10
Saturday, August 6th:
Newt and Dick were sitting in the Haven Lunch. The newspaper was between them. The lead story was another outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast; the story that most concerned them that morning was below the fold. NEUROSURGEON KILLED IN LIGHT PLANE CRASH, the headline read. There was a photo of the plane. Nothing recognizable remained of the once beautiful Cessna Hawk except its tail.
Their breakfasts were pushed to one side, mostly untouched. Molly Fenderson, Beach's niece, was cooking now that Beach was dead. Molly was a helluva nice girl, but her fried eggs looked like broiled ass**les. Dick thought they tasted that way, too, although he'd never actually eaten an ass**le, broiled or any other way.
Might have, Newt said.
Dick looked at him, eyebrows raised.
They put damn near anything in hot dogs. Least, that's what I read once.
Dick's gut rolled over. He told Newt to shut his f**king gob.
Newt paused, then said: Must have been twenty, thirty people see that ijit come low acrost the village.
All from town? Dick asked.
Yes.
Then we have no problem, do we?
No, I don't think so, Newt replied, sipping coffee. At least, not unless it happens again.
Dick shook his head. Shouldn't do. Paper says he was off-course.
Yeah. So it said. You ready?
Sure.
They left without paying. Money had ceased to hold much interest to the residents of Haven. There were several large cardboard cartons of cash in Dick Allison's basement, carelessly tucked into the old coal-hold - twenties, tens, and ones, mostly. Haven was a small town. When someone needed cash for something, they came and got some. The house was unlocked. Besides telepathic typewriters and water heaters that ran on the power of collapsing molecules, Haven had discovered a nearly perfect form of collectivism.
On the sidewalk in front of the Lunch, they stared toward the town hall. The brick clock tower was flickering uneasily. One moment it was there, as solid as the Taj Mahal, if not so beautiful. The next, there was only blue sky above the jagged ruin of the tower's base. Then it would come back. Its long morning shadow fluttered like the shadow of a window-shade blown by an intermittent wind. Newt found the fact that sometimes the shadow of the clock tower was there when the tower itself was not particularly disturbing.
Christ! If I looked at that sucker too long, I'd go batshit, Dick said.
Newt asked if someone was taking care of the deterioration.
Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline have had to go up to Derry, Dick said. They're supposed to go to about five different service stations, plus both auto-parts stores. I sent damn near seven hundred bucks with them, told them to come back with as many as twenty car batteries, if they could. But they're supposed to spread the buy around. There's people in some of the towns around here that think folks have gone battery-crazy in Haven.
Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline? Newt asked dubiously. Christ,
they're just kids! Has Tommy got a driver's license, Dick? '
No, Dick said reluctantly. But he's fifteen and he's got a permit and he drives real safe. Besides, he's big. Looks older than he really is. They'll be okay.
Christ, it's so f**king risky!
It is, but
They communed in thoughts that were more images than words; this was happening more and more in Haven, as the people in town learned this strange new thought-language. For all of his misgivings, Newt understood the basic problem that had caused Dick to send a couple of underage kids to Derry in the Fannins' pickup truck. They needed batteries, needed them, but it was getting harder and harder for the people who lived in Haven to leave Haven. If a codger like Dave Rutledge or an old coot like John Harley tried it, they would be dead - and probably rotting - before they got to the Derry city line. It would take younger men like Newt and Dick a slightly longer time, but they would also go ... and probably in agony, because of the physical changes that had begun in Bobbi's shed. It didn't surprise either man that Hilly Brown was in a coma, and he had left when things were just starting to really roll. Tommy Jacklin was fifteen, Hester Brookline a well-developed thirteen. They at least had youth on their side, and could hope to leave and come back alive without the equivalent of NASA spacesuits to protect them from what was now an alien and inimical atmosphere. Such equipment would have been out of the question even if they'd had it. They probably could have cobbled something together, but if a couple of folks showed up at the Napa auto-parts store in Derry wearing moonsuits, there might be a few questions. Or more than a few.
