by P. J. Tracy
"Dead zone coming up," Harley s voice boomed through the RV intercom. "And this is a big one. We've got about five square miles to cover. Eyes front."
They all got up instantly and started to head for the front of the bus and the big windows. By the time they got there, Bonar and Harley were looking at a smear of smoke on the horizon.
"I wonder what's burning," Harley was saying.
Bonar shrugged. "Could be anything. Folks still burn garbage up this way, and every now and then, one of those hundred-year-old barns with hundred-year-old hay in it goes up. And it's been real dry. Could be a grass fire. Long way away, though."
Magozzi was half listening to their conversation, but most of his attention was focused on the road ahead and the passing countryside. It was a lot lighter now, and the sky was taking on that early-morning frosted-blue color that promises heat to come. He could see patches of woods, fallow fields, and not a single sign of human life anywhere. It seemed that you could call a place like this a dead zone for a lot of reasons.
His eyes kept going back to that smudge of gray on the horizon. For no good reason he could think of, the smoke bothered him.
BY THE TIME Hemmer and Acker got into Four Corners, the town wasn't quiet anymore. Dozens of shouting men had converged with shovels and hoses on the fire that had once been Dale's garage bay. There were still occasional minor explosions as something inside reached ignition point, but they were beating it.
Jesus, there was a lot of gasoline. An unbelievable amount of gasoline around the pumps and all over the road, but other men were shoveling dirt on it as fast as they could. To a civilian, it would have looked like mass confusion, but Hemmer recognized it for what it was-ordered chaos. Yes, it was loud, but there was no one for miles around to hear the noise, so that didn't bother Colonel Hemmer. The smoke cloud did.
The damn thing was huge; acrid, black smoke billowing into an enormous, oily, reeking mass spreading over the town like a visible, airborne cancer. It boiled into a huge cauliflower shape directly over the station while its edges sank toward the ground, a dark and deadly blanket settling onto a fiery bed. Soon enough, someone would see it and raise an alarm, if they hadn't already. But he didn't need a lot of time. The women in the house were the last loose end, and with the deputy dead, the last witnesses. Even if outsiders did come in, it was going to take them far too long to find out what had happened here. He glanced at his watch. The two trucks they had left on the road were already nearing their destinations. Innocent, lumbering things that looked like they belonged where they were going, and there they would sit, benign, unmanned, unnoticed-until ten hundred hours, when they would automatically send out a wake-up call that the whole world would hear.
Gagging against the smoke and the odious stench of burning rubber, Acker and Hemmer crept up to the house and slipped inside, their minds and bodies in full fighting mode. Well, not fighting exactly; this time, it would really be murder, but it was necessary. Christ. Goddamned women. Setting a gas station on fire as if it were a fucking flare and now they were cowering in a dark hole somewhere inside this house while his men were risking their lives trying to undowhatthose stupid bitches had done. . . .
Don't do that. Rage is a distraction. It slows reaction time and dulls the senses. Let it go.
Colonel Hemmer fought for control, but he kept a small bit of the rage going, too, so what he had to do would be easier. He wasn't a killer, not by nature, and he found no pleasure in it. But he had never shirked in his duty. Not once.
With the door closed behind them, the house was almost blessedly quiet after the din outside. He and Acker moved silently, carefully, like the soldiers they were, from room to room.
Hemmer shivered a little beneath his sweat-soaked shirt, disturbed beyond all reason that the house was so still, so oddly pristine, while all hell was breaking loose just outside. His thoughts galloped down that never-forgotten path of memory where he was lost in the blowing sand, separated from his unit until a smiling American soldier came out of nowhere to lead him to safety. Only it hadn't been a fellow soldier, and although the soldier looked and talked and dressed the part, he hadn't even been an American, not in the way it mattered. One goddamned turncoat in the entire U.S. Army, and he had managed to find Hemmer and lead him right to a cage in the middle of the desert, where things happened that he'd never told a living soul. He'd seen and felt the horrors of extremism in that cage, but that wasn't what had opened his eyes. It was the American who'd led him there.
