The thing from outer space did not come by night.
It did not sizzle Earthward from the troposphere like a sulfur match scratching against starry blackness, to land in some farmer’s remote field and disgorge a blob. Instead, it punched a hole in a cloudbank like a huge, blunt bullet, just after lunchtime. It came down with the scream of a buzz-bomb to tear through the roof of Handelmeyer’s Hardware, destroying most of Aisle Four (all your gardening needs) and splitting the brick wall of the First Federal Credit Union. It put a big ding in the east face of the vault but did not breach the sandwich of layered steel and reinforced concrete. The contents of the two-room safe and the fiscal hoardings of approximately thirty percent of the population of Williamson, Nebraska, remained inviolate. Luckily, there were no casualties apart from Alma Teetle’s claim that she had turned her ankle while dropping a fifteen-pound bag of birdseed in Handelmeyer’s Aisle Three (pet supplies). She was swiftly quoted by Olnee Strats of the Williamson Star-Ledger: “Then the roof came apart and it sounded like the end of the world.” It was the seventh time Alma’s picture would appear in the modest local paper. She organized nature hikes and pamphleteered a lot about missing pets and animal rights. Her old frame house on Siddons Street was mildly notorious as an unlicensed menagerie for ferals. She usually smelled of cat pee and was somewhat of a fidget-pickle.
The duly appointed law enforcement officers of Williamson deployed—all five of them. Olnee Strats took a lot of pictures of the “devastation” (his word) on what was shaping up to be one of those rare days that merited a special edition. Since the Star-Ledger was the only surviving newspaper in a town of twenty-five thousand citizens (the Bugle had folded in 1965, and good riddance to it, as far as Olnee was concerned), the story was an exclusive that Olnee’s wife, Emmalene, would happily vend to the wire services. Olnee’s Linotype operator and chief printer, sixty-seven-year-old John “Blackjack” McCormick, would earn himself a shot of overtime. Before now, the headline for the next edition was to have been a bracing piece on the acquisition of new, clearly labeled litter receptacles for the intersection of Main Street and Grand Avenue, the heart of Williamson’s business district since it featured the most traffic lights—four.
As a benefit of being surrounded by farmland, Williamson was a minor Union Pacific rail hub. Its principal commodities were cattle and calves, soybeans, dairy products, and wheat, all of which required processing. Most of the beef was rawhided directly to the big Kendrick Meats slaughterhouse five miles southwest of the center of town. Academics from Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture often conducted field research in Williamson, and a good proportion of the eastern suburbs were occupied by retired military, many of whom were former missile silo workers. The next nearest town, Humbridge, was twenty-five miles away. The Chamber of Commerce (Lyle Witwer) liked to pitch Williamson as a “more nature, less noise” type of environment for those seeking a “neck of the woods” without the urban cacophony of, say, Lincoln, the state capital. The Williamson economy was vibrant enough for Joselle Turner to actually turn a buck by running a bed-and-breakfast place.
But there was not a preponderance of what might be called “local scientists,” and was therefore a scenario in which Dr. Manny Steckler’s phone was fated to ring sooner or later.
Dr. Steckler had moved to Williamson ten years ago, in 1958. He quickly grouped local physicians into a sort of co-op—one of the first of its kind for this neck of the country—and founded the Williamson General Clinic two years later. The populace seemed to like the arrangement, and Steckler’s then-innovative model had been copied in other towns of similar size, especially those communities that could not support a full-blown hospital. So it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world that once Sheriff Joseph Delaney had gone on the record for Olnee’s tape recorder (“It’s a miracle nobody got hurt, except of course for Missus Teetle; everybody should stay calm; we’re looking into it”), he would ring up Dr. Steckler—who by broad taxonomy was close enough to Delaney’s brand-new need for an “expert”—double-quick.
Delaney said, “Doc, I’m gonna need your professional input on something like this, if you don’t mind. Shouldn’t take too much time. I’ll buy you a coffee.” This was no casual largesse. Delaney always mentioned the coffee as a homey, small-town inducement; a just-between-you-and-me familial ritual. He favored two cafes on Grand Street, where he usually got the coffee for free, with a wink and a smile and a refill and all. Later, he deducted this cost of doing business at a set rate on his tax returns, with a name from his notebook to go along with each transaction or consultation.
What the hell, the coffee at Diane Crispen’s diner was always great, anyway.
At the time of Delaney’s call, there were exactly nine recently deceased people in Williamson. (For a comparison figure, it should be noted that there were only 360 students matriculating at Williamson High School.) Six of these were in the basement morgue of the Williamson General Clinic.
* * *
The six dead bodies cooling off at the clinic, in order of age, were:
Eleanor “Hattie” Brainard, ninety-two, natural causes (myocardial infarction), a grandmother eight times over who had outlived her husband, Kenneth, by a decade and change, their union constituting one of the area’s three silently condoned biracial marriages. Since they had come from out of state, already hitched, there was nothing much anybody cared to do about it. But there was always talk.
