He tried speaking and found that his voice had returned. “Are you dead, Steven, or are you faking?”
Across the black room, slumped against a black wall, the artist didn’t answer.
“I think they’re gone and won’t be coming back. So if you’re faking, it’s all clear now.”
No reply.
“Well, then you’ve gone over, and all the bad in you was left here. I’m sure you’re full of remorse now and wish you’d been more compassionate toward me. So if you could exert a little of your cosmic power, reach through the veil, and work a little miracle so I can walk again, I believe that would be appropriate.”
The room remained silent.
He still couldn’t feel anything below his neck.
“I hope I don’t need the services of a spirit channeler to get your attention,” Roy said. “That would be inconvenient.”
Silence. Stillness. Cold white light in a tight cone, blazing down through the center of that encapsulating blackness.
“I’ll just wait. I’m sure that reaching through the veil takes a lot of effort.”
Any moment now, a miracle.
Opening the driver’s door of the pickup, Spencer was suddenly afraid that he had lost the keys. They were in his jacket pocket.
By the time Spencer got behind the wheel and started the engine, Rocky was in the backseat, and Ellie was already in the other front seat. The motel pillow was across her thighs, the laptop was on the pillow, and she was waiting to power up the computer.
When the engine turned over and Ellie switched on the laptop, she said, “Don’t go anywhere yet.”
“We’re sitting ducks here.”
“I’ve got to get back into Godzilla.”
“Godzilla.”
“The system I was in before we got out of the truck.”
“What’s Godzilla?”
“As long as we’re just sitting here, they probably won’t do anything except watch us and wait. But as soon as we start to move, they’ll have to act, and I don’t want them coming at us until we’re ready for them.”
“What’s Godzilla?”
“Ssshhh. I have to concentrate.”
Spencer looked out his side window at the fields and hills. The snow didn’t glow as brightly as it had earlier, because the moon was waning. He had been trained to spot clandestine surveillance in both urban and rural settings, but he could see no signs of the agency observers, though he knew they were out there.
Ellie’s fingers were busy. Keys clicked. Data and diagrams played across the screen.
Focusing on the winterscape once more, Spencer remembered snow forts, castles, tunnels, carefully tamped sled runs. More important: In addition to the physical details of old playgrounds in the snow, he faintly recalled the joy of laboring on those projects and of setting out on those boyhood adventures. Recollections of innocent times. Childhood fantasies. Happiness. They were faint memories. Faint but perhaps recoverable with practice. For a long time, he hadn’t been able to remember even a single moment of his childhood with fondness. The events in that July not only had changed his life forever thereafter but had changed his perception of what his life had been like before the owl, the rats, the scalpel, and the knife.
Sometimes his mother had helped him build castles of snow. He remembered times when she’d gone sledding with him. They especially enjoyed going out after dusk. The night was so crisp, the world so mysterious in black and white. With billions of stars above, you could pretend that the sled was a rocket and you were off to other worlds.
He thought of his mother’s grave in Denver, and he suddenly wanted to go there for the first time since his grandparents had moved him to San Francisco. He wanted to sit on the ground beside her and reminisce about nights when they had gone sledding under a billion stars, when her laughter had carried like music across the white fields.
Rocky stood on the floor in back, paws planted on the front seat, and craned his head forward to lick affectionately at the side of Spencer’s face.
He turned and stroked the dog’s head and neck. “Mr. Rocky Dog, more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, terror of all cats and Dobermans. Where did that come from, hmmm?” He scratched behind the dog’s ears. Then with his fingertips, he gently explored the crushed cartilage that ensured the left ear would always droop. “Way back in the bad old days, did the person who did this to you look anything like the man back there in the black room? Or did you recognize a scent? Do the evil ones smell alike, pal?” Rocky luxuriated in the attention. “Mr. Rocky Dog, furry hero, ought to have his own comic book. Show us some teeth, give us a thrill.” Rocky just panted. “Come on, show us some teeth,” Spencer said, growling and skinning his lips back from his own teeth. Rocky liked the game, bared his own teeth, and they went grrrrrrr at each other, muzzle to muzzle.
“Ready,” Ellie said.
“Thank God,” he said, “I just ran out of things to do to keep from going nuts.”
“You’ve got to help me spot them,” she said. “I’ll be looking too, but I might not see one of them.”
Indicating the screen, he said, “That’s Godzilla?”
“No. This is the gameboard that Godzilla and I are both going to play with. It’s a grid of the five acres immediately around the house and barn. Each of these tiny grid blocks is six meters on a side. I just hope to God my entry data, those property maps and county records, were accurate enough. I know they’re not dead-on, not by a long shot, but let’s pray they’re close. See this green shape? That’s the house. See this? The barn. Here are the stables down toward the end of the driveway. This blinking dot—that’s us. See this line—that’s the county road, where we want to be.”
