Читать книгу Hero - Майкл Грант - Страница 15

7	MALMEDY IN THE PINE BARRENS

“DAD. THEY’RE GOING to kill us.”

“Now you’re being paranoid,” Markovic said. “They’re probably going to put us in a hotel for the night.”

Simone hoped he was right. She tried to push away a growing panic as they were moved by rows to a side door and marched down a hallway. A National Guard private stood there handing out bottles of water and granola bars, smiling, looking normal and sympathetic. It should have calmed Simone’s nerves, but she kept hearing echoes of books she’d read, books about the Holocaust. The Nazis had lulled Jews into a false sense of security as they were sent to die in showers spewing nerve gas.

In the crush of bodies, she was separated from her father. As they reached cold night air, she was stopped from catching up to him and saw her father loaded onto a bus by armed men in black tactical gear bearing no identification patches or badges.

Simone looked desperately for an escape, but there was none. They were in an alleyway loading bay, soldiers to both sides. She in her turn was herded aboard a bus, a borrowed yellow bus with the words “New York School Bus Service” in blue script down the side.

Simone was seated with a woman who, like everyone on the bus, bore the telltale bloody bandages.

“I heard we’re going to a Motel 6.”

“Yeah? My dad seems to think they’ll take us to a suite at the Four Seasons.”

Peering ahead, Simone could see her father’s bus ahead of them, led through panic traffic by black SUVs with lights and sirens going.

They dipped down into the luridly lit Lincoln Tunnel, heading toward New Jersey, and Simone felt the anxiety on the bus grow. As the ride went on and on, complaints grew louder, and demands for a bathroom stop intensified.

They were far from the city now, far from any city. They had left the interstate, and pine trees crowded the road on both sides, interrupted by stretches of marsh.

“The Pine Barrens,” a voice whispered.

Then Simone saw the lead bus slow and turn onto a narrow, pockmarked and unpaved road that dived straight into the woods.

“They’re going to kill us,” Simone whispered. It might have been paranoia earlier, but now she could see it about to play out. It made sense to kill them all; that’s what she’d seen back at Carnegie Hall, that the cold logic of the situation would lead the government to snuff them out fast, before any of them could become a serious problem. Now it was no longer theoretical. There was no other explanation.

“They’re going to kill us!” Simone yelled, standing up. Her seat partner gaped at her in disbelief.

The armed guards—one at the front, one at the back, both bristled and brought their weapons to bear on her. For a moment Simone was too appalled to react: they were pointing guns at her. At her!

“Sit down, please,” the guard at the front said. “We’re just taking a bathroom stop at a park restroom facility.”

That calmed most, and Simone heard nervous relief laughter, but she felt in her bones that it was a lie. What was she going to do? What could she do?

She sat back down, hands twisting on her lap, and tried to hold her head still so as not to restart the headache that was receding at last, replaced on her list of physical woes by the fiery, insistent itching of her many puncture wounds.

Ahead the bus pulled into a clearing, silvery and vague in the faint starlight, eerily bright where the headlights illuminated grass and mud. There were some picnic tables that looked as if they’d never been used, and, sure enough, there was a wooden building marked with bathroom signs. Simone felt the collective sigh of those around her, saw their scornful looks at her, the girl who had panicked and started yelling about being killed, ha, ha, ha.

“Okay, we are taking a break,” the guard announced. “Everyone off, and line up. We’ll bring you up in groups of six to use the restroom.”

Simone, abashed but not reassured, filed off the bus with the others and headed toward the restrooms. But a man in black tactical gear with a balaclava covering his face held up a hand and pointed them to a space yards away. “Line up there. Three rows.”

Then Simone saw the camouflage-painted military truck parked beside the clearing, a dark green canvas cover over the back.

Simone tried to make her way to her father, but here there were still more men and women in black tactical gear holding assault rifles, insisting that everyone line up.

“Line up! Line up!” an authoritative voice shouted. They did. They lined up. Three rows of about thirty people per row.

And that’s when the canvas cover of the army truck was raised.

Simone stared at the perforated black tube of a machine gun’s barrel.

“No!” she screamed. “No! No!”

The machine gun opened fire, spitting tracer rounds that flew like rocket-powered fireflies in the darkness.

Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap!

Screams. Screams from everywhere, including from Simone’s own throat.

Simone turned and ran in blind panic—no reasoning, no plan, just run from the machine gun! Run! Something punched her hard in the back and she fell on her face, hands sinking into soft, wet soil. She heard her own voice whimpering. She tasted mud.

The machine gun roared on, relentless, the well-oiled steel parts pushing rounds out of the belt, striking the percussion caps, exploding the gunpowder, propelling the thumbtip-sized slugs down the rifle barrel, then kicking out the used brass casing and pushing the next round into place, many times each second. Tracer rounds flitted inches above her back, so close she could feel the breeze.

Screams of terror came from all sides, screams and cries and pitiful demands to know, “Why? Why?” and the grunts of those who were beyond words and would soon be beyond all pain.

The machine gun stopped, and the still-living who could move ran or crawled. But now the black-clad guards, faces behind balaclavas, began shooting, a higher-pitched sound of assault rifles. Simone raised her head and saw a child shot in the back. His mother screamed and crawled to him and was shot in the neck.

A man fell on Simone, a big man, his weight so still, so inert she knew he must be dead. She felt his blood trickling down on the back of her neck. She smelled the stink of his voided bowels.

The machine gun, reloaded, started up again, sweeping the field, punching holes into the still-living and the already-dead. Simone felt the impact as bullets struck the dead man over her. Bullets that would have struck her, would have torn holes through her, but for the shelter the dead man provided.

