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Authors: Jon Land

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BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven
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Blaine heard a muffled rasp, the shadow of a word lost before it reached him. Johnny moved his ear away and gazed upward.
“What’d he say, Indian?”
“‘Gone,’ Blainey. He said ‘gone.’”
 
Neither Johnny nor Blaine paid the dazed highway patrolman much heed until the next words slid out more audibly between his freshly moistened lips:
“Beaver Falls.”
“Indian, did he say—”
“Yes!” Karen Raymond blared. “I heard him!”
The patrolman rasped out something else.
“What?” McCracken prodded.
The man swallowed and tried again. “There … I was there.”
“You
came
from Beaver Falls?”
His eyes were turning wild, mad. “Must get back there … Must stop them.”
Blaine and Johnny gazed at each other, then back at the figure at their feet, who was gathering his wits.
“Maybe we can help,” offered McCracken.
 
They got the patrolman into the car and turned the air conditioning on high to help him cool down. His breathing steadied quickly, but the furtive madness continued to skirt through his eyes, making all of them wary. McCracken had traded places with Karen in the backseat.
“What’s your name?” Blaine asked him.
“Denbo. Wayne Denbo.”
“Well, Wayne, what was it you saw, exactly?”
The story of what Denbo and his partner found when they drove into Beaver Falls the previous Monday emerged in fits and starts between grateful gulps of water. Ultimately he clutched the canteen to his chest, where it trembled and throbbed to mirror his own agitation. It shook as he sketchily detailed finding that all the inhabitants of Beaver Falls had suddenly vanished in the midst of whatever tasks they were performing. But the water did not begin to jump out until he got to the part about exiting the school after his partner’s disappearance.
“I was talking on the mike. That’s when I saw them.”
“Saw who?” McCracken quizzed.
“The figures from the dust. Whiter than the sun. They came for me and I jumped in the car. Must not have known I was in the school, too. Musta missed me.” He swallowed hard and the canteen settled against his chest. “Didn’t miss anyone else, though. Whole town was gone, I tell ya, the whole town!”
“Describe them,” Karen Raymond urged.
“I did already.”
“Again.”
“All white, that’s what I remember most.” Wayne Denbo stopped and seemed to be thinking. The canteen
went still in his grasp. “Holding things and … driving things.”
“What kind of things?” she pushed. “What kind of things were they holding?”
“Machines I never saw the likes of before. They came out of the dust everywhere. In their suits.”
“White suits,” Karen said for him. “Almost like what astronauts wear.”
Denbo leaned forward. “Yes! Yes! And they were coming after me!”
She looked at McCracken. “Decontamination suits to keep the wearers safe from all possible toxins. Standard procedure when entering a potentially contaminated setting.”
“Contaminated as in …”
“Diseased, usually. The machines he’s describing are used to take samples of the air or, in the event you know what you’re looking for, they can be programmed to tell you instantly if the toxin is still active.”
Denbo looked confused. The canteen began to throb again. “What about the vehicles? Like campers, with spindly things twirling on their tops.”
“Tracking devices?” Blaine raised to Johnny.
“Or motion sensors to track down the positions of all residents, Blainey.”
“To make sure they didn’t miss any.”
“One of them could have been a mobile lab,” Karen pointed out. “It would have probably been in the rear, the largest.”
“What about the
people?”
asked Wayne Denbo.
“They must have been evacuated before you got there,” Karen told him, “before the decontamination team got there.”
“And my partner?”
“He’s probably with the others they brought out.”
Denbo’s face grew determined. “That’s why I was going back. I’ve got to find him.”
McCracken looked at Karen Raymond. “How does all this tie in with Van Dyne’s AIDS vaccine?”
“Well, it explains why Freddy Levinger and I found the project center empty last night: Van Dyne had already covered their tracks, making sure no one else learned that something went wrong.”
“How much of the town was part of the test group?”
“Only about a fifth. They may have evacuated everybody else for precautionary reasons, or because they witnessed something no one could know about.”
“And if we drive into town now?”
Karen swallowed hard and drew her field bag closer to her in the front seat. “I may be able to learn something, I may not. It’s been four days.”
“Then we’d better not waste any more time.”
 
