Last Gasp (36 page)

He didn’t have fond memories of Miami from his previous visit and this trip had done nothing to modify his opinion.

Distantly the horn sounded and he ran gratefully toward it. His heart hammered in his chest and his rapid breathing fogged the faceplate. He wasn’t in shape, Chase realized, even for someone in his mid-forties. But that strange guttural cry, he guessed, had done as much to make his heart race as the physical exertion. What the hell was it?

Nearing the corner he slowed to a walk and buckled the automatic into its holster. Glass crunched underfoot, making him stop dead in his tracks. There was a queer dragging sound and he spun on his heel, seeing a childhood terror made real, lurching toward him from a doorway with reaching arms and dead eyes staring straight ahead. The outer layer of flesh had peeled away, leaving a drab pasty white. There were eyes but no eyelids. There was a gash of a mouth and two raw holes in place of nostrils. The bone of the skull showed through the peeling strips of skin, and in his stricken terror, when the mind seizes on irrelevant details, Chase saw that the fingernails on the outstretched hands had fallen off leaving red tatters of flesh.

If this thing had once been human it was human no more.

Then the most remarkable thing about it struck him like a blow.
It wasn’t wearing a mask!
It was breathing the denuded atmosphere and surviving.

Chase’s hand fumbled with the holster flap and gripped the butt of the automatic. He stepped backward as the nonhuman thing shambled toward him. A moment later Chase dropped through a trapdoor as his foot slid from beneath him and he hit the slimy pavement with a jarring thump that dug the air tank into the small of his back as if he’d been rabbit-punched.

Chase gasped with pain. Frantically he tried to squirm away as the nonhuman thing stooped over him, its face looming nearer like a rotting skull. The mouth opened. A few jagged pegs of black teeth remained in the red weeping gums. A string of brackish brown saliva leaked from its mouth and dribbled onto his faceplate.

The groping hands reached for him. Tugging desperately at the automatic, Chase at last got it free. But the nonhuman thing now had hold of his mask. One quick wrench and he was as good as dead: The toxic mix of gases would kill him even if oxygen starvation didn’t.

In his panic Chase thought he was blacking out. The nonhuman thing’s head had vanished. Huge dark spots obscured his vision. He couldn’t see—just as he hadn’t heard the explosion as Dan’s shot smashed the thing between the eyes and scattered shards of bone and red-speckled brain matter ten yards across the street.

Cheryl helped Dan remove the headless body, but even without its weight Chase was unable to stand. They got him to his feet, one supporting each arm. His mouth was clamped shut. He gagged and vomit spurted from his nostrils.

“Hurry, for God’s sake!” Cheryl started dragging him along the street. “If he’s sick inside the mask he’ll suffocate!”

Chase was bent forward, gagging and choking, the mask filling up. Drowning in his own vomit, he was led blindly up the street.

A few miles north of Fort Pierce they encountered civilization again: the pitted and pockmarked two-lane blacktop that was all that remained of the Florida turnpike. Regular patrols by the National Guard made the road reasonably safe.

Above the old 55 mph speed limit signs a warning had been added in large red capitals:
DON’T BREATHE THE AIR!

Some people still lived this far south, surviving in isolated communities. Like bacteria and insects, it seemed, the human race could adapt to the most adverse and hostile conditions. Chilling to think, Chase brooded, that in time they might adapt to the point of actual mutation—was the creature with which he’d come face-to-face in Miami Beach the portent of things to come?

Ten years ago even the gloomiest of doom-laden prophecies hadn’t prepared them for the catastrophic decline they were now experiencing. Maybe Bill Inchcape had known, based on DELFI’s predictions, but if so he’d kept tight-lipped about it. There was a sick irony in the fact that Theo Detrick’s prognosis had been vindicated by events and the man himself raised to the misty heights of prophet in the popular imagination.

