The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  He answered the ad, all right. Any choice in the matter was long since forfeit.

  It brought them all back. People like Logan: spreading the Word randomly in his black van, cruising death and deliberately avoiding the tour path, to further throw off the scent. It brought Kyle: to this night, in this speeding car, to serve as strange an act as The Scream and their even-stranger manager, Walker. And strangest of all, to serve their fans.

  Momma’s own little kamikazes.

  The Screamers.

  Tara’s voice husked something unintelligible through the speakers. Something moved in the rearview mirror. The tiny hairs on the back of Kyle’s neck stood up as if trying to work their way around front, accompanied by an almost involuntary surge of bile as he contemplated what the stud in the back was about to quite literally get himself into. Kyle shuddered slightly. Jesus, couldn’t he smell it?

  Guess not. The stud rustled around and said something that sounded like “Ooh, baby.” On the passenger side, the Dempsey-thing twitched spastically and delivered another clipped “Eayoww!”. That was starting to get on Kyle’s nerves.

  It was their common expletive, after the transformation; and it seemed that, the further along they went, the more that became the most cogent sentiment the little fuckers could voice. It increased in tandem with their instability.

  Screamers, bottom line, really were rock ’n’ roll kamikazes, with their engines on fire and the conning tower in sight. And the only things they were good for were making trouble.

  And making more Screamers.

  Cyndi Wyler sat in the back seatwell, hair whipping around her face in a medusan swirl of Rasta-clumped, ropey tendrils. Not bathing for extended periods will do that. Her clothes were similarly ripe with the smell of stale funk, stale beer, stale sweat.

  Her head lolled dreamily. The Mylar Band-Its reflected stray oncoming lights of passing traffic, giving the appearance of glowing, shifting eyes. Strictly an illusion. The eyes were the windows to the soul, after all.

  She was possessed of neither anymore.

  She’d also lost her tan, fourteen pounds, and major portions of her frontal lobes. But she still had her girlish figure, much to the joy of the geek sitting beside her. What was his name? She couldn’t recall. He leaned closer, smelling of Stiff Stuff, smoke, and poor oral hygiene. It hardly mattered. There had been so many like him: in parking lots and beer bashes, in woods and under bleachers.

  It was always the same. They’d drug her, she’d take them. They’d prong her, she’d let them. Grunt and thrust, grunt and thrust. She’d take it. And only then, when they were lost, deep inside, would they meet her Maker.

  That alone felt good.

  The rest she felt as if from a great distance. There was very little of her left to feel anything anymore: decaying shreds hung in the space where her soul had been, ruptured synapses trying vainly to comprehend the full scope of what was going on.

  No use. She wasn’t in control. She had no control. Her body was a bootleg far-removed from the master tape, endlessly churning out fourth-generation dupes as it hurtled toward a blood-red blackness that throbbed in perfect syncopation with the speakers behind her head. She could vaguely discern voices, howling like a pack of joyriding banshees as they pressed her ruined relays to overload. The sound pounding into the back of her skull was the only thing she could seem to key in on; it filled her many empty spaces, gave her the only sense of direction in an otherwise reeling void.

  She felt the insistent, brutish probe. Her body responded in kind, heat and moisture pooling up deep within her belly. Something was moving down there; she couldn’t say exactly what. It was like trying to decipher stray signals bleeding in from another bandwidth, one that was forever beyond her grasp.

  Understanding wasn’t important, however.

  It was time to spread the Word.

  “Give it to me, baby.

  Wanna feel you fill the hole.

  You gotta giveitomee, bay-bayee . . .”

  Stiff Stuff tugged at her jeans.

  “C’mon, baby, like the song says,” he slurred, “giveittomee . . .” She moaned, low in her throat.

  Stiff Stuff took this as a positive sign and pressed on. Unbuttoning the last fly-notch on her 501’s. Hiking out her paisley bigshirt-tails. Moving in for the kill. He’d never done it in the back of a moving car before, but hey. The chick was a pig, fer sure; but she was into it, man, and he wasn’t about to argue.