“Is this based on one of the video games you invented?”
“No, this is nasty reality,” she said. “And whatever happens, Spencer…I love you. I can’t imagine anything better than spending the rest of my life with you. I just hope it’s going to be more than five minutes.”
He had started to put the truck in gear. Her frank expression of her feelings made him hesitate, because he wanted to kiss her now, here, for the first time, in case it was the last time too.
Then he froze and stared at her in amazement as comprehension came. “Godzilla’s looking straight down at us right now, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a satellite? And you’ve hijacked it?”
“Been saving these codes for a day when I was in a really tight corner, no other way out, because I’ll never get a chance to use them again. When we’re out of here, when I let go of Godzilla, they’ll shut it down and reprogram.”
“What does it do besides look down?”
“Remember the movies?”
“Godzilla movies?”
“His white-hot, glowing breath?”
“You’re making this up.”
“He had halitosis that melted tanks.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Now or never,” she said.
“Now,” he said, putting the truck into reverse, wanting to get it over with before he had any more time to think about it.
He switched on the headlights, backed away from the barn, and headed around the building, retracing the route that they had taken from the county road.
“Not too fast,” she said. “It’ll pay to tiptoe out of here, believe me.”
Spencer let up on the accelerator.
Drifting along now. Easing past the front of the barn. The other branch of the driveway over there. The backyard to the right. The swimming pool.
A brilliant white searchlight fixed them from an open second-floor window of the house, sixty yards to their right and forty yards ahead. Spencer was blinded when he looked in that direction, and he could not see whether there were sharpshooters with rifles at any of the other windows.
Ellie’s fingers rattled the keys.
He glanced over and saw a yellow indicator line on t
he display screen. It represented a swath about two meters wide and twenty-four meters long, between them and the house.
Ellie pressed ENTER.
“Squint!” she said, and in the same moment Spencer shouted, “Rocky, down!”
Out of the stars came a blue-white incandescence. It was not as fierce as he had expected, marginally brighter than the spotlight from the house, but it was infinitely stranger than anything he had ever seen—above-ground. The beam was crisply defined along the edges, and it seemed not to be radiating light as much as containing it, holding an atomic fire within a skin as thin as the surface tension on a pond. A bone-vibrating hum accompanied it, like electronic feedback from huge stadium speakers, and a sudden turbulence of air. As the light moved on a course that Ellie had laid out for it (two meters wide, twenty-four meters long, between them and the house but approaching neither), a roar arose similar to the subterranean grumble of the few grinding-type earthquakes that Spencer had ridden out over the years, although this was far louder. The earth shook hard enough to rock the truck. In that two-meter-wide swath, the snow and the ground beneath it leaped into flames, turned molten in an instant, to what depth he didn’t know. The beam moved along, and the center of a big sycamore vanished in a flash; it didn’t merely burst into flame but disappeared as if it had never existed. The tree was instantly converted into light and into heat that was detectable even inside the truck with the windows closed, almost thirty yards from the beam itself. Numerous splintered branches, which had hung beyond the sharply defined edge of the beam, fell to the ground on both sides of the light, and they were on fire at the points of severance. The blue-white blade burned past the pickup, across the backyard, diagonally between them and the house, across one edge of the patio, vaporizing concrete, all the way to the end of the path that Ellie had set it upon—and then it winked out.
A two-meter-wide, twenty-four-meter length of earth glowed white-hot, boiling like a lava flow at its freshest, on the high slopes of a volcano. The magma churned brightly in the trench that contained it, bubbling and popping and spitting showers of red and white sparks into the air, casting a glow that reached even to the truck and colored the surviving snow red-orange.
During the event, if they had not been too stunned to speak, they would have had to shout at each other to be heard. Now the silence seemed as profound as that in the vacuum of deep space.
At the house, the agency men switched off the searchlight.
“Keep moving,” Ellie said urgently.
Spencer hadn’t realized that he’d braked to a complete stop.
They drifted forward again. Easy. Moving cautiously through the lion’s den. Easy. He risked a little more speed than before, because the lions had to be scared shitless right now.
“God bless America,” Spencer said shakily.
“Oh, Godzilla isn’t one of ours.”
“It isn’t?”
“Japanese.”
“The Japanese have a death-ray satellite?”
“Enhanced-laser technology. And they have eight satellites in the system.”
“I thought they were busy making better televisions.”
She was working diligently on the keyboard again, getting ready for the worst. “Damn it, my right hand’s cramping.”
He saw that she had targeted the house.
She said, “The U.S. has something similar, but I don’t have any codes that’ll get me into our system. The fools on our side call it the Hyperspace Hammer, which has nothing to do with what it is. It’s just a name they liked from a video game.”
“You invent the game?”
“Actually, yes.”
“They make an amusement park ride out of it?”
