“Almost quarter till ten. I remember, ’cause I saw the clock just before it hit.” She pulled her dusty hair back from her face, aware that the money stuffed in her blouse was going to make her appear even heftier than she was. “I work at the Brandin’ Iron. That’s a cafe. Lord, I must look a mess!”
“You look fine. Get me a pan shot and come back to her face.” The cameraman slowly swiveled, filming the houses of Inferno. “Lady, this is about to be the most famous town in the country. Hell, in the whole world!”
“Am…I gonna be famous?” she asked.
“You and everybody else. We’ve gotten a report that there might’ve been extraterrestrial contact. Can you verify that?”
She was aware of the importance of her answer. And just like that she saw her face and the faces of other people from Inferno and Bordertown on the newscasts, the covers of magazines, newspapers, and books, and she had a dizzy spell that was almost as heart-stopping as a monkey flip. She said, very clearly, “Yes.” Said it again. “Yes. There were two creatures. Both different kinds. The sheriff—Sheriff Ed Vance is his name—told me one was after the other. When that ship came down, the whole town almost shook itself to—”
“Cut!” the man in the cap said. He was looking over his shoulder, and he’d seen what was coming. “Thanks, Mrs. Mullinax. Gotta go!” He and the cameraman began running up the ridge to the dune buggy.
She saw what had scared them: a jeep full of soldiers with MP on their helmets was turning onto Bowden, its driver swinging around the cracks and craters. Some of the soldiers leapt out and sprinted up the ridge after the two newsmen. “It’s Miss Mullinax!” she shouted. The dune buggy’s engine fired before the soldiers could get there, and the vehicle sped away down the other side of the ridge.
An unmarked dark blue car stopped at the north end of the Snake River Bridge. Two men in the uniforms of air-force colonels and another man in civilian clothes got out. They strode briskly toward the group of people who were coming from the south end of the fire-scarred bridge.
“My God!” The hawk-nosed officer with “Buckner” on a security-clearance tag at his breast pocket halted. He’d recognized one of the men approaching them, but if that was indeed Colonel Rhodes, Matt had aged ten years in one night. “I think we’ve found him.” And another few steps closer brought an “Affirmative. It’s Colonel Rhodes. Tell Central.”
The other officer, a captain named Garcia, had a field telephone, and through it he said, “Able One to Central, we’ve found Colonel Rhodes. Repeat: we’ve found the colonel. We need a medic evac truck, on the double.”
“Medic evac on the way, Able One,” the dispatcher answered, routing traffic from the Central Command trailer parked in the Bob Wire Club’s lot.
Rhodes was being helped along by Zarra Alhambra, and he saw Colonel Buckner of Special Intelligence coming toward him. “Morning, Alan,” he said when the other man reached them. “You missed some excitement last night.”
Buckner nodded, his dark eyes humorless. “I suppose I did.” He looked at the ragtag bunch of civilians. They appeared to have stumbled out of a battle zone: their clothes were covered with dust and grime, their eyes weary hollows in bruised and blood-streaked faces. One of them, a wiry young man with curly blond hair, was being supported between a Hispanic boy and girl, and all three of them had the thousand-yard stare of shell-shock victims. Another older man had bloody strips of shirt around his arms, and next to him was an ashen-faced woman holding a little girl who—amazingly—appeared to be asleep. The other people were more or less just as dazed and battered. But Matt Rhodes had left Webb AFB yesterday morning looking fairly young, and now dust lay in deep lines on his glass-cut face and much of his hair had seemingly turned gray overnight. Coagulated blood had oozed through the fingers of the hand clamped to his shoulder. He was smiling bravely, but his eyes were deep-socketed and there were things behind them that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
“This is Mr. Winslow. He’s a coordination specialist.” Buckner motioned to the civilian, a crewcut blond man in a dark blue suit. Mr. Winslow wore sunglasses and had a face like a slab of stone, and Rhodes caught a whiff of Washington. “Captain Gunniston’s already been taken to Debriefing,” Buckner said. It was actually a large trailer parked near the Texaco station. “We’ll have a truck here for you in a few minutes to take you to Medical.” He gazed around at the destruction. “Looks like this town took a hell of a beating. Can you estimate the casualties?”
“High,” Rhodes said. His arm was no longer hurting now; it was just heavy, like a sack of freshly poured concrete. “But I think we came out on top.” How to explain to this man standing before them that in the space of twenty-four hours—an iota of a second on the scale of the universe—the fate of two civilizations had been fought for in the Texas dust?
