A War of Shadows

THREE

The alarm clock woke them. He reached out, fumbled for the stud that would silence it, and finally succeeded. He opened his eyes, still holding the clock, and brought it in front of him so he could see it.

He stared at it in wonder, trying to figure out why. He held the clock for the longest time, looking at it curiously, as if it were some strange new thing. He felt confused, adrift, wrong somehow.

He looked around the room, and it didn’t help. Nothing was familiar, nothing looked like some-thing he’d seen or known before. He felt a shifting next to him, and for the first time he was aware that he was not alone in the bed.

She was still asleep. She was middle-aged, a bit dumpy, with a few touches of gray, in an aquamarine-blue nightgown.

Who the hell was she?

He strained, tried to remember, and could not. He was a blank, a total blank—it was as if he’d just been born.

He got out of bed slowly, carefully, so as not to wake the woman. He felt odd, giddy, light-headed, but with a dull ache that started in his head and spread throughout his body.

He walked dully out into the hall, an unfamiliar hall still masked in shadow, and looked up and down. He tried one room, then another, before finally finding the bathroom. He had to go, he knew that much.

He walked in, searched for and finally found the light switch, and turned it on.

He almost jumped. A man’s face stared at him, and he started to address it, to apologize or whatever, when he realized suddenly that it was his reflection.

His? Someone he’d never seen before?

He stared at it until he just had to go, and did. After, he didn’t flush for fear of disturbing the quiet and that woman in the bedroom.

He switched out the light and stood there in the semi-darkness, wondering what to do next. Get dressed and get out of here, he decided. That first of all.

He crept back into the bedroom, but stepped on a loose floorboard, and the woman awoke with a start, sat up, and stared at him, an expression not unlike that on the face in the mirror’s on her own features.

“Who—who are you?” she asked timidly, a bit fearfully.

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “Who are you?”

Her mouth was open, and she shook her head slowly from side to side. “I don’t know,” she said wonderingly. “I can’t remember.”

The sound gonged at her from beyond her subconscious, beating in, like a lot of little hammers. It seemed to be demanding entrance. She struggled against it, but it kept on, insistent, and slowly turned from a series of poundings into an insistent ringing.

Dr. Sandra O’Connell awoke. Like a contortionist, she was twisted and bent in the chair, and she’d obviously slept hard for quite some time. Her right arm and upper calf were both asleep, and she could hardly move them. She tried shifting, and pain shot through her.

Cursing, using sheer willpower, she managed to get both feet on the floor and somehow grab the ringing telephone, bringing the receiver to her.

“Hello?” she answered groggily, still half asleep. There was no reply, and it took a few seconds before she realized she had the thing upside down. Turning it right, eyes still only half-open, brain only partially there, she tried again.

“Dr. O’Connell,” she mumbled.

“Sandy? This is Mark.” It was the voice of Dr. Spiegelman. “Better wake up in a hurry. Another town’s been hit.”

This brought her mentally awake immediately, although the rest of her body didn’t seem to want to cooperate.

“What? So soon? Where?”

“Little town on the Eastern Shore, not seventy miles from here,” he told her. “We’re getting a team up from here and Dietrick now. Want to come along?”

Her mind raced. “Give me a moment,” she pleaded. “My god! How are you getting there?”

“Choppers. One’s here now. Two more due any minute. Get yourself together, grab your kit, and get up to the roof. I’ll bring you some coffee in the helicopter.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said, wondering if she could really do it.

She managed to get up, almost falling on the tingling leg, but worked it out as best she could. The wall clock in the outer office said 9:10; the light coming in from the windows said it was in the morning.

Four hours, she thought, resigned. At least I got four hours’ worth of sleep.

Four out of forty.

It would have to do.

She knew she looked a mess, but whatever repairs could be made in the helicopter would be all that would be done. She got her purse, reached inside for some keys, and unlocked the right double drawer of her desk, removing a doctor’s bag. Her smaller purse fitted into it on clips, and she hoisted the whole thing and put the strap over her shoulder.

She was almost to the hall before she realized that she was going barefoot. With the carelessness of someone in a hurry she knocked over a couple of things getting back, unlocking, getting in, getting the shoes, and leaving again. She put them on while waiting for the elevator, which seemed to take forever to come.

