“Don’t get yourself in a dither, Colonel,” Donny Ausley had told him from San Antonio. “If you get nervous, them folks are gonna get nervous, right? And there ain’t no sense in gettin’ nervous, ’cause that mountain’s been standing for a few thousand years, and it ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
“It’s not the mountain!” Macklin had said, his fist tightening around the receiver. “It’s the tunnels! My cleanup crews are finding new cracks every day!”
“Settlin’, that’s all. Now listen, Terry and me have pumped ’bout ten million big ones into that place, and we built it to last. If we didn’t have bidness to run, we’d be right there with you. Now, that far underground, you’re gonna have some settlin’ and water leaks. Ain’t no way ’round it. And we’re payin’ you one hundred thousand dollars a year to endorse Earth House and live down there, you bein’ a big war hero and all. So you fix them cracks and keep everybody happy.”
“You listen, Mr. Ausley: If I don’t get a structural engineer to look this place over within a week, I’m leaving. I don’t give a damn about my contract. I’m not going to encourage people to stay down here if it’s not safe!”
“I believe,” Donny Ausley had said, his Texas accent getting a few degrees cooler, “you’d better calm yourself down, Colonel. Now, you don’t want to walk out on a bidness deal. That ain’t good manners. You just ’member how Terry and me found you and brought you along ’fore you start flyin’ off the handle, okay?”
Discipline and control! Macklin had thought, his heart hammering. Discipline and control! And then he’d listened as Donny Ausley had told him he’d send an engineer up from San Antone within two weeks to go over Earth House with a fine-tooth comb. “But meantime, you’re head honcho. You got a problem, you fix it. Right?”
And that had been almost a month ago. The structural engineer had never come.
Colonel Macklin stopped his cart near a pair of double doors. Above the doors was the sign TOWN HALL in ornate, old-timey lettering. Before he went in, he tightened his belt another notch, though the trousers were already squeezed around his midsection; then he drew himself up tall and straight and entered the auditorium.
About a dozen people sat in the red vinyl seats that faced the podium, where Captain Warner was answering questions and pointing out features of Earth House on the wall map displayed behind him. Sergeant Schorr, who stood ready to field the more difficult questions, saw the colonel enter and quickly stepped to the podium’s microphone. “Excuse me, Captain,” he said, interrupting an explanation about the plumbing and water-filtration system. “Folks, I want to introduce you to someone who certainly needs no introduction: Colonel James Barnett Macklin.”
The colonel continued at a crisp pace along the center aisle as the audience applauded. He took his place behind the podium, framed by an American flag and the flag of Earth House, and looked out at the gallery. The applause went on, and a middle-aged man in a camouflage combat jacket rose to his feet, followed by his similarly dressed wife; then all of them were standing and applauding, and Macklin let it continue for another fifteen seconds before he thanked them and asked them to be seated.
Captain “Teddybear” Warner, a husky ex-Green Beret who’d lost his left eye to a grenade in the Sudan and now wore a black patch, took a seat behind the colonel, and Schorr sat beside him. Macklin paused, gathering in his mind what he was going to say; he usually gave the same welcoming speech to all the new arrivals at Earth House, told them how secure the place was and how it would be the last American fortress when the Russians invaded. Afterward, he took their questions, shook their hands and signed a few autographs. That was what the Ausley boys paid him for.
He looked into their eyes. They were used to nice, clean beds, sweet-smelling bathrooms and roast beef on Sunday afternoons. Drones, he thought. They lived to breed and eat and shit, and they thought they knew all about freedom and loyalty and courage—but they didn’t know the first thing about those attributes. He cast his gaze over the faces, saw nothing but softness and weakness; these were people who thought they’d sacrifice their wives and husbands, infant children, homes and all their possessions as the price of keeping the Russian filth off our shores, but they would not, because their spirits were weak and their brains were corrupted by mental junk food. And here they were, like all the others, waiting for him to tell them they were true patriots.
He wanted to open his mouth and tell them to get the hell out of Earth House, that the place was structurally unsound and that they—the weak-willed losers!—ought to go home and cower in their basements. Jesus Christ! he thought. What the hell am I doing here?
