Blind Panic (21 page)

“That could be a problem, sir.”

The president had opened the closet and was taking out a clean white T-shirt and shorts. “Why? Where is she?”

“Not just the First Lady, sir. All of them. All of our communications are out. Telephones, cell phones, Internet. TV and radio are all out, too.”

Graywolf said quietly but very clearly, “To defeat your enemy, first you must take away his eyes, and then his ears.”

“Get him out of here!” snapped the president.

Kaminsky went up to Graywolf and tried to take hold of his arm, but as he did so Graywolf gave a sideways jerk of his head and Kaminsky shouted out, “Jesus! My wrist!”

Johnson tossed aside the crust of his sandwich and pulled out his gun, too, holding it with both hands and aiming it at Graywolf’s head.

“What’s the matter, Joe?
Hey!
Hey, buddy, don’t you move a muscle!”

“Felt like my wrist was being twisted. Hurts like hell.”

“Okay, wise guy,” said Johnson, edging around Graywolf, until he was standing close behind him. “Put your hands behind your head and walk toward the door, and don’t try anything clever.”

Graywolf turned to the president. “You and I will see each other again, my friend, when this is all finished, and the smoke has cleared. We will have the greatest scalp dance that this land has ever seen.”

“Just get the hell out of here, whoever you are,” the president retorted.

“
I said hands behind your head!
” Johnson barked out.

Graywolf unhurriedly raised both hands and put his fingers into his shoulder-length hair.

“Now move!” Kaminsky ordered him.

Graywolf started to walk toward the open door, with the two Secret Service men following him. As they neared the door, however, Johnson and Kaminsky turned to face each other and collided.

Both of them shouted, “
Hey!
” in surprise. But then—immediately afterward—they both let out screams of pain. Somehow they had not only collided, but stuck together, chest to chest, and they were staring at each other in horror.
The front of their white shirts was suddenly flooded with dark red blood, and the cotton fabric ripped apart.

“
Aaah!
” cried Kaminsky. “
Christ Almighty! Aaaah! Christ, that hurts!
”

At first the president couldn’t work out what was happening. But then he saw the two agents’ skin tear open, so that their chest muscles were exposed, as scarlet as freshly butchered meat. Their breastbones audibly cracked apart, and their ribs splayed out of their chest cavities, wider and wider, like four skeletal hands opening up, and he could see their lungs swelling, and their frantically pumping hearts.

“Oh God!” screamed Johnson, and his voice was so high that it could have shattered glass.

Graywolf turned around. His dried-up face was expressionless, but he appeared to be muttering under his breath, and every now and then he closed his eyes and nodded his head, as if for emphasis.

“
What are you doing, you bastard?
” the president shouted at him. “
Stop it! You’re killing them!
”

But Graywolf didn’t acknowledge him. Instead, he took his hands away from the back of his head and held them up in front of his face, lacing his fingers together like a cat’s cradle.

Johnson’s ribs and Kaminsky’s ribs slid together just as Graywolf’s fingers did, and the two of them were drawn closer and tighter together, until they were screaming in each other’s faces, their noses less than three inches apart. Graywolf had turned them into conjoined twins, two men whose insides were now inextricably interlocked.

“
Get them apart!
” the president shouted at Graywolf. By now, several nurses and orderlies had heard the screaming and had gathered in the reception room outside the door. They all looked shocked, but it was clear that they couldn’t understand what they were looking at or what they could do.

“You heard me, you bastard! Get them apart!”

Graywolf unlaced his fingers, but Johnson and Kaminsky
stayed fastened together, screaming until they were hoarse. They staggered from one side of the doorway to the other, their arms around each other as if drunken dancers trying to keep their balance.

Graywolf said something, but the president couldn’t hear it. Then he tilted his head back and let out a long, eerie howl.

Johnson lifted his right hand and tried to angle his automatic to point at his own forehead, but Kaminsky’s shoulder made it impossible for him to twist his hand around far enough. Gasping with pain, he said, “Shoot me! Shoot me! And I’ll shoot you!”

“
No!
” the president shouted, and tried to step forward, but Graywolf lifted one hand, with his palm facing toward him, and the president felt as if he had been pushed in the chest, hard.

Johnson pointed his automatic at Kaminsky’s ear, and Kaminsky managed to raise his gun so that the muzzle was pressed against Johnson’s left temple.

