“Sheriff, this is official business. You know what’s happened to I-5 don’t you? Well the air force believes there may be some connection between the two events.”
Bill was bluffing, but he was so good at it Terry began to wonder what he did for the military.
“You’re talking to the wrong person,” the sheriff insisted. “We’re only holding the suspect until the FBI can transport him. I don’t have the authority to admit you.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” the doctor cut in. “He was severely agitated, so we sedated him. He won’t be conscious for a few hours. When he does wake up I wouldn’t expect much. He isn’t responsive.”
“Catatonic?” Terry asked.
“Not yet, but that’s the direction he’s headed.”
Bill argued with them until he got a “maybe you can see him” out of them and strode back to the elevator as if he had a sense of purpose.
Terry lagged behind, unsure of what to do next. Ellen was down in the lobby talking to Angie, and Terry supposed he should collect his wife and try to work his way over to highway 101 and head north along the Oregon coast. It would be slower than I-5, but at least there weren’t any new mountain detours. Still, Terry had an irrational feeling of unfinished business. Wherever that mountain had come from—and Terry could not even remotely guess—he couldn’t move it and had no idea of how to go around it. He might, however, be of some use with Kenny Randall. Paranoid schizophrenia wasn’t normally what he dealt with, but his residency had exposed him to most of the psychoses. Still, there were more competent people than Terry to deal with Kenny’s problem. Terry had nearly convinced himself to head home when Bill said, “You coming?” Terry followed him, feeling like Tonto.
While Angie and Ellen waited in a coffee shop, Bill and Terry headed south, to search Kenny’s dormitory room.
To Terry it seemed that the easiest way to find Kenny Randall’s room was to ask the administration. But Bill instead started asking students if they knew Kenny. Everyone did, and everyone rolled their eyes at the mention of his name. The third person they talked to directed them to Residence Hall. Bill had to ask only two people before he found out which room was Kenny’s. The reason Bill avoided the administration building became clear as they stood outside Kenny’s room and Bill pulled a credit card out and opened the locked door.
“Bill, this is breaking and entering!”
“No, it’s only entering.”
“Oh, that makes me feel much better. Why are we playing burglar?”
“I doubt the dean would let us in, and as soon as the police or the FBI think of it they’ll seal this room. They’re probably on their way here now.”
“What if someone catches us in here?” Terry worried out loud.
“Don’t worry, I’m licensed to kill,” Bill said, wiggling his eyebrows.
The room looked much like Terry’s son’s room. The bed was unmade, and dirty clothes were piled all over the bed, and on the floor. Piles of books and papers were scattered here and there around the room. A desk was buried under more books and papers, a computer sitting in the middle of the clutter. Terry felt skeptical: This was like a thousand other dorm rooms around the country.
Bill settled in front of the computer and began sorting through the disks. Reluctantly, Terry decided to snoop around, not expecting to find anything. The closet was filled with books and more dirty clothes. Buried in the far corner Terry turned up a typewriter case. He found nothing in it but the expected typewriter and two extra ribbon cartridges. He sorted through the books—mostly texts on organizational psychology, systems theory, personnel management, history, literature, and a surprising number of geography books with sections highlighted in yellow and pink.
Terry, who had marked up his textbooks in the same way, reflected how some things don’t change about college students. Other books dealt with science, specifically physics, with titles like Quantum Theory, The New Physics, Physics in the New Age, and Whatever Happened to Newton’s Universe? There were books on magnetism, superconductivity, and nuclear fusion and fission. But the topic Kenny seemed to like best was “time.” There were at least a dozen books with the word time in the title. So what? Terry wondered. Now we know Kenny Randall likes to read books on management, physics, and time. That does not tell us why a twenty-year-old college student held a group of strangers hostage in a cave. Nor does it tell us how a mountain ended up sitting in the middle of I-5.
Terry thought about the mountain again, and began to wonder if he’d been right in assuming it had been a natural event. He picked up a book titled Unified Time Theory and thumbed it. Uneasy now, he tried to remember what Kenny and his sister had said about things falling out of the sky. But why books on time? Wouldn’t the mountain be better explained with books on geology?
Bill was still working with Kenny’s computer, running programs. So Terry started looking through the books on the shelf above Kenny’s desk. There were titles like Stranger Than Fact, The Unknown, and Science and the Unexplained. They reminded him of tabloids in grocery store racks, pulp journals that mixed fact and fiction. Terry thumbed through Stranger Than Fact and found a chapter on ghosts, describing how a man bought a house, against the advice of his friends, which supposedly had a haunted room. One night the man went to bed in the room and woke up in the night feeling someone’s breath on the back of his neck. He rolled over to find himself inches from the decaying face of a dead woman, her fetid breath blowing into his face. Terrified, the man ran into the street, pulling his hair out.
Other stories were similar, and Terry was about to throw the book back onto the shelf when he noticed some pages were highlighted in pink.