Then a mental voice, like the sound of a cracking bullwhip, said, Discipline and control! Shape up, mister!
It was the voice of the Shadow Soldier. Macklin closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he was staring into the face of a bony, fragile-looking boy sitting in the second row between his father and mother. A good strong wind would knock that kid to the ground, he decided, but he paused, examining the boy’s pale gray eyes. He thought he recognized something in those eyes—determination, cunning, willpower—that he remembered from pictures of himself at that age, when he was a fat, clumsy slob that his Air Force captain father had kicked in the ass at every opportunity.
Of all of them sitting before me, he rhought, that skinny kid might have a chance. The others were dogmeat.
He braced himself and started giving the orientation speech with as much enthusiasm as if he were digging a latrine ditch.
As Colonel Macklin spoke Roland Croninger examined him with intent interest. The colonel was a lot heavier than the photographs in Soldier of Fortune, and he looked sleepy and bored. Roland was disappointed; he’d expected a trim and hungry war hero, not a used car salesman dressed up in military duds. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who had shot down three MiGs over the Thanh Hoa Bridge to save a buddy’s crippled plane and then had ejected from a disintegrating aircraft.
Rip-off, Roland decided. Colonel Macklin was a rip-off, and he was beginning to think Earth House might be a rip-off, as well. That morning he’d awakened to find a dark water stain on his pillow; the ceiling was leaking from a crack two inches wide. There had been no hot water from the shower head, and the cold water was full of grit and rust. His mother had thrown a fit about not being able to get her hair clean, and his father had said he’d mention the problem to Sergeant Schorr.
Roland was fearful of setting up his computer because the air in his bedroom was so damp, and his first impression of Earth House as a neat-o medieval-type fortress was wearing thin. Of course, he’d brought books to read—tomes on Machiavelli and Napoleon and a study of medieval siege warfare—but he’d counted on programming some new dungeons for his King’s Knight game while he was here. King’s Knight was his own creation—128K of an imaginary world shattered into feudal kingdoms at war with one another. Now it looked as if he was going to have to read all the time!
He watched Colonel Macklin. Macklin’s eyes were lazy, and his face was fat. He looked like an old bull that had been put out to pasture because he couldn’t get it up anymore. But as Macklin’s eyes met his and held for a couple of seconds before they slid away again, Roland was reminded of a picture he’d seen of Joe Louis when the boxing champion had been a Las Vegas hotel greeter. In that picture, Joe Louis looked flabby and tired, but he had one massive hand clasped around the frail white hand of a tourist, and Joe Louis’s eyes were hard and dark and somewhere far away—maybe back in the ring, remembering the feel of a blow slammed against another man’s midsection almost to the backbone. Roland thought that the same distant stare was in Colonel Macklin’s eyes, and, just as you knew Joe Louis could’ve smashed the bones in that tourist’s hand with one quick squeeze, Roland sensed that the warrior within Colonel Macklin was not yet dead.
As Macklin’s address continued the wall telephone beside the display map buzzed. Sergeant Schorr got up and answered it; he listened for a few seco
nds, hung the receiver up and started back across the platform toward the colonel. Roland thought that something in Schorr’s face had been altered in the time he was on the telephone; Schorr appeared older now, and his face was slightly flushed. He said, “Excuse me, Colonel,” and he placed his hand over the microphone.
Macklin’s head snapped around, his eyes angry at the interruption.
“Sir,” Schorr said quietly, “Sergeant Lombard says you’re needed in Perimeter Control.”
“What is it?”
“He wouldn’t say, sir. I think ... he sounded pretty damned shaken.”
Crap! Macklin thought. Lombard got “shaken” every time the radar picked up a flock of geese or an airliner passing overhead. Once they’d sealed Earth House because Lombard thought a group of hang gliders were enemy paratroopers. Still, Macklin would have to check it out. He motioned for Captain Warner to follow him, and then he told Schorr to dismiss the orientation after they’d gone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Macklin said into the microphone, “I’m going to have to leave you now to take care of a small problem, but I hope to see each of you later this afternoon at the newcomers’ reception. Thank you for your attention.” And then he stalked up the aisle with Captain Warner right behind him.