“Don’t do it!” the president pleaded. “Joe! Dennis! Don’t do it! We can find a way to help you!”

But Johnson hysterically shouted out, “One! Two!
Three!
” and the two of them fired together. The double bang of their guns was deafening, and blood was sprayed up the walls and halfway across the ceiling, in the shape of a monstrous red flower.

The president closed his eyes, took a single staggering step sideways, and sat on the bed. Johnson and Kaminsky collapsed together onto the floor, their arms and legs tangled. Outside, in the reception room, a hospital security guard shouted at Graywolf, “Stay there! Stay there! Keep your hands where I can see them!” One of the nurses was sobbing in shock and a doctor was shouting again and again for a paramedic, as if Johnson and Kaminsky were not far beyond human help.

“Stay there! Don’t you move!” shouted the security guard.

The president opened his eyes and saw that Graywolf was continuing to cross the reception room, heading for the opposite door. The security guard moved sideways to block his path, but Graywolf seemed undeterred. He carried on walking, and walked right through the security guard and vanished.

The security guard whirled around, as if he expected Graywolf to reappear behind him, but the medicine man was gone.

“Did you see that?” said the security guard. His eyes were bulging in disbelief. “Did you
see
that?”

The president stood up. “Listen to me!” he said in his clearest, presidential-address voice. “I want you all to stay calm, and clearheaded.”

“The guy just disappeared!” jabbered the security guard. “He was coming right for me, and then he walked right into me and disappeared!”

The president raised his hands for silence. “Please—let’s not panic! You need to know that there are some pretty strange influences at work here. I guess you can call them supernatural, if you want to. But everything that’s happened here in the clinic, and the blindness that so many people have been suffering all across America—they’re all part of the same phenomenon.”

The doctor came forward and hunkered down beside Johnson and Kaminsky. He was young and red-faced, with a sandy mustache. He examined the two Secret Service men quickly, and then he looked up at the president and said, “What could possibly cause anything like this? I see it. I see it with my own eyes, like I saw that old guy vanish just now. But I don’t believe it. It’s impossible.”

“We’ll have to believe it if we want any chance of surviving it,” said the president. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen things—visions, if you like. Ghosts. And there was one in particular, who told me what’s been happening to us, and why.”

The doctor slowly stood up. “Ghosts,” he repeated.

“What do you think that was? That guy who just disappeared?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of hologram?”

The president said, “Can somebody cover up these two poor bastards, and bring a gurney to take them away?”

“Shouldn’t we leave them here, sir, for the police to look at?”

“This isn’t a police matter, Doctor. This vision I saw, this ghost—he said he was a Wampanaug medicine man. He said that we had a choice. Either we tear down our buildings and dig up our roads and go back to living the way the Indians used to live, or else we’ll all be massacred.”

“With all due respect, Mr. President, that’s crazy.”

“That’s what I told him. But it seems like our past has caught up with us. What we did to the Indians, they’re going to do back to us, in spades.”

The doctor carefully negotiated his way around the two dead Secret Service agents and came up close to the president and looked him in the eyes. “Mr. President…this blinding, it isn’t being caused by ghosts. We haven’t yet been able to identify why so many people are losing their sight, but the most likely culprit is some type of virus, like the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.”

“So what are you saying? That I’ve been hallucinating?”

“No, sir, I’m not necessarily suggesting that. But the trauma of sudden blindness can play all kinds of strange tricks on your mind.”

The president waved his hand backward and forward in front of his face. “This Wampanaug medicine man said that he would give me my sight back so I could watch our whole society being taken apart. And he
did
—you can’t argue with that.”

The doctor looked uncomfortable. “You can see again, sir; that’s for sure. And I find that really encouraging. It indicates that this blindness is reversible, and maybe only temporary.”

“But nothing to do with Indian spirits? In spite of what
happened to these two guys here? And the guy who disappeared into thin air, right in front of your eyes?”

The doctor pouted, so that his mustache bristled out. “I wouldn’t like to contradict you, Mr. President. And I’m not pretending that I can understand any of this. But there has to be some explanation, even if it’s mass delusion.”

