Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  The Red Bison backed up the road in reverse.

  Tailgate to tailgate, the plan was either to hook up a tow bar or transfer men.

  During the operation the gap between would be a shooting arcade.

  Transfer was better.

  Less time in the open.

  At two thousand five hundred rounds, the Mad Dog's team ran out of ammo.

  "Gimme your weapon," he snapped at the driver.

  "Can't," said the grunt. "We're not involved."

  "Gimme your fuckin' gun!" The Mad Dog waved a fist at the soldier, and wondered if he'd be court-martialed if they survived.

  Probably.

  The army these days.

  Tailgates dropped, the transfer began. Under cover of a blistering barrage from both Bison turrets, aided by eddies of blinding snow, all but the Mad Dog ran the gantlet to safety in the rescue APC. Clips lashed end to end for rapid reloading, fire one, a quick reverse, and let her rip again, the rebels synchronized a volley that forced the Force inside; then Grizzly stepped from behind a tree with peril in his hand.

  Crouched like a sprinter in the rear of the Blue Bison, gazing across the no-man's gap to the sanctuary beyond, the Mad Dog waited for all those clips to empty at once, then he dashed.

  Bam!

  A bullet hit him.

  Slamming his body armor.

  His boot slipping on the gas slick to bring him to his knees.

  What Grizzly had in his hand was a Flash Bang. For five nights ERT patrols had worked at containing the camp, sneaking surreptitiously through surrounding bush to string trip wires triggering stun grenades across a web of paths, planting electronic sensors in the trees, or flying choppers equipped with FLIR—forward-looking infrared—around Totem Lake. The infrared band of the spectrum registers anything warmer than absolute zero, revealing bodies visually hidden in foxholes and sniper nests, so should it come to an assault, the ERTs would have targets.

  Woodsmen themselves, the rebels had uncovered some of the grenades and sensors. What Grizzly was about to toss was an incendiary device hidden by the Mad Dog and now a boomerang, returning to ignite the gas to fry him alive and roast ERTs in the ovens.

  Grizzly pulled the pin.

  Snow, snow, free-falling snow, whirling, twirling, swirling around the cockpit of the plane, Spann in the copilot's seat and George behind as Dodd maneuvered the Beaver down.

  Snow had forced them to abandon trailing Win-terman Snow. From the forest sweat lodge with its grisly totem pole, now stored in back of the plane, they had trudged north to Cy Flint's body to examine the crime scene as best they could before lugging the frozen corpse uphill to fly it out. Left in the woods, it would be stripped to bones.

  The radio caught the distress call from the Blue Bison.

  The air exclusion zone circling Totem Lake banned flights for five nautical miles. Dodd radioed to report he was coming in, as the eerie whiteout transmogrified into a void, the wind tearing rents through the curtain of snow. Below, they saw the red top of the Red Bison behind the blue top of the Blue APC, and men running the gantlet between.

  "Open your window," Ghost Keeper shouted over the buzz of the Wasp.

  Spann twisted the knob to unlock the window beside her and slid down the glass.

  The Cree wrenched Dodd's rifle from the rack that held it ready just behind her door, worked the bolt to arm it, and aimed it out the opening. Fire forward and he would shoot through the arc of the propeller not a wise move. Fire back and he might hit the strut holding up the wing. The one o'clock to three o'clock position was clear.

  To give him a better shot, Dodd put the plane into a sideslip, niching the nose left and banking the right wing a bit.

  Though heaven and earth seemed wrapped together in indistinguishable chaos, a damnation alley cleared from here to there, here being the flare and whip crack that blazed from the rifle, there being Grizzly with the pm of the Flash Bang in one hand, the other hand advancing to toss the grenade, when the bullet blew right through his heart.

  He was dead before the Flash Bang exploded in his fist.

  The Mad Dog was pulled into the Red Bison, and it was off down the road.

  The Album

  Vancouver

  The heart of skid road is two blocks east of Maple Tree Square, Gassy Jack's historical heart of the city. One block farther east is Chinatown. Back last century, when this was unhealthy swamp, the Chinese shared their alleys with whores. They still do.

