Billy Summers

by Stephen King

  “I want to get a couple of skirts and tops as well as the dye for my hair and a wig for you. A pair of cheap tennies. Also some underwear that’s not so…” She trails off.

  “The kind of stuff your clueless uncle might pick up for you in a pinch? Don’t spare my feelings. I can take it.”

  “What you got me was fine, but I could use a little more. And a bra that doesn’t have a knot holding one of the straps together.”

  Billy forgot about that. Like the Fusion’s license plates.

  Although Bucky is back on the porch, smoking and drinking orange juice (Billy doesn’t know how he can bear the combination), Alice lowers her voice. “But I don’t have much money.”

  “Let Bucky take care of that, and I’ll take care of Bucky.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She takes the hand not holding the razor and gives it a squeeze. “Thank you. For everything.”

  Her thanking him is simultaneously crazy and perfectly reasonable. A paradox, in other words. He keeps this to himself and tells her she’s welcome.

  3

  Bucky and Alice leave in the Cherokee at quarter past eight. Alice has done her face and there’s no sign of the bruises. They wouldn’t show much even without the makeup, Billy thinks. It’s been over a week since her date with Tripp Donovan, and the young are fast healers.

  “Call me if you need to,” he says.

  “Yes, Dad,” Bucky says.

  Alice tells Billy she will, but he can see that in her mind she’s already on the road, talking with Bucky the way normal people talk (as if any of this is normal) and thinking about what she will see in stores that are new to her. Maybe trying stuff on. The only sign he’s gotten this morning of the girl who was raped is the way the shower ran and ran.

  Once they’re gone, Billy walks the path Alice took yesterday. He stops at the little cabin Bucky calls the summerhouse and looks inside. There’s an unpainted plank floor and the only furniture is a card table and three folding chairs, but what else does he need? Just his word-cruncher and maybe a Coke out of the fridge.

  Oh for the life of a writer, he thinks, and wonders who said that to him. Irv Dean, wasn’t it? The security guy at Gerard Tower. That seems long ago, in another life. And it was. His David Lockridge life.

  He walks up to where the path ends and looks across the gorge to the clearing, wondering if he might see Alice’s phantom hotel. He doesn’t, just a few charred uprights where it once stood. There’s no condor, either.

  He goes back to the house for his Mac Pro and that can of Coke. He sets them on the card table in the summerhouse. With the door wide open, the light is good. He sits in one of the folding chairs gingerly at first, but it seems solid enough. He boots up his story and scrolls down to where Taco was handing the squad bullhorn to Fareed, their terp. He’s about to pick up where he left off when Merton Richter interrupted him, then notices there’s a picture on the wall. He gets up for a closer look, because it’s in the far corner—weird place for a painting—and the morning light doesn’t quite reach there. It appears to show a bunch of hedges that have been clipped into animal shapes. There’s a dog on the left, a couple of rabbits on the right, two lions in the middle, and what might be a bull behind the lions. Or maybe it’s supposed to be a rhinoceros. It’s a poorly executed thing, the greens of the animals too violent, and the artist has for some reason plinked a dab of red in the lions’ eyes to give them a devilish aspect. Billy takes the painting down and turns it to face the wall. He knows that if he doesn’t his eyes will be continually drawn to it. Not because it’s good but because it isn’t.

  He cracks the can of Coke, takes a long swallow, and gets going.

  4

  “Come on, you guys,” Taco said. “Let’s get some.” He handed Fareed the bullhorn that had GOOD MORNING VIETNAM on the side and told him to give the house the usual loudhail, which came down to come out now and you come out on your feet, come out later and you’ll be in a body bag. Fareed did it and nobody came out. That was usually our cue to go in after chanting We are Darkhorse, of course of course, but this time Taco told Fareed to give it to them again. Fareed shot him a questioning look but did as he was told. Still nothing. Tac told him to go one more time.

  “What’s up with you?” Donk asked.

  “Don’t know,” Taco said. “Just feels wrong somehow. I don’t like the fucking balcony running around the dome, for one thing. You see it?” We saw it, all right. It had a low cement railing. “There could be muj behind it, all crouched down.” He saw us looking at him. “No, I’m not freaking out, but it feels hinky.”

