“What’s wrong with Mommy and Daddy, Mr. Mongo?”
“I … I had to make them go to sleep, Vicky.”
“Why?”
“For two reasons, Vicky. First, they might not understand that I have to find something and shut it off before it hurts other little girls and boys like you. Second, because they might want to hurt themselves—and you—if I didn’t make them go to sleep.”
“Why would Mommy and Daddy want to hurt me, Mr. Mongo?”
“They wouldn’t know they were hurting you. They believe wrong things. They believe they have to take themselves and you off to God. That’s wrong. If God wants you, He’ll take you in His own good time.”
“We’re all supposed to go to God in a little while, Mr. Mongo. There are going to be demons all around outside. We were supposed to stay here until Jesus came down to drive away all the demons and take care of us, but now everything here smells like poo-poo. Mr. Thompson says it’s a sign that we’re supposed to go to God now, before the demons come. He’s made us stuff to drink that will make us sleep while God takes us.”
“Vicky, do you like Mr. Thompson?”
She made a small grimace. “I guess he’s all right, but he looks real funny now that he doesn’t have any ears. Some demon hurt him and took away his ears. Now he kind of scares me sometimes, and I know he scares my mommy and daddy. When he came around here and told us we have to drink that stuff, Mommy and Daddy tried to argue with him. He made them be quiet. I think he scared them.”
“Vicky, Mr. Thompson is wrong. He believes wrong things about what God wants. Santa knows what God wants, and Santa doesn’t want you or anyone else to drink that stuff and go to sleep like Mr. Thompson wants you to. If you do, you’ll never wake up again, and then you won’t be able to play with your puppy. That’s why Santa sent me here to stop Mr. Thompson from doing those bad things. Do you believe me, Vicky?”
Her answer was a small nod of her head.
“I have to tie your parents up, Vicky, but it will only be for a little while. It’s so they won’t hurt themselves or try to stop me. After I find what I’m looking for, we’ll come back and untie them. Okay?”
She thought about it, finally nodded. “Okay, Mr. Mongo. But please don’t tie them too tight.”
“I won’t. Is there any rope in the house, Vicky?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“It’s okay,” I said, quickly getting to my feet, hurrying across the room, and sticking my head around the door to glance at the clock radio.
11:19.
I went back, quickly rolled the shower curtain lengthways, and started to tie the man’s hands. “Vicky,” I said tentatively, feeling the breath catch in my throat, “your father’s been working here at Eden for a long time, hasn’t he? He takes care of things, right?”
“Yes. But it’s not his fault that things here smell like poo. He told me that they weren’t building it right, and that they were putting too many people in here.”
“Did he ever take you around Eden with him?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and smiled. “He used to take me with him all the time, and he let me help him take care of things. It was a lot of fun before everything started to smell like poo.”
“Do you know what a radio transmitter is?”
She shook her head, and I swallowed a grunt of frustration as I tried to think how to describe something when I didn’t even know what it looked like.
I continued, “Did your daddy ever talk about a machine, or anything, that was going to send everybody to God just before the demons came?”
“You mean the thing that’s going to kill all the niggers, kikes, mud people, and burnoose-heads?”
“Where is it, Vicky?”
“Across the ocean, up on the shore just before the place where the jungle begins. Daddy never did anything to it. He told me it takes care of itself, and that it’s all set. But he used to show it to me. It’s going to help Jesus when He comes to fight the demons.”
“How can we get to it, Vicky?”
“We can get there in a cart by going around the ocean, but it’s more fun to go across in a boat.”
“Where do they keep the carts, Vicky?”
“They’re parked down by—” The girl suddenly stopped speaking, and her eyes suddenly went wide as she looked at something behind me. “What are you going to do with that ax, Mr. Thompson?”
I pushed Vicky to one side, then leaped away just as the heavy head of a fire ax buried itself with a loud thunk into the floor on the spot where I had been kneeling a moment before. Tanker Thompson cursed loudly as he struggled to free the ax head.
