Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “Do you think Mr. Harod is up to the task, Charles?”

  Colben stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. “I don’t think Harod’s up to the task of wiping his own ass,” he said. “The question is, what do we do when he screws up?”

  “I presume you have considered the options,” said Barent. “Yeah. Haines is ready to step in to take care of the old woman. Once Harod fucks up, I’d like to deal with that Hollywood phony myself.”

  “I presume you would recommend termination.”

  “I recommend that I stick a Police Special in that punk’s mouth and blow his fucking brains all over West Philly,” said Colben.

  There was a brief silence broken only by static. “What ever you feel is necessary,” Barent said at last.

  “Oh,” said Colben, “his chink secretary will have to disappear too.”

  “Of course,” said Barent. “Charles, just one other thing . . .”

  Agent Leonard stuck his head in the office and said, “Haines just got here with Mr. Harod and the girl. They’re all aboard the chopper.”

  Colben nodded. “Yeah, what’s that?” he said to Barent. “Tomorrow is very important to us all,” said Barent. “But please remember that once the old woman is removed from the board, Mr. Borden remains our chief interest. You will contact him to negotiate if possible, but terminate him if the situation dictates. The Island Club is putting much trust in your judgment, Charles.”

  “Yeah,” said Colben. “I’ll remember. I’ll talk to you later, all right?”

  “Good luck, Charles,” said Barent. The line hissed and went dead. Colben hung up, pulled on a flak vest and baseball cap, and slipped his.38 and clip-on holster into the front pocket of his arctic parka.

  The rotor blades began turning faster even as he ran crouching toward the open door of the he li cop ter.

  Saul Laski, Taylor, Jackson, and six younger members of Soul Brickyard watched the helicopter rise and depart to the northeast. The panel truck had stopped along the high wooden fence half a block from the entrance gate to the FBI control compound.

  “What do you think?” Taylor asked Saul. “There go your voodoo man?”

  “Perhaps,” said Saul. “Are we near the construction end of the lot here?”

  “Near’s I can tell,” said Taylor. “Are you sure you can get the equipment started without keys?” Jackson spoke. “Shoot, man. Three months in the motor pool of a construction battalion in Nam before I ended up out in the boonies. I could hot-wire your mama.”

  “The bulldozers will suffice,” said Saul, knowing, as Jackson knew, that a bulldozer required more than a simple hot-wiring to start it.

  “Hey,” said Jackson, “I get ’em started, are you going to be able to handle yours?”

  “Four years building and maintaining a kibbutz,” said Saul. “I could bulldoze your mama.”

  “Careful, man,” said Jackson, grinning broadly. “Don’t start playing no dozens with me, babe. White boys just don’t have the knack for good insults.”

  “In my cultural group,” said Saul, “we make a habit of trading insults with God. What better practice could one have for playing the dozens?”

  Jackson laughed and slapped Saul on the shoulder. “You two cut the shit,” said Taylor. “We two minutes behind.”

  “You’re sure your watch is correct?” said Saul.

  Taylor looked indignant. He held out his wrist to show an elegant Lady Elgin complete with 24-karat gold trim and inlaid diamond chips. “This don’t lose five seconds a year,” he said. “We got to move.”

  “Fine,” said Saul. “How do we get in?”

  “Catfish!” Taylor called and one of the boys in back pushed open the rear door, swung himself onto the roof of the van, jumped to the top of the ten-foot-high wooden fence, and dropped out of sight on the other side. The other five in the rear followed. They carried heavy backpacks in which bottles clinked.

  Saul looked at his taped left arm. “Come on,” hissed Taylor, pulling himself out of the cab.

  “That arm’s going to hurt,” said Jackson. “You want a shot of something?”

  “No,” said Saul. He followed the others up and over.

  “This can’t be legal,” said Tony Harod. He was watching streetlights, high-rises, and expressways pass under them as they roared along at only three hundred feet of altitude.

  “Police he li cop ter,” said Colben. “Special clearance.”