  Fareed was halfway through his spiel when Captain Hurst, the new company commander, came by, standing up in an open Jeep, legs spread like he thought he was George S. Fucking Patton Esquire. On the other side of the street from him were three apartment buildings, two finished and one half-built, all spray painted with a big C, meaning they had been cleared. Well, supposedly. Hurst was green, and maybe not aware that sometimes the hajis crept back, and through even bad optics his head would look as big as a Halloween pumpkin.

  “What are you waiting for, Sergeant?” he bawled. “Daylight’s wastin’! Clear that fucking hacienda!”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” Taco said. “Just giving them one more chance to come out alive.”

  “Don’t bother!” Captain Hurst shouted, and on he sped.

  “The dingbat has spoken,” Bigfoot Lopez said.

  “All right,” Taco said. “Hands in the huddle.”

  We grouped in tight, the Hot Eight that used to be the Hot Nine. Taco, Din-Din, Klew, Donk, Bigfoot, Johnny Capps, Pillroller with his medical bag of tricks. And me. I saw us as if I was outside myself. It happened to me that way sometimes.

  I remember sporadic gunfire. A grenade went off somewhere behind us in Block Kilo, that low crump sound, and an RPG banged somewhere up ahead, maybe in Block Papa. I remember hearing a helo off in the distance. I remember some idiot blowing a whistle, fweet-fweet-fweet, Christ knows why. I remember how hot it was, the sweat cutting clean trails down our dirty faces. And the kids up the street, always the kids in their rock n rap T-shirts, ignoring the gunfire and the explosions like they didn’t exist, bent over their scabbed knees and picking up spent shell casings to be reloaded and redistributed to the fighters. I remember feeling for the baby shoe on my belt loop and not finding it.

  Our hands all together for the last time. I think Taco felt it. I sure did. Maybe they all did, I don’t know. I remember their faces. I remember the smell of Johnny’s English Leather. He put on a little every day, rationing it out, his own private lucky charm. I remember him once saying to me that no man could die smelling like a gentleman, God wouldn’t let it happen.

  “Give it to me, kids,” Taco said, so we did. Stupid, childish—like so many things in war are stupid and childish—but it pumped us up. And maybe if there were muj waiting for us in that big domed house it gave them a moment’s pause, time to look at each other and wonder what the fuck they were doing and why they were probably going to die for some elderly half-senile imam’s idea of God.

  “We are Darkhorse, of course of course! We are Darkhorse, of course of course!”

  We gave our knotted hands a shake, then stood up. I had an M4 and my M24 slung over my shoulder, as well. Next to me, Big Klew held the SAW over one arm, twenty-five pounds or so fully loaded and the belt slung over one massive shoulder like a necktie.

  We clustered at the gate in the outer courtyard. Crisscross shadows from the unfinished apartment building across the street made the mural on the wall into a checkerboard—children in some squares, the watching women and the mutawaeen in others. Bigfoot had his M870 breaching tool, a doorbuster shotgun meant to blow the lock on the gate to smithereens. Taco stood aside so Foot could do his thing, but when Pablo gave the gate an experimental push, it swung open with a horror movie creak. Taco looked at me and I looked at him, two lowly jarhead bullet sponges with but a single thought: how
fucking dinky-dau is this?

  Tac gave a little shrug as if to say it is what it is, then led us across the courtyard at a run, head down and bent at the waist. We followed. There was a single lonely soccer ball on the cobbles. George Dinnerstein gave it a sidefoot kick as he went by.

  We crossed without a single shot fired from the house’s barred windows and finished against the cement wall, four on either side of the double doors, which were heavy wood and at least eight feet high. Carved into each were crossed scimitars over a winged anchor, the symbol of the Ba’athist Battalions. Another hoodoo sign. I looked around for Fareed and saw him back by the gate. He saw me looking and shrugged. I got it. Fareed had a job and this wasn’t it.

  Taco pointed to Donk and Klew, signaling them to go left and check the window there. Me and Bigfoot went to the right. I snuck a peek in the window on my side, hoping to pull back in time if some muj decided to blow my head off, but I saw no one and no one shot at me. I saw a big circular room with rugs on the floor, a low couch, a bookcase now containing just one lonely paperback book, a coffee table on its side. There was a tapestry of running horses on one wall. The room was almost as high as the nave of a smalltown Catholic church, rising at least fifty feet to that dome, which was lit by lasers of sunlight made almost solid by dancing dust motes.

