The Slab (40 page)

***

Billy dove to the hard ground when he heard the glass break nearby, and the bullet whistled over his head. In the commotion he couldn’t hear where it landed. He rolled over, pausing only momentarily to fire a round in the general direction of the muzzle burst he’d seen, then he rolled again. The nearest home was a double-wide trailer mounted on blocks, and he shoved himself underneath it, pushing his way through spider webs and trash and who knew what else had grown or been blown under here by the desert winds. But at least he was in shadow here, and presumably couldn’t be seen by whoever had shot at him.

Scrambling to get underneath, though, he accidentally kicked the underside of the double-wide, and the impact was almost immediately followed by a loud “What the hell was that?” Billy froze. Maybe the liberal bleeding hearts were right, there were way too many people around here with guns, and it didn’t take much to imagine one being aimed through the floor of the double-wide at him right now. The mobile home creaked and shifted as someone walked across the floor. Billy decided he needed to be away from it before somebody came out and trapped him under here—the last thing he wanted was to be caught in a crossfire with no room to maneuver. He pushed himself forward with his hands and feet, belly scraping the Slab, crushing mushrooms between himself and the cement, until he was at the front of the double-wide. Going this way would put him back out onto the Slab, not into the desert like he’d wanted, but as unpleasant as the prospect was it was better than backing out blindly. When he’d gone under he hadn’t had time to strategize. Now he’d just have to make do.

***

At the other end of the stretch of desert that formed the eastern section of Imperial County, over the Arizona line in Yuma, past the confluence of rivers that had formed the Salton Sea, Colonel Franklin Wardlaw could barely refrain from rubbing his hands together in glee. It was too much of a cliché, he thought, so he bit back the urge. But he still experienced the glee, because Captain William Yato and Marcus Jenkins were taxiing an F/A-18 Hornet to an imminent take-off. The aircraft was armed—in addition its usual assortment of Sidewinders, Sparrows, and M61 Vulcan rotary cannon—with a centerline Guided Bomb Unit-12. The GBU carried a five-hundred-pound warhead that would plow through the concrete of the Slab like a hot knife through butter.

Wardlaw knew that Jenkins and Yato were on his side in this. The Slab needed to be gone. What waited beneath it needed to be free. Nothing else mattered. Back in some cobwebbed corner of his military mind, Wardlaw knew that he could face serious charges for authorizing this mission. But would anyone bring those charges? What would the face of the Earth resemble when Wardlaw’s task was complete? Who would be in charge? He didn’t know the answers to those questions…he only knew that everything would be different, and he, who had obliterated the Slab, would be held in much favor.

He paced in his office now, watching the aircraft take off in the dark. A corpse lay on his carpet, two bullet holes in its head. A Captain who had come in to protest the unscheduled mission, claiming that neither Yato nor Jenkins were flight certified, that there was no paperwork—paperwork! In a time of crisis this guy had been worried about marks on paper. Wardlaw had taken care of him, and no one else seemed to be complaining.

Soon…soon enough, listening to the complaints of whiners would be a thing of the past for Franklin Wardlaw. He reveled in the roar of the jet as it banked toward the west.

Toward the Slab.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Keep your head down!” Ken shouted. Hal did as he was told, though it seemed like somewhat vague and unhelpful advice when he’d just seen one man torn almost in half at the waist by a shotgun blast, the homes of friends and neighbors flattened like used cardboard boxes after a move, and bullets flying every which way from every corner of the community he’d called home for so long. As he ran—head down—he could barely believe that this was all really happening. But the hammering in his chest was real. So was the ringing in his ears, and the furious, inescapable noise—guns, bulldozers, the screaming and wailing of people he knew, the faint, faraway-seeming patter of his own feet on the cement, running at a speed he hadn’t been able to attain in years, if not decades. All those things were undeniable.

He and Virginia lived on the third of the various Slabs. Ken knew the way, and as fast as Hal was, Ken was faster. So Ken led the way and Hal followed. He stayed on the dirt path, at least at first, Hal guessed because the big machines were sticking to the concrete and most of the gunplay seemed centered around those.

Most, but not all.