They drove back in the electric cart the way Macklin had come, Macklin muttering all the way about Lombard’s stupidity. When they went into the Perimeter Control Room, they found Lombard peering into the screen that showed the returns from the sky radar atop Blue Dome. Near him stood Sergeant Becker and Corporal Prados, both staring at the screen as well. The room was full of electronic equipment, other radar screens and the small computer that stored the arrival and departure dates of Earth House’s residents. On a shelf above a row of radar screens, a voice was blaring from a shortwave radio, almost obscured by the crackling of static. The voice was panicked, babbling so fast Macklin couldn’t understand what was being said. But Macklin didn’t like the sound of it, and instantly his muscles tensed and his heart began to pound.
“Move aside,” he told the other men. He stood where he could get a good look at the screen.
His mouth went dry, and he heard the sizzling of circuits in his own brain at work. “God in Heaven,” he whispered.
The garbled voice from the shortwave radio was saying, “New York got it ... wiped out ... the missiles are comin’ in over the east coast ... hit Washington ... Boston ... I can see flames from here....” Other voices surged out of the storm of static, bits and pieces of information hurtling along the network of ham radio operators across the United States and picked up by Blue Dome Mountain’s antennas. Another voice with a Southern accent broke in, shouting, “Atlanta just went dead! I think Atlanta got hit!” The voices overlapped, swelled and faded, commingled into a language of sobs and shouts, weak, faint whispers and the names of American cities repeated like a litany of the dead: Philadelphia ... Miami ... Newport News ... Chicago ... Richmond ... Pittsburgh ...
But Macklin’s attention was fixed on what the radar screen showed. There could be no doubt about what they were. He looked up at Captain Warner and started to speak, but he couldn’t find his voice for a second. Then he said, “Bring the perimeter guards in. Seal the doorway. We’re under attack. Move it!”
Warner picked up a walkie-talkie and hustled off. “Get Schorr down here,” Macklin said, and Sergeant Becker—a loyal and reliable man who had served with Macklin in Chad—instantly picked up the telephone and started pressing buttons. From the shortwave radio a frantic voice said, “This is KKTZ in St. Louis! Calling anybody! I’m lookin’ at a fire in the sky! It’s everywhere! God A’mighty, I’ve never seen such a—” A piercing squeal of static and other distant voices flooded into the empty hole left by St. Louis.
“This is it,” Macklin whispered. His eyes were shining, and there was a light sheen of sweat on his face. “Ready or not, this is it.”
And deep inside him, in the pit where no light had shone for a very long time, the Shadow Soldier cried out with joy.
9
10:46 A.M. Central Daylight Time
ON INTERSTATE 70,
ELLSWORTH COUNTY, KANSAS
TWENTY-FOUR MILES WEST OF Salina, Josh Hutchins’s battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs. Josh saw the temperature gauge’s needle zoom toward the red line. Though all the windows were lowered, the inside of the car felt like a steam bath, and Josh’s white cotton shirt and dark blue trousers were plastered to his body with sweat. Oh, Lord! he thought, watching the red needle climb. She’s about to blow!
An exit was coming up on the right, and there was a weathered sign that said PawPaw’s! Gas! Cold Drinks! One Mile! and had an exaggerated drawing of an old geezer sitting on a mule smoking a corncob pipe.
I hope I can make another mile, Josh thought as he guided the Pontiac onto the exit ramp. The car kept shuddering, and the needle was into the red but the radiator hadn’t blown yet. Josh drove northward, following PawPaw’s sign, and before him, stretching to the horizon, were immense fields of corn grown to the height of a man and withering under the terrible July heat. The two-lane county road cut straight across them, and not a puff of breeze stirred the stalks; they stood on both sides of the road like impenetrable walls and might have gone on, as far as Josh knew, for a hundred miles both east and west.
