would have some way of pulling up its fuel in the event of a power failure.
He liked to think about stuff like this. Keeping the world working. But the GODDAMN WORLD WAS NOT WORKING, WAS IT? Goddamn them, fine! FINE! What if this happened: this thing kept up until all the human garbage, the ragheads, the Chinks, the spics, the Mexes, the blacks, you name it, all of that trash perished? A few good Americans and Englishmen and Germans, too, of course, couldn’t be helped. But ALL of that garbage—and then suddenly they opened the redoubts and here was a whole new world ready to start over again.
Except it wasn’t going to be like that, was it? It wasn’t going to be like that AT ALL.
Oh, he’d taken the fucking white powder gold. And he was a good man. Churchgoing. You had to be a good little boy, they said, to make that shit work. He’d goddamn well drunk it like a milkshake for days, and all he’d gotten out of it was bloody piss. Plus now there was this frigging black spot on his stomach that he could not get rid of. He tried scraping it, he’d even tried packing it in bleach. Would not go away. Cut at it with a razor. Whatever it was, the sucker went deep.
“General, we have an escort.”
“What the fuck?”
“There’s one’a them UFOs up there.”
What in hell was this? He’d seen video of these things. They were kidnapping people all over the world. Well, hell, he had damn few soldiers in this unit and probably half of them would take off the second the sun set, so he did not need this. He popped the overhead hatch and saw this big goddamn thing up there. Should he shoot it? No fuckin’ way, God only knew what kind of ordinance it had. These things had been around for years and nobody knew what they were. NASA maybe, the president maybe, but not this soldier. “Increase speed. Let’s see if we can get out from under this sucker.”
The radios didn’t work, so they used hand signals, and it was about a minute before a signal came back from the fuel truck. If they increased speed, they would need to load more diesel fuel before they reached Raleigh. “Maintain speed!” And, goddamn it, what next?
One radio that was functional was the single sideband unit that was used for contacting Mack. It was kept powered down except when in use, and so far it was fine. In fact, he could hear his communications officer sending a burst right now. He did that every fifteen minutes.
But then, a screech of brakes, the screaming of tires.
“What the hell?”
One of the Humvees veered off the road and went over on its side in a cloud of dust and a crash of a kind he hadn’t heard since Iraq—the sound of a whole lot of metal taking a hell of a beating.
A second later, a column of light as white as powder came down from the thing overhead, and two young soldiers floated out of the Humvee, their arms raised to the sky, and went up in it and were damn well gone. And so was the thing—whoosh, just like that. Steel-white sky, end of story.
He threw open the access hatch and ran to the Humvee. Nobody else had moved except one soldier, who had taken off across country and was going like hell. He was tempted to order the man shot, but that might bring outright rebellion, so he ignored the desertion.
When he looked inside the Humvee, he had a hell of a shock. What was in there was the driver, and he had literally ripped his own clothes off. His body was as red as a tomato and there was heat coming off it, a lot of heat. The eyes were open and staring and they were not glazed like the eyes of dead men, they were sharp with horror, like he was suffering somewhere deep inside himself. They were not dead eyes, and that was weird.
Whatever was happening to the guy, it was horrible and it just plain hit George Wylie right between the eyes. He was U.S. Army to the core, though, and the U.S. Army saved the lives of its soldiers. You got a man down, you did what was necessary to get all that training and that skill back to medical support. You did that. But here? “Hey, soldier, you hear me?”
Nothing.
Then he noticed on the kid’s bare chest and around his side, one of those damn spots, black and gleaming. So what in shit’s name was this stuff then, cancer caused by the fucked-up sun?
He went back to the Stryker.
“One KIA,” he called out. “Driver. The other three are gone.” He pulled himself into the vehicle and commanded them to get moving.
As they went on down the road the general found himself feeling kind of sick. There was something about the two guys who had gone up in that thing that he didn’t like. Not the fact that he’d lost men, although that was a pain, for sure, but the way they had looked as they ascended, like saints or some damn thing. That was it, a couple of beautiful young saints. He was a Christian and all that. Damn right, and screw the opposition. You weren’t with Jesus, you needed your heart cut out.
But he didn’t like saints. You weren’t gonna win a war with damn saints in your army.
He hit his driver on the shoulder. “What’s our ETA?”
“We don’t have any holdups, three hours.”
That would be well after dark, such as it was with that violet thing, if it came back.
As the vehicle sped along, he found his mind going to his most recent wife, to Sally. Pretty, not beautiful, so why had he married her? Couldn’t tell her no, was the main reason.
She went on and on, wanted this, wanted that. Expert in one thing: being disappointed.
He just got so damn mad sometimes, and leave it to a woman to bring out the worst in you.
So what happens when you’re isolated in a survival redoubt and you command the security force and you off your wife? They put her in the freezer is what happens, and good-bye.
Too bad he hadn’t brought a bottle on this little frolic. He needed a bottle. He always needed a goddamn bottle. Essential carry, soldier, forget it again, just blow your own head off.
One thing, the Acton Clinic meant maybe getting something that would get him out of this mess, and maybe the whole Blue Ridge group. Too late for the rest, probably. But the Seven Families were at Blue Ridge, plus the cream of America, so they were first in line, anyway.
“Any response from Mack?”
“No, Sir.”
Never mind, they’d be there soon enough. If those bastards had offed Mack, though, there was going to be a slight change in plans. He would still kill them, of course, but slow. Damn slow.
19. STEALING PEOPLE
Mack had thought that he would kidnap Caroline Light and possibly David Ford, but he had not anticipated that Caroline would start re-creating the portal as immediately as she had, or move nearly so fast. And he had not understood, until he saw them together, that they were so tender toward one another. Now, he would definitely take Ford. Torture is a reliable form of interrogation in only one instance: when you torture the lover and question the subject.
Because of the attack, Mack was no longer locked down, and he had been able to slip out and watch her. He stood in the shadows on the stairway that led into the recreation area.
Without knowing it, she had made this a race. Either her painting got finished and they used it—however that was to be done—or the townspeople invaded and gave Mack the chance he needed.
Except for one thing. They would not use it because he was going to prevent it. He would destroy the painting again and this time he would kill her as well. Far better, though, if the deserving got the benefit of the thing.
In the darkness across the room, hidden in the red shadows, Katie was also watching, and she felt every endearing touch between the lovers like a knife skewering her heart.
As the new star had shone its baleful light through the high windows of the rec room, her jealousy had festered into hate, and then into the truth of her soul: the pathological, murderous rage that was her great hidden flaw.
Katrina had a secret. She had killed. She had killed more than once. First, when she was a child, she had killed a boy called Jerry Flournoy. It had happened during a celebration bonfire at Camp Oscalana.
