The third and last table bore some of Rod’s favorite items. The staple gun, for example. It wasn’t the kind of device you’d expect to see in a place like this, but he always had a lot of fun with it. You figure: if it can anchor speaker wire into three-quarter-inch plywood, it can do a pretty number on naked skin. A half an inch into tensed abdominals, for certain. Straight through the scrotum, no problem at all. Not a lethal weapon, barring a clear shot through the eye or the temple.
But a great pain-bringer, all the same.
Mssr. Rockne is hanging there, waiting for this, he told himself. It’s not polite to keep him waiting. Leave your dumb old fucking thoughts alone.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple.
Rod began to roll the table forward in the hope that each revolution of the wheels would bring him deeper back into the mood. It didn’t work. All this thinking, all this backtracking through memory, just rekindled the anger and fear. He felt suddenly ridiculous in his goddamn bikini briefs, trying to fuck his way sane while the world was falling down around his ears.
And the thought of feeling ridiculous in front of these pissants made him almost unbearably furious. For a second the roles felt hideously reversed: he was the victim, trussed up without a tongue, and they were the ones who were free to gloat and cluck at his inadequacies.
The thought was too ugly to bear.
It had to be rectified.
At once.
Rod slammed the table into the other two and then turned to his male receptacle. The staple gun came up in his hand. He jammed the pay end in Knute’s hard belly flesh and squeezed the trigger twice. Knute jerked and wailed. Rod brought the machine up and broke the fucker’s cheekbone with it.
“Shut UP!” he howled, then pulled back toward composure. There was some panting involved. He tried to keep it under check. “You are on drugs now, asshole,” he said more quietly. “Just wait till they wear off. Then you can start your fucking screaming.”
From that point on, Rod was utterly centered. His memories, his rage, and the moment at hand were one. Purely one. No separation at all.
“You know what it is to be nicked away, a piece at a time?” Rod demanded.
Knute was not capable of a coherent answer. His wide eyes and cold sweat were all the testimony needed. Rod accepted and dismissed it all at once.
“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s the story of my life. It’s what’s going on in my life right now. You wanna know why I’m gonna hump you till you bleed and die?
“I’ll tell you.
“I’ll tell you right now.
“BECAUSE THE SCREAM IS MY FUCKING BAND!” he roared. “IT’S MY FUCKING BAND! FROM DAY ONE, IT WAS MINE! I HAD MY BROTHER UNDER CONTROL, I HAD THE RHYTHM SECTION UNDER CONTROL, I HAD THE WHOLE GODDAMN DREAM POINTED RIGHT WHERE I WANTED IT!
“AND NOW THIS FUCKING CUNT IS TRYING TO TAKE IT AWAY, AND MY GODDAMN BROTHER IS DYING, AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS FUCKING MEANS?”
Rod took five more shots in rapid succession. They made a blood-trickling ladder up the center of his victim’s torso, brought the exquisite bucking and yowls.
It didn’t matter that Knute didn’t understand. There was nothing left to say anyway. What needed to be worked off had nothing to do with words.
The smell of blood was in the air.
Rod stepped back, composing himself. It wasn’t easy, but it could be done. He needed respite, distraction. Three tables worth of regalia decorated the tables before him. Lots of serious toys, every one ripe for the using. His erection returned like the dawn.
“So what do you wanna do?” Rod asked.
And smiled.
* * *
TWENTY-TWO
Of the overlapping worlds upon worlds themselves, only one could rightly be considered a place. It alone occupied space and time and obeyed the laws of physics and form. It had life. Its primary currency was flesh. It was hungered for and sought after, scorned and mourned and fought over. As the playing field. The battleground. The ultimate stage: both for those who occupied its frail boundaries . . .
. . . and for those who wished to.
For many denizens of the other planes yearned eternally for enfranchisement through the coin of the realm. They hovered, ever on the other side, watching and waiting for a passageway to open up. The ways in were few, and fleeting. And there was a barrier in the way, one that kept the Kingdoms at bay.
