Everybody Scream!

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The voice of the DJ or operator or whatever he was inside the booth came back in place of the music: “Okay…we’re gonna pick things up a little bit…I think she can handle the strain. Are you having a good time? Let’s hear it!” A few yelled “yeahs.” The DJ had a slight Outback accent in his drawl, and he savored this like an actor playing a sinister role. “Now let’s see how fast this baby will go. Y’all ready, now? I wanna hear ya. Here we go…everybody screeeam!”

  This time there was a more enthusiastic response, and because Noelle heard Bonnie shrieking-laughing hysterically (and the insect being letting out a high cicada buzz) she cried out herself loudly. The man standing in front of the control booth was a blur indistinguishable from the zipping columns, and a siren wailing over the crazy beat of the music marked the climax. Soon the ride began to slow, slow, crawl to a halt.

  The army-jacketed man trotted down the clanging ramp and put his hands on Bonnie’s cab to keep it from rocking so profoundly. He then strode past Noelle. Noelle thought it was over and pushed at her bar but it wouldn’t give; it had locked automatically, and a moment later the circular train of cabs began to rotate in the opposite direction–backwards. “Oh no!” she laughed, glancing back at Bonnie. Bonnie was exuberant. Maybe she should take a button from her, seeing as how she’d missed out on this morning’s golden sunrise breakfast. Maybe that would help to disperse the gray shreds of fog which still crept between her and her excitement, still muffled her exhilaration and weighted her smile, a haunting distraction. Vague, but there.

  The rotation increased in speed; now her car swept backwards up the hill, plunged backward into the gully, though her innards still piled up against her heart. The physical stimuli helped distract her from the distraction of the nameless, obscure fog and Noelle grinned stupidly again, squinting against the flagellations from her own living head of dark medusa-serpents.

  The spinning having nearly reached its apex, the DJ broke in a last time.

  “Okay, we’re about ready to call it quits. Hope you folks aren’t too shaken up, now. Thanks for your time. I think we can still squeeze in a little more speed before you leave us, though. Are you ready now? Let me get my hands on the controls here. Hey, what’s this red button? It says ‘light speed’, looks like. Let’s give it a try.” The speed picked up and the cabs surfed its highest crest. “Has anybody got a beer for me?” the DJ said to one side of his mic. “Oh–sorry–are we still on?” He chuckled with feigned embarrassment. “Okay, folks, looks like we’re right there. Are y’all ready now? Oh-kay…everybody SCREEEAM!”

  Noelle screamed at the top of her lungs shrilly.

  “What’s the problem here?” said Mitch Garnet even before he stopped walking up to the game booth at which he had distantly spotted some friction.

  It was one of many games in the long aisle where most of the games were congregated, like close prison cells in which inmates were trapped by the bulk of cheap stuffed animals. At this one, two tall, heavyset boys in crew cuts and long black overcoats had been thrusting their jaws and words at the wiry shirtless Choom inside the booth. Mitch didn’t have an advance idea of whom to side with so he kept it open. One boy had his hands in his pockets but they looked like high school or college jocks, all muscle, insulated at school, maybe, from the need for guns–maybe–but it was the way the Choom was sitting with his arms under the booth that had made Mitch intervene; he knew the Choom was even now aiming some weapon at the boys under the counter, ready to fire through the wood.

  “Who are you?” growled one of the youths.

  “Chief of Security–what’s going on?”

  “Nothing, man,” said the Choom.

  “This little snake cheated us, man–he said if you get the ball in the hoop you win a prize, right? I got it in the hoop but he says I leaned over the counter.”

  “He practically leaned over and put it in the basket,” said the Choom, sticking to his casual pose of readiness.

  “Blast you, twinkledink!”

  “Alright, alright,” said Garnet. “You–what’s your name?”

  “Rum.”

  “Rum what?”

  “Rum Helsinki.”

  “Okay, Helsinki. A compromise. Give the kid another shot and I’ll watch.”

  The boy disapproved. “What if I don’t get it in again. man? I had it in!”

  “Don’t push your luck, kid. I’m trying to be fair–alright? Take your shot.”

