They were up now, milling around like cattle in a thunderstorm. He had to move them before they had a chance to think once, let alone twice.
Gathering the force of the minds linked to his, Henry sent them an image of the store.
THERE! he called to them. IT'S YOUR ONLY CHANCE! THROUGH THE STORE IF YOU CAN, BREAK DOWN THE FENCE IF THE DOOR'S BLOCKED! DON'T STOP, DON'T HESITATE! GET INTO THE WOODS! HIDE IN THE WOODS! THEY'RE COMING TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN, THE BARN AND EVERYONE IN IT, AND THE WOODS ARE YOUR ONLY CHANCE! NOW, NOW!
Deep in the well of his own imagination, flying on the pills Owen had given him and sending with all his strength--images of possible safety there, of certain death here, images as simple as those in a child's picture-book--he was only distantly aware that he had begun chanting aloud: "Now, now, now."
Marsha Chiles picked it up, then her brother-in-law, then Charles, the man with the overgrown solar sex-panel.
"Now! Now! Now!"
Although immune to the byrus and thus no more telepathic than the average bear, Darren was not immune to the growing vibe, and he also joined in.
"Now! Now! Now!"
It jumped from person to person and group to group, a panic-induced infection more catching than the byrus: "Now! Now! Now!"
The barn shook with it. Fists were pumping in unison, like fists at a rock concert.
"NOW! NOW! NOW!"
Henry let them take it over and build it, pumping his own fist without even realizing it, flinging his hand into the air to the farthest reach of his aching arm even as he reminded himself not to be caught up in the cyclone of the mass mind he had created: when they went north, he was going south. He was waiting for some point of no return to be reached--the point of ignition and spontaneous combustion.
It came.
"Now," he whispered.
He gathered Marsha's mind, Bill's, Charlie's . . . and then the others that were close and particularly locked in. He merged them, compressed them, and then flung that single word like a silver bullet into the heads of the three hundred and seventeen people in Old Man Gosselin's barn:
NOW.
There was a moment of utter silence before hell's door flew open.
8
Just before dusk, a dozen two-man sentry huts (they were actually Porta-Potties with the urinals and toilet-seats yanked out) had been set up at intervals along the security fence. These came equipped with heaters that threw a stuporous glow in the small spaces, and the guards had no interest in going outside them. Every now and then one of them would open a door to allow in a snowy swirl of fresh air, but that was the extent of the guards' exposure to the outside world. Most of them were peacetime soldiers with no gut understanding of how high the current stakes were, and so they swapped stories about sex, cars, postings, sex, their families, their future, sex, drinking and drugging expeditions, and sex. They had missed Owen Underhill's two visits to the shed (he would have been clearly visible from both Post 9 and Post 10) and they were the last to be aware that they had a full-scale revolt on their hands.
Seven other soldiers, boys who had been with Kurtz a little longer and thus had a little more salt on their skins, were in the back of the store near the woodstove, playing five-card stud in the same office where Owen had played Kurtz the ne nous blessez pas tapes roughly two centuries ago. Six of the card-players were sentries. The seventh was Dawg Brodsky's colleague Gene Cambry. Cambry hadn't been able to sleep. The reason was concealed by a stretchy cotton wristlet. He didn't know how long the wristlet would serve, however, because the red stuff under it was spreading. If he wasn't careful, someone would see it . . . and then, instead of playing cards in the office, he might be out there in the barn with the John Q's.
And would he be the only one? Ray Parsons had a big wad of cotton in one ear. He said it was an earache, but who knew for sure? Ted Trezewski had a bandage on one meaty forearm and claimed he'd gouged himself stringing compound barbed wire much earlier in the day. Maybe it was true. George Udall, the Dawg's immediate superior in more normal times, was wearing a knitted cap over his bald head; damn thing made him look like some kind of elderly white rapper. Maybe there was nothing under there but skin, but it was warm in here for a cap, wasn't it? Especially a knitted one.
"Kick a buck," Howie Everett said.
"Call," said Danny O'Brian.
Parsons called; so did Udall. Cambry barely heard. In his mind there rose an image of a woman with a child cradled in her arms. As she struggled across the drifted-in paddock, a soldier turned her into a napalm road-flare. Cambry winced, horrified, thinking this image had been served up by his own guilty conscience.
