“Hold this.”
Kittridge quickly made his way down the stairs. By the time he burst through the door, the convoy was less than a hundred feet away. He jogged into the street, waving his arms.
“Stop!”
The lead Humvee jerked to a halt just a few yards in front of him, the soldier on the roof tracking his movements with the fifty-cal. The lower half of his face was hidden by a white surgical mask. “Hold it right there.”
Kittridge’s arms were raised. “I’m unarmed.”
The soldier pulled the bolt on his weapon. “I said, keep your distance.”
A tense five seconds followed; it seemed possible that he was about to be shot. Then the passenger door of the Humvee swung open. A sturdy-looking woman emerged and walked toward him. Up close her face appeared worn and lined, crackled with dust. An officer, but not one who rode a desk.
“Major Porcheki, Ninth Combat Support Battalion, Iowa National Guard. Who the hell are you?”
He had only one card to play. “Staff Sergeant Bernard Kittridge. Charlie Company, First MP Battalion, USMC.”
Her eyes narrowed on his face. “You’re a Marine?”
“Medically discharged, ma’am.”
The major glanced past him, toward the schoolhouse. Kittridge knew without looking that the others were watching from the windows.
“How many civilians do you have inside?”
“Eleven. The bus is almost out of gas.”
“Any sick or wounded?”
“Everybody’s worn out and scared, but that’s it.”
She considered this with a neutral expression. Then: “Caldwell! Valdez!”
A pair of E-4s trotted forward. They, too, were wearing surgical masks. Everyone was except Porcheki.
“Let’s get the refueler to see about filling up that bus.”
“We’re taking civilians? Can we do that now?”
“Did I ask your opinion, Specialist? And get a corpsman up here.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
They jogged away.
“Thank you, Major. It was going to be a long walk out of here.”
Porcheki had removed a canteen from her belt and paused to drink. “You’re just lucky you found us when you did. Fuel’s getting pretty scarce. We’re headed back to the guard armory at Fort Powell, so that’s as far as we can take you. FEMA’s set up a refugee-processing center there. From there you’ll probably be evaced to Chicago or St. Louis.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, do you have any news?”
“I don’t mind, but I’m not sure what to tell you. One minute these goddamned things are everywhere, the next nobody can find them. They like the trees, but any sort of cover will do. The word from CENTCOM is that a large pod’s massing along the Kansas-Nebraska border.”
“What’s a pod?”
She took another gulp from the canteen. “That’s what they’re calling groups of them, pods.”
The corpsman appeared; everyone was filing out of the school. Kittridge told them what was happening while the soldiers established a perimeter. The corpsman examined the civilians, taking their temperatures, peering inside their mouths. When everyone was ready to go, Porcheki met Kittridge at the steps of the bus.
“Just one thing. You might want to keep the fact that you’re from Denver under your hat. Say you’re from Iowa, if anyone asks.”
He thought of the highway, the lines of torn-up cars. “I’ll pass that along.”
Kittridge climbed aboard. Balancing his rifle between his knees, he took a place directly behind Danny.
“God damn,” Jamal said, grinning ear to ear. “An Army convoy. I take back everything I said about you, Kittridge.” He poked a thumb toward Mrs. Bellamy, who was dabbing her brow with a tissue taken from her sleeve. “Hell, I don’t even mind that old broad taking a shot at me.”
“Sticks and stones, young man,” she responded. “Sticks and stones.”
He turned to face her across the aisle. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. What is it with old ladies and the snot-rag-in-the-sleeve thing? Doesn’t that strike you as just a little unsanitary?”
“This from a young man with enough ink in his arms to fill a ditto machine.”
“A ditto machine. What century are you from?”
“When I look at you, I think of one word. The word is ‘hepatitis.’ ”
“Christ, the two of you,” Wood moaned. “You really need to get a room.”
The convoy began to move.
