“What the fuck are you?” the tall one with the switchblade said. “The invisible man? You look like a fucking stork with your pale-ass legs sticking out. Are you a stork, man? Or are you somebody just too fucking ugly to look at?”
Darkman’s breathing speeded up. Adrenaline flowed into his system, making his stomach lurch as if he had jumped on a Ferris wheel going too fast. His vision swam momentarily, then solidified into one motionless picture.
He warned them, tried to; tried to warn them before it was too late: “Run for your lives!” Darkman hissed at them in his fire-ravaged voice.
“Oooh,” Baby Bear said, being very casual on this jaunt through the cement jungle. “We’re so fucking scared.”
What happened next came as a surprise to everyone, even to Darkman. In unison the three lunged at him, intending to pin his arms behind his back and work him over from the front. The fastest one was Baby Bear, and he was the first to be surprised. As he charged, Darkman whipped one hand out of the raincoat, too fast to see, and caught Baby by the throat. The punk squawked. Darkman hoisted him off his feet and tossed him aside; he went end over end and smashed against a lamppost some fifteen yards away. Darkman blinked. How the hell had he done that?
“Fucking mummy man!” the tall one barked, and tried to stab Darkman in the stomach. Darkman’s other hand flashed out and caught the cool steel blade in mid-swing. His finger bones crunched down on it. Papa Bear tried jerking it free, obviously appalled by the idea that a man could snag a knife blade and hold on without losing a few fingers and a lot of blood. Darkman gave a sharp pull on it, and then it was his, sliding out of the punk’s greasy hand. His rage was huge, overpowering. He turned the knife around with the intention of stabbing Papa Bear to end his useless and miserable life, but as he drew back to do it he was overwhelmed with horror, seeing himself stab the kid again and again, gutting him like a fish. Disgusted with himself and this repulsive vision, he threw the knife away. It flew the entire length of the block and skittered into a sewer drain.
“Want to die?” Darkman hissed as his self-control began spiraling away, to be replaced by a whirlwind of insane anger. He reached for the punk’s throat.
For a big bad bear Papa was getting very scared very fast. He looked at Darkman’s reaching hands, his eyes growing large.
“What in the fuck are you?” he asked, falling back, seeming genuinely puzzled.
Darkman could have come up with a dozen handy answers. He lurched toward the boy, drunk with the desire to rip his throat out and see hot blood splashing, smell it, roll in it.
You are Peyton Westlake.
No way, man. I am the dark angel of death. I make the rules.
For God’s sake, stop now!
Where was God when I was burned alive for no reason? Where is He when a mud slide in Chile kills twenty-five thousand people? There is no god left for me. I am the beginning and I am the end.
You are just the end, man. Just the end. No past and no future. Do yourself a favor and crawl in a hole with your cousins, the worms and the mites and the maggots. That is how low you will sink if you kill this boy.
“Shut up!” Darkman screamed aloud, scaring the punk even more. He turned and sprinted away before the bony claws had a chance to clamp over his throat. Darkman fought a lengthy mental duel with the voice of reason, the last remnant of the memory that was Peyton Westlake. Thou shalt not kill. It was no lie.
All that was left was the medium-sized guy, Mama Bear, the one with the green hair. He apparently didn’t like the looks of this; his eyes were wild and frightened as he reconsidered things. He turned to run.
Let him go, Peyton Westlake commanded, and for a moment Darkman hated him more than he hated the punks, more than he hated himself and his new role. Lord, the chance to open a vein on the kid and watch his blood soil the street. And then gut him, gut him, gut him as if he were fresh and hanging in a slaughterhouse.
He jumped at the kid, who was ten feet away and moving fast. For a moment Darkman was Superman, fifteen feet in the air with his arms outstretched and his hands hooked into claws and his raincoat flapping like a sorry black cape, performing the world’s longest long jump. He landed behind the fleeing bear and spun him around. He hoisted the kid by the spikes of his hair. Leather squeaked and creaked as Mama Bear pedaled his legs frantically, uselessly.