"Gene?" Al Coleman asked. "Are you going to call, or--"
"What's that?" Howie asked, frowning.
"What's what?" Ted Trezewski said.
"If you listen, you'll hear it," Howie replied. Dumb Polack: Cambry heard this unspoken corollary in his head, but paid it no mind. Once it had been called to their attention, the chant was clear enough, rising above the wind, quickly taking on strength and urgency.
"Now! Now! Now! Now! NOW!"
It was coming from the barn, directly behind them.
"What in the blue hell?" Udall asked in a musing voice, blinking over the folding table with its scatter of cards, ashtrays, chips, and money. Gene Cambry suddenly understood that there was nothing under the stupid woolen cap but skin, after all. Udall was nominally in charge of this little group, but he didn't have a clue. He couldn't see the pumping fists, couldn't hear the strong thought-voice that was leading the chant.
Cambry saw alarm on Parsons's face, on Everett's, on Coleman's. They were seeing it, too. Understanding leaped among them while the uninfected ones only looked puzzled.
"Fuckers're gonna break out," Cambry said.
"Don't be stupid, Gene," George Udall said. "They don't know what's coming down. Besides, they're civilians. They're just letting off a little st--"
Cambry lost the rest as a single word--NOW--ripped through his brain like a buzzsaw. Ray Parsons and Al Coleman winced. Howie Everett cried out in pain, his hands going to his temples, his knees connecting with the underside of the table and sending chips and cards everywhere. A dollar bill landed atop the hot stove and began to burn.
"Aw, fuck a duck, look what you d--" Ted began.
"They're coming," Cambry said. "They're coming at us."
Parsons, Everett, and Coleman lunged for the M-4 carbines leaning beside Old Man Gosselin's coatrack. The others looked at them, surprised, still three steps behind . . . and then there was a vast thud as sixty or more of the internees struck the barn doors. Those doors had been locked from the outside--big steel locks, Army issue. They held, but the old wood gave with a splintering crack.
The prisoners charged through the gap, yelling "Now! Now!" into the snowy mouth of the wind and trampling several of their number underfoot.
Cambry also lunged, got one of the compact assault rifles, then had it snatched out of his hands. "That's mine, muhfuh," Ted Trezewski snarled.
There was less than twenty yards between the shattered barn doors and the back of the store. The mob swept across the gap, shouting "NOW! NOW! NOW!"
The poker-table went over with a crash, spilling crap everywhere. The perimeter alarm went off as the first internees struck the double-strung fence and were either fried or hooked like fish on the oversized bundles of barbs. Moments later the alarm's honking, pulsing bray was joined by a whooping siren, the General Quarters alert which was sometimes referred to as Situation Triple Six, the end of the world. In the plastic Porta-Potty sentry huts, surprised and frightened faces peered out dazedly.
"The barn!" someone shouted. "Collapse in on the barn! It's an escape!"
The sentries trotted out into the snow, many of them bootless, moving along the outside of the fence, unaware that it had been shorted out by the weight of more than eighty kamikaze deer-hunters, all screaming "NOW" at the top of their lungs, even as they jittered and fried and died.
> No one noticed the single man--tall, skinny, wearing a pair of old-fashioned horn-rim specs--who left from the back of the barn and set out diagonally across the drifts filling the paddock. Although Henry could neither see nor sense anyone paying attention to him, he began to run. He felt horribly exposed under the brilliant lights, and the cacophony of the siren and the perimeter alarm made him feel panicky and half-crazy . . . made him feel the way Duddits's crying had, that day behind Tracker Brothers.
He hoped to God Underhill was waiting for him. He couldn't tell, the snow was too thick to see the far end of the paddock, but he would be there soon enough and then he would know.
9
Kurtz had everything on but one boot when the alarm went off and the emergency lights went on, flooding this godforsaken piece of ground with even more glare. He felt no surprise, no dismay, only a mixture of relief and chagrin. Relief that whatever had been chewing on his nerve-endings was now out in the open. Chagrin that this fucking mess hadn't held off for another two hours. Another two hours and he could have balanced the books on the whole deal.