They stopped a half mile out of Beaver Falls and parked their car near a slight rise beneath a larger overhanging hillside that overlooked the center of town. Wareagle had brought binoculars with him and fished them from his pack. He handed them to McCracken as they approached the small ridge. But Blaine did not need the binoculars to see what Beaver Falls had to show him. The primary structures along the main avenue, as well as the homes that dotted the perimeter and outskirts with greening lawns, were a study in the mundane. Like something out of a painting; Rockwell working in a desert southwestern motif of beige, cream, and terra-cotta stucco, with adobe finishes adorning a town that could have been sliced from a century back, if not for its tar black roadways.
And something else.
McCracken looked at Wareagle. Karen Raymond squinted and cupped a hand upon her brow. Wayne Denbo sank to his knees, shaking his head.
“No,” he muttered, casting his eyes fervidly about the scene beneath him.
“No! …
”
A few cars inched their way along the town’s central
road. Women walked with handbags dangling from their arms. A man emerged from a shop holding an ice cream cone. At the far end of town, children spent the last of the afternoon on a playground adjacent to the school building on the outskirts of town.
Beaver Falls, it seemed, wasn’t gone at all.
Wayne Denbo took the binoculars from McCracken and pressed them to his eyes. Blaine and Johnny could see his face tighten as he took in a closer view of Beaver Falls. They watched him move the binoculars in an arc from left to right, stopping a few times en route.
“Are you sure this is the place? Are you sure this is where you were?” Blaine asked him.
Wayne Denbo’s hand edged slightly toward his empty holster the way an amputee reaches for a missing limb. “Oh, yeah. Beaver Falls. Gone no more.”
Johnny and Blaine looked at each other, trying to make sense of it. Maybe Denbo was crazy. Maybe he had made the whole business up; but neither thought so.
“Right people can get an awful lot done in four days, Indian.”
“Replacements, Blainey?”
“It won’t hold up long, but maybe it doesn’t have to. If it works in the short term, that’s good enough. You can’t keep a disappearing town secret. But now …”
“I’ve still got to go down there,” Karen Raymond insisted.
“Doesn’t the fact that people are alive tell you what you need to know?” Blaine asked her.
“It tells me things are safe now. It doesn’t tell me what led to the evacuation. But the town itself might be able to.” She touched the handle of her field bag, which looked like a large black makeup case. “There’s still the soil, the roadbed, the storm drains or sewers, where I can get samples of water that’s been standing since Monday.”
Blaine didn’t look convinced. “And if anyone sees you …”
“Who said anyone had to? I can get my samples from the outlying homes and streets as easily as the town center. And don’t tell me you can do it,” Karen said, anticipating Blaine’s next proposal. “It would take me a month to teach you how to use the equipment in this bag.”
“Guess we don’t have quite that long,” McCracken agreed.
 
Taking a roundabout route to be safe, Karen reached the outskirts of Beaver Falls in half an hour. She had to work fast, but not at the expense of thoroughness. Her priorities were air, soil, vegetation, and standing water, especially the latter three. Long after a potential toxin or contaminant had disappeared from the air, its residue remained on leaves, in dirt, or water pooled for some time.
She approached a house that had all of its windows closed and most of its blinds drawn, figuring that indicated no one was home. To be at least partially accurate, Karen knew she would need to duplicate the sample-gathering process in at least two other locations in Beaver Falls, preferably as far away as possible from this one.
She started with the air, employing a small vacuum pump to fill a thermally sealed container with a sample. The soil came next, five separate samples taken and cataloged from five different depths along the house’s backyard. She then clipped a hefty section of grass and
vacuum-bagged it. She took tree leaf samples, a section of a cypress tree branch, and sliced off the outgrowth from some sort of fern growing in the garden in front of the house. Karen imagined she would look like a gardener to anyone who happened by.
On the side of the house she found a moderate hole in the ground that seemed to be waiting for a tree or shrub to fill it. The hole was half-filled with murky, thickening water coated with a light film on top. Muttering a silent prayer of thanks, she reached into her field bag for three small vials. She used an eyedropper to fill the first two vials with the standing water before her and then skimmed some contents from the very top to fill the third. She stowed the vials in the tailored slots within her padded field bag and set out writing labels for all three. She was halfway through the third when a shadow suddenly blocked the sun.
“I think you better come with me, miss.”
Startled, she turned and squinted up into the eyes of a short, uniformed figure wearing a gun.
 
