The Omicron Legion (43 page)

“What the fuck, Jack?”

“I told you, the process doesn’t work instantaneously. That water’s got plenty to cool. Just get your ass up here!”

McCracken reached the ladder and began to climb. The rungs themselves were boiling now. Bubbles of steam rose off them, and he could feel the intensity of the heat even through his gloves. It was like climbing out of a furnace, the conditions made all the worse by his already damaged fingers. They were raw now, and he had trouble closing them around the rungs to supply him the rapid lift he needed. The agony deepened by the instant, making it impossible to place himself beyond it.

“Come on, Blaine. You’ve got it!” Jack Tunnel said. “Get your ass the fuck up here!”

Blaine gazed up at the hatch through his faceplate and tried to smile. The additional two catwalks had been left behind, leaving him barely another fifteen rungs to scale. Unless the cooling water was too late to stop the core from melting down, he was going to make it.

And then the eighth rung from the top gave way under his grasp. McCracken wasn’t sure whether it had melted from its casing or simply snapped. Whatever the case, he felt himself falling, falling into a superheated hellhole from which there could be no return.

The explosion shook the steel structure. Johnny felt himself totter on the edge and grabbed for the nearest support beam for balance. Abraham was wavering badly, the girder becoming a tightrope for him. Wareagle seized the opportunity to lunge out sideways with both legs leading, holding fast to the beam as he did. The heavy blow connected with Abraham’s side and staggered him further. The
Wakinyan
twisted to grab Johnny’s legs, but Wareagle kicked out again and then locked Abraham’s neck in between the knees.

Abraham managed to tear free of the grasp, his momentum forcing him forward. Johnny kicked back at him in the same direction, and the blow caught the
Wakinyan
square in the head and pitched him over.

He headed straight for the huge hunting blade, which still protruded bloodily through the slat in the girder.

Abraham’s scream was awful as his midsection was impaled upon the knife. He spasmed and writhed there as Johnny leaped two girders over, closer to the street side and the hovering helicopter, to gaze downward.

A huge irregular crater lay where a large portion of the street had been just seconds before. Bodies lay everywhere, some moving, some not. Sirens wailed. Johnny’s eyes searched for and found the president’s limousine. Rubble had compressed much of its top and carved huge dents in as many places as not. It had escaped the major brunt of the blast, though, and Johnny could tell from the congestion of Secret Service agents around its perimeter that the president was safe inside.

Johnny might have let himself feel triumphant if the scent of blood hadn’t burned into his nostrils. It caused him to swing around even before he heard the wheezing sound Abraham made as he regained his feet on the nearby girder, his insides spilling out. The warning gave Wareagle the instant he needed to grasp the steel support rod that was now beneath him and swing it around, trying to knock the raging
Wakinyan
aside.

Abraham’s lunge had brought him too close to Johnny for the Indian to reach him with a sweeping blow, so he changed the motion to a savage jab. The collective force drove the heavy steel through the
Wakinyan’s
already gaping wound, shredding more flesh and bones before emerging through Abraham’s back. His wail became a gurgle. Johnny let go of the rod and shrank back from the bitter stink of blood and oozing innards.

Abraham dropped downward off the girder, the steel rod looking like a spike driven through his body. The rod caught on a pair of neighboring girders, halting his fall and driving the steel straight up against his sternum. His feet twitched and spasmed and Johnny watched death take him at last.

The Indian heard the approach of another elevator coming up from the building’s rear and took one last look at the glaze-eyed Abraham.

“We’re up!” announced the head of the Secret Service unit that poured tentatively onto the high steel girders.

“Shoot to kill!” ordered Arnold Triesman from his position next to the battered limousine, a deep ringing still cursing his ears.

“Nothing to shoot at,” the team leader replied after a pause.

“What?”

“I got one target already big-time dead and nothing else.”

“Say again?”

“No Indian, Alley Cat. He gave us the slip again.”

McCracken saw the rope at the beginning of his drop. By the time he could grasp it, he was already even with what remained of the shot-to-hell dummy that had preceded him down the shaft.