  His pants slid down to his knees in record time; hers came off entirely. He shoved one thick-knuckled hand under the rim of her rancid panties, groping her breasts with the other. Her body felt chill and goose-pimply in the whipping breeze, but he liked it that way. Made her nipples nice and stiff.

  She groaned a little louder and writhed beneath his touch. Nobody else seemed to be paying the slightest attention. It was a dream come true.

  The music wailed.

  The voices grew louder: “Give it to me, bay-bayee!”

  Stiff Stuff made full contact, pushing deep inside her.

  Cyndi pushed back. Something inside her went snap!

  Blood started to well in her crotch; Stiff Stuff realized that something was amiss. He tried to pull away; Cyndi held him tight.

  Snap snap.

  And the real screaming started.

  * * *

  NINE

  Late summer. Darkness.

  And Jake was back again.

  Thick scent of exhaust wafting up from the LZ as the choppers finished their drop and made for the relative safety of the bigger base to the south. Jake limped up the hill to his sandbagged bunker, unhitched his rucksack, and heaved his tired self down. He picked up his two warm cans of Bud: today’s big treat. His reward for survival.

  Yahoo.

  In his left hand, gripped by its dusty, sweat-tracked neck, was the battered black market acoustic guitar he’d picked up in Saigon on his last in-country R&R. It was a tiny thing, a Silvertone, with a cheap plate tailpiece and a skinny little string-strap and a Day-Glo sunburst finish that he knew would last about a week back in the bush, and nothing at all like the vintage Strat he’d left back in the World. So what. It was something to hold on to that gave back anything but heat and pain and hurt, and it was his friend. He’d spent the rest of that R&R wacked on Jack Daniel’s and Thai stick, singing his Saigon lullaby to the whores, orphans, and cyclo-boys who littered the hot, stinking alleys in the Paris of the Orient.

  For three whole days, nobody died.

  That was a million years ago, give or take a millennium. Jake was back again. The guitar was dinged and cracked and ugly as ol’ buddy Duncan’s specks, but it was still here, dammit. It was his friend, the only one he had left.

  Much safer that way. It didn’t pay to get too close to anything that could draw fire. Duncan taught him that much. Don’t bunch up, Doc. Don’t get too close. Good advice, when you could follow it.

  Pity it didn’t always work that way.

  Jake felt the back of his throat choking up. Too much dust, swirling up in the choppers’ wakes. Too many friends going home; too many of them in pieces. When he closed his eyes he could practically see the black rubber sacks that would fill the bellies of the freedom birds, day after day after day. It got to the point where they hardly seemed real anymore; just tag ‘em, bag ‘em, load ‘em up, and move ‘em out. Next . . . Next . . .

  Zip, zip. Snap, snap.

  Next.

  It was a factory, a big assembly line of death. It was utterly amoral: progress measured daily in gross tonnage of dead flesh. Every pound counted. Head. Chest. Arms, legs, eyes, balls; alone or in pairs. It was currency, the only one that counted. A hundred times a day. On brush-clogged trails and both sides of the endless miles of can-strung concertina wire. In hooches and hamlets. Buy now, pay later.

  And pay.

  And pay . . .

  He drained the first beer in three gulps and crushed the can, very slowly, in his fist. He was amazed at how calm he was, how st
range it felt to be back. As if he’d never left at all. He looked out over the darkening fire base, a littered mass of canvas and burlap, steel and tin, and vast, sweating humanity that sprawled across the denuded hillside and flanged out toward the jungle like the hand of Doom. Gun emplacements like thick knuckles, daring anyone to come closer.

  They hardly ever did; in person, anyway.

  They much preferred for us to come to them.

  Twenty klicks north, a detachment of Skyraiders from the 172nd Airborne was doing just that, busily pounding the Ho Bo woods into mulch. He could feel the shock waves running into his ass and all the way up his spine, like God and the devil going one-on-one in the Cosmic Badass playoffs.

  At the moment he wasn’t exactly sure who was winning.

  One thing was certain: he wasn’t.

  There was nothing to win out here, beyond another sixty seconds of surrealistic survival. This was an alternate universe, unto itself. The future didn’t exist. The past had never happened. There was only one elongated, screaming present, now and forever, amen.

