Monsters (34 page)

As they approached Washington DC, James noted how Gainsborough skirted the outer edges of the city. The General ensured his army circled around the city to the north without passing through the former capital. Lisa was right. The campaign was a farce—a theatrical show. They weren’t going to take Washington, they just needed the expedition to brush past the city.

“What does the sign say?” Simon asked.

“It's describing the distance to Maryland, 20 miles.”

“Merry land?” cried Simon. “What is that? Some kind of joke?”

“No,” James replied. “Not Merry. It's Mary, as in the woman's name.”

“Mary? You mean they named this area after a woman?”

“Apparently.”

Simon seemed a little put out by that, James just shrugged.

The scouts had identified several places of interest and the force headed to a large hangar complex below Washington-Dulles airport. James could see that the thick woods surrounding the hangar made McIntyre nervous, but Gainsborough was intent on exploring inside the derelict buildings.

“Johnson has hooked up a portable generator,” McIntyre said after the scouts had moved through the building, checking for monsters. “He says he can bring at least some of the lights on.”

“Good. Good,” Gainsborough said, walking into the darkened hangar. “Fire it up. Let’s see what’s in this house of treasures.”

McIntyre talked into the radio and moments later lights flickered on the broad, curved ceiling spanning the length of the vast hangar. Some places were better lit than others, but the dark shapes and shadows suddenly took form; whereas before there had been murky, indistinct smudges, now there was an explosion of color.

James bent down and picked up a muddied tourist guide. He wiped the dust from it.

“Oh, my,” Gainsborough said, momentarily lost for words as he looked around the vast hangar. He turned to James and said, “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

The general’s voice carried in the air, echoing throughout the vast hangar. James began describing the various aircraft around them. Lisa limped along beside him.

Over fifty soldiers followed along behind them while the others waited outside. No one said a word. It seemed the grand building commanded reverence.

“Ah,” James began, looking at a sea of meaningless names like Concorde, Blackbird, Phantom, Shuttle. He looked up, quickly matching the shapes on the guide with the airplanes before him.

Gainsborough walked over toward a bright yellow plane with no fuselage.

“What is this?” he demanded.

“A flying wing,” James replied, reading highlights from the guide.

“It looks like half a plane. Just two wings stuck together,” McIntyre said, following a few paces behind the general.

James read from the guide.

“It was developed during World War II and was intended to carry bombs all the way to Germany, in Europe. It could cover 275 miles every hour.”

“Fascinating,” Gainsborough replied, walking around the brilliantly colored craft, holding his arms behind his back with the formality of one inspecting guards. He walked over to a small metal frame with a large propeller on top. “And this?”

There was nothing on the guide. At a guess, James said, “It’s a helicopter, designed for a single man strapped to the seat. The blades whirl around above the pilot’s head. Sitting there, it would feel like there was a hurricane beating down upon you. The markings on the tail are German, so this was an enemy craft.”

Walking around the fragile frame, James added, “I can’t imagine it was too useful. The engine and fuel tank look too small. It probably only stayed aloft for a couple of minutes at a time. It’s a prototype, something from which they learnt more about flight so they could build bigger craft.”

Gainsborough nodded thoughtfully.

Behind them, soldiers came up and touched the various planes the general had walked past, running their hands over the smooth leading edge of the wings, intrigued by the designs. It seemed they couldn’t resist touching, or perhaps it was more likely they couldn’t read the ‘
do not touch
’ signs, James thought.

A couple of the mechanically-minded soldiers carefully examined the props and landing gear of the flying wing. James could see they were itching to get inside one of these planes. Given their success with the steam engine and boilers, they probably fancied they could get these planes running again, but James knew it was technology hundreds of years more advanced than anything they’d played around with.

“This one has no wings, no propellers, no blades,” Gainsborough announced, having walked ahead past several other larger airplanes. James wasn’t sure if he was asking a question about the dark capsule in front of him or simply making a statement. A plaque in front of the craft told James this was Apollo 12.