“Blaine!” he heard Tunnel yell through the communicator in his helmet.

McCracken felt his shoulders strain and pull from the sudden pressure. His neck snapped backward in whiplash effect. He slammed forward and struck the ladder with enough force to jiggle it and crack his faceplate. But he had managed to hold fast to the rope supporting the radiation suit that was leaking stuffing through the dozens of bullet holes pierced through it.

“Hold on, you son of a bitch!” Tunnel shouted.

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“Not until we pull you up. We fry, friend, we fry together.”

McCracken felt himself being hoisted upward, powerless now to help in the slightest. All he could do was keep squeezing the rope that had become his lifeline. The rungs of the ladder passed by him in slow, surreal fashion, in an almost dreamlike way. And a dream it might well have been, based on the words that reached him as he came within a grasp of the hatch:

“
Critical stage warning is canceled. Critical stage warning is canceled.
”

Patty gawked disbelievingly at Shimada, the loving Hunsecker house servant for twenty years. “You’re the leader! You’re the one Takahashi couldn’t identify!”

Shimada stared around her. “My legacy to inherit and now to lose,
Hana-shan.
”

“Don’t call me that. Don’t ever call me that.”

“It is what you still are, just as I am what I have always been.”

Patty gazed back briefly at the front of the conference room. “You spoke through that mannequin so no one would know it was you.”

“Traditionally, women are not highly regarded in our culture. Accordingly, the illusion was necessary.”

“Dad—”

“You’ve got to leave, Patty,” Phillip Hunsecker interrupted.

“Not without you.”

He shook his head serenely. “No.”

“The boys! Think of the boys!”

“I am.” He looked toward Shimada. “That’s why we’re letting you leave. You must go. Your friends are drawing closer.”

“They’re not my friends! I came alone! For you!”

“Would you have joined us, Patty? Is that what you came for?”

“I…don’t know.”

“Our vision was pure, direct. No one will ever understand.”

“You were going to destroy the country, murder millions!”

Shimada stepped forward. “The deaths would occur, yes, because fitting revenge could be achieved only by reducing America’s great cities to what Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been reduced to. But enough of America would have been left to serve as foundation for a new America,
Hana-shan.
Our America…
Japan’s
America. A new society would have been chartered, rebuilt, and controlled by us. A new and different order that would look to the Rising Sun for direction.”

“Madness!”

“Truth, Patty,” said her father. “We were placed here for a purpose, and now that purpose has failed. Our lives were dedicated to the secrecy of our existence. Without that secrecy we cannot live.”

“Stop it!”

Shimada drew close enough to touch her but didn’t. “The decisions are irreversible now. Our fate was chosen for us long ago. Leave now or you join us in it.”

“For the boys,” her father said. “You’re all they’ve got.”

“No!” Patty wailed. “There’s got to be another answer!”

Shimada and her father backed away, toward the mannequin. She made no motion to follow.

“Please,” she pleaded.

“Go, Patty,” her father said just before the shadows swallowed him. “This is your last chance.”

Patty turned and ran, heart thundering in her chest, eyes clouded with tears. She lost her bearings briefly, then recovered them, finding her way back to the elevator that had brought her down.

The elevator her father had left operational for her, she realized now.

Her tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks as the compartment hurtled upward. Her body felt heavy and used up. When the elevator stopped, she had to drag herself out into the shell of the cover building.

Outside, a rumbling in the ground underfoot shook her senses alert. She bolted into a run toward her waiting helicopter, realizing it had been joined by several others, all packed with armed men.

Patty spotted Sal Belamo standing twenty yards in front of his eager troops, rifle slung over his shoulder. As she ran into his arms, another rumble shook the ground. A blast followed, muffled by the blanket of covering earth. She turned back long enough to see the wooden shack crumble into the ground that had become a mass grave for the Children of the Black Rain.

Epilogue

“WHY DID THEY
do it?” Patty asked Blaine as she sat by his hospital bed.

“Honor,” he replied. “They were following the samurai code. That was what this whole mission was about—and once they failed, there was only one recourse.”

