Midnight (52 page)

38

Tessa worried about Sam. She and Chrissie and Harry returned to Harry’s house at one in the morning, after being debriefed three times by men in decontamination suits. Although they had terrible nightmares, they managed to get a few hours’ sleep. But Sam was gone all night. He had not returned by the time they finished breakfast at eleven o’clock Wednesday morning.

“He may think he’s indestructible,” she said, “but he’s not.”

“You care about him,” Harry said.

“Of course I care about him.”

“I mean
care
about him.”

“Well … I don’t know.”

“I know.”

“I know too,” Chrissie said.

Sam returned at one o’clock, grimy and gray-faced. She’d made up the spare bed with fresh sheets, and he tumbled into it still half dressed.

She sat in a chair by the bed, watching him sleep. Occasionally he groaned and thrashed. He called her name and Chrissie’s—and sometimes Scott’s—as if he had lost them and was wandering in search of them through a dangerous and desolate place.

Bureau men in decontamination suits came for him at six o’clock, Wednesday evening, after he’d slept less than five hours. He went away for the rest of that night.

By then all the bodies, in their multitudinous biologies, had been collected from where they had fallen, tagged, sealed in plastic bags, and put into cold storage for the attention of the pathologists.

That night Tessa and Chrissie shared the same bed. Lying in the half-dark room, where a towel had been thrown over a lamp to make a night-light, the girl said, “They’re gone.”

“Who?”

“My mom and dad.”

“I think they are.”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry, Chrissie.”

“Oh, I know. I know you are. You’re very nice.” Then for a while she cried in Tessa’s arms.

Much later, nearer sleep, she said, “You talked to Sam a little. Did he say if they figured out … about those animals last night … where they were all running to?”

“No,” Tessa said. “They haven’t got a clue yet.”

“That spooks me.”

“Me too.”

“I mean, that they haven’t got a clue.”

“I know,” Tessa said. “That’s what I mean too.”

39

By Thursday morning, teams of Bureau technicians and outside consultants from the private sector had pored through enough of the Moonhawk data in Sun to determine that the project had dealt strictly with the implantation of a nonbiological control mechanism that had resulted in profound physiological changes in the victims. No one yet had the glimmer of an idea as to how it worked, as to how the microspheres could have resulted in such radical metamorphoses, but they were certain no bacterium, virus, or other engineered organism had been involved. It was purely a matter of machines.

The Army troops, enforcing the quarantine against news-media interlopers and civilian curiosity-seekers, still had their work to do, but they were grateful to be able to strip out of their hot and clumsy decon suits. So were the hundreds of scientists and Bureau agents who were bivouacked throughout town.

Although Sam would surely be returning in the days ahead, he and Tessa and Chrissie were cleared for evacuation early Friday morning. A sympathetic court, with the counsel of a host of federal and state officials, had already granted Tessa temporary custody of the girl. The three of them said see-you-soon to Harry, not goodbye, and were lifted out by one of the Bureau’s Bell JetRanger executive helicopters.

To keep onsite researchers from having their views colored by sensationalistic and inaccurate news accounts, a media blackout was in force in Moonlight Cove, and Sam did not fully realize the impact of the Moon-hawk story until they flew over the Army roadblock near the interstate. Hundreds of press vehicles were strewn along the road and parked in fields. The pilot flew low enough for Sam to see all the cameras turned upward to shoot them as they passed over the mob.

“It’s almost as bad on the county route, north of Holliwell Road,” the chopper pilot said, “where they set up the other block. Reporters from all over the world, sleeping on the ground ‘cause they don’t want to go away to some motel and wake up to find that Moonlight Cove was opened to the press while they were snoozing.”

“They don’t have to worry,” Sam said. “It’s not going to be opened to the press—or to anyone but researchers—for weeks.”

The JetRanger transported them to San Francisco International Airport, where they had reservations for three seats on a PSA flight south to Los Angeles. In the terminal, scanning the news racks, Sam read a couple of headlines:

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BEHIND COVE TRAGEDY
SUPERCOMPUTER RUNS AMOK

That was nonsense, of course. New Wave’s supercomputer, Sun, was not an artificial intelligence. No such thing had yet been built anywhere on earth, though legions of scientists were racing to be the first to father a true, thinking, electronic mind. Sun had not run amok; it had only served, as all computers do.

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, Sam thought: the fault lies not in our technology but in ourselves.

These days, however, people blamed screwups in the system on computers—just as, centuries ago, members of less sophisticated cultures had blamed the alignment of celestial bodies.

Tessa quietly pointed out another headline:

SECRET PENTAGON EXPERIMENT BEHIND
MYSTERIOUS DISASTER

The Pentagon was a favorite Boogeyman in some circles, almost beloved for its real and imagined evils because believing it was the root of all malevolence made life simpler and easier to understand. To those who felt that way, the Pentagon was almost the bumbling old Frankenstein monster in his clodhopper shoes and too-small black suit, scary but understandable, perverse and to be shunned yet comfortably predictable and preferable to consideration of worse and more complex villains.

