Everybody Scream!

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The audience cried out in the thrilled unity of horror, loathing, morbid fascination.

  Johnny Leng splayed flat on his face. He didn’t moan now.

  Del turned, eyes still hungry, on Roland LaKarnafeaux, who on hands and knees rolled the large corpse of Mendez over onto its back, exposing the bright plastic and metal gun underneath it. LaKarnafeaux gaped up in shocked distress, a fat child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Del covered the few steps toward him, swinging the bat up into the ready position once more.

  “Hey–no! No! Come on!” LaKarnafeaux blubbered, tumbling onto his back, hands flailing, pushing his body along with his legs away from Mendez and the gun. “Don’t, man, I give up! Don’t, don’t, don’t!”

  Del quit advancing, stood over Mendez. LaKarnafeaux was sobbing, tears actually running into his grizzled beard, his glasses dislodged, hanging from one ear. His t-shirt had rolled up to expose the hairy planet of his belly. He was too helpless and pathetic a thing to kill. Like the beast called Jonah’s Whale, through whose body people rode, he wasn’t even fully alive. Killing him would be more like pulling the plug on a life support machine. He groveled, whimpered, whined. Now Del carried the scepter of the blue baseball bat.

  Over his shoulder, he glared hard and brightly at the Martians. The fiery triumph he showed was splashed with the cold water of fear as he saw the boy with the cigar-or-licorice whip lift his blaster to aim it at him once more.” Hey–wait!” Del tossed the bat away. “Wait!”

  Purple vortex, the Martian captain had decided finally, was more important than a code of honor…

  “I’m unarmed, I’m unarmed!” Now Del was batless and groveled. Things could change so quickly. No one person could ever be the most dangerous, the most powerful. They could just take turns based partly on their skill and boldness, and partly on opportunity and luck. Del’s opportunities and his luck had shifted badly. The deliberateness of the Martian’s aim, the one or two ticks of hesitation, indicating a last vestige of reluctance, were all that saved him. The Martian, in that tick or two, in turn squandered his moment of opportunity and luck, of dangerous superiority…

  The explosive bullet from Mitch Garnet’s pistol transformed the neck of the Martian captain into a gushing organic volcano, his head obliterating like a shotgunned plaster bust. The pitiful rag of a body crumpled bonelessly. In his crouched firing stance, Mitch merely had to swivel a few inches to reduce the head of the second boy to a shattered clay pigeon.

  “Get down, Del!” he roared. “Everybody scatter!” He meant that for the audience.

  Del understood Mitch’s meaning as he dove behind a display table.

  Not everyone understood, or even had time to respond anyway, and most of those who tried collided with each other as the three Martians sprang out from their hiding places nearby and opened fire with their baroque, ridiculously bulky assault engines, bandoliers with grenades clipped to them criss-crossing their narrow chests. One Choom man in the range of fire absorbed an automatic blast of a half dozen ray bolts, and like a lasered St. Sebastian swooned in death. A teenage girl took a hole through her narrow neck. A man had his wrist lanced clean through.

  Mitch rolled, came up kneeling, fired. His explosive bullet struck the boy on the gun. But the gun blew up. And the grenades blew up.

  He had popped out from behind a trailer which was a dilky stand, and the chain of explosions which shattered the Martian to fragments like a vase blasted with a machine gun (each bullet shattering more, but all so close together that nothing was left for long) rocked the trailer, tore through the metal skin of it. The lights flickered inside. The Choom proprietor had ducked under his counter back when the first of the gunfire began, wiser than the gathered crowd, most of whom hadn’t really fled until now, only moving further back or spreading out a little, confident in their role as observers, as if this were all some holographic VT program. A few pieces of shrapnel struck the proprietor but left only minor cuts.

  The shrapnel freed from the grenades, however, was like ten machine gunners standing in a circle wildly spraying…a ravaging locust storm. Many of the frantic audience members went down thrashing, flopping, shrieking. Three would die, and a burly teenage boy would live the rest of his life as a glassy-eyed giant fetus hooked up to a machine.

