The Tommyknockers (61 page)

“Devils on every side!” Gardener cried out grandly. He slugged back the last of the Scotch and threw the bottle over the porch railing and into the bushes. “Devils on every side!” he repeated, and passed out.

“That guy saw us,” Butch said as the Jeep bulled across Anderson's garden on a diagonal, knocking over huge cornstalks and sunflowers that towered high over the Cherokee's roof.

“I don't care,” Ev said, wrestling the wheel. They emerged from the garden on the far side. The Cherokee's
wheels rolled over a number of pumpkins that were coming to full growth amazingly early. Their hides were strangely pale, and when they burst they disclosed unpleasant fleshy-pink interiors. “If they don't know we're in town by now, then I'm wrong about everything . . . Look! Didn't I tell you?”

A wide, rutted track wound into the woods. Ev bounced onto it.

“There was blood on his face.” Dugan swallowed. It was hard. His head ached very badly now, and all the fillings in his teeth seemed to be vibrating very fast. His guts were churning again. “And his shirt. Looked like somebody popped him one in the n—

“Pull over, I'm going to be sick again.”

Ev jammed on the brakes. Dugan opened his door and leaned out, vomited a thin yellow stream onto the dirt, and then closed his eyes for a moment. The world was swooping and turning.

Voices rustled in his head. A great many voices.

(Gard saw them he's yelling for help)

(how many)

(two two in a Cherokee they were headed)

“Look,” Butch heard himself say, as if from a great distance, “I don't want to spoil the party, but I'm sick.
Seriously
sick.”

“Thought you might be.” Hillman's voice came down a long, echoing hall. Somehow Butch managed to haul himself up again in the passenger seat, but he didn't even have strength enough to pull the door closed. He felt as weak as a new kitten. “You ain't had time to build up any resistance, and we're right where it's strongest. Hold on. I got something that'll fix you up. Least I think I do.”

Ev pushed the switch that lowered the Cherokee's electric rear window, got out, lowered the tailgate, and pulled out the gunnysack. He dragged it back to the Jeep and then hoisted it onto the seat. He glanced at Dugan, and didn't like what he saw. The trooper's face was the color of candlewax. His eyes were shut, the lids purplish. His mouth was half-open and he was breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Ev found a moment to wonder how whatever-it-was could be doing that to Dugan when he himself felt nothing, absolutely nothing.

“Hang on, friend,” he said, and used his pocketknife to cut the rope holding the neck of the bag.

“. . . sick . . .”
Dugan wheezed, and retched brownish fluid. Ev saw that there were three teeth in the mess.

He got out a light plastic oxygen-supply tank—what the clerk at Maine Med Supplies had called a flat-pack. He stripped the gold-foil circle from the end of the hose leading out of the flat-pack, revealing a stainless-steel female connector. Now he brought out a gold-colored plastic cup—the sort jet airliners come equipped with. A segmented white plastic tube was attached to this, and at the end there was a white plastic male connector—a valve.

If this don't work the way that guy said it would, I do believe this big fella's going to die on me.

He slammed the male connector of the mask into the female connector on the oxygen supply—violent intercourse which he hoped would result in keeping Dugan going. He heard oxygen sighing gently inside the gold cup. All right. So far, so good.

He leaned over and put the cup over Dugan's mouth and nose, using the elastic straps. Then he waited anxiously to see what would happen. If Dugan didn't come out of his tailspin in thirty or forty seconds, he would haul ass. David was missing and Hilly was sick, but neither thing gave him the right to murder Dugan, who hadn't known what sort of mess he was getting into.

Twenty seconds passed. Then thirty.

Ev dropped the Cherokee into reverse, meaning to turn around on the edge of Anderson's garden, when Dugan gasped, jerked, and opened his eyes. They looked very wide and blue and bewildered above the rim of the gold cup. Some color had come back into his cheeks.

“What the hell—” His hands groped for the cup.

“Leave it on,” Ev said, putting one of his big arthritis-warped old hands over one of Butch's. “It was the outside air poisoning you. You in a hurry for another dose?”

Butch stopped reaching for the cup. It bobbed on his face as he said, “How long will this stuff last?”

