Doris lessing, the Golden notebook 10 страница

“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. The 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 spotterplane. Dawson had called them Big Injun Woods, but Chief Wahwayvokah was long gone, and today the new, non-racist 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-per-cent 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 spreadeagled on top of the tank. Most had nosebleeds; a few earbleeds; 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 and 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 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—”

“We've got reports there's a fire in Haven, Andy. Maybe a big one. Have you got that?”

“Yeah, we do. David, I can't take you over there. The information you gave me checks out, though. Fire crews and recon people can't get into town. They get sick. We've lost a forest ranger. A guy I knew. I heard...” He shook his head. “Forget what I heard. It's too goddam crazy to be true.”

Bright's voice was excited. “What was it?”

“Forget it.”

“But you say firemen and rescue crews are getting sick?”

“Recon people. We don't know yet if anyone needs rescuing or not. Then there's the shit about the fire trucks and jeeps. Vehicles seem to stop running when they get close to or into Haven

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You mean it's like the pulse?”

“Pulse? What pulse?” He had a crazy idea that Bright was talking about Henry's pacemaker, that he had known all along.

“It's a phenomenon that's supposed to follow big nuclear bangs. Cars stop dead.”

“Christ. What about radios?”

“Them too.”

“But your friend said—”

“All over the band, yes. Hundreds. Can I at least quote you on the sick firemen and rescue people? The vehicles stopping?”

Yeah. As Mr Source. Mr Informed Source.”

When did you first hear—”

“I don't have time to do the Playboy interview, David. Your Leandro went to Maine Med Supplies for air?”

“Yes.”

“He thought it was the air,” Torgeson said, more to himself than to Bright. “That's what he thought.”

“Andy... you know what else stops cars dead, according to the reports we get from time to time?”

“What?”

“UFOs. Don't laugh; it's true. People who sight flying saucers at close range when they're in their cars or planes almost always say their motors just drop dead until the thing goes away.” He paused. “Remember the doctor who crashed his plane in Newport a week or two ago?”

War of the Worlds, Torgeson thought again. What a pile of crap.

But Henry Amberson's pacemaker had... what? Exploded? Could that possibly be true?

He would make it his business to find out; that you could take to the bank.

“I'll be talking to you, Davey,” Torgeson said, and hung up. It was 3:15. In Haven, the fire which had begun at the old Frank Garrick farm had been burning for over an hour, and was now spreading toward the ship in a widening crescent.

Torgeson called Augusta at 3:17 P. M. At that time, two sedans with a total of six investigators in them were already northbound on 1–95; Fire Station Three had called the A. G. “s office at 2:26 P. M. and the Derry state police barracks at 2:49. The Derry report included the first jagged elements—the crash of the Unity pumper, the death of a forest ranger who appeared to have been shotgunned by his own pacemaker. At 1:30 P. M. mountain time, a Utah state police cruiser stopped at the campground where Jim Tierney and his family were staying. The trooper informed him there was an emergency in his home state. What sort of emergency? That, the trooper had been told, was information obtainable strictly on a need-to-know basis. Tierney could have called Derry, but Torgeson in Cleaves Mills was a guy he knew and trusted. Right now he wanted more than anything else to talk to someone he trusted. He felt a slow sinking dread in his gut, a feeling that it had to be Maine Yankee, had to be something with the state's only nuclear plant, had to be, only something that big could have caused this kind of extraordinary response almost a whole country away. The trooper patched him through. Torgeson was both delighted and relieved to hear Tierney's voice.

At 1:37 P. M. mountain time, Tierney climbed into the shotgun seat of the cruiser and said, “How fast does this go?”

“Sir! This vehicle will go one hundred and thirty miles an hour and I am a Mormon sir and I am not afraid to drive it at that speed sir because I am confident that I will avoid hell! Sir!”

“Prove it,” Tierney said.

At 2:03 P. M. mountain time, Tierney was in a Lear jet with no markings but the U. S. flag on its tail. It had been waiting for him at a small private airfield near Cottonwoods... the town of which Zane Grey wrote in Riders of the Purple Sage, the book which had been Roberta Anderson's favorite as a girl, the one which had perhaps set her course forever as a writer of westerns.

The pilot was in mufti.

“Are you Defense Department?” Tierney asked.

The pilot looked at him with expressionless dark glasses. “Shop.” It was the only word he spoke before, during, or after the flight.

That was how the Dallas Police entered the game.