It was not a wall. There was no watt between the worlds, as such. No great stone edifice. No fortress, with gates of pearl and streets of purest gold. Not even so much as a solid black line of demarcation between the heavens above, the hells below, and the Earth so squarely poised between.
But there was something. Intangible, yet real as the spark that could turn soft folds of gray meat into living, thinking mind, or discern order in a whirlwind of chaos.
Some thought the barrier was karmic in nature, an ethereal membrane thin as the line between yin and yang, with a pliancy that allowed it to counterbalance the assault of countless millions of tragedies. Some thought the very life-force of the biosphere sustained it, soul-energy holding it together as it moved across the surface of the planet like patterns on the skin of a soap bubble. Others disagreed, for reasons of theology or conviction or purely mortal dread. And most never thought of it at all.
But whatever it was, one property of its nature was clear to any with eyes to see. It fed upon whatsoever we gave it, for better or worse. The keys to the Kingdoms, as always, lay within us.
Just itching for us to let them out . . .
At two A.M. Channel Four repeated its eleven o’clock newscast, right on time. Sue Simmons and Chuck Scarborough presented the on-the-scene madness with just the right touch of anchorperson angst, keeping track of the rising death toll like emcees on a March of Dimes telethon. Sixty-seven dead, two hundred and sixteen injured seriously enough to require hospitalization. Scores more hurt in the stampede and the parking lot riot that ultimately ensued. Police, rockers, right-wingers—everybody blaming everybody else for the panic that gripped the southern edge of the City of Brotherly Love.
By eleven there had been time to assemble a reasonably coherent video recap of the play-by-play, culminating in The Scream’s destructo set. It was a tumultuous montage of images: the white phosphorous grenades, blooming in the distance. Alex, taking his big dive. The band, freaking out and walking off, leaving instruments on and howling. The chopper, lifting off. The bodies, spilling out the gates and over the fences, even tumbling off the top of the amphitheater in a frantic exodus that conjured shades of the fall of Saigon.
And on every network Walker checked, the one image that had been instantly transformed into the day’s definitive icon of pop disaster: the woman. Backstage. Screaming.
Through a faceful of blood.
Walker looked up from his desk. The vast expanse of his office was dark, illumination coming solely from the blue flicker of the tube. It was an island of light in a sea of shadow. Walker watched, expressionless, as the shadow swelled. And chuckled.
And spoke.
“Too bad Andy Warhol’s dead,” Momma said. “He would’ve had a ball with that.”
Walker felt his hackles rise instinctively. She’s getting bigger, he thought, or maybe just more substantial. . . .
“Both actually,” Momma said. Walker flinched the tiniest bit as her presence touched his thoughts and receded again. “Oh, dear,” she whispered, “I do hope that I can retain my girlish figure.”
The laughter that followed filled his head with a sound like bags of dry leaves and bones dragging across a concrete floor. Walker endured it in silence for about another thirty seconds. The scar tissue on his back and his face and on the knuckle-joint of his missing finger throbbed; the vacant hole where his left eye had been itched horribly. “It’s been a long day, Momma—” he began.
“And a fruitful one, too.”
“—and if you don’t mind, I’m a little beat.”
&
nbsp; “I’m sure,” it replied, “but alas, there’s yet more to come. Miles to go before you sleep, one might say.”
Another cryptic chuckle. Walker groaned and lit another Lucky. There was no escape, he knew. There was no way around it. Only through it.
“All right. What’s up?”
“First of all, some good news. Do you see the box on your desk?”
Walker looked down. A small UPS shipping carton sat atop the In basket. “Yes. What of it?”
“It contains something for our boy genius. You will, of course, see that he gets it.”
Walker picked up the box and opened it up. Inside, a brand-new E-prom chip nestled in the packing material, copper pins sticking up like the legs of a dead millipede. “Very pretty. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.”
“You have no idea.”
“Who sent it?”
“Friends. In high places.”
