The Tommyknockers (95 page)

“We've got reports there's a fire in Haven, Andy. Maybe a big one. Have you got that?”

“Yeah, we do. David, I can't take you over there. The information you gave me checks out, though. Fire crews and recon people can't get into town. They get sick. We've lost a forest ranger. A guy I knew. I heard . . .” He shook his head. “Forget what I heard. It's too goddam crazy to be true.”

Bright's voice was excited. “What was it?”

“Forget it.”

“But you say firemen and rescue crews are getting sick?”

“Recon
people. We don't know yet if anyone needs rescuing or not. Then there's the shit about the fire trucks and Jeeps. Vehicles seem to stop running when they get close to or into Haven—”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You mean it's like the pulse?”

“Pulse? What pulse?” He had a crazy idea that Bright was talking about Henry's pacemaker, that he had known all along.

“It's a phenomenon that's supposed to follow big nuclear bangs. Cars stop dead.”

“Christ. What about radios?”

“Them too.”

“But your friends said—”

“All over the band, yes. Hundreds. Can I at least quote you on the sick firemen and rescue people? The vehicles stopping?”

“Yeah. As Mr. Source. Mr. Informed Source.”

“When did you first hear—”

“I don't have time to do the
Playboy
interview, David. Your Leandro went to Maine Med Supplies for air?”

“Yes.”

“He
thought it was the air,” Torgeson said, more to himself than to Bright. “That's what
he
thought.”

“Andy . . . you know what else stops cars dead, according to the reports we get from time to time?”

“What?”

“UFOs. Don't laugh; it's true. People who sight flying saucers at close range when they're in their cars or planes almost always say their motors just drop dead until the thing goes away.” He paused. “Remember the doctor who crashed his plane in Newport a week or two ago?”

War of the Worlds
, Torgeson thought again.
What a pile of crap.

But Henry Amberson's pacemaker had . . . what?
Exploded?
Could that possibly be true?

He would make it his business to find out;
that
you could take to the bank.

“I'll be talking to you, Davey,” Torgeson said, and hung up. It was 3:15. In Haven, the fire which had begun at the old Frank Garrick farm had been burning for over an hour, and was now spreading toward the ship in a widening crescent.

Torgeson called Augusta at 3:17
P.M.
At that time, two sedans with a total of six investigators in them were already northbound on 1-95; Fire Station Three had called the A.G.'s office at 2:26
P.M.
and the Derry state police barracks at 2:49. The Derry report included the first jagged elements—the crash of the Unity pumper, the death of a forest ranger who appeared to have been shotgunned by his own pacemaker. At 1:30
P.M.
mountain time, a Utah State Police cruiser stopped at the campground where Jim Tierney and his family were staying. The trooper informed him there was an emergency in his home state. What sort of emergency? That, the trooper had been told, was information obtainable strictly on a need-to-know basis. Tierney could have called Derry, but Torgeson in Cleaves Mills was a guy he knew and trusted. Right now he wanted more than anything else to talk to someone he trusted. He felt a slow, sinking dread in his gut, a feeling that it had to be Maine Yankee, had to be
something with the state's only nuclear plant, had to be, only something that big could have caused this kind of extraordinary response almost a whole country away. The trooper patched him through. Torgeson was both delighted and relieved to hear Tierney's voice.

At 1:37
P.M.
mountain time, Tierney climbed into the shotgun seat of the cruiser and said, “How fast does this go?”

“Sir! This vehicle will go one hundred and thirty miles an hour and I am a Mormon sir and I am not afraid to drive it at that speed sir because I am confident that I will avoid hell! Sir!”

“Prove it,” Tierney said.

At 2:03
P.M.
mountain time, Tierney was in a Learjet with no markings but the U.S. flag on its tail. It had been waiting for him at a small private airfield near Cottonwoods . . . the town of which Zane Grey wrote in
Riders of the Purple Sage
, the book which had been Roberta Anderson's favorite as a girl, the one which had perhaps set her course forever as a writer of westerns.

The pilot was in mufti.

“Are you Defense Department?” Tierney asked.

