And suffered many things of many physicians,
and had spent all that she had,
and was nothing bettered,
but rather grew worse.
When she had heard of Jesus, she
came in the press behind and touched his garment.
For she said, ‘If I may but touch his clothes, I shall be made whole.’
And straightway the course of her blood was dried up;
and she felt in her body
that she was healed of that plague.”
Beneath pale lids Eleanor Astor’s eyeballs moved rapidly as if watching her own private movie screen. Her mind accessing, associating words to her missing sister in New York.
And Franklin stopped referring to God. Stopped using biblical quotes. Stopped mentioning anything directly related to her sister. And as he started talking to her strengths, her breathing, the tension in her facial muscles, a look of deep peace overtook her:
“You may . . . remember a time when you can feel yourself-reliant and creative. A time when you are in this place where you can solve any problem.”
Her eyeballs slowed, her breathing shallowed further. He reached over and squeezed her fleshy left shoulder: “Bring that time, that feeling, those abilities forward, here, with you now . . . And as you do, consider your options . . .”
Half an hour, thousands of words later, Mrs. Eleanor Astor’s eyes fluttered open.
She offered him a smile. “Thank you for talking with me, Reverend. Thank you so very, very much.” She even surprised him with a little one-armed hug.
“Nice owl,” she said leaving the front office.
She may not be in perfect spirits, Franklin thought. But she’s better. Lots better. She’s functional, and coping.
And uncharitably he thought, Screw Ralph.
The Gathering
Beneath the thirty or so portable restaurant heaters scattered across the vast metal barn, a big muscular man in a thick red and green flannel jacket set up folding tables that would hold fresh fruits and vegetables — and yes, even the smoky barbecue that would annoy a few of his guests.
When he finished lifting fifteen hundred chairs off their racks, setting them up two-at-a-time before the tables, he looked down the rows, reviewing his work — adjusting a chair forward here, another back there.
It was really starting to look like something.
The security lights were on. The yard was plowed, major snowdrifts pushed aside. Small signs had been posted out on the road. An even-dozen gender-assigned porta-potties made a neat row behind the barn. No way could Erik Sorenson’s house — or his septic tank — handle the expected overflow.
He could scarcely believe it. Held here! Erik thought. On my forty acres! Plenty of room for all the trailers, motor homes, vans and tents he expected to see pitched out back. Erik could barely contain the sense of power, pleasure, humility and arrogance that coursed through his veins at the tremendous honor granted him. This gathering was going to be very big. The biggest in twenty years. And despite the way things turned out — the timing and all — the consensus among The People over New York and Virginia Beach would be nothing short of elation.
So in part, today would be a celebration.
He smiled out the big barn door at the impressive row of eight parallel blue garbage trucks parked nose out, facing his driveway. Waiting. Erik smiled. Only the last two would haul out trash.
The other six would haul something else entirely.
As the ball of the sun broke the horizon, glasses rattled on shelves at Eric Sorensen’s farmhouse. It felt like a shock wave from another bomb.
“They’re here!” squealed Erik’s wife Mary Beth, from the kitchen.
A gleaming black pickup in the lead — guns racked across its back window — came first. Matt from Idaho! Always one of the early birds! A real organizer. Erik directed Matt where to park on the snowy front grass. Where people could see Matt’s truck when they drove up.
Hot on his tail, Billy Bob in his orange long-body van, up from Georgia. This way! Erik pointed. Right here next to Matt!
Erik hurriedly drafted Matt and Billy Bob to help verify the first bunch until someone else could take over. In a steady stream they powered through the front gate. West Virginia license plates. Texas. Tennessee. So many, Erik didn’t even know them all himself.
He grabbed the storm door. “Mary Beth!” he called, “MB! The checkered tablecloths! You need to be getting the ladies organized!”
Will Big Mombo Run . . . In Time?
Morning hid behind dark clouds, a storm building over the leafless black forest of east Pennsylvania. Six hours ago Everon had been right here. Flying the MD-900 west over the lines for Mercer.