  Grumbling, the huge boy took up the ball, barely aimed, and casually tossed it. Right through the hoop without even nicking the sides, it seemed. He had made a point to step back clear of the counter.

  Mitch gave the Choom a moment’s long weary look. “Give the kid two prizes, Helsinki.”

  “Look, man, this is my game!”

  “Do I have to come in there and take them myself? It’s pretty crowded in there, Helsinki, you might get an elbow in the eye. Give him the fucking prizes, and it isn’t your fucking game. The Kahns run a clean midway, they make a point to keep the games fresh. Don’t think you’re gonna make an extra profit because it’s last night. I’m gonna keep you in my sights. Don’t fuck with me. I won’t even go to the Kahns, I’ll deal with you myself–understood?”

  “Sure, sure, don’t get so rabid, Mr. Mauser.” Mr. Mauser was a popular VT crime show. “Pick your damn teddy bears, college boy.”

  Mitch barred the boy’s chest with one arm. “Wait a minute. What did you call me, Helsinki?”

  “What’s the big deal, officer?”

  “You got a big mouth, even for a Choom, fuck-face. I said what did you call me? Huh?”

  Helsinki looked a little closer at the human’s eyes and small tight mouth. The face was a fist, wearing brass knuckles at that. It showed no compromise, and he wasn’t so entirely stupid that he didn’t know when to back down. “Nothing,” he muttered, “sorry–alright?”

  “Now give the kid his prizes. The next time I talk to you, you’d better take your hand off your gun or I’ll blow your useless head apart–you got me, air-waster?”

  “Understood.”

  Meanwhile the boy had picked out which hanging prizes he wanted. “Give me that pink unicorn, and that bumble.”

  Once the boys had left, Mitch moved on without another look at the Choom but felt his scalp ripple under a cautiously malignant stare. He continued on his beat, which would last all day and night with only a few breaks that he seldom expanded on or varied. Some of the game operators nodded to him and said hi. Finally at the end of the games he turned and at a snack stand bought his first food for the day–a bag of salty, tasty dilky roots, a native favorite, though treated and softened for human teeth. The Chooms had developed their heavy jaws and multiple rows of teeth to deal with the tough roots and vegetables of their world. An angry Choom–such as Rum Helsinki, for instance–might refer to a human as a “no-mouth.”

  Mitch strolled at a more subdued pace, juggling the greasy bag of roots and a Candyjuice soda. Until he heard the gunfire.

  Mitch was good at tracing gunshots in a labyrinth, back from his days with Car Thirteen on Forma Street. The dilky roots scattered and bright Candyjuice splashed. He bolted, wove between people, bumping a few lightly as he passed, but he was good at avoiding that, too...since on Forma Street, if you bumped somebody it wasn’t unlikely that you could be shot in the back as you ran.

  Mitch was fast. People backed off and looked at the furious energy in his running as he shot past. He had chased down young, animal-quick car thieves and purse snatchers, gang kids and muggers, rapists and killers. Without exaggeration, Mitch could run down seven or eight out of ten runners, unless they were on a few buttons or something strong like purple vortex, that really gave them a jolt…and then they might reach hiding only to suffer a lethal heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage.

  He could see them ahead in the open, in front of the lavatory shack, which looked like a small barn with a wooden divider to separate males from females. Peripherally, Garnet saw Roland LaKarna
feaux on his chair and his men turn their heads and track him as he bolted.

  The area was too open–dangerous. Mitch was already pulling his automatic pistol from inside his windbreaker. With his trained eyes he was able to slow down time and in a few seconds, computer-like, absorb and analyze information, to recreate the actions which had led to the outcome he would become a part of in another few seconds…

  Five black men in their early twenties; they wore a variety of black clothing styles, but four of them wore the latest fashionable head gear for tough young black men: bright-colored rubber swimming caps. The mutant had one of them pinned by the throat in its single hand, and he was convulsing. Another had been hurled, it looked, a great distance and lay unmoving. The other three humans had pulled out guns, a pistol and two compact submachine guns, and were sending blazes of lead into the mutant. The mutant maybe had squat legs under the hanging, cracked folds of ossified gray flesh, but it only had one long arm (split and pus-oozing at the joints), the other a stump, and an elephant trunk for a neck with no head at the end. This madly thrashed. Greenish-white pus or blood sprayed and poured from tears in the silent creature’s thick hide.

