The walkers startled those who had not felt the abrupt call to go for a stroll, and some reporters tagged along for a while, asking questions, then shouting questions. None of the walkers answered.
Joel was possessed by a feeling that there was a place he must go to, a special place, where he would never again have to worry about anything, a place where all would be provided, where he would have no need to worry about the future. He didn’t know what that magic place looked like, but he knew he’d recognize it when he saw it. He hurried forward excitedly, compelled, drawn.
* * *
Need.
The protean thing in the basement of the Icarus Colony was in the grip of need. It had not died when the other children of Moonhawk had perished, for the microsphere computer within it had dissolved when it had first sought the freedom of utter shapelessness; it had not been able to receive the microwave-transmitted death order from Sun. Even if the command had been received, it would not have been acted upon, for the cellar-dwelling creature had no heart to stop.
Need.
Its need was so intense that it pulsed and writhed. This need was more profound than mere desire, more terrible than any pain.
Need.
Mouths had opened all over its surface. The thing called out to the world around it in a voice that seemed silent but was not, a voice that spoke not to the ears of its prey but to their minds.
And they were coming.
Its needs would soon be fulfilled.
* * *
Colonel Lewis Tarker, commanding officer at the Army field headquarters in the park at the eastern end of Ocean Avenue, received an urgent call from Sergeant Sperlmont, who was in charge of the county-route roadblock. Sperlmont reported losing six of his twelve men when they just walked off like zombies, with maybe a hundred reporters who were in the same strange condition.
“Something’s up,” he told Tarker. “This isn’t over yet, sir.”
* * *
Tarker immediately got hold of Oren Westrom, the Bureau man who was heading the investigation into Moonhawk and with whom all of the military aspects of the operation had to be coordinated.
“It isn’t over,” Tarker told Westrom. “I think those walkers are even weirder than Sperlmont described them, weird in some way he can’t quite convey. I know him, and he’s more spooked than he thinks he is.”
* * *
Westrom, in turn, ordered the Bureau’s JetRanger into the air. He explained the situation to the pilot, Jim Lobbow, and said, “Sperlmont’s going to have some of his men track them on the ground, see where the hell they’re going—and why. But in case that gets difficult, I want you spotting from the air.”
“On my way,” Lobbow said.
“You filled up on fuel recently?”
“Tanks are brimming.”
“Good.”
* * *
Nothing worked for Jim Lobbow but flying a chopper.
He had been married three times, and every marriage had ended in divorce. He’d lived with more women than he could count; even without the pressure of marriage weighing him down, he could not sustain a relationship. He had one child, a son, by his second marriage, but he saw the boy no more than three times a year, never for longer than a day at a time. Though he’d been brought up in the Catholic Church, and though all his brothers and sisters were regulars at Mass, that did not work for Jim. Sunday always seemed to be the only morning he could sleep in, and when he considered going to a weekday service it seemed like too much trouble. Though he dreamed of being an entrepreneur, every small business he started seemed doomed to failure; he was repeatedly startled to find how much work went into a business, even one that seemed designed for absentee management, and sooner or later it always became too much trouble.
But nobody was a better chopper pilot than Jim Lobbow. He could take one up in weather that grounded everyone else, and he could set down or pick up in any terrain, any conditions.
He took the JetRanger up at Westrom’s orders and swung out over the county-route roadblock, getting there in no time because the day was blue and clear, and the roadblock was just a mile and a quarter from the park where he kept the chopper. On the ground, a handful of regular Army troops, still at the barricade, were waving him due east, up into the hills.