Hemmer shuddered as that particular memory surfaced, sensing on some primal level that at this moment, the house he was standing in and that smiling American face, they were the same. Good and right on the outside, quivering with evil just beneath.
Something was wrong here, and for the first time in a long time, he was afraid.
He pushed that fear back, reminding himself that a lot of people would think what he was doing was evil. But they hadn't learned the lesson yet: that sometimes pure evil hides beneath apparent goodness, and sometimes it was the other way around. His own government hadn't learned that lesson yet. So dogmatic in their adherence to human rights that the founding fathers had mandated hundreds of years ago that they were afraid to take the single, pathetically simple action that would end the threat instantly. When people were trying to get into your country to destroy it, youclosed the goddamned door. It was so easy, and yet unbelievably, they wouldn't do it. So good Americans-faithful, loyal, patriotic Americans like Hemmer and allhis men-had to do it themselves, because the government had also forgotten another thing that the founding fathers had said about power reverting to the people when their government failed to provide protection: ". . , it is their right, it is their duty . . , to provide new Guards for their future security."
Hemmer and Acker found a few things that were glaringly out of order in the otherwise tidy kitchen. Acker's flashlight beam picked up brassy bits of shrapnel glinting from odd points all around the room-punched into the plaster and scattered across the counters and floor like tiny, sharp sequins flung at random, and the room was filled with mingled, rank smells. Empty metal skillets left on open flames, old fat smoking and vile, and something else elusive yet oddly familiar. Only the skillets weren't entirely empty. There were a few bits of brass in them as well.
"Oh, shit." Hemmer closed his eyes the moment he finally identified the strange, underlying odor as the gas that escaped from his grandmother's stove when the pilot light went out. But the pilot lights weren't out on this stove, because the burners were still producing flame.
It came together in a hurry. The women were not in this house- they'd left long ago. And the bullets that went off in here hadn't come from any gun. They'd been fired from two goddamned stupid skillets, and at least one of them had pierced a gas line.
He could almost imagine narrow streams of invisible vapor shooting from tiny cuts in the line, gathering in a dense mass in the confined area of the stove, sinking inexorably toward the burners.
And then, very suddenly, he didn't have to imagine anymore.
THE SOLDIERS fighting the fire in the garage bay had been feeling pretty good about themselves. By the time the Colonel was finished in the house, he would be very pleased to find the fire almost totally under control. And sure, the sky was lightening by the minute, but the coming dawn had brought a breeze with it, and already the huge cloud of black smoke was beginning to dissipate. By full sunrise, it would look like the remnants of a smoky garbage fire.
And then something inside the house had exploded, and the back half of the building seemed to suck in a huge breath and swallow itself. That was the funny part-that the damn thing had seemed to explode inward. And the Colonel and Acker were still in there.
A few of the stunned soldiers called out and made hesitant moves toward the house, but others had their eyes lifted skyward, watching in horror as minor debris from the roof-pieces of flaming shingles, mostly-initially flew away from the blast, over their heads, and into the forest.
More ominous yet were the ones floating down toward the lake of gas that had collected on the other side of the pumps and spread onto the road. They'd shoveled dirt between the garage bay and the pumps, soaking up what they thought was the immediate danger, but they hadn't worried about the gas out by the road. Hadn't they been silly.
THE SOUND of the explosion stopped the women in their halting run through the still-dark woods. They were all breathing hard from both panic and exertion, and sweat soaked their clothes and streamed down their faces the instant they stopped moving.
They turned and looked back toward the town, eyes lifting to see the tower of fire they had hoped for. "Damn," Grace said softly.Something had exploded, but it hadn't been all that loud, and she could barely see the new fire through the trees. Even the oily cloud from the initial fire was beginning to dissipate. There wasn't a chance in hell that someone miles away would think it was worth traveling to.
