The harsh lights only made the pressure in his head more intense.
“Are you okay?” one of the other guards asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You look like hell.”
Halloway had given up trying to make anybody else understand about the hum. No one else seemed to hear it.
“Every day’s the same. We keep looking at those monitors. Nothing ever happens.”
“That’s the way I like it,” the second guard said. “You’d rather have somebody attack us, just for the excitement? Maybe you didn’t get shot at enough over in Iraq.”
“As if terrorists care about an observatory,” the first guard said. “I have no idea what we’re doing here, but the pay’s good.”
“You got that right. The pay’s good. So Earl, just shut up and quit complaining.”
The night-viewing function on the cameras outside had been activated several hours earlier. On the monitors, the dishes, the fences, the scrub grass, the dirt, the miles and miles of godforsaken nothing-all of it was tinted green. One of the screens showed three coyotes loping by. Their body heat made them glow brightly. On a different screen, a jackrabbit jerked its head up. Sensing the coyotes, the rabbit bounded away in a panic. It, too, glowed unnaturally.
Moments later a third screen showed the coyotes chasing the rabbit through the green darkness.
“Who says nothing ever happens?” the first guard asked. “Any bets on who wins?”
“My money’s on the rabbit,” the second guard answered.
“How much? Oops, too late. Just as well you didn’t have time to make your bet.”
Halloway scowled at the screen. “Man, even blood looks green on those night-vision images.” He stood and walked toward the door- way, stumbling slightly.
“Get some sleep,” the second guard said.
“If only.” Halloway left the room and walked along the stark corridor. His bootsteps echoed irritably.
The door to the Data Analysis area was closed. Wincing from his headache, he put his left ear against it.
You’re not supposed to be in here, the researcher named Gordon had told him after Halloway had made an effort to be friends with him. Gordon’s eyes had looked stern behind his spectacles. This area’s off- limits. You belong in the surveillance room.
Try to be nice to people, and they treat you like shit, Halloway thought.
He pressed his ear harder against the cold metal door. All he heard was the hum. Throughout the afternoon, he’d made yet another effort to find what caused it. He’d searched every room in the facility- the latrines, the sleeping quarters, the kitchen, the mess hall, the generator room, the exercise room, the surveillance room-and yet again, he hadn’t found any answers.
I didn’t get a chance to check the research area again, he thought darkly. That son of a bitch Gordon decided I wasn’t good enough to be allowed in there any longer.
The hum filled Halloway’s head. The only time he hadn’t been in pain was last night when he’d listened to the music-the wonderful music that made him feel he was dancing with the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, smelling her cinnamon hair, tasting orange juice and vodka.
He gripped the doorknob and turned it.
Nothing happened. That bastard Gordon had locked it.
Halloway banged on the door but didn’t get a response.
He hammered louder.
Down the hall, one of the guards leaned his head out from the surveillance room. “What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like?”
“We were told to stay out of there.”
“I thought I heard somebody shouting for help.”
Halloway pounded so hard that his fist throbbed, but the pain was nothing compared to his headache.
Suddenly the door was yanked open. Standing in the harsh lights of the research area, Gordon glared from behind his tortoiseshell glasses. His face was bright red. “What’s the matter with you? Damn it, follow orders.”
Halloway stared past him toward the other researchers. Amid banks of glowing electronic instruments, they all wore earphones. A headset-presumably Gordon’s-was lying on a table.
“You’re listening to the music, aren’t you? But you didn’t let me know.”
“You have no idea what you’re interfering with. Unless you want to lose your job, leave us alone.”
Gordon started to close the door.
Halloway pressed a hand against it and stopped him. “That’s what you’re doing, right? You’re listening to the music.”
Gordon put more effort into closing the door.
Halloway rammed it open, knocking him back.
“Hey!” Gordon shouted.
Halloway stalked past him, approaching the table. The other researchers thought he was coming at them and stumbled away. But all he cared about was the earphones. Faintly the music drifted from them. The wonderful, soothing music.
“Gordon, you brought it back, but you didn’t tell me.”
“Of course we didn’t tell you. You’re just a damned guard.”
“I tried to be friends,” Halloway said.
“What?”
“Friendship doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
A guard appeared in the doorway. He held an M4.
“Is everything all right?”
“Lock this man up until a helicopter comes to fly him out of here,” Gordon said. “He’s fired.”
Halloway picked up the earphones.
The guard came over. “You heard him, Earl. They want you out of here.”
Halloway raised the earphones toward his head.
The guard gripped his left forearm. “The music isn’t our business, Earl. Make this easy for everybody. Let’s go.”
Halloway put down the earphones.
The guard looked relieved. “Good. We’ll just let these people do their work.”
Halloway punched the guard in the throat.
“Uhhhh…”
The guard dropped the M4 and raised both hands to his smashed larynx.
