The Dead Town

They had been made to unmake and ultimately to be unmade. An exquisite efficiency.

In time, the insects whose existence depended on animals would perish, and the insects who fed on those insects would perish next, and the plants whose roots were aerated by those insects would die off. On it would go, until the world in every corner remained irreparably barren and silent and still.

Returning to the center of the barn, Ariel said, “Help me to become what I am meant to be.”

Surveying the scattered stalks of hay that littered the floor, Nancy grimaced and said, “Just give me a few minutes to sweep this floor. You can’t create in all this disorder. Just because it’s a barn, there’s no excuse for this mess, no excuse at all, this just makes me livid.”

Chapter 31

From the arsenal on the big conference-room table, Mason Morrell chose only a pistol, and from the cache of ammunition, he selected one spare magazine, which he loaded.

“I’ll be locked in the broadcast booth,” he told Sammy. “If they get as far as breaking down that door, the rest of you are dead and I won’t have any hope of holding out against them. I’ll want to kill a couple, just for the principle of it, but then I won’t need anything but one round for myself.”

He went away with Deucalion, who needed to coach him a few more minutes about what he should say when he pulled the current recorded program and went live.

More familiar with all of these weapons than the average radio ad salesman might have been in, say, Connecticut, Burt Cogborn took some time deciding what he might need. He chose a pistol, an assault rifle, and a pistol-grip shotgun, plus spare magazines for the first two and a box of shells for the 12-gauge.

“I know there isn’t time,” Burt said, “but I sure wish I could go home and get Bobby, bring him back here.”

Bobby was his Labrador retriever. He always took Bobby with him on sales calls and usually brought the pooch to the station, as well. Mason Morrell called them the Cogborn twins, Burt and Bobby. For some reason, Burt had left the dog at home this time.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if anything happens to Bobby.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to Bobby,” Sammy assured him. “He’s smart and tough.”

“If something happens to me,” Burt said, “will you take in Bobby and treat him like your own, like you’d had him since a puppy? I’d trust you to be good to him.”

Sammy was touched, though he figured that if Burt died defending KBOW, they would all be overwhelmed and killed. “I will, sure. I’ll take him in.”

“He really likes those Royal Canin treats.” Burt spelled the brand name. “They’re made with fruit and vegetables, so they’re good for him. Little brown cookies with ridges in them.”

“Royal Canin treats,” Sammy said.

“His favorite toy is the bunny. Not the fully stuffed one, the floppy one. Not just the one with floppy ears but the one that the whole thing is floppy. And not the white floppy one, but the light-green one.”

“Light-green fully floppy bunny,” Sammy said. “I’ve got it.”

Burt was not by nature an emotionally demonstrative person, but with tears standing in his eyes, he hugged Sammy. “You’re a good friend, Sammy. You’re the best.”

Burt took his guns to the reception lounge to set up a defense position near the front door.

Ralph Nettles had already armed himself, which left only Sammy to choose from the dazzling variety of weapons that remained.

Because his roots went back to the land of Mahatma Gandhi, some people assumed that Sammy must be an ardent advocate of nonviolence, but that was an erroneous assumption. His family had long included Hindu apostates who had numerous reasons to be unmoved by Gandhi, and many who were Americophiles. Sammy’s grandfather had been a fan of the hard-boiled novels of Mickey Spillane, and his father thrived on Spillane and the thrillers of John D. MacDonald. Sammy had read everything by both those authors, adored the work of Stephen Hunter and Vince Flynn, and couldn’t resist learning to use the guns in the stories that he had been reading since he was ten. Besides, this was not gun-fearing San Francisco or Malibu, this was Montana, and Sammy wanted to fit in with the locals, unlike most Californians who fled their state and moved here and then wanted to make Montana into a version of what they left behind.

As the program director, promotion director, and community-affairs director of KBOW, Sammy was the most senior company officer on the scene. With Warren Snyder dead — dead twice if you counted his replicant — Sammy was certain to remain the big bear as long as this crisis continued. By his standards, this required that he take for himself the most difficult role in the station’s defense: rooftop sniper and guardian of the broadcast tower.

At 130 pounds, he would find many shotguns difficult to control, but he could handle the low-recoil Beretta Xtrema2 12-gauge, which some well-trained shotgunners could even fire with a one-hand grip. He also — and primarily — wanted the Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle, which was a gas-operated semiauto with a thirty-round magazine with Trijicon optics.

He didn’t think he would need a pistol, but he took one anyway.

Ralph Nettles had brought three spare loaded magazines for the Bushmaster. Sammy filled a waterproof ammo bag for the other guns, collected additional gear that he needed, and piled everything in the break room, off the kitchenette, where a set of spiral stairs in one corner led up to the roof door.

The areas of the studio directly associated with the broadcast were kept cooler than other rooms, and Sammy tended to chill easily. He had come to work wearing insulated longjohns, blue jeans, and a wool sweater, so he wasn’t underdressed for rooftop work.

When he went into his office to snatch his ski jacket from the hook on the back of the door, Sammy realized that the station feed coming through the wall speaker was no longer the recorded material that had been running. Mason had gone live again, although not with advice to the lovelorn and dysfunctional families. Sammy turned up the volume.

“… this town that I love, the wonderful people of both this town and the county beyond, and perhaps the people of Montana and of the entire United States are in grave peril tonight. Many who are listening might have turned on their radios to find out why they have no telephone or Internet service. Others may have tuned in to KBOW because they’ve seen something strange or inexplicable, and they’re seeking information that might make sense of it to them.”

It’s begun, Sammy thought, and for the first time he began to feel the true momentous nature of these events. So much had happened so fast, so much of such a fantastical nature, that his ability to absorb it, believe it, and react properly to it had required all of his energy and had prevented him from grasping the more profound implications of events. The danger had initially seemed primarily personal, to himself and his coworkers, to his plans for KBOW. Now he had a chilling sense of the full existential nature of the threat: to the town, the county, the state, and to all of humanity.

“Others of you may be missing family members,” Mason continued, “some for a short enough time that you attribute it to bad weather, delays because of road conditions. Others may know people who have been missing for the larger part of the day and are puzzled as to why the police seem to dismiss your concern. Folks, you’ve been listening to me for two years, you know I tell people truths that they need to hear, no matter how difficult it is for me to say it or for them to hear it. And what I tell you now is truth of a very hard kind, hard both to say and believe: You cannot trust the Rainbow Falls police. They aren’t who they appear to be. Your missing friends and family members may be dead. An unknown number of people in this town have been killed. The killing continues as I speak.”

Sammy ran to the spiral stairs in the break room. He needed to get to the roof. Mason had blown the lid off the conspiracy, and the blowback would be coming.

Chapter 32