by Alan Rodgers
The way I ought to be.
He looked out onto the deserted highway that ran past the front of the closed hotel. What am I going to do now? Hitchhike to Manhattan? Hitchhike — hell, there’s no one on the road to give me a ride, even if people did pick up hitchhikers in this state.
That was when he saw the bus. Far away, a pinprick in the western distance. A battered New York City bus, and even from here it looked to Luke as though the thing had driven all night through the fires of Hell.
THE FIRES OF KANSAS
Literally: the thing was scarred by fire. Scarred by graffiti, and rocks. And when the bus got close enough for him to see it clearly Luke was certain that some of those words on the side of the bus weren’t written in paint at all.
No. Those words, he thought, were written in blood.
BUS TO HELL
I’m going to die if I get on that bus. I know it. I won’t live three hours.
He was right about that, too — almost to the minute.
He didn’t flag the bus down — he had enough self-control to keep himself from that — but he stepped out toward the curb, to watch it, and the driver stopped for him.
No, he thought, I can’t do this. He tried to turn and run from the thing, but his legs ignored him. He wasn’t in control of himself any more, not consciously. Something from deep in his id ruled him, some bit that lived in absolute terror of the emptiness in the streets. The bus was something horrible, his id knew that. But there were people inside it, at least, people that for all it knew were the last left alive in the world.
As the door opened the driver turned and smiled at Luke vacantly. The man’s face was . . . wrong. Vacant wasn’t the word to describe him; there was expression on the driver’s face. Just not any expression Luke had ever seen on a human face in all his life. Like the expression he always expected to see on the face of an alien when he saw science fiction movies on television — only TV aliens were never that alien. Almost always when you saw those movies you got the impression that the costume designer was thinking about a dog or a horse or some bug, and not an alien at all.
Luke coughed. “I need to go to Manhattan,” he said. “Does this bus go there?”
Luke waited for an answer with one foot on the bus’s first step and the other still on the pavement. The driver didn’t say a word — he just kept staring at Luke, strangely and quietly, his face painted and glowing with an expression that Luke could not understand.
A shout, from somewhere inside the bus: “Are you coming or ain’t you? Get on the goddamn bus or get off of it. We ain’t never going to get there, you keep us standing here in the middle of Queens.”
Without even thinking about it, Luke stepped forward and up, and before he even knew what was happening the bus’s door had slapped closed behind him, and the driver was slamming the transmission into gear, and they roared out and away so hard that the force of acceleration slammed him into a rail.
Oh my God — what have I done?
The bus was still accelerating.
For a moment he imagined that the bus somehow was bound for hell, imagined that he’d already died and reached some bizarre afterlife. And if this bus is going to hell, does that make New York purgatory? Even with circumstances as bad as they were, that thought nearly managed to drag a laugh out of him. No. I’m not dead, and I’m not on a bus to hell. That’s crazy thinking. Things are bad enough already; the last thing I need to do is go out of my mind.
The man behind the steering wheel was definitely a New York City bus driver. He had on an MTA bus driver’s uniform, and even though he was bone-thin and very tall it fit him perfectly. His jacket was filthy and torn in places, but unquestionably authentic. The man, Luke thought, was just in shock — that was why the strange expression, the filth, why he ignored Luke’s question. Why, for that matter, the man was out here driving his bus today in the first place. That had to be it — the man was in shock and driving his bus aimlessly through the city.
Maybe, Luke thought, this was for the best, even if the driver was crazy. Sooner or later they’d have to end up someplace where the hotels were still open. It might take all day to end up in a place like that, but even if it did that had to be better than trying to walk to Manhattan. Which was the only other thing Luke could think of doing. He sighed, and relaxed a little; grabbed hold of the support pole near his left hand and climbed the last two steps to the floor of the bus.
Once he had his footing he reached into the back pocket of his slacks, digging for change to pay his fare. But when he finally had the money in his hand he saw that the fare box had been vandalized, and that there was no way to put the quarters into it.
“Should I give this to you,” he asked the driver, “or — or what should I do with it?”
The driver ignored the question, just as he’d ignored the others Luke had asked.
Jesus. What am I doing?
This is crazy — just plain crazy. I’ve got to get off of this thing. He reached up and over, pulled the cord that made the stop requested sign light up over the driver’s head. “I’d like to get off, I think. If that’s okay.” The driver ignored Luke, and the sign, too. Worse than that, the man pressed even harder on the gas pedal, and the bus began to accelerate again.
I could yank him out of that seat, and stop this thing myself. The man was slight enough that Luke thought he could probably do it, even though he was pretty far out of shape himself. I’d probably end up wrecking the damned bus — No. The only thing to do is sit this out and see where I end up. If nothing else, he’s got to run out of gas sooner or later. Make myself comfortable and try to enjoy the ride.
He put his money back into his pocket and took a look at the interior of the bus. It was a grim sight — grimmer, even, than the outside had been. There was the graffiti, of course, and the three seats that hung slack and broken from the wall. A two-foot gap in the floor near the well of the left-rear tire.
