The Sheep Look Up (41 page)

“Hell, I know that cat!” Pete said as a black patrolman waved them to a stop. He wound down his window and peeled off his mask, risking a fit of coughing.

“Chappie! Chappie Rice!” he called.

“Who the—? Ah, shit, it’s Pete Goddard! Didn’t see you in months, man!” The patrolman glanced up to make sure no more cars were approaching, and bent to Pete’s window.

“Chappie, meet Phil Mason that I work for now. Say, what the hell is going
on?
”

“Man, I just got here! Didn’t ought to be on duty, but they recalled everyone they could reach. All I know is the city’s like bent its brain. Back in Arvada and Wheatridge they put the Army in, two hundred fifty men from Wickens. Like three or four hundred houses afire, gangs of crazy kids out on the street bare-ass naked, singing this wild song and breaking everything up. Over by the post office they’s like four big buildings afire, stores and office blocks, and gas stations being blown up all over, and now right here we got a sniper—Say, you see that hole in your roof?”

“We saw it!” Philip snapped. “Officer, I’m trying to ride Pete home. What’s the likeliest way? He lives at—oh, shit! What’s the number?”

Pete gave it. Chappie Rice looked grave.

“Like they say, man, if I wanted to get there I wouldn’t start from here! But if you back up to that last intersection and go three blocks south and ...”

And they made it.

The area was dead. Everything disturbing the city seemed to be very far away, though in fact it was no more than five blocks distant at its closest. The street Pete lived on had closed up tight like a scared clam. There was literally no one in sight as Philip drew up in front of his apartment building, except that curtains were fluttering at windows.

“Wait,” Philip advised. “Snipers?”

Thirty tense seconds. Nothing happened. Pete said, “Oh God. Thank God. I see Jeannie!”

Philip glanced toward the window of their home. There she was, waving wildly.

“Thanks for the mask—and the gun!” Pete said, opened the door, awkwardly struggled to get his legs out of it. Philip set the parking brake, hastened around the car to help him, but here came Jeannie at a run.

“Oh, Pete baby! I been trying to call you, and all the phones are out!” She flung her arms around him and nearly knocked him off balance. “Are you okay, honey?”

“We—uh—we had a bit of trouble at the warehouse,” Pete said. Philip recalled with a pang of dismay that he’d said nothing to the patrolman about Mack’s death; against the scale of what was happening to the city it had seemed negligible.

“But are
you
okay?”

“Yeah, fine, thanks to Phil.”

Jeannie rounded on Philip and hugged him and kissed him and left his cheek a trace wet: tears. “I don’t know how to thank you!” she exclaimed. “If anything bad happened to Pete, I’d go crazy.”

Like everybody else ... “That’s all right,” Philip said gruffly. “I—uh—I better be getting home myself. Can you make it indoors, Pete?”

“Oh, from here it’s easy. I do it all the time. Uh—thanks again.”

Philip turned to get back in the car. Crossing the sidewalk, Pete called out.

“See you tomorrow, if they sort all this out!”

“Yeah!”

In his own home street: a car burning lazily, its nose against a mailbox. On the opposite sidewalk, a dog squatting on its haunches howling. The sound made Philip’s spine crawl. Nobody was visible around here, either.

Across the entrance to the underground garage beneath his apartment block, the steel anti-thief grille. He stopped inches from it and blasted his horn.

No one came to let him in.

Somewhere he had a key they’d given him, but he’d never used it because ...

He rustled in the glove-compartment, hoping it might be there, and while he was stirring up the contents—used tissues smeared with Denise’s lipstick, broken sunglasses belonging to Josie, BankAmericard receipts, a spare spark plug, incredible junk—the car, and the ground, shook, and a monstrous thump hurt his ears. He jumped and stared wildly over his shoulder. Soaring into the air not more than a half a block away, a cloud of smoke shot through with dazzling sparks, like a magnesium flare.

The hell with the car!

