Book of the Dead (10 page)

No big deal. Bigfoot Rapes Girl Scouts last week, the dead people coming back to life this week, the dwarf mass murderer next week.

No big deal until they started to come out everywhere. No big deal until the first news film (“You may want to ask your children to leave the room,” Dan Rather introduced gravely) showed up on network TV, creatures with naked bone showing through their dried skin, traffic accident victims, the morticians’ concealing makeup sloughed away either in the dark passivity of the earth or in the clawing climb to escape it so that the ripped faces and bashed-in skulls showed, women with their hair teased into dirt-clogged beehives in which worms and beetles still squirmed and crawled, their faces alternately vacuous and informed with a kind of calculating, idiotic intelligence; no big deal until the first horrible stills in an issue of
People
magazine that had been sealed in shrink-wrap like girly magazines, an issue with an orange sticker that read
Not For Sale To Minors!

Then it was a big deal.

When you saw a decaying man still dressed in the mud-streaked remnants of the Brooks Brothers suit in which he had been buried tearing at the breast of a screaming woman in a T-shirt that read
Property of the Houston Oilers
, you suddenly realized it might be a very big deal indeed.

Then the accusations and the saber rattling had started, and for three weeks the entire world had been diverted from the creatures escaping their graves like grotesque moths escaping diseased cocoons by the spectacle of the two great nuclear powers on what appeared to be an undivertable collision course.

There were no zombies in the United States, Tass declared: This was a self-serving lie to camouflage an unforgivable act of chemical warfare against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Reprisals would follow if the dead comrades coming out of their graves did not fall down decently dead within ten days. All U.S. diplomatic people were expelled from the mother country and most of her satellites.

The president (who would not long after become a Zombie Blue Plate Special himself) responded by becoming a pot (which he had come to resemble, having put on at least fifty pounds since his second-term election) calling a kettle black. The U.S. government, he told the American people, had incontrovertible evidence that the only walking dead people in the USSR had been set loose deliberately, and while the premier might stand there with his bare face hanging out and claim there were over eight thousand lively corpses striding around Russia in search of the ultimate collectivism,
we
had definite proof that there were less than forty. It was the
Russians
who had committed an act—a
heinous
act—of chemical warfare, bringing loyal Americans back to life with no urge to consume anything but other loyal Americans, and if these Americans—some of whom had been good Democrats—did not lie down decently dead within the next
five
days, the USSR was going to be one large slag pit.

The president expelled all Soviet diplomatic people… with one exception. This was a young fellow who was teaching him how to play chess (and who was not at all averse to the occasional grope under the table).

Norad was at Defcon-2 when the satellite was spotted. Or the spaceship. Or the creature. Or whatever in hell’s name it was. An amateur astronomer from Hinchly-on-Strope in the west of England spotted it first, and this fellow, who had a deviated septum, fallen arches, and balls the size of acorns (he was also going bald, and his expanding pate showcased his really horrible case of psoriasis admirably), probably saved the world from nuclear holocaust.

The missile silos were open all over the world as telescopes in California and Siberia trained on Star Wormwood; they closed only following the horror of Salyut/Eagle-I, which was launched with a crew of six Russians, three Americans, and one Briton only three days following the discovery of Star Wormwood by Humphrey Dagbolt, the amateur astronomer with the deviated septum, et al. He was, of course, the Briton.

And he paid.

They
all
paid.

*  *  *

The final sixty-one seconds of received transmission from the
Gorbachev/Truman
were considered too horrible for release by all three governments involved, and so no formal release was ever made. It didn’t matter, of course; nearly twenty thousand ham operators had been monitoring the craft, and it seemed that at least nineteen thousand of them had been running tape decks when the craft had been—well, was there really any other word for it?—invaded.

Russian voice
: Worms! It appears to be a massive ball of—

American voice
: Christ! Look out! It’s coming for us!

Dagbolt
: Some sort of extrusion is occurring. The port-side window is—

Russian voice
: Breach! Breach! Suits!

(Indecipherable gabble.)

American voice
: —and appears to be eating its way in—

Female Russian voice
(Olga Katinya): Oh stop it stop the eyes—

(Sound of an explosion.)

Dagbolt
: Explosive decompression has occurred. I see three—no, four—dead—and there are worms… everywhere there are worms—

American voice
: Faceplate! Faceplate!
Faceplate!

(Screaming.)

Russian voice
:
Where is my mamma? Where
—

(Screams. Sounds like a toothless old man sucking up mashed potatoes.)

Dagbolt
: The cabin is full of worms—what appears to be worms, at any rate—which is to say that they really
are
worms, one realizes—they have extruded themselves from the main satellite—what we took to be—which is to say one means—the cabin is full of floating body parts. These space-worms apparently excrete some sort of aci—

(Booster rockets fired at this point; duration of the burn is seven point two seconds. This may or may not have been attempt to escape or possibly to ram the central object. In either case, the maneuver did not work. It seems likely that the chambers themselves were clogged with worms and Captain Vassily Task—or whichever officer was then in charge—believed an explosion of the fuel tanks themselves to be imminent as a result of the clog. Hence the shutdown.)

American voice
:
Oh my Christ they’re in my head, they’re eating my fuckin br
—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: I am retreating to the aft storage compartment. At the present moment, this seems the most prudent of my severely limited choices. I believe the others are all dead. Pity. Brave bunch. Even that fat Russian who kept rooting around in his nose. But in another sense I don’t think—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: —dead at all because the Russian woman—or rather, the Russian woman’s severed head, one means to say—just floated past me, and her eyes were open. She was looking at me from inside her—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: —keep you—

(Explosion. Static.)

