by Barry, Mike
Giggling again, but only with excitement, not with nervousness or anything like that, because he had the whole situation under control and they could do nothing at all to shake that control, Coates began to move toward the line. His walk was jaunty yet controlled, brisk yet measured; he had all the time in the world, he knew, and until he had done what he had to, all events would stop, chronology would freeze. He controlled utterly. He held all events in the palm of his hand.
If there were people around, he did not see or sense them; he was sealed into the filaments of a bottle called Events, which he had capped himself. If there were sounds around him, protests, questions, the motion and swirl of bodies, he did not see them, because all focus had contracted, narrowed around him, and in the tight and binding sheets of concentration there was nothing existing but he, James Coates himself. So he walked toward the car, his plans firming. He was in control now. He would ease himself into the back seat, hugging the sack to his body, bring the door closed, clutch the sack underneath his arm, and just like a chauffeured passenger in this Fleetwood, he would be conveyed to Toronto. “Pardon me,” he would say when they opened the door on him there, looked at him, their eyes bulging in surprise, “pardon me, I’ve got to see the top man here,” and how he would laugh at their expression! Well, there would be time to think of that later, time to enjoy all of the anticipation during the hours of the drive. For now it was sufficient to move forward, to get inside the car.
Stride by stride he closed ground, stride by stride Coates moved toward his destiny, tight and bunched within himself, moving toward consummation. The vague stiffened forms that he had noticed before were now clamoring at him, coming to strike with stiffened arms (but what did they matter? They did not matter at all, he could make them vanish simply by concentrating his force upon them; they were nothing but abstractions), hit at him like a great gong, and he kept on moving slowly, dramatically. “Watch it now,” he said quietly, with superb control, “watch it now, you don’t want to do anything like that, I’ve got a gun,” and made a gesture toward the point-forty-five in his left pocket, not that he wanted to use it unless he had to, but they were forcing him. Oh, yes, they were definitely forcing him. “Don’t do it,” he said again. “I want this to go nicely, I want it to be easy, there’s no reason for any trouble at all,” and he began to move again. They staggered away (just as he had always known that they would), and everything was fine, everything was working well, and he was really going to do it, and all was going to be in place and he would have five million dollars, and the eight-year plan would go ahead and his life was saved, brought together in a fusion of purpose, and he had never been happier in his life, and the world blew up.
XXI
From his perch on the parapet in the last instants before the fuses exploded, Wulff could see the man walking toward the line, the man in blue who looked oddly like a policeman, moving with an odd, jaunty stride, slapping people away with an odd backhanded barrage of motions, his left hand dug suspiciously into his pocket as if he were going—Wulff could tell this from old knowledge—for a gun. It was a cop’s walk, a cop’s gesture. With a stick in his hand the blows would have been deadly, but as it was, they were merely laughable, parodies of a strike. What was not laughable was the fact that he was walking straight toward the place where fire would be ignited, the sack jammed under his shoulder, wedged in by his elbow so that he was able to strike out with those odd, convoluted blows, but coming free every now and then as his reach extended, the sack almost going to the floor, so that he had to grasp at it. The man was walking straight toward the point of combustion, and Wulff knew that he should flee, should get out, because the first flash was going to put everybody within fifty yards of the explosion on the ground with the possibility of slivers through them. A lot of innocent people, in short, were going to be hurt for the sake of purgation, but that was all right. What was not all right was that the stupid fool, by walking into the fuses, might crush the intricate wiring, might possibly destroy all of the timers. But Wulff had no more time to think of it; if he did not move now, he knew he would merely be another statistic when the reporters and night squad started to poke around an hour or two from now, and so, slowly, almost reluctantly, he put his head down and ran. He knew that he was attracting attention this time; he had abandoned any pretense of trying to fit into the scenario of the plant, but the important thing was to put ground between himself and the fire, to save his own ass for another day, a perfectly normal human desire, no disgrace in it at all. If there was one thing he was not, it was suicidal; he had his own set of conditions to meet now, he would meet them. The delay in looking at the man in the cop’s uniform walking madly toward the cars had set him back just enough so that the explosion hit him before he had quite gotten clear, a maddening set of waves like a fist in the small of his back, the dull whoomp! of the incendiaries touching. Then he felt the ignition of flame, as one burning thrust overtaking him, and the second, duller explosion came as the fuses touched; the time incendiaries came off together, and metal began to buckle.