14
The plan was in motion. His team was assembled, the jet would meet them at dawn. Guilder had been in touch with his contact at Blackbird; everything had been arranged. The server and the hard drives at the warehouse had all been wiped. Go home, he’d told the staff. Go home and be with your families.
It was after midnight when he drove to his townhouse through quiet, rain-slickened streets. On the radio, a continuous stream of bad news: chaos on the highways, the Army regrouping, rumblings abroad. From the White House, words of calm assurance, the crisis was in hand, the best minds were at work, but nobody was fooling anybody. A nationwide declaration of martial law was sure to come within hours. CNN was reporting that NATO warships were churning toward the coasts. The door would slam on the North American continent. The world might despise us, Guilder thought; what will it do when we’re gone?
As he drove, he kept a watchful eye on the rearview. He wasn’t being paranoid; it was just how things tended to unfold. A roar of tires, a van pulling in front of him, men in dark suits emerging. Horace Guilder? Come with us. Amazing, he thought, that it hadn’t happened already.
He pulled into the garage and sealed the door behind him. In his bedroom, he packed a small bag of essentials—a couple of days’ worth of clothes, toiletries, his meds—and carried it downstairs. He fetched his laptop from the study and placed it in the microwave, sizzling its circuitry in a cloud of sparks. His handheld was already gone, tossed from the window of the Camry.
In the living room he doused the lights and peeled back the drapes. Across the street, a neighbor was loading suitcases into the open hatch of his SUV. The man’s wife was standing in the doorway of their townhouse, clutching a sleeping toddler. What were their names? Guilder either had never known or couldn’t remember. He’d seen the woman from time to time, pushing the little girl in a brightly colored plastic car up and down the driveway. Watching the three of them, Guilder was touched by a memory of Shawna—not that last, terrible encounter but the two of them lying together in the aftermath of lovemaking, and her quiet, whispering voice, tickling his chest. Are you happy with the things I do? I want to be your only one. Words that weren’t anything more than playacting, a bit of cheap theatrics to crown a dutiful hour. How stupid he’d been.
The man accepted the child from his wife’s arms and gently lowered her into the backseat. The two of them got in the car. Guilder imagined the things they’d be saying to each other. We’ll be all right. They have people working on it right now. We’ll just stay at your mother’s a week or two, until this all blows over. He heard the engine turn over; they backed from the drive. Guilder watched their taillights vanish down the block. Good luck, he thought.
He waited five more minutes. The streets were silent, all the houses dark. When he was satisfied he wasn’t being watched, he carried his bag to the Camry.
It was after two A.M. when he got to Shadowdale. The parking area was empty; only a single light burned by the entrance. He stepped through the door to find the front desk unmanned. An empty wheelchair sat beside it, a second in the hall. There were no sounds anywhere. Probably there were security cameras watching him, but who would examine the tapes?
His father was lying on his bed in darkness. The room smelled awful; nobody had been in for hours, perhaps as long as a day. On the tray by his father’s bed, somebody had left a dozen jars of Gerber’s baby food and a pitcher of water. A spilled cup told him his father had attempted the water, but the food was untou
ched; his father couldn’t have opened the jars if he’d tried.
Guilder didn’t have long, but it was not an occasion to rush. His father’s eyes were closed, the voice—that hectoring voice—silenced. Better that way, he thought. The time for talk was over. He searched his memory for something nice about his father, however meager. The best he could come up with was a time when his father had taken him to a park when Guilder was small. The recollection was vague and impressionistic—it was possible it had never happened at all—but that was all he had. A winter day, Guilder’s breath clouding before his face, and a view of bare trees bobbing up and down as his father had pushed him on a swing, the man’s big hand at the center of his back, catching him and launching him into space. Guilder recalled nothing else about that day. He might have been as young as five.
