The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Page 17

  The official clock showed 7:12 remaining in the first quarter, 7:11, 7:10, 7:09. They’d neglected to stop it. On the main scoreboard a message was flashing on and off:

  STAY CALM. DON’T PANIC.

  A THREAT HAS BEEN COMMUNICATED.

  THERE IS PLENTY OF TIME.

  Fans in the aisles above and below Probst were laughing. Several imitated the explosive action of a bomb with their arms and added phlegmy sound effects.

  6:54, 6:53, 6:52…

  If the bomb was set to go off at a specific time in the game?

  Silly.

  On the field a few Redskins tossed footballs, made diving catches, pointed at disturbances in the stands. Whole sections had grown pink, the color of the seats, as the fans drained into the exits. The Cardinals themselves were long gone.

  Through a gate behind the Visitors’ end zone blue squad cars were pouring onto the field—six, eight, ten, a dozen of them, silent but flashing. Foot patrolmen brought up the rear. A halt was put to the game of catch. The Redskins trotted to the sidelines, lateraling the balls back and forth.

  6:25, 6:24, 6:23…

  His attention on the clock, Probst walked right into the woman who’d been sitting next to him. “Excuse me,” he said.

  She turned. “That’s all right.” Her teeth were perfect, pearly, tiny. Her eyes dipped demurely. “Trudy Churchill,” she said.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Jack said in his ear.

  Probst looked into the twinkling eyes. “Martin Probst.”

  Mrs. Churchill continued to smile. “I know.”

  He took her arm in his fingers, finding her muscles to be firm. “The line is moving,” he said.

  “Oh!” She glanced over her shoulder.

  Something blew.

  It was a sharp boom. She was in his arms, her face in his sweater. He felt the explosion in his chest cavity. His organs rattled. A flash had lit the arches in the rim of the stadium. There were crashes, distant thuds and screams. Black smoke rose in a pillar from a point outside the stadium.

  “Move it, goddamn it!” a man squealed.

  Awkwardly Probst stroked Mrs. Churchill’s hair, his eyes on her husband, who turned, just then, and gave him a vacant look.

  “Move it.” The squeal was despairing.

  There was no place to go. A sharp chin, Jack’s, cracked into the back of Probst’s head. He held Mrs. Churchill tight.

  “Fifty thousand friggin people,” Jack said, his gimme-a-break voice at Probst’s ear. “And we’re gonna be the last ones out.”

  Three helicopters descended on the stadium, darting and halting like dragonflies, the blades blurred against the low cloudbanks.

  “Shit, oh, SHIT!”

  People above Probst were screaming. He turned, loosening his grip on Mrs. Churchill—

  5:40.

  “My neck—”

  A wave of bodies swept down from above him, a mass loss of balance, engulfing him and the woman he held and Jack and everyone else, and—

  Uhhh—

  They tumbled headlong into the seats further down. A fat leg wrapped itself crushingly around Probst’s neck. His eyes bugged, and the pink plastic seats approached him swiftly, driving into his rib cage. His left pinkie got caught on an armrest. It snapped back and broke. Bodies huffed, groaned, puffed. The fat man, kicking wildly, vaulted over into the next row of seats. Through tears Probst could see the open sky above him, wisps of angry smoke and birds.

  Jack was sitting upright in a seat, drawing deep breaths. Not many people had landed in this aisle. Mrs. Churchill lay next to Probst on the Coke-spattered concrete. He started to sit up but pain in his hand forced him down. He leaned over Mrs. Churchill. Blood was gathering in a raw spot on her jaw. He put his finger on the spot. “Anything broken?” he said.

  “Yes.” Her voice cracked. “I think my leg.”

  He looked at the trim leg in plaid slacks. It lay at an unnatural angle to her hips, her ankle pinned by the seat Jack was sitting on. Behind her, the husband struggled to his feet and patted himself down with age-spotted hands.

  3:47, 3:46, 3:45…

  The heads of other dazed fans popped up all around. The thickest clot of bodies was three rows up, where a pair of policemen waded among the scraped and bruised limbs, helping people to their feet and waving them towards the exit. The press at the exit had diminished.

  “Those who can,” one of the policemen shouted, “keep moving towards the gates. Keep right on moving. Please. We can take care of any injuries, so just keep right on moving.”