He hit the ground in an army low crawl, moving stubbornly, desperately toward the exit. In a little valley of sound beneath the explosion he could hear the screams and moans of some who had been caught in the first wave. He hoped that they had not been too badly hurt. He had rigged it for property rather than personal damage; he wanted no one not directly concerned to die, but in a war the innocent would always be affected; that was the very definition of the war, something so virulent that it struck out beyond those immediately involved and began to consume the world. That was what he had to end, the existence of an enemy so ruthless that it would enlist three million junkies as nothing more than hostages to their own position. It would not come easily; every step of it would come with pain, and this, for him and for some others, would be the most painful of all. Belly to the floor, he kept on moving like a wounded animal, sensing rather than seeing the light, and came into a small open space which must have been an access doorway; then he found himself in the air, huddled behind a huge ramp that stretched upward. He had found an emergency exit. The rough air cleared him out slowly as he rolled on his back, looking up at the sky, and he could see, several yards above, how the windows, some of them, had buckled out like obscene breasts, cracks and crinkles for the veins. This made him giggle, but only for a moment; he had to keep on moving; he had to get out of here. Slowly he rose, by using his palms, off the ground, brought himself to a standing position, and then began to run.
He could run quite well, he found, better than he would have thought after the weeks of inactivity and then the tensions and pressures of setting this up in a small space; but running was not all of it. You could not dedicate your life to motion; you had to reconnoiter too, and so he turned in hard pivot to see that flames were coming out of the huge plant like fingers, the aspect of a gigantic, dismembered hand desperately reaching toward the air, trying to claw itself back to the form from which it had been severed. Even in his haste Wulff could not resist running backward for a moment to take it in; it was beautiful in a way; he could admire his handiwork.
They would never be shipping skag out of this building. They wouldn’t be shipping many Fleetwoods, either. A lot of people, he thought, were going to get the message.
And then he went back to the truck he’d abandoned before the first wave of sirens could hit him and got ready to highball the hell out of there.
There would be more missions, but he felt for the first time, now, that he was on the downhill slide.
Wulff grinned, and his grin was a mask of death.
XXII
In what had once been an intricate and highly evolved assembly plant but was now a tangle of metal and fire, a sack lay twisted around a measure of iron pipe. No one saw it, and no one would see it for many days yet. After the debris had been sifted, after the police and the ambulance crews and the investigators and the insurance people had been through, the sack would still be there, and it would only b
e a careful sweep by a rookie squad that would finally unearth it.
The sack would cause wonderment in the department; it would be taken to the commissioner, and the commissioner himself would for the first time in many years lose his composure and begin to babble as he saw the contents of the sack. It would in subsequent years become quite famous as part of the folklore of the PD and of PD’s everywhere. But that lay in the future, as did the hopes of several thousand people who did not yet know that someday they would be desperately seeking what would have been the diluted contents of that sack, people who would be put through the worst withdrawal agonies because what would have been the underpinning of the supply system during a certain month no longer existed. But at this time of course these people did not know about it, and if it had been brought to their attention they would not, except for the most alert of them, have understood what had happened to them.
The hand that had held the sack was attached to an arm, the arm to a trunk, the trunk to limbs and a head, and all of it lay in a curiously intact state about fifty yards downrange from the point where the sack was found. The cleanliness of the corpse would be an object of amazement to the investigators, as would be the fact that in an explosion so devastating that the plant would never function again as it had, this was the only body that had been found. Everybody else had scattered in the first explosion. The corpse had stayed, held its ground when all the others had run, and that explained the fact that it was a corpse. But as to its cleanliness, the skin as unlined and fresh as if it had been lying outdoors for only a short time after death from natural causes—there was no explanation at all.
And there was no explanation either for the fact that the corpse was smiling. James Coates, Detroit PD—they dug up an Identikit finally—had died happy, and no one could understand why, not even his grieving wife and family.
They never put the corpse together with the sack nor made the proper connection.
They never understood the happiness.
Coates had died quickly, embracing five million dollars’ worth of shit.
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Copyright © 1975 by Mike Barry
All rights reserved.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4244-9
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4244-2
Cover art © 123rf.com/Andrii IURLOV
