It happened with a speed that was exhilarating.
Henry felt Bill’s mind rising toward his, floundering out of the nightmares that had entangled it, reaching for Henry the way a drowning man will reach for the lifeguard who has swum out to save him. Their minds connected like couplers on a pair of freight-cars.
Bill took his sister-in-law’s hand. Marsha’s eyes flashed open at once, almost as if she had been waiting for this, and Henry felt all the dials inside his head turn up another notch. She wasn’t supporting as much growth as Bill, but perhaps had more natural talent. She took Charles’s hand without a single question. Henry had an idea she had already grasped what was going on here, and what needed to be done. Thankfully, she also grasped the necessity of speed. They were going to bomb these people, then swing them like a club.
Charles sat with a jerk, eyes wide and bulging from their fatty sockets. He got up as if someone had goosed him. Now all four of them were on their feet, hands joined like participants in a s6xance… which, Henry reflected, this almost was.
Heads rose; some people sat up out of sound sleeps as if they had been electrified.
They did it as instinctively as people whistling a tune or clapping to a beat. If he’d given them time to think about it, it probably would have been harder, perhaps even impossible, but he didn’t. Most of them had been sleeping, and he caught the infected ones, the telepaths, with their minds wide open.
Operating on instinct himself, Henry sent a series of images: soldiers wearing masks surrounding the barn, most with guns, some with backpacks connected to long wands. He made the faces of the soldiers into editorial-page caricatures of cruelty. At an amplified order, the wands unleashed streams of liquid fire: napalm. The sides of the barn and roof caught at once.
Henry shifted to the inside, sending pictures of screaming, milling people. Liquid fire dripped through holes in the blazing roof and ignited the hay in the lofts. Here was a man with his hair on fire; there a woman in a burning ski-parka still decorated with lift-tickets from Sugarloaf and Ragged Mountain.
They were all looking at Henry now-Henry and his linked friends. Only the telepaths were receiving the images, but perhaps as many as sixty per cent of the people in the barn were infected, and even those who weren’t caught the sense of panic; a rising tide lifts all boats.
Clamping Bill’s hand tightly with one of his own and Marsha’s with the other, Henry switched the images back to the outside perspective again. Fire; encircling soldier; an amplified voice shouting for the soldiers to be sure no one got clear.
The detainees were on their feet now, speaking in a rising babble of frightened voices (except for the deep telepaths; they only stared at him, haunted eyes in byrus-speckled faces). He showed them the barn burning like a torch in the snow-driven night, the wind turning an inferno into an explosion, a firestorm, and still the napalm hoses poured it on and still the amplified voice exhorted: “
Imagination fully pumped up now, feeding on itself in a kind of frenzy, Henry sent images of the few people who managed to find the exits or to wriggle out through the windows. Many of these were in flames. One was a woman with a child cradled in her arms. The soldiers machine-gunned all of them but the woman and the child, who were turned into napalm candles as they ran.
“
they had a chance to think once, let alone twice.
Gathering the force of the minds linked to his, Henry sent them an image of the store.
Deep in the well of his own imagination, flying on the pills Owen had given him and sending with all his strength-images of possible safety there, of certain death here, images as simple as those in a child’s picture-book-he was only distantly aware that he had begun chanting aloud: “
Marsha Chiles picked it up, then her brother-in-law, then Charles, the man with the overgrown solar sex-panel.
“
Although immune to the byrus and thus no more telepathic than the average bear, Darren was not immune to the growing vibe, and he also joined in.
“
It “umped from person to person and group to group, a panic-induced infection more catching than the byrus: “
“
Henry let them take it over and build it, pumping his own fist without even realizing it, flinging his hand into the air to the farthest reach of his aching arm even as he reminded himself not to be caught up in the cyclone of the mass mind he had created: when
It came.
“Now,” he whispered.
He gathered Marsha’s mind, Bill’s, Charlie’s… and then the others that were close and particularly locked in. He merged them, compressed them, and then flung that single word like a silver bullet into the heads of the three hundred and seventeen people in Old Man Gosselin’s barn:
NOW.
There was a moment of utter silence before hell’s door flew open.
Just before dusk, a dozen two-man sentry huts (they were actually Porta-Potties with the urinals and toilet-seats yanked out) had been set up at intervals along the security fence. These came equipped with heaters that threw a stuporous glow in the small spaces, and the guards had no interest in going outside them. Every now and then one of them would open a door to allow in a snowy swirl of fresh air, but that was the extent of the guards” exposure to the outside world. Most of them were peacetime soldiers with no gut understanding of how high the current stakes were, and so they swapped stories about sex cars, postings, sex, their families, their future, sex, drinking and drugging expeditions, and sex. They had missed Owen Underhill’s two visits to the shed (he would have been clearly visible from both Post 9 and Post 10) and they were the last to be aware that they had a full-scale revolt on their hands.
Seven other soldiers, boys who had been with Kurtz a little longer and thus had a little more salt on their skins, were in the back of the store near the woodstove, playing five-card stud in the same office where Owen had played Kurtz the
And would he be the only one? Ray Parsons had a big wad of cotton in one ear. He said it was an earache, but who knew for sure? Ted Trezewski had a bandage on one meaty forearm and claimed he’d gouged himself stringing compound barbed wire much earlier in the day. Maybe it was true. George Udall, the Dawg’s immediate superior in more normal times, was wearing a knitted cap over his bald head; damn thing made him look like some kind of elderly white rapper. Maybe there was nothing under there but skin, but it was warm in here for a cap, wasn’t it? Especially a knitted one.
“Kick a buck,” Howie Everett said.
“Call,” said Danny O'Brian.
Parsons Called; so did Udall. Cambry barely heard. In his mind there rose an image of a woman with a child cradled in her arms. As she struggled across the drifted-in paddock, a soldier turned her into a napalm road-flare. Cambry winced, horrified, thinking this image had been served up by his own guilty conscience.
“Gene?” Al Coleman asked. “Are you going to call, or-”
“What’s that?” Howie asked, frowning.
“What’s what?” Ted Trezewski said.
“If you listen, you’ll hear it,” Howie replied.
“
It was coming from the barn, directly behind them.
“What in the blue
Cambry saw alarm on Parsons’s face, on Everett’s, on Coleman’s. They were seeing it, too. Understanding leaped among them while the uninfected ones only looked puzzled.
“Fuckers’re gonna break out,” Cambry said.
“Don’t be stupid, Gene,” George Udall said. “They don’t know what’s coming down. Besides, they’re
Cambry lost the rest as a single word-