Charles Lee “Chuck” (also “Champion”) Greene, eighty-one, natural causes (died in his sleep from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), Loving Husband, Devoted Father, all the usual eulogistic stats, a litter of descendants, a raft of vague compliments, and nobody apparently knew one single real thing about him, except that he was a four-pack-per-day chain smoker who had served in the navy during the war. No one was even sure which war anymore, not that it mattered worth a rat fart.
Paul “Sonny” Brickland, fifty, who basically drank himself to death in five months flat once he found out he had bowel cancer. Prior to that he had been a machine operator and farmhand on Lester Collins’s soybean spread, living rent-free in a tarpaper-roofed shack on the far end of the acreage, near the water pumps. Paul had joked that when he died, he planned to be so pickled in alcohol that it would take his corpse months to start rotting.
Jason Allan Lowwens, thirty-four, death by misadventure (auto accident), the regional district manager of the biggest Chrysler dealership in Custer County, had been driving red-eye from god knew where on his way back to Lincoln to see his wife; he dozed off at the wheel and plowed his lovingly restored 1935 Ford Woodie into the guts of a power tower that overcooked both him and his ride. Folks who read about the mishap in the Star-Ledger had always found it curious and noteworthy that Lowwens was not driving a Chrysler.
Dolores Anne-Marie Whitaker (nee Collins), thirty-two, maternal death due to obstructed labor, whose much-sought and rigorously planned pregnancy ultimately killed both her and her daughter, who was to have been named Cherie Camela. Dolores had insisted on a home birth, and by the time the ambulance reached the farmhouse occupied by her and her husband, Brian, trauma and hemorrhage had taken charge.
Cherie Camela Whitaker, intrapartum death (stillborn).
The three recently deceased people in Williamson yet unknown to either Chief Delaney or the Star-Ledger, in order of their demise, were:
Allyson Roberta “Minx” Manx, twenty-two, former Williamson High cheerleading captain, who had been strangled last Wednesday by the love of her life (this week), Cameron “Chip” Jackson, former Williamson High Corsairs fullback. The issues of contention had been threefold: their immediate need for a revenue stream, vague and unfounded issues of sexual fidelity, and the equitable distribution of a dwindling ration of assorted chemical stimulants. Chip boldly protested that his mild interface with the world of crime, so far, was not his fault. It was the sort of argument that could only escalate. Now, he had introduced himself to the “crimes of passion” bracket, and was already upset enough that he’d had to choke Ally with a length of barbed wire to shut her up, and less perturbed that he had manifested a raging erection while killing her. Once he had metabolized his initial panic, he stashed Ally’s corpse deep in the Pickton wheat fields. He didn’t want to think any more about somehow getting the body closer to the tempting facilities of Kendrick Meats for disposal purposes, but it was Monday already, and he was going to have to do something.
Richard “Ramses” Coverdale, fifteen, had decided he had taken the last beating he was ever going to take from his father, over school grades. His first impulse had been to work such overdue patricide using Dad’s very own antique Savage/Fox 20-gauge side-by-side, which Rick knew to be loaded at all times, like all the firearms in the house—that way, so lectured his father, “you’ll never shoot yourself with an ‘unloaded’ gun.” Thanks to a worn trigger sear, the damned thing went off as soon as Ricky pulled it (bore-first) from the gun case, atomizing the left side of his head so quickly that he wasn’t alive long enough to see the muzzle flash of his own erasure.
Lorena Darling, forty-four, had died at home of a brain aneurysm, completely unexpectedly. One moment she was laughing and joking, smoking some after-dinner weed and forking up great gobs of apple pie with too much cornstarch in it, partaking of giggles with her de facto life partner, Buddy Rawls, with whom she shared a small clapboard house on a five-acre plot that was mostly potato field interrupted by two modest greenhouses. Past inadequate camouflage, the greenhouses were mostly full of marijuana plants. Buddy, his brother Bernardo, Bernardo’s girlfriend, Tammy, and a fifth-wheel guru ostensibly named Kersawani had wound up here two years ago after Buddy and Bernardo successfully altered their identities, thereby ducking the military draft. They played guitar, shared campfires, sold kush to most of the delinquents in Williamson, and fancied themselves true Age of Aquarius psychedelic savants … which was the problem. Kersawani had insisted that involvement by the Man not despoil the beauty of Lorena’s unanticipated death, that she be cleansed and worshipped and honored and duly given back to Mother Earth right here, in private, on the property, according to customs and rituals they could invent themselves, not shoplift out of someone else’s life-handbook. So, on that same Monday, Lorena was laid out on a repurposed door in the living room, barefoot, doused in patchouli and surrounded by wildflowers. She was beginning to stink and Tammy had already mentioned the possibility of calling in an actual adult, for which Bernardo almost slapped her, but he knew better. He also knew that harboring a corpse after twenty-four hours hung between major misdemeanor and minor felony; failure to report the death, failure to report the disposition of a body, and possible desecration at least.