Don’t do it!
The voice was too strong to ignore. He kicked the bear in the crotch with one ragged shoe, wanting to do more, needing to do more.
The ghost of Peyton would not let him, but it was a voice that was growing weaker, becoming dim.
Darkman leaned his head back and shrieked with raw fright and interior pain. The Mr. Hyde inside him was becoming strange and frightening. He was one step away from mastery of his mind. He knew with a terrible and dreadful certainty that he was a man . . .
thing???
. . . on the verge of going insane.
By the time he found the phone booth on Ackurd, he was sick and shaking. He lurched into the booth and pushed the door shut, then slumped against the glass wall.
“What happened to me?” he whispered, full of doubt and a strange, drowsy kind of terror at what he was becoming. He stared at his hands, his criminal hands. “How could I think of doing that to those . . . boys?”
Simple. You redirected their miserable lives. You ought to be proud.
But—I . . . I wanted to murder them!
Law of the jungle, big boy. Ask Darwin.
Shut up. You don’t even know who you are anymore.
We’re Darkman, baby, and we can rock and roll. Julie’s just a phone call away, and Durant can’t be much farther. Revenge will taste even sweeter than tossing those boys around and trying to scare them to death. Dig it?
Darkman dug in his raincoat pockets, not digging anything but change. He dropped two dimes in the slot and dialed Julie’s apartment.
It rang many times. Not there.
He dialed Pappas and Swain, and talked to the receptionist. “Miss Hastings is on temporary leave, sir,” she told him, “but I can forward a message.”
“Do you know where she might be?”
“Well, I probably shouldn’t say, but I believe she is spending the day with Louis Strack.”
“Who?”
“Louis Strack, of Strack Industries.”
“Where can I find him?”
She gave him the address of the Strack family mansion.
And then he called Millings Supply for more equipment, racked with fear at what he was becoming, for what Julie might think of him when he came back from the dead.
The time, and this strange test, were not far away.
18
An Interlude at Millings Supply
JASON P. MILLINGS was the owner and president of that large company, and he had a standing policy that any unusual or exotic orders would have to be cleared through his office. On this early morning he had awakened with a pounding headache, thanks to last night’s ingestion of a fifth and a half of Four Roses whiskey, normal fare for a man who stood five feet six and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He was a man with a drinking problem so severe that he had to get drunk every day in order not to be frightened to death at the enormity of his addiction.
He was sleeping sitting up at his giant desk this Monday, his nose mashed against the blotter, his arms dangling to the floor, his ample ass spread across an executive chair manufactured especially for fat asses. The desktop intercom buzzed and he raised his head. His eyes were as red as spring tomatoes; his unshaved face a disaster area of Four Roses-ruptured capillaries and veins; his breath so bad, he could smell it himself. He slapped the intercom with one big hand and dropped his head back onto the desk.
“Yeah, what is it,” he said with a moan.
“Another order that needs clearance from you. This one’s wild.” His secretary, Ms. Jackson, tittered loudly into the intercom. Millings flinched as these loud new hurts were pounded through his skull.
&nbs
p; “Bring it on in, then.”
She got there fast, holding a sheet of computer printout. Millings made himself sit up. She thrust the paper at him.
“Please,” he grumbled unhappily. “Just read it to me.”
She nodded. “Okay. One two-hundred-forty-volt generator, gasoline powered.”
“We can get that.”
“A Starling briefcase, brown with gold latches.”
“We’ve already got a billion of those.”
“A box of cigars seven inches long with one-inch diameter, dark brown in color, natural-leaf wrapping.”
“What are we, a tobacco store? Tell whoever it is to get screwed.”
“Fine. One dozen wigs for a size-eight head, no color specified.”
“Screwed.”
“Forty bottles of hair dye, every color.”
Millings sighed. Why did some idiots think this was a department store?
“Five dress suits, long-sleeved shirts, and matching ties. Size forty-two.”