“Colonel Buckner?” Garcia said, the field phone’s receiver to his ear. “I’ve got Perimeter Control. They’re reporting intruders getting through security—probably newsmen. Captain Ingalls says there’s no way to stop them with all the open spaces out—”
“Tell him to keep them out of here!” Buckner snapped. In his voice there was a hint of panic. “Jesus Christ! Tell him to lock the bastards up if he has to!”
“Might as well forget it,” Rhodes said calmly. “There’s no way to keep this secret.”
Buckner gaped at him as if Rhodes had just asserted that the American flag’s colors were green, pink, and purple, and Winslow’s reflective sunglasses held images of Rhodes’s face.
The distant rumbling of the black pyramid suddenly stopped.
Cody, Rick, Rhodes, and the others looked back at it. The object’s base had begun to glow a blue-orange color. Waves of heat shimmered in the morning light.
The bridge trembled. A vibration passed through the earth, and the upper three quarters of the pyramid began to rise, leaving the heated base below. Thin jets of white flame shot around the pyramid’s rim, and those flames roared through the tunnels on the Bordertown side and melted red dirt and sand into clumps of ebony glass. Hot winds shrilled across the bridge.
The pyramid slowly rose four hundred feet in the air and paused there, golden sunlight hitting its black-scaled surface. The pyramid began a graceful rotation.
“Captain Redding reports Alpha Strike’s Sidewinders are armed and ready,” Garcia relayed to Buckner through the field phone.
Sidewinder missiles, Rhodes knew. He looked up, saw the contrails of jets gathering into strike formation. “Let it alone,” he said.
Buckner grabbed the phone’s receiver. “This is Team Leader, Alpha Strike. Hold your positions. Fire Sidewinders on my command, acknowledge?”
“No!” Tom protested, pushing forward. “Let the ship go!”
Whips of energy were flailing out from the pyramid’s sides. “Ready on my command,” Buckner repeated.
“Tell the fighters to disarm, Alan.” Rhodes clutched the man’s wrist. “I don’t care what your orders are. Please let it go.” The other man pulled free, splotches of red surfacing on his cheeks.
And now the pyramid’s sides were compressing, as loops of power crackled from it like lightning and shot a hundred feet in all directions. The air fluttered with heat, making the pyramid shimmer like a mirage. In another few seconds the spacecraft had tightened itself into a shape akin to that of a sharpened spear.
It began to ascend again, faster now, rapidly gaining speed. In the space of two heartbeats it was an ebony streak moving upward into the blue.
“Go,” Rick said. “Go!”
The fighters were waiting, circling above.
Buckner’s mouth started to open.
Rhodes reached out, with deliberate strength, and jerked the phone’s cable out of its field pack.
There was a sonic boom that knocked the first roving vultures out of the turbulent air and kicked up dust over thirty miles of Texas desert. The spacecraft seemed to elongate, a dark blurred streak arcing into the cloudless heavens like an a
rrow. It shot past the circling jets as if they were painted on the sky and vanished in a violet shimmer.
The wind blew across the bridge, ruffled clothes and hair and whistled over the remaining roofs of the town.
The ship and its pilot were gone. Far above, the jets were still going around and around like frustrated mosquitoes deprived of a good arm to bite.
“Sir?” Winslow’s voice was slow and thick. Rhodes thought they must breed these high-level government security boys on farms somewhere. “I believe that was probably your last action as a member of the United States Air Force.”
“You can kiss my ass,” Rhodes said. To Buckner, “You too.” He gazed up. The fighters were coming down. It was all over but the cleaning up.
A truck with a Red Cross on it pulled to the north end of the bridge. Its rear panel opened up and a ramp slid down. Inside were cots, oxygen masks and tanks, medical supplies and a couple of attendants.
“Time to go.” Buckner motioned Rhodes on.
The colonel took a few steps, Zarra helping him, but he stopped abruptly. The sun was a quarter up, the sky was turning blue, and it was going to be another scorcher. He turned to the others, looked at the faces of Cody, Rick, Miranda, Jessie, Tom, and the little girl. Even the sonic boom hadn’t awakened her, and he figured they all would be sleeping like that pretty soon. Later there would be nightmares. But everyone would deal with those as best they could, because human beings knew nothing if not how to endure. We saved two worlds, Rhodes thought. Not a bad night’s work for bugs.