He jerked open the door of the Winnebago with his right hand, still holding his other boot in his left. A savage roaring came from the barn, the sort of warrior's cry to which his heart responded in spite of everything. The gale-force wind thinned it a little, but not much; they were all in it together, it seemed. From somewhere in their well-fed, timorous, it-can't-happen-here ranks, a Spartacus had arisen--who would have thunk it?
It's the goddam telepathy, he thought. His instincts, always superb, told him this was serious trouble, that he was watching an operation go tits-up on a truly grand scale, but he was smiling in spite of that. Got to be the goddam telepathy. They smelled out what was coming. . . and someone decided to do something about it.
As he watched, a motley mob of men, most in parkas and orange hats, came moiling through the sagging, shattered barn doors. One fell on a splintered board and was impaled like a vampire. Some stumbled in the snow and were trampled under. All the lights were on now. Kurtz felt like a man with a ringside seat at a prizefight. He could see everything.
Wings of escapees, fifty or sixty in each complement, peeled off as neatly as squads in a drill-team and charged at the fence on either side of the ratty little store. Either they didn't know there was a lethal dose of electricity coursing through the smoothwire or they didn't care. The rest of them, the main body, charged directly at the back of the store. That was the weakest point in the perimeter, but it didn't matter. Kurtz thought it was all going to go.
Never in any of his contingency plans had he so much as considered this scenario: two or three hundred overweight November warriors mounting a no-guts-no-glory banzai charge. He had never expected them to do anything but stay put, clamoring for due process right up to the point where they were barbecued.
"Not bad, boys," Kurtz said. He smelled something else starting to burn--probably his goddam career--but the end had been coming anyway, and he'd picked one hell of an operation to go out on, hadn't he? As far as Kurtz was concerned, the little gray men from space were strictly secondary. If he ran the news, the headline above the fold would read: SURPRISE! NEW-AGE AMERICANS SHOW SOME BACKBONE! Outstanding. It was almost a shame to cut them down.
The General Quarters siren rose and fell in the snowy night. The first wave of men hit the back of the store. Kurtz could almost see the whole place shudder.
"That goddam telepathy," Kurtz said, grinning. He could see his guys responding, the first wave from the sentry huts, more coming from the motor-pool, the commissary, and the semi trailer-boxes that were serving as makeshift barracks. Then the smile on Kurtz's face began to fade, replaced by an expression of puzzlement. "Shoot them," he said. "Why don't you shoot them?"
Some were firing, but not enough--nowhere near enough. Kurtz thought he smelled panic. His men weren't shooting because they had gone chickenshit. Or because they knew they were next.
"The goddam telepathy," he said again, and suddenly automatic-rifle fire began inside the store. The windows of the office where he and Owen Underhill had had their original conference lit up in brilliant stutterflashes of light. Two of them blew out. A man attempted to exit the second of these, and Kurtz had time to recognize George Udall before George was seized by the legs and jerked back inside.
The guys in the office were fighting, at least, but of course they would; in there they were fighting for their lives. The laddie-bucks who had come running were, for the most part, still running. Kurtz thought about dropping his boot and grabbing his nine-millimeter. Shooting a few skedaddlers. Bagging his limit, in fact. It was falling down all around him, why not?
Underhill, that was why not. Owen Underhill had played a part in this snafu. Kurtz knew that as well as he knew his own name. This stank of line-crossing, and crossing the line was an Owen Underhill specialty.
More shooting from Gosselin's office . . . screams of pain . . . then triumphant howls. The computer-savvy, Evian-drinking, salad-eating Goths had taken their objective. Kurtz slammed the Winnebago's door on the scene and hurried back to the bedroom to call Freddy Johnson. He was still carrying his boot.
10
Cambry was on his knees behind Old Man Gosselin's desk when the first wave of prisoners smashed its way in. He was opening drawers, looking frantically for a gun. The fact that he didn't find one very likely saved his life.
"NOW! NOW! NOW!" the oncoming prisoners screamed. There was a monstrous thud against the back of the store, as if a truck had driven into it. From outside, Cambry could hear a juicy crackling sound as the first detainees hit the fence. The lights in the office began to flicker.
