Nightfall

  Chapter Fifteen

  His eyes were sticky when he tried to open them, and when he rubbed them with his left hand it came away bloody. He hurt in a million places, and for a few minutes he couldn’t remember where he was or how he got there. He groaned, but if anyone heard him there was no response.

  He wiped semi-dried blood from his eyes and tried to look around. All the glass in the helicopter was shattered, and the door nearest him was completely twisted off. He was lying half on his back and half on his side, still buckled in to his seat but almost touching the ground. No, that wasn’t right; it was mud. They seemed to have crashed in a patch of swampland and partially sunk in.

  He thought immediately of alligators and pythons. Some of the kids in his astronomy classes had enjoyed telling horror stories about snakes and gators attacking helpless passengers of airline crashes and boat wrecks in the Everglades, snickering while they dwelt lovingly on all the gruesome details. It was the kind of thing only a teenager would consider funny, of course, and Mike hadn’t believed a word of it at the time. But still, he sure didn’t want to find out the hard way that all those lurid stories were true after all.

  Or even partly true, for that matter.

  He quickly checked himself for injuries and found no obvious ones, other than cuts and bruises. There was a nasty slice on his forehead right at the hairline, which was probably where the blood in his eyes had come from. It hurt like the devil.

  He glanced over at Amos, who was still knocked out but didn’t seem to have any worse injuries than Mike himself did. Then he leaned forward to check on Katrina. Or tried to, at least; his seat belt had locked in place and wouldn’t let him move even an inch. He fumbled for the catch with his bloody fingers and finally managed to release it, but he’d forgotten about his change in position. He fell out of his seat into the swamp, getting himself soaking wet and coated with stinking black mud from head to toe before he was able to struggle back to his feet.

  Katrina’s eyes were open when he managed to climb up to a place where he could see her, and that was a relief.

  “Are you okay?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Yeah, I think so. Can’t get out, though; my legs are trapped under what’s left of the control panel,” she said.

  “It’s a wonder it didn’t crush you,” he said, staring at the wreckage of the copter’s nose.

  “Well, you know what they say. Any landing you walk away from is a good one,” she said, with a weak smile.

  “I didn’t know you knew how to fly,” he said, and then remembered that yes, he did know; Damon had mentioned it back in Natchitoches. There’d been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

  “Yeah. Papa’s had me flying almost since I learned how to walk. Lucky for you he did,” she said, and Mike couldn’t have agreed more. But there was something that puzzled him.

  “What are you doing in Tampa, anyway?” he asked, raising one brow and then shutting his eyes when the movement sent a bolt of pain through his cut.

  “We had to come see Philip. Last week was my birthday, so Papa decided it was finally time to retire and let me have this,” she said, holding up her left hand. On her middle finger was the same silver Avenger’s ring that Damon had been wearing when Mike first saw him.

  Mike stared at it for a second, and realized he’d barely spoken a word to Philip or Joan in weeks; not since coming back from Brazoria, in fact. Just a very occasional brief call, during which he couldn’t have said anything substantive even if he’d wanted to. He’d told them Tyke and Annabelle were away on vacation and he was very busy with work, and that had been pretty much the extent of their conversations. At first he’d been so lost in misery that he hadn’t wanted to speak to anybody, and then later on he’d been feverishly busy with the tachometer, of course.

  Still, he felt a twinge of guilt for ignoring them so long.

  “Well, congratulations, Katrina,” he said.

  “Thanks. We would’ve invited you to the anointing ceremony, but Philip said the NADF were keeping a pretty close watch on you and he didn’t dare ask,” she said.

  Well, that was good to hear, in a way. At least Philip and Joan understood he was on a tight leash and it wasn’t safe to have too much contact with him. No doubt the bombing would provide enough distraction that the NADF wouldn’t have the time or the resources to spy on him quite as thoroughly as they had before, but he knew that would only be a temporary reprieve at best. Before long the screws would be tightened down again, as soon as things returned to some semblance of normalcy.

  “Anyway, Papa was about to come get you himself when we heard about the bomb, but then Philip said to let me go, that it’d be a good first mission for me,” Katrina said proudly.

  “I think he gave you a humdinger of a first mission, girl,” Mike said, staring at the wrecked helicopter again.

  “Well, we thought there’d be a little more time, you know. And we didn’t know the bomb would be that big,” she pointed out.

  “I guess. I wonder who planted it,” he said.

  “It was a group called the Western Brotherhood. They’re anarchists. Those are people who think we’d be better off with no government at all, just everybody doing their own thing,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know what an anarchist is,” Mike said.

  “Well, they found out the University has been doing research work for the Defense Forces, and they wanted to teach other schools a lesson not to make the same mistake,” she said, and Mike felt a twinge of guilt at that, too.