I don't like it, Newt said at last.
Hell, I don't either, Dick replied. I'm not going to have a minute's peace until they get back, and I've got ole Doc Warwick parked out by the HavenTroy line to take care of 'em just as soon as they do
I they do.
Ayuh ... if. I think they will, but they'll be hurting.
What kind of problems do you expect?
Dick shook his head. He didn't know, and Doc Warwick refused to even guess ... except to ask Dick in a cross mental voice what he, Dick, thought would happen to a salmon if it decided to ride a bike upstream to the spawning grounds instead of swimming.
Well ... Newt said doubtfully.
Well, nothing, Dick returned. We can't leave that thing - he nodded toward the oscillating clock tower - the way it is.
Newt returned: We're almost down to the hatchway now. I think we could leave it.
Maybe. Maybe not. But we need batteries for other things, and you know it. And we need to keep being careful. You know that, too.
Don't teach your grammy to suck eggs, Dick.
(Fu)
Fuck that, ass**le, was what Newt had been about to say, but he squashed it, although he found more to dislike about Dick Allison with every passing day. The truth was, Haven ran on batteries now, just like a kid's toy car from FAO Schwarz. And they kept needing more, and bigger ones, and mail-order was not only too slow, it was the sort of thing that might send up a warning flag to someone somewhere. You could never tell.
All in all, Newt Berringer was a troubled man. They had survived the plane crash; if something happened to Tommy and Hester, could they survive that?
He didn't know. He only knew he wouldn't have much peace until the kids were back in Haven, where they belonged.
11
Sunday, August 7th:
Gardener was at the ship, looking at it, trying to decide again - if any good could be turned from this weird mess ... and if not, if there was any way out of it. He had heard the light plane two days before, although he had been in the house and had come out a moment too late to see it on its third pass. Three passes was just about two too many; he had been pretty sure the pilot had spotted the ship and the excavation. The thought had afforded Gardener a strange, bitter relief. Then, yesterday, he had seen the story in the paper. You didn't have to be a college graduate to see the connection. Poor old Dr Bailey had wandered off-course, and that leftover from the space armada of Ming the Merciless had stripped his gears.
Did that make him, Jim Gardener, an accessory to murder? It might, and, wifeshooter or not, Gard didn't care for the thought.
Freeman Moss, the dour woodsman from Albion, hadn't shown up this morning -Gard supposed the ship had blown his fuses as it had those of the others before him. Gard was alone for the first time since Bobbi had disappeared. On the surface, that seemed to open things up some. But when you looked deeper, the same old conundrums remained.
The story of the dead neurosurgeon and the crashed plane had been bad, but to Gard's mind, the story above the fold - the one Newt and Dick had ignored - was much worse. The Mideast was getting ready to explode again, and if there was shooting this time, some of it might be nuclear. The Union of Concerned Scientists, those happy folks who kept the Black Clock, had advanced the hands two minutes to nuclear midnight yesterday, the paper reported. Happy days were here again, all right. The ship could maybe pull the pin on all that ... but was that what Freeman Moss and Kyle Archinbourg and old Bozie and all the rest of them wanted? Sometimes Gard felt a sickening surety that cooling out the powderkeg the planet was sitting on was the last thing which the New and Improved Haven was concerned with. And so?
He didn't know. Sometimes being a telepathic zero was a pain in the ass.
His eye moved to the pumping machinery squashed into the mud at the edge of the trench. Working at the ship had previously been a matter of dust and dirt and rocks and stumps that wouldn't come up until you were just about half-crazy with frustration. Now it was wet work - very wet work indeed. The last couple of nights he had gone home with wet clay in his hair, between his toes, and in the crack of his ass. Mud was bad, but clay was worse. Clay stuck.
The pumping equipment was the strangest, ugliest conglomeration yet, but it worked. It also weighed tons, but the mostly silent Freeman Moss had transported it from Bobbi's dooryard all by himself ... it had taken him most of Thursday and about five hundred batteries to do it, but he had done it, something which would have taken an ordinary construction crew a week or more to accomplish.