“That’s if we’re caught,” Buddy argued him down. “It probably ain’t legal, but who cares? Is it legal to drive over the speed limit? No, but people do it all the time and what usually happens? Nada.”
* * *
“It’s one of ours,” Dr. Steckler said unnecessarily.
Sheriff Delaney’s boys had strung hazard tape and established a perimeter while Brice Handelmeyer rolled his eyes and moaned about the damage to his store to Olnee Strats, whose wife, Emmalene (a former Husker Queen and still a head-turner on a good day), had also come down to demonstrate something or other; maybe the full power of the local fourth estate. More likely to get a jump on the out-of-town reporters who would soon swarm to Williamson in droves if this was some kind of lost government bird or top-secret space project. She quickly scampered back to the Star-Ledger office bearing fresh intel and Olnee’s latest rolls of undeveloped negative.
With the help of Delaney’s men, the Credit Union had posted a door notice advising temporary closure due to unforeseen circumstances. General Manager Tommy Tighe had given his employees the remaining half-day off rather than waste that time explaining the hole in the wall to irate customers. In half an hour, Dill Barrett’s pickup would arrive, and by sundown Dill would have fixed up the wall just fine, because he was a good craftsman who knew what he was doing, one of those guys who had an almost Zen relationship with bricks and mortar, with lathe and plaster and raw lumber.
Dr. Steckler had brought a Geiger counter from the hospital, a clunky, halogen-tube warhorse model at least fifteen years old, plus latex gloves and assorted kit. Delaney thought Steckler looked like one of those, what did you call them, character actors, like the guy who always plays the hero’s best friend, or the good-hearted buddy who always gets killed ten minutes before the end of the movie. He had dramatic hair and very pale blue eyes. Big, competent, veiny hands. Harsh spectacles.
Steckler thought Joseph Delaney fit right into the mold of the community father figure, twenty pounds over fighting trim but the kind of guy who still starched his uniform blouses. Receding hair but advancing intellect. A “bold baldie.” A man quick to counsel and slow to violence.
“This isn’t radioactive, is it?” said Delaney.
“No,” said Steckler. “Not in the sense you mean. Don’t let the clicking make you nervous. This measures any sort of ionizing radiation—alpha, beta, gamma, all down the line. The number of clicks is the number of ionization events detected. See?” He showed the chief the dial. “No giant ants.”
Delaney furrowed his brow. Was Steckler funning him? Were they going to have their old country-mouse/city-rat argument again?
“Not to worry,” said Steckler. “We’re not going to start glowing in the dark or anything. But I want to wipe this thing down and bag some samples for residue, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“Well, we know spacecraft reentering the atmosphere heat up due to friction with the air, three thousand degrees or better. That’s usually good enough to sterilize this little capsule or probe or whatever it is.”
“Burned off all the decals or serials,” said Delaney. “But you’re right—this is ours. Just look.”
The object resembled a nose cone about two feet in diameter. Shiny, still-warm factory-rolled steel with the kind of rivets you see on jet airplane wings. Contact with oxygen at high speed had burnished the metal and left sooty charcoal-colored streaks. The underside was concave and featured a scorched docking collar (it reminded Delaney of a septic tank join) girded by concentric, tubular metal ribs. Stamped on the outermost rib was MADE IN USA.
“So you think there’s a possibility this might have some kinda germ or bug or virus inside?” said Delaney.
“Not likely,” said Steckler. “This looks like a detector, not a collector. Like Sputnik Seven. Like those testing sensors for the MIDAS missile early warning satellite program. You ever hear of Thor Agena B, or Thor Ablestar?” He grinned gamely at the chief’s incomprehension. “I used to like to watch the launches. The blastoffs.”
“In Russia?” Delaney said. “I mean, you did just say ‘Sputnik,’ right?” The telltale brow lines returned as he squinted, not really suspicious, just … careful. The sheriff was no fan of Commies.
“No, I only read about those. They were interesting because several of them were off-world probes. The Venera series. Most of them failed to separate or blew up. But one of them made it all the way to Venus, no foolin’.”
Both men were now regarding the capsule with respect, as though it could hear and judge them.
“This may be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened around here!” said Olnee Strats, butting in, unable to contain himself.
“Olnee,” Delaney said in his best parental tone, “now I don’t want you getting people all upset prematurely. Hysteria is the last thing we want.”
Olnee kept snapping photos, looking vaguely chastised, but nothing could dampen his verve right now.
“We’re going to be famous,” Dr. Steckler said out of one side of his mouth. He took off his glasses and polished them. It was something to do with his hands to buy a small moment of time, now that he had stopped smoking.
“Or infamous,” said Delaney, who did not cotton to any loss of control. His town. His people. His call. “This is gonna be one of those all-day, all-night deals; I can just smell it.”
“We can always bring those large-sized coffees back here from Diane’s,” Steckler ventured.
