by Alan Rodgers
Still. Still. It would leave him dead for a time. And more important was the act of murder itself. George Stein was a religious man, and a good man, he liked to think. And he knew that intimate murder was perhaps the vilest sin one man could commit against another. And he knew that few things in his life had soothed his soul the way that murder did. It should be a foul thing, he knew — squeezing and squeezing Herman’s thin, wiry neck, feeling his thumbs press deep into the man’s arteries and windpipes. Watching the skin of Herman Bonner’s face redden deeper and deeper, shift finally toward a blackish ocher. His eyes bulge out spasmodically — but not just involuntarily. Herman’s bulging eyes, his contorted features — they were a mask of terror, not just involuntary movement.
And it was good, because Herman Bonner had hurt him, and violated him in ways that George Stein had never imagined that he could be violated. Until he felt Herman go slack and dead, and George Stein began to come back to his senses, and as soon as he did he was ashamed of himself.
He had a lot to atone for. And, it seemed, every day there was more.
That was when he remembered St. Louis.
Dear God, he thought, Herman’s sent them out to destroy that city. I’ve got to stop them, stop them —
He looked down at Herman, and saw him still and cooling, discolored, tongue protruding. He was dead, no question. George let his hands relax, stood to walk into the other room, where he’d call somebody and get that damnable thing stopped. . . .
He didn’t get very far. Before he was even fully erect Herman was all over him, alive because he’d never died, he wasn’t human, he wasn’t something you could kill — and he was furious. . . .
And strong. Stronger than any man his size could possibly be. Before George Stein even knew what was happening Herman Bonner was picking him up and throwing him across the room, and he was flying through the air until his neck and the back of his head smacked all his weight into the opposite wall, breaking his neck.
It was a long time after that before George Stein was alive again.
³ ³ ³
INSIDE THE KOREAN DEMILITARIZED ZONE
Bill didn’t die, the way it turned out. Not precisely. Nor, precisely, did he survive. Two of the three bullets that tore into his abdomen burst and destroyed vital sweetbreads. Those wounds by themselves would have killed him over the course of hours, if it weren’t for the microbes thriving in his blood; as it was, they were no real threat.
It was the third bullet that brought Bill to the border land between life and death, and held him there for hours. It struck him in the stomach as the force of the first two threw Bill toward the ground — struck, because of the incline of his fall, at an angle. An angle that sent it through Bill’s center, instead of toward his spine. And instead of lodging in the hard muscle of his back, as the first two bullets had, this third round sunk itself down into the cavity that held his heart.
And that was the first thing that killed Bill: a heart attack, brought on by bruise and laceration of his heart. Not that Bill knew the first thing about it; by the time the heart attack killed him, he was already insensate, deep in shock.
The second thing that set out to destroy Bill was the acid in his stomach. Which that same third bullet had set loose into his middle abdomen. Where it began to digest his insides, just as though they were food.
Again, it wasn’t any damage the microbes couldn’t have undone. By the time his heart was ready to attempt to restart itself, five minutes after the heart attack, the peritonitis had done its damage, and the repair had barely begun. And as the blood began to surge through the great arteries in his abdomen, the one nearest his stomach — weak and corrupt from self-digestion — burst. And sent blood gushing all through the space between Bill’s sweetbreads.
And Bill died again, instantly.
Still: in its way the burst artery was a blessing. The blood that flowed from it was more than enough to absorb the stomach acid, and even as Bill died an ounce of it was clotting around the bullet hole in his stomach. If it hadn’t been for the bullet beside his heart Bill would have begun to recover immediately.
The bullet was lodged beside Bill’s heart. And when, twenty minutes later, his body tried to restart itself again, that bullet killed him all over again. And killed him for the stupidest reason: Bill’s heart was more than strong enough to throb with a gumdrop-sized knot of lead crouched beside it.
It wasn’t the presence of the bullet, in and of itself, that killed Bill for the third time in less than half an hour: what killed him was a tiny nick in the bullet’s skin. A nick that scratched at the membrane of his heart, tearing it with every beat. Again and again, ever so slightly. Until, after a little less than two dozen beats, the scraping became too much and Bill’s heart seized up for the third time.
And the process of rebirth started all over again.
It went on like that, with Bill living and dying and living and dying, for most of three hours.
Never in all that time did Bill’s brain starve completely for lack of oxygen; the intermittent beating of his heart was just enough to hold him just above the edge of brain death.
And lying for hours in that place that wasn’t life and wasn’t death, Bill Wallace began to dream.
Just as Luke Munsen and Christine Gibson had dreamed not long before.
And just as the life that sustained him wasn’t entirely life — just as Luke’s and Christine’s dreams had not entirely been dreams — the visions that came to Bill were something other than mere seeings.
³ ³ ³
At the very beginning of the dream, Bill was alone in a dim room that was lit by nothing but the candle on the desk in front of him. He sat at that desk, writing a letter with a fine-tip ball-point pen on unruled white paper.