  Cruising these seedy streets in the rain to chance on a parking spot, Nick Craven wrestled with trouble in mind. Losing their unborn child in the aftermath of the Africa case had profoundly affected Gill, for it turned out that was her final chance at motherhood, having let her biological clock run down, too busy carving out her career in pathology to mind impatient time. And because Nick was motive for the ship being bombed, which dumped Gill in the ocean and ended her pregnancy, he suspected she subconsciously held him to blame.

  Whatever the reason, he felt the chill.

  At ViCLAS he had noticed how she looked at Robert DeClercq. There was a time when the same warmth had focused on him, for reasons Gill had expressed that first night they blubbed together in the hot tub out on the deck of her hillside home overlooking the city lights sparkling below:

  Their toes played footsie under the water as Gill tilted back her head to catch the raindrops in her open mouth. The wind was blowing so fast the city was stripped of pollution. "Your turn. What do you want to know about me?" she asked.

  "Why am I here? We're hardly two of a kind," said Nick.

  "I'm bored by predictable men, and you puzzle me."

  "I think I'm straightforward."

  "Dream on, retro man. I see this old photograph in the paper of a 'Hell's Angel on a Harley' with a kiddie tucked under his arm, and I ask myself why a rebel like that risked death to save the girl."

  "She was in the way and blocked my arm. That photo dates back almost two decades to my wild and wonderful teens."

  "Why'd you become a cop?"

  "To legally beat people up."

  "Crack on the head, broken fingers, from the Tarot shoot-out? Joke's on you."

  "My dad was a Mountie. And so was his dad. It all began when my great-grandfather won the V.C. at Rorke's Drift in the Zulu War."

  "Is that why, gun blazing, you kicked in Tarot's door? I think you're addicted to danger and thrills."

  "Don't see why that interests you."

  "So I'm not puzzled later. The way you're going, odds are you'll end up on my slab. Glean the facts now, and I'll know why you died."

  Nick laughed. "Spider woman. Madame Defarge."

  Gill ran her foot up his submerged calf. "I'm not looking for ties. I'm looking for excitement. I want to whitewater-raft and skin-dive for treasure. I want to downhill race and zoom on a chopper. I want someone wild to electrify me in bed."

  "And I thought you lived to curl up with a good book."

  Gill paddled across the tub and slithered up his chest. "Tell me your secret. What drives you?"

  "My dad shot himself the day I was born, and I don't know why."

  Well, he'd faced the answer to that after the ship bombing, and so doing had cost Gill their child and him her interest. I'm not looking for ties. I'm looking for excitement. She'd been up-front with him from the start, and it was his own damn fault he quickly tell head over heels in love with her.

  They read the same books.

  They love the same music.

  And both are at the top of their forensic fields.

  DeClercq lost a child.

  So did she.

  And Gill's seeking help to fill her depressed mind

  with uplifting ideas. I'm physical He's mental. Passion versus reason.

  Emotionally, the corporal felt like skid road. Nick spied a space on Cordova and parallel-parked the car. Bare head baptized by rain, he sloshed a block over to Hastings, drawn by the bass of perhaps the best bar song ever recorded: the Northern Pikes's "She
Ain't Pretty (She Just Looks That Way)." always struck him as he neared The Corner—perhaps the junkiest mainline in North America, first stop for Triad heroin smuggled from Hong Kong—how many native Indians hit the skids. Disproportionately, they also filled the jails, a crime which explained to his mind what was happening up north at Totem Lake.

  Realm of the five-dollar buzz cut, the two-dollar breakfast, the one-dollar glass of draft, and the twenty-five-cent peep show, the business district of skid road grew pawnshops, pom shops, strip bars, and scuzzy hotels. No hotel was scuzzier than the Hyakk— they hoped to siphon guests off the Hyatt downtown?—outside which three hookers strolled in crotch-cleaving shorts, and ambulance attendants wearing latex gloves pressed a nerve behind the ear of a wino slumped against the refuse bin to get a response, the young one shouting, "Hello, can you hear me?" A string-haired and hollow-eyed druggie harassed a uniformed cop for having jaywalked across Hastings, until the blue blew his cool and shoved the heckler against a wall and warned him to "Fuck off." "Who the fuck do you think you are?" String Hair yelled. "You think you're better than us 'cause you wear a gun?"

  Nick entered The Hyakk.