For instance, in a section called “Human Torches” one story detailed how an old woman was found burned to death sitting in a chair in her room on February 5, 1905. She and the chair were burned to crispy charcoal. The floor was charred around the woman’s chair eighteen inches in all directions, but beyond that the room was untouched, and the walls were free of soot. The woman did not smoke and the book described it as a case of spontaneous human combustion. There were other similar cases, ranging from 1725 to 1977. The last case was nearly identical to the 1905 one—a woman found in front of her television, her body completely consumed by a fire that left only the head and one foot. Nothing else in the room was burned.
Terry flipped through the book again to a chapter called “Extinct?” A highlighted section described a fish called a “coelacanth” caught in a fisherman’s net off the coast of South America. The 120-pound armored fish was half-fish and half-land animal, and thought to be extinct for seventy-five million years.
Terry flipped through the pages to other highlighted sections on Sasquatch sightings in the Pacific Northwest, yeti sightings in Tibet, and dinosaur sightings in Africa. A big section was devoted to things falling from the sky. Fish, frogs, seeds, ice, and rocks have fallen out of a blue sky and pelted people and homes. In Singapore on the morning of February 16, 1861, fish had poured from the sky and the Chinese and Malays had collected hundreds of pounds in baskets. Terry jumped over reports of fish falls in 1920, 1941, and 1968 to a similar report from Kamilla, India, in 1975, when thousands of sardine-size fish poured out of the sky. In this report the fish were dried.
Probably the strangest story told of a group of archaeologists working in the Egyptian desert who were found in the shambles of their camp, dead. They had been drowned. No one could explain how the archaeologists and their workers had drowned in the middle of the desert. There were no signs of foul play, and obviously there wasn’t enough water to drown in.
Terry found himself peculiarly attracted to the stories in the book. They had the same kind of appeal that had brought people into freak shows for centuries, and took them to slasher movies today. The excitement wasn’t in seeing someone merely killed, but in seeing someone killed in an unusual way.
Despite his affinity for the book and its stories, Terry could not see the common thread that tied the sto
ries together. Spontaneous combustion, Big Foot, and prehistoric fish added up to nothing but a waste of time.
Terry put the book back on the shelf and looked through the stacks of papers and other books. An overstuffed file of newspaper clippings next to the computer told stories similar to those in the books on the shelf. The first was only two paragraphs long, describing a woman walking down a street in Seattle. A man passed her in the other direction. Suddenly there was a “whoosh” and a “pop” and when the woman turned around the man was on fire. Not just flickering with flames, but a human torch that burned so hot the body was nearly consumed. Terry immediately remembered the old woman burned in her room, but still could not see the significance of these events. The next clipping was of an event in Hiroshima, Japan. Several people in a park repotted a strange shower of flowers. Not just a few, but thousands; they fell in torrents, burying a woman and a child. Something about the event suddenly tickled Terry’s mind, but Bill interrupted his thoughts. “I can’t make heads or tails out of this. Let’s go.” Terry started toward the door but Bill began taking the computer apart and putting the pieces into a computer pack—the monitor, the keyboard, and the mouse. There was no place for the hard drive, so Bill stacked it on top of the pack. Then he noticed Terry watching.
“Don’t stand there, Terry. Gather up anything and everything.”
Not certain enough to resist Bill, Terry gathered up the file folder with the clippings, then the books, using Kenny’s bedspread to make a sack. Bill followed his example, and they filled a bedspread, a blanket, and a sheet. When Terry reached up for the last of the books, he noticed a jar at the end of the shelf. He picked it up and shook it. It was full of dried corn.
When Terry and Bill left, dragging their improvised bags behind them, Terry, guilt-ridden, knew Bill felt like they had accomplished something, but Terry was sure only that they had just burgled Kenny Randall’s room.
As planned, Angie and Ellen were in the coffee shop. Ellen’s face told Terry something was wrong before his wife blurted it out.
“We’ve got to get home, Terry. We’ve got to find John.”
“What is it, Ellen? What’s happened to John?”
“Maybe nothing. I don’t know, but Portland is gone.”
24. Rogues’ Gallery
He was found on the piaza in Mexico City, dressed in his resplendent uniform and carrying a strange gun. He was very confused and thought he was in Manila, Philippines. He said he was looking for the governor’s palace, to which he had been posted that morning. We were later to confirm he was telling the truth. In what manner he was so instantly transported no one has yet to explain.
—Mexico City, October 1593
Washington, D.C.
PostQuilt: Sunday, 1:40 P.M. EST
Elizabeth’s organizational instincts expanded well beyond the President’s needs, and it was no surprise to Nick when she presented him with a schedule of activities. He was only mildly irritated by Elizabeth’s intrusion. Nick admitted to himself he was stumbling blindly.
He had accessed the PresNet, the computer network of presidential science advisors. PresNet was Dr. Gogh’s achievement. One of his strengths was in organization. He’d managed to negotiate an appropriation out of Congress to fund his dream. Using the prestige of the White House, and the money from Congress, he’d recruited a far-flung group of scientists from all disciplines to serve as the “President’s Science Advisor Associates.” The networked scientists received the prestige of being part of an elite group, state-of-the-art computer equipment, and perceived access to the White House. More practically they received unlimited database access, on-line supercomputer time, and the means to communicate with colleagues across the country through the sophisticated computer network.
