The Flying Eyes (10 page)

Wes walked to the door. “Take care of Ichabod for me, won't you? I'm entrusting him to you. And don't worry. I'll see you tomorrow for supper.”

He went out, the car door slammed, and he was gone.

Linc was numb. It had happened so quickly. There had been no hesitation, no lingering farewell. It was over already, and it had barely begun. But Wes hadn't wanted to wait. He had made up his mind to do it, and he was doing it.

Linc looked to Kelly, and she echoed his numbness. “He could at least have had dinner,” she said. There was fear in her eyes, and a doubt that hadn't been there before. But Wes was gone, and there was nothing either of them could do about it except wait.

* * * *

They waited in the house, together, but alone, too tense to take sympathy from each other. The joy Linc had known a few hours before was submerged in worry.

Night passed and in the morning the sun was hidden behind a heavy overcast. Outside the windows, Colt Street was in full glory as the trees outlined themselves and their fiery colors against the dark sky. But there was no word.

Linc went to the lab after breakfast to check on his caged Eye. He stopped to see no one, and when Iverson shot a question at him from down the hall, he mumbled words he knew would be incoherent, but would sound like an answer, and hurried out. He didn't want to be questioned. When Wes returned, successful, that would be soon enough for revelation.

When he reached home again, Kelly was in the living room with the vacuum cleaner, dumping ashtray debris and rubbish into a paper bag.

“I've never seen such a mess. Remind me never to include a man in my housekeeping.”

“I thought that was just about settled yesterday.”

“Only on the condition that you promise more consideration than this. For instance, when you get mail, dump the envelopes in the wastebasket, not on the coffee table. And cigarette packages, and match books, and newspapers. In two weeks, you wouldn't be able to climb over the mountain of papers you'd have in here.”

Linc watched her work, trying to drain contentment from it. It was a good moment. Kelly's new relationship with him made it good. And yet he couldn't relish it. There was too much on his mind to let contentment in: the Eyes, the one Eye imprisoned in the cage, and Wes. Most of all Wes. He kept imagining what Wes was doing at any given moment. He mentally placed him deep inside the hole, but the background of the picture was so uncertain, so nebulous, that he could go no further. Only Wes could fill in that background. It wouldn't be too many hours before Wes would be home.

“I'm cooking tonight,” Kelly interrupted his thoughts. “Fried chicken and candied sweet potatoes.”

“Wes' favorites?”

“Yes. He'll deserve anything he' wants after today.” Caught up again in his own thoughts, it didn't seem long before Kelly had finished the housework and was in the kitchen, banging pots and pans about. He looked out of the windows, and Colt Street was darkening. The street lamps were on, and the trees were shadowed. Dusk. He listened for the sound of the car—but there was nothing.

“Give him time,” Linc told himself. “It's still early. Give the man time.”

And the time went by. Kelly's special dinner was ready, then held in the warming oven, then dried out and cold. They didn't even nibble at it. At ten o'clock, Linc picked up the phone and dialed the number of the lab.

“Is Wes there, by any chance?” he asked.

The reply was loud in his ear, but Kelly was straining to hear. Linc put the phone back in its cradle and turned to her.

She read the answer in his eyes, and quickly lit a cigarette. “A lot of things could have delayed him,” she said.

“Just one thing would have been enough.”

“Don't believe that, Linc. No Eye in the world could defeat Wes, not in the state he was in. He had the courage of twenty men.”

“He went too fast. He was overanxious. I should have known better than to let him go that way. I was a fool.”

Kelly snuffed the cigarette out. “Is it all right if I stay the night? Or would you rather—”

“It makes no difference to me. I'm not going to bed anyway. I'm going to stay right here in this chair until Wes comes. And he'd better come! He'd damn well better.”

Kelly stood up at his desperate, angry tone. “I'll make some more coffee—in case it's a long wait.”

