savagery that had come boiling up just now. He thought, Not only can I kill, I want to kill.
His people had turned against him so easily, just on the strength of a piece of paper dropped either by the enemy himself or by traitors in his employ.
Unfortunately, he was fairly sure that the enemy was overreacting. He had no idea what he might do to defeat them. In fact, the modern world was about as prepared to deal with all this as the Aztecs and Incas had been prepared to deal with the Spaniards. It had taken the Aztecs weeks just to figure out that the horses and the men riding them were two different creatures, and they had not understood how guns worked at all. Of course they had considered their adversaries gods. They had observed them working magic.
The Aztec was overwhelmed by the gun, we by the light. We did not understand what we were seeing, either, any more than the Aztecs had understood the actual way the horse and man worked together.
The Aztec—also using a version of the Mayan calendar—had first encountered the Spaniards on the day that their reverenced god Quetzalcoatl had been prophesied to return. So they were even more certain that they were gods. They fit right in to the Aztecs’ cosmology.
Somebody, working thousands of years in advance, had known when that would happen. But who? How?
Did the answer lie a mile beneath the sea off the coast of Cuba, and had the Brits been obstructing exploration to make sure it was not found?
This, he thought, was true. Had to be. Coupled with the attempt to take him out, there was now no question in his mind but that the enemy had subverted world government, and had done so years ago.
What had been that general’s name? Samson. General Samson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That man had been evil.
But there was another, deeper truth, wasn’t there? It was that the Spaniards were far more vulnerable than they had seemed. They hadn’t defeated anybody. The Aztecs had been defeated not by the Spaniard’s strength, but by their own ignorance. In fact, Spanish technology had not been that far in advance of Aztec technology, and in many ways behind that of the Incas. Perhaps far behind. Perhaps we were still behind.
He pulled into Louise’s driveway and was careful to park the car in its usual place. Then he got out and went around the house and back into the stand of trees behind it. He needed to get out of sight and stay out of sight, but this was Kansas and these hills were low, their woods were sparse, and they were full of meadows and grassy glades. If anybody realized he’d come this way, they would be likely at some point to spot him.
He moved through the trees and up toward the ridge line that would lead him, after about half a mile, to the old road where he used to bring his archaeology students to search for remains of the stagecoach that had crashed there in the nineteenth century.
He’d also searched the area for fossils and arrowheads, which he’d found by the dozens, even some Folsom points ten thousand years old. He’d searched these hills with Trevor, teaching him the skills that he knew, of finding things that normally would not be found.
He clambered up the ridge, and from here had a long view across to town. He could pick out the white steeples of the churches, the roof of the bank, the roofs of houses, and the top of the Burnside Building above the tree line. He knew this spot well, he’d been coming to it since he was a boy and out hiking alone, come and wondered here about time and chance, and what life might bring.
He thought, Whoever is here is stripping away the people but leaving everything else intact. What the enemy was going to have was an empty but intact world, and millions upon millions of slaves.
Thus he knew that the enemy might be more technologically advanced than we were, but he had a more primitive culture. No modern human society used slaves, or even needed them.
He wondered what manner of creature might come to this same spot in the future, and contemplate those steeples.
Then, incredibly, he heard a familiar but unexpected sound. Somewhere nearby, a helicopter was moving slowly from east to west, paralleling the ridgeline but out of sight, therefore below it in the draw where the Saunders River flowed.
Who would have a helicopter? Certainly not Lautner County. Could it be the state police? That had been a state cop who’d showed up last night, completely oblivious to the danger, so maybe they were still functioning.
The sound faded. He waited a moment more, then moved along the ridge. If Trevor had survived, Martin thought there was a good possibility that he would have gone home. No question. If he had been able to make it, he’d be there right now waiting for the family to reassemble.
The helicopter came roaring up as if out of the ground, not five hundred feet away. He dove off the ridge, down into the tumble of rocks that bordered the path. He hit heavily, felt pain clutch his left hip and leg.
The thing thundered overhead. Sweat broke out all over him, and his muscles literally twisted against themselves, so strong was the urge to run. He told himself that fear, above all things, kills. Fear makes you a fool. And so he did not do what he so desperately wanted to do, which was to roll another few feet down and run crouching along to see if he might find one of the shallow caves that honeycombed the ridge.
No, they would have motion sensors. In among these sun-warmed rocks, infrared spotting devices would not work. So he stayed still, and the helicopter went slowly off along the ridge.
It was black, and the windows were black. He’d hardly dared look, but what he had seen was nothing but reflective glass.
For twenty minutes, he waited. Finally, he could bear it no longer. The chopper had been gone for a long time, and he was so eager to find Trevor that he almost couldn’t bear it.
His worry now was dogs. If they were indeed looking for him, they might have understood that he’d parked Louise’s car in her drive and come on foot. If so, dogs would follow soon.
Warily, he got to his feet. His thigh ached, but he hadn’t broken anything, thank God.
He knew that he would not be able to stay at his house. He thought he might not even be able to approach it. But he had to know if Trevor was there, he could not leave the area without knowing that.
As he trotted steadily on, his thirst increased fast, and his fatigue exploded into a crippling weight. He thought that his only chance was speed. There was too much power arrayed against him. The people of Harrow were more than enough to defeat him, but there was yet more strength here, and he thought that it wasn’t the state police or the U.S. military, and he thought that they might have a lot more dangerous things than highly sophisticated helicopters.
Then his house was there, his and Lindy’s beautiful home which they’d built when he got tenure. He was proud of it, the lovely new house, Craftsman style, that blended so well with the older houses in the area.
The windows were dark, but the house was not silent. No, there were vehicles there—two pickups. He didn’t recognize them.
So people were waiting for him. Well, he could wait, too. He’d wait until the locals left. He’d wait until the military left. And they would leave. In time, they would all leave.
As he moved closer to the house, he heard the sound of breaking glass. Then he saw a window shatter and his reading chair come through and smash into one of Lindy’s flower beds.
They were looting, of course. Oh, God, please don’t hurt Trevor if he’s in there. He stared across at the storm cellar. Could Trevor have gone down there? It was certainly possible. But there was fifty feet of yard between here and there, and he didn’t dare cross. He thought that the people in that house would shoot him on sight, no question.
Then the helicopter came back. It hovered over the house. The people inside did not appear. It came lower, and when it did, he thought for a moment that it was not a helicopter at all, that it had another configuration entirely. It also made a strange sound, he noticed, hissing like escaping gas rather than chuffing like helicopters usually do.
He watched the helicopter circle the house, then fly off fast in the direction of Harrow.
They hadn’t even landed. But surely they weren’t in radio contact with the people in the house, not with townspeople. So what were they really doing?
The destruction inside his house went on and on. At least he was fairly sure they wouldn’t set it on fire. It was the dry season, and a fire would spread up and down the ridge. The volunteer fire department would be in a shambles, if it even still existed, so no, they wouldn’t do that.
He saw books coming out of Winnie’s bedroom window, her old treasures, The Winter Noisy Book and Cat in