He offered his face to the sun, and went on.
Jessie felt Stevie’s heart beating, slowly and steadily, against her chest. She touched the child’s face, ran her hand over the dusty auburn hair—and her fingers found two blood-clotted slashes under Stevie’s hair, at the back of the neck. Stevie shifted her weight and made a pained face in her sleep. Jessie removed her fingers.
Someday the story would have to be told to her. Someday, but not this one.
Jessie clasped Stevie with one arm and her other hand found Tom’s. They needed to get Ray at the clinic, but Ray would be all right. He was a born survivor, Jessie knew. That trait must run in the family. Tom and Jessie crossed the bridge, and Stevie dreamed of stars.
Trucks and jeeps were all over Inferno now. Several helicopters warily circled the starship’s remaining base section, which engineer crews in the days ahead would find impossible to cut apart or otherwise move.
A figure lingered on the bridge as the others went across. Cody stared at the wreckage of his motorcycle, his hands hanging limply at his sides. The Honda—his old friend—was dead too, and it seemed like the bridge was a hundred miles long.
Rick glanced over his shoulder and stopped. “Take my sister with you,” he told Mendoza, and the man helped Miranda to the truck. Then Rick limped back and stood waiting.
Cody reached down, picked up a piece of scorched exhaust pipe. Let it clatter back to the pavement like so much useless junk.
“Heard you were good with tools,” Rick said.
Cody didn’t answer. He sat down, his knees pulled up close to his chest.
“You coming, or not?”
Cody was silent. Then, after a long shudder of breath: “Not.”
Rick limped a few paces closer. Cody averted his face. Rick started to speak, but it was just filling space. He didn’t know what to say. Then something hit him, right out of the blue: “It’s the last day of school. How about that? Think we graduated?”
“Leave me alone. Go on.” He motioned toward the Inferno side.
“No use sitting out here, Cody. Either you walk the distance or somebody’ll come get you.”
“Let ’em come!” Cody shouted, and when he turned his face, Rick saw the tears running down his cheeks. “My dad’s dead, don’t you get it?” The shout left his throat raw. His eyes was so full he couldn’t see. “My dad’s dead,” he repeated in a quieter voice, as if grasping it fully for the first time. Everything that had happened in Stinger’s spaceship was a jumbled blur, and it would take him a long time to sort it out. But he remembered clearly enough his father lying in front of him, holding on to life long enough to look at a faded picture. A hole yearned inside him, and never in his wildest dreams would he have thought he might ever miss his father.
“Yeah, he is dead,” Rick agreed. He came two more paces nearer. “He saved our tails, I’ll tell you that. I mean… I didn’t know him too well, but…he sure came through for us. And for Daufin too.”
“A hero,” Cody said. He laughed in spite of the tears, and he had to wipe his nose. “My dad’s a hero! Think they’ll put that on his tombstone?” His crazy smile fractured, because he realized there wasn’t a body to bury.
“I think they might,” Rick told him.
“Yeah. Maybe so.” Cody watched the sun coming up. It had been almost twenty-four hours since he’d been sitting on the Rocking Chair, counting the dead ends; he felt older now, but not weaker. His dad was dead, yes, and he would have to deal with that, but the world seemed different today; it seemed larger, and offered second chances and new beginnings.
“We did something real important last night,” Rick said. “Something that people might not ever understand. But we’ll know it, and that may have to do.”
“Yeah.” Cody nodded. “I reckon so. What do you think’s gonna happen to Inferno?”
“I think it’ll be around for a while longer. Bordertown too. As soon as people find out what landed here—well, you never know about tomorrow.” Rick stepped forward and offered his hand. “You want to go across now?”
Cody looked at the brown hand for a moment. The palm was rope-burned. He wiped his eyes and snuffled his nose. If any of the ’Gades saw him like this, he’d…
No, he thought. No ’Gades and no Rattlers. Not anymore. That was yesterday, and today began for both of them from right here, at the middle of this bridge.
Cody reached up and grasped the hand, and Rick helped him to his feet.
The sunlight strengthened, chasing away the last shadows, and two men crossed the bridge together.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1988 by The McCammon Corporation
cover design by Thomas Ng
978-1-4532-3217-0
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Robert R. McCammon, Stinger
(Series: # )
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