Bloodstone (44 page)

“No matter, Jon Shannow. You, of course, will travel with me.”

“As you wish. We need to make our way to the crest of that hill,” said Shannow. Sarento’s eyes followed where he pointed, then swung back to the group by the paddock fence. “Kill even one of them and you will never see the twentieth century,” warned Shannow.

“How long will this take? I hunger!”

“As soon as we reach the crest.”

The man turned and walked slowly toward the hillside. Sarento strode alongside him, lifting him from his feet. He began to run, effortlessly covering the ground. The old man was light, and Sarento felt his life draining away.

“Don’t die, old man,” he said. Reaching the summit, he lowered Shannow to the ground. “Now your promise!”

Shannow swung the microphone into place. “Do it!” he whispered.

Violet light flared—and then they were gone …

Amaziga staggered to her feet. Behind her the riflemen were cheering and hugging one another, but all Amaziga could feel was shame. Turning from the hillside, she walked back to the farmhouse. How could he have done it? How could he?

Beth came out to greet her. “He succeeded, then,” she said.

“If you can call it success.”

“We’re still alive, Amaziga. I call that success.”

“Was the cost worth it? Why did I help him? He’s doomed a world.” When the Bloodstone had appeared, Shannow had called her to him.

“I have to get close to him,” he said. “I need you!”

“I don’t think I can take your weight. Let Sam help!”

“No. It must be you!”

Sam came out to join them now. Laying his hand on Amaziga’s shoulder, he leaned down and kissed her brow. “What have I done, Sam?” she asked.

“What you had to do,” he assured her. Together, hand in hand, they walked away to the far fields. Beth stayed for some time, staring at the hillside. Zerah Wheeler and the children joined her.

“Never seen the like,” said Zerah. “Gone, just like that!”

“Just like that,” echoed Beth, holding firm against the yawning emptiness within. She remembered Shannow as she had first seen him more than two decades before, a harsh, lonely man driven to search for a city he knew could not exist. I loved you then, she thought, as I could never love you since.

“Has the bad man gone?” Esther asked suddenly.

“He’s gone,” Zerah told her.

“Will he come back?”

“I don’t think so, child.”

“What will happen to us, to Oz and me?”

Zerah chuckled. “You’re going to stay with old Zerah. Isn’t that a terrible punishment? You’re going to have to do chores and wash and clean. I suspect you’ll run away from the sheer torment of it all.”

“I’d never run away from you, Zerah,” Esther promised, her face suddenly serious. “Not ever.”

“Me, neither,” said Oz. Lifting the little pistol from his coat pocket, he offered it to Zerah. “You’d better keep this for me, Frey,” he said. “I don’t want to shoot nobody.”

Zerah smiled as she took the gun. “Let’s go get some breakfast,” she said.

Beth stood alone. Her son was dead. Clem was dead. Shannow was gone. What was it all for? she wondered. To the left she saw Padlock Wheeler talking to a group of his men, Nestor Garrity among them. Isis was standing close by, and Beth saw Meredith take her hand and raise it to his lips.

Young love …

God, what was it all for?

Tobe Harris moved alongside her. “Sorry to bother you, Frey,” he said, “but the baby is getting fractious, and the last of the milk’s gone bad. Not to mention that the little fellow is beginning to stink the place out, if you take my meaning.”

“You never cleaned up an infant, Tobe?”

“Nope. You want me to learn?”

She met his eyes and caught his infectious grin. “Maybe I should teach you.”

“I’d like that, Beth.” It was the first time he had used her name, and Beth realized she liked it. Turning toward the house, she saw Amaziga and Sam coming down the hillside. The black woman approached her.

“I was wrong about Shannow,” she said, her voice soft. “Before he asked me to help him from the house, he gave this
to Sam.” From her pocket she took a torn scrap of paper and passed it to Beth. On it was scrawled a single word: “Trinity.”

“What does it mean?” asked Beth.

Amaziga told her.

New Mexico, July 16, 5:20
A.M.

T
HE STORM WAS
disappearing over the mountains, jagged spears of lightning lashing the sky over the distant peaks. The rain had passed, but the desert was wet and cool. Shannow fell forward as the violet light faded. Sarento grabbed him, hauling him close.

“If you have tricked me …” he began. But then he picked up soul scents so dense and rich that they almost overwhelmed him. Millions of them. Scores of millions. Sarento released Shannow and spun around and around, the heady mind aroma so dizzying that it almost quelled his hunger just to experience it. “Where are we?” he asked the old man.

Shannow sat down by a rock and looked around at the lightning-lit desert. The sky was brightening in the east. “New Mexico,” he said.

Sarento walked away from the wounded man, climbing a low hill and staring out over the desert. Glancing to his left, he saw a metal lattice tower like a drilling rig and below it a tent, its open flaps rippling in the wind.

The twentieth century! His dream. Here he could feed for an eternity. He laughed aloud and swung around on Shannow. The old man limped up behind him and was standing staring at the tower.

“We are a long way from the nearest settlement,” said Sarento, “but I have all the time in the world to find it. How does it feel, Shannow, to have condemned the entire planet?”

“Today I am become death,” said Shannow. Wearily, the old man turned away and walked back down the hillside.

Sarento sensed his despair; it only served to heighten the joy he felt. The sky was clearing, the dawn approaching.

He looked again at the metal tower, which was around a hundred feet high. Something had been wedged beneath it, but from there Sarento could not see what it was.

Who cares? he thought. The largest concentration of people was away to the north. I will go there, he decided. Shannow’s words came back to him, tugging at his memory.

“Today I am become death.”

It was a quote from an old book. He struggled to find the memory. Ah, yes … The
Bhagavad Gita
. I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. How apt.

There was something else, but he could not think of it. He sat down to await the dawn and exult in his newfound freedom. Atop the metal lattice tower was a galvanized iron box as large as a shed. As the sun rose, it made the box gleam, and light shone down on the tower itself. Now Sarento could see what was wedged below it.

Mattresses. Scores of them. He smiled and shook his head. Someone had laid mattresses twenty feet deep under the tower. How ridiculous!

The quote continued to haunt him.

“Today I am become death.”

Knowledge flew into his mind with every bit as much power as the distant lightning. With the knowledge came a numbing panic, and he knew without doubt where he was—and when.

The Alamogordo bombing range, New Mexico, 180 miles south of Los Alamos. Now that his memory was open, all the facts came flashing to his mind. The mattresses had been placed beneath the atomic bomb as servicemen had hauled it into place with ropes. They had feared dropping it and triggering a premature explosion.

Swinging around, he sought the old man. There was no sign of him.

Sarento started to run. The facts would not stop flowing into his mind.

The plutonium bomb resulted in an explosion equal to
twenty thousand tons of TNT. The detonation of an atomic bomb releases enormous amounts of heat, achieving temperatures of several million degrees in the bomb itself. This creates a large fireball.

On wings of fear Sarento ran.

Convection currents created by the explosion suck dust and other matter up into the fireball, creating a characteristic mushroom cloud. The detonation also produces a shock wave that goes outward for several miles, destroying buildings in the way. Large quantities of neutrons and gamma rays are emitted; lethal radiation bathes the scene
.

I can’t die! I can’t die!

He was 127 yards from the tower at 5:30
A.M.
on July 16, 1945. One second later the tower was vaporized. For hundreds of yards around the zero point that Oppenheimer had christened Trinity, the desert sand was fused to glass. The ball of incandescent air formed by the explosion rose rapidly to a height of 35,000 feet.

Several miles away J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the mushroom cloud form. All around him men began cheering. “Today I am become death,” he said.