He watched the car bump out of sight.
She might be shopping. Idly curious, or so he told himself, Joey waited a prudent few minutes and then followed on his Yamaha. He checked the empty mall lots along the highway for her car, but it wasn’t there.
Visiting somebody?
So who was to visit?
Slow suspicions formed in Joey’s mind.
Not that he cared what she did. He hadn’t seen her much lately. He wasn’t sure what Beth meant to him or used to mean to him. A few good Friday nights.
But he remembered the way she used to undress for him, shy and bold at the same time. He remembered her shrugging out of an old sleeveless T-shirt in a dark room, unbuttoning her pants with one hand while she watched him watch. The memory provoked a knot of tension in his belly. Not desire. More like fear.
He rode past Kindle’s house, past Bob Ganish’s ugly little ranch house.
No Volkswagen.
Then he drove past the hillside house where Matt Wheeler lived. Her car was in the driveway.
Joey parked his motorcycle in a garage half a block away. He approached the house along a line of hedges and used the camcorder’s zoom to spy on the doctor’s house. But the blinds had all been pulled.
He waited about two hours until Beth came out again, looking somewhat pink in the cheeks.
He taped her climbing into the car and bump-jerking away from the curb.
Bitch, Joey thought.
Among the last things Tom Kindle moved down from his mountain cabin was his Remington hunting rifle, old but sturdy.
He hadn’t used it much in the last few years. Hunting in the coast forests wasn’t what it used to be; too many hobby shooters had moved into what had once been some pretty secluded territory. Every autumn, the woods grew a new crop of chubby CPAs in orange flak jackets. It made for a dangerous situation, in Kindle’s opinion. He didn’t relish getting shot by somebody who carried his ammunition in a nylon fanny pack.
But this talk of storms and travel made him nervous, too. So he brought down the Remington and picked up some shells and took some practice shots at the knotholes of a long-dead slippery elm back of his house.
The crack of the gunshots echoed a long time in the still air; the bullets struck the decayed tree with a different and softer sound, like a mallet head hitting a fence post.
Kindle found his aim was reasonably accurate even after too many lax years. But the rifle kicked harder than he remembered. Of course it wasn’t the rifle that had changed: He was getting old. There was no denying the fact. He bruised too easily, went to bed too early, and pissed too often. Old.
For shooting, he wore the corrective lenses he’d had made up a couple of years ago. Kindle was mildly myopic, which affected his aim, but the condition didn’t seem to have worsened—which was good, because where were the opticians since Contact? Gone to heaven, every one.
He sighted on a circle where the bark had dropped from the tree. Squeezed off a shot and missed by what appeared to be a good half foot.
“Damn,” he said, and massaged his shoulder.
He could have gone inside, where Chuck Makepeace was talking by radio to Avery Price, the Boston guy, but Kindle distrusted this business about Ohio. It was where everybody wanted to go, a new Promised Land, a Place Prepared; worse, it was where the Helpers wanted them all to go. Boston and Toronto were both travelling with Helper guides, and probably so were a bunch of small towns like Buchanan.
At least they called it guiding. Another word for it was herding. All the wild human beings were being assembled in one place—and Kindle guessed there were other such places on other continents, little reservations, little corrals. Barns. Pens.
He didn’t like that idea at all.
No doubt, he thought, the promises were true. Everybody would be defended against the weather; the land would be fertile and the skies would be blue. They would all be well cared for.
Like cattle.
Cattle were well cared for. Cattle were also slaughtered.
He put three more shots into the bole of the tree and then stopped because his right shoulder felt damn near dislocated.
The sky was a high, luminous blue brushed with cloud. The air smelled of brine. There had been ground fogs every morning for the last week. Sunsets had been wide and vivid.
If old bones tell the weather, Kindle thought, then something big was indeed about to break. The last few days he had been sleeping restlessly. This morning, he had woken up at dawn in a cold sweat. His body felt tight, as if it was braced for something.
He turned and squinted across the bay. The water was choppy, whitecaps feathering in a stiff breeze.
The ocean, Kindle thought.
Dear God, what mischief had been committed out there?
Storms were already raking the east coast as the President of the United States prepared to leave the White House.
He was alone in the building. The First Lady had abandoned her skin many weeks before. Elizabeth had been captivated by the Greater World and had wanted to explore it in greater detail, an impulse William understood; in any case, she had never liked bad weather. It frightened her.
William, on the other hand, had been a devotee of thunder, a relisher of storms.
It was not entirely his aim to relish the weather that had already begun to wreak so much destruction. There were still many mortal human beings on the surface of the Earth… and many of them would die, despite the best efforts of the Helpers. But it was the paradox of the senses that they did not make such distinctions. A stormy sky made his skin tingle, his pulse quicken, no matter what the circumstances.
Fundamentally, though, it wasn’t the storms William wanted to see; it was the country—the nation he had once governed, if “govern” was a meaningful verb.
That was why he had clung to the flesh even after Elizabeth went Home. (Besides, she was not really absent, merely less accessible.)
Only a small minority of Contactees had retained their corporate bodies, and many of those, like William, had changed or were changing themselves in some critical way.
After alclass="underline" it wouldn’t do to go tramping across the landscape in an old man’s cumbersome shell.
Therefore William went to bed for a week; and while he slept the neocytes altered certain genetic instructions and ran his cell division at a feverish pace. He radiated heat, and when he woke he was many pounds lighter than he had been. He was also younger.
He peered at himself in a full-length mirror and saw a face he hadn’t seen since the year the Allies marched into Berlin.
What age would he have guessed this boy to be? Twelve? Thirteen?
Anticipating the change, William had obtained some clothes to fit before he went to sleep. He dressed himself in blue jeans and a T-shirt and fresh running shoes. The shoes were a little loose; he’d had to guess at the size. But how glorious.
He felt newly minted. He felt like a bright penny.
He felt restless and hungry. The White House seemed suddenly bigger and more ridiculous than ever, and he couldn’t wait to get away from its stifling frills and history. He thought of all those miles of America opening out from his doorstep, a continent like a long empty beach.
William laughed a high child’s laugh and ran down the steps of the Main Portico.
The sky that day was heavy and fat with clouds.
By January, the albedo of the planet had risen considerably.
Traveller-engineered phytoplankton laced the surface waters of the tropics. Like crystals of fine glass, they bounced sunlight back into the sky.