Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

  “We’ve got to get Mack and Sarge into the APC,” Gruen said to Koslow.

  “Then go forward and find out who’s alive ahead of us. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Gruen, they’re building barricades.”

  Gruen stared at him. What the fuck?

  He got into a crouch, then raised his head over the hood of the Humvee. The rear APC was still upright. It was a boxy, slab-sided thing on tracks, more heavily armored than the Humvees. More important, there were only four men in it, and room for eight more.

  One of the APC’s occupants was on the roof-mounted .50-caliber gun, 5 0

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  firing back the way they’d come. Two other marines were on their bellies by the tires, firing as well. The fourth man was probably behind the wheel. A hundred feet away at the end of the bridge, a jumble of car tires maybe three feet high had appeared like a magic trick, spanning the width of the bridge. More tires were being thrown onto the pile every second, even though the marines were filling the air with bullets. Locals swarmed out of the nearby buildings—five-story wooden shacks leaning into the river—and ran down the sloping streets toward the bridge, carrying tires, furniture, sheet metal. Like the entire city had been saving up junk in their backyards, waiting for this opportunity to personally fuck Private Gruen.

  “The shooters are lining up back there,” Koslow said. “Plenty of AK-47s, sounds like. They have us pinned down, at least until air support arrives. If we can get a gunship to clear—”

  Gruen looked at the man with disgust. “Air support? We don’t have time to camp here, Koslow. Forget the rifles—they’ve got RPGs. We’ve got to move now, before they frag us.”

  “Nazis!” the sergeant said. He was staring at the bridge wall behind Gruen. Gruen followed his stare. On the cement wall, a spray-painted red swastika. But that was like a holy symbol here, wasn’t it? A Hindu thing or something.

  “Go up front,” Gruen said to Koslow. “See if you can get around the hole and find out what happened with the lead vehicle. We’re going home in the APC.” The M113 was Vietnam-era technology, slow and cranky, but it was armored to hell. “Get back here quick, okay?”

  “Shit,” Koslow said. He rose into a crouch, then moved into the smoke to the west.

  Gruen turned back, and Sergeant Stevens was up, squatting on his haunches, the helmet off and on the pavement. Stevens tore a strip from the roll of medical tape and pressed it to the front of the helmet. Gruen wouldn’t have thought that right hand was functional.

  “What are you doing, Sarge? You need to get your helmet back on.”

  The sergeant ignored him. He pressed a second piece of tape onto the helmet, making an upside down V, and tore another strip from the roll.

  “Sergeant, please . . .”

  Stevens thumbed the third strip into place and suddenly jumped to his

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  feet, all trace of shock gone. Spine straight, shoulders back, he looked half a foot taller. Bullets ripped through the air around his head, but he ignored them. He gazed down at Gruen with a confident smile. Gruen had never noticed how blue the man’s eyes were.

  “Oh, shit,” Gruen said. He felt sick to his stomach. “I need you to sit down, Sergeant.”

  “Not Sergeant,” Stevens said.

  He placed the helmet firmly on his head. The tape on the forehead formed a blocky letter A.

  “It’s Captain.”

  Stevens stalked across the road to the steel roof hatch that had come loose from the overturned Humvee. He gripped the inside handle with his left hand and lifted it like a shield. It must have weighed thirty or forty pounds, but he held it easily by that one awkward handle.

  “Round up the men,” Stevens said. There was no arguing with that voice. “I’ll clear the barricade.”

  And then he ran toward the end of the bridge, into a hail of bullets. Gruen stood up, shouting, “Sarge! Sarge!” He’d never seen a man run so fast, so beautifully, covering the length of the bridge in what seemed to be a series of still frames. Stevens raised the makeshift shield in front of him, and bullets sparked off the steel and whined away—once, twice, and then a hailstorm. Several times rounds seemed to strike his legs and arms, causing a barely perceptible stutter, but if anything his speed increased. Ten feet from the barricade he leaped, legs spread in a V, his shield in front of him like a battering ram, his bandaged right fist outstretched. Two gunmen went flying, another three collapsed under him. And then he was gone, vanished behind the wall of smoke and tires, into the mass of attackers. Gruen looked around wildly. Koslow came back through the smoke, his arms around another marine, and two others followed. One of the followers carried a dead man. “Let’s go!” Gruen shouted. “Go, go, go!” He ran around the hummer and picked up Mack’s blood-soaked body. Mack’s left arm was missing, but Gruen didn’t see it anywhere on the pavement. The overturned hummer was still burning. There was nothing they could do for the bodies inside.

