The Tommyknockers (97 page)

He had cleaned up a lot of ugly messes on the highway, but he still drew in a harsh gasp and shied his face away.

“Christ, what hit him?” Weems asked. The mask muffled his words, but the tone of dismay came through loud and clear.

Torgeson didn't know. He had seen a man once who'd been hit by a snowplow. That guy had looked a little like this. That was the closest.

The guy was blood from the top of what had been his head all the way down to his waist. His belt buckle had been driven deep into his body.

“Christ, man, I'm sorry,” he murmured, and laid the body down gently. He could go for the wallet, but he wanted nothing more to do with that smashed body. He headed for the car. Weems fell in beside him, riot gun
held on a slant against his chest. In the distance, to the west, the smoke was growing thicker by the moment, but here there was only a faint woodsy tang.

“This is crazy shit,” Weems said through his mask.

“Yes.”

“I have a very bad feeling about being here.”

“Yes.”

“I believe we should vacate this area on the dou—”

There was a crackling sound from behind them, and for a moment Torgeson thought it must be the fire—it was far away, relatively speaking, but it could be over here too. Perfectly reasonable! When you were at the Mad Hatter's tea party, anything was. Turning, he realized that the sound was not burning branches but breaking ones.

“Holy
shit!”
Claudell Weems cried.

Torgeson's jaw dropped.

The Coke machine, stupid but reliable, moved in again. This time it came out of the brush at the side of the road. The glass display front was broken. The sides of the big rectangular box were scratched. And on the metal part of the machine's front, Torgeson saw a horridly suggestive shape driven in so deep it looked almost sculpted.

It looked like half a head.

The Coke machine moved out over the road and just hung there for a moment like a coffin painted in incongruously gay colors. They were gay, at least, until you noticed the blood which had dripped and run and was beginning to dry in maroon splotches.

Torgeson could hear a faint humming, and a clicking sound—
Like relays,
he thought.
Maybe it's been damaged. Maybe, but still
—

The Coke machine suddenly arrowed straight at them.

“MothaFUCKAH!”
Weems shouted—there was dismay and terror in his voice, but a kind of crazed laughter as well.

“
Shoot it, shoot it!”
Torgeson cried, and leapt to the right.

Weems took a step back and promptly fell over Leandro's body. This was extremely stupid. It was also extremely lucky. The Coke machine missed him by inches. As it banked for another run, Weems sat up and pumped three quick shotgun blasts into it. Metal exploded inward in metal daisy shapes with black centers. The machine
began to buzz. It stopped, jittering back and forth in the air like a man with Huntington's chorea.

Torgeson drew his service pistol and fired four rounds. The Coke machine started for him, but now it seemed lethargic, unable to get up any speed. It jerked to a stop, jerked forward, stopped, jerked forward again. It rocked drunkenly from side to side. The buzzing grew louder. Runnels of soda fell from the access door in sticky rivulets.

As it came at him, Torgeson pivoted easily away.

“Drop, Andy!”
Weems yelled.

Torgeson dropped. Claudell Weems shot the Coke machine three more times, firing as fast as he could work the pump action. On the third shot, something inside it exploded. Black smoke and a brief belch of fire licked out one side of the machine.

Green
fire, Torgeson saw.
Green.

The Coke machine thumped to the road about twenty feet from Leandro's body. It tottered, then fell forward with a hollow bang. Broken glass jingled. There were three seconds of silence; then a long metallic croaking sound. It stopped. The Coca-Cola machine lay dead across the white line in the middle of Route 9. Its red-and-white hide was full of bullet-holes. Smoke poured from it.

“I have just drawn my weapon and killed a Coke machine, sir,” Claudell Weems said hollowly inside his mask.

Andy Torgeson turned toward him. “And you never even ordered it to halt, or fired a warning shot. Probably draw a suspension, you dumb shit.”

They stared at each other over the masks, and started to laugh. Claudell Weems laughed so hard he was nearly doubled over.

Green,
Torgeson thought, and although he was still laughing, nothing felt very funny inside, where he lived.
The fire that came out of that fucker was
green.

“Never fired a warning shot,” Weems cackled breathlessly. “No, I never did. Never did at all.”