The pilot looked at him with expressionless dark glasses. “Shop.” It was the only word he spoke before, during, or after the flight.

That was how the Dallas Police entered the game.

Haven had been nothing but a wide place in the road, dreaming its life away comfortably off the major Maine tourist tracks. Now it had been noticed. Now people headed there in droves. Since they knew nothing of the anomalies that were being reported in ever-increasing numbers, it was only the growing pall of smoke on the horizon which drew them at first like moths to candle flames. It would be almost seven o'clock that evening before the state police, with the help of the local National Guard unit, would be able to block off all the roads to the area—the minor ones as well as the major. By morning, the fire would become the greatest forest-fire in Maine history. The brisk easterly wind came up right on schedule,
and once it did, there was no way the fire's running start could be overcome. The realization did not sink in all at once, but it
did
sink in: the fire might have burned unchecked even if the day had been dead calm. You couldn't do much about a fire you couldn't get to, and efforts to get near this one had unpleasant results.

The spotter plane had crashed.

A busload of National Guardsmen from Bangor ran off the road, struck a tree, and exploded when the driver's brain simply burst like a tomato loaded with a cherry-bomb. All seventy weekend warriors died, but maybe only half of them in the crash; the rest died in a fruitless effort to crawl out of the poison belt.

Unfortunately, the wind was blowing the wrong way . . . as Torgeson could have told them.

The forest-fire which had begun in Burning Woods had crisped half of Newport before fire-fighters could properly go to work . . . but by then they were strung too thin to do much good, because the fire line was nearly six miles long.

By seven that evening, hundreds of people—some self-appointed fire-fighters, most your common garden-variety
Homo rubberneckus
—had poured into the area. Most promptly poured right back out again, faces white, eyes bulging, noses and ears jetting blood. Some came clutching their lost teeth in their hands like pitted pearls. And not a few of them died . . . not to mention the hundred or so hapless residents of eastern Newport who got a sudden dose of Haven when the wind turned brisk. Most of those died in their houses. Those who came to gawk and stayed to asphyxiate on the rotten air were found in or beside various roads, curled in fetal positions, hands clutched over their stomachs. Most, one G.I. later told the Washington
Post
(under the strict condition that he not be identified), looked like bloody human commas.

Such was not the fate of Lester Moran, a textbook salesman who lived in a Boston suburb and spent most of his days on the highways of northern New England.

Lester was returning from his annual late-summer selling trip to the schools in the SADs (school administrative districts) of Aroostook County when he saw smoke—a lot of it—on the horizon. This was at about 4:15
P.M.

Lester diverted immediately. He was in no hurry to get back, being a bachelor and having no plans for the next
two weeks or so, but he would have diverted even if the national sales conference had been slated to begin the next day with him as the principal speaker and his speech still unwritten. He couldn't have helped himself. Lester Moran was a fire-freak. He had been one since earliest childhood. In spite of having spent the last five days on the road, in spite of a fanny that felt like a board and kidneys that felt like bricks after the constant jolting his sprung car had taken on the shitty roads of townships so small they mostly had map coordinates for names, Lester never thought twice. His weariness fell away; his eyes glowed with that preternatural light which fire-chiefs from Manhattan to Moscow know and dread: the unholy excitement of the natural-born fire-freak.

They are the sort of people fire-chiefs will, however, put to use . . . if driven to the wall. Five minutes ago, Lester Moran, who had applied to the Boston Fire Department at the age of twenty-one and been turned down because of the steel plate in his skull, had felt like a whipped dog. Now he felt like a man highballing on amphetamines. Now he
was
a man who would happily don an Indian pump which weighed almost half as much as he did himself and lug it on his back all night, breathing smoke the way some men breathe the perfume on the nape of a beautiful woman's neck, fighting the flames until the skin of his cheeks was cracked and blistered and his eyebrows were burned clean off.

He exited the turnpike at Newport and burned up the road which led toward Haven.

The plate in his head was the result of a hideous accident which had occurred when Moran was twelve, and a junior-high patrol-boy. A car had struck him and thrown him thirty feet, where his flight had been interrupted by the obdurate brick wall of a furniture warehouse. He had been given last rites; his weeping parents had been told by the surgeon who operated on him that their son would likely die within six hours, or remain in a coma for several days or weeks before succumbing. Instead, the boy had been awake and asking for ice cream before the end of the day.

