(Static.)
Dagbolt: — dead after all because Ching-Ling Soong — or rather, Ching-Ling Soong’s severed head, one means to say — just floated past me, and her eyes were open and blinking.
She appeared to recognize me, and to —
(Static.)
Dagbolt: — keep you —
(Explosion. Static.)
Dagbolt: — around me. I repeat, all around me. Squirming things. They — I say, does anyone know if —
(Dagbolt, screaming and cursing, then just screaming. Sounds of toothless old man again.) (Transmission ends.)
The Xiaoping/Truman exploded three seconds later. The extrusion from the rough ball nicknamed Star Wormwood had been observed from better than three hundred telescopes earthside during the short and rather pitiful conflict. As the final sixty-one seconds of transmission began, the craft began to be obscured by something that certainly looked like worms. By the end of the final transmission, the craft itself could not be seen at all — only the squirming mass of things that had attached themselves to it. Moments after the final explosion, a weather satellite snapped a single picture of floating debris, some of which was almost certainly chunks of the worm-things. A severed human leg clad in a Chinese space suit floating among them was a good deal easier to identify.
And in a way, none of it even mattered. The scientists and political leaders of both countries knew exactly where Star Wormwood was located: above the expanding hole in earth’s ozone layer. It was sending something down from there, and it was not Flowers by Wire.
Missiles came next. Star Wormwood jigged easily out of their way and then returned to its place over the hole.
On the Pulsifers’ satellite-assisted TV, more dead people got up and walked, but now there was a crucial change. In the beginning the zombies had only bitten living people who got too close, but in the weeks before the Pulsifers’ high-tech Sony started showing only broad bands of snow, the dead folks started trying to get close to the living folks.
They had, it seemed, decided they liked what they were biting.
The final effort to destroy the thing was made by the United States. The President approved an attempt to destroy Star Wormwood with a number of orbiting nukes, stalwartly ignoring his previous statements that America had never put atomic SDI weapons in orbit and never would.
Everyone else ignored them, as well. Perhaps they were too busy praying for success.
It was a good idea, but not, unfortunately, a workable one. Not a single missile from a single SDI orbiter fired. This was a total of twenty-four flat-out failures.
So much for modern technology.
And then, after all these shocks on earth and in heaven, there was the business of the one little graveyard right here on Jenny. But even that didn’t seem to count much for Maddie because, after all, she had not been there. With the end of civilization now clearly at hand and the island cut off — thankfully cut off, in the opinion of the residents — from the rest of the world, old ways had reasserted themselves with unspoken but inarguable force. By then they all knew what was going to happen; it was only a question of when. That, and being ready when it did.
Women were excluded.
It was Bob Daggett, of course, who drew up the watch roster. That was only right, since Bob had been head selectman on Jenny for about a thousand years. The day after the death of the President (the thought of him and the first lady wandering witlessly through the streets of Washington, DC, gnawing on human arms and legs like people eating chicken legs at a picnic was not mentioned; it was a little much to bear, even if the bastid and his blonde wife were Democrats), Bob Daggett called the first men-only Town Meeting on Jenny since sometime before the Civil War. Maddie wasn’t there, but she heard. Dave Eamons told her all she needed to know.
‘You men all know the situation,’ Bob said. He looked as yellow as a man with jaundice, and people remembered his daughter, the one still living at home on the island, was only one of four.
The other three were other places . . . which was to say, on the mainland.
But hell, if it came down to that, they all had folks on the mainland.
‘We got one boneyard here on Jenny,’ Bob continued, ‘and nothin ain’t happened there yet, but that don’t mean nothin will. Nothin ain’t happened yet lots of places . . . but it seems like once it starts, nothin turns to somethin pretty goddam quick.’
There was a rumble of assent from the men gathered in the grammar-school gymnasium, which was the only place big enough to hold them. There were about seventy of them in all, ranging in age from Johnny Crane, who had just turned eighteen, to Bob’s great-uncle Frank, who was eighty, had a glass eye, and chewed tobacco. There was no spittoon in the gym, of course, so Frank Daggett had brought an empty mayonnaise jar to spit his juice into. He did so now.
‘Git down to where the cheese binds, Bobby,’ he said. ‘You ain’t got no office to run for, and time’s a-wastin.’
There was another rumble of agreement, and Bob Daggett flushed. Somehow his great-uncle always managed to make him look like an ineffectual fool, and if there was anything in the world he hated worse than looking like an ineffectual fool, it was being called Bobby. He owned property, for Chrissake! And he supported the old fart — bought him his goddam chew!
But these were not things he could say; old Frank’s eyes were like pieces of flint.
‘Okay,’ Bob said curtly. ‘Here it is. We want twelve men to a watch. I’m gonna set a roster in just a couple minutes. Four-hour shifts.’
‘I can stand watch a helluva lot longer’n four hours!’ Matt Arsenault spoke up, and Davey told Maddie that Bob said after the meeting that no welfare-slacker like Matt Arsenault would have had the nerve to speak up like that in a meeting of his betters if that old man hadn’t called him Bobby, like he was a kid instead of a man three months shy of his fiftieth birthday, in front of all the island men.
‘Maybe you can n maybe you can’t,’ Bob said, ‘but we got plenty of warm bodies, and nobody’s gonna fall asleep on sentry duty.’
‘I ain’t gonna — ‘
‘I didn’t say you,’ Bob said, but the way his eyes rested on Matt Arsenault suggested that he might have meant him. ‘This is no kid’s game. Sit down and shut up.’
Matt Arsenault opened his mouth to say something more, then looked around at the other men
— including old Frank Daggett — and wisely held his peace.
‘If you got a rifle, bring it when it’s your trick,’ Bob continued. He felt a little better with Arsenault more or less back in his place. ‘Unless it’s a twenty-two, that is. If you ain’t got somethin bigger’n that, come n get one here.’
‘I didn’t know the school kep a supply of em handy,’ Cal Partridge said, and there was a ripple of laughter.
‘It don’t now, but it will,’ Bob said, ‘because every man jack of you with more than one rifle bigger than a twenty-two is gonna bring it here.’ He looked at John Wirley, the school principal. ‘
‘Okay if we keep em in your office, John?”
Wirley nodded. Beside him, Reverend Johnson was drywashing his hands in a distraught way.
‘Shit on that,’ Orrin Campbell said. ‘I got a wife and two kids at home. Am I s’posed to leave em with nothin to defend themselves with if a bunch of cawpses come for an early Thanksgiving dinner while I’m on watch?’
‘If we do our job at the boneyard, none will,’ Bob replied stonily. ‘Some of you got handguns.
We don’t want none of those. Figure out which women can shoot and which can’t and give em the pistols. We’ll put em together in bunches.’
‘They can play Beano,’ old Frank cackled, and Bob smiled, too. That was more like it, by the Christ.
‘Nights, we’re gonna want trucks posted around so we got plenty of light.’ He looked over at Sonny Dotson, who ran Island Amoco, the only gas station on Jenny. Sonny’s main business wasn’t gassing cars and trucks — shit, there was no place much on the island to drive, and you could get your go ten cents cheaper on the mainland — but filling up lobster boats and the motorboats he ran out of his jackleg marina in the summer. ‘You gonna supply the gas, Sonny?’
‘Am I gonna get cash slips?’
‘You’re gonna get your ass saved,’ Bob said. ‘When things get back to normal — if they ever do — I guess you’ll get what you got coming.’