Moss had used a gadget like a metal-detector to guide each component to its final resting-place - first off the truck, then through the garden, then out along the well-worn path to the dig. The components floated serenely through the warm summer air, their shadows pooled beneath them. Moss carried the thing which had once been a metal-detector in one hand, and something which looked like a walkie-talkie handset in the other. When he raised the curved stainless-steel antenna on the end of the walkie-talkie gadget and moved the dish at the end of the detector, the motor or pump would rise. When he moved them to the left, the piece of equipment went left. Gard, watching this with the bemusement of a veteran drunk (and surely no one sees as many strange things as one of those), thought that Moss looked like a scrofulous animal trainer leading mechanical elephants through the woods to the site of some unimaginable circus.
Gardener had seen the laborious moving of enough heavy equipment to know that this device could revolutionize construction techniques. Such things were outside his practical knowledge, but he guessed that a single gadget such as the one Moss had used on Thursday with such absent ease could cut the cost of a project the size of the Aswan Dam by twenty-five per cent or more.
In at least one respect, however, it was like the illusion being maintained at the town hall - it required a lot of juice.
'Here,' Moss said, handing Gard a heavy packsack. 'Put this on.'
Gard winced shouldering the straps. Moss saw it and smiled a little. 'It'll
get lighter as the day goes along,' he said. 'Don't you worry about that.' He plugged the jack of a transistor earphone into the side of the radio-controller and pushed the phone into his ear.
'What's in the pack?' Gardener asked.
'Batt'ries. Let's go.'
Moss had switched the gadget on, seemed to listen, nodded, then pointed the curved antenna at the first motor. It rose in the air an hung there. Holding the controller in one hand and the customized metal-detector in the other, Moss walked toward the motor. For every step he took, the motor retreated a similar distance. Gard brought up the rear.
Moss walked the motor between the house and the shed, urging it around the Tomcat, and then ahead of him through Bobbi's garden. A wide path had been worn through this, but on both sides of it the plants continued to grow in rampant splendor. Some of the sunflowers were now twelve feet high. They reminded Gardener of a science-fiction novel called The Day of the Triffids he had read as a boy. One night about a week ago he had awakened from a terrible nightmare. In it, the sunflowers in the garden had uprooted themselves and begun to walk, eldritch light shining from their centers and onto the ground like the beams of flashlights with green lenses.
There were summer squashes in the garden as big as U-boat torpedoes. Tomatoes the size of basketballs. Some of the corn was nearly as high as the sunflowers. Curious, Gardener had picked one of the ears; it was easily two feet long. A single ear, had it been good, would have fed two hungry men. But Gard had spat out the single mouthful of butter-and-sugar kernels he had bitten off, grimacing and wiping his mouth. The taste had been meaty and hideous. Bobbi was growing a garden full of huge plants, but the vegetables were inedible ... perhaps even poisonous.
The motor had cruised serenely ahead of them along the path, cornstalks rustling and bending on either side as it pushed its way through. Gardener saw smears and swatches of grease and engine oil on some of the militantly green, swordlike leaves. On the far side of the garden, the motor began to sag. Moss had lowered the antenna, and the motor settled to the earth with a gentle thump.
'What's up?' Gardener had asked.
Moss only grunted and produced a dime. He stuck it in the base of his controller, twisted it, and pulled six double-A Duracells out of the battery compartment. Tossed them indifferently on the ground. 'Gimme some more,' he said.
Gardener unshouldered the knapsack, undid the straps, opened the flap, and saw what looked at first glance like a billion double-A's; it was as if someone had hit the Grand Jackpot at Atlantic City and the machine had paid off in batteries instead of bucks.
'Jesus!'
'I ain't Him,' Moss said. 'Gimme half a dozen of those suckers.'
For once Gardener didn't seem to have a wisecrack left in him. He handed six batteries over and watched Moss fit them into the compartment. Then Moss replaced the battery hatch, turned it on, refitted the earplug in his ear, and said, 'Let's go.'