  “Fuck! You fucking bastards!” Mitch bellowed in outrage at having been forced by these monsters to himself make the nightmare even worse. You couldn’t even fight back at them. They made you help them kill. Mitch shook with this madness, horrified at himself. He was a protector of the people. He was afraid to shoot again.

  One of the remaining two strafed his gun toward Mitch, ripping through a blindly stumbling, shrapnel-pierced man to do so. Though he couldn’t fire again, Mitch was able to dive at the ground, scramble for cover behind the table with its museum display of handcuffs, knives, iodine pipes. The glass shattered, the freed colorful eyes danced exuberantly, crazily, high into the air.

  The other Martian moved to a more advantageous position. He saw a form hiding behind a table. A grenade rocket might hurt LaKarnafeaux at this nearness to him. He launched a huge capsule of military-grade plasma from his rifle instead.

  The capsule hit Cod on the left of his chest and the quivering gelatinous plasma spread instantly over his writhing, flopping form like a blazing mantle of white light half solidified. It ran into his open mouth; no scream got past it. It poured into his ears, his nostrils, sank through his pores. In moments the quivering blob grew less and less human in outline and shrank away to nothing…no bones, no sludge, no stain.

  The strafing Martian, seeing that the enemy was pinned, came running out from his station to close in on a clearer target, circling in to better see those display tables. Too frenzied strafing might hit LaKarnafeaux and they couldn’t have that. Luckily, at last, most of the bystanders had withdrawn or lay dead or immobilized, creating less obstruction.

  The Martian, however, ran past Shiv Mofo, who had ducked behind a trash barrel, a black gang boy wearing a hot pink rubber swim cap, who had never much liked the Martians and who was even more offended by having been caught in the middle of one of their gun battles. As the Martian ran past Mofo, ignoring him, Mofo simply extended his arm and shot him cleanly through the skull with two lead bullets.

  The Martian continued running for a bit, but weaving as if dodging air fire, before he pitched forward dead across a moaning wounded innocent.

  Garnet found a safe spot to peek out of, and maybe to fire from, in time to see the last of the Martian unit die. Two white humans and a Choom were shooting him, standing around him and getting closer as he dropped his rifle. They had decided individually, without the inspiration of Shiv Mofo or each other. This was outer Punktown, but it was still Punktown. The little boy’s inner lining of bullet and ray-proof mesh seemed to be keeping him barely alive, except for some bone-cracking blunt trauma, but some gang boys of similar age dashed in with nunchakus to flail at his head, and finished him off and then some.

  Wearily, warily, Del Kahn and Mitch Garnet stood up from behind their shelters. Del saw two scorched ray holes in Mitch’s silver windbreaker but knew he had a protective mesh lining inside. They looked at each other for a moment, then Del saw Mitch scan the battlefield of dead and wounded with a look of horrified despair he had never seen on Mitch’s tight, hard face. Rousing himself from his shock, however, Mitch went to handcuff the cowering, trembling, half insensate blob that was Roland LaKarnafeaux.

  Within minutes, almost every weapon (and some wallets) had been stripped from the dead. One of the gang boys tucked away his nunchakus in favor of a Martian’s hand blaster, another lugged away the Martian’s trademark assault engine. Del watched a boy dash off with bandoliers from which a half dozen fragmentation grenades hung like fruit. Del himself bent to retrieve Dingo Rubydawn’s semiautomatic from the hand of Johnny Leng…half to keep a kid from taking it, half for himself should more Martians attack before the inevitable influx of town enforcers.


  Tucking the flat gun in his waistband, Del watched a bloodied, disoriented man, apparently struck by shrapnel, stagger away with the assault engine from the Martian killed by Shiv Mofo.

  Once again a crowd gathered, a tide coming in, more people than ever…children licking ice cream, teenagers munching corn dogs, and toward the rear a towering, bluish-greenish scaled Torgessi, craning its neck with mild curiosity as it placidly chewed dilkies from a greasy little bag.

  Nick Bovino’s arm ached but his pride was more injured…that fucking little monkey had beaten him within a minute. Five feet tall and as skinny as his daughters. He cursed under his breath and rubbed at his arm. At least he’d seen a human man beat it, finally. A handsome young man had won against five contenders in a row, had been awarded a trophy…but those who had gathered and remained to watch him didn’t applaud his victory, cheer, or clap his back. They were either too shy or reserved or unemotional or too used to watching life through their VT screens.