Chrissie pulled from the rack a rare special edition of a major national tabloid, filled with stories about Moonlight Cove. She showed them the main headline:

ALIENS LAND ON CALIFORNIA COAST
RAVENOUS FLESH-EATERS SACK TOWN

They looked at one another solemnly for a moment, then smiled. For the first time in a couple of days, Chrissie laughed. It was not a hearty laugh, just a chuckle, and there might have been a touch of irony in it that was too sharp for an eleven-year-old girl, not to mention a trace of melancholy, but it
was
a laugh. Hearing her laugh, Sam felt better.

40

Joel Ganowicz, of United Press International, had been on the perimeter of Moonlight Cove, at one roadblock or another, since early Wednesday morning. He bunked in a sleeping bag on the ground, used the woods as a toilet, and paid an unemployed carpenter from Aberdeen Wells to bring meals to him. Never in his career had he been so committed to a story, willing to rough it to this extent. And he was not sure why. Yes, certainly, it was the biggest story of the decade, maybe bigger than that. But why did he feel this need to hang in there, to learn every scrap of the truth? Why was he obsessed? His behavior was a puzzle to him.

He wasn’t the only one obsessed.

Though the story of Moonlight Cove had been leaked to the media in piecemeal fashion over three days and had been explored in detail during a four-hour press conference on Thursday evening, and though reporters had exhaustively interviewed many of the two hundred survivors, no one had had enough. The singular horror of the deaths of the victims—and the number, nearly three thousand, many times the number at Jonestown—stunned newspaper and TV audiences no matter how often they heard the specifics. By Friday morning the story was hotter than ever.

Yet Joel sensed that it wasn’t even the grisliness of the facts or the spectacular statistics that gripped the public interest. It was something deeper than that.

At ten o’clock Friday morning, Joel was sitting on his bedroll in a field alongside the county route, just ten yards away from the police checkpoint north of Holliwell, basking in a surprisingly warm October morning and thinking about that very thing. He was starting to believe that maybe this news hit home hard because it was about not just the relatively modern conflict of man and machine but about the eternal human conflict, since time immemorial, between responsibility and irresponsibility, between civilization and savagery, between contradictory human impulses toward faith and nihilism.

Joel was still thinking about that when he got up and started to walk. Somewhere along the way he stopped thinking about much of anything, but he started walking more briskly.

He was not alone. Others at the roadblock, fully half the two hundred who had been waiting there, turned almost as one and walked east into the fields with sudden deliberation, neither hesitating along the way nor wandering in parabolic paths, but cutting straight up across a sloped meadow, over scrub-covered hills, and through a stand of trees.

The walkers startled those who had not felt the abrupt call to go for a stroll, and some reporters tagged along for a while, asking questions, then shouting questions. None of the walkers answered.

Joel was possessed by a feeling that there was a place he must go to, a special place, where he would never again have to worry about anything, a place where all would be provided, where he would have no need to worry about the future. He didn’t know what that magic place looked like, but he knew he’d recognize it when he saw it. He hurried forward excitedly, compelled,
drawn.

* * *

Need.

The protean thing in the basement of the Icarus Colony was in the grip of need. It had not died when the other children of Moonhawk had perished, for the microsphere computer within it had dissolved when it had first sought the freedom of utter shapelessness; it had not been able to receive the microwave-transmitted death order from Sun. Even if the command had been received, it would not have been acted upon, for the cellar-dwelling creature had no heart to stop.

Need.

Its need was so intense that it pulsed and writhed. This need was more profound than mere desire, more terrible than any pain.

Need.

Mouths had opened all over its surface. The thing called out to the world around it in a voice that seemed silent but was not, a voice that spoke not to the ears of its prey but to their minds.

And they were coming.

Its needs would soon be fulfilled.

* * *

Colonel Lewis Tarker, commanding officer at the Army field headquarters in the park at the eastern end of Ocean Avenue, received an urgent call from Sergeant Sperlmont, who was in charge of the county-route roadblock. Sperlmont reported losing six of his twelve men when they just walked off like zombies, with maybe a hundred reporters who were in the same strange condition.

“Something’s up,” he told Tarker. “This isn’t over yet, sir.”

* * *

Tarker immediately got hold of Oren Westrom, the Bureau man who was heading the investigation into Moonhawk and with whom all of the military aspects of the operation had to be coordinated.

“It isn’t over,” Tarker told Westrom. “I think those walkers are even weirder than Sperlmont described them, weird in some way he can’t quite convey. I know him, and he’s more spooked than he thinks he is.”