She left the room and Linc was alone with only the sleepy eyes of Wes' little spotted dog. He refused to look at Ichabod. There was only one thing important in Ichabod's world—Wes. And he couldn't stand to think that perhaps Ichabod's world was now empty.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The deadline was two days gone; Wes was three days late; but still Linc waited. He stayed alone in the house, and waited. Logically, he knew it was useless, but there was nothing else to do. A nagging thought reminded him of what Wes had said—that if he was lost, he would at least be lost knowing that Linc was alive and able to try something else. He supposed he should be trying something else. But he hadn't the heart.

The radio news reported the evacuation still going on. Stanley had worked out a new method, sending larger groups of people and using all the roads, paved and unpaved, to baffle the Eyes. With so many out at once, the Eyes couldn't get them all. Some got through. Many didn't, but following Collins' rule of the loss of the few for the good of the many, Stanley went ahead with the evacuating-bombing plan.

Twice during the three days, there were footsteps in the driveway, and the back door rattled as someone tested it for entrance. Peering out, he saw a man one time, a woman and boy the next time, all of them dirty and disheveled. The man carried a shotgun, the boy had a crowbar. When the doorknob failed to turn, they prepared to break the lock, but in both cases Ichabod's barking—such a deep bark for a small dog—sent them away.

At noon, the phone rang and he answered it fast. Iverson's voice spewed out of the earpiece. “Where in the devil have you been, Hosier? I've been making excuses for you until I'm blue in the face. What do you and Wes think you're doing, running out in the middle of the fight?”

“We haven't run out,” Linc said.

“Then where have you been?” Iverson had barely asked it when he interrupted himself. “Well, never mind—there's something big happening, and I want you and Wes here to cover it.”

“Wes isn't with me.”

“Then find him and bring him. But make it in fifteen minutes, understand? This is urgent.”

Iverson hung up and Linc stood undecided. Then he dialed Kelly's number and asked her to come, to take over the waiting while he was gone. He scribbled a note for Wes, in case he got back before Kelly arrived, and went out, locking the door behind him. Whatever Iverson wanted, he had to find out. He had sat by long enough. It was time he dove into work again.

When he went through the gate into the parking lot, a station wagon was waiting, its motor running, and Iverson waved at him to hurry. As he climbed in beside the driver, he glanced back to find Stanley and Collins in the rear.

“What's this all about?” he asked, as the driver revved the car forward, in the direction of open country.

“We don't know much about it ourselves,” Iverson said. “Stanley got a call from the National Guard post out by the hole, and—the people are coming out. Great crowds of them, coming up out of the hole.”

Coming out? Was this some of Wes' doing? Was that why Wes was so late?

“Where are they going from the hole?” he asked.

“The report said they were just walking away—no Eyes with them, or leading them. We'll soon see.”

“I don't like it.” Stanley was glowering in the back seat. “It's a new move—probably something to counter our evacuation. They're not simply going to surrender those people. That wouldn't make sense. I tell you, it's a new move, and until we know where it's leading, we're on dangerous ground.”

“We should have gotten in there sooner with the bomb,” Collins said. “We may have lost our chance. If the people are going, the Eyes may leave, too. We should have acted sooner.”

“Thank God we didn't,” Iverson sighed. “All those people—I was nearly convinced that they were not in the hole any more. We would have blown them all into ashes.”

The driver turned onto the highway that passed near the game preserve, and the car suddenly stopped. “Look ahead,” the driver said, and it was half-whisper, half-scream.

There was no road ahead of them. Only a sea of moving forms.

For, coming out of the woods half a mile down, and spilling onto the cement, into the ditches, and halfway across the fields, was a great mass of people. Thousands of them; staggering along, stumbling, holding their hands before them to grope like blind men. They were tattered and filthy, and their stench preceded them on the highway.

They came straight for the car, and the driver backed it around the corner he had taken a moment before. Linc got out, and went to the road. Iverson was beside him, and he heard Stanley's intake of breath. The people were coming straight toward them, fanning out, covering the pavement and field alike. They were pale, and queerly not like people. But Linc walked to meet them—thousands of eyewitnesses to the conditions inside the hole.