  “But how did you find out?” Mike asked.

  “Luther hooked us up several years ago with an informant who tips us off sometimes when they plan things like this. Not that he disagrees with what they’re doing, you know. He just wants to give us the chance to save a few people from getting killed now and then. Soothes his conscience, I guess. If we could find a way to stop them completely we would, but in the meantime we can only do what we can do. Things aren’t always perfect,” she said.

  “That’s the truth,” he muttered.

  “Do you think you can walk all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said, after considering it for a minute.

  “You may have to go get help. I doubt anybody will come looking for us out here, considering what just happened at the University. They’ve got bigger fish to fry right now,” she said.

  “That’s true,” he agreed.

  “See if you can find Papa and Philip. They’ll know what to do,” she said, and he nodded. Any other time Joan would have come along, too, but of course at the moment she was nine months pregnant and big as a house, not to mention utterly exhausted.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, and then hobbled off as fast as he could toward the west. South would have taken him directly back toward the University, and that seemed unwise. Thick black smoke was still rising from the remains of the campus, blotting out most of the Tampa skyline, and he wondered exactly how powerful of a bomb the Western Brotherhood had managed to plant. It must have been massive, to cause that much damage.

  The sheer magnitude of the disaster made it almost impossible to comprehend. There had to be incredible destruction back in the city, untold hundreds or even thousands of lives lost. It was hard to believe even an anarchist could be so cruel as to blow up an entire university full of innocent students who mostly cared no more for politics than they did for the price of tea in Shanghai. Kids who liked to joke about plane crashes and alligator attacks, and sometimes sleep in class when they thought Mike didn’t notice.

  But the earth was full of blood and deceit in these last days, just as it had been long ago in the time of the prophet Micah. Mike had always had a particular liking for his namesake, of course, and now he found himself pondering something else the man had said. It was one of the most famous lines in scripture, a promise that in spite of all the murder and treachery in the hearts of men, there’d come a day when all t
hose things would be done away with, when peace should come to a blood-stained world and things like the university bombing would never happen again.

  For they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

  And their spears into pruning hooks;

  Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

  Neither shall they learn war any more.

  Mike wished it could have come true already.

  He thought about those and other things while he plodded steadily onward. It was hard to believe there could be such a big patch of swampland so close to the city, even in Florida. Slogging through heavy mud slowed him down, but even worse than that it exhausted him at a time when he didn’t have much energy to spare in the first place. If he didn’t find help soon then he might end up having to spend a whole night out there in the swamp with the gators, a prospect he didn’t relish at all.

  It took almost three hours before he stumbled across a deserted access road, but after that the going was much easier. He didn’t know exactly where he was, but it couldn’t have been too far from civilization. The helicopter hadn’t had time to get very far. But there was nothing to be done except to plod along slow and steady, one foot in front of the other, till sooner or later he came out of the wilderness somewhere.

  Eventually the road carried him into the suburban town of Lake Magdalene, and even there he found occasional signs of damage; broken windows and such. But for the most part things seemed to be semi-normal in that neck of the woods, and soon he was able to borrow a phone from a passing stranger.

  “Philip, can you come get us?” he asked.

  “Where are you? They’ve got the whole area around the University blocked off,” Philip said.

  “No, I’m in Lake Magdalene, at the corner of Main and 34th Street,” Mike said.

  “Is Katrina with you?” Philip asked.

  “No, the helicopter crashed in the swamp. She’s okay but she’s stuck in the wreckage. We’ve got to go get her out,” Mike said.

  “All right. No problem. Just stay where you are and wait on us. We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Philip said.

  Mike sat down on a street bench in utter exhaustion. His aches and pains had subsided for a while when he’d been walking, but now that he wasn’t moving anymore they’d returned with a vengeance.

  Philip and Damon arrived nearly two hours later, and by then evening was gathering.

  “Sorry it took us so long, but the city is in chaos. It’s hard to drive anywhere,” Philip apologized.

  “It’s okay, I figured that much,” Mike said.

  “Where is she?” Damon asked, and Mike told him which way to go.

  “We’ve got one of my lab techs with us, too. Amos McClendon. He was with me when Katrina showed up screaming about a bomb. I’m not sure if he’s hurt or not, but he was still knocked out when I left earlier,” Mike said.

  “That’s all right. We’ll fix him up, too,” Philip said.

  They were able to reach the crash site faster by circling around to the north on another access road Mike hadn’t known existed, and from there it was only a half mile walk back to the copter. Amos was awake when they arrived, which was a relief.

  “How are you feeling, Amos?” Mike asked as soon as he got close enough.

  “Aw, I’ve been worse,” he shrugged, as if he were talking about a cat scratch or a chest cold. Mike suspected some of that was due to the need to put up a show of toughness in front of a girl, but he let it pass. If Amos was in good enough shape to care about flirting then he was probably in good enough shape not to have to worry about him anymore.