“Help me, God.”
She laughed. “There’s a lot more. Four shades of lipstick. A tube of nontoxic mastic. A cassette recorder with microphone. An SLR camera with telephoto lens. Rolls of film. A package of men’s underwear. Press-on fingernails. Eyebrow pencil. Colored contact lenses, nonprescription, in green, brown, hazel, slate. Two watches—one gold, another silver. A complete darkroom kit with chemicals. Tweezers. Pair of socks. Eleven things I can’t even pronounce: protohydro-emulsiactor, dillotantinantin, guar gum—what the hell is that for? Also, six other—”
Millings waved a hand to shut her up. “Get on the horn and tell whichever dipshit ordered that stuff that he can get his ass over to K Mart. The chemicals are no problem, but we aren’t haberdashers.”
She turned to leave. Millings made her stop.
“Who did order that, anyway?”
She looked at the paper. “Wayne State.”
“Order code right?”
“Down to the last digit. Chemistry Department.”
Millings frowned, puzzling over this. What was going on over at that college? It occurred to him that they might be building a robot or something. Either that or they had decided to put Millings to the test. By contract they had to buy all university-related equipment from Millings Supply, but that contract was due for renewal at the end of this fiscal year. Something was fishy here, and it smelled like a pullout.
“They’re negotiating with another firm,” he told Ms. Jackson. “Probably Willis Supply, the bastards. We’re both being put to the test, I guarantee it. If we screw up, the deal is gone, and that sucker is worth over three mill a year.”
She looked alarmed. “What should we do, then?”
He grinned, even though he hurt. “Give them everything they want. Everything that’s in our power to get, and by God, if we can’t get it, we’ll invent it. Give them a ten-percent discount, just for the hell of it. No way am I going to let Willis steal my customers.”
“Fill the order, then?”
He nodded. “Take the day off and hit the department stores if you have to. I want that order filled and delivered before noon. And Willis can sit on his thumb and rotate. We’re the biggest, and we’re gonna stay that way.”
She nodded and left.
Millings sat around feeling very crafty, but his hangover got the best of him and he went to sleep again.
19
The First Move
BY LATE AFTERNOON Darkman was taking his first crack at developing film. The developing set, which arrived in the shipment from Millings around noon, came complete with bottles of developer, fixer, wetting agent, and enough pans to satisfy Betty Crocker. On his way back from the phone booth Darkman had scouted through several promising-looking dumpsters and trash cans, finding old clothing that stank worse than sour diapers, and even a huge, tattered black hat he could pull down past his ears. Feeling strangely proud of himself and his new wardrobe, he paraded back to the soap factory but didn’t come across a soul. A pity, he had thought, and ducked into the cool darkness of home.
After the shipment came and was put into some semblance of order (the driver had not stuck around long to help, though), Darkman loaded up his brand-new Nikon XE-35X, unwound himself from his burden of bandages, and became a bagman. The smell of the ratty clothing he wore was revolting, but it would ensure that no one came very close. He tied a colored rag just below his eyes, a bandanna that was stiff with age but covered his absent face like a train-robbing outlaw. The hat went on top, the camera in his pocket, his hands safely buried there too.
It had been two o’clock, a hot and muggy afternoon, the sky a blank slate, when the sleaze bag named Pauly Reynolds arrived at Ernie’s Best Deli, a place where Rick had said illegal transfers of money or dope took place almost daily. Pauly, Darkman remembered, was the tough guy who drank Maalox by the quart and enjoyed torturing innocent biochemists. Seeing him saunter to the deli with a smirk on his face and a blue bottle of Maalox in one hand, Darkman’s rage had ballooned, threatening to split his skull and send him charging out of the alley where he had hidden himself. He could kill Pauly as easily as Pauly had killed him, and with greater effect on the man’s future. But, he said to himself again and again, I will not kill anymore. I will destroy.
