The Mountain Cage (13 page)

I’m afraid, Jessamyn thought, I am really afraid now.

Lois finally went to bed just after midnight. Miller, knowing he would not be able to sleep until he knew what was going on in Hannaford, stayed up with Joe, watching the helicopter shots of the mall mob and listening to the commentary of Ed Stapleton and Elisa Nguyen.

People were lined up on the bridge and along the ramp. The parking lot, except for the vehicles parked there, was empty. Calling out the National Guard units, Miller thought, had accomplished exactly nothing. The uniformed guards were now scattered among the crowd, standing on the bridge with them, waiting for—what?

“I have General Thorne on the phone now,” the voice of Elisa Nguyen said. “General, are there any plans to send in more soldiers?”

“Not much point in that,” a raspy male voice replied, “if they’re just going to end up becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution.”

“What could be causing all of these people to behave that way?” Elisa Nguyen asked.

General Thorne let out a sigh. “Well, if I knew that—” He fell silent.

The scene changed to show the two anchors at the Action News desk, both still looking meticulously groomed but a tad wearier around the eyes. “In case you’ve just tuned in,” Ed Stapleton said, “we’re in the middle of live coverage of what has to be one of the strangest incidents in Hannaford city history. We’re still not clear on many of the details, but at about seven o’clock this evening, both the employees and the customers at the Hannaford Center Mall apparently looted many of the stores and then came out of the mall into the parking lots at approximately eight-thirty, where most of the Hannaford police force was waiting for them. The police, instead of restraining them, joined the crowd. National Guard units were on their way to the Dunn Bridge near the mall by ten-thirty, but it appears that they have joined the mob as well. At the moment, an estimated four thousand people are standing on the bridge—for what purpose, I can’t begin to guess. So far, there are no reports of injuries or violence.”

The anchorman shook his head. “As I said, this has to be one of the oddest news stories I’ve ever covered.”

“You can say that again,” Joe muttered to Miller.

“We go now to Alexa Browne, reporting from a boat on the Leakansa River.” Ed Stapleton’s talking head disappeared, to be replaced by a young woman in a windbreaker.

“Alexa Browne, reporting from Hannaford police boat number two.” The reporter’s usual helmet of dark hair looked windblown and ungroomed. “We’re about a quarter of a mile downriver from the Dunn Bridge. Given what has happened so far, with members of the police force and National Guard now part of the mob, Chief of Police Gibson is waiting before deciding on further action.”

“Isn’t there a chance that the mob will simply get tired and disperse?” the voice of Ed Stapleton asked.

“We can hope for that,” Alexa Browne replied. The camera swept away from her to a shot of the bridge in the distance. Under the lights lining the bridge, the crowd was clearly visible; people stood along the walkways and against the railings. The Dunn Bridge was old, Miller recalled; the structure had been around nearly as long as he had. Even with its recent refurbishing, he wondered how much weight it could hold.

“I’ll be darned,” Joe said. “Good thing we decided to sleep over. I’ll bet this story starts getting network coverage if this goes on much longer.”

“If it goes on much longer,” Miller said, “you may be my house guests for a while.” He watched the people on the bridge, all so quiet and orderly, all standing there as if they were waiting for something. They’d have to get tuckered out eventually, he thought. He wondered what the police would do later. If they pressed charges, they would have to lock up a lot of people, including some of their own men. There were children among the mob; he had seen them earlier, when the crowd was still in the mall parking lot. How could people drag little kids into something like this?

This whole weird business was reminding him of why he had bought this house, why he had decided to leave Hannaford and live out in the country away from other people. Being by himself, Miller could hear his own thoughts, become more like himself. If a man was around other people all the time, with little or no solitude, pretty soon he wouldn’t know what thoughts were his own and what was only received wisdom. If others kept interrupting him all the time, intruding on his thoughts, it was only natural that, after a while, he wouldn’t know what he really thought. He would not know if the voice he was hearing inside himself was his own or that of some other guy who had impressed his thoughts upon him.

And, he told himself, all the media and phones and brand names and national franchises had done their share to make people more like one another, even inside themselves, as if they were all only part of one great big common mind. The more alike they were, the easier it would be for the politiians and the CEOs and the other high muckety-mucks of the world to control them. They should all go and read that old Robert Frost poem, he thought. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” it began, but ended with “Good fences make good neighbors.”

“Damned if I know what they’re gonna do,” Joe said.

Miller sighed. “There’s one thing they’d probably better do, and soon, and that’s figure out how to get all those folks off that old bridge.”

Thoughts about resonance and amplitude were flowing to Chris from the rest of the mind. That was how she perceived her companions now, her other selves, the other parts of her own intelligence.

“Not quite.” Another thought was coming to her now. “Not yet. The distinctions among us still remain, and it seems that some are stronger than others, have more forceful thoughts, ones that respond more readily to the transponder and then come to dominate the rest.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Chris and several others recited in unison.

The answer came. “We wanted crowd control. The question is: who’s going to control the crowd?”

“Some doofus screwed this project up big time,” several voices murmured. “Hope somebody can turn off that transponder, or at least had the sense to set it to shut down automatically.”

Chris noticed dimly that she and all of the people standing to either side of her were all resting their arms against the railing. She gazed at the river below, watching the reflections of the bridge lights dancing on the dark water. She thought of how easy it would be to climb up over the railing and leap into the river, sink under the water and move with the current that was like the thoughts flowing into all of them.

