The Tommyknockers (106 page)

Curl up, baby! Curl up tight!

Curl up, baby! Keep it all outta sight!

Undercover

Keep it all outta sight,

Under cover of the night.

—T
HE
R
OLLING
S
TONES
, “Undercover”

O every night and every day

A little piece of you is falling away . . .

Toe your line and play their game

Let the anaesthetic cover it all

Till one day they call your name:

You're only waiting for the hammer to fall.

—Q
UEEN
, “Hammer to Fall”

Most of them died in the fire.

Not all; a hundred or more never reached the clearing at all before the ship pulled itself out of the ground and disappeared into the sky. Some, like Elt Barker, who had gone flying off his motorcycle, did not reach it because they had been wounded or killed on the way . . . fortunes of war. Others, like Ashley Ruvall and old Miss Timms, who was the town librarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays, were simply too late or too slow.

Nor were all of those who did reach the clearing killed. The ship had gone into the sky and the awful, draining power which had seized them dwindled away to nothing before the fire reached the clearing (although by then sparks were drifting down and many of the smaller trees at the eastern edge were blazing). Some of them managed to stumble and limp further into the woods ahead of that spreading fiery fan. Of course, going straight west was no good to these few (Rosalie Skehan was among them, as were Frank Spruce and Rudy Barfield, brother of the late and mostly unlamented Pits), because eventually they would run out of breathable air, in spite of the prevailing winds. So it was necessary to first go west, and then turn either south or north in an effort to buttonhook around the fire-front . . . a desperation play where the penalty for failure was not losing the ball but being roasted to
cinders in Big Injun Woods. A few—not all, but a few—actually did make it.

Most, however, died in the clearing where Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener had worked so long and hard—died within feet of that empty socket where something had been buried and then pulled.

They had been used roughly by a power which was much greater than the early, tentative state of their “becoming” could cope with. The ship had reached out to the net of their minds, seized it, and used it to obey the Controller's weak but unmistakable command, which had been expressed as
WARP SPEED
to the ship's organic-cybernetic circuits. The words
WARP SPEED
were not in the ship's vocabulary, but the concept was clear.

The living lay on the ground, most unconscious, some deeply dazed. A few sat up, holding their heads and moaning, oblivious of the sparks drifting down around them. Some, mindful of the danger coming from the east, tried to get up and fell back.

One of those who did not fall back was Chip McCaus-land, who lived on Dugout Road with his common-law wife and about ten kids; two months and a million years ago, Bobbi Anderson had gone to Chip for more egg cartons to hold her expanding collection of batteries. Chip shambled halfway across the clearing like an old drunk and fell into the empty trench. He tumbled, shrieking, all the way to the bottom, where he died of a broken neck and a shattered skull.

Others who understood the danger of the fire and who could possibly have gotten away elected not to do so. The “becoming” was at an end. It had ended with the departure of the ship. The purpose of their lives had been canceled. So they only sat and waited for the fire to take care of what remained of them.

By nightfall, there were less than two hundred people left alive in Haven. Most of the township's heavily wooded western half had burned or was burning flat. The wind grew stronger yet. The air began to change, and the remaining Tommyknockers, gasping and whey-faced,
gathered in Hazel McCready's yard. Phil Golden and Bryant Brown got the big air-exchanger going. The survivors gathered around it as homesteaders might once have gathered around a stove on a bitter night. Their tortured breathing gradually eased.

Bryant looked over at Phil.

Weather for tomorrow?

Clear skies, diminishing winds.

Marie was standing nearby, and Bryant saw her relax.

Good  that's good.

And so it was . . . for the time being. But the winds were not going to remain calm for the rest of their lives. And with the ship gone, there was only this gadget and twenty-four truck batteries between them and eventual strangulation.

How long?
Bryant asked, and no one answered. There was only the flat shine of their frightened, inhuman eyes in the fireshot night.

The following morning there were twenty less. During the night John Leandro's story had broken worldwide, with all the force of a hammerfall. State and Defense departments denied everything, but dozens of people had taken photographs as the ship rose. These photographs were persuasive . . . and no one could stop the flood of leaks from such “informed sources” as frightened residents of the surrounding towns and the first arriving National Guardsmen.

The Haven border-barriers held, at least for the time being. The fire-front had advanced into Newport, where the flames were finally being brought under control.

Several Tommyknockers blew their brains out in the night.

Poley Andrews swallowed Dran-O.

Phil Golden awoke to discover that Queenie, his wife of twenty years, had jumped into Hazel McCready's dry well.

That day there were only four suicides, but the nights . . . the nights were worse.

By the time the Army finally broke into Haven, like
inept burglars into a strong safe, later that week, there were less than eighty Tommyknockers left.

Justin Hurd shot a fat Army sergeant with a kid's Daisy air rifle that squirted green fire. The fat sergeant exploded. A scared E-4 in the APC just then roaring past Cooder's market turned the .50-caliber he was sitting behind on Justin Hurd, who was standing in front of the hardware store, wearing only a yellowing pair of Hanes underpants and his orange work-shoes.

“Fixed them woodchucks!”
Justin was screaming.
“Fixed them all, you're fucking-A, you're
—

Then he was hit by some twenty .50-caliber slugs. Justin nearly exploded, too.

The E-4 puked into his gas mask and nearly choked on the stuff before someone could get a fresh one over his face.

“Someone get that popgun!” a major shouted through an electric bullhorn. His mask muffled his words but did not destroy them. “Get it, but be careful! Pick it up by the barrel! I repeat, be extremely careful! Don't point it at anyone!”

Pointing it at someone, Gard would have said, always comes later.

