A Day for Damnation twatc-2 Page 9

  Duke nodded. So did I.

  "Good." The radio beeped then and Colonel Tirelli swiveled back to her controls. We were over Geyserville, and we'd picked up the second wing of choppers.

  I dropped into the right side bubble and watched the ground stream past. We were flying low, not quite treetop level, but close enough to give me a good case of the queasies anyway. Lizard dropped us even lower, and now we began following the rolling texture of the countryside, up one hill and down the next. California had a landscape like a rumpled blanket.

  The hillsides should have been green with April foliage, but they weren't. The trees and shrubs passing below us looked yellowish and sickly. There were patches of pink and red mottling the ground. "I know, it looks like lichen," said Lizard, "but it's not. It's another form of the sea sludge. Needless to say, its byproducts aren't friendly to local life-forms. The redwoods are especially vulnerable. The stuff grows fastest in puddles. Those bright patches are the places that were slowest to dry after the February storms. We've still got a lot of rain due. If it's bad, this whole area could be red by the end of summer. Denver is already testing specific biocides, but it doesn't look good. "

  "Thanks," I said. "Any more good news?"

  "Yeah," said Lizard. "It gets worse ahead. Stand by. We're about to hit Clear Lake." She thumbed her radio to life. "All right, ducklings, this is Banshee-6. We're going in. Watch for beacons."

  Suddenly we were over water. I could look straight down into it. The clear surface was as bright as the sky, a dazzling silver mirror. I could see the dark shadow of the Banshee rippling below us. Not too far behind were the shadows of the Scorpions. They were bigger and more ominous. They roared behind us like flying dragons. From the ground, they must have been terrifying.

  We crossed the north shore of the lake and suddenly I was staring down at an animated nightmare. The brightness of it hurt my eyes-they started watering. I blinked in confusion. I couldn't tell what I was looking at. It was all a burning wash of color. I'd never seen anything so garish and bright. I fumbled my goggles over my eyes and dialed them down.

  It didn't help.

  All the colors were red-all different shades of red, a kaleidoscope of crimson and vermilion blossoms, scarlet trees and royal fireworks. The eye could not assimilate the information. The brain could not make sense of it. All the possible intensities of red were painted here-all splashed across a pink and almost fleshy-looking landscape. There was umber, orange, ochre and magenta-the colors seemed to hover without shape.

  My vision blurred then and I saw the Earth as a gigantic living creature. Its bright pink skin was broken open, scored and lacerated. I looked down into deep and bloody eruptions. Here were open sores and festering wounds. Streams of warm dark blood came bubbling to the surface, ran and puddled into hollows.

  I lifted my goggles, rubbed my eyes, and looked again. Beneath the chopper was a dazzling vision of the floor of Hell. Bright orange bushes leapt upward like flames. Tall sequoias, smothered in red, looked like plumes of crimson smoke. Purple streamers hung from trees like shabby cobwebs. Below were large black spidery growths-they crouched in shadowy places. Red creepers stretched across the ground; they looked like grabbing claws.

  The ground was pink.

  It looked like it was tufted. It looked like it was made of cotton candy. The hills were sugary dunes. Welcome to wonderlandor insanity. The ground was patched with pallid streaks of blue-or erupting with yellow globular clusters-the colors delineated alien shapes. I couldn't tell what I was looking at. The hills were etched with purple threads-and white ones too; they looked embroidered; they were a crazy quilt of blinding hues.

  The trees-what was left of them-were stark black spires, pointing accusingly up from the ground. They looked as if they had been burned raw. I saw the ruins of buildings-a scattering of hollow shells, crumbling beneath their coats of crimson ivy.

  We'd crossed into a whole new world-a world from which the color green had been entirely banished. And everything else that lived in that green world too.

  I looked and I knew. I didn't have to worry about renegade Tribes any more. I didn't have to worry about humanity at all.

  I was staring into time. Beyond the bubble was a vision of the future of the Earth. How many years away? It didn't matter. We were not a part of it. Not even bones. There would be no place for humanity. Not here.

