by Jon Land
“But we were talking about you, Mr. McCracken.”
“Boring subject.”
“Not to me,” said the Reverend Harlan Frye. “I’ve dedicated my life to saving souls. But you, you are one of those rare individuals who found the strength to save his own. I know what you evolved from. I know what you evolved into. Your dedication, your belief, your loyalty … You exemplify everything I hold dear. But you, like all classic heroes, see yourself able to do more than any man can. If you could save all the world at once, you would do it, would you not?”
“Like I said,” Blaine said flatly, “that’s what I’m here for.”
The Reverend Harlan Frye sighed. “And still you bicker, still you doubt. Even if you stopped me, Mr. McCracken, the world wouldn’t be saved—only the lives of those who are determined to bring it down. The tragedy of your life lies in that dichotomy. You fight to save those whose existence perpetuates the need for you to fight again and again. Truly tragic.”
“Is this the part where you ask me to sign up and I say no, Reverend?”
“I wouldn’t belittle you with such a request. You and I are too much alike to coexist peacefully. You know it and I know it.”
“You’ve got that much right.”
“I felt I owed you this much. That is why I spared you this long. I wanted you to hear, to see.”
“See what?”
“Watch,” said Harlan Frye, as the theater lighting dimmed slightly and a new image replaced that of the map of San Antonio on the screen.
Rachel could not believe the pain. The monster had torn her insides up with a blade and, while she lay there, he leaned over grinning and sliced off her hair to the scalp. Left her for dead and melted away after her brother.
Jacob, Jacob …
She tried to call out to him and failed. Where was the walkie-talkie? Rachel tried to remember. It was no use. She could save him if she could make herself move, drag herself along in the monster’s wake.
Rachel began to do just that, pulling with one hand while the other did its best to hold her ruptured innards in place.
Find her brother, save her brother …
Time lost meaning and then direction. She felt as though she were floating. Then she heard the sudden burst of rounds from Jacob’s Mac-10. A single burst, that was all.
“Jacob,” she tried to call, but barely a whisper emerged. “Jacob …”
The next sound Rachel heard was a maniacal giggle. She knew it was over, knew Earvin Early had killed her brother after he had just missed killing her.
She stopped moving and rested her mangled body against a shack, wanting to close her eyes and for it to be over. But some instinct made her raise her eyes to a sign posted upon the shack:
DANGER!
HIGH VOLTAGE TRANSFORMER!
This shack, she realized, must hold one of the kingdom’s central power junctions. With the last of her strength, Rachel managed to pull an explosive charge from her pack. No way she could push it accurately into place. No way she could do anything but press herself against the building, wedging the plastique in between her body and the foundation. The pressure-activated detonator was automatically set to the two-minute mark.
Rachel used every ounce of her remaining strength to hold herself against the building.
McCracken had intended to use his remote control device as soon as the lighting dimmed, but the images unfolding on the screen stopped him. He wanted to watch, needed to watch.
He recognized Beaver Falls instantly. The shot of Main Street was slightly shaky, picturing the town in its last throes of normalcy. Then the scene changed to a shot of a long line of white, windowless buses rolling into Beaver Falls one after the other. The angle from another camera turned on dozens of armed figures in contamination suits fanning through the center of town, toward the business establishments along the main drag and the school at the street’s end. The residents were herded into the buses at gunpoint, prodded along like cattle. The camera’s shifting angles caught none of their faces long enough to see the terror they must have felt.
The suited figures were continuing their sweep through the town when Frye spoke. “I wanted you to witness the beginning, Mr. McCracken: Of course, at the point this film was being made, I thought it was the end. Strange, isn’t it, how curses become blessings. When I learned of the fate that had befallen Beaver Falls, I thought I was beaten. But it was merely the Lord’s means of showing me a better way.”
Blaine turned halfway to the theater’s rear and eased the remote control device into his hand. “San Antonio, Reverend?”
“Those who come to the city will depart as His unwitting messengers.”
“While you and however many others you can squeeze in wait down here to reclaim a world turned wasteland.”
“We won’t have to wait down here at all. And we won’t have to squeeze anywhere.”
McCracken could sense the smile beneath Frye’s voice. And then he realized.
“Karen Raymond’s vaccine, Lot 35 …”
“Very good, Mr. McCracken. My faith in you is restored. She could have saved us much trouble and allowed us to save far more of our brethren had she simply turned the formula over. No matter. Our scientists are collating the material salvaged from her lab. In good time we will regenerate Lot 35. A few months, a year at most.”
“Inspired.”
“Yes, inspired by God and given His blessing.”
“Time I gave you one of my own.”
Blaine pressed the OFF button on the remote control. Instantly the picture on the screen before him died, plunging the theater into total darkness.
“Shoot him! Shoot him!” Frye screamed.
Bullets from the gunmen he had stationed through the back of the theater rained down almost instantly, but not before McCracken propelled himself up and into the white screen itself. The flimsy material tore under his forward thrust and he rolled beneath the wave of bullets that followed him through the fabric. Momentum carried him to a hatchway built into the stage and he yanked it open to reveal a ladder. He thrust his feet down and began a rapid descent that ended in a large storage room equipped with a single door. Blaine flung it open and burst into a corridor on what must have been the first sublevel.
