Midnight (51 page)

35

Harry heard noises downstairs—the elevator, then someone in the third-floor bedroom. He tensed, figuring two miracles were one too many to hope for, but then he heard Sam calling to him from the bottom of the ladder.

“Here, Sam! Safe! I’m okay.”

A moment later Sam climbed into the attic.

“Tessa? Chrissie?” Harry asked anxiously.

“They’re downstairs. They’re both all right.”

“Thank God.” Harry let out a long breath, as if it had been pent up in him for hours. “Look at these brutes, Sam.”

“Rather not.”

“Maybe Chrissie was right about alien invaders after all.”

“Something stranger,” Sam said.

“What?” Harry said as Sam knelt beside him and gingerly pushed Worthy’s mutated body off his legs.

“Damned if I know,” Sam said. “Not even sure I want to know.”

“We’re entering an age when we make our own reality, aren’t we? Science is giving us that ability, bit by bit. Used to be only madmen could do that.”

Sam said nothing.

Harry said, “Maybe making our own reality isn’t wise. Maybe the natural order is the best one.”

“Maybe. On the other hand, the natural order could do with some perfecting here and there. I guess we’ve got to try. We just have to hope to God that the men who do the tinkering aren’t like Shaddack. You okay, Harry?”

“Pretty good, thanks.” He smiled. “Except, of course, I’m still a cripple. See this hulking thing that was Worthy? He was leaning in to rip my throat out, I had no more bullets, he had his claws at my neck, and then he just fell dead, bang. Is that a miracle or what?”

“Been a miracle all over town,” Sam said. “They all seemed to have died when Shaddack died … linked somehow. Come on, let’s get you down from here, out of this mess.”

“They killed Moose, Sam.”

“The hell they did. Who do you think Chrissie and Tessa are fussing over downstairs?”

Harry was stunned. “But I heard—”

“Looks like maybe somebody kicked him in the head. He’s got this bloody, skinned-up spot along one side of his skull. Might’ve been knocked unconscious, but he doesn’t seem to’ve suffered a concussion.”

36

Chrissie rode in the back of the van with Harry and Moose, with Harry’s good arm around her and Moose’s head in her lap. Slowly she began to feel better. She was not herself, no, and maybe she never would feel like her old self again, but she was better.

They went to the park at the head of Ocean Avenue, at the east end of town. Tessa drove right up over the curb, bouncing them around, and parked on the grass.

Sam opened the rear doors of the van so Chrissie and Harry could sit side by side in their blankets and watch him and Tessa at work.

Braver than Chrissie would have been, Sam went into the nearby residential areas, stepping over and around the dead things, and jump-started cars that were parked along the streets. One by one, he and Tessa drove them into the park and arranged them in a huge ring, with the engines running and the headlights pointing in toward the middle of the circle.

Sam said that people would be coming in helicopters, even in the fog, and that the circle of light would mark a proper landing pad for them. With twenty cars, their headlights all blazing on high beam, the inside of that ring was as bright as noon.

Chrissie liked the brightness.

Even before the landing pad was fully outlined, a few people began to appear in the streets, live people, and not weird looking at all, without fangs and stingers and claws, standing fully erect—altogether normal, judging by appearances. Of course, Chrissie had learned that you could never confidently judge anyone by appearances because they could be anything inside; they could be something inside that would astonish even the editors of the
National Enquirer.
You couldn’t even be sure of your own parents.

But she couldn’t think about that.

She didn’t
dare
think about what had happened to her folks. She knew that what little hope she still held for their salvation was probably false hope, but she wanted to hold on to it for just a while longer, anyway.

The few people who appeared in the streets began to gravitate toward the park while Tessa and Sam finished pulling the last few cars into the ring. They all looked dazed. The closer they approached, the more uneasy Chrissie became.

“They’re all right,” Harry assured her, cuddling her with his one good arm.

“How can you be sure?”

“You can see they’re scared shitless. Oops. Maybe I shouldn’t say ‘shitless,’ teach you bad language.”

“‘Shitless’ is okay,” she said.