Dagbolt
: Is it possible for a severed penis to have an orgasm? I th—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: —around me. I repeat, all around me. Squirming things. They—I say, does anyone know if—

(Dagbolt, screaming and cursing, then just screaming. Sound of toothless old man again.)

Transmission ends.

The
Gorbachev/Truman
exploded three seconds later. The extrusion from the rough ball nicknamed Star Wormwood had been observed from better than three hundred telescopes earthside during the short and rather pitiful conflict. As the final sixty-one seconds of transmission began, the craft began to be obscured by something that certainly
looked
like worms. By the end of the final transmission, the craft itself could not be seen at all—only the squirming mass of things that had attached themselves to it. Moments after the final explosion, a weather satellite snapped a single picture of floating debris, some of which was almost certainly chunks of the worm-things. A severed human leg clad in a Russian space suit floating among them was a good deal easier to identify.

And in a way, none of it even mattered. The scientists and political leaders of both countries knew exactly where Star Wormwood was located: above the expanding hole in earth’s ozone layer. It was sending something down from there, and it was not Flowers by Wire.

Missiles came next.

Star Wormwood jigged easily out of their way and then returned to its place over the hole.

More dead people got up and walked.

Now they were all biting.

The final effort to destroy the thing was made by the United States. At a cost of just under six hundred million dollars, four SDI “defensive weapons” satellites had been hoisted into orbit by the previous administration. The president of the current—and last—administration informed the Soviet premier of his intentions to use the SDI missiles, and got an enthusiastic approval (the Russian premier failed to note the fact that seven years before he had called these missiles “infernal engines of war and hate forged in the factories of hell”).

It might even have worked… except not a single missile from a single SDI orbiter fired. Each satellite was equipped with six two-megaton warheads. Every goddamn one malfunctioned.

So much for modern technology.

Maddie supposed the horrible deaths of those brave men (and one woman) in space really hadn’t been the last shock; there was the business of the one little graveyard right here on Jenny. But that didn’t seem to count so much because, after all, she had not been there. With the end of the world now clearly at hand and the island cut off —
thankfully
cut off, in the opinion of the island’s residents—from the rest of the world, old ways had reasserted themselves with a kind of unspoken but inarguable force. By then they all knew what was going to happen; it was only a question of when. That, and being ready when it did.

Women were excluded.

It was Bob Daggett, of course, who drew up the watch roster. That was only right, since Bob had been head selectman on Jenny since Hector was a pup. The day after the death of the president (the thought of him and the first lady wandering witlessly through the streets of Washington, D.C., gnawing on human arms and legs like people eating chicken legs at a picnic was not mentioned; it was a little too much to bear, even if the bastid and his big old blond wife
were
Democrats). Bob Daggett called the first men-only Town Meeting on Jenny since someplace before the Civil War. So Maddie wasn’t there, but she heard. Dave Eamons told her all she needed to know.

“You men all know the situation,” Bob said. He had always been a pretty hard fellow, but right then he looked as yellow as a man with jaundice, and people remembered his daughter, the one on the island, was only one of four. The other three were other places… which was to say, on the mainland.

But hell, if it came down to that, they
all
had folks on the mainland.

“We got one boneyard here on the island,” Bob continued, “and nothin’ ain’t happened yet, but that don’t mean nothin’
will
. Nothin’ ain’t happened yet lots of places… but it seems like once it starts, nothin’ turns to somethin’ pretty goddam quick.”

There was a rumble of assent from the men gathered in the basement of the Methodist church. There were about seventy of them, ranging in age from Johnny Crane, who had just turned eighteen, to Bob’s great-uncle Frank, who was eighty, had a glass eye, and chewed tobacco. There was no spittoon in the church basement and Frank Daggett knew it well enough, so he’d brought an empty mayonnaise jar to spit his juice into. He did so now.

“Git down to where the cheese binds, Bobby,” he said. “You ain’t got no office to run for, and time’s a-wastin’.”

There was another rumble of agreement, and Bob Daggett blushed. Somehow his great-uncle always managed to make him look like an ineffectual fool, and if there was anything in the world he hated worse than looking like an ineffectual fool, it was being called Bobby. He owned property, for Chrissake! He
supported
the old fart, for Chrissake.

But these were not things he could say. Frank’s eyes were like pieces of flint.

“Okay,” he said curtly. “Here it is. We want twelve men to a watch. I’m gonna set a roster in just a couple minutes. Four-hour shifts.”

“I can stand watch a helluva lot longer’n four hours!” Matt Arsenault spoke up, and Davey told Maddie that Bob said after the meeting that no frog setting on a welfare lily pad like Matt Arsenault would have had the nerve enough to speak up like that if his great-uncle hadn’t called him Bobby, like he was a kid instead of a man three months shy of his fiftieth birthday, in front of all the island men.

“Maybe so,” Bob said, “but we got enough men to go around, and nobody’s gonna fall asleep on sentry duty.”

“I ain’t gonna—”

“I didn’t say
you
,” Bob said, but the way his eyes rested on Matt Arsenault suggested that he
might
have meant him. “This is no kid’s game. Sit down and shut up.”

Matt Arsenault opened his mouth to say something more, then looked around at the other men—including old Frank Daggett—and wisely sat down again.

“If you got a rifle, bring it when it’s your trick,” Bob continued. He felt a little better with Frere Jacques out of the way. “Unless it’s a twenty-two. If you got no rifle bigger’n that, or none at all, come and get one here.”

“I didn’t know Reverend Peebles kept a supply of ’em handy,” Cal Partridge said, and there was a ripple of laughter.

“He don’t now, but he’s gonna,” Bob said, “because every man jack of you with more than one rifle bigger than a twenty-two is gonna bring it here.” He looked at Peebles. “Okay if we keep ’em in the rectory, Tom?”

Peebles nodded, dry-washing his hands in a distraught way.