Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  Settled, he turned and headed down the road. Not once did he look at the ax-burred body of the big man, as if it didn’t exist, and as if therefore his barbarity, and the hunger and glee with which he’d planted that last blade deep in the face of the man, didn’t exist either. He pressed along, wondering how much time he had before Audie blew the levee, and how much after. How quickly would the lowlands go under? Would the water have the force of a moving wall, a pure destructiveness, or would it seep slowly forth, rising in increments until it soaked the world? He didn’t know. He really didn’t care all that much either. If he made it out, wouldn’t that be a treat and a half? And if he didn’t, that was the way the cards sometimes came to lay on the table.

  He found the turnoff, took the new road, which led back into piney woods that gradually yielded to more jungly growth. The fires still burned on the horizon in one sector of the sky, but not nearly so brightly. He didn’t care. He didn’t look at his watch either, because he didn’t care what time it was. He didn’t pay attention to the possibility of ambush by yet still-unaccounted-for guards, because he didn’t care much about that either.

  At last he came to still another smaller road behind a gate and realized that the Screaming House lay behind it; but this road, followed another few hundred yards, led to the Drowning House, where the prison launch was moored and the concrete blocks and chains were stored. He saw now what he’d have to do if he had the time.

  The gate was locked. He shot it off, not caring about noise. He walked boldly up the road, and any man hiding in the bushes or the building with a rifle could have shot him. He didn’t care. He came then to the building. It was the newest structure on the property, giving ample evidence of sound U.S. Army Engineer Corps design and construction. He heard the generator going out back, which explained the electric lights blazing in a region yet to be electrified.

  He kicked in the door.

  No one greeted him, but the place was neat, almost antiseptic, any government building foyer, from the Marine Corps to the Civil Conservation Corps. The swirls of a wax buffer on the green linoleum testified to the spic-and-span efficiency of whatever labor detail attended. From far off came a loony tune of music, though of the higher form, that orchestra stuff, that spoke to Earl only of balls and fancy snoots in fancy suits. He had no idea what it was and no curiosity.

  He opened the door and walked down the hall, as the music rose, until at last he reached the room where he had been examined all those weeks ago. He kicked it in.

  It was empty. Whoever had staffed this place, they had fled, leaving almost nothing. A few papers and towels lay on the floor, evidence of a hasty retreat. Who knew where they went?

  Then Earl heard soft music. It came from one more door.

  Earl kicked it in.

  AUDIE dug.

  He was excavating an ever expanding hole halfway up the inside lip of the levee, where the ground was softest. Audie was young and strong, and his system was choked with the power that all his adrenaline and testosterone—considerable in both cases—had generated over the past few hours. He was also weirdly, fabulously happy. He could have whistled while he worked.

  He had no idea how deep he should go, but after a furious forty minutes of work, he was a good five feet into the levee, and he figured that was enough.

  He already had retrieved the bundled sticks of dynamite from the raft. The stuff was waxy and had an unpleasant odor. It amounted to five bundles of ten sticks apiece and awkwardly, he planted them in the bottom of the hole. Then he took the detonating cap, opened the waxy paper at a central stick in the central bunch, and plunged it in, twisting it against the cakelike consistency of the explosive itself. He twisted till the cap nearly disappeared, leaving a residue of ground powder on his fingers.

  Next came the fuse. That was neatly wedged into the well at the top of the cap and screwed tight itself, so that the connection was solid.

  The long green waxy twine of fuse curled up out of the hole. Audie climbed out carefully, so as not to kick anything with a foot or bring down a rush of earth from the hole and disconnect things. He wanted to do this right the first time, and not have to come back. Filling was easier; ten minutes of easy shovel work at the hole filled it in again.

  He pulled out his Zippo, flicked it once. It whooshed healthy flame, which he quickly cupped to the frazzled end of the fuse. That waxy twine glowed red once, and then at last sparked to life and began to sputter away toward detonation.

  Audie raced up the levee and stood for just a second. The broad black flat river stood on one side, placid in the moonless night. On the other side, beyond the levee, stood the reclaimed fields with their drained swamps and okra crops.

  He thought: the world is going to look a lot different in ten minutes.

  He climbed into the raft and paddled to the center of the dark river.

  THE music was sweet and sickly, full of tinkly piano passages.

  The doctor sat at his table under a single-bulb lamp which bent on a curve to illuminate his work. He was writing with a fountain pen in a notebook, and Earl could see a piece of meat in a dish in front of him, uncooked. Then he realized it was human meat: it was a liver, with a kind of pale crust spotted with green at one end. The doctor was describing it in his ink scribbling.

  Beyond him, on a morgue table, far in the darkness but clearly not quite indistinct, lay a black man. Earl didn’t recognize him. His chest had been bisected surgically then splayed backward, so that all his innards lay before the world. Some of them had been removed.

  The doctor said, “Schubert.”

  “What?”

  “Schubert. On the Victrola. Schubert’s ‘Fantasie.’ Do you like it?”

  Earl put a bullet through the Victrola, smashing Herr Schubert’s beautiful notes into a million pieces.

  The doctor winced, for he was not used to such noise so close, so loud.

