The Tommyknockers (94 page)

Around two-thirty that afternoon, Bright suddenly began to think of another Johnny—poor, damned Johnny Smith, who had sometimes touched objects and gotten “feelings” about them. That had been crazy, too, but Bright had believed Johnny Smith, had believed in what Smith said he could do. It was impossible to look into the man's haunted eyes and not believe. Bright was not touching anything which belonged to John Leandro, but he could see his desk across the room, the hood pulled neatly over his word-processor terminal, and he began to get a feeling . . . a very dismal one. He felt that Johnny Leandro might be dead.

He called himself an old woman, but the feeling didn't
go away. He thought of Leandro's voice, desperate and cracking with excitement.
This is my story, and I'm not going to give it up just like that
. Thought of Johnny Smith's dark eyes, his trick of constantly rubbing at the left side of his forehead. Bright's eyes were drawn again and again to Leandro's hooded word-cruncher.

He held out until three o'clock. By then the feeling had become sickening assurance. Leandro was dead. There was just no maybe in it. He might not ever have another genuine premonition in his life, but he was having one now. Not crazy, not wounded, not one of the missing. Dead.

Bright picked up the phone, and although the number he dialed had a Cleaves Mills exchange, both Bobbi and Gard would have known it was really long-distance: fifty-five days after Bobbi Anderson's stumble in the woods, someone was finally calling the Dallas Police.

The man Bright talked to at the Cleaves Mills state police barracks was Andy Torgeson. Bright had known him since college, and he could talk to him without feeling that he had the words
NEWS SNOOP
tattooed on his forehead in bright red letters. Torgeson listened patiently, saying little, as Bright told him everything, beginning with Leandro's assignment to the story of the missing cops.

“His nose bled, his teeth fell out, he got vomiting, and he was convinced that all of this was coming out of the air?”

“Yes,” Bright said.

“Also, this whatever-it-is in the air improved the
shit
out of his radio reception.”

“Right.”

“And you think he might be in a lot of trouble.”

“Right again.”

“I think he might be in a lot of trouble too, Dave—it sounds like he's gone section-eight.”

“I know how it
sounds.
I just don't think that's the way it
is.”

“David,” Torgeson said in a tone of great patience, “it might be possible—at least in a movie—to take over a
little town and poison it somehow. But there's a
highway
that runs through that little town. There's
people
in that little town. And
phones.
Do you think someone could poison a whole town or shut it off from the outside world with no one the wiser?”

“Old Derry Road isn't really a highway,” Bright pointed out. “Not since they finished the stretch of 1-95 between Bangor and Newport thirty years ago. Since then, the Old Derry Road has been more like this big deserted landing strip with a yellow line running down the middle of it.”

“You're not trying to tell me
nobody's
tried to use it lately, are you?”

“No. I'm not trying to tell you much of anything . . . but Johnny
did
say he'd found some people who hadn't seen their relatives in Haven for a couple of months. And some people who tried to go in to check on them got sick and had to leave in a hurry. Most of them chalked it up to food poisoning or something. He also mentioned a store in Troy where this old crock is doing a booming business in T-shirts because people have been coming out of Haven with bloody noses . . . and that it's been going on for weeks.”

“Pipe dreams,” Torgeson said. Looking across the barracks ready-room, he saw the dispatcher sit up abruptly and switch the telephone he was holding to his left hand, so he could write. Something had happened somewhere, and from the goosed look on the dispatcher's face, it wasn't a fender-bender or purse-snatching. Of course, people being what they were, something always
did
happen. And, as little as he liked to admit it, something might be happening in Haven as well. The whole thing sounded as mad as the tea party in
Alice
, but David had never impressed him as a member of the fruits-and-nuts brigade. At least not a card-carrying one, he amended.

“Maybe they are,” Bright was saying, “but their essential pipe-dreaminess can be proved or disproved by a quick trip out to Haven by one of your guys.” He paused. “I'm asking as a friend. I'm not one of Johnny's biggest fans, but I'm worried about him.”

Torgeson was still looking into the dispatcher's office, where Smokey Dawson was now ratchet-jawing away a mile a minute. Smokey looked up, saw Torgeson looking,
and held up one hand, all the fingers splayed.
Wait,
the gesture said.
Something big.

“I'll see that someone takes a ride out there before the end of the day,” Torgeson said. “I'll go myself if I can, but—”

“If I was to come over to Derry, could you pick me up?”

“I'll have to call you,” Torgeson said. “Something's happening here. Dawson looks like he's having a heart attack.”

“I'll be here,” Bright said. “I'm
seriously
worried, Andy.”

“I know,” Torgeson said—there had not even been a flicker of interest from Bright when Torgeson mentioned something big was apparently up, and that wasn't like him at all. “I'll call you.”

Dawson came out of the dispatcher's office. It was high summer, and except for Torgeson, who was catching, the entire complement of troopers on duty was out on the roads. The two of them had the barracks to themselves.

“Jesus, Andy,” Dawson said. “I dunno what to make of
this.
”

“Of what?” He felt the old tight excitement building in the center of his chest—Torgeson had his own intuitions from time to time, and they were accurate within the narrow band of his chosen profession. Something big, all right. Dawson looked as if someone had hit him with a brick. That old tight excitement—most of him hated it, but part of him was a junkie for it. And now that part of him made a sudden exhilarating connection—it was irrational but it was also irrefutable. This had something to do with what Bright had just called about.
Somebody get the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter, plop the Dormouse into the pot,
he thought.
I think the tea party's getting under way.

“There's a forest-fire in Haven,” Dawson said. “
Must
be a forest-fire. Report says it's probably in Big Injun Woods.”

“Probably?
What's this
probably
shit?”