He leapt out, not slamming the door, not even shutting off the engine, and ran for the street-level entrance. For this grille he did have a key; he’d demanded one because the guards kept falling sick. He didn’t shut it behind him, but raced for the elevators—

And couldn’t wait for one to arrive, so made for the stairs.

Panting, he reached his own floor, and the door of the apartment was locked against him, and he hammered and banged and pounded on it and there was another explosion outside that shook down dust from a crack in the ceiling he didn’t recall seeing before.

Inside the apartment, the sound of movement He shouted.

Locks being unfastened. The clink of the security chain.

And there was Denise weeping.

“Oh, honey!” He swept her into his arms, frantic, and felt her shake and shake. “Honey, it’s all right now! I’m here, and ...”

And I left my gun in the car, and I left the car door open and the engine running. Christ, am I crazy too? Has the whole fucking world taken leave of its senses in an hour?

“It’s not all right,” Denise said. Her tears had ceased, and her voice had the chill of marble. She shut the door and turned to face him. “I can’t contact the police.”

“Honey—”

“It’s not all right. It’s Josie.”

There was an instant of utter silence. Nothing happened. Inside, outside the building—anywhere, to the ends of the universe.

“I thought she was just asleep. But Harold killed her.”

THE REFERRED PAIN

...
burning out of control. As darkness falls, Denver from the air looks like the pit of a volcano. Gas stations, stores and private homes are going up in smoke. All the time, mingled with the roar of flames, one hears the crackle of shots. Sometimes that’s the police fighting a desperate rearguard action against the populace of a city which seems to have turned against them in the blink of an eye. Sometimes it’s the Army and National Guard reinforcements which are trying to restore order in the surrounding suburbs. Already two thousand men destined for Honduras have been reassigned and parachuted into the area with full battle equipment. For this is no ordinary riot.

And the lava of this volcano—well, it’s people. Tens of thousands of them, old and young, black and white, overflowing into the surrounding country. All major highways serving the city are blocked by colossal jams, involving an estimated eighteen thousand cars. Some collided, some broke down, the drivers of others were killed by snipers ... but the reasons don’t matter, only the outcome. Abandoning their cars, often within a block or two of home, the population is on the move, carrying what they can, leaving what they can’t to the flames. Observers are comparing this to the aftermath of war to
give
an idea of the scale of it, but that doesn’t tell you much. The catastrophe has struck from nowhere, and no one knows what the hell is going on ...

OUT OF HAND

President:
But we need those men! The Tupas are within mortar range of San Pedro Sula!

State:
Let the spics do their own dirty work for a change. This isn’t just a riot—this is civil war.

Defense:
I’m afraid that’s broadly true, Mr. President This is not a subversive uprising, though. It’s more like what you’d expect if someone were to

PORTION OF TRANSCRIPT OMITTED AVAILABLE ONLY TO PERSONNEL WITH TRIPLE-A-STAR SECURITY CLEARANCE

so of course the antidote was never stockpiled. We must try and obtain supplies from a pharmaceutical company at once. In the meantime—well.

Intelligence:
In the meantime, there’s only one thing to do. Put the area under martial law, the whole state if need be, and cordon it with troops under orders to shoot to kill if anyone refuses to obey them.

Justice:
Yes, there’s no alternative, sir. This country is simply not equipped to cope with four hundred thousand lunatics.

OCTOBER

THE TICK-TOCK MEN

Fernando: ... Why, he does,

Nor will contented rest until the world,

The whole great globe and orb by land and sea,

Ticks to his pleasure like a parish clock.

You are a cogwheel, Juan, as am I:

He’s shaped us round, and prettied us with jags,

And gilded us with gold—

Juan: Add: gelded us!

Fernando: Aye, so he has, my brother. And ’tis all

Part of his clockwork. See you, he’s the weight;

We follow from him in an engined train;

Ducats are oil to make our axles turn

Without a squeak.

Juan: I’ll squeak, i’faith! I’ll rant

And call down hurricanoes on his head,

I’ll conjure earthquakes to beset his path!

