Blind Panic Read online

  “Holy crap,” said Mickey—yet almost as quickly as the lights had flared up, they died down again, and he found himself in total darkness. He lowered his hand, but he was still in total darkness. He blinked furiously and rubbed his eyes, but it made no difference. He couldn’t see anything except seamless black.

  It was Cayley who screamed out first. “I’m blind! Remo, I can’t see! Remo, I’m blind! Help me!”

  But Remo was blundering around in circles, with his arms flailing, and he was shouting out, “Ahh! Ahh! Shit! What have you done to me, you bastard? What have you done?”

  Charlie had sank to his knees on the ground, rotating his head around and around and tilting it from side to side as if his eyes had simply come loose and he could somehow shake them back into place and bring his sight back.

  “What have you done to me?” Remo screamed. “Where the fuck are you, and what have you done to me?” He fired off another shot, and Cayley screamed and stumbled against Mickey’s side. Mickey took hold of her arm and steadied her and said, “I’m here; it’s Mickey. I can’t see anything either. Don’t move. Charlie, where are you?”

  “I can’t see nothing,” moaned Charlie. “What’s happened to me, Mickey? I can’t see nothing!”

  Mickey reached out with his other hand and found Charlie’s shoulder. “Don’t move, Charlie. He’s blinded us. Those lights that came out of their eyes.”

  “Are you still here?” Remo yelled out. “Are you still here, Mr. Infernal Fricking John?”

  There was a long pause. Apart from Cayley’s persistent whimpering, the only sounds they could hear were the wind fluffing against their ears, the river gurgling, and the lurching of the logs on their campfire. But then they heard the cicada-whirring noise of the totemlike figures, and wooden footsteps clattering around behind them.

  “Don’t come any closer!” Remo shouted. “I’m warning you! Maybe I can’t see you, but I’m going to go on shooting till I blow your fricking head off!”

  Wodziwob said, “You are helpless, like nursing babies. You can do nothing to save yourselves. You are the same now as we once were. When you first appeared in our land, we, too, were blind. We were blind to your greed and blind to your cruelty and we were deaf, too—deaf to your lies, which buzzed like a thousand blowflies on the corpse of our happiness.”

  Mickey said, “We really don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. We’re sorry if we’ve done anything to upset you, but if we did we sure didn’t do it on purpose, and if there’s anything we can do to put it right…And this blindness. It’s only temporary, right? Like looking at the sun, right?”

  Wodziwob must have come right up close to him, because Mickey could actually smell him, some herbal smell like cilantro, and a dry spice, a little like nutmeg. He could smell buttery grease, too, and an underlying reek of tobacco.

  “What you did to our people—that was not temporary, was it?”

  “We don’t understand you!” Mickey screamed at him—and this was Mickey, who hardly ever lost his temper. “We don’t know what you mean! I can’t stay blind forever! I can’t be a blind person!”

  “You should not be fearful,” said Wodziwob. “You will not be blind for very long.”

  “What?” said Mickey, and now he was shaking. “What do you mean?”

  Wodziwob didn’t answer, but Mickey heard him step away and call out, “Tudatzewunu! Tubbohwa’e! Let us show our friends the way to join their forefathers!”

  Remo said, wildly, “You’re going to kill us? You think you can fucking kill us, and nobody’s going to come after you? Everybody knows where we are, Mr. Infernal John. Our parents know we’re here. Our friends know we’re here. The park rangers know we’re here. We have GPS, too.”

  He heard one of the totemlike figures creaking up behind him, and he wheeled around and lost his balance and fell heavily onto the rocks, dropping his rifle with a loud clatter. Mickey took two groping steps forward and tripped over one of the logs on which they had been sitting to roast their wieners. He pitched forward into the fire, hands first, in a huge shower of hot sparks. He shouted and rolled over, his hands scorched and his hair alight. He sat up and banged at his head with both hands, and then furiously rubbed his scalp to make sure that his hair wasn’t still burning.

