Wounded Earth (33 page)

Babykiller
steered the car down a neatly kept gravel road and parked. Larabeth had steeled herself for a showdown in a secluded clearing deep in the Carolina flatwoods. She was ready for hand-to-hand combat with a homicidal maniac. She was not prepared for him to welcome her as a houseguest.

“Dear Larabeth,” he said, “I have waited so long for you to come to me. My home is ready for you. All my homes are ready for you.” He beckoned for her to join him on one of the terraces jutting from the side of the massive house.

Larabeth's eyes were drawn downward, where the house descended, level by level, into a huge natural depression. Its wings and porches and balconies grew out of the sloping soil like mushrooms from a rotting tree trunk. There was no sign of human life. Was she truly alone with a babykiller?

He was standing so close, peering so deeply into her eyes. He seemed to be ferreting out her thoughts and perhaps he was, because he answered them. “We're finally alone. I sent the help away for the evening. It's been so long since we were alone together. Actually, we were never really alone in the hospital ward, but I pretended we were. Since I couldn't move my head, I couldn't look at the other patients, so I imagined them away. You were the only person I could see so, to me, you were the only person in the room. In the world.”

“You did have other nurses.”

“Shut up.” His harsh words dropped into the soft, tree-covered valley below them. There wasn't even an echo. He took a single breath and resumed talking with the exaggerated calm he always used with her. “I have so few good memories. Don't taint them.”

He took her elbow and guided her into the house. “We've lost so many years of happiness together. I have no ambitions for the rest of my life beyond domestic bliss with you.”

Regardless of his ambitions, Babykiller's house seemed remarkably blissless. The expensive carpet beneath her feet was a moldy shade of brown. Strolling slowly with Babykiller down a long hall, she noticed a complete lack of windows in the rooms on her right. Each room on her left was lit by a sliding glass door that occupied an entire wall. The asymmetric design was necessary for a building sunk so deep into the side of a steep hill, but she knew this house would be hell for a claustrophobe.

He steered her into a small den, located (of course) on the windowless, airless side of the house. It was carpeted with the same awful brown stuff and the walls were paneled in dark wood.

“I've been dreaming of this moment,” Babykiller said, “wondering what happy couples do to unwind at the end of a long working day. I considered sex, but that was too obvious. Then it came to me. Happy couples, all around the world, watch television together. And I have provided such fascinating programming for the world's viewing pleasure.”

He seated Larabeth on a cozy leather loveseat, positioned himself uncomfortably close to her, and started channel surfing. CNN had scrapped its regular schedule to devote full-time coverage to the standoff at the Savannah River Site. Headline News was broadcasting continuous updates on the situation at the Hanford Site.

The news from Hanford was repetitive. Two people were dead: the pilot and the security guard who tried to stop him. The fire was under control and there was little remaining danger of an uncontrolled nuclear event, or so the government said.

“Listen to our benevolent government,” he sneered. “I'd like to broadcast a counterpoint to their soothing nonsense. I'd remind the public about the good old days of nuclear research, when the government warned the Kodak factory of nuclear releases at Oak Ridge, because Kodak complained that the nasty radiation fogged its film. Did they ever warn the ordinary humans living nearby? Why should they? The poor suckers had no clout.”

“I've heard that,” Larabeth murmured.

“You don't have much to say, darling.”

“The last time I spoke, you told me to shut up. So I did.”

“It's been so long since I've had a woman in my life. I've forgotten how sensitive they can be. I'll try to be more gentle.”

Larabeth looked at Babykiller. He had kidnapped her, taken her daughter hostage, laid a death sentence on her lover, and staged full-scale disasters at two nuclear facilities, all within the past twenty-four hours. And now he was promising to be more gentle. Telling him what she thought of him would be counterproductive, so she watched television as if her life depended on it, because it probably did.

He flipped over to the broadcast from the Savannah River Site. The General was blathering about the Second Amendment and the Internal Revenue Service and personal sovereignty.

“This clown is a useful tool, but he does grow tiresome,” Babykiller commented. “We should be thinking about dinner—”

Babykiller stopped talking. He was momentarily riveted to the screen. Then he started to laugh.

“Did you see the General check his watch and glance down the road? The pimply-faced ninny. Even I'll admit that not all federal agents are incompetent. One of them is watching, right now, noticing that nervous glance, and picking up a phone. Within minutes, the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation will know that the General is expecting the Cavalry to come riding, bugles blaring, over the hill.”

“I don't get the joke.”

“The Cavalry's not coming. I'm not sending them. I can't wait to watch the showdown when the government realizes the General can't back up his threats. The FBI will probably blow up the Savannah River Plant themselves, trying to recapture it.”

Larabeth knew that, by agreeing to go with Babykiller, she had bought Cynthia nothing but time. She hadn't even been able to do that much for J.D. Now her daughter sat in the fields of Armageddon, waiting for the final battle to begin.

She was trembling from fear, shock, anger—she couldn't tell the difference any more—but she tried to still herself. Babykiller had his arm around her and it was a poor time to show weakness.

* * *

Immediately after the Army of the Resurrection took the Savannah River Site, the General demanded a television crew and access to America's airwaves. He posed in front of the south gate of the Savannah River Site and began talking to his fellow Americans. After he'd been talking awhile, Chao quietly returned to the van housing his command office.

If the General had possessed a gram of common sense, he would have insisted that Chao stay with him at all times, but the General was stupid. And he was busy telling America about the Army of the Resurrection and about its grievances with the federal government.