Fernando: You’ve no escapement, Juan. You’re enchained.

At your vain wrath he will politely nod

And say you have come forth to strike the hour,

He’s ’bliged to you ...

—“The Tragedy of Ercole,” 1625

STATEMENT OF EMERGENCY

“Thank you. Friends and fellow Americans, no president of the United States has ever had a more melancholy task than I have at this moment. It is my sad duty to inform you that our country is in a state of war. A war that is none of our choosing. And, moreover, not a war with bombs and tanks and missiles, not a war that is fought by soldiers gallant on the field of battle, sailors daring the hostile sea, airmen streaking valiant through the skies—but a war that must be fought by you, the people of the United States.

“We have been attacked with the most cowardly, the most monstrous, the most evil weapons ever devised by wicked men. We are the victims of a combined chemical and biological attack. You are all aware that our crops have failed disastrously last summer. We, the members of my cabinet and I, delayed announcing the truth behind that story in the vain hope that we might contain the threat of the
jigras.
We can no longer do so. It is known that they were deliberately introduced into this country. They are the same pest which ruined the entire agriculture of Central America and led to the sad and unwished-for conflict in Honduras.

“That by itself we could endure. We are resilient, brave, long-suffering people, we Americans. What is necessary, we will do. But alas there are some among us who bear the name ‘American’ and are traitors, determined to overthrow the legitimate government, freely elected, to make the work of the police impossible, to denigrate and decry the country we love. Some of them adhere to alien creeds, the communism of Marx and Mao; some, detestably, adhere to a creed equally alien yet spawned within our own borders—that of the Trainites, whose leader, thank God, is safely in jail awaiting his just punishment for kidnapping an innocent boy and imprisoning him and infecting him with foul diseases that endangered his life.

“We are fighting an enemy already in our midst. He must be recognized by his words as well as his deeds. One of the great cities of our nation today writhes in agony because the water supply, the precious diamond stream that nourishes our lives, has been poisoned. You may say: how can we resist an enemy whose weapon is the very faucet at the sink, the very water-cooler we go to for relief in the factory or the office? And I will say this! It is you, the people of our great land, who must provide the answer!

“It is not going to be easy. It is going to be very hard. Our enemies have succeeded in reducing our stocks of food to the point where we must share and share alike. Following my speech, you will be informed of the emergency arrangements we are putting in hand for equal and fair distribution of the food we have. You will be informed, too, of the plans we have for silencing known traitors and subversives. But the remainder is up to you. You know who the enemy is—you met him at work, you heard him talking treason at a party, you heard about his attendance at a commie-front meeting, you saw the anti-American books in his library, you refused to laugh at his so-called jokes that dragged the name of the United States in the mud, you shut your ears to his anti-American propaganda, you told your kids to keep away from his kids who are being taught to follow in his traitor’s footsteps, you saw him at a Trainite demonstration, you know how he lied and slandered the loyal Americans who have built our country up until it is the richest and most powerful nation in history.

“My friends, you elected me to lead you into the third century of our country’s existence. I know you can be trusted to do what is right. You know who the enemy is. Go get him before he gets you!”

THAT’S TELLING ‘EM!

“Did you hear what that son of a bitch said about Train?”

“I sure did! And he hasn’t even been put on trial yet!”

GETTING STRAIGHT

Knock.

Grimy, unshaven, in clothes he had worn for more than a week, Philip snatched for his gun even before opening his eyes. It was still nearly dark in the living-room of the apartment, which they had decided on as a home base. There had been no power since the start of the emergency. Nor had there been water. Before the battery of their one transistor radio ran down, they had learned it had been the water supply which drove the city mad ... and Harold.

He sat there in the corner, soiled, uncaring, sucking his thumb and staring at infinity. He had not spoken since the moment he killed his sister. He might as well have been autistic.

Josie was in the deep freeze with the lid shut. She was starting to stink. But that was nothing to the reek from the toilet.