“Hmmph,” Walker grunted. He was too tired to care. “Anything else?”
“Yes. It seems that our South African mining concern just happened onto a rather large vein of gold in that supposedly mined-out hole in Zimbabwe, a”—it chuckled again—“a mother lode, you might say.”
Oh, Jesus, he winced, carefully modulating his thoughts. “My, we are in an insufferably good mood tonight, aren’t we?”
“We should be. We’ve done well.”
“I suppose.”
“All is exactly as it should be.”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“Then accept your good fortune, as a token of my beneficence.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Yes, I know; which is quite again more than I can say for you. But take it anyway.”
Walker sighed; it was not as if he had much of a choice. The money would go to their agent in Johannesburg, then to their Swiss accounts, then on and on, until it ultimately filtered through the world EFT network and into their Citibank accounts. Just like everything else. Momma had seen to it.
Oh, he did the actual phone-calling, letter-writing and check-signing, giving off every indication of being the genius managerial firebrand with the world’s greatest inside information. And he had, over the long haul, picked up a genuinely comprehensive understanding of the machine into which he’d been thrust.
But Momma called the shots. Always. He was the eyes and the ears, the hands and the mouthpiece. But in the end, Momma was the source.
Same as she’d ever been.
Since the beginning . . .
* * *
The circumstances of their meeting had less to do with predestinative significance than with plain ol’ bad timing. He was the right man, in the wrong place, at the worst of all possible times.
It was another in a seemingly endless chain of secret-missions-that-never-happened; no colorful code name, like Project Muscle Beach or Brass Monkey. Not even a dust-dry designation like Op 34, or its oh-so logical follow-up, Op 34A. Nossir. This one didn’t even exist at all. Walker was part of a Special Forces team under Major James “Bo” Strakker—three Americans, an Aussie, and four Nung team members—who were heading far up through the Central Highlands, well into Cambodia. Up to Phnom Dac, a ville that MACV Recon indicated was a pit stop for NVA regiments moving through on their way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. No big surprises there; Walker had often witnessed the aftermath of the VC incentive program. The possibility of having your belly slit open and your entrails eaten by wild pigs as you died could make anyone cooperative.
It wasn’t that the villagers were innocents; they were human beings, after all, with the same penchant for everyday deceit and fuckery that you might find among human societies anywhere else on the planet.
But they were caught, as it were, in the middle of a grudge match between opponents whom it was best not to piss off. They could not serve two masters. They could not escape.
They were doomed.
Going in was comparatively easy. A hot, muggy walk up hills and down hills, through a thick triple canopy of jungle foliage that filtered the sunlight in a thousand subtle shades of green and yellow and gold. They moved, as always, in a disciplined silence, all moving parts on their weapons and gear taped down, all insignia stripped, all identification with the military mechanism that had brought them there excised. They’d smoked Thai cigarettes and eaten rice and nuoc mam until their very sweat smelled of the land through which they moved. Their faces and necks were dappled with green and brown streaks of cammo paint; when they moved it was as if no more than a breeze had riffled through the saw grass and bamboo and banyan trees, and when they stood still they seemed to melt into the mother earth altogether.
They hiked for two days. It was hard to tell where Nam left off and Cambodia began. Not that it really mattered. They humped about sixteen clicks from where the gunships originally deposited them, reconnoitering supply routes for H&I strikes, placing little surprises along the “safe” trails until they weren’t quite so safe anymore. . . .
It could have happened any number of times. Like an embolism ready to blow hot blood into all the wrong places, the pressure mounted. At a hundred different places, a hundred times a day, atrocities raged across the land. At a hundred different places the veil wore thin. It was only a matter of time until one gave out.
And at each one, just on the other side, the demons waited.
They knew that it wouldn’t stay open long. It never did. The Mother struggled to protect herself, healing the perforations even as they occurred. Closing the holes, shutting them out. Their opportunity, such as it was, lasted only seconds.
But, sometimes, seconds were long enough. . . .