“Violated its fucking civil rights,” Torgeson said.

“Have to be an investigation!” Weems laughed. “Yo, baby! I mean . . . mean . . .” He tottered on his feet, and there was a lot of Claudell Weems to totter. Torgeson suddenly realized he was dizzy himself. They were breathing pure oxygen . . . hyperventilating.

“
Stop laughing!”
he shouted, and his voice seemed to come from a long distance away. “Claudell, stop laughing!”

He somehow crossed the distance to where Weems was swaying woozily on his feet. The distance seemed very wide. When he was almost there, he stumbled. Weems somehow caught him and for a moment they stood swaying drunkenly, arms about each other, like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed at the end of the first fight.

“You pullin me down, asshole,” Weems muttered.

“Fuck you, you started it.” The world came into focus, wavered, steadied.
Slow breaths,
Torgeson told himself.
Big slow breaths, easy respiration. Be still, my beating heart.
That last made him giggle again, but he got hold of it.

The two of them wavered back toward the cruiser, arms about each other's waists.

“The body,” Weems said.

“Leave it for now. He's dead. We're not. Yet.”

“Look,” Weems said as they passed Leandro's remains. “The bubs! They're out!”

The blue flashers, called bubbles or bubs by the troopers, on top of the cruiser were dead and dark. That wasn't supposed to be—leaving the flashers on at the scene of the accident was ingrained behavior.

“Did you—” Torgeson began, and then stopped.

Something in the landscape had changed. The day had darkened, as it does when a large cloud floats over the sun or when an eclipse begins. They looked at each other, then turned. Torgeson saw it first, a great silvery shape emerging from the boil of smoke. Its huge leading edge gleamed.

“Holy
Christ!”
Weems almost squealed. His large brown hand found Torgeson's arm and bore down upon it.

Torgeson barely felt it, although there would be bruises in the shape of Weems's hand the next day.

Up it came . . . and up . . . and up. Smoke-hazed sunlight glinted on its silvery-metallic surface. It rose on an angle of roughly forty degrees. It seemed to be wavering slightly, although that could have been an illusion or heat-haze.

Of course the whole thing was an illusion—
had
to be. No
way
it could be real, Torgeson thought; it was oxygen rapture.

But how can we both be having the same hallucination?

“Oh my dear God,” Weems groaned, “it's a flyin saucer, Andy, it's a fuckin flyin saucer!”

But to Torgeson it did not look like a saucer. It looked like the underside of an Army mess-plate—the biggest damn plate in creation. Up it came and up it came; you thought it must end, that a hazy margin of sky must appear between it and the rafters of smoke, but still it came, dwarfing the trees, dwarfing all the landscape. It made the smoke of the forest-fire look like a couple of cigarette butts smoldering in an ashtray. It filled more and more of the sky, blotting out the horizon, rising, oh, something was rising out of Big Injun Woods, and it was deathly silent—there was no sound, no sound at all.

They stared at it, and then Weems clutched Torgeson and Torgeson clutched Weems, they hugged each other like children, and Torgeson thought:
Oh, if it falls on us
—

And still it came up from the smoke and the fire, and up, as if it would never end.

By nightfall, Haven had been cut off from the outside world by the National Guard. The Guardsmen surrounded it, those downwind wearing oxygen equipment.

Torgeson and Weems made it out—but not in their cruiser. That was as dead as John Wilkes Booth. They hoofed it. By the time they had used up the oxygen in the last flat-pack, swapping it back and forth, they were well into Troy and found themselves able to deal with the outside air—the wind left them lucky, Claudell Weems said later. They walked out of what would soon be referred to as “the zone of pollution” in top-secret government reports, and theirs was the first official word of what was going on in Haven, but by then there had been hundreds of unofficial reports on the lethal quality of the air in the area and
thousands
of reports of a gigantic UFO seen rising from the smoke in Big Injun Woods.

Weems made it out with a bloody nose. Torgeson lost half a dozen teeth. Both counted themselves lucky.