Denise, as dirty as himself, without her wig, her ringworm scars like brands across her scalp, sat up and whispered, “Who can that be?”

“How the shit should I know?” Philip snapped, steadying himself on the corner of a table and rubbing sleep from his eyes with the knuckles of his gun hand. He was feeling very sick this morning, worse than yesterday, but they’d broken their one thermometer when trying to take Harold’s temperature, and on his only two expeditions out-of-doors so far he hadn’t made it to a drugstore. The first had reclaimed his gun; the second had yielded nothing except the information that all the nearby food stores had been looted. They were living off deep-frozen hamburger and orange juice.

Detour on the way to the spyhole, around their improvised hearth. It was no fun living in a modern apartment with all the utilities out. Gas had been cut off around the same time as the power. They’d been lucky to find a sheet of asbestos on which they could rig cook-stove bars.

He peered cautiously out, and tensed.

“Army!” he said under his breath, and at the same time became aware of noises from the apartment next door, which had been dead silent for two days.

“Are you sure?” Denise on her knees, trembling. “It could be someone pretending—”

But there was something convincing about the man outside the door: a top sergeant, face half-hidden by an issue filtermask, holding a clipboard and a pen, making some kind of register, maybe. Then, behind him, another man came into view, a private with medical corps collar badges. He carried a box of phials and a jar of white pills.

“It’s okay,” he muttered, and slipped the locks, although he retained the security chain and made sure his gun was poised where it could be seen.

And—

“Drop the gun or I’ll drop you!” As though by magic, the sergeant had a carbine leveled; it must have been slung at his back, muzzle down, where a flick of his arm sufficed to bring it into firing position.

“But I’m not going to do anything,” Philip said weakly. “I live here. It’s my home!”

Filthy. Stinking. Grimy. Foul. Mine.

“Drop the gun!”

He shrugged and tossed it on to a nearby cushion.

“That’s better,” the sergeant said. “Are you Philip A. Mason?”

“Y-yes.”

“ID!”

Philip fumbled in his hip pocket for his billfold and offered his driver’s license. Taking it, the sergeant added, “And open this stinking door, will you?”

“I—uh, sure!” He released the chain. The private entered and glanced around, wrinkling his nose. He’d dropped his filtermask below his chin and looked as though he wished he hadn’t. But the air in here was no worse than you got by opening a window; some of the fires in the downtown area had burned five days, and the wind was still bringing in smoke from the suburbs.

“And you’re Mrs. Mason?” the sergeant said, handing the license back. “And you got two kids?”

The sound of authority in the sergeant’s voice, Philip found, was curiously reassuring. Since Josie’s death he had been able to imagine that no one any longer anywhere in the world knew what he was about. He himself had spent hours on end, sometimes half the day, staring out of the window at the wreaths of smoke, incapable of reacting, let alone of making plans.

Denise struggled to her feet, clutching a blanket to her bosom. Since she was fully dressed—neither she nor Philip had had their clothes off in the past week—it made no particular odds.

Now a third man entered the apartment, another private, carrying a gunny sack with something heavy in the bottom. On spotting Philip’s gun he snatched at it, stripped the remaining shells out, and dropped it in the bag.

“Hey, that’s mine!” Philip objected weakly.

“Ban on firearms in this city,” the sergeant grunted. “We had like twenty thousand people shot to death so far. That your son?” Pointing at Harold, who was not even following the intruders with his eyes.

“Uh—yes.”

“And the other kid, the girl?”

“Well ...”

“She’s dead.” Clearly, from Denise.

The sergeant made a check mark, not in the least surprised. “Uh-huh. How?”

“Harold killed her. Want to see her body?”

That penetrated the sergeant’s matter-of-fact pose. Lowering the clipboard, he stared at her.

“He killed her. I thought she was just asleep, but he’d cut her up and covered her with her favorite blanket.” Denise’s voice was quite level, drained of all emotion. It had been a week of hell; there was nothing left.

The sergeant and the medical private exchanged glances.

