Arslan by M. J. Engh Read Free Book Online Page A

town this morning, and I didn't get any sleep much last night.”
    Wallace Ford was principal of Kraft County Consolidated High School. Their new school building was located a mile out of town, which had raised considerable opposition from the people who thought the only place to build a new building was where the old one was torn down.
    “I could invite you to sit down, and I could offer you some breakfast, too. But any talking we do had better be outside.”
    He shrugged hopelessly. “Forget it, then. That's all right, I've had breakfast; I stopped at home a minute. I just thought—” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “What are they going to do with the kids, Franklin?”
    “Nothing—not with my kids. They'll be safe at home unless some grown-up does something stupid.”
    He gave me a wild look, the very picture of a man longing to go crazy and get away from it all. “ My kids are still locked up at school.”
    “Then why in heaven's name aren't you with them?”
    “They sent the faculty home this morning.”
    And he had let himself be sent. “All right, Wally, tell me about it.”
    “Oh, my God, Franklin.” But that was something of an exaggeration. What he had to tell wasn't much. I'd known from the first day that the high school had been shut up the same as we were; some of the parents I phoned had already heard from Wally about their older children. “But the kids are still there,” he mourned. “Franklin, you've had a night's sleep, at least. I just can't think any more. What in God's name am I supposed to do? ”
    “That's your problem, Wally. I've got all the responsibility I need right now.” It was a shame to disappoint Wally when he wanted to impress me, but I just didn't feel inclined to hold his hand for him. I had both hands full. “What you really ought to do is go back home and get some sleep yourself. Come on, I'll walk you over.”
    By dawn the next morning the high school was empty. During the day and night every single student had been trucked away toward the west.
    He hadn't abducted my students, but in the next two weeks he did a pretty thorough job of taking over my school. He informed me that my office was now his office—meaning, in a nutshell, that it wasn't my office any more; he never did any work there, to my knowledge. He was all over the rest of the school, though, directing operations I didn't like the look of. Electronic equipment, canned goods, and God only knew what else, was being brought in by the truckload and installed on every floor. Floodlights were mounted all around the schoolground. There were more and more rooms I wasn't allowed to enter. The whole building rattled with carpentry. Walls were torn down, partitions set up. All of the children's desks were knocked apart and the pieces neatly stacked on racks in the basement. “Firewood,” Arslan explained with lifted eyebrows, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. He was stockpiling a real conglomeration of things, from pumpkins to transistors. It looked as though he couldn't make up his mind whether to expect a Vicksburg siege or a computerized space battle.
    Meanwhile, Colonel Nizam had quietly moved into Frieda Althrop's house. Frieda's place was one of the biggest in town, built by her grandfather back when people knew how to build big houses, and modernized a time or two since then. It also commanded the intersection of Pearl Street and Illinois 460, looking north from its high-shouldered yard to the square, east to the school, and south along the hardroad out of town as far as the curve. Here my wolfish colonel had established his own headquarters—whatever it might be headquarters for. He disappeared into the house like a broody termite into a timber, and that was that.
    The Althrops were out-of-county people to start with, and Frieda had never married, so she didn't have many relations in town. She moved in with her neighbors, the Schillingers, till she could get a place of her own.