The light was so intense he couldn’t see where he was going, and now his face was swelling so fast he feared it would explode like a beach ball. He stumbled forward, tripped over something-PawPaw’s body, writhing in agony in the doorway. Josh smelled burning hair and scorched flesh, and he thought crazily, I’m one barbecued sonofabitch!

He could still see through the slits of his swollen eyes; the world was an eerie blue-white, the color of ghosts. Ahead of him, the trapdoor yawned open. Josh reached down with his free hand, grabbed the old man’s arm and dragged him, along with the woman and child, toward the open square. An explosion sent shrapnel banging against the outside wall-the pumps, Josh knew-and a shard of hot metal flew past the right side of his head. Blood streamed down, but he had no time to think of anything but getting into that basement, for behind him he heard a wailing cacophony of wind like a symphony of fallen angels, and he dared not look back to see what was coming out of that cornfield. The whole building was shaking, cans and bottles jumping off the shelves. Josh flung PawPaw Briggs down the steps like a sack of grain and then leapt down himself, skinning his ass on the wood but still clinging to the woman and child. They rolled to the floor, the woman screaming in a broken, strangled voice. Josh scrambled back up to close the trapdoor.

And then he looked through the doorway and saw what was coming.

A tornado of fire.

It filled the sky, hurling off jagged spears of red and blue lightning and carrying with it tons of blackened earth gouged from the fields. He knew in that instant that the tornado of fire was advancing on PawPaw’s grocery store, bringing half the dirt from the field with it, and it would hit them within seconds.

And, simply, either they would live or they would die.

Josh reached up, slammed the trapdoor in place and jumped off the steps. He landed on his side on the concrete floor.

Come on! he thought, his teeth gritted and his hands over his head. Come on, damn it!

An unearthly commingling of the mighty roar of whirling wind, the crackle of fire and the bellowing crash of thunder filled the basement, forcing everything from Josh Hutchins’s mind but cold, stark terror.

The basement’s concrete floor suddenly shook-and then it lifted three feet and cracked apart like a dinner plate. It slammed down with brutal force. Pain pounded at Josh’s eardrums. He opened his mouth and knew he was screaming, but he couldn’t hear it.

And then the basement’s ceiling caved in, the beams cracking like bones in hungry hands. Josh was struck across the back of the head; he had the sensation of being lifted up and whirled in an airplane spin while his nostrils were smothered with thick, wet cotton, and all he wanted to do was get out of this damned wrestling ring and go home. Then he knew no more.

Ten - [Burning Spears]

10:17 A.M. Mountain Daylight Time

Earth House

“More bogies at ten o’clock!” Lombard said as the radar swept around again and the green dots flickered across the display screen. “Twelve heading southeast at fourteen thousand feet. Jesus Christ, look at those mothers move!” Within thirty seconds, the blips had passed out of radar range. “Five more coming over, Colonel.” Lombard’s voice shook with a mixture of horror and excitement, his heavy-jowled face flushed and his eyes large behind aviator-style glasses. “Heading northwest at seventeen-oh-three. They’re ours. Go for it, baby!”

Sergeant Becker whooped and smacked a fist into the palm of his open hand. “Wipe Ivan off the map!” he shouted. Behind him, Captain Warner smoked a cork-tipped cheroot and impassively watched the radar screen through his good eye. A couple of other uniformed technicians monitored the perimeter radar. Across the room, Sergeant Schorr was slumped in a chair, his eyes glassy and unbelieving, and every once in a while his tortured gaze crept toward the main radar screen and then quickly moved back to a spot on the opposite wall.

Colonel Macklin stood over Lombard’s right shoulder, his arms crossed over his chest and his attention fixed on the green blips that had been moving across the screen for the last forty minutes. It was easy to tell which were Russian missiles, because they were heading southeast, on trajectories that would take them hurtling into the midwestern air force bases and ICBM fields. The American missiles were speeding northwest, toward deadly rendezvous with Moscow, Magadan, Tomsk, Karaganda, Vladivostok, Gorky and a hundred other target cities and missile bases. Corporal Prados had his earphones on, monitoring the weak signals that were still coming in from shortwave operators across the country. “Signal from San Francisco just went off the air,” he said. “Last word was from KXCA in Sausalito. Something about a fireball and blue lightning-the rest was garbled.”

“Seven bogies at eleven o’clock,” Lombard said. “Twelve thousand feet. Heading southeast.”

Seven more, Macklin thought. My God! That brought to sixty-eight the number of “incoming mail” picked up by Blue Dome’s radar-and God only knew how many hundreds, possibly thousands, had streaked over out of radar range. From the panicked reports of shortwave radio operators, American cities were being incinerated in a full-scale nuclear assault. But Macklin had counted forty-four pieces of “outgoing mail” headed for Russia, and he knew that thousands of ICBMs, Cruise missiles, B-l bombers and submarine-based nuclear weapons were being used against the Soviet Union. It didn’t matter who’d started it; all the talking was over. It only mattered now who was strong enough to withstand the atomic punches the longest.

