by Alan Rodgers
In one of the rooms that made up Herman Bonner’s quarters.
It only took him another moment after that to remember the strange reports from New York and from the mid-South. Stories about dead people coming back to life. Herman had hinted that he knew what caused them — he hadn’t come out and said it, but he’d made it pretty clear to George that one of the men in his laboratory had been working on a strain of bacteria that might have that effect, and that the germs might have got loose in the blast Herman had staged to free his ersatz Beast.
George had suspected something else, listening to Herman — something that Herman hadn’t hinted at, but that was right there between the lines when George stopped to think about it. Herman had known about that bacteria. He’d known it would get loose when he set off his bomb. And he’d known what kind of havoc it would create when it started to spread. Maybe he hadn’t known exactly what it would do, but he’d had a damn good idea of the consequences. And that infection was here, now, right here inside the gates of the base. Those strange microbes were inside George, else he wouldn’t be alive and healthy now.
Herman Bonner was up to something. Something bad enough that he’d never let George see more than a hint of it, and likely hadn’t let Paul Green see any more than that. And whatever he intended was dear enough to him that he’d murdered a man he’d known for years.
George shook off the chill in his heart and sat up on the edge of the bed. The chain was long enough to let him sit up, long enough even to let him stand up and walk half a dozen paces. Herman was nothing if he wasn’t generous with his friends.
Three of the rooms Herman had taken for himself had broad, tall floor-to-ceiling windows over the runway that faced out toward the Lake of Fire. The view was spectacular; and more than that. Thrilling, the way only something dangerous could be. Oh, the man with the Geiger counter — that Air Force technician Herman had taken under his wing when everyone else on this base had been . . . seen to — Herman’s tech had insisted that at this distance there wasn’t any danger from the radiation. Whether that was true or not, it defied good sense. How could a molten hole in the earth the size of two counties not be a danger? If it gave off light enough to brighten so much of the sky at night, how could it not be giving off radiation, too? Three evenings ago he’d visited Herman in this very room, and the only light they’d needed was the glow from the Lake of Fire. It had been dim light, true, and eerie, but it had been more than enough to see by. Well, it was giving off radiation, the technician had said. The five-headed missile that had landed fifty miles from where they stood had struck some kind of a nuclear research facility on the far end of the base. No one was sure exactly what sort of a facility it had been — it was classified so thoroughly that no one on this end of the base had known the first thing about it. But whatever it was was serious; there had been some kind of an apocalyptic meltdown, much worse than he’d have expected from an ordinary commercial nuclear plant. Still, the man had said. They were twenty-five miles from the crater the explosion had created, and twenty more miles from the Lake of Fire that burned at the crater’s heart. There might be a little visible light, but whatever hard radiation could reach them from forty-five miles away wasn’t anything they had to worry about.
Might as well fret that the lake would burn a hole straight through to China, and that the heathens there would invade them through it. And he’d laughed.
George hadn’t thought it was funny; he’d glanced across this room, to Herman, and seen that he wasn’t laughing, either.
It was late afternoon, now, and dim; the sky outside was thick with storm-clouds. Off in the distance the Lake of Fire was almost like a sunset in the wrong direction — but wider. No setting sun ever consumed so much of the horizon. He stood, walked as far as his chain-tether would allow him, so that he could glory in the beauty that the lake painted on the sky —
And as he moved forward he saw the plane.
It was in the foreground, right there on the landing field outside the building. Until he’d stood it’d been obscured by the bottom edge of the window’s view.
“Dear God,” he said. And didn’t even notice that he’d taken the Lord’s name in vain.
Out on the runway was a dark green plane — it looked enough like an airliner that George thought it might be a transport, but he didn’t know enough to be certain — and strapped piggyback to the top of it was a nuclear missile. The missile was nearly as long, end to end, as the plane itself.
He heard the door to the room swing open behind him, but didn’t turn to see who it might be. Who else could it be but Herman?
“Remarkable, isn’t it, George?” Herman’s voice, all right.
George didn’t have an answer for him; he was still too appalled to speak.
“Our technician tells me that all of the rockets were too close to the blast that created the Lake of Fire. Not close enough to explode, but close enough that the electronics that guide them were destroyed. Hence the need to deliver them . . . a bit more directly, shall we say?” He smiled. “We considered removing the warheads and using the troop transports as makeshift bombers. Certainly that would be preferable to sending good, God-fearing men on suicide missions. Unfortunately, it happens that disassembling the missiles disarms the warheads completely — and quite irreversibly. Even as it is, detonating them is no small matter. They’re designed quite carefully not to detonate in any way other than the one originally intended.”
George swallowed.
“This is crazy, Herman. You’re going to get that plane to fly half-way around the world without stopping to refuel it? And if you do stop it, no one in his right mind will let it into the air again.” George didn’t know what sort of range planes like the troop transport had, but he couldn’t imagine it flying all the way into Russia with all the extra drag the missile would add. “And anyway, what’s the point of bombing the Russians now? They’re too busy fighting among themselves to be a threat to anyone else.”
