by Sandy Nathan
Sam felt rage burst up from his boots. His hands closed into fists. Who did that little snot think he was? Pick your favorite wife and three kids? Leave the rest to die? He took a step toward Jeremy.
“That’s close enough,” Arthur said, stepping between them. Arthur moved silently, all in black, looking the commando he was. He wore a gun belt bristling with weapons and held a long, black stick in his hand. Sam kept coming, too enraged to stop.
“Da!” Ru cried. But it was too late.
Sam found himself on the floor with Arthur standing over him, holding the stick in both hands. His ears rang. Blood ran down the side of his head. Fighting Arthur was no use. He was better than all the general’s men combined. He hid in a suit and a driver’s hat, and none of the Russians suspected what he was. It was the villagers who saw Arthur and Jeremy spar. Sam could beat Arthur if he got his hands on him, but, suited up and ready, nah. No one could beat him.
Sam felt his will giving way. No one would get into the shelter unless Jeremy said they could. Arthur would kill the whole village, despite how friendly he’d seemed through the years.
He sat up, head aching where Arthur had popped him. Enraged, he dropped any pretense of speaking proper English. “OK, Mr. Egerton. How many o’ us get in, now tha’ th’ scientists ain’t comin’?” He dipped his head like a servant, wanting to kill Jeremy and Arthur.
“How many of you are there?” Jeremy looked stony eyed. Sam realized he would have left most of the village to fry if the geniuses had come. Rage came up again; he hated Jeremy. Arthur’s hand went to his pistol. Sam bowed his head and talked civil, like he always did to those of the big house. But he said what he’d wanted to say all his life.
“Ah dunnoh, Mr. Egerton. We ain’t got a school. Not a one of us can read or count, thanks to you and the lady thinkin’ so much of us that ye forgot t’ send a teacher out. Ah c’n count us out on a stick or pull everyone out and you an’ the geniuses can count us proper...” He stopped talking and stood there, jaws locked, breath going in and out between his teeth.
“Is this another time like th’ med’cine t’ stop the spots? Is this like that?” he spit out. “R’member when the spots come here a few years back?”
Jeremy’s jaw dropped. Sam saw that the little bugger knew exactly what he was saying. They were like slaves, the people of the village. Worked for her, worked for Jeremy. Got a share of the crops, fought off marauders. In return, they got to stay in the barns, forgotten until the Egertons wanted to have a day in the country.
Long years before, the lady had sent a nurse out. She had given them all shots so they wouldn’t get sick. Some fierce sicknesses ran around the Hamptons, things his healin’ couldn’t touch. So they got shots. The lady forgot to send a nurse out again, for the batch of littl’uns that came along.
When the spots came back, the babies were mowed down. He lost four of his children. Twenty-eight died. Those that lived had marks on their faces from it.
The lady forgot to send the nurse back to take care of the babies. Just like she forgot to send the teacher every year.
“Is this like that, Mr. Egerton?” He hoped that skinny monkey could feel how much he hated him. “Takin’ care of the village like wi’ the spots?”
“Oh, Sam. I’m so sorry. That was a terrible mistake. My mother didn’t mean—”
“Ye were wee, Mr. Egerton, too little t’ know. Ah don’ blame ye. But wha’ about Henry, Mr. Egerton? An’ th’ rest? The lady’s butler and maid and all o’ them? Were they froze up so they didn’t know what was happenin’? Was there no news o’ th’ village on yer tellie?”
Jeremy deflated. “No. It’s not like that, Sam.” But it was, both of them knew. The villagers weren’t good enough. “We can’t save everyone. Everyone’s going to die, all over the world. And so will the people going into the shelter, eventually. We hoped that we’d be able to leave descendants that were the best humanity could produce... a super race.”
Sam’s jaw clenched and released. His people weren’t good enough to save.
“But it’s not like that now, Sam. Look, the shelter can hold one hundred people. If there are fewer than a hundred of you, we can all fit in. We’ll make the new super race.”