“Uh-oh,” McCracken said, as through his binoculars he watched a patrol car return to the sheriff’s office.
He didn’t have to see the figure in the backseat clearly to know it was Karen Raymond. An officer waiting near the curb reached in to help her out. The driver emerged holding her field bag by its shoulder strap, letting it dangle low toward the ground.
“Trouble, Indian,” he told Johnny.
“More than you realize, Blainey.”
“What?”
Wareagle’s naked eyes were fixed on a figure that had just emerged at the head of Beaver Falls’ main street.
“Denbo,” Blaine realized, before he had even rotated his binoculars. “Son of a bitch!”
 
“Let her go!”
Karen swung round and saw Patrolman Wayne Denbo
standing in the middle of the street, a hand poised over his noticeably empty holster. The officer who had picked her up on the outskirts of town nodded to the deputy on her other side. The deputy drew his gun and stepped down off the curb.
“I want to know what you did with the
real
people who live here!” Denbo demanded. “Do you hear me? I want to know where they are!”
“No!” Karen screamed when she saw the deputy’s gun coming up.
She broke free of her captor’s hold and slammed into the deputy. He reeled sideways and grabbed hold of her hair, pulling hard when she rushed him again.
Wayne Denbo had closed to within ten yards by then. Before he could draw any closer, though, one of the apparent bystanders charged in from his rear and smashed Denbo over the head with a club. Karen watched him crumple to the street.
“Get her inside,” Karen heard someone yell to the deputy who still had her by the hair.
 
“We’ve got to get them out of there,” McCracken said, lowering his binoculars.
“Their captors will be expecting us, Blainey.”
“Because they were advised of the possibility,” Blaine followed, something occurring to him. “Then why did they let Denbo get so far? They must have seen him coming, right?”
Wareagle understood his point at once and, looking about him, seemed to sniff the air. “We must get out of here, Blainey.”
McCracken nodded.
Before they could reach their car, a dozen armed figures appeared atop the larger hillside overlooking the small rise where the two of them were standing. Most had their hands already poised on the triggers and eyes pressed to the sights. Their spacing was good, certain to deny Johnny
and Blaine victory even if they had been able to reach their guns.
“Hands in the air!” a voice shouted down, and then repeated itself, words turned into a scattered echo by the surroundings.
 
“Tried to arrest them,” Wayne Denbo muttered near the door to the small root cellar, his unshaven face pale and flaking. “Tried to arrest them.”
They had all been gathered here rather than taken to the three cells of the Beaver Falls jail. Karen and Denbo were already inside when Blaine and Johnny were shoved through the door. McCracken saw them briefly before their armed escorts yanked it closed again, slamming a bolt lock into place. The meager light available came only from what was able to sneak feebly through the thin cracks in the wood.
That was enough for Blaine to see Denbo curled up on the floor in a ball. A portion of his hair was matted with blood. Streaks of it were visible on his forehead.
“What happens now?” Karen Raymond asked McCracken.
“I suspect we’ll be taken elsewhere.”
“Why not just kill us?”
“Because Frye will want to be sure we haven’t involved anyone else. He knows I was asking questions in Washington. He doesn’t know of whom.”
“You still think he’s behind all this?”
“I know he is, Karen.”
“You’re forgetting that the real key is Van Dyne, and so far there’s been no hint of any connection between the Reverend and them.”
“There wouldn’t be; he would make sure of it.”
“You sound like you know him.”
“Not personally, just his type. That’s enough.”
She moved a bit closer to him in the near dark. “So all this is nothing new for you.”
“Not new, just different.”
“How so?”
“Well, I’ve met up with more than my share of madmen, but never one who thought he had God speaking to him, that he was speaking for God. All fanatics believe they’re right, but what they’re capable of, how far they’ll go, is determined by how well they can justify their actions. Not just to others, but also to themselves. Harlan Frye can justify
anything.
He can do anything and accept anything because he’ll honestly believe he’s doing the work of the Almighty. That strips him of fear, and a man who fears nothing is the hardest opponent of all. Makes him less likely to make the kind of mistakes that helped me take down others who came before him.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“I’d better.”
 