“Men once flew to the moon in this capsule,” he said.

“Really?” Gainsborough exclaimed, examining it with curiosity. “It’s round. Where is the front?”

The general walked around the sloping sides of the craft, peering in the tiny windows, looking at the tarnished metal and examining the machined handles and pop-rivets. He ran his hand over the dust that had accumulated on the corrugated side panels. Bending down, he examined the edge of the worn heat shield.

“There was no front,” James replied as Lisa hobbled up beside him. “Best I understand it, there was no up, no down, no sense of this way or that. Apollo floated in space like a cork on the ocean. When it was launched, it moved up, with the hatch at the top being the front. But when it returned to Earth, it moved down, with this blunt edge leading the way.”

Gainsborough said something softly to McIntyre, who then waved his hands, signaling for soldiers.

“This one,” McIntyre said, leaning down and examining the wheels on the trolley upon which the Apollo spacecraft sat.

“You can’t take it,” James protested.

“Why not?” Gainsborough demanded. “It’s ours now.”

“But you don’t understand. This is part of our heritage. That’s why it’s here, to protect it.”

“For what?” Gainsborough asked. “For future generations? We are those future generations.”

“But it’s of no use to us.”

“Man has been to the moon once. He shall go there again,” Gainsborough proclaimed.

“But you can’t reuse this craft. Even in its day, it couldn’t be reused. To launch a spacecraft like this, you need a mighty rocket, you need the technical know-how to cross the unimaginable depths of space. Apollo sent three men at a time to the moon, but only two men in each craft ever walked on the moon’s surface, and yet it took over a hundred thousand men and women here on Earth to make Apollo a reality. Technicians, scientists, engineers, pilots, just about every industry was involved in one way or another.”

Gainsborough seemed to deeply consider his words. It was in that moment that James realized why they were here—Gainsborough was looking to exploit technology from the past, to cannibalize anything that would be of use to him and his propaganda machine.

“And this?” Gainsborough asked, pointing at the massive delta-wing craft in the center of the floor. “This flew in space?”

“Yes,” James replied, checking against the guide. “This is the space shuttle. But it too rode on the back of rockets.”

“Rockets like this one?” Gainsborough asked, standing before the Redstone rocket. James nodded.

Gainsborough wandered back out of the annex into the main hangar, having only looked superficially at a fraction of the spacecraft on display. Seeing that the general had lost interest in Apollo, McIntyre and the soldiers left the capsule where it sat.

“And this one?” Gainsborough asked, having walked past several other airplanes to a large bomber raised off the ground in the middle of the vast hangar. There were more modern jet planes and fighters around him, but the General seemed to have a particular interest in the shiny, chrome bomber, and James suspected Gainsborough knew more about the contents of the hangar than he was letting on.

“This is the Enola Gay,” James said, reading the name from the guide. He’d heard this name before as a child, it was mentioned in one of the history books his father had read with him. Looking at the plaque in front of the craft he quickly remembered why. Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan in order to end World War II. James doubted Gainsborough’s interest was historical.

Standing there, looking up at his own distorted reflection in the shiny metal fuselage of the bomber, James felt intimidated in a way no monster had ever scared him before.

“What did it do?” Gainsborough asked, and James was sure the General knew damn well what the Enola Gay had done.

“It dropped a single bomb with enough power to destroy an entire city.”

McIntyre had already walked over beneath the open bomb bay doors. He stood next to a caddy holding a large bomb.

“And this is it?” McIntyre asked. “This is the Little Boy?”

“Yes,” James replied, noting McIntyre knew precisely what he was looking for.

Lisa was standing beside her father. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Not now, Lisa.”

“You can’t do this,” she protested. “You cannot use a weapon like this on your enemies.”

“It won’t work,” James added. “It’s a dummy, a replica. Even if it was a real atomic bomb, it probably wouldn’t detonate after all these years. And how would you deploy such a bomb? Using a horse and cart?”