“Aye. Th’ super race. Me an’ ma people.” Sam stared at Jeremy. “Th’ village will have its day.” A bit of the Voice crept into his speech. He’d never used it on the Egertons, never acted aught but their faithful dog. “We’ll see wha’ kind o’ world comes then.”
37
“Knock that off! Don’t you ever do that to me.” Jeremy jumped when he heard Sam’s Voice. He’d heard him use it with the villagers and others from the Hamptons, and on the general’s men, too. They’d never known what hit them; they did what Sam wanted, without thought.
“This is my shelter, Sam, not yours. I built it. You couldn’t build it to save your soul. If the village is saved, it will be by me, on my terms. That sounds tough, and it is tough. You know the diseases that your people have. You have people who can’t even talk, they’re so disabled. What about the ones who rage and attack? They kill people. Is that what you want for a new world?”
Sam looked down, backing off the tiniest bit. Jeremy kept banging on him. He didn’t know if he could withstand Sam’s Voice for very long and didn’t want to try. “Do you know why I didn’t tell you what we were building?”
“Yeah, ah do. Y’ wanted t’ lock us out.”
“That’s not it, entirely. I couldn’t tell you. If I told even you what we were building, it would have been all over that honky-tonk in Jamayuh before the sun set. The next day, everyone in the Hamptons would have known. The feds would have come in and all of you would be in camps. Me, too. You aren’t to be trusted.”
“Oh,” was all Sam could say. If the hooch was on him, he’d blab.
“Only the people here knew about the shelter, and my mom and the general. The scientists knew about it, but not totally and not where it was. They knew enough to design parts of it, but not enough so that they could be tortured into saying where it was.” Jeremy’s eyes grabbed Sam’s.
“My mom knew. She paid for a lot of this, and got loans for the rest.” Jeremy laughed. “She got a federal grant from the president. She said it was a theme park and he believed her. She told him the computers were to run the rides!” Jeremy laughed in a short, angry burst. “And the general knew. He had his own plans for the shelter.
“My mom saw what was coming. She told me to say good-bye to you for her. She said she was glad you had been friends. She wanted to save you.” When Jeremy said that, Sam jerked like he’d been struck. “She cared about you, even if she didn’t seem to, sometimes.
“So, there it is. You’re invited to live here to escape the holocaust tomorrow. But I have some rules. We’ll get to those. I want to see if Rupert can ID that missile.
“Rupert, come up next to me.” Rupert did what he was told, leaning away like Jeremy might bite him.
Jeremy typed furiously at one of the computers, pulling up images of nuclear installations. “These weapons were produced both before and after Tsar Yuri took over in 2097. The installations he supposedly got rid of would be like these.” Long tube-shaped things filled the screen, and rockets pointing into the air from concrete craters. “Take a good look, Rupert. Tell me if you see one that looks like what’s in Jamayuh.”
Rupert looked carefully. “That one.” He pointed to an image. “Tha’s it. Bu’ it had a long one lyin’ on the ground, too.” He pulled out a paper and handed it to Jeremy. It was a sketch of the missile on the screen, letters and numbers carefully inscribed in the margins. Another missile lay horizontally.
“Son of a bitch. There weren’t supposed to be any of those east of the Mississippi. They moved the installations around.”
“What does that mean?” Henry asked.
“It’s the final confirmation. A WDC154 down the road confirms that the party’s on and can’t be stopped. Whoever set up the big game we’ve been livi
ng in, wired it to destruct. This is Tsar Yuri’s doing.” Jeremy’s face was grim. “I bet that the world leaders have gotten good-bye messages from him. I bet he’s been playing some game with us since the Second Revolution.”
Jeremy pointed at the screen. “That’s not a weapon of defense. It’s a weapon of offense, with two heads. One’s pointed at Russia, which will retaliate if there’s anyone left alive to shoot back, and the other is pointed at New York City. The wind patterns will bring the fallout right here. When the warhead on the ground blows, it will make a crater. All the dirt in that crater will be radioactive. The mushroom cloud will lift it and deposit it over this area. This is the worst-case scenario.”
“Oh.” The group deflated audibly.
