J.M. Dillard - War of Worlds: The Resurrection (6 page)

"All right," she answered shortly, and went over to squat by the transmitter.

Chambers was silent. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye; he was studying her intently. Finally, he said, "I want you to know how much I admire the way you've handled yourself through all this."

If he'd said all this sooner, maybe it would have mattered. She shrugged. "I did what I had to do."

"Which is more than most people do." He paused. "Especially when it comes to . . . killing. I know it isn't easy."

"Do you?" She gave him a hard look.

"No," Chambers said quickly, bitterly. "No, I don't really know. I've never killed anyone face-to-face, the way you did today. Doing it long distance was hard enough." Ashamed, he looked away.

She sat on her haunches, staring at him. She felt a surge of accomplishment, of pride.
He admires me. He's envious of my strength.
At the same time, it was unsettling, frightening. Chambers may have been a political science professor, but he knew no more about revolution than she did, was no more qualified than she to lead one.

He'd made her kill the guards because he was afraid to do it himself. She turned back to her work, disgusted.

He started back for the truck, then stopped. "I can get the rest of the equipment. You set up. After all, you're the mass comm major."

She nodded. He finished unloading, then came to stand beside her as she was getting the camera where she wanted it.

"The schedule calls for us to transmit in forty-seven minutes," Chambers said. He scuffed the toe of one boot nervously in the sand.

"We'll be ready." She was peering into the camera, then looked up at him. "Why don't you stand about three feet in front of me . . . here." She pointed.

He stood in the wrong place.

"No," she said, gesturing. "More to the left. I want. . ." But Chambers didn't move. Exasperated, she came around the camera and took him by the shoulders to show him. He grasped her hand and looked at her meaningfully. Forty-seven minutes. It would be a while before the others returned from setting charges around the base's perimeter.

Her expression hardened. She pushed him where she wanted him, pulled her hand away, and stepped behind the camera again. "Better. I can keep you in frame and still see the barrels in the background." She

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wanted the barrels in the shot to prove they were actually on the Jericho Valley site. Some of the barrels had been knocked over, no doubt during the struggle. At first she wanted to ask Chambers to set them upright, then decided it would be more effective to leave them and show that a battle had taken place.

Chambers was not offended by the rebuttal; maybe he took hope from the fact she hadn't been angered by it. He smiled at her.

"You're cheerful," she said without enthusiasm.

Suddenly he was hyper, talkative; perhaps, Urick decided, the realization hit him that he was really going to be on worldwide television.

"Something about the irony of pirating a U.S. communications satellite to broadcast our demands always makes me smile," he answered.

She was not amused. "Smile on camera and no one will take us seriously." The way he was grinning made her uncomfortable.

"If they don't"—Chambers was suddenly serious —"we'll just have to blow this place up . . . and send a big fat nuclear cloud of radioactive waste floating over their nice middle-class homes."

He smiled again. She couldn't return it; for the first time she saw everything clearly. He was a madman, this Chambers, a charismatic madman with a talent for making his insanity sound logical, even attractive, to misfits such as she. The premonition of death came over her again, this time stronger than ever, and so bitterly cold that she shivered in the early morning chill. Chambers was too wrapped up in his dream of global fame to notice. He, Urick, Finney, Mossoud, Teal, Einhorn—they were all as dead as the bodies stacked in the yard, even if they were still walking around.

Consciousness seeped back.

A long darkness. Then awareness; then sweltering, agonizing suffocation. He was trapped in some type of metal confine, and there was not enough air. He gasped, probing frantically until he found the roof of the confine. The metal was corroded there; he encountered a hole and pushed with all his newfound energy. The metal crumpled under the pressure. He was free.

Panting, dazed, he pulled himself out. . . but the light was painfully harsh. He hid for a moment in a patch of shade created by the containers, and tried to understand where he was. This was not home: the air was too rich, the gravity too heavy, the light too strong.

Memories of the battle returned. They had been successful at first, claiming victory when the sickness had overcome them. Defeat so close to success had been bitter; best for them to die here, on this alien rock, than to return home vanquished. He had been trying to maneuver his ship back to the base when the fever came upon him; around him, vessels fell from the sky as their pilots died at the controls. His transmitter reported the sad message that two of the three members of the Supreme Leader had perished. Shortly after, he succumbed himself to the pain and blacked out.

A miracle he had not been killed when his vessel crashed.

Another miracle: the sickness was gone. As confusion lifted, he remembered his duty: to find the others, especially the surviving member of the Supreme Leader, and the Advocate, and to see to it that all their efforts had not been in vain.

No doubt the others were trapped in the same type of horrible container he had emerged from. Xashron set to work.

Mossoud planted the last of the booby traps and covered it gently with sand. He'd gotten only a couple of hours sleep the day before—prebattle nerves—and had been working through the night. He stood up, dusting the sand from the legs of his jump suit, then stretched, and gently rotated the arm connected to the sore shoulder. Probably had himself one hell of a bruise .. . but then, it coulda been worse ... he could be lying dead in the yard instead of that lieutenant.

Mossoud raised the sleeve of his jacket to peer at his most recent acquisition. It really was a nice watch, a Rolex, probably worth a nice fat wad of greenbacks. And then Mossoud chuckled to himself. If Chambers' little TV show was successful, he wouldn't have to worry about how much he could pawn the watch for. Hell, he wouldn't have to worry about dollars ever again. Not much longer to airtime. He started humming an old tune, "Act Naturally." Who'd recorded it? The Beatles? Musta been all of six when he'd first heard it.