The initial perimeter, staffed with National Guardsmen from Bangor and Augusta, was thin. By nine
P.M.
it had
been augmented by Guardsmen from Limestone and Presque Isle and Brunswick and Portland. By dawn a thousand more battle-equipped Guardsmen had been flown in from Eastern Corridor cities.

Between the hours of 7:00
P.M.
and 1:00
A.M.,
NORAD stood at DEFCON-2. The President was circling the Midwest at sixty thousand feet in
Looking Glass
and chewing Tums five and six at a time.

The FBI was on the scene at 6:00
P.M.,
the CIA at 7:15
P.M.
By 8:00 o'clock, they were yelling about jurisdiction. At 9:15
P.M.
a frightened, infuriated CIA agent named Spacklin shot an FBI agent named Richardson. The incident was hushed up, but both Gardener and Bobbi Anderson would have understood perfectly—the Dallas Police were on the scene and in complete control of the situation.

There was a moment of paralyzed silence in Bobbi's kitchen following the misfire of Ev Hillman's old .45, a silence that was as much mental as it was physical. Gard's wide blue eyes stared into Bobbi's green ones.

“You tried—” Bobbi began, and her mind

(! tried to !)

produced an echo in Gardener's head. That moment seemed very long. And when it broke, it broke like glass.

Bobbi had dropped the photon pistol to her side in her surprise. Now she brought it up again. There was to be no second chance. In her agitation, her mind was completely open to Gardener, and he felt her shock at the chance she had given him. She intended that there should be no second chance.

There was nothing he could do with his right hand; it was under the table. Before she could aim the muzzle of the photon pistol at him, he put his left hand on the edge of the kitchen table and, without thinking, shoved as hard as he could. The table legs squealed harshly on the floor as the table moved. It struck Bobbi's lumped and misshapen chest. At the same instant, a beam of brilliant green light shot from the barrel of the toy gun hooked into Hank Buck's big radio/tape-player. Instead of hitting Gard's own chest, it jerked upward and passed over his shoulder—more than a foot above it, actually, but he
could still feel the skin there tingle unpleasantly under the shirt, as if the surface molecules were dancing like drops of water on a hot skillet.

Gard twisted to the right and dropped down to get away from that beam of what looked like light. His ribs struck the table, struck it hard, and the table rammed Bobbi again, this time even harder. Bobbi's chair rocked backward on its rear legs, teetered, and then both it and she toppled over with a crash. The beam of green light swung upward, and Gardener was momentarily reminded of those guys who stand on airport tarmacs at night, using powerful flashlights to guide planes into their berths.

He heard a low crunching, crackling sound like splintering plywood from overhead, looked up, and saw the photon pistol had drawn a slit in the kitchen ceiling. Gardener staggered to his feet. Incredibly, his jaws cracked and wavered in another yawn. His head clanged and echoed with the grass-fire alarm of Bobbi's thoughts

(he's got a gun tried to shoot me bastard bastard gun he's got)

and he tried to shield himself before he went mad. He couldn't. Bobbi was screaming inside his head, and as she lay on the floor pinned for the moment between the table and overturned chair, she was trying to bring the gun to bear on him for another shot.

Gardener lifted his foot and shoved the table again, grimacing. It overturned, beers, pills, and boom-box radio all sliding off. Most of the stuff fell on Bobbi. Beer splashed in her face and ran, fizzing and foaming, over her New and Improved skin. The radio hit her neck, then the floor, landing in a shallow puddle of beer.

Flash, you fucker!
Gardener screamed at it.
Explode! Self-destruct! Explode, goddammit, ex
—

The radio did more than that. It seemed to bulge, and then with a sound like rotten cloth ripping along a seam, it shattered outward in all directions, belching streaks of green fire like bottled lightning. Bobbi screamed. What he heard with his ears was bad; the sound inside his head was infinitely worse.

Gardener screamed with her, not hearing himself. He saw that Bobbi's shirt was burning.

He started for her, not thinking about what he was up to. He dropped the .45 as he did so, without even thinking. This time it
did
go off, sending a slug into Jim Gardener's
ankle, shattering it. Pain blew through his mind like a hot wind. He screamed again. He took a shambling step forward, his head ringing with her horrid mental cries. They would send him mad in a moment. This thought was actually a relief. When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore.