It Came Out of the Sky”, Creedence Clearwater Revival 20 страница

And Haven, Gardener thought now, running the pumps up to full power, is like a smoke-filled room. They were sick here at first... they were like a bunch of kids learning to smoke cornshucks out behind the barn. But now they like the air in the room, and why not? They're the ultimate chainsmokers. It's in the air they breathe, and God knows what kinds of physiological changes are going on in their brains and bodies. Lung sections show formation of oat cells in the lung tissue of people who have only been smoking for eighteen months. There's a high incidence of brain tumors in towns where there are high-pollution milling operations or, God save us, nuclear reactors. So what is this doing to them?

He didn't know—he had seen no surface, observable changes except for the loss of teeth and the increased shortness of temper. But he didn't think they'd chase him very far if he split. They might begin by lighting out after him with the fervor of a posse in a Republic western, but he somehow thought they would lose interest very quickly... as soon as the withdrawal symptoms set in.

He got all four pumps running at top speed, swelling the creek into a wide stream almost at once. Then he began the day's work of checking the U-clamps which held the hoses still.

If he got away, his choices were two: keep his mouth shut or blow the whistle. He knew that, for a variety of reasons, he would probably keep quiet. Which meant simply dealing himself—writing off the last month of back-breaking labor, writing off any chance to change the suicidal course of world politics at a stroke, most of all writing off his good friend and erstwhile lover Bobbi Anderson, who had been in absentia for the best part of two weeks now.

Third option: Get rid of it. Blow it up. Destroy it. Make it no more than another vague rumor, like the supposed aliens in Hangar 18.

In spite of his dull fury at the insanity of nuclear power and the energyswilling technocratic pigs who had created it and underwritten it and refused to see its dangers even in the wake of Chernobyl, in spite of his depression at the AP wirephoto of the scientists advancing the Black Clock to two minutes before midnight, he fully recognized the possibility that destroying the ship might be the best thing he could possibly do. The oxidation of whatever had been impregnated in the surface of its hull (deliberately, he had no doubt) had created a cornucopia of mind-blowing gadgets out here; God alone knew what wonderful things might be waiting inside. But there was the other stuff, wasn't there? The neurosurgeon in the crashed plane, that old man and the big state cop, maybe the lady constable, Mrs McCausland, maybe the two other state cops who had disappeared, maybe even the Brown kid... how much of this could be laid at the door of this thing he was staring at, which was jutting out of the ground like the breeching snout of the greatest white whale ever dreamed of? Some? All? None of the above?

Gardener was sure of one thing—it wasn't the last.

That the ship in the earth was a font of creation was undeniable... but it was also the wrecked craft of an unknowable species from somewhere far out in the blackness—creatures whose minds might be as different from those of human beings as human minds were from the minds of spiders. It was a marvelous, improbable artifact shining in the hazy sunlight of this Sunday morning... but it was also a haunted house where demons might still walk between the walls and in the hollow places. There were times when he would look at it and feel his throat fill up with strangeness, as at the sight of flat eyes staring up at him from the earth.

But get rid of it how? Blow it up how? Even supposing he wanted to, how would he do it? The packet charges they had used to chop up the bedrock holding the ship fast were more powerful than dynamite, but they didn't even scratch the hull of the thing. Was he supposed to trot off to Limestone Air Force Base, steal an A-bomb, moving with the silky, unbelievable smoothness of Dirk Pitt in a Clive Cussler novel? And wouldn't it be funny, wouldn't it really be the last laugh, if he actually did manage to get a nuke and set it off, only to discover that all he'd really managed to do was to set the ship, still uncannily unharmed and unscratched, free at a stroke?

Those were his options, the third of which was not an option at all... and apparently his hands had known more than his brain, for while he went on turning them over in his mind for the umptieth time, he had gone calmly about the morning's work—driving the pumps up to full blast and making sure that the dumper hoses were solidly planted. Now he was back at the trench, checking the sucker hoses, and the level of the water. He was happy to find he needed a powerful flashlight to see the water—it was falling rapidly. He guessed that blasting and excavation could begin again by Wednesday, Thursday at the latest... and once they got going again, the work would go fast. The rock of an aquifer was spongy and large-pored. They wouldn't need to waste time digging glory-holes for explosives, because there would be enough natural spots for not just exploding radios but satchel charges. The next phase would be like moving from a dense, gluey batter to a freshly risen dough.

Gard stood bent over the cut in the earth for some time, shining the big light into the black depths. Then he clicked it off, meaning to inspect the clamps again. Here it was, only eight-thirty in the morning, and already he wanted a drink.

He turned around.

Bobbi was standing there.

Gardener's mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap after a moment of gaping and started toward her, fully expecting this hallucination to grow transparent, then be gone. But Bobbi stayed solid, and Gard saw that she had lost a great deal of hair—her brow, a pale and shining white, extended back nearly to the middle of her skull, leaving the world's biggest widow's peak in the center. Nor were these newly exposed sections of skull the only pale things about her; she looked like someone who had been through a terrible debilitating illness. Her right arm was in a sling. And

—and she's wearing makeup. Pan-Cake makeup. I'm pretty sure that's what it is she's laid it on heavy the way a lady does when she wants to cover up a bruise. But it's her... Bobbi... no dream...

His eyes suddenly filled with tears. Bobbi doubled, then trebled. It wasn't until then—that moment—that he realized just how scared he had been. And how lonely.

“Bobbi?” he asked hoarsely. “Is it really you?”

Bobbi smiled, that old sweet smile he loved so well, the one that had saved him from his own idiot self so often. It was Bobbi. It was Bobbi and he loved her.

He went to her, put his arms around her, laid his tired face against her neck. He had done this before, too.

“Hello, Gard,” she said, and began to cry.

He was crying too. He kissed her. Kissed her. Kissed her.

His hands were suddenly all over her; her free one was on him.

No, he said, still kissing her. No, you can't

Shh. I have to. It's my last chance, Gard. Our last chance.

Kissed. They kissed. Oh they kissed and now her shirt was unbuttoned and this was not the body of a sex-goddess, it was white and sickish, the muscles flabby, the breasts saggy, but he loved it and he kissed her and kissed her and their tears were all over each other's faces.

Gard my dear, my dear, always my

shhhh

Oh please I love you

Bobbi I love

love

kiss me

kiss

yes

Pine needles under them. Sweetness. Her tears. His tears. They kissed, kissed, kissed. And as he entered her, Gard realized two things at once: how much he had missed her, and that not a single bird was singing. The woods were dead.

Kissed.

Gard used his shirt, which wasn't very clean anyway, to wipe swatches of brown makeup from his naked body. Had she come out here expecting to make love to him? Something it might be just as well not to think about. Now, anyway.

Although they both should have been Thanksgiving dinner for the mosquitoes and noseeums and moose-flies, spouting sweat as they had been doing, he hadn't a single bite. He didn't think Bobbi had any, either. It's not only an IQ booster, he thought, looking at the ship, it's got every insect repellent on the market beat hollow.

He tossed his shirt aside and touched Bobbi's face, running a finger down her cheek, picking up a little more of the makeup. Most of it, however, had either been sweated off... or washed away by her tears.

“I hurt you,” he said.

You loved me, she answered.

“What?”

You hear me, Gard. I know you do.

“Are you angry?” he asked, aware that the barriers were going up again, aware that he was acting again, aware that it was over, all the things they'd had were finally over. These were sorry things to be aware of. “Is that why you won't talk to me?” He paused. “I wouldn't blame you. You've put up with a lot of shit from me over the years, woman.”

“I was talking to you,” she said, and, sorry as he was to be lying to her after loving her, he was glad to sense her doubt. “With my mind.”

“I didn't hear.”

“You did before. You heard... and you answered. We talked, Gard.”

We were closer to... that.” He flagged an arm at the ship.

She smiled wanly up at him and put her cheek against his shoulder. With most of the makeup scrubbed away, her flesh had an unsettling translucence even her illness, whatever it had been, could not account for.

“Did I? Hurt you?”

“No. Yes. A little.” She smiled. It was that old Bobbi Anderson go-to-hell grin, but a final tear ran slowly down her cheek nonetheless. “It was worth it. We saved the best for last, Gard.”

He kissed her gently, but now her lips were different. The lips of the New and Improved Roberta Anderson.

“First, last, or in the middle, I didn't have any business making love to you, and you don't have any business out here.”

“I look tired, I know,” Bobbi said, “and I'm wearing a lot of goop, as you already found out. You were right—I let myself get overtired and I had something like a complete physical breakdown.”

Bullshit, Gardener thought, but he covered this thought with white noise so Bobbi couldn't read it—he did this with barely a conscious thought. Such hiding was becoming second nature to him now.

“The treatment was... radical. It's resulted in some superficial skin problems and some hair loss. But it'll all grow back.”

“Oh,” Gardener said, thinking: You still can't lie for shit, Bobbi. “Well, I'm glad you're all right. But you maybe ought to take a couple of days off, put your feet up—”

“No,” Bobbi said quietly. “This is the time for the final push, Gard. We're almost there. We started this, you and me—”

“No,” Gardener said. “You started it, Bobbi. You literally stumbled over it. Back when Peter was alive. Remember?”

Gard saw pain in Bobbi's eyes at the mention of Peter. Then it was gone. She shrugged Gardener's qualification off. “You were here soon enough. You saved my life. I wouldn't be here without you. So let's do it together, Gard. I bet it's no more than another twenty-five feet down to that hatchway.”

Gardener had a strong hunch she was right, but he suddenly didn't feel like admitting it. There was a spike turning and turning in his heart, and the pain was worse than any hangover headache he'd ever had.

“If you think so, I'll take your word for it.”

“What do you say, Gard? One more mile. You and me.”

He sat thoughtfully, looking at Bobbi, noticing again how still, how almost malignant the woods seemed with no birdsong in them.

This is how it would be—this is how it will be—if one of their asshole power plants ever does melt down. The people will have smarts enough to get out—if they're warned in time, that is, and if the power plant in question and the NRC have balls enough to tell them—but you can't tell an owl or woodpecker to clear the area. You can't tell a scarlet tanager not to look at the fireball. So their eyes will melt and they'll just go flapping around, blind as bats, running into trees and the sides of buildings until they starve to death or break their necks. Is this a spaceship, Bobbi? Or is it a great big containment housing that's already leaking? It has, hasn't it? That's why these woods are so quiet, and that's why the Polyester-Clad Neurologist Bird fell out of the sky on Friday, isn't it?

“What do you say, Gard? One more mile?”

So where's the good solution? Where's peace with honor? Do you run? Do you turn it over to the American Dallas Police so they can use it on the Soviet Dallas Police? What? Any new ideas, Gard?

And suddenly he did have an idea... or the glimmer of one.

But a glimmer was better than nothing.

He hugged Bobbi with a lying arm. “Okay. One more mile.”

Bobbi's grin started to widen... and then it became a look of curious surprise. “How much did he leave you, Gard?”

“How much did who leave me?”

“The Tooth Fairy,” Bobbi said. “You finally lost one. Right there in the front.”

Startled and a little afraid, Gard raised his hand to his mouth. Sure enough, there was a gap where one of his incisors had been yesterday.

It had started, then. After a month working in the shadow of this thing., he had foolishly assumed immunity, but it wasn't so. It had started; he was on his way to becoming New and Improved.

On his way to “becoming.”

He forced an answering smile. “I hadn't noticed,” he said.

“Do you feel any different?”

“No,” Gard said truthfully. “Not yet, anyway. What do you say, you want to do some work?”

“I'll do what I can,” Bobbi said. “With this arm

“You can check the hoses and tell me if any of them are starting to come loose. And talk to me.” He looked at Bobbi with an awkward smile. “None of those other guys knew how to talk, man. I mean, they were sincere, but...” He shrugged. “You know?”

Bobbi smiled back, and Gardener saw another brilliant, unalloyed flash of the old Bobbi, the woman he had loved. He remembered the safe dark harbor of her neck and that screw in his heart turned again. “I think I do,” she said, “and I'll talk your ear off, if that's what you want. I've been lonely, too.”

They stood together, smiling at each other, and it was almost the old way, but the woods were silent with no birdsong to fill them up.

The love's over, he thought. Now it's the same old poker game, except the Tooth Fairy came last night and I guess the bastard will be back tonight. Probably along with his cousin and his brother-in-law. And when they start seeing my cards, maybe exposing that glimmer of an idea like an ace in the hole, it'll be all over. In a way, it's funny. We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H. G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.

“I want to have a look into the trench,” Bobbi said.

“Okay. You'll like the way it's draining, I think.”

Together they walked into the shadow cast by the ship.

Monday, August 8th:

The heat was back.

The temperature outside of Newt Berringer's kitchen window was seventynine at a quarter past seven that Monday morning, but Newt wasn't in the kitchen to read it; he was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, inexpertly applying his late wife's makeup to his face and cursing the way the sweat made the Pan-Cake clump up. He had always thought makeup a lot of harmless ladies” foofraw, but now, trying to use it according to its original purpose—not to accent the good but to conceal the bad (or, at least, the startling)—he was discovering that putting on makeup was like giving someone a haircut. It was a fuck of a lot harder than it looked.

He was trying to cover up the fact that, over the last week or so, the skin of his cheeks and forehead had begun to fade. He knew, of course, that it had something to do with the trips he and the others had made into Bobbi's shed—trips he could not remember afterwards; only that they had been frightening but even more exhilarating, and that he had come out all three times feeling ten feet tall and ready to have sex in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers. He knew enough to associate what was happening with the shed, but at first he had thought it was simply a matter of losing his usual summer tan. In the years before an icy winter afternoon and a skidding bread truck had taken her, his wife Elinor liked to joke that all you needed to do was to put Newt under one ray of sun after the first of May and he turned as brown as an Indian.

By last Friday afternoon, however, he was no longer able to fool himself about what was going on. He could see the veins, arteries, and capillaries in his cheeks, exactly as you could see them in that model he'd gotten his nephew Michael two Christmases ago—The Amazing Visible Man, it was called. It was damned unsettling. It wasn't just being able to see into himself, either; when he pressed his fingers against his cheeks, the cheekbones felt definitely squashy. It was as if they were... well... dissolving.

I can't go out like this, he thought. Jesus, no.

But on Saturday, when he had looked in the mirror and realized after some thought and a lot of squinting that the gray shadow he was seeing through the side of his face was his own tongue, he had almost flown over to Dick Allison's.

Dick answered the door looking so normal that for a few terrible moments Newt believed this was happening to him and him alone. Then Dick's firm, clear thought filled his head, making him weak with relief: Christ, you can't go around looking like that, Newt. You'll scare people. Come in here. I'm going to call Haze].

(The phone, of course, was really not necessary, but old habits died hard.)

In Dick's kitchen, under the fluorescent ring in the ceiling, Newt had seen clearly enough that Dick was wearing makeup—Hazel, Dick said, had shown him how to put it on. Yes, it had happened to all the others except Adley, who had gone into the shed for the first time only two weeks ago.

Where does it all end, Dick? Newt had asked uneasily. The mirror in Dick's hallway drew him like a magnet and he stared at himself, seeing his tongue behind and through his pallid lips, seeing a tangled undergrowth of small, pulsing capillaries in his forehead. He pressed the tips of his fingers against the shelf of bone over his eyebrows, hard, and saw faint finger indentations when he took them away again—they were like fingermarks in hard wax, right down to the discernible loops and sworls of his fingerprints sunk into the livid skin. Looking at that had made him feel sick.

I don't know, Dick had answered. He was talking on the phone with Hazel at the same time. But it doesn't really matter. It's going to happen to everyone eventually. Like everything else. You know what I mean.

He knew, all right. The first changes, Newt thought, looking into the mirror on this hot Monday morning, had in many ways been even worse, even more shocking, because they had been so... well, intimate.

But he had gone a ways toward getting used to it, which only went to show, he supposed, that a person could get used to anything, given world enough and time.

Now he stood by the mirror, dimly hearing the deejay on the radio informing his listening audience that an influx of hot southern air coming into the area meant they could look forward to at least three days and maybe a week of muggy weather and temps in the upper eighties and low nineties. Newt cursed the coming humid weather—it would make his hemorrhoids itch and burn, it always did—and went on trying to cover his increasingly transparent cheeks, forehead, nose and neck with Elinor's Max Factor Pan-Cake. He finished cursing the weather and went fluently on to the makeup with never a break

in his monologue, having no idea that makeup grew old and cakey after a long enough period of time (and this particular lot had been in the back of a bathroom drawer since long before Elinor's death in February 1984).

But he supposed he would get used to putting the crap on... until such time as it was no longer necessary, anyhow. A person could get used to damn near anything. A tentacle, white at its tip, then shading to rose and finally to a dark blood-red as it thickened toward its unseen base, fell out through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Almost as if to prove his thesis, Newt Berringer only tucked it absently back in and went on trying to get his dead wife's makeup to spread evenly on his disappearing face.

Tuesday, August 9th:

Old Doc Warwick slowly pulled the sheet up over Tommy Jacklin and let it drop. It billowed slightly, then settled. The shape of Tommy's nose was clearly defined. He'd been a handsome kid, but he'd had a big nose, just like his dad.

His dad, Bobbi Anderson thought sickly. Someone's going to have to tell his dad, and guess who's going to be elected? Such things shouldn't bother her anymore, she knew—things like the Jacklin boy's death, things like knowing she would have to get rid of Gard when they reached the ship's hatchway—but they sometimes still did.

She supposed that would burn away in time.

A few more trips to the shed. That was all it would take.

She brushed aimlessly at her shirt and sneezed.

Except for the sound of the sneeze and the stertorous breathing of Hester Brookline in the other bed of the makeshift little clinic the doc had set up in his sitting-cum-examination room, there was only shocked silence for a moment.

Kyle: He's really dead?

No, I just like to cover “em up that way sometimes for a joke, Warwick said crossly. Shit, man! I knew he was going at four o'clock. That's why I called you all here. After all, you're the town fathers now, ain't you?

His eyes fixed for a moment on Hazel and Bobbi.

Excuse me. And two town mothers.

Bobbi smiled with no humor. Soon there was going to be only one sex in Haven. No mothers; no fathers. Just another Burma-Shave sign, you might say, on the Great Road of “Becoming.”

She looked from Kyle to Dick to Newt to Hazel and saw that the others looked as shocked as she felt. Thank God she was not alone, then. Tommy and Hester had gotten back all right—ahead of schedule, actually, because when Tommy started to feel really ill only three hours after they had driven out of the Haven-Troy area, he had begun to push it, moving as fast as he could.

The damn kid was really a hero, Bobbi thought. I guess the best we can do for him is a plot in Homeland, but he was still a hero.

She looked toward where Hester lay, pallid as a wax cameo, breathing dryly, eyes closed. They could have—maybe should have—come back when they felt the headaches coming on, when their gums began to bleed, but they hadn't even discussed it. And it wasn't only their gums. Hester, who had been menstruating lightly all during the “becoming” (unlike older women, teenage girls didn't ever seem to stop... or hadn't yet, anyway), made Tommy stop at the Troy General Store so she could buy heavier sanitary napkins. She had begun to flow copiously. By the time they had bought three car batteries and a good used truck battery in the NewportDerry Town Line Auto Supply on Route 7, she had soaked four Stayfree Maxi-pads.

Their heads began to ache, Tommy's worse than Hester's. By the time they had gotten half a dozen Allstate batteries at the Sears store and well over a hundred C, D, and doubleand triple-A cells at the Derry Tru-Value Hardware

(which had just gotten a new shipment in), they both knew they had to get back... quick. Tommy had begun to hallucinate; as he drove up Wentworth Street, he thought he saw a clown grinning up at him from an open sewer manhole—a clown with shiny silver dollars for eyes and a clenched white glove filled with balloons.

Eight miles or so out of Derry, headed back toward Haven on Route 9, Tommy's rectum began to bleed.

He pulled over, and, face flaming with embarrassment, asked Hester if he could have some of her pads. He was able to explain why when she asked, but not to look at her while he did so. She gave him a handful and he went into the bushes for a minute. He came back to the car weaving like a drunk, one hand outstretched.

“You got to drive, Hester,” he said. “I'm not seeing so hot.”