Chase bore some of the responsibility for that. His book One Minute
to Midnight,
published in 2000, had drawn extensively on Theo’s research, quoting whole chunks from his treatise “Back to the Precambrian.” He’d also included information passed on to him by Boris Stanovnik concerning the Project Arrow scheme, and—the real clincher, which had given the book number-one spot in Time’s list for thirty-four consecutive weeks—sensational revelations about the top-secret U.S. military plan code-named DEPARTMENT STORE. To this day Chase didn’t know the identity of the person who had sent the dossier to Cheryl; but rumor had it that heads had rolled like ninepins in the Defense Department when the facts were revealed. General “Blindeye” Wolfe had taken the brunt of it. Stripped of his rank and dishonorably discharged, he committed suicide one year to the day following the book’s publication, which, symbolic gesture or pure coincidence nobody knew, served to fan speculation to white heat and did nothing to harm sales either.

The theme of One Minute
to Midnight,
encapsulated in its title, was that the superpowers were deliberately engineering global catastrophe by means of the so-called environmental war, and that this wanton tampering with the forces of nature had brought the planet to within sixty seconds—following Chase’s analogy of a hand sweeping around a twelve-hour clockface—of ultimate disaster. Then he hit them with the killer punch. Crazy and criminal as this military strategy was, the planet had beaten the superpowers to it and was already, thanks to man’s two centuries of unchecked industrial growth, on a steep downward path and possibly already past the point of no return.

What the military sought to bring about, the factory furnace and the automobile had already accomplished.

The book polarized opinion in both the lay and scientific press. It was accused of being “paranoid fantasy.” Other critics dismissed it as a piece of trashy sensationalism—panic-mongering at its worst to get onto the best-seller lists—and the author’s bid to become the “ecology guru” of the twenty-first century. Chase had expected this. He had been less prepared for the abuse and vilification heaped upon his head by many leading scientists who, in a positive fury (or envy?), leveled the charge that he was “betraying” science.

All the fuss and controversy had the predictable effect of boosting sales and making Chase an internationally known figure. In the eighteen months after publication he was hardly off the television screen. He achieved the respect and notoriety, in pretty well equal measure, that many commentators could only compare to how Ralph Nader had been regarded thirty years before.

The success of the book and his subsequent fame served another useful purpose too—they saved his life.

He had returned from New York with the unshakable conviction that powerful vested interests were determined to silence him. Precisely who these interests were he could only guess at. But the man at JFK (who Chase had belatedly recognized as the same man who had threatened Cheryl in Geneva) was in the pay of a multinational or a government agency or a military group; it was immaterial which, to Chase at least, because the end result was clearly to shut him up at all costs. Dead journalists tell no tales.

For fourteen months Chase worked solidly on the book, living with Dan in a remote croft near the small town of Dornoch on the east coast of Scotland. There they settled down in the tiny two-room dwelling with its whitewashed walls and red corrugated iron roof, with not a neighbor in sight. No electricity, no phone, no TV. Oil lamps, a camping gas stove, and a log fire for when the bleak and bitterly cold northern winter closed in.

In the spring of 2000 he delivered the typescript, and seven months later it was published. Prior to its publication Sentinel had run three long extracts from it, which to John Ware’s delight lifted the circulation past the million mark. By that time Chase’s fame was as good as life insurance. In any case, silencing the author when the articles and book were in print would have been a somewhat futile gesture, particularly when One Minute to Midnight, with its damning indictment of what the Americans and Russians were secretly up to, was available in every bookstore throughout the developed world.

Chase looked back on those months in the Scottish croft, just the two of them, father and son leading a life that was basic, simple, and wholly satisfying, with a painful nostalgia that brought a stab to the heart. He would never again feel so close to Dan, nor be so absorbed in a piece of work to which he was totally committed and believed in absolutely.

It was a murky yellowy dusk by the time they reached the outskirts of Orlando. Atmospherics down here produced sometimes weird, sometimes beautiful, effects.

After the experience in Miami, Chase wasn’t keen to spend the night in a deserted city. It might not turn out to be as deserted as all that— there could be a settlement there, and friendly or hostile it was impossible to know.

So at the National Guard checkpoint where the turnpike intersected the Bee Line Expressway he asked a young guardsman if he could recommend a secure overnight place to stay. The guardsman was dressed like a worker in an atomic reactor—enclosed from head to foot in a black protective cocoon and linked by umbilical airline to the concrete cube of the guardhouse. Through the transparent faceplate they could see he wore a white helmet and had a throat mike taped just below his thyroid cartilage.