  I ducked back for Bigfoot to take my place. Since I hadn’t gotten my head blown off, he looked a little longer.

  “Can’t see the doors from here,” Foot said to me. “Angle’s wrong.”

  “I know.”

  We turned back to Tac. I rocked my hands back and forth in a gesture that meant maybe okay, maybe not. From beside the window on the other side, Donk conveyed the same message with a shrug. We heard more gunfire, some distant and some closer, but there was none on Block Lima. The big domed house was quiet. The soccer ball Din-Din kicked had come to rest in the corner of the courtyard. The place was probably deserted, but I kept feeling my belt loop for that fucking shoe.

  The eight of us drew back together, flanking the door. “Gotta stack,” Taco said. “Who wants some?”

  “I do,” I said.

  Taco shook his head. “You went first last time, Billy. Quit grubbing for tin and give someone else a chance.”

  “I want some,” Johnny Capps said, and Taco said “You’re it, then,” and that’s why I’m walking today and Johnny isn’t. Simple as that. God doesn’t have a plan, He throws pickup sticks.

  Taco pointed to Bigfoot, then at the double doors. The one on the right had an oversized iron latch sticking out like an impudent black tongue. Foot tried it, but the latch stayed firm. The courtyard had been open, maybe because kids came in there to play in better times, but the house was locked. Taco gave Bigfoot the nod and Foot shouldered his shotgun, which was loaded with special door-busting shells. The rest of us moved into a line—the ever-popular stack—behind Johnny. Klew was second, because he had the SAW. Taco was behind Klew. I was fourth in line. Pill was at the back of the stack, as he always was. Johnny was hyperventilating, psyching himself up. I could see his lips moving: Get some, get some, fucking get some.

  Foot waited for Taco, and when Tac signaled, Foot blew the lock. A good chunk of the righthand door went with it. It shuddered inward.

  Johnny didn’t hesitate. He hit the lefthand door with his shoulder and burst into the room, yelling “Banzai, motherfuck—”

  That was as far as he got before the muj who had been waiting behind the door on that side opened fire with an AK aimed not at Johnny’s back but at his legs. His pants rippled as if in a breeze. He gave a shout. Surprise, probably, because the pain hadn’t hit yet. Klew backed into the room, shouting “Get back Marines!” We did and when we were clear he opened fire with the SAW. He had it set for rapid-fire rather than sustained and the door blew back against the guy behind it, splinters flying, the crossed scimitars vaporizing. The muj fell out with nothing but his clothes holding him together. And still he was grabbing for one of the grenades taped to his belt. He got it, but it fell from his fingers with the spoon still in. Klew kicked it away. I could see Johnny over Taco’s shoulder. Now he was feeling the pain. He was screaming and weaving around, blood pouring onto his boots.

  “Get him,” Taco said to Klew, and then he yelled “Corpsman!”

  Johnny took one more step and then went down. He was screaming “I’m hit oh my God I’m hit bad!” Klew started forward with Taco right behind him, and that was when they opened up on us from above. We should have known. Those dusty rays of sunlight high in the dome should have told us, because we had observed no windows from the outside. Those were loopholes busted in the concrete, down low, where the waist-high wall around the outside balcony hid them.

  Klew was hit in the chest and staggered backward, holding onto the SAW. His body armor stopped that one, but the next round took him in the throat. Taco looked up at the sunbeams, then grabbed for the SAW. A bullet hit him in the shoulder. Two more pinged off the wall. The fourth hit him in the lower face. His jaw turned as if on a hinge. He spun toward us spraying out a fan of blood, waving us back, and then the top of his head came off.

  Someone thumped me and for just a second I thought I’d been shot from behind and then Pill ran past, his medical pack now off his back and dangling from his hand by one strap.

  “No, no, they’re up top!” Bigfoot shouted. He grabbed the pack’s other strap and yanked our corpsman back, which is the only reason Clayton “Pillroller” Briggs is still in the land of the living.

  Bullets hit the big room’s floor, sending chips of tile flying. Bullets hit the rugs, raising puffs of dust and fiber. A bullet hole appeared in the tapestry, taking one of the running horses in the chest. A bullet hit the coffee table and sent it spinning. The mujahedeen on the balcony were firing steadily now. I saw the bodies of Taco and Klew jerk again and again as they shot them some more, maybe to make sure, maybe venting their rage, probably both. But they stayed away from Johnny, who lay in the middle of the floor in a spreading pool of blood. And screaming his head off. They could have taken him out easily, but that wasn’t what they wanted. Johnny was their staked goat.

  All of this, from Foot blowing the door to the muj on the balcony pouring fire into the bodies of Tac and Klew, happened in a minute and a half. Maybe less. When things go wrong, they don’t waste time.

  “We have to get Cappsie,” Donk said.

  “That’s what they want,” Din-Din said. “They ain’t stupid, don’t you be.”

  “He’ll bleed to death if we leave him,” Pill said.

  “I got him,” Foot said, and ran in the door, bent almost double. He grabbed the back-hook on Johnny’s body armor and started dragging, bullets hitting all around him. He made it as far as the body of the dead muj, then he took one in the face and that was the end of Pablo Lopez of El Paso, Texas. He went over on his back and the insurgents above switched to him for their target practice. Johnny continued to scream.

  “I can reach him,” Din-Din said.

  “That’s what Foot thought,” Donk said. “Those assholes can shoot.” He turned to me. “What do we do, Billy? Call for air?”

  We all knew that a Hellfire missile could take care of the hajis on the balcony, but it would end Johnny Capps in the process.

  I said, “I’m going to take them out.”

  I didn’t wait for any discussion. We were way past that. I ran back across the courtyard, dropping my M4 on the cobbles. “You guys pull back now, boss?” Fareed asked.

  I didn’t answer, just ran across the street to the unfinished apartment building. There was no door. Inside it was shadowy and smelled of wet cement. The lobby was a treasure trove of canned goods, snack packs, and Hershey bars. There was a pallet of Coca-Cola and a pile of magazines with a Field & Stream on top. Some enterprising Iraqi tajir had been using this as his trading post.

  I started running up the stairs. There was a lot of trash scattered on the first flight. On the second landing someone had spray painted YANKEE GO HOME, an
old favorite that never loses its charm. I could still hear fusillades of gunfire from across the street and Johnny Capps screaming. I didn’t hear Pete Cashman get it, but he surely did. Din-Din said Donk’s last words were “I can get him no problem, he’s so close now.”

  The walls stopped on the fourth floor and sunlight hit me like a fist. I dodged around a wheelbarrow filled with hardened cement, shoved aside a pile of boards, and kept going up. I was panting like a dog and sweat was pouring off of me. The stairs ended at the sixth floor and that was okay because I was even with the top of the dome across the street and able to look down on the balcony.

  There were three of them. They were on their knees with their backs to me. I looped the strap of the M24 over my right shoulder nice and tight and laid the barrel on a handy piece of rebar jutting out of an unfinished wall. All three were laughing and cheering each other on like it was a soccer match and their side was winning. I aimed for the middle guy’s head. It wasn’t as big as a Halloween pumpkin, but it was plenty big enough. I squeezed the trigger and presto, the head was gone. Nothing but blood and brains running down the curved side of the dome where it had been. The other two looked at each other, bewildered—what just happened?

  I took out the second one and the third threw himself against the cement railing, maybe thinking it would give him cover. It didn’t. It was too low. I shot him in the back. He lay still. No body armor. He probably believed that Allah had his six but Allah was busy elsewhere that day.

  I ran back down the stairs and across the street. Fareed was still standing there. Din-Din and Pill were in the Funhouse, Pill on his knees beside Johnny. He had already cut away the legs of Johnny’s pants. Bone fragments were stuck to the fabric and poking out of Johnny’s skin. Din-Din was yelling into Pill’s walkie, telling someone that we had casualties, many casualties, Block Lima, big domed house, evac, evac, need a dustoff, etc.

  “Hurts!” Johnny screamed. “Oh Christ it hurts SO FUCKING BAD!”