Haven had been nothing but a wide place in the road, dreaming its life away comfortably off the major Maine tourist tracks. Now it had been noticed. Now people headed there in droves. Since they knew nothing of the anomalies that were being reported in ever-increasing numbers, it was only the growing pall of smoke on the horizon which drew them at first, like moths to candle flames. It would be almost seven o'clock that evening before the state police, with the help of the local National Guard unit, would be able to block off all the roads to the area—the minor ones as well as the major. By morning, the fire would become the greatest forest fire in Maine history. The brisk easterly wind came up right on schedule, and once it did there was no way the fire's running start could be overcome. The realization did not sink in all at once, but it did sink in: the fire might have burned unchecked even if the day had been dead calm. You couldn't do much about a fire you couldn't get to, and efforts to get near this one had unpleasant results.

The spotter-plane had crashed.

A busload of National Guardsmen from Bangor ran off the road, struck a tree, and exploded when the driver's brain simply burst like a tomato loaded with a cherry-bomb. All seventy weekend warriors died, but maybe only half of them in the crash; the rest died in a fruitless effort to crawl out of the poison belt.

Unfortunately, the wind was blowing the wrong way... as Torgeson could have told them.

The forest fire which had begun in Burning Woods had crisped half of Newport before fire-fighters could properly go to work... but by then they were strung too thin to do much good, because the fire line was nearly six miles long.

By seven that evening, hundreds of people—some self-appointed firefighters, most your common garden variety Homo rubberneckus—had poured into the area. Most promptly poured right back out again, faces white, eyes bulging, noses and ears jetting blood. Some came clutching their lost teeth in their hands like pitted pearls. And not a few of them died... not to mention the hundred or so hapless residents of eastern Newport who got a sudden dose of Haven when the wind turned brisk. Most of those died in their houses. Those who came to gawk and stayed to asphyxiate on the rotten air were found in or beside various roads, curled in fetal positions, hands clutched over their stomachs. Most, one G. I. later told the Washington Post (under the strict condition that he not be identified), looked like bloody human commas.

Such was not the fate of Lester Moran, a textbook salesman who lived in a Boston suburb and spent most of his days on the highways of northern New England.

Lester was returning from his annual late-summer selling trip to the schools in the SADs (school administrative districts) of Aroostook County when he saw smoke—a lot of it—on the horizon. This was at about 4:15 P. m.

Lester diverted immediately. He was in no hurry to get back, being a bachelor and having no plans for the next two weeks or so, but he would have diverted even if the national sales conference had been slated to begin the next day with him as the principal speaker and his speech still unwritten. He couldn't have helped himself. Lester Moran was a fire-freak. He had been one since earliest childhood. In spite of having spent the last five days on the road, in spite of a fanny that felt like a board and kidneys that felt like bricks after the constant jolting his sprung car had taken on the shitty roads of townships so small they mostly had map coordinates for names, Lester never thought twice. His weariness fell away; his eyes glowed with that preternatural light which fire-chiefs from Manhattan to Moscow know and dread: the unholy excitement of the natural-born fire-freak.

They are the sort of people fire-chiefs will, however, put to use... if driven to the wall. Five minutes ago, Lester Moran, who had applied to the Boston Fire Department at the age of twenty-one and had been turned down because of the steel plate in his skull, had felt like a whipped dog. Now he felt like a man highballing on amphetamines. Now he was a man who would happily don an Indian pump which weighed almost half as much as he did himself and lug it on his back all night, breathing smoke the way some men breathe the perfume on the nape of a beautiful woman's neck, fighting the flames until the skin of his cheeks was cracked and blistered and his eyebrows were burned clean off.

He exited the turnpike at Newport and burned up the road which led toward Haven.

The plate in his head was the result of a hideous accident which had occurred when Moran was twelve, and a junior-high patrol-boy. A car had struck him and thrown him thirty feet, where his flight had been interrupted by the obdurate brick wall of a furniture warehouse. He had been given last rites; his weeping parents had been told by the surgeon who operated on him that their son would likely die within six hours, or remain in a coma for several days or weeks before succumbing. Instead, the boy had been awake and asking for ice cream before the end of the day.

“I think it's a miracle,” the boy's sobbing mother cried. “A miracle from God!”

“Me too,” said the surgeon who had operated on Lester Moran, and who had looked at the boy's brain through a gaping hole in the poor kid's shattered skull.

Now, closing in on all that delightful smoke, Lester began to feel a little sick to his stomach, but he chalked that up to excitement and then forgot all about it. The plate in his skull was, after all, nearly twice the size of the one in Jim Gardener's. The absence of police, fire, or Forestry Department vehicles in the thickening murk he found both extraordinary and oddly exhilarating. Then he rounded a sharp curve and saw a bronze-colored Plymouth lying upside-down in the left-hand ditch, its red dashboard flasher still pulsing. Written on the side was DERRY F. D.