“Exactly what I was thinking, Doc.”
* * *
At 4:21 p.m. that afternoon, the late Paul Brickland—“Sonny” to his intimates—opened his eyes and tried to sit up on the stainless steel drawer inside the Williamson General Clinic’s morgue, locker #2. He banged his head on the low-clearance vault but felt no pain. His eyes were dull full moons of cataract. His movement was not impeded by the excavation of autopsy, which had left the usual crudely tucked, Y-shaped stitches across his chest. His overall temperature was about thirty-nine degrees, none of it self-generated. Inside the constricted space he heaved his naked body forward to thump his yellowed feet against the barrier of the locker door, just as his neighbor in #3, Dolores Whitaker, began to stir.
Casey Fields, a strawberry-blonde candy striper who had transitioned directly to clinic work after graduation, loitered in the ground-floor corridor waiting for the shift change at 4:30 that would bring intern Kyle Fredericks downstairs. At 4:30, Lenny Rana would clock out of the morgue and soon thereafter, Casey and Kyle could steal some time to get recreational out of the sight of their coworkers. Casey wore the regulation thick-soled white shoes and unflattering white pantyhose to complete her eponymous uniform, but in her case the cotton panel part of the pantyhose had been scissored out to liberate her carefully manicured pubis, also strawberry blonde. A little weed, a little vigorous fornication; it had become a semi-regular break routine for her and Kyle, who was going to be an actual doctor soon, so they would never have to worry about money.
Kyle, Scandinavian of jaw, a gray-eyed wonder with superhero hair, showed up right on time, complete with boner. Casey’s hand went straight to his groin for reassurance and she smiled, catlike, almost evilly.
“Lenny’s still on the desk,” she said, flashing forward to when she might be mounted on the same desk. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“I’ll hustle him up,” said Kyle with a wink, bumping through the swinging doors.
Her insides felt restless, a term she loved using. Butterflies in her heart chakra. A silvery, plunging anticipation shot through her stomach.
But by then, Kyle was screaming. Not hollering, but screaming, raw-throated and primal. Casey pushed open the doors just as fresh blood pooled forth to besmirch her spotless white shoes. She had unwittingly foretold the future: neither she nor Kyle would ever have to worry about money again.
* * *
Dr. Steckler put down the counter phone at Handelmeyer’s. “There’s some kind of problem at the clinic,” he told Sheriff Delaney.
“Go,” said Delaney. “Go deal. You’ve got your samples, right? Take care of business. Nothing else is gonna happen here tonight.”
“Thanks for the coffee.”
“That’s nothing; I’ll buy you a real drink when we wrap this up.”
Steckler passed Emmalene on his way out. She seemed to bear heavy news; her usually sparkling eyes had gone flat with purpose.
“Sheriff?” she said to the room at large. “Apparently there are army trucks lining up near the Kendrick slaughterhouse, and Lester Collins just called the paper to find out what’s going on because he says he saw more army guys on the other side of town, near his soybean farm.”
“What the hell…?” Delaney muttered. He turned to the proprietor of the hardware store. “Brice? Lemme have that phone.” His deputies were still mugging for Olnee Strats’s camera. “Lester, Bob—off your asses and get ready to roll.”
Another uniform, Chet Downing (the youngest cop in Williamson), bustled through the push-bar glass doors looking mildly shell-shocked. “Joe?” he said to his superior. “You’d better come have a look at this.”
Halfway down Main Street, near the intersection with Grapeseed Road (no stoplight), somebody covered in blood was lurching down the center of the street, weaving as though drunk or wounded. A good quadrant of his head was absent. Flies touched down on macerated brain matter and exposed, splintered bone.
“Holy shit, that’s Ricky Coverdale!” bleated Chet, his voice cracking. Ricky had been a freshman the year Chet graduated Williamson High.
Like iron filings to a magnet, onlookers and bystanders gravitated from Handelmeyer’s to this new attraction. There were close to twenty citizens hanging around with nothing better to do, much like flies themselves. They filled the air with dry-mouthed fear, astonishment, and easy loathing amid much natter about who to summon or what should be done; Sylvia Perkins was in the middle of unnecessarily saying call an ambulance when she barfed all over the corner mailbox. Chicken salad and red wine, from Diane Crispen’s diner.
Several hardier locals rushed to steady the blood-drenched, nearly Impressionist apparition in the middle of the street until the late Ricky Coverdale chomped a huge, wet bite out of the nearest helping hand.
More screaming.
Tyler Strong, entrepreneur of the 76 gas station two blocks away, fell on his ass with three fingers missing from his right hand, his voiceless, gape-mouthed reaction very similar to someone who has just witnessed an inexplicable magic trick. Then he found his voice and began to howl, crabbing backward as Ricky bit off the nose of Ace Baldwin, a car customizer and wrench who was also Tyler’s best drinking buddy. (It was Ace Baldwin who had restored Jason Lowwens’s ’35 Woodie for a pretty penny two years back, before that asshole had married it to a power pole and destroyed it beyond reclamation, barbecuing himself in the deal.)
