At first it seemed that the two nose-to-nose political systems did not want to believe in what Dagbolt had found, even after the Royal Observatory in London had pronounced his photographs and data authentic. Finally, however, the missile silos closed and telescopes all over the world homed in, almost grudgingly, on Star Wormwood.
The joint American/Chinese space mission to investigate the unwelcome newcomer lifted off from the Lanzhou Heights less than three weeks after the first photographs had appeared in the Guardian, and everyone’s favorite amateur astronomer was aboard, deviated septum and all. In truth, it would have been hard to have kept Dagbolt off the mission—he had become a worldwide hero, the most renowned Briton since Winston Churchill. When asked by a reporter on the day before lift-off if he was frightened, Dagbolt had brayed his oddly endearing Robert Morley laugh, rubbed the side of his truly enormous nose, and exclaimed, “Petrified, dear boy! Utterly pet-trified!”
As it turned out, he had every reason to be petrified.
They all did.
The final sixty-one seconds of received transmission from the Xiaoping/Truman were considered too horrible for release by all three governments involved, and so no formal communiqué was ever issued. It didn’t matter, of course; nearly twenty thousand ham operators had been monitoring the craft, and it seemed that at least nineteen thousand of them had been rolling tape when the craft had been—well, was there really any other word for it?—invaded.
Chinese voice: Worms! It appears to be a massive ball of—
American voice: Christ! Look out! It’s coming for us!
Dagbolt: Some sort of extrusion is occurring. The portside window is—
Chinese voice: Breach! Breach! To your suits, my friends! (Indecipherable gabble.)
American voice:—and appears to be eating its way in—
Female Chinese voice (Ching-Ling Soong): Oh stop it stop the eyes—
(Sound of an explosion.)
Dagbolt: Explosive decompression has occurred. I see three—er, four—dead, and there are worms… everywhere there are worms—
American voice: Faceplate! Faceplate! Faceplate!
(Screaming.)
Chinese voice: Where is my mamma? Oh dear, where is my mamma?
(Screams. Sounds like a toothless old man sucking up mashed potatoes.)
Dagbolt: The cabin is full of worms—what appear to be worms, at any rate—which is to say that they really are worms, one realizes—that have apparently extruded themselves from the main satellite—what we took to be—which is to say one means—the cabin is full of floating body parts. These space-worms apparently excrete some sort of acid—
(Booster rockets fired at this point; duration of the burn is 7.2 seconds. This may have been an attempt to escape or possibly to ram the central object. In either case, the maneuver did not work. It seems likely that the blast-chambers themselves were clogged with worms and Captain Lin Yang—or whichever officer was then in charge—believed an explosion of the fuel tanks themselves to be imminent as a result of the clog. Hence the shutdown.)
American voice: Oh my Christ they’re in my head, they’re eating my fuckin br—
(Static.)
Dagbolt: I believe that prudence dictates a strategic retreat to the aft storage compartment; the rest of the crew is dead. No question about that. Pity. Brave bunch. Even that fat American who kept rooting around in his nose. But in another sense I don’t think—
(Static.)
Dagbolt:—dead after all because Ching-Ling Soong—or rather, Ching-Ling Soong’s severed head, one means to say—just floated past me, and her eyes were open and blinking. She appeared to recognize me, and to—
(Static.)
Dagbolt:—keep you—
(Explosion. Static.)
Dagbolt:—around me. I repeat, all around me. Squirming things. They—I say, does anyone know if—
(Dagbolt, screaming and cursing, then just screaming. Sounds of toothless old man again.)
(Transmission ends.)
The Xiaoping/Truman exploded three seconds later. The extrusion from the rough ball nicknamed Star Wormwood had been observed from better than three hundred telescopes earth-side during the short and rather pitiful conflict. As the final sixty-one seconds of transmission began, the craft began to be obscured by something that certainly looked like worms. By the end of the final transmission, the craft itself could not be seen at all—only the squirming mass of things that had attached themselves to it. Moments after the final explosion, a weather satellite snapped a single picture of floating debris, some of which was almost certainly chunks of the worm-things. A severed human leg clad in a Chinese space suit floating among them was a good deal easier to identify.
