««—»»
Candace had looked up into the remorseless faces of the nurses. Her vision was fogged, so that the shapes she made out were only tawdry halos of shadows, as incorporeal as old time gaslight. Yet, somehow their expressions crystallized out of everything else. Totally unaltruistic, without a single morphine’s grain of charity in their truculent souls. They mouthed kindnesses at her without conviction.
It was the complete opposite of the burning boys in the alley. Even though she’d been seeing weird things for a while, she’d only this night really become aware of two triads of evil in the city:
Heat, hatred, brutality.
Cold, indifference, severity.
“There, there,” the first nurse had muttered with all the cheeriness of an oracle predicting the Ides of March. “I’m Nurse Collins. We’ll take good care of you here at Bon General, Candace.”
Candace looked up at her, unable to blink her eyes. Seeing a praying mantis in white, a spider holding reams of webbing to adhere her to. And above, the ceiling boiled with images straight out of the Christian concept of Hades, people drowning in a sea of flames. But this nurse was right out of the old Norse version of the underworld, ruled by the frozen goddess Hel.
“There, there,” said the woman as she bandaged the eyes and then even misty sight was lost.
There’d been a man, the kind one who’d rushed into the alley to save her. She’d watched as the gangbanger between her thighs had his forehead explode outward, the third eye in it opening up to shower out some terrible red foredoom. The blood and brains coming out had taken on shapes in the seconds it took for the lumps to descend like falling stars.
Seconds later her rescuer had seemed to explode, too. From someplace deep within his chest as she wept next to it. An uncoiling wave of fire, the sort that—for prophets—might have held the voice and face of God. But there was no God in this. An intelligence of a kind, yes. She’d heard it hissing in her ears as she became covered in flames.
Oh, Candace, we’re going to be so HOT together!
She’d thought at first the man said it, just another vicious street monster after all. Not a white knight. But it hadn’t been him; it had only come out of him. She had a sudden flash that he’d done this before, or that whatever was inside him had done it through him before.
“At least we won’t have to cut her hair,” said the other nurse. “All of it was burned clean off to the roots. Probably never grow back.”
Candace heard that. Her long chestnut hair, the way the highlights had caught the sun, shone under the moon, flashed when she sat before a fire.
Fire…
Nothing about the injuries she must have sustained brought it home to her as hard as what this cruel nurse said.
Except Candace knew she wasn’t deliberately being cruel. She just wasn’t able to feel how her remarks could hurt. Maybe she couldn’t even care that she might be accomplishing more harm. Understanding this didn’t help. Candace felt a bitter rage mounting, worse than all the petty anger she’d been unable to vent lately.
Candace had a glimpse of this second nurse before her eyes were bandaged. Not any more life than a waxwork. And beneath the panoramic hallucination of the burning lake upside down on the ceiling, Candace almost expected to watch her melt, in big tallowy globs, like a candle, like a glacial but tasteless ice cream.
She didn’t catch much more of what was said because she was racked with pain, with fear of what she was going to end up resembling, with the need but inability to grieve for herself as tears wouldn’t come. But one of the nurses had left. A doctor had supervised Candace being moved into a hydrobath to clean her burns.
“There, there,” she finally heard the second nurse remark, voice of liquid nitrogen.
The warm water hurt and Candace moaned as she was gently lowered into it, but she winced worse at the coldness of the nurse’s hands.
There was a nauseating toss in her belly, a rising of searing bile up through her chest and into her throat. She heard what she’d heard in the alley. Oh, Candace, we’re going to be so HOT together!
The water began to boil. The temperature jumped to that of fusion chili. Candace opened her mouth to scream but only steam came out. The heat was in her as it had been in the man in the alley, the one with the singed eyebrows. It had erupted out of him again and again while he’d survived. Was Candace going to survive, too?
No. In less than a few seconds the water became so hot that already-broiled flesh was separating from her bones. Her brain cooked inside her skull. Then she was dead.
The nurse simply raised her eyebrows in confusion. Something reached out from Candace, either with the patient’s own burned arm or not, and grabbed the nurse by the throat, pulling her down into the scalding water.
It was still only night. Down in the morgue, most of the dead were victims of one sort or another. The stainless refrigerated shelves they were stretched out on grew silver arms and legs, wrapping them about the corpses. The shelves sprouted formidable steel phalluses, the perfect frozen truncheons for penetrating such insipid, unfeeling flanks.
And throughout the hospital, patients who’d been drugged to sleep began waking up. They saw vortices appearing in the walls, spinning in the hiemal cobalt ceilings, or only simply heard the toilets in their rooms flushing over and over again until the noise was a chilling shrill. Wind howled down the purpling corridors, stinging as ether, howling as if exulting in its hunger. The patients sighed, not one reaching for a call-button. Many yanked out their I.V.s to watch the fluids cascade off into the whirlwinds, the emptiness of their hearts empathizing with something at last.
««—»»
Bear was dreaming. It was a facility which came easily to him, whether he was asleep or awake. In the old days, he might have been considered a wise man for it; he might have been a shaman.
