Lowland Rider

by Chet Williamson

  "Yeah. Yeah. The stuff you brought me last time was good, so I cut it a lot. I've still got some left."

  "Good. That's good. Come here. Sit down with me." She moved to the couch and sat beside him. He put an arm around her. "You won't need any more.”

  “Any more . . . heroin?"

  "No. We're going away. Finally. You're going to get clean."

  "Bob, I . . . I don't think I can."

  "Yes, you can. Where we're going. It's a beautiful place, Gina. A little house back in the woods. Not a city for miles and miles. Just clean air and trees and animals. And you and me together."

  "Bob . . ."

  He hugged her more tightly, and she put her head on his shoulder. "Do you know, Gina, that you're my first?"

  It was early, and she was still sleepy. She closed her eyes and listened to his voice, soft and comforting. "Your first?" she whispered.

  "Mmm-hmm. It's love that lets you do it, you know. I can do it now, for you. I love you, Gina.”

  “I know, Bob. I love you."

  He shifted slightly, pushing his hips forward so that he could reach the pistol behind his back with his left hand. He removed it quietly and brought it around, holding it down over the side of the couch so that she would not see it. He did not want her to see it, did not want her to know.

  "Turn around," he said. "Turn around and put your head in my lap." She sat up, turned, put her legs over the right arm of the couch, and he aimed at the nape of her neck, at the place where the round hardness of the skull ends, and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet snapped her head forward for a second, and he saw the hole it made in the wispy tendrils that covered her neck. An instant later, she fell back with her head on his lap, and he felt the warm blood run from her body, dampening his groin. Her eyes were still open, but he knew they saw nothing.

  "You are my first," he told her, in case she could still hear him. "You were always the first, the only thing with me. This is the only way I can get you loose from it now, the only way we can be together."

  He thought for a moment that he saw her eyes move, that somehow, somewhere in death she heard him, and was even now waiting for him. A sound came from out in the hall. It might have been a door slamming, but he wasn't sure. He only knew that he didn't have much time left. The sound of shots kept people away in this city, but not forever. Sooner or later someone would come, and he had to leave before then, or the fate he had wished on Sinclair would be his as well—there were too many people in the jails of the state who hated him for him to live longer than a few days, even if he had wanted to. He didn't.

  Finally, he thought, he had killed someone. And it made so much sense. She was the only person other than himself that he could kill. You had to love someone to kill them, he didn't know why he'd never realized that before. He hoped he could love himself, poor, foolish man that he was, enough to pull the trigger again.

  He looked into Gina's wet eyes, and put the barrel of the pistol into his mouth.

  Love. It's all because of love.

  He pulled the trigger and entered darkness.

  And in the darkness, a hundred feet directly beneath where Bob and Gina Montcalm lay, Enoch stood within a tunnel, gazing upward, the only light around him the pale glow which radiated from his perfect face, a face suffused with love.

  CHAPTER 30

  Rags had been looking for Jesse for hours, ever since he had run from the spur where he had seen Baggie and Enoch together. As he ran, he expected to hear footsteps behind him, growing ever nearer until he was dragged to the stones and. . .

  And what? Torn? Devoured? Or something worse? But nothing had happened. He had heard no sound behind him, no laughter, no shrieks of fury. It was as though Enoch had wanted him to see, had wanted him to run and tell someone, to spread the gospel. . .

  Now what had brought that idea into his mind, he wondered uncomfortably. Connecting the gospel to the hideous thing he had seen done was the worst kind of blasphemy, and he struggled to get the word out of his mind.

  He finally found Jesse at the Times Square station, standing beneath a clock, looking up at it as if he expected it to tell him something more than the time, for of what use was time to skells? "Jesse," Rags panted as he scuttled up to the man, then stopped.

  Jesse's eyes were more intense than Rags had ever seen them. There was something else too. If he could have put this Jesse Gordon beside the Jesse Gordon he first met down here months ago, he doubted if he could have told that they were the same man. It was not so much a matter of physical appearance as it was of attitude. The man who stood before him now was a creature of the tunnels, but not a skell. There was none of the secretiveness, the shabbiness, the sense of subservience, of being something less than human, about Jesse Gordon. Rather there was a sense of place, there was purpose, there was mission in the lines of his face, in the set of his shoulders. This was a man who was home, who was where he was always meant to be.