The president laid a hand on his shoulder, firm and paternal. “Okay. Maybe it
was
a delusion. But until you can convince me it was a delusion, I’m going to treat it as if it really happened. Go downstairs and tell the Secret Service detail what’s happened up here, and also tell them that I want the vice president brought here as soon as possible, as well as the secretary for homeland security, and General McNamara from the Pentagon. And Mrs. Perry.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Oh—and one more thing. Tell them to find the assistant secretary for Indian affairs, and make sure that they bring
her
along, too.”

The doctor said nothing, but the president was canny enough to guess from his expression what he was thinking:
Why don’t you ask for a psychic, for good measure?

Eugene, Oregon

Less than two hours after we left Portland we were driving south through the Willamette Valley toward Eugene. It was a bright afternoon, with a sky so blue that it was almost violet, and way off to our right we could see the rumpled gray peaks of the Cascade mountains, dusted with snow.

I counted fewer than twenty other vehicles on our way down Route 5 from Portland—SUVs and crossovers, most of them, with suspiciously staring families inside, and precarious piles of suitcases on the roof. Some were headed north and some were headed south, but I had no idea where they were going, or why they thought that where they were going would be any safer than where they had come from. Although the Willamette Valley is idyllic, all cherry trees and vineyards and lazily winding river, there was an almost tangible feeling of foreboding in the air, as if war had been declared and we were expecting an H-bomb to explode at any moment, like a scene out of
Dr. Strangelove.

We turned off Route 5 onto 126 and drove into the suburbs of Eugene.

“Eugene, tree hugging capital of the world,” I remarked.

“Nothing wrong with hugging a tree or two,” Amelia retorted. “You’d be surprised how much psychic energy they can absorb.”

“
Trees
are psychic? You’re pulling my leg.”

“No, I’m not. Sometimes I can hug a very old tree and I can hear the voices of people who sat under it more than a hundred years ago. Only faintly, but it’s almost like a long-playing record, with tree rings instead of grooves.”

“Is that what they call ‘keeping a log’?”

Amelia smacked me on the shoulder. “Your jokes get worse—you know that?”

After they had unceremoniously kicked us out of the Inn @ Northrup Station, we had rented a blue Ford Escape from Hertz and headed for civilization—or what we thought would be civilization. We didn’t know then that the power blackout had already crept all the way northward from San Diego to San Francisco, with the lights blinking out in one community after another, and as far east as St Louis. We
did
know that neither of us could get a signal on our cells, and that the Escape’s radio gave out nothing but a soft hiss of white noise, but we didn’t yet realize that
all
communications were rapidly closing down—phones, faxes, e-mails, everything. By now, the only way to get messages across the country was by carrier pigeon or heliograph. Or maybe smoke signals, if you were a Native American and understood how to read them. Singing Rock had tried to teach me a few, but all I could remember was: if you see smoke halfway up a hill, everything’s hunky-dory—but if you see smoke on the summit, watch out, General Custer’s coming.

“
Trees,
” I repeated as we drove slowly through the center of Eugene. It looked like most of the stores and cafés were closed, and the sidewalks were almost deserted. However, there were squad cars parked at almost every intersection, and there were even cops with rifles on the upper deck of the Fifth Street Public Market., leaning against the railings with their sunglasses glinting in the afternoon sun.

“What about trees?” Amelia asked me.

“Don’t you remember when Misquamacus first got himself reborn inside of Karen? We went to visit Dr. Snow, and Dr. Snow told us all about Native American medicine men
and the different ways they reincarnated themselves. He said that after they were dead, Kiowa medicine men could reappear as trees, and they could even move from place to place and talk.”

“I remember, sure. But how does that help us with these Eye Killers?”

“It doesn’t. Not in the slightest. But Dr. Snow could. He’s the greatest expert on Native American superstitions in the whole damned country. If anybody will know about the Eye Killers, he will.”

“Stop,” said Amelia. “There’s a restaurant right across the street, and it’s open, and I’m hungry and I need to visit the bathroom.”

I U-turned and parked in front of a brick-fronted building that announced itself as the Steelhead Brewery and Café. We climbed out of the Escape and went in through the open front doors. Inside, the place smelled of glass polish and stale beer, and the only person in there was the bartender, who was shining up the mirrors behind the bar.

“You open?” I asked him.

He didn’t turn around, but he didn’t need to, because I could see his face in the mirror. He looked like a spotty version of Ron Howard, in the days when Ron Howard still had hair.