"Was that the pumps?" Annie asked, and Grace shook her head.
"The pumps won't blow. Too many safeguards. Something in the garage, maybe. It's probably not going to bring in help, but our chances of getting out are a whole hell of a lot better. Keep your eyes open, though, just in case they left some soldiers out here somewhere." She turned and started running through the forest again.
So help was not on the way-no fire trucks, no police cars, no gawkers, bless them all, coming to see the show, because the plan hadn't worked. The goddamned fire hadn't been big enough.
It was a bitter pill for Annie. As independent and self-reliant as she was, this was one time when even she wished the cavalry would come riding over the hill-preferably with a martini.
She kept trying to swallow, but she didn't have enough saliva left to soothe the soreness in her throat. They should have stopped for a drink. Yes, indeedy, that's what they should have done. Stopped somewhere between cooking bullets and committing arson to have a glass of iced tea or something.
She wondered how far they had come and, at the angle they'd traveled, how much farther before they'd hit the highway that they'd been on when the car had broken down. My God. She'd almost forgotten the car breaking down. Was that only yesterday?
Dodgeball,Grace thought, twisting and weaving through the spindly trunks of second- and third-generation pines packed closely together, starving for light beneath the canopy of their giant parents. A great many of them were already long dead, canted and leaning against their siblings, propped up in a sorry parody of life simply because there wasn't room to fall down. Kindling waiting for flame.
She misstepped only once and stumbled, but Annie's voice was quick behind her.
"Careful, careful!"
Grace almost smiled at that, even though she kept right on running. Annie was protecting her again. (You've got to eat more. You're not sleeping enough. You didn't wear a hat? What is this? You think pneumonia is a joke?) She hadn't seen that side of Annie since this whole nightmare had started. It was almost as if Four Corners had sucked away part of her identity, and it was only now, as they were finally leaving that place behind, that the old Annie was coming back.
After five minutes of running, even Grace, who was in amazing physical condition, felt a searing pain in her side, and every breath she drew seemed to contain less and less oxygen. They hadn't covered very much ground-the woods had been damn near impassable at first-but she felt like they'd been running for hours.
"Stop .. ." She heard Annie panting breathlessly from a few yards behind her. "I've . . , got.., to .., stop .., for just a minute."
They all stumbled to a halt and just stood there with their heads bowed, chests heaving, breath rasping through dry throats. Finally, they turned and looked back the way they had come. They listened for the sound of crazed men crashing through the woods in hot pursuit, but all they could hear was a faint crackling sound far behind them, and the answering wheeze of their own ragged exhalations.
They stumbled on, running as long as they could, finally slowing to a gasping dog-trot, then to a walk through trees that were starting to thin. The only noises they heard now were the ones they made with their feet and breath.
Around them, the forest floor had begun to open again, the canopy of old pines so thick overhead that there wasn't enough light to support undergrowth and they were able to walk abreast.
"We must be close to the highway now," Grace said. "But we'll have to stay out of sight of the road. Some of them might drive out this way, and they still want us dead. More than ever. We're the only ones who know what really happened back there."
Annie made a disgusted noise with her lips. "Terrific. So what are we going to do? Hike all the way to the next town through the woods? Do you remember how far that was?"
"We need to check out anyone who comes along before they see us."
Damnit, damnit, no fair,Annie thought, watching the filthy toes of the purple high-tops as they popped into view in front of her.Left,right, left, right, onward Christian soldiers, marching, still marching, god-damnit, off to war.
"Hold it." Grace stopped, her eyes fixed straight ahead. "There it is." She pointed through a curtain of trunks to a ribbon of asphalt less than a hundred feet away, riding high on the top of the berm, separated from the woods by a ditch full of wild grass.
Less than five minutes after they'd started walking parallel to the highway, just inside the cover of trees, all three women heard the car. A big car, not a jeep, Grace thought, roaring up the other side of the hill they were walking toward.