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  The marines ran toward the only remaining vehicle, the APC. The soldiers had stopped firing. Automatic gunfire still crackled from the west end of the bridge, but no one on this side seemed to be firing anymore. The driver opened the hatch from the inside, and the marines clambered into the rumbling vehicle, stepping on one another. It seemed to take minutes to load and get situated. Gruen sat on the bench seat, Mack cradled in his arms. The APC slowly backed up and swung around.

  “Hold on,” the driver said. The engine whined, and the tracks scraped and squealed. The APC jerked into motion, picked up speed. Through his window slit Gruen could see the ground moving past them. The vehicle jolted as it went over something—a tire, a body?—and then they were into the barricade.

  The APC struck the wall of tires, sending debris exploding away from them. Gruen gripped a handle above his head with one hand and held on to Mack with the other. The nose of the APC went up, banged down hard. The vehicle stopped. Gruen pulled himself off the floor, then bent to peer through the windows, looking for the sergeant. There.

  Stevens stood in the middle of an unmoving pile of bodies, the circular hatch still on his left arm. The edge of the shield was stained a solid stripe of red. His uniform hung in tatters. The flesh above his waist had been torn into red ribbons, as if he’d taken several rounds directly to the chest. There was nothing left of his right arm below the elbow. Gruen couldn’t understand why he hadn’t bled out by now. Stevens grinned, his teeth impossibly bright, and raised the stump of his arm into the suggestion of a salute. The marines stared at him through the windows. No one spoke.

  Then the shield dropped from his grip. Stevens fell to his knees, and pitched forward.

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  Half a block from the Hyatt Regency, traffic came to a dead stop. We were on Wacker, just above Michigan Avenue, almost in the shadow of the Hyatt’s black steel and gray-tinted glass towers. Competing mobs of protesters and costumed counterprotesters had overrun their sawhorse-delimited camps on the sidewalks in front of the hotel and were spilling into the street, compressing police officers and unaligned audience members between them. The protesters had signs and bullhorns, but the less organized countercrowd—DemoniCon attendees in trench coats, nightgowns, and red, white, and blue jumpsuits—looked to be having more fun.

  “Just drop me off here,” I said. There was nowhere to go except back the way we’d come, or maybe a hard left into the river.

  “Hold on,” Lew said. His phone was still plugged into his ear, and for a moment I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. He’d spent half the drive on the cell, interrogating a series of underlings who either couldn’t or wouldn’t install something called a domain controller. It was weird to think of Lew, disorganized geek, as a boss. But it was clearly killing him to be away from the office. “I’ll circle around and come back on Wacker.”

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  I’d
already opened the door. “Just pop the trunk. You can get back to work.”

  “It’s just these guys, if you don’t watch them they do it half-assed, and then you’ve got to scrape the servers and start over.”

  If you don’t watch them? I laughed. “Lew, Lew. You the man. And I don’t mean, you the man. You the man.”

  “Get a job, slacker.”

  The Audi’s trunk yawned open. I swung the duffel onto one shoulder, and the weight nearly tipped me off balance and onto the hood of the car behind me. Lew stepped out of the car, careful to keep his door from dinging the SUV next to him.

  He shook my hand and clapped me on the back. “So this doctor guy—call me and let me know how it goes. Good or bad, okay? Maybe me and Amra can cancel our thing, come back down, have dinner.”

