Ogle turned to greet his new cellmate. The man had risen up to his hands and knees and was now looking down at Ogle from the upper bunk like a jaguar perched in a tree. He was breathing rapidly and raggedly.
A huge bubble of mucous grew from Jeremiah Freel's left nostril and popped.
Freel launched himself from the bunk headfirst, trying to sink his teeth into Ogle's cheek. Ogle instinctively turned his head away and snapped his head back. The impact slammed him back against the bars. Freel tumbled to the floor.
Freel reached for Ogle's groin. Ogle bent over and shoved his finger into one of Freel's eyes. Freel moved his head at the last moment and sank his teeth into Ogle's finger. Ogle stomped on one of Freel's hands.
And then they started fighting. In cells all around them, the convicts from D.C. flocked to the bars shouting, laughing, and pumping their fists in exultation.
Several hundred feet beneath Cacher, Oklahoma, Otis Simpson was sitting in a swivel chair in the Communications Center, staring at a wall of dead screens. He had been staring at them ever since roughly 19:08 Greenwich Mean Time. At that moment, President Richmond had gone live to the world, flanked by the leaders of the legislative and judicial branches. Then all the screens had gone black. The faxes had gone silent. The computer links had been cut off. He had tried sending messages to the Network, but all the encryption keys had been changed.
Finally he stood up, harvested a few remaining faxes that had come out of the machines earlier that day, and fed them into the shredder. He typed a command into the computer system that would cause it to re-format all of its disks seven times in a row, destroying all of the information in the system.
Otho was lying in his bed. He had been lying there since earlier today and was now beginning to go into rigor mortis. Otis bent over him and closed his eyes and smoothed back what was left of his hair.
Then he climbed on the lift and took it up to the surface. It was a bleak midwinter day, a strong steady wind coming out of the northwest prairie, whistling and gusting between the heaps of lead tailings as it picked up a load of toxic metal dust. Otis put on his warm coat and his mittens and his hat with the earflaps. Then he started to walk down the shoulder of the highway, headed southward, where he thought it might be warmer.
Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar was poised above his anaesthetized patient, just about to flick the power switch on his bone saw, when the first tendrils of noise began to infiltrate the reinforced-concrete walls of the Radhakrishnan Institute. It was a noise that was senses through the soles of the feet - not so much an actual sound as a change in the way the ground felt. Perhaps there had been another earthquake up in Uttar Pradesh. He flicked the switch and pressed the madly vibrating blade of the bone saw against the freshly peeled skull of Sasha Yakutin, a promising young up-and-coming Russian politician who had just been cut down in the prime of his life by a tragic stroke.
When he finished cutting a hatch through Mr. Yakutin's head and turned off the saw, the room became quiet - but not entirely quiet. A palpable noise was penetrating the walls of the operating room.
A nurse entered the operating theater. "Your brother Arun in on the telephone," she said.
"Can't you see I am in the middle of an operation?"
"He says it's an emergency. He says you should get out of the country."
A tremendous impact reverberated through the structure of the building, causing the steel instruments to vibrate against their trays. Down the hallway, someone screamed.
"Continue the operation," Dr. Radhakrishnan said to Toyoda, one of his most promising young proteges."
"Doctor?" Toyoda said.
Dr. Radhakrishnan stripped off his gloves and tossed them into a rubbish can.
When he stepped out into the corridor, the noise became louder; but it was still indistinct. He had heard something like this once in Elton. He had been awakened early in the morning by the most frightening noise, a noise that could peel paint from walls, the noise that madmen must hear in their nightmares, and had shivered under the covers for a few moments, thinking it was the end of the world; finally he had peered out under a windowshade and discovered that the trees in his front yard had been taken over by a vast flock of starlings, millions of them, all screeching at the tops of their lungs.
Dr. Radhakrishnan was approaching a closed door at the end of a hallway. The noise was coming through that door, seeping around its edges.
He opened the door. The sound was crushing, maddening, a noise that could cave your skull in. This room was a third-story office with a picture window that faced on to a major street. But the window had been smashed out. Slivers of smoked glass had been strewn explosively all over the room. A few rocks and bricks littered the floor, looking crude and dirty in this clean high-tech space. Hot polluted air streamed in through the window and blew over Dr. Radhakrishnan's face. He stepped forward, walking carefully on the broken glass, and looked out the window.
The Radhakrishnan Institute had been surrounded by two million people.
They were all pumping their fists in the air and chanting. Like starlings. They covered the ground for miles in every direction, flowing in a smooth carpet around buildings and vehicles, like the monsoon floods.
The mob seemed to have no particular center. But a few hundred yards away, he could see a kind of vortex, a swirling center of activity, moving slowly through the crowd. Moving toward the institute.
It was an elephant. Unlike the mob, most of whom were poorly, minimally clad, the elephant was stunningly clothed in gold and brightly colored, embroidered silk. A man was sitting on the back of the elephant. Sitting in a chair on the animal's back. Tied into the chair, actually, so he wouldn't flop out.
Dr. Radhakrishnan recognized the man. He was an ex-patient. And then, at last, he figured out what the crowd was chanting.
WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA.
Zeldo's telephone rang again in the late afternoon; probably another one of his friends calling to ask him if he had heard about Presidents Cozzano and Richmond. Zeldo didn't have time for it now. He had been at the California branch of the Radhakrishnan Institute for almost twenty-four hours, going over some data from one of their newest patients - one Aaron Green. Green had been committed here around the time of Election Day, plagued by psychological troubles - posttraumatic stress from the Pentagon Towers bloodbath. Finally, he had volunteered to have several chips implanted in his head.
Zeldo jerked the phone out of its cradle. "What?"
"It's me." Zeldo would have known the voice anywhere: it was Mary Catherine Cozzano. "They're covering their tracks. We've been hearing some weird stuff from the Pentagon and we think you're in trouble. Get on that bike of yours and pedal like your life depends upon it, because it does. See you at dinner."
Something in Mary Catherine's voice got Zeldo up out of his chair. He grabbed his backpack, skittered down the stairs, and yanked his mountain bike from the employee bike rack out front. He rode across the small parking lot of the Radhakrishnan Institute and into the entrance of the bicycle path.
He was about half a mile away from the Institute when something caught his eye: an airplane. Usually you didn't notice airplanes, they were part of the scenery. But this one drew his attention because it was flying incredibly low. He thought maybe it was coming in for a landing at the airstrip. But it was going way too fast to make a landing. It was streaking across the landscape, actually kicking up a dust trail from the ground. It was very small, and dark.
Zeldo recognized the shape. He had seen a documentary about these things once, on 60 minutes, a few years ago. It was a Gale Aerospace Stealth Cruise Missile. It had achieved great notoriety for going way off course during its test flights.