The Dead Town

Chapter 54

The seeming void silent and dark above, the snow materializing out of that inverted abyss, the houses bright or dark but each as still as a mausoleum, and the deserted white street from which this swaddling winter might have robbed all dimension if not for evenly spaced streetlamps dwindling toward other neighborhoods …

As the band and collet and prongs of a ring existed to display the gemstone, so it seemed to Rusty Billingham that everything his senses perceived in this glittering scene existed to display the jewel of a woman at the center of the intersection. From a distance of seventy feet, as he approached her, walking the middle of the street, she promised to be extraordinarily beautiful, and when he was still sixty feet from her, he knew that promise would be kept, perhaps more fully than he could imagine. Although it must be but a trick of lamplight and diamonded threads of snow, she appeared radiant, luminous from within.

Rusty was certain now that she’d been the one who screamed, because she was clearly in a state of shock. Standing there with snow well above her ankles, perhaps barefoot, wearing a short silk robe that offered no protection against the night, she seemed to be oblivious of the piercing cold. She had fled from something, out of a house into the street, but now she didn’t run to him as a frightened woman seeking protection ought to have done. He asked her again what was wrong, and this time she didn’t even ask him to help her, just stared at him as if in a trance.

As he closed to within fifty feet of her, Rusty realized that his reaction to her was as unusual as was her catatonic stare. Seeing a woman in distress, whether she was beautiful or not, he would have ordinarily hurried to her, but he moved not slowly but deliberately. Unconsciously, some experience cautioned him, some reference to the past that he could not in the instant recall — and when the engine sound of a fast-moving vehicle rose from the west, Rusty came to a halt, still more than forty feet from the woman.

She turned her head to her right, peering along the cross street toward the approaching vehicle, suddenly bathed in its headlights. She made no attempt to get out of its way, seemed rooted or perhaps frozen to the pavement.

Braking, snow chains stuttering, a Chevy Trailblazer appeared and came to a stop beside the woman, its headlights now past her. Four or five people were in the SUV.

The front passenger window purred down, and a grandmotherly figure leaned out. “Honey, are you all right, you need some help?”

Suddenly Rusty knew why he’d been inexplicably cautious. Four years back. Afghanistan. A woman in a burka, only her eyes revealed. She approached a checkpoint with U.S. Army security. He happened to be at a window half a block away when she detonated the bomb strapped to her body, out of the danger zone but witness to the horror.

The blonde’s silk robe revealed the contours of her voluptuous body so completely that no bomb could have been concealed under it — but in some way that Rusty could not comprehend, she proved to be a bomb. The grandmother in the Trailblazer leaned out of the passenger window, asked the courteous question, and a thick, silvery jet of … something like molten metal shot out of the flaxen-haired beauty, into the older woman’s face, and the face seemed to dissolve as she toppled over in her seat. The blonde and the silvery something were one and the same, and as the jet continued spewing into the SUV, she evaporated up from the street, leaving footprints in the snow, transforming entirely into that corrosive stream and fully invading the Trailblazer.

People were screaming inside the SUV, maybe four people very loud, but then three not so loud, and the vehicle rocked from the power of what was happening in there, creaked and twanged, bounced on its tires, springs singing a tortured song. Only one person screaming now. A couple windows cracked but didn’t break, something splashed against the glass, not blood but maybe some blood in it. The driver wasn’t in control anymore, most likely wasn’t even alive, but the Trailblazer rolled across the intersection, jumped a curb, plowed into a hedge, came to a stop, canting to port. The last scream faded in a thin falsetto, but something continued to churn inside the vehicle, as if it were frenziedly feeding on remains. All was chaos in there, and Rusty could make no sense of the seething shapes he glimpsed.

He took several halting steps toward the Trailblazer as it coasted across the intersection. But by the time it shuddered to a stop in the hedge, he knew there was nothing he could do to help those people. There might be nothing he could do to save himself, either, but he broke into a run.