Day of the Delphi
Page 39
The shape stirred slightly. His eyes opened: uncertain, wavering, frightened. His lips began to take in the tea.
“That’s it. There we go. Not too fast now.”
Denbo pulled the cup away and McBride was left with dark brown droplets washing the sand off his chin. His lips trembled, then opened, moving.
“I think he’s trying to talk, Wayne,” Langhorn pronounced. “I think he’s trying to say something.”
Denbo moved his right ear closer.
“Did you walk here from home, Mr. McBride? Did you walk here from Beaver Falls?”
The shape tried to force out a word and spit sand forth in its place. His hand latched desperately onto Denbo’s sleeve and drew the patrolman closer.
Joe Langhorn heard a muttered rasp, something like air bleeding from a tire. The rasp came again and then Wayne Denbo pulled away.
“What’d he say, Wayne?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, what’d you hear?”
Frank McBride was just lying there, not trying to talk anymore.
Denbo gulped down the rest of the tea himself. “One word.”
“What word, for the love of Christ?”
Denbo looked up from the empty cup. “Gone, Joe. I think he said gone.”
By the time the officers got him into the back of their patrol car, McBride was out again, eyelids jittering like a dreaming dog’s.
“What do you think he meant, Wayne?” raised Joe Langhorn. “What do you think he meant when he said gone?”
“Beaver Falls.”
“Huh?”
Denbo settled himself in the passenger seat. “I said Beaver Falls. Know anything about it?”
“Population of maybe a thousand. Nothing ’round it for miles. Folks live there like their privacy. Residents call it the Falls. Beaver got lost a long time ago.” Langhorn met Denbo’s stare and got the message. “Not on our patrol, that’s what you’re thinking.”
The senior man’s eyes tilted toward the backseat. “We should run him home.”
“Call it in’s what we should do. Stay with him while we wait for the ambulance to get here.”
“Forty minutes if we’re lucky,” Denbo told his partner.
“Long wait for a guy who maybe just needs to sleep one off.”
“He walked out of the desert.”
“Fight with his wife, maybe.”
“Way he’s dressed, that empty airline folder in his pocket, I’m thinking maybe he got home and saw something he didn’t like. Made him leave in a hurry.”
“Start the car, Joe,” Denbo ordered. “Beaver Falls is barely out of our way.”
Joe Langhorn never would have admitted it, but he breathed a silent sigh of relief when the town of Beaver Falls came into view. A part of him deep within had feared it was going to be … gone. Melted into the ground or reduced to rubble, like in some thriller novel they sold in the discount paperback section of Wal-mart. But it was there, rustic colors baking in the midday sun.
A squat collection of buildings no more than three stories high formed the town center along a half-mile drag. There was a church on one side of town. A K—12 school rested on the other. Couple restaurants, a bar, post office and bank. The single parking lot was half full.
Joe Langhorn snailed the squad car through the outskirts past some of the residents’ homes and headed into the center of town. He pulled into a parking space in front of the sheriff’s station marked RESERVED.
In the backseat Frank McBride shifted uneasily, threatening to come awake.
“Wait here,” Wayne Denbo instructed.
“The hell I will,” followed Langhorn, joining him on the hot pavement. They entered the sheriff’s office one behind the other.
It was empty. A cup of coffee that had long lost its steam sat on a big desk with a SHERIFF JOHN TOULAN nameplate. A half-eaten donut rested next to it on a napkin. There were three other desks and a counter for the receptionist/ dispatcher, all unoccupied.
“Musta left in a hurry,” said Langhorn.
Wayne Denbo moved behind the counter and reached for the microphone attached to the communications base unit. “Sheriff Toulan, this is the Arizona Highway Patrol. Come in, please. Over.”
Silence.
“Sheriff Toulan, come in, please. Over.”
More silence.
Langhorn and Denbo looked at each other. They started for the door.
“Maybe they’re out looking for McBride,” Langhorn offered.
Back in the street Denbo stiffened. “Look over there. ’Cross the street.”
Langhorn followed his eyes to an old-fashioned diner called Ruby’s dominated by a long counter.
“What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Right. Even though it’s lunchtime.”
Denbo started moving and Langhorn quickly followed him. Bells jangled when the senior cop entered the diner, presently lined by empty counter stools and unoccupied booths. Half of the stools had plates of breakfast food resting before them, most partially eaten. A blackboard advertised a western omelet special, and three orders with varying amounts left looked lonely in one of the booths.
Langhorn stuck his hand in a half-gone cup of coffee and swept his tongue across his fingers. “Hours old. Looks like they never got past breakfast, never mind lunch.”
“Enough time maybe for Mr. McBride to walk himself across the desert?”
“What the fuck, Wayne? What the fuck?”
They backed out through the door. The bells jingling startled Langhorn and he unsnapped his gun retainer.
“Let’s take a walk,” Denbo suggested.
In the post office, the lone counter had been abandoned with four letters resting atop it. Four stamps waited nearby to be licked.
The bank, too, was empty, the floor dotted with stray bills, a few checks, and deposit slips.
