The shock wave hit several milliseconds later, flattening every single person standing in the arena as the air pressure slammed outward, then back in to suck any available air molecule into the growing pillar of fire. Thousands trapped in the uppermost tiers of the stadium blacked out, as eardrums imploded and lungs deflated like toy balloons and thick coils of black poison choked off everything above the exit ramps.
The ramps themselves became miniature wind tunnels, each one funneling fresh, colder oxygen in to feed the firestorm. Over two thousand people died in the first five seconds, from smoke and shock and blast.
Many more followed . . .
By Hook’s estimate the nape would spray up and out almost twelve feet on detonation, covering everything it touched in viscous, blistering death. He wasn’t far off the mark in his guess. It coated very evenly along its entire circumference, consuming another four thousand in a blazing cylindrical inferno. The stench of several tons of frying human flesh was instantaneous, a vast gaseous presence so incredibly thick and hot and foul-sick-sweet that it brought on a retching gag reflex even through the four-stage filter of his mask.
But he didn’t heave. He was ready for it.
It brought back memories.
He reached for the second switch, marveling at the transformation.
The concert hall was gone. In its place was Hell: an instant scale replica, so perfect, so easy, so there for the making. The enclosed vault of the ceiling had miraculously become a Dantean sky, black smoke boiling above them like the wrath of an angry god; the floor before him a roaring lake of fire. He drank in the majesty of it a moment longer.
Then he hit the second switch three times . . .
. . . and two D batteries responded to the overture, sending tiny sparks of electrical current racing through the detonation cord leading to the five steel pillars, each one of which contained mounted within its frame exactly thirty-three for a grand total of one hundred sixty-five claymore antipersonnel devices, each one of which cost exactly sixty-two dollars on the open market and which gave a tremendous bang-per-buck ratio, as each one come packed with approximately four point oh four for a grand total of six hundred and sixty-six pounds of BBs, each one of which promptly blew outward at a sixty-five-degree angle to pulverize and shred absolutely everything in their effective killing range, all of which Hook had artfully deployed to create the shape of a star, an enormous overlapping star-shaped pool of liquified humanity, with some chunks of living flesh still remaining along each side’s seventy-five-foot length but absolutely none left in the middle, where all five paths converged and collided and conspired to reduce every living being within to the consistency of warm, runny Jell-O.
It was a fucking masterpiece.
The backlash of the blast had killed some and maimed more in the shower of chicken wire and plastic and papier-mâché, of course, but that was nothing, that was the paint flecks that framed the canvas of his great work. It was a marvel of economy: of cost, of construction, of impact. As performance pieces went, it was world-class. How could it not be? It demanded total sensory involvement. Taste, texture, smell . . .
It would be a couple of minutes yet before he could hear clearly, of course, to enjoy the sound.
But sight-wise, it was stunning.
The tinted lenses in his mask afforded him considerable blast protection, for which he was eternally grateful. It would have been a shame to miss the sight of the burning ring, the blasted columns, and the razor-sharp lines of decimation that the claymores had carved through the mass of stoned, swarming wasteoids that packed the floor of the hall. His only regret was that he missed the all-important aerial view.
Of course, it wasn’t often that one was afforded a ringside seat at the unveiling of a stadium-sized raw-meat flaming pentagram, and that in itself was really something special.
But he’d still have loved to see it from above . . .
8:13:13 P.M.
Walker stared down from the rim of the press box: his own private box seat for the grand opening of Hell. He could afford the luxury. He was responsible for it.
He was humbled by the spectacle before him.
For this was the Inferno, live at last. A sight to make Dante blanch and Doré turn pale, running mile-wide rings around the visions of Ernst and Bosch and St. Peter and all who had tried to bring that ultimate horror to life. Not even the war, for all its monstrosity, had ever created such a set piece of evil and then granted him such an island of immunity from which to observe it. The smoke, the flames, the pool, the writhing bodies everywhere, the giant demon on the stage, the limp forms surrounding it.
The smoke burned in Walker’s good eye. He swiped at it, but the gas mask was in the way. He thought about removing it, knew that was madness, somehow refrained. The pain got worse. His one eye watered, muddying his vision.
“Momma.” He couldn’t hear himself. It didn’t matter. “Momma.” If she could hear him, she would speak inside his head.
But no. This is our last conversation, she had said, till we meet face-to-face. There was no reason to doubt her word, at least with regards to that. She was busy now, busily being born, too busy to be bothered with what he did in these last few strokes of the clock.
So what now?
On the press box floor, Hempstead lay dazed. Walker had stripped the ski mask off. The gun in Walker’s hand tracking loosely with the movements of his head. So they had come, after all. Just like Momma said. He wondered how many and where. Not that it mattered. Not anymore. A bullet in the face would put an end to him, sure; but for some reason, Walker just couldn’t see the point.
In his mind’s eye (and wasn’t that a touch of levity!) he could see himself back at the ambush, all those many years back; he could still see the bloody sap, oozing down the trees.
