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63.
Linsey managed, with luck, to hitch a ride on a California Forest Service DC-4 heading west to refuel at Montgomery Field before flying north. That at least got her to Kearny Mesa, and from there she could walk through Serra Mesa and downhill to the stadium in Mission Valley. The streets were clogged with refugees streaming through Linda Vista. She called Jack, and learned he was heading down into Mission Valley. "We must be two or three miles from each other," he said forlornly.
She told him: "You should head toward the newspaper offices. That's only about mile or so from where you are."
"A good reporter doesn't head in when a story is going hot."
"You have Nellie with you. She can't walk much further."
"I know. It worries me. She might need oxygen soon."
"Stay where you are, Jack. Try to flag down a police car or some other emergency vehicle. Get her to someplace where she can be looked after in case of a heart attack."
" Good idea. Maybe you can take over my story for me."
"I might as well," she said, more in frustration than humor. "I've felt useless as a bump on a log since yesterday. Got decoyed away by a mushroom person who committed suicide out near Alpine. Then my CHP helicopter had to set down, running out of fuel, and I was stuck in the East County overnight."
"It's been a madhouse here. Stay away from the mob that's heading east. Some of them are starting to turn violent."
"Thanks for the warning."
"I had a major insight, Linsey."
"What's that?"
"I think the other shoe has yet to drop."
"What other shoe?"
"I have a feeling that what we've seen so far is nothing yet. You know all those big bracket fungi? I saw one today—it is the scariest thing I have ever seen in my life."
"Why, sweetie?" She felt a sudden deep concern.
"You had to see it. Ernie Walesky, embedded in a wall with Aunt Joanie sucking his DNA and fluids out. She was getting cuter and he was getting uglier. He was like a ghost image of himself, divided up among a couple of dozen grayish plates with darker gray spots on them. And you could read the anguish in his face as the last of his humanity drained away."
"Ick. I'm sorry you had to see that."
"Me too. I have a feeling we will all be seeing more of that." She could hear him sucking in a sobbing breath. "The scary part is that I think something more is going to happen. It's not just that those bracket things are going to sit there and shoot out billions of spores to populate our world with more of themselves."
"Oh?"
The connection went dead. She shook her cell phone. Dead.
She stuck the cell phone in her pocket and stood in the middle of Montgomery Field. She could see streams of people moving down Aero Drive at the southern end of the airfield. Louise wasn't answering her calls at the moment. Her boss at the Harbor Police HQ was out in the field and only answering a special emergency phone frequency that she couldn't access. She relayed a message to Louise and Harbor Police that she was at Montgomery Field and would try to make her way back west. She wanted another look at the Lima Voyager. What had yesterday's dead mushroom driver been so anxious to hide?
As she walked down the street, she glanced at a newspaper dispenser and stopped cold. Just above the fold on one side was a two-column local news story about a horrific car crash in El Cajon. She dropped in a couple of quarters, retrieved a paper, and stood fumbling through the pages to the East County jump. There it was: James Robertson Jr., driving such and such, struck by an apparent suicide driver...she skimmed through the details. Jack had mentioned that a James Robertson had failed to appear for an interview with two South Americans, and now he was the only one of the three left alive. Treated and discharged from Grossmont Hospital. Case being investigated for possible terrorrist angle among other things....Linsey tossed the paper aside and took off running.
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