Chao reviewed videotapes of the convoy that had carried the Army and its hostages onto the site. The tapes confirmed his earlier observations. The trucks had been primarily loaded with personnel, each one carrying an assault rifle. There was certainly enough room in the trucks for small volumes of explosives, but nobody had driven a U-Haul full of ANFO past him. If they were planning the kind of large-scale destruction the world had just seen in Oklahoma City, they would be using other means.

He turned off the VCR and looked at a real-time tape of the General. He was still talking.

“So, you see, America is the New Jerusalem promised by God. White Europeans are the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and the Constitution is God's gift to His chosen people. Only the Constitution and the Bill of Rights come from God. All other laws have been instituted by a puppet government bent on conferring the blessing of sovereign American citizenship on blacks and Asians and women and homosexuals and Jews. We will die to defend God's plan. We will kill to defend God's plan. If you don't think we will, get out your Bibles and check the Old Testament. God killed women. God killed children. God killed babies. We will do no less.”

The General paused and looked at his watch. Then he repeated his fatal error. He glanced down the entrance road, looked at his watch again, and resumed his tirade. Chao checked the counter on the video player, so he could return to that moment of indecision, then he chewed on his pencil eraser while the General kept talking.

The imbecile is expecting reinforcements, Chao thought. The initial assault force was sent to secure the site, but the big guns are coming later.

He called Agent Shanks, who was sitting nearby in a van full of nuclear physicists trying to pinpoint exactly how much havoc the Army of the Resurrection could wreak. Chao told him to concentrate on scenarios using weapons smaller than a car bomb. In this case, maybe smaller than a breadbox. It bothered him that Shanks didn't sound greatly relieved.

Next, he called the helicopter team, on standby in Barnwell, and asked for full surveillance of the area outside the Site boundary.

“These guys are paranoid about helicopters. Stay as high and as far from the Site as possible while still giving full coverage. If you see anything suspicious—large trucks, a sizeable group of vehicles traveling together, anything like that—we're going in.”

“And the children?”

“If we let a truckload of explosives cross the boundary, the whole site is vulnerable. Do you know how many children live downwind from here?”

The voice was weak in his ear. “No, sir, I don't.”

“Then I repeat: if you guys see anything suspicious, then we're going in. I'll take full responsibility for what happens to the children.”

Babykiller
clicked the television off. “It's very homey here with you, and I'm having a hell of a time watching the Feds squirm, but I had a more romantic evening in mind.”

Even now, even twenty-some-odd years after her rape, her body reacted to his implication. Her blood ran cold and her throat constricted, but she willed her fists not to clench. He mustn't see her respond to his threats. Or were they threats?

Babykiller seemed to be laboring to convince himself that she wanted to be with him, that all these years she had yearned for him, just as he had yearned for her. If she stopped playing along and made him admit that he had coerced her into coming to him, then he would lose and she would win. He would probably also kill her, but that wasn't the point. She recognized that she had some control over both their fates and the balance of power shifted ever-so-slightly in her direction.

She decided to play the game. She gave him a small smile and allowed him to interpret it. Maybe she was being coy. Maybe she was just shy. She looked up at him and said, “I don't want to watch TV, either. What do you want to do?”

He stood up and jerked her off the sofa without looking to see whether she landed on her feet. “This house has lovely gardens. Let me show them to you.”

* * *

J.D.'s wound was bleeding again. Cynthia hated to disturb his rest and she really hated the idea of making him hurt even more than he already did, but she couldn't ignore the blood.

She opened the last dozen sterile gauze pads—two-inch squares were pitifully inadequate for this job—and wadded them together. She pressed the absorbent mass into J.D.'s gunshot wound and leaned on it with all her weight, trying not to think about the damage his broken collarbone was doing to the tissues around it.

She watched the gauze go red and judged that the bleeding had slowed, but she wasn't much encouraged. J.D. barely flinched under the torture she was dealing out. It had been a half-hour since he opened his eyes.

* * *

Babykiller gestured grandly at the land sloping below him. “My house's location on the lip of a Carolina bay has given my gardeners room for creativity. They've built terraces down the slope for flowers and vegetables and, on the floor of the bay, they've created a garden comprised of only native plants.

Larabeth was letting Babykiller drone on. There was an escape plan weighing on her brain, and she needed to let it be born. It wasn't just an escape plan either. It was a rescue plan. She just needed to work out some pesky details.

“I'd like to see the native plant garden,” she said.

“Ever the environmentalist, aren't you, darling? Well, the native plants aren't as lovely as these,” he said, gesturing at the rosy crape myrtles and the nodding lilies, “but they sure are easy to grow, if you feed them.”

He limped down a ramp that Larabeth supposed was constructed especially to accommodate his disability and she followed. She had no choice but to follow. He was holding her hand.

* * *

Cynthia knelt by J.D. Their guard remained several yards away from their position under a shady tree on the creek bluff. It would have been a pleasant place for a picnic.

She took her patient's pulse and respiration every fifteen minutes and they hadn't changed, for better or worse, in more than an hour. She didn't know this man. She had barely shared two conversations with him. Somehow, his survival had become painfully important to her.

Perhaps it was because he had tried to save her from these brutes. Perhaps worrying over his fate kept her from worrying over her own. Perhaps she clung to him as her only link to her long-lost natural mother. He had said he loved her mother. Cynthia had never had a chance to love her. She just wanted to meet her.

Twice, J.D. had stirred under her discarded jumpsuit, calling a name that sounded something like “Larabeth.” The first time, Cynthia did a double-take, then dismissed her suspicions as sheer fantasy. What adopted child hadn't fantasized about rich, famous parents who would be making a dramatic entrance any minute, ready to whisk their lost baby away to their very expensive home?