  “No, don’t do that. Seriously.” He’d already apologized for having to do something with Amra’s friends tonight, and even one apology was very un-Lew. “I’m going to get an Uno’s pizza, a beer, watch some hotel porn, and go to sleep.” The cars next to us started rolling forward, and honks erupted from the line of cars stopped behind us. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  I got to the sidewalk, and watched the cop wave Lew’s Audi into the opposing lanes and send him back the way we’d come.

  “Well shit,” I said. On my own again.

  I turned and hiked up the hill toward the hotel, the duffel feeling like a dead body on my shoulder. The frigid wind lashed my hair and ruffled my spring jacket, a nylon, no-name thing from T. J. Maxx. Though I couldn’t see it, somewhere a few hundred yards ahead of me was the lake.

  As I reached the edge of the crowd, a huge man wheeled suddenly and I had to put out an arm to avoid colliding with him. He was big, over three hundred pounds. I would have taken him for a Fat Boy impersonator if not for the rest of his costume. He wore the Truth’s broadbrimmed fedora and a black trench coat cinched tight as a sausage casing. He grinned down at me, his face huge as a moon. Maybe he

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  wasn’t possessed, but there definitely seemed to be more than one person in there.

  “Sorry,” I said, and moved sideways, nudging between a teenage boy wearing horns (the Piper?) and a chaps-wearing Lariat. I shifted the duffel to my front and used it like a bumper to plow through a sea of impersonators: a Pirate King; a pair of white-gowned, curly-haired Little Angels; a Smokestack Johnny in pinstriped overalls; a half dozen shield-carrying Captains; two more Truths; a Beggar (pockets stuffed with Monopoly money); a goggle-eyed Kamikaze; a bare-chested Jungle Lord. The religious protesters were outnumbered, but made up for it in noise and passion. They were stacked up behind a row of sawhorses, shouting back at the DemoniCon fans, singing hymns, and waving signs:

  t h o u s h a lt n o t h av e a n y g o d b e f o r e m e l e t j e s u s i n t o y o u r h e a r t — n o t s a ta n s i m o n s ay s : n o a m e r i c a n i d o l o ta r s d o n ’ t b e d e m o n i - c o n n e d

  The protesters could have been from any number of denominations, from Roman Catholics to Latter-day Saints, but the flavor of the signs struck me as distinctly fundamentalist. Possession was the perfect disease for the postmetaphorical wings of the church. Most Anabaptist strains of Protestantism incorporated possession into their theology, and quite a few used the disorder on both ends of the equation: demons could take you, true, but so could Jesus. “Asking Jesus into your heart” wasn’t just a turn of phrase—he took you. The Pentecostals favored the spiritual third of the Trinity over Jesus himself, with the Holy Ghost repossessing believers at regular intervals, overriding their vocal cords to inflict glossolalia, and then moving on, leaving the suddenly empty vessels to collapse in the pews. 5 6

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  A funkily dressed woman in hoop earrings—I never would have taken her for a fundamentalist—held a sign that said, the body is g o d s ’ t e m p l e . I smiled at the punctuation, and the woman took this as interest and flipped the sign over: not the devils playg r o u n d . She wore a gold brooch in the shape of two Christian fish intersecting like an eye:

  I nodded—yes, very nice, have to be going now—and stepped past her. The brooch marked her as a Rapturist—and maybe they all were. It made sense for them to be here. The Rapturists saw possession as one more sign of the end days, clearly described in Revelations, and they’d taken possession logic a step further than most sects: Armageddon was being waged now, between angels and demons, with human bodies as the battlefield. To a Rapturist, DemoniCon attendees weren’t just misguided kids; they were plots of enemy territory to be captured.

  I wondered what they’d make of me. To a Rapturist, I was fucking Iwo Jima.

  A minute more of nudging and sidestepping got me past the last sawhorse, through the fundamentalists, and onto the mostly clear cement patio surrounding the Hyatt entrance. I pushed through the revolving door and stopped, dazed by the sudden absence of sunlight, bullhorns, and wind.

  My eyes adjusted to the dimness. The atrium was an immense glass box. The furnishings projected a bland veneer of luxury, like a Ford Crown Victoria with deluxe trim. Gleaming floors, stiff couches, a long front desk in dark wood.

