'You did it because somewhere deep inside, you thought you deserved what happened to you.'
'Deserved is the wrong word. I thought I'd bought and paid for it, which isn't the same thing at all. My life changed after that. I kept on getting good grades, but I stopped raising my hand so much. I never quit grade-grinding, but I stopped grade-grubbing. I could have been valedictorian in high school, but I backed off during the second semester of my senior year. Just enough to make sure Carlene Plummer would win instead of me. I didn't want it. Not the speech, not the attention that went with the speech. I made some friends, the best ones in the smoking area behind the high school.
'The biggest change was going to school in Maine instead of at Princeton... where 1 was indeed accepted. My father raved and thundered about how no daughter of his was going to go to a land-grant cow college, but I stood firm.'
She smiled.
'Pretty firm. But compromise is love's secret ingredient, and I loved my dad plenty. I loved thern both. My plan had been to go to the University of Maine at Orono, but during the summer after my senior year, I made a last-minute application to Bates - what they call a Special Circumstances application - and was accepted. My father made me pay the late fee out of my own bank account, which I was glad to do, because there was finally a modicum of peace in the family after sixteen months of border warfare between the country of Controlling Parents and the smaller but well-fortified principality of Determined Teenager. I declared a journalism major, and that finished the job of healing the breach... which had really been there ever since that day on the bandstand. My parents just never knew why. I'm not here in The Mill because of that day - my future at the Democrat was pretty much foreordained - but I am who I am in large part because of that day.'
She looked up at him again, her eyes shining with tears and defiance. 'I am not an ant, however. I am not an ant.'
He kissed her again. She wrapped her arms around him tightly and gave back as good as she got. And when his hand tugged her blouse from the waistband of her slacks and then slipped up across her midriff to cup her breast, she gave him her tongue. When they broke apart, she was breathing fast.
'Want to?' he asked.
'Yes. Do you?'
He took her hand and put it on his jeans, where how much he wanted to was immediately evident.
A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. 'Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I've kind of forgotten how this thing goes.'
'It's like riding a bicycle,' Barbie said.
Turned out he was right.
15
When it was over, she lay with her head on his arm, looking up at the pink stars, and asked what he was thinking about.
He sighed.'The dreams. The visions. The whatever-they-are. Do you have your cell phone?'
'Always. And it's holding its charge nicely, although for how much longer I couldn't say. Who are you planning to call? Cox, I suppose.'
'You suppose correctly. Do you have his number in memory?'
'Yes.'
Julia reached over for her discarded pants and pulled the phone off her belt. She called COX and handed the phone to Barbie, who started talking almost at once. Cox must have answered on the first ring.
'Hello, Colonel. It's Barbie. I'm out. I'm going to take a chance and tell you our location. It's Black Ridge. The old McCoy orchard. Do you have that on your... you do. Of course you do. And you have satellite images of the town, right?'
He listened, then asked Cox if the images showed a horseshoe of light encircling the ridge and ending at the TR-90 border. Cox replied in the negative, and then, judging from the way Barbie was listening, asked for details.
'Not now,' Barbie said. 'Right now I need you to do something for me, Jim, and the sooner the better. You'll need a couple of Chinooks.'
He explained what he wanted. Cox listened, then replied.
'I can't go into it right now,'Barbie said,'and it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense if I did. Just take it from me that some very dinky-dau shit is going on in here, and I believe that worse is on the way. Maybe not until Halloween, if we're lucky. But I don't think we're going to be lucky'
16
While Barbie was speaking with Colonel James Cox, Andy Sanders was sitting against the side of the supply building behind WCIK, looking up at the abnormal stars. He was high as a kite, happy as a clam, cool as a cucumber, other similes may apply. Yet there was a deep sadness - oddly tranquil, almost comforting - running beneath, like a powerful underground river. He had never had a premonition in his whole prosy, practical, workaday life. But he was having one now. This was his last night on earth. When the bitter men came, he and Chef Bushey would go. It was simple, and not really all that bad.