The facility had its own fire control team, but it wasn’t anywhere near the smoldering central bunker—at least, as far as Howard could tell. The blue light made his head swim.
Maybe they were all dead. Including his uncle, he thought. Alan Stern had been at the center of this project, that much had been obvious; Stern had been its lord, its shaman, its guiding presence. If the accident was lethal it would have taken Stern first of all. All this fluorescence suggested some kind of radiation, though nothing Howard could pin down—something powerful enough to kick photons out of the air. He knew there was radioactive material at the facility. He had seen the warning labels on the closed bunkers. They had given him a film badge as soon as he passed the gate.
That was why he’d chased the Two Rivers VFD all the way out here. He didn’t think small-town volunteer firemen were trained or equipped to fight radioactive fires. Most likely they weren’t even aware of the danger. They might blunder into an event more deadly than they could guess. So Howard had jumped into his car and rushed after, meaning to warn them—still, meaning to.
But he saw the trucks hesitate and stop, then reverse, wobble, retreat.
He drove down the hillside to meet them.
Assistant Chief Haldane saw the civilian automobile come over the rise, but he was too dazed to worry about it. He had climbed out of his car, vomited once into the young weeds by the side of the road, then sat on a wedge of natural granite with his head in his hands and his stomach still churning.
He didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to speak to anyone. What mattered was that he was beyond the border of blue light, that he had found his way back into the world of sanity. His relief was immense. He took deep, cleansing gulps of air. Pretty soon he would be back in his sane house in the sane town of Two Rivers and this nightmare would be over. All these buildings could burn to the ground as far as he was concerned—the better if they did.
“Chief?”
He spat on the ground to clear the taste of puke from his mouth. Then he looked up. Standing before him in blue jeans and a pressed cotton shirt was a civilian, presumably the man from the automobile—more like a boy, though, Haldane thought, with his pink skin and his bug-eye glasses. Haldane didn’t speak, only waited for this apparition to justify its presence.
“I’m Howard Poole,” the civilian said. “I work at the facility. Or I was supposed to—I would be, if this hadn’t happened. I came because I thought, if you were fighting the fire, you might not know—there might be some radioactivity in there, some particulate matter in the smoke.”
Poole seemed exquisitely uneasy. “Particulate matter,” Haldane said. “Well, thank you, Mr. Poole, but I don’t believe particulate matter is our problem right now.”
“I saw you turn back.”
“Yessir,” Haldane said. “That we did.”
“May I ask why?”
Some of the firefighters had shaken off their queasiness and gathered behind Poole. Chris Shank was there, and Tom Stubbs, both looking demoralized and numb under their helmets and scuffed turnout coats. Haldane said, “You work here, you know more about it than me.”
Poole said, “No—I don’t understand any of this.”
“It’s like we crossed a line,” Chris Shank volunteered. Good old Chris, Haldane thought, never failed to open his mouth when he could just as well keep it shut. “We were heading down to size up the hazard, and it was weird, you know, with all this light and everything, but then we crossed some kind of line and suddenly it was—I mean, you couldn’t tell where you were going or coming from.” He shook his head.
“There are
Haldane frowned. That had been his own perception, true enough.
But Chris Shank was nodding vigorously. “That’s it,” he said. “I saw…”
“Tell the man,” Haldane said. If they were going to talk about this, they might as well speak plainly.
Shank lowered his head. Awe and shame played over his face like light and shadow.
“Angels,” he said finally. “That’s what I saw in there. All kinds of angels.”
Haldane stared at him.
Tom Stubbs was shaking his head vigorously. “Not angels! Nossir! Mister, it was Jesus Christ Himself in there!”
Poole glanced between the two men without comprehension, and the Saturday silence seemed louder now. A crow screeched in the still air.
“You’re both fucked up,” Chief Haldane said.
He looked back into the no-man’s-land of the research facility, so thick with light that it seemed as if a piece of the sky had fallen onto it. He knew what he’d seen. It was quite clear in his mind, despite the nausea, the sense of no-direction that had overtaken him. He remembered it. He remembered it vividly. He would remember it forever.
He said, “There’s no angels in there, and there sure as hell ain’t Jesus Christ. The only thing in there is monsters.”
“Monsters?” Poole said.
Haldane spat into the dry earth a second time, weary of all this. “You heard me.”
What spread through the town that day was not panic but a deep, abiding unease. Rumors passed from backyard to main street to gatepost. By sunset, everyone had heard about the miraculous barricades of virgin forest north and south on the highway. Several had also heard about Chris Shank’s assertion that there were angels flying around the Two Rivers Physical Research. Laboratory. Some few even gave credence to Tom Stubbs’s claim that it was the Second Coming; that Jesus Christ, two hundred fifty feet tall and dressed in Resurrection white, was about to come striding into town—a point of view condemned Sunday morning at nearly every church service in town. That Sunday, all the churches were full.
The weekend rolled on without electrical power, phone service, or adequate explanation. Most people stayed near their families and told each other it would all come clear soon, that the lights would flicker back and the TV would make sense of things. Food stocks began to run low at the few grocery stores open for business. The big supermarket at the Riverview Mall remained closed, and without power for refrigeration, some said, it was just as well—after two days of warm spring weather it must stink like sin in there.
Saturday night, Dex Graham and Howard Poole exchanged accounts of what they had seen. They were careful at first not to strain each other’s credulity; less cautious when they realized they had each witnessed miracles. In the morning they set out to map the perimeters of the town. Dex drove while Howard sat in the passenger seat with a recent survey map, a pencil, and a pair of calipers. Howard marveled at the southern interruption of the highway, then marked it with careful precision on his chart. Similarly the northern limit. Then they followed private roads, logging roads, and the east-west axis of the farm roads. Each ended abruptly in humid pine forest. At the western margin of County Route 5, Howard creased the map with his pencil and said, “We might as well quit.”
“It does get a little monotonous.”
“More than that.” Howard held the map against the dashboard. He had marked every dead end and joined them together: a perfect circle, Dex observed, with the town of Two Rivers in the southeastern quadrant.
Howard used his calipers to mark the center of the circle, but Dex had already seen what it must be: the old Ojibway reserve, the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory, where Howard had seen veils of blue light, and where the fire chief had seen monsters.