  Charlie said, “Okay, okay. We won’t tell anybody what you did to us. We promise. But please don’t hurt us, okay?”

  “I don’t want to be blind!” Cayley suddenly screamed. “I’d rather be dead than blind!”

  Wodziwob said, “We will do to you, child, only what your ancestors did to us.” With that, he knelt down next to Remo and beckoned to the totem figure he had called Tubbohwa’e. The totem figure bent down with a complicated series of jerks and clicks, and seized hold of Remo with jointed fingers that were so realistically carved out of oak that they almost looked human.

  “Let go of me, you bastard!” Remo swore at it. “Let go of me—you’re breaking my fucking wrists!” He struggled and kicked and twisted, but the totem figure was far too strong for him, and he remained pinned to the ground, grunting with pain and frustration.

  Wodziwob unbuttoned his coat. Wound around his waist was a long, thin rope that he loosened and dragged free, yard after yard of it, and wrapped around his right elbow. There was more than ten yards of it in all, with a loop in one end, like a lariat. While the totem figure held Remo’s wrists tightly together, Wodziwob tied a double knot around them and yanked it tight.

  “Shit, man!” Remo protested. “You’re cutting off my goddamned circulation!”

  Wodziwob said nothing, but stood up and walked over to Charlie, his open coat flapping in the smoky wind. He beckoned to the totem figure he had called Tudatzewunu, and the figure came looming up behind Charlie and gripped both of his forearms. In the meantime, Tubbohwa’e heaved Remo up from the ground and dragged him closer, so that he and Charlie were standing less than three feet apart.

  “They’re going to come looking for us, man,” said Remo, although now he was beginning to sound seriously frightened. “The park rangers, the cops. The FBI. If we don’t come back they’re going to come looking for us, and you guys are going to be toast.”

  Wodziwob tied Charlie’s wrists, and then Cayley’s, and Mickey’s last of all. The four of them now stood together as if they were a chain gang. Cayley was quietly weeping, but the other three were silent, their heads lowered, as if they had already accepted what was going to happen to them. Mickey had not been too seriously burned, although the front of his hair was short and prickly, and his forehead and his nose were reddened; but he was shivering with shock, and his teeth were chattering.

  “Now you must climb to the place where our people were forced to climb, and your people climbed after them, and murdered them all.”

  Cayley sobbed, “Why are you doing this? What did we ever do to you? I’ve never been here before! I don’t even know who your people are!”

  “Exactly,” said Wodziwob. “You do not know who our people are because our people’s bones are lying buried in the dirt and their names have all been carried away by the wind. Now we will start to climb.”

  The totem figure called Tubbohwa’e took hold of the rope and started to pull them past their Winnebago and up the slope toward the rimrock, which rose in front of them like a great dark wall. They kept staggering and stumbling and bumping into one another, but whenever they lost their footing, the totem figure called Tudatzewunu would forcibly wrench them upright again with those jointed wooden hands that gripped them as tight as a vise.

  “I can’t do this,” sobbed Cayley as the gradient grew steeper and steeper and the rough scrub prickled and tore at their legs. “I just can’t do this. Please don’t make me do this.”

  Charlie said nothing, but after the first fifty feet of climbing he was already wheezing for breath.

  “Listen to him, man!” Remo panted. “He has asthma!”

  But Wodziwob said, “Many of my people were sick, too, when they came to hide on
this mountain. Many were women, and many were defenseless children, and many were old. But they all had to climb, regardless.”

  From the sound of his breathing, he was obviously finding the climb as laborious as they were, but he doggedly plodded upward, and Tubbohwa’e kept on pulling the rest of them after him, scaling the loose volcanic rubble as though he were some monstrous black spider, with a deathly white face, and Tudatzewunu followed behind, to heave them up on their feet again, if they fell.

  It took them more than two hours to reach the top of the promontory, and although the ground was still rocky and uneven and covered with loose volcanic shale, it began to level off beneath their feet. They could see nothing at all, only blackness, but they could feel the night wind blowing more strongly in their faces, and all around them they could hear the soft roar of thousands of pine trees, which surrounded the rimrock like the ocean.

