by Allen Steele
Stepping behind the counter, the Golem swept his gun in an arc from one side of the room to the other. He wheeled around once to check the door, then he turned back to stare through the bars of the holding cell at Macy. “Where are they?” he asked.
She collapsed against the far wall of the cell. In less than a few seconds any hope that she was safe here had vanished. Macy had been waiting for one of Tony Salvatore’s killers to find her. Well, here he was. Not just any torpedo either. The Golem himself.
“Henry,” she stammered. “What … I don’t know what …”
“The records you took from his safe,” he said. His voice was without color or inflection. He could have been asking a long-distance phone operator for a number in Duluth. “The diskettes, Macy. Where are they?”
“I … the diskettes, I don’t …”
The Skorpion’s stubby snout moved a half-inch more towards her; it was all the incentive she needed to begin thinking again. “Over there!” she shouted, pointing at Binder’s desk. “They’re on the desk, Henry, all of them. They’re …”
A fatalistic urge overtook her. She giggled hysterically, letting her back slide down the wall until her bottom hit the floor next to the cold metal bed frame. Gazing at the Golem’s hard face, she thought she saw a flicker of emotion: confusion, hopeless anger. It made her laugh aloud.
“Too bad, so sad,” she murmured. “They’ve been sent away. Everything …” She raised her right hand, snapped her fingers. “Poof! Gone. Copied and sent to the FBI. I watched him do it.”
She giggled again, feeling warmth surge through her chilled veins. “There you go. Hey, you snooze, you lose …”
The Golem looked at the desk, then down at the little pile of diskettes scattered across the floor. She watched as his right foot gently sifted through them. “By the way,” she added, realizing that nothing she said now would make any difference, “tell Tony that he was always a lousy lay …”
“Where’s Seven?” he asked.
His glacial voice brought her back to the here-and-now of her situation. The laughter choked in her throat. Macy looked through the bars of her cell at the Golem. “Whu … what?” she breathed.
“There’s six diskettes here,” he said with surreal calm, looking up at her again. “You took seven from his bedroom safe. Where’s the seventh diskette, Macy?”
His eyes. So dead, like those of a fish she had once seen, washing up on the banks of the Charles River when she was a little girl, walking with her mother in that little riverside park … she couldn’t remember the name of the park. In Boston. On a Sunday afternoon. A fine spring afternoon. She had seen a dead fish and wanted to pick it up and take it home to put in their tropical tank so it would come back to life.
Against her will, she began to weep again. “Please, Henry,” she sobbed as her resolve faded, her muscles collapsed. “I … I … don’t kill me, don’t … I dunno, I didn’t look at them, I don’t know where, just please don’t shoot me, please don’t …”
Macy heard the soft sound of the Skorpion being lowered on its strap, rubbing against his clothes. She looked up and saw him lowering the gun, letting it hang from his shoulder, and for a few seconds she thought that the Golem was going to let her go. She let out her breath; it seemed as if her lungs were deflating, and for a brief instant there was hope.
Then he bent over, reaching under his right trouser leg, and pulled out an automatic. Straightening, he shifted his body sideways and gently slid the chamber back. She heard the sharp cha-clik! of the round sliding home.
“Goodbye,” he said. Same featureless voice, like ice water trickling down a glass pane. Then he raised the gun and carefully aimed directly at her face, until she could see straight down the black hole of the silencer. Macy closed her eyes.
“Golem!” someone shouted.…
A muffled gunshot thudded from the office.
Bigthorn fell back into the doorway of the adjacent coffee room as the bullet splintered plaster from the corridor wall opposite his position. From behind him, outside the front door of the building, he heard Wade Hoffman yell his name. The sheriff stretched out his arm to wave his deputy back. The shot had been in his general direction, but not close enough to indicate that the Golem knew exactly where he was hidden. That would change soon enough, though.
“It’s me, Ostrow,” he called out. “I’ve come to take you down. You can make this easy, or …”
Another shot. This time it ricocheted off the wall near the doorway where he was hiding. If he had been using a submachine gun before, when he killed Parker—and, Bigthorn presumed, LeFevre and Binder—he had since switched to an automatic pistol. Okay, so the Golem wasn’t about to throw down his gun and surrender. Bigthorn hadn’t really thought he would.