“The report came from a fire-watch station in China Lakes,” Dawson said. “They logged smoke over an hour ago. Around two o'clock. They called Derry Fire Alert and Ranger Station Three in Newport. Engines were sent from Newport, Unity, China, Woolwich—”

“Troy? Albion? What about
them?
Christ, they
border
the town!”

“Troy and Albion didn't report.”

“Haven itself?”

“The phones are dead.”

“Come on, Smokey, don't break my balls.
Which
phones?”

“All
of them.” He looked at Torgeson and swallowed. “Of course, I haven't verified that for myself. But that isn't the nuttiest part. I mean, it's pretty crazy, but—”

“Go on and spill it.”

Dawson did. By the time he finished, Torgeson's mouth was dry.

Ranger Station Three was in charge of fire control in Penobscot County, at least as long as a fire in the woods didn't develop a really broad front. The first task was surveillance; the second was spotting; the third was locating. It sounded easy. It wasn't. In this case, the situation was even worse than usual, because the fire had been reported from twenty miles away. Station Three called for conventional fire engines because it was still technically possible that they might be of some use: they hadn't been able to reach anyone from Haven who could tell them one way or the other. As far as the fire wardens at Three knew, the fire could be in Frank Spruce's east pasture or a mile into the woods. They also sent out three two-man crews of their own in four-wheel-drive vehicles, armed with topographical maps, and a spotter plane. Dawson had called them Big Injun Woods, but Chief Wahwayvokah was long gone, and today the new, nonracist name on the topographical maps seemed more apt: Burning Woods.

The Unity fire engines arrived first . . . unfortunately for them. Three or four miles from the Haven town line, with the growing pall of smoke still at least eight miles distant, the men on the pumper began to feel ill. Not just one or two; the whole seven-man crew. The driver pressed on . . . until he suddenly lost consciousness behind the wheel. The pumper ran off Unity's Old Schoolhouse Road and crashed into the woods, still a mile and a half shy of Haven. Three men were killed in the crash; two bled to death. The two survivors had literally crawled out of the area on hands and knees, puking as they went.

“They said it was like being gassed,” Dawson said.

“That was them on the phone?”

“Christ, no. The two still alive are on their way to Derry Home in an amb'lance. That was Station Three. They're trying to get things together, but right now it looks like there's a hell of a lot more going on in Haven than a forest-fire. But that's spreading out of control, the Weather Service says there's going to be an easterly wind by nightfall, and it don't seem like no one can get in there to put it out!”

“What else do they know?”

“Jack
shit!”
Smokey Dawson exclaimed, as if personally offended. “People who get close to Haven get sick. Closer you get, the sicker you are. That's all anyone knows, besides something's burning.”

Not a single fire unit had gotten into Haven. Those from China and Woolwich had gotten closest. Torgeson went to the anemometer on the wall and thought he saw why. They'd been coming from upwind. If the air in and around Haven was poisoned, the wind was blowing it the other way.

Dear God, what if it's something radioactive?

If it was, it was like no kind of radiation Torgeson had ever heard of—the Woolwich units had reported one-hundred-percent engine failure as they approached the Haven town line. China had sent a pumper and a tanker. The pumper quit on them, but the tanker kept running and the driver had somehow managed to reverse it out of the danger zone with vomiting men stuffed into the cab, clinging to the bumpers, and spread-eagled on top of the tank. Most had nosebleeds; a few, ear-bleeds; one had a ruptured eye.

All of them had lost teeth.

What kind of fucking radiation is
THAT?

Dawson glanced into the dispatcher's booth and saw that all of his incoming lines were lighted.

“Andy, the situation's still developing. I gotta—”

“I know,” Torgeson said, “you've got to go talk to crazy people. I've got to call the attorney general's office in Augusta and talk to other crazy people. Jim Tierney's the best A.G. we've had in Maine since I put on this uniform, and do you know where
he
is this gay day, Smokey?”

“No.”

“On
vacation,”
Torgeson said with a laugh that was slightly
wild “First one since he took the job. The only man in the administration that might be able to understand this nuttiness is camping with his family in Utah. Fucking
Utah!
Nice, huh?”

“Nice.”

“What the fuck's going on?”

“I don't know.”

“Any other casualties?”

“A forest ranger from Newport died,” Dawson said reluctantly.

“Who?”

“Henry Amberson.”

“
What?
Henry?
Christ!
”

Torgeson felt as if he had been hit hard in the pit of the stomach. He had known Henry Amberson for twenty years—the two of them hadn't been best friends, nothing like it, but they had played some cribbage together when times were slow, done a little fly-fishing. Their families had taken dinner together.

Henry, Jesus, Henry Amberson. And Tierney was in fucking
Utah.
“Was he in one of the Jeeps they sent out?”

“Yeah. He had a pacemaker, you know, and—”

“What? What?” Torgeson took a step toward Smokey as if to shake him.
“What?”

“The guy driving the Jeep apparently radioed in to Three that it exploded in Amberson's chest.”

“Oh my Jesus Christ!”

“It's not sure yet,” Dawson said quickly. “Nothing is. The situation is still developing.”

“How could a pacemaker
explode?”
Torgeson asked softly.

“I don't know.”

“It's a joke,” Torgeson said flatly. “Either some weird joke or something like that radio show that time.
War of the Worlds.”

Timidly Smokey said: “I don't think it's a joke . . . or a hoax.”

“Neither do I,” Torgeson said. He headed for his office and the telephone.

“Fucking
Utah,”
he said softly, and then left Smokey Dawson to try to keep up with the increasingly unbelievable information that was coming in from the area of which Bobbi Anderson's farm was the center.

Torgeson would have called the A.G.'s office first if Jim Tierney hadn't been in fucking Utah. Since he was, he put it off long enough to make a quick call to David Bright at the Bangor
Daily News
.

“David? It's Andy. Listen, I—”