  Wodziwob stopped, and Tubbohwa’e pulled sharply at the rope to stop the four of them from climbing any farther. Charlie dropped to his knees, whining with asthma.

  Wodziwob said, “It was September, one hundred fifty years ago, and three tribes had gathered here—Paiute, Modoc, and Pit River. Usually, they were enemies. But this was a Big Time, which happened once a year, when enemies would forget their hostility and come together for feasting, games, trading, and for marriages to be arranged between the tribes.”

  “And what the fuck does that have to do with us?” Remo demanded, although he was still out of breath.

  “It has everything to do with you,” Wodziwob told him. “Your white soldiers did not understand about Big Times even though they used to be common in California before the Europeans came. Because three enemy tribes had gathered together, your soldiers assumed that they intended to attack them, and so they decided to wipe them out.

  “But, tell me, if the tribes had been here to plot war, why did they have their women and children and their old people with them? If they had not had their women and children and old people with them, they would not have been forced to stay here at Infernal Caverns and fight. They would have melted away, like shadows, so that they could fight another day.

  “Any soldier with any intelligence would have realized that. And any man with any humanity would have let these people go. But they murdered more than twenty of them, including women and children and old people, and that is a crime that still cries out for justice.”

  “But it wasn’t us,” wheezed Charlie, in desperation. “It wasn’t even our grandfathers’ grandfathers.”

  But Wodziwob took no notice. “Let me tell you what they did, these white soldiers. They took five prisoners, including Chief Si-e-ta. Their Indian scouts took thorn branches and pulled their eyes out onto their cheeks. Then they bound them together, and told them to walk to the edge of the rimrock and keep on walking.

  “It is six hundred feet to the valley floor below.”

  Mickey said, in a haunted voice, “You’re not expecting us to do the same?”

  Wodziwob circled around them, prodding each of them with his finger. “If I did, would you not call that justice? What does it say in your holy book? ‘Life for life, eye for eye’?”

  Cayley started to cry again, inconsolably, like a miserable child.

  Wodziwob said, “Don’t you think that we cried, too, when our children were killed?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Washington, DC

  After twenty minutes, Dr. Schaumberg and Dr. Henry came into the room, followed by Dr. Cronin.

  “David, the doctors are back,” said the First Lady, taking hold of the president’s hand.

  Dr. Schaumberg approached the bed, holding up an ophthalmic scan, even though the president was unable to see it. He was lean and stringy, with a thinning gray comb-over and half glasses and a withered neck like an iguana. He cleared his throat and said gravely, “We have the results of your tests, Mr. President.”

  “Well?” demanded the president. “What’s the verdict?”

  “Mr. President—you have one hundred percent corneal opacification.”

  “What? I have what?”

  “Your corneas have become clouded,” said Dr. Henry. He was black and bulky, like a retired wrestler, with a bald, dented head that was polished to a high gleam. “In other words, the transparent lens covering your iris is no longer transparent.”

  “Is it permanent?”

  Dr. Henry shook his head. “We don’t yet know, Mr. President. First of all, we have to run a whole series of tests to find out what might have caused it, so we may send you over to the Washington National Eye Center. It’s highly unusual for corneal clouding to happen so quickly and so completely, and without any warning.”

  Dr. Schaumberg nodded in agreement. “In almost every case of corneal opacification, patients show very obvious symptoms before they lose their sight. For example, with any form of conjunctivitis, the eyes will be pink and sore and weeping for at least five to twelve days before the patient’s sight starts to be affected.”

  “I had nothing like that, no soreness. I just blinked, and the lights went out.”

  “Don’t you have any idea why it happened?” asked the First Lady.

  “Corneal clouding can be caused by a whole variety of different conditions,” Dr. Schaumberg told her. “Conjunctivitis is one of them—but as we know, the president had no ‘pinkeye’ or other ocular irritation before his blindness occurred. A drastic lack of vitamin A can sometimes be responsible, but I doubt very much that the president is subsisting on a Third World diet. There’s Sjogren’s syndrome, which is associated with rheumatoid arthritis, but that’s very rare, and usually found among middle-aged women.”