His first awareness was that he’d been writing for a long time. So long, in fact, that he had no memory of ever having started.
He did know what he was writing: a letter to his long-lost love.
Which was a peculiar thing indeed, since he hadn’t had a steady girl since he’d been nineteen. And while she’d been a swell girl, he hadn’t loved her then and knew that he didn’t love her now.
It’s strange here, he wrote, and no fun at all. But if everything goes right I’ll be home soon, and then. . . . Please remember always that I love you very, very much. And miss you more than I know words to say.
And then the dream fell out from under him, and the desk and the letter and the girl he loved but didn’t know were all gone, just as though they’d never been.
From the moment the new dream began, Bill knew that he wasn’t alone inside it.
Here, looking at him quiet and expectantly, was the beautiful Asian woman. Her hair the color of the onyx his grandma gave him when he turned eighteen. Skin that seemed the color of gold when you mixed it with copper, but wasn’t that exactly, because nobody really had skin that looked like metal. Her lips so thin, so fine; and her eyes almost the same blue-black color of her hair, but brighter.
Why was she here? This was Bill’s dream, not hers. And when Bill looked at her he knew that she was no dream-phantom; the people in his dreams were never so exact nor so mysterious as the woman who sat there on that grassy hill beside him.
The boy, Jerry Williams, was playing on the summit of the hill beside theirs. And somewhere invisible in the distance was another presence that Bill thought he recognized — though where he recognized it from he couldn’t say.
The black-eyed woman was smiling at him.
“Who are you?” she asked him. “Why do I know you?”
Bill blinked. Frowned.
“You followed me,” he said. “From down in the tunnels. You remember, don’t you? We were all together. You and me and the boy and that dead man. We walked a couple of miles together. Out around that mountain. Into the DMZ.”
Now it was her turn to frown. “No,
” she said. “Of course I remember that. How could I forget the explosions? That man. That same man who killed me. The bodies. . . !” She looked away. “No. I’ve known you longer than that.”
Bill shrugged. “News to me. First I saw of you was in the laboratory, there — just when you was beginning to wake up.”
Her lips pursed; she looked uneasy. “Who are you, then? Have I seen you . . . in the news maybe? On television? In the papers?”
Bill thought about that: it was possible. Just barely. He hadn’t been around to see it himself, but it was pretty likely that he’d made the papers as the man who’d killed the President. It wasn’t anything he wanted to talk about if he could avoid it. “Could be. I might’ve been in the papers round about a week ago. Any idea,” he hesitated, because the question he was about to ask was one that struck him as indelicate, “any idea how long you been dead?”
It was indelicate, too. Had to be, to judge by the way it made her expression so distant. Made her warm black eyes look cool and still as lake water in the starlight.
“No,” she said, finally. “It’s summer now. I died in early spring. When the trees first began to green with soft small leaves.”
And for the longest time she didn’t say another word. Didn’t make a sound, in fact, until Bill got tired of the emptiness in the air and spoke up himself.
“You got any idea where we are?” he asked her. “Any idea what we’re supposed to be doing here?”
The woman shook her head. God she was beautiful.
“Maybe we should get up. Walk around a little. See if there’s anything else here besides us and the boy and the hills and the grass.”
She hesitated again before she answered. “If you’d like.”
They were down in the low between their hill and the boy’s when Bill’s foot twisted out from underneath him and sent him stumbling into her. For a moment he thought he was going to end up throwing both of them into the grass — but the black-eyed woman was amazingly strong; she caught him up in her arms and before he could understand what was going on she was holding Bill gently as he’d try to hold a child.
Gently as he’d hold a lover.
Her arms were wrapped around him. One reached between his neck and right shoulder. The other supported him from the ribs below his left arm. Her hands met, one above the other, at the center of his spine.
His arm was around her waist; Bill could feel the firm soft skin of her waist through her silk blouse.
There was a dance like this, he thought. And wondered if he’d pulled that dance up out of memory, into his dream. Bill wasn’t enough of a dancer to be able to name it, but he’d seen it before, in movies.
“You’re stronger than I’d realized,” he said.
She laughed. “This is a dream,” she said. “A dreamer is always as strong as he lets himself believe.”
Bill wasn’t any too sure what she meant by that. It didn’t matter, much; his head was too full of the sight of her looking so beautiful down into his eyes. He wanted to reach up and kiss her, and — and do whatever felt natural after that. He held back because he didn’t know if that was what she wanted, and he wanted her so bad that he didn’t know that he could take it if she told him to stop.
And then all of the sudden it didn’t matter, because she lowered her face and kissed his lips ever so light, so dry like a feather that the electric power of it sent a chill that washed all through him.
So wonderful, so basic and necessary and needful that Bill wondered how he’d managed to go through an entire life without ever living though that kiss before.
And two things happened, the one right after the other:
The boy screamed, up on the hill before them.
And night fell sudden as a curtain over the sky that had been blue and bright as noon.
“What?” Bill felt the word rise up out of his throat involuntarily. Suddenly he was standing, looking up a hill that was far taller than it had been only a moment ago. The woman he loved was beside him —
No. That couldn’t be her. Could it?