More than a dozen were shot down on the first day of the invasion by scared, trigger-happy soldiers, kids, most of them, who pursued the Tommyknockers from house to house. After a while, some of the invaders' fear began to rub off. By afternoon they were actually having fun—they were like men driving rabbits through wheat. Two dozen more were killed before the Army doctors and Pentagon brain-trusters realized that the air outside of Haven was lethal to these freak-show mutations who had once been American tax payers. The fact that the invaders could not breathe the air
inside
Haven would have seemed to have made the converse self-evident, but in all the excitement, no one was really thinking very well (Gard wouldn't have found this very surprising).

Now there were only forty or so. Most were insane; those who weren't wouldn't talk. A makeshift stockade was
built in the area which passed for a town square in Haven Village—just below and to the right of the towerless town hall. They were kept there for another week, and during that period another fourteen died.

The changed air was analyzed; the machine which manufactured it was carefully studied; the failing batteries were replaced. As Bobbi had suggested, it didn't take the braintrusters long to understand the mechanics of the device, and the underlying principles were already being studied at MIT, Cal Tech, Bell Labs, and the Shop in Virginia by scientists who were nearly vomiting with excitement.

The remaining twenty-six Tommyknockers, looking like the weary, pox-raddled remnants of the final Apache tribe in existence, were flown in the controlled-environment cargo-bay of a C-140 Starlifter to a government installation in Virginia. This installation, which had once been burned to the ground by a child, was the Shop. There they were studied . . . and there they died, one by one by one.

The last survivor was Alice Kimball, the schoolteacher who was a lesbian (a fact 'Becka Paulson had learned from Jesus one hot day in July). She died on October 31st . . . Halloween.

At about the same time Queenie Golden was standing on the edge of Hazel's dry well and preparing to jump in, a nurse stepped into Hilly Brown's room to check on the boy, who had shown some faint signs of returning consciousness over the last couple of days.

She looked at the bed, and frowned. She couldn't be seeing what she was seeing—it was an illusion of some kind, a double shadow thrown onto the wall by the light from the corridor—

She flipped the wall switch and took a step closer. Her mouth dropped open. It hadn't been an illusion. There were two shadows on the wall because there were two boys in the bed. They slept with their arms wrapped around each other.

“What—?”

She took another step, her hand going unconsciously to the crucifix she wore around her neck.

One of them, of course, was Hilly Brown, his face thin and wasted, his arms seemingly no thicker than sticks, his skin nearly as white as his hospital johnny.

She didn't know the other boy, who was very young. He was wearing blue shorts and a T-shirt which read
THEY CALL ME DR. LOVE
. His feet were black with dirt . . . and something about that dirt seemed unnatural to her.

“What—?” she whispered again, and the younger boy stirred and wrapped his arms more tightly around Hilly's neck. His cheek rested against Hilly's shoulder, and she saw with something like terror that the boys looked very much alike.

She decided she had to tell Dr. Greenleaf about this. Right now. She turned to leave, heart beating fast, one hand still clutching at her crucifix . . . and saw something that was quite impossible.

“What—?” she whispered for the third and last time. Her eyes were very wide.

More of that strange black dirt. On the floor. Tracks on the floor. Leading to the bed. The little boy had crossed to the bed and gotten in. The two boys' facial resemblance suggested that this was Hilly's missing—and long since presumed dead—brother.

The tracks didn't come from the hall. They started in the middle of the floor.

As if the little boy had come from nowhere.

The nurse bolted from the room, screaming for Dr. Greenleaf.

Hilly Brown opened his eyes.

“David?”

“Shut up, Hilly, I'm sleepun.”

Hilly smiled, not sure where he was, not sure
when
he was, sure only that many things had been wrong—just what those things had been no longer mattered, because everything was okay now. David was here, warm and solid against him.

“Me too,” Hilly said. “We got to trade G.I. Joes tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. But we got to. I promised.”

“When?”

“I dunno.”

“As long as I get Crystal Ball,” David said, settling himself more firmly into the crook of Hilly's arm.

“Well . . . okay.”

Silence . . . there was a dim commotion at the nurses' station down the hall, but here there was silence, and the sweet warmth of boys.

“Hilly?”

“What?” Hilly muttered.

“It was cold where I was.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“Better now?”

“Better. I love you, Hilly.”

“I love you too, David. I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“I dunno.”

“Oh.”

David's hand groped for the blanket, found it, and pulled it up. Ninety-three million miles from the sun and a hundred parsecs from the axis-pole of the galaxy, Hilly and David Brown slept in each other's arms.

August 19th, 1982

May 19th, 1987

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:

“Thank the Lord for the Night Time” by Neil Diamond, copyright © Tallyrand Music, Inc., 1967. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“Run Through the Jungle” by John Fogerty, copyright © Jondora Music, 1970. Courtesy Fantasy Inc.

“Downstream” (Bob Walkenhorst), copyright © Screen Gems—EMI Music, Inc. and Bob Walkenhorst Music, 1986. All administrative rights controlled by Screen Gems—EMI Music, Inc.

“Drinkin' on the Job” (Bob Walkenhorst), copyright © Screen Gems—EMI Music, Inc. and Bob Walkenhorst Music, 1986. All administrative rights controlled by Screen Gems—EMI Music, Inc.

“Undercover of the Night” (Mick Jagger/Keith Richards), copyright © EMI Music Publishing Ltd., 1983. All administrative rights for the United States and Canada controlled by Colgems—EMI Music, Inc.

“Hammer to Fall” (Brian May), copyright © Queen Music Ltd., 1984. All administrative rights for the United States and Canada controlled by Beechwood Music Corporation.

“Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk” (S. Weedman, D. Locorriere, R. Haffkine), copyright © Screen Gems—EMI Music, Inc., 1982

Quote from
Where the Wild Things Are
, story and pictures by Maurice Sendak. Copyright © Maurice Sendak, 1963. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.