  Then he said, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing. But even a man like you will understand this.”

  He pushed a document across the table.

  “Go on, read it. You can read. You are or were military. You know the meaning of orders and the higher good. Read it. Go on.”

  Earl seized it and noted the heavy embossment of the United States Department of Defense. TO ALL LOCAL, STATE AND FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES, it began.

  The bearer of this document is a participant in an operation that is classified HIGHEST TOP SECRET and has been officially deemed In the National Interest. As such it—and the bearer of this document—fall under the full protection of the United States Government. It and the bearer of this document have been granted a priori immunity from all state, local and federal laws.

  Any violation of this policy on the local level will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law by the United States Attorney’s Office in your jurisdiction. You are hereby ordered to cease and desist all law enforcement or other activities involving the program at Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) in Thebes County, Mississippi. You are ordered to release the bearer of this document and leave the area immediately.

  For further clarification of this policy, call the duty officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency at WE-5-2433, Arlington, Virginia, using the code name BLUE TUESDAY for authentification purposes.

  THIS IS AN OFFICIAL POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AND THOSE IN VIOLATION OF IT WILL BE CONSIDERED TRESPASSERS AND FACE ALL LEGAL SANCTIONS.

  “You know what that means, don’t you,” said the doctor. “You are up the river in more ways than one. See, you have no idea how valuable this is, how important?”

  Earl just stared at him. The moment seemed to go on and on.

  “Suddenly you see your duty and you’re brought up short. The best thing you can do is escape again, with whatever men you’ve brought, and leave us in peace. This is too important for a little man like you to destroy. Too much is at stake, as that document—and you don’t doubt it, do you?—makes clear. You’ve killed all the red
necks who beat you, so you should be satisfied with your meaningless vengeance. Now, either you leave or I will make a phone call and in twenty minutes I can have the Marine Corps here.”

  Earl held the document up to his gun muzzle, and fired. The flash ignited the paper; he let it fall from his hands to the floor, where it was devoured crisply in a quick spurt of flame.

  “You are trespassing on a Top Secret government—”

  “What you’re doing is wrong,” said Earl.

  “No, what we’re doing is right,” said the doctor. “You have no idea what this is all about.”

  “I know exactly what this is all about, Dr. Stone,” said Earl. “Or is it Dr. Goodwin, whatever the hell you’re calling yourself these days? You been injecting these colored men with syphilis. I believe it’s called Treponema pallidum, or some such. But it ain’t just any syphilis. It’s some kind of supersyphilis. You’re trying to turn the clap into a germ warfare weapon. That’s why the Los Alamos Plutonium lab and the people at Fort Dietrich in Maryland are involved. Dietrich is the Army’s germ warfare installation. That’s why the infected convicts are painted with big numbers, so your boys can watch them die or sicken through binoculars from a long way out and take notes. That’s why the contaminated bodies have to go underwater. You’re making atom-powered syph to fight the commies, and you’re testing how it kills on American Negroes.”

  Now it was the doctor who could think of nothing to say.

  After gibbering ineffectively for a second or two, he recovered enough to say, “How did you know that? That is Top Secret. You are not supposed to know that. You cannot know that! How dare you know that? Who do you think you are to know that? This is the most secure—”

  “I saw the red radiation marking on a package shipped to you some months back. Didn’t mean a thing then. But then someone you don’t know nothing about ferreted you out, and saw you’s receiving correspondence and shipments from Los Alamos and Fort Dietrich. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. But tonight it comes out zero. I’m ending it.”

  “Look, you idiot, stop and consider. Yes, what has happened here is monstrous, and I am the monster in charge. But the bigger picture, the only picture that counts, is the war we will fight sooner or later against people who would destroy us. We must stop them. We must. We will fight it in Asia or Africa or South America. And what if we have become so comfortable we lack the will? And what if we can’t use atomic bombs? A biological weapon, untraceable, undetectable until too late, could decimate an enemy force. It could save the lives of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers. That is my humble contribution to our survival. I am building a weapon that will destroy our enemies. I am almost there. And you come along and destroy it in a single night.”

  He stood.

  “You started out to cure the disease,” said Earl, “after what it did to your wife and child. Now you’re turning it into a weapon. You’re killing American men, same as you and me, to test it, and you say it’s for commies. But I know soldiers and I know whores and I know it can’t be controlled. It’ll just go on and on and on.”

  Far off came the sound of detonation.

  Everything in the lab rattled a little and leaped ever so slightly from its place, including the liver on the plate. The vibration rolled through the room.

  “That’s the water,” said Earl. He reached into his case.

  “What is that?”

  “That’s the fire,” he said.

  “You cannot—”

  Earl unscrewed the cap, pulled the cord; this one worked just fine. It sputtered, spraying sparks this way and that, and he tossed it deep into the room.

  “Stand clear,” he said. “It’s burning time.”

  The doctor did an insane thing. Earl had heard of such a thing in the war, and knew that men were capable of such commitment, or bravery. And it was bravery. Nevertheless, it stunned Earl; it was the last thing he figured on.