And it flashed on him then that maybe the snipers had had a point: that maybe—if he’d not given in, if he’d let himself die, as God or Fate or ordinary life had most likely intended—none of this would have happened at all. He had succumbed to the darkness and the evil at each successive turn, and it had returned the favor, in turn, by selling each of them out in a gradually tightening knot of betrayal.
Until there was only himself and it.
Then it sold him out.
“God damn you!” he spat.
The burning in his eye was worse. His brain began to ache.
He looked at the arena. It was bad.
He looked at the stage. Worse still.
He looked at Tara.
And Tara was worst of all.
Because she was still kneeling, the body beneath her no longer twitching, her head and arms thrown back in forever abandon. She was giving birth now, her cargo ripe and ready to deliver at last.
Delivered by self-serve cesarean section.
Millions and millions of tiny tiny worms . . .
They gushed out from the more-than-foot-long gash she had opened in her belly, poured onto the stage, streamed out toward the edge and the floor below. There were more of them than she could have possibly contained.
She had become a doorway.
And the space where his long-gone eye had been began to itch and tingle and squirm; the awe he had felt turned swiftly to terror. They were in there—they were in there!—and all of the assurances were for shit, his mind and his soul were not his own, they never had been, not since the moment she’d come to him, she wasn’t even a her, she was an it, it was nothing that desperately wanted to be something, and how had he ever been so stupid as to think it wouldn’t turn on him, too?
The pain squirmed and thrashed in the dead skin of his eye socket, halfway between spirit and substance. He heard the dim nattering of their voices behind the ringing in his ears. No no no! He felt the onrushing panic. It’s all in your mind! It’s what the fucking thing wants you to believe, it’s all in your MIND . . .!
Yes, it certainly was. Squirming and chewing, feeding on the fear and growing, just as the Faith of the Chosen was growing down o
n the floor. Growing more real by the second, reaching for that point when it no longer needed their belief, until it could reach out and force belief on all it surveyed. The line between imagination and physical reality had gotten very thin indeed, had almost disappeared in fact.
Walker squashed the panic, hard. Years of deadened experience were all that separated him from the utter madness that was gaining ground as he tore his gaze away from the red squirming torrent, forced himself to look back at the floor. The Screamers were moving down there now. They had descended in droves, a hundred or more, from the lower grandstand; they waded through the pitiful semiconscious forms of the audience. It looked as though they were howling, but his ears still could not register sound.
Inside the flaming circle, the star began to ripple and glow . . .
And Walker ran out of the box: ignoring his would-be assassin, ignoring the press room and the bodies therein as he barreled down the stairs. The feeling in his head clicked on and off, on and off, intensifying exponentially. If this was it, there was something that he wanted to do very badly.
And he was almost out of time . . .
8:17:11 P.M.
In the hive-mind, a ruptured rapturous scrambling through the widening portal . . .
8:17:12 P.M.
The Screamers stepped into the fading circle of fire, began slashing and feeding bodies to the luminous lake. The shapes hovered at the surface for a moment, some of them thrashing feebly; then, suddenly, they were gone. It reminded Hook insanely of the opening scene from the movie Jaws: the hapless blonde, fearfully treading water one moment; the next, vanishing abruptly beneath the waves.
The only problem was that the lake could only be a few inches deep at maximum. There was nowhere for the bodies to go. . . .
Hook had one long moment to contemplate the impossible.
Then the pair of Screamers were upon him, pulling him backward by the throat, down to the floor beside his newly dead assistant . . .
. . . and he didn’t even have rime to register his betrayal before, with no artistry at all, they slit his throat, dragged him off the platform, across the floor, and into the abyss . . .
8:18:00 P.M.
Pennycate hauled ass up the corridor an instant after the shock and the sound of the first blast hit him. He didn’t need to see what was happening; he recognized both by smell. The thick rich stench of petroleum and cordite permeated the air of the passageway, along with the smell of something much, much worse. Death. Lots and lots of it.
Well, this certainly changes a lot of things, he thought as he ran down the backstage access corridor. I wonder what the big plan is now.
He heard accompanying blasts of automatic weapons and grenades from up on the mezzanine, and what sounded like some police sirens that ended rather abruptly as what sounded like gas tanks went off. Pennycate decided that somebody better check that out.
He elected himself, tearing up the stairs leading to the promenade as he pulled the bolt back on the Uzi and got ready to just bash through the door and book his butt behind some available cover, when somebody who looked an awful lot like Keith Richards appeared at the head of the stairs, coming down fast, and he had a gun too, and it looked like an impromptu gunfight at the Stairwell Corral, and Pennycate was fast but the Keith-clone was just a little bit faster, and he squeezed off two shots that took Pennycate’s knees out from under him and sent him cartwheeling back down the stairs in what he would have to admit was a very unprofessional position, and his neck hit the fourth step from the bottom in entirely the wrong way, sending sparks and pain and then numb black oblivion into every inch of his body . . .
. . . and Kyle jumped over the limp dead form in the ski mask, barely having time to wonder Who the fuck is that? because things were getting very hairy up there, and when you start blowing up cops you’d better have some backup real quick and he didn’t have enough and he was starting to rethink his commitment to this whole freak show, and he ran like hell down the hall . . .