Herman smiled. For a long while he didn’t say a word, and when he finally did speak George thought he’d changed the subject. “They’ve finally mobilized the National Guard in New York,” he said. “Even with all their . . . peculiar difficulties, they should be able to take the network headquarters from us in a day or two. Another thirty-six hours after that, and the ABC people can use the hardware in that building to take the Voice of Armageddon from us — or at the least to force it off the air.”
Herman was still smiling strangely. His smile had always been a thing that made George uncomfortable, but this was different somehow. It brought George not just the familiar mild discomfort, but dread. Herman Bonner had plans, and down deep in his gut George was certain that there was evil in those plans. He even began to wonder how he could possibly have known the man for so many years and not known that evil for what it was.
“The answer, of course, is to destroy the building. The Voice of Armageddon can function well enough without it, no matter how susceptible it may be to the equipment in that building.” Herman turned and stared wistfully out the window, in the direction of the Lake of Fire. “We don’t have access to that sort of ordinance.” He was beginning to chuckle in a way George found even more unsettling than the smile. “So what do we have access to?”
He wheeled around to look George in the eye, his expression demanding an answer. And George answered him, even though the only sound that would come from his throat was a whisper.
“Missiles. Atomic bombs. Dear God in heaven you’re going to destroy New York.”
Herman clapped his hands, exuberant. “Marvelous, George. Marvelous. You’ve always been a quick study; I’ve always prided myself on you because of it.”
George blinked, shook his head; there were hints of something in that last statement that he didn’t want to think about. Whatever it meant or didn’t mean wasn’t especially important when it stood beside the nuclear destruction of the
nation’s largest city.
“Herman — Herman, listen to me. There isn’t any need for this. There isn’t any call for it. Have you lost your mind? This isn’t war against an evil empire. It isn’t forestalling Armageddon, or even taking its reins. It’s murder. The murder of millions and millions of innocents.”
Herman shook his head, just a little sadly. “No, George. Not murder — cleansing. Cleansing of the vile city that is Sodom to our time.” There was no passion in his voice as he spoke; George suspected that not even Herman Bonner believed a word he said. “You’ve softened, George. You’ve lost your vision. I saw that in you yesterday; it’s why I saw a need to dispose of you — and to keep you disposed.”
He’s lost his mind, George thought. Lost his mind completely. . . . Unless it’s me that’s changing. And realized that just maybe it was so. He felt a guilty chill at the possibility that he could have stood in a room like this one and reasoningly considered the destruction of the city of New York. He tried to imagine himself conspiring with Herman to set loose a nuclear holocaust on his own nation — and found that it was easier than he wanted to admit even to himself. How different had it been, after all, when he and Herman and Paul Green had sat down to plan the destruction of Russia so many years ago?
I’ve got a lot to atone for.
The telephone rang in the next room; Herman disappeared to answer it. He reentered George’s room a few moments later, beet-red and eyes bulging with anger.
“They’ve escaped me,” he said. And left, shutting the door behind him without another word of explanation.
³ ³ ³
SOUTH KOREA—AT THE EDGE OF THE DMZ
It took them most of half an hour to get around the mountain, and during that time half a dozen rockets hit close enough to send them to the ground for cover. Their luck wasn’t all bad, though; when they finally did get around the turn of the mountain the land was scarred but still, and the sound of rockets was just an echo in the distance.
We don’t have to go all the way into the DMZ, Bill thought. We’re out of range here. There isn’t any sense going any farther.
It was an enormous relief.
There was a thin, clear spring flowing along the mountainside not a dozen yards from where Bill stood when it occurred to him that they could stop running. He looked at the boy and told him that they might as well clean themselves up and reconnoiter a little. And walked to the spring and fell to his knees and rinsed the muddy grit from his face and hands in water so cold and so pure that he could almost taste it through his skin.
When he was done he sank back onto his rump and let out a long slow sigh. There was still shelling off in the distance someplace. Well, maybe not that far in the distance. Right here the world was clean and lush and beautiful, and for the life of him Bill couldn’t begin to imagine anything that could be important enough to get killed over. Much less to kill. The boy was wading in the spring that wasn’t any deeper that the tops of his feet, chasing after water bugs or tadpoles or some such. Even the zombies seemed more alive here, somehow. The woman — God she was beautiful — her especially. She still hadn’t said a word, but her eyes . . . they were more nearly alive now. Not just staring off into space mindlessly. She was watching Jimmy, watching Bill, too. Was she coming out of her funk? Yes, Bill thought. She was. Another hour, maybe two, and the shock of rebirth would have faded enough for her to realize where she was. Bill realized that he was looking forward to that moment, and the realization surprised him. Though it shouldn’t have. Of course he was looking forward to it. She was beautiful; even if there had been nothing else to draw him to her, her beauty alone would have done it.
And there was something else that drew them together. Something that Bill had seen three times now, but still didn’t understand:
The glow.
The glow that Bill, the woman, and the boy all shared.
Bill smiled, basking in the sight of her. And the question rose up out of him before he stopped to think that there was no way she’d be ready to understand it yet.