“Twenty-five minutes or so, the guy said. It's a demand valve, though. Every now and then you can pull it down. When you start feeling woozy again, put it back on. I want to go on in, if you think you can. It can't be far, and . . . and I feel like I got to know.”

Butch Dugan nodded.

The Cherokee lurched forward again. Dugan stared
out at the woods around them. Silent. No birds. No animals. No nothing. This was very wrong. Very bad and very damned
wrong.

Faintly, far back in his mind, he could hear thoughts like a whisper of shortwave transmissions.

He looked at Ev. “What the blue fuck is going on here, anyway?”

“That's to find out.” Without taking his eyes off the rough track, Ev rummaged in the sack. Dugan winced as the Cherokee's undercarriage screamed over a stump sawed off a little higher than the others.

Ev brought out a big .45. It looked old enough for its original owner to have carried it in World War I.

“Yours?” Dugan asked. It was amazing how fast the oxygen was bringing him around.

“Yeah. They teach you to use these things, don't they?”

“Yes.” Although the one Hillman had looked like an antique.

“You might have to use it today,” Ev said, and handed it over.

“What—”

“Have a care. It's loaded.”

Up ahead, the land suddenly sloped downward. Through the trees came a giant reflection: sunshine bouncing off a huge metal object.

Ev stamped the brake, suddenly terrified to the depths of his heart.

“What the hell?” he heard Dugan mutter beside him.

Ev opened the door and got out. As his feet touched the ground, he became aware that the earth was crisscrossed with small dusty cracks and that it was vibrating very rapidly. At the next moment music so loud that it was deafening blew through his head at gale force. It went on for perhaps thirty seconds, but the pain was excruciating and it seemed forever. At last, it simply winked out.

He saw Dugan standing in front of the Cherokee, the cup now hooked under his chin. He held the flat-pack by the strap in one hand, the .45 in the other. He was looking at Ev apprehensively.

“I'm all right,” Ev said.

“Yeah? Your nose is bleeding. Just like that guy back at the farm we passed.”

Ev wiped his nose with his finger and looked at the
smear of blood. He wiped his finger on his pants and nodded toward Dugan. “Remember to put the mask back on when you start to feel woozy.”

“Oh, don't worry.”

Ev leaned back into the Cherokee and rummaged in his bag of tricks again. He brought out a Kodak disk camera and something that looked like a cross between a pistol and a blow-dryer.

“Your flare-gun?” Dugan asked, smiling a little.

“Ayuh. Get on the gas again, Trooper. Your losin y'color.”

Dugan pulled it up, and the two men started toward that glittering thing in the woods. Fifty feet from the Cherokee, Ev stopped. It was more than huge; it was titanic, a thing that would perhaps be large enough to dwarf an ocean liner when completely uncovered.

“Gimme your hand,” he said roughly to Dugan.

Dugan did as he asked, but wanted to know why.

“Because I'm scared shitless,” Ev said. Dugan squeezed his hand. Ev's arthritis flared, but he squeezed back anyway. After a moment, the two men started forward again.

Bobbi and Jud got the guns from the hardware store and put them in the back of the pickup. The side trip hadn't taken long but Dick and the others had gotten a good start and Bobbi pushed the pickup as fast as she dared to catch up. The truck's shadow, shortening as the day approached noon, ran beside them.

Bobbi suddenly stiffened a little behind the wheel.

“Did you hear it?”

“Heard something,” Jud said. “It was your friend, wasn't it?”

Bobbi nodded. “Gard saw them. He's yelling for help.”

“How many?”

“Two. In a Jeep. They were headed out to where the ship is.”

Jud brought a fist down on one leg. “The fuckers! The dirty snooping fuckers!”

“We'll catch them,” Bobbi said. “Don't worry.”

They were at the farm fifteen minutes later. Bobbi pulled her truck in behind Allison's Nova and Archinbourg's Cadillac. She looked at the group of men and thought how much like the nights they had met out here this was . . . the ones who were to be made

(to “become” first)

especially strong. But Hazel wasn't here and Beach was; Joe Summerfield and Adley McKeen had never been inside the shed either.