8:18:31 P.M.
. . . as Ted awoke to the mad ringing in his ears and the crushing weight of bodies on top of him, plastering him to the floor. The blinding thunder was still alive in his head. He couldn’t move. He could barely think.
The rain of worms slid over the lip of the stage.
There were five people above him. They took the brunt of the first downpour. They began to twitch and scream; the worms sloughed down in torrents. Most sluiced past, riding the crest of the deepening tide; less than fifty actually came to rest on Ted’s arms and back and head in the first five seconds.
Then they started to bite him, and his mind cleared dramatically. The pain made him a believer. It threw his body into motion. There was a fleeting pocket of uninhabited space two feet ahead and to the right, flush against the stage. He clawed his way toward it, one thought screaming through his brain.
Jesse.
Ted climbed to the lip of the stage.
Another fifty thousand fell . . .
8:18:52 P.M.
. . . and the music was playing, it was playing itself, the coprocessors and sequencers charged with both life and death as they mounted to the first movement’s crescendo. They had kept right on going in the seconds it had taken for Alex to regain his footing. He still had a job to do. He was, after all, the ears of The Scream.
Momma’s ears, now.
And the voice of Its creation . . .
Alex was the only one still standing on the stage. Tara had passed over, turned to pure inseminoid, her spawn gushing madly out toward the rippling star. Gene and Terry had crumbled, given up their crawling hosts. The bouncers had fallen, unprepared for the moment. And dear little big brother had fallen, too.
“Don’t you worry, Rod, baby!” He beamed widely as he spoke. “In a minute, we’ll all be together at last!”
The giant Momma-thing had gone dead on stage; no doubt the crew had not been fully prepped. No matter.
It had served its purpose. What was left of the audience lay like newly threshed wheat. They were well on their way to real believing.
The second movement would convince them completely.
He watched as the hot tide of Tara-spawn spilled out to grow between the outstretched legs of the star. He watched the center of the star roiling in synchronous accord, the pool bubbling along a thirty-foot central slit, a slit that bubbled and frothed and opened in yawning expectation. He watched Screamers wade into the burning muck, dragging unfortunate survivors to the edge and pitching them in. The squirming wave slid closer to the lip of the hole.
Alex’s finger poised over the key that would trigger the critical mass. He tipped a loving nod toward Jesse, down on the stage. After all, hers was the ever-important missing ingredient. They were about to make beautiful music together, their symphonies entwined like light and dark. Like Life and Death. They were made for each other.
Alex pushed the button and smiled. He had no clear idea of what would happen next, and he couldn’t hear it quite as well as he’d have liked, but he was sure that all was perfection.
He believed.
8:19:00 P.M.
It was time to come out now, come out and take form. All the elements had, at forever last, commingled: flesh and faith, worm and song, all a part of it now. Only one thing remained, one act left to be done.
The supreme act of will.
I AM THAT I AM
As the thing that mockingly called itself Momma began to push its way into the world.
8:19:05 P.M.
In the back of her mind, Jesse heard the Symphony’s terrible transmutation. She was still semiconscious from the blast, so it seemed to her more like a resonant echo from the dream. “Nooo . . .,” she moaned, drowning in the aura of corruption, fighting the psychotic visions of Pete in her mind as she clawed her way back toward the surface.
Then she felt something give in the vicinity of her ankles, felt the sudden sharp straining at her shoulders and wrists. Body awareness brought her all the way back
. She opened her eyes.
And started to scream.
Because she recognized Ted instantly, despite the worms that were burrowing into his body and face. She saw the pain in his eyes and knew that he could not last much longer. Her eyes were on the knife in his hand as he wavered before her, screaming as well . . .
. . . and it wasn’t just the pain, the tearing of their teeth, or the burning sting of the poison they secreted. It was the fact that they were inside him now. Inside his mind.
Saying nasty things.
He looked at Jesse closely for a second. He had never seen her so nearly naked before. Certainly not trussed up like that. Certainly not while he had his trusty knife in hand. There were so many holes to fill, so many more he could create with a simple homing thrust . . .
. . . and he couldn’t stop the voices, even as he willed the blade to come up, even as he began to saw through the rope that bound her left wrist to the cross . . .
. . . and she swung forward, still dangling by the other wrist. He caught her before her weight could snap the delicate bone, pressed her back against the cross with his body, awkwardly cut her loose. Her feet touched the floor at last; she collapsed against him for a moment, going, “Oh, thank God . . .”
. . . and then the worms were biting into her, too, and as she screamed and pushed away from Ted and he fell to the floor she saw that others were moving on the stage now, staggering to their feet, the bouncers and Rod Royale and a fourth man in a black ski mask who appeared from behind her and began to blow holes in the first two men, making them jitter and spray as they fell . . .
. . . and Rod Royale looked up into the black mask, the eyes without a face, the barrel of the gun, then over at the widening mouth of Hell. They were far too close together, Lord, the black hole and the burning one. There was scarcely any difference at all.
The Scream Page 42