* * *

Westrom, in turn, ordered the Bureau’s JetRanger into the air. He explained the situation to the pilot, Jim Lobbow, and said, “Sperlmont’s going to have some of his men track them on the ground, see where the hell they’re going—and why. But in case that gets difficult, I want you spotting from the air.”

“On my way,” Lobbow said.

“You filled up on fuel recently?”

“Tanks are brimming.”

“Good.”

* * *

Nothing worked for Jim Lobbow but flying a chopper.

He had been married three times, and every marriage had ended in divorce. He’d lived with more women than he could count; even without the pressure of marriage weighing him down, he could not sustain a relationship. He had one child, a son, by his second marriage, but he saw the boy no more than three times a year, never for longer than a day at a time. Though he’d been brought up in the Catholic Church, and though all his brothers and sisters were regulars at Mass, that did not work for Jim. Sunday always seemed to be the only morning he could sleep in, and when he considered going to a weekday service it seemed like too much trouble. Though he dreamed of being an entrepreneur, every small business he started seemed doomed to failure; he was repeatedly startled to find how much work went into a business, even one that seemed designed for absentee management, and sooner or later it always became too much trouble.

But nobody was a better chopper pilot than Jim Lobbow. He could take one up in weather that grounded everyone else, and he could set down or pick up in any terrain, any conditions.

He took the JetRanger up at Westrom’s orders and swung out over the county-route roadblock, getting there in no time because the day was blue and clear, and the roadblock was just a mile and a quarter from the park where he kept the chopper. On the ground, a handful of regular Army troops, still at the barricade, were waving him due east, up into the hills.

Lobbow went where they told him, and in less than a minute he found the walkers toiling busily up scrub-covered hills, scuffing their shoes, tearing their clothes, but scrambling forward in a frenzy. It was definitely weird.

A funny buzzing filled his head. He thought something was wrong with his radio headphones, and he pulled them off for a moment, but that wasn’t it. The buzzing didn’t stop. Actually it wasn’t a buzzing at all, not a sound, but
a feeling.

And what do I mean by that? he wondered.

He tried to shrug it off.

The walkers were circling east-southeast as they went, and he flew ahead of them, looking for some landmark, anything unusual toward which they might be headed. He came almost at once to the decaying Victorian house, the tumbledown barn, and the collapsed outbuildings.

Something about the place drew him.

He circled it once, twice.

Though it was a complete dump, he suddenly had the crazy idea that he would be happy there, free, with no worries any more, no ex-wives nagging at him, no child-support to pay.

Over the hills to the northwest, the walkers were coming, all hundred or more of them, not walking any more but running. They stumbled and fell but got up and ran again.

And Jim knew why they were coming. He circled over the house again, and it was the most appealing place he had ever seen, a source of surcease. He wanted that freedom, that release, more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He took the JetRanger up in a steep climb, leveled out, swooped south, then west, then north, then east, coming all the way around again, back toward the house, the wonderful house, he had to be there, had to go there, had to go, and he took the chopper straight in through the front porch, directly at the door that hung open and half off its hinges, through the wall, plowing straight into the heart of the house, burying the chopper in the heart—

* * *

Need.

The creature’s many mouths sang of its need, and it knew that momentarily its needs would be met. It throbbed with excitement.

Then vibrations. Hard vibrations. Then heat.

It did not recoil from the heat, for it had surrendered all the nerves and complex biological structures required to register pain.

The heat had no meaning for the beast—except that heat was not food and therefore did not fulfill its needs.

Burning, dwindling, it tried to sing the song that would draw what it required, but the roaring flames filled its mouths and soon silenced it.

* * *

Joel Ganowicz found himself standing two hundred feet from a ramshackle house that had exploded in flames. It was a tremendous blaze, fire shooting a hundred feet into the clear sky, black smoke beginning to billow up, the old walls of the place collapsing in upon themselves with alacrity, as if eager to give up the pretense of usefulness. The heat washed over him, forcing him to squint and back away, even though he was not particularly close to it. He couldn’t understand how a little dry wood could burn that intensely.

He realized that he could not remember how the fire had started. He was just suddenly
there,
in front of it.

He looked at his hands. They were abraded and filthy.

The right knee was torn out of his corduroys, and his Rockports were badly scuffed.

He looked around and was startled to see scores of people in his same condition, tattered and dirty and dazed. He couldn’t remember how he had gotten there, and he definitely didn’t recall setting out on a group hike.

The house sure was burning, though. Wouldn’t be a stick of it left, just a cellarful of ashes and hot coals.

He frowned and rubbed his forehead.

Something had happened to him. Something … He was a reporter, and his curiosity was gradually reasserting itself. Something had happened, and he ought to find out what. Something disturbing.
Very
disturbing. But at least it was over now.

He shivered.