Greg Bear - Blood Music

“No more going outside,” she told herself. “Uh- uh .”

She ate a granola bar and turned on the radio, hoping to still be able to receive the British station she had heard the day before. With a little tuning, the speaker produced a weak voice, cross-thatched with interference, like a man speaking through felt

“…to say that the world economy will suffer is certainly an understatement. Who knows how much of the world’s resources—both in raw materials and manufactured goods, not to mention, financial records and capital—lies inaccessible in North America now? I realize most people worry more about their immediate survival, and wonder when the plague will cross the ocean, or whether it is already with us, biding its time—” Static overwhelmed the signal for several minutes. Suzy sat with crossed legs next to the radio, waiting patiently. She didn’t understand much, but the voice was comforting. “—yet my concern, as an economist, must be with what happens after the crisis passes. If it passes. Well, I’m an optimist. God in all His wisdom has some reason for this. Yes. So there has been no communication from the whole of North America, with the exception of the famous meteorological station on Afognak Island. The financiers are dead, then. The United States has always been the great bastion of private capital. Russia is now the dominant nation on the globe, militarily and perhaps financially. What can we expect?”

Suzy turned the radio off. Blather. She needed to know what it was that had happened to her home.

“Why?” she asked out loud. She watched the wheels tumbling through the plaza, their remains beginning to obscure the concrete. “Why not just kill myself and end it all?” She tossed her arms out with self-conscious melodrama, then began to laugh. She laughed until it hurt and became frightened when she realized she couldn’t stop. Hands over her mouth, she ran to a water fountain and gulped the clear, steady stream down.

What really scared her, Suzy realized, was the thought of climbing the tower. Would she need keys? Would she get halfway and find she couldn’t go any farther?

“I’ll be brave,” she said around a bite of the granola bar. “There’s nothing else I can be.”

It had been a normal and a good life, selling parts and junk out of his back yard, going to auctions and picking up odds and ends, raising his son and being proud of his wife, who taught school. He had taken great pleasure in his major acquisitions: a load of tile, all different kinds, to fix up the bathroom and kitchen in the huge old white house; an old British jeep; fifteen different cars and trucks, all blue; a ton and a half of old office furniture, including an antique wooden file cabinet which proved to be worth more than he had paid for the whole load.

The weirdest thing he had ever done (since getting married) was shave the thinning hair on his crown to expedite going bald. He had hated the in-between state. Ruth had cried when she saw him. That had been two months ago and the thinning hair had come back, as unruly and distasteful as ever.

John Olafsen had made a good living back when life had been normal. He had kept Ruth and seven-year-old Loren in good clothes and well fed. The house had been in his family for ninety years, since it had been new. They had wanted for little.

He pulled away the scratched black enamel binoculars and wiped fatigue and sweat from his eyes with a red bandana. Then he continued his peering. He was surveying the broad spread of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and the Sandia Labs across the road. The smell of dried grass and dust made him want to blow his nose, leave, pack up…and go nowhere because that was exactly the only place he had left to go. It was five thirty and dusk was coming on. “Wave your flag, Jerry,” he murmured, “you sonofabitch.”

Jerry was his twin brother, five minutes younger, twice as reckless. Jerry had flown crop dusters in the Salinas Valley. How John had escaped, neither of them knew, but it was obvious Jerry was too full of DDT and EDB and what have you. He just plain didn’t taste good to whatever had eaten the town of Livermore.

And Ruth, and Loren.

Jerry was down between the big modern square buildings and the old bungalows and barracks, scouting the thirty-foot-high mounds that now rose wherever there was empty space on the LLNL grounds. He carried another red bandana on a stick. Neither brother was ever without a bandana. Each Christmas, they had bought each other new ones, wrapping them up in red foil with big red ribbons.

“Wave,” John growled. He shifted the binoculars and saw the red bandana circling rapidly on the stick: once clockwise, once counterclockwise, then three times clockwise. That meant John should come down and see what there was to see. Nothing dangerous…as far as Jerry could tell.

He hefted his two hundred and fifty pounds up and brushed down the knees of his ragged black Levis. Curling red hair and beard glowing against the eastern grayness, he climbed out of the drainage ditch and squeezed through the barbed wire fence, the chicken wire fence, and the no-longer-electrified inner perimeter fence.

Then he ran and slid down the twenty-foot grade and hopped another culvert before slowing to a casual walk. He lit up a cigarette and broke the match before tossing it into the dirt. Fifteen or twenty cars were still parked in a lot next to the old Yin-Yang fusion project buildings. An especially impressive mound, about sixty feet in diameter, rose from the earth near the lot Jerry stood on top of the mound. He had come across a pick somewhere and was dangling it head-down by the handle, a big grin on his beardless face.

“No more joggers,” he said as John climbed the mound to join him. They called some of the peculiar things they had seen in Livermore joggers. The name seemed appropriate, since the things almost always ran; not once had they seen one standing still.

“Gladdens my heart,” John said. “What’s your plan?”

“Dig my way to China,” Jerry said, tapping the mound. “Ain’t you curious?”

“There’s curious, and curious,” John said. “What if these mounds are something the lab people put in…you know, defense, or maybe an experiment out of hand?”

“I’d say an experiment’s already got out of hand.”

“I still don’t think it came from here.”

“Shit” Jerry plunked the head of the pick on the mound, cracking the already fissured dirt and dried grass. “Why not and where in hell else?”

“Other places got labs.”

“Sure, and maybe it’s aliens.”

John shrugged. They’d probably never know. “Dig, then.”

Jerry brought the pick up and expertly swung it down. The point broke through the dirt like a pin through an eggshell and the handle almost jerked from his hands. “Hollow,” he grunted, pulling it loose with some effort. He knelt down and peered into the pick hole. “Can’t see.” He got to his feet and swung the pick again.

“Hit ’em,” John said, licking his lips. “Let me hit ’em.”

“We don’t know anything’s down there,” Jerry said, snatching the pick handle away from his brother’s broad, thick outstretched hand.

John nodded reluctantly and put the hand in his jeans pocket. He looked off at the setting sun and shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do to them,” he said. “There’s just us.”

Jerry swung three times in quick succession and a hole a yard wide caved in. The brothers jumped back, then retreated several more steps for caution’s sake. The rest of the mound held. Jerry got on his hands and knees and crawled up to the hole. “Still can’t see,” he said. “Go get the flashlight.”