The first of them reached him and walked by. He roamed among them, growing sicker with each one he passed. To his right an old woman stumbled, and fell to the ground. She rolled and twisted, moaning animal sounds pouring out of her mouth. He knelt beside her and turned her over. She was covered with black dirt and the red stain of clay from the inside of the pit. Her gray hair was matted on her head, and the cries poured out of her without stopping. He left her. Others stumbled over her and fell, making a pile-up of rolling bodies. There was nothing he could do.

When he moved back into their midst again, he saw others down, vomiting, fainting, crying. A little girl limped by, pulling at her hair. It came out in her hands, great handfuls of it, blond and useless. He closed his eyes and stood still to catch hold of himself, but he was buffeted by the crowd sweeping past him, blindly unaware of barriers, man or tree. The stench of them was overpowering. Linc pulled out his handkerchief and held it over his nose, trying to shut it out.

Now he gazed into their faces, ignoring the desperate state of their bodies. The shock of meeting them eye to eye brought the protecting handkerchief down. There was nothing in these people. He looked at them, but they didn't look back. Their eyes met his, and went through him. Their gaze was empty, devoid of sense or humanity. They were nothing, staring at him with the blank stare of idiots.

He watched them hard, determining if the blankness was the trance of hypnosis or something else. It was something else. They were no longer hypnotized; they were no longer anything to be hypnotized; they were dead shells of human beings, the light and mind gone out of them.

He walked faster, striding through them, trying not to look upon their naked horror, but searching for a pair of eyes with a vestige of sense left in them. The crowd surged about him, a stumbling, falling surge, and he grew dizzy with dodging.

A certain color caught his eye—the soft, gray plaid of a sport jacket—and he ran. That man, off at the edge of the crowd—he had to be Wes. The man's back was to him, but as he neared, he knew it was Wes. And the jacket wasn't as dirty as the others, the figure not so bent or fumbling.

Linc reached him, grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around. “Wes!” he cried as he met the happily familiar face. “Wes, where—?”

Linc stopped, for the eyes that swept to meet his own were not Wes' eyes. The face was Wes', the body, the jacket, were Wes', but Wes was gone out of them all. The shell of the man looked at him and sighed. And that was all.

Linc closed his eyes and cried out, loud and strong against the stench and the shuffling of thousands of feet. He clenched his friend tight and cried with the sighs that breathed out of Wes' lungs.

A hand on his shoulder turned him around fearfully. He didn't want to meet any more idiot eyes. But it was Stanley. And in Stanley's hand was a small radiation counter.

At the sight of Wes, his face fell. “How,” was all he said, “did he get here?”

“He's been among them for three days,” Linc told him.

“And you didn't report it?”

“I couldn't. He went on my say-so. I had to wait.” Linc indicated the counter in Stanley's hand. “What are you doing with that?”

“Following a hunch that turned out to be right. These pitiful, collapsing people are radioactive, Linc. All of them, slightly radioactive. That's why they're dying. Radiation sickness. Every one of them is doomed. Every one of them is radioactive.”

Linc took a firmer hold on Wes.

“Wes, too,” Stanley said. “Only not quite so much as the others.” He put the counter in his pocket, out of sight. “I figure that Hendricks died of the same cause. It wasn't his proximity to the reactor, as you thought. It was his stay in the hole. And that's why you came away from the reactor all right, while he didn't.”

Linc nodded. It made sense. But he didn't want to consider it right now.

“What about the other thing?” he asked Stanley. “What about their minds? Radiation can't account for their mindlessness.”

“No, it can't. That's something else again. I don't know yet.” Stanley hesitated a moment, then moved away, back through the stumbling stream of dying people that walked the road.

“What will we do with them all?” Linc heard Iverson's voice over the din of moans and cries. “They're dying! What will we do with them?”

Linc tilted his head back and searched the sky. He wanted to see the distorted shape of a flying Eye—to vent his hate, to allay the guilt and grief that burdened his heart. But the sky was empty, and overcast. The Eyes had let these people go. Yet he knew that they were gathering more into the hole, even while they were herding these out.