“I’ve got to contact my other cells and say good-bye.” He turned to Sam. “If my friends were able to build their shelters, we may have company in the new world. Give me a couple of minutes.
“Arthur, would you show Sam what the general left? I’ll open the vaults up for you.
“Sam, take a good look at what Arthur shows you. I’ve got some rules that everyone going into the shelter will have to swear to live by. You’ll see why.”
38
Val jumped every time a leaf hit the windshield. The GPS hadn’t worked since they’d passed the third checkpoint. It kept showing houses and neighborhoods. A college.
“What are we going to do, Josh?” She looked over at him. Something leapt onto the running board on his side of the vehicle, howling. She screamed before she could stop herself. Some kind of animal was banging on Josh’s window, trying to get in. She thought it was an ape, but it was wearing clothes. It kept scratching at the window and shrieking. “Use my gun,” she said, raising her arm so he could get to her holster.
Josh put the gun’s muzzle against the window and shot it in the belly. The thing fell away. She punched the gas pedal again, ramming her way forward. She’d been using the car’s hover mode, but now she put the wheels down fast. They needed all the power they could get. The car fishtailed; she wasn’t used to driving a wheeled vehicle. Trees beat at the windshield, lashed the windows. The forest was pitch black outside their headlights’ beams.
The creatures started coming out of the trees, running down the hill. They were people, she realized. Strange, rustic people like those she had seen in history books. They had coats made of hides, big hats. Boots.
They were coming at them from everywhere. Men and women ran into the SUV. They screamed and waved at them, talking in gibberish, and pointing behind them and up the hill. She didn’t know how many there were or what they wanted. They looked terrified.
“Uh hant!” she heard. “Hant! Hant!”
“What’s a hant?” she asked Josh. He shook his head. They plowed ahead. The hill remained on the right and the ground dropped off on the left, but the headlights illuminated a wide swath of space. Then they saw the “hant,” hovering in space, searching for new victims.
Its face was wider than a football field. Brilliant, hateful eyes scanned the forest from the sky. Its vicious teeth snapped and flashed. Hair flowed off the face like clouds, rippling out past the area she could see. The thing plucked one of the people running toward them off the ground, then tossed him into the air and caught him in its teeth. They could hear the crunching of bones inside the car.
She tried to turn around, veering the SUV downhill toward the river. Even with its wheels down, the car spun in the gravel and started fishtailing, then stalled. She worked to get it going again.
Josh screamed, “Get us out of here!”
The car tipped slowly downhill as the ignition caught, and shot forward over the incline when the hant hit them. It picked up the vehicle in its jaws, shook it and threw it down the hill. The SUV bounced, flipped, and kept flipping, all the way to the river. She was thrown out—she hadn’t put on her seat belt.
Neither had Josh. She watched him fly through the windshield into the monster’s jaws. It tossed him, but, before it could devour him, the SUV hit the rocks, going up like an inferno. The extra gas she’d loaded into the back blew. She didn’t know whether the explosion or the monster killed Josh.
Val crept down the hill. She’d lost one shoe and the other had a broken heel. She could hear the river below her. She couldn’t walk because sticks and broken tree trunks stuck up everywhere. When she found a pair of legs sticking out of the dirt, she thought the exploding car had killed whoever it was. The feet sported almost new lace-up boots. “Sorry, buddy,” Val said. “I need these. You can’t use them.”
She untied the boots and pulled to get them off. Legs pulled out of the soft dirt. Just legs—no body attached. She looked around and discovered hands emerging from the dirt and parts of more people sticking out of shallow graves. She fought back hysteria. A movement above revealed the hant hovering in the sky, watching the forest. She cowered but couldn’t look away.
It looked like a giant version of one of those hairy little dogs that rich women have. But it was horrible. Val realized what the graveyard was: where the hant buried his bones.
She pulled the boots off the legs and put them on, scrambling down the hill and into the river. The Dog Master said that dogs couldn’t track in water.
39
Sam followed Arthur down another locked corridor at the back of the computer lab. The others clustered in front of the lab, waiting for Jeremy. Sam’s jaws clenched. He wanted to extract some revenge from the man who’d knocked him down, but he controlled himself. Arthur was still armed.