  Mitch was firing his pistol from both hands even before he had finished running.

  One of the two machine-gunners, the straps of his orange shower cap hanging unbuckled, took an explosive bullet in the side of the jaw. In police school, Garnet had been taught not to aim at a man’s chest, for even hit there he could still keep coming long enough to kill you (even ruling out numbing drugs), but for the kidneys to lower blood pressure instantly or for the spine or mouth/lower face area to shut down the central nervous system, the only sure spots for immediate take down. But that Garnet hit the man in the jaw was mostly unnecessary instinct, with an explosive bullet. It turned the man’s entire head into a red coleslaw.

  The other machine-gunner started to look his way and caught two bullets in the chest. Even with a bulletproof mesh shirt the concussions broke his bones, split his organs, sent rib fragments ripping through his lungs.

  The one with the pistol had fully turned and by now Mitch had come to a stop and aimed from his planted police stance. The black man’s pistol had barely moved in his direction when an explosive projectile detonated on the man’s left eyebrow. A mostly red splash flecked with bone, brain, hair, and pink rubber shot across the front of the wooden divider for the men’s and women’s toilets.

  The mutant released its captive, who lay moaning barely conscious, and started to shamble away, disoriented, shaking. It only got a few steps before it fell, gave a few agonized heaves, and then lay still with its thick pus-blood oozing. Mitch came to stand over it.

  “Elliot…Elliot!” a woman screamed, running. “Elliot! Elliot!” She flung herself down on the dead creature, mindless of the pus. Embracing it, cheek to the ossified hide, she sobbed hysterically.

  “Who was he?” Mitch asked quietly.

  “My husband,” the woman groaned.

  Garnet produced a hand phone and bleeped Del Kahn’s code. A few moments. “Hello?”

  “It’s Garnet. We had a shoot-out by the toilet shed–four dead, maybe five. I killed three.”

  A long silence. Mitch waited for Del to ask him if it was necessary but he didn’t. “Looks like tonight’s not going to be as quiet as we’d hoped.”

  More wails, screams, chaos from off to the right. People were clustered around a boy of maybe twelve lying on his back, his legs crossed. In police school, the rule of experience was that if they fell with their legs crossed they would never get back up. A stray bullet from one of the machine guns. “Make that six–a kid got hit with a stray.”

  “Oh God…oh man,” said Del Kahn’s voice.

  “I’ll clean things up, take names. Then I’m taking an early break.”

  “Alright, talk to me later.”

  “Right.” Mitch pocketed the device.

  Last year there’d been a violent riot, like a cowboy movie brawl on a mass scale, mostly precipitated by a huge gang of bikers. But they had only been a catalyst. All it took was the right volatile mixture to set off a chain reaction in every direction. There’d been ten deaths, many injured, much damage.

  We’re only four deaths short already, thought Mitch. The riot had been at night. It was now just short of noon.

  Yes, Mitch would deviate from his usual rigid schedule for an early break. Pearl made him agitated, but Pearl made him peaceful.

  Far up ahead, not too distant from the barn structure in which the cows were penned, the toilet shed again saw normal traffic. From here as he walked, Del saw a man with a baby in a stroller standing next to the octopus-like dark stain on the front of the wooden divider while he waited for a wife or child to return from the ladies’ room. Del slowed his walking pace down to a languid oozing. Mitch and the meds had cleaned things up fast. That was good. Carnage wasn’t good for business.

  “Hey,” someone on his right said to him as he was scuffing past, wondering whether he really wanted to go to the morgue next. “You’re a little late for the action, Del.”

  Del came to a stop, faced the speaker, hands in pockets. “So it would seem.”

  “Quite a mess. Your security man there is hot, though. Really cleaned house.”