Lester parked his old Ford wagon, got out, and trotted over to the wreck. There was blood on the steering wheel and the seat and driver's-side floormat. There were droplets of blood on the windshield.

All in all, quite a lot of blood. Lester stared at it, horrified, and then looked toward Haven. Dull red colored the base of the smoke now, and he realized he could actually hear the dull crackle of burning wood. It was like standing near the world's biggest open-hearth furnace... or as if the world's biggest open-hearth furnace had sprouted legs and was slowly approaching him.

Next to that sound, next to the sight of that dull yet titanic red glow, the overturned Derry fire-chief's car and the blood inside began to seem a good deal less important. Lester went back to his own car, fought a brief battle with his conscience, and won by promising himself he would stop at the first pay phone he came to and call the state police in Cleaves Mills... no, Derry. Like most good salesmen, Lester Moran carried a detailed map of his territory in his head, and after consulting it, he decided Derry was closer.

He had to resist the yammering urge to goose the wagon up to its top speed... which was about sixty these days. He expected at every turn of the road to come upon sawhorses blocking the road, a confusion of crazily parked vehicles, the sound of CB radios squealing out messages at top gain, shouting men in hard-hats, helmets, and rubber coats.

It didn't happen. Instead of sawhorses and a boiling nest of activity he came upon the overturned Unity pumper, cab broken off its body, the tank itself still spraying the last of its load. Lester, who was now breathing smoke as well as air that would have killed almost anyone else on earth, stood on the soft shoulder, mesmerized by the limp white arm he saw dangling from the window of the pumper's amputated cab. Rivulets of drying blood ran erratic courses down the arm's white and vulnerable underside.

Something wrong here. Something a lot more wrong than just a woods fire. You got to get out, Les.

But instead he turned toward the fire again and was lost.

The smoky taste in the air was stronger. The sound of burning was now not a crackle but rolling thunder. The truth of it suddenly fell on him like a bucket of cement: No one was fighting this fire. No one at all. For some reason he couldn't understand, they either hadn't been able to get into the area or hadn't been allowed in. As a result, the fire was burning out of control, and with the freshening wind to help, it was growing like a radioactive monster in a horror movie.

The idea made him ill with terror... and excitement... and sick, dark joy. It was bad to feel a thing like that last, but it was there and it was impossible to deny. Nor was he the only one who had felt it. That dark joy had seemed to be a part of every fire-fighter he had ever bought a drink for (which was almost every fire-fighter he'd ever met since he flunked his own 13FD physical).

He fumbled and stumbled back to his car, started it with some difficulty (assuming that in his excitement he had probably almost flooded the damned dinosaur), boosted the air-conditioner all the way up, and headed toward Haven again. He was aware this was idiocy of the purest ray serene—he was, after all, not Superman but a forty-five-year-old textbook salesman who was going bald and who was still a bachelor because he was too shy to ask women for dates. He was not just behaving in an idiotic fashion, either. Harsh as that judgment was, it was still a rationalization. The truth was, he was behaving like a lunatic. And yet he could no more stop himself than a junkie can stop himself when he sees his fix cooking in the spoon.

He couldn't fight it...

...but he could still go see it.

And it would really be something to see, wouldn't it? Lester thought. Sweat was already rolling down his face, as if in anticipation of the heat ahead. Something to see, oh yeah. A forest fire that was for some reason being allowed to rage utterly out of control as they had millions of years ago, when men were little more than a small tribe of hairless monkeys cowering in the twin cradles of the Nile and the Euphrates and the great fires themselves were touched off by spontaneous combustion, strokes of lightning, or meteor-falls instead of drunk hunters who didn't give a shit what they did with their cigarette butts. It would be a bright orange furnace, a firewall ninety feet high in the woods; across the clearings and gardens and hayfields it would race like a Kansas prairie fire in the 1840s, gobbling houses so swiftly they would implode from the sudden change in air-pressure, as houses and factories had done during the World War II firebombings. He would be able to see the road he was on, this very road, disappearing into that furnace, like a highway into hell.

The tar itself, he thought, would first begin to run in sticky little rivulets... and then to burn.

He stepped down harder on the gas, and thought: How could you not go on? When you had a chance—a once-in-a-lifetime chance—to see something like that, how could you not?

“I just don't know how I'm going to explain to my dad, is all,” the Maine Med Supplies clerk said. He wished he had never argued four years ago for expanding their business to include rentals in the first place. His father had thrown that in his face after the old guy rented the flat-pack and never returned it, and now all hell was breaking loose in Haven—the radio said it was a forest fire and then went on to hint that even weirder things might be happening there—and he was betting he'd never see the flat-pack he had rented that morning to the reporter with the thick glasses, either. Now here were two more fellows, state troopers no less, demanding not just one flat-pack each, but six of them.