Earth House had been ordered sealed when Macklin saw the first blips of Soviet missiles on the radar screen. The perimeter guards had been brought in, the rock doorway lowered and locked in place, the system of louver-like baffles activated in the ventilation ducts to prevent entry of radioactive dust. There was one thing that remained to be done: Tell the civilians inside Earth House that World War III had started, that their homes and relatives had possibly been vaporized already, that everything they’d known and loved might well be gone in the flash of a fireball. Macklin had rehearsed it in his mind many times before; he would call the civilians together in the Town Hall, and he would calmly explain to them what was happening. They would understand that they would have to stay here, inside Blue Dome Mountain, and they could never go home again. Then he would teach them discipline and control, mold hard shells of armor over those soft, sluggish civilian bodies, teach them to think like warriors. And from this impregnable fortress they would hold off the Soviet invaders to the last breath and drop of blood, because he loved the United States of America and no man would ever make him kneel and beg.

“Colonel?” One of the young technicians looked up from his perimeter radar screen. “I’ve got a vehicle approaching. Looks like an RV, coming up the mountain pretty damned fast.”

Macklin stepped over to watch the blip approaching up the mountain road. The RV was going so fast its driver was in danger of slinging it right off Blue Dome.

It was still within Macklin’s power to open the front doorway and bring the RV inside by using a code that would override the computerized locking system. He imagined a frantic family inside that vehicle, perhaps a family from Idaho Falls, or from one of the smaller communities at the base of the mountain. Human lives, Macklin thought, struggling to avoid decimation. He looked at the telephone. Punching in his ID number and speaking the code into the receiver would make the security computer abort the lock and raise the doorway. By doing so, he would save those people’s lives.

He reached toward the telephone.

But something stirred within him-a heavy, dark, unseen thing shifting as if from the bottom of a primeval swamp.

Sssstop! The Shadow Soldier’s whisper was like the hiss of a fuse on dynamite. Think of the food! More mouths, less food!

Macklin hesitated, his fingers inches from the phone.

More mouths, less food! Discipline and control! Shape up, mister!

“I’ve got to let them in,” Macklin heard himself say, and the other men in the control room stared at him.

Don’t backtalk me, mister! More mouths, less food! And you know all about what happens when a man’s hungry, don’t you?

“Yes,” Macklin whispered.

“Sir?” the radar technician asked.

“Discipline and control,” Macklin replied, in a slurred voice.

“Colonel?” Warner gripped Macklin’s shoulder.

Macklin jerked, as if startled from a nightmare. He looked around at the others, then at the telephone again, and slowly lowered his hand. For a second he’d been down in the pit again, down in the mud and shit and darkness, but now he was okay. He knew where he was now. Sure. Discipline and control did the trick. Macklin shrugged free of Captain Warner and regarded the blip on the perimeter radar screen through narrowed eyes. “No,” he said. “No. They’re too late. Way too late. Earth House stays sealed.” And he felt damned proud of himself for making the manly decision. There were over three hundred people in Earth House, not including the officers and technicians. More mouths, less food. He was sure he’d done the right thing.

“Colonel Macklin!” Lombard called; his voice cracked. “Look at this!”

At once, Macklin stood beside him, peering into the screen. He saw a group of four bogies streaking within radar range-but one seemed slower than the others, and as it faltered the faster three vanished over Blue Dome Mountain. “What’s going on?”

“That bogie’s at twenty-two thousand four,” Lombard said. “A few seconds ago, it was at twenty-five. I think it’s falling.”

“It can’t be falling! There aren’t any military targets within a hundred miles!” Sergeant Becker snapped, pushing forward to see.

“Check again,” Macklin told Lombard, in the calmest voice he could summon.

The radar arm swept around with agonizing slowness. “Twenty thousand two, sir. Could be malfunctioned. The bastard’s coming down!”

“Shit! Get me an impact point!”

A plastic-coated map of the area around Blue Dome Mountain was unfolded, and Lombard went to work with his compass and protractor, figuring and refiguring angles and speeds. His hands were trembling, and he had to start over more than once. Finally, he said, “It’s going to pass over Blue Dome, sir, but I don’t know what the turbulence is doing up there. I’ve got it impacting right here,” and he tapped his finger at a point roughly ten miles west of Little Lost River. He checked the screen again. “It’s just coming through eighteen thousand, sir. It’s falling like a broken arrow.”

Captain “Teddybear” Warner grunted. “There’s Ivan’s technology for you,” he said. “All fucked up.”

“No, sir.” Lombard swiveled around in his chair. “It’s not Russian. It’s one of ours.”

There was an electric silence in the room. Colonel Macklin broke it by expelling the air in his lungs. “Lombard, what the hell are you saying?”

“It’s a friendly,” he repeated. “It was moving northwest before it went out of control. From the size and speed, I’d guess it’s a Minuteman III, maybe a Mark 12 or 12A.”

“Oh… Jesus,” Ray Becker whispered, his ruddy face gone ashen.

