The Tommyknockers, Page 71

  Torgeson stopped and the two men got out. Weems paused, then took the riot gun clipped under the dash. Torgeson nodded. Things were starting to come clear. Not sane, but clear. Gabbons and Rhodes had disappeared on their way back from this town. And Monster had been here the day before he committed suicide. What was that Phil Collins song, the one with the spooky drums? I can feel it in the air tonight ...

  It was in the air, all right.

  Gently, Torgeson turned over the man he believed to be the one who had finally blown the whistle on this craziness.

  He had cleaned up a lot of ugly messes on the highway, but he still drew in a harsh gasp and shied his face away.

  "Christ, what hit him?" Weems asked. The mask muffled his words, but the tone of dismay came through loud and clear.

  Torgeson didn't know. He had seen a man once who'd been hit by a snowplow. That guy had looked a little like this. That was the closest.

  The guy was blood from the top of what had been his head all the way down to his waist. His belt buckle had been driven deep into his body.

  "Christ, man, I'm sorry," he murmured, and laid the body down gently. He could go for the wallet, but he wanted nothing more to do with that smashed body. He headed for the car. Weems fell in beside him, riot gun held on a slant against his chest. In the distance, to the west, the smoke was growing thicker by the moment, but here there was only a faint woodsy tang.

  "This is crazy shit," Weems said through his mask.

  "Yes."

  "I have a very bad feeling about being here."

  "Yes."

  "I believe we should vacate this area on the dou--"

  There was a crackling sound from behind them, and for a moment Torgeson thought it must be the fire--it was far away, relatively speaking, but it could be over here too. Perfectly reasonable! When you were at the Mad Hatter's tea party, anything was. Turning, he realized that the sound was not burning branches but breaking ones.

  "Holy shit!" Claudell Weems cried.

  Torgeson's jaw dropped.

  The Coke machine, stupid but reliable, moved in again. This time it came out of the brush at the side of the road. The glass display front was broken. The sides of the big rectangular box were scratched. And on the metal part of the machine's front, Torgeson saw a horridly suggestive shape driven in so deep it looked almost sculpted.

  It looked like half a head.

  The Coke machine moved out over the road and just hung there for a moment like a coffin painted in incongruously gay colors. They were gay, at least, until you noticed the blood which had dripped and run and was beginning to dry in maroon splotches.

  Torgeson could hear a faint humming, and a clicking sound--Like relays, he thought. Maybe it's been damaged. Maybe, but still--

  The Coke machine suddenly arrowed straight at them.

  "MothaFUCKAH!"Weems shouted--there was dismay and terror in his voice, but a kind of crazed laughter as well.

  "Shoot it, shoot it!" Torgeson cried, and leapt to the right.

  Weems took a step back and promptly fell over Leandro's body. This was extremely stupid. It was also extremely lucky. The Coke machine missed him by inches. As it banked for another run, Weems sat up and pumped three quick shotgun blasts into it. Metal exploded inward in metal daisy shapes with black centers. The machine began to buzz. It stopped, jittering back and forth in the air like a man with Huntington's chorea.

  Torgeson drew his service pistol and fired four rounds. The Coke machine started for him, but now it seemed lethargic, unable to get up any speed. It jerked to a stop, jerked forward, stopped, jerked forward again. It rocked drunkenly from side to side. The buzzing grew louder. Runnels of soda fell from the access door in sticky rivulets.

  As it came at him, Torgeson pivoted easily away.

  "Drop, Andy!" Weems yelled.

  Torgeson dropped. Claudell Weems shot the Coke machine three more times, firing as fast as he could work the pump action. On the third shot, something inside it exploded. Black smoke and a brief belch of fire licked out one side of the machine.

  Green fire, Torgeson saw. Green.

  The Coke machine thumped to the road about twenty feet from Leandro's body. It tottered, then fell forward with a hollow bang. Broken glass jingled. There were three seconds of silence; then a long metallic croaking sound. It stopped. The Coca-Cola machine lay dead across the white line in the middle of Route 9. Its red-and-white hide was full of bullet-holes. Smoke poured from it.

  "I have just drawn my weapon and killed a Coke machine, sir," Claudell Weems said hollowly inside his mask.

  Andy Torgeson turned toward him. "And you never even ordered it to halt, or fired a warning shot. Probably draw a suspension, you dumb shit."