  Jesse was no longer wearing a white T-shirt. Instead he had on his black turtleneck. But despite the heat of the station, there were no signs of perspiration on his face. He looked cool and ready and unafraid. He looked, thought Rags, like a Deliverer.

  "Jesse," Rags said again.

  "What is it, Rags? Is it Enoch?"

  How did he know? "Yeah, oh sweet Jesus, it sure is. I seen Baggie, that old woman, she had a baby, Jesse. She took somebody's baby, and she killed it, she killed it right in front of Enoch, like they done for Baal in the Bible."

  "What did you do, Rags?" Jesse's voice was quiet and still.

  "What did I do?"

  "Did you try and stop her?"

  "I… I didn't know for sure till it was too late. I seen her on the train and she . . . she had a knife, Jesse."

  "Find her, Rags. Take her knife. Stop her.”

  “Stop her? I can't . . . she got a knife, Jesse.”

  “This is your chance, Rags. The chance to make up for what you did, why you came down here. Children, Rags. To save children."

  "Jesse, I…"

  "You think she'll stop now? You think Enoch will stop, will say that's enough, that's fine, go and kill no more?"

  "Jesse…"

  "Find her, Rags. Stop her."

  "You're telling me to kill her."

  "Yes."

  "But . . . but even if I do, that won't stop Enoch. Somebody else'll do for him, bring him babies.”

  “I'll stop Enoch."

  "You?"

  "I'll stop Enoch," Jesse said again.

  Rags looked into Jesse's face for a long time before he spoke again. "You been sent, Jesse? That it? You been sent?"

  For the first time, Jesse looked down, and a touch of humanity in the form of confusion and uncertainty crossed his face. "Something sent me. Something . . ." He paused, then said, "Walk with me."

  It seemed to Rags that they walked hundreds of yards through a honeycomb of tunnels before Jesse spoke again. When he did, his words were slow and measured, as if he had never before dared to think the words, let alone speak them.

  "I think I was sent, Rags. By what I don't know. Maybe it was by God." He smiled bitterly. "After it happened, I thought there was no God, that there could be no purpose in it, that a god wouldn't let such things happen. But I think I was wrong. There was a purpose. Sit with me."

  They sat together on a bench at the end of an uptown platform. Jesse leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs. His eyes looked at the edge of the platform, but Rags knew he was seeing far more. "Random violence. That's what I couldn't accept, what nobody can really accept. It means an unstructured universe, Rags. It means that there's no reason for anything. Why go on living and struggling when a random act can kill us in an instant? What's the point? But the longer I've been down here, the more I've seen. And the more I've thought about it, the more I see patterns. Reasons. Reasons for everything. And there are reasons we can't see, and those are the ones that drive us mad, that make us think the world is a madhouse."

&nbs
p; Rags shook his head wearily. "I see what you mean, Jesse, but I don't know what difference it makes. It's just a way of looking at things."

  Jesse put a hand on Rags's shoulder. "All life is a way of looking at things. And how we look at things makes us who we are, makes us do what we do."

  "But what's the reason for your wife? And for your little girl? For the boy you killed?"

  "To bring me down here. Nothing less would have brought me here. But that chain of events—their deaths leading to my killing the boy who tried to help me—that was enough. They were sacrifices, Rags. As horrible as that seems, they were necessary sacrifices to the final purpose."

  His eyes were alive now. Rags did not want to ask the question, but he had no choice. "What . . . what's that purpose then?"

  "To kill Enoch."

  "Jesse . . ."

  "The evil that comes from him is unbelievable, Rags. I don't know what hold he has over people, but I do know it's incredibly strong. You've just seen it with Baggie, and I've seen it several times. These tunnels stink with his power."

  "It ain't no earthly power, Jesse," Rags said.

  "I don't know about that, Rags, but if it isn't, then no earthly power sent me down here to deal with him."