  The roar of the Banshee's engines shifted then-we were slowing. We'd reached the target area.

  ELEVEN

  WE STARTED seeing dome clusters almost immediately. And many of them were second-stage nests.

  The pattern was standard: one central dome, six more the same size placed hexagonally around it. We'd seen that in the Rocky Mountain District too, but we still didn't have a sense yet how many Chtorrans a dome cluster would house. A single dome never held more than four; this was obviously an expansion-but for how many? These were the first clusters I'd seen where construction looked complete.

  We tagged the first few, then gave it up. There were too many. "Save your markers," Lizard said. "There's a lot more to see."

  "Jim!" said Duke, "Directly below us."

  I leaned as far forward in the bubble as I could. There were at least a dozen bright red worms streaming across the ground below us, more than I'd ever seen in one place before-and they were huge! That one, chasing the chopper's shadow, had to be at least as big as a Greyhound Land Cruiser.

  I had a horrifying realization. Every time the scale of the infestation expanded, so did the size of the worms. Was there no limit to their growth?

  It gave me a queasy feeling to realize how puny we really were in comparison. How big were they going to get? And-how did they perceive us? The worms were turning to look up at us, often raising a third or more of their length off the ground. They waved their arms agitatedly, but I couldn't hear if they were screeching.

  The scattered dome clusters were becoming frequent now. I had the sense of a village or a small town. There were domes and corrals and funny-looking spires. I remembered the totem pole I'd seen in front of the very first dome I'd ever burned. Were these the same thing? I wished I could have gone down to look at them firsthand. I wondered what a Chtorran town might look like when it was complete. Most of these structures were still in varying stages of construction. There were half-finished domes everywhere-and they were laid out in serpentine courses as often as they were circular. There was a hint of pattern in the layout-but it wasn't clear yet. I needed to see more.

  But as we flew on, the sense of pattern became less, not more, obvious. As the density of clusters increased, so did the number of domes in each cluster-but the careful geometric spacing of the domes seemed to be disintegrating as if under pressure. It was as if some instinctual blueprint had broken down. There were extra domes jammed tightly around every core now, sometimes as many as nine or ten. They were squashed so tightly together, the individual domes were built misshapen, as if pushed out of round by the pressure. I could feel the wrongness.

  Behind us, I could hear the first of the explosions. The Scorpions were going to work. They were dropping smart bombs to take out the large clusters. I could see the worms moving frantically beneath us. Was that a Chtorran panic? They streamed out of the domes. From the air, they looked like fuzzy pink caterpillars humping and flowing madly after us. I imagined I could hear their warbling cries over the noise of the jets.

  "Chtorrrr! Chtorrrrrr!"

  The ship rocked as the blast waves passed us. Lizard hollered something and we bounced up higher. I looked back and saw an ugly yellow cloud spreading across the horizon behind us. A wave of twenty-four Scorpions was spreading a swath of death in our wake. The idea was to sterilize the ground, make it uninhabitable to worms-or anyone else, for that matter.

  The truth was, we had no idea how effective any of our measures really were. The Chtorran ecology recovered too fast. Once the short-life radioactives expired and the biodegradables broke down, the Chtorran plants and insec
t-things were back in force in a matter of weeks. They established themselves faster than any Earth species could. This area would have to be sprayed regularly-until we could find something more permanent. Denver was talking longer short-lives.

  Lizard was hollering something at me. "McCarthy! Coming up at two o'clock. What's that?"

  It was on my side of the ship-the largest dome cluster yet! A cluster of clusters-the pattern was expanded again! The original hexagon of domes was the core of a larger wheel of hexagons-a Chtorran mandala! A third-stage nest! The sense of pattern was very clear here-there wasn't the same pressured feeling as we had seen elsewhere. It was as if this huge wheel of domes were some kind of model Chtorran village-and the other villages were pushing their growth in an effort to catch up and doing it wrong! The pressure was expressed as cancerous-looking domes.

