Joseph didn’t even appear to feel it. His grin was undiminished. His hands clamped down on Rudy’s shoulders, hoisting the vampire up to dangle at arm’s length and two feet in the air.
“C’mon, you little supernatural sonofabitch,” Joseph said. “Let’s take a walk.”
He took a step forward, Rudy still in tow. The train lurched suddenly, sickly, back into motion. Joseph staggered forward in a series of awkward little dance steps, slamming Rudy’s back into a pole.
Rudy went apeshit.
And Joseph’s beeper went off.
Beepbeepbeepbeep. Rudy clawed at Joseph’s arms like a wildcat, raking out great bleeding divots of fabric and flesh. Joseph winced back pain and leaned forward, pressing Rudy’s spine into the pole, trying to fuse them. Beepbeepbeepbeep. Rudy flailed out with his feet, catching Joseph in the thighs with a volley of vicious kicks that sent cramps screaming through the muscles of his legs. Beepbeepbeepbeep. Joseph folded up slightly. Rudy’s hand snaked out, grabbed a handful of Joseph’s hair, and pulled with brutal, incredible strength.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep as Joseph howled, the world fading out in a brilliant white flash, white flash turning red, red flood turning back into Rudy’s snarling face, cold, spittle lips … red, rolling eyes. Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep in his ears, driving him crazy, filling his mind with hate that boiled up and out of him like a geyser of cold, oily blackness. Hate the job. Hate the city. Hate the sound of the beeper. Hate the lousy motherfucker in my hands. Hate this pain …
And Rudy kicked and thrashed and wailed and ripped out the handful of Joseph’s hair, then dug his nails into the raw meat of the scalp. And the beeper went on and on and on. And the pain and the sound and the sheer effort of holding Rudy up weighed down on Joseph, making his knees start to buckle, making him choke down the terrible fear that he wouldn’t be able to keep it up, he was going to lose it, he was going to die and it would all have been for nothing …
“NO!” he screamed, throwing all of his strength into one last desperate surge forward …
… and sunlight streamed in through the windows, a solid wall of light that rolled down the length of the car like a bulldozer’s blade. It swept over them just as Joseph pinned Rudy back against the pole. It drowned them in its radiance.
Rudy began to decompose.
It began with the x-shaped brand at the base of his skull, the blistering bald spot at the crown: a mottled, red-black scum oozed up to the surface as if squeezed from a tube. It slopped over his shoulders and down the sides of his head as he jerked and stiffened like a man being pulled apart by horses. His head lolled back, face contorted with agony. Sunlight hit the crosshatched tattoo across the broken nose, the sore on the lip, the dangling earlobe. A pale slime, like blood and blobs of curdled milk, spilled down into his open mouth.
… and he was plummeting face-first into a vast, oily blackness, his disembodied awareness shrieking in terror as the hot, fetid wind choked him and roared like a million roasting souls, drowning out all thought as he fought to lose consciousness, to abandon all awareness of the horror yawning before him …
Rudy screamed: burbled at first, then pushing through, a deafening air-raid siren of anguish that warbled and screeched and raked at Joseph’s eardrums like needles, while a geyser of pale, rank fluid arced outward from the mouth and splattered all over their shoes. When Peggy Lewin died, it was like a single soul being doused with gasoline and lit; Rudy’s was more like the scream of legions, of the hundreds of thousands who died at Treblinka all screaming in unison. It was a sound that no single dying human could make.
… and the roar of the wind was laughter, hideous and all-consuming laughter that laid his soul bare, peeled away to reveal the sour core of his arrogance and his ignorance, and the void parted its thick, acrid clouds to reveal a huge demonic maw, opening wide to receive him as he fell, buffeting against the finely veined membrane, screaming as he plunged down and down and …
Rudy kicked and clawed like a wind-up puppy, blindly thrashing at the air in mechanical frenzy. His face swelled up, turned gray-green and murky, like a layer of scum on a stagnant pool. The red light faded from his eyes, leaving behind a pair of yellowish hard-boiled eggs that had no pupils, no irises, no veins.
Still he screamed, the sound spiraling up into ultrasonic frequencies, cutting through the rumble of the train like a dentist’s drill. The flesh around the mouth sputtered and frayed, stretching across his jawbones like molten rubber bands. Something started to bubble up behind the eyes.
… and he was blind, he was blind, the hot howling wind robbing him, deafening him, sealing him in with its molten kiss, deaf to his own choking screams, screams that pulsed with the madly staccato beepbeepbeepbeep that seemed so very far away …
Rudy’s wind-up motion was grinding down to the last few turns of the key. His scream broke up into a grotesque parody of the beeper’s shrill, steady pulse, out of phase and painfully distorting. The meat of his shoulders went soft and spongy under Joseph’s hands. Joseph gripped them harder, pushing Rudy against the pole. Something snapped, and Joseph’s fingers tore through the fabric of Rudy’s shirt, sinking to the hilt in writhing, rotting meat and muscle. Thick clouds of sickly green vapor spewed hissing from the punctured flesh. Rudy’s eyes exploded suddenly like tiny pus-filled water balloons.
Joseph screamed, finally able to stand it no more, slipping helplessly over the edge into madness. He jerked his hands away frantically. Rudy stuck to them. A thin animal squeal ripped itself from Joseph’s throat; Rudy flapped and flopped at the ends of his arms as Joseph tried desperately to shake the body loose.
… and all was fire, all was pain, raw fear and madness spiraling upward and echoing back as his soul crisped and rolled and fell, like a shooting star, across endless plains of molten fire where the countless writhing hordes of the damned paused in their suffering to applaud the spectacle blazing through the vaulted heavens above them; falling, falling, the tormentors jeering and pointing with long, crooked fingers as the dying soul of Rudy Pasko arced headfirst into oblivion …
Rudy finally came loose with a sputtering sound, slapping back against the pole and then slithering down its length like a warm stick of butter. Death rattled in his throat, a stopwatch ticking off the final seconds with pitiless precision. His moldering hands clenched and unclenched in a farewell spasm as he folded up on the floor, settling into himself like freshly mixed batter.
Then the maggots began to squirm in Rudy’s eye sockets, and Joseph fell back blindly against the rear door. His hands pushed through the weakened window glass, sent it flying outward in a meteor shower of crystalline fragments that twinkled and sang as they plummeted toward the tracks and the East River below. A blast of air pounded into his face, buffeting him backwards like an enormous hand. It may well have been the only thing that kept him from going the way of the window.
It was certainly the only thing that kept him from puking.
Got him, he thought, and then the merciful black glove of unconsciousness wrapped around him, lowering him gently to his knees, to his side, to a brief, restful moment of blessed oblivion …
Less than a minute later, Joseph Hunter awoke to the sound of his beeper. His hand automatically snaked across the floor, groping for the goddamn alarm clock; it touched something wet and unpleasant, snapping him back into his surroundings just as his hand recoiled in revulsion.
“Jesus Christ,” he moaned, struggling to his knees. The taste of bile was still heavy in his throat; the stench of decay was still heavy in the air. He kept his gaze clear of the thing on the floor; in a big way, it was the last thing in the world that he needed to see.
Instead, he pulled himself to his feet and looked out the window at the morning sky. In spite of everything … or because of it, perhaps … the sunrise had never seemed quite so beautiful, bright red and orange gracefully segueing into a washed-out blue that the next hour would ripen into brilliance. The color patchwork reflected warmly off th
e thousandfold windows of lower Manhattan, making the skyline shimmer and gleam like the jewel-studded spires of a fabled city in a fantasy tale.
It’s over, his mind informed him with a silent sigh of relief. It’s finally over. A curious calm, just this side of emptiness, stole through him like a midnight prowler. Part of it was exhaustion, of course: twenty-four hours on the razor’s edge tend to do that. And part of it was, just as surely, the calm that follows the storm.
But more than anything, it was the simple fact that it was over, in so many ways. More than just Rudy had been put to rest, at long last and forever; something more than just evil had been overcome. Joseph’s memory skimmed over the events of the past eight days, back to the day when his mother had first been stricken down. He ran a silent inventory of all the pain collected, the suffering sustained, the violence taken in and meted out, the guilt and fury.
It still hurt. Just not as badly. And he had a feeling that it was going to get a whole lot better. In time.
He smiled.
On the downhill side of the Manhattan Bridge, the D express to Coney Island lumbered steadily toward the tunnel mouth of Brooklyn. A barge drifted slowly through the water below, heading westward into the depths of upper NewYork Harbor. To Joseph’s right, the sun cast spiderweb shadows through the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, was reflected by the waves. Beyond, the Statue of Liberty was a child’s toy soldier in a wash of white footlights, no bigger than his thumb. Why it should strike him as so unspeakably beautiful, all of a sudden, was something that he wouldn’t even try to explain.
But damn, it felt good to be alive, riding on the train, having waded through the wall of fire without a burn that couldn’t be healed. The next station stop was DeKalb Avenue: only seven blocks away from the apartment that he shared with no one. Not even the ghosts. He would be there in less than fifteen minutes.
The stench of death was still upon him, but it would wash off easily enough. And then he would answer the beeper that he silenced now, finally, with a flick of his gore-smeared thumb.
And then, perhaps, he would go through his belongings: what to pack, what to sell, and what to throw away.
The nightmare was over.
And Joseph Hunter was free.
Epilogue
The Other Side
No charges were pressed. In the end, it was easier to construct a myth from whole cloth, using only the inescapable snippets of reality. There was no getting around the victims, of course, and no way around Rudy; but the survivors of the hunt were encouraged to disappear for a while, lick their wounds, recuperate behind a swaddling screen of welcome anonymity. They were happy to oblige.
Twenty-nine deaths had resulted directly from that first late-night joyride on the RR train. Of those, nineteen were credited to Rudy Pasko. Some, like Peggy Lewin and Dod “The Bod” Stebbits, were just as easily swept into the bottomless caseload of murders not committed by Rudy Pasko; others, like the derelict vampires, were never even brought up at all. At the same time, much was made of the butchered roommates, the rats and dead children in his apartment, the decapitated bag lady, the writing on the walls, the splatter-film slayings, the staking of Ian Macklay, and the “indiscriminate savagery” of his final killing spree.
The pièce de résistance, of course, remained the carnage on the “Terror Train.” Detective Brenner and the others who were pressured to create more palatable fictions for the public were at least free to admit that “We have no idea how he did it. We’ll probably never know. It’s our guess that they’ll still be wondering in 150 years.”
Rudy Pasko was captured and killed, as the legend would have it, by a pair of veteran patrolmen named Sweeney and Anderson. For their imaginary heroics, they got a lot of publicity, a nice set of brownie points, and a free boot up the ladder. Brenner ate a lot of shit, spat it out in sanitized form, performed to everyone’s satisfaction, and took his benefits under the table.
For almost three weeks, Rudy’s name enjoyed the kind of notoriety that he’d always hungered for in life. His picture was in all the papers, along with sketchy and highly speculative recountings of his sordid life and times. He joined the lofty pantheon of celebrated psychos, became one with the likes of Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Ed Gein, Jack the Ripper, and the Boston Strangler.
TV docudramas were conceived and announced: one of them boasted its “sensitive, upbeat portrayal of the tough, courageous cops who risked everything to stop the ‘Subway Psycho.’” Ed Koch brought him up in speeches. Johnny Carson made Rudy Pasko jokes in his opening monologues. Jimmy Swaggart and his Bible-thumping hordes branded him a “demon from Hell” and made up wild stories about him; oddly enough, they were much closer to the truth than anyone dreamed.
His moment in the sun, as it were, took endless forms. His name popped up at cocktail parties and American Legion posts, flicking off the tip of every waggling tongue in the civilized world. He even made his way into the common street parlance, where guys like Three Card Monty would come back at hecklers with lines like, “Who do you think you are, blood? Fuckin’ Rudy Pasko or sumpin’?”
