The Tommyknockers Read online

  They are the sort of people fire-chiefs will, however, put to use ... if driven to the wall. Five minutes ago, Lester Moran, who had applied to the Boston Fire Department at the age of twenty-one and been turned down because of the steel plate in his skull, had felt like a whipped dog. Now he felt like a man highballing on amphetamines. Now he was a man who would happily don an Indian pump which weighed almost half as much as he did himself and lug it on his back all night, breathing smoke the way some men breathe the perfume on the nape of a beautiful woman's neck, fighting the flames until the skin of his cheeks was cracked and blistered and his eyebrows were burned clean off.

  He exited the turnpike at Newport and burned up the road which led toward Haven.

  The plate in his head was the result of a hideous accident which had occurred when Moran was twelve, and a junior-high patrol-boy. A car had struck him and thrown him thirty feet, where his flight had been interrupted by the obdurate brick wall of a furniture warehouse. He had been given last rites; his weeping parents had been told by the surgeon who operated on him that their son would likely die within six hours, or remain in a coma for several days or weeks before succumbing. Instead, the boy had been awake and asking for ice cream before the end of the day.

  "I think it's a miracle," the boy's sobbing mother cried. "A miracle from God!"

  "Me too," said the surgeon who had operated on Lester Moran, and who had looked at the boy's brain through a gaping hole in the poor kid's shattered skull.

  Now, closing in on all that delightful smoke, Lester began to feel a little sick to his stomach, but he chalked that up to excitement and then forgot all about it. The plate in his skull was, after all, nearly twice the size of the one in Jim Gardener's. The absence of police, fire, or Forestry Department vehicles in the thickening murk he found both extraordinary and oddly exhilarating. Then he rounded a sharp curve and saw a bronze-colored Plymouth lying upside-down in the left-hand ditch, its red dashboard flasher still pulsing. Written on the side was DERRY F.D.

  Lester parked his old Ford wagon, got out, and trotted over to the wreck. There was blood on the steering wheel and the seat and driver's-side floormat. There were droplets of blood on the windshield.

  All in all, quite a lot of blood. Lester stared at it, horrified, and then looked toward Haven. Dull red colored the base of the smoke now, and he realized he could actually hear the dull crackle of burning wood. It was like standing near the world's biggest open-hearth furnace ... or as if the world's biggest open-hearth furnace had sprouted legs and was slowly approaching him.

  Next to that sound, next to the sight of that dull yet titanic red glow, the overturned Derry fire-chief's car and the blood inside began to seem a good deal less important. Lester went back to his own car, fought a brief battle with his conscience, and won by promising himself he would stop at the first pay phone he came to and call the state police in Cleaves Mills ... no, Derry. Like most good salesmen, Lester Moran carried a detailed map of his territory in his head, and after consulting it, he decided Derry was closer.

  He had to resist the yammering urge to goose the wagon up to its top speed ... which was about sixty these days. He expected at every turn of the road to come upon sawhorses blocking the road, a confusion of crazily parked vehicles, the sound of CB radios squealing out messages at top gain, shouting men in hard-hats, helmets, and rubber coats.

  It didn't happen. Instead of sawhorses and a boiling nest of activity he came upon the overturned Unity pumper, cab broken off its body, the tank itself still spraying the last of its load. Lester, who was now breathing smoke as well as air that would have killed almost anyone else on earth, stood on the soft shoulder, mesmerized by the limp white arm he saw dangling from the window of the pumper's amputated cab. Rivulets of drying blood ran erratic courses down the arm's white and vulnerable underside.

  Something wrong here. Something a lot more wrong than just a woods fire. You got to get out, Les.

  But instead he turned toward the fire again and was lost.

  The smoky taste in the air was stronger. The sound of burning was now not a crackle but a rolling thunder. The truth of it suddenly fell on him like a bucket of cement: No one was fighting this fire. No one at all. For some reason he couldn't understand, they either hadn't been able to get into the area or hadn't been allowed in. As a result, the fire was burning out of control, and with the freshening wind to help, it was growing like a radioactive monster in a horror movie.

