They finally managed to corral the thing in a recently harvested field where it had no chance for cover; Yost piled out and ran through the stubble in a crouch, hoping to get closer with the M79 without getting shot by some freckle-faced deputy.
That was when the creature began to turn in circles like a dog getting ready to bed down.
But it didn’t bed down. It just kept turning faster, then faster and faster, until it was spinning in place like some wicked cross between a garden sprinkler and a Gatling gun.
Yost hit the deck reflexively, hearing the clamorous sound of his team being pelted with their own projectiles. Recycled shrapnel zinged and whanged off the BearCat’s half-inch armor and ballistic glass. Spent rounds whizzed back over his head like angry insects. Windows shattered out of county prowlers; bullet holes marched across doors. Bodies fell like spouting dominos.
Then the dust cleared, and the BearCat was somehow airborne, landing on its roof with a ground-trembling crash a hundred yards away.
‘Lawler!’ Yost barked into the com set on his shoulder, scrambling to his feet even as the green-eyed thing turned slowly his way. ‘Johnson! Dunn! Report!’
Empty static from the ’Cat.
Also, Troop A SWAT Sergeant Andy Yost couldn’t help noticing a curious dark shadow spreading around his own boots.
Ben stood at the passenger door of Christine’s Highlander and waited for Charley to climb in the back. When was the last time the three of them had been in a car together? Three years? Four? He couldn’t even remember. ‘What the hell are you grinning about?’
‘It’s like we’re going on vacation,’ Charley said.
‘If you think jail sounds like a vacation, sure.’
‘You won’t go to jail, I bet.’
‘That’s very reassuring.’
‘If you do, I’ll come visit you on my birthday.’
‘I forgot to tell you. Your birthday’s canceled. Get in.’
When everybody was settled, Christine backed out of the parking area and headed for the access road. ‘Lakeside has an ER,’ she said. ‘We’ll be there in ten minutes if game traffic hasn’t let out.’
‘Definitely not,’ Ben said. ‘Get back on 80 and head south.’
‘You aren’t driving, so don’t try to drive.’
‘I’m not arguing this, either. You can’t take me anywhere I haven’t already been.’
‘Why?’
‘Because things are bad enough already, that’s why. I’m being followed.’
‘By who?’
‘Oh my god,’ Charley said from the back. ‘Mom, you should have seen these guys. They were all like …’
‘Ben? Who is he talking about?’
‘It doesn’t matter right now,’ Ben said. ‘All that matters is keeping me and the tire slasher back there away from people until Abe calls.’
Christine turned out on to Fishery Road, heading back toward Highway 31. ‘I guess I’ll just keep asking, then: who is Abe?’
‘I like her,’ Charley said. ‘She’s hot.’
This raised an eyebrow. ‘She?’
‘Trust me,’ Ben said. ‘I’m way too young for her.’
‘Whatever you say. We’re still getting you to a hospital.’
‘Go north and I’ll bail. Seriously.’ Ben sat up in the seat. The movement made his head pound. What was left of his nose throbbed mercilessly in response. ‘Just head toward my place. I’ll call Curnow on the way. Between here and Mo Valley, maybe the cops have found enough by now to actually listen to my crazy story.’
‘Our crazy story,’ Charley said.
It broke Ben’s heart a little, how cheerful the kid seemed, now that the three of them were together. On the other hand, so what? After the day they’d had, he deserved a little cheer, even if it didn’t last. ‘Anyway. Francesca’s probably there. So you’re duty-bound as a responsible stepmother to follow my instructions.’
Christine was silent a long moment. Then she sighed. ‘God help us.’
Ben chuckled. ‘I’m sure going to miss you.’
She put on her blinker, braked to a stop, looked both ways. ‘Why? Am I going somewhere?’
Ben looked at her.
‘Atlanta is off,’ she said, turning cautiously on to the highway. ‘Tony called me first thing this morning. He said he turned it down.’
Ben felt a tingle. He caught a flash in the rearview mirror: Charley pumping his fist in the backseat. He said, ‘Oh?’