“You kidding me?” he said.

I looked around. In one corner of the bar stood a red London telephone booth. “That work?” I asked him.

He sprayed more Spic ‘n Span on the mirror, and carried on polishing. “You kidding me?”

I went up to the bar and watched him polish for a while. “Okay,” I said, “I’m kidding you. But are you planning on opening anytime soon?”

“Nope. Well, not until the power comes back on.”

“Everything’s out? Even the phone?”

“Yup.”

“Anyplace in town where it isn’t?”

“Nope. Not so far as I know. And nowhere else, neither, not from here to Myrtle Creek.”

Amelia came out of the women’s bathroom. “There was no light in there,” she complained.

“Power’s out,” I told her. “All the way from here to Myrtle Creek. Phones are out, too.”

We left the bar and climbed back into our Escape. “What do we do now?” asked Amelia. “I’m absolutely starving.”

“We stock up on Hershey bars and Whatchamacallits and go visit Dr. Snow.”

“Be serious, Harry. Dr. Snow lives in Albany. It’s going to take us
days
to drive to Albany.”

“Aha—that’s where you’re wrong,” I told her. “When he turned eighty, Dr. Snow moved to California to live with his daughter’s family in Memory Valley.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I, until our last run-in with Misquamacus. I called him up a couple of weeks later because I wanted to tell him what had
really
caused that so-called blood infection.”

“Did you talk to him?”

I shook my head. “The woman who bought his house gave me his number, but I never got around to it. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure that he would believe me.”

“Why not? It was true.”

“I know. But Dr. Snow always insisted that Indian spirits were so much more powerful than European spirits, didn’t he? He wouldn’t believe that Misquamacus would have needed to raise up those
strigoi
things to help him.”

“Those
strigoi
things were absolutely terrifying.”

“Sure they were, but they were Romanian, and Dr. Snow thinks that compared with Native American demons, Old World demons are no more frightening than a pack of rabid dogs.”

“Rabid dogs are frightening. They sure frighten me.”

“Yes, but a rabid dog can’t strike you blind just by looking at you, can it? And you can shoot a rabid dog. But these Eye
Killers…God alone knows how we’re going to find a way to stop them.”

Amelia said, “Harry, we don’t have to stop them ourselves. All we need to do is find out what they are and how to send them back to wherever they came from, and convince somebody in authority that we’re not lunatics.”

“Oh, simple.”

“Harry, you can’t save the whole country single-hand-edly.”

We were back on Route 5 now. I turned into a Shell gas station and pulled up.

“Listen, Amelia,” I told her, “I may not be the most selfless guy you ever met. I may have dishonestly extracted a whole lot of money from some very gullible old ladies by making them believe that they were going to get lucky in the sack. And, believe me, I’m not trying to save the whole country single-handedly. But whether I like it or not, this country happens to contain you, and Lucy, and Karen, and a lot of other people I really care about, and if the only way for me to protect you from these Eye Killer things is to face up to them myself personally, then face up to them myself personally I will.”

Amelia sat and looked at me for a long moment. Then she leaned across and kissed me.

“I love you, Harry Erskine. But look.”

She pointed to an improvised cardboard sign hanging from the gas pumps.
Sorry no gas Pumps non-operashanul.

“Actually I didn’t stop here for gas. I came here for candy and soda.”

“In that case, get me some Three Musketeers, would you? And a bottle of Mountain Dew.”

“Your wish is my command,” I said, and I kissed her back.

Memory Valley may have been a whole lot closer to Eugene than Albany, but it was still more than five hundred thirty
miles due south, through Yreka and Weed and the Whis-keytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area, and all the way down the Sacramento Valley.

Great scenery, I expect. But we drove through the night, taking it in turns to sleep on the backseat, and all that either of us saw were bushes turned into cardboard by the light of our headlights, and deer’s eyes gleaming at us out of the darkness. Apart from changeovers at the wheel, the only stop we made was at the 76 gas station in Williams, at about one thirty in the morning. I cut a length of hose from the air line and siphoned a tankful of gas from a Jeep that was parked at the side of the forecourt. Amelia kept watch in case an enraged proprietor came out with a shotgun, but the gas station was locked and silent, and all I heard was a dog barking in the distance.