  “There’s trachoma,” said Dr. Henry.

  “Trachoma?” said the president. “You mean that disease that African children get?”

  “That’s the one, sir. Chlamydia trachomatis. But trachoma usually affects the cornea in several stages, and causes blindness only through a gradual process of repeated scarring and repeated healing. What happens is that—”

  “All right,” interrupted the president, impatiently. “How long are these tests going to take?”

  “At least three days. Maybe longer, depending on what we find.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll have Doug Latterby clear my schedule, and I’ll be back here first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re not thinking of leaving, Mr. President?”

  “Of course I am. I have a meeting in two-and-a-half hours’ time with the president of the Russian Federation.”

  “David,” the First Lady protested. “You can’t meet Gyorgy Petrovsky if you’re blind. Kenneth will have to do it.”

  “Oh, yes? And how are we going to explain my failure to show up at one of the most critical political meetings since the breakup of the Soviet Union? Are we going to tell the media that I’ve had a heart attack? Or a stroke maybe? That’s just as bad as going blind—worse. Or maybe we can announce that I simply forgot that Petrovsky was coming and went fishing instead.”

  “Mr. President, I really have to advise you to stay here," said Dr. Schaumberg. “Your condition came on very suddenly—if we delay treatment it could get very much worse. Not only that, most conditions that cause corneal problems are extremely infectious.”

  Dr. Cronin said, “That’s true, sir. They can be spread by hand contact, saliva or sinus secretions. I don’t think it would help our relations with the Russian Federation if you sneezed on President Petrovsky and he went blind, too.”

  The president laid his hand on Dr. Cronin’s shoulder and eased himself down from the bed. “It’s a risk I’ll have to take. This meeting is a showdown about Russian criminal activities in the United States. We’ve been preparing our intelligence for three years at a cost of millions of dollars, and the only person who can face down Petrovsky is me.”

  “How are you going to face him down if you can’t even see him?”

  “I can wing it. If Doug Latterby stays close by, he can act as my guide dog.
”

  The First Lady said, “David—darling—I’m begging you. Suppose you go to this meeting and you lose your sight forever?”

  “I ask young men to go to foreign countries on behalf of the United States of America, and to risk a whole lot more than their eyesight. This time, Marian, my country has to come first. And I can do it. You just watch me. I was elected as the Can-Do Man. ‘If anyone can, the Can-Do Man can.’”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. President,” said Dr. Cronin, “you’re not only blind; you’re nuts.”

  The president turned and stared over Dr. Cronin’s right shoulder. “Just this once, Andrew, I’ll pretend that I’m deaf, too.”

  The president was waiting on the steps of the South Portico when President Petrovsky’s motorcade arrived. It was a warm afternoon, but the sky was gray and overcast, and it had just stopped raining, so the air was steamy and the limousine’s tires made a fat, wet sound on the asphalt.

  President David Perry was well over six feet tall, barrel-chested, with a large rough-hewn head and dense iron gray hair. His gray, deep-set eyes always seemed to be narrowed, as if he were trying to focus on something that was just a little too far away for him to see. This morning, of course, he could see nothing at all. He was heavily built, but he worked out with a Marine trainer every day, so his waist was taut, and he swung his arms when he walked.

  His wife Marian, standing close beside him on his left, was a petite woman with blonde-highlighted hair and a flat, pretty face that photographed well. This afternoon she was wearing a pink and white floral-patterned jacket and a pink skirt by her favorite designer, Peggy Jennings.

  Doug Latterby hovered only inches behind President Perry on his right. His long, big-nosed face was usually relaxed and genial, but as President Petrovsky climbed out of his limousine, his mouth became tightly puckered and his shoulders hunched with tension.

  “He’s walking up the steps now. He’s smiling at you. He’s holding out his hand. Raise your hand, extend it. More to the left. More to the left. That’s it.”