Johnny stroked his mustache. “I’ve thought about that a lot.”
“And what did you decide?” Ben said.
“Let’s just look at the facts. Since the war I’ve done some research into this. Not much—there isn’t much you can find out—but some. What I know comes from other vets. A guy at the VA in Iron Mountain told me that the planes doing the spraying were from an Air Force unit called the 57th Tactical Bombadier Group.” He looked around at the worn faces surrounding him. “That probably doesn’t mean jack to any of you. But if I were to say that that particular unit still exists and is based out of Pierce Noolan AFB, it might start making sense.”
Lou shrugged. “Sorry. Still not getting it.”
Ben’s eyes widened, though. “Pierce Noolan Air Force Base is about twenty minutes from here.”
“That’s right,” Lisa said.
Johnny nodded. “What do you folks know about that place?”
“Nothing to know,” Ben said. “It’s high security, I know that much. It’s not open to the public. Cousin of mine’s a plumbing contractor. His firm won a bid to modernize the boilers there. He said you had to go through three gates to get in. There were guys with machine guns at each checkpoint. My cousin and his crew were escorted in and out of the place, were never allowed to wander off by themselves. Said you had to show your ID card just to take a piss.”
Johnny was starting to look satisfied. “It’s right on the fence there, some shit about it being a U.S. Government facility and use of deadly force authorized etc. All that bull. It’d be easier to get into Miss America’s pants than that place.”
“All right, sure,” Lou said. “But that’s the military. They get like that. Hell, you were a SEAL and all. I bet you guys had top level clearances.”
“I could’ve walked right into the Pentagon.”
Lou slapped his hands on his knees. “Well, there you go. That’s how they do shit. But that don’t mean we got some sort of conspiracy here.”
Ruby Sue laughed. “You people just astound me.” She pulled a joint out of her coat, fired it up. Everyone, of course, just stared. “Hey, you smoke yours, I’ll smoke mine.”
“Why not?” Lou said, firing up another cigarette.
“What astounds you about us?” Ben wanted to know.
She coughed, blowing out smoke. “Oh shit, man. This country ain’t nothing but one big conspiracy. Haven’t you heard of Area 51? The JFK thing? Roswell? Shit, man, it’s everywhere. This whole country ain’t nothing but a nest of lies. Right, Nanc?”
Nancy was staring off into space through glazed, fixed eyes. Her lips trembled. She shifted from one position to the next. She hugged herself. She trembled.
“She’s been through a lot,” Ben said, stroking her cheek. It was damp and cool like the underside of a mushroom. But he told no one that.
Nancy squinted her eyes shut, then opened them.
She managed a thin smile which quickly became a frown.
There was something not right with her, but everyone pretended ignorance. Ben was right, they figured: she had been through a lot.
Ruby Sue looked away. “I say Johnny’s one-hundred percent correct. CIA, NSA, DIA… all those secret black budget ops groups, man, they have no respect for human life.” She sucked off her joint, coughed again. “Good shit. Anyone… no? More for me. But like I was saying, those groups, man, they’d spray a town down in an instant.”
Lou sighed. “Whatever. But let’s not digress, people.”
“What I’m saying,” Johnny pointed out, “is that from what I found out, the research on that stuff, on Laughing Man, was carried out many places. But the group that dispersed it is right next door to Cut River. Let me speculate here a minute. Yeah, I think there is a conspiracy here. A conspiracy of silence. Uncle Sam won’t admit he has stuff like this. But he does. And he stores it at certain facilities. My guess is that Pierce Noonan is one of them.”
“But you’re guessing,” Lou pointed out.
Johnny shrugged. “Sure, I am. Facts aren’t exactly plentiful, pal. I’m offering you people an explanation for this fucking nightmare. You think some goddamn virus or something just happened to mutate and cause this? Bullshit. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I don’t think so. I’m not saying for a moment that the Air Force did this on purpose. I’m thinking more like a mistake here. Colossal fuck-up comes to mind. How? I don’t know.”
Lou stared at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke. He decided he was getting pretty good at this Devil’s Advocate thing, so he kept at it. “All right. It’s feasible, I’ll say. And it explains things. I’ll give you that. But don’t you think stuff like this Laughing Man would be stored in a really secure place?”
“Who knows?” Lisa chimed in. “Maybe a container of it broke open, maybe some kind of animal infected with it got out. Maybe it vaporized and came down in that rain. I don’t see the point in arguing here. It happened… or something damn close to it.”
She was right.
They all knew that. The hows and whys really didn’t matter at present… or not too much.
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Lou said, stabbing out his cigarette. “We can sort it out later.”
Ruby Sue laughed. “Sort what out? You guys hear what you’re saying? Christ, I thought I was the one who was baked here! Sort it out? They’re not going to let you do that. On purpose or by accident, people, they’ll never admit to it. They’ll blame this shit on the Libyans or Osama Bin Laden or something. But be sure of one thing, we won’t get answers. Shit, if they find out we saw this and survived, they’ll probably kill us anyway.”
“Christ, you watch too much TV,” Lou said.
“Maybe I do. But they’ll come for us. Black ops troops. Assassins. I saw a movie like that once.” She roached her joint, put the unsmoked end in her pocket. “This plane or train or something full of some chemical warfare crap crashes and infects this whole town. People there go nuts or something. Then the government comes in. Bang! Martial law. Even if you’re not infected, man, you ain’t getting out.”
Lou looked to Joe who just shrugged. “Well, let’s not worry about that. What we gotta think about here, friends and neighbors, is how this stuff spreads. Granted it’s infectious, contagious, whatever you want to call it. But how does that happen?”
“Could be just about any way,” Ben said. “Water, personal contact, animals.”
“Even through the air,” Lisa said. “We might be full of it and not know it. Not yet.”
Lou smiled grimly at that. “Any thoughts, Johnny?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. All I can say is that I was exposed in ’Nam and never got it.”
“If this is that Laughing Man junk, then wouldn’t the military want a germ that was controllable? Something they could stop easy enough but the enemy couldn’t?” Lou asked them.
Johnny shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I don’t want to do is to get into the minds of the crazy, sadistic pricks who could dream up something like this.”
“And use it,” Lisa said.
“We might all be infected,” Ben said, looking down with desperation at Nancy. Feverish heat was rolling off her clammy skin in waves. As if to show the others that she was just fatigued, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. In a whisper, he said: “If you got it, baby, then I want it, too.”
Joe looked out the window, closed the drapes. “How long, you figure, before those creatures out there, them crazy shits, sniff us out and make an assault?”
Johnny looked grim. “I’d say it could happen anytime. Anytime at all.”