On the afternoon of the second day they reached the hamlet of Phnom Dac. Once there, they rounded everyone up: maybe sixty-seventy people. Men, women, children. Strakker’s team was slick, all right. Total pros. He had the Nung team circle around and come in on the north side first; the spotters thought they were NVA. By the time they realized what was up it was too late. Slick.
They found rice, and medicine, and ammo, and weapons. Standing orders were prepare to blow in place. This they did, conscripting the aid of several villagers in piling the ordnance in heaped and bristling pyramids, then wiring it all for command detonation when they’d gotten safely out of range.
Then they came to the problem of the prisoners. Standard mission procedure was to evac civilians to a POW camp, interrogate them till they found out who was doing what, and relocate the rest to a fortified hamlet somewhere in the south. That was what they usually did.
Not here. Not this far over the border, no fucking way. The fate of Phnom Dac seemed cloudy, until Major Strakker stepped in. He made it all crystal-clear. He took one of the ville elders from the huddled mass, held him by the chin and scalp, and very calmly asked him when the next NVA convoy was due in. He got no satisfactory answer, only a stream of appeasing denials. More questions, more denials. Strakker nodded and listened and nodded some more.
Then he snapped the old man’s neck, like a dry twig. And he hauled up another.
And another.
And another . . .
The veil stretched. The veil stretched. With each snap of bone and cartilage the opening forced a little wider. Until it was possible to get a little help from the other side.
Until it tore completely . . .
Six dead dinks later, the team got the picture. They questioned a few more. And they lined up the rest. Sixty, seventy people. Men, women.
Children . . .
. . . as the Passage opened, the pipeline between worlds. It was tiny. It took far worse to effect any sort of major opening for more than a microsecond, and this was nothing compared to the gouges left by Dak To or Hill 875, Dien Bien Phu or the Plain of Jars. The horrors here, such as they were, were barely enough to squeeze through. Still, opportunity knocked.
And the demons answered.
Only a few got out, scrambling and clawing through the void, beating each other back in a mad dash for substance. The first th
rough the gap became flame, became smoke, became madness and hate and rage. They tainted the adrenaline-charged moment like a mega-dose of impure speed: amping the panic, poisoning the fury . . .
They shot them. It took five minutes, tops. It was nothing personal.
Walker did his bit like everybody else. The professional in him understood the necessity of it, understood that they were operating in an area where they were officially “deniable,” against an enemy that commonly employed women and children as fighters, smoke screens, and sacrifices. They all knew the rap. Every one of them left breathing threatened their odds of getting out of there alive.
But his human side felt it: the schizoid fracture deep within his soul. On the one hand, the urge to waste these fuckers here and now. Every last little slit-eyed zipperheaded one of them.
And totally at odds with that, the glaring sense of wrongness. You don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill children. Sixteen years of Catholic schooling had pounded that much into him, and he’d come halfway around the planet to fight the good fight for God and country. He was beginning to realize that he’d become enmeshed in a machine not of his design, one whose purpose evaded him and whose outcome was to transform him into exactly what he’d come here to halt. He stood there with an AR15 smoking in his hands and watched the rounds shimmy and pock into backs, legs, heads. Most of them just laid there and took it.
But one woman—more a girl, actually, but with a babe of her own in her arms—made a run for it. She was near the edge of the woods on Walker’s side. She broke through the underbrush and hauled ass down the hill.
Walker shot her, too.
She screamed, a high-pitched shriek, and the baby wailed. But she kept on running. He fired a few more rounds in her direction, slicing through the leaves along her projected trajectory when he couldn’t see her anymore. She stumbled, but kept running. The baby kept crying.
And Walker kept firing . . .
Already the gap was closing, healing shut. Of the demons that pried free that moment, only one resisted the impulse to flee, to settle for what could be bought in the immediacy of the moment. It alone remained, one ethereal appendage hooked through the slit between worlds, like some hellish Dutchman with its finger in the dyke. Working the wound. Keeping it open. Gathering strength . . .
The Scream Page 27