And in a way, none of it even mattered. The scientists and political leaders of both countries knew exactly where Star Wormwood was located: above the expanding hole in earth’s ozone layer. It was sending something down from there, and it was not Flowers by Wire.
Missiles came next. Star Wormwood jigged easily out of their way and then returned to its place over the hole.
On the Pulsifers’ satellite-assisted TV, more dead people got up and walked, but now there was a crucial change. In the beginning the zombies had only bitten living people who got too close, but in the weeks before the Pulsifers’ high-tech Sony started showing only broad bands of snow, the dead folks started trying to get close to the living folks.
They had, it seemed, decided they liked what they were biting.
The final effort to destroy the thing was made by the United States. The President approved an attempt to destroy Star Wormwood with a number of orbiting nukes, stalwartly ignoring his previous statements that America had never put atomic SDI weapons in orbit and never would. Everyone else ignored them, as well. Perhaps they were too busy praying for success.
It was a good idea, but not, unfortunately, a workable one. Not a single missile from a single SDI orbiter fired. This was a total of twenty-four flat-out failures.
So much for modern technology.
And then, after all these shocks on earth and in heaven, there was the business of the one little graveyard right here on Jenny. But even that didn’t seem to count much for Maddie because, after all, she had not been there. With the end of civilization now clearly at hand and the island cut off—thankfully cut off, in the opinion of the residents—from the rest of the world, old ways had reasserted themselves with unspoken but inarguable force. By then they all knew what was going to happen; it was only a question of when. That, and being ready when it did.
Women were excluded.
It was Bob Daggett, of course, who drew up the watch roster. That was only right, since Bob had been head selectman on Jenny for about a thousand years. The day after the death of the President (the thought of him and the first lady wandering witlessly through the streets of Washington, D.C., gnawing on human arms and legs like people eating chicken legs at a picnic was not mentioned; it was a little much to bear, even if the bastid and his blonde wife were Democrats), Bob Daggett called the first men-only Town Meeting on Jenny since sometime before the Civil War. Maddie wasn’t there, but she heard. Dave Eamons told her all she needed to know.
“You men all know the situation,” Bob said. He looked as yellow as a man with jaundice, and people remembered his daughter, the one still living at home on the island, was only one of four. The other three were other places… which was to say, on the mainland.
But hell, if it came down to that, they all had folks on the mainland.
“We got one boneyard here on Jenny,” Bob continued, “and nothin ain’t happened there yet, but that don’t mean nothin will. Nothin ain’t happened yet lots of places… but it seems like once it starts, nothin turns to somethin pretty goddam quick.”
There was a rumble of assent from the men gathered in the grammar-school gymnasium, which was the only place big enough to hold them. There were about seventy of them in all, ranging in age from Johnny Crane, who had just turned eighteen
, to Bob’s great-uncle Frank, who was eighty, had a glass eye, and chewed tobacco. There was no spittoon in the gym, of course, so Frank Daggett had brought an empty mayonnaise jar to spit his juice into. He did so now.
“Git down to where the cheese binds, Bobby,” he said. “You ain’t got no office to run for, and time’s a-wastin.”
There was another rumble of agreement, and Bob Daggett flushed. Somehow his great-uncle always managed to make him look like an ineffectual fool, and if there was anything in the world he hated worse than looking like an ineffectual fool, it was being called Bobby. He owned property, for Chrissake! And he supported the old fart—bought him his goddam chew!
But these were not things he could say; old Frank’s eyes were like pieces of flint.
“Okay,” Bob said curtly. “Here it is. We want twelve men to a watch. I’m gonna set a roster in just a couple minutes. Four-hour shifts.”
“I can stand watch a helluva lot longer’n four hours!” Matt Arsenault spoke up, and Davey told Maddie that Bob said after the meeting that no welfare-slacker like Matt Arsenault would have had the nerve to speak up like that in a meeting of his betters if that old man hadn’t called him Bobby, like he was a kid instead of a man three months shy of his fiftieth birthday, in front of all the island men.