“I guess I’d better get the doc to check this one out,” the private said after a moment. “It’s beyond me, sarge.”

“Yeah.” The sergeant licked his lips. “Go see if he’s through with the bodies next door.”

“Bodies?” Philip took half a pace forward. They’d never been very friendly with the Friedrichs in the adjacent apartment, but they had been on nodding terms, and the day the crisis broke, when he was still thinking of joining forces and resources, he’d gone to try and talk to them—but they’d refused to open the door.

“Sure, bodies,” the sergeant said curtly. “We didn’t find anyone but you alive in this building yet. You done your military service?” Pen poised to make the next check mark on his form.

“I ...” Philip swallowed hard. “Yeah, here’s my discharge certificate.” Out with the billfold again. One had had to carry that all the time since about the time the Honduran operation turned sour; they were very fierce on dodgers.

“Mm-hm? Manila? I was there too,” the sergeant said, busily writing. “Why in hell didn’t you report like you should have done?”

“I don’t understand,” Philip said slowly.

“You were supposed to report to Wickens if you weren’t either sick or crazy. Or to the Arsenal. Three days ago.” The sergeant handed the certificate back. “You gon’ be in trouble, Mr. Mason.”

Philip shook his head. “Was it on the radio or something?” he said faintly. “Because our radio’s been out for more than three days—we kept it on all the time at the beginning because we were trying to find out what was going on—and the phone’s out, and last time I went down to the street I got shot at.”

The sergeant looked at him thoughtfully. “Well, I guess they won’t be hard on you. We need everyone we can find who’s neither sick nor crazy.”

“I am kind of sick,” Philip said. “Fever, I guess.”

“Ah, that’s easy. It’s this rabbit thing that’s giving us headaches—what’s it called, Rocco?”

The medical private said, “Tularemia. But the typhus is worse, and I keep hearing they got smallpox, too.”

Philip looked at Denise and found she was so overcome she was simply gaping. He felt that way himself.

“Got a bag for the kid?” the sergeant went on, turning to the other private, the one collecting guns. The man nodded and produced a thing like a fat black cigar; shaken, it unrolled into a plastic bag about six feet by eighteen inches.

“Coffins,” the sergeant said with a wry grin. “Best we can—”

“My God, it’s Phil Mason!” A shout from the door, and Doug McNeil thrust his way in. “And Denise! Thank God you’re alive, at least!”

He was haggard, newly bearded, and dressed in khaki fatigues a size too big, but from the way he moved he was well. Philip wondered whether he dared fall on his neck and cry.

But before he could react in any such ridiculous fashion, Doug had caught sight of Harold. A single glance, and he rounded on Denise.

“He got at the water!”

Denise gave a dull nod. They’d been over that a hundred times, reconstructing the way in which, while his mother was dozing after taking that massive dose of painkillers for her migraine, he must have drunk from the deadly supply, then taken a knife to his sister’s belly.

“Josie?”

“Here,” Philip said, and led Doug to the kitchen.

He was silent for a long time, then turned away, shaking his head.

“Disposal detail!” he snapped at the man with the plastic bag, and added, “Sorry, Phil. But we have to get all the bodies out of the city and burned, quick as we can. There’ll be a mass cremation, with a service. We’re holding three a day. Denise can attend if she likes.”

“But not me?”

Doug hesitated. Then, with rapid professional deftness, he checked Philip’s pulse, rolled back one of his eyelids, and asked him to put out his tongue.

“No, not you. You’re lucky. You have no idea
at all
how lucky you’ve been. Rocco, you have treated them, have you?”

“Not yet, sir,” the medical private said awkwardly.

“Hell, get on with it!” Moving out of the way of the man trying to get Josie into the plastic bag. Denise had made no move to help. Presumably she couldn’t. And continuing to Philip: “I’m told we had about one and a half guns to every two people. Those that haven’t been shot went insane, those that aren’t insane mostly have one of the three or four killer diseases that are rife ... We’re still picking up the bits.”