  Off the lobby was the Jugs Beer Parlor. It was unclear whether "Jugs" referred to pitchers on the tables or the stripper onstage. The ecdysiast grinding to "She Ain't Pretty" was pretty if your taste runs to balloon-boobed babes. The muff men bent close for gynecological detail, pushers and heavies seated behind with backs to the walls. Stubble, black leather, and Harley-Davidson T-shirts were in style. A native complained to the bartender his beer glass was cracked. The bartender poured a second draft, but only to the level of the one turned in. Two women came out of the John in a huff, complaining so many hypes were shooting up in the cubicles they couldn't take a pee. Hip-humping on a blanket to finish her bump and grind, the stripper stopped to frantically flick a bug from her skin and stomp it to death beneath her spiked heel.

  The bookish clerk in the glass cage of the check-in counter was reading Virgil's Aeneid.

  "It's a job," he said in answer to Craven's raised brow.

  The Mountie flashed his badge. "Pass me the key to Bron Wren's room." "Got a warrant? The guy's got rights."

  "His rights died with him." Stretching proof a tad to win the key: "You don't want to get in the way of us apprehending his killer unless you want lots of time to read."

  The clerk shrugged and gave up the key. He buzzed the security door to a dim stairwell. Fidgeting beneath a video of two women engaged in oral sex, an effeminate cross-dresser asked, "You want anything?" as Nick passed through.

  A tattered red carpet stinking of urine stepped up crooked stairs to the floor above. Expecting the worst, the Mountie found it in Room 110, the pathetic offering seedier than any he had encountered while undercover in the Third World. The ledge outside the grimy window was littered with garbage: needles, Big Mac containers, cig butts, condoms, and booze bottles. In summer there'd be a gagging stench and hordes of green flies.

  Nick pulled on latex gloves to toss this dump. The gloves were more to protect him than forensic traces in the room.

  The dump consisted of a naked bulb overhead, chair in front of a music stand that seemed out of place, bed with a purple blanket peppered with burn holes, garbage can fashioned from a Diversol pail, dingy pink curtains, and a threadbare blue carpet embedded with squished cockroaches. The towel by the basin looked as if it had doubled as a handkerchief.

  The brush beside the basin contained shedded black hairs. The Mountie seized it so the lab could match the hairs with those of the shrunken head.

  Nick stripped the lumpy bed of its blanket, sheet, and plastic pad.

  No bedbugs that he could see.

  And nothing under the mattress.

  The desk, etched with the names of hookers who once had serviced the room, was missing a drawer.

  Nick found nothing of interest in the drawers that remained.

  He pulled back the carpet and shook his head with disgust.

  Years of dirt swept under the rug puffed up in his face.

  The floor beneath the music stand was crusted with spots. So was the torn cushion on the facing chair. The cop in Nick knew Bron Wren had masturbated here, with a jack-off aid on the stand.

  Was the aid a book?

  Magazine?

  Photograph?

  The Mountie searched for signs indicating a hidden cache.

  The papered walls were patched here and there in a losing battle against peeling skin. Beside the chair a blood spray from spiking a vein decorated the covering, one curled corner of which was grimed with fingerprints front and back. Tugging the paper stretched chewing gum to expose a hole hollowed in the wall. Originally for a junky's outfit and stash of H, today the cache secreted a time-yellowed album.

  The photo album obviously predated the pedophile's twenty-five-year jail term, and had been retrieved after his release.

  The Polaroids inside the album were of naked young boys and girls.

  Taped beside each photo was a lock of hair.

  Powwow

  At dinnertime DeClercq's office served as a pizza parlor. Rounds of Siciliana, Napoletana, Arrabiata, and Marinara steamed on the horseshoe desk, filling the air with the fattening aromas of an Italian kitchen. Winter on the West Coast assailed the dark windows while those gathered for the brainstorm munched or sipped Starbucks coffee. Sleet had replaced the usual rain, as if Spann, George, and Dodd had dragged the snowfall at Totem Lake south to Vancouver behind the plane when they flew down Flint's body this afternoon. The sleet slipped over the panes like an army of white slugs.

