Nightmares And Dreamscapes Part 33

(Screams. Sounds like a toothless old man sucking up mashed potatoes.) Dagbolt: The cabin is full of worms - what appear to be worms, at any rate - which is to say that they really are worms, one realizes - that have apparently extruded themselves from the main satellite - what we took to be - which is to say one means - the cabin is full of floating body parts. These s.p.a.ce-worms apparently excrete some sort of acid - (Booster rockets fired at this point; duration of the burn is 7.2 seconds. This may have been an attempt to escape or possibly to ram the central object. In either case, the maneuver did not work. It seems likely that the blast-chambers themselves were clogged with worms and Captain Lin Yang - or whichever officer was then in charge - believed an explosion of the fuel tanks themselves to be imminent as a result of the clog. Hence the shutdown.) American voice: Oh my Christ they're in my head, they're eating my f.u.c.kin br - (Static.) Dagbolt: I believe that prudence dictates a strategic retreat to the aft storage compartment; the rest of the crew is dead. No question about that. Pity. Brave bunch. Even that fat American who kept rooting around in his nose. But in another sense I don't think - (Static.) Dagbolt: - dead after all because Ching-Ling Soong - or rather, Ching-Ling Soong's severed head, one means to say - just floated past me, and her eyes were open and blinking. She appeared to recognize me, and to - (Static.) Dagbolt: - keep you - (Explosion. Static.) Dagbolt: - around me. I repeat, all around me. Squirming things. They - I say, does anyone know if - (Dagbolt, screaming and cursing, then just screaming. Sounds of toothless old man again.) (Transmission ends.) The Xiaoping/Truman exploded three seconds later. The extrusion from the rough ball nicknamed Star Wormwood had been observed from better than three hundred telescopes earthside during the short and rather pitiful conflict. As the final sixty-one seconds of transmission began, the craft began to be obscured by something that certainly looked like worms. By the end of the final transmission, the craft itself could not be seen at all - only the squirming ma.s.s of things that had attached themselves to it. Moments after the final explosion, a weather satellite snapped a single picture of floating debris, some of which was almost certainly chunks of the worm-things. A severed human leg clad in a Chinese s.p.a.ce suit floating among them was a good deal easier to identify.

And in a way, none of it even mattered. The scientists and political leaders of both countries knew exactly where Star Wormwood was located: above the expanding hole in earth's ozone layer. It was sending something down from there, and it was not Flowers by Wire.

Missiles came next. Star Wormwood jigged easily out of their way and then returned to its place over the hole.

On the Pulsifers' satellite-a.s.sisted TV, more dead people got up and walked, but now there was a crucial change. In the beginning the zombies had only bitten living people who got too close, but in the weeks before the Pulsifers' high-tech Sony started showing only broad bands of snow, the dead folks started trying to get close to the living folks.

They had, it seemed, decided they liked what they were biting.

The final effort to destroy the thing was made by the United States. The President approved an attempt to destroy Star Wormwood with a number of orbiting nukes, stalwartly ignoring his previous statements that America had never put atomic SDI weapons in orbit and never would. Everyone else ignored them, as well. Perhaps they were too busy praying for success.

It was a good idea, but not, unfortunately, a workable one. Not a single missile from a single SDI orbiter fired. This was a total of twenty-four flat-out failures.

So much for modern technology.

And then, after all these shocks on earth and in heaven, there was the business of the one little graveyard right here on Jenny. But even that didn't seem to count much for Maddie because, after all, she had not been there. With the end of civilization now clearly at hand and the island cut off - thankfully cut off, in the opinion of the residents - from the rest of the world, old ways had rea.s.serted themselves with unspoken but inarguable force. By then they all knew what was going to happen; it was only a question of when. That, and being ready when it did.

Women were excluded.

It was Bob Daggett, of course, who drew up the watch roster. That was only right, since Bob had been head selectman on Jenny for about a thousand years. The day after the death of the President (the thought of him and the first lady wandering witlessly through the streets of Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, gnawing on human arms and legs like people eating chicken legs at a picnic was not mentioned; it was a little much to bear, even if the bastid and his blonde wife were Democrats), Bob Daggett called the first men-only Town Meeting on Jenny since sometime before the Civil War. Maddie wasn't there, but she heard. Dave Eamons told her all she needed to know.