Speigelman was waiting for her on the roof, along with a number of technicians, lab men, and some other department heads. A “hit” this close to home was irresistible to them.

She had little time to get any details before the second helicopter swung into view and came over the roof, blowing dirt, dust, hair and everything else around it as it settled gently onto the large painted cross.

They lost no time in piling in; it was a large craft, but it already carried a number of people from Dietrick and a lot of technical gear. She scrunched into a hard seat next to her fellow NDCC doctor and had barely fastened the seat belt when they were off.

It was tremendously noisy, and she strained to be heard over the whomp! whomp! whomp! of the over-head rotors and the whine of the twin jets to either side.

“What have we got?” she screamed at Spiegelman.

He shook his head. “McKay, little town on the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County. Just about everybody seems to have woke up this morning with total amnesia.”

She frowned. “How big’s the town?” she yelled.

“Twenty-three hundred,” he told her. “Pretty much like the others. First reports said it wasn’t a hundred percent, either, as usual. Bet we find out most of the exceptions weren’t in town during some period about three days ago.”

“You think it’s the same thing, then?”

He nodded. “Remember our talk last night? A catalyst that struck a particular and very limited part of the brain, creating an odd sort of stroke. You know most total amnesia victims have some kind of clotting cutting them off.”

She nodded. It wasn’t her specialty, and she had been more administrator than doctor anyway these past few years, but she’d heard of rare cases. It made sense. It matched with the others.

Which meant it didn’t match at all.

The agent, whatever it was, was pretty consistent, though. She wouldn’t take Spiegelman up on his bet. But what sort of agent could appear in such widely separated communities, rear its ugly head for only a brief period, then vanish without a trace?

Suburban Washington vanished quickly beneath them, replaced by the sandy soil and dense forests of southern Maryland, a place curiously little changed from its earliest beginnings, geographically or culturally.

As she checked herself out in a mirror and tried to become as presentable as possible they crossed the ancient Patuxent River and the fossil-strewn cliffs of Calvert with its incongruous nuclear reactors and LNG docks stuck somehow in the middle of wilderness, and out over the broad, blue bay.

Within twenty minutes they were angling for a landing. The town was a pretty one, almost a picture-book type. The families here were old and deep-rooted, mostly involved in the shellfish trade as their ancestors had been for centuries; the town was neat, almost manicured, with a strong eighteenth century look to it.

But now there were helicopters landing, and swarms of vehicles on the ground, while Maryland State Police on land and sea blocked access to the curious.

They touched down with a slight jar, then quickly unloaded personnel and gear.

“Joe Bede got here ahead of everybody and he’s coordinating,” Mark Spiegelman told her, their ears just starting to readjust to the lack of steady noise.

Sandra nodded approval. “Joe’s a good man. But how did he get here ahead of us?”

Spiegelman chuckled. “He was on vacation, on that boat of his, just up at St. Michaels The call came over for any and all doctors, he smelled what it was, and got somebody to drive him down. I’d say he was here inside of thirty minutes from the first reports.”

That was good, she thought. A trained NDCC doctor on the scene almost from the start. In a way she almost pitied poor Joe; he was not only going to lose the rest of his vacation, but stood the awful chance of being debriefed almost to death in the next few days.

They had the people out in the town square; somebody had set up folding chairs procured from various restaurants, the church basement, and who knew where else? It was a shock to see them; they just sort of sat there, seemingly at a loss to do or say anything. But their expressions weren’t blank; there was tremendous fear and tension there, so thick you could smell it.

Several men and women had set up tables and were interviewing the townspeople one by one. After the interviews, they were taken gently off by troopers to waiting busses. A few would be flown out to Bethesda and Walter Reed; the rest would be placed temporarily in every local hospital from Norfolk to Wilmington, and probably a lot more, too.

Dr. Joseph Bede, in a tremendously loud sport shirt, jeans, and sunglasses, a three-days’ growth of beard on his face, hardly looked like the supervising doctor in a medical crisis. He looked up, saw her, and waved.

She went over to him. “Hello, Joe,” was all she could say.