  "How you gonna find him, Jesse?"

  "I can find him. I can do whatever it is that I have to do. And so can you, Rags. Find Baggie. Stop her. With whatever it takes. Bring me the knife."

  "Jesse…"

  "Rags," Jesse said, laying a hand on his friend's shoulder, "You're going to die soon. Nothing is going to stop that from happening. That growth is going to kill you. If you stop Baggie, that will mean something. It's good you're doing, Rags. Good."

  Rags began to raise a hand to his neck, but stopped before he touched the hard swelling beneath the cloths. The hand closed into a fist. "I'd be doing… good?"

  "Yes, Rags. Good. Go. Stop her. I'll find Enoch." Jesse walked away.

  Rags looked down at his feet. Jesse's words had hurt him, but in a strange way they had also given him hope. Maybe, he thought, Jesse was right. Maybe the way for Rags to redeem himself was to kill Baggie, just as Jesse wanted to redeem himself by killing Enoch.

  All right then. All right. If he was going to die, he had nothing to lose. He'd find her then. He'd find Baggie. One thing was sure—it would be a damn sight easier dealing with her than dealing with Enoch. Baggie could take your life, but Rags was all too certain that Enoch could take your soul.

  CHAPTER 31

  Enoch. She heard the name echo over and over in her mind. She saw His face before her, filled with love and peace and satisfaction, and she knew that she loved Him too, and that what had passed between them would last her the rest of her life, even if she was never to see Him again.

  But she would see Him again. She had brought Him her sacrifice, and He had loved her for it, and she had told Him that there would be more, she would not make Him ask for more, oh no, never make Enoch ask again. Now she knew all, now she was one of the blessed, and she looked around her at the teeming thousands who scurried through the tunnels, and knew that they were there whenever she needed them. They were ready for the harvest, ready for Enoch. All she had to do was pick them.

  She carried no bags now, nothing but the clothes on her back and the knife buried deep in her pocket, and the ruby that He had given her, that stone as large as the baby's fist, red as the baby's blood. He told her to do what she would with it—sell it and use the money to live on if she liked. But she would never do that. Sell a gift from Enoch? It was unthinkable. She would keep it always, and take it from her pockets when no one was looking, stare into its red depths, and see Enoch's face. That was all she wanted from life now.

  To see Enoch's face.

  CHAPTER 32

  "Son of a bitch!" Tony Rodriguez said in English. He had just woken up and flicked on the color TV at the foot of the bed to see a black and white photo of Bob Montcalm on the noon news. Angelina, his most recent lady, was singing a salsa song at the dressing table. "Shut up," he told her in Spanish, and she did, allowing him to hear the rest of the story. When it was over, Rodriguez hit the remote and turned the set off. "Son of a bitch," he said again, more quietly.

  "What's wrong?" Angelina asked in Spanish. Her English was poor.

  "Guy I know. Transit cop I paid to let me do business on his line. He killed himself this morning. Something about the murder of a janitor. Now what the fuck…" he added in English, shaking his head.

  "I bet there was a woman," Angelina said, straightening the straps of her filmy nightgown and cupping her breasts.

  "What?"

  "A woman. Men always kill themselves over a woman."

  Rodriguez frowned, feeling himself grow semi-erect and wondering if maybe they had time to do it again before he hit the street. "Yeah, there was a woman all right. His wife. He shot her too."

  "Ah," Angelina said, crossing to the bed and smiling at the bump Rodriguez's spiky penis made under the sheet. "You see? She was cheating on him. Was she beautiful, I wonder?"

  "All I know about her was that she was a junkie. I used to give him heroin for her." He reached up and touched a breast. Angelina slid onto the bed and licked his neck.

  "And he killed her for love," she said, grasping his penis through the sheet.

  "He didn't kill her," Rodriguez said, unmoving. "He . . . paralyzed her."

  "What?"

  "She can't move, can't speak."

  "Poor woman," Angelina said, pulling her nightgown over her head and slipping between the sheets. After a minute of working on him, she looked up, a child's petulant frown on her sixteen-year-old face. "What's wrong?" she asked him.

