“Verne? Palmerson? Major Walker’s putting together a squad to get those last four planes before it gets dark. You, Blondie, Hammerhead, you better come too. He needs every warm body.”
Czernas looked up, doubtful and torn, and Shango went to the door without a word and held out McKay’s pass. The guardsman gave it one cold glance and said, “Well, excu-u-use me,” saluted elaborately, and went downstairs with Verne and Palmerson, leaving Czernas and Shango alone. A few minutes later Shango saw a small squad, including the lookout corporal and the guy with the strapped-up shoulder, leave the base of the tower, heading out toward the farthest smoking wreck.
Still no sign of approaching vehicles. That meant no water, no food, no relief for the burned and broken and pain-racked. Far out on one runway someone had set up a depot of something-Shango couldn’t tell if it was food or water or weapons or what-surrounded by men; there seemed to be an argument going on in front of it.
Night was coming on.
He and Czernas copied until it was almost too dark to see, Shango listening more and more intently to the silent stairwell as the minutes passed. Once he thought he heard noises and walked to the top of the stairs to see. But there was only dark and silence and the stench of piss from the dead restroom on the landing below.
Quietly, he said, “We better get going.”
A big section of Loudon County remained yet to be copied, but Czernas packed up his pencil and sheets without a word. Shango got a candle from his backpack and handed it to Czernas, wishing there were some way he could carry one too, in addition to the bike and the hammer. One light wouldn’t be a hell of a lot, in that stairwell.
Gremlins in the baggage tunnels. .
The flame danced and jigged with the updraft of the stairwell. Door at the bottom left open, thought Shango, straining his eyes to look past the darkness, to look past the next turn in the pitch-black stair. Straining his ears as well, though all he could hear was the click and clatter of the wheels, as they slowly spun with the movement of being carried; the creak of backpack straps and the scrape of the coarse nylon on the walls. Czernas’ breathing. .
Czernas yelled, and as he and the bike crashed down into Shango’s back, Shango thought, They were behind us. Restroom… Weight smashed him, rolled him agonizingly down the stairs, metal, flesh, concrete jabbing and punching him. The light went out. Hands clutched, gouged in the dark. Someone kicked him, stepped on him. He heard Czernas yell his name and tried to lunge back up the stairs to help him, but the bike caught on something or someone and he was falling again, a man’s weight falling on top of him.
“Shango!” Czernas yelled again and then cried out, a mortal cry, and there was a stink of blood.
He came to hearing men outside the stairwell door: “The fuck you’re gonna get that bike!” “You said we’d flip for ’em!” “Yeah, well, you guys flip for the other one. . ”
A moment later, dim and confused with echoes in the darkness, another cry.
Something hot lay against Shango’s leg, limp and wet. He groped along the floor: it was Czernas, he identified the light nylon shirt. There was a lot of blood, but he could tell it wasn’t pumping out anymore. He felt for his face, to see if there was breathing, and encountered the gashed throat.
All they wanted was the damn bikes, he thought, sitting in the silent dark. You should have played possum. Why did you call out my name?
Were you trying to get to me? To make sure I was alive?
Was that why they killed you?
His backpack was still buckled to his body, though the water bottles and the outside knife were gone. His whole body throbbed and he guessed the only reason he wasn’t throwing up was there was nothing to throw. He sat in the dark beside the body for a long time, listening to the far-off groaning of the injured in the main terminal.
IT’S ON ITS WAY AND IT’S GOING TO BE BAD. As if a door had opened before him into one of the lower rooms in Hell, he glimpsed how bad it was actually going to get.
Was that what McKay had seen yesterday at 9:17, when the earth had shaken and the blue lightning had crawled along the walls, and the lights went out?
If Bilmer was in the terminal still, alive or dead, he’d have to find her. To hunt patiently through the dying and the dead, to keep clear of the quarrels and fights over food, over water, over fear as the confusion and conflicting orders grew worse.
And if she wasn’t there, he’d have to go look for her. Look for United Flight 1046, somewhere out in the green countryside that lay beyond the airport. Because McKay had asked him to.
Because if he had to leave McKay in danger, he had to bring back something to show for his desertion.
There was no point in staying longer at Czernas’ side. His body would be picked up by a clean-up squad or rot where it lay; that was another one of many things that was no longer Shango’s job. He rolled Czernas over, unbuckled his backpack and added it to his own, went carefully over the dark landing to make sure he wasn’t leaving a water bottle that the thieves had missed.
Then he drew a deep breath, picked up his hammer and went down the dark stairs to the dark night outside.
He didn’t look back.
WEST VIRGINIA
The mist started at about Blackbird Street, a hundred feet or so beyond the trailer court, where land had been cleared in the eighties for a housing development that never came through. It grew thicker among the trees beyond. It was a curious mist, white and thin, but it made little swirls along the ground and Wilma felt the skin on her neck prickle again at the sight of it-the smell of it. She slowed her steps on the cracked and disused sidewalk of Second Street and gestured Shannon, Ryan and Hazel to stay back.
Shannon said, “Be careful! The things I saw-the things that chased me. .”
“Do you want my spear?” asked Ryan. He’d brought the makeshift weapon with him when he’d come to tell his aunt about what was happening to his eight-year-old brother, Louie.
Wilma only shook her head. “I’m not sure a spear will do any good.” They’d already learned, to the chagrin of about eighty percent of the town’s masculine population, that the guns weren’t working. She moved forward cautiously, the white vapors swirling around her knees. The mist seemed to flatten the shapes of the pavement, the vacant lots, the trees behind them, into a pale matte one-dimensionality that was unsettlingly reminiscent of the expression in Tessa’s eyes.
Dampness and cold. It was close to twilight, and maybe time was different; who could say? It was harder and harder to see the trees on either side of the road, but this was not because of mist. Rather, visibility itself seemed to be breaking up. The smell was stronger, cold, like the air after lightning, and there was a sound. Someone crying, she thought, crying at the end of an endless tunnel.
Wilma stepped back with an exclamation as a black flying cloud swirled out of the mist-crickets, cicadas, june bugs, driven as if in a wind. The insects enveloped her, crawling and clinging. Wilma beat at them with her hands, twisted, flailed, clawed the horrid things from her hair, but at the same time felt in each struggling little bug a helpless desperation.
She ran free of the whirling cloud, panting. The crying in the trees was louder. Women running, she thought. She had an impression of long black hair, deerskin skirts, wrapped babies clutched to naked dusky breasts, wailing in pain and terror. Through flesh gone transparent she saw their bones outlined in fire, and then they were gone.