He raised his camera up and zoomed in on Pauly as he walked to the door. The Nikon was a professional model with auto-wind. He snapped eight pictures. Several moments later two other shady types approached, a Mexican fellow carrying a briefcase . . .
Martinez!
. . . and a man with a bad limp.
Skip!
Darkman got six clear shots, feeling absurdly as if he had known these unsavory chaps all his life. He watched through the big windows as they marched to a booth and sat down with Pauly. Though the fumes from his scavenged clothes were beginning to bother him, Darkman waited until they reemerged twenty minutes later. When they did, it was Pauly who had the briefcase. Darkman got three more shots, then pocketed the camera.
While on his way home, feeling safely disguised and smelling sickeningly of garbage, he stopped at a travel agency on McQueen Street and purchased two airline tickets. The fat lady he talked to was about to tell him to take a hike when he withdrew fifteen hundred dollars and handed it over.
After that she worked fast.
Developing the pictures now in near darkness, Darkman’s heart was beating just a little too fast. The day was about to end outside, the sun giving up and sinking past the horizon, and if he wasn’t able to do it tonight, he probably never would. In the planning stage it had seemed oh so plausible, so perfect and so fitting. Now that night was approaching, he was having an attack of nerves. His hands shook as he used tweezers to withdraw the photo from its bath. What if it was blank?
He carried it to the loading dock, finding the last of the day’s light.
It was Pauly, all right. A little too fuzzy but Pauly nonetheless.
Satisfied, although still jittering inside, he developed the other photos and clipped them to a piece of old twine he had tied to the nearest mooring pillars. When they were done and sufficiently dry, he started the new generator (John Deere instead of Honda—oh, well), which purred to life and didn’t make half the racket he had expected.
The connections had already been made while the prints were developing. For the first time in decades the dusty overhead lights came alive, filling the factory’s lower level with a sick, feeble glow that made it seem even more haunted than when it was bathed in darkness. So? he thought defiantly. It’s still home sweet home.
Almost trembling, he flipped the power switch on the big IBM computer. A green cursor began to flash on the screen while the hard drive whined, getting itself up to speed. Presently it announced that all was well and good.
He sat on the bones of his office chair and began to empty his scientific mind out into the computer. Peyton Westlake had been a genius.
The computer was even smarter.
By eleven his brain was frazzle
d and his ears were sore from the eerie and endless tack-tacking of his finger bones on the keyboard. The stench of his clothes was enough to fell a tree and he got out of them. Wearing only brand-new underwear that still smelled of its modern factory, his face exposed and his hands unwrapped, he loaded a floppy disk into the slot below the hard drive and clicked the lever shut. He typed two last commands, and the holographic plate began to sprout rainbows.
So far so good, he thought, and wished now that he could have salvaged the digitalizer from his old computer. The old way, you fed the picture in and the computer broke it down into vectors and angles. Now, holding the Pauly pictures like a deck of cards, he fed the information manually.
It took two hours. He was ready to collapse, but he was getting the hang of it again. He ran through the sequences that fed the Bio-Press. It signaled okay. He went to the ThinkTank-PinkTank transformer and started the charging process. Nervously gnawing on a finger bone, he checked everything over again, wishing he had skin on his face because he was hot there but unable to sweat. Just another annoyance.
When the bulletlike charge came, he hastily opened the pipette and watched the goop surf onto the hot Bio-Press. When it had filled all the crevices and was a shimmering, pancake-thin sheet, he turned the pipette off and waited. The smell of burned pork rose in the air as the hot pins of the Bio-Press adjusted upward to remake the picture Darkman had broken down into lines and vectors. In less than a minute it was done.
Darkman peeled it off the press with the tweezers and dropped the completed sheet into an aluminum tub. This he covered over with black plastic. In the dark it would be fine.
Growing excited, he manhandled the computer some more and made two new parts. They went into the tub. The hardest part came next, and while it was brewing, he used surgical scissors to cut the first two parts out of the remainder of the floppy sheet of artificial skin.
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