  His wife and daughters had never caught up with him. Now where the hell were they? Probably watching those fireworks he had heard going off a little while back. Was that them up ahead? Christ, were they still gawking at those stupid crab legs? There was a small crowd there now but Nick saw his daughter Claire’s bright pink Sphitt t-shirt and knew it was them; he quickened his pace and drew in enough breath to berate them.

  “For Christ’s sake, Venus, are you still here?” he began, arm aching, pride smarting, grateful for the opportunity to yell at someone.

  “Look,” she told him.

  Nick looked. His brow furrowed. “What the blast are they doing?”

  The three Bedbugs stood before the legs in a line, the one in the middle with some kind of black device on a strap around its head area which had no winking lights or lit screens but which exuded a thin bluish stream of gas from a grilled vent in one side.

  There was a waterfall splashing out of the sky. It poured over several of the legs and had a faint pinkish tinge. A large muddy puddle with trash floating in it spread around the Bedbugs’ pincered feet. Was that creature actually underwater in its dimension, having now torn a hole wide enough to let in its sea? How long might it go on for–long enough to flood the carnival until they could get some zapper under the flow to catch and eliminate it? Might the hole in the dam widen, the gush too violent to contain, until that alien sea flooded all of Punktown? Or was this a sort of amniotic fluid released with the birth of the creature into this plane?

  Nick saw a curled leg uncurl and touch the muddy ground; he could see it sink and settle as weight shifted onto it heavily. He watched a pincered claw appear from the sky, then become a whole leg which also settled into the mud, all within thirty seconds. He counted fifteen legs in various states of advancement, with more claws appearing.

  The moon-sculpture called The Head was nearly directly overhead.

  “Let’s go, Mom.” Mallory clung to Venus’s waist. “I’m scared.”

  “Wow!” said a little Choom boy who came running to watch.

  Something else began to appear…not a leg. Its shape and identity were not apparent at first, particularly through the widening pink waterfall.

  “My God!” Venus exclaimed, recoiling suddenly against Nick. “Look at those eyes!” And then she let out a scream…but at something new that had come into her vision.

  Toward the crowd came a human man, pained but determined. Blood from his nose had caked on his face, in his mustache. He wore a dusty black plastic jacket and carried a frighteningly over-complex rifle with multiple barrels, heavy-looking for him to carry let alone the dead child he had taken it from.

  “Look out,” he croaked to the crowd firmly, and they obliged…had been obliging even before he spoke.

  One of the Bedbugs noticed him and began to chitter excitedly, a cicada-like sound.

  The man took a wide stance and red ray bolts sprayed from him.

  The chattering Bedbug went into a crazed tarantella. Some of the bolts glanced off its chitin-like armor. Others cracked the shell, sent pieces of it flying like pottery shards, and a viscous greenish fluid spattered and ran from the punctures. It went onto its back, kicking and lashing its tentacle-like arms in the spasm of death.

  Hector switched his aim to the one in the middle.

  The black device, specifically. The blue smoke vanished, the plastic or metal or chitin shell dented, cracked, and from the cracks escaped flicking snake tongues of black electricity. The web of electricity spread from the device across the shaking Bedbug’s body. The device didn’t explode…the black current simply stopped, and released from its grip, the Bedbug dropped dead, its two prosthetic arms adapted to life in a hominid-dominated society steaming.

  Hector ducked as one of the giant legs shot out of the air and swept at his head. Another–it caught his sleeve. He hurled himself to the ground, and from the ground on his back fired at the last Bedbug as it came leaping-scrambling toward him with maniacal speed and movements, chattering piercingly. Before the whipping arms could reach him the ray bolts drove it back, back, back. It fell, convulsed, the cicada-screams dwindling and green life fluid oozing.

  Hector rolled away from the reaching arms through the mud, regained his footing and now faced the eyes of the Gatherer.