Halloway picked up the rifle and fired a three-shot burst into Gordon’s face. The tortoiseshell glasses disintegrated.
Hearing screams behind him, he turned and saw the other scientists scrambling for cover.
Aim away from the equipment, he warned himself.
When the second guard rushed into the room, Halloway shot him in the chest.
The panicked scientists ran for the door. Relieved that their direction took them away from the equipment, he shot all of them in the back.
He picked up the second guard’s M4 and checked to make sure that its magazine was full. As he stepped into the corridor, he saw Taggard running toward him. Halloway blew his head off.
He searched the facility and shot two maintenance workers crouching behind boxes in a storage room. He found a female scientist hiding beneath a bunk and shot her, also.
Throughout, he was conscious of the terrible hum. He returned to the research area, satisfied himself that the first guard was finally dead, and put on the earphones.
His headache vanished as the music drifted and floated.
38
Beneath the airbase, Raleigh unlocked a metal door and stepped into a room that he hadn’t visited for three years. The smell of dankness and must hung in the air. He saw tiny red and white lights that might have been the eyes of animals, but when he flicked a switch on the wall, overhead lamps revealed that they belonged to a vast array of electronic instruments stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Needles pulsed, and dials glowed. As he examined them closely, he saw that they registered an unusually high level of activity.
Perfect, he thought.
When he had personally supervised the installation of this array, the equipment had been state-of-the-art. Since then, major advances had made it necessary to supplement all the instruments with serious updates that his team had brought. Even so, the existing equipment was doing its
job, amplifying energy from the source and transmit- ting it through the dish concealed in the wreckage of the hangar above him. That camouflaged dish was synchronized with the horizontal dish at the observatory.
Tomorrow night the signal would be amplified even more and beamed through a vertical dish that pointed toward a satellite.
In previous experiments, the links had failed, sometimes with disastrous results. But given the improved electronics that his team was installing, and the unusually powerful energy the source was giving off, Raleigh believed that this time he would finally be able to complete a journey that he’d begun as a boy inspired by his grandfather.
He pressed a button and activated a row of surveillance monitors. In night-vision green, they showed the ruined hangars as well as the area around the airbase. The superior lenses on the hidden cameras allowed him to magnify images impressively. He watched the dog handler and the German shepherd patrolling the fence.
He switched his attention to the viewing area down the road, where the crowd was out of control, charging toward the fence. He hadn’t counted on having human test subjects. The fact that there were hundreds of them provided an even greater benefit.
But what really mattered, he knew, were the test subjects he’d brought with him. The reaction of the men on his team would deter- mine whether or not the project could be reliably continued. They didn’t know that by setting up the experiment, they were crucial parts of it.
39
A shoe struck Brent’s forehead. For a moment, his vision turned gray.
“Keep the cameras rolling!” he shouted into his lapel mike as people trampled over him. He worried that the director in the station’s control room would stop the broadcast if he thought that Brent was being seriously injured on camera, so he did his best to sound in control.
From Brent’s perspective on the gravel, everything was a blur of pant legs and dresses. The truth was, he felt smothered. Another shoe struck him, this time on the side of his neck. He wheezed and rolled, trying to get away from the mob. The gravel tore at him. His shoulder banged against the underside of the motor home. Desperate, he squirmed beneath the vehicle as far as he could manage. From this vantage point, he saw shoes, boots, and pant legs rushing past. The side of his neck throbbed.
Any closer to my throat and I might have been killed, he thought. Suddenly the crowd was gone, and he crawled from under the truck.
“I’m okay! I’m okay!” he shouted into the microphone.
God, I hope the helicopter’s getting a shot of this, he thought. The left sleeve of his suit coat was torn open. Blood trickled from his forehead.
Hearing shouts and screams from the crowd, he was about to climb to the top of the motor home and continue broadcasting, but abruptly he saw Anita and Luther Hamilton lying on the gravel. The camera was on its side, its red light still on.
He ran to Anita and heard her groan. “Are you okay? Can you stand?” he asked urgently. “I need to get you away from this crowd!”
He put one of her arms around his neck and raised her. She wavered.
“Come on, I’ll take you where it’s safe.”
The producer and his crew scrambled from the truck. Brent gave Anita to them and hurried over to Luther Hamilton, who coughed and struggled to crawl. Brent helped him stand and guided him to- ward the back of the truck.
“We need an ambulance!”
“That’s for sure.” The producer pointed.
Brent turned and gaped at a half-dozen people lying on the gravel.
At the back of the parking lot, people charged against each other, pushing toward the darkness beyond the fence.
“I see them!”
“They’re beautiful!”
“Out of my way!”
“Can’t breathe!”
Brent picked up Anita’s camera and gave it to the producer. “Do you remember how to use one of these?”
“You bet. I even keep paying my union dues.”
“Then follow me to the top of the Winnebago.”
