It had been the surface glitz on the whole of the space-research mission, but now it was a shambles of broken glass and smashed and burned furniture, stinking of urine and old death. It was a dry and bitter stench that seemed to ooze outward from the other sections of the base.
“Let’s stay here,” Jeff Thomas suggested sullenly.
“Yeah. Explore when it gets light,” agreed Pete Turner.
Jim was too tired to argue. He knew that they should do something about their own safety at least, find a door that would shut, and keep a watch for any threat coming out of the ranging desert.
Mac was the only one trying to make a case for more care and security.
“Who shot the guards? Who opened up that man’s throat for him? We don’t know. Don’t know who and don’t know when. Or where the killers are.”
“Anyone wants to cut my throat… I’ll hold still for them.” Kyle Lynch had been recovering in the past hour or so and was now able to stand unaided.
“Yeah, me, too.” Carrie had swept a patch of dusty carpet clear of most of the broken glass and was stretching out on it.
Mac peered toward where Jim stood in the doorway. “You’re captain. What d’you say?”
“I was captain of the Aquila, Mac. That was then. This is now. Let’s try and get something organized in the morning. Sleep’ll do us all good.”
That was it. They couldn’t be budged for the time being. They abandoned their battered bodies to mindless, healing rest. And the most important thing that happened in the night was that nothing happened in the night.
Chapter Eleven
Jim was dreaming.
During the twelve years of marriage he’d got used to seeing his wife in a variety of small TV or vid roles. Every now and again she’d get a break and she’d get some publicity. Sunstrokers was probably her biggest role, if not exactly the best.
In his dream Jim was watching a film with his two girls, Andrea and Heather, out on the patio of their sunbaked Hollywood home. The water of the pool glittered with a bland beauty, and far below, near the reservoir, a lone coyote howled.
In the film they were watching, Lori Hilton was playing one of her airhead-blond killer roles. She had two daughters, a little like Andrea and Heather, and she had murdered them both. Gutted them with a ceremonial samurai sword, throwing the bodies into the pool of her home.
Jim had gone into the cool of the house, letting himself in through the screen of the sliding glass doors. He ambled over to the bar and poured himself a vodka and Coke.
“How’s the movie, girls?” he called as he walked back, blinking in the bright sunlight.
But their orange-and-chrome loungers were both empty, and the television showed only a black-and-white field of crackling static.
“Where are you?” His voice sounded muffled and flat, as if he was in a concrete bunker instead of the smoggy California air.
“Jeremiah says look for the still waters,” said a sharp, maniac voice from the television.
“The pool,” Jim whispered.
The girls were in the pool.
He remembered he’d once seen an exhibition of paintings from some old English guy, from the late eighties and nineties. A lot of them were lyrical pastels of California swimming pools, in idyllic blues and greens.
There hadn’t been a lot of red in them.
But his pool was flooded with crimson. An opaque veil that spread upward from something near the bottom obscured the details.
He heard steps behind him. The clicking of high-heeled sandals on the tiled surround of the sunbaked patio.
“Now you, Jim,” said his wife, smiling.
HIS THROAT FELT RAGGED, and he had the certainty that he must have been screaming at the top of his voice.
But when he looked around the lobby of the mission-control section of the Stevenson Air Base, Nevada, the other survivors seemed to be still fast asleep, undisturbed.
There was a strange, opalesque light filtering through the shattered frames of the entrance doors, casting uncertain shadows across the room, highlighting the thousands of shards of splintered glass on the dusty carpet.