Moose made a mewling sound and shifted in her lap. He probably had the kind of headache that only karate experts usually got from smashing bricks with their heads.

“Well,” Harry said, “look at them—they’re scared plenty bad, which probably tags them as our kind. You never saw one of those others acting scared, did you?”

She thought about it a moment. “Yeah. I did. That cop who shot Mr. Shaddack at the school. He was scared. He had more fear in his eyes, a lot more, than I’ve ever seen in anybody else’s.”

“Well, these people are all right, anyway,” Harry told her as the dazed stragglers approached the van. “They’re some of the ones who were scheduled to be converted before midnight, but nobody got around to them. Must be others in their houses, barricaded in there, afraid to come out, think the whole world’s gone crazy, probably think aliens are on the loose, like you thought. Besides, if these people were more of those shape-changers, they wouldn’t be staggering up to us so hesitantly. They’d have loped right up the hill, leaped in here, and eaten our noses, plus whatever other parts of us they consider to be delicacies.”

That explanation appealed to her, even made her smile thinly, and she relaxed a little.

But just a second later, Moose jerked his burly head off her lap, yipped, and scrambled to his feet.

Outside, the people approaching the van cried out in surprise and fear, and Chrissie heard Sam say, “What the blazing
hell?”

She threw aside her warm blankets and scrambled out of the back of the van to see what was happening.

Behind her, alarmed in spite of the reassurances that he had just given her, Harry said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

For a moment she wasn’t sure what had startled everyone, but then she saw the animals. They swarmed through the park—scores of mice, a few grungy rats, cats of all descriptions, half a dozen dogs, and maybe a couple of dozen squirrels that had scampered down from the trees. More mice and rats and cats were racing out of the mouths of the streets that intersected Ocean Avenue, pouring up that main drag, running pell-mell, frenzied, cutting through the park and angling over to the county road. They reminded her of something she’d read about once, and she only had to stand there for a few seconds, watching them pour by her, before she remembered: lemmings. Periodically, when the lemming population became too great in a particular area, the little creatures ran and ran, straight toward the sea, into the surf, and drowned themselves. All these animals were acting like lemmings, tearing off in the same direction, letting nothing stand in their way, drawn by nothing apparent and therefore evidently following an inner compulsion.

Moose jumped out of the van and joined the fleeing multitudes.

“Moose, no!” she shouted.

He stumbled, as if he had tripped over the cry that she had flung after him. He looked back, then snapped his head toward the county road again, as if he had been jerked by an invisible chain. He took off at top speed.

“Moose!”

He stumbled once more and actually fell this time, rolled, and scrambled onto his feet.

Somehow Chrissie knew that the image of lemmings was apt, that these animals were rushing to their graves, though away from the sea, toward some other and more hideous death that was part of all the rest that had happened in Moonlight Cove. If she did not stop Moose, they would never see him again.

The dog ran.

She sprinted after him.

She was bone weary, burnt out, aching in every muscle and joint, and afraid, but she found the strength and will to pursue the Labrador because no one else seemed to understand that he and the other animals were running toward death. Tessa and Sam, smart as they were, didn’t get it. They were just standing, gaping at the spectacle. So Chrissie tucked her arms against her sides, pumped her legs, and ran for all she was worth, picturing herself as Chrissie Foster, World’s Youngest Olympic Marathon Champion, pounding around the course, with thousands cheering her from the sidelines.
(“Chrissie, Chrissie, Chrissie, Chrissie …”)
And as she ran, she screamed at Moose to stop, because every time he heard his name, he faltered, hesitated, and she gained a little ground on him. Then they were through the park, and she nearly fell in the deep ditch alongside the county road, leaped it at the last instant, not because she saw it in time but because she had her eye on Moose and saw
him
leap something. She landed perfectly, not losing a stride. The next time Moose faltered in response to his name, she was on him, grabbing at him, seizing his collar. He growled and nipped at her, and she said, “Moose,” in such a way as to shame him. That was the only time he tried to bite her but, Lord, he strained mightily to pull loose. Hanging on to him took everything she had, and he even dragged her, big as she was, about fifty or sixty feet along the road. His big paws scrabbled at the blacktop as he struggled to follow the wave of small animals that was receding into the night and fog.