“They could have waited, could have tried again another time.”

Blaine shook his head. “Samurai thinking doesn’t work that way.”

“It makes no sense.” She sighed. “They’re willing to wait almost fifty years for revenge, but not try it a second time.”

Blaine propped himself up as best he could. His hands were wrapped in thick bandages, and his face and neck looked as if he had a severe sunburn.

“You’re talking about a society that has never been able to grasp the ‘live to fight another day’ credo,” he explained. “Plenty of our POWs learned that the hard way in the war. Maybe this is poetic justice, or karma. The Children of the Black Rain got fucked by the very principles that led us to drop the bombs in the first place.”

“They didn’t miss by much. If those nuclear plants had gone up, the country could only have rebuilt itself by depending on the Japanese-owned stockpiles the Children controlled.”

Blaine smiled. “Sound familiar?”

“My God,” Patty realized. “Japan in the aftermath of World War Two.”

“Yup, except with the roles reversed. Again, they didn’t heed their own lessons. They rebuild our world and sometime down the road everything’s set right again, maybe even more so.”

Patty suddenly looked sad. “Not for everyone.”

“How are your brothers?”

“I…haven’t told them yet.”

“Want me there when you do?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether you plan on staying.”

“I didn’t think that was your style.”

“Well, things change.”

“I don’t.”

“Is that a warning?”

“Just an assurance, kid. You know me well enough to count on that much.”

“Better than ever,” Patty acknowledged. “I never really understood you until I faced my father in that bunker. That someone I loved could have fooled me that much…” Her eyes gazed into his knowingly. “It’s why you exist alone, isn’t it? It’s why the only people you let into your life are the same as you. Like Johnny and Sal.”

“And you, Hunsecker?”

“Before—no. Now, yeah, I think so.”

“Uh-uh.”

“What?”

“I said no, kid. I can never remember being anything but the way I am now. If you can remember something different, then forget it. You’ll slip back. My world’s a dark one, where it’s okay to hide for a while. As soon as you start feeling for the light switch, it’s time to go.”

“I won’t.”

“You
will.
We are what we are, Hunsecker, and it’s crazy to try to pretend otherwise.”

Tears filled Patty’s eyes. “So—so what do I do?”

“You go back to your brothers. Maybe you take them out on the ocean for a while. That’s
your
world—the best place for you to make them understand and accept. Then you ease them back into theirs.”

“Like you’ve done for me…”

He looked at her proudly. “You’re learning, Hunsecker.”

“I had a good teacher.”

“You look restless, Blainey,” Wareagle told him two days later.

“The doctors won’t even let me go outside until I heal up. I miss the sun.”

“There are other places to seek light than beyond the window. Look inside yourself.”

“Plenty of blown bulbs.”

“And plenty that aren’t. New ones burn as old ones are extinguished.”

“Your vision is better than mine, Indian.”

“Because I know the right places to look. Your focus is elsewhere.”

McCracken held Wareagle’s stare for a long moment. “We didn’t get all the
Wakinyan,
did we, Indian?”

“We killed all of those whose inward view finds only the dark.”

“Which we were able to do because we’re no different than they are. Better maybe, but not different.”

Johnny’s stare grew reflective. “In the old ways of my people, Blainey, a young warrior must drink the blood of his first kill. My first kill was a wolf that attacked our livestock. But I was not allowed to drink its blood because the blackness of its murderous heart was not worthy to taste. Its death gave nothing to the world because it had nothing to give.” Wareagle’s huge hand touched McCracken’s shoulder. “That is the difference, Blainey.”

“Why do we do it, Indian?”

“
Hanbelachia.
”

“But now that Abraham’s history, you’ve finally passed yours.”

“No. I was wrong, Blainey. The vision quest is not one event, but a continuous series. We keep growing and changing. And each phase we pass into requires its own
Hanbelachia.
The shaman had tried to tell me as much when I was a boy, but I did not realize the truth until my slaying of Abraham left me feeling no different than killing the wolf had. A means to something that has no end.”

“So we keep going.”