What little light they had at first vanished with the fall of night, nothing left to slither through the slight cracks in the heavy wooden door. An hour had passed since sunset when McCracken and Wareagle heard footsteps approaching outside. Karen Raymond could feel them glance at each other in the darkness, certain their positions had been strategically chosen.
Karen tensed as the door was opened. She half expected McCracken and his Indian friend to surge into motion at that instant, but they held their ground, and it wasn’t long before Karen saw why. Beyond the door, beyond the flood of light pouring into the root cellar from a number of flashlights, she distinguished shapes and some movement.
The street beyond was teeming with gunmen, each with his weapon drawn. Three of the men, carrying flashlights, approached the prisoners and beckoned the small group to accompany them back to the surface. One reached down to grasp the dazed form of Wayne Denbo. Karen noticed all three of them were unarmed and could sense Blaine McCracken’s disappointment in that fact. It seemed every move their captors made was designed defensively to keep McCracken from seizing the advantage.
Back on the street, the true scope of their predicament
became obvious. The gunmen rimmed it in a wide circle, all with guns held ready at eyes or hips. Their unarmed escorts prodded the four of them into the center of the circle and cast their eyes upward to the night sky. Karen also noticed that only a select few streetlights in the center of Beaver falls, the bare minimum, had been switched on—another defensive measure on the part of their captors.
The gunmen possessed an incalculable advantage over them in all respects, yet Karen could sense their tension as clearly as her own. These men had obviously been warned what McCracken was capable of. She looked his way in the darkness and saw his face was expressionless, emotionless. The Indian’s was a virtual mirror image. They might have appeared to be nonchalant, even indifferent. But their eyes missed nothing, waiting for an opportunity to present itself. Karen knew she would have little warning when it came and made herself ready to respond with only a heartbeat’s notice.
Suddenly the night sky was split by a wash of light and sound. A helicopter surged in low over the sheltering hillside. It slowed into a hover above the center of Main Street and then began to descend deliberately toward ground level. Its rotor wash kicked dust, street debris, and paper into the air, forcing most of those present to raise their hands up to shield their faces. McCracken’s hands stayed down. Karen thought in that instant of distraction Blaine was going to move, but instead he squeezed her arm tenderly, reassuringly.
“Not yet,” he whispered.
 
Blaine noted the helicopter was a Chinook troop carrier, military issue repainted in civilian colors, its twin main rotors just now slowing to a complete stop. With no airfield nearby, he had been expecting the arrival of some form of chopper to spirit them off to another destination. They couldn’t be killed until the enemy knew how far its opposition extended; who else, in other
words, Blaine and/or Karen Raymond had taken into their confidence.
He and Johnny had held off making any move yet because they knew the chopper would offer their best opportunity. Once they were airborne inside it, the confined space and limited enemy numbers would work in their favor. He was certain the Indian and he would be tied down, but he was confident he could deal with that eventuality somehow.
The Chinook finally settled uneasily into the center of the street, its rotors continuing to cough debris in all directions as the blades slowed. Two gunmen moved toward the chopper and threw open its rear hold, exposing a single troop ramp. On cue, their unarmed escorts eased Blaine and Johnny forward, Karen Raymond and Wayne Denbo walking just ahead of them.
They were halfway to the Chinook, walking straight into the spill of its most powerful floodlight, when Blaine felt the man at his side go rigid and then drop. The second went down in rapid fashion and then the third, as if the street had been yanked out from under them.
McCracken hadn’t heard the gunshots and didn’t bother considering their origin; he simply took Karen down safely to the ground, as Johnny Wareagle did the same with Patrolman Wayne Denbo. For all they knew, they could just as easily be the sniper’s next targets. Suddenly, though, the remainder of the guards placed strategically in the street began to drop, felled by fire from the unseen gunman. Those left standing lunged for cover and fired wildly in all directions, hoping to at least keep their mystery enemy at bay.
BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven
6.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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