  They stared at each other over the masks, and started to laugh. Claudell Weems laughed so hard he was nearly doubled over.

  Green, Torgeson thought, and although he was still laughing, nothing felt very funny inside, where he lived. The fire that came out of that fucker was green.

  "Never fired a warning shot," Weems cackled breathlessly. "No, I never did. Never did at all."

  "Violated its fucking civil rights," Torgeson said.

  "Have to be an investigation!" Weems laughed. "Yo, baby! I mean ... mean ..." He tottered on his feet, and there was a lot of Claudell Weems to totter. Torgeson suddenly realized he was dizzy himself. They were breathing pure oxygen . . . hyperventilating.

  "Stop laughing!" he shouted, and his voice seemed to come from a long distance away. "Claudell, stop laughing!"

  He somehow crossed the distance to where Weems was swaying woozily on his feet. The distance seemed very wide. When he was almost there, he stumbled. Weems somehow caught him and for a moment they stood swaying drunkenly, arms about each other, like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed at the end of the first fight.

  "You pullin me down, asshole," Weems muttered.

  "Fuck you, you started it." The world came into focus, wavered, steadied. Slow breaths, Torgeson told himself. Big slow breaths, easy respiration. Be still, my beating heart. That last made him giggle again, but he got hold of it.

  The two of them wavered back toward the cruiser, arms about each other's waists.

  "The body," Weems said.

  "Leave it for now. He's dead. We're not. Yet."

  "Look," Weems said as they passed Leandro's remains. "The bubs! They're out!"

  The blue flashers, called bubbles or bubs by the troopers, on top of the cruiser were dead and dark. That wasn't supposed to be--leaving the flashers on at the scene of the accident was ingrained behavior.

  "Did you--" Torgeson began, and then stopped.

  Something in the landscape had changed. The day had darkened, as it does when a large cloud floats over the sun or when an eclipse begins. They looked at each other, then turned. Torgeson saw it first, a great silvery shape emerging from the boil of smoke. Its huge leading edge gleamed.

  "Holy Christ!" Weems almost squealed. His large brown hand found Torgeson's arm and bore down upon it.

  Torgeson barely felt it, although there would be bruises in the shape of Weems's hand the next day.

  Up it came ... and up ... and up. Smoke-hazed sunlight glinted on its silvery-metallic surface. It rose on an angle of roughly forty degrees. It seemed to be wavering slightly, although that could have been an illusion or heat-haze.

  Of course the whole thing was an illusion--had to be. No way it could be real, Torgeson thought; it was oxygen rapture.

  But how can we both be having the same hallucination?

  "Oh my dear God," Weems groaned, "it's a flyin saucer, Andy, it's a fuckin flyin saucer!"

  But to Torgeson it did not look like a saucer. It looked like the underside of an Army mess-plate--the biggest damn plate in creation. Up it came and up it came; you thought it must end, that a hazy margin of sky must appear between it and the rafters of smoke, but still it came, dwarfing the trees, dwarfing all the landscape. It made the smoke of the forest-fire look like a couple of cigar
ette butts smoldering in an ashtray. It filled more and more of the sky, blotting out the horizon, rising, oh, something was rising out of Big Injun Woods, and it was deathly silent--there was no sound, no sound at all.

  They stared at it, and then Weems clutched Torgeson and Torgeson clutched Weems, they hugged each other like children, and Torgeson thought: Oh, if it falls on us--

  And still it came up from the smoke and the fire, and up, as if it would never end.

  11

  By nightfall, Haven had been cut off from the outside world by the National Guard. The Guardsmen surrounded it, those downwind wearing oxygen equipment.

  Torgeson and Weems made it out--but not in their cruiser. That was as dead as John Wilkes Booth. They hoofed it. By the time they had used up the oxygen in the last flat-pack, swapping it back and forth, they were well into Troy and found themselves able to deal with the outside air--the wind left them lucky, Claudell Weems said later. They walked out of what would soon be referred to as "the zone of pollution" in top-secret government reports, and theirs was the first official word of what was going on in Haven, but by then there had been hundreds of unofficial reports on the lethal quality of the air in the area and thousands of reports of a gigantic UFO seen rising from the smoke in Big Injun Woods.

  Weems made it out with a bloody nose. Torgeson lost half a dozen teeth. Both counted themselves lucky.

