Chapter 35
Route 495 had been slow, but 290 was a parking lot. Nothing moved in the southbound lanes. A series of fender-benders and worse, caused by frantic people who’d waited until the last minute and were now trying desperately to escape New England, had practically closed off both routes. Almost no one was going north: national guard vehicles, an occasional ambulance and state police cars were all that used this strip of paving, two traveling lanes, plus breakdowns. Sitting empty. Shit, thought Mike Guaranga, even half a lane would do for that traffic. If it wasn’t for a ridge of crusted snow that remained in the center section he’d...The car was jammed as well: wife, two kids, dog, birdcage, three suitcases, six boxes, a knapsack, stuffed animals and the hand-woven rugs his mother had made. Everything of value, monetary or sentimental from their house in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He’d thought of taking I-93, but he’d have had to go through Connecticut to get out of New England. And the traffic through Boston or on Route 128 around was apt to be a crush. Like this. He pounded on the steering wheel. He’d figured he’d take the Mass Pike, New York State was closer that way. Looks like others had the same idea. They should have left yesterday, just like Janice said...
They heard about accidents en route from Joe Harrison in the WEYE copter. Traffic monitors were the only private planes allowed in the skies over New England. Some in fixed wing and some helicopters, these airwaves flyers that hovered daily over metropolitan areas at peak traffic periods alerting drivers to what lay ahead on their homeward commute, were vital support during this sudden crush to abandon New England. Their eyes in the sky were able to spot trouble points and focus emergency vehicles at a time when ground services were unable to cruise about freely. They had been making flights all night. That they were still at it on the morning of March 17 was a tribute to their courage or foolhardiness, take your pick.
“We shoulda taken 93,” said Janice Guaranga for the third time.
“We been over that,” growled Mike. “Susie, don’t lean out the window.”
“Nothing’s happening, why are we stopped?” asked his daughter, age twelve.
“Cause we shoulda taken 93,” repeated Janice.
“Did you hear him? Did you listen, huh? Joe Harrison said Boston’s locked up tight and so’s 128. So we take 93, to where? There’s no friggin place to get off it!”
Janice folded arms across her chest. “You know what time it is? It’s almost seven o’clock. We got just five hours to get out of Mass. Then we’re dead.”
Susie started to cry.
“Geez, Janice, whyn’t you just break her arm! It’s okay, Suze. This trip’s just a precaution. It’s probably all a big bluff. Six billion, and all they done was send six letters! I shoulda sent one to the mayor; think he’d pay me a couple mill? What I don’t like is leavin Maple Street.”
“I sure wasn’t going to stay there!”
“But everybody was leavin: the Gillises, the Santiagos, the Velises, the whole street. Nobody’s left to look after the houses. Maybe this is all a big scheme to scare people out of town so they can burglarize the houses, just take whatever they want.”
Janice turned to look at him. “You think that might be it?”
“Well it could be, couldn’t it?”
Janice thought about it. “They’re not going to bother with Lawrence when they got Newton and Brookline and money places like that.”
A few seconds of silence. All Janice could stand. “Oh Mike, suppose it’s a bomb. All kinds of countries have atomic bombs now, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis anybody can get a hold of them.” She turned to him. “If an atomic bomb went off in the center of Boston, how far away would you have to be to be safe?”
“I don’t know. Fifty miles?”
“How far are we from Boston right now?”
“Maybe twenty-five miles is enough. That’s a long way when you think about it, all the way to Angelica’s from Maple Street. Doesn’t seem like a bomb would carry that far.”
“We’re not far enough, are we?”
“The wind’s from the north. Maybe it would blow the stuff away from us.”
“And the blast? How about the blast? How far does that carry?”
“Hey, they’re movin,” said Nando with seven-year excitement.
“Yeah! Here we go.” Mike put the wagon in gear. “Must have gotten that wreck off the road.”
“It’s just the left lane,” said Janice. “Ours isn’t moving at all. Cut in there, Mike.”