Macklin stared at the radar screen. The runaway blip seemed to be getting larger. His insides felt bound by iron bands, and he knew what would happen if a Minuteman III Mark 12A hit anywhere within fifty miles of Blue Dome Mountain; the Mark 12As carried three 335-kiloton nuclear warheads-enough power to flatten seventy-five Hiroshimas. The Mark 12s, carrying payloads of three 170-kiloton warheads, would be almost as devastating, but suddenly Macklin was praying that it was only a Mark 12, because maybe, maybe, the mountain could withstand that kind of impact without shuddering itself to rubble.

“Falling through sixteen thousand, Colonel.”

Five thousand feet above Blue Dome Mountain. He could feel the other men watching him, waiting to see if he was made of iron or clay. There was nothing he could do now, except pray that the missile fell far beyond Little Lost River. A bitter smile crept across his mouth. His heart was racing, but his mind was steady. Discipline and control, he thought. Those were the things that made a man.

Earth House had been constructed here because there were no nearby Soviet targets, and all the government charts showed the movement of radioactive winds would be to the south. He’d never dreamed in his wildest scenarios that Earth House would be hit by an American weapon. Not fair! he thought, and he almost giggled. Oh no, not fair at all!

“Thirteen thousand three,” Lombard said, his voice strained. He hurriedly did another calculation on the map, but he didn’t say what he found and Macklin didn’t ask him. Macklin knew they were going to take one hell of a jolt, and he was thinking of the cracks in the ceilings and walls of Earth House, those cracks and weak, rotted areas that the sonofabitching Ausley brothers should have taken care of before they opened this dungeon. But now it was too late, much too late. Macklin stared at the screen through slitted eyes and hoped that the Ausley brothers had heard their skin frying before they died.

“Twelve thousand two, Colonel.”

Schorr let out a panicked whimper and drew his knees up to his chest; he peered into empty air like a man seeing the time, place and circumstances of his own death in a crystal ball.

“Shit,” Warner said softly. He drew once more on his cigar and crushed it out in an ashtray. “I guess we’d better get comfortable, huh? Poor bastards upstairs are gonna be thrown around like rag dolls.” He squeezed himself into a corner, bracing against the floor with his hands and feet.

Corporal Prados took off his earphones and braced himself against the wall, beads of sweat glistening on his cheeks. Becker stood beside Macklin, who watched the approaching blip on Lombard’s radar screen and counted the seconds to impact.

“Eleven thousand two.” Lombard’s shoulders hunched up. “It’s cleared Blue Dome! Passing to the northwest! I think it’s going to make the river! Go, you bastard, go!”

“Go,” Becker breathed.

“Go,” Prados said, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “Go. Go.”

The blip had vanished from the screen. “We’ve lost it, Colonel! It’s gone below radar range!”

Macklin nodded. But the missile was still falling toward the forest along Little Lost River, and Macklin was still counting.

All of them heard a humming like a distant, huge swarm of hornets.

Then silence.

Macklin said, “It’s dow-”

And in the next second the radar screen exploded with light, the men around it crying out and shielding their eyes. Macklin was momentarily blinded by the dazzle, and he knew the sky radar atop Blue Dome had just been incinerated. The other radar screens brightened like green suns and shorted out as they picked up the flash. The noise of hornets was in the room, and blue sparks spat from the control boards as the wiring blew. “Hang on!” Macklin shouted. The floors and walls shook, a jigsaw of cracks running across the ceiling. Rock dust and pebbles fell into the room, the larger stones rattling down on the control boards like hailstones. The floor heaved violently enough to drop both Macklin and Becker to their knees. Lights flickered and went out, but within seconds the emergency lighting system had switched on and the illumination-harsher, brighter, throwing deeper shadows than before-came back.

There was one last weak tremor and another rain of dust and stones, and then the floor was still.

Macklin’s hair was white with dust, his face gritty and scratched. But the air-filtration system was throbbing, already drawing the dust into the wall vents. “Everybody okay?” he shouted, trying to focus past the green dazzle that remained on his eyeballs. He heard the sound of coughing and someone-Schorr, he thought it must be-sobbing. “Is everybody okay?”

He got a reply back from all but Schorr and one of the technicians. “It’s over!” he said. “We made it! We’re okay!” He knew that there would be broken bones, concussions and cases of shock among the civilians on the upper level, and they were probably panicked right now, but the lights were on and the filtration system was pumping and Earth House hadn’t blown apart like a house of cards in a high wind. It’s over! We made it! Still blinking to see past the green haze, he struggled to his feet. A short, hollow bark of a laugh escaped between his clenched teeth-and then the laughter bubbled up from his throat, and he was laughing louder and louder because he was alive and his fortress was still standing. His blood was hot and singing again like it had been in the steamy jungles and parched plains of foreign battlefields; on those fields of fire, the enemy wore a devil’s face and did not hide behind the mask of Air Force psychiatrists, bill collectors, scheming ex-wives and cheating business partners. He was Colonel Jimbo Macklin, and he walked like a tiger, lean and mean, with the Shadow Soldier at his side.