Now everything was different: Nan was on the east lines in the HALO with Andréa. Enya was in the hospital. He felt like Right Deters. Worry tore at his focus. Fixing the Williams system had become personal.
Holmes and Rani were silent too, watching through the helicopter’s open cargo doors.
“There’s no obvious damage, E,” Rani said over the intercom.
Everon silently agreed. He toggled his mic for the twentieth time. “Calling Turban . . . Aja? Come in, Aja?”
There was no response.
Enya had been with him a long time. She was the glue that held the team together. First Cynthia, now Enya! Shit! She’s just lying there . . . breathing . . .
Stop it!
He shook his head, blinking rapidly. Fixing one of Hunt’s generating plants is the only way I can save her. Everything depended on power. Without it they had nothing. That meant Turban.
“At least Scrounge found us some extra fuel,” Rani said over his headset.
“Not enough to keep Mercer’s little junior combustion diesel going very long, is it?” Holmes shot back. “Unless Turban can get us the Big Mombo — Mercer’s main coal unit — started, half a day is all we’ve got. A day at most.”
Turban can fight for some crazy belief about his headgear, Everon thought, but can he black-start a whole gen plant?
“Well maybe it’ll be enough,” Rani said.
“A very big maybe,” Holmes shot back.
“Hey!” Rani yelled. “Look at that!”
They all whooped as Mercer came into view. The entire yard was brightly lit. In the reflection of several hundred floodlights, the river took itself around Mercer’s outer fence.
“Damn! He’s got power!” Holmes said.
The plant looked like an old cartoon. A crazy top-secret machine. Insulated steam tubes running this way and that, feeding back on themselves. Long horizontal blimp tanks. The two-hundred-foot-tall steam chimney stacks.
And, a big beautiful long black mountain. Three-inch chunks of coal. Waiting to be ground into coal dust, turned into power.
“All right, guys,” Everon said, “the lines below us get examined next! Mercer to Nicola!”
As if parallel parking, Everon angled the helicopter sideways. Inched right up to the lines. The lines were hung on the tower arms in pairs, each group of two heavy wires known as a Phase: Phase A, Phase B, Phase C.
Holmes and Rani were completely covered, head to toe, by Faraday suits of silvery cloth that would protect them from the dangerous voltage that normally ran through the lines.
Seated on the four-foot-square platform that extended from the helicopter’s right cargo door, Holmes reached out with a metal wand and tapped the lines. “Nothing.” There was no arc, no sparks. He hooked his carabiner onto the nearest powerline. Placed his left kneepad on it . . . and swung his right knee over onto the other.
Holmes would check Phase A. Gripping tightly with gloved hands, he began to crawl.
Two hundred feet in the air.
“Kinda slippery,” Holmes radioed through his headset. “I don’t know why we have to wear the suits if the juice is off.”
“Something we hope Turban’s going to change,” Rani radioed back. The accident . . . no way Rani�
�s ever going up on any line without a suit, Everon thought.
Everon moved his rotor wash away from Holmes, and just as smoothly deposited Rani twenty-five yards back on a parallel set of lines.
Phase B.
Strung between towers, each a football field away from the next, miles of power line lay in front of the two men. They would look for cable spurs, feel for flattened or burned areas. Rani and Holmes would examine every inch.
Everon touched down on the large painted helipad . Before the blades had stopped turning he was out and running past the deserted guard station. His eye caught a small silver plaque in the dim morning light:
Fifty-two years old, Everon thought. Cyn was only thirty-five.
As he ran into the middle of the yard, he began to notice a sound he recognized, like the muffled rattle of an idling 18-wheeler.
Somewhere inside, a diesel generator is running.
His ears took him quickly across the yard. On the east side of the building sat the three gigantic transformers that would take Mercer’s relatively tame 23,000-volt output and multiply it by ten. When everything was ready, Everon’s people would close circuit breakers and switches, sending that 230,000 volts screaming directly into Nicola. Then to Thomas. And on to Trenton Memorial Hospital.