  The doctor threw himself on the canister, to muffle its destructiveness. He was atop it when it detonated, and the radiance of the flame blowtorched him alive and swallowed him in incredible destruction. He burned, screamlessly and passively, his body just absorbed in the totality of the fire. He melted like a witch in an old movie.

  And in his insane courageousness, he succeeded. The fire simply expended its entire force on him until nothing remained but a smoking carcass.

  Earl turned away. He’d seen Japs fried crispy with the flamethrowers and hadn’t liked it. This was all that, only concentrated on one figure. He fought a surge of vomit in his throat but then regained control. He had one more bomb left. He removed it, pulled the cord—it worked just fine again, and tossed it. The device ignited, and the room filled with its illumination. Earl now saw in the light that the place was a kind of museum on the theme of atomic-powered Treponema pallidum: along the walls on shelves stood jar after jar, each full with liquid, each with its biological treasure, a harvest of items from inside the body, dense, meaty, placid. Or outside it: several large diseased penises were included.

  The fire’s heat was explosive. It burned furiously, spewing gobbets of itself about, lighting the room in just seconds.

  Earl beat it to the door, and by the time he was outside, the building was gone in fire.

  71

  SECTION Boss had no taste for battle. When he heard the shots, he knew immediately that one loomed. It so happened that he had drawn duty that night in the dog kennel, a job he hated and felt should be beneath him, given all his responsibility. His job was to beat the dogs with rawhide soaked in Negro sweat, not care for them. But as the firing mounted and mounted and the glow of flames began to light the horizon, he understood how lucky he had been in being way out here, away from the prison’s central structures.

  The dogs yowled. He didn’t care. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.

  He took Mabel Louise, of course, his treasure: the Thompson submachine gun. He took a bagful of thirty-round magazines brimful with ammo and all the food he could carry. His damned horse was back at the corral, so he couldn’t ride. It was simply a question of following the river upstream, staying calm, and living to live another day.

  He stayed close to the riverbank, and came soon to the big levee the engineers had built in ’43. It was grassy and broad, and walking it was no difficulty. At the center he halted. There he could see it and…My God!

  The whole sky was lit up with flames. Knowing the place as intimately as he did, he could place each blaze to a building and figured in a second that his intuition had been correct: the whole place was going. It was over, razed to the ground, forgotten and flattened to ashes.

  Glad I ain’t there, he thought.

  Turning, he continued his way along the levee, the gun in his hand, the going easy.

  But soon levee gave way to riverbank, and the going got tougher. Sawtooth cut at his legs and boughs whipped his face. The ground here was infirm, a soupy insubstantial margin between earth and water. But onward he went, at a considerably reduced pace.

  Sometime toward dawn he heard an explosion. It shook the trees and rattled the leaves. Dust seemed to be torn from the earth by its vibrations, and he realized what had happened: they’d blown the levee and whatever remained of Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) would shortly be gone completely. One thing about them boys: they did the job up right.

  But he continued on, now altering his plan. He’d just get far enough out and go to ground for a bit. No sense in trying to fight his way out of this place, and getting torn to shreds.

  Then, maybe in a day or so, he’d work his way back. He’d shoot off a couple of clips, dirty his face, and by the time he returned and the state authorities had found out and taken over the site of the disaster, he could represent himself as a weary veteran of the fight who’d stayed at his post ’til it was overwhelmed, then heroically fought his way out of there and laid up.

  Hell, he guessed there’d be no other damned witnesses. This thing could play out right swell
for him.

  So it was that he found a dry spot off the riverbank and set himself down for a nice nap in the cool pines, far removed from the violence.

  He dreamed of glory and escape and a better life and at some point people were cheering him madly. But then he realized the cheering was in the real world, not the dream one, and he blinked awake to the sound of voices.

  He fought his panic as he looked around. He checked his watch. It was nearly 10:00.

  The voices seemed to be coming from the river. He snaked his way forward, and then he saw them.

  Cowboys.

  There were six of them, sixty feet out in the water. They were in the prison launch, which they had commandeered. They were laughing and joshing loudly among themselves, having a fine old time.

  Then he recognized that goddamn Bogart.

  That one!

  Still alive!

  Suddenly it made all kinds of sense. Bogart had somehow survived his murder, and as everybody said he was a trickier man than he let on. Back in the world, he recruited these bandits, and they came back in the dead of night for the dark pleasures of retribution. Now on the stolen prison launch they were escaping, heading upriver.

  Section Boss had a machine gun.

  He could kill them all. Even if he didn’t get them all, he could shoot the shit out of the boat and sink it dead in the water. Then if there were any left alive, he could finish them, or simply vanish before they could get organized and come after him.

  He would be a hero. An actual, real-life hero.

  He hunkered down behind the gun, began to check off the firing requirements. Steadily, he drew the bolt back, till it clicked. He looked at the two levers above the grip on the left-hand side, the safety (off) and full-auto (on).

  He checked the sight, that fancy Lyman job, and diddled a bit with it to make certain the gun would shoot to point of aim at less than fifty yards.

  He had them.

  He brought the gun to bear, and at that moment beheld an amazement. A thin cowboy stepped out of the cabin of the craft, and took his hat off, and cascades of blond hair fell out, and Section Boss saw that it was a girl!