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It was DT calling from another oak off to her left. She changed course toward
it, guessing he'd called because there were no more trees in the rangeland
beyond. It was open grassland down there and cropped close by cattle for at
least half a mile. DT caught her arm to help stop her.
"You know, that's weird," he said. "See how the cows have eaten the pasture
down below us, but not up toward the farm. It's almost as though the cows
avoided that area. The ones I scared away from my first stand up there were
real spooky, as though they'd been herded up there by something below us. I
don't see a sign of anyone down there, though."
She took a moment to catch her breath. "You have any bright ideas how we're
going to get out of this?"
"Keep on like we are," he said.
"We've got to get out and report what we've seen," she said. She looked up at
him, but he was keeping his attention on their back trail.
"I think you got another one of those creeps that dove into the grass," he
said. "Only one of them seems to be moving. You ready to make another run?"
"As ready as I'll ever be. You see anything of the one I missed?"
"He's still crawling, but he's gonna run outa grass pretty soon. Let's
separate now. You bear a bit to your left until you hit the road, then try to
follow it. I'll hold right. The creek should be over there; you can see the
line of trees off that way about a mile. We'll give 'em two targets to chase.
If
I can reach the creek --"
DT had been scanning the ground toward the farm as he began speaking and,
still speaking, he turned to look in the direction they would run. Clovis
whirled around at the startled way DT
stopped speaking. She let out an involuntary gasp. A solid line of hairless,
nude human figures blocked their escape route. The line stood about five
hundred yards below them, beginning far off to their left in the scrub oaks of
rising ground there and reaching into the distance at the right, even beyond
the trees that marked the creekbank where DT had expected to take cover.
"Jeeeesus!" DT said.
There must be ten thousand of them! Clovis thought.
"I haven't seen that many gooks since Nam," DT husked. "Jeeeeesus! It's like
we stirred up a whole anthill of 'em."
Clovis nodded, thinking: That's exactly what we've done. The whole thing
fell into place:
Hellstrom was a front for some kind of weirdo cult. She noted the pale skins.
They must live underground. The farm was just a cover. She stifled a
hysterical giggle. No, the farm was only a lid! She raised her gun,
intending to take as many of that ominous advancing line as possible, but a
crackling hum from close behind numbed her body and mind. She heard one shot
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as she toppled, but could not decide whether it was from her gun or DT's.
From Nils Hellstrom's diary. The concept of a colony planted directly in the
midst of an existing human society is not unique. There have been many secret
groups and movements in human history. Gypsies provide a crude analogue of
our way even today. No, we are not unique in this.
But our Hive is as far removed from those others as they are removed from
primitive, cave-
dwelling humans. We are like the colonial protozoan, carchesium, all of us in
the Hive attached to a single, branching stem, and that stem concealed in the
very ground beneath the other society that believes itself to be the meek who
will inherit the earth. Meek! That word originally meant "mute and silent."
It had been a frantic and confused flight from JFK Airport -- an hour's
layover at O'Hare, the quick transfer to a chartered flight at Portland and
the noisy discomfort of a single engine all the way up the Columbia Gorge,
and, then, as evening came down over them, the long haul diagonally across
Oregon into the southeastern corner. Merrivale was in a violent mood when the
plane set him down in Lakeview, and it was a mood amplified by the elation
simmering in him.
When he had least expected it, in fact when he had resigned himself to a
degrading personal defeat, they had called on him. They -- a board whose
existence he had known about, but never identified
-- they had chosen Joseph Merrivale as "our best hope to salvage something
from this mess."
With both Peruge and the Chief dead, who else did they have? This gave him a
sense of personal power which, in turn, fed his anger. Who was he to be
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