“Have it your way, asshole,” he said, keeping his eye on the shattered door. “Just remember what I told you. If you harm the girl, you’re going to die.”
And if you don’t harm her, he added silently, you’re going to die. I’ve had it with you, you son-of-a-bitch.
There was a long moment of silence. Then, from within the office, he heard the Golem’s leaden voice. “How are you going to kill me?”
His calm was ethereal; Bigthorn had heard vending machines speak with more emotion. “With a Taser?” Ostrow asked. “You’re not fooling me.”
Shit, but he had a point. The Taser in Bigthorn’s hand was as effective as a child’s squirt gun; it didn’t have nearly the range to take out Ostrow. At least not before the Golem killed him. But he couldn’t let Ostrow intimidate him like that.
“I don’t need a gun,” Bigthorn answered, carefully watching the door. “Guns are for Anglo pussies like you. Fuck, man, I’ll take your bullets and still keep coming to get you.” He waited a moment, then added, “You hear me?”
No reply. Then there was the faint sound of something moving inside the office. Bigthorn carefully centered the Taser on the doorway, holding the plastic gun steady with both hands and narrowing his vision down the sights. The Taser wasn’t made for sharpshooting, but it was the best he had.
No more sounds came from within the office, except for Macy’s distant weeping. Shut up, girl, and let me concentrate. He felt hot sweat rolling down from his armpits. The Golem was stalking him now, moving in on the sound of his voice, being entirely too careful for Bigthorn to get a one-chance drop on him. As risky as it was, he had to draw the Golem out.
“C’mon, you cheap cock-sucking hood,” he taunted. “I thought you were a pro.”
Cruncchh! It was the hard sound of a booted foot stepping on broken glass. A shadow flickered across the floor just inside the office door. “Or can you only take out unarmed women with bombs?” he needled, unable to keep the anger out of his voice. “I’m going to …”
The Golem leaped into the doorway, half-seen in the dark hallway. The Skorpion roared as he fired indiscriminately in a wide arc, starting in Bigthorn’s direction. The sheriff ducked, hunched his shoulders between his knees, as bullets cut a swath just above his head, showering him with bits of plaster. He heard sharp, high whines as the rounds passed within inches of his ears. Fuck, fuck, fuck—!
Then the volley moved away as the Golem fired straight down the corridor. At that instant, Bigthorn raised his head, yanked up his weapon, and fired.
His aim was only slightly better than the Golem’s. The two electrified monofilaments from the Taser only grazed Ostrow’s right arm. To have knocked him cold, they would have had to make full contact with his body.
But it was good enough. The 2,000 volt charge kicked the Golem flat on his ass; the Skorpion sailed out of his hands, landing somewhere out of sight as Ostrow fell backwards and sprawled on the broken glass in the doorway. Bigthorn stared at him, thinking for a moment that Ostrow was unconscious.…
Wrong. Ostrow was stunned, but he was still moving, struggling to his knees and searching for the submachine gun. The sheriff threw down the Taser and lunged through the door at the fallen killer.
The Golem’s left leg slammed upwards; there was a cold, jarring second of agony as the Golem’s knee rammed straight into his balls. Simultaneously he kicked Bigthorn over him in a savage jujitsu move.
For a moment the sheriff was airborne … then he hit the floor about ten feet away, inside the office behind Ostrow. Breath knocked out of him, his legs feeling paralyzed, he almost succumbed to the temptation to pass out. Goddamn motherfuck, it hurt!
Through narrowed eyes, he saw Rollie Binder lying dead on the floor nearby. He heard scrabbling noises behind him, but forced himself not to look. Bigthorn hobbled to his knees. Don’t give up now, muchacho. His feet found the floor. Get the hell out of here! Blinded by the glare of the lights, patterns of starlight swarming before his eyes, he staggered towards the back door.