“Sandy,” he said. “Hey! Get a chair. This isn’t gonna be too pleasant, but you should be in on this.

“At least no one died this time,” she tried.

He frowned, paused, sat back a moment and sighed. “Well, depends on how you look at it. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.” He turned back around, nodding to a nervous-looking State Police corporal. “Next one,” he ordered softly.

The next one was a middle-aged woman, over-weight, face lined and weathered. She stood there, looking nervous and bewildered.

A young man in casual dress leaned over toward Joe Bede. “Holly Troon,” he said. “Lived here most of her life. That’s her old man, Harry, second row, third one in over there. Part-time cashier, drug store. Three kids—we took ’em on the first bus.”

“Education?” Bede asked.

The young man shrugged. “High school. Nothin’ odd, nothin’ special, neither.”

Bede nodded, then turned back to the woman. “Please have a seat,” he urged in his most calm, soothing manner. She sat, looking at him expectantly.

“I’m Dr. Bede,” he told her. “What do you remember about yourself?”

She didn’t say a word, just shook her head slowly from side to side.

“Tell me the first thing you do remember,” he prodded, gentle as ever.

“I—I woke up,” she stammered. “And—well, I didn’t know where I was. I still don’t know. And then this old man came into the room, and we kind of stared at each other.”

The kindly interrogator nodded sympathetically. “And this man—you had never seen him before, either?”

She shook her head. “I can’t remember anything at all. Nothing.” She looked at him, almost pleadingly. “Why can’t I remember? Why can’t any of there remember?” She gestured at the waiting townspeople, her voice rising slowly and quivering as if bordering on hysteria. He calmed her with that charismatic gentleness he had been born with.

“Take it easy,” he said. “You—all of you—caught a disease. It has this effect—loss of memory. We’re working on it.”

She clutched at the straw. “You mean you can cure me?”

He put on the number twenty-three smile, the one reserved for terminal patients.

“All of your memory’s still up there. It’s just that the rest of you can’t get to it right now. That’s what we’ll be working on. Like a telephone that’s out of order because a wire is broken. Fix the wire and you can use it again.”

It seemed to make her feel better, and she relaxed.

“Now, tell me,” he continued. “When you saw this strange man you weren’t afraid of him? I mean, a woman sees a strange man…”

That brought back a little of it. “You just don’t understand,” she said, shaking a little. “When I woke up I didn’t even know I was a woman.”

His eyebrows went up. “You thought you were a man?”

“No,” she said in frustration. “I wasn’t anything. Then he said, ‘Who are you?’ and I asked him the same thing, and we found neither of us knew. And then we found this closet mirror and looked at ourselves and neither of us recognized ourselves.” She half-pointed to herself. “I never saw this woman in my life before. You understand that?” The hysteria was rising again.

“Just take it easy,” he told her. “Now, I don’t think we’ll pester you any more. We want to get you to a hospital, where they can start to find out how to bring you back.”

The corporal took her arm, genuine pity in his face, and she went meekly with him to the bus.

All around the square the same scene was being repeated, with slight variations. Spiegelman was already handling some.

Joe Bede sighed and turned to Sandra O’Connell. “See what I mean?”

She did. “My god! And they’re all like this?”

He nodded. “There are some gradations, of course. Most are total. Some are so far beyond total they can’t even remember what a telephone is,” he told her. “Even some basic skills have disappeared or diminished. Even the ones with some vague concept of identity can’t remember their pasts.” He turned, looked at the still considerable numbers of people waiting patiently on the chairs. “Notice something else?”

She thought a minute. “The docility,” she asked as much as said.

He nodded. “You can lead ’em anyplace. Not a one of ’em in a rage, or yelling and screaming, or resisting. Almost like sheep. Even if they get close to hysteria, like that poor woman, they are easily diverted. Worst they do, men or women, old or young, is cry softly and hopelessly. And suggestion! Just on a hunch I asked a woman who was still wearing a nightgown and nothing else to disrobe for me, and damned if she didn’t do it, right here in front of everybody!”

Sandra shivered and decided to slightly change the subject. She looked quizzically over at the young man who had provided the identification. Bede got her meaning and both her intents.