He dreamed he was back on the reservation. He was riding a horse that at turns became a 1969 Ford Mustang, motor rumbling like a strong heart beneath a metal chest. Once it turned into a tank and he found himself inside it, claustrophobic and too hot.
It was winter in the hills, the wind a strong voice of icy native poetry. It shouted in his ears and against his eyes. It gusted, laughing at him, back out of his own mouth, making vaporous spirit shapes.
Food was becoming scarce in the village and he was out trying to hunt some meat to take back. It gave him an excuse to be alone. It gave him a reason to avoid the others who looked at him whenever they thought he didn’t know. The funeral for his father—dead from emphysema—had been yesterday. Standing by as the rite was done, Bear had dreamed while wide awake that coyotes had crawled out of the ground to do a ghost dance around the ceremony, their paws sliding from side to side in the sunwise circle, and their chants howling out in what was to foretell the snowstorm which had come up this morning. He’d joined them, shaking his head, big human feet sliding, round and round. He’d noticed everyone staring, wondering if he was grief-crazy or just having flashbacks from the stuff which had contaminated him during the war. They had seen it on the news, even if the government claimed there was no such thing.
(The U.S. government said all kinds of stuff, none of it ever true. It was the old joke: you could tell they were lying because their lips were moving.)
Then Bear looked down and saw that the coyotes had turned into clackety, ratchety wind-up toys, with badly-fashioned limbs and cheaply-painted faces. And from inside them came an itchy, tinny, pre-recorded voice saying over and over, “Old ways are almost gone. It will be our time next…”
Hunting, Bear caught sight of a deer and spurred the horse after it. He chose to hunt with bow and arrow not merely because of traditional leanings, but because—after the war—he simply couldn’t stand guns anymore. He fired a bolt and watched the deer bound into the air as it was struck, then fall in a heap to the ground, its blood rising up to create a fine red mist which briefly obscured it. When he got to it, the horse shied away, spooking. It wasn’t a deer at
all. It was a lawnmower, cranked up and rolling across the barren soil under its own power. The horse threw Bear and ran off.
Bear scrabbled back up quickly to avoid being struck by the whirring blades. He ran up a hill where he was certain it couldn’t follow. He crested the top and went down the other side, huffing, slowing down. Stopping when he saw the large jackrabbit standing there, watching him, not more than twenty feet away.
Bear brought up the bow, notching another arrow. This one struck its target, too, clean through the middle. The same red mist swelled, a bloody cloud he couldn’t see through. He jogged over to it and found the rabbit had become a riveter, like those he’d seen used to fasten metal girders together in the city. It was fully upright and spitting out rivets fast as a sub-machine gun, no one holding it up, no one operating it. It bounced toward him, tilted, throwing rivets like bullets. Bear dodged them, felt them whizzing past his face. He ran back up the hill and then down another side, hearing its ping ping ping! fade out.
Looking down this slope he saw what seemed to be an enormous grizzly bear, sleeping in full sight on the ground. This, of course, was something no bear would ever do, sleep so out in the open. Then it shifted, rolling slightly, turning its massive head until Bear could see the grizzly had the head of a wolf.
It also had human feet although the hands were paws.
Bear went down the hill and knelt before it.
It opened one eye and regarded him. It asked, “What do you want? Go away. I’m tired. I don’t feel like rending you to pieces right now.”
“I’m tired, too,” Bear replied.
The grizzly creature studied him for a few moments, then said, “Old ways are almost gone. You don’t want to see what will take their place.”
“I’ve already seen,” Bear told it. “I don’t want to be here when it comes. Can’t I go with you?”
It lifted its paws for him to crawl under. Then a newspaper blowing through the park struck his face and rustled like a crow at him. He woke up a little, tearing it from it, cursing.
««—»»
Mike stopped for a drink, his hand too steady as it pulled the glass of beer to his lips. Had he really believed it would cool him? Certainly not with his touching the glass seeming to suck the frost from it. The beer’s frothy head dissipated before his eyes, evaporating right on up into the air.
Had his fingers done that? Was the fire still inside him enough to cause this? It had been hours since he’d come to the rescue of the woman in the alley.
Rescue? Ha… Is that what you call it? he thought to himself.
There was a television above the bar. A hockey game was on but the local news broke in. Mike moved toward the set to hear better.
“Emergency personnel summoned to the scene found a woman in flames but still alive. She has been transported to Bon General Hospital. Her name is being withheld pending notification of family. No word yet on her condition but she is believed to be the seventh victim of The Christmas Torch.
“In International news, we have just received word that London’s famous clock tower Big Ben has just exploded. Witnesses report hearing a jumble of chimes prior to the disaster. Authorities are speculating that it is the work of terrorists. Also, communications—which over the last six hours have been mysteriously lost with Paris, Rome, Tokyo, New Delhi and Sidney—have yet to be re-established…”
Seven victims. Seven. A sacred number. A holy number.
The number you rolled on the dice when you were hot.
Mike heard snickers and guffaws in the barroom.
“Guys like ’em warmed up a little.”