There was the thuffft! of a silenced gunshot, from somewhere behind him. He didn’t see where the bullet hit, but since there was no further pain, he figured the Golem must have missed. Bigthorn threw his shoulder against the door, twisted the knob and fell out into the darkness.…
He almost collided with Danny D’Angelo, coming up the back steps, Taser raised high in his right hand. Danny tried to catch him, then he looked over Bigthorn’s shoulder and let go of the sheriff to balance the Taser in both hands. “Danny, don’t—!” Bigthorn gasped.
Another muffled shot. The next bullet blew Danny’s brains out. As the officer toppled backwards, Bigthorn fell down the stairs. He landed on his knees on the pavement next to D’Angelo’s corpse; the pavement tore through his trousers, skinning his knees. Get out, dammit, move …! He struggled to his feet and lurched out into the night, forcing one foot in front of the other. Even after he had reached the deeper shadows, the sheriff kept running.
He didn’t need to look behind to know that he had become the Golem’s newest prey.
21
Eve of Destruction
(Sunday: 9:00 P.M.)
In a low orbit four hundred miles above Earth, Icarus Five coasted high above the night sky of the North Atlantic.
A blunt white cylinder with a single liquid-fuel engine mounted at its rear, it closely resembled one of the old Project Apollo moonships of the last century. A satellite maintenance crew had visited the derelict to wrap a string of red and white strobe lights around its fuselage and attach a radio transponder to its payload section; Icarus Five blinked like a lost Christmas tree, and spacecraft passing within one hundred nautical miles of the interceptor received a multilingual warning to avoid its spatial coordinates. Even an accidental rendezvous with Icarus Five was punishable under international space law. It was a pariah in space.
It was also a closely watched pariah. Just as it had once monitored space junk before most orbital debris had been cleared from LEO by Project Whisk Broom, the Consolidated Space Operations Center of the U.S. Air Force now kept track of Icarus Five. At CSOC’s operations center near Colorado Springs, the nuclear interceptor was one of a special number of objects that never disappeared from the screens, no matter what command was entered to change the display. After all, it contained the only fissionable nuclear warhead known to be in orbit; until it could either be safely brought back to Earth or disposed of in space, Icarus Five would remain under permanent guard.
It was exactly 2000 hours, Mountain Time, when USAF Lt. Martha Wellen noticed the change in Icarus Five’s status. It was at that moment—just as the sun was sinking behind the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, as she was finishing her second mug of tea after coming on duty—that Gustav Schmidt’s instructions to Icarus Five’s inertial guidance system were triggered.
Suddenly, after two years of waiting, Icarus Five awakened. In the black loneliness of space, RCRs on the sides of the interceptor fired briefly, gently turning the little spacecraft until its nose was pointed at a predetermined set of coordinates. The second that Icarus Five was reoriented, the massive bell-shaped nozzle of its main engine silently flared for six seconds, and Icarus Five began to move from orbit.
Lieutenant Wellen was looking at the LCD screen of her work station when she saw the dotted line indicating Icarus Five’s footprint over Earth veer sharply. Martha Wellen had been assigned to CSOC for just over a year; every day of her often-monotonous tour of duty she had come to rely on Icarus Five’s maintaining its precalculated trajectory, of seeing it come and go exactly the same way during each shift. Only the rising and the setting of the sun and the moon were more predictable than Icarus Five. That was just fine with her; she liked things to be nice and predictable. Especially when things included satellites containing 100-megaton nukes.
When she saw the course-change on her screen, Martha carefully put down her tea mug and tapped commands in her keyboard, which centered a small box above the white spot of light that was Icarus Five. A small 3-D window opened in the corner of her screen, displaying a simulation of the object’s trajectory as well as its coordinates. Leaning a little closer in her leather-backed chair, she studied the screen. The numbers matched what she was seeing: Icarus Five was moving away from Earth, heading for deep space.
Remaining calm, she retyped her commands to make sure that there was no error. When the information was confirmed. Lieutenant Wellen frowned and picked up the handset of the telephone at her station.
“Sir, this is CSOC Station Seven, Lieutenant Wellen speaking,” she said. “We have an unusual situation with Icarus Five. I think you should take a look, sir.”
There weren’t enough ambulances available to hold all the dead.
