End Time (54 page)

“Oh, there you are. We've been looking for you.”

He picked the hematite earring out of the tangled pile of trinkets on the camp table. “I've been looking for this too.” He examined the baggie with the burnt ear and its own earring; Bhakti sighed. He stuck the earring from Lila's dresser in the baggie and zipped it closed; a baggie, an ear, and two matching earrings.

“Maybe it's time we kept these together so they don't get lost.”

*   *   *

Outside the interrogation tent, the troopers had set up a fenced perimeter and a maze of chain-link corridors connected to a dozen holding tents, as though the military were expecting more detainees. But the new customers had failed to materialize, and Major Todd's entire outfit had quietly passed away in the night, like their commanding officer—of galloping old age. The two men stepped over motionless bodies; a couple of soldiers died on their knees, hunched over in prayer. Waiting for Godot.

They found Cheryl and Beatrice in their own tent, rumpled blankets on the canvas cots showing where the women had slept all this time. The two women stared blearily at the men as though recovering from an eight-day bender. The ladies seemed to have been treated fairly well during their detention despite being doped to the gills. Periods of sleep, half-eaten meals, trips to the shower tent, the porta-potties, then back to the cots again. Bea's leg brace lay on her cot, like an extra limb. With great effort, she groggily strapped it on.

They found a Humvee outside the compound with gas in the tank and keys in the ignition. Back at the roadhouse, Big Bea opened the door and walked into her dark saloon and they silently gathered around the bar to regroup and reassess. The saloonkeeper flipped on the spotlights and the television came on too: a test pattern of Felix the Cat.

A groan of disgust rippled around the bar; Bea snapped the TV off. They drank flat soda without tasting. A pall descended over them, the heavy sedatives leaching out of their systems, leaving them all sapped.

At some point during their drugged-out detention, Major Todd had informed Big Sis that her brother, Webster Chargrove, PhD, would not be making any more mea culpas—ever again. Major Todd spared nothing, recounting every gory detail, hoping to shock Big Sis into spilling what they knew of the security breach. The ploy worked. Beatrice spilled her guts. But what she knew in the end amounted to very little—just her kid brother's video confessions. But as the drugs wore off the grief returned. Big Sis at the bar chewed the gristle of anger and stared pensively at the blank TV.

Cheryl said nothing. The shock of freedom turned to numbness.

When Rachel's ghost reappeared, sitting on the bar and crossing her legs like a torch singer, Cheryl repressed the urge to make sarcastic remarks. Her gal pal leaned close. “Sorry I haven't been around, but I couldn't miss my own memorial service. Everyone at the firm thought it was nice.” Cheryl's long face brought Rachel up short. “C'mon, don't go all Gloomy Gus on me. I worked Los Angeles for you. The will is straightened out, and I convinced the family of the late lamented Ricardo Montoya to drop the civil suit.”

“Great,” Cheryl said flatly to no one in particular.

An unspoken question seemed to float silently around the bar.… So
were they really
going to finish the job, find this girl, Lila Chen, with the godly DNA, and keep her out of the hands of the Pi R Squared maniacs?

“A logical next step would be nice,” Beatrice said to the ceiling. “Any ideas?” Nobody said anything for a while, as though not wishing to go first, say something stupid.

“The game show told us where to go,” Cheryl said. “
New York
. That's where Lila's gotta be, along with Maria and the older boy.”

Bea sighed; too much faith, too little reason. She crossed her arms over her chest, a marble bust of skepticism.

“New York is a big place. Have you ever been there?”

The lady copper pursed her lips. “Grew up in Poughkeepsie, but my mother allowed me to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center when Daddy put down the beer can and kicked me off his lap.” She took a breath. “Look, we've done all right so far. Dead ants and a menu on a windshield, remember?”

“Yes, I know what you told me.” Beatrice unlaced her arms, planting her hands on the bar. “So what's the plan? Get out your baggie of dead ears and see which way they point?”

“You know, I'm starting to be real sorry we confided anything to you at all,” Cheryl said. Chilly words.

Beatrice left off, got up from the bar, and went over to the jukebox. The record player had taken quite a beating: riddled with bullet holes, 45-rpm records shattered inside. She stared at the holes in the walls where Chaffy the cook made his last stand.