Stay with us, Enya!
He visually checked each of Mercer’s output switches where someone had already padlocked the massive circuit breakers. Safely disconnecting the power lines back to Nicola.
Good. But accidentally sending juice anywhere would be a disaster. Too many of the systems they were testing today had been damaged by the bombs’ EMP. He couldn’t afford to take the chance any of the big breakers were faulty.
By hand he began cranking the long silver switch tubes to vertical on their hinges. There were three sets.
The first set connected the lines Holmes and Rani were crawling east to Mercer. A second set of massive switches ran off to the northwest, to the U.S. grid. At the rear of the yard, a third, smaller set, strangely surrounded by their own separate chain-link fence, also presumably connected somehow to the U.S. grid.
That was odd.
Everon stepped closer.
The snow in front of the locked gate was scraped smooth. As if it had been swung open recently. A smattering of footprints ran in all directions. The big blade switches inside looked older than the others in the yard. They were already raised straight up and down. Disconnected.
Behind the switch, its heavy output wires disappeared into conduits, down into the earth.
Where do they go? Everon wondered. Through the woods somewhere? U.S. grid lines usually ran overhead.
They were disconnected, all he needed to know right now. He ran for the distant control room stairs.
He passed the diesel tank. Its slender glass sight gauge showed a horizontal line just above the 9,000 gallon mark.
And then a noise grabbed him, in that first moment like the sound of the rushing river. Growing louder . . . into a low WHOOOM! The sound of a deep-throated blast furnace.
Everon knew that sound.
It had to be Mercer Junior, the LM6000 combustion turbine, identical to those mounted below the wings of a Boeing 737.
Starting already? What the heck is with this guy? How could Turban possibly get it up and running so quickly?
Everon ran for the center of that sound.
Dead Meat
In his old Dodge pickup, Russ Bezier joined the line of vehicles at the gate to the Sorensen property. Russ’s old bomber jacket sported a small CSA pin — a sword held by a fist — on the collar. Beneath the jacket and a red flannel shirt, he was wearing a very tiny wire. A microphone-transmitter combo that looked exactly like a mole centered in a chest freckle.
Dozens of vehicles were already here, parked inside on the snowy lawn. The event was shaping up to be the largest group of white separatists he’d ever seen.
The car ahead was let through and Russ pulled up. Though he normally pronounced his name as if it were French — BEZ-EE-AY, he told the guard it was Bass. “Russ Bass, with the CSA — The Covenant, Sword, Arm of the Lord; Southwest Branch.”
The dark-haired gate guard took one look at the pickup, Russ’s collar pin, and passed him through no problem.
Fitting in with these clowns ought to be a piece of cake, Russ thought. Russ Bezier was an agent of the FBI.
Everything began well. He made his way back to the barn. Got himself a soda. Mixed in. Started getting to know people. Making a few friends. Until he took a bite of that damn sausage.
Questions seemed to come from three directions at once. “Where are you from, exactly?” “You’re a member of the CSA?” “I know all the Eastie Arm-of-the-Lord boys. Never seen one eat meat.”
How could I have been so stupid!
Russ had studied their organization. Memorized every detail. Lived their eccentricities. Each attending group had its own peculiarity. To the Aryan Nations and the Odin People, their religion was simply white power. The Neo-Nazi boys liked to march around and salute. Followers of Jesus Christ-Christians spent all their free time in prayer. The Brotherhood was somewhere in between. Those KKK folks were into a Dixie thang — flags, robes, crosses.
For the CSA, any mysticism beyond your basic speaking in tongues and faith healing was completely taboo. And MEAT, dammit! Meat! But it smelled so good. He’d really bit the big weenie this time. Food preference reflected each group’s religious beliefs. The Klan loved a good barbecue. Pillar of Fire members drank cokes and sweet lemonade, ate cookies and angel food cake, even red licorice.