“Get the guns,” she told Jud. “Joe, you help. Remember—no shooting unless you have to, and don't shoot the cop, no matter what.”

She looked toward the porch and saw Gard lying there on his back. Gard's mouth was open and he was breathing in slow, rusty snores. Bobbi's eyes softened. There were plenty of people in Haven—Dick Allison and Newt Berringer probably chief among them—who thought she should long since have gotten rid of Gard. Nothing had been said out loud, but in Haven you no longer
had
to say things out loud. Bobbi knew if she put a bullet through Gard's head, there would be a whole platoon of willing workers out here an hour later to help bury him. They didn't like Gard because the plate in his head made him immune to the “becoming.” And it made him hard to read. But he was her brake. And even that was crap. The truth was simpler yet: she still loved him. She was still human enough for that.

And they would all have to admit that, drunk or not, when they had needed a warning, Gard had given it.

Jud and Joe Summerfield came back with the rifles. There were six of them, varied calibers. Bobbi saw that five went to people she could trust completely. She gave the sixth, a .22, to Beach, who would complain if he didn't get a shooting iron.

Occupied with the ritual of guns, none of them saw that Gardener had half-opened his bloodshot eyes and was looking at them. No one heard his thoughts; he had learned how to seal them off.

“Let's go,” Bobbi said. “And remember: I want that cop.”

They moved out in a group.

Ev and Butch stood well back from the edge of what was now a ragged slash running better than three hundred yards from right to left and yawning sixty feet across at its widest point. Anderson's old mongrel of a truck stood off to one side, looking tired and used. Next to it was the souped-up payloader with its giant screwdriver snout. There were other tools in a lean-to of peeled logs. Ev saw a chainfall on one side, a chipper on the other. There was a big pile of sodden sawdust below the mouth of the chipper's exhaust vent. There were cans of gasoline in the lean-to, and a black drum labeled
DIESEL.
When Ev had first heard those noises in the woods, he had thought New England Paper must be doing some logging, but this was no logging operation. This was an excavation.

That dish. That monstrous dish glittering in the sun.

The eye could not stay away; it was drawn back again and again. Gardener and Bobbi had removed a lot more hillside. Ninety feet of polished silver-gray metal now jutted out of the earth and into the green-gold sunlight. If they had looked into the slash, they would have seen another forty feet or better.

Neither of them went close enough to look.

“Holy Jesus,” Dugan said. The gold cup bobbed on his face, and above its rim his blue eyes bulged. “Holy Jesus, it's a spaceship. Is it ours or is it Russian, do you think? Holy Jesus
Christ,
it's as big as the
Queen Mary,
that ain't Russian, that ain't . . . ain't . . .”

He fell silent again. In spite of the oxygen, his headache was coming back.

Ev raised the disk camera and clicked off seven shots as fast as his finger could push the camera's button. Then he moved twenty feet to the left and took another five, standing by the chipper.

“Move to the right!” he said to Dugan.

“Huh?”

“Your right! I want you in these last three, for perspective.”

“Forget it, Pop!” Even muffled by the cup, there was a shrill note in Dugan's voice.

“You don't have to. Four steps will do it.”

Dugan moved four very small steps to the right. Ev
raised the disk camera again—a Father's Day present from Bryant and Marie—and clicked off the final three shots. Dugan was a very big man, but the ship in the earth reduced him to the size of a pygmy.

“Okay,” Ev said. Dugan stepped quickly back to where he had been. He walked with mincing, tentative steps, looking at the great round object as he went.

Ev wondered if the pictures would turn out. His hands had been shaking. And the ship—for it certainly was some sort of spaceship—might be putting out radiation that would fog the film.

Even if it does come out, who's gonna believe it? Who, in a world where kids go off to the movies every damn Saturday and see things like
Star Wars
?

“I want to get out of here,” Dugan said.

Ev looked at the ship a moment longer, wondering if David was in there, imprisoned, wandering through unknowable corridors or passing through doorways cut for no human shape, starving in the darkness.
No . . . if he was in there, he would have starved a long time ago. Starved, or died of thirst.