“She lives at the San Remo; it's an apartment building.”

“That's right,” Cheryl said. “The little girl told us on the show. So if Top Hat lives there, she probably lives there too.”

They shoved off before noon. The lady cop and Beatrice scrounged the saloon for anything useful. The saloonkeeper measured her new pal on the QT, surreptitiously glancing at Cheryl when the other wasn't looking. “Take whatever you think might be useful, Gorgeous. You never know when you'll need a few quarts of mayonnaise and a gallon of canned pickles.”

“Or Beer Nuts,” Cheryl remarked.
Gorgeous?
Officer Cheryl Gibson, lately of the California Highway Patrol, now known as “Gorgeous,” wasn't altogether sure she approved. Still, she hated to admit it—she sorta liked the big gal calling her Gorgeous.

Big Bea came out from the back stumping along on her bum leg, in one hand a red plastic hand-crank fuel pump still in its box. “Who knows what's still working on the interstate,” she said. “If we have to get juice out of an underground station tank for three guzzlers you'll wish we had more than one of these things.” She also lugged a kind of silver suitcase almost identical to the
Deal or No Deal
case but larger. She slapped the case onto the bar and flipped it open.

“From my field-agent days,” Bea explained. Inside black-foam cushion cutouts sat four Motorola walkie-talkies, with car chargers. A couple of semi-auto pistols lay in snug little pockets, along with clips, ammo, and a Kevlar tactical vest with lots of pouches. General-issue postal inspector gear? Cheryl got the feeling there was a lot more to this Beatrice lady than met the eye.

“Did anybody miss this stuff when you took it home?” Cheryl asked.

Big Bea grinned slyly. “Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night stayed this courier from requisitioning what she needed out of baseline budget for extended field deployment. Know what I mean, Gorgeous?”

Cheryl helped lug their stuff out to the cars. “In the California Highway Patrol we called it
stealing
. If the world still worked I'd pinch one of your hairs out of your hairbrush and run you through Codis.”

From outside a car horn honked.

Time to go.

Billy rode alone in the white minivan, and Cheryl rode with Bhakti in the yellow 4Runner, as they had since California. Beatrice turned the key in the Gran Torino, and the engine rumbled like thunder restrained. She put the car in gear and led the way out of town, nice and easy. Despite all the craziness in the big world, nobody in this corner of Ohio seemed to have forgotten Halloween. Yard displays on every block: the jack-o'-lanterns, spiderwebs strung from trees. Cauldrons and skeletons, fake gravestones. An enormous pressurized Casper the Friendly Ghost grinned at them from one front yard.

However, here in Vandalia it was midday, middle of the week, and everyone in town seemed to be sitting in front of their houses like a crowd for a parade, watching the caravan drive down the street: the neon purple Gran Torino in the lead, the white minivan next, and the yellow Toyota with the motorcycle trailer pulling up the rear.

Most of the townsfolk had brought out lawn chairs and coolers like a picnic, occasionally passing around a soda or a beer. The gatherings seemed extremely subdued; people hardly talked to each other. When the children started to get rambunctious, their parents shushed them quiet. A thousand eyes stared as the cars crawled by.

Beatrice picked up her walkie-talkie off the dash and talked into it. “You guys see this? What are they waiting for?”

Major Todd's men may have died of old age in their tent compound, but here everyone seemed healthy. Maybe the major's men had brought their porphyria with them; maybe the Skeeterbugs around these parts were spreading another disease. In any case, none of the onlookers looked too sick just yet.

In the yellow Toyota 4Runner Cheryl palmed the steering wheel and groped for her radio, which had fallen down the seat crack. Bhakti fished it out, shut it off by mistake, turned it on again too loud, hit the transmission bar a couple of times, and finally fumbled the thing over to her. Cheryl just shook her head and laughed at him; the two had grown so accustomed to each other the thought of riding with anybody else never even occurred. She pressed the transmission button.

“Wanna stop and trick or treat?”

Nobody wanted to stop; the cars crawled down the suburban street.

