“I hear you’re a computer type, too,” Sam commented. “Beth has a PC. I think she’d have fun talking computers to you.” Dietrich rolled his eyes. Alan’s particular eccentricity was well known among the fisherman. His was fairly mild compared to some. One fisherman carried around a bag of ashes collected in small handfuls from every fire he’d ever sat around. The bag was getting kind of big; the man was nearly seventy. He never explained his habit and wasn’t required to. He was, of course, required to take a ribbing, just as Alan had to take jokes about his little portable computer and his Internet.
“Alan likes them cybersex bulletin boards,” Dietrich grinned.
“You know I read about them in Time,” Jack mentioned from the next booth over. “Them girls are all fat and pimply and can’t get dates, which is why they’s at home pretending to be sex queens on the Net.”
“I thought you liked ’em like that, Jack,” Alan said mildly, and there was general laughter.
Alan, in fact, did have a special friend on the Net, but he wasn’t about to let the boys know that. Her name was Krista Lewis and she was twenty-six.
Krista was supposed to be in the San Luis Valley this month, another unspoken reason why Alan Baxter suddenly decided he had to fish the Rio Grande. She suggested they get together for dinner. He couldn’t pass up the chance to meet her face to face, even though there was a whole generation between them. It was just dinner, after all.
Alan headed back to his Bronco. First he had to find the Williams’s Ranch and catch about six hours of sleep. That would put him on the Rio Grande in the early evening, a good time for dry-fly fishing.
He put a hand on his car door handle and thought for a second that his car engine was still running, though he was holding the keys in his other hand. The Bronco suddenly lurched away from him like something alive. The ground twisted and heaved under Alan’s feet. He shouted something foolish, something that might have been “Hey!”
The guardrail where he’d stood moments before sagged outward and down. A moment later there was a high, sharp sound, like a guitar string breaking. A section of guardrail twisted abruptly into the air. Alan left his Bronco and staggered toward the road, away from the edge of the scenic drop-off. He had time to regret his favorite fly rod, an old eight-footer he’d had for years. He’d lose everything if the Bronco went over the cliff. But the only thing he could think of was the faithful eight-footer, catcher of a thousand fish. As he reached the asphalt of the highway, he was thrown to his knees. The shaking abruptly stopped. There was a roaring sound. Alan looked up in dumb wonder as an avalanche of rocks and dirt swept from the mountainside over the far end of the diminished scenic viewing area. A small scattering of rocks bounced against the tires of his Bronco. The avalanche swept serenely over the restroom, lifting the wooden structure and smashing it down the mountainside after the vanished guardrail.
The roaring stopped. Alan got slowly to his feet in a profound silence. The squirrels and the birds were silent. The road was buckled in a few places, but it looked like the Bronco could make it. The Bronco itself was completely untouched. One half of the parking lot was somewhere down below with pieces of the mountain on top of it. If Alan had parked six slots to the left, he’d be walking to Alamosa right now. Or he’d be dead. Alan’s knees felt watery for a moment. It was too unreal to be believed. Who’d ever heard of earthquakes in Colorado?
The dust started to clear as he made a slow and careful way down into the San Luis Valley. After a while, he heard the birds begin to sing again.
Briargate Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
When an earthquake happens in California, people know what to do. They react instantly. They drop what they’re doing and run for bracing doorways and away from deadly windows. They do not, as the Coloradans did, stand with wondering gaze and try to figure out what the hell is going on.
Joe Tanner didn’t know what was going on. He was standing in his living room eating a bagel and watching Fox news when the first tremor hit. The sun was up and the air was fresh and clear, with a coolness that would dissolve into early summer heat by mid-morning. Rush hour hadn’t quite started in Colorado Springs since it was only six A.M., but half the city was up and getting ready to go. Joe was in his version of a business suit, a pair of jeans and a cotton T-shirt. As a computer programmer, he could dress as he liked. Like many programmers, he liked comfortable clothes. A rattle shook Joe’s living room panes and made his screen door quiver just a bit. There was a faint booming sound, as though a jet from the Air Force Academy had broken the sound barrier too close to town. He saw movement from the corner of his eye and looked away from the television to see an amazing sight outside his living room window.