“Yes.”
“I saw one.”
Moving past the house now. Not even looking up at the windows. Not tempting fate.
“You can commandeer a secret Japanese defense satellite?”
“Through the DOD,” she said.
“Department of Defense.”
“The Japanese don’t know it, but the DOD can grab Godzilla’s brain any time they want. I’m just using the doorways that the DOD has already installed.”
He remembered something that she had said in the desert only that morning, when he had expressed surprise about the possibility of satellite surveillance. He quoted it back to her: “‘You’d be surprised what’s up there. “Surprised” is one word.’”
“The Israelis have their own system.”
“The Israelis!”
“Yeah, little Israel. They worry me less than anyone else who’s got it. Chinese. Think about that. Maybe the French. No more jokes about Paris cabdrivers. God knows who else has it.”
They were almost past the house.
A small round hole was punched through the side window behind Ellie, even as the sound of the shot cracked the night, and Spencer felt the round thud into the back of his seat. The velocity of the bullet was so great that the tempered glass crazed slightly but did not collapse inward. Thank God, Rocky was barking energetically instead of squealing in agony.
“Stupid bastards,” Ellie said as she pressed ENTER again.
Out of airless space, a lambent column of blue-white light shot down into the two-story Victorian farmhouse, instantly vaporizing a core two meters in diameter. The rest of the structure exploded. Flames filled the night. If anyone was left alive in that crumbling house, they would have to get out too fast to worry about holding on to their weapons and taking additional potshots at the pickup.
Ellie was shaken. “I couldn’t risk them hitting the up-link behind us. If that goes, we’re in deep trouble.”
“The Russians have this?”
“This and weirder stuff.”
“Weirder stuff?”
“That’s why most everyone else is desperate to get their version of Godzilla. Zhirinovsky. Heard of him?”
“Russian politician.”
Bending her head again to the VDT, entering new instructions, she said, “Him and the people associated with him, the whole network of them even after he’s gone—they’re old-fashioned communists who want to rule the world. Except this time they’re actually willing to blow it up if they don’t get their way. No more graceful defeats. And even if someone’s smart enough to wipe out the Zhirinovsky faction, there’s always some new power freak, somewhere, calling himself a politician.”
Forty yards ahead, on the right, a Ford Bronco erupted from concealment in a stand of trees and bushes. It pulled across the driveway, blocking their escape.
Spencer halted the pickup.
Though the driver of the Bronco stayed behind the wheel, two men with high-power rifles jumped out of the back and dropped into sharpshooter positions. They raised their weapons.
“Down!” Spencer said, and pushed Ellie’s head below window level even as he slid down in his seat.
“They aren’t,” she said in disbelief.
“They are.”
“Blocking the driveway?”
“Two sharpshooters and a Bronco.”
“Haven’t they been paying attention?”
“Stay down, Rocky,” he said.
The dog was standing again with his forepaws on the front seat, bobbing his head excitedly.
“Rocky, down!” Spencer said fiercely.
The dog whimpered as though his feelings had been hurt, but he dropped to the floor in back.
Ellie said, “How far are they?”
Spencer risked a quick peek, slid down again, and a bullet rang off the window post without shattering the windshield. “I’d say forty yards.”
She typed. On the screen appeared a yellow line to the right of the driveway. It was twelve meters long, angling over an open field toward the Bronco, but it stopped a meter or two from the edge of the pavement.
“Don’t want to score the driveway,” she said. “Tires would dissolve when we tried to get across the molten ground.”
“Can I press ENTER?” he asked.
“Be my guest.”
He pressed it and sat up, squinting, as the breath of Godzilla streamed down through the night again, scoring the land. The ground shook, and an apocalyptic thunder rose under them as if the planet was coming apart. The night air hummed deafeningly, and the merciless beam dazzled along the course that she’d assigned to it.
Before Godzilla had turned the earth into white-hot sludge along even half those twelve meters, the pair of sharpshooters dropped their weapons and leaped for the vehicle behind them. As they hung on to the sides of the Bronco, the driver careened off the blacktop, churned across a frozen field beyond, smashed through a white board fence, crossed a paddock, rammed through another fence, and passed the first of the stables. When Godzilla stopped short of the driveway and the night was suddenly dark and quiet again, the Bronco was still going, fast dwindling into the gloom, as though the driver might head overland until he ran out of gasoline.
Spencer drove to the county road. He stopped and looked both ways. No traffic. He turned right, toward Denver.
For a few miles, neither of them spoke.
Rocky stood with his forepaws on the back of the front seat, gazing ahead at the highway. In the two years that Spencer had known him, the dog had never liked to look back.
Ellie sat with her hand clamped to her wound. Spencer hoped that the people she knew in Denver could get her medical attention. The medications that she had finessed, by computer, out of various drug companies had been lost with the Range Rover.