  In the meantime, Damon and Philip had brought some kind of contraption to extract Katrina from the wreckage. It resembled the old Jaws of Life equipment that Mike had seen on movies and whatnot in the past, though it wasn’t quite the same. In less than an hour they had her out.

  Damon carried his daughter back to the car, while Mike and Philip had to help Amos, who it turned out had a broken bone in his right foot.

  “Where’s Joan?” Mike asked during the walk.

  “She’s at home with the kids, but Marie came over to sit with her just in case she has to go ahead to the hospital,” Philip said absently.

  “How nice of her,” Mike said dryly, not liking this unwelcome reminder of how deeply Lieutenant Luke Bartow’s snoopy tentacles reached into every aspect of his life. But he didn’t say so.

  They reached the car and slowly drove back to Clearwater Beach. Most of the roads through Tampa proper were on lockdown, so Philip had to steer them far out of the way through Tarpon Springs and Dunedin before they finally made it home.

  “You’re welcome to stay with us tonight if you want to, Amos; I don’t think you’ll make it home with the traffic all snarled up like it is,” Philip said.

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Carpenter,” Amos murmured. He lived on campus at the University most of the time, but his parents were in Temple Terrace, uncomfortably close to the blast site.

  Indeed, when they got inside the house and were finally able to see live footage from the bomb scene, the damage was horrific, even worse than Mike’s bloodiest nightmares. Hundreds of blocks of northern Tampa were either leveled or heavily damaged, and windows had been shattered for miles. The University itself was utterly obliterated. There was nothing left on campus except a blast crater, and the death toll would almost certainly be in the tens of thousands, if it could ever be known at all. It was theorized that the perpetrators had used a small nuclear device of the “clean” type; that is, one which wouldn’t leave behind any contaminating radiation.

  Praise God for small mercies, Mike thought to himself. If the bomb had been a dirty type, then thousands upon thousands more might have died.

  “Where did a group like that get hold of a nuclear bomb?” Mike muttered to himself, staring at the screen.

  “Nuclear technology is two hundred years old, Mikey. It’s not hard to come by anymore. This isn’t the first time it’s been used in a bomb, nor even the worst time. I know they’ve been used in Spain and in China, not to mention during the Boer War in South Africa. They ended up with nearly ten million dead from that little episode. This won’t be a drop in the bucket compared to that,” Philip said sadly.

  “This is the first time it’s happened in North America, though,” Mike said.

  “Well, yes. . . but I don’t know why that should come as a surprise to anybody. We’re not immune to tragedy just because we speak English,” Philip said.

  “No, I don’t guess we are,” Mike said.

  “I don’t think the world can go on much longer like this. Mark my words; sooner or later some really big catastrophe will come, probably of our own doing, and then that’ll be the end,” Philip said.

  “You really think so?” Mike asked, startled. His mind went instantly to the empty world he’d seen through the tachometer, and he couldn’t decide whether Philip was psychic or simply wise.

  “Well. . . the end of this current situation, at least. But one way or another the world will die for lack of love, and if there’s anything to be saved from the ruins then it’ll only be love that saves us,” Philip said.

  “I don’t know, Philip,” Mike said without rancor. He was used to Philip’s habit of digging for deep truths, but sometimes the little nuggets he came up with required a lot of thoughtful chewing before you got much nourishment out of them.

  “You need to come see us one day as soon as you can, Mikey. Time is short,” Philip said in a low voice, and Mike nodded.

  He knew well enough what Philip meant. They needed to come up with another escape plan while there was still time, but they couldn’t do it with Amos in the house. Not that anybody believed the boy was a secret spy for the NADF or anything like that, but then again on the other hand you never really knew. It would have been highly foolish to take an unnecessary risk.

  They were showing fresh footage of the bombing victims on TV, and Mike u
nwillingly watched a whole new parade of horrors march across the screen.

  He thought once again of his students in the astronomy department, and all the others like them. It had been the busiest time of day on campus, with untold thousands of students in class or eating lunch. It wasn’t hard to imagine the tears and the wailing of grief from a million hearts that he knew must surely have been going on at that very moment, from all the families who’d lost children that day.

  Would love have saved them, as Philip seemed to think? Well, perhaps; even a little bit of love in the hearts of the Western Brotherhood might have kept them from doing what they did. But there’d been nothing left in their souls except poisonous hatred, and they were far from the only ones in that condition. So perhaps the world would die for lack of love, whatever specific form that might end up taking, and in twelve more years it would breathe its last gasp.

  He thought of Tyke, and then finally sat down and wept at the blood and the horror of it all.

  Oh, my son, what kind of world have I brought you into? he thought to himself.

  And for that there was no answer at all.