Forty yards into the woods there was another battery change; sixty yards after that, another. Floating the motor sucked less juice when it was going downhill, but by the time Moss had finally settled the big motor-block on the edge of the trench, they had gone through forty-two batteries.
Back and forth, back and forth; one by one they brought the pieces of pumping machinery from Freeman Moss's truck to the edge of the trench. The knapsack on Gardener's back grew steadily lighter.
On the fourth trip, Gard had asked Moss if he could try it. A large industrial pump, whose raison d'etre before this odd little side-trip had probably been pumping sewage from clogged septic tanks, was sitting on a tilted angle about a hundred yards from the trench. Moss was once more changing batteries. Dead double-A's lay all along the path now, reminding Gard with odd poignance of the kid on the beach at Arcadia Beach. The kid with the firecrackers. The kid whose mother had given up drinking ... and everything else. The kid who had known about the Tommyknockers.
'Well, you can give her a try.' Moss handed over the gadget. 'I could use a smidge of help, and I don't mind sayin' so. Wears a man out, liftin' all that.' He saw Gardener's look and said: 'Oh, ayuh, I'm doin' part of it m'self; that's what the plug's for. You can try it, but I don't think you'll have much luck. You ain't like us.'
'I noticed. I'm the one that isn't going to have to buy a set of teeth from Sears and Roebuck when all this is over.'
Moss looked at him sourly and said nothing.
Gard used his handkerchief to wipe off the brown coating of wax Moss had left on the earplug, then stuck it in his ear. He heard a distant sound like the one you heard when you held a conch shell to your ear. He pointed the antenna at the pump as he had seen Moss do, then cautiously flickered the antenna upward. The quality of the dim seashore rumble in his ear changed. The pump moved the tiniest bit - he was sure it wasn't just his imagination. But a instant later, two other things happened. He felt warm blood coursing down his face from his nose, and his head was filled with a blaring voice. I CARPET YOUR DEN OR YOUR WHOLE HOME FOR LESS!' screamed some radio announcer, who was suddenly sitting right in the middle of Gardener's head and apparently yelling into an electric bullhorn. 'AND YES WE DO HAVE A NEW SHIPMENT OF THROW-RUGS! THE LAST SHIPMENT SOLD OUT FAST, SO BE SURE -'
'Oww, Jesus, shut up!' Gardener had cried. He dropped the handset and reached for his head. The earphone was dragged out of his ear, and the blaring announcer cut out. He had been left with a nosebleed and a head that was ringing like a bell.
Freeman Moss, startled out of his taciturnity, stared at Gardener with wide eyes. 'What in Christ's name was that?' he asked.
'That,' Gardener said weakly, 'was WZON, Where It's Only Rock and Roll
Because That's the Way You Like lt. You mind if I sit down for a minute, Moss? Think I just pissed myself.'
'Your nose is bleedin', too.'
'No shit, Sherlock,' Gardener said.
'Think maybe you better let me use the lifter after this.' Gard had been more than happy to abide by that. It took them the rest of the day to get all the equipment out to the trench, and Moss was so tired when the last piece arrived that Gardener had to practically carry the man back to his truck.
'Feel like I just chopped two cord of wood and shit m'brains out while I was doin' it,' the older man gasped.
After that, Gardener hadn't really expected the man to come back. But Moss had shown up promptly at seven the next day. He had been driving a beat-up split-grille Pontiac instead of his truck. He got out of the Pontiac banging a dinner bucket against his leg.
'Come on. Let's get to it.'
Gardener respected Moss more than the other three 'helpers' put together ... in fact, he liked him.
Moss glanced at him as they walked out to the ship with the morning dew of that Friday morning wetting down the cuffs of their pants. 'Caught that one,' he grunted. 'You're okay too, I guess.'
That was about all Mr Freeman Moss had to say to him that day.