At Beaver Falls’ single filling station, a Chevy Cavalier waited at the pump with the nozzle from the regular slot jammed into its tank. The gas had come to an automatic stop. The Cavalier’s driver’s door was open, key still in the ignition and no driver to be found.
Each window Langhorn and Denbo passed, each closed door they stopped to knock on brought the same results: nothing.
Langhorn was palming his gun butt now, flirting with whether or not to draw it. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”
“Whatever it was musta happened fast.”
“Wayne, let’s get out of—”
“If they were all together, where would they be?” Denbo followed, his eyes drifting up the street toward the school.
“We got to call this in, Wayne.”
“One more thing to check.”
The school door closed behind them with a rattling clang. The main office was just on the right and Wayne Denbo led the way in.
Beyond the front counter, a trio of secretary’s desks were empty.
The two highway patrolmen advanced down the narrow hall separating the offices of the principals and guidance counselors. The first three were empty as well.
They moved on to a room packed with copying and mimeograph machines, attracted by a dull hum emanating from a space-age Xerox with multiple paper slots protruding from one side. The top slot had overflowed and spit neatly printed paper everywhere. The machine’s small LED readout flashed a continuous message:
PAPER OUT
The Mr. Coffee against the far wall brimmed with a steaming full pot. Three styrofoam cups had been set out as if to await its contents.
“Nothing,” Joe Langhorn said from the doorway. “Fucking nothing.”
“You take the back end of the building,” Wayne Denbo told him. “I’ll take the front.” He pulled the walkie-talkie from his belt. “Stay in touch.”
Judging by the maps dangling from the front wall in the first classroom he entered, Denbo figured this must be the school’s social studies section. Textbooks and notebooks lay open on unoccupied desks, some with pens dropped haphazardl
y upon them. What little of the blackboard the maps left exposed showed a sentence uncompleted, abandoned in the middle.
Denbo moved on to the next classroom.
Identical sheets rested atop each desk. Denbo stopped near one in the rear and hovered over the chair, as if the kid was still seated there. Social studies quiz. Twenty questions, all multiple choice. Junior high school stuff. Kid from this desk had gotten through the first nine.
“Wayne?” Langhorn’s voice called over the walkie-talkie.
“Here, Joe.”
“I’m in one of the science labs. It stinks down here. Got all kinds of stuff in vials and tubes left out. Instructions on the board saying what to do.”
“Don’t do anything. Don’t touch anything,” warned Denbo, worried about chemicals being left out that weren’t supposed to. He tried thinking about what it was like for Frank McBride. Back from a business trip to find his whole town missing. That had been hours ago. Maybe McBride had seen something then that might help decipher what had happened here in the Falls.
“Wayne, you there?”
“Yeah, Joe.”
“I’m heading your way. We’re calling this in. I’ve had e—”
The walkie-talkie went cold in Wayne Denbo’s hand. He brought it back to his lips.
“Joe? Come in, Joe, come in … .”
No response.
“Joe!”
Denbo was already sprinting down the hall. The stink Joe Langhorn had referred to, like rotten eggs, drew him toward the science labs.
“Joe,” he kept calling into his walkie-talkie. “Joe.”
“Joe.”
His own voice bounced back at him, and Denbo looked through the door of the second lab on the right. Joe Langhorn’s walkie-talkie lay on the floor, speaker facing up. Denbo backed into the corridor and drew his gun. His mouth felt like someone had papered it with Kleenex. He started running, heels clacking against the linoleum tile and contents of his gun belt bouncing up and down.
He burst through the front doors and reached the patrol car breathless, one hand on his knee as he reached for the door.
In the backseat the slumped form of Frank McBride was gone.
“Jesus,” he muttered, only halfway in when he grabbed the mike. “Base, this is Seventeen. Base, come in!”
“Go ahead, Seventeen,” returned dispatcher Harvey Milkweed.
Denbo muttered a silent thanks, glad there was still a voice out there to greet him.
“We got a situation here, a major situation.”
“What is your location, Seventeen?” asked Milkweed. “Are you requesting backup?” He’d rooted himself to a desk after a brief visit to the Gulf War left him with part of a land mine stuck in his leg. Milkweed hated the desk, missed situations.
“Backup? We need the whole goddamn national guard down here in a hurry. We need—Wait a minute … What the … Oh my God … Oh my—”
The hairs on Harvey Milkweed’s neck stood on end. He leaned forward in his chair.
“Seventeen, what’s going on? Seventeen, come in … . Denbo, what’s wrong?”
Milkweed waited.
“Denbo? Denbo, come in!”
There was no response, and Milkweed realized there wasn’t going to be.
Wayne Denbo was gone.
Jon Land is thirty-six years old and lives in Providence, Rhode Island where he is at work on his next bestseller for Tor, THE KINGDOM OF THE SEVEN.
Notes
1 Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, South End Press, Boston 1980.
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DAY OF THE DELPHI
Copyright © 1993 by Jon Land
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
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ISBN: 0-812-53434-4
Cover art by Paul Stinson
eISBN 9781429956871
First eBook Edition : July 2011
First Tor edition: November 1993