  Colben had his jumpseat swiveled so that he could almost lean out a window panel that had been opened on the starboard side. Cold air roared in and sliced at Harod and Maria Chen like invisible blades. Colben held a Colt .30 caliber military sniper’s rifle cradled in a special mount in the open window. The weapon looked clumsy with its bulky nightscope, a laser sighting device, and an oversize magazine clip. Colben grinned and whispered into the headset mike just visible under his parka hood. The pilot banked hard right, circling above Germantown Avenue.

  Harod held on to the padded bench with both hands and closed his eyes. He was sure that only his seat belt kept him from tumbling out the open window and falling thirty stories to the brick street below.

  “Red Leader to Control,” Colben called, “status report.”

  “Control here,” came Agent Leonard’s voice. “Blue Team Two reports incursion of four automobiles carrying Hispanic males into secured area at Chelten and Market. More unidentified groups in alley behind Castle One and Castle Two. Group of fifteen unidentified black males just passed White Team One on Ashmead. Over.”

  Colben turned and grinned at Harod. “I think it’s just a fucking rumble. Spades versus greasers on New Year’s Eve.”

  “It’s past midnight,” said Maria Chen. “It is New Year’s Day.”

  “What ever,” said Colben. “Well, what the fuck. Let them fight as long as they don’t interrupt our Sunrise Operation. Right, Harod?”

  Tony Harod held on and said nothing.

  Sheriff Gentry was panting heavily as he ran to keep up with the leaders. Marvin and Leroy led a loose line of ten gang members through a dark maze of alleys, backyards, junk-strewn empty lots, and abandoned buildings. They reached the entrance to an alley and Marvin waved everyone down. Gentry could see a van parked sixty yards away, past Dumpsters and sagging garages.

  “Federal pigs,” whispered Leroy. The bearded youth glanced at his watch and grinned. “We a minute early.”

  Gentry rested his arms on his knees and panted. His ribs hurt. He was cold. He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton. Gentry rested his head against cold brick and thought of something that had happened when they were leaving Community House, something that had changed the way he looked at Germantown and Soul Brickyard.

  A young boy— no older than seven or eight— had come running in just as the last team was ready to leave. The youngster had run straight to Marvin. “Stevie,” the gang leader said, “I told you not to come down here.” The little boy had been crying, brushing away tears with his arm. “Mama say you should come straight home, Marvin. Mama say she and Marita need you at home and you should come now.” Marvin had taken the child into another room, his arm around him. Gentry had heard “. . . you tell Mama I’ll be home first thing in the morning. Marita, she stays there and takes care of things. You tell them that, OK, Stevie?”

  It had disturbed Gentry. So far the gang had been part of a five-day nightmare he had been living. Germantown and its inhabitants had been perfectly consistent with the nightmarish sequence of pain, darkness, and seemingly unrelated events going on around Gentry. He had known that the gang members were young— Jackson was an exception, but he was a lost soul, a visitor, an alumnus returned to his old haunts because life had left him nowhere else to go. Gentry had seen few other adults on the cold streets; those he had seen had been silent, bruised-looking women on hurried errands, old men walking nowhere, peering out from tavern doors, the inevitable winos lying in littered storefront
s. He had known that this was not the true community, that in summer the streets and stoops would be filled with families, children jumping double dutch, teenagers shooting baskets, young men laughing, leaning against polished automobiles. He had known that the nightmarish emptiness was a result of cold, and new violence on the streets, and the presence of an invading army that thought itself invisible, but with Stevie’s arrival the knowledge had become reality. Gentry felt himself lost in a strange, cold place, fighting in the company of children against adult opponents who held all the power.

  “They’re here, man,” whispered Leroy.

  Three loud automobiles, slung low, roared to a stop on the street at the opposite end of the alley. Young men poured out, laughing, singing, shouting in Spanish. Several of them went over to the van and began beating on its side with baseball bats and pipes. The vehicle’s lights came on. Someone inside shouted. Three men jumped out the side door of the van; one fired a shotgun into the air.

  “Come on,” hissed Marvin.

  The line of gang members silently sprinted twenty yards down the alley, staying close to the sides of garages and fences. They paused in an empty area behind a shed, most leaning against a low metal fence. More shots rang out from the direction of the van. Gentry heard the low riders accelerate away toward Germantown Avenue.