'You men all know the situation,' Bob said. He looked as yellow as a man with jaundice, and people remembered his daughter, the one still living at home on the island, was only one of four. The other three were other places . . . which was to say, on the mainland.

But h.e.l.l, if it came down to that, they all had folks on the mainland.

'We got one boneyard here on Jenny,' Bob continued, 'and nothin ain't happened there yet, but that don't mean nothin will. Nothin ain't happened yet lots of places . . . but it seems like once it starts, nothin turns to somethin pretty G.o.ddam quick.'

There was a rumble of a.s.sent from the men gathered in the grammar-school gymnasium, which was the only place big enough to hold them. There were about seventy of them in all, ranging in age from Johnny Crane, who had just turned eighteen, to Bob's great-uncle Frank, who was eighty, had a gla.s.s eye, and chewed tobacco. There was no spittoon in the gym, of course, so Frank Daggett had brought an empty mayonnaise jar to spit his juice into. He did so now.

'Git down to where the cheese binds, Bobby,' he said. 'You ain't got no office to run for, and time's a-wastin.'

There was another rumble of agreement, and Bob Daggett flushed. Somehow his great-uncle always managed to make him look like an ineffectual fool, and if there was anything in the world he hated worse than looking like an ineffectual fool, it was being called Bobby. He owned property, for Chrissake! And he supported the old fart - bought him his G.o.ddam chew!

But these were not things he could say; old Frank's eyes were like pieces of flint.

'Okay,' Bob said curtly. 'Here it is. We want twelve men to a watch. I'm gonna set a roster in just a couple minutes. Four-hour s.h.i.+fts.'

'I can stand watch a h.e.l.luva lot longer'n four hours!' Matt a.r.s.enault spoke up, and Davey told Maddie that Bob said after the meeting that no welfare-slacker like Matt a.r.s.enault would have had the nerve to speak up like that in a meeting of his betters if that old man hadn't called him Bobby, like he was a kid instead of a man three months shy of his fiftieth birthday, in front of all the island men.

'Maybe you can n maybe you can't,' Bob said, 'but we got plenty of warm bodies, and n.o.body's gonna fall asleep on sentry duty.'

'I ain't gonna - '

'I didn't say you,' Bob said, but the way his eyes rested on Matt a.r.s.enault suggested that he might have meant him. 'This is no kid's game. Sit down and shut up.'

Matt a.r.s.enault opened his mouth to say something more, then looked around at the other men - including old Frank Daggett - and wisely held his peace.

'If you got a rifle, bring it when it's your trick,' Bob continued. He felt a little better with a.r.s.enault more or less back in his place. 'Unless it's a twenty-two, that is. If you ain't got somethin bigger'n that, come n get one here.'

'I didn't know the school kep a supply of em handy,' Cal Partridge said, and there was a ripple of laughter.

'It don't now, but it will,' Bob said, 'because every man jack of you with more than one rifle bigger than a twenty-two is gonna bring it here.' He looked at John Wirley, the school princ.i.p.al. ' 'Okay if we keep em in your office, John?''

Wirley nodded. Beside him, Reverend Johnson was drywas.h.i.+ng his hands in a distraught way.

's.h.i.+t on that,' Orrin Campbell said. 'I got a wife and two kids at home. Am I s'posed to leave em with nothin to defend themselves with if a bunch of cawpses come for an early Thanksgiving dinner while I'm on watch?'

'If we do our job at the boneyard, none will,' Bob replied stonily. 'Some of you got handguns. We don't want none of those. Figure out which women can shoot and which can't and give em the pistols. We'll put em together in bunches.'

'They can play Beano,' old Frank cackled, and Bob smiled, too. That was more like it, by the Christ.

'Nights, we're gonna want trucks posted around so we got plenty of light.' He looked over at Sonny Dotson, who ran Island Amoco, the only gas station on Jenny. Sonny's main business wasn't ga.s.sing cars and trucks - s.h.i.+t, there was no place much on the island to drive, and you could get your go ten cents cheaper on the mainland - but filling up lobster boats and the motorboats he ran out of his jackleg marina in the summer. 'You gonna supply the gas, Sonny?'

'Am I gonna get cash slips?'

'You're gonna get your a.s.s saved,' Bob said. 'When things get back to normal - if they ever do - I guess you'll get what you got coming.'