They sunk a nest of hoses into the trench and rigged more hoses - outflow hoses, this time - to direct the water they pumped out downhill, on a slope that ran a bit southeast of Bobbi's place. These 'dumper hoses,' as Moss called them, were big, wide-bore rolls of canvas that Gardener supposed had been scavenged from the VFD.
'Ayuh, got a few there, got a few other places,' Moss said, and would offer no more on that subject.
Before starting the pumps, he had Gardener pound a number of U-shaped clamps over the dumper hoses. 'Else they'll go whippin' around, sprayin' water everywhere. If you've ever seen a fireman's hose outta control, you know someone c'n get hurt. And we ain't got enough men to stand around holdin' a bunch of pissin' hoses all day.'
'Not that there'd be any volunteers standing in line. Right?'
Freeman Moss had looked at him silently, saying nothing for a moment. Then he grunted: 'Pound those clamps in good. We'll still have to stop pretty often to pound 'em back in. They'll loosen up.'
'Can't you control the outflow so you don't have to bother with all this clamping shit?' Gardener asked.
Moss rolled his eyes impatiently at his ignorance. 'Sure,' he said, 'but there's one f**k of a lot of water down in that hole, and I'd like to get it out before doomsday, if it's all the same to you.'
Gardener held out his hands, half-laughing. 'Hey, I was just asking,' he said. 'Peace.'
The man had only grunted in his inimitable Freeman Moss style.
By nine-thirty, water was pouring downhill and away from the ship at a great rate. It was cold and clear and as sweet as water can be - which is sweet indeed, as anyone with a good well could attest. By noon they had created a brand-new stream. It was six feet wide, shallow, but brawling right along, carrying pine needles, loamy black topsoil, and small shrubs away. There was not much for the men to do but to sit around and make sure none of the plump, straining dumper hoses came free and started to fly around, spraying water like bombed-out fire hydrants. Moss shut the pumps down regularly, in sequence, so that they could pound in loose clamps or switch them to a new place along the hose if the ground was getting loose where they had been.
By three o'clock, the stream was rolling larger bushes downstream, and just before five o'clock, Gardener heard the rending rumble of a biggish tree going over. He got up and craned his neck, but it had happened too far down the new stream's course to see.
'Sounded like a pine,' Moss said.
It was Gardener's turn to look at Moss and say nothing.
'Might have been a spruce,' Moss said, and although the man's face remained perfectly straight, Gardener believed Moss might just have made a joke. A very small one, but a joke, just the same.
'Is this water reaching the road, do you think?'
'Oh, ayuh, I sh'd suspect.'
'It'll wash it out, won't it?'
'Nope. Town crew's already putting in a new culve't. Large bore. S'pose they'll have to detour traffic for a couple of days while they tear up the tarvy, but there ain't's much traffic out this way as there used to be, anyway.'
'I noticed,' Gardener said.
'Damn good thing, if you ask me. Summer people're always a pain in the ass. Looka here, Gardener - I'm gonna cut the outflow on these pumps way down, but they'll still pump fifteen, maybe seventeen gallons a minute overnight. With four pumps workin', that's thirty-eight hundred gallons an hour, all night long. Not bad for runnin' on automatic. Come on, let's go. Yon ship's lovely, but it makes my blood pressure jumpy. I'll drink one of your beers before I head home to the missus, if you'll let it be so.'
Moss had shown up again yesterday, Saturday, in his old Pontiac, and had promptly run the pumps up to capacity - thirty-five gallons per minute each, eighty-four hundred gallons an hour.
This morning, no Freeman Moss. He had finally played out like the others, leaving Gardener to consider the same old options.
First option: Business as usual.
Second option: Run like hell. He had already come to the conclusion that if Bobbi died, he would suffer a fatal accident soon afterward. It might take as long as half an hour for him to have it. If he decided to run, would they know in advance? Gardener didn't think so. He and the rest of Haven still played poker the old-fashioned way: with all the cards dealt face down. Oh, and by the way, gang - how far would he have to run to get out of the reach of them and their Buck Rogers gadgetry?
