when they still believe that they might have some way to save themselves. Only later, when they understand the hopelessness of their situation, do they turn on one another. In another couple of days that would happen here. In fact, he was probably lucky that it hadn’t already happened.
He went to the door and paused, evaluating the crowd. There were men, women, and children present, so this was probably some kind of survivorship gathering. Safe enough.
He stepped in. Voices rumbled around him, angry and desperate ones, and the children were crying, many of them. A few were playing.
“We’re real hungry, John,” a male voice said. “You gotta find a way.”
“We need to do some urban foraging,” the man in front, probably the mayor, said.
“We’ve scoured the town, goddamn it,” somebody shouted. Rage. Terror. They were just about to turn on one another.
Mack took a breath and raised his voice. “Excuse me.”
They froze like frightened mice, then turned all at once. Suspicion in the faces. Women swept their children behind them. He was acutely aware of the fact that the room was full of guns.
He held up his hands. “Hey, I’m unarmed.” He looked from face to face, smiling just enough but not too much. His next words were crucial, and he had thought about them carefully.
“I just escaped from the Acton Clinic.”
An immediate murmur, more suspicion in the faces. All expected. He was playing them.
“I’m not a crazy, okay!”
They quieted down a little.
“Let him talk,” the man at the front of the room said. He was pudgy, but his eyes were hollow. That was one famished fat man up there. He must be almost crazy with hunger, probably dropping ten pounds a day.
“I’m an assistant chef.”
A guy with a deer rifle said, “What do you mean, you escaped? Why does an assistant chef need to escape?”
“That goddamn place is a palace! There’s tons of food,
“How much food exactly?” a woman asked.
“Try a hundred dressed hogs, forty beeves, maybe a quarter ton of prepared meats, not to mention a whole huge basement storage area full of canned goods for long-term use. That’s a damn Versailles palace up there on that hill, and they have no right to keep all that food just for a bunch of loonies. No right, not when good, normal people who are the backbone of the country need it! That’s why I escaped. I want to help people who need help… folks who’re healthy and normal.” He laughed, made it bitter. “That palace up there is full of people who this world doesn’t even need. But it needs you.” He pointed to a little girl peeking out from behind her mother’s dress. “It needs her.”
“They got more guns than we have, man.”
General assent.
“Yeah, I know. You’ve gone up there and taken a few shots, I know that, too.”
“I did that,” the same voice said. He stepped out of the crowd. He was a young guy, about thirty. He had a preteen boy in tow who looked as tough as he did. “I’m two tours in ’Stan. I was on rotation stateside when this thing started. And if we try on the Acton Clinic, I can tell you as a soldier that a lot of us are gonna get wasted.”
Mack let silence follow that statement. They needed to taste their fear, then be pulled out of it. “How long has it been since you folks got anything to eat?”
People looked around at each other. “Three days,” the man in the front said.
“Okay, I had three squares before I came out. I think it was the steak that made me make my move, eating it, knowing that at least some decent, normal folk down here could be eating what the crazies were gobbling. And the patients get a lot better than we do. It’s like a damn cruise ship up there.”
Another voice rose, this a kid of about fifteen. “Mister, they signal. They use SSB code bursts. I pick them up on my scanner. So they could signal for help.”
That brought an uneasy murmur. Of course, the kid was worrying about Mack’s own code bursts, but no way could he say that.
“Those are probably just signals to their rich families, arranging for more supplies. Now listen to me, I know the place from the inside out and I’ve got the kind of training you need for an op like this. Special Forces. Afghanistan. Pakistan.”
“Unit?” the guy with the rifle asked.
He’d done this sort of thing many times before, and it actually felt good to do it again. “Night Stalkers,” he replied easily. “160th SOAR.” One of the many answers he had to the many questions a CIA field officer gets about his identity. You always lie, even to your friends.
The guy started to be impressed, but then he asked another question. “How’d you end up in the kitchen?”
“Oh, I was on security, all right. But we got shoot-to-kill orders last week and I told Glen MacNamara that I could not do that.” He looked around the room. “You all know who Glen is?”
They knew. Like any town living beneath the walls of a castle, they were obsessed with what went on inside it. Except they did not know about this food, of course. Naturally not, because it didn’t exist. But their imaginations and their eagerness to hate the palace made them believe it in without question. In truth, the clinic was just about stripped of food like everyplace else—except, of course, for the redoubts. If he had wanted to be straight with them, he should tell them how to get to the Blue Ridge underground facility, but he had no intention of doing that. There, they would find food enough to carry this town for five years. Yeah, and give the food of the pure of blood to this gaggle of human trash? Not gonna happen. The pure of blood were the future of the world, or it had no future.
“What I need to do is for you folks to get me the building and ground plans for the clinic from the buildings department, then I can lay out a professional plan of attack for you.”
“Mister, they’ve got SOPMODs in there, I’ve seen them. And bigger stuff. Lots of it. Plus those cannons that make you feel like you’re on fire. The best we can do are a couple of assault rifles and this kinda stuff.” He ported his deer rifle.
“Except you’re gonna have me in there, and you’re gonna have a Ranger plan.” He addressed them all. “I can’t tell you that nobody’s gonna go down, because that’s not gonna happen. There will be casualties. But you will win. That I can tell you, because that’s what’s gonna happen.”
And when they couldn’t find the food, they would first slaughter the bosses, and when they still couldn’t find it, they would fall victim to their own rage, and they would lay waste to the place.
They got the blueprints he needed, and together they laid out a good plan of attack, one that would actually work. “This gate,” he said at last, pointing to the disused back gate on the grounds plan, “will be unlocked. After your feint draws them to the front of the grounds—and they’ll all come running, they’re not that well trained—then you just send your main force right through that gate. You get inside the grounds, they are toast, people.”
They worked out a schedule, and at midnight, he began his journey back. Crazy ole Mack was just about done in, starving and filthy. Mack was sorry. Mack was coming home.
14. THE HAND OF DARKNESS
On the night side of the earth, most of the lights—the cities of New York and London and Paris—had gone dark, and the atmosphere glowed softly purple against the strangling void. The International Space Station swung through its orbit in darkness. Inside, the bodies of the crew floated, one or two hands fisted, most touching the air as if it was something miraculous, their fingers carefully extended. The bodies appeared old, the hair gray with frost from the suffocating carbon dioxide of their own breath, which is what had—mercifully and gently—killed them.
Along the face of the night far below moved the great, glowing objects, working faster now, sliding just a few hundred feet above the suffering land, seeking with probes beyond human knowing, signals from our souls.