Pursuit would be closing already, from in front as well as behind him. He had bought himself a bit of time, but weaponless, there was little he could accomplish. McCracken was considering the few options he had when suddenly the corridor was plunged into dead-silent darkness, even the soft whir of the building’s air system gone.
The kingdom’s power had died.
Karen Raymond waited for Johnny Wareagle to tell her they were safe before moving. Only a few minutes earlier, when Johnny had detected the footsteps approaching the level below, Karen had spotted white protective suits and helmets hanging on the side wall. After each had pulled one on, Johnny’s very tight on his massive frame, Karen activated his oxygen supply as well as her own and then led the way into the isolation ward holding the residents of Beaver Falls.
As they expected, the guards who stormed up the stairs seconds later did not dare enter the ward to search for them. Their cursory check through the glass didn’t reveal Johnny and Karen in their concealed positions beneath unused beds.
“They’re gone,” he said, voice muffled behind the faceplate of his helmet.
Karen rose from her perch near the big Indian in the isolation ward’s rear and fell in step behind him back toward the entry doors. Outside the ward again, they removed their helmets and stripped off the suits.
“What now?” Karen asked him.
“They will be after Blainey as well.”
“So?”
“We have what we came for. We must find him. Then—”
The lighting died suddenly, totally.
“Frye,” Karen muttered.
“No,” corrected Wareagle, “the twins.”
“But—”
She felt his powerful grasp close on her arm
And then the Indian was leading her down the stairs through the blackness.
McCracken blessed what could only be the work of the twins and continued down the pitch-black corridor, pressing himself against the wall for support and bearings. To a great extent the darkness neutralized the advantage of familiarity his pursuers had of these halls. Blaine snaked his way forward in search of the first stairwell that would take him upstairs, where he hoped to find Johnny Wareagle and Karen Raymond.
As he hoped, the end of the hall gave way to a staircase. Blaine grasped the railing and climbed upward.
Wareagle heard the single set of steps coming toward Karen and him from below when they reached the first floor on the staircase Johnny had found. A small glass plate in a nearby exit door allowed thin slivers of light to pass through from outside. The light helped him find the door to the stairwell.
“Blainey,” he called softly, after opening it.
“Figured I’d be running into you soon, Indian.”
Johnny handed him one of his submachine guns, a British Sterling with collapsible stock. “There is much to tell.”
Flashlights pierced the darkness at the top of the staircase Johnny and Karen had just descended. Wareagle and McCracken spun toward the beams simultaneously, waited for them to begin a wobbly descent, and then fired into the source of the light. The beams rolled wildly, flashlights stripped from the grasp of their holders. The magnified sounds of their shots echoed and reechoed in the confined stairwell.
“More will be coming, Blainey.”
“Best not to wait for them, Indian,” McCracken followed, and threw his shoulder into the exit door.
The solar-powered gaseous lighting strung from the sandstone mine’s roof had not been affected by the power failure. The illumination allowed some of the waiting gunmen to greet them with a hail of automatic fire. Wareagle countered with a token burst and then ducked back inside. Blaine resealed the door and the darkness returned instantly, save for what little light could sneak through the glass plate at face level. Johnny, meanwhile, spun partway back up the stairwell, expecting another attack from that angle any second. Karen Raymond pressed her shoulders against the near wall, frozen with fear.
“Not a great place to make a stand,” McCracken whispered.
When none of the Reverend’s soldiers appeared on the stairwell, Johnny edged back down. “Give me twenty minutes, Blainey.”
“To do what?”
“Acquire us a taxi.”
CHAPTER 35
There was no time to elaborate further, and Wareagle didn’t bother to. McCracken waited for Johnny to take position by the door before he shouldered it ajar yet again. He fired a burst from his Sterling into the darkness, then stopped long enough to allow Wareagle to dash across his field of fire. Johnny squeezed his trigger in short, controlled bursts that were swiftly supplemented by Blaine’s. Their fire was returned, but they had succeeded in pinning down the enemy and throwing them briefly on the defensive.
“Blaine!”
McCracken heard Karen’s scream just ahead of a fresh barrage of gunshots originating at the other end of the corridor where another group of Frye’s guards had massed. McCracken drained the remainder of his first clip at their positions and then snapped home the second and final one Johnny had given him.
“We’ve got to head down!” Blaine ordered, feeling for Karen’s arm to guide her.
She felt his hand find her shoulder and slide down to her elbow.
“Careful,” Blaine cautioned, easing her sideways and then forward into the stairwell he had climbed moments before. “The first step should be right in front of you.”
She crossed over the threshold of the top step and quickly grasped the railing with her left hand. McCracken glided down the stairs toward the first sublevel sideways, most of his attention focusing on the doorway behind them. He stopped at the bottom and drew Karen to him.
