The House of Thunder (36 page)

“Just getting a preview,” Harch said. “Say, baby, aren’t you looking forward to it as much as I am? Hmmmmm?”

She closed her eyes, seeking oblivion, and she—

“
Harch!
”

—heard McGee shout her tormentor’s name.

She opened her eyes and saw Harch turning away from her with a startled look on his face. He said, “What are
you
doing here?”

Lacking the strength to sit all the way up in bed, Susan lifted her head as far off the pillow as she could, which wasn’t very far, and she saw Jeff McGee. He was only a few feet from the end of the bed. The draft-blown candle flames cast wavering shadows over him, so that he appeared to be wearing a rippling black cape. He was holding a long-barreled pistol, and it was pointed at Harch.

Harch said, “What in the hell are you—”

McGee shot him in the face. Harch pitched backwards, out of sight, and hit the floor with a sickening thud.

The pistol had made only a whispering sound, and Susan realized that part of the long barrel was a silencer.

That soft hiss, the sight of Harch’s face exploding, the deadweight sound of him hitting the floor—all of that had the unmistakably gritty feeling of reality. It wasn’t the stylized, exaggerated, endlessly extended, surreal violence to which she had been subjected during the last few days; there wasn’t anything remotely dreamlike about this. It was death: cold, hard, quick.

McGee came around to the side of the bed.

Susan blinked at the pistol. She was no less confused by this strange turn of events. She felt herself teetering on the edge of a chasm. “Am I next?”

He shoved the gun in a pocket of his overcoat.

He was carrying a bag in his other hand, and he dropped that on the bed beside her. No, not a bag. It was a pillowcase, stuffed full of something.

“We’re getting out of here,” he said.

He began pulling clothes out of the pillowcase. Her clothes. Panties. A pair of dark slacks. A white sweater. A pair of penny loafers.

There was still a large, round object in the bottom of the pillowcase, and she regarded it with growing fear. The dreamlike feeling overtook her again; reality faded; and she was suddenly sure that the last thing in that pillowcase was Jerry Stein’s severed, rotting head.

“No,” she said. “Stop!”

He pulled out the last object. It was only her corduroy blazer, which had been rolled into a ball.

Not a dead man’s head.

But she didn’t feel any better. She was still adrift, unable to grab at the edge of reality and stabilize herself.

“No,” she said. “No. I can’t go through any more of this. Let’s just get it over with.”

McGee looked at her oddly for a moment, then understanding came into his blue eyes. “You think this is just a setup for another series of nasty little scenes.”

“I’m very, very tired,” she said.

“It’s not,” he said. “It’s not a setup.”

“I just want to be finished with this.”

“Listen, half of your weariness is because of the drug they’ve been pumping into you. You’ll perk up a bit in a little while.”

“Go away.”

She couldn’t hold her head up any longer. She fell back on the pillow.

She didn’t even care that she was naked before him. She didn’t reach for the blankets. She wasn’t sure she could pull them up, anyway. Besides, any attempt at modesty was ludicrous after what they had already done to her, after what they had seen of her.

She was cold. That didn’t matter, either. Nothing mattered.

“Look,” McGee said, “I don’t expect you to understand what’s going on. I’ll explain later. Just trust me for now.”

“I did,” Susan said softly. “I trusted you.”

“And here I am.”

“Yes. And here you are.”

“Here 1 am, rescuing you, dummy.” He said it with what seemed to be very real frustration and affection.

“Rescuing me from what?”

“From Hell,” he said. “Wasn’t that the latest line they were feeding you? Hell. That’s what the program called for.”

“Program?”

He sighed and shook his head. “We don’t have time for this now. You’ve got to trust me.”

“Go away.”

He slipped an arm under her shoulders and lifted her into a sitting position. He snatched up the white sweater and tried to get her arms into the sleeves.

She resisted him as best she could. “No more,” she said. “No more sick games.”