“Maybe you can n maybe you can’t,” Bob said, “but we got plenty of warm bodies, and nobody’s gonna fall asleep on sentry duty.”
“I ain’t gonna—”
“I didn’t say you,” Bob said, but the way his eyes rested on Matt Arsenault suggested that he might have meant him. “This is no kid’s game. Sit down and shut up.”
Matt Arsenault opened his mouth to say something more, then looked around at the other men—including old Frank Daggett—and wisely held his peace.
“If you got a rifle, bring it when it’s your trick,” Bob continued. He felt a little better with Arsenault more or less back in his place. “Unless it’s a twenty-two, that is. If you ain’t got somethin bigger’n that, come n get one here.”
“I didn’t know the school kep a supply of em handy,” Cal Partridge said, and there was a ripple of laughter.
“It don’t now, but it will,” Bob said, “because every man jack of you with more than one rifle bigger than a twenty-two is gonna bring it here.” He looked at John Wirley, the school principal. “Okay if we keep em in your office, John?”
Wirley nodded. Beside him, Reverend Johnson was dry-washing his hands in a distraught way.
“Shit on that,” Orrin Campbell said. “I got a wife and two kids at home. Am I s’posed to leave em with nothin to defend themselves with if a bunch of cawpses come for an early Thanksgiving dinner while I’m on watch?”
“If we do our job at the boneyard, none will,” Bob replied stonily. “Some of you got handguns. We don’t want none of those. Figure out which women can shoot and which can’t and give em the pistols. We’ll put em together in bunches.”
“They can play Beano,” old Frank cackled, and Bob smiled, too. That was more like it, by the Christ.
“Nights, we’re gonna want trucks posted around so we got plenty of light.” He looked over at Sonny Dotson, who ran Island Amoco, the only gas station on Jenny. Sonny’s main business wasn’t gassing cars and trucks—shit, there was no place much on the island to drive, and you could get your go ten cents cheaper on the mainland—but filling up lobster boats and the motorboats he ran out of his jackleg marina in the summer. “You gonna supply the gas, Sonny?”
“Am I gonna get cash slips?”
“You’re gonna get your ass saved,” Bob said. “When things get back to normal—if they ever do—I guess you’ll get what you got coming.”
Sonny looked around, saw only hard eyes, and shrugged. He looked a bit sullen, but in truth he looked more confused than anything, Davey told Maddie the next day.
“Ain’t got n’more’n four hunnert gallons of gas,” he said. “Mostly diesel.”
“There’s five generators on the island,” Burt Dorfman said (when Burt spoke everyone listened; as the only Jew on the island, he was regarded as a creature both quixotic and fearsome, like an oracle that works about half the time). “They all run on diesel. I can rig lights if I have to.”
Low murmurs. If Burt said he could do it, he could. He was a Jewish electrician, and there was a feeling on the outer islands, unarticulated but powerful, that that was the best kind.
“We’re gonna light that graveyard up like a friggin stage,” Bob said.
Andy Kingsbury stood up. “I heard on the news that sometimes you can shoot one of them things in the head and it’ll stay down, and sometimes it won’t.”
“We’ve got chainsaws,” Bob said stonily, “and what won’t stay dead… why, we can make sure it won’t move too far alive.”
And, except for making out the duty roster, that was pretty much that.
Six days and nights passed and the sentries posted around the little graveyard on Jenny were starting to feel a wee bit silly (“I dunno if I’m standin guard or pullin my pud,” Orrin Campbell said one afternoon as a dozen men stood around the cemetery gate, playing Liars’ Poker) when it happened… and when it happened, it happened fast.
Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night, and then the gravestone marking the final resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier’s boy Michael, who had died of leukemia at seventeen (bad go, that had been, him being their only child and them being such nice people and all), fell over. A moment later a shredded hand with a moss-caked Yarmouth Academy class ring on one finger rose out of the ground, shoving through the tough grass. The third finger had been torn off in the process.