“Keep going,” he whispered. “Wait for me at the bottom of the next stairwell.”
“But—”
“Do it!”
Blaine heard the footsteps thundering his way from above just after Karen slid stiffly away in the darkness. He yanked from his belt one of the two grenades the twins had provided and hurled it upward. It rattled across the ground floor as Blaine pressed himself against the wall.
The explosion was dizzying, deafening, the darkness broken for that brief instant. The screams above were piercing, but brief.
“Karen,” McCracken said through the ringing in his ears.
“Here,” her voice called to him from halfway down the next stairwell.
He caught up and eased an arm around her shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Karen fell into an uneasy step beside him as they plunged deeper into the darkness.
For Johnny Wareagle, surviving the present was as simple as utilizing the past. The circle kept repeating itself; the same thing, a different place, a different time.
In the hellfire there had been minefields he had crossed more than once. The first instance, though, had been the most precarious. A pair of soldiers lay wounded and taking fire on the other side, giving Johnny no time to pick his way. He simply had to rush across the mud, trusting the spirits to choose the darts, turns, and twists required to keep him alive. On that day, twilight actually, the ground had spoken to him, the slight imperfections and ridges betraying the planting sites of the mines.
Dashing across the enemy machine guns’ field of fire today was much the same. His path was erratic, seemingly random, forming a nonsymmetrical zigzag. He used the shadows and places where the light was held back. The bullets never found him. Johnny fired until all three of his clips were exhausted, and discarded the Mac-10 with little regret; at this point, his muzzle flashes would serve only to alert the enemy to his position.
Wareagle knew where he was headed, just as he knew the best route there would be the one that lost his pursuit in the process. Here, too, Johnny trusted his instincts, his mind like a supercomputer that, once programmed, would get him to his destination without requiring further consideration. The route he took brought him to the mine’s edges, where the darkness was most pronounced.
Along the way he came upon a double row of trucks and cars parked within what looked like a darkened alcove. Two of the cars were limousines, leading Johnny to realize that Harlan Frye must have had another route constructed to allow nonconstruction vehicles to access the kingdom without being detected. Where, though, would the origin of such a route be? He moved between the vehicles and saw that the alcove actually extended well into the earth in the form of an underground tunnel that must spill out unnoticed into the Panhandle miles away. Accordingly, the presence of Frye’s guests need never be noted entering.
Johnny spent a few precious minutes moving one of the trucks to a new location, a task he felt would come in handy later, and then continued on to the area where the truck that ferried them into the kingdom had stopped. The giant John Deere 744E loader loomed before him, its six-foot tires black against the dark scene. Its bright yellow frame reflected the light that reached it from overhead. Johnny skirted the perimeter of the open foundation for the soon-to-be-built depot center en route to the four-rung ladder that facilitated climbing up into the loader’s cab. Once behind the wheel, he would head the massive machine back toward the kingdom’s main building where Blaine McCracken would be waiting. Standing upon the ladder’s lowest rung, he was able to reach up and grasp the door latch. It opened with a slight squeak and Wareagle started to hoist himself up the remaining rungs.
The shape waiting inside crashed into him with enough force to strip away his grasp and send him tumbling backward. The stink that flooded his nostrils was the first indication of the identity of the shape searching for firm purchase on him now. Both of them plunged downward for the gravel below, Johnny’s eyes locked on the evilly grinning face of Earvin Early.
The Reverend Harlan Frye had taken refuge in his pr
ivate office, escorted there by the six guards who had lost their chance at McCracken when he plunged through the screen just seconds before the whole of the kingdom lost its power. Frye had tripped the breaker in order to force the electronic door to his office open, but there was no way to get it closed again. The guards had remained with him in its stead, forming a human wall that provided the Reverend virtually no comfort whatsoever.
Major Osborne Vandal appeared in the doorway, letting part of his flashlight’s beam find his face for identification.
“Reverend?”
Frye turned his flashlight in the direction of the voice. “Come in. Be quick about it.”
“We have found the source of the blackout, sir,” Vandal reported after entering. “A transformer was blown in the western sector of the kingdom. Fortunately we were able to contain the resulting fire. The remains of a body were found in the same vicinity.”
“A body?”
“Tentatively identified as one of the Turgewell twins. Traces of a second body were found in the area of the transformer.”
“Early,” Harlan Frye realized, feeling suddenly hopeful. “It must have been … .”
“I’m afraid there’s no sign of him, sir.”
“You misunderstand me, Major. Early is out there, and he is to be the instrument of our deliverance, he alone. You must find him and bring him here.”
“We are trying, sir. In the meantime we are also working to bypass the blown transformer and reroute power to this building.”
“What about the guards I requested?”
“I have stationed an additional dozen along this hallway and two at the doors to all stairwells and elevators leading onto it.”
“Take charge of them yourself, Major.”
“With all due respect, sir, I—”
“You fool! Do you think if McCracken wants to get me, all your guards would be enough to stop him? … They wouldn’t. I’m not sure a thousand would be sufficient. Until Early is found, I want you to take personal charge.”