  The initial perimeter, staffed with National Guardsmen from Bangor and Augusta, was thin. By nine P.M. it had been augmented by Guardsmen from Limestone and Presque Isle and Brunswick and Portland. By dawn a thousand more battle-equipped Guardsmen had been flown in from Eastern Corridor cities.

  Between the hours of 7:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M., NORAD stood at DEFCON-2. The President was circling the Midwest at sixty thousand feet in Looking Glass and chewing Turns five and six at a time.

  The FBI was on the scene at 6:00 P.M., the CIA at 7:15 P.M. By 8:00 o'clock, they were yelling about jurisdiction. At 9:15 P.M. a frightened, infuriated CIA agent named Spacklin shot an FBI agent named Richardson. The incident was hushed up, but both Gardener and Bobbi Anderson would have understood perfectly--the Dallas Police were on the scene and in complete control of the situation.

  10.

  TOMMYKNOCKERS, KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

  1

  There was a moment of paralyzed silence in Bobbi's kitchen following the misfire of Ev Hillman's old .45, a silence that was as much mental as it was physical. Gard's wide blue eyes stared into Bobbi's green ones.

  "You tried--" Bobbi began, and her mind

  (! tried to !)

  produced an echo in Gardener's head. That moment seemed very long. And when it broke, it broke like glass.

  Bobbi had dropped the photon pistol to her side in her surprise. Now she brought it up again. There was to be no second chance. In her agitation, her mind was completely open to Gardener, and he felt her shock at the chance she had given him. She intended that there should be no second chance.

  There was nothing he could do with his right hand; it was under the table. Before she could aim the muzzle of the photon pistol at him, he put his left hand on the edge of the kitchen table and, without thinking, shoved as hard as he could. The table legs squealed harshly on the floor as the table moved. It struck Bobbi's lumped and misshapen chest. At the same instant, a beam of brilliant green light shot from the barrel of the toy gun hooked into Hank Buck's big radio/tape-player. Instead of hitting Gard's own chest, it jerked upward and passed over his shoulder--more than a foot above it, actually, but he could still feel the skin there tingle unpleasantly under the shirt, as if the surface molecules were dancing like drops of water on a hot skillet.

  Gard twisted to the right and dropped down to get away from that beam of what looked like light. His ribs struck the table, struck it hard, and the table rammed Bobbi again, this time even harder. Bobbi's chair rocked backward on its rear legs, teetered, and then both it and she toppled over with a crash. The beam of green light swung upward, and Gardener was momentarily reminded of those guys who stand on airport tarmacs at night, using powerful flashlights to guide planes into their berths.

  He heard a low crunching, crackling sound like splintering plywood from overhead, looked up, and saw the photon pistol had drawn a slit in the kitchen ceiling. Gardener staggered to his feet. Incredibly, his jaws cracked and wavered in another yawn. His head clanged and echoed with the grass-fire alarm of Bobbi's thoughts

  (he's got a gun tried to shoot me bastard bastard gun he's got)

  and he tried to shield himself before he went mad. He couldn't. Bobbi was screaming inside his head, and as she lay on the floor pinned for the moment between the table and overturned chair, she was trying to bring the gun to bear on him for another shot.

  Gardener lifted his foot and shoved the table again, grimacing. It overturned, beers, pills, and boom-box radio all sliding off. Most of the stuff fell on Bobbi. Beer splashed in her face and ran, fizzing and foaming, over her New and Improved skin. The radio hit her neck, then the floor, landing in a shallow puddle of beer.

  Flash, you fucker! Gardener screamed at it. Explode! Self-destruct! Explode, goddammit, ex--

  The radio did more than that. It seemed to bulge, and then with a sound like rotten cloth ripping along a seam, it shattered outward in all directions, belching streaks of green fire like bottled lightning. Bobbi screamed. What he heard with his ears was bad; the sound inside his head was infinitely worse.

  Gardener screamed with her, not hearing himself. He saw that Bobbi's shirt was burning.

  He started for her, not thinking about what he was up to. He dropped the .45 as he did so, without even thinking. This time it did go off, sending a slug into Jim Gardener's ankle, shattering it. Pain blew through his mind like a hot wind. He screamed again. He took a shambling step forward, his head ringing with her horrid mental cries. They would send him mad in a moment. This thought was actually a relief. When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore.

  Then, for one second, Gard saw his Bobbi for the last time.

  He thought perhaps Bobbi was trying to smile.