“Jim Shoup, this is Dr. Sandra O’Connell, the coordinator for the National Disease Control Center Action Teams,” he said. “Jim’s from Hartley, about ten kilometers down the point here, closer to the main drag. He knows almost everybody.”

Shoup nodded. He appeared to be in his middle twenties, lean and athletic.

“Anybody in Hartley come down with this?” she asked both of them.

Shoup nodded. “A dozen or so. So far,” he added worriedly.

“I wouldn’t worry,” she reassured him. “This thing only strikes once, it seems, like lightning. If you didn’t get it within an hour or two of everybody else, odds are you won’t.”

He scratched his chin nervously. “Well, I hope you’re right. This is really givin’ me the creeps.”

“If I could wake up twenty-four, tanned, and muscular I’d surrender every damned memory I got,” Bede mumbled, and it relaxed the other two. It was almost a miracle that he’d been the first here; he was the best field man NDCC had.

The light, warm wind shifted slightly, and Bede’s pipe smoke blew toward Sandra. She coughed and he tried to shield it. As luck always had it, no matter where he put it the smoke aimed at her.

“I’ll put the damned thing out,” he said apologetically, and knocked it against his foot.

The odor didn’t quite vanish, but seemed to reveal another tobacco smell, fouler by far than his pipe.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got to go check on the other groups, make sure all the spaces are reserved, and get the labs set up again.” She stood up. The odor persisted. “Lord! This—agent—whatever it is, it gets increasingly bizarre, doesn’t it?”

“Increasingly closer to perfection,” said a sharp, Brooklynesque male voice just behind her.

She turned in surprise and saw a man standing there with a monstrous black cigar in his mouth. He was slightly shorter than she, about 175 centimeters or so, with a pitted, blotched complexion and a nose at least four times too large for his face. Although he was neatly dressed in suit and tie, the clothing hung wrongly on him, and looked like it had been worn by someone completely different for a week before he got it. He was mostly bald, with incongrously long shocks of gray-white hair on the sides and back.

He looks like a mad scientist from an old and bad movie, she thought.

“What do you mean, ‘increasingly closer to perfection?’ ” she asked him irritably. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”

He smiled, and in back of the cigar she could see that his obviously false teeth were stained and yellow. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a little leather case, and flipped it open. It contained a picture of him on an ID card that managed the impossible task of making him look worse than he did, and a very fancy embossed metal emblem above it.

“Chief Inspector Jacob Edelman, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said.

She thought to herself that, if people like this were Chief Inspectors, no wonder the crime rate was through the roof. Aloud, she said, “And what did you mean by that remark?”

“Just think it over, Doctor,” he said. “Suppose you invented something—a disease, a chemical, who knows what?—that could in theory wipe out everybody’s memory on a massive scale and make them obedient sheep. Now, the brain’s a pretty complicated place, and you can only do so much on animals, so you start guessing. You hit the wrong centers the first few times out. Then you get lucky—you hit a nice reaction that does exactly what you wanted it to, maybe more. Pick small towns, the easier to observe effects, rate of spread, and the like. I think they hit it early on. Here.”

She was appalled. It was a nightmarish vision beyond her comprehension.

“No one would do such a thing,” she protested. “What you are suggesting is monstrous. Do you have any proof of this wild idea?”

He shrugged. “Only logic, Doctor, for now. Logic and a few other things.” He looked around. “That’s about all I can say about it for now, but we’ll be seeing each other again, in, ah, quieter surroundings.”

Not if I can help it, she told herself. The man gave her the creeps. “Just what department are you Chief Inspector of?” she asked, starting to turn away and attend to her business.

“Counterespionage,” he replied matter-of-factly, and walked off, humming a bit to himself.

“It’s mighty public to be going on with that shit,” Joe Bede said. “Hell, there’ll be scare stories all over the evening papers tonight.”

She stared after the strange little man. “I think he already knows that much,” she muttered. “I think he said that because he really likes scaring people to death.”

But as she tended to her own duties, made up organization charts, dispatched teams to the hospitals, recommended NDCC Dietrick lab teams, and all the other ten million things she had to do, she couldn’t get those two visions from her mind.

The blank zombies being processed, and the strange little man with the ability to construct a nightmare so casually.