‘He said he couldn’t do it to you.’
‘To me?’
‘He’s a divorced father too, you know. He said he tried to imagine his ex moving across the country with Frankie and decided he wasn’t going to be that guy.’
Ben didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t even know what to feel about it. So he just sat there, throbbing.
‘He’s a good guy, Ben. You’d like him if you gave him half a chance. His favorite band is The Who, for god’s sake.’
‘Jesus, I hope this monster kills me.’
Charley laughed in the back. ‘Dad.’
‘Monster?’ Christine said.
Ben was pondering his response as they approached the ramp. But a curious sight stopped him:
A convoy of three National Guard Humvees, blasting north on the interstate. Just as they rumbled past, he heard an alarming sound overhead. Ben ran down his window, stuck his head out, and looked up. He saw two T-38 training jets screaming across the sky in tight formation, coming from the general direction of Offut AFB.
Heading toward a towering column of heavy black smoke in the far distance.
His blood ran cold. That wasn’t just a figure of speech, Ben realized: his blood literally felt cold in his veins.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said to the wind.
TWENTY-NINE
What started as a rush against the sunset became a desperate race against a catastrophe-in-progress.
Even with half the leaves in the forest on the ground instead of over their heads, it got darker faster in the timber than under the open sky. And then there were half the leaves in the forest on the ground to contend with.
Despite the hastily woven search net comprising herself, First Floor IT, Deputy Curnow, Agents Battis and West, four temporarily reallocated crime scene technicians, and four eager television news reporters wearing inappropriate footwear, Anabeth had begun to despair of ever finding the Shepherd Stone, let alone finding it in time to minimize the disaster currently unfolding fifteen miles to the north of Ben Middleton’s property.
They needed more bodies. They needed those pole-mounted floodbanks that turned construction sites and crime scenes from night into day. They needed a break.
Be careful what you wish for, Anabeth would think later, long after the first voice called out: ‘What’s that?’
Another voice: ‘What’s what?’
‘That! It’s …’
‘Did somebody toss a cigarette?’
‘Stamp it out! It’s nothing but kindling back here!’
‘Found it!’ yet another voice shrieked, and Anabeth was sprinting, rushing to the stranger now holding the Shepherd Stone in her hands. The stranger happened to be one of the news reporters who’d joined in the search, her hair still sprayed almost perfectly in place, even after tromping around out here in the trees. ‘It was … I swear, that thing was glowing. Pete! Are you getting this?’
‘Give it to me,’ Anabeth said. Her voice sounded hoarse, unfamiliar to her own ears.
‘God, that smells awful,’ the reporter said, wrinkling her nose in distaste as she handed the stone over. In the background, Pete the photographer scrambled to grab his gear from where he’d stashed it at the base of a huge bur oak. Anabeth had admonished them all: Put those cameras down and help us. ‘I saw it glowing through the leaves. It looked like a hot coal or something. But it was ice cold!’
Not to Anabeth.
To Anabeth, the stone felt warm.
Just like always.
She sank to her
knees on the forest floor. It was as if a great weight pressed her down. Her chest felt tight. Now tighter. Like a steel band constricting her ribs.
The stone had glowed. It had flared like embers, like a beacon, bright enough to be noticed in the dim, dusky light. And then it had faded.
Now a dark spot appeared on its surface, followed by another, then another. These faded too, slowly, as the cursed old clay absorbed Anabeth’s tears.
Reuben, she thought, struck low by a sudden grief. She became dimly aware of Gordon and Jeremy and Devon at her side, but she had nothing for them. Nothing at all. Anabeth clutched the horrid stone to her breast and wept, knowing in her weary soul that this stroke of good fortune – this lucky break she’d wished for so keenly – could mean only one thing:
Somehow, somewhere, a water carrier had died.
THIRTY
On the evening of Saturday, October 17, under expedited emergency authorization from the Pentagon, in conjunction with the gubernatorial offices of Nebraska and Iowa, based on classified ground intelligence submitted with highest priority by the Federal Deviative Assessments Bureau, a pair of unmanned aerial vehicles engaged a confirmed non-human combatant at an evacuated truck and container yard near Chalco Hills Recreation Area, just southwest of the Omaha, Nebraska city limits.
