“He’s in the air,” Kalisha said. None of them needed to ask who she meant.
“I’d love to fly again,” Helen said wistfully. “I would love that.”
“Will they wait for him, Sha?” Nicky asked. “Or just turn on the gas? What’s your thinking?”
“Who made me Professor Xavier?” She threw an elbow into Avery’s side… but gently. “Wake up, Avester. Smell the coffee.”
“I’m awake,” Avery said. Not quite truthfully; he had still been drowsing, enjoying the hum. Thinking of telephones that got bigger, the way Bartholomew Cubbins’s hats had grown bigger and fancier. “They’ll wait. They have to, because if anything happens to us, Luke would know. And we’ll wait until he gets here.”
“And when he does?” Kalisha asked.
“We use the phone,” Avery said. “The big phone. All of us together.”
“How big is it?” George sounded uneasy. “Because the last one I saw was very fuckin large. Almost as big as me.”
Avery only shook his head. His eyelids drooped. At bottom he was still a little kid, and up long past his bedtime.
The Ward A kids—it was hard not to think of them as the gorks, even for Kalisha—were still holding hands. The overheads brightened; one of the tubes actually shorted out. The hum deepened and strengthened. They felt it in Front Half, Kalisha was sure of that—Joe and Hadad, Chad and Dave, Priscilla and that mean one, Zeke. The rest of them, too. Were they frightened by it? Maybe a little, but—
But they believe we’re trapped, she thought. They believe they’re still safe. They believe the revolt has been contained. Let them go on believing that.
Somewhere there was a big phone—the biggest phone, one with extensions in many rooms. If they called on that phone (when they called on it, because there was no other choice), the power in this tunnel where they were trapped would go beyond any bomb ever exploded on the earth or below it. That hum, now just a carrier wave, might grow to a vibration that could topple buildings, maybe destroy whole cities. She didn’t know that for sure, but thought it might be true. How many kids, their heads now empty of everything but the powers for which they had been taken, were waiting for a call on the big phone? A hundred? Five hundred? Maybe even more, if there were Institutes all over the world.
“Nicky?”
“What?” He had also been drowsing, and he sounded irritated.
“Maybe we can turn it on,” she said, and there was no need to be specific about what it was. “But if we do… can we turn it off again?”
He considered this, then smiled. “I don’t know. But after what they did to us… frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
9
Quarter past eleven.
Stackhouse was back in Mrs. Sigsby’s office, with the Zero Phone—still silent—on the desk. Forty-five minutes from now, the last day of the Institute’s normal operation would be over. Tomorrow this place would be abandoned, no matter how the business with Luke Ellis turned out. Containment of the program as a whole was possible in spite of the Wendy person Luke and his friend Tim were leaving down south, but this facility was blown. The important things tonight were obtaining the flash drive and making sure Luke Ellis was dead. Rescuing Mrs. Sigsby would be nice, but it was strictly optional.
In point of fact, the Institute was being abandoned already. From where he sat, he had an angle on the road that led away from the Institute, first to Dennison River Bend, then to the rest of the lower forty-eight… not to mention Canada and Mexico, for those with passports. Stackhouse had called in Zeke, Chad, Chef Doug (twenty years with Halliburton), and Dr. Felicia Richardson, who had come to them from the Hawk Security Group. They were people he trusted.
As for the others… he had seen their departing headlights flickering through the trees. He guessed only a dozen so far, but there would be more. Soon Front Half would be deserted except for the children currently in residence there. Maybe it was already. But Zeke, Chad, Doug, and Dr. Richardson would stick; they were loyalists. And Gladys Hickson. She would stick as well, maybe after all the others were gone. Gladys wasn’t just a scrapper; Stackhouse was becoming more and more certain that she was an out-and-out psycho.
I’m psycho myself for staying, Stackhouse thought. But the brat’s right—they’d hunt me down. And he’s walking right into it. Unless…
“Unless he’s playing me,” Stackhouse murmured.
Rosalind, Mrs. Sigsby’s assistant, stuck her head in. Her usually perfect makeup had eroded over the course of the last difficult twelve hours, and her usually perfect graying hair was sticking up on the sides.
“Mr. Stackhouse?”
“Yes, Rosalind.”
Rosalind looked troubled. “I believe Dr. Hendricks may have left. I believe I saw his car about ten minutes ago.”
“I’m not surprised. You should go yourself, Rosalind. Head home.” He smiled. It felt strange to be smiling on a night like this, but it was a good strange. “I just realized that I’ve known you since I came here—many moons—and I don’t know where home is for you.”
“Missoula,” Rosalind said. She looked surprised herself. “That’s in Montana. At least I suppose it’s still home. I own a house in Mizzou, but I haven’t been there in I guess five years. I just pay the taxes when they come due. When I have time off, I stay in the village. For vacation, I go down to Boston. I like the Red Sox and the Bruins, and the art cinema in Cambridge. But I’m always ready to come back.”
Stackhouse realized it was the most Rosalind had said to him in those many moons, which stretched back over fifteen years. She had been here, Mrs. Sigsby’s faithful dogsbody, when Stackhouse had retired from his service as an investigator for the US Army (JAG), and here she still was, and looking about the same. She could have been sixty-five, or a well-preserved seventy.
“Sir, do you hear that humming noise?”
“I do.”
“Is it a transformer or something? I never heard it before.”
“A transformer. Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”
“It’s very annoying.” She rubbed at her ears, further disarranging her hair. “I suppose the children are doing it. Is Julia—Mrs. Sigsby—coming back? She is, isn’t she?”
Stackhouse realized (with amusement rather than irritation) that Rosalind, always so proper and so unobtrusive, had been keeping her ears peeled, hum or no hum.
“I expect so, yes.”
“Then I’d like to stay. I can shoot, you know. I go to the range in the Bend once a month, sometimes twice. I have the shooting club equivalent of a DM badge, and I won the small handgun competition last year.”
Julia’s quiet assistant not only took excellent shorthand, she had a Distinguished Marksman badge… or, as she said, the equivalent of. Wonders never ceased.
“What do you shoot, Rosalind?”
“Smith & Wesson M&P .45.”
“Recoil doesn’t bother you?”
“With the help of a wrist support, I manage the recoil very well. Sir, if it’s your intention to free Mrs. Sigsby from the kidnappers holding her, I would much desire to be a part of that operation.”
“All right,” Stackhouse said, “you’re in. I can use all the help I can get.” But he would have to be careful how he used her, because saving Julia might not be possible. She had become expendable now. The important thing was the flash drive. And that fucking too-smart-for-his-own-good boy.
“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”
“I’m sure you won’t, Rosalind. I’ll tell you how I expect this will play out, but first I have a question.”