Like the Aryan Brotherhood and The Creators, CSA members barely ate sugar. Never meat! What’s wrong with me? Russ thought. I know this!
“Uh, these’re vegetarian, aren’t they?” That’s right. Smooth it over.
“You here with somebody?” One of Russ’s inquisitors asked. “Who do you know here?”
Russ Bass wasn’t known by anybody.
Within a minute the big red-haired Viking guy was out talking with one of the gate guards. Uh-oh! Both glancing in his direction. Russ could just about read their lips.
“Did anybody vouch for him?”
“Nobody,” the man shook his head.
Russ tried to play it cool. Backing casually toward the rear door of the barn, slowly reaching behind his back for his weapon. He was instantly surrounded. Revolvers, shotguns, full automatic assault weapons of every size and shape.
All against a single Glock pistol.
His.
They took his weapon. Pinned his arms to his sides. He was searched, his hands tied back. Frog marched and locked into a porta-potty.
It was a poor time for a pun, gallows humor maybe. But the first thing Russ could think to whisper into the chest microphone was:
“Cheryl, get me out of this! I’m really in the shitter now!”
Ding!
Franklin’s morning went by in a blur of grief. Needy church members crushed by their expected losses. Each transferring their load to his back. By eight a.m. he could barely take it.
He took a few minutes between visitors to wander out to Marj’s desk.
“The pet store sent over a selection,” she grimaced, eyeballing a paper bag on the side table. “They said they were all owl favorites.”
Inside the bag Franklin found a covered white styrofoam cup marked GRASSHOPPERS, and a Chinese take-out carton that squeaked when he moved it. Inside the carton were two small white mice.
He carefully popped the top on the cup, caught the first grasshopper trying to escape. When he held it between Harry’s cage bars, the owl sniffed cautiously, then backed off and dropped another feather.
“Maybe he doesn’t like grasshoppers?” Marj suggested.
Franklin slipped the bug back into the cup and lifted out one of the mice by its tail.
Harry wouldn’t even look at it.
Franklin watched Harry’s feathers shake, not knowing what to do. “He ate some trout at my grand
mother’s.”
“He seems to be getting sicker,” Marj said.
There was a small red sore forming along the right side of the bird’s beak.
Is it radiation? The bird was under my shirt all that time. So far, I feel great. The picture persisted: Harry and Melissa separated by the thin metal of Cyn’s old file cabinet. Could Melissa have been exposed to whatever radiation Harry was?
Ding!
His thoughts were interrupted by a bell from Marj’s computer.
She said, “It’s horrible. We’re just getting a tremendous amount of email, so many calls. I’ve had to start putting off appointments with anyone who mentions an article or a news program,” she tapped a chubby finger on the cover of People magazine, “without bringing up the loss of someone in New York or Virginia.”
Ding!
She smiled self-consciously, “These sounds help me keep track of the people you really need to talk to.”
She whispered, “It’s like the Sundays you give the sermon, more than double the attendance of Reverend Maples.” She raised an eyebrow, “I’ve heard women compare your voice favorably with dark chocolate, you know.”
Franklin frowned at her.
“Your voice is nice, but I don’t think that’s it,” she smiled, speaking normally. “It’s because you care so much about us.”
She moved her mouse. It dinged twice more.
“How do you do that?”
“Oh, you just click here,” she moved the mouse across the screen again. “Then here. Type in the names of anybody you want it to sound different for. You can choose a bell —” the little chime sounded. “Or a . . .” A gong sounded. “Well, some of them are pretty silly. Doesn’t always work, but it helps.”
She flipped back to a page in People with a folded corner. “I was reading where the Army’s set up call centers around New York and Virginia Beach. Cellphones don’t work there. Everyone who escaped but hasn’t found a way out of the area is being allowed one minute to contact a loved one, a friend. Even at twenty-five thousand calls an hour, six hundred thousand calls a day, not everyone can get through.”
Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2) Page 21