  "I was just thinking," Rodriguez said, looking at the ceiling, "about what she will feel when that first craving hits her. Mother of God, what will she feel?"

  His lust was gone. He got dressed and went out onto the street, hoping that the dead man had not mentioned him in any notes, looking for new territories, thinking of tortured Gina Montcalm, hearing her silent screams.

  CHAPTER 33

  It was rush hour when Rags found Baggie in the 66th Street IRT station. She was standing against a wall, watching the people pass. There was none of the misanthropy that had previously sat on her face like a cloud. She seemed, Rags thought, to be enjoying herself, like a patron of an outdoor cafe, sipping a drink and watching the people pass, in love with life and the city. If her appearance had not been unmistakable, he might have thought she was a different woman.

  Everyone was changing—first Jesse, now Baggie, and even himself. Was he really going to kill this woman in cold blood? Even as he asked himself the question, he knew that he was. And why? Because Jesse had told him to do so. And didn't that make him the same as Baggie, with her blind obedience to Enoch?

  No. He didn't think so. There was a difference. He was killing something evil to stop the evil from killing more good. That had been done before, in the Bible. God's people had destroyed the people who were evil.

  But Rags, said a voice within him, who made you one of God's people?

  Jesse did, he answered. Jesse did, and he's enough.

  He didn't know how he was going to kill her. He had no weapon, and, though he was big and strong enough to kill her with his hands, he did not know how he could do that with all these people around. Then the thought occurred to him that it worked both ways. How could she do anything to him?

  He moved toward her through the crowd, and was soon close enough to reach out and touch her. "Hey," he said, and she turned and looked at him. Her eyes narrowed, but there was none of the hatred that she had shown whenever she had seen him before. There was rather a bland curiosity, and she cocked her head and looked at him as though she recognized him as an old acquaintance, but couldn't be sure, and was afraid of getting his name wrong.

  "I wanta see you," Rags said, and she cocked her head to the other side. What the hell, Rags wondered. Had she gone simple? Like a kid? "You hear me? I wanta see you."

/>   She turned away from him then and walked off. He followed her through the milling mob, pushing aside the owners of the thigh-high forest of briefcases and handbags that struck at him. Baggie didn't look back to see if he was coming, but plowed ahead, her arms hidden by her body and the throng.

  At last, near the turnstiles, the crowd began to thin, and he was able to get close to her again. But she walked faster, toward a short passage he had never been down before, with gray, unmarked, closed doors on either side. "You wait a minute," he said, and put out his hand, grabbed her shoulder.

  She whirled on him, and he saw that the fury had returned to her face. It was alight with hate as she swung her knife in a savage backhand across his throat.

  The rags saved him. He felt a coldness beneath his chin, a sudden shock, but no pain, and he realized that although the knife had cut him, it was now tangled in the layers of cloth that wrapped his neck, and Baggie was tugging at it frantically, the exertion spraying a fine mist of spittle into Rags's face.

  He brought up his arm and shoved her backward so that she stumbled, losing the grip on the knife. Rags wrenched it from the cloths with his right hand and pressed his throat with the other. He felt wetness, but did not look at his hand. His eyes were on Baggie.

  She started to growl, a low, bubbling roar that sounded more to Rags like the approach of a faraway train than anything from a human throat. And; like a train, she came at him, hands in front of her, her white, twiglike fingers crooked into claws to tear his eyes. He thrust out the knife and caught her on it.

  The breath left her in a cloud of blood as Rags's hands, pushed by rock-hard arms, sank into the wound the knife had made and pressed through the woman's ripped flesh, which bathed his forearms in red warmth. Her arms fell to her side, her head rocked back, and the two of them stood there, the man holding the woman in a dance of death. At last he drew a shuddering breath and stepped back, but she fell against him, as if reluctant to break their embrace. He yanked his arms away, leaving the knife deep within the cavern of her torso, and the body fell to the floor with a soft, wet sound. He looked at it for a long time, unable to believe that anything that alive with hatred could die so easily.