After a couple of minutes, their familiar Minnie Winnie loomed ahead, a dark island in a sea of concrete dotted with mushrooms, like whitecaps on the ocean of night. No lights burned inside, and in the dim, crazy illumination of flames and reflected headlights and what moonlight could penetrate the haze of smoke and dust overhanging the Slab, he thought he could make out a bullet hole in the Winnie’s outer skin.

When he saw that he pushed harder, passing Ken and barely slowing in time to keep from slamming into the RV’s door. The screen door confounded him for a moment, as he tried to open it and succeeded only in bouncing it off his own leg and face, but then he got it wide, and he shoved through the inside door, trying to look everywhere at once in the dark interior. “Virginia!” he called. “Gin!”

The world seemed to go silent for a moment, and his heart rose to his throat, but then he heard a rustling sound and Virginia’s voice, speaking through a quiet sob, said, “I’m in here.”

The voice came from the head, the only space inside with no window exposure to the mad world beyond. Hal crossed to it and gently tapped on the door. “It’s okay, Virginia,” he said. “You can come out.”

“Are you sure?” she asked him, her voice plaintive. “I don’t…”

“Come on out, Gin,” he said. “Please. I just want to see you.”

He heard the door latch work, and then it opened and she rushed out and into his arms. He wrapped his arms around her. Her back hitched as she sobbed, great, sorrowful noises that shook her and made him feel regret that he had ever left her side. He moved his hands in a slow, circular pattern that he hoped was comforting. It’ll be okay now, Virginia,” he said. “Now we’re together.”

“But—” she began, and her voice caught, and she had to start again after two more racking sobs. “But I was so scared. And I didn’t know where you were. And I thought the most horrible things…”

“I know,” Hal said soothingly.

“No, I mean, before, the things I was thinking about…”

“I know,” he said again. “I really do know.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Don’t worry. It’s not your fault.”

Outside, the racket continued. It had never stopped, but he felt that it had, that the whole world had dropped away when he’d come inside and couldn’t find Virginia, when he had feared that she was already gone. The magic that had happened to him hadn’t changed anything; he still wanted to go first, didn’t want to live on an Earth that didn’t have Virginia Winfield Shipp on it, and when he heard her voice it was like a wish granted, a miracle.

The screen door opened and he started, but it was just Ken and Penny coming in. The RV dipped a little as they stepped up into it. “Everything okay?” Ken asked.

“Fine,” Hal said. “Just fine.”

“I’ll see that you two are safe in here,” Ken said.

“Don’t you worry about us,” Hal argued. “We’ll be fine. We’ve got the magic on our side, remember?”

Ken took a step closer, and Hal felt Virginia shift in his arms, backing her face away from his chest to look at the lawman. “Harold’s right,” she said. You don’t need to worry about us. I’m sure you have much more important things to take care of.”

“There isn’t anything more important,” Ken said. He reached out and stroked the exposed skin of Virginia’s arm, as if to reassure her, but when he touched her, Hal thought his face clouded over for a moment. Lowering his hand, Ken looked straight into Hal’s eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll leave you here for now, while I try to go stop whatever it is that’s going on here tonight. But when this is all over, Hal, you and me, we need to have a talk about some things. A serious talk.”

Hal knew what he meant. He knew about the bodies, somehow. The dead women. His horrific legacy. “You’re right, Ken. We do.”

“Stay with them, Penny,” Ken said on his way out the door. “I’ll be back soon’s I can.”

“You can’t do everything by yourself, Ken,” she argued. But he just pressed his pistol into her hands.

“You know how to use that,” he said. “If you need to, don’t hesitate.” Armed now with only his service shotgun, he tromped down the steps and banged the door shut.

Penny shrugged and went to the window to look outside. “How do we even know who the good guys are?” she asked.

Hal gave a deep-throated chuckle. “Good guys?” he echoed. “There aren’t any good guys. You saw it yourself.”

“What do you mean?” she wondered, turning away from the window to regard him. “You mean that vision or whatever? The Indians?”