  It made no sound, no cry, but despite the nonhuman aspect of the eyes, Hector could see and hear the roar of hatred in them. The chanting device was destroyed; it was wedged between worlds…pinned. But so long as it was reaching into this world it could still collect the energy-traces of the freshly dead. Hector leveled the muddy humming rifle and squeezed its trigger.

  The ray bolts glanced off the thick external skull-like housing around the eyes, but one eye dented in, dented more, caved inward and a pudding-thick green blood came flopping out. Quick scribbles of black electricity also issued from the wound. The great creature did not cry out even now, but the legs had gone mad, all clawing the air and mud, tangling with each other, the many heads of a Hydra with a sword in its breast. Hector couldn’t hit the other eye through that frenzy, or worsen the damage of the existing wound. Hot rays whined off the armored legs–one of them, the first one, still sporting the spray-painted words “Toby Fucks” like a tattoo.

  A bolt ricocheted back at Hector, over his shoulder, almost hitting someone off behind him as well. This wasn’t working. He looked down at the gun, read the tiny digital displays. Plasma launcher. He thumbed the switch and a green light came on. Again he pointed the rifle and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

  Someone from behind was coming forward, and took his elbow.

  “Let me see that,” said Nick Bovino, jaw set. “I was in the army.”

  Hector allowed the man to take the weapon from him, stepped to one side to numbly watch.

  Nick fell into the wide stance of a rock singer, swivelled the gun, muscles bulging, and yelled as he launched plasma capsule after plasma capsule…

  The white hot gelatinous material quickly encased a number of those limbs that pawed at the air like the legs of rearing demon horses. The legs blazed a trembling white, and the increased frantic kicking and stamping sent hot globules flying, dislodged, but fortunately no one was hit.

  The audience grew–people came running, children with puffs of candyfloss–and some of its members advanced to plant themselves beside Nick. Two teenage gang boys spat at the creature and then opened fire with their revolvers loaded with a much weaker plasma bullet. A paunchy middle-aged Choom with a baseball cap blew off rounds on an old semiauto with lead bullets. A Fog security man arrived panting, then another, confused as to whether to break up the firing squad or add to it–but by then Nick had started punctuating his plasma onslaught with rocket grenades. This cooperation was not harmony. The audience and shooters shared a focus, unified in fear, and loathing, and hostility. On one hand it was encouraging. On the other, these people weren’t sure why they were fighting this monster, except that they had seen one man, Hector, battling it. They only knew it was big an
d unknown to them and so they feared it and so they had to destroy it. Only by a dim instinct and by good fortune were they correct, this time, in their hostility…and so it was heartening to Hector nonetheless as he watched them kill the Gatherer. This time it was cavemen spearing a mammoth rather than big game hunters shooting an elephant. It had a good purpose. He could admire them–cautiously.

  The rocket grenades were what did the trick, so it was Nick, really, who killed the monster, the others just adding their symbolic support. And even then they couldn’t be sure the great animal was actually dead–both eyes gone, chunks of armor blasted away, the legs no longer thrashing, just quivering limply, dragging the mud, some finally melted to stumps by the plasma, the constant pink waterfall rinsing away the oozing green blood–as it slowly slipped backward into its own dimension. The head with the black electricity dancing from its shattered eyes submerged into empty air, vanished. Leg after leg. The waterfall decreased. The water stopped, the receding stopped, the portal clamped shut on two last legs, one of them reading “Toby Fucks.” And these Nick blasted with plasma and grenades while the security men pushed everyone else back. The bombs shook Hector; he flinched. And it was over.

  Shiny with sweat and grinning, exhilarated, Nick looked around for Hector as if he might hand him a trophy. He would make love to Venus tonight like a teenager. “Hey–you want this back?” He extended the bulky rifle.

  “Keep it.” Hector smiled tiredly, his bruised belly unknotting slowly, gingerly…but with pleasure, as if insinuating itself into a soothing steamy bath. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah…sure.” Nick would have liked to ask the man some questions but he was already slipping away into the crowd, vanishing from sight like the creature. Nick was left standing confused, holding the assault engine, muscular and sweaty, and it was Nick who would appear in holographs and photos on the front pages of tomorrow’s tabloids and newspapers: “The Man Who Beat the Monster,” “The Hero at Last Night’s Paxton Fair.”