The groping hands reached for him. Tugging desperately at the automatic, Chase at last got it free. But the nonhuman thing now had hold of his mask. One quick wrench and he was as good as dead: The toxic mix of gases would kill him even if oxygen starvation didn't.
In his panic Chase thought he was blacking out. The nonhuman thing's head had vanished. Huge dark spots obscured his vision. He couldn't see--just as he hadn't heard the explosion as Dan's shot smashed the thing between the eyes and scattered shards of bone and red-speckled brain matter ten yards across the street.
Cheryl helped Dan remove the headless body, but even without its weight Chase was unable to stand. They got him to his feet, one supporting each arm. His mouth was clamped shut. He gagged and vomit spurted from his nostrils.
"Hurry, for God's sake!" Cheryl started dragging him along the street. "If he's sick inside the mask he'll suffocate!"
Chase was bent forward, gagging and choking, the mask filling up. Drowning in his own vomit, he was led blindly up the street.
A few miles north of Fort Pierce they encountered civilization again: the pitted and pockmarked two-lane blacktop that was all that remained of the Florida turnpike. Regular patrols by the National Guard made the road reasonably safe.
Above the old 55 mph speed limit signs a warning had been added in large red capitals: don't breathe the air!
Some people still lived this far south, surviving in isolated communities. Like bacteria and insects, it seemed, the human race could adapt to the most adverse and hostile conditions. Chilling to think, Chase brooded, that in time they might adapt to the point of actual mutation --was the creature with which he'd come face-to-face in Miami Beach the portent of things to come?
Ten years ago even the gloomiest of doom-laden prophecies hadn't prepared them for the catastrophic decline they were now experiencing. Maybe Bill Inchcape had known, based on DELFI's predictions, but if so he'd kept tight-lipped about it. There was a sick irony in the fact that Theo Detrick's prognosis had been vindicated by events and the man himself raised to the misty heights of prophet in the popular imagination.
Chase bore some of the responsibility for that. His book One Minute to Midnight, published in 2000, had drawn extensively on Theo's research, quoting whole chunks from his treatise "Back to the Precam-brian." He'd also included information passed on to him by Boris Stanovnik concerning the Project Arrow scheme, and--the real clincher, which had given the book number-one spot in Time's list for thirty-four consecutive weeks--sensational revelations about the top-secret U.S. military plan code-named DEPARTMENT STORE. To this day Chase didn't know the identity of the person who had sent the dossier to Cheryl; but rumor had it that heads had rolled like ninepins in the Defense Department when the facts were revealed. General "Blindeye" Wolfe had taken the brunt of it. Stripped of his rank and dishonorably discharged, he committed suicide one year to the day following the book's publication, which, symbolic gesture or pure coincidence nobody knew, served to fan speculation to white heat and did nothing to harm sales either.
The theme of One Minute to Midnight, encapsulated in its title, was that the superpowers were deliberately engineering global catastrophe by means of the so-called environmental war, and that this wanton tampering with the forces of nature had brought the planet to within sixty seconds--following Chase's analogy of a hand sweeping around a twelve-hour clockface--of ultimate disaster. Then he hit them with the killer punch. Crazy and criminal as this military strategy was, the planet had beaten the superpowers to it and was already, thanks to man's two centuries of unchecked industrial growth, on a steep downward path and possibly already past the point of no return.
What the military sought to bring about, the factory furnace and the automobile had already accomplished.
The book polarized opinion in both the lay and scientific press. It was accused of being "paranoid fantasy." Other critics dismissed it as a piece of trashy sensationalism--panic-mongering at its worst to get onto the best-seller lists--and the author's bid to become the "ecology guru" of the twenty-first century. Chase had expected this. He had been less prepared for the abuse and vilification heaped upon his head by many leading scientists who, in a positive fury (or envy?), leveled the charge that he was "betraying" science.
All the fuss and controversy had the predictable effect of boosting sales and making Chase an internationally known figure. In the eighteen months after publication he was hardly off the television screen. He achieved the respect and notoriety, in pretty well equal measure, that many commentators could only compare to how Ralph Nader had been regarded thirty years before.
The success of the book and his subsequent fame served another useful purpose too--they saved his life.
He had returned from New York with the unshakable conviction that powerful vested interests were determined to silence him. Precisely who these interests were he could only guess at. But the man at JFK (who Chase had belatedly recognized as the same man who had threatened Cheryl in Geneva) was in the pay of a multinational or a government agency or a military group; it was immaterial which, to Chase at least, because the end result was clearly to shut him up at all costs. Dead journalists tell no tales.
For fourteen months Chase worked solidly on the book, living with Dan in a remote croft near the small town of Dornoch on the east coast of Scotland. There they settled down in the tiny two-room dwelling with its whitewashed walls and red corrugated iron roof, with not a neighbor in sight. No electricity, no phone, no TV. Oil lamps, a camping gas stove, and a log fire for when the bleak and bitterly cold northern winter closed in.
In the spring of 2000 he delivered the typescript, and seven months later it was published. Prior to its publication Sentinel had run three long extracts from it, which to John Ware's delight lifted the circulation past the million mark. By that time Chase's fame was as good as life insurance. In any case, silencing the author when the articles and book were in print would have been a somewhat futile gesture, particularly when One Minute to Midnight, with its damning indictment of what the Americans and Russians were secretly up to, was available in every bookstore throughout the developed world.
Chase looked back on those months in the Scottish croft, just the two of them, father and son leading a life that was basic, simple, and wholly satisfying, with a painful nostalgia that brought a stab to the heart. He would never again feel so close to Dan, nor be so absorbed in a piece of work to which he was totally committed and believed in absolutely.
It was a murky yellowy dusk by the time they reached the outskirts of Orlando. Atmospherics down here produced sometimes weird, sometimes beautiful, effects.
After the experience in Miami, Chase wasn't keen to spend the night in a deserted city. It might not turn out to be as deserted as all that--there could be a settlement there, and friendly or hostile it was impossible to know.
So at the National Guard checkpoint where the turnpike intersected the Bee Line Expressway he asked a young guardsman if he could recommend a secure overnight place to stay. The guardsman was dressed like a worker in an atomic reactor--enclosed from head to foot in a black protective cocoon and linked by umbilical airline to the concrete cube of the guardhouse. Through the transparent faceplate they could see he wore a white helmet and had a throat mike taped just below his thyroid cartilage.
He was friendly and helpful. "Take the next exit onto highway twenty-seven. About fifteen miles west of here you'll come to a transit camp for immigrants heading north. I guess you could stay there. Follow the signs to Disney World and you can't miss it."