Clarke County General had only three of the refitted electric carts, and each could take away only one body at a time. To make matters worse, Big Sky had become a madhouse by the time they arrived. The paramedics who had been dispatched to the scene had to push through a panic-stricken crowd which had surrounded the town hall; not only had the townspeople from the nearby meeting converged on the killing ground, the members of the Church of Elvis had also made it inside the town hall.
Most of the Church members were in various stages of hysteria—weeping loudly, huddled around the bullet-riddled corpse of Oliver Parker, or simply sagging against the wall, staring with blank expressions at nothing in particular. Two women tried to keep the paramedics from removing the body on a stretcher until Wade Hoffman managed to gently pull them away. Outside the building, townspeople watched in horror as the bodies were brought down the stairs and through the crowd. Then there was a general surge towards the door, as everyone tried to get inside to find out what had happened.
It was all Hoffman could do to keep order. For the first time he realized how fatally undermanned the Sheriff’s Department was. Seven officers: it was a sick joke. With Bigthorn missing, only he, Cussler, and Bellevedere were the surviving officers on the scene. Almost half the department had been wiped out by the Golem. The paramedics managed to take away Sharon’s and Rollie’s bodies, but Danny was still lying outside behind the building, covered by a blood-soaked sheet.…
He tried not to think about Danny, or Sharon or Rollie either. After Wade evicted the Elvis cultists from the building, he left Lou and Dale outside to control the crowd as best they could. “Pull out your Tasers,” he whispered to them as they stationed themselves on the front steps. “Use them only if you have to, but keep that mob out. Understand?”
Beyond them was a growing ring of frightened, curious, and outright hostile faces. There were people in the crowd whom Hoffman would have earlier sworn were pacifists; now they were just other members of a mob. Arms outstretched to hold back the crowd, the two officers nodded their heads. Wade patted Lou’s arm, then trotted up the steps to revisit the scene of the massacre.
The only surviving witness was in shock. Macy Westmoreland was still cowering next to her bed in t
he holding cell where she had been cornered, apparently withdrawn from reality. Dr. Witherspoon and a paramedic were attending to her; Hoffman walked through the battered office in time to see Witherspoon shining a penlight on her dilated pupils while the intern loaded a syringe-gun with a sedative and scrubbed her forearm with alcohol.
“Get her to the ER when the next ambulance comes back,” Witherspoon said softly to the paramedic as he stood up. “We’ll have Dr. Harmon take a look at her, but my guess is that she’s going into the psych ward for treatment.”
He saw Hoffman and walked over to join him. “She might pull through,” Witherspoon said, answering the deputy’s unspoken question, “but I don’t know. She saw a lot of bad stuff here.…” He shook his head. “She’s going to have a lot to work through.”
“Uh-huh.” Hoffman was in shock himself. With the immediate crisis over, everything was beginning to hit home. Three fellow officers snuffed in a matter of minutes. In their own office. He stared down at the drying pool of blood where Roland Binder had been found, and felt his strength drain from him. “Jesus …” he whispered.
“Pull it together,” Witherspoon said. He gripped Hoffman’s arm and gave him a shake. “You’re the person in charge here right now. Where’s John?”
“I dunno.” Hoffman pointed absently towards the open back door. “He lost his phone. I haven’t heard from him since.…” He swallowed. “He went after the Golem, I guess. Danny was coming in when he got in the way, and all I heard were the …”
Hoffman’s voice choked. Witherspoon gave his arm another shake. “Stay with me, Wade,” he said urgently. “The Golem? Is that the guy who shot up the place?” Eyes fixed on the floor, the deputy nodded his head. “Who is he?” the doctor asked urgently. “Why did …?”
“What the hell’s going on here?” a voice behind them demanded.
They both looked around to see Neil Schorr striding through the office. Behind him, Bob Morse was stepping gingerly through the broken glass door. They had used their authority to get past Bellevedere. Morse was gazing in horror at the wreckage—the bullet-pocked front counter, the glass strewn everywhere, the bloody spot where Sharon LeFevre had died—but Schorr did not seem to notice as he advanced on the two men.