  “Grumblethorpe,” Leroy said, and Gentry peered through the fence to see a small backyard, large, bare tree, and the rear of a stone house.

  Marvin crawled near. “They got bars on the first-floor windows. One door in back. Two in front. We’re going in both ways. Come on.” Marvin, Leroy, G. B., G. R., and two others flowed over the fence like shadows. Gentry tried to follow, got hung up on torn wire, and landed heavily on one knee in frozen soil. He pulled the Ruger free of his pocket and ran to catch up.

  Marvin and G. B. beckoned him to the side of the house. Both carried pump shotguns and Marvin had tied a red kerchief around his forehead and Afro. “We gonna do the street doors.”

  There was a four-foot-high wooden fence between the stone house and the delicatessen next door. The three of them waited for an empty trolley to rumble past and then Leroy kicked open the gate and he and G. B. stepped out boldly, nonchalantly walking past shuttered windows to the two doors. Low railings stood on either side of each door like entrance stiles. There was a padlocked cellar door slanting almost to the sidewalk. Gentry stepped back and looked up at the front of the old house. No light was visible in any of the nine windows. Germantown Avenue was empty except for the receding trolley two blocks to the west. Bright, “anticrime” streetlights threw a yellow glare on storefronts and brick. The night had a late, cold smell to it.

  “Do it,” said Marvin. G. B. stepped to the west door and kicked hard. The stout oak did not budge. Marvin nodded and the two of them pumped their shotguns, stepped back, and fired at the locks. Splinters flew and Gentry spun away, instinctively covering his eyes. The two fired again and Gentry looked back in time to see the west door sag open. G. B. grinned at Marvin and held up his fist in a victory salute just as a single small red dot appeared on his chest and moved upward to the side of his head. G. B. looked up, touched his forehead so that the circle of light appeared on the back of his hand, and glanced over at Marvin with a look of amused surprise. The sound of the shot was small and distant. G. B.’s body was driven into the wooden door and then back onto the sidewalk.

  Gentry had time to notice that most of the youth’s forehead was missing, and then he was running, falling on all fours, scrambling for the gate to the side yard. He was barely aware that Marvin had jumped the low railings and had dived for the open west door. Small red dots danced on the stone above Gentry, two shots kicked stone dust in his face, and he was through the gate, rolling to his right and coming up hard against something even as several shots tore through the fence and slammed into frozen ground to his left. Gentry crawled blindly toward the rear of the yard. More shots came from the direction of the avenue, but nothing hit near him.

  Leroy ran up, panting, and dropped to one knee. “What the fuck?”

  “Shots from across the street,” gasped Gentry, amazed to find that he was still holding the Ruger. “Second floor or rooftop. They’re using some sort of laser sighting device.”

  “Marvin?”

  “Inside, I think. G. B.’s dead.”

  Leroy stood up, motioned with his arm, and was gone. Half a dozen shadows ran by toward the front of the house.

  Gentry ran to the side of the stone building and peered into the backyard. The backdoor gaped open and a faint light was visible from inside. Then a van slid to a stop in the alley; a door opened, the interior light briefly silhouetting a man stepping down from the driver’s seat, and half a dozen shots rang out from dark areas near the shed. The man fell into the interior and the door was pulled shut. Someone shouted from the direction of the shed and Gentry saw shadows running quickly toward the large tree. From overhead there came the roar of a helicopter and, without warning, a brilliant searchlight stabbed down to illuminate most of the backyard in white glare. A boy Gentry did not know by name froze like a deer in a headlight and squinted up into the beam. Gentry saw a red dot dance on the boy’s chest for a split second before his rib cage exploded. Gentry heard no shot.

  Gentry braced the Ruger with both hands and fired three times in the direction of the searchlight. The beam stayed on but pivoted wildly, illuminating branches, rooftops, and the van as the helicopter spun away higher into the night.

  There was a riot of shots from the front of the house. Gentry heard someone screaming in a high, thin voice. There were more explosions and muzzle flashes from the direction of the van in the alley and Gentry heard other cars nearby. He glanced at the Ruger, decided there was no time to reload, and ran for the open rear door of Grumblethorpe.

