He gave the signal that would open the gate, and the bars went sliding back.
As he drove in, down the little road, Frank could see that the main house was on fire. Flames were dancing across its rear facade. The whole front of the building looked to be gone, and the tiled roof over the middle section had fallen in. There was a shallow crater behind the house, where the path to the communications center had been. The communications center itself was still standing, but it had taken some damage, and appeared to have been knocked off its foundation. Most of the other structures, the minor outbuildings, looked more or less intact. Little fires were burning here and there in the trees behind them.
Through the haze and smoke Frank saw a small figure wandering about outside, moving as though in a daze. Cindy. Ancient, tottering little Cindy. Her face was smudged and blackened. He got out of the car and ran toward her, and embraced her. It was like clutching a bundle of sticks.
“Frank,” she said. “Oh, look at everything, Frank! Look at it!”
“I saw the planes leaving. Three of them, I saw.”
“Three, yes. They came right overhead. They fired missiles, but a lot of them missed. Some didn’t. The one direct hit, that was a good one.”
“I see. The main house. Is anyone else alive?”
“Some,” she said. “Some. It’s bad, Frank.”
He nodded. He caught sight of Andy, now, standing in the skewed doorway of the communications center. He looked about ready to drop from exhaustion. Somehow, though, he managed a grin, the smirking one-side-of-the- mouth Andy-grin that always looked so sneaky and false to Frank. But that grin was a welcome sight now.
Frank went trotting over to him.
“You okay?”
The grin became a weary smile. “Fine, yes. Real fine. A little concussion, is all. Not too serious. Slight dislocation of the brain, nothing more. But the whole communications system got wrecked. If you were wondering why I’ve been off the air, now you know.” Andy pointed to the crater on the path. “They didn’t miss by much. And the main house—”
“I can see.”
“We were leading a charmed life up here for a hell of a long time, boy. But I guess we tried one little trick too many. It all happened very fast, the raid. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, blam, blam, blam, and they were here and gone. Of course, they might come back and finish the job half an hour from now.”
“You think?”
“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”
“Where are the others?” Frank asked, glancing around. “What about my father?”
Andy hesitated just a moment too long. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Frank. Anson was in the main house when the bomb hit it.—I’m very sorry, Frank. Very sorry.”
A dull thudding sensation was all that Frank felt. The real shock, he suspected, was going to hit later.
“My father was in there with him,” Andy added. “My mother, too.”
“Oh, Andy. Andy.”
“And also your father’s sister.” Andy stumbled over the name. “—Les—Leh—Lesl—” He was right at the edge of collapse, Frank realized.
“Leslyn,” Frank supplied. “You ought to go inside and get off your feet, Andy.”
“Yes. I really should, shouldn’t I?” But he stayed where he was, bracing himself against the frame of the door. His voice came to Frank as though from very far away: “Mike is okay. Cassandra, too. And La-La. Lorraine, I mean. Peggy was pretty badly hurt. She may not pull through. I’m not sure what happened to Julie. The whole ranch-hand compound got smashed. But Khalid’s place wasn’t even touched. It’s the infirmary for the survivors, right now. Mike and Khalid went into the main house and brought out anybody who was still alive, just before the roof fell in. Cassandra’s looking after them.”
Frank made a vague sound of acknowledgment. Turning away from Andy for a moment, he stared across the way, toward the burning building. Through his numbed mind went the thought of the Colonel’s books, of the maps and charts in the chart room, of all that history of the vanished free human world going up in flames.
He wondered why he should think about anything as irrelevant as that just now.
“My brothers and sisters?” he asked.
“Most of them okay, just shaken up. But one of your brothers died. I don’t know if it was Martin or James.” Andy gave him a sheepish look. “Sorry about that, Frank: I never could keep them straight in my head.” In a mechanical way he went on, now that Frank had started him going again: “My sister Sabrina, she’s okay. Not Irene. As for Jane—Ansonia—”
“All right,” Frank said. “I don’t need to hear the whole list now. You ought to get yourself over to Khalid’s house and lie down, Andy. You hear me? Go over there and lie down.”
“Yeah,” Andy said. “That sounds like a good idea.” He went lurching away.
Frank glanced up and off toward the left, where the road that came from town could be seen, snaking along the flank of the mountain. The other cars would be arriving soon—Cheryl, Mark, Charlie. Some splendid homecoming this would to be for them, too, after the excitement of the grand and glorious expedition to Los Angeles. Perhaps they already knew of the mission’s failure. But then, to learn of the raid on the house, to see the damage, to hear of the deaths—
Rasheed was the only one who would ride with the blow, Frank suspected, out of the entire group that had gone to Los Angeles. The strangely superhuman Rasheed, who had been designed and constructed by his father, the equally strange Khalid, to handle any kind of jolt without batting an eye. That eerie detachment of his, the otherworldly calm that had allowed him to venture right into the den of Entity Prime and fasten a bomb to the wall: that would carry him through the shock of returning to the gutted ranch without any difficulty at all. Of course, Rasheed’s mother and father and brothers and sisters hadn’t been touched. And he might not have given a damn about the success or failure of the mission in the first place. Did Rasheed give a damn about anything? Probably not.
And very likely that was the attitude they would all need to cultivate now: detachment, indifference, resignation. There was no hope left, was there? No remaining fantasies to cling to now.
He walked slowly back toward the parking area.
Cindy was still standing by his car, running her hands over its sleek flanks in a weird caressing way. It occurred to Frank that the frail old woman’s mind must be gone, that she had been driven insane by the noise and fury of the bombing raid; but she turned toward him as he approached, and he saw the unmistakable clear, cool look of sanity in her eyes.
“He told you who the dead ones are?” she asked him.
“Most of them, I guess. Steve, Lisa, Leslyn, and others, too. One of my brothers. And my father, too.”
“Poor Anson, yes. Let me tell you something, though. It was just as well, I think, that he died when he did.”
The casual brutality of the remark startled him. But Frank had seen on other occasions how merciless the very old could be.
“Just as well? Why do you say that?”
Cindy waved one claw-like hand at the scene of destruction. “He couldn’t have lived with himself after seeing this, Frank. His grandfather’s ranch in ruins. Half the family dead. And the Entities still running the world, despite everything. He was a very proud man, your father. All the Carmichaels are.” The hand swiveled around and came to rest across Frank’s forearm, grasping it tightly. Her eyes glittered up into his like those of a witch. “It was bad enough for him when Tony was killed. But Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day if he had survived this. Knowing that his second great plan for ridding the world of the Entities had been an even bigger failure than the first—that it had ended by bringing all this wreckage upon us. He’s a lot better off not being here now. A lot better off.”
Better off? Could that be true? Frank needed to think about that.
He disengaged his arm and took a few steps away from her, toward the jumble of blackened granite and flagstone that was the smoldering house, and dug the toe of his boot into the heaps of charred wood scattered along the path.
The bitter smell of burning things stung his nostrils. Cindy’s harsh words sounded and resounded in his ears, a doleful clamor that would not cease.
