AllFreeNovel
Share Us
While they worked, Simons squatted down next to her, pulling off his Kevlar helmet. “What in God’s name happened here?” asked the corporal in an awed whisper.
Val looked at him for a moment. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said.
2
It took two days to put out all the fires, though water was pumped onto the buildings for much longer. Nearly a week passed before all of the survivors were found and counted.
Some of them had been hiding in root cellars under their farmhouses; others in any shelter they could find. A dozen farmers and their families had crowded into a big shed that was piled with huge sacks of garlic bulbs. The entire congre-gation of a synagogue had boarded themselves up in the sanctuary. Over a hundred people, mostly teenagers, had been herded into the barn at the Haunted Hayride by a couple of actresses and a stuntman. A Bucks County blues band, Kindred Spirit, and their entire audience hid in the pool house at the country club and for some reason no one was even injured. A group of moviegoers had barricaded themselves in a drive-in projection room, and on the college campus a bunch of students from the theater department had survived by covering themselves in fake wounds and hiding among the dead. Those were the kinds of stories that emerged as the days went on.
But not all of these stories ended well. Four stock boys, three checkers, and half a dozen customers had tried hiding in the walk-in refrigerator of a ShopSmart, and though they survived the night, they were trapped in the cold darkness and found two days too late. Several people had apparently fled into the woods but were killed by smoke inhalation.
Three teenage girls were found locked in an old 1950s bomb shelter that was sealed by a combination lock they apparently couldn’t open, and they never turned on the air filtra-tion system.
There were other stories of survival and disaster, and with each day the tallies of both living and dead rose. When the official counts were finally checked and rechecked a dozen times, the survivors numbered 6,532. The death toll stood at a staggering 11,641, making it one of the worst disasters in U. S. history. Nearly two-thirds of all the people in town for the festival had died—a mix of residents, tourists, entertain-ers, and reporters.
Somewhere, no one ever discovered where, there were eighty-four people missing, among them Lois Wingate, the mother of the boy rescued in the forest. No trace of them was ever found by the authorities; no remains were ever discovered.
Over time the hundreds of forensics investigators from dozens of local, state, federal, and military agencies put together a clear picture of what happened. Blood tests showed that a large number of the survivors ha
d ingested dangerously high doses of LSD, haloperidol, PCP, and other hallucinogens. Bags of tainted candy corn and other treats were found in the pockets of many of these people. They found even larger quantities of these drugs in the town’s water supply, in beer kegs, even in locally bottled well water. Autopsies revealed that a number of the victims died from massive overdoses of these drugs, particularly among the children; another group had lapsed into comas. It didn’t help matters much that haloperidol was known for disrupting memories, so some survivors had no recall of anything happening.
They found weapons caches, and background checks allowed the authorities to tie the weapons to over a dozen mil-itant groups ranging from the Aryan Brotherhood to Al Qaeda.
They found anti-Semitic literature that espoused a violent call to arms to stop the ‘Jewish takeover of America. ’ They even found Internet downloads of schematics for making a low-yield dirty bomb—this in the garage of a Syrian doctor who was killed at the hospital. In short they found absolute proof of a hotbed of terrorism right there in Small Town, America. Homeland jumped on this and released it to the press in an attempt to counter the wild stories of vampires and monsters. It was a far more reasonable explanation for the witness reports, and for the most part it worked.
Vic Wingate would have been pleased. Setting up that smokescreen had taken years to plan and implement.
Depending on who was looking at the evidence, and how much of the evidence he was looking at, it either made perfect sense or no sense at all. That, too, would have been fine with Vic. He had left good leads to follow and some that were obvious red herrings. He wanted misdirection and that’s exactly what he got. Except in transcripts of eyewitness reports—
which were always privately discredited by physicians and psychologists—the word “vampire” never made it into any official report. If it did, it was on an eyes-only level, and at that level no one was particularly chatty.
Even so, Homeland’s press blackout did little good, so eventually the story got out. Reporters descended on Pine Deep like an invading army, and once entrenched they could not be budged for weeks. Nightline began nightly reports from Pine Deep that went on for forty-six days. Every detail of information released by the authorities was minutely picked over and endlessly debated by experts in fields ranging from pharmacology to international politics. Every person in town was interviewed over and over again. Every avenue of investigation was explored with unflagging enthusiasm.
No army of terrorists was ever discovered, though some of the less credible terrorist organizations tried to take credit for the catastrophe. That at least gave the current administration someone to shoot at.
When the press found out that the body of Ruger, the infamous Cape May Killer, was discovered at the scene of the Dark Hollow slaughter, that hyped things up again. Just what his involvement had been was never determined, and the coroner’s report was sealed by order of Homeland Security.
The official story, given to a prime-time audience by the president, was that a small domestic terrorist cell had been formed by Vic Wingate, Karl Ruger, and Kenneth Boyd.
Drug money financed the cell and it received support of var-ious kinds from other terrorist organizations around the world. Wingate and Ruger had known ties to white supremacist organizations, so overall this was seen as “terrorism from within,” a sound-bite-friendly phrase that got great coverage. The president saw this as a clear sign that America “must increase its vigilance within our own borders” and “never back down even in the face of great personal harm”
and “that every citizen must join with him in responding appropriately. ” It was not the worst lie of that administration, but it was close. When another U. S. carrier battle group was dispatched to the Middle East as part of the appropriate response, even the president’s usual critics applauded the action. At the time.
The government breathed a sigh of relief that the Official Story had been successfully swallowed because of the collective gullibility of the people. But the investigators in the government were still deeply afraid because they knew they were lying; they really had no idea what had happened in Pine Deep and they were terrified that it would happen again.
Only a handful of people knew the full and complete story, and one of them wrote it down and waited for just the right moment to spring it on the world.
3
One year later, on the anniversary of the Pine Deep Massacre, Willard Fowler Newton published his first book. It was called Hellnight: The Truth behind the Destruction of Pine Deep; and it told the true story of what had happened in the town from an insider’s point of view. He wisely changed many of the names. Crow and Val were downplayed in the story and their later actions ascribed to townsfolk who had died—a literary license that created new heroes for the public. Mike Sweeney was not mentioned at all, and his role in the story was given to Brandon Strauss, who would forever be remembered as the dhampyr in the Pine Deep catastrophe, and who was one of the eighty-four people still unaccounted for.
The book was not a sensationalized piece of writing, not like the dozen or so terrorist-themed books punched out by tabloid writers for the hungry paperback crowd. If anything, Hellnight was understated, the prose a little dry. The book didn’t just chronicle the events of that one night, but instead presented a backstory that jumped decades and even centuries into the past. Newton’s book did not focus on white supremacists, psychedelic hallucenations, or mass hysteria.
Newton told a monster story.
The immediate result was a media outcry and a universal panning of the book by every critic in the country. Within a day of the first reviews Newton was fired from the Black Marsh Sentinel.
