Dark Rivers of the Heart

“Thank God,” he said, “I just ran out of things to do to keep from going nuts.”

“You’ve got to help me spot them,” she said. “I’ll be looking too, but I might not see one of them.”

Indicating the screen, he said, “That’s Godzilla?”

“No. This is the gameboard that Godzilla and I are both going to play with. It’s a grid of the five acres immediately around the house and barn. Each of these tiny grid blocks is six meters on a side. I just hope to God my entry data, those property maps and county records, were accurate enough. I know they’re not dead-on, not by a long shot, but let’s pray they’re close. See this green shape? That’s the house. See this? The barn. Here are the stables down toward the end of the driveway. This blinking dot — that’s us. See this line — that’s the county road, where we want to be.”

“Is this based on one of the video games you invented?”

“No, this is nasty reality,” she said. “And whatever happens, Spencer…I love you. I can’t imagine anything better than spending the rest of my life with you. I just hope it’s going to be more than five minutes.”

He had started to put the truck in gear. Her frank expression of her feelings made him hesitate, because he wanted to kiss her now, here, for the first time, in case it was the last time too.

Then he froze and stared at her in amazement as comprehension came. “Godzilla’s looking straight down at us right now, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a satellite? And you’ve hijacked it?”

“Been saving these codes for a day when I was in a really tight corner, no other way out, because I’ll never get a chance to use them again. When we’re out of here, when I let go of Godzilla, they’ll shut it down and reprogram.”

“What does it do besides look down?”

“Remember the movies?”

“Godzilla movies?”

“His white-hot, glowing breath?”

“You’re making this up.”

“He had halitosis that melted tanks.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Now or never,” she said.

“Now,” he said, putting the truck into reverse, wanting to get it over with before he had any more time to think about it.

He switched on the headlights, backed away from the barn, and headed around the building, retracing the route that they had taken from the county road.

“Not too fast,” she said. “It’ll pay to tiptoe out of here, believe me.”

Spencer let up on the accelerator.

Drifting along now. Easing past the front of the barn. The other branch of the driveway over there. The backyard to the right. The swimming pool.

A brilliant white searchlight fixed them from an open second-floor window of the house, sixty yards to their right and forty yards ahead. Spencer was blinded when he looked in that direction, and he could not see whether there were sharpshooters with rifles at any of the other windows.

Ellie’s fingers rattled the keys.

He glanced over and saw a yellow indicator line on the display screen. It represented a swath about two meters wide and twenty-four meters long, between them and the house.

Ellie pressed ENTER.

“Squint!” she said, and in the same moment Spencer shouted, “Rocky, down!”

Out of the stars came a blue-white incandescence. It was not as fierce as he had expected, marginally brighter than the spotlight from the house, but it was infinitely stranger than anything he had ever seen — above- ground. The beam was crisply defined along the edges, and it seemed not to be radiating light as much as containing it, holding an atomic fire within a skin as thin as the surface tension on a pond. A bone-vibrating hum accompanied it, like electronic feedback from huge stadium speakers, and a sudden turbulence of air. As the light moved on a course that Ellie had laid out for it (two meters wide, twenty-four meters long, between them and the house but approaching neither), a roar arose similar to the subterranean grumble of the few grinding-type earthquakes that Spencer had ridden out over the years, although this was far louder. The earth shook hard enough to rock the truck. In that two-meter-wide swath, the snow and the ground beneath it leaped into flames, turned molten in an instant, to what depth he didn’t know. The beam moved along, and the center of a big sycamore vanished in a flash; it didn’t merely burst into flame but disappeared as if it had never existed. The tree was instantly converted into light and into heat that was detectable even inside the truck with the windows closed, almost thirty yards from the beam itself. Numerous splintered branches, which had hung beyond the sharply defined edge of the beam, fell to the ground on both sides of the light, and they were on fire at the points of severance. The blue-white blade burned past the pickup, across the backyard, diagonally between them and the house, across one edge of the patio, vaporizing concrete, all the way to the end of the path that Ellie had set it upon — and then it winked out.

A two-meter-wide, twenty-four-meter length of earth glowed white-hot, boiling like a lava flow at its freshest, on the high slopes of a volcano. The magma churned brightly in the trench that contained it, bubbling and popping and spitting showers of red and white sparks into the air, casting a glow that reached even to the truck and colored the surviving snow red-orange.

During the event, if they had not been too stunned to speak, they would have had to shout at each other to be heard. Now the silence seemed as profound as that in the vacuum of deep space.

At the house, the agency men switched off the searchlight.

“Keep moving,” Ellie said urgently.

Spencer hadn’t realized that he’d braked to a complete stop.

They drifted forward again. Easy. Moving cautiously through the lion’s den. Easy. He risked a little more speed than before, because the lions had to be scared shitless right now.

“God bless America,” Spencer said shakily.

“Oh, Godzilla isn’t one of ours.”

“It isn’t?”

“Japanese.”

“The Japanese have a death-ray satellite?”

“Enhanced-laser technology. And they have eight satellites in the system.”

“I thought they were busy making better televisions.”

She was working diligently on the keyboard again, getting ready for the worst. “Damn it, my right hand’s cramping.”

He saw that she had targeted the house.

She said, “The U.S. has something similar, but I don’t have any codes that’ll get me into our system. The fools on our side call it the Hyperspace Hammer, which has nothing to do with what it is. It’s just a name they liked from a video game.”

“You invent the game?”

“Actually, yes.”

“They make an amusement park ride out of it?”

“Yes.”

“I saw one.”

Moving past the house now. Not even looking up at the windows. Not tempting fate.

“You can commandeer a secret Japanese defense satellite?”

“Through the DOD,” she said.

“Department of Defense.”

“The Japanese don’t know it, but the DOD can grab Godzilla’s brain any time they want. I’m just using the doorways that the DOD has already installed.”

He remembered something that she had said in the desert only that morning, when he had expressed surprise about the possibility of satellite surveillance. He quoted it back to her: “‘You’d be surprised what’s up there.