  Besides, the forces moving through this world didn’t care whether you understood; they didn’t even appear to fully understand themselves. So what.

  Understanding wasn’t mandatory.

  Participation was.

  So you played the game: endless cycles of mines and booby traps and spider holes that held opponents who nine out of ten times you never even fucking saw. Not that it mattered. The opponents were young and old, men and women, little kids and babies. The faces changed, but the name was always the same.

  Victor Charley.

  And he was a crafty little fucker. Believe it.

  He made you play on his turf, by his rules. In the jungle, mostly: wired and tired and permanently strung-out. He’d turn your own body against you, forcing you to live for months with your skin rashing in the heat and your feet rotting in your boots and the ringworm and lice and fire ants and scorpions and snakes all around and over you and in you. He’d snipe at you by day and lob mortar rounds on you at night. He’d send his own fucking kids to beg for candy and cigmo with grenades taped to their bellies. Or maybe he’d just blow your pecker off when you paused on the trail to take a leak.

  And always, after the tripwire or the ambush that left half your team splattered and dying before you could bind ‘em tight enough to be Medevacked the hell outathere, he’d fall back. To the one place you’d never ever want to follow.

  Straight into the bowels of the mother herself.

  Into the jungle. Into the tunnels.

  Jake popped the other can, fired up some Buddha grass, and leaned back on his pack. The gauze-packed pressure bandages made for a nice cushion. Comfy-cozy. He sipped and toked, watching the smoke rise up to mingle with the distant smoke lofting off the horizon. The Skyraiders had gone bye-bye, having shot their collective wad; a Spooky gunship was now cruising the trails, long tongues of flame licking out its side as its belly guns belched death. Munch munch. Winning hearts and minds.

  In the funny papers, maybe.

  In the bush it was another story. It was way too easy to die out there. Duncan had taught him that. Big, gawky guy with X-ray specks, King Nerd turned tough. Legally blind. It was Duncan who had taken Jake under his wing during his first-days in-country, when Jake was still a shavehead FNG.

  Fucking New Guys were routinely scorned. They were always cut less slack than anybody, and Jake had geared himself up for his fair share of abuse.

  Then Duncan came along.

  Maybe he just felt sorry for him, maybe this was karmic payback; Jake never really knew or asked. Like or dislike happened instantly in the bush: it was a real pure kind of thing. Duncan took to him, showing him the ropes and keeping him from getting his butt shot off, until Jake could fend for himself. Even got him the corpsman position on his squad.

  Hell, it was Duncan who pointed out the Silvertone on that long-gone R&R; at dusk, after a day of booney-humping, he’d liked to perch up on the sandbags, grinning and squinting as Jake pounded out the changes to everything from Creedence Clearwater to “Purple Haze.”

  And when Jake had first heard the distant wail of an alto sax answering back one night, it was Duncan who knew who it came from.

  “Hempstead.” He drew out the syllable in his native Louisiana coonass till it came out “Heyamp-staid.”

  Jake looked up at him: hunched over on the bunker like that, Duncan looked like a bird of prey in a Warner Brothers cartoon. His glasses caught a ray of waning sunlight, flashing amber in the shadow of his face.

  “Say what?” Jake asked without breaking his rhythm.

  “Hempstead, boy. Big black dude. Door gunner with the hundred and twentieth. Carries that horn with him absolutely everywhere. Plays it in the clouds on the way out. You ain’t met him yet?”

  Jake shook his head, still playing. The sax faded away.

  “You will.” Duncan nodded sagely and lit a joint. “Shoot, Doc, I b’lieve you are the only person in the entire world could get feedback outta a ‘coustic guitar.” He jumped down and held the doob up to Jake’s lips.

  “You gonna be a star, boy. Ol’ Doc Rock. Yup, yup, yup . . .”

  Jake laughed, erupting smoke. He’d had to stop playing. When Duncan wanted to he could seem like the stupidest person ever born.