"Stand together, men!" Danny O'Brian cried. "For the love of Christ, stand toge--"
The rear door came off its hinges with so much force that it actually skittered backward across the room, shielding the first of the screaming men who clogged the doorway. Cambry ducked, hands laced over the back of his head, as the door fell on the desk at an angle with him beneath it, in the kneehole.
The sound of rifles on full auto was deafening in the tiny room, drowning out even the screams of the wounded, but Cambry understood that not all of them were firing. Trezewski, Udall, and O'Brian were, but Coleman, Everett, and Ray Parsons were only standing there with their weapons held to their chests and dazed expressions on their faces.
From his accidental shelter, Gene Cambry saw the prisoners charge across the room, saw the first of them caught by the bullets and thrown like scarecrows; saw their blood splash across the walls and the bean-supper posters and the OSHA notices. He saw George Udall throw his gun at two beefy young men in orange, then whirl and lunge at one of the windows. George got halfway out and was then yanked back; a man with Ripley growing on his cheek like a birthmark sank his teeth into George's calf as if it were a turkey drumstick while another man silenced the screaming head at the other end of George's body by jerking it briskly to the left. The room was blue with powder-smoke, but he saw Al Coleman throw his gun down and pick up the chant--"Now! Now! Now!" And he saw Ray Parsons, normally the most pacific of men, turn his rifle on Danny O'Brian and blow his brains out.
Now the matter was simple. Now it was just the infected versus the immune.
The desk was hit and slammed against the wall. The door fell on top of Cambry, and before he could get up, people were running over the door, squashing him. He felt like a cowboy who has fallen off his horse during a stampede. I'm going to die under here, he thought, and then for a moment the murderous pressure was gone. He lunged to his knees, driving with adrenaline-loaded muscles, and the door slid off him to the left, saying goodbye with a vicious dig of the doorknob into his hip. Someone dealt him a passing kick in the ribcage, another boot scraped by his right ear, and then he was up. The room was thick with smoke, crazy with shouts and screams. Four or five bulky hunters were propelled into the woodstove, which tore free of its pipe and went crashing over on its side, spilling flaming chunks of maple onto the floor.
Money and playing cards caught fire. There was the rancid smell of melting plastic poker chips. Those were Ray's, Cambry thought incoherently. He had them in the Gulf. Bosnia, too.
He stood ignored in the confusion. There was no need for the escaping internees to use the door between the office and the store; the entire wall--no more than a flimsy partition, really--had been smashed flat. Pieces of this stuff were also catching fire from the overturned stove.
"Now," Gene Cambry muttered. "Now." He saw Ray Parsons running with the others toward the front of the store, Howie Everett at his heels. Howie snatched a loaf of bread as he ran down the center aisle.
A scrawny old party in a tassled cap and an overcoat was pushed forward onto the overturned stove, then stomped flat. Cambry heard his high-pitched, squealing screams as his face bonded to the metal and then began to boil.
Heard it and felt it.
"Now!" Cambry shouted, giving in and joining the others. "Now!"
He broad-jumped the growing flames from the stove and ran, losing his little mind in the big one.
For all practical purposes, Operation Blue Boy was over.
11
Three quarters of the way across the paddock, Henry paused, gasping for breath and clutching at his hammering chest. Behind him was the pocket armageddon he had unleashed; ahead of him he could see nothing but darkness. Fucking Underhill had run out on him, had--
Easy, beautiful--easy.
Lights flashed out twice. Henry had been looking in the wrong place, that was all; Owen was parked a little to the left of the paddock's southwest corner. Now Henry could see the Sno-Cat's boxy outline clearly. From behind him came screams, shouts, orders, shooting. Not as much shooting as he would have expected, but this was no time to wonder why.
Hurry up! Owen cried. We have to get out of here!
I'm coming as fast as I can--hold on.
Henry got moving again. Whatever had been in Owen's kickstart pills was already wearing off, and his feet felt heavy. His thigh itched maddeningly, and so did his mouth. He could feel the stuff creeping over his tongue. It was like a soft-drink fizz that wouldn't go away.