The ground heaved like (like the belly of a pregnant woman getting ready to drop her load, Dave almost said, and hastily reconsidered) a big wave rolling into a close cove, and then the boy himself sat up, only he wasn’t anything you could really recognize, not after almost two years in the ground. There were little splinters of wood sticking out of what was left of his face, Davey said, and pieces of shiny blue cloth in the draggles of his hair. “That was coffin-linin,” Davey told her, looking down at his restlessly twining hands. “I know that as well’s I know m’own name.” He paused, then added: “Thank Christ Mike’s dad dint have that trick.”
Maddie had nodded.
The men on guard, bullshit-scared as well as revolted, opened fire on the reanimated corpse of the former high-school chess champion and All-Star second baseman, tearing him to shreds. Other shots, fired in wild panic, blew chips off his marble gravestone, and it was just luck that the armed men had been loosely grouped together when the festivities commenced; if they had been divided up into two wings, as Bob Daggett had originally intended, they would very likely have slaughtered each other. As it was, not a single islander was hurt, although Bud Meechum found a rather suspicious-looking hole torn in the sleeve of his shirt the next day.
“Prob’ly wa’ant nothin but a blackberry thorn, just the same,” he said. “There’s an almighty lot of em out at that end of the island, you know.” No one would dispute that, but the black smudges around the hole made his frightened wife think that his shirt had been torn by a thorn with a pretty large caliber.
The Fournier kid fell back, most of him lying still, other parts of him still twitching… but by then the whole graveyard seemed to be rippling, as if an earthquake were going on there—but only there, noplace else.
Just about an hour before dusk, this had happened.
Burt Dorfman had rigged up a siren to a tractor battery, and Bob Daggett flipped the switch. Within twenty minutes, most of the men in town were at the island cemetery.
Goddam good thing, too, Dave Eamons said, because a few of the deaders almost got away. Old Frank Daggett, still two hours from the heart attack that would carry him off just as the excitement was dying down, organized the new men so they wouldn’t shoot each other, either, and for the final ten minutes the Jenny boneyard sounded like Bull Ru
n. By the end of the festivities, the powder smoke was so thick that some men choked on it. The sour smell of vomit was almost heavier than the smell of gunsmoke… it was sharper, too, and lingered longer.
And still some of them wriggled and squirmed like snakes with broken backs—the fresher ones, for the most part.
“Burt,” Frank Daggett said. “You got them chainsaws?”
“I got em,” Burt said, and then a long, buzzing sound came out of his mouth, a sound like a cicada burrowing its way into tree bark, as he dry-heaved. He could not take his eyes from the squirming corpses, the overturned gravestones, the yawning pits from which the dead had come. “In the truck.”
“Gassed up?” Blue veins stood out on Frank’s ancient, hairless skull.
“Yeah.” Burt’s hand was over his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Work y’fuckin gut all you want,” Frank said briskly, “but toddle off n get them saws while you do. And you… you… you… you…”
The last “you” was his grandnephew Bob.
“I can’t, Uncle Frank,” Bob said sickly. He looked around and saw five or six of his friends and neighbors lying crumpled in the tall grass. They had not died; they had swooned. Most of them had seen their own relatives rise out of the ground. Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen tree had been part of the crossfire that had cut his late wife to ribbons; he had fainted after observing her decayed, worm-riddled brains exploding from the back of her head in a grisly gray splash. “I can’t. I c—”
Frank’s hand, twisted with arthritis but as hard as stone, cracked across his face.
“You can and you will, chummy,” he said.
Bob went with the rest of the men.
Frank Daggett watched them grimly and rubbed his chest, which had begun to send cramped throbs of pain all the way down his left arm to the elbow. He was old but he wasn’t stupid, and he had a pretty good idea what those pains were, and what they meant.
“He told me he thought he was gonna have a blow-out, and he tapped his chest when he said it,” Dave went on, and placed his hand on the swell of muscle over his own left nipple to demonstrate.
The Living Dead Page 33