Actually, Gard didn't think it would be all that far. Derry, Bangor, even Augusta ... all those might be too close. But Portland? Maybe. Probably. Because of what he thought of as the Cigarette Analogy.
When a kid started to smoke, he was lucky if he could get through half a butt without puking his guts out or almost fainting. After six months' experience, he might be able to get through five or ten butts a day. Give a kid three years and you had yourself a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day candidate for lung cancer.
Then turn it over. Tell a kid who has just finished his first butt and who is wandering around green-faced and gagging that he has to quit smoking, and he'll probably fall down and kiss your ass. Catch him when he's doing five or ten smokes a day and you've got a kid who probably doesn't care much one way or another ... although a kid habituated even at that level may find himself eating too many sweets, and wishing for a smoke when he's bored or nervous.
Ah, Gardener thought, but take your smoking vet. Tell him he's got to quit the coffin-nails and he clutches his chest like a man who's having a heart attack ... only he's just protecting the smokes in the breast pocket of his shirt. Smoking, Gardener knew from his own mostly successful efforts to either quit the habit or at least damp it down to a less lethal vice, is a physical addiction. In the first week off cigarettes, smokers suffer from jitters, headaches, musclespasms. Doctors may prescribe B-12 to quiet the worst of these symptoms. They know, however, that there are no pills to combat the ex-smoker's feelings of loss and depression during the six months which begin the instant the smoker crushes out his last butt and starts his or her lonely voyage out of addiction.
And Haven, Gardener thought now, running the pumps up to full power, is like a smoke-filled room. They were sick here at first ... they were like a bunch of kids learning to smoke cornshucks out behind the barn. But now they like the air in the room, and why not? They're the ultimate chainsmokers. It's in the air they breathe, and God knows what kinds of physiological changes are going on in their brains and bodies. Lung sections show formation of oat cells in the lung tissue of people who have only been smoking for eighteen months. There's a high incidence of brain tumors in towns where there are high-pollution milling operations or, God save us, nuclear reactors. So what is this doing to them?
He didn't know - he had seen no surface, observable changes except for the loss of teeth and the increased shortness of temper. But he didn't think they'd chase him very far if he split. They might begin by lighting out after him with the fervor of a posse in a Republic western, but he somehow thought they would lose interest very quickly . . . as soon as the withdrawal symptoms set in.
He got all four pumps running at top speed, swelling the creek into a wide stream almost at once. Then he began the day's work of checking the U-clamps which held the hoses still.
If he got away, his choices were two: keep his mouth shut or blow the whistle. He knew that, for a variety of reasons, he would probably keep quiet. Which meant simply dealing himself - writing off the last month of back-breaking labor, writing off any chance to change the suicidal course of world politics at a stroke, most of all writing off his good friend and erstwhile lover Bobbi Anderson, who had been in absentia for the best part of two weeks now.
Third option: Get rid of it. Blow it up. Destroy it. Make it no more than another vague rumor, like the supposed aliens in Hangar 18.
In spite of his dull fury at the insanity of nuclear power and the energyswilling technocratic pigs who had created it and underwritten it and refused to see its dangers even in the wake of Chernobyl, in spite of his depression at the AP wirephoto of the scientists advancing the Black Clock to two minutes before midnight, he fully recognized the possibility that destroying the ship might be the best thing he could possibly do. The oxidation of whatever had been impregnated in the surface of its hull (deliberately, he had no doubt) had created a cornucopia of mind-blowing gadgets out here; God alone knew what wonderful things might be waiting inside. But there was the other stuff, wasn't there? The neurosurgeon in the crashed plane, that old man and the big state cop, maybe the lady constable, Mrs McCausland, maybe the two other state cops who had disappeared, maybe even the Brown kid ... how much of this could be laid at the door of this thing he was staring at, which was jutting out of the ground like the breeching snout of the greatest white whale ever dreamed of? Some? All? None of the above?
Gardener was sure of one thing - it wasn't the last.