“Shit! They won’t let me.”
“Just do it! What are they going to do, hit you?”
“Okay, hold on!” There was a screeching of brakes and a crash as a car slammed into their left front fender, locking with the bumper. “God damn it! Hey you bastard, what are you trying to do, kill us?”
“Keep going! Keep going! We can’t stop now!” Janice was bouncing in her seat. Mike wrestled the wheel and gave the station wagon gas. With a rasping metallic protest the cars parted. The battered wagon limped into lane one with a tinkling of glass from the shattered headlight.
“We made it!” Janice thumped the dash. “Keep going, the hell with the car!”
He turned the wheels from side to side. They moved freely, nothing pressing against them. As he floored the pedal to catch up with the cars ahead, another from his former lane pulled out in front of him. Unable to brake in time, the wagon plowed into the driver’s door of a 94 Mercury.
“Shit!” screamed father Guaranga. “What the Christ does that son-of-a-bitch think he’s doing! He cut right in front of me!”
The force of the crash moved the Mercury back into lane two, where the car trailing it hit its right rear fender. The car behind that one, trying to avoid the pileup, swung into lane one, where it was hit by a car trying to turn into lane two. These in turn were clobbered by those behind them...
The radio in the incapacitated Guaranga car had been damaged and its volume stuck at a loud blare: “This is Joe Harrison in the WEYE copter. We’re over Route 290, there’s a ten-car pileup in the southbound lane. One of the cars has been flipped on its side. This is going to take a while to sort out. Take Route 93 if you can; it’s started to open up. Traffic south is heavy but moving...”
Chapter 36
Joel Albert’s feet were wet. Snow along the riverbank was over the top of his National Guard boots, and had worked its way down the inside to melt. The temperature hadn’t climbed out of the teens, and a piercing northwest wind made it feel colder. Had he his druthers he’d be nearly anyplace but on the banks of the Connecticut River slogging through deep snow looking for something that shouldn’t be there. But today was N Day; the day the Nutcracker will unleash his horror on New England, unless he, Joel, or others in the Guard get there first. They’d been told about the pods the afternoon before and what horror they could bring; horror he had already experienced in Stewart, without knowing the source, so he scarcely felt the wind and wet. Carol was depending on him, as she had in Stewart. They’d gotten out of that place. He’d moved the two of them up river, clear to Lebanon, New Hampshire. He hadn’t much cared where they went, as long as it was out of Stewart. But Carol had been brought up on the Connecticut, and, well, who would have suspected the river…
“Joel! Hey Joel, over here!” Bruce Jeaneau was digging snow. “Something’s moving the water.”
Joel unstrapped his own shovel and dug it in next to Bruce’s. Made for compactness, these implements were too small to be effective in snow.
“I’ll get help. Craig!”, he put force behind the yell to carry upwind. “Tell Stover we’ve got something here. Could use a snow shovel.”
With one good shovel and six others designed for foxholes, they’d soon cleared five-foot square down to frozen earth, right to the edge of the sluggishly moving Connecticut.
“Nothing here,” said Joel.
“No, but look at the river there. There’s something going on underneath the surface.”
As they watched, a bubble broke the gray s
urface.
The seven squad members pulled back. “Think that’s it?” said Willie Weiker in a hushed voice.
“If it was we wouldn’t still be talking,” said Joel.
“Why didn’t they issue us gas masks?” Bruce wanted to know.
“Didn’t have ’em, all got requisitioned.” Paul Quint’s brother was in supply.
“By who?”
“Who the hell knows, Army, FBI...”
“Let’s get upwind of it anyway,” said Joel. They scrambled around to the north of the effluvial belch and considered. There were few buildings on this stretch of river. One, a weather-beaten cape, sat on a small rise behind them. Smoke rose from the center chimney.
“Thought everybody’d been excavated,” said Willie.
“Evacuated. Yeah, they should have been.”
“Let’s take a look.” Sounding like a better idea than digging at the bank of the gassy river, they all plodded up. Joel banged on the door. No answer. He hit the door again.