The sight that hurt worst of all was the people. The wreckage of the bus was nothing compared to them.
Luke had seen people like them before. They were homeless, bag ladies and derelicts. Junkies. Twenty, maybe thirty of them. There weren’t many people like that in Tennessee, but Luke had seen them all the time during the three years he’d spent in New York getting his doctorate. Now that he was looking at them, Luke thought he could smell them, in spite of the air rushing through the bus’s open windows.
Over there, five seats from where Luke stood, was a one-eyed woman who looked like she’d steeped for months in her own filth. Her socket was unpatched, open to the air; corruption oozed out of it and leaked down toward her nose. Two bulging plastic garbage bags lay on the floor near her feet, the contents of one of them spilling out, littering three feet in every direction.
A half-naked man clutching an empty bottle of Ripple had splayed himself across the floor and fallen unconscious. Crusty-dried vomit clung to the hair of his chest; his pants were half unzipped and stained badly with urine.
I don’t belong here, damn it. I don’t. I’m whole. I make a decent living. I’m doing something with my life.
There was an enormous woman sitting in two seats near the back door of the bus. She weighed four hundred pounds, to judge by the look of her, and her skin was as white and viscous-looking as the underbelly of a fish. Too much of that skin was showing; her clothes couldn’t possibly cover all of it.
Don’t think about it. If I think about this I’ll go out of my mind.
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Chapter Eleven
WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE JOHNSON COUNTY, MISSOURI
Damn those Russians, Paul Green thought. Damn each and every one of them to the deepest pit in hell.
How on earth was he supposed to have a war with Russia with those people throwing a revolution? It was exasperating. Infuriating.
Just now the plane was descending, getting re
ady to land and refuel at some damned Missouri Air Force base or another. It was good to be in the plane. Here in Air Force One Green was connected for the first time in days to the hub of the nation’s defense apparatus. They still ignored his orders, but when he sat in this plane they could not keep him from hearing.
That’s how he knew about the Russians, and about everybody else. The Russians had tried to launch their nuclear arsenal as soon as they’d seen his two missiles heading at them over the Arctic Ocean, and their luck had been even worse than his own: not a one of their warheads had got more than a mile from its silo. Most of the missiles had exploded inside their silos, in fact; all of their missile bases had been destroyed, and destroyed with them were a third of the Russian Army and most of the Russian Air Force.
I should’ve expected it. They told me about this, too. The NSC man who’d briefed him last had gone into detail about the subject. The Russians didn’t have good technical people, not in any numbers. Lots of good Ivory Tower-types, theory people. But no technicians. Not even on the lowest levels; they had to import their electronics from places like Singapore and South Korea. The Defense Department had a throttle on that — even the stuff coming out of Singapore — and they managed to keep the Russians from getting anything much more complicated than a video game machine. The Russians still bought the stuff, and bought it in quantity. Those game machines were the best they could get, years ahead of anything they could produce themselves.
And, of course, the situation in the Russian Army’s missile silos was exactly what you’d expect, given the circumstances. There was complicated stuff inside a missile’s guidance system, and while they did manage to patch the things together, their maintenance people tended to do more harm than good. There was even one story that had managed to find its way into the Western press, about a technician (if you could call him that) who’d tried to clean rat droppings out of a missile’s guidance system with a water hose.
In a fit of fury after the bombs had blown up in their faces, what was left of the Russian Army had turned on the political apparatus and marched into Moscow. Even those divisions stationed in Transcaucasia were making their way back home — though it wasn’t certain that they’d make it; a whole trainload of Russian infantrymen had died in Ingushetia, killed by a bomb that exploded as their train wound through the mountains. Intelligence wasn’t at all certain about that bomb; there was considerable suspicion that it hadn’t been a bomb at all, but an antiaircraft rocket launched at the train by a renegade unit of the Russian Army.
As word of the nuclear explosions — and of the military uprising — spread through Moscow, the people had taken to the streets as well, whole mobs of them ripping political officials and soldiers — especially soldiers — limb from limb. There was word, unconfirmed, of similar uprisings in Vladivostok, St. Petersberg, Murmansk, and Tbilisi.
Green’s own government was in little better shape than the Russians’. Congress was in hiding — as it had been since he’d tried to have the Speaker of the House arrested — and the riots had most of Washington on fire. The military had its hands full keeping the mobs outside the gates of its bases.
Eight hours!
Eight hours, and every semblance of world order had disappeared. Most of Europe was still intact. Japan, too. But the superpowers were at their knees. At least for the moment. Word from Intelligence was that the leaders in Europe were going into hiding, too. They weren’t taking any chances.
Air Force One touched down, its landing gear thumped and skidded three hard beats along the runway.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. How were they ever going to live out the prophecy if it kept going like this? How were they ever going to bring on the Rapture? How could they have a nuclear Apocalypse if there wasn’t anybody else to fire missiles at them?
He had to talk to Herman about this.