“I think it's a miracle,” the boy's sobbing mother cried. “A miracle from God!”

“Me too,” said the surgeon who had operated on Lester
Moran, and who had looked at the boy's brain through a gaping hole in the poor kid's shattered skull.

Now, closing in on all that delightful smoke, Lester began to feel a little sick to his stomach, but he chalked that up to excitement and then forgot all about it. The plate in his skull was, after all, nearly twice the size of the one in Jim Gardener's. The absence of police, fire, or Forestry Department vehicles in the thickening murk he found both extraordinary and oddly exhilarating. Then he rounded a sharp curve and saw a bronze-colored Plymouth lying upside-down in the left-hand ditch, its red dashboard flasher still pulsing. Written on the side was
DERRY F.D.

Lester parked his old Ford wagon, got out, and trotted over to the wreck. There was blood on the steering wheel and the seat and driver's-side floormat. There were droplets of blood on the windshield.

All in all, quite a lot of blood. Lester stared at it, horrified, and then looked toward Haven. Dull red colored the base of the smoke now, and he realized he could actually
hear
the dull crackle of burning wood. It was like standing near the world's biggest open-hearth furnace . . . or as if the world's biggest open-hearth furnace had sprouted legs and was slowly approaching
him.

Next to that sound, next to the sight of that dull yet titanic red glow, the overturned Derry fire-chief's car and the blood inside began to seem a good deal less important. Lester went back to his own car, fought a brief battle with his conscience, and won by promising himself he would stop at the first pay phone he came to and call the state police in Cleaves Mills . . . no, Derry. Like most good salesmen, Lester Moran carried a detailed map of his territory in his head, and after consulting it, he decided Derry was closer.

He had to resist the yammering urge to goose the wagon up to its top speed . . . which was about sixty these days. He expected at every turn of the road to come upon sawhorses blocking the road, a confusion of crazily parked vehicles, the sound of CB radios squealing out messages at top gain, shouting men in hard-hats, helmets, and rubber coats.

It didn't happen. Instead of sawhorses and a boiling nest of activity he came upon the overturned Unity pumper, cab broken off its body, the tank itself still
spraying the last of its load. Lester, who was now breathing smoke as well as air that would have killed almost anyone else on earth, stood on the soft shoulder, mesmerized by the limp white arm he saw dangling from the window of the pumper's amputated cab. Rivulets of drying blood ran erratic courses down the arm's white and vulnerable underside.

Something wrong here. Something a lot more wrong than just a woods fire. You got to get out, Les.

But instead he turned toward the fire again and was lost.

The smoky taste in the air was stronger. The sound of burning was now not a crackle but a rolling thunder. The truth of it suddenly fell on him like a bucket of cement:
No one was fighting this fire. No one at all.
For some reason he couldn't understand, they either hadn't been able to get into the area or hadn't been
allowed
in. As a result, the fire was burning out of control, and with the freshening wind to help, it was growing like a radioactive monster in a horror movie.

The idea made him ill with terror . . . and excitement . . . and sick, dark joy. It was bad to feel a thing like that last, but it was there and it was impossible to deny. Nor was he the only one who had felt it. That dark joy had seemed to be a part of every fire-fighter he had ever bought a drink for (which was almost every fire-fighter he'd ever met since he flunked his own BFD physical).

He fumbled and stumbled back to his car, started it with some difficulty (assuming that in his excitement he had probably almost flooded the damned dinosaur), boosted the air conditioner all the way up, and headed toward Haven again. He was aware this was idiocy of the purest ray serene—he was, after all, not Superman but a forty-five-year-old textbook salesman who was going bald and who was still a bachelor because he was too shy to ask women for dates. He was not just behaving in an
idiotic
fashion, either. Harsh as that judgment was, it was still a rationalization. The truth was, he was behaving like a lunatic. And yet he could no more stop himself than a junkie can stop himself when he sees his fix cooking in the spoon.