When he slid the pillow from beneath his father’s head, the man’s eyes fluttered but didn’t open. Here was the precipice, Guilder thought, the mortal moment; the deed, that, once done, could never be undone. He thought of the word patricide. From the Latin pater, father, and caedere, to cut down. He had lacked the courage to kill himself, yet as he placed the pillow over his father’s face, he experienced no hesitation. Gripping the pillow by the edges, he increased the pressure until he was certain no air could reach his father’s nose or mouth. A minute crept by, Guilder counting out the seconds under his breath. His father’s hand, lying on the blanket, gave a restive twitch. How long would it take? How would he know when it was over? If the pillow didn’t work, what then? He watched his father’s hand for additional movement, but there was none. Gradually it came to him that the stillness of the body beneath his hands meant only one thing. His father wasn’t breathing anymore.
He drew the pillow away. His father’s face was just the same; it was as if his passage into death represented only the subtlest alteration in his condition. Guilder gently placed his palm beneath his father’s head and moved the pillow back into place. He wasn’t trying to hide his crime—he doubted anybody would be around to examine the situation—but he wanted his father to have a pillow to lie on, especially since, as now seemed likely, he would be lying there for a very long time. Guilder had expected a rush of emotion to overcome him at this moment, all the pain and regret unloosed inside him. His awful childhood. His mother’s lonely life. His own barren and loveless existence, with only a hired woman for company. But all he felt was relieved. The truest test of his life, and he had passed it.
Outside, the hallway was quiet, unchanged. Who could say what degradations lay behind the other doors, how many families would be facing the same cruel decision? Guilder glanced at his watch: ten minutes had passed since he’d entered the building. Just ten minutes, but everything was different now. He was different, the world was different. His father was nowhere in it. And with that, tears came to his eyes.
He strode briskly down the hallway, moving past the empty common room and the vacant nurse’s station and farther still, into the early morning.
15
It was late on the second day, approaching the Missouri border, that Grey saw an obstruction ahead. They were in the middle of nowhere, miles from any town. He brought the car to a halt.
Lila looked up from the magazine she was reading: Today’s Parenting. Grey had gotten it for her at a mini-mart in Ledeau, with a pile of others. Family Life, Baby and Child, Modern Toddler. In the last day, her attitude toward him had shifted somewhat. Perhaps it was the mental effort of maintaining the fiction that their journey was nothing out of the ordinary, but she was becoming increasingly impatient with him, speaking to him as if he were an uncooperative husband.
“Will you look at that.” She dropped the magazine to her lap. On the cover was the image of a ruddy-cheeked girl in a pink jumper. WHEN PLAY DATES GO BAD, the caption read. “What is that?”
“I think it’s a tank.”
“What’s it doing there?”
“Maybe it’s lost or something.”
“I don’t think they just lose tanks, Lawrence. Like, excuse me, have you seen my tank anyplace? I know it was around here somewhere.” She sighed heavily. “Who just parks a tank in the road like that? They’ll have to move it.”
“So you’re saying you want me to ask them,” Grey stated.
“Yes, Lawrence. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
He didn’t want to, but to say no seemed impossible. He exited the car into the falling dusk. “Hello?” he called. He glanced back at Lila, who was watching him with her head angled through the open passenger window. “I think it’s empty.”
“Maybe they just can’t hear you.”
“Let’s just turn around. We can find another road.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. They can’t just block the road like that. Try the hatch. I’m sure there has to be somebody inside.”
Grey doubted this, but he didn’t want to argue. He clambered up on the exposed treads and hoisted himself to the top of the turret. He positioned his face above the hatch, but it was too dark to see anything down there. Lila had exited the Volvo and was standing at the base of the tank, holding a flashlight.
“I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” Grey said.
“It’s just a tank, Lawrence. Honestly. Sometimes you men are all the same, you know that?”
She passed him the flashlight. There was nothing to do now but look inside. Grey pointed the beam through the hatch.
Jesus fuck.
“So? What’s down there?”
Grey guessed there had probably been two of them. It wasn’t the easiest thing to sort out, visually. It looked like somebody had dropped a grenade, that’s how torn up the soldiers were. But it wasn’t a grenade.