He took hold of Wes firmly, and steadying him, walked back through the crowd, leading him around the fallen ones, shielding him from the falling, hearing his sighs like cries from his own soul.

He cut out of the stream at the corner, and with the driver's help, lifted Wes into the station wagon. Iverson could worry about the others. Wes was going home.

“It's pure hell,” the driver muttered. “A pure hell those things have made. I tried to pick up a little boy but the others tramped over him before I could get there. What's going to happen to us, Mr. Hosier? What are we going to do?”

****

Back again in the parking lot, Iverson and Stanley helped him shift Wes from the station wagon to his own car. Iverson had work to do—hospitals to call, arrangements to make for the care and final disposition of thousands—but he waited to help with Wes. Linc felt a numbness that penetrated to his bones. He hadn't known grief since childhood, and the weight of it was almost intolerable.

“He was only gone three days,” Stanley said. “Maybe we can bring him out of it. Those others have been in there a week or more.”

“I'd like to know why he went in the first place—and why you didn't report it three days ago.” Iverson was sour.

“Not now,” Linc sighed. “Don't light into me now. How much do you think I can stand, old man? Wes is my friend. Let me do what I have to do for him, then tear me to bits if you want. But not now!”

He went around to his side of the car and climbed in, slamming the door on Iverson's low “Sorry. Take all the time you need.”

He drove out of the lot and down the streets for home. Wes sat propped beside him, his eyes empty and distant, his only sound the continual sighing. If only the sighing meant there was fight still left in the shell. If only the sighing were a sign that Wes was still struggling against the effects of the Eyes. But such a hope was senseless. Linc knew that whenever he glanced at Wes' dark, blank eyes.

As the cement hummed beneath the wheels, he let the damnation come and torture him. He had found one friend—one hard-sought friend—and he had killed him. Selfishly killed him. He had sent him out unprepared, and what tortures Wes had suffered, what horrors of mind and body he had endured, would remain forever a mystery. But he had done it. On account of Kelly. To have Kelly and feel her warm in his arms, he had killed his friend.

He pulled into the drive and lifted Wes from the car. Kelly already had the door open, and together they carried Wes upstairs and placed him on his bed. With warm, sudsy water, Linc washed the lanky body, dressed Wes gently in pajamas, and tucked him warmly under the covers. When Kelly came back, Wes: dull eyes were closed, and the room looked like any other sickroom.

“Linc?” Kelly's touch was on his arm, fleeting and unsure. “What are you thinking?”

“That he can't even offer me forgiveness.”

She didn't answer him, one way or another. She simply stood by the bed, staring at Wes, and she was white and trembling.

“Don't you have anything to say?” he asked loudly. “Why aren't you telling me that it's best this way? That you're happy it's Wes lying there and not me? That you're grateful to have your chosen protector safe and sound and to hell with the rest of the world? You should be here, in my arms, making me forget my conscience again.”

She turned a stricken face to him, but still said nothing.

“Well?” he shouted. “Have you got enough love or worth in your whole body and soul to make up for what we did together? Wes is not a man to be easily atoned for. He was worth more than the two of us combined!”

She wavered, swaying on her feet. She took everything he threw at her, but offered no reply.

“Say something!” He cursed her, wanting to make her cry, to sob and pay in part for some of his grief.

In the heavy silence, Ichabod's nails clicked across the floor. The dog jumped onto the bed, peered into Wes' face, licked the man's chin, wagged his little tail—then whined, long and high. His tail drooped, and he jumped from the bed, clicking back out of the room and down the stairs.

Kelly was crying now. Silently, and to herself, she was crying. “Wes is dead to the dog,” she said. “Ichabod knows he's not really here any more.”

“But he's not dead to us,” Linc answered her. “We still have to go through that. It may take days for him to die. And we're going to spend those days taking care of him. Watching him, nursing him, knowing we can't save him, but offering our souls to try.”