Nick guessed that Gogh never imagined the network would be used in the way Nick was using it. Unfortunately, big chunks of the network were down, and those coming on-line were seeking as much information as they were providing.
The few on the network reported that physical changes had been wrought, apparently instantly, in widespread parts of the country, with no obvious connection. Nick had two assistants working on assessing the amount of affected acreage, and once he had enough data, patterns might present themselves, and theories could be generated. At least that was the idea. But the only pattern Nick could discern was no pattern.
There were now “confirmed” reports of changes in other parts of the world, including Russia. Cannon had sent over these new reports with a note emphasizing that “only confirmed reports were reliable and only these reports should be shared with the President.” Nick wondered what criteria the CIA used to decide if a report was “confirmed”? Three reliable witnesses ? Ten ? Did one of them have to be a CIA agent ? N ick also had a copy of the administration’s policy on leaking information and an admonition to keep the Security Council discussions to himself. The note ended with Cannon’s scrawled signature and a handwritten note stating, “we still have no confirmed reports of dinosaurs.”
The schedule Elizabeth imposed on Nick was grueling. She checked with Nick on the hour to see if he had a solution to the problem yet, and at the same time scheduled a series of interviews for him with people who claimed to know what was going on. The list included three psychics who had predicted cataclysmic events, two religious fanatics from cults that preached the end of the world, and a man who had been arrested in front of the Capitol Building for taking off his clothes and masturbating. He later explained that the masturbation symbolized what was soon to happen to the world. Nick thought about it but could see no connection between a public orgasm and time displacement. The last person on the list was a college kid who had been arrested for holding tourists hostage in a cave put in Oregon. He too had anticipated the end of the world.
Each of Elizabeth’s rogues’ gallery had an individual file. Nick thumbed through them and whistled silently through his teeth. The psychics each had a thick bundle of papers, including faxed air force reports. “Why would the air force keep files on psychics?” Nick wondered. The religious fanatics had FBI files and the masturbator a thick police record. The college kid’s file was empty except for a note saying an air force colonel and a psychologist were bringing him out from Oregon. Now that was curious, Nick thought. A psychologist and a colonel; not a lieutenant, or a sergeant, but a colonel! Nick put the kid’s file to the bottom and prepared himself to meet “Madame Sylvia.”
Madame Sylvia was large but not fat—instead, what Nick’s mother liked to call “big boned.” Her hair was a mass of dyed brown ringlets. Fond of makeup, Madame Sylvia used it generously. She was also delighted at being called to the White House. Madame Sylvia’s file noted she had a contract with a supermarket tabloid. Nick could only guess what a White House summons would do for its circulation.
“I understand you predicted the world would end?” Nick probed gently.
“I predicted catastrophe, not an end.”
“An end to the world as we know it.”
“The world as you know it. I am part of a greater world,” Madame Sylvia announced loftily.
“A different world than this?” Nick inquired.
“This world is part of a greater world. The essence of my being is part of the greater consciousness that is the spiritual fabric of the universe.”
“Is that what allows you to see the future?”
“It is an explanation your mind can grasp?”
“But not all of your predictions have come true, have they?”
“True. My physical self clouds my vision. Once I am released from my body I will see with perfect clarity.”
Nick thumbed through the file and pulled out a three-month-old tabloid clipping listing Madame Sylvia’s predictions for the next six months. Elizabeth, or someone, had circled one in red: “Earthquakes, floods, and storms will wreak unprecedented havoc.”
“Can you tell me more about this?” Nick asked politely.
“New York is gone. There are floods, land
slides, hurricanes, tornadoes. These are the catastrophes I predicted and they have come true.”
Nick was surprised to hear her say New York was gone. The last Nick had heard the media people were still calling it a blackout. He made a mental note to check Cable Network News.
“What is the source of these catastrophes? Why did they happen all at once and why now?”
“It is part of a larger plan. A plan I cannot explain in terms you could understand.”
Nick dug deeper into the pile.
“I see you predicted cataclysms six … no, seven times in the past three years. In the last five years you also predicted contact with aliens three times, two presidential assassinations, that California would slide into the sea, and that cancer would be cured … you predicted that four times.”
“As I told you, my vision is sometimes clouded.”
“That physical-self problem?”
“Exactly.”
“Thank you for coming.”
The religious fanatic was next, painfully thin with a pinched, lined face and dark emotionless eyes.
“Mr. Love? Is that your real name?”
“That is the name I received upon sanctification. Jesus gave it to me,” Mr. Love intoned.
“It’s a good name. Why did you think the world was going to end?”
“Jesus told me. In a vision.”
“Something has happened, but the world did not end,” Nick countered.
“God has only begun.”
“What will happen next?”
“I see hellfire and brimstone. I see the wrath of God poured out from the heavens. Not a stone will be left standing. Not a being left living.” Mr. Love stood up, eyes burning.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord …” The man leaned forward, gesturing wildly,
“Guard?” Nick turned.
Mr. Love was still speaking as the marine led him away.
“… turn to Jesus while there is still time.”
Footprints of Thunder Page 17