The hallway they traveled down provided its own problems. Sam had to force himself to walk along the passage. The place reeked of knowledge humans shouldn’t have. Arthur negotiated a couple of corners and stopped at a door. It opened—because Jeremy opened it from his command station, Sam knew. He was watching them. They entered a small room. Commando suits were hung on the walls. Helmets and weapons like Arthur carried were neatly stowed.
“Sam, I’m sorry about hitting you,” Arthur said. “I didn’t want to—but I will protect Jeremy. You’ll understand why what we’re doing is so important when you see what’s behind this door. I wish this stuff didn’t exist.” Arthur led him to another round door in a steel wall. “The general gave everything here to Jeremy to use after the radiation clears. Jeremy’s descendants are supposed to come out of the shelter and take over the United States with this stuff.” The door swung inward.
Sam looked in. The room was a perfectly ordered munitions bay. Rifles mostly, sweet things. Beautiful things. Automatic and semiautomatic. Machine guns. Grenade launchers.
Arthur watched his reaction. “Like those? Take a look at this.” He walked through the bay, and stood before another door on the far side. It was buried far into the earth. “We’re here, Jeremy.” The door opened. Arthur stepped aside so Sam could look in.
He did so and then stepped back. “What is it?”
“The stuff in the big tanks up to the ceiling is bug spray,” Arthur replied. “Biological weapons. It will kill anything—plant or animal— that comes in contact with the littlest bit of it. Makes the nerve gas they used years ago look benign. Dump it in the river, you’ll kill everything the water touches, even from evaporation.
“Virotoxins are in the glass cases in the back. If they get into the air, everything dies. Plants and animals. The stuff behind the steel doors in the back is explosives. Big explosives. Not atomic, but not so far from it. The guns back there deliver the whole mess. They’ll shoot accurately for five miles. That’s handheld. If you mount them properly, they’ll hit targets hundreds of miles away. You can arm them with the virotoxins and bug spray. Those are weapons of mass destruction, but not nuclear.”
“Close th’ door.” Sam put his hand over his eyes. “Why would any have such things?”
“The general has his own stash hidden in Russia and probably other places, too. At the end of the war, he and his son plan on making their way over here. Jeremy’s forces will meet them with this. They’ll take ove
r the world, and things will be just like they are now, except the general will control everything.
“He thinks Jeremy’s too afraid to do anything but follow orders. But he doesn’t know how bright Jer is, or how tough.”
“Jeremy has a plan?”
“Yeah. It involves you. Let’s go back and Jeremy will tell you.” Arthur stopped and looked at Sam. “You see why we’re so uptight?” Sam nodded. “If the village is living down here and folks want to shoot off some guns for the joy of it—don’t do it. If you hit one of those tanks, you’d be dead before you could blink.”
They came back to the computer lab, threading their way through narrow corridors. Jeremy had just finished notifying his other cells. The computers’ screens lit him, and his hair stuck out wildly. He seemed more an apparition than a boy Sam had known all his life. He’s a Tek, Sam said to himself, not a wizard. A Tek.
Jeremy looked up, still in full work mode. His eyes blazed. “Arthur, you want to wait with the others? I need to talk to Sam.”
“Of course, Jeremy. We’ll be right out front.” Arthur opened the door and joined the others on the far side of the glass and steel walls.
“Did you get the scene, Sam?” Jeremy’s eyes drilled into him.
“Yes’r.” Sam turned his hat in his hands, feeling more out of place. What business had he with this kind of power?
“Sam, you’re up to it. I’ve watched you operating around the village. You’re a master at using power. You’re a leader. I know you act dumb around us and do your yokel act to get away with things. I don’t know how things got so screwed up between the village and the big house, but I’m sorry. We need to change things fast.
“That thing about the vaccine is the worst thing I’ve heard of. I always thought it was my fault. I was a baby. I thought if my mom hadn’t had me to take care of, she would have thought about the village more. But then I realized I’d always had nannies. She just forgets about things—really important things, like vaccines—and me. If we could just get over all that right now...”