  Then the screaming began again. She screamed and tried to beat out the flames that were turning her torso to tallow, and that screaming was too much, far too much, too loud, far too loud; it was unbearable. For them both, he thought. He bent, found the triple-damned pistol on the floor, and picked it up. He needed to use both of his thumbs to get it cocked. The pain in his ankle was bad--he knew that--but for the moment it was lost to him, buried under Bobbi's shrieking agony. He pointed Hillman's pistol at her head.

  Work, you goddam thing, oh please, please work--

  But if it worked and he missed? There mightn't be another cartridge in the mag.

  His motherfucking hands wouldn't stop shaking.

  He fell to his knees like a man struck with a sudden violent need to pray. He crawled toward Bobbi, who lay shrieking and writhing and burning on the floor. He could smell her; could see black shards of plastic from the radio's case bubbling their way into her flesh. He almost overbalanced and fell on top of her. Then he pressed the.45 against the side of her neck and pulled the trigger.

  Another click.

  Bobbi, screaming and screaming. Screaming inside his head.

  He tried to pull the slide back again. Almost got it. Then it slipped. Snick.

  Please God, oh please let me be her friend this one last time!

  This time he got the slide all the way back. He tried the trigger again. This time the gun went off.

  The scream suddenly became a loud buzz in Gardener's head. He knew he was listening to the mental sound of mortal disconnect. He turned his head upward. A. bright stripe of sunlight from the unzipped roof fell across his face, bisecting it. Gardener shrieked.

  Suddenly the buzzing stopped and there was silence.

  Bobbi Anderson--or whatever she had become--was as dead as the pile of autumn-leaf corpses in the control room of the ship, as dead as the galley
slaves which had been the ship's drive.

  She was dead and Gardener would have gladly died then, too ... but it still wasn't over.

  Not yet.

  2

  Kyle Archinbourg was having a Pepsi in Cooder's when the screams began in his head. The bottle dropped from his hand and shattered on the floor as his hands jerked up to his temples. Dave Rutledge, dozing outside Cooder's in a chair which he had caned himself, was tilted back against the building and dreaming weird dreams in alien colors. His eyes snapped open and he sat bolt upright as if someone had touched him with a live wire, scrawny tendons standing out on his throat. His chair slid out from under him, and when his head hit the wooden wall of the market, his neck shattered like glass. He was dead before he hit the asphalt. Hazel McCready was making herself a cup of tea. When the screams began, her hands jerked. The one holding the teapot spilled boiling water across the back of the one holding the cup, scalding it badly. She hurled the teapot across the room, screaming in pain and fear. Ashley Ruvall, riding his bike past the town hall, fell over into the street and lay there stunned. Dick Allison and Newt Berringer were playing cribbage at Newt's house, a pretty goddam stupid thing to be doing since each knew what the other held in his hand, but Newt didn't have a Parcheesi board, and besides, they were only passing time, waiting for the telephone to ring, waiting for Bobbi to tell them the drunk was dead and the next phase of the work could begin. Newt was dealing, and he sprayed cards all over the table and floor. Dick bolted to his feet, eyes wild, hair standing on end, and lurched for the door. He ran into the wall three feet to the right of it instead and went sprawling. Doc Warwick was in his study going over his old diaries. The scream hit him like a wall of cinderblocks being trundled along a set of tracks at brisk speed. His body dumped adrenaline into his heart in lethal quantities, and it blew like a tire. Ad McKeen was in his pickup truck, headed over to Newt's. He ran off the road and into Pooch Bailey's abandoned Hot Dog House. His face hit the steering wheel. He was momentarily stunned, but no more. He had been going slow. He looked around, dazed and terrified. Wendy Fannin was coming up from the cellar with two jars of peach preserves. Since her "becoming" had started, she ate little else. In the last four weeks she had eaten over ninety jars of peach preserves all by herself. She wailed and threw these two into the air like a spastic juggler. They came down, struck the stairs, shattered. Peaches and sticky juice ran and dripped. Bobbi, she thought numbly, Bobbi Anderson's burning up! Nancy Voss was standing blankly at the back window and thinking about Joe. She missed Joe, missed him a lot. She supposed that the "becoming" would eventually wipe that longing out--every day it seemed more and more distant--but although it hurt to miss Joe, she didn't want that hurt to stop. It made no sense, but there it was. Then the shrieks began in her head and she jerked forward so suddenly that she broke three of the windowpanes with her forehead.