Sonny looked around, saw only hard eyes, and shrugged. He looked a bit sullen, but in truth he looked more confused than anything, Davey told Maddie the next day.

'Ain't got n'more'n four hunnert gallons of gas,' he said. 'Mostly diesel.'

'There's five generators on the island,' Burt Dorfman said (when Burt spoke everyone listened; as the only Jew on the island, he was regarded as a creature both quixotic and fearsome, like an oracle that works about half the time). 'They all run on diesel. I can rig lights if I have to.'

Low murmurs. If Burt said he could do it, he could. He was a Jewish electrician, and there was a feeling on the outer islands, unarticulated but powerful, that that was the best kind.

'We're gonna light that graveyard up like a friggin stage,' Bob said.

Andy Kingsbury stood up. 'I heard on the news that sometimes you can shoot one of them things in the head and it'll stay down, and sometimes it won't.'

'We've got chainsaws,' Bob said stonily, 'and what won't stay dead . . . why, we can make sure it won't move too far alive.'

And, except for making out the duty roster, that was pretty much that.

Six days and nights pa.s.sed and the sentries posted around the little graveyard on Jenny were starting to feel a wee bit silly ('I dunno if I'm standin guard or pullin my pud,' Orrin Campbell said one afternoon as a dozen men stood around the cemetery gate, playing Liars' Poker) when it happened . . . and when it happened, it happened fast.

Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night, and then the gravestone marking the final resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier's boy Michael, who had died of leukemia at seventeen (bad go, that had been, him being their only child and them being such nice people and all), fell over. A moment later a shredded hand with a moss-caked Yarmouth Academy cla.s.s ring on one finger rose out of the ground, shoving through the tough gra.s.s. The third finger had been torn off in the process.

The ground heaved like (like the belly of a pregnant woman getting ready to drop her load, Dave almost said, and hastily reconsidered) a big wave rolling into a close cove, and then the boy himself sat up, only he wasn't anything you could really recognize, not after almost two years in the ground. There were little splinters of wood sticking out of what was left of his face, Davey said, and pieces of s.h.i.+ny blue cloth in the draggles of his hair. 'That was coffin-linin,' Davey told her, looking down at his restlessly twining hands. 'I know that as well's I know m'own name.' He paused, then added: 'Thank Christ Mike's dad dint have that trick.'

Maddie had nodded.

The men on guard, bulls.h.i.+t-scared as well as revolted, opened fire on the reanimated corpse of the former high-school chess champion and All-Star second baseman, tearing him to shreds. Other shots, fired in wild panic, blew chips off his marble gravestone, and it was just luck that the armed men had been loosely grouped together when the festivities commenced; if they had been divided up into two wings, as Bob Daggett had originally intended, they would very likely have slaughtered each other. As it was, not a single islander was hurt, although Bud Meechum found a rather suspicious-looking hole torn in the sleeve of his s.h.i.+rt the next day.

'Prob'ly wa'ant nothin but a blackberry thorn, just the same,' he said. 'There's an almighty lot of em out at that end of the island, you know.' No one would dispute that, but the black smudges around the hole made his frightened wife think that his s.h.i.+rt had been torn by a thorn with a pretty large caliber.

The Fournier kid fell back, most of him lying still, other parts of him still twitching . . . but by then the whole graveyard seemed to be rippling, as if an earthquake were going on there - but only there, noplace else.

Just about an hour before dusk, this had happened.

Burt Dorfman had rigged up a siren to a tractor battery, and Bob Daggett flipped the switch. Within twenty minutes, most of the men in town were at the island cemetery.

G.o.ddam good thing, too, Dave Eamons said, because a few of the deaders almost got away. Old Frank Daggett, still two hours from the heart attack that would carry him off just as the excitement was dying down, organized the new men so they wouldn't shoot each other, either, and for the final ten minutes the Jenny boneyard sounded like Bull Run. By the end of the festivities, the powder smoke was so thick that some men choked on it. The sour smell of vomit was almost heavier than the smell of gunsmoke . . . it was sharper, too, and lingered longer.

And still some of them wriggled and squirmed like snakes with broken backs - the fresher ones, for the most part.

'Burt,' Frank Daggett said. 'You got them chainsaws?'