Do you see, Grey?
He startled, as if hit by a jolt of current. The voice. Not like the one in the garage; the voice was in his head. The voice of Zero. Lila was staring at him from the base of the tank. He tried to say something, to warn her, but no words would leave his mouth.
Are you … hungry, Grey?
He was. Not just hungry: famished. The sensation seemed to take hold of every part of him, each cell and molecule, the tiniest atoms whirring inside him. Never in his life had he felt a hunger so profound.
It is my gift to you. The gift of blood.
“Lawrence, what’s the matter?”
He swallowed. “I’ll be … just a sec.”
Down the hole he went. He had dropped his flashlight, but that didn’t matter; the tank’s dark interior was bright to his eyes, each surface glowing with its beautiful coating of blood. A titanic need seized him, and he pushed his face against the cold metal to drag his tongue along it.
“Lawrence! What are you doing in there?”
He was on his hands and knees now, licking the floor, burying his face in the syrupy remains. So wonderful! As if he hadn’t eaten for a year, a decade, a century, only to be presented with the richest banquet in the history of the world! All the joys of the body rolled into one, a trance of purest pleasure!
The spell was broken by a violent boom. His fingers were in his mouth; his face was covered in blood. What the hell was he doing? And what was that sound, like thunder?
“Lawrence! Come quick!”
Another boom, louder than the first. He scrambled up the ladder. Something was wrong with the sky; everything seemed lit by a fiery glow.
Lila took one look at his bloody face and began to scream.
A pair of jets roared low overhead, splitting the air with their velocity; a violent white sheen lit the sky, and Grey was slapped by a wall of heated air that knocked him off the roof of the tank. He landed hard, the wind sailing out of him. More planes shot past, the sky to the east flashing with light.
Lila was backing away from him, her hands held protectively before her face. “Get away from me!”
There was no time to explain, and what would he have said? It was clear what was happening now, they had wandered into the war. Grey grabbed her by the arm and began to dr
ag her to the car. She was kicking, screaming, thrashing in his grip. Somehow he managed to open the passenger door and shove her in, but then he realized his mistake: the instant he closed the door, Lila hit the locks.
He pounded on the glass. “Lila, let me in!”
“Get away, get away!”
He needed something heavy. He scanned the ground near the car but found nothing. In another moment Lila would realize what she had to do; she would take the wheel and drive away.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Grey reared back, squeezing his hand into a fist, and sent it plunging into the driver’s window. He expected to be met by a wall of pain, all the bones of his hand shattering, but that didn’t happen; his hand passed through the glass as if it was made of tissue, detonating the window in a cascade of glinting shards. Before Lila could react, he opened the door and wedged himself into the driver’s seat and jammed the car into reverse. He spun into a 180, shifted into drive, and hit the gas. But the moment of escape had passed; suddenly they were in the midst of everything. As more planes rocketed past, a wall of fire rose before them; Grey swung the wheel to the right, and in the next instant they were barreling through the corn rows, the tires spinning wildly in the soft earth, heavy green leaves slapping the windshield. They burst from the field and, too late, Grey saw the culvert. The Volvo rocketed down, then up, the car going aloft before crashing onto its wheels again. Lila was screaming, screaming-screaming-screaming, and that was when Grey found it: a road. He yanked the wheel and shoved the accelerator to the floor. They were racing parallel with the culvert; the sun had dipped below the horizon, sinking the fields into an inky blackness while the sky exploded with fire.
But not just fire: suddenly the car was washed with a brilliant light.
“Stop your vehicle.”
The windshield filled with an immense dark shape, like a great black bird alighting. Grey jammed his foot on the brake, pitching both of them forward. As the helicopter touched down on the roadway, Grey heard a tinkle of breaking glass and something dropped into his lap: a canister the size and weight of a soup can, making a hissing sound.
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