Then the weeks turned into months, and the public imagination was inevitably diverted. New robberies, rapes, and murders. Wars and rumors of wars. Rising interest rates. Dwindling attention spans. One disaster after another, all trotted out in front of the collective eye like ducks in a shooting gallery, given their fifteen seconds in the light, then banished to the oblivion on the other side.
The press conferences were over. The families had assembled, the funerals had been staged, the bodies were long in the ground. The blood had been scoured and sandblasted off. The phosphor dots flickered and faded away.
Rudy Pasko was all but forgotten.
On the hill …
Autumn, and the year’s slow skidding on the downhill side. Trees, many trees, rapt with deathly metamorphosis, resplendent in their funeral attire. A light breeze, rippling through the raiments. A mellowed sun, softly sustaining their glow. And the colors: the bright orange and rich red and yellow, the gold and the brown and the lingering green.
In the clearing …
A rolling plateau of freshly manicured lawn. A narrow road, winding through it like a thin, gray ribbon, trailing down to the bottom of the hill. A few scattered wreaths. A few severed bouquets.
Rows and rows of sculpted stone, carved and autographed by death.
In front of the grave …
Joseph stood, for a moment, in silently thrumming indecision. He’d been fine on the drive out, without a crack in his outward composure; but standing there, with the moment finally at hand, he wavered slightly on his feet and in his will to see it through.
The breeze tugged gently at the collar of his denim jacket, ran tentative phantom fingers through his hair. It’s nice out here, he thought, smiling faintly. Man, you could’ve done worse than to have family in Monroe. Why you left this place for the city is something I’ll never understand. He got a sudden vivid flash of the cemeteries in Queens … Calvary, New Calvary, Mt. Zion, Evergreen … and he shuddered, picturing the endless acres of cramped and anonymous tombstones, in tight little rows that stretched for miles.
He remembered cruising with Ian once down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and Ian had said, “Jesus, it must be standing room only in that place! I mean, look at the way those things are packed together!” He’d smacked himself across the forehead, flashed a typical wild-ass grin, and added, “If I ever wind up in there, make sure they put down S.R.O. instead of R.I.P., okay?” It had been funny at the time.
“Wiseass,” Joseph muttered, and his voice brought him back to the present. Looking down at Ian’s grave, it was almost funny again; and he laughed, less from genuine amusement than from simple need. “You crazy little bastard. Nothing sacred in your book. That was for sure.”
Ian’s headstone stared back at him, mute and gray. Joseph took a last drag off his cigarette and then hunkered down on his haunches, grinding the butt out on a patch of ungrow
n soil. He set down the paper bag that was in his other hand, and it faintly tinkled: the sound of glass on glass.
In the valley, in the distance, a lone car was approaching. The size of a horsefly, from where he crouched, but already he could hear the mellow drone of its engine. Sound really carries in the country, he mused. It was something that he planned on getting used to, very soon.
He opened the bag. There were two cool pints of Guinness inside. He took them out, set them down, crumpled up the empty bag and stuffed it into his back pocket. Then he reached into his jacket, palmed his Swiss Army knife, and used the bottle opener to uncap them. A thin white mist wafted out from their open mouths.
“I’m leaving today,” he said, turning back to address the grave. “I am finally going. All my stuff’s in the van.” He smiled, a brief and bittersweet muscular reaction.
“Yeah, I can hear you now,” he continued, and then pulled off a passable Ian Macklay imitation. “‘So what the hell took you so long, might I ask? Sensitivity training through the Learning Exchange? Advanced Toe-Sucking seminars three times a month?’” Again he laughed, head ruefully shaking. “Fucking smartass.”
God, this is weird, Joseph thought. He can’t hear you. You know it. You spend too much time talking to tombstones these days. Below, the car was getting closer. He hoped that it wouldn’t come up. Performing the ritual was hard enough; he did not want an audience.
Joseph pocketed the caps and the butt, then picked up the pints and stood. He took several steps to the right before moving inward; there was something about the idea of walking over Ian’s body that made slugs seem to crawl in his stomach. At the tombstone, he stopped and eased himself down, sitting cross-legged beside it.
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