Altogether the drive took us more than nine hours, and when we finally rolled into Memory Valley it was quarter after three in the morning, and we were exhausted.

“Maybe we could find a motel,” said Amelia as we crept along Main Street. Of course, the power was out, but a cold white moon was still high in the sky, and I could see what a neat, prosperous community this was. There were potted yuccas along the center of the street, and an ornamental fountain, even though it wasn’t working, and bookstores, craft shops, and a whole-food restaurant called Earthly Origins.

“How are we going to find Dr. Snow?” asked Amelia. “Do you still have his number?”

“Uh-uh. But I don’t suppose it’ll be difficult. This is the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else’s business. Look at that. Even that gym is called Busybodies.”

Main Street ended in a brick-paved square surrounded by cafés and the Memory Valley library. We turned off left and drove down a shadowy, tree-lined avenue until we passed a sign saying
SWEET MEMORY’S BED-&-BREAKFAST
. It was a fine old colonial-style house with a porch and a
gambrel roof, and even a turret with a weathercock on top. I parked the Escape outside, and Amelia waited for me while I went up to the front door. The doorbell didn’t work, so I took hold of the knocker and gave a few sharp raps.

No answer, and the windows remained in darkness, so I knocked a second time. Still no answer. Amelia put down her window and said, “Forget it, Harry. There’s probably a Howard Johnson’s on the outskirts of town.”

“Okay,” I agreed, and turned away, but as I did so I heard a shuffling noise inside the house, and then a banging, as if somebody had knocked over a chair. A querulous woman’s voice called out, “Who is it? What do you want?”

I went back up close to the door and said, “Me and my friend, we’re looking for someplace to stay. We just drove all the way from Oregon.”

“I can’t let you in. I’m sorry. We’ve all been told not to.”

“All we want is a bed for a couple of hours, and maybe a bath, and something to eat.”

“There’s no power.”

“Yes, ma’am. I understand that. A cold bath and a couple of baloney sandwiches would do it.” I had eaten so many Whatchmacallit bars that I felt sick, and I was sure that I had put on ten pounds.

“I still can’t let you in.”

I beckoned to Amelia. She climbed out of the Escape and came up to join me at the door. “She won’t let us in. Can you persuade her that we’re not a couple of yeggs?”

“I’ll try,” said Amelia. She rapped gently on the stainedglass window at the side of the door and called out, “Ma’am? Ma’am? My name is Amelia and all we need is someplace to rest up for a while. We won’t bother you at all, I promise.”

“They told us not to let anyone in.”

“Who told you?”

“Deputy Ramsay. He said to keep our doors locked and not to let anyone in, and that he’d come around and check up on us in the morning. But I don’t know whether it’s morning
yet. What time is it? I tried to find out the time from the phone but the phone’s dead.”

“It’s three thirty-five, ma’am. It’s still not sunrise yet.”

There was a very long pause, and then the woman said, “What did you say your name was?”

“Amelia. Mrs. Amelia Carlsson. I’m from New York City. My friend here is called Harry. I can swear to you that all we want is a bed to sleep in. We won’t give you any trouble.”

We heard the woman shuffle up to the door. Then we heard the bolts drawn back, and the chains rattle. Eventually the door opened, and there was a skinny woman in her late sixties with a silver pudding-basin haircut and a kneelength black dress, with three strings of pearls around her neck. She stared at us with her chin slightly raised, but she didn’t seem to be focusing on us at all.

“Can I really trust you?” she asked us.

Amelia said, very gently, “You can’t see us, can you? You’re blind.”

The woman nodded. “Me and half of the population of Memory Valley, from what they tell me. That’s why Deputy Ramsay told us all to stay indoors. They’re trying to get help, but it doesn’t look very likely that anybody is going to come. Not anytime soon, anyhow.”

“The same thing has happened to my sister Lizzie, and her family,” said Amelia. “It’s been happening everywhere, all across the country.”

“Is it okay if we come in?” I asked her.

“I guess so. You haven’t come to rob me, have you? Even if you have, there isn’t much for you to steal, apart from bathrobes, and my guests steal those, anyway.”

We stepped into the hall. Although it was very gloomy, we could see that it was furnished with antique side tables and vases of dried flowers, and on the wall hung a large oil painting of a fetching young woman with very red lips, wearing a brown bonnet and a brown riding coat.