Four gunshots, shakily aimed but nicely grouped, drove Ricky into a rearward stagger and finally eliminated the rest of his head in a puffball of crimson mist. What was left of Ricky collapsed in a moist pile of unrealized youthful potential. The living sprang back to avoid getting nastiness on them. Sheriff Delaney caught up just as Chet fired the kill round from his .357 revolver. He put his hand atop the hot weapon to caution his panicked deputy to put the gun down, now.
* * *
Out at the clandestine pot farm, Kersawani proclaimed they had all witnessed a bona fide miracle when the supposedly dead Lorena came back to them. They were all sure she had been devoid of heartbeat, pulse, or breath, but they had all read Poe. Never mind that her formerly bright eyes were now the tint of dirty dishwater, and did not seem to see Buddy directly even as he rushed to be first to embrace her. Her joints cracked loudly. She smelled not dissimilar to badly cured pork. She wrapped her arms around him and gnawed about a pound of live meat directly out of his neck. Kersawani was next. Lorena pulled his voice box right out of his throat and ate it while he dropped to his knees, drowning in his own blood. The organ imploded like a dog toy, gushing fluid. Tammy was yelling incoherently at the top of her lungs while Buddy’s brother Bernardo fumbled the shotgun and almost blew off his own foot. The tube was full of deer slugs. Bernardo got the weapon up and fired, point-blank. The slug was about the size of a stack of five nickels, a subsonic round that hit with the force of a speeding train. It blew a hit single—that is, a 45 rpm–sized window—through Lorena’s middle in a thundercloud of desiccated tissue. But Lorena kept groping toward Tammy, so Bernardo fired once more. Lorena’s head violently detached and shattered a window on its way outside. Her body caved in like a clipped puppet. Bernardo and Tammy ran for the pickup truck, trying desperately to formulate a new life-ethos.
Eighteen-year-old John Pickton, Jr., had decided to take his pony Teabiscuit out for an afternoon tear among the sheaves. Both John Junior and the horse loved to breeze along the rows of wheat at full gallop; to them it was the sensation of earthbound flight, zipping down a half-mile with wheat feathering your arms and legs, then cranking a turn and gobbling up another row faster than a clown could blink. Straight line from the elbow to the bit; cue with the reins and push with the leg so the horse turns around your leg in the desired direction. With practice, pro rodeo was not out of the question; John Junior had not inherited his father’s love for the harvest.
There was a woman striding down the wheatrow, toward him.
Correction: there was a naked, redheaded woman with D-cup titties and big nipples and long legs striding toward him, and she did not bridle or flee at his appearance. She kept right on coming, nearer.
Teabiscuit, however, bridled.
John Junior wasted vital final moments still trying to process the naked lady from nowhere. The rearing horse failed to slow her attack. She went right for the forearm portion of the front leg, and as John Junior came unsaddled, only then did he notice that the naked lady was kind of … well, dusty and crooked.
Teabiscuit crashed down hard on her right side, a thousand pounds of horseflesh losing against gravity, hurling John Junior two rows over, clean. He knew how to land. He came up flash-fire pissed, and tackled the interloper.
Horses can scream. Pretty soon John Junior was screaming, too.
* * *
“Sheriff, I’m telling you, this isn’t a disease!” Dr. Steckler was practically shouting into the phone and did not care who overheard. “Or contagious psychosis or a virus or space madness or anything like that. It’s not the capsule. Hell, for all I know it’s cosmic rays or God’s will or some hippie shit I don’t understand. The capsule is just a jumped-up radio! No germs, no ooze, no nothing!”
“We’ve got a situation down here,” Sheriff Delaney growled back. The incipient alarm in his voice hurt to hear. Both men were snapping at each other because they lived in denial of the void in which no explanation was credible, or even available. Rarely if ever had Delaney actually heard Steckler resort to what both their moms would have called that kind of language. “A situation where people are dying. A medical situation. Doc, I know you’re doing everything you can. I know this is big and frightening. But we can’t lose our heads. We—”
“I hear you, Sheriff,” Steckler overrode. “Fear gets us nowhere. Fear gets us gut reactions and panic and worse. You’re not going to want to hear this, but all the dead people in the morgue just got up and attacked my staff. Even Hattie Brainard. We both heard Emmalene Strats say the military was edging up on the town—”
It was Delaney’s turn to interpose: “There is no way in Hell or on God’s green earth that Ricky Coverdale was dead when he attacked Tyler and Ace. He was fucked up, true, probably out of his mind on LSD or something, but he wasn’t dead already!” So much for not cussing.
“He’s dead now, right?”
“Doc, he doesn’t have a head.”
“What shape are Tyler and Ace in?”
“Tyler lost some fingers. Chet and Cab bandaged them up. They seem woozy but okay. They really need you to look at them, Doc…”
“Watch them,” said Steckler. “If they lapse or stop breathing or anything, lock them up until I can get there. Avoid contact with them however you can and above all, don’t let them bite or draw blood.”
