He was dragged under the water, and the light showed him that the crowd of blind men were pushing and shoving one another as they forced their way through a tiny gash under a rock ledge. One by one the blind men and their prisoners wriggled through it. Von Essen’s lungs were already exploding, and he became lost in the chaos as he was shoved and kicked through the small hole. Just when he thought his life was over, his head broke the surface. He choked and heaved and breathed, and was dragged under the water again.
It seemed like hours before they were out of the water, then he was set on his feet and commanded, with a push, to walk. His leather Oxfords didn’t work out well on the slippery rocks. His impatient captors dragged them off his feet.
His body was an ocean of pain and exhaustion. He no longer cared what was happening or why; he simply prayed that it would be over soon. He didn’t know that his journey had only just begun.
Nobody serviced Nishitsus like McGarrity Nishitsu in Apache Hats, Missouri. Mr. McGarrity had commercials made especially for airing, overnights. “It’s 2:00 a.m. and your Nishitsu needs a tune-up—where do you go? McGarrity Nishitsu! I’m Mike McGarrity, and I’m here to give you my solemn promise—nobody services Nishitsus like McGarrity, twenty-four hours a day!”
For a chronic insomniac like Jon Usumi, working overnights wasn’t so bad. Sometimes it was a drag when the second shift left him their unfinished work, but mostly you got easy jobs from other insomniacs. Oil changes, tune-ups, fix a belt, test an electrical system. But every once in a while some oddball would roll in with a really strange job, and wouldn’t you know it always happened when Jon was on the shift all alone.
Some sort of a sound caught his attention, and he dragged his head out from under the hood of the 2003 Nishitsu Grasshopper. The Grasshopper was the latest attempt by the Japanese home office to cash in on the economy SUV market The Grasshopper’s fuel pump was so flawed it could cause a fire when the vehicle wasn’t even running, and Jon could replace one without looking. He squinted at the open garage entrance as he worked.
There were people out there, but they were staying in the darkness of the lot. The inside of the repair garage was ablaze with bright light.
“Hello?” Jon called.
He heard growling.
“Who’s there?”
A man came out of the darkness wearing sunglasses—and nothing else. He was a hairy, filthy creature with flesh as white as death. He had an armful of rocks, which he dumped on the spotless floor of a repair bay. Then he started throwing them at the lights.
“Hey! Stop that.”
His aim was good. The second rock shattered an overhead lamp.
“Hey, asshole, what do you think you’re doing?” Jon grabbed his cell phone, which elicited excited grunts from the group still outside in the darkness. The one with the sunglasses sent his next rock flying at Jon. It slammed into his rib cage with bone-crushing force, and the phone clattered across the floor.
Jon crawled for the phone as he heard more fights being taken out by the rock thrower. The garage grew darker. The people outside became more excited. How many were there? Who were they? What were they?
Another rock sailed out of nowhere and knocked the phone away just as Jon reached for it again. The pain from the broken ribs was blinding, but it would be a lot worse after he’d been forced to march for forty-eight hours.
As the repair bays grew darker, the creatures outside entered and helped with the rock throwing until every bulb was shattered and only the Exit signs illuminated the place. Jon never did reach the phone.
They were albinos, all of them, just like the one in the sunglasses, and they were all as filthy. Jon might not have been so quick to judge them if he’d known he’d be just as dirty soon enough.
The albinos started grabbing toolboxes and equipment, and Jon noticed they were looking at their hands. As he struggled to sit up, he glimpsed one of the hands and saw a permanent marker drawing of a ratchet wrench toolbox. The albino grunted over the hand and searched until he found the toolbox, which he poked experimentally, then grabbed. Other albinos took tools of every description, and several went behind the parts counter, stuffing auto parts into sacks.
They’ll take what they want, then leave, Jon thought optimistically. But one of the albinos had to have had Jon’s picture on his hand. The albino grinned and reached for him.
“Don’t! Please!” Jon Usumi tried to run and found himself locked in the arms of the ugliest, biggest brute in the entire group. Jon shouted and straggled. The brute growled at him. Jon kept shouting until he found himself hanging by his ankles. The brute pounded Jon’s head on the once immaculate garage floor.
He had to pound Jon three times to make him shut up.
Department of Homeland Security Special Agent Charlie Roca didn’t trust what the system was telling him.
“Can’t fucking be.”
“You want me to play it again?” cried the system operator.
“Yes.”
“Fine.” The operator played the video, which was now forty-five seconds old.
The monitor showed the main compartment of Emergency Federal Command Authority Station #5. The nuke-proof bunker was deep underground, right below Roca’s feet and protected by eighteen layers of structural and radiation shielding. There was just one way in or out, and that door was bolted shut.
But somebody had just made another entrance. The video clearly showed the wall of the command authority station blasting open. The figures on the bunks— eighteen of the finest bureaucrats in the U.S. government—scrambled out of bed as something big penetrated the interior of the station, filling the room with flashing light that fried the camera and turned the screen black.
“Jesus.” Roca snapped at the communications officer, “did you reach them?”
“No answer!”
“Dammit!” He grabbed the phone that put him in direct contact with the director of homeland security, and at that moment the power went out.
“How could this happen?” he demanded. The station was equipped with more redundant systems than he could keep track of.
“They must have cut the umbilical to the station!” the operator gasped.
“What? How?”
The ground started shaking.
“Now what?” Roca demanded.
“Oh, shit!” The operator stared at the floor of the control and command center, horrified, and then he ran for the door. Of course he couldn’t open it. They were sealed in—for their own protection.
When the ground yawned open and fried the command center with dust and scythes of static electricity, they had nowhere to run.
Four mainframe computers were nestled deep in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium.
Other hospitals possessed mainframe computers— mostly relics of the 1970s, when a big organization needed big hardware to organize itself electronically. Mainframes such as that had since been replaced with smaller boxes that could do much more—sometimes the central boxes disappeared entirely in favor of a network of computing power.
Supercomputers continued being built, and they were used to crunch data points by the trillions. The military used computers like that to electronically organize and stage its resources—every soldier, every tank, every roll of toilet paper—and to create scenarios that used those resources. Meteorological research around the world used these computers to look for patterns in weather based on millions of concurrent measurements of temperature, wind speed, air pressure and geographical factors.
The supercomputers below the sanitarium, the Folcroft Four, were not in the service of Folcroft Sanitarium. They served CURE. They routinely, automatically hacked into government systems around the world. Harold Smith’s programming skills had made them into a data-gathering powerhouse that the Pentagon could only dream of. Mark Howard had come in with some knowledge of evolutionary programming—he was teaching the Four how to identify patterns, however disconnected the data making up the patterns, and to initiate searches based on these digitally identified hunches. New chips and new storage drives were being added routinely to the system, to keep them current with the best technology.