“Christ!” he said. He dropped the sweater and eased her back onto the pillow. “Stay here and listen. Can you
listen’?”

Before she could respond, he withdrew a penlight from his overcoat pocket, switched it on, and hurried away, into the darkness. The sound of the waterfall, toward which he was headed, soon masked the
tap-tap-tap
of his footsteps.

Maybe he would leave her alone now. Or finish her off. One or the other.

She closed her eyes.

The roar of the waterfall stopped abruptly.

In an instant, the House of Thunder became the House of Silence.

She opened her eyes, frowning. For a second, she thought she had gone deaf.

McGee shouted to her from the darkness. “Hear that? Nothing but a tape recording of a waterfall.” He was drawing nearer as he spoke; there was no sound to mask his footsteps now. “It was a tape recording, blasting through four big quadraphonic speakers.” He stepped into the glow of the candles and switched off his penlight. “Driest waterfall you’ll ever see. And this cave? It’s a bunch of hollowed-out rocks, papier mâché, cardboard and spit. A stage setting. That’s why there’re only a few candles: if you could see only a few feet farther, you’d know it was just a hoax. It’s set in the middle of the high school gymnasium, so that you get a feeling of open space beyond the darkness. I’d turn the lights on and show you, except I don’t dare draw any attention. The windows are blacked out, but even if a little light escaped, someone might notice—and come running. And that musty smell, in case you’re wondering, is canned odor, guaranteed to make a spelunker feel right at home. Some of our people whipped it up in the lab. Aren’t they handy?”

“What is Willawauk?” she asked, getting interested in spite of herself and in spite of her fear that she was being set up once more.

“I’ll explain in the car,” McGee said. “There isn’t time now. You’ll just
have
to trust me.”

She hesitated, head spinning.

He said, “If you don’t trust me, you might never find out what Willawauk is.”

She let her breath out slowly. “All right.”

“I
knew
you had moxie,” he said, smiling.

“I’ll need help.”

“I know.”

She let him dress her. She felt like a little girl as he put her sweater on for her, pulled her panties and then her jeans up her legs, and slipped her shoes on her feet.

“I don’t think I can walk,” she said.

“I didn’t intend to ask you to walk. Can you at least hold the flashlight?”

“I think I can do that.”

He picked her up. “Light as a feather. A big feather. Hold tight to my neck with your free arm.”

She directed the light where he told her, and he carried her out of the phony cavern, across the floor of the gymnasium. The beam of the small flash bounced off the highly polished wood floor, and in that pale glow, she was aware that they passed under a basketball hoop. Then they went down a set of concrete steps, through a door that McGee had left ajar, and into a locker room.

The lights were on here, and three dead men were sprawled in the area between the coach’s office and the lockers. Jellicoe and Parker were on the floor. Half of Jellicoe’s face was gone. Parker had two holes in his chest. Quince was draped over a bench, still dripping blood onto the floor from a wound in his neck.

Beginning to huff a bit, McGee carried her between two rows of tall lockers, past the shower room, to another door that had been left ajar. He shouldered through it, into a well-lighted hallway.

Another dead man lay on the floor here.

“Who’s he?” she asked.

“Guard,” McGee said.

They went a short distance down the hall, turned the corner into another hall, and went to a set of metal doors, beside which lay another corpse, apparently another guard.

“Kill the flash,” McGee said.

She switched it off, and he leaned against the pushbar handle on the metal doors, and then they were outside.

It was a clear, cool night. Almost an entire day had passed while she had slid in and out of a drugged stupor.

Two cars waited in the school lot. Breathing hard now, McGee took her to a blue Chevrolet and put her down beside it. She leaned against the car, for her legs were too limp to support her even for the few seconds he took to open the door and help her inside.

They drove boldly out of Willawauk by way of Main Street, which eventually turned into a county road. They were not only headed away from Willawauk, but also away from the building in which she had been hospitalized. Neither of them spoke until the last lights of town were out of sight, until only wild, green countryside lay around them.