'I got em,' Burt said, and then a long, buzzing sound came out of his mouth, a sound like a cicada burrowing its way into tree bark, as he dry-heaved. He could not take his eyes from the squirming corpses, the overturned gravestones, the yawning pits from which the dead had come. 'In the truck.'

'Ga.s.sed up?' Blue veins stood out on Frank's ancient, hairless skull.

'Yeah.' Burl's hand was over his mouth. 'I'm sorry.'

'Work y'f.u.c.kin gut all you want,' Frank said briskly, 'but toddle off n get them saws while you do. And you . . . you . . . you . . . you . . . '

The last 'you' was his grandnephew Bob.

'I can't, Uncle Frank,' Bob said sickly. He looked around and saw five or six of his friends and neighbors lying crumpled in the tall gra.s.s. They had not died; they had swooned. Most of them had seen their own relatives rise out of the ground. Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen tree had been part of the crossfire that had cut his late wife to ribbons; he had fainted after observing her decayed, worm-riddled brains exploding from the back of her head in a grisly gray splash. 'I can't. I c - '

Frank's hand, twisted with arthritis but as hard as stone, cracked across his face.

'You can and you will, chummy,' he said.

Bob went with the rest of the men.

Frank Daggett watched them grimly and rubbed his chest, which had begun to send cramped throbs of pain all the way down his left arm to the elbow. He was old but he wasn't stupid, and he had a pretty good idea what those pains were, and what they meant.

'He told me he thought he was gonna have a blow-out, and he tapped his chest when he said it,' Dave went on, and placed his hand on the swell of muscle over his own left nipple to demonstrate.

Maddie nodded to show she understood.

'He said, "If anything happens to me before this mess is cleaned up, Davey, you and Burt and Orrin take over. Bobby's a good boy, but I think he may have lost his guts for at least a little while . . . and you know, sometimes when a man loses his guts, they don't come back." '

Maddie nodded again, thinking how grateful she was - how very, very grateful - that she was not a man.

'So then we did it,' Dave said. 'We cleaned up the mess.'

Maddie nodded a third time, but this time she must have made some sound, because Dave told her he would stop if she couldn't bear it; he would gladly stop.

'I can bear it,' she said quietly. 'You might be surprised how much I can bear, Davey.' He looked at her quickly, curiously, when she said that, but Maddie had averted her eyes before he could see the secret in them.

Dave didn't know the secret because no one on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, and the way she intended to keep it. There had been a time when she had, perhaps, in the blue darkness of her shock, pretended to be coping. And then something happened that made her cope. Four days before the island cemetery vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with a simple choice: cope or die.

She had been sitting in the living room, drinking a gla.s.s of the blueberry wine she and Jack had put up during August of the previous year - a time that now seemed impossibly distant - and doing something so trite it was laughable. She was Knitting Little Things. Booties, in fact. But what else was there to do? It seemed that no one would be going across the reach to the Wee Folks store at the Ellsworth Mall for quite some time.

Something had thumped against the window.

A bat, she thought, looking up. Her needles paused in her hands, though. It seemed that something bigger had moved jerkily out there in the windy dark. The oil lamp was turned up high and kicking too much reflection off the panes for her to be sure. She reached to turn it down and the thump came again. The panes s.h.i.+vered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty falling on the sash. Jack had been planning to reglaze all the windows this fall, she remembered, and then thought, Maybe that's what he came back for. That was crazy, he was on the bottom of the ocean, but . . .

She sat with her head c.o.c.ked to one side, her knitting now motionless in her hands. A little pink bootie. She had already made a blue set. All of a sudden it seemed she could hear so much. The wind. The faint thunder of surf on Cricket Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, like an elderly woman making herself comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hallway.

'Jack?' she asked the silent night that was now no longer silent. 'Is it you, dear?' Then the living-room window burst inward and what came through was not really Jack but a skeleton with a few mouldering strings of flesh hanging from it.

His compa.s.s was still around his neck. It had grown a beard of moss.

The wind flapped the curtains in a cloud above him as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and knees and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown.

He made grunting sounds. His fleshless mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was hungry . . . but this time chicken noodle soup would not serve. Not even the kind that came in the can.