Sharon was through the trees and into the ditch in an instant, peeking through the dewy grass to catch first sight of the car as it topped the rise. And when it did, she jumped to her feet and walked smack-dab into the middle of the road and started waving like crazy.
She turned toward the woods with a fierce grin and looked straight at where Grace and Annie were standing. "It's a goddamned fucking police car!" she yelled happily, and turned to face the oncoming car as it slowed, still smiling so hard that her cheeks hurt.
Grace looked at her watch.
Five hours until Armageddon.
GRACE AND ANNIE watched from the trees as Sharon stood patiently in the middle of the road, her gun holstered, her badge held high. She didn't move when the patrol car stopped ten feet from her and idled there for a moment while the man inside checked her out.
Damnit, she should have left her gun with Annie. She was trying to stop a cop car with her holster clearly visible by holding up an FBI badge that probably looked like a Cracker Jack prize at this distance. "Sharon Mueller, FBI!" she hollered.
Another moment, and the driver's door opened and a man slid out to crouch behind it. She could see his eyes over the window frame and not much more. Good cop, she thought. Careful cop.
"Both hands over your head, ma'am!" he shouted. "Higher!"
Sharon complied, holding rock-still as he rose slowly and moved toward her. His weapon was drawn and in both hands, pointed straight at her.
"Now step forward, put your weapon on the hood, please, then step well back."
Sharon did exactly as she was asked, careful to point the gun away from the man.
Back in the trees, Grace had a bead on the man's forehead, hoping like hell this was a seasoned, steady cop who was just taking precautions and not the kind who got nervous, got twitchy, and sometimes made tragic mistakes, like shooting a fellow officer who'd been running for her life all night from other men with guns.
He took a look at Sharon's 9mm, then tucked it into his belt. "Thank you, ma'am. You can put your hands down now."
Grace saw Sharon frown for a moment, then lower the hand that held her badge very, very slowly to hook it back on her jacket pocket. Both the cop and Sharon moved around to the driver's side of the car and had a rapid conversation that Grace couldn't quite make out.
Sharon darted around to the side of the car that faced the woods and shouted down, "Come on, hurry!"
Grace looked at her. She looked a lot different than she had a few minutes ag
o. Still filthy, still exhausted, still like a woman who'd been through hell, but. . , happy. For Sharon Mueller, a cop carwas the cavalry. One of her own had come to take her home.
Grace stood up slowly, and when the man walked around the front of the car and approached her, she automatically raised the Sig. Sharon scowled down at her. "Damnit, Grace, put that down. He's one of us."
No, he's one of you. Not me, not Annie, not us.
"He's a cop, Grace, just like me. Missaqua County Deputy."
Grace never took her eyes off the man. He'd spotted her almost the second she'd stood up, and stopped dead when he'd seen her weapon, his hands up, palms out. But he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and cowboy boots that looked like they'd seen a lot of wear. He looked
like anybody. Put him in a patrol car, instant cop; put him in camouflage, instant soldier. "Where's his uniform?"
Sharon actually rolled her eyes. "He was off duty, at home, when a call came through on the fire."
Grace kept the gun steady, her lips folded inward.
"Come on, Grace, give me some credit. I asked him all the right questions; he had all the right answers."
So why is your heart beating so fast, Grace? What are you afraid of? Well, that's pretty simple: Everything. Everyone. Just life always.
Annie remained hunkered down in the bushes, looking up at Grace's face, waiting. She didn't have Grace's instincts about certain people and situations, and she knew it. If Grace was nervous, there was probably a damn good reason.
"Uh, ma'am?" the man called to Sharon. "Your friend there seems a little nervous. We've got a lot of units on the way. You all want to just sit tight here 'til you're feeling better about things, that's just fine, but I've got to get to the staging area and report for duty." He took a couple hesitant steps backward, hands still up, harmless, which finally eased Grace's mind a little-that he was willing to drive away without them.