Wolfit's shoulder chucked up and down but she didn't hear him laugh. 'Two kinds of people. Those who get it. Those who don't. You just spent your whole life walking in darkness. Just like everyone else in Washington. You think I never saw things while I was working in that place? All the cruelty? All the cynicism?'
'You're talking about cruelty? Larry… did you take a look at Vegas?'
'People die in wars. You got to see the big picture.'
'You sound like Hitler.'
He laughed then. 'Like I said. You either get it or you don't. And now it's just too late for me to throw a little light on the matter. There's things moving out there, and I can't let you have even the faintest chance of stopping it.'
The gun rose, made a dark shape against the backdrop of stars. 'If you'd been a little less nosy, if you'd done as you were told, maybe you'd have lived to find out. We gave you every chance to back out. But no…'
Something moved, close to them, back near the ridge. She checked her breathing, shuffled slowly, as noiselessly as she could, into a pool of darkness cast by the higher rocks.
'Damn me,' he muttered. 'Damn me if that kid isn't still alive. A pop from this thing and he's still grunting.' He flicked the switch on the flashlight, swept the narrow yellow beam over toward the ridge. She had to watch. There was no choice. Jeff Green was curled up in a ball by a single hulking rock, a big dark pool of blood growing around his stomach. His eyes glittered in the torchlight, wide open, scared, like those of an animal. He was doing something with his hands, and some small inner voice told her not to stare too hard. It looked like he was trying to push his spilled guts back inside his body.
Wolfit, crazy now, she didn't doubt it, put on a phony Southern accent, like Foghorn Leghorn worked up on speed, all this nervousness bubbling over inside him. 'Boy. I say boy. You need some help over there?'
Green opened his mouth. Something liquid came out, ran down over his chin, dark and viscous, and no human sound, nothing but a low, physical gushing, rhythmic, fading slowly away.
'One more pop and then you can say night-night,' Wolfit murmured. The kid said something unintelligible. His hand moved again, and something small, something silver, glinting in the moonlight, rolled across the rocky ground toward them.
'Night-night,' Wolfit said, not seeing this. The gun jumped in his hand, making that sickening popping sound again, and Helen Wagner saw Green's head explode like a pumpkin, felt something hot and sticky rain in droplets on her face.
'Hey,' Wolfit said clinically. 'That's what it looks like. You think we can play that game now, Helen?'
And what Belinda Churton told you to do was think, Helen reminded herself. More than anything. Think. Of what they discussed in the helicopter, of the little silver cartridge rolling across the rock floor of the desert, winking in the moonlight. Something hissing, fizzing beneath the curtain of winking stars.
Flash.
This hurt. She was scrabbling over onto her side, mind racing, just realizing what the dying Green had rolled toward them when the grenade ignited. Her body blocked most of the brightness, but enough got through to throw her, fire some bright, white curtain across the back of her mind and make her, in an instant, blind, insensate, helpless. Somewhere behind her — yards away or just feet? these distances meant nothing in this white, dreamlike world — Larry Wolfit screamed in pain, an animal noise, of agony and loss.
Blind people can still kill you, she thought. Then rolled, hard and fast, across the ground, not minding the sharp rocks digging into her body, eyes screwed shut against the agony.
Flash.
Even with her eyes shut and her arm set against her head, the light came through, a livid red-tinged orange, the colour of flesh, the colour of blood.
'Fuck you!' Wolfit screamed. And somewhere to her left there was the low, soft whisper of the gun and a sharp explosion in the ground. Dust and rock flew up and battered the back of her head. Two more to go. She reached into the pocket of her suit, grabbing for the goggles, found the cheap plastic lenses in her hand, heard Wolfit's lumbering footsteps once more, rolled again, then carefully, slowly, so as to make no noise, pulled them over her head.
Flash.
She knew what Wolfit must be doing now. Standing there, the gun in one hand, his free arm covering his face, waiting for the grenade to run out of steam. She opened her eyes. And saw nothing. The world was pale white, no detail, no movement. This brightness was so strong it wiped out the senses for a time, like staring at the sun, and there was no telling how long it would be before they returned. Then something stirred in the whiteness, a shape moved, there was the sound of those big mountain boots crunching the desert gravel.
'I can see you,' Wolfit said, and she thought: Lying, he's lying again, he always lies, this dishonesty seeps out of his pores like sweat. And she stayed still, stayed silent. The dim white shape moved, a ghostly arm extended away from her. It jerked; the gun made a sound. Somewhere close by the ground exploded.
She almost had to bite her tongue to stay quiet. And that was what he wanted. To make her taunt him. Hear her voice, then turn, grinning. Eyes screwed shut tight once more, then she opened them, gingerly. More detail. Less light. Her eyesight was slowly getting back to something close to normality, the complex structure of the eye recovering from the shock of the first flare.
There are four, she thought. And tried to remember how many were already gone.
His outline revolved, arm extended; the gun jerked again. Wolfit was guessing. His sight was gone completely, she thought, and now he was just trying to listen, maybe even work methodically around himself in an arc, hoping to catch her.
Flash.
So near she could hear the sound of the phosphor fizzing in the air. And it hurt again, even through the goggles. She closed her eyes and wanted to scream. No, a voice (Belinda Churton's distant, ghostly) said. Correction, Helen. You did scream.
We heard you.
We all heard you.
And in that instant she became aware of the noise she was making: the loud, laboured sound of her breathing, the sobbing gasps that welled up in her throat, the constant, rushing roar of the blood through her veins. She forced her eyes open. Pain. His presence was overwhelming. She could feel him there, a huge black figure in front of her, see the shape of his legs no more than two feet away, and didn't dare look up, knowing what was there (long and dark and deadly).
'Women,' Larry Wolfit said slowly. 'Just can't keep quiet, can you?'
'What the hell are you?' she yelled, hearing the words trip out of her mouth automatically, not caring any more how they betrayed her.
Wolfit sounded as if he were offended by the question, as if she ought to have known the answer already. 'Me, Helen? I'm just a little piece of the mechanism, a little cog in the celestial machine. Nighty-night, now.'
And it was like the sound of a rapier moving through the air, so sudden, so full of force. She heard this rush of energy, heard too Wolfit groaning, then screaming, became aware of his presence diminishing, blinked, blinked again, found some vision returning, fought with her eyes, searching for some control.
He was gone. Something lifted him up, bulk and all, and threw him a good five feet away. Larry Wolfit lay, a crumpled heap, unmoving, on the hard desert floor. The sound of footsteps. A hand came down and fell gently upon her shoulder.
'Don't touch me, you bastard!'
Not her voice, this was not her voice at all.
'Okay. Okay.'
Something familiar. Memories flooding back into her head.
'Helen. It's me,' Barnside said. 'It's okay now. You're safe.'
'Safe?'
She heard herself laugh, and still the voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. Slowly, with no small degree of pain, her sight was coming back. The dry, dead desert floor, Wolfit's slumped body, all these were becoming real to her now.