Gray stuff hung and swung beyond those dark barnacle-encrusted holes, and she realized she was looking at whatever remained of Jack's brain. She sat where she was, frozen, as he got up and came toward her, leaving black kelpy tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt and fathoms. His hands stretched. His teeth chomped mechanically up and down. Maddie saw he was wearing the remains of the black-and-red-checked s.h.i.+rt she had bought him at L. L. Bean's last Christmas. It had cost the earth, but he had said again and again how warm it was, and look how well it had lasted, how much of it was left even after being under water all this time.

The cold cobwebs of bone which were all that remained of his fingers touched her throat before the baby kicked in her stomach - for the first time - and her shocked horror, which she had believed to be calmness, fled, and she drove one of the knitting needles into the thing's eye.

Making horrid thick choking noises that sounded like the suck of a swill pump, he staggered backward, clawing at the needle, while the half-made pink bootie swung in front of the cavity where his nose had been. She watched as a sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the bootie, leaving a trail of slime behind it.

Jack fell over the end table she'd gotten at a yard sale just after they had been married - she hadn't been able to make her mind up about it, had been in agonies about it, until Jack finally said either she was going to buy it for their living room or he was going to give the biddy running the sale twice what she was asking for the G.o.ddam thing and then bust it up into firewood with - - with the - He struck the floor and there was a brittle, cracking sound as his febrile, fragile form broke in two. The right hand tore the knitting needle, slimed with decaying brain tissue, from his eye-socket and tossed it aside. His top half crawled toward her. His teeth gnashed steadily together.

She thought he was trying to grin, and then the baby kicked again and she remembered how uncharacteristically tired and out of sorts he'd sounded at Mabel Hanratty's yard-sale that day: Buy it, Maddie, for Chrissake! I'm tired! Want to go home and get m'dinner! If you don't get a move on, I'll give the old bat twice what she wants and bust it up for firewood with my - Cold, dank hand clutching her ankle; polluted teeth poised to bite. To kill her and kill the baby. She tore loose, leaving him with only her slipper, which he chewed on and then spat out.

When she came back from the entry, he was crawling mindlessly into the kitchen - at least the top half of him was - with the compa.s.s dragging on the tiles. He looked up at the sound of her, and there seemed to be some idiot question in those black eye-sockets before she brought the ax whistling down, cleaving his skull as he had threatened to cleave the end table.

His head fell in two pieces, brains dribbling across the tile like spoiled oatmeal, brains that squirmed with slugs and gelatinous sea worms, brains that smelled like a woodchuck exploded with ga.s.sy decay in a high-summer meadow.

Still his hands clashed and c.l.i.ttered on the kitchen tiles, making a sound like beetles.

She chopped . . . chopped . . . chopped.

At last there was no more movement.

A sharp pain rippled across her midsection and for a moment she was gripped by terrible panic: Is it a miscarriage? Am I going to have a miscarriage? But the pain left and the baby kicked again, more strongly than before.

She went back into the living room, carrying an ax that now smelled like tripe.

His legs had somehow managed to stand.

'Jack, I loved you so much,' she said, 'but this isn't you.' She brought the ax down in a whistling arc that split him at the pelvis, sliced the carpet, and drove deep into the solid oak floor beneath.

The legs separated, trembled wildly for almost five minutes, and then began to grow quiet. At last even the toes stopped twitching.

She carried him down to the cellar piece by piece, wearing her oven gloves and wrapping each piece with the insulating blankets Jack had kept in the shed and which she had never thrown away - he and the crew threw them over the pots on cold days so the lobsters wouldn't freeze.

Once a severed hand closed upon her wrist. She stood still and waited, her heart drumming heavily in her chest, and at last it loosened again. And that was the end of it. The end of him.

There was an unused cistern, polluted, below the house - Jack had been meaning to fill it in. Maddie slid the heavy concrete cover aside so that its shadow lay on the earthen floor like a partial eclipse and then threw the pieces of him down, listening to the splashes. When everything was gone, she worked the heavy cover back into place.

'Rest in peace,' she whispered, and an interior voice whispered back that her husband was resting in pieces, and then she began to cry, and her cries turned to hysterical shrieks, and she pulled at her hair and tore at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s until they were b.l.o.o.d.y, and she thought, I am insane, this is what it's like to be insa - But before the thought could be completed, she had fallen down in a faint, and the faint became a deep sleep, and the next morning she felt all right.

She would never tell, though.