“That is not rational.”
“Look, Joe—even though it’s not a disease, it helps to think of this as rabies, but from what I’ve seen, incredibly fast-moving. That’s another reason the satellite isn’t to blame. This is all happening too soon, and if what we’re up against was from space, how come we aren’t all affected? We can figure this out later, but we’ve got to deal with it now.”
“Something like, kill the symptoms now, fix the disease later?”
“Exactly.”
“So I guess we need another dead person to start moving around?”
“That would help convince us both. I haven’t witnessed this actually happening yet. If this is systemic, it’ll have a pattern, and what we’d call an incubation period. We’ve got to know what that is.”
Steckler paused to release an explosive sigh. No doubt Delaney could hear the background chatter at the clinic, the voices now surrounding him, demanding he make a decision or take action. Likewise, he could hear nondescript people yelling beyond Delaney’s side of the call. The only sideshow this circus was missing so far was a goddamned priest, hollering holies and freaking out his flock.
“Jesus,” said Steckler. “I can’t believe we’re actually talking about this as though we were in our right mind…”
“Punch a wall if you have to, but don’t vaporlock on me,” said Delaney. “The whole town’s gonna need us. You go ahead on, just keep doing what you’re doing, because you’re about to get a bunch of new patients, maybe alive, maybe dead, I don’t know and don’t want to speculate anymore. But you call through on the radio if you get any flashes of brilliance.”
“Yeah—in twelve hours we’ll probably be laughing about this.”
“In twelve hours I hope to be dead drunk or fast asleep,” said Delaney. “Meanwhile, I’m gonna go ask the army what the hell they think they’re doing, loitering outside my town.”
While they were talking, Ty Strong died from shock and blood loss.
* * *
There was one more dead person in Williamson yet unaccounted for.
Hollis Grenier (sixty-seven, grocery store manager, kidney disease) was boxed up and lay in state inside the Chapman & Browning Funeral Home, preparatory to a traditional burial service scheduled for the next day at 11:00 a.m. He began to stir about sundown on the Day of the Satellite.
Fleet Jones, an apprentice in mortuary science who had moved down from the university in Omaha, heard a commotion in the prep room just as he was locking up for the boss. He found Hollis weaving like a willow in a high wind, barefoot, his Velcroed funeral suit hanging in bum tatters. This was unusual. Fleet knew Hollis was full of embalming fluid, pumped via cannula into his (very uncooperative) carotid artery.
Fleet, his hands trembling, inadvertently addressed the risen cadaver as if it were still a human being. “Mister Grenier…?” It lifted its head to look at him. In life, Hollis had suffered from cervical myelopathy due to “dropped head syndrome.”
Then Fleet made his second mistake. He moved to steady Hollis, to perhaps reassure this apparition with a human touch. This was some kind of horrific misunderstanding; things needed to be put to rights.
Hollis’s joints made a crackling sound akin to rupturing ice as his dead fingers clawed at his own mouth, splitting the gum-stitches and wire that held it shut. He spat out the cotton batting and gnawed a gob of tissue from Fleet’s biceps, right through his shirt.
Fleet committed no further errors. His last received sensation was the stench of formaldehyde.
* * *
Dr. Manny Steckler watched the dead baby crawl toward him blindly, mewling, trailing a purple umbilical cord, its toothless mouth champing. Somehow it had gotten out of its jar in Pathology; it had not yet been transferred to the morgue, which was now barricaded with utility furniture, quickly scavenged and repurposed.
Steckler’s stomach seemed to drop straight down to Hell and bounce back. A sight such as this could force you to seriously recontemplate your place in the universe, or reconsider the advantages of a quick suicide.
Unavoidably he thought of the Kendrick slaughterhouse. Normally the calmest level of the clinic, the morgue had become a hiding bath, bleeding pit, and mulching chamber all in one as grotesque, mindlessly hungry things dismembered and cannibalized at least three of the clinic’s staff, identifiable now only by a head count of who was still standing, outside. Was it technically cannibalization when a clinically dead corpse resurrected and chewed pieces out of you?
He had seen just enough to drive him to the edge of the crazy pit before he ordered the morgue buttoned up. It was carnage in there, a bloodbath of sundered limbs and exposed organs, tendons snapping like rubber bands, human fat greasing the floor. The dead revived, to chow down on the living, who in turn became dead, who in turn …
Here, now, crept the embodiment of every revulsion he had felt as a med student, the potential healer repelled by the raw pink animalism of infants, the gut reactions and instinctive hatreds he had tamped back with notions of human compassion and species unity. Doctors were not supposed to dislike children, especially in a place like America, where motherhood was unjustly elevated to godhood. He was relieved to leave the clandestine D&Cs to a younger and more idealistic doctor, Felicia Raine, who was willing to take the heat if anybody ever found out that some of the females of Williamson were not falling gently into their presupposed role as brood mares. Discreet and careful even as the militant feminist in her stirred to wakefulness, Felicia had calibrated her own conscience so as not to make a political issue out of a moral one.