  “Shall we?” Jack said.

  “This woman is hurt.” Probst spread his coat over her. The husband was wiping the blood off her jaw with a napkin. “Trudy,” he said. “Can you walk?”

  She managed to shake her head. The husband, pale, his white hair pointing every which way, looked up at Probst and Jack. “Let’s let her rest for a second. I’m going to need help.” He began to work her foot free from the seat.

  Overhead a helicopter approached. Probst was surprised to see the logo of KAKA-TV, KSLX’s chief rival, on the side of the machine. He’d assumed it was the police. A video lens poked from the left portal.

  Jack shouted something. He was pointing at the main scoreboard.

  ATTENTION GENOCIDAL PIGS

  GOD IS THE BIG RED

  WE OW! ARE REDSKINS

  WE FREE THE LAND FROM

  IMPERIALIST NAZI U. S.

  DEATH TO PLACENT GENTIALS

  The police on the field had seen it, too. A cluster of men in blue were looking up at the scoreboard, and several ran to their cars. More than twenty cars now occupied the field, half of them circling the perimeter. Most of the stadium was pink.

  2:36…2:36. The clock had stopped.

  Probst stared at the glowing time. His address. 236 Sherwood.

  “Let’s try and move her,” Mr. Churchill shouted.

  Probst tried to flex his injured finger. He couldn’t. Jack and Mr. Churchill slipped their arms under Mrs. Churchill’s shoulders and raised her into position for a fireman’s carry. She didn’t make a sound. Probst’s coat hung precariously from her waist. He felt useless, but his finger was killing him.

  In the cavernous concession area there were radio speakers. They’d been installed to let fans buying refreshments hear KSLX’s play-by-play, but Jack Strom was speaking from the studios now. His tones were low and earnest. “…Eighty, ninety percent of the fans have left the stadium, although there are still a good many in the immediate vicinity. The surrounding streets, particularly Broadway and Walnut, are solid masses of humanity, as the police have directed people to simply keep moving as far as possible from the threatened area. Traffic has been blocked off entirely, except on Spruce Street, which the police and fire departments are using for access to the stadium. For those of you who just joined us, there has been a bomb threat directed against the football stadium in downtown St. Louis, where a game was in progress. A small explosion has already occurred on the plaza outside the stadium. The police appear, uh, were apparently warned in advance about that blast, which was felt throughout the downtown area, and there were no serious injuries. Let me repeat that elsewhere as well there have been no serious injuries reported thus far, and the evacuation of the stadium should be complete within the next five to ten minutes. We—one moment…We’ve received confirmation that it is indeed the group known as the Osage Warriors that is responsible for the situation—We’re going to switch over now to Don Daizy, who is outside the command post at police headquarters. Don?”

  “Jack, it appears the situation is under control. I spoke moments ago with Chief Jammu, who is at the command post here, the explosive charges beneath the stadium have been located, and it appears that we’re looking at enough explosives to do what was threatened, namely, to kill all of the fans—at—the game. Now, it’s by no means certain the charges are in fact authentic, the Bomb and Arson Squad is at work defusing the charges, but the estimate I got from Chief Jammu is�
�that—the threat is real. There have been several serious disturbances in the stands, as the fans move towards the exits, but as you say, the police force has kept Spruce Street relatively clear, so it appears that ambulances are reaching the stadium in sufficient numbers to deal—with—the problem. The police were able to mobilize very quickly, they’ve done an excellent job so far, the evacuation has proceeded as well as could be expected, and…”

  In the hot breath of the mob Probst felt his knees give way. He grabbed for the pipes beneath a drinking fountain and hit the ground, unconscious of everything but a deep unhappiness.

  Information

  Words crowd together single file, individuals passing singly through a single gate. The pressure is constant, the flight interminable. There is plenty of time. Born in motion, borne by syntax, stranger marrying stranger, they stream into the void…

  Probst came to. The throng in front of him was thinning, the fans on their toes in their hurry, their fingertips resting on the shoulders of the fans ahead of them. He looked up at the rusty porcelain underside of the drinking fountain. Mineral cysts had formed at the pipe joints.

  Sitting up he saw a glowing word revealed, eclipsed, and revealed again by the heads in the crowd. The word was INFORMATION. There was an information office across the hall.