  Saul Laski had not driven a bulldozer in years, but as soon as Jackson had replaced a magneto to get the thing roaring to life, Saul was in the padded seat and working to remember skills he had not used since he had helped to clear a kibbutz almost two decades earlier. Luckily, this was an American Caterpillar D-7, direct descendent of his kibbutzim machines: Saul disengaged the flywheel clutch lever, set the speed selector level to neutral, pushed the governor control to the firewall, stood on the right steering brake and locked it in position with a clamp, checked to make sure that important gears were in neutral, and then started searching for the starter engine controls.

  “Ahhh,” he whispered when he found them. He set the transmission and compression levers to their proper settings— he hoped— pushed the starting engine clutch in, opened a fuel valve, set the choke, dropped the idling latch, and clicked on the ignition switch. Nothing happened.

  “Hey!” shouted the skinny youth named Catfish who was crouching next to the seat. “You know what the fuck you doing, old man?”

  “Absolutely!” Saul shouted back. He reached for a lever, decided it was the clutch, grasped a different one, and pulled it back. The electric starter whined and the engine roared to life. He found the throttle, let the clutch out, gave too much traction to the right tread, and almost ran over Jackson as the man crouched to start the second bulldozer on Saul’s left. Saul got the machine straightened out, almost stalled it, and managed to get it lined up with the trailer complex sixty yards away. Diesel exhaust and black smoke blew back into their faces. Saul glanced to his right and saw three of the gang members sprinting across the broken ground alongside the machine.

  “Can’t this thing go any faster?” screamed Catfish.

  Saul heard a loud scraping noise and realized that he had not yet elevated the blade. He did so and the machine moved forward with much more enthusiasm. There was a roar behind them as Jackson’s bulldozer moved out of the construction area.

  “What you going to do when we get there?” shouted Catfish. “Just watch!” called Saul and adjusted his glasses. He had not the slightest idea what he was going to do. He knew that any second now the FBI agents could come outside, step
to either side, and open fire. The slow-moving bulldozers would be easy targets. Their chances of making it all the way to the trailers seemed incredibly remote. Saul had not felt so good in decades.

  Malcolm Dupris led eight members of Soul Brickyard into Anne Bishop’s house. Marvin had been reasonably certain that the Voodoo Lady was in the other place— the old house on the Avenue— but Malcolm’s team had been assigned to check out the house on Queen Lane. They had no radios; Marvin had arranged for each group to have at least two midgets— members of the auxiliary gang in the eight-to-eleven-year-old range— to act as runners. There had been no word from Marvin’s group, but as soon as Malcolm heard the rattle of gunfire from the direction of the avenue he took half his group out of the alley and into Anne Bishop’s backyard. The other six stayed behind to watch the telephone van that sat dark and silent at the end of the alley.

  Malcolm, Donnie Cowles, and fat little Jamie— Louis Solarz’s younger brother— went in first, kicking open the kitchen door and moving fast. Malcolm swung the oiled and shiny 9mm automatic pistol that he had bought from Muhammed for seventy-five dollars. It carried a staggered box magazine with fourteen rounds in it. Donnie held a crude little zip gun with a single .22 caliber cartridge chambered in the makeshift barrel. Jamie had brought only his knife.

  The old woman who lived there was not home and there was no sign of the Voodoo Lady or the honky monster. They took three minutes to search the little house and then Malcolm was back in the kitchen while Donnie checked the front yard.

  “Bunch of shit on the bed upstairs,” said Jamie, “like somebody packing in a hurry.”

  “Yeah,” said Malcolm. He waved at the group in the backyard and Jefferson, their ten-year-old midget runner, hurried up. “Get over to the old house on the Avenue and see what Marvin’s going to . . .”

  There was the sound of garage doors scraping open and a car engine idling. Malcolm waved to the others, slammed through the back gate, and skidded into the alley just as a funny old car with a weird grill pulled out of the garage. The car had no headlights on and the old lady in the driver’s seat clutched the wheel with the desperate grip of a timorous driver. Malcolm recognized the white woman as Miss Bishop; he had seen her around the neighborhood his entire life, had even cut her tiny yard for her when he was a little kid.