  Del smiled tightly, shrugged. “Gotta have security.”

  The man with whom he talked was called Eddy Walpole. Tall, with neatly cut sandy hair, blonde eyebrows, steel-rimmed glasses, a constant little smile in his eyes, on his lips. He was reclining in a lawn chair with a cigarette dangling out of his fingers over the edge of the metal arm-rest, one sneaker hooked over another. He sat in the shade of a canopy that extended far out from the side of a huge hovercamper and was supported by rods and wires. A large van was a second wall to the enclosure. Two Dozer hovercycles rested off beyond the van. Under the tent were several long tables, one offering t-shirts and scarves and such, another new and used music chips, another table presenting a museum-like display of buttons, pins, jewelry, sunglasses, knives, handcuffs, metal seaweed pipes and related novelties under a pane of glass.

  “He is good, but I couldn’t help but question his handling of it a little bit. Do you know what happened?”

  “A bit,” said Del.

  Eddy Walpole sketched out the incident. “The mutant was already dead on its feet…so why kill the three kids? If he wanted to put an instant stop to things, why not just finish the mutant off, which is gonna die anyway, plainly, instead of killing three other guys? See?”

  “Well, they killed a boy–a bystander. Plus, if he shot the mutant they might think he’d shoot them next and the three of them might have fired on Garnet simultaneously. Also, by the sound of things they instigated the trouble, probably by harassing the mutant.”

  “He could have just let them finish the mutant and that would have been the end of it. He doesn’t have to arrest people for crimes, just keep the peace. One life, instead of four.”

  “Well it wasn’t a stray derelict, it was a woman’s husband. If it were a human child, a little girl, would you still say Mitch should have shot the girl instead of the three men? Or that Mitch should have just let them kill her because she was only a little girl?” Del’s tone was not argumentative; he knew Eddy well enough to know it was a sly little debate, but his solemn, forced tolerant tone must have been a bit revealing.

  Eddy said, “I’m just playing courtroom with you, Del, don’t worry…hey, he’s a pretty tough trigger, that man of yours. Good man to have to step in for ya. I know it’s no party when lives are on the line and there’s no time to think, just act and hope you’ve judged for the best. I wouldn’t want his job.”

  “Nor I.”

  “It’s just senseless. Makes me a wee philosophical, is all. That three young men should have to die for shooting a degenerating sort of mutant who’d die in a few months or years. That a boy should have been hit by a tiny little chunk of lead that could have gone anywhere, and in the head instead of in the arm or something. Bad thi
ngs domino. Ever notice that?”

  “Yeah.” Del’s eyes, like parts of an automatic machine, parts of his robot self, shifted to two teenage girls who leaned over the glass of the museum-like exhibit. They both wore Sphitt t-shirts but one’s high feather-duster hairdo was dyed lime green and the other’s was stark white like Chancy Carnal’s hair. The trapdoor in the rear of one girl’s black sweat pants was open fully, the other’s trapdoor was still half buttoned, one flap falling aside in a cuter, more coy tease. No underwear. Young girls’ bottoms were so smooth, so taut, like doll skin, no dimples or striations. But the costumes disgusted Del on another level. Sphitt fans, hardcore–a trademark outfit more like a uniform; the female branch of the cult. The green-haired, half-unbuttoned girl squealed over something in the case which pleased her and rocked her head madly from side to side, her feathery hair jiggling, as they did to the music when they listened. Seas of jiggling dyed hair at the concerts–Del had seen them on Sphitt muvids. Del called these ass-baring types “baboons.”

  When he overcame his robot and flicked his eyes back to Walpole he saw the knowing extra twinkle in the man’s eyes and felt stupid, naked, his own trapdoor opened up. He resented the twinkle. He hated this asshole.

  Walpole, however, stuck to their conversation. “Maybe I was a little hard on your man because I was chased down Forma Street by the Car Thirteen boys once. It wasn’t Garnet; this was way back when I was a teen, but these guys were just as fast and just as tough. They beat me unconscious. One of them stomped on my hand and broke it because he said I was reaching for a wine bottle in all the trash–we were in an alley.”