He started back toward the truck. He hadn't made

it very far when he passed by an aisle of barrels. But something about them wasn't right. He stopped to take a closer look.

Finney appeared, stepping gingerly so as not to set off any of the charges. "Mossoud—it's almost time."

"Right behind you." Mossoud gestured for him to go on.

Finney nodded; his careful steps crunched noisily against the gravel as he left.

Mossoud drew closer to the curious scene. This was the spot where just last night Finney had killed the lieutenant. Mossoud knew that none of the barrels had been knocked over then. And no one had been there since he and Finney dragged the body away.

Yet now six barrels from the lower tier—the older rusted ones—were overturned. Didn't make any sense at all. Mossoud bent over to examine one. "What the hell. . .?"

The top of the barrel looked as if it had been exploded from the inside, as if whatever had been in there had forced its way out.

And then left. The barrel was completely empty. Question was, where the hell had it gone?

He saw with alarm that the blood-smeared barrel on the upper tier was leaking where Finney's bullet holes had punctured it. It must have dripped onto the barrel and eaten the top away. Mossoud cringed. Probably radioactive or toxic or something; and
he'd
been exposed to it! He turned to run, to warn the others.. ..

Something stirred behind one of the upright barrels, scraped softly across the gravel.

Mossoud raised his gun. "Come out! Come out with your hands up, or I'll start shooting!"

Someone,
something,
rose and moved into view. Mossoud stared; for an instant his mind simply refused to accept what his eyes told him.

It was an animal, he thought at first, some strange hideous beast, but it was like nothing Mossoud had ever seen. He'd grown up by the ocean, and to him the thing resembled a huge jellyfish—about five feet tall, not quite as wide—walking wobbily on its tentacles, only its skin looked like gray-brown leather, oiled and glistening. Its lipless, open mouth quivered and drooled. The worst was its eye—a huge dark thing that gazed intently at Mossoud with far more intelligence than any animal.

"Holy shit," Mossoud whispered. He took a step backward; soft, three-fingered appendages rustled behind him, wreathed themselves around his neck. . . .

He went down shooting.

Urick adjusted the sound equipment behind the camera, while Chambers smoothed his hair down in a hand-held mirror for the fifth time. Einhorn and Teal cracked off-color jokes and watched from the fringes. Chambers was becoming nervous and increasingly obsessed with his appearance, even asked Urick's opinion about whether he should wear his glasses on the air. She told him it didn't matter.

It was in the little things, her father had said, and not the big ones that people revealed their true character. She'd never believed it before; now, watching Chambers, she wondered.

He looked up anxiously from the mirror. "Could you help me with my collar?"

"It looks fine," she answered shortly, then, to give him something to do and, hopefully, shut him up: "Sound check."

"Testing," Chambers said in a deeper-than-normal voice, "one, two, three . .."

Finney walked up and stood next to Teal and Einhorn, who were laughing and nudging each other. They were excited and happy, Urick realized; why wasn't she?

Chambers read dramatically from the smudged paper in his slightly trembling hand. "We, the free soldiers of the People's Liberation Party, have come to you, citizens of the World, with a list of demands, including the immediate resignation of the President of the United States____"

She glanced at her watch and silenced him. "Perfect. Five minutes."

Chambers nodded, looking a bit green at the thought.

Five minutes and the world would be forever changed. Strangely, the closer the time for the broadcast came, the less she believed it would actually happen. It was like killing those corporals: it simply wasn't real. There was only one thing she believed in anymore, and that was the cold sensation of death's nearness that draped her like a shroud. Yet at the same time she told herself there was no reason to be so afraid now, when success was in their hands. But Urick was unable to shake the fear.

"Where's Mossoud?" Teal asked.

"On his way," Finney answered.

Chambers snapped at Finney. "You heard her. Only five minutes. Just what's taking him so long?"

Finney shrugged and began to answer, but his words were drowned out by gunfire.

"Mossoud!" Chambers shouted.

Instinctively, Urick ran to the truck and found the Uzi propped against it. She expected to hear more bursts, but after the first all was silent. Even so, the five of them spread out and headed for the gunfire's source. Urick made her way down an aisle of barrels, working her way parallel to Teal and Einhora.

This is it,
she told herself.
They've found us, and now we're all going to die.
She was sick with fear, but not at all surprised, as if she had known from the start this was going to happen.

A man screamed to her left; she whirled, Uzi at the ready, and craned her neck to see over the barrels. Two aisles down, the briefest glimpse: Finney down, back arching, mouth a rictus, being dragged by his legs by something dark. It looked like there were ropes around his thighs, but she wasn't sure even in the bright daylight. He disappeared behind a towering stack of barrels, gave one final blood-chilling scream, then fell silent.

"Finney!" she mouthed soundlessly. No gunfire; whatever had taken Finney did not use bullets. She began to follow after him, but cautiously.

On the other side of the yard, one of the barrels fell—or was knocked over.

"Chambers?" she called hoarsely, shifting the Uzi and wiping first one wet palm, and then the other, on the front of her jump suit.

No answer. Louder.
"Chambers?!"

A rustle, this time on her right... muted sounds of someone struggling, a muffled cry.

"Teal!" she shouted. "Einhorn! Chambers!!" She was clenching her teeth now, the gun held tightly in both hands. Dear God, she was alone....

Only a few yards in front of her came the sound of a barrel scraping across the ground, being moved aside. A shadow fell across the ground at her feet. She froze and raised the gun.

Mossoud stepped in front of her.

"Mossoud," she said, embarrassed that she had been so terrified, that she had thought herself alone among the dead. "What the hell is going on?"