Then Tony Schoondist ran through them, slapping them, shoving them, telling them to get
the hell back, to return to the barracks and that was an order. He was trying to get his own sunglasses on and kept missing his face with them. He got them where they belonged only after poking one bow into his mouth and the other into his left eyebrow.
Sandy saw and heard none of that. What he heard was the hum. What he saw were the flashes, turning the groundmist smoke into electric dragons. What he saw was the column of stuttery purple light rising from the conical roof-vent, stabbing up into the darkening air like a lance.
Tony grabbed him, shook him. Another silent gunshell of light went off in the shed, turning the lenses of Tony’s sunglasses into small blue fireballs. He was shouting, although there was no need to; Sandy could hear him perfectly. There was the humming sound, and someone murmuring Good God almighty, and that was all.
‘Sandy! Were you here when this started?’
‘Yes!’ He found himself shouting back in spite of himself. The situation somehow demanded that they shout. The light flared and glared, mute lightning. Each time it went off, the rear side of the barracks seemed to jump forward like something that was alive, the shadows of the troopers running up its board back.
‘What started it? What set it off?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Get inside! Call Curtis! Tell him what’s happening! Tell him to get his ass over here now!’
Sandy resisted the urge to tell his SC that he wanted to stay and see what happened next. In a very elementary way the idea was stupid to begin with: you couldn’t actually see anything.
It was too bright. Even with sunglasses it was too bright. Besides, he knew an order when he heard it.
He went inside, stumbling over the steps (it was impossible to judge depth or distance in those brilliant stutterflashes) and shuffled his way to dispatch, waving his arms in front of him. In his swimming, dazzled eyesight, the barracks was nothing but overlaid shadows. The only visual reality for him at that moment were the great purple flashes floating in front of him.
Matt Babicki’s radio was an endless blare of static with a few voices sticking out of it like the feet or fingers of buried men. Sandy picked up the regular telephone beside the dedicated 911 line, thinking that would be out, too — sure it would — but it was fine. He dialed Curt’s number from the list tacked to the bulletin board. Even the telephone seemed to jump with fright each time one of those purple-white flashes lit the room.
Michelle answered the phone and said Curt was out back, mowing the grass before it got dark. She didn’t want to call him in, that was clear in her voice. But when Sandy asked her a second time, she said, ‘All right, just a minute, don’t you guys ever give it a rest?’
The wait seemed interminable to Sandy. The thing in Shed B kept flashing like some crazy neon apocalypse, and the room seemed to waver into a slightly different perspective every
time it did. Sandy found it nearly impossible to believe something generating such brilliance could be anything but destructive, yet he was still alive and breathing. He touched his cheeks with the hand not holding the telephone, checking for burns or swelling. There was neither.
For the time being, at least, he told himself. He kept waiting for the cops outside to begin screaming as the thing in the old garage exploded or melted or let something out —
something unimaginable with burning electric eyes. Such ideas were a million miles from the usual run of cop-thoughts, but Sandy Dearborn had never felt less like a cop and more like a scared little boy. At last Curt picked up the telephone, sounding both curious and out of breath.
‘You have to come right now,’ Sandy told him. ‘Sarge says so.’
Curt knew what it was about immediately. ‘What’s it doing, Sandy?’
‘Shooting off fireworks. Flashes and sparks. You can’t even look at Shed B.’
‘Is the building on fire?’
‘
‘Don’t think so, but there’s no way to tell for sure. You can’t see inside. It’s too bright. Get over here.’
The phone at Curt’s end crashed down without another word spoken and Sandy went back outside. If they were going to be nuked, he decided, he wanted to be with his friends when it happened.
Curt came roaring up the driveway marked TROOPERS ONLY ten minutes later, behind the wheel of his lovingly restored Bel Aire, the one his son would inherit twenty-two years later.
When he came around the corner he was still moving fast, and Sandy had one horrible moment when he thought Curtis was going to clean out about five guys with his bumper. But Curt was quick on the brake (he still had a kid’s reflexes), and brought the Chevy to a nose-dipping hair.
He got out of his car, remembering to turn off the engine but not the headlights, tripping over his own eager feet and almost sprawling on the macadam. He caught, his balance and went running toward the shed. Sandy had just time to see what was dangling from one hand: a pair of welders’ goggles on an elastic strap. Sandy had seen excited men in his time — sure, plenty, almost every guy you stopped for speeding was excited in one way or another — but he had never seen anyone as burning with it as Curt was then. His eyes seemed to be bulging right out of his face, and his hair appeared to be standing on end . . . although that might have been an illusion caused by how fast he was running.
Tony reached out and grabbed him on the way by, almost spilling him again. Sandy saw Curt’s free hand close into a fist and start to rise. Then it relaxed. Sandy didn’t know how close the rookie have come to striking his sergeant and didn’t want to know. What mattered was that he recognized Tony (and Tony’s authority over him) and stood down.
Tony reached for the goggles.
Curt shook his head.
Tony said something to him.
Curt replied, shaking his head vehemently.
In the still-bright flashes, Sandy saw Tony Schoondist undergo his own brief struggle, wanting to simply order Curt to hand the goggles over. Instead, he swung around and looked at his gathered Troopers. In his haste and excitement, the SC had given them what could have been construed as two orders: to get back and to return to the barracks. Most had chosen to obey the first and ignore the second. Tony took a deep breath, let it out, then spoke to Dicky-Duck Eliot, who listened, nodded, and went back into the barracks.
The rest of them watched Curt run toward Shed B, dropping his baseball cap on the pavement as he went and slipping the goggles over his eyes. Much as Sandy liked and respected the newest member of Troop D, he did not see anything heroic in this advance, not even while it was happening. Heroism is the act of going forward in the face of fear. Curt Wilcox felt no fear that night, not the slightest twinge of it. He was simply bugshit with excitement and a curiosity so deep it was a compulsion. Much later, Sandy would decide the Old Sarge had let Curtis go because he saw there was no chance of holding him back.
Curt stopped about ten feet in front of the roll-up door, raising his hands to block his eyes as a particularly brilliant flash erupted from inside the shed. Sandy saw the light shining through Curt’s fingers in purple-white spokes. At the same time, Curt’s shadow appeared on the mist like the figure of a giant. Then the light died and through a blot of afterimage Sandy saw Curt advance again. He reached the door and looked inside. He stood that way until the next flash came. He recoiled when it did, then at once went back to the window.
Meanwhile, here came Dicky-Duck Eliot back from his errand, whatever it had been.
Sandy saw what he was holding as Dicky-Duck went past. The Sarge insisted that all of his D-cars should go out equipped with Polaroid cameras, and Dicky-Duck had run to fetch one of them. He handed it to Tony, cringing involuntarily as the shed lit up in another silent fusillade of light.
Tony took the camera and jogged across to Curtis, who was still peering into the shed arid recoiling at each new flash (or series of them). Even the welder’s goggles weren’t enough protection from what was going on in there, it seemed.
Something nuzzled Sandy’s hand and he almost screamed before looking down and seeing the barracks dog. Mister Dillon had likely slept through the whole thing until then, snoring on the linoleum between the sink and the stove, his favorite spot. Now he’d emerged to see what all the excitement was about. It was clear to Sandy from the brilliance of his eyes, the peak of his cars, and the high set of his head that he knew something was going on, but his previous terror wasn’t in evidence. The flashing lights didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.