  ICOP should have already started its sessions, but the lobby was largely empty of people. There was no one at the front desk, and only seven or eight people sat in the couches and chairs arranged in constellations around the room. I crossed the marbled floors until I could see around a large col-

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  umn to the far end of the lobby. Past the elevators was a set of escalators, one leading up and another two leading down to the underground ballrooms. The area in front of the escalators was cordoned off by burgundy velvet ropes like the kind used in movie theaters. The only way past was through a metal detector guarded by a rent-a-cop, a black man in a gray uniform parked on a high stool. I shifted the duffel bag and deliberately looked away from the guard. I was okay. I could get to the elevators, and my room, without going through the metal detector.

  As I waited at the front desk I flipped through the credit cards in my wallet, trying to remember which card I’d used to reserve the room, and whether any of the cards could cover it. My mother used to talk about her “flood of bills” every month, and maybe that was why I’d started picturing my own debt as water rising in a sinking ship—with me trapped in the lower holds. The ship was going down, no doubt about that, but a few cabins still had pockets of air, and my job was to swim to the ones that had enough breathing room, like Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure.

  “One night?” the clerk asked me. She was a mocha-skinned woman in a tailored blue suit. I nodded, wondering if she thought I was a fan trying to sneak into the legit conference. I should have worn a tie. “And will this be on the Visa?”

  I stifled the urge to say, “Which one?” My credit union Visa was dead, and the airline tickets had sucked the last of the oxygen out of my Lands’ End card, but there might still be a few inches of breathing space near the ceiling of my Citibank. “Let’s do Discover Card,” I said. I had maybe $800 left on that one.

  I kept my relaxed smile in place until the transaction cleared. Ten minutes in the room and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to unpack, so I’d toured the bathroom (fantastically clean) and closets (oddly small), then inspected the mandatory hotel room equipment—TV, telephone, minibar—each with its own tented instructional card. Some poor slob with the same college degree as me had probably spent weeks designing each card. Or even sadder, they’d 5 8

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  fired the poor slob with the useless degree and hired a high school kid who could use Microsoft Publisher.

  I opened the drapes, and sat on the king-sized bed. I was thirty floors up. The second Hyatt tower blocked my direct view, but to either side I could see Lake Michigan: a broad plain the color of steel stretching to the horizon, scored with whitecaps. So huge. Repeated exposure to maps had never eradica
ted my boyhood conviction that this was no lake, not even a “great” one, but a third ocean. The thing in my head paced back and forth, running a stick along the bars.

  I got up, closed the drapes. Sat down in one of the chairs. Got up and looked through the drawers in the bedside table. Empty, not even a Gideon Bible. There hadn’t been one in the last hotel I’d stayed at, either. Maybe the Gideons were falling down on the job. I opened the duffel and looked through the printouts from the ICOP website.

  Dr. Ram only showed up on the schedule for two events. The first, in less than an hour, was a poster session (whatever that was) with several of his grad students. The important event was his talk at 3:00 p.m. today in the Concorde room, one of the underground conference rooms.

  So. Ambush him at the poster session, at the talk, or somewhere in between?

  I pulled out the two collared shirts I’d brought—one blue, one white—both of them wrinkled as hell. I couldn’t decide which one to wear and decided to iron both of them. The room’s iron, annoyingly, was heavier and more fully featured than any I’d ever owned. I didn’t know when it would be best to approach Dr. Ram, or what I would say. This part of my plan had been hazy, even though I’d written over a dozen letters to him since I’d first read about his research, explaining my situation and proposing that my condition and his research interests seemed to intersect. Some of these letters were eloquent and cogent. Some were written from inside the white-noise cocoon of Nembutal.

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  I hadn’t sent any of them. The problem was this: Demons didn’t write letters to neurologists; therefore I wasn’t possessed. Perhaps I had been possessed, but in that I was no different than thousands of other victims. There was no such thing in the literature as half-possessed—