“… came to the mall to get ready for what I have to do.” Chris straightened, attentive to this new, darker, more despairing thought. “There’s no more reason to go on. My business is gone, my wife is gone, my investors are going to sue and the IRS is sure to come after me. I can’t dig myself out of this hole. Funny—once I made up my mind that I’d have to cash in my chips, just drive out to the bridge and jump off and finally do myself in, I felt a whole lot better. Felt better than I have in a long time.”

“Felt a lot better,” a group of children near Chris said softly as she mouthed the words silently.

“No reason for that, brothers and sisters.” Another more forceful mind and voice were speaking to her. “Ain’t no reason to give up hoping. A better day’s coming. The good Lord doesn’t give a body more than a body can bear.”

Someone began to sing. Voices rose in song all around her. Chris reached for the hands of the people standing to her right and left as she sang. She could not remember if she had ever heard this song before, yet she knew it, and everything in her warmed to the sound.

“Rejoice and sing!” Everyone around Jessamyn was shouting out the words. Still clutching the hands of Kyle and the guy called Rich, she swayed to the sound of the hymn. She hadn’t been inside a church since leaving high school, but she knew this hymn.

“Make a joyful noise,” she sang aloud, hearing Rich and Kyle repeat the words. The unhappy, despairing thoughts that had troubled her so much only a few moments ago were easing. Hope flowered inside her again; the ruin that was all that left of the business and the failing marriage were things that they could all put behind them now.

“The good Lord doesn’t give a body more than a body can bear,” Jessamyn said with Kyle and Rich and the group of uniformed men over by the railing and all of the people on the bridge.

“And death is the end of all suffering,” more voices responded.

They sang and stamped their feet. The pavement under her feet shook to the sound of the music. She lifted her left foot and then her right, part of the All, part of the mind making a joyful noise on the bridge, and it almost seemed that the railing and the girders and the sidewalks of the bridge were humming and wailing and singing along with her.

Chris was still singing and stamping her feet in unison with the others when the surface under her suddenly heaved, throwing her forward. She caught a glimpse of others in the long line at the railing grabbing at one another, still singing.

Abruptly the voices inside her fell silent. She was so closed in on herself that for a moment, she was afraid that she had gone deaf. Then she heard a sharp tearing metallic sound; the pavement around her seemed to be rippling. Everything under her heaved again, nearly tossing her into the air.

People around her were screaming. Grabbing at the railing, Chris pulled herself to her feet and was thrown forward again. She caught herself and hung on to the railing. She knew then that the bridge was collapsing under them. She hung there, watching as people dropped from the bridge, falling toward the river in rows, almost as if someone had choreographed and synchronized their movements, and then lost her grip and fell into the darkness.

“Kyle!” the girl next to Rich screamed. “Kyle!”

Rich scrambled to his feet, trying to remember how he had gotten here. He had been with the others over at the mall and had followed them to the bridge. They had all been together, in perfect communion, monads with windows open wide enough to catch a hurricane, and now everything around him was rippling and cracking and shaking like an earthquake had hit.

“Anna!” he cried. He did not know why he could no longer hear the others. “Anna!” The pavement suddenly ripped open in front of him. He had a moment of realizing that the bridge was coming apart before he dropped into the abyss.

Chris felt a hard surface against her back and gradually became aware that a blanket covered her. As she drew in some air, a sharp pain stabbed at her left side. She opened her eyes and saw a dark shape looming over her.

“Better stay still,” the shadowy form said in a tenor voice. “You’ve got a broken rib. You were one of the lucky ones, lady.”

Chris closed her eyes, waited for a few moments, then opened them again. The sky above her was blue with daylight, the air warm against her face. She carefully took a breath and realized that someone had taped her around the midriff. Fighting through the pain, she forced herself up and leaned on her right elbow.

She looked in the direction of the bridge. All that remained of the structure were the pylons and some of the metal framework and girders. She was lying on a stretcher along the bank; other stretchers with people on them were being carried toward the ambulances and other vehicles parked on the road above them. Then she looked out at the river and saw the bodies. There had to be over a hundred just floating there, amid the small boats moving among them. Men on the boats were thrusting long poles into the water to pull the bodies out.

“Oh, my God,” Chris murmured.

“I know you.” A black-haired young woman in green scrubs squatted next to her. “You’re on the eleven o’clock news—Chris something.”

“Chris Szekely.”

“I’m Dr. Rahman.”

Satellite trucks and a few buses were parked on either side of the river. Chris saw two vans with network logos on them and another from CNN. “How many?” Chris asked.

“How many what?”

“How many died?”

Dr. Rahman cleared her throat before answering. “At least a thousand that we know of so far, and I don’t think a lot of the others are going to survive.” She paused. “As soon as we get the seriously injured on their way, we’ll move you and the ones who aren’t so badly hurt. They had to send in teams from as far away as Windsor to handle this.”

Chris was silent.

“How did it happen?” the physician asked. “I mean, what made all those people act like that?”

Chris frowned. She could not remember much of anything except driving to the mall with Bob Unger and then being on the bridge in the middle of a mob. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Hey,” Dr. Rahman said, “you’d better rest. I shouldn’t be bothering you now.”

Chris lay down again and stared up at the sky. There was a kind of hole in her mind, in her memory, almost as if something had overloaded her mental circuits and burned them out somehow. She grasped at that notion, thinking for a moment that her memories were returning to her, then closed her eyes once more.