  The idea made him ill with terror ... and excitement ... and sick, dark joy. It was bad to feel a thing like that last, but it was there and it was impossible to deny. Nor was he the only one who had felt it. That dark joy had seemed to be a part of every fire-fighter he had ever bought a drink for (which was almost every fire-fighter he'd ever met since he flunked his own BFD physical).

  He fumbled and stumbled back to his car, started it with some difficulty (assuming that in his excitement he had probably almost flooded the damned dinosaur), boosted the air conditioner all the way up, and headed toward Haven again. He was aware this was idiocy of the purest ray serene--he was, after all, not Superman but a forty-five-year-old textbook salesman who was going bald and who was still a bachelor because he was too shy to ask women for dates. He was not just behaving in an idiotic fashion, either. Harsh as that judgment was, it was still a rationalization. The truth was, he was behaving like a lunatic. And yet he could no more stop himself than a junkie can stop himself when he sees his fix cooking in the spoon.

  He couldn't fight it ...

  ... but he could still go see it.

  And it would really be something to see, wouldn't it? Lester thought. Sweat was already rolling down his face, as if in anticipation of the heat ahead. Something to see, oh yeah. A forest-fire that was for some reason being allowed to rage utterly out of control as they had millions of years ago, when men were little more than a small tribe of hairless monkeys cowering in the twin cradles of the Nile and the Euphrates and the great fires themselves were touched off by spontaneous combustion, strokes of lightning, or meteor-falls instead of drunk hunters who didn't give a shit what they did with their cigarette butts. It would be a bright orange furnace, a firewall ninety feet high in the woods; across the clearings and gardens and hayfields it would race like a Kansas prairie fire in the 1840s, gobbling houses so swiftly they would implode from the sudden change in air pressure, as houses and factories had done during the World War II firebombings. He would be able to see the road he was on, this very road, disappearing into that furnace, like a highway into hell.

  The tar itself, he thought, would first begin to run in sticky little rivulets ... and then to burn.

  He stepped down harder on the gas, and thought: How could you not go on? When you had a chance--a once-in-a-lifetime chance--to see something like that, how could you not?

  6

  "I just don't know how I'm going to explain to my dad, is all," the Maine Med Supplies clerk said. He wished he had never argued four years ago for expanding their business to include rentals in the first place. His father had thrown that in his face after the old guy rented the flat-pack and never returned it, and now all hell was breaking loose in Haven--the radio said it was a forest-fire and then went on to hint that even weirder things might be happening there--and he was betting he'd never see the flat-pack he had rented that morning to the reporter with the thick glasses, either. Now here were two more fellows, state troopers no less, both big, and, most unsettling of all, one about as black as a fellow could be, demanding not just one flat-pack each, but six of them.

  "You can tell your dad we requisitioned them," Torgeson said. "I mean, you do provide respiration gear for firemen, don't you?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "And there's a forest-fire in Haven, isn't there?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "Then get them out here. I don't have time to bullshit."

  "My father is gonna kill me!" he wailed. "That's all we got!"

  Torgeson had met Claudell
Weems pulling into the parking lot of the barracks just as Torgeson himself was pulling out. Claudell Weems, Maine's only black state trooper, was tall--not as tall as the late Monster Dugan, but a very respectable six-four. Claudell Weems had one gold tooth in the front of his mouth, and when Claudell Weems moved very close to people--suspects, for instance, or reluctant clerks--and smiled, revealing that sparkling gold incisor, they became very nervous. Torgeson once asked Claudell Weems why this was, and Claudell Weems said he b'leeved it was dat ole black magic. And then laughed until the glass in the barracks windows seemed to tremble in its frames.

  Weems now leaned very close to the clerk and employed dat ole black magic dat he wove so well.

  When they left Maine Med with the flat-packs, the clerk was not really sure what had happened ...except that the black fella had the biggest gold tooth he had ever seen in his life.