Brent grabbed the toppled ladder and propped it against the truck. The tremor in his right hand alarmed him. Feeling faint, he struggled up. At the top, he noted that the station’s helicopter had activated its landing lights, illuminating the crowd.
Hoarse from the blow to the side of his throat, he spoke into his lapel mike, describing what he saw. “The people at the back are forcing everyone ahead. Those in the middle are being crushed. The ones in front are being squeezed against the barbed-wire fence.”
Brent heard wood cracking.
“I think the fence is about to…”
Several posts snapped. The fence collapsed. The people in front dropped with it, screaming as they fell onto the barbed wire. The rest of the crowd surged over their backs, charging into the field.
In the distance, the lights continued to shimmer.
“I hear a sound,” Brent said into his microphone. “Luther Hamilton mentioned that sometimes a sound accompanies the lights. I wonder if that’s happening now. No, I’m wrong. The sound has nothing to do with the lights. It’s-”
40
Standing next to a car at the side of the dark road, Page gaped toward the observation area, where the crowd was out of control. If he’d been alone, he’d have run to help the police, although he couldn’t imagine how even ten times as many officers would be able to handle what he was witnessing.
Right now, Tori was all he cared about.
“You were right to stay away from the crowd,” he said.
He turned.
She wasn’t next to him.
He frowned toward the shadowy road, then stepped toward the space between the parked cars, but he still didn’t see her.
“Tori?”
He hurried back to her Saturn. She wasn’t inside. He studied the darkness on the far side of the row of parked cars. No sign of her.
“Tori!”
Page doubted that she’d have gone toward the crowd, which had become a single mass that was trampling over the barbed-wire fence, crushing people, and disappearing into the night.
But if she hadn’t gone in that direction, there was only one other possibility.
Thunder rumbled.
Page swung toward the murky grassland and ran toward it. Tori had been right when she’d guessed that the observation area was an arbitrary spot from which to try to see the lights. They could be detected from other points along the road, and tonight, to his surprise, he’d had no trouble spotting them. When Tori had pointed excitedly toward the dark horizon, he’d seen them immediately.
I must have learned to see them, he thought. The way I learned to see the cuttlefish.
Or am I just fooling myself?
In the distance, the colors bobbed and drifted. Not only did Page see them much more quickly than on the previous night, but he also saw them more clearly. It was as if a haze had been removed from his eyes. Radiant, they swirled, far away and yet close. His skin seemed to ripple.
“Tori!”
Thunder rumbled louder, the storm approaching rapidly.
Page made his way toward the fence. Thanks to his pilot training, he knew that the best way to see at night was to try to detect objects from the periphery of his vision. Staring straight ahead at something in the darkness achieved less results than if he worked to detect it from the corners of his eyes because the eye cells designed for night vision, known as rods, were located on the eye’s perimeter.
He looked obliquely past the barbed wire. To his right, he heard shouts from the viewing area. Over there, wraith-like shadows moved farther into the grassland, attracted to the lights. He also heard groans.
“Damn it, I told you to stop shoving me!” someone yelled.
Lightning flashed, revealing silhouettes in a struggle. A man punched another man in the stomach. When the second man doubled over, the first man knocked him to the ground and kicked him in the head. Other people grappled in similar frenzied fights, so many that Page knew he couldn’t stop th
em.
Then darkness swooped back, seeming deeper than before because Page’s night vision was compromised. Unable to wait for his eyes to adjust, he gripped a post and climbed it, using the barbed wire as a ladder, jumping to the ground on the other side. His holstered hand- gun dug into him.
“Tori!”
A sudden wind hurled dust into his face. He raised his left arm to shield his eyes and moved forward into the murky field. Scrub grass crunched under his sneakers. A drop of rain struck his nose.
He almost tripped over a rock. When he regained his balance, he shifted ahead and tried to continue in a straight line toward the distant lights. The dust made him shut his eyes for a moment. More drops of rain pelted his forehead.
The next flash of lightning revealed silhouettes closer ahead. Once the crowd had reached the field, everyone had separated, desperate to avoid the crush of people that had propelled them over the toppled fence. They looked confused, as if they suddenly realized where they were.
Thunder shook Page’s chest. Then he was sightless again, over- whelmed by darkness.
The next moment, the storm unloaded, the force of the downpour making him stoop. Shockingly cold, it enveloped him, obliterating the distant lights. Without them, he had no bearings. Even the lights back at the observation platform were no longer visible.
“Tori!”
Gusts whipped his face. His wet clothes clung to his skin, the cold rain making him shiver. The next flash of lightning struck nearby. He saw its multiple forks and heard a crack. The two-second blaze of light revealed a figure stumbling ahead of him. Then darkness enveloped him again. Propelled by thunder, he shifted toward where his memory told him he’d seen the figure.
Abruptly they collided. He knew at once that the figure was Tori. Ten years of marriage made it impossible for him not to be able to recognize the feel of her body in the dark.
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