There was a man in the street wearing nothing but a pair of white Jockey shorts. His face was covered with shaving cream, and he held a cheap disposable razor in his left hand. It was Ralph Morrison, Joe’s neighbor. He had moved from California that year and seemed like a nice man. Joe had thought when he met him that he looked just like the actor Danny Glover. He was wearing blue socks too, Joe noted with amazement. Danny Glover in blue socks, elderly Jockey shorts, and shaving cream, standing in the middle of the street.
“Quake,” he bellowed in a huge voice. “Quake!”
The earth quivered under Joe’s feet. Joe, who had never been in an earthquake before in his life, felt the floor underneath him start shaking like it was turned to gelatin.
The word Ralph Morrison was bellowing finally reached the proper slot inside his brain. Joe tried to run to the door but the ground was heaving under his feet. He staggered with bruising force into a bookshelf and was flung into the doorway and through the screen. He rolled with the fall and crouched on the pads of his feet, vaguely proud that the training his girlfriend Eileen had made him go through seemed to be working. So far the gun training had been useless, though fun. But the martial arts seemed to be coming in handy. His house, behind him, gave an awful and human-sounding groan. Joe scrambled on hands and knees away from his house, towards Ralph the California man. The earth itself seemed to be screaming. The asphalt of the street writhed under him, a feeling so loathsome that he cried out in disgust and tried to crawl away, back towards his house. Ralph kept his feet, bellowing, his shaver clutched in his hand.
Just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Joe crouched on hands and knees on the sidewalk, jeans stained with mud and grass. He saw other figures up and down the block, most in bathrobes, some clutching wailing children. Ralph looked up and down the block and held up his shaver. He waved it back and forth.
“Don’t go in your houses!” he bellowed. “Gas pipes may be busted!”
“What can I do?” Joe said, getting to his feet and stepping into the street. He balled his hands into fists to stop the shaking that wanted to take hold of his body. Ralph looked at him, startled, then nodded sharply.
“Right,” he said in his normal Ralph Morrison voice. “You take this side of the street. I’ll take my side. Tell people to stay out. I’ll start turning the pipes off. If you find anybody who’s in shape to help, send them to me.”
“Okay,” Joe said firmly. Ralph peered at him closely then gave him a startling, unexpected wink.
“We’ll be fine, boy,” he said. “This was just a baby quake. Sure don’t feel so great though, does it?”
“No shit,” Joe said, and bit back a jagged laugh.
Ralph Morrison turned around without another word and marched to his side of the street. Joe started off in the other direction, on his side.
“One other thing,” Ralph shouted back at him. Joe turned, to see Ralph’s grin as white as the shaving cream on his face. He waved. “If someone has a spare bathrobe, send it along.”
Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jim Leetsdale knew he was going to die. He’d known it since he made the decision to unmask the project. They were going to kill him and it was going to be today, and he hadn’t finished yet. There was sti
ll so much to package together, so many calls to make, and there was Krista Lewis. Krista was his conduit, the way he planned to break the news to the mainstream. With the array of data that Krista was gathering in the Great Sand Dunes, he could present proof that could not be denied.
Yet there they were, at the end of the hall, walking without any particular hurry. The earthquake hadn’t slowed them down; the earthquake had helped them by clearing the building and distracting the guards. The Air Force guards were just past being children anyway. They couldn’t face these men and win. Who could?
There were two of them, lit intermittently by the hallway emergency lights, heading toward Jim and his office and all the proof he had to unmask the project that had killed his wife. They looked ordinary but tough. One was gray-haired and wide, with a belly just starting to go soft. The other was younger and smaller, with merry black eyes and a slight curve of smile. They were Death come to collect him.