  7

  The toothless old man who had sold Leandro the T-shirt stood on his porch and watched expressionlessly as Torgeson's cruiser blasted by. When it was gone he went inside and made a phone call to a number most people wouldn't have been able to reach; they would have heard the sirening sound which had infuriated Anne Anderson instead. But there was a gadget on the back of the storekeeper's phone, and soon he was talking to an increasingly harried Hazel McCready.

  8

  "So!" Claudell Weems said cheerfully after craning his neck to look at the speedometer. "I see we are driving at just over ninety miles an hour! And since the consensus is that you're probably the shittiest motor-vehicle operator in the entire Maine State Police--"

  "What fucking consensus?" Torgeson asked.

  "My fucking consensus," Claudell Weems said. "Anyway, that leads to a deduction. The deduction is that I will die very soon. I don't know if you believe in that bullshit about granting a doomed man's last request, but if you do, maybe you'd tell me what this is all about. If you can before we receive our engine-block implants, that is."

  Andy opened his mouth, then closed it again. "No," he said. "I can't. It's too nuts. Just this much. You may start to feel sick. If you do, put some of that canned air to you right away."

  "Oh, Christ," Weems said. "The air's been poisoned in Haven?"

  "I don't know. I think so."

  "Oh Christ," Weems said again. "Who spilled what beans?"

  Andy only shook his head.

  "That's why no one's fighting the fire." The smoke boiled up from the horizon in a widening swath--mostly white so far, thank God.

  "I don't know. I think so. Run one of the bands on the radio."

  Weems blinked as if he thought Torgeson might be crazy. "Which band?"

  "Any band."

  So Weems began to run the police band, at first getting nothing but the confused, beginning-to-be-frightened babble of cops and firemen who wanted to fight a fire and somehow couldn't get to where it was. Then, further down, they heard a request for backup units at the scene of a liquor-store robbery. The address given was 117 Mystic Avenue, Medford.

  Weems looked at Andy. "Jeepers-creepers, Andy, I didn't know there was any Mystic Avenue in Medford--in fact, I didn't think there was any avenues at all in Medford. Couple of pulproads, maybe."

  "I think," Andy said, and his voice seemed to be coming to his own ears from very far away, "that particular squeal is coming from Medford, Massachusetts."

  9

  Two hundred yards over the Haven town line, Lester Moran's motor died. It did not cough; it did not hitch; it did not backfire. It just died, quietly and without fanfare. He got out without bothering to switch off the key.

  The steady crackle of the fire filled the whole world, it seemed. The air temperature had gone up at least twenty degrees. The wind was carrying the heavy smoke toward him but up, so the air was breathable. It still had a hot, acrid taste.

  Here on the left and right were wide fields--Clarendon land on the right, Ruvall land on the left. It rose in a long, undulating slope toward the woods. In those woods, Lester could see steadily brightening winks of red and orange light; smoke poured up from them in a torrent which was steadily darkening. He could hear the thumping explosions of hollow trees imploding as the fire sucked the oxygen out of them like marrow from old bones. The wind was not straight into his face, but close enough; the fire was going to break out of the woods and into the field in minutes ... seconds, maybe. Its rush down to where he stood, face red and running with sweat, might be lethally quick. He wanted to be back in his car before that happened--it would start, of course it would, old gal had never failed him yet--and piling up distance between himself and that red, oncoming beast.

  Go, then! Go, for Chrissake! You've seen it, now GO!

  Thing was, he really hadn't seen it. He'd felt its heat, seen it wink its eyes and fume smoke from its dragon's nostrils ... but he really hadn't seen the fire.

  But then he did.

  It came out of Luther Ruvall's west field in a pounce. The main fire-front bore on into Big Injun Woods, but this side now broke free of the forest. The trees massed at the far end of the field were no match for the red animal. They seemed for a moment to grow blacker as the light behind them was turned up--yellow to orange, orange to glare-red. Then they simply swept into flame. It happened in an instant. For a moment Lester could see their tops, and then they were gone, too. It was like the act of some fabulcus prestidigitator, the sort of magician Hilly Brown had once wanted to be with all his heart and soul.