“Yeah what?’ The gravely male voice was muffled and irritated.
“Open up, National Guard.”
“Come back later. I’m not up.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Pretend I’m not.”
“There’s something in the river we need to ask you about.”
Silence. Then footsteps, the door opened. An unshaven man in long underwear and his middle fifties yawned at them. A rifle dangled loosely from his right hand. “A body?”
At the sight of the weapon several in the squad put hands on their pieces.
“Easy,” said Joel to the other Guardsmen. “Why the gun?”
“Looters. That’s why I’m here.”
“Is this your property?”
“Damn right.”
“All the way to the river?”
“Yeah. So?”
“There’s something entering the river there, that’s what. You know anything about it?”
“Yeah!” Willie chimed in. “We’re looking for someone putting biological material in the river. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”
“Shut up, Willie,” said Bruce. “That’s classified stuff.”
“It’s the seventeenth, ain’t it? Where’s he going with it now? Answer the question, Bud.”
“Jesus! For that they’re callin out the National Guard?” The man rubbed his unshaven jaw in awe.
“It’s him!” yelled Willie pointing his rifle at the man’s middle. “Drop your rifle, Bud!” Others raised their pieces.
The man’s weapon thumped against the doorsill. “Okay! Okay! You got me. It was that Christly building inspector, wasn’t it? Damn geek has been out to get me since day one. But the National Guard!”
“We always get our man,” said Willie proudly, pulling a length of rope from his knapsack.
Joel looked at the man curiously. “Why didn’t you wait until noon?”
“And in the meantime pound sand up my ass?”
“Don’t get smart,” said Willie, wishing he could snap on a pair of handcuffs as he tied the man’s hands behind him.
“Innocent people will die.” Joel felt the wind harder on his cheek. Good. Blow the stuff away from their home and Carol. “Where do I turn it off?”
“There’s a switch at the head of the cellar stairs,” the man said, shaking his head as if in a fog.
“Why kill innocent people?” Bruce wanted an answer to Joel’s comment.
“Me? How?”
“Poisoning the river.”
“Poisoning? That’s just a load of shit!”
“Don’t deny it.”
“I just admitted it!”
Joel came back from the cellar stairs. “It ends with a pipe in the river?”
“Yes.”
“Where does it start?”
“At my toilet! I just told you! Je-sus! An overloaded cesspool and they send the fucking National Guard.”
The soldiers looked at each other as the sun rose higher in the sky.
Chapter 37
Wally was awake when the knock came at the door. He turned on the light and looked at his watch. Four AM. Six o’clock in New England. Six hours left. He hadn’t slept; there must be something he could still do. He’d gone over the searches of the last three days, by air and land but mostly air. There was no trace of Hudson or any indication as to what happened to him. It was a big desert.
“Yes?”
“It’s Loni, Mr. Carver. Can I come in?”
“Wait.” He padded to the door and opened it to let her in. She stood there indecisively. “You look terrible. What’s the matter?”
“They saw birds.”
“What?”
“The pilot. Of one of the search planes. There were a lot of birds circling over a gully.”
“You mean vultures.”
“Yes.”
“Well, come in, come in. There’s no point to us talking in the hall. That doesn’t mean he’s dead, or even that it’s Hudson. Why didn’t I hear about it? Why didn’t they land and see what it is?”
“He’s in a fixed wing; there was no place to land. A posse, or whatever they call it, some men, left an hour ago. He’s gone back to his plane to guide them.”
“Why not one of the helicopters?”
“They’ve gone back to their regular duties. Three days was all they could spare them for.”
“Why wasn’t I told? How come you know?”
“He...Jimmie, he’s the pilot, just told me.”
“At three o’clock in the morning?”
“We been up, talking. He didn’t tell me until now, I guess cause he felt it was bad news.”
“You’ve been up till now? Never mind. Which way did they go?”
“We can listen in by radio at the police station.”