“I wouldn’t call it a vision,” he said. He and Virginia sat down side by side on the living area’s sofa, holding hands. “You were reading the pictographs on the walls, and you saw the story in your head, that’s all. And what you saw may be what was written there but it was filtered through your own brain, your own perceptions. You saw a guy who was, you said, maybe the personification of evil. But he was gray, right?”

“Yes…” she said hesitantly.

“Because it’s not a black and white world. Evil isn’t absolute and it lives in all of us. So does good. Those bastards who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center had some good in them somewhere, and the cops who gave their lives to save others, they were heroes but they were human beings, they had some evil too. You said yourself that some of the victims you saw in that Indian camp had been killed by one another, not by the gray guy, right?”

“Well, yeah…I think they were under his influence, but…okay, I see your point.”

“It’s simplistic as all heck, but it’s always been true, and I expect it always will be.”

Virginia squeezed Hal’s hand with her own. “Whatever are you two talking about?” she asked. She always had possessed a streak of curiosity as wide as the Mississippi, he thought.

“I guess there’s a lot to tell you,” he said. He leaned over and kissed the soft skin of his wife’s cheek. “Now may not be the best time, but soon, okay?”

“Real soon,” she said with a laugh. “Or I’m going to start thinking you two are keeping secrets from me.”

“Never,” Hal promised. “Never again.”

***

Virginia Shipp tried to join in the conversation, tried to get Hal to share some of what he’d obviously been through with this young lady and Kenneth Butler. But she could only force herself to be mildly interested. She was relieved that he’d come back, relieved and happy. But those emotions warred inside her with another one, an urge so strong that she could barely suppress it.

She wanted to get her hands on the gun that Penny held. Ken’s gun. That was her overwhelming priority at this moment. She could almost feel its cool steel skin, the way it would buck in her hands as she discharged it, the jets of flame that would erupt from its barrel, the matching jets of blood that would erupt from those she pointed it at.

Including Harold. Oh, God, especially Harold…

***

Vic writhed on the cement slab, trying to drag himself away from Rock’s trailer to someplace he might reasonably expect to get some help. Better yet, to someone who could find Cathy for him.

The bullet had smashed his left hip and he couldn’t even raise himself up onto hands and knees, could only tug himself by pressing his hands against the flat concrete and pushing as much as he could stand with his right leg. The more he moved, the more it hurt, but he had to move, couldn’t just stay where he’d fallen so whoever had shot him could finish him off at will.

When he’d heard the firefight start up in earnest, he was heartened, thinking that maybe it wasn’t the Dove, maybe it was Muslim terrorists or something. But he gave up on that notion in a hurry, since there was nothing on the Slab to attract the attention or interest of terrorists of any stripe. No, it was the Dove, he was sure. She was out there, down in the brush, most likely, where she couldn’t see him as long as he was flat and she didn’t change her position. Not that she’d need to, she seemed to have a pretty good angle on the trailer’s door.

Fucking Kelly, he thought, fucking Kelly had talked him into all this. If he could only walk he’d go back in there and kill the bastard himself.

But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true. Yes, Kelly had brought him in, had persuaded him to join in the fun. But there was something inside himself that had responded to the offer, that had made him think that rape and murder sounded like a good time. Killing Kelly wouldn’t kill that. Vic thought it was already dead, thought that it had died in the moment at the cabin when he’d first realized that it lived. But he couldn’t be sure. Even now, crawling like a slug because he couldn’t stand up, as helpless as a newborn, he couldn’t deny that it would feel good, someplace deep inside that he didn’t want to examine too closely, to hold a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger and breathe in the rank odors of blood and brain and smoke and lead and death.

Biting his lower lip until it bled, trying to stifle the pain, Vic dragged himself forward another foot.

***

Mikey Zee and his men had no casualties other than one man with a cheek scraped by shrapnel, metal chips that had flown when someone’s bullet had struck the Multi Terrain loader near his face. The men moved with the loaders, always staying behind the cover of the heavy metal equipment, and used their shotguns sparingly to guarantee the safety of the vehicle operators. So far more than a dozen of the ramshackle residences had fallen before their onslaught, and Mikey estimated that they’d only had to shoot six of the locals.