Jim turned and closed the door to his office. It had only two locks but was made of metal. It would take a while. He realized he was shaking, and his breath was a pant in his own ears.
“Lori, babe, be waiting for me,” he whispered, just in case it took a while for the angels to collect her from wherever she was and get her to the other end of the tunnel. Lori was never late. Even pregnant and weary with morning sickness, she was on time and waiting to pick him up when a Los Angeles earthquake dropped a cinderblock wall on her and another person at the Burbank Airport. Lori and their unborn baby and a young, unemployed actor named Stephen Brill were killed, the only three fatalities in the latest shake from the San Andreas. Their deaths didn’t even make the national news.
He started copying files to disk as fast as he could, scattering paperwork throughout his filing cabinets while each disk finished loading up information. Unless they burned his entire office, they might miss something, and Krista might find it later. He ignored the tiny sounds coming from the office door, the little chittering sounds that might be mice but were not. He had shoved a sturdy Air Force office chair against the door handle, but he knew that wouldn’t be enough.
He wrote Krista’s name on a yellow Post-it note, and put the note in his palm. What to do with it? He needed to leave her name in his office but he didn’t want the soldiers to find that, certainly. They would kill her, too. Jim gave a hiccupy laugh, thinking how brave he was trying to be while his whole body was shaking. His body didn’t want to die. His ancient brain, his lizard brain, was dumping adrenaline into his system in preparation for a fight to the death. Well, he was going to do that, he promised the lizard. He was going to try and take those bastards with him. But he’d seen what they could do, that one time in the dunes when they’d finished with Max O’Dell. O’Dell had tried to quit, too, which branded him a traitor. A traitor just like him.
The door shuddered in its frame. Jim spun toward the door, his breath accelerating into a pant, his heart thundering in his chest. Just a few seconds now. He looked at Krista Lewis’s name on the Post-it and breathed a prayer. Then he reversed the note and stuck it quickly on the underside of his desk.
“Go gettum, Krista,” he said quietly, and pulled out a file cabinet drawer. Armed with this frail weapon, he waited as the door shuddered again and then fell open. Jim Leetsdale was no longer afraid. He felt a remote kind of calmness and thought again of Lori, waiting on the other side.
“Coming, sweetheart,” he whispered.
3
Great Falls, Virginia
“My life,” wailed Lucy Giometti, “is over.”
“No, it’s not,” Carolyn Giometti said. Her voice was a deep maple-syrup tone that reminded Lucy of a nature film narrator. In person, Lucy’s sister-in-law was short, round, and merry, with snapping black eyes and hair so deeply curled it looked like black yarn. Right now her voice on the phone was all Lucy had, and she needed it.
“Hank didn’t sleep much at all last night,” Lucy said, trying to keep the wail out of her voice. Right now her darling son, Henry Theodore Giometti, one year old, ready to be weaned and showing no signs of wanting to let go of Lucy’s milk supply, lay sleeping against her exposed breast. His little mouth, so much like her husband’s, so beautiful, was smeared with milk. His lashes lay against his rosy cheek, like a cherub in a child’s book.
“Think of this as World War Baby,” Carolyn said.
“World War Baby?” Lucy asked. She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. Her eyes were grainy and her back ached.
“World War Baby,” Carolyn said matter-of-factly. “You get pregnant, you bear a child, for the next three years you’re fighting the equivalent of a war. You’re never relaxed, you’re always dirty and frazzled with exhaustion, you never get enough sleep.”
“Oh, exactly,” Lucy sighed.
“Right, and the war is first to keep this little creature alive, and then to turn it into a nice human being. Housebroken, with a full set of teeth, willing to share a toy and not bash another kid in the head with it. It’s a war. You may be at home, but you’re not, really. You’re in a foxhole in France somewhere with people shooting mortar rounds past your head.”