“Wouldn’t happen if they wouldn’t be so damned frigid.”
“Now she’s too hot to trot, I’ll bet.”
Mike closed his eyes, swaying on his feet, almost knocked over by the rush of heat. He thought back to a lesson he’d been teaching his class the other day.
His students were preparing to study Boccaccio’s DECAMERON. As historical background, Mike was telling them about the black plague of the fourteenth century. The kids were making stupid and grisly little jokes. The usual teenaged threshold of tolerance against past apocalypse might have been greater than he was accustomed to. Or perhaps Mike was simply tired by their cynicism.
“You know, people laughed then, too. Sometimes,” he told them. “While the disease swept through Normandy, a harsh winter had kept it from yet getting into nearby Picardy. The people of Picardy saw the black flags flapping from the cathedral towers in Normandy and made fun of their misery. Also happened in Scotland, where the English across the border began bloating up all black in the bodies while the Scots, temporarily saved by the shattering cold, were not affected. The Scots invaded, laughing at the hapless Brits as they marched. Entering where the plague was already rooted, they quickly contracted the illness, falling down in their ranks.”
“You mean they didn’t get off Scot-free?” asked one little wise-ass.
“Almost nobody does, when the rot is deep enough,” he replied.
He was instantly, diabolically, pleased when the students shut up and…shivered.
Mike stood now in the bar, watching the beer taps squirm, forked tongues flicking out through the ends. The liquid in a bottle of whiskey simmered as the unnoticing bartender poured a glass of it. A patron drank, wiped his mouth with a shout of pain, and spat it out. He then roared, “Hey, this is hot! You burned me… What gives?”
The bartender looked at the boiling bottle he’d set upon the counter. He turned to the shelves of assorted liquors behind the bar. They were all trembling, chinkling against the mirrored back of the wall, labels starting to peel as contents boiled.
Is it me? Mike wondered as he headed for the door to return to the street and storm.
He could feel the torrefaction from every person he passed. There were pinpoints of flame in their eyes. He thought he smelled smoke in all the corners of the bar. As he went through the doorway, the sprinklers in the ceiling switched on.
Is it them?
His feet hit the ice and he saw it turn into pools of steaming water under his shoes.
I guess it’s all of us.
Firestarters, every one. But he didn’t understand why some perished with it while he just went on.
A few were always immune to plague, weren’t they? But it didn’t mean he couldn’t be a carrier.
A man caught his sleeve, and Mike expected him to ask for spare change. It was because the fellow looked like one of those street crazies (who nearly managed to make the rest look sane) with the bulging eyes and the nervous tics.
The man told him in a heated whisper, “I was in the subway. The train turned into an enormous serpent, the passengers still inside and pushing against its engorged body. Oh, God, my family was in there.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Mike replied, shaking his head incredulously. But was he astounded because he couldn’t accept the man’s bizarre story or because he did?
The man let go of him and stumbled away down the sidewalk. Mike noticed the cuffs of the man’s trousers were on fire. He could hear the fellow mumbling and recognized more words from T.S. Eliot.
“To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out…”
««—»»
The woman on the ledge, named Rani, looked down at the crowd that had gathered so far below. How many stories up was she? Forty?
The wind was really the force up God up that high, wasn’t it? She’d seen frozen pigeons hurtling past her, heard the glass in the windows crackle as she braced against them.
And she heard the people below chanting.
Jump jump jump jump jump jumpjumpjumpjumpjump…
Thing was, they weren’t shouting. No one raised their voice above a murmur.
Perhaps they weren’t even making any noise. Their lips moved silently, creating new pockets in the already surging air currents. Their lips puffed out little clouds, a misty mantra
provoking suicide.
How was it possible they could look up and see her through the falling snow? How was it she could look down and see them? They should have been invisible to each other, the top and the bottom separated by degrees of temperature and shades of moisture.
The whole neighborhood probably knew this building had a high dollar whorehouse on its uppermost floor. Likely they made red light jokes and cat house jokes and pussy motel jokes.
There had been red lights in the windows tonight. The johns were on the beds like overlarge rinds of bacon, erections crisped off. The satin sheets had erupted on the mattresses, hissing out as the sprinklers came on. The girls had climbed off, high on porky smoke inhalation, strolling through the hall, lingerie burning, stench of shriveling silk, lace, ostrich feather boa. Images of abusing parents and siblings and pimps shrieked red hot in their brains. They had smiled, teeth turning black in their mouths, backs stiff and upright with a springy poise as the metal coils of the mattresses now replaced their ribcages and spines. The stereo was stuck on the smoldering voice of Miss Peggy Lee, crooning, “You give me fever, in the morning, fever all through the night…”
Rani had not burned. But she’d felt the heat fanning across her, through her, trying to burst out and up like an atom bomb, flavor of ash and firestorm in her mouth. She’d fled the horror, meat roasted and roasting, art deco mirrors melting and calling her to slip inside their molten silver-backed wombs, Tiffany lamps turning into warped glass cocks which gestured for her to bend and receive them.
Up, Out of Cities That Blow Hot and Cold Page 4