  “We are going to break for the two o’clock network news, we’ll be back immediately following with the latest on the situation at the stadium, I’m Jack Strom, Information Radio, KSLX, St. Louis, it’s—two o’clock.”

  “Here! You son of a gun.” Jack raised a leg for balance and took a drink of water.

  “I guess I passed out,” Probst said, wiping a drop of water off his forehead.

  “Jesus, Martin, that’s a nasty gash.”

  Jack was looking at the back of Probst’s neck. Probst reached and felt under his collar. His hand came away dripping. Now he could feel the blood pooling at the waist of his pants, but he couldn’t feel the wound. “Where’re the Churchills?”

  “I got ’em on an elevator. But let me take a look at you. Why didn’t you say something?”

  Probst let him probe the back of his neck. “Yi!” Jack said. “Tsk.” Probst still couldn’t feel anything. His finger was throbbing, twitching. Jack’s shoes gritted on the concrete. “Tsk. Oooo. Martin. Tsk.”

  “What is it?”

  “Tsk.”

  “I think we better go.”

  “Tsk. You have a handkerchief?”

  Probst realized his handkerchief had gone the way of his coat. As had his car keys. Barbara would have to drive down with the other set. She’d have to drive down anyway. Her husband was bleeding.

  8

  Once upon a time, the land had been a hunting ground for the Cahokia people, native Americans leading lives which bore so little connection with the subsequent Caucasian experience of the eastern plains that it seemed they must have taken the very land along with them when they vanished. History lives or dies in buildings, and the Cahokians didn’t build with stone. Across the river in Illinois and further down it in Missouri they did build huge earthen burial mounds, which survived to loom above the succeeding tribes like the worn peaks of a sunken Atlantis; but up here in the hills hardly a trace remained of the Cahokians, and only arrowheads marked the passage of the later Iowas and Sauks and Foxes, those Americans modern enough to be misnamed Indians.

  It had taken white men to fix the land within a grid. They’d logged it over in the nineteenth century, hauling the wood five miles east to the Mississippi and floating it downstream to St. Louis, where it was chopped for steamboats or milled for houses. They had also tried to farm the land, but crops grew poorly on the rocky, uneven terrain. By the turn of the century it had fallen into the hands of creditors, who let it go to seed, as creditors will, the low land marshing over, the high ground gradually effacing the pioneer scars.

  Buzz Wismer had bought up two sections in 1939 for little more reason than his faith in real estate, which couldn’t disintegrate the way his fledgling airplane business might. Ten years later, after the war had made a rich man of him once and for all, the land proved to offer security of a different sort. He had an extensive bomb shelter dug in the north face of the highest ridge here, a winter haven for the months when the prevailing winds blew from the north. His summer shelter was in the Ozarks, optimally situated to avoid fallout from both the silos and the urban centers. Unless, of course, the wind played tricks.

  The land was beautiful. Secondary growth, the scrub oak and cottonwood, sycamore and sassafras, hawthorn and sumac, had crept from the safety of the ravines and vaulted, annually, ever farther into the old cornfields, converging and rising. Conifers consolidated early gains, blackberry brambles and cattails reaffirmed the swamps, the old apple orchard let down its hair, grew crazy in the sweet rot of its droppings, and no man could touch a twig of any of all of this without Buzz’s permission. He’d enclosed it with an eight-foot fence topped with barbed wire and bearing strongly worded signs at the few points where it broke to let deer in and out. Within the enclosure he let the woods grow. He avoided even making paths, preferring to forge rough ones as he went, fending off thorns with his machete and his boots and gloves. Farther up, on the stonier slopes, the going was easier.

  At sixteen Buzz had been a barnstorming wunderkind, touring his way out of Warren County and into the city and then cross-country from there. He’d flown the upper Midwest, Alberta, Toronto, Quebec. He’d walked wings over New England, he’d buzzed rooftops in Aurora, and with cash in his pocket and his nickname on his fuselage, he’d headed home again. At an air show in St. Charles he bailed out from six hundred feet and broke both his legs. He restructured his priorities, marrying a nurse named Nancy George and going into business. His business throve, but his Nancy, having entered his life on a flight path nearly vertical, like the VTOLs he would later build, soon took off again. She was married to an oil man now, a fellow by the name of Howard Green.