Part of the prophecy was that the armies of Gog and Magog were supposed to do battle with the legions of the righteous. Gog and Magog were in Russia, that was clear as crystal. All you had to do was look on any old map from Bible times, and there Gog and Magog were, smack in the middle of Russia. That was Armageddon — the battle outside the gates of Jerusalem. How were they supposed to have Rapture without Armageddon — much less the nuclear Apocalypse?
The problems were getting tougher and tougher.
Praise God for foresight, Green thought. Months ago, when it first became apparent that there were forces in the government that would do anything they could to stop the Rapture, Green and his closest, secretest advisers (all of them were people from his church) had begun trying to place their own people in command of the bases in the Midwest where the nukes were kept. There weren’t enough of his people in the Air Force, or in the Army, to give Green real control of any of the bases. But if he could get his people in command, Green figured there were ways to get control of the bases. And his people would have their orders. As soon as Green had ordered the missiles out of their silos, his commanders would confine the soldiers to their quarters, and bring in the armed militia from the church. Once everyone was in place, the officers would be dismissed, the enlisted men would be given the option of becoming soldiers in the army of the righteous.
Their only real success so far had been at Eidner Air Force Base, out in Cheyenne County, Kansas, where they’d managed to put Bruce Thompsen in charge. He’d be enough, if they played their cards right.
It was a dangerous plan, but it was working. Bruce Thompsen had even managed to get a couple of his people down into the missile silos. That had to be why those few missiles had been launched, and no others. It was a real accomplishment on Bruce’s part, too: the men who worked down in the silos were watched and screened very closely, very carefully. And screened from the Pentagon, not just by their base commanders.
Whiteman AFB, here, wasn’t anyplace Green could feel secure — no more than he could back at Andrews, in Washington. That didn’t worry Green in any special way. He was President, and because he was President there were some things that no one in the country — military or otherwise — could deny him. No matter how bad things were, no matter what they felt about the things he was doing. His personal safety. This plane. Air time on the television, during moments of legitimate crisis. Oh, maybe they could’ve tried to stop him — certainly the Army had guns enough to do whatever they pleased. But the moment it raised a hand against him, the Army would be by definition in a state of mutiny. What American general could defy the Constitution and still live with himself? Paul Green couldn’t even imagine it; the sort of man who was apt to become a career officer in the United States’ military was too steeped in the tradition of civilian control to even see his own bias. Even the fact that the Chiefs of Staff were ignoring his orders was unprecedented. No matter how the events of the next few days unfolded, no matter what the nation thought of their acts, the careers of the men responsible were at an end.
The plane taxied to a remote corner of the runway and came to a stop. Two minutes later Green saw the fuel truck coming toward them. Another ten minutes and the tanks would be full and he could get back in the air. Another hour — certainly not more than two — and they’d land at Eidner.
That was where he’d decided to go, as soon as he’d realized that it was Bruce Thompsen’s men who’d launched the missiles. Herman would be there too, soon enough, and so would the others. And somehow they’d find a way to bring on the Rapture, no matter what it took.
³ ³ ³
PFC Bill Wallace was in a deep, cold sweat, in spite of the fact that the morning was the hottest in this part of Missouri yet this spring. There’d been rumors all over the barracks, all over the base, for weeks. Rumors about the President, and the Pentagon not listening to him. About nuclear war, and the fact that the generals were trying to stop it. The President, the rumors said, wanted a war for the war’s own sake.
Bill shuddered, reached into the breast poc
ket of his uniform for a cigarette. Remembered that he was driving a fuel truck on the air base’s runway, and swore at himself for nearly blowing himself and the truck to kingdom come.
Last night there’d been the explosion, far on the western horizon. Everyone who’d been awake had seen it, like a new sun rising from the wrong part of the compass, and that sun had burned long and bright enough to wake almost everyone before the sound and wind of the atomic explosion had reached the base — maybe a minute or so after the false sunrise.
Bill Wallace had been awake to see it all. He shouldn’t have been. His duty-shifts had been in the day for a couple of weeks now. But he hadn’t slept well these last few days; no one had. Three days ago General Simpson, the base’s commander, had canceled all leaves and passes, closed and locked the base’s gates. He hadn’t stopped at that, either; he’d had every radio and television on the base collected and locked up for safe keeping, and that cut everyone off from the news. None of that had stopped the rumors about what was happening in the rest of the country. Crazy, self-contradictory rumors that had to come from people’s nightmares. None of them were real enough to believe in.
The last certain thing that anyone had heard was that the President wanted to atom-bomb the Russians because they caught some friend of his trying to smuggle in a backpack nuke.
The man really wanted to put an end to the world. He was crazy, he had to be.
And now here he was, right here on this base, refueling Air Force One. You couldn’t mistake that plane, sitting right there in the middle of the runway. Not that anyone was saying that was who it was.
And Bill Wallace was the one who had to refuel it.
It was a grave responsibility, and a terrifying one. And in a way, Bill thought, carrying it out was going to make him one of the most horrible war criminals in the world.
Maybe that was taking it too far.
Bill Wallace didn’t have the world’s largest sense of social responsibility. When he thought about global thermonuclear war, the thing that came to mind first was his own death. And still — and still —