  The fire-line was before him, eighty feet high and eating trees as Lester Moran stood mesmerized, mouth gaping, before it. Flames began to run down the slope of the field. Now the smoke began to rafter around him, thicker, choking. He began to cough.

  Get out! For Christ's sake, get out!

  Yes. Now he would; now he could. He had seen it and it was every bit as spectacular as he had expected it would be. But it was a beast. And what a right-thinking man did when confronted with a beast was run. Run just as fast and far as he could. All living things did it. All living things--

  Lester backed halfway to his car and then stopped.

  All living things.

  Yes. All living things ran before a forest-fire. The old patterns were suspended. The coyote ran beside the rabbit. But there were no rabbits and no coyotes coming down that field; there were no birds in the gunmetal-colored sky.

  No one here but him.

  No birds or animals running from the fire meant there were none in the woods.

  The overturned F.D. car, the blood everywhere.

  The pumper wrecked in the woods. The bloody arm.

  What's going on here? his mind screamed.

  He didn't know ... but he knew he was putting on those fabled boogie shoes. He pulled the door open--and then looked back one final time.

  What he saw rising out of that great pillar of smoke jerked a scream from him. He drew in smoke, coughed on it, screamed again.

  Something--some huge something--was rising out of the smoke like the greatest whale in creation slowly breaching.

  Smoke-hazed sunlight gleamed mellowly on its side--and still it came up, came up, came up, and there was no sound except for the awkward thunder-crunch strides of the fire.

  Up ... and up ... and up ...

  His neck craned to follow its slow, impossible progress, and so he never saw the small, queer thing which came out of the smoke and trundled smartly down the road toward him. It was a red wagon. It had belonged to little Billy Fannin at the beginning of the summer. In the center of the wagon was a platform. On the platform was a Bensohn brush-trimmer-little more than a power blade at the end of a long pole. The blade was controlled by a pistol-grip control. A sales tag reading CUT UP A STORM WITH YOUR BENSOHN! still fluttered from the top of the pole. It was on a moving gimbal, and looked a bit like the jutting prow of an absurd ship.

  Lester was cringing against his car and staring up into the sky when the gadget's EEG sensor--which had begun life as a digital meat probe--triggered the brush-trimmer's electronic starter (a mo
dification the Bensohn designers had never considered). The blade shrieked into life, the small gas motor howling like a hurt cat.

  Lester turned and saw something like a fishing-pole with teeth coming at him. He cried out and ducked toward the rear of his car.

  What's going on here? his mind screamed. What's going on, what's going on, what's going on, what's--

  The brush-trimmer swung on its gimbal, seeking Lester, following his brain-waves, which it sensed as neat little pulses, not much different from radar blips. The brush-trimmer was not very bright (its brain came from a programmable toy called the Terrible Tracker Tank), but it was bright enough to stay homed in on the low electrical output of Lester Moran's own brain. His battery, one might say.

  "Get out!" Lester screamed as Billy Fannin's wagon trundled toward him. "Get away! Get awaaaay!"

  Instead, the wagon seemed to leap at him. Lester Moran, his heart hammering wildly in his chest, zigged. The brush-trimmer zigged with him. Lester Moran tried to zag--and then a huge, slowly moving shadow fell over him, and he looked up in spite of himself ... he just couldn't help it. His feet tangled in each other and the brush-cutter pounced. Its whirling blade chewed into Lester's head. It was still working on him when the fire engulfed both it and its victim.

  10

  Torgeson and Weems saw the body in the road at the same time. They were both breathing canned air now; nausea had come on them quickly with frightening power, but with the masks in place, it disappeared completely. Leandro had been right. The air. Something in the air.

  Claudell Weems had ceased asking questions after they'd picked up the police-band squeal from Massachusetts. After that he only sat with his hands in his lap, his eyes moving steadily and cautiously. Further down-tuning had brought them news of police doings in such interesting places as Friday, North Dakota; Amette, Texas.