  As we came over the mandala, I could see that it was still growing. The central cluster of domes was being expanded into one huge dome-and other clusters were being laid out neatly around the perimeter. The mandala was adding yet another circle.

  I hollered back to Lizard, "Bingo! We just found the Chtorran City Hall!" I fired a marker into it, and then another just to be certain. I leaned out into the bubble to watch behind. I wanted to see it explode. I could see the worms streaming out of it as it went up in flames.

  The ground was erupting Chtorrans now-it looked like it was bleeding. There were too many of them. All sizes. Larger than I'd ever seen. Smaller than I'd ever seen. And all colors too, from bright purple to flaming orange. I saw everything from baby pink Chtorrans to huge scarlet worms. It was a riot of red! I couldn't see them as individual creatures any more. They were merely crimson streaks on a flesh-toned nightmare landscape. They flowed like oil. They looked like particles of fire. There were so many of them all flowing together that I could see the pattern of their panic as a vermilion river streaking horribly beneath us. It was insanity! Unreal

  The whole camp was on the move-they were a furious stampede. New worms kept joining all the time. In their blind fear, the larger ones tumbled the smaller ones aside, or flowed over them, leaving them writhing and injured in the dirt; the injured creatures disappeared beneath the maddened onrushing bodies of their fellows. I could hear them screaming. All of them. The sound was a high-pitched screech like metal being sheared. I could hear it even over the whuffling of the chopper's blades and the noise of its jets.

  Now, as we came over them-and as the sound of the Scorpions behind us grew louder-the crimson river swirled in confusion, as if it were caught in the churning turbulence of the chopper blades. The shrieking worms turned this way and that in a bedlam of terrified disorder-until they were enveloped by the sulfurous yellow clouds from the Scorpions. The great black beasts came roaring on behind us like the avenging angels of death.

  Suddenly the ground below was rockier. The clusters of huts vanished like a dream-as abruptly as if the worms themselves had drawn a border. No more of those crimson horrors poured out of the ground. No more paced the chopper's shadow. The last of them fell behind us and disappeared beneath the Scorpions' wrath.

  A few miles farther and the festering red landscape vanished too. The hills gave way to green and brown again. There were pine trees here-and redwoods and sequoias.

  For a moment, there was silence in the plane. Only the steady chuff and screech of chopper blades and the muted whine of jets filled the cabin, and that wasn't a sound any more; it was merely a presence, constant and unpleasant.

  Lizard made a sound then-something like a growl, something like a shriek. It started low and quickly rose. It was a release of tension, a controlled scream like the whistle of a steam engine. Her face was tight

  And then she stopped and took a breath. And took us higher.

  TWELVE

  I TURNED around and looked at Duke. He looked away. He wouldn't meet my eyes. Goddammit. He did this every time we came up against the wall-every time we were reminded just how badly we were losing. He wouldn't share the pain, he kept it bottled up instead. He scared me when he got like this.

  "Goddamn worms." He said it bitterly.

  I knew he'd have to go off somewhere to be by himself for a while-and then he'd be okay again. Until the next time. But until he had that chance, he would be bitter. And he'd take it out on the rest of us.

  My own reaction

  I felt drained. Every mission only put me more in touch with the total hopelessness of the job. This one was the worst. I didn't know what I was doing here.

  The worms confused me. I was horrified by them-and at the same time, I was fascinated. I wanted to know everything I could about them. I was attracted by the horror-and paralyzed by it.

  And there was another feeling too, a darker more disturbing one. All that I could sense of it was an occasional hot red flash of memory-as if there was something I once knew, but had since forgotten; and yet the resonance of the experience still echoed in my head.

  Whenever these feelings came over me, so did a profound disgust for my own species. Human beings were turning into something even more monstrous than the invaders.

  It was all the killing.

  I knew that there were people who looked at me with horror now-because there was death in my eyes. I could see it in Duke's face too. All of us who had met the worms head-on-we all wore the same expression.