She turned to him. Nodded. And he saw her face. And saw that it was her, the same oriental woman he loved who followed him up out of the tunnels below the Korean DMZ.
She was wearing a full suit of armor.
Armor like a knight’s armor, at least in spirit. In detail it was modern and sleek; black-painted steel and high-impact plastic from a technophile’s dream.
She raised her sword above her head, and lightning struck it, and it glowed. And she told him to follow her up into hell.
That presence again. The same dark, invisible presence he’d felt when this portion of the dream first started.
The presence that he recognized.
Just out of sight in every direction; silent but just on the verge of speaking.
Bill focused himself as he followed his one true love, tried to peel the confused half-memories away from one another, tried to figure out just how it was he recognized that presence —
Did it have anything to do with the reason the boy was screaming, why night had fallen so suddenly all around them? He didn’t think so —
And that was when he recognized it.
Recognized him.
The dead policeman. The presence was the dead policeman.
And it wasn’t the threat; the dead policeman’s aura was like a love that protected them from the cold and harshness of the night.
They were almost at the crest of the hill. A step; another. One more and they saw over the rise, saw the boy. . . .
Oh dear God. Bill saw the boy. Saw the thing that menaced him. And horrible as that thing was Bill knew that it was real, because it was too terrible to be anything his own imagination could have made. He knew his limits; knew his faults and his propensities. Nothing Bill would ever imagine would look like that. Never — not even if he lived for a million years.
It had ten heads, each of them fully formed and alive. Reptilian heads, every one viler and hungrier-looking than the one beside it. And from the topmost center of each head there was a horn like the horn of a rhinoceros. Mouths like lions’ maws. More than anything else, the creature reminded Bill of a massive, grey-pelted leopard. Those lower legs, those feet, they were the feet of a bear. And it had hands, too — but they were more like the hands of a monkey than they were like a man’s.
One of those hands held the boy high in the air by the neck of his t-shirt; dangled him above the hungry sets of jaws as though he were some tasty bit of food —
“The Beast!” his lover shouted. “We have to kill it while still we can!”
And she charged the foul, foul thing, leading with her sword —
And the Beast from Revelation laughed. All ten heads rising toward the moon, baring their throats to the edge of her blade as though it were only inconsequential danger. And his love charged close, drew back her sword to cut —
Before her blade could begin its forward arc the Abomination grabbed her the wrist of her sword arm, and lifted her, and Bill heard the sound of shattering bone.
And he leapt at the thing himself, armed with nothing but his bare hands, armored by nothing but a t-shirt and denim slacks. He dove for its waist which would have been an underbelly if the damned thing hadn’t been erect on its hind legs — trying to push it to the ground where the woman and the boy would have the leverage of their feet to defend themselves. Bill might just as well have been trying to tackle a tree or a concrete lamppost, for all the difference he made; the Abomination wasn’t even shaken, and the impact was so bad it’d like to break Bill’s neck, and in an instant there were jaws as large and strong as a bear trap clamped into his scalp, trying to crush his skull —
And just as sudden as day had turned to night, Bill was falling to the ground and was the boy and was the woman who he loved, and where the Abomination had been rock and metal against
his body there was nothing at all but the ground rushing up to meet him.
There was something else above him now; and Bill looked up to see it.
“Get away, Herman. You haven’t got any business here. Not now, and not ever in a place like this.” And there in the air where Beast had been was an oval portal like a door into another world, and the Beast was drifting away, evaporating into wisps of vapor thinner than fog.
Bill looked up, into the portal — and found himself staring eye-to-eye with the President he’d murdered.
He shook his head, trying to clear it. “I killed you,” Bill said. “What are you doing here? Have you come back to haunt me or something?”
There was a twinkle in the man’s eye that wasn’t like anything in any picture of President Paul Green that Bill had ever got a look at. It looked unnatural on him — kind of like Boris Badinov from the Bullwinkle cartoons dressed up in a Santa Claus suit. Bill thought that maybe it wouldn’t have seemed quite that way if he hadn’t seen so many pictures of the guy acting like a raving lunatic.
“No,” the President said. “I wouldn’t hurt you.” and he looked genuinely wounded. Not like a put-on at all, but like Bill’s question really had hurt him. Still, Bill was suspicious of the man. Even if he was dead, and dead for good by all accounts. Even if he had saved them from the Abomination from the Book of Revelation. Even if he was acting like some kind of a fairy godfather.
“Then why’re you here?”
The President sighed. Patiently.
The boy was on his feet, examining the place where the portal into some other world met the air in this one. “He’s here to save us from that thing,” Jerry said. In a tone of voice that suggested it was a matter of indisputable fact. “Aren’t you, Mr. President?”
“No. Herman couldn’t have done you any real harm. Not here. No matter how real he seemed, he’s got less claim here than he does on the land of the living.”
Made no sense at all to Bill. Not one bit.
Jerry harrumphed.