By the time the dog calmed down enough to be willing to go back toward the park, Tessa and Sam joined Chrissie. “What’s happening?” Sam asked.

“They’re all running to their deaths,” Chrissie said. “I just couldn’t let Moose go with them.”

“To their deaths? How do you know?”

“I don’t know. But … what else?”

They stood on the dark and foggy road for a moment, looking after the animals, which had vanished into the blackness.

Tessa said, “What else indeed?”

37

The fog was thinning, but visibility was still no more than about a quarter of a mile.

Standing with Tessa in the middle of the circle of cars, Sam heard the choppers shortly after ten o’clock, before he saw their lights. Because the mist distorted sound, he could not tell from which direction they were approaching, but he figured they were coming in from the south, along the coast, staying a couple of hundred yards out to sea, where there were no hills to worry about in the fog. Packed with the most sophisticated instruments, they could virtually fly blind. The pilots would be wearing night-vision goggles, coming in under five hundred feet in respect of the poor weather.

Because the FBI maintained tight relationships with the armed services, especially the Marines, Sam pretty much knew what to expect. This would be a Marine Reconnaissance force composed of the standard elements required by such a situation: one CH-46 helicopter carrying the recon team itself—probably twelve men detached from a Marine Assault Unit—accompanied by two Cobra gunships.

Turning around, looking in every direction, Tessa said, “I don’t see them.”

“You won’t,” Sam said. “Not until they’re almost on top of us.”

“They fly without lights?”

“No. They’re equipped with blue lights, which can’t be seen well from the ground, but which give them a damned good view through their night-vision goggles.”

Ordinarily, when responding to a terrorist threat, the CH-46—called the “Sea Knight,” officially, but referred to as “The Frog” by grunts—would have gone, with its Cobra escorts, to the north end of town. Three fire teams, composed of four men each, would have disembarked and swept through Moonlight Cove from north to south, checking out the situation, rendezvousing at the other end for evacuation as necessary.

But because of the message Sam had sent to the Bureau before Sun’s links to the outside world had been cut off, and because the situation did not involve terrorists and was, in fact, singularly strange, SOP was discarded for a bolder approach. The choppers overflew the town repeatedly, descending to within twenty or thirty feet of the treetops. At times their strange bluish-green lights were visible, but nothing whatsoever could be seen of their shape or size; because of their Fiberglas blades, which were much quieter than the old metal blades that once had been used, the choppers at times seemed to glide silently in the distance and might have been alien craft from a far world even stranger than this one.

At last they hovered near the circle of light in the park.

They did not put down at once. With the powerful rotors flinging the fog away, they played a searchlight over the people in the park who stood outside the illuminated landing pad, and they spent minutes examining the grotesque bodies in the street.

Finally, while the Cobras remained aloft, the CH-46 gentled down almost reluctantly in the ring of cars. The men who poured from the chopper were toting automatic weapons, but otherwise they didn’t look like soldiers because, thanks to Sam’s message, they were dressed in biologically secure white suits, carrying their own air-supply tanks on their backs. They might have been astronauts instead of Marines.

Lieutenant Ross Dalgood, who looked baby-faced behind the faceplate of his helmet, came straight to Sam and Tessa, gave his name and rank, and greeted Sam by name, evidently because he’d been shown a photograph before his mission had gotten off the ground. “Biological hazard, Agent Booker?”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said, as the chopper blades cycled down from a hard rhythmic cracking to a softer, wheezing chug.

“But you don’t know?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“We’re the advance,” Dalgood said. “Lots more on the way—regular Army and your Bureau people are coming in by highway. Be here soon.”

The three of them—Dalgood, Sam, and Tessa—moved between two of the encircling cars, to one of the dead things that lay on a sidewalk bordering the park.

“I didn’t believe what I saw from the air,” Dalgood said.

“Believe it,” Tessa said.

“What the hell?” Dalgood said.

Sam said, “Boogeymen.”