“Who are you?” he asked her. And saw from the change on her face that she either understood or almost did, saw her begin to try to answer —
And that was when the first shell managed to reach this side of the mountain. And sent an avalanche of dust and stones and larger, slower things rolling down toward them.
“Christ,” Bill said. They had to get going again. The big rocks, the boulders rolling down from high on the mountain, weren’t going to come close enough to be a problem. The next rocket would come closer. Maybe too close. They had to keep moving if they were going to stay out of range. He stood; nodded to the boy, the woman. “Okay,” he said, “let’s get back at it.”
There was no way Bill could have known for certain that they were heading straight toward the North Korean lines. After all, he wasn’t any psychic; he didn’t know the future. If he’d thought just a little farther ahead, he could have guessed it. After all, Allied lines were behind them. That was obviously where the shelling was coming from. And it only stood to reason that they were trying to hit something. Which had to be the North Koreans. Bill couldn’t have known that the NKs had fallen back to their fortified positions on the far side of the DMZ, but he could have guessed that, too: it was the only reasonable place for them to retreat to.
To be fair to Bill, he wasn’t the only one who didn’t realize how far the NKs had retreated. If the Americans and South Koreans to the south had known, they wouldn’t have bothered shelling territory the enemy had already given up.
Bill didn’t think far enough ahead to realize any of those things. Maybe he might have if he’d paid a little more attention, back in basic training. They hadn’t taught him a whole lot back then about strategy or logistics, but they’d taught him some. Which was more than he’d learned in the years since, years that he’d spent mostly marking time. Fueling planes; working cleanup details. Grunt work that you didn’t have to think about to do.
Instead of heading sideways, toward the sea or the high mountains and away from the fighting, Bill Wallace led the four of them straight into the hands of the enemy.
That took a while.
³ ³ ³
What came first — before Bill and the boy Jimmy and the two dead people fell ultimately and disastrously into the grip of the North Koreans — what came first was the awful business in the DMZ. And worse things at the edge of it.
Carnage. Utter and awful and powerful carnage.
The near edge of the DMZ lay only a couple hundred yards beyond the base of the mountain, and there were two striking things there by the bunkers and the barbed wire and the barricades. Least of them was the amazing forest — dense and thick and untouched as a virgin jungle — that lay just beyond the line. Bill had heard tell of that forest, from airmen returned after duty in Korea. Wild things lived in it, things that man had long since hounded out of the rest of Asia. Big cats. Bears. Wild dogs so feral you couldn’t tell them from wolves. One guy, back at Whiteman, told Bill about standing watch on the line at six in the morning, and right there not ten feet from him in the dawn light was a full-grown deer no bigger than a rocking horse nibbling at the fine leaves on the low branches of a tree.
For all that, for all the wonder of it, the forest just didn’t seem too important compared with the carnage at the near edge of it.
Carnage? No, that was too mild a word. There wasn’t a word that Bill could think of that could begin to make the sight real.
And the smell — the smell came to them before the sight, before they passed through the stand of pine that hid that part of the line from their view. Sour/sweet, like a hair burning, rancid wax — and some other smell that brought Bill back to the coffin he’d woke in just days before.
He saw the bodies when they were still in among the pines. So many, so close that in places they covered the ground like a carpet. American uniforms, South Ko
rean, North Korean. Thousands, thousands — more than the eye could begin to count. Most of them piled up on both sides of the barricades, but not all of them. A few scattered, farther back. And there, near the spot where the barricades had been bulldozed to make way for supply trucks: bodies lined up neatly in front of the wall of a barracks, and an even string of bloodstains and bullet holes on the wall. As though the fifty Americans and South Koreans there had been lined up and executed by a firing squad. Which could only have happened if they’d surrendered.
By the time they reached the first of the bodies, the smell was so intense that it gave the boy a case of the dry heaves. The shelling was getting close again, but Bill stopped, waited; put his arms around the boy’s shoulders to help him through it. Which didn’t seem to help much, but Bill hoped that it was something. After a while, when the boy was closer to still than he was to convulsing, Bill said, “C’mon, Jerry. It won’t be any better until we get past it.” He looked up, saw that the oriental woman looked kind of green at the gills, too. Nodded to her. “You too.” And she seemed to understand. The policeman’s eyes were as dead as they’d been the first time Bill saw him.
Then they were moving again, picking their way through a sea of corpses toward the road the invaders had cut through the barricade. Bill did his best not to see them, even if he did have to look down to keep from stepping and stumbling on the dead. When he tried hard, hard as he could, he could just barely manage to look down at the sight of endless death without telling his heart exactly what it was his eyes had taken in. Once the boy did stumble, but Bill caught his arm, stopped him from landing down among the corpses. Which was a victory of sorts, a small triumph over the infinitude of death and destruction.
The last half-dozen yards were the worst. The bodies were piled especially high and thick there. Pressed and bunched together, from the look of them, by the same bulldozer that had broken down the barricade and cleared a trail through the forest. Too close together to walk around them; so close that there was no way to get by without walking over the bodies, stepping gingerly on a carpet of putrefying flesh. More than one of those corpses was crushed, pulped to the point where it was hard to be absolutely certain that it’d once been human.