The MQ-9 Reaper drones – scrambled out of Des Moines and operated remotely by the Iowa Air National Guard’s 132nd Fighter Wing – each carried two 100-pound Longbow Hellfire air-to-surface missiles at a unit cost of $16.9 million apiece. Range: 1,500 miles. Top air speed: 300 miles per hour. Projected media and public affairs fallout surrounding domestic drone strike policy: eight to thirty-six months. Estimated time-to-target: thirty-two minutes.
Anyway. That didn’t work, either.
‘Then tell them to stop shooting it!’ Ben yelled into the phone, craning for a better view out the window. ‘I’m almost there – you gotta get a message to somebody in charge. We’ll be the red Toyota Highlander with its hazard lights on. They need to clear us a path. And, Curnow?’
‘Still here,’ the deputy said in his ear.
‘Please drive faster.’
He hung up the phone as Christine raced along the wide shoulder, flashing past backed-up traffic, her knuckles white on the wheel. ‘Dear god,’ she whispered.
‘Wow,’ Charley said from the back.
‘Ben, what is happening here?’
They were driving into a war zone, that was what: soldiers, police, armored vehicles, choppers circling overhead. They plunged into a strobing haze of drifting smoke and flashing emergency lights. An oily, acrid smell seeped into the sealed car – the smell of a gasoline tanker driving into a dynamite plant on the Fourth of July.
Ben reached out and punched the hazard button as they approached the West Omaha exit. Through the smoke up ahead, he saw barricades. Road flares. A cordon made up of military fatigues and assault rifles.
‘Crap,’ he said, already ringing Deputy Curnow again.
Tom Curnow kept his pedal to the floor, roaring up the wrong side of Highway 6 toward Gretna with full lights and wailers. Agents Battis and West were hot on his tail in their government sedan. I-80 was a parking lot, with Saturday football traffic backed up for miles, and 6 wasn’t much better. But it was flat ground, with shoulder to work with. State patrol had everything moving south sealed off at Highway 370, with an escort of cruisers waiting to pick them up at Capeheart Road.
‘I understand that, son,’ he said to the Army Reserve E4 on the other end of the line. ‘No, I’m not in your chain of command. But I’m telling you: if that red Highlander is at your TCP, and if the guy who handed you that phone is named Middleton, then right now, Exit 440 is ground zero. You’re all sitting ducks. You bet I’ll stand by.’
He glanced over at the Glass girl while he waited. She was hunched in the passenger seat, scraping furiously at her crazy rock with the multi-tool from Curnow’s gear belt. ‘What are you doing with that thing, anyway?’
‘What I should have done weeks ago,’ she said. ‘Tampering with the universe.’
From what Tom could see in quick glimpses, ‘tampering with the universe’ appeared to mean trying like hell to scrape out the foreign-looking inscription carved into the clay.
‘No,’ she specified. ‘Just the aleph.’
‘The what?’
‘The first letter.’
‘Why?’
‘Because emet means truth,’ she said. ‘And met means death.’
As crazy as it was to admit it, Curnow thought he understood. She was attempting to convert this magic rock of hers from a control module into a kill switch – not unlike converting a semi-automatic rifle into a fully automatic machine gun by filing down the firing pin. Curnow saw only one problem: all that stuff about filing down a firing pin was a bunch of crocked-up, soldier-of-fortune nonsense that only worked in the movies. ‘And you’re pretty sure that’s going to do the trick?’
‘Let’s hope we get a chance to find out,’ she said, scraping all the harder.
Her entire outward persona had changed since the forest. This same young woman who’d shrugged off a Taser jolt like it was no big deal between friends had become all business: terse, tense, ultra-focused, stoic as the warrior her combat boots might have suggested, were they not covered in paintball splotches.
This new mode of hers hadn’t changed even after they’d gotten word from Sheriff Prescott about the teenager in the Subaru and her unconscious passenger – one Reuben Wasserman from Chicago, according to his Illinois-issued driver’s license.