“You can tell your dad we requisitioned them,” Torgeson said. “I mean, you do provide respiration gear for firemen, don't you?”

“Yes, but—”

“And there's a forest fire in Haven, isn't there?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then get them out here. I don't have time to bullshit.”

“My father is gonna kill me!” he wailed. “That's all we got!”

Torgeson had met Claudell Weems pulling into the parking lot of the barracks just as Torgeson himself was pulling out. Claudell Weems, Maine's only black state trooper, was tall—not as tall as the late Monster Dugan, but a very respectable six-four. Claudell Weems had one gold tooth in the front of his mouth, and when Claudell Weems moved very close to people—suspects, for instance, or a reluctant clerk—and smiled, revealing that sparkling gold incisor, they became very nervous. Torgeson once asked Claudell Weems why this was, and Claudell Weems said he b'leeved it was dat ole black magic. And then laughed until the glass in the barracks windows seemed to tremble in its frames.

Weems now leaned very close to the clerk and employed dat ole black magic dat he wove so well.

When they left Maine Med with the flat-packs, the clerk was not really sure what had happened... except that the black fella had the biggest gold tooth he had ever seen in his life.

The toothless old man who had sold Leandro the T-shirt stood on his porch and watched expressionlessly as Torgeson's cruiser blasted by. When it was gone he went inside and made a phone call to a number most people wouldn't have been able to reach; they would have heard the sirening sound which had infuriated Anne Anderson instead. But there was a gadget on the back of the storekeeper's phone, and soon he was talking to an increasingly harried Hazel McCready.

“So!” Claudell Weems said cheerfully after craning his neck to look at the speedometer, “I see we are driving at just over ninety miles an hour! And since the consensus is that you're probably the shittiest motor-vehicle operator in the entire Maine state police-”

“What fucking consensus?” Torgeson asked.

“My fucking consensus,” Claudell Weems said. “Anyway, that leads to a deduction. The deduction is that I will die very soon. I don't know if you believe in that bullshit about granting a doomed man's last request, but if you do, maybe you'd tell me what this is all about. If you can before we receive our engine-block implants, that is.”

Andy opened his mouth, then closed it again. “No,” he said. “I can't. It's too nuts. Just this much. You may start to feel sick. If you do, put some of that canned air to you right away.”

“Oh, Christ,” Weems said. “The air's been poisoned in Haven?”

“I don't know. I think so.”

“Oh Christ,” Weems said again. “Who spilled what beans?”

Andy only shook his head.

“That's why no one's fighting the fire.” The smoke boiled up from the horizon in a widening swath—mostly white so far, thank God.

“I don't know. I think so. Run one of the bands on the radio.”

Weems blinked as if he thought Torgeson might be crazy. “Which band?”

“Any band.”

So Weems began to run the police band, at first getting nothing but the confused, beginning-to-be-frightened babble of cops and firemen who wanted to fight a fire and somehow couldn't get to where it was at. Then, further down, they heard a request for backup units at the scene of a liquor-store robbery. The address given was 117 Mystic Avenue, Medford.

Weems looked at Andy. “Jeepers-creepers, Andy, I didn't know there was any Mystic Avenue in Medford—in fact, I didn't think there was any avenues at all in Medford. Couple of pulproads, maybe.”

“I think,” Andy said, and his voice seemed to be coming to his own ears from very far away, “that particular squeal is coming from Medford, Massachusetts.”

Two hundred yards over the Haven town line, Lester Moran's motor died. It did not cough; it did not hitch; it did not backfire. It just died, quietly and without fanfare. He got out without bothering to switch off the key.

The steady crackle of the fire filled the whole world, it seemed. The air temperature had gone up at least twenty degrees. The wind was carrying the heavy smoke toward him but up, so the air was breathable. It still had a hot, acrid taste.

Here on the left and right were wide fields—Clarendon land on the right, Ruvall land on the left. It rose in a long, undulating slope toward the woods. In those woods, Lester could see steadily brightening winks of red and orange light; smoke poured up from them in a torrent which was steadily darkening. He could hear the thumping explosions of hollow trees imploding as the fire sucked the oxygen out of them like marrow from old bones. The wind was not straight into his face, but close enough; the fire was going to break out of the woods and into the field in minutes... seconds, maybe. Its rush down to where he stood, face red and running with sweat, might be lethally quick. He wanted to be back in his car before that happened—it would start, of course it would, old gal had never failed him yet—and piling up distance between himself and that red, oncoming beast.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29