  Buzz’s current wife, Bev, was his third. People didn’t like Bev, and although Buzz didn’t either anymore, the slow revelation of the world’s lack of charity had appalled him. In order to have any daytime social life at all beyond the occasional lunch with Barbara Probst, Bev was reduced to giving bridge parties for the wives of Buzz’s lower-echelon engineers, wives who were honored that Wismer’s wife took an interest in them. In the evenings, lacking any sort of invitations, Bev made Buzz take her to dinner at the St. Louis Club—a duty which Buzz had for many years resented and taken pains to shirk. This fall, however, evenings at the St. Louis Club had become much more agreeable, because Princess Asha Hammaker had begun to dine there regularly with her husband Sidney.

  Buzz was really enthusiastic about this Indian newcomer. Jammu he could take or leave; Asha Hammaker had depth. He and Bev had shared a television with the Hammakers at the Club’s election-night party. They had all shared a table at the Murphy girl’s wedding reception. And finally, in the Club bar on the first Saturday in December, Buzz had had a chance to spend several minutes alone with the Princess—“Call me Asha”—while Bev freshened up and Sidney was detained by Desmond, the maître d’. With a graceful sweeping motion Asha pushed her black hair off her forehead, off her dot, and caught it in back with both hands. “I’ve heard a secret about you,” she said, leaning closer to Buzz. “I’ve heard you’ve bought property in the city.”

  “Ah? Well, yes. That’s true.”

  “So glad to hear it.” She touched his wrist with two soft fingertips. “Planning to develop?”

  “The property?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Maybe.”

  “Maybe.” With a fingernail she traced a long, deliberate line down his wrist and across his palm, ending at the barrier of his wedding ring. “I’d like to discuss this with you sometime. But—” She rose abruptly from her seat. “Privately.”

  Buzz looked over his shoulder and saw that General Norris, whiskey in hand, cigar in mouth, was watching him. Buzz smiled, and
Asha hurried off. The General ambled over and proposed a hunting trip.

  All fall, with mysterious frequency, the General had been dropping into Buzz’s life and standing him to drinks, talking of the agonies and ecstasies of corporate presidency, proffering cigars, and expanding endlessly on his Indian conspiracy theory. Buzz couldn’t figure out why Norris was suddenly so interested in spending time with him. The General had plenty of cronies and an army of sycophants, and he always seemed to have to hold his nose around Buzz. You could hardly call them friends.

  And yet here they were on Buzz’s land at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, preparing for a midday hunt. The two men sat on safari stools on the bungalow veranda, a hundred yards downhill from the shelter. The land was as still as a chapel on a weekday, the sky a bluish shade of white.

  The General unzipped his gun case and displayed his weapon. “A big man needs a big stock,” he said. He wore a red-and-black lumberjack jacket, green trousers, and gigantic swamp boots. His big thumb stroked the walnut stock. “I had this custom-made, from the barrel on up. You guess what it cost me?”

  Buzz was loading the magazine of his Sako.

  “Try three grand,” the General said.

  “That’s a lot,” said Buzz.

  “Worth every nickel, dime, and penny of it. I show you the scope? Take a look at this field.”

  With an effort—the gun weighed a ton—Buzz raised the scope to his eye. It was a bright, flat field, extra wide, parallax corrected, with a crisp reticle. But a scope was a scope. “Not bad.” He handed the gun back to the General.

  “It fits my eye, Buzz. It fits my eye.” He paused. “You got some kind of toilet out here?”

  Toilet? He had thirteen hundred acres of land. “Up at the shelter.”

  “We’ll stop there a second.”

  The General stepped daintily off the veranda. Buzz dropped a handful of cartridges into his jacket pocket and followed. At the shelter he opened three locks and two doors and sent Norris to the toilet, which probably hadn’t been used twice in twenty years. He hoped they could kill a deer quickly so they could return to the city in time for him to eat a late lunch and work eight hours. A couple of young men from R&D had helped him write a set of programs to simulate air current tensors. He was working on weather prediction from a relativistic viewpoint, basing his model on the mutating coordinates of an individual pressure system—a new wrinkle, and it had some potential, at least in “simple” meteorological fields like the Great Plains. Around 7:00 he’d call downstairs for a Reuben sandwich, chips, pickles, and a bottle of Guinness.