There was no news at four or four-thirty. At five-fifteen the radio crackled.
“Air One Oh Three to Base. Ground is only a half-mile from the site. Their radio is out, but we’re circling the arroyo, joining the other flyers.”
“He means the birds,” said Loni.
“I know that,” growled Carver.
They waited. Ground was a four-wheel drive rescue truck.
“Air One Oh Three to Base. They’re at the arroyo...They’ve found something, they’re bringing a stretcher...” Loni bit her lip. Carver leaned his forehead on his hand. “They’re coming back out...there’s someone on the stretcher...it’s a man. They’re looking at him. And...” There was silence for nearly thirty seconds.
“And what?” exploded Carver into the microphone. “Finish the damn sentence.”
“They’ve pulled a sheet over his head.”
Chapter 38
Frances Ingalls and Bob Gold sat watching a growing disaster. The third member of the audience in front of the Carver television set was Andre Adams, who had spent the previous week prodding New England state governments to do more to prevent what was on its way to becoming one of the most horrific environmental disasters of all time. His efforts, coming on top of all the other pressures facing these civil servants, reduced the number of responses to his calls to zero. He had thus decided that a visit to northern New England, which, being far enough north to be nearly at the rivers’ headwaters, hadn’t been evacuated, and was preferable to being caught up in escaping mobs. Bob Gold was only too happy to have someone house sit his cottage while he, himself, recuperated at Wally’s.
Film clips taken around New England looked more and more like a war zone, which was just the way Gold saw it. Someone had declared war on the six state region, and suddenly that secure countryside, which hadn’t been endangered during the lifetime of anyone living, was threatened with catastrophe. Few clues were handed out by authorities so the media had a guessing field day. What was known was that those living on major rivers were told to move out, and given no reason. The task proved impossible in metropolitan areas like Boston where everyone was within a few miles of the Charles River. Residents there were advised to
stay inside with windows and doors closed. This suggestion not only wasn’t much comfort to anyone who dwelled in New England’s largest and most likely target, but proved particularly unsettling to those with more active imaginations, prompting many, with unprintable suggestions as to what the authorities could do with that advice, to scramble out of the bulls eye. Many of the weak - and some of the strong that got blindsided - were trampled at South Station, as proper Bostonians improperly attempted to stuff themselves aboard overloaded trains. An aerial shot of a freight train flashed on the screen; it was leaving the station crawling with what looked like banditos in a Mexican movie to Frances and ants on a chocolate bar to Bob.
Logan Airport had been the first to go. Those boarding or hoping to get a seat on outgoing flights, unable to find parking spaces in the garage or metered lots, left their automobiles in the streets around the terminal and ran for their planes. This froze the airport and backed up traffic on the access ramps to the Boston Tunnels, built to carry automobiles from Boston city to Logan, in turn backing up the Boston side. By five-thirty on the morning of March twenty-second nothing moved on the streets of Boston.
The telephone rang, answered by Frances.
“Cilla!” The voice barked.
“She’s not here, Mr. Carver.”
“Where is she?”
“You’re not going to believe this, I’m not sure I do myself...”
“Just tell me”
“She’s climbing Mt. Washington! In the middle of winter!”
“Why?”
“She’s after the Nutcracker. She feels if she can find him he’ll tell her where Hudson is.”
“I see...”
“Any news of the search?”
“Tell her to call me as soon as you hear from her. The Sedona police station will know where I am.”
He hung up.
Chapter 39
It was just after noon when Cilla heard the sound. The day had turned sunny, and, without the wind, it was hot climbing. They were on snowshoes, and had stopped several times to take off layers of clothing, before shirts and sweaters got sweat-soaked and lost insulating capabilities. The stream that runs into Ammonoosuc Lake is Crawford Brook, which parallels the A - Z trail which they were on. Last night’s storm had apparently only affected the summits of the Presidential Range. Tracks would have been visible, but nowhere along the length of where they knew the brook to be could they see any signs.
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