First I threw a pillow from the sofa at him, because it was the only thing at hand. He didn’t seem even to notice as it bounced off his face. But he noticed when I threw a side kick into his left thigh, just above the spot where I had pumped a bullet into his leg. The seemingly indestructible giant screamed, grabbed with both hands at his thigh, and began hopping around on his right foot. I hopped after him, drawing my revolver and aiming it directly at the hole on the right side of his head where one of his ears had been before he’d pulled it off. I pulled the trigger; just as I feared, I was rewarded for my efforts with nothing more than a dull click. As he roared with pain and rage and reached for me, I ducked under his arms and brought the end of the barrel up hard into his groin. His roar went up two or three octaves, and his torso came down. I brought the butt of the gun down with all the strength I could muster onto the top of his shaved head, and that sent him crashing to the floor.
From past experience, I estimated that it would take me at least a week to beat Tanker Thompson to death, and I had neither the inclination nor the time to hang around to see if he was going to stay on the floor. “Let’s go, Vicky!” I shouted, grabbing the child’s hand and pulling her after me out of the room.
We ran through the living room, and out the front door. When Vicky tripped, I swept her up in my arms and carried her, staggering drunkenly as I tried to run on legs that felt like rotten rubber. Sweat was pouring into my eyes, blinding me. Gasping for breath, I weaved my way down the center of the road back the way we had come, toward the shores of Eden’s ocean.
I suffered two serious stumbles, but I managed to catch myself each time before I fell with the child in my arms. After what seemed an eternity of breathlessness and pain, I reached the shore of the ocean—which, now that I looked closer in the shimmering, pale green light, appeared to be covered with lumps of what looked suspiciously like unprocessed human excrement. I set Vicky down, looked up and down the shoreline. Twenty-five yards to my right, barely visible in the eerie chemical glow, were a rowboat and a kayak with portals for two people. In the distance, in what seemed to me at least a lifetime away across the ocean, the green, misty mass of the rain forest rose up, filling the entire end of the dome.
And I was about to pass out. I reached into my pocket with a violently shaking hand, took out the bottle of pills. I shook one out, popped it in my mouth, and swallowed it.
“He’s coming, Mr. Mongo!” Vicky screamed.
I spun around and was astonished to see Tanker Thompson, blood running down over his bruise-colored face, hobbling up the road toward us, dragging his left leg along behind him. He was holding the fire ax firmly in his hands, occasionally using it as a crutch.
Although the amphetamine certainly couldn’t have had time to work its way into my bloodstream, the sight of the ax-wielding Tanker Thompson making his way up the road had a near-miraculous effect on my nervous system and energy level. It was motivational. Vicky ran on ahead of me as, pumping my arms and gasping in the fetid air, I managed to shuffle along at a pretty good pace across the feces-covered sand to the boats. There was a two-bladed paddle next to the kayak. I gave the rowboat a shove with my foot, sending it out into the water, then sat Vicky down in the front portal of the kayak. I slid into the back, pushed against the sand with my paddle, and we glided out over the greenish-brown water.
I grabbed the two-bladed paddle in the center, with my hands about two feet apart, then began paddling, stroking first on one side, then the other. I tried to concentrate on keeping my pace steady, for it seemed an impossibly long distance across the polluted body of water, and I knew I was very near the edge of my energy reserves. I’d needed the pill, because I’d been close to collapsing, but now I was having a reaction. I wasn’t having the near-hallucinations I’d experienced before, but it felt like there was a ball of fire in my stomach—and the ball was gradually growing hotter as it expanded, sending tongues of flame throughout the rest of my body. I didn’t like the sensation at all.
“Vicky,” I said to the child in a stranger’s voice that shocked me with its raw hoarseness. “You have to point out to me where we have to go.”
“I … I’m not sure, Mr. Mongo. Daddy never took me over there when it was dark like this.”
“Do the best you can, sweetheart. We have to land as close to the machine as possible.”
Vicky hesitated, then pointed off to the right at a forty-five-degree angle. “I think it’s over there, Mr. Mongo.”