  We were killing machines. The only difference between us and the worms was that the worms didn't have a choice. We did. We chose to kill. We would even kill ourselves if it would hurt the Chtorrans.

  I felt the pressure in my chest again.

  The chopper bumped me out of my brooding. We were picking up speed. I looked at Lizard. Her face was military blank. Except for that one moment of screaming release, she was a perfect soldier machine; a pilot-thing, not a human being.

  I wondered if she had ever been a real woman, then discarded the thought. Her face was set like steel. I couldn't imagine her laughing, or having a good time, let alone anything more intimate. She wore her body like armor and the effect was inhuman, almost repelling. I couldn't imagine her naked-nor could I see her trusting another human being enough to open up to him. No, she was just another monstrous machine. We all were now.

  She was checking her flight plan. "All right, that's the worst of it. We'll let the navy finish cleaning this up. I want to look at Red Bluff before we turn back. Then we'll come back down the coast and look for sea sludge."

  "Don't you have skyball overflights?" Duke asked. His voice and expression were normal again-hard and clipped.

  "We did-but something's been knocking them down."

  "And you want to go looking for it?" I asked. There was incredulity in my tone.

  Lizard ignored me. She said to Duke, "We don't have enough skyballs left to schedule regular patrols. We won't until Lockheed starts shipping again."

  "How about satellite eyeballs?"

  "They can give us pretty good resolution, but they can't get under cloud cover. And they're not mobile on the scene. We need to find out what's going on."

  Lizard thumbed her radio to life. "All right, ducklings. This is Banshee-6. You done good. I'm turning east. Fall in behind and keep your eyes open."

  "Roger, dodger."

  The horizon angled crazily as Lizard tilted the ship eastward. We were over crumpled hills again.

  "This area looks green-" Lizard pointed. "But it's red on the map. We're spotting worms in these woods every day now. The governor has pulled the whole lumber industry out."

  She added bitterly, "We're going to lose the northern half of the state. It's too wild to control. You won't get anyone to admit it officially, but it's just a matter of time. It's going to be a bitch just to hold the road open. We're running traffic in convoys now and it seems to work, but I don't know what it'll be like in two years. Hell, we don't even know what the worms will be like in two years." And then she added in a quieter tone, "Or even humanity, for that matter. Shit." She flew on in silence.

  I l
ooked at Duke. He was leaning forward, staring out of his bubble. All I could see was his back. He had his face in his hands. What was he remembering? He'd probably never tell.

  I turned back to my window and stared out at the ground too. This pervading despair was infectious.

  The hills were leveling out now. The slopes were lush and green and heavily forested. Some of the trees looked like they had a white sheen to them. I couldn't figure out what it was.

  "Time to turn north again," Lizard said and banked the chopper to the left. I wondered if we were close enough to see the 1996 meteor crater, now called Red Lake. That was supposed to be around here somewhere. As we angled around and dropped into our new course, I strained forward to look-but the northern horizon was hidden by a line of pink clouds.

  I looked back, but I couldn't see the Scorpions any more. I climbed forward and sat down in the copilot's seat. "Are the other choppers still with us?"

  Lizard glanced at her controls. There was a screen in the center of the dashboard. She tapped it. "See those red dots. They're five minutes behind us. Don't worry about it, they're just making a wider turn. They'll catch up with us up here-" She tapped the screen. "If we have the fuel, we'll take a look around Redding too."

  "Oh, I see. Thanks."

  "Sure."

  "Can I ask you something, Colonel?"

  "You can ask anything you want. I don't promise I'll answer."

  "It's about Denver. . . ."

  Her tone was guarded. "Go on."

  "Well ...I remember thinking that the Special Forces people were all so-well, ruthless."

  "Mm hm," she said. "That's what it takes to win a war."

  "I know that now," I said. "In fact, sometimes I think we're not being ruthless enough. But that's not my question. What I want to know is-well, you were one of the first people there to be kind to me. In your own gruff way. Do you mind if I ask why?"