The Pontiac wheezed and gave a jolt. “Come on,” Josh urged, the sweat streaming down his face. “Come on, don’t give out on me now.” He didn’t relish the idea of walking a mile in hundred-degree sun; they’d find him melted into the concrete like an ink blot. The needle continued its climb, and red warning lights were flashing on the dashboard.
Suddenly there was a crackling noise that made Josh think of the Rice Krispies he used to like as a kid. And then, in the next instant, the windshield was covered with a crawling brown mass of things.
Before Josh could finish drawing a surprised breath, a brown cloud had swept through the open windows on the Pontiac’s right side and he was covered with crawling, fluttering, chattering things that got down the collar of his shirt, into his mouth, up his nostrils and in his eyes. He spat them from his mouth and clawed them away from his eyes with one hand while the other clenched the steering wheel. It was the most ungodly noise of chattering he’d ever heard, a deafening roar of whirring wings. And then his eyes cleared and he could see that the windshield and the car’s interior were covered with thousands of locusts, swarming all over him, flying through his car and out the windows on the left side. He switched on the windshield wipers, but the weight of the mass of locusts pinned the wipers to the glass.
In the next few seconds they began flying off the windshield, first five or six at a time and then suddenly the whole mass in a whirling brown tornado. The wipers slapped back and forth, smearing some unlucky ones who were too slow. And then steam billowed up from under the hood and the Pontiac Bonneville lurched forward. Josh looked at the temperature gauge; a locust clung to the glass, but the needle was way over the red line.
This sure isn’t turning out to be my day, he thought grimly as he brushed the remaining locusts from his arms and legs. They, too, whirred out of the car and followed the huge cloud that was moving over the sunburned corn, heading in a northwesterly direction. One of the things flew right up in his face, and its wings made a noise like a Bronx cheer before it darted out the window after the others. Only about twenty or so remained in the car, crawling lazily over the dashboard and the passenger seat.
Josh concentrated on where he was going, praying that the engine would give him just a few more yards. Through the cloud of steam he saw a small, flat-roofed cinder block structure coming up on his right. Gas pumps stood out front, under a green canvas awning. On the building’s roof was a full-sized old Conestoga wagon, and printed in big red letters on the wagon’s side was PAWPAW’S.
He breathed a sigh of relief and turned into the gravel driveway, but before he could reach the gas pumps and a water hose the Pontiac coughed, fa
ltered and backfired at the same time. The engine made a noise like a hollow bucket being kicked, and then the only sound was the rude hiss of steam.
Well, Josh thought, that’s that.
Bathed in sweat, he got out of the car and contemplated the rising plume of steam. When he reached out to pop the hood open, the metal burned his hand like a bite. He stepped back and, as the sun beat down from a sky almost white with heat haze, Josh thought his life had reached its lowest ebb.
A screen door slammed. “Got y’self some trouble?” a wizened voice inquired.
Josh looked up. Approaching him from the cinder block building was a little humpbacked old man wearing a sweat-stained ten-gallon hat, overalls and cowboy boots. “I sure do,” Josh replied.
The little man, who stood maybe five foot one, stopped. His ten-gallon hat—complete with a snakeskin hatband and an eagle’s feather sticking up—almost swallowed his head. His face was as brown as sunbaked clay, his eyes dark, sparkling dots. “Oooooeeeee!” he rasped. “You’re a big ’un, ain’t you! Lordy, I ain’t seen one as big as you since the circus passed through!” He grinned, revealing tiny, nicotine-stained teeth. “How’s the weather up there?”
Josh’s sweaty frustration tumbled out in a laugh. He grinned widely as well. “The same as down there,” he answered. “Mighty hot.”
The little man shook his head in awe and walked in a circle around the Bonneville. He, too, attempted to get the hood up, but the heat stung his fingers. “Hose is busted,” he decided. “Yep. Hose. Seen a lot of ’em lately.”
“Do you have spares?”
The man tilted his neck to look up, still obviously impressed with Josh’s size. “Nope,” he said. “Not a one. I can get you one, though. Order it from Salina, should be here in ... oh, two or three hours.”
Swan Song Page 8