I stroked twice, hard, on my left, waited while the nose of the kayak swung around to the desired direction, then resumed my steady windmill paddling, trying to concentrate on taking deep, steady breaths. The air was growing even fouler as we crossed the water toward the far shore with its infernal machine, and the rain forest beyond.
“He’s coming, Mr. Mongo!” Vicky cried out in a small, frightened voice as she pointed back over my shoulder.
Although I knew it would disrupt my rhythm, fear made me stop paddling and glance back behind me. I wished I hadn’t. We were perhaps a quarter of the way across Eden’s ocean; yet, despite the fact that Tanker Thompson had to be suffering a giant headache, and despite the fact that he’d had to wade or swim out into the water to retrieve the rowboat, he was no more than twenty-five or thirty yards behind me. Like the monsters of nightmares that keep coming at you, he was rowing the boat with steady, powerful strokes generated by his bulk and the bulging muscles in his broad back and thick arms. Even with his back to me, I could see that he was covered with offal from the fouled waters; he glistened in the pale green light like some giant slug turned into human form.
As I stared back at him, momentarily paralyzed with horror, he slowed his pace slightly, turned around, and met my gaze. He was close enough so that I could clearly see his features; his small eyes were filled with hate, and his lips were twisted in a grimace of fierce determination. The main outrider of the second horseman out of Eden was threatening to ride me down—or sink me. I wondered if he still had his fire ax with him.
I wondered what time it was, and if it was going to make any difference.
And then Tanker Thompson turned back, leaned far forward, dipped his oars in the water, and gave a mighty pull. His boat seemed to surge through the water; with that one pull, it seemed to me that he had almost halved the distance between us.
His performance was tremendously inspiring to me.
“Are we still heading in the right direction, Vicky?!” I shouted as I turned my head forward and began to paddle furiously.
“That way a little, Mr. Mongo!” she shouted back, pointing a few more degrees to the right. “Please don’t let him catch us! I’m scared!”
Me too. Escaping from Tanker Thompson had become a moot point. He was definitely going to catch us—or at least me; I was resigned to the fact that I was a dead man, even though I didn’t much care for the idea. The only question that remained was whether I was going to be able to wreck the transmitter before Tanker Thompson wrecked me.
And I had to find a way to save Vicky Brown. The child Garth and I had pledged to help must not die.
“Vicky! Is there a way to get out of Eden on the other side?!”
“No, Mr. Mongo!”
Pull! Pull! Pull!
“How do you get out?!”
“There’s a door back there behind the church! But it’s locked to keep the demons out!”
Pull! Pull! Pull!
“Vicky!” Pull! Pull! “The moment we reach the shore, you must jump out and run away just as fast as you can! Don’t look back! Just run! Run into the jungle and hide! Try to get as close to the wall as you can and curl up into a ball! Bombs are going to be falling on this place, but you’ll be all right if you stay close to the wall! Then nice men will come and find you! Do you understand?!”
“What about my mommy and daddy?!”
I tried to think of something reassuring to say to the little girl, but I had no more lies left in me, and precious little wind. “I hope they’ll be all right, too. By now, your mommy and daddy will be with the others.”
“But they could be hurt by the bombs.”
“I’m … sorry, Vicky.”
The girl began to cry, but I could think of nothing else to say. The fire that had started in my belly was now blazing in my arms and thighs, and I noted with alarm that it was burning away much of my remaining strength and resolve. There was a terrible temptation simply to stop paddling, lean forward, and wait for Tanker Thompson to come up and split my head open. I wondered if my heart would rupture when the fire in me reached it, but I tried to put that thought out of my mind.
Pull! Pull! Pull!
Pull! Pull! Pull!
There seemed no point in trying to see what progress I was making, and no point at all in looking behind, and so I screwed my eyes shut, sucked in a deep breath, then opened them to slits and concentrated only on trying to keep the kayak pointed in the right direction. The only point was somehow to keep going. I tried not to think of the pain and fire in me, and tried to find solace in the fact that Tanker Thompson, despite his seemingly superhuman endurance and tolerance for pain, also had to be hurting; if I could suddenly collapse with a heart attack, or simply run out of gas and pass out, then—damn it—so could he.