He was friendly and helpful. “Take the next exit onto highway twenty-seven. About fifteen miles west of here you’ll come to a transit camp for immigrants heading north. I guess you could stay there. Follow the signs to Disney World and you can’t miss it.”

Dan’s face lit up. “Is it near Disney World?” he asked, nose pressed against the cab window.

The guardsman gave a wry grin through the faceplate. “Hell, son, it is Disney World. But you won’t find any rides or amusements anymore.” He spoke to Chase. “They’ve set up the transit camp there, with accommodations for ten thousand people. That’s your best bet within fifty miles of here.” He stepped back to survey the door panel with its green symbol on a white ground.

“What is this, a survey for Earth Foundation?” he asked with interest.

It would take too long to explain, so Chase merely nodded. “That’s right.”

“I saw the guy who wrote that
Midnight
book on TV, you know? The ecologist? I thought he was right. I agree with a lot of it, your aims and everything. In fact I was gonna join but it ain’t permitted for service personnel.” The black shroud waggled derisively. “Damn Defense Department rules!”

“I know,” Chase said. “But we appreciate your support all the same.”

The guardsman waved them off. “Keep up the good work,” he called out as they pulled away.

“Another convert,” Cheryl said and glanced impishly across the cab. “You should have asked him for a donation, famous TV ecologist.”

“So famous he didn’t even recognize me.”

“Maybe you didn’t have this then.” Cheryl leaned across and tugged at his beard. “I bet you grew it so you wouldn’t be recognized by your fans,” she taunted him. “My wonderful self-effacing hero.”

Chase laughed, grateful that he had someone who could unfailingly prick the bubble of his own pomposity. It was a trait he’d never admired in himself, yet couldn’t shake. Cheryl was the perfect antidote. Cynical and yet tolerant, she possessed an incisive mind coupled with plain common sense. Six years together hadn’t dulled the edge of their relationship, and he prayed it would endure come what may.

It was sad to see what had befallen Disney World.

The pronged dome of Space Mountain (he’d ridden that alone, when Angie had chickened out) housed the reception center, and the other buildings on the sprawling site had been converted into dining halls, dormitories, and general living quarters. Remembering what it had been like when the huge entertainment complex catered to thousands of visitors every single day and seeing it now, pressed into such cheerless, austere service, depressed him intensely.

The International Hotel, connected by monorail to the Magic Kingdom, billeted a division of the National Guard. In past days the monorail had transported millions of visitors to and from the parking lots, and it was still in working order. The EPCOT Center nearby, “city of the future,” was now the National Guard headquarters for southern Florida.

The air-conditioning plant had been adapted to make each building a sealed enclosure, filtering the outside air and supplying an enriched oxygen mixture up to the required 20 percent by volume.

“You must have been about nine or ten when they shut it down,” Chase told Dan. “That’s about the perfect age to experience something like this. I’m sorry now I didn’t bring you. The Haunted Mansion, Starflight to Saturn, Pirates of the Caribbean, Space Mountain, the Rocky Mountain Railroad.”

“I used to go to the one in Los Angeles,” Cheryl said. “The sky over Disneyland always looked different from everywhere else, a kind of deeper blue. The sun was always shining. When I was a kid it was a make-believe world at the other end of the rainbow.”

“Knowing what I’ve missed makes me feel a lot better,” Dan said lugubriously. “I always thought I’d been born twenty years too late.” Confronted by the bleakly functional reality, these golden memories seemed to mock them, figments of a lost age. The picture-book colors on the towers and turrets had faded, the once sparkling gilt on the carrousels peeling and dull. There was now a tragic sadness about the place, like a ghost town still echoing dimly with long-ago music and fireworks and children’s laughter.

They lined up at the steel counter in one of the crowded dining rooms, which Chase recognized as having housed the circular cinema—a 360-degree screen enclosing the audience. Torn strips hung from the metal framework. Many of the people, he noted, looked haggard and pale. There were the unmistakable signs of cardiovascular and respiratory illness. The survival of the fittest wasn’t just a textbook phrase anymore.