  Nobody ever fucked with him, though; it was a luxury he had earned. Because Duncan could just as easily run and hip-fire an M60 like most guys could shoulder-fire an M16 standing, all while carrying enough ammo to qualify as his own assistant. Could blow the titties off a field mouse at five hundred yards. He also had a knack for sniffing out booby traps and set-ups.

  Duncan was a squad leader, scout, and one-man fire support team, all rolled up in one. His patrols had a higher survival rate, and that made him very very popular. He took care of his people. No one really seemed interested in winning, not anymore. The good guys were pulling out, the party was over. It was only a matter of time before the gears of the big green death machine ground all the way down.

  And no one, but no one, wanted to get pinched in the last few turns . . .

  Jake looked out into the darkness; the gunship was moving south. Fire-tongues licked the distant ground, going brrrraaaaaaaattttttt like big neon raspberries from hell. He snuffed the joint and leaned back, stoned again. The buzz was almost as strong as the fatigue that nailed his bones to the bunker. He wished he still had some morphine ampules, but he’d used them all up this afternoon. He watched the gunship till the darkness swallowed it completely.

  When he looked back to the bunker, Duncan was gone. Of course. Jake wasn’t really surprised; he was just back. He closed his hollow eyes and clutched the guitar to his chest like a dead puppy.

  No one ever wants to get caught in the last few turns, he thought.

  But someone always does . . .

  It should have been another routine, nine-to-five search-and-destroy on some suspected VC cadres operating supply routes out of some butthole dinville near Chu Ci: chopper out, win the hearts and minds of the locals, burn down a hooch or two, and split. Snap snap.

  Except . . .

  Except that the lieutenant, that fucking brown-bar ROTC idiot no more than three days in-country, had to tag along for the ride. Which would have been tolerable, had he stayed out of the way.

  But no; he had to go and pick up the fucking kid. Never pick up the kids. Especially near an unsearched ville, especially the ones that run up to meet you at the edge of the trail. Never. It was like a rule.

  But he did it, a big shit-eating grin on his pink-cheeked, all-American face. They had barely spaced their line, coming off the trail. Brown bar had no idea of reality, was heavy into the hearts-and-minds trip, as if he really believed it. The kid was maybe five, maybe six. Mama-san nowhere in sight. Little high-pitched, reedy voice calling out Pidgin English, going “Numba One, GI! Candee, GI!” Couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or a girl.

  Didn’t matter.

  It blew up, j
ust the same.

  The lieutenant and the kid died instantly. So did the top-six and five grunts: Sanchez, Claiborne, Ricechex, Gomer, and Natch, the radio operator. Natch’s radio was ripped right off his back, went flying ass-over-teakettle some thirty feet into the air and landed with a tube-crunching whump! The squad’s remnants flattened into the earth in a split second.

  Just as the automatic weapons opened up . . .

  Jake cried out, as the fabric of time itself again went all rubbery and strange: too short here, too long there, stopped altogether in manic frozen-flashes of nightmare replay. . . .

  Three more hit at once. Half the squad gone, stone-dead. Two still twitching in the undergrowth, desperately trying not to attract fire. The rest of the team falling back onto the trail, capping wildly on a ragged azimuth to the ville. Duncan and his A-gunner laying down clipped, suppressing fire. Jake tried to inch over to the wounded. No go. Answering rounds cut through the jungle canopy like a swarm of hot metal bees, whizzing inches overhead or pinging clumps of sod out of the packed earth of the trail. The wounded started screaming. Duncan’s A-gunner, big black guy from Philadelphia named Willie, had to lift up a little to get one of the hundred-round bandoliers over his shoulder.

  Willie from Philly took two rounds in the face: boom boom.

  The A-gunner’s brains blew all over him. His squad was getting greased.

  And Duncan just freaked.

  He opened up with the M60, rocking and rolling and screaming incomprehensibly, and just wilted the place. Answering fire from the ville momentarily halted in the onslaught of it; the rest of the squad seized the opportunity to let loose with M79’s, willy petes, M16’s, absolutely everything they had.

  The fire cut a swath of destruction across the entire face of the hamlet, shooting up huts, animals, anything and everything that moved, stood still, bled or blew up. Judgment Day in dinville, and God was pissed.