That the ship in the earth was a font of creation was undeniable ... but it was also the wrecked craft of an unknowable species from somewhere far out in the blackness - creatures whose minds might be as different from those of human beings as human minds were from the minds of spiders. It was a marvelous, improbable artifact shining in the hazy sunlight of this Sunday morning ... but it was also a haunted house where demons might still walk between the walls and in the hollow places. There were times when he would look at it and feel his throat fill up with strangeness, as at the sight of flat eyes staring up at him from the earth.
But get rid of it how? Blow it up how? Even supposing he wanted to, how would he do it? The packet charges they had used to chop up the bedrock holding the ship fast were more powerful than dy***ite, but they didn't even scratch the hull of the thing. Was he supposed to trot off to Limestone Air Force Base, steal an A-bomb, moving with the silky, unbelievable smoothness of Dirk Pitt in a Clive Cussler novel? And wouldn't it be funny, wouldn't it really be the last laugh, if he actually did manage to get a nuke and set it off, only to discover that all he'd really managed to do was to set the ship, still uncannily unharmed and unscratched, free at a stroke?
Those were his options, the third of which was not an option at all ... and apparently his hands had known more than his brain, for while he went on turning them over in his mind for the umptieth time, he had gone calmly about the morning's work - driving the pumps up to full blast and making sure that the dumper hoses were solidly planted. Now he was back at the trench, checking the sucker hoses, and the level of the water. He was happy to find he needed a powerful flashlight to see the water - it was falling rapidly. He guessed that blasting and excavation could begin again by Wednesday, Thursday at the latest ... and once they got going again, the work would go fast. The rock of an aquifer was spongy and large-pored. They wouldn't need to waste time digging glory-holes for explosives, because there would be enough natural spots for not just exploding radios but satchel charges. The next phase would be like moving from a dense, gluey batter to a freshly risen dough.
Gard stood bent over the cut in the earth for some time, shining the big light into the black depths. Then he clicked it off, meaning to inspect the clamps again. Here it was, only eight-thirty in the morning, and already he wanted a drink.
He turned around.
Bobbi was standing there.
Gardener's mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap after a moment of gaping and started toward her, fully expecting this hallucination to grow transparent, then be gone. But Bobbi stayed solid, and Gard saw that she had lost a great deal of hair - her brow, a pale and shining white, extended back nearly to the middle of her skull, leaving the world's biggest widow's peak in the center. Nor were these newly exposed sections of skull the only pale things about her; she looked like someone who had been through a terrible debilitating illness. Her right arm was in a sling. And
- and she's wearing makeup. Pan-Cake makeup. I'm pretty sure that's what it is she's laid it on heavy the way a lady does when she wants to cover up a bruise. But it's her ... Bobbi . . . no dream ...
His eyes suddenly filled with tears. Bobbi doubled, then trebled. It wasn't until then - that moment - that he realized just how scared he had been. And how lonely.
'Bobbi?' he asked hoarsely. 'Is it really you?'
Bobbi smiled, that old sweet smile he loved so well, the one that had saved him from his own idiot self so often. It was Bobbi. It was Bobbi and he loved her.
He went to her, put his arms around her, laid his tired face against her neck. He had done this before, too.
'Hello, Gard,' she said, and began to cry.
He was crying too. He kissed her. Kissed her. Kissed her.
His hands were suddenly all over her; her free one was on him.
No, he said, still kissing her. No, you can't
Shh. I have to. It's my last chance, Gard. Our last chance.
Kissed. They kissed. Oh they kissed and now her shirt was unbuttoned and this was not the body of a sex-goddess, it was white and sickish, the muscles flabby, the br**sts saggy, but he loved it and he kissed her and kissed her and their tears were all over each other's faces.
Gard my dear, my dear, always my
shhhh
Oh please I love you
Bobbi I love
love
kiss me
kiss
yes
Pine needles under them. Sweetness. Her tears. His tears. They kissed, kissed, kissed. And as he entered her, Gard realized two things at once: how much he had missed her, and that not a single bird was singing. The woods were dead.
Kissed.