“I’d rather be in a foxhole in France,” Lucy said, shifting a little in her armchair. Hank stirred but didn’t wake. He’d had an awful night last night with teething pain. The new tooth had caused his nose to run, and he couldn’t breathe well. Lucy had given him acetaminophen and rocked him half the night, nursing him until her breasts were sore, and at dawn he’d finally fallen into a deep sleep. She was in her armchair in her office, her computer in front of her, and she never felt less like working in her life.
“At least you have a stay-at-home job,” Carolyn said. “Although you don’t have to work if you don’t want to. My brother can take care of you.”
“I know, but—”
“Exactly,” Carolyn interrupted. “Without an outside interest, your brain would melt. Look at me, for example. Now that my house is done, I’m trying to figure out what to do.”
Carolyn and her husband had bought an ancient Victorian house in Chicago when her children were toddlers. Now her youngest was twelve and her gorgeous house was refinished from attic to basement, work that Carolyn had done herself, by hand.
“Buy another house,” Lucy suggested.
“I might,” Carolyn said. “I might not. But I have the luxury of contemplation. You, on the other hand, are surviving on basically no sleep. How’s the government research work going in the middle of all that?”
“Pretty good,” Lucy admitted. “I’m surprised that I can still accomplish anything, but research is fun.” What Lucy had never told Carolyn was that she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. She was an analyst, specializing in computers, a tiny worker bee in a huge organization, and was as far away from fieldwork as a person could be.
Well, sort of. Lucy had ended up in the midst of an undeclared war when she was six months pregnant with Hank, a nuclear conflict between the United States and a terrorist group. They’d launched a nuclear missile from a captured missile silo in Uzbekistan and if Lucy hadn’t been in Colorado, the bomb might have taken out most of the Midwest. Instead, she and a group of newfound friends had used the top-secret missile defense program to shoot the bomb down. This was all pretty much an accident, but her analysis of the terrorist group and her warning had arguably saved the world.
This led her and Ted to a very private dinner at the White House and a medal that she could show to no one. Her one regret was that she had to wear a pregnancy dress to the White House dinner. The most exciting dinner of her life and she looked like a humpback whale wrapped in black velvet.
All that happened before Hank’s arrival. When he was born, everything changed for her. She’d pushed for two hours before her doctor delivered Hank’s head, and then the rest of his little body slipped out painlessly. She’d lain back in the birthing bed, exhausted with the pain and the effort, and the nurse had swept her gown aside and laid Hank on her bare chest. He was still attached to
her by his umbilical cord, and he was covered in blood and fluids—he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She held him and Ted held her and they’d both cried, and Hank who was supposed to cry didn’t wail at all. He just lay in her arms and looked at the two of them with his bright eyes.
When she gave her notice at the CIA, panic ensued. The CIA hadn’t had many successes lately. She was their golden girl of the moment, pretty and young and brilliant, proving to the other bureaucracies, and most of all to the White House, that the CIA had a purpose.
“They set up your office at home and everything,” Carolyn interrupted. Lucy had to smile. Steven Mills, her horrid boss, had talked her into working at home. Imagine that. To a man like Steven Mills, working at home must be the worst idea ever. He was a fifties-style boss, a micromanager, and hated Lucy. Her medal and her status didn’t change his loathing of her, but he was a smart horrible boss. He was determined to keep her.
He arranged a secure encrypted T1 phone link into her house and used some newfound pull to get her basement office shielded electronically. She stepped through a strange doorway lined with brass plates to get to her computer and her walls had an odd sort of cardboard look, but Hank’s playpen and diaper-changing table stood in the corner, and her dog, Fancy, lay on Lucy’s feet and snored while she worked. Her work wasn’t at the highest levels, but it was still analysis. If she really needed some sensitive materials, she was still allowed to go to the CIA building and look at them there. It was better than no work at all.
Not that she was working right now. She was talking to her sister-in-law and wondering if she could even focus on her computer screen.
“I feel better just talking to you,” she said. Carolyn laughed. “Hey, you know, you could write a book about child-raising. You could call it World War Baby. Or you could get a job reading books-on-tape. You have a great voice.”
Earthquake Games Page 3