Huddled in the passenger’s seat, Susan looked over at McGee. His face was strange in the green luminescence of the dashboard gauges. Strange—but not threatening.

She still didn’t entirely trust him. She didn’t know what to believe.

“Tell me,” she said.

“It’s hard to know where to begin.”

“Anywhere, dammit. Just begin.”

“The Milestone Corporation,” he said.

“Back there on the hill.”

“No, no. That sign you saw on the hospital lawn when you escaped in the Pontiac—that was just put up to confuse you, to add to your disorientation.”

“Then the place is really a hospital.”

“A hospital—and other things. The real Milestone Corporation is in Newport Beach.”

“And I work for them?”

“Oh, yes. That’s all true. Although it wasn’t Phil Gomez you spoke with on the phone. That was someone in Willawauk, pretending to be Gomez.”

“What do I do at Milestone?”

“It’s a think tank, just like I told you. But it doesn’t work with private industry. Milestone’s a front for a super-secret U.S. military think tank that functions under the direct control of the Secretary of Defense and the President. Congress doesn’t even know it exists; its appropriations are obtained in a very roundabout fashion. At Milestone, two dozen of the finest scientific minds in the country have been brought together with perhaps the most sophisticated data library and computer system in the world. Every man and woman at Milestone is a brilliant specialist in his or her field, and every science is covered.”

“I’m one of the experts?” she asked, still not able to recall a thing about Milestone, still not even convinced that it actually existed.

“You’re one of two particle physicists they have there.”

“I can’t remember.”

“I know.”

As he drove through the dark, forested countryside, McGee told her everything he knew about Milestone—or at least, everything he
professed
to know.

Milestone (according to McGee) had one primary goal: to develop an ultimate weapon—a particle beam, some new kind of laser, a new biological weapon,
anything—
which would in one way or another render nuclear weaponry not just obsolete but useless. The U.S. government had for some time been convinced that the Soviet Union was seeking nuclear superiority with the express intention of launching a first-strike attack the moment that such a monstrous tactic was likely to result in a clean, painless Soviet victory. But it hadn’t been possible, until recently, to sell the American public on the idea that rearmament was a desperate necessity. Therefore, in the middle Seventies, the President and the Secretary of Defense could see no hope except a miracle; a miracle weapon that would cancel out the Soviet arsenal and free mankind from the specter of an atomic holocaust. While it wasn’t possible to launch a massive arms buildup costing hundreds of billions of dollars, it was possible to secretly establish a new research facility, better funded than any had ever been before, and hope that American ingenuity would pull the country’s ass out of the fire. In a sense, Milestone became America’s last best hope.

“But surely that kind of research was already being done,” Susan said. “Why was there a need to establish a new program?”

“Anti-war elements within the research community—primarily student lab assistants—were stealing information and leaking it to anyone who would listen and who would join the battle against the Pentagon war machine. In the mid-Seventies, the university-based weapons research establishment was crumbling. The President wanted that kind of research to go forward strictly in the shadows, so that any breakthroughs would remain the exclusive property of the United States.

“For years, the very existence of Milestone was unknown to Soviet Intelligence. When agents of the KGB finally learned of it, they were afraid that the U.S. might be nearing—or might already have achieved—its goal of rendering the Soviet war machine impotent. They knew they had to get their hands on one of Milestone’s scientists and engage in weeks of unrestrained interrogation.”

The Chevy began to accelerate too rapidly down a long, steep hill, and McGee tapped the brakes.

“The scientists at Milestone are encouraged to familiarize themselves with one another’s fields of interest, in order to search for areas of overlap and to benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas.
Every one
of the
twenty-four department chiefs
at Milestone knows a great deal about the workable ideas that have
come
out of the place
so
far. It means that many of the Pentagon’s future plans could be compromised by any one of the Milestone people.”

“So the Soviets decided to snatch me,” Susan said, gradually beginning to believe him, but still filled with doubts.