Steckler was more or less alone in the corridor; everyone else was hanging back, because he was in charge, and nobody could venture a useful theory about what was actually transpiring here.
Having dealt with his phobia—risen above it, in fact—did not mean that a fear so elemental, bullied into dormancy, could not erupt fresh, given the correct stimulae, the old prompts. The thing lolling in the corridor was a pallid, leaking grub and though it was clearly not breathing, it made a wheezing, clotted sound as it dragged itself along the floor. Steckler instantly hated it; wanted to kill it with fire—and that was also an instinct, vomited up from a much deeper, more primal level than the usual bilge about how adorable babies were, the easy lies by which the subject is swiftly changed.
That thing was not Dolores Whitaker’s technically stillborn daughter. Was not.
Steckler picked it up by the throat. It thrashed in his grasp like a rattlesnake. Since he had the correct keys, he threw it down the elevator shaft before his staff could bear witness. He heard it hit bottom with a snap, like a ripe maggot bursting open.
Then he heard it moving around again.
* * *
On the far side of the morgue barricade, Casey Fields resurrected. Her paramour, Kyle Fredericks, reanimated. And attendant Lenny Rana revived. Half of him, anyway. Casey still felt “restless” inside, but was incapable of codifying the modified vector of this new hunger that was so much more primal than sex. In combination with the ambulatory remains of Jason Lowwens, Hattie Brainard, Chuck Greene, Sonny Brickland, and Dolores Whitaker, their group now massed to sufficient heft to breach the doors, which—despite the fact they had been dammed outside all the way to the far wall with office furniture—came free at their weakest point, the inside hinges.
Awaiting them in various corners of the clinic were at least fifteen other patients lacking the simple strength to move from their beds with any speed.
Most of the clinic staff had vacated in naked, directionless dread, once their boss, their Number One, their leader, had proven incapable of further leadership.
Something vital and irredeemable had snapped inside of Dr. Manny Steckler when he encountered the baby in the corridor. Once that snowball begins to roll, best to take cover until the avalanche is spent. He was already in his car, headed out of town at top speed, legal limits be damned.
He was T-boned by a pickup truck being driven recklessly by Bernardo Rawls and his girlfriend, Tammy. Per Buddy’s pronouncement, people over-sped the legal limit all the time and usually, nothing happened. Nada.
There were no survivors.
* * *
Not regular army, thought Sheriff Delaney. Nope. The soldiers he could see were all in murky-dark fatigues devoid of company or mission patches, and toting the newer M16s. Just as Indochina had become Vietnam, the coveted “black rifles” had evolved to this A1 variant, which would not become the standard service long gun for another nine months. Delaney had never actually seen one before but knew the mags were supposed to be ten rounds bigger.
He got a closer clue when the chrome-plated bore teased the nape of his neck, about a quarter-mile past the boundary to Lester Collins’s soybean field, where Sonny Brickland had drunk himself to death. He heard the crackle of a radio-comm behind him: “Trespasser in the loop, Captain.”
Delaney was divested of his sidearm and escorted by a pair of sentries toward a cluster of three-quarter Jeep trucks and larger, “five-quarter” carriers. A low-light field HQ had been set up in one of these latter. The authority of his badge and his standing as sheriff did not seem to impress his captors overmuch. They herded him with monosyllables and prods, almost like an animal, but more like an enemy, which set off the danger alarms in his flesh like firecrackers.
A flap was lifted and Delaney was presented. “Here’s our stray,” said the soldier who had proven to be quieter than Delaney, out there in the field. Stealthy sonofabitch. The kid looked about nineteen, eager to be a war dog.
“This fella pokes me one more time, I’m gonna lay him out,” said Delaney directly to his chaperone … who backed up a step without meaning to.
“Come in, Sheriff Delaney,” said a man with captain’s bars on a brigade sweater, probably the oldest man here except for Delaney, who mentally chalked the soldier as somewhere in his mid-forties. The man had a pretty dynamic mustache for military issue. One of those guys with perfect gray temples but black hair above, resulting in salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He dismissed the guards and waved Delaney toward the nearest bench in the cramped truck bed. “Sit down.” He looked up and made direct eye contact. “Please.”
“Please,” Delaney repeated. “That courtesy shit only works in an equal environment. You just had me brought here at gunpoint, so don’t butter my ass, Captain—?”
“Fletcher.” The captain removed his steel-rimmed glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose, exuding a precise balance between harried bureaucrat and hardball centurion—a performance that seemed too calculated for Delaney, as though strictly for his benefit. Whatever decisions were to be enacted here had been made already.
Now the guy would try to “confide” in Delaney. He’d act off-the-record and crack a serpent’s smile.
“Sorry,” said Fletcher. He cracked the smile. “Long day.”