Her terrified, panicky brain told her she was wounded, too, that the sudden blow to her back, the blow that had knocked her down, had come from the machine gun. But she felt no pain and suspected she’d simply been knocked down by another victim. Some person whose name she would never know had taken the bullet with her name on it.

The machine gun stopped again. Sudden silence. Then the sound of a woman weeping and seconds later a cry for mercy and two rounds of assault rifle fire and the cry stopped abruptly. Simone opened one eye narrowly, a sideways view that revealed men in black walking like wraiths through the steam rising from bloody corpses, shooting everyone, living or dead, two rounds in the head.

Bang! Bang!

If she waited, she would die.

She tried to move, but the dead man’s weight was too great to free herself from. She had a sudden flash of the last Lord of the Rings movie, of King Théoden lying broken on the battlefield, trapped beneath his dead horse, saying, My body is broken.

Bang! Bang!

Helpless. She was helpless, and for a moment despair offered her an easy way out. Simply wait for death. Just lie there beneath a dead man and wait for the bang . . . bang. She would only hear the first shot. Maybe not even that. And all the fear and fury would be gone.

But despair had not won out yet; rather, the temptation of surrender poured fuel on the fire of her anger. How dare they do this? How dare they simply murder people this way? Her father might already be dead. Why? It wasn’t her fault or her father’s or the fault of any of these people, these poor, massacred people.

She struggled again to free herself and this time drew the attention of a man in black, who looked at her from a hundred feet away and said, “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll get to you.”

Nonchalant. Like mass murder was a daily affair for him. Like her life was nothing.

She felt a sick, acid bile in her throat, felt her whole body tingling, still wracked by pain, but this was something else, something different. Rage filled her, rage and impotence, a burning sense of injustice and of her own weakness.

Then the dead man rolled aside.

He had rolled aside because suddenly Simone was on her hands and knees and had shrugged him off. Impossible just seconds earlier; the man weighed twice what she did. Impossible!

The man in black who’d noticed her yelled over his shoulder, “Live one here!” He came striding toward her, fast, weapon at his shoulder, leveled on her.

At nearly point-blank range, he fired!

Simone saw him fire. Saw the muzzle flash. Heard the loud popping noises.

Saw it and heard it . . . from about fifty feet in the air.

“Shit!” the killer yelled, and raised his weapon to aim up at her. He fired and missed again, because now Simone was higher still, and moving through the air with no more difficulty than a trout in a mountain stream.

Tracer bullets from a half dozen guns chased her through the sky, like something from an old World War II movie where she was the brave fighter pilot. She was not fast enough to outrun bullets, but she was too fast for them to be able to keep sight of her in the deepening darkness.

The army truck switched on a small spotlight. Its beam swept around the sky, searching, but too slowly, like someone trying to spear a cockroach with a chopstick—it followed her but had no chance of catching up and keeping her illuminated.

Simone found she had only to think of moving, and she did. No time yet to ask what had happened to her, and no need to ask how: even in her frazzled, freaked-out state, she knew it was the rock. Dozens of particles no bigger than a grain of sand had pierced her. Had they been larger they might still have been moving at twenty-eight thousand miles an hour and blown right through her, like gamma rays, but small particles traveling through air are slowed by friction. So the rock had not simply blown through her; it had stayed within her. Like buckshot.

Simone’s overriding thought was that she needed to find her father. He might not be her favorite human being, but however he treated the poor fools who took his loans, he’d always been good to her. And whatever else might happen, he was her father.

Below she saw a bizarre scene, a sort of drone camera pan over a battlefield, except that this was not a battle but cold-blooded massacre. A hundred or more bodies lay in twisted poses, holes dripping urine and stomach contents and blood. The black-clad killers were still finishing off the wounded.

Bang! Bang!

But now a more mundane fear shivered through her, the fear of falling. She was in the air.

In the air!

Visions of Road Runner cartoons flashed, and she imagined being Wile E. Coyote as he looks down to see he’s run past the edge of the cliff. But Simone did not fall. She had no idea how she was doing this . . . And then Simone looked down at her legs. The jeans were gone, and her legs . . . She stifled a scream. Her legs were covered with what looked like iridescent scales, like a trout—but no, that wasn’t right, either. Because these scales did not lie flat; they moved. They beat like tiny hummingbird wings. And it wasn’t just her legs. Her entire body was covered, every square inch of it, with hundreds, no, thousands of tiny, iridescent bee wings. She raised a hand and looked in fascination at the furiously buzzing things all down the back of her hand, though not on her palms. She touched her face—no wings there, or on her throat, but her head, her shoulders, her sides were all winged, like some weird insectoid bedazzling.

And she was no longer the color of a white girl who lived in the shadow of tall buildings: beneath the iridescent wings was flesh the color of faded Smurf toy left too long in the sun.

I can fly!

The rock. There was no doubt about that. Nor was there any doubt that the government had feared just this sort of thing and had tried to solve the problem with bullets.

Simone veered away as the searchlight’s shaft swept nearby. She didn’t have to do anything to fly, just think, go there, or go that way, or, faster!

Her duty was to find her father, but the killing field below was dark, and all she saw were twisted bodies and armed men. She spotted a column of vehicles approaching, headlights moving slowly, led by an earth mover, along with two heavy dump trucks and three black SUVs.

Coming to bury the dead!

If she reduced altitude far enough to search faces, she would be shot, and while she could fly and had become significantly stronger, she had no reason to imagine that she could survive being shot.

Simone knew she would feel sadness, terrible sadness, and soon, but right now was all about staying alive. In the distance she heard the air-punching sound of military helicopters and suspected that she would be their main target.

Her mother. That’s what she needed to do: get to her mother. Then she could cry for her dead father.