Many people lifted their eyes to the sky, vacantly staring, like waiting to welcome Elvis off the mothership. Many wore summer clothing; short-sleeve shirts, which seemed a little odd for October. A chill spiked the air as the day lengthened toward afternoon.

Billy Shadow, in the white minivan, picked the walkie-talkie out of a cup holder, thinking about what to say. He shrugged. No clue why the good people of Vandalia took it into their heads to sit in their front yards. Billy didn't feel particularly frightened, only curious; he examined the radio, looking for the transmission button. An answer popped into his head.

“They're waiting to get bit.”

Dead silence from everyone in the convoy.

After a moment, Cheryl pressed the transmission. “They're waiting for
what
?”

“It's the Pi R Squared thing.”

Again dead silence from the caravan; Billy's voice came through choppy: “Pi R Squared's secret got out; somebody besides Webster blabbed how those kooks planned to inoculate the general population. The process hasn't even started yet. None of the townsfolk know the interceptor Skeeterbugs are waiting on Lila Chen. These brain donors think if they stand outside, one of the magic mosquitoes will select them. The truth got garbled in translation.
Go outside; get bit; you're immune.
”

“A rumor,” Cheryl repeated in quiet awe.

Now they all understood. On this last Halloween, these poor saps had heard the word and just hoped to escape the crawling crud by sitting outside and waiting to get stung by the good government bugs. Hoping against hope the magic mosquitoes would find them attractive. All on a misconception.

As the caravan slowly crawled past the lines of people, this or that person—a granny or a kid, a mama or papa—jumped up, smiling, showing off where they'd been bit. But there were no good bugs out there, just the bad ones that made you sicker.

No one squawked or squelched the walkie-talkies. In the purple Ford Torino Beatrice tossed hers onto the dash. She took a deep breath. Just thinking about that damn place, how they'd turned poor Webster into an elongated freak of nature, made her want to slam the dash. She didn't want to look out the window at the deluded crowds. Let them hope for salvation—it didn't come for Webster; it wouldn't come for them either. Beatrice gripped the wheel and stared through the windshield. No siree Bob, hope may spring eternal, but whether they knew it or not, in Vandalia, they were fresh out.

In the white minivan Billy watched the tragic fools lining their front yards and storefronts, all trying to avoid the reckoning. He tried to remember the last time he'd ever really lost someone. He'd grown up sort of an orphan, so Granny Sparrow was the only one who counted for him now. Was she still lying in bed in the trailer? Or had she given up the last gasp of the wolf whistle? He stared at his cell phone.
Go on; pick it up; make the call.…
He let it lie, too afraid to call the only person he cared about in case Granny had caught the bug and wasn't there.
Chicken, go on, make the call.…
He reached for the phone, tucked it in his shirt pocket, but still couldn't make the call.

In the yellow SUV Bhakti fiddled with the radio. No humming, no praying this time. A current of gritty anxiety seemed to have come over the Punjabi scientist, as though he feared he'd arrive too late. Whether for Lila Chen or Eleanor, or both? He breathed heavily through his mouth as he hopped from frequency to frequency. Only strong signals came through, and those that did sounded pretty much the same. Canned music. Spanish-language stations. When Bhakti finally hit on a news report the transmission was so broken neither he nor Cheryl could follow it. The only clear words: “
and no reason for alarm
.
Stay tuned to
—” The transmission died for good.

“Anything on the Internet?” Cheryl couldn't help asking.

Bhakti hadn't even bothered booting up his laptop or snapping on his BlackBerry. “I can try again, but it seems frozen or temporarily unavailable. The blogs are so full of raving as to be insane.”

He paused for a moment, but when Cheryl glanced at him hard for an explanation, Bhakti elaborated. “You've got kooks saying the Four Horsemen are here and the Easter Bunny is going to stop them.”

Cheryl blinked. She dug into the side pocket in the driver's door, coming up with a can of Off! bug spray. Here and there along the way they'd stocked up on a dozen spray bottles, the pump version and the aerosol, placing them liberally around the 4Runner, always within easy reach. At first he'd hated it, but after a while got used to the scent. This was the pump version, pocketbook size. She waggled it at him, offering a spritz.