“You mock us,” Gainsborough said. “But we will not stand still. We have recovered a foundry. We will forge new guns. We will make our own bullets.”

“And we will have mastery of the air,” McIntyre said with confidence. To one side, James could see a couple of the mechanics standing on the wing of a Mustang fighter plane. They’d opened the cowling, exposing the engine and were looking at the various components, while another soldier had opened the cockpit and climbed inside.

“We cannot aspire to jet aircraft,” McIntyre added. “But we need not have jets. Even the simplest of airplanes will give us an insurmountable tactical advantage over our enemies.”

“And we will acquire nuclear weapons,” Gainsborough said. “Perhaps not here, not now. But there are stockpiles. There are naval bases, airfields, army depots. We will find them. We will not need rockets to deliver them, just planes, like the Enola Gay.”

James couldn't help himself. He blurted out, “No man should have that power.”

“But some man will,” Gainsborough replied. “And that demands we hold that power too. You cannot put the genie back into the bottle. Since nuclear weapons exist, we
must
have them, and we must be the first to have them.”

“But, don’t you get it? They don’t exist, not in practice. Even if you could get your hands on one, you wouldn’t know how to maintain it or have the specialist skills to service it. And if you find a damaged nuke, the radiation from an exposed core would kill anyone that handled it. Perhaps not straight away, but within anywhere from six months to a few years.”

Gainsborough was silent. James continued.

“Even in their day, nuclear weapons were Pandora’s Box, containing an evil so insidious they could never be used. They were so powerful, so devastating that they could not be fired, not without war escalating into total annihilation.”

“And yet they ended a war,” Gainsborough replied. “They brought peace.”

“You’re mad,” James cried. “Why would you want that kind of power? You don’t want to restore the Old World, you want to rule the New.”

“Get them out of here,” Gainsborough said.

McIntyre signaled to a couple of soldiers who led James and Lisa out of the hangar. Behind them, James could hear McIntyre issuing instructions to take the Mustang, Messerschmitt and Zero—all airplanes from the World War II era. They might be over ambitious, but they knew what was feasible and what wasn’t.

“Do you see?” Lisa asked, as they sat in the sun, well away from the soldiers working with ropes to pull the aircraft out of the hangar. “We’re all so concerned about our world being overrun with monsters, all this talk about restoring man to his rightful place, but these are the real monsters. My father scares me more than any grizzly bear or mountain lion.”

“Come with me,” James said rather impetuously. “We can escape this madness. We can live free.”

“There’s nowhere my father wouldn’t follow.”

“Not necessarily. If he thought you were dead, if he thought you’d been killed by some monster while trying to escape, he’d have no reason to give chase.”

“But I can’t,” Lisa replied. “I need to—”

“You need to what?” James asked. Although he’d cut her off, her voice had been trailing to a stop, and he knew this was a sentence she didn’t want to complete. “You need to change things? Now, who sounds like the general?”

James looked deep into her eyes.

“We can do this. We can escape, but we need to do it now, while they’re distracted, while there’s enough daylight to put some serious distance between us and them.

“You know he’ll never change. You know that, for all your efforts to improve the quality of life in Richmond, your good graces will be abused. And it’s not just him, it’s the whole system. After Gainsborough will come McIntyre, and after McIntyre, some other lackey they’ve groomed. And all your goodwill, all your years of toil to help those trapped in that system will simply support a regime you despise.”

Lisa had tears in her eyes. James knew her well enough to know that silence was an answer in its own right.

He left her there and headed over to the horses.

There was so much excitement about the aircraft being wheeled from the hangar that no one noticed as he took a water bladder, a satchel filled with dried foods, a couple of blankets and ground sheets, his bow and arrows and a sword.

Looking back at Lisa, he could see she’d moved to the edge of the old administration building, ready to slip around the corner and out of sight. He grabbed some of her clothes from one of the tents set up by the hangar and casually walked towards her. As he helped her stand, they both looked down at her leg. Even with a walking stick, she’d struggle to make more than a few miles in a day.