His pulse had been so thready and weak on arrival that Prescott had radioed immediately for medical. Wasserman had flatlined in the ambulance shortly after Tiff and Roy Webber arrived on site. They’d gotten him back with the paddles, but he’d coded again twice in traffic. He didn’t seem responsive to the vasopressin/epinephrine cocktail they’d loaded into his system. It was touch and go, with no available airlift, and Tiff hadn’t sounded optimistic on the phone. Glass called Wasserman her cousin, although Tom suspected that was bullshit. Why she was lying, he couldn’t have guessed.
But it didn’t matter. Wasserman was Tiff’s concern.
Tom’s concern – though he still had trouble accepting it – was the thing wreaking havoc up at Exit 440 like some old-fashioned drive-in creature feature come to life.
That, and the unusual young woman scraping a rock with his multi-tool like she was trying to start a fire in the rain.
‘Listen,’ he told her. ‘For what it’s worth, lots of people have tried dying on Tiff. Very few ever succeed. My money says your cousin pulls through.’
Glass responded by banging the tool against his dashboard, blowing clay dust from its jaws, and resuming her scraping.
Then the corporal came back on the line.
‘Still here,’ Tom said. ‘Affirmative. Take ’em into custody if you have to, just get them moving west on 370 and we’ll meet you in the mid … Jesus, what … Exit 440, do you copy?’
But nobody seemed to be receiving just then. Tom winced and took the phone away from his ear, the conversation suddenly ended by the sudden rattle of M16 fire on the other end of the line.
National Guard troops had cordoned off Exit 440 at both ends: the off-ramp on one side, 144th Street on the other, creating a muster zone in between. While the corporal spoke to Deputy Curnow on Ben’s phone, his fellow citizen-soldiers ushered them through the first set of barricades, which they closed again behind the Highlander, culling them from stalled traffic into a kind of extended sally port.
Or a holding pen.
Ben first saw the motorcycle through his open window: a big Victory bagger in full touring dress. It came over the roofline of the bike dealer’s showroom directly on their right, separated from their position by a grassy ditch and a low chain-link fence. The bike sailed through the air in a flat, riderless spin, landing with a crash fifty feet in front of them. It skidded across the pavement, sending up a comet tail of sparks, s
cattering Guard troops like digital-camo bowling pins.
‘Holy shit!’ Charley cried.
Christine’s eyes couldn’t have opened any wider. ‘What in God’s name …’
Then everybody was shooting, drowning everything else in a chattering cacophony of automatic weapons fire.
‘Get out of the car!’ Ben shouted at them, shoving Christine toward her door as he shouldered open his own, his pellet wounds stinging along to a single, vivid picture in his mind: a memory of his own kitchen. Specifically, what had happened there this morning, after he’d unloaded on the creature with the shotgun.
He threw open the back, dragging Charley out, shoving him down to the ground. Christine appeared around the front end, her face flushed and terrified, hair flying. He shoved her down, too, shouting with as much force as his lungs would produce over the deafening machine-gun fire all around them: ‘Get under!’
Charley scrambled instantly, crawling under the Highlander on his belly, Christine following right on the soles of those sneakers she’d painted for him by hand. Ben hit the deck himself just as projectiles began slamming themselves into the body paneling above him like kamikaze June bugs, perforating the sheet metal, turning the Highlander into a colander.
The continuous static of gunfire shorted out into sporadic bursts. Ben now heard screaming. Radio chatter. Boots pounding pavement, commands to hold all fire. A long, keening wail of agony somewhere nearby.
And then he heard something else he remembered very well from this morning. A mind-erasing sound, directly behind him.
Somewhere between crashing jetliner and fallen asteroid.
Accompanied by a seismic tremor that opened up a crack in the very pavement beneath his cheek.
Anabeth first saw the motorcycle on the north side of Gretna: a race replica sport bike sitting in the long line of traffic backed up at the state patrol barricade.
Kill Monster Page 25