“Don’t,” said Delaney. “Don’t offer me bad coffee or pretend you’re my pal. If this was legitimate, I would have been notified. This is my town. People are dying and nobody can explain it. So spare me the spreadable cheese and tell me what the fuck is going on here. Do me that kindness, because that’s all I want to know.”
“Fair enough.” Fletcher stacked some paper, uselessly truing the edges—another corporate cue that it was time for plain talk. “We have experienced a terra incognita event. The entire country, so far as we can tell; possibly the whole world. Not just your town, ah—” (he had to check) “—Williamston.”
“Nearest ‘Williamston’ is in Michigan state,” said Delaney dryly.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. Talk plain or shut up.”
“All right. A terra incognita event is something we’ve never seen or experienced before.”
“Yeah—‘unknown land.’”
“We had a suborbital snooper drop unexpectedly. A satellite.”
“Yeah, I know that, too. I’ve also got a doctor who says the satellite has nothing to do with what’s going on with dead people. Or people who are wounded and die. They get back up and attack.”
“Yes, we had reports from California, Boston, New York City, all over. But the satellite crashed in Williamson, Sheriff. Your own newspaper has already posted stories to the wire services. It was exactly the kind of story we needed to explain what was happening, in order to stave off major panic for as long as possible.”
A beauty of a headache—the kind caused only by the truth—was settling into the space between Delaney’s eyes with the sizzle of a hot bullet casing. “You need a cover story. Deniability for some larger screwup.”
Fletcher brought his steepled hands down on his meager desk with a thump—the first honest reaction Delaney had seen. “That’s just it, Sheriff. There was no screwup. Our first guess was that it was a biowar spill, an accident from … somewhere. Nope—nothing reported yet. No ground zero. It’s not from space unless it’s a cosmic ray belt that saturated the entire planet at the same time…”
Delaney’s vision lost focus. “There’s no time to investigate and split hairs about what it is or isn’t. You’ve got a bigger and more immediate problem … and so do I. Whatever happens, people are going to say it was because a space thing crashed in Williamson and it isn’t true, and that makes you all happy because now you’ve got something to blame. Terrific. What else are you planning to do for me?”
“We need your cooperation. We’ve cordoned off the town. Nobody in or out.”
“Your men are toting hot weapons,” said Delaney, meeting Fletcher’s gaze directly.
“We need you to tell the people in Williamson to cope as best they can while we get a determination from the president.” It was a near-classic tied-hands ploy. I have to wait for orders from my superiors; that’s all I can do.
“Cope,” said Delaney, now doubting the meaning of the simplest words. “Cope with their friends and neighbors trying to eat them. And they try to leave, you’ll shoot them, plain enough? This is a scared shitless scenario, Captain. I’m scared. You’d be scared, too, if you saw what I’ve seen so far today.”
“But containable,” said Fletcher.
“Oh, yeah, no big deal at all.” Delaney stood up in the narrow space. “I think you and I are done.”
The guard just beyond the tailgate brandished his weapon. Fletcher waved off the conflict.
“Sheriff Delaney, my orders are to maintain a sterile cordon.”
And that brought the face Delaney had wanted to see all along: the humorless mouth, the metallic eyes, all cards on the table, whose dick was biggest.
“Tell your people we’re doing the best we can.”
Delaney turned back. “Against what? You don’t even know. This is all to support a goddamned story you just made up.”
“Corporal, let the sheriff go back into town, and make sure he’s headed in the right direction.”
“That’s it, huh?” Delaney shot back.
“You said it, not me. We’re done.” Fletcher nodded, his lips white. He whispered sorry one more time, but Delaney could not hear. Then he unracked the receiver for his hot line.
“This is Captain Fletcher.” He recited a confirmation code and a few other special numbers. “We are pulling back to the outer marker. We are green, I repeat, green-for-go, for Anubis.”
* * *
Sheriff Delaney plodded grimly across the soybean field, looking for his Jeep in the dark. If all else failed, he could tack toward the back-field pole lamps illuminating the grounds around Lester Collins’s farmhouse.
The soldiers had returned his pistol but taken all his ammo, and wasn’t that a rancid cherry on top of the whole psychotic day?
Delaney had a new job now. Tell anybody who would listen that his whole town had been the victim of a lie. A space thing had crashed and dead people had become ambulatory. Cause plus effect equals falsehood. Because a story, any story, was better than the crimson abyss of uncertainty, even if it wasn’t the entire story. The alternative was utter chaos, total breakdown. Everything stops, the end.
He thought of all the gentle untruths he had told throughout his whole life, his entire career, in order to keep the peace or avoid a bigger clash.
Dr. Steckler could have told him that the human nervous system requires one-thirtieth of a second to register, and one-tenth of a second to flinch. Nuclear blast waves come in at twice the speed of sound.
Sheriff Delaney lived long enough to see the flash, but the blood in his brain evaporated before he could feel a thing.