By the time they got back to the town line, the front seat of the car was splashed with gore and Tommy was unconscious. By then Hester herself was able to see only through a dark curtain; she knew it was four of a bright summer's afternoon, but Doc Warwick seemed to come to her out of a thundery purple twilight. She knew he was opening the door, touching her hands, saying It's all right, my darling, you are back, you can let go of the wheel now, you are back in Haven. She was able to give a more or less coherent account of their afternoon as she lay in the protective circle of Hazel McCready's arms, but she had joined Tommy in unconsciousness long before they got to the doc's, even though Doc was doing an unheard-of sixty-five, his white hair flying in the wind.

Adley McKeen whispered: What about the girl?

Well, her blood pressure's dropping, Warwick said. The bleeding's stopped. She is young and tough. Good country stock. I knew her parents and her grandparents. She'll pull through. He looked around at them grimly, his watery old blue eyes not deceived by their makeup, which in this light made them look like half a dozen ghastly suntanned clowns.

But I don't think she'll ever regain her sight.

There was a numb silence. Bobbi broke it:

That's not so.

Doc Warwick turned to look at her.

She'll see again, Bobbi said. When the “becoming” is finished, she'll see. We'll all see with one eye then.

Warwick met her gaze for a moment, and then his own eyes dropped. Yes, he said. I guess. But it's a damned shame, anyway.

Bobbi agreed without heat. Bad for her. Worse for Tommy. No bed of roses for their folks. I have to go and see them. I could use company.

She looked at them, but their eyes dropped away from hers a pair at a time and their thoughts dulled into a smooth hum.

All right, Bobbi said, I'll manage. I guess.

Adley McKeen spoke up humbly. I guess I'll come with you if you want, Bobbi. Keep you company.

Bobbi gave him a tired yet somehow brilliant smile and squeezed his shoulder. Thank you, Ad. For the second time, thank you.

The two of them went out. The others watched them, and when they heard Bobbi's truck start, they turned toward where Hester Brookline lay unconscious, hooked up to a sophisticated life-support machine whose component parts had come from two radios, a turntable record-changer, the auto-tuning device from Doc's new Sony TV...

...and, of course, lots of batteries.

Wednesday, August 10th:

In spite of his tiredness, his confusion, his inability to stop playing Hamlet, and -worst of all—the persistent feeling that things in Haven were going wronger all the time, Jim Gardener had managed the booze pretty well since the day Bobbi had come back and they had lain together on the fragrant pine needles. Part of the reason was pure self-interest. Too many bloody noses, too many headaches. Some of this was undoubtedly the influence of the ship, he thought—he hadn't forgotten that he'd had one after Bobbi had repeatedly urged him to touch her find, and he had seized the leading edge of the ship and felt that rapid, numbing vibration—but he was wise enough to know that his steady drinking was doing its part, as well. There had been no blackouts per se, but there had been days when his nose had bled three and four times. He had always tended toward hypertension, and he had been told more than once that steady drinking could worsen what was a borderline condition.

So he was doing fairly well until he heard Bobbi sneezing.

That sound, so terribly familiar, called up a set of memories and a sudden terrible idea exploded in his mind like a bomb.

He went into the kitchen, opened the hamper and looked at a dress—the one she'd been wearing yesterday evening. Bobbi did not see this inspection; she was asleep. She had sneezed in her sleep.

Bobbi had gone out the previous evening with no explanation—she had seemed nervous and upset to Gardener, and although both of them had worked hard all day, Bobbi had eaten almost no supper. Then, near sundown, she had bathed, changed into the dress, and driven off into the hot, still, muggy evening. Gardener had heard her come back around midnight, had seen the brilliant flare of light as Bobbi went into the shed. He thought she came back in around first light, but wasn't sure.

All day today she had been morose, speaking only when spoken to, and then only in monosyllables. Gardener's clumsy efforts to cheer her up met with no success. Bobbi skipped supper again tonight, and just shook her head when Gardener suggested a few cribbage hands on the porch, just like in the old days.

Bobbi's eyes, looking out of that weird coating of flesh-colored makeup, had looked somber and wet. Even as Gardener noticed this, Bobbi yanked a handful of Kleenex from the table behind her and sneezed into them two or three times, rapidly.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29