  DeClercq called the powwow to order while Chandler pinned morgue shots of Flint to the Strategy Wall. Eyes shifting warily from the chief to Gill and back, Craven sat tensely beside Macbeth on the minion chairs. Pumped from the shooting at Totem Lake and cramped too long in the plane, Spann and George paced the floor to work out stress and kinks.

  Chitchat died.

  "The Totem Lake crisis first," said DeClercq. "The escalation in violence has provoked some politicians to demand the Force relinquish control of the situation to the army. Hawks want the camp stormed. Doves don't want a Waco. Since many of the doomsday cultists are up here from the States, Commissioner Chartrand has transferred the case to Special X. We're no longer there as backup. Instead we call the shots.

  A time bomb is ticking on my desk, so how do we respond?"

  On the wall above his desk hung Sydney Hall's The Last Great Council of the West, painted for the London Graphic to convey the tour of the Northwest Territories by the Marquis of Lorne, the Canadian governor general, in 1881. In the picture the pith-hatted marquis sat in regal arrogance under a sun awning erected at Blackfoot Crossing, guarded by the Mounted Police, hand on sword, with feathered Indians squatting at his feet. The tour, complete with French chef and six servants, had been mounted to commemorate the fact that by Treaty Number 6, signed at Fort Carlton on August 23, 1876, the Cree and Assiniboine Indians had surrendered what is now Saskatchewan and part of Alberta, followed by Treaty Number 7, inked along the Bow River on September 22, 1877, by which the Blackfoot, Peigan, Blood, Sarcee, and Stoney tribes had given away what remained of Alberta. The tour, colonial history maintains, was of "special significance" to the Indians, for as thanks for handing over their priceless lands, they got to meet the G.G.'s wife, Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria, the Great White Mother herself.

  What a deal!

  Stony-faced, Ghost Keeper glanced at Sydney Hall's painting. DeClercq watched him intently from the corner of his eye, wondering what thoughts were flashing through the Cree's mind. Before Treaty 6 his people had had a thousand miles of prairie to roam. Because of the treaty George had been raised in a one-room shack on the cramped Duck Lake Reserve. The British Columbia Colony had dealt with the Indian question in a more cavalier way, grabbing native lands without the bother of a treaty. Here there was no legal theft paper to wave at Totem Lake faces, and that was what the standoff
was all about. Changes hi Mounted policing had brought natives into the Force; then irony had pitted George against those of his people unwilling to bite the bullet over past wrongs.

  Now—to add insult to injury—he had been forced to gun down one of his own.

  So how George would respond to this escalation had paramount influence with DeClercq.

  "The leaders of both factions in the standoff camp are dead, creating a vacuum waiting to be filled," said George. "Up for grabs is whether the Doomsdayers or the Sundancers gain control. The Dooms are on the war path. The Suns will listen to peace. So how we respond should make it hard to stay entrenched in the camp and easy to come out."

  "The wild card is the cache of arms being smuggled in," said Spann. "If it gets through, word is the Dooms will be armed with mortars and missiles. From what went down this morning, they'll use them."

  "So," summed up Chandler, "the question is: Should we storm the camp now for a preemptive strike, shedding blood almost certainly on both sides, or blockade Totem Lake as best we can and hope that shipment doesn't get through to raise the body count?" "Which response errs on the side of caution?" said DeClercq.

  "Damned if I know," Chandler replied, "but you can bet the armchair strategists will second-guess us after the smoke clears."

  "I favor Colin Powell's approach," said George—a comment that caused DeClercq, the military tactician in the powwow, to blink—" 'Overwhelming force, cautiously applied.' The key to success is the conservative use of wartime resources, which should be committed to maximum capacity. What worked for Desert Storm might avoid more tragedy here."

  "Okay," said DeClercq. "We give peace a chance. We besiege Totem Lake with a daunting strangle of crushing force, and cut the rebels off from the outside world. A carrot-and-stick approach will be employed.

  The stick is firepower unleashed only in self-defense, unless you—Zinc—order the rebels taken out. The carrot will be negotiations with the Sundancers, aimed at spirituality in their cause. We find a way for them to come out with pride. The Doomsdayers, however, we ignore. Henceforth, we refer to them as terrorists, and if they have criminal records, inform the media. We will control the flow of information about this crisis, and keep public focus on the criminal agenda."