I hoped. I certainly had to admit that Tanker Thompson was the closest thing to a flesh and blood demon I had ever come across, a terrifying creature that kept popping up, back, from death by freezing, bludgeoning, and bullets like some malevolent jack-in-the-box from hell.
That’s the kind of thinking an oxygen-starved brain will give you, I mused, and might have smiled if I’d had the energy.
In any case, I just didn’t think Tanker Thompson was going to do me any favors by having a heart attack or passing out. Just as I was operating far over the edge, discovering reserves of energy and determination inside myself I wouldn’t have imagined I had, because I was driven by the need to save one child in particular and millions of people in general, so, too, was Thompson operating far over his edge, driven by his equally fervent desire—implanted, he fully believed, by God—to see this child and those millions of people die.
Pull! Pull! Pull!
I knew I was now in danger of completely losing it; the fire in me had spread up to my neck, down to my toes, and my head felt like it was ready to explode. I was breathing in a series of small, tortured gasps, and my windpipe felt like it would seize up and close at any moment.
Pull! Pull! Pull!
Desperately, I tried to concentrate on images of scorched earth, flattened buildings, craters in the ground—and bodies; millions of bodies. That was what was going to happen if I couldn’t reach and destroy the transmitter.
I wondered what time it was.
Pull! Pull …
A universe of pain, a world without air, heart and lungs that felt ready to burst at any moment. I tried to recall what I was doing, why I was suffering, where I was going, and what it was I was supposed to do when I got there.
Pull …
Somewhere, sometime soon, something horrible was going to happen unless …
Unless …
“Mr. Mongo, wake up! Wake up!”
Oh-oh. I snapped awake to find myself slumped forward in the portal of the kayak. My hands were empty, the paddle having slipped from my fingers. I was wondering how long I’d
been out, then realized that it could only have been seconds; I could see the paddle ten yards or so to my right, just beginning to float out of sight.
“Mr. Mongo—!”
I spun around and looked up just in time to see Tanker Thompson rear up in the prow of the rowboat, fire ax raised over his head …
And then the prow of the kayak bumped the shore at the same time as the fire ax came swinging down, narrowly missing my head, crushing the stern of the kayak. I rolled to my left, out of the portal and into the water, put my feet down and touched bottom. I plucked Vicky out of the front portal, staggered up on the shore, and set her down.
A metal structure perhaps three feet high, enclosed in what looked like an inverted test tube with an enormous aerial atop it, rose out of the sand perhaps twenty yards up a slope, slightly to my left, clearly visible in the green light of the artificial world.
“Run, Vicky!” I shouted hoarsely as I struggled up the slope that suddenly seemed as steep as Mount Everest, feet plowing in the dirty sand. “Run!”
“No!” Tanker Thompson’s deep voice, equally hoarse, boomed from behind me. “Don’t you dare run away, Vicky! You belong to your parents and to God, not this man!”
To my horror, Vicky Brown, clearly terrified, suddenly stopped at the crest of the slope, beside the transmitter, and slowly turned back. Her small body was trembling all over.
I glanced over my shoulder, saw that Tanker Thompson was out of the water and onto the shore—but he was obviously hurting pretty good, too. Dragging his injured leg behind him, leaning on the fire ax, he lurched forward, then stumbled, did a pirouette, and fell on his face. I turned back to the child, struggled to yell, but could no longer make any sounds come out of my swollen throat. I mouthed the words.
Run! You’ll be killed!
But the child remained frozen in place. In the ghostly light, her tiny body was framed by a soaring, greenish-black mass that almost seemed